A Veteran gives a tour at The American Airpower Museum
Jack Kemp
"I was twelve years old, listening to a radio like that when they announced Pearl Harbor had been bombed. I asked my father what that meant and he told me it meant we were at war."
Speaking was my guide, Air Force veteran Bob Romeo, pointing to a display of a typical 1940s home with a cathedral shaped table radio. We are in the small but growing American Airpower Museum at Republic Field in Farmingdale, Long Island, http://www.americanairpowermuseum.com/Website/EventsGallery.aspx in the heart of World War plane manufacturers' factory locations of Republic Aircraft and Grumman Engineering. The old hangar had been designated an historical site, saving it from becoming an extension of one of Republic Field’s runways. In World War II, it had been a final assembly site for fighter planes, taking up to weeks to finish the last steps but rolling out one finished plane every 15 minutes.
Walking over to the photo and diorama exhibit of the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii, Bob Romeo tells me that Congress had, in recent years, passed a law allowing those that served on the U.S.S. Arizona to have their remains buried – or their ashes spread – at the Memorial. I tell Mr. Romeo about the time I was returning from Las Vegas in early December with my dad, changing for an earlier standby flight. One of the Pearl Harbor veterans who had gone there that week for a convention noticed us sitting apart and gave up his seat so that we could be together. In more ways than one.
Bob Romeo had entered the Army Air Force at the end of the War and was going to go to pilot training. But after his preliminary training, the atomic bomb ended the war and the military had a surplus of pilots from both the Pacific and European Theaters, so they stopped training new ones.
“They were nice enough to ask me what I wanted to do in the Air Force, so I became an aircraft mechanic.”
We walked on to enter a reconstruction of an actual ready room for World War II bomber missions. The place where they held briefings, it contained a map of Europe, a blackboard and some benches.
“They’d wake the crews up at two a.m. and tell them what their target was. They would take off at sunrise. To climb into a formation would take about an hour and the plane before you, which you couldn’t see, had to get high enough. Once in formation, spread out over multiple altitudes, the gunners’ fire overlapped and covered the planes. But the biggest cause of bomber losses in Europe was the FLAK, the German 88 guns which could fire a shell up to 35,000 feet and then explode near or inside a bomber in pieces of shrapnel.”
Bob took a flyer’s flak jacket off a wall hook an handed it to me. It consisted of steel plates sown into a shirt-vest. It was quite heavy. He explained that there were also flak pants made, but no one could walk around a plane with all that weight. The crew often took off the flak jacket and placed it along the exterior wall of the plane where they were working. They also had an electric suit, kind of like a modern electric blanket that plugged into different outlets around the airplane. With all this and leather clothing – and the minus 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures – if a flyer got hit with shrapnel or a fighter plane’s shells, they could not remove the clothing because the crew member would freeze to death. The often applied a tourniquet and in some desperate cases dropped them out of the plane with a parachute so that the German hospitals would treat (that did happen). Flying in World War II was a lot less glamorous than we would now think. A bomber crew was most often in a non-pressurized plane that typically flew at 25,000 feet. Depending on the bomber, they flew at speeds ranging from 175 to 275 miles an hour, making it was a relatively slow moving target. The German fighter planes were considerably faster. And even with the later development of the P-51 Mustang fighter escorts, which didn’t have to turn back quickly to England, the biggest problem were the German 88 guns which could take deadly aim at the bombers over the target.
We walked to a diorama of the Ploiesti oil field raids in Romania, where American planes suffered huge losses and five bomber pilots were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bob Romeo called it “a suicide mission.”
"Around 30,000 members of the 8th, 9th, 11th, 12th, and 15th Army Air Forces died in the ETO / MTO" (European and Mediterranean Theaters in World War II), according to one website. http://www.taphilo.com/history/8thaf/8aflosses.shtml Others have estimated higher figures.
“All over Germany there were synthetic oil plants that were not bombed. Churchill insisted on bombing the cities because of the German bombing of English cities (roughly 50,000 people lost their lives in England from those bombings).”
I mentioned some details known years later, namely that Russia suffered 8 million military deaths and 12 million civilian deaths in World War II. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#USSR Stalin insisted on bombing civilian targets in Germany as well. In 1944, American planes in England, were able to fly to targets over Germany, fly on to a landing field in Russia, then reload with fuel and bombs to hit other Eastern European targets on a flight to US bases in Italy and then make a similar more western bombing run on the way back to their bases in England. Stalin insisted on a veto and choice of targets for planes going to and from Soviet bases because of the horrendous losses Russia suffered before the Allies invaded Europe. This information – and many other amazing details of the War, can be found in Donald Miller’s definitive book “Masters of the Air.”
We went on to a P-40 Flying Tiger plane that was flown by American volunteers in Chang Kai Shek’s Chinese Air Force in 1940, before America officially entered the War. Pilots were paid an incentive of $500 in gold for every Japanese Zero they shot down. At $35 an ounce, that is 14.285 ounces – or the equivalent of around $21,428 in today’s dollars. The Curtis P-40 Warhawk was an inferior plane to the Japanese Zero, so special tactics were devised to attack the Zeros from out of direct sunlight and in a high speed dive.
Bob Romeo told me that The Airpower Museum offers rides in some of their planes for tax-deductible membership donations, such as a simulated D-Day paratrooper drop where the participants are outfitted in a WW II paratrooper’s uniform and flown in an actual C-47, complete with military markings, to a staging area out over Long Island where a uniformed historical reenactor portrays a jump commander until the drama ends without leaving the plane. I’d been in the Museum’s C-47 when it was on ground display and sat on its tin bench of seats. With the roar of the engines and no temperature controls, it would be quite an experience to relive the easy part of a D-Day jump. Bob told me that The Museum’s C-47 had not been in D-Day but had taken part in "Operation Market Garden" in Holland (the subject of the movie "A Bridge Too Far") and had later been sold to the Israeli Air Force. Speaking of that, one of soldiers who did jump on D-Day was a West Point graduate military lawyer who didn’t want to sit out the war riding a desk. With no parachute training, Col. Mickey Marcus jumped behind enemy lines into the French countryside in the first wave of the D-Day assault. He would later go on to become the first General in the Israeli Army since the time of the Bible, killed in a mishap not knowing a Hebrew password and being shot by a guard. He is buried at West Point. But I digress – somewhat.
A woman and her sons left another guide and joined us. She asked Bob why some planes, such as a Grumman Navy fighter-bomber on display, had folding wings. He explained that is a requirement of carrier based aircraft, even today. It is done to make room on the elevators of air craft carriers and storage in the crowded lower decks.
Speaking of women, one of the aircraft motors on display had a mannequin of a woman working on it in a defense plant, as often happened on Long Island in World War II and around the country. There was also an exhibit of women who flew military aircraft from factories to delivery at Air Force and Naval bases around the country.
Many school groups visit this Museum to learn about what being in the Air Corp was really like during wartime. It is a lesson and legacy that we need to tell our youngsters – and ourselves – so that we remember why and how we have our freedoms and what many brave men and women did to ensure that in past years. I have only touched on part of what is on display at the American Airpower Museum, a museum that may move to a larger location in coming years.
On this Memorial Day Weekend, I salute you, Bob Romeo, and all the people whose efforts to keep this living memorial open and all the veterans who keep our country safe.
"I was twelve years old, listening to a radio like that when they announced Pearl Harbor had been bombed. I asked my father what that meant and he told me it meant we were at war."
Speaking was my guide, Air Force veteran Bob Romeo, pointing to a display of a typical 1940s home with a cathedral shaped table radio. We are in the small but growing American Airpower Museum at Republic Field in Farmingdale, Long Island, http://www.americanairpowermuseum.com/Website/EventsGallery.aspx in the heart of World War plane manufacturers' factory locations of Republic Aircraft and Grumman Engineering. The old hangar had been designated an historical site, saving it from becoming an extension of one of Republic Field’s runways. In World War II, it had been a final assembly site for fighter planes, taking up to weeks to finish the last steps but rolling out one finished plane every 15 minutes.
Walking over to the photo and diorama exhibit of the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii, Bob Romeo tells me that Congress had, in recent years, passed a law allowing those that served on the U.S.S. Arizona to have their remains buried – or their ashes spread – at the Memorial. I tell Mr. Romeo about the time I was returning from Las Vegas in early December with my dad, changing for an earlier standby flight. One of the Pearl Harbor veterans who had gone there that week for a convention noticed us sitting apart and gave up his seat so that we could be together. In more ways than one.
Bob Romeo had entered the Army Air Force at the end of the War and was going to go to pilot training. But after his preliminary training, the atomic bomb ended the war and the military had a surplus of pilots from both the Pacific and European Theaters, so they stopped training new ones.
“They were nice enough to ask me what I wanted to do in the Air Force, so I became an aircraft mechanic.”
We walked on to enter a reconstruction of an actual ready room for World War II bomber missions. The place where they held briefings, it contained a map of Europe, a blackboard and some benches.
“They’d wake the crews up at two a.m. and tell them what their target was. They would take off at sunrise. To climb into a formation would take about an hour and the plane before you, which you couldn’t see, had to get high enough. Once in formation, spread out over multiple altitudes, the gunners’ fire overlapped and covered the planes. But the biggest cause of bomber losses in Europe was the FLAK, the German 88 guns which could fire a shell up to 35,000 feet and then explode near or inside a bomber in pieces of shrapnel.”
Bob took a flyer’s flak jacket off a wall hook an handed it to me. It consisted of steel plates sown into a shirt-vest. It was quite heavy. He explained that there were also flak pants made, but no one could walk around a plane with all that weight. The crew often took off the flak jacket and placed it along the exterior wall of the plane where they were working. They also had an electric suit, kind of like a modern electric blanket that plugged into different outlets around the airplane. With all this and leather clothing – and the minus 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures – if a flyer got hit with shrapnel or a fighter plane’s shells, they could not remove the clothing because the crew member would freeze to death. The often applied a tourniquet and in some desperate cases dropped them out of the plane with a parachute so that the German hospitals would treat (that did happen). Flying in World War II was a lot less glamorous than we would now think. A bomber crew was most often in a non-pressurized plane that typically flew at 25,000 feet. Depending on the bomber, they flew at speeds ranging from 175 to 275 miles an hour, making it was a relatively slow moving target. The German fighter planes were considerably faster. And even with the later development of the P-51 Mustang fighter escorts, which didn’t have to turn back quickly to England, the biggest problem were the German 88 guns which could take deadly aim at the bombers over the target.
We walked to a diorama of the Ploiesti oil field raids in Romania, where American planes suffered huge losses and five bomber pilots were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bob Romeo called it “a suicide mission.”
"Around 30,000 members of the 8th, 9th, 11th, 12th, and 15th Army Air Forces died in the ETO / MTO" (European and Mediterranean Theaters in World War II), according to one website. http://www.taphilo.com/history/8thaf/8aflosses.shtml Others have estimated higher figures.
“All over Germany there were synthetic oil plants that were not bombed. Churchill insisted on bombing the cities because of the German bombing of English cities (roughly 50,000 people lost their lives in England from those bombings).”
I mentioned some details known years later, namely that Russia suffered 8 million military deaths and 12 million civilian deaths in World War II. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#USSR Stalin insisted on bombing civilian targets in Germany as well. In 1944, American planes in England, were able to fly to targets over Germany, fly on to a landing field in Russia, then reload with fuel and bombs to hit other Eastern European targets on a flight to US bases in Italy and then make a similar more western bombing run on the way back to their bases in England. Stalin insisted on a veto and choice of targets for planes going to and from Soviet bases because of the horrendous losses Russia suffered before the Allies invaded Europe. This information – and many other amazing details of the War, can be found in Donald Miller’s definitive book “Masters of the Air.”
We went on to a P-40 Flying Tiger plane that was flown by American volunteers in Chang Kai Shek’s Chinese Air Force in 1940, before America officially entered the War. Pilots were paid an incentive of $500 in gold for every Japanese Zero they shot down. At $35 an ounce, that is 14.285 ounces – or the equivalent of around $21,428 in today’s dollars. The Curtis P-40 Warhawk was an inferior plane to the Japanese Zero, so special tactics were devised to attack the Zeros from out of direct sunlight and in a high speed dive.
Bob Romeo told me that The Airpower Museum offers rides in some of their planes for tax-deductible membership donations, such as a simulated D-Day paratrooper drop where the participants are outfitted in a WW II paratrooper’s uniform and flown in an actual C-47, complete with military markings, to a staging area out over Long Island where a uniformed historical reenactor portrays a jump commander until the drama ends without leaving the plane. I’d been in the Museum’s C-47 when it was on ground display and sat on its tin bench of seats. With the roar of the engines and no temperature controls, it would be quite an experience to relive the easy part of a D-Day jump. Bob told me that The Museum’s C-47 had not been in D-Day but had taken part in "Operation Market Garden" in Holland (the subject of the movie "A Bridge Too Far") and had later been sold to the Israeli Air Force. Speaking of that, one of soldiers who did jump on D-Day was a West Point graduate military lawyer who didn’t want to sit out the war riding a desk. With no parachute training, Col. Mickey Marcus jumped behind enemy lines into the French countryside in the first wave of the D-Day assault. He would later go on to become the first General in the Israeli Army since the time of the Bible, killed in a mishap not knowing a Hebrew password and being shot by a guard. He is buried at West Point. But I digress – somewhat.
A woman and her sons left another guide and joined us. She asked Bob why some planes, such as a Grumman Navy fighter-bomber on display, had folding wings. He explained that is a requirement of carrier based aircraft, even today. It is done to make room on the elevators of air craft carriers and storage in the crowded lower decks.
Speaking of women, one of the aircraft motors on display had a mannequin of a woman working on it in a defense plant, as often happened on Long Island in World War II and around the country. There was also an exhibit of women who flew military aircraft from factories to delivery at Air Force and Naval bases around the country.
Many school groups visit this Museum to learn about what being in the Air Corp was really like during wartime. It is a lesson and legacy that we need to tell our youngsters – and ourselves – so that we remember why and how we have our freedoms and what many brave men and women did to ensure that in past years. I have only touched on part of what is on display at the American Airpower Museum, a museum that may move to a larger location in coming years.
On this Memorial Day Weekend, I salute you, Bob Romeo, and all the people whose efforts to keep this living memorial open and all the veterans who keep our country safe.
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 7:16 AM
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