Another WWII veteran gone...


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Posted by Dana on Tuesday, November 04, 2003 at 1:43PM :

The "Greatest Generation" as they've been called, lost another one this weekend. My sister-in-law lost her father, Ray Whittington, in Council Bluffs, IA. I'm so glad I took the time to sit and visit with Ray this past Fourth or July while we watched my kids, their cousins, his grandkids, kids of every age play volleyball, pitch horseshoes and blow things up! Ray was a P-38 pilot during WWII and I knew that, but what I didn't know is that Ray was in on some of the testing done for Lockheed in Southern CA for the P-38!

He talked to me all afternoon about being shot down. I knew he'd been shot down but I didn't know it was more than once, and that he usually was the plane with the cameras in the nose (photo recon) rather than the guns! When they would get jumped by the Japanese Zeros, his job was to GETOUTTATHERE!! Of course the Zeros knew why he was fleeing and they would disengage the dogfight to shot him down before the film got home. He was fished-out of the drink by Catalina PBYs twice, and glad to have been in such a stable plane. He talked about the P-38 in a flat-out dive would break the sound barrier. He said, of course, back then, they didn't know what that was! No one had ever gone faster than the speed of sound. He said the gauges would basically reverse and go hay-wire. He said they lost some pretty good pilots because of that. Ray said, "You had to have real 'moxie' to fly one like that!" (Moxie, there's a word you don't here any more!!) Ray came home from the war, moved to Iowa and raised a son and five daughters. We'll miss him at all the family gatherings.
Have a great flight home Ray.




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