October 10, 1943

Switch is On,

They're trying out a new machine on 12 of us. It's simulated gunnery practice. The machine is a large barrel shaped business about 100 feet long and 20 feet in diameter. It's all dark inside with a complete set of controls in one end and a movie screen on the other end with a small plane that dashes all over the place. The plane you sure in doesn't move but your controls move the horizon and the little plane on the screen. The instructor also controls the little plane. He tries to keep you from hitting it with your electric gun. The sensation you get is the same as climbing, diving, steep turns, etc. They even have a machine that simulates the roar of your engine. I swore up and down that I was up on my side the he stopped the thing. Actually you never leave the straight and level position. It just appears that way with the horizon shifting all over the place. At different angles you have to lead the ship with your sights anywhere from 2 radii to putting you right on it. It certainly will help me a lot when I get in combat. We leave a week from today and go down on am island in the Gulf and get two weeks of real gunnery with real ships and bullets. We have tow targets and ground targets that we shoot at.

I've got about five hours in the P-40. It's a funny feeling the first time you take off in one of them. There's no back seat, therefore no instructor like there was every other time we soloed in a new ship. A ship like that with over twice the horsepower (1400 HP) of anything we ever flew is really hot. I dove from 12,000 feet at 400 MPH down to 3,000 feet, pulled back on the stick, blacked myself out and when I recovered from the blackout, I was back up at 12,000 feet. That baby climbed straight up. The first two days the boys cracked up four of them.  (Don't tell Mom) Most of them crack up landing it.

Speaking of crackups, I folded about $4,000 worth of AT's. This is a "Military Secret" so don't tell anyone.

I was coming in for my last landing the other morning about 3 AM and the tower told me to clear the runway straight ahead because other ships were landing right on my tail, so I was breezing along about 35 MPH. Not seeing a thing with the big nose up in front when the tower let out a scream over the radio to watch that ship in front of me. They say it too late. I tried to ground loop my ship by tramping on the right brake. It just started to swing when I hit him with full force. You should have seen the pieces fly when my prop started chewing his tail off. I finally ended up with my ship nosed over on the prop and knocked the other guy off the runway.

I hoped out of my ship and ran over to where he was sitting with his motor racing wide open and asked if her was all right. He just shrugged his shoulders, I asked why in the hell didn't he just shut off the engine. "Oh. I was waiting for someone to tell me what to do".

Boy they certainly raised hell with me for a while. I was up before more boards, Captains, Group Commanders and what not. They claimed it looked as though I was going so fast that I was going to take off again. Everybody thought it was the tower's fault for telling me to clear straight ahead, but of course the Captain in the tower wasn't going to take the blame, so I didn't say much until I was brought before the air inspector. He's the boy that counts. He's the one that decided whose to blame and he was willing to listen to my side of the story.

Here's the story I gave him.

"They claimed I was going at take off speed which is about 90 MPH. Not at night it's impossible to judge the speed of a plane on the ground from the tower. Well not if the plane I hit was going 10 MPH and I was going 35 MPH which I claim I was doing, that means that I was closing in at a rate of 25 MPH which is about 37 feet per second. At the time the tower warned me I was approximately 15 yards away which is 45 feet. This gave me 1 1/5 seconds before I hit. On average, it takes about 3/4 of a second for the mind to react and your reflexes to do something. This gave me less than a second to do anything."

At this point he stopped me and says, "Hey pal, what did you do in civilian life?" (If he only knew) He said out of the hundreds of accidents he has investigated, I was the only first one to ever explain feet per second, etc. At this point in the story, a Captain walks into the outer office and the air inspector says, "Hey Captain, come on in; I got a cadet in here explaining Einstein's Theory to me".

He told me to go over the story again. So after that, everything I said started off with "According to Einstein" this it truth etc. After I got though, he said, "You still haven't told me what you did in civilian life?" Then I gave him a song and dance about being the investigator for all the accidents in the 101st Infantry. He says, "OK, don't let anything else happen, you'll be OK".

I've got a hundred stories to tell but no time to do it in.

Hoping to see you all soon, As ever

Al

P.S. I may need some dough. I don't know at yet. Nobody knows anything, damn it.