TampaSaint OP t1_j9uhspg wrote on February 24, 2023 at 5:28 PM

Reply to comment by Southern_Snowshoe in My Dad, somewhere on an aircraft carrier in World War II; he was a fighter pilot in the navy during WWII. He earned the Navy Cross Medal for extraordinary heroism in combat (second to the medal of honor) and came home to live a quiet life and raise a family. by TampaSaint

Ha Ha good plan. My dad was mostly on an obscure carrier called the USS Chenango which I linked in a comment above. Oddly, he almost never spoke of the time. We have no idea how her earned all the medals. Its on his official discharge papers but he never spoke of combat. Only that he liked the food and that he thought he suffered less than those doing infantry type fighting. The only stories he ever told us were when he had an engine failure during combat, ditched into the sea, and earned the name "Corky" because his buddies all said he was bobbing up and down just like a cork.

Southern_Snowshoe t1_j9uliq3 wrote on February 24, 2023 at 5:51 PM

That’s a great story! Funny, my father also said he felt fortunate to not be a Marine or soldier slogging it out in the jungle. I remember him saying more than once, “Barring being forced down, I always knew I had a warm dry bed waiting for me and that I wouldn’t be sleeping in a muddy ditch.”

I missed the link you mentioned. I’ll check that out. I happened across a photo of my father last year in the Wikipedia article on his ship, the USS Bismarck Sea. Buried in the article is a photo of an accident unfolding on the deck and a crumpled individual in the middle of the mess. It seemed very similar to a story Dad told me about an accident he was involved in, so I dug a bit deeper. Sure enough, it was Dad. He was mentioned in the photos source material. (He was virtually uninjured but his plane captain and another pilot were lost).