Lectures at Fort Leavenworth
Edgar Whitehead attended an Officers training course in 1944 at the Army Base in the USA at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
One of the lectures was from a Colonel of the 8th Army Air Corps recently returned from Normandy, on aircraft identification. This was a contrast to some of the other lectures Edgar endured. After a brief, but vivid description of how to distinguish the principal belligerents' fighter aircraft, he showed a film of a fighter head on in a power dive. He then shouted, "Those who'd fire put up their hands."
A forest of hands went up and he said, "That's just too bad, its a British Spitfire. Let's try again."
Another aircraft appeared nose on and again he yelled the same question. This time a few wavering hand went up. He shook his head sadly, "That's just too bad, it's a Japanese Zero."
In the next ten minutes he showed the audience their ignorance. He finally had mercy on them and gave a personal reminiscence. "Just before D-Day I was out on a sweep over Northern France with my wing of Mustangs. We got into a dog fight and I got separated from the others and was returning across the channel. It was just at the time when some German destroyers tried to escape from Brest. The next thing I saw was two of our B26's vigorously bombing a British Destroyer and she was firing back with everything she'd got; it was just a matter of time till somebody got hurt. At that moment there came a full Squadron of Messerschmit 109 F's, who drove off the B 26's and proudly escorted the British Destroyer up Channel. That gentlemen, may console you for your performance this afternoon."
(The British asked North American Aviation to build Curtiss P-40 Warhawks as Germany rampaged across Europe in 1940. Instead the Americans built a brand new prototype aircraft in 102 days and flew it a few weeks later. Unfortunately their American built Allison engine's performance dropped off drastically at high altitudes. In the Autumn of 1942 the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine replaced it and the Mustangs top speed leapt to over four hundred miles per hour. High speed, long range, low cost, and six .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns established air supremacy.)
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References:
- Sir Edgar Whitehead's Unpublished Memoirs, Rhodes House, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, by permission.
- Photo credit: The National WWII Museum, New Orleans.
