INTRODUCTION

Every now and then I am overcome with a jolt of high energy and decide to throw out junk that has been accumulating for years. That is how I came across a box that had been sitting unopened in a closet for 60 years. It contained 230 letters that my family sent me between 1943 and 1946 while I served in World War II. As I started reading the letters I found that many memories, dimmed by over a half century of time, were being revived. That was when I decided to write this book about my experiences as an aviation cadet and fighter pilot during those World War II years. But this book is not just about me, it is about the thousands of young Americans who enlisted to fly.

Hopefully as you read this book you will get a sense of the times during those years when almost every able-bodied young man in the nation was in some branch of military service and our country was fighting for survival both in Europe and in the Pacific. Not only will you learn what our young pilots went through, but you will also read about the daily problems faced by the people back home. When quoting from my family’s letters, I have intentionally left uncorrected the grammatical and spelling errors of my Italian immigrant parents because such errors were part of their character, personality and charm.

The reader should remember that 60 years ago we did not have computers, cell phones or email. There was the radio and the U. S. mail (now referred to as “snail mail”) and the telephone. But the telephone was too expensive and, because of the war, it was difficult to get through to anyone overseas so we relied on the very slow U.S. mail. 

There were millions of experiences during WWII. This book contains a few of them.