Veteran's Day

[nohanii]

My grandpa, Richard Healy, was born September 20, 1922. In 1943, when he was 21 years old, he joined the Army Air Corps and attained the rank of 2nd lieutenant. After training, he was stationed in the South Pacific, in Borneo and the Solomon Islands. In the time Grandpa spent in the Air Corps, he piloted a B-25 Mitchell Bomber on 47 missions to flush out the Japanese, and he never even got a bullet in the wing. His B-25 bomber was part of a wing consisting mainly of the larger B-24 Liberator bombers. He named his plane "Little Hotshot" and had it painted with a long-legged woman with a big hypodermic needle -- representing his wife Madeline who was back in the States artificially inseminating cows at the time.

Grandpa made a habit of flying out before bombing runs to drop leaflets on the region's natives to warn them to get out while they could. Years later, he met one of those natives at Fjords, his mom-and-pop buffet style restaurant. She was 4 or 5 years old when it happened, but she still remembered catching some of those leaflets, running out to the beach, and being overjoyed that the Americans were there, trying to help them.

One time he was flying around and he came up on two oil dereks way too fast. He didn't have time to fly around them or pull up to go over them, so he turned the plane and flew sideways between them. Hopefully everyone was strapped in!

He went out on a bombing run another time, and one of the bombs got stuck in the hatch! Try as they might, no one could get the darn thing out. As he was returning to base, he heard over the radio, "873, what is that hanging from your plane? Is that a bomb?!?" He was forced to attempt a landing with the darn thing sticking out of his plane's belly. He landed safely, and the bomb just popped right out. When he and everyone else got off the plane, they saw an airman standing with one leg up on the bomb, smoking a cigarette. Seriously. They all thought he was nuts.

Between bombing runs, Grandpa was the popular guy around base. This could be due to the fact that he rigged up a washing machine out of motors and spare parts and let everyone in the unit use it. He also set up his own dark room so he could develop any photos taken there.

His plane had to be shipped to and from the South Pacific in pieces because it wasn't able to make the long flight from the mainland to Hawaii then to Borneo, so Grandpa sailed back home in a ship with the other soldiers. They passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and were greeted in San Francisco as heroes by Dinah Shore, a popular singer at the time.

I never knew my grandpa very well. He died on Easter morning in 1994 after a decade-long battle with cancer. I was only seven years old.
 

This is my grandpa, Richard Healy, 2nd Lieutenant of the US Army Air Corps during WWII. This picture was taken in 1977.

A B25 Mitchell bomber with Grandpa's Army Air Corps unit. I don't know where he is in the photo. 

Post inspired by blondealibi 
Edit: We believe Grandpa was the one taking the second picture.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/nostalgia__/]

aw that's such a good story.
my dad was a marine in combat in vietnam, but he doesn't talk much about his experiences there. he always kind of brushes it off when i ask him about vietnam.

[moxymojo.livejournal.com]

that's an interesting story and the pics are amazing too.

[honeystix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I wish I knew more about him. I'm sure he had a lot more stories to tell.