Captain Cooke might differ.....Originally Posted by c322348
Ron Wanttaja
Captain Cooke might differ.....
Ron Wanttaja
The Kittyhawk(P40) was used extensively by the RAAF in the western desert. Wg Cm Bobby Gibbes was the Commander of No3 Sqn RAAF and got ten kills with this aeroplane,having said that he was shot down twice and once three hundred miles behind the lines and after walking fifty miles was picked up by a LRDG patrol with the immortal words"gday cobber,got any water". The Australians loved them,they were tough and good for ground attack. Cheers Ross
A friend of mine was a WASP and ferried P-40's from Buffalo to Anchorage, where some Soviet pilot would take the plane west from there. She thought it was an awful plane to taxi and fly: the controls were heavy, unbalanced, and hard to keep in trim. She preferred the the Bell fighters much more. Instead of flying cross country across Canada, direct to Anchorage, she had to follow roads that paralleled the border, in case of a forced landing, such was the War Department's limited faith in the aircraft they were provide Stalin's air force. The only planes she had problems with were the Mustangs coming out of Dallas. Climbing out of Greenville, NC, she had the Packard Merlin pack it in so she bailed out. Returning to the airport, they gave her another one to fly to Gander, only to have that one seize up about five minutes out. She had to hit the silk again, and landed about 100 feet away from the burning pile that had been a beautiful P-51D a moment earlier.
My uncle grew up in Buffalo during the war, and he recalls the P-40's "buzzing around, everywhere, all the time."
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