henning wrote:
well ironically the P47 was the mount of
Capt. walter hollander, 334th fs, 4th FG
qp-B, p47 , 41-6538
this according to the "immortal" Don Allen, who did the
artwork on the front of it.
Yes, Keith H. is a super troop. I've known him for about 5 years now. We just finalized discussions for a large panoramic view painting of Debden with Don Gentile buzzing over after a mission. Keith had a great idea of showing Col. Don taxiing underneath shaking his fist at Gentile.
You can almost hear Gentile saying "DOHP!"
When I first posted the P-47 pic above, I meant that I was curious as to the "story" of what the men were looking at and talking about. I figured that looking up the nose art/pilot would be easy enough ... or so I thought!
I've spent some time with Don Allen, and his scrapbooks of original sketches for the various nose arts is unbelievable. I'm sure Don's reference to P-47C "QP-B" is correct for when he first painted the removeable side engine panel most 4th FG P-47 art was applied to, but I think that THIS picture may be a different (later) aircraft.
First, the cowling is an early "D" model cowling, based on the squared off cowl flaps going all the way down past the 'shorter' C-model arrangement. It
was very common for the 'art panel' to be swapped to a 'new' aircraft for a variety of reasons. When the new D-1s came on board, some of the vets swapped their art panel to their new D-model. The same thing happened when the first few updated D-5s arrived in May or so.
Also, in the 4th FG it was common practice for the individual code letter to be the "property" of the crew chief, not the pilot. As aircraft were handed down so that a pilot could have a "newer" model, the new plane got the same code letter (assuming the pilot kept his same crew chief), and the 'new' crew chief of the older plane then painted HIS code letter on the plane. In good high-rez pictures you can see evidence of many "repaints" of code letters. This is definitely Hollander's personal artwork; he was from Hawaii, and this is a Hawaiian saying. What's unclear is why he's listed as flying a "B" most everywhere,
and this is definitely not a "B" code.
There's always the slight chance that the art panel was swapped to THIS plane from his regular "B" coded plane while "B" was in the shop with an engine change (typically done after only 80 hours under combat conditions!). It happened many times - and again with Mustangs, the "form" fitting tendencies of the cowling panels to specific P-51 aircraft nothwithstanding. However, the 'swaps' were the art panels only, not the entire cowling.
Here's a 100% crop of the raw scan ... the code letter under the crewman's chin is an "A".
Wade
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