From sun-herald.com
03/09/06
Don Moore veterans column
There are some bonuses for occasionally being wrong
The plus side of screwing up the facts in a column is that one gets a lot of phone calls and e-mails. From the army of people who called and wrote me about my transgression a week or so ago after I called a B-25 Mitchell bomber a B-25 Marauder, came a call from Don Bushey of Murdock.
Seems that Don was an 18-year-old and working on the production line at North American Aviation Company in Inglewood, Calif. during World War II. This was the company that built the B-25 Mitchell and the more famous P-51 Mustang fighter.
Of all things, "My job was to put the relief tubes in the cockpit of each plane." When you gotta go, you gotta go, I guess.
It's a little improbable imagining a conversation between Don and a grandson about his war effort during the big one.
"Granddaddy, what did you do in the war?"
"Well Johnny, I put the pee pipes in the P-51 fighter planes."
It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.
As Bushey recalls, there were possibly 40 P-51s with their wings on and their engines installed moving down the production line in the final stages of completion in the part of the factory where he worked. Fighter production was an around-the-clock operation at North American.
One day, while Bushey was working on fighters, they brought in a Mitchell bomber that was shot so full of bullet holes it looked like a sieve, he said. When they got a break, he and a buddy checked out the badly damaged twin-engine bomber.
"We were trying to figure out how the plane could fly with as many holes as it had in it," he said 60-plus years later. "It was amazing."
The "scuttlebutt" was that the bomber was going to be taken around the country on a War Bond tour. Bushey said he never heard anymore about the B-25.
"I often wondered if it actually went on tour or not. Maybe there's somebody out there that saw it and would get back to you," he said.
When he was 18, Bushey, like every other kid his age, registered for the draft. However, he flunked the eye exam. That's how he ended up working for North American Aviation during the early part of the war.
By 1944, he went back to the draft board and explained that he had waited long enough. He wanted in the fight because all his buddies were already over there fighting for their country.
The second time around, he was drafted and arrived in Europe just in time to take part in the D-Day Invasion. But he didn't hit Utah Beach in Normandy with an M-1 in his hand; Pfc. Don Bushey stormed Europe with his portable typewriter. He served as a clerk typist for an Army field hospital.
Like most of the 16 million men and women who served in the Second World War, he never saw the frontlines. However, his job was equally important to the overall plan for winning the war.
He did his duty, performed his job well, returned to the U.S.A. and went on with his life.
Contact me
If you're a vet with a story or you have a friend who has a tale to tell about his part in any war or veterans' activity, give Don Moore a call at (941) 681-3000, ext. 217 or 1 (877) 827-6204. You can also e-mail:
moore@sun-herald.com, or fax: (941) 426-3576. To send a letter, write: Englewood Sun, 167 W. Dearborn St., Englewood, FL 34223.
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Robbie
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