German airspace, (our P-47s were targets due to limited fuel storage capability) inflicted heavy losses that were profound. Morale was at an all-time low. In one week in October of 1943, 153 aircraft and crews were lost. American ingenuity would eventually prevail. In November of 1943, the first external fuel tanks were installed on our fighters. In December, the new P-51 Mustang was deployed in the theater. This remarkable aircraft could now escort bombers anywhere in Germany. Dad spent from 1943 to 1945 maintaining allied aircraft from Leiston Air Station. Initially, he worked on the P-47 Thunderbolt and later the P-51 Mustang. The labor of Sergeant Clare Naegle and that of his fellow mechanics, crews and pilots, resulted in a monumental slowdown of the German war machine. One can only imagine what the D-Day invasion and the ensuing march to Germany would have cost in additional allied lives had it not been for the massive air campaign targeted at the German war industry. In June of 1945, during the Army of Occupation, he was sent to the 73rd Air Depot Wing in Neubiberg, Germany. It was located just south of Munich, on the Salzburg Autobahn. He served there until February of 1946, at which time he concluded his service and returned home to Utah. His awards and decorations include: The Army of Occupation Medal The European African Middle Eastern Service Ribbon The World War II Victory Medal with Germany clasp The Distinguished Unit Badge Submitted by Michael C. Naegle, son K. Barton Olsen When my assignment came, I was assigned to Fort Sill. I'd only had this assignment a short time when a memo came down and said any first or second lieutenant who weighed less than 165 pounds could apply for liaison pilot training, if they were interested. I had always been interested in flying, but I asked him what a liaison pilot was. Then the following day, here came orders to report to Denton, Texas, immediately for flight training. I had never made application, but that didn't matter to the Army. After we completed flight training, we went back to Fort Sill to be taught the field artillery portion of our training. Here they taught us how to direct artillery fire from those little planes [Piper Cubs] and how to land and take off from any small flat place we could find, places you'd never dream of getting in and out of. The idea is, we'd follow our guns and find places to land and take off from as close to where the guns were as possible. Our purpose was to go up and find enemy targets to shoot and radio instructions to our guns until they hit the target. Our main targets were enemy guns or anything else worth shooting at. Training and the African campaign followed. A few days later, we loaded up on a boat for the invasion of Sicily. Sicily, being very mountainous, had to depend mostly on our observation planes for observing where they were shooting. Because of the mountainous terrain, there weren't many places we could find to land our small planes so there were planes for three battalions (six planes) on one field. We each had the telephone communication, and our guns. We'd take turns keeping one plane in the air all day long. I was on the ground when the telephone rang. I answered it, and it was my commanding officer who said a battalion off to our right side had left their liaison planes in North Africa. Because of the mountainous terrain, they couldn't see down in the valleys on the other side of the ridge. Their ground OP (observation points) couldn't get where they could see anything so their guns were sitting there idle. So the commanding officer of this outfit called my CO (commanding officer) to see if they could borrow one of his planes to go up and get them 'registered in.' My CO said he couldn't order us to do it because it was out of our assigned area of responsibility. I said I'd go up and try to register them in. We picked a cross roads on the map that I thought I could identify when we got up in the air. I then asked how we could communicate with their guns as the radio of our plane could only communicate with our own radios. My CO said they would put one of our radios in a vehicle and have the vehicle take the radio over to their guns. I then asked where the front lines were in this other area. He said they didn't know but said while they were getting our radio over to their guns, we could go up and, by flying around, we could probably tell where the front lines were. We were supposed to take an observer with us to help with the map and handle the radio so one of the pilots from one of the other battalions said he'd go up with me. We took off and flew down to this other sector, then by flying back and forth above enemy. There just wasn't anything happening on the ground below us. It looked just as peaceful as any countryside so we just kept going further in towards the enemy territory. Finally, we flew over a small country town, j 46 Nicosia. This town was right on top of a hill, way back in the mountains just about in the middle of Sicily. As we went over this town, I could see all kinds of vehicles on the road going in and coming from the town. I turned to the pilot with me and said, 'Can you tell if those are American or German trucks? Because if they are German, we've gone too far.' So, as we turned the plane back towards our front lines, the Germans and Italians opened up on us with everything in the books. The silence ended up with what looked and sounded like an entire war all directed just at us. (I can just imagine they sat down there following us with their antiaircraft guns and machine guns wondering where those crazy fools are going and thinking we can knock that slow flying plane down anytime they wanted.) I'd look out of the top of the plane and the sky was black with the smoke of the antiaircraft shells bursting above us. I'd look out in front and to the side at tracer bullets criss-crossing all around us just like we were being attacked by a hive of bees. (I think every fifth bullet on the German machine gun was a tracer, so for every tracer we could see, there were four other bullets we couldn't see.) The tracers were so thick it looked like you couldn't throw a baseball through them without getting full of holes, let alone a plane getting through, to say nothing of the antiaircraft shells. There was no way we could fly in a straight line to get back to our front lines so we just weaved our way back and forth, just changing directions constantly and at the same time trying to head for a mountain ridge that was in the general direction of our lines. When they opened up on us, the first thought that came to my mind was, 'Oh no, this can't happen to me, I was promised in my Patriarchal Blessing I'd return home safely.' Yet there was just no way we'd get out of this. I wondered what it would feel like when it did happen. Just after they had opened up on us, on came the radio and a voice said they were now at their guns, were we in a position to register them in? I took the radio and said, 'No, we are being fired upon, and we're trying to get out of here.' Two or three times they'd come in on the radio and ask if we were then in a position to register them in. Each time we'd give the same reply. After what seemed like an eternity or more, but Probably was 15-20 minutes, we'd go to the mountain ridge and dive the plane down the other side of the ridge into a canyon. All grew so quiet it made us wonder if it was real, and I turned to the other pilot and said, 'Boy, were we ever lucky to get out of that.' I had no more said that when all at once we were being shot at by machine guns. Evidently, this canyon was full of German infantry men. We had no choice but to fly down the canyon as we didn't have the power to climb out of the canyon without just slowly circling to gain altitude, so we just weaved our way from one side of the canyon to the other. Finally, the machine gun fire stopped, and there was only rifle fire, then soon that stopped. Again, they came on the radio asking if we were in a position to register their guns in. By then, we had been up long enough; we didn't have enough gas left to get back up to position to direct their fire, and we said we were heading home (back to our little landing field). When we got down, we both got out and patted the ground. We then looked the plane over and couldn't believe there wasn't a single hole in the plane. My CO said he sat by a radio, and he said every time we pushed the button on the radio to talk he could hear the commotion going on. As a follow up to this experience after we captured Sicily, a fighter-bomber had been on a bombing run over Germany. His plane had been hit, and he nursed it back near the coast of Sicily when he couldn't keep it flying any longer, and bailed out of the plane. He came down by parachute and landed in the water just off from the coast. Since the fighting was over in Sicily, my commanding officer asked if I'd fly him back to his base which was located along the coast about where the original invasion took place. It just happened the route to get us back to his base took us right over this little town of Nicosia As we flew over it, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'You see that town there?' I told him I did and he said that the town had the greatest concentration of antiaircraft in Sicily. When they'd go on a bombing mission, their route used to take them over that town; but they had so many of their planes shot down, they got so they'd go way out around it. I told him I could believe it as I'd flown over it ten days before it was captured. He just laughed at me and said no way could I have done that. I tried to convince him, but he'd just laughed and said, 'No way.' I could see I couldn't convince him so I stopped trying. 47