Thank you for returning the registration information. I think you folks are doing a wonderful job with the web site and I truly appreciate it. I am aware of the Coleman tradgity and deeply sorry that your uncle was involved. I am also sorry that I am unable to provide any positive supporting information. Unlike the war in Europe where the missions were mainly flown over land mass and planes shotd down could almost always be tracked. In the Pacific, missions ranged anywhere from 10 to 18 hours and almost all over water. Other than the target areas, there usually were no means of referencing the location of a downed plane and if you unabele to inflate a lifraft your chances of survival were limited. We definetly fought a different kind of war. Yes, we flew 3 missions to Yap. They were our 27th mission on 06/26/1944 ( the day after your uncles mission) 30th mission on 08/02/44 and 31st mission on 08/08/44. we were in the air for approximatly 13 hours on each mission. If they were on the oceans surface, we would probably have spotted themon our 6/26 mission an taken appropriate action. On one of our early missions to Truk, our plane was severely shot up and we lost so much fuel that we were unable to make it back to our home base and had to bail out and fortunetly picked up by a destroyer that was escorting a small convoy. We flew 19 missions to TruThere was so many planes down that they instructed us to drop down to 500 ft altitude on the way home and search for survivors. We did spot a life raft with 3 persons in it and one person waving like crazy. We circled the raft several times dropping all the dye marker powder we had to make their position easily noticible plus navigation smoke bombs and we also threw out our survival kit which had a Gibson Girl radio plus rations, drinking water etc, etc and meanwhile we were radioing our base so that they could get a fix on us. They sent out a Catalina Flighing boat and picked them up. That sure gave us a good feeling.
OH, by the way, We followed the Arnnett plane down on the Palau mission. They were right along side of us when they got hit.
My Regards to you, Al Jose
Posts: 635 | From: Shoreview, MN | Registered: Dec 2004
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