Here is a picture of my Grandfathers airplane, B-17 s/n 41-9099 in
Allahabad, India, Jun 1942. This trip took from 26 April to 7 May 1942.
He was plane captain and his right seater was the famous Fred Bock.
He picked up this airplane new from the factory and with his
airplane crew they headed overseas.
its a story!
Our family has a very unique and TRUE story that starts back during WWII. During WWII my grandfather flew B-17's and B-24's overseas. While he was gone in 1943 my Dad was born. My grandfather did not know he had a son since he left suddenly to war with a crew and airplane (he was the plane captain) and did not even know my Dad was conceived. My grandmother tried for a year to contact him thru telegrams and letters but with no success. When Dad was born he was boarded in a children’s hospital since Grandmother and Grandfather were NOT married. That was looked down on very poorly during that time frame. Dad was adopted shortly thereafter and grew up never knowing anything about his parents except that his Dad was "killed in the war". That was an assumption of my grandmother since she never was able to contact him. Dads mom last saw him only weeks after he was born and shortly after adoption Dad and his new adoptive parents moved far away. Dad grew up in a great household with a younger adopted sister. Both Dads adoptive parents were school teachers, nothing to do with aviation at all.
While in high school Dad had an urge to be a pilot. After college Dad went to OCS and eventually went on to become a NAVAL aviator flying jets in Vietnam and had a very long US NAVY career. Dad flew the SNB, T-34, T-28, Helos, F9F, A-7, AV-8 and Kingair. He is now retired.
Dad got me started in aviation when I was young. I started flying at a very young age of 13. During my Senior year of High School I was a flight instructor at the NAS Lemoore flying club.
My career in the aviation industry has afforded me the opportunity to continue flying all my life(I'm 47 now) One of the things I am most passionate about in life is restoring and flying warbirds. I have 2 warbirds, the 1st is a North American T-28C. This plane was actually in the same squadron in Pensacola when Dad CQ’d and became a naval aviator back in the mid 1960's. We did not know this when I bought the unflyable airplane sight unseen back in 1999. My T-28C won the National Aviation Heritage "HAP" Arnold Warbird trophy sponsored by the Smithsonian Air and Space museum back in 2004 at the Reno airraces.
Unfortunately my adoptive grandparents have recently passed on.
Where this story takes a twist is recently in early 2006 I pushed my Dad to try and help me find the fate of his natural parents. For all my life I was not allowed to talk about them or really even allowed to ask questions about them. My adoptive grandfather would entertain my questions when Dad was not around but he really did not have any information, just that he was killed in the war and she was possibly a school teacher. Dad was very bitter that he was put up for adoption and really did not know the real story about his parents nor was he interested. We knew almost nothing about them and particularly what happened to his Dad in WWII.
I spent 5 months and countless hours searching, inquiring into the childrens hospitals that Dad was boarded in when he was born and finally petitioning the Montana state superior court for adoption records. There were a lot of dead ends but every now and then a new clue would emerge. The hard part was determining what clues and bits of information were valid enough to keep looking into.
In July 2006 I discovered that my grandfather was still alive and living here in California! In September 2006 my Dad and I flew the T-28 to meet him and his wife for the FIRST TIME. That day changed my Dads life.
A few months later DNA tests were done. The results confirmed that they are father and son.
Now thats the short story. There is much more to this story like my Dads 1/2 sister he never even knew about, nor did she ever know about him! The interesting parts are Dads aviation and my aviation background and what possessed us to follow in the footsteps of someone we never knew. It must have been in our genes. And remember the HAP Arnold warbird trophy I won back in 2004, well in Sept 2006 my grandfather was telling us stories about the war. One such story was about the day he spent with HAP Arnold when he visited the pilots in India. Its really fun to sit down with him and listen to the “war stories”. If thats not enough to make you say WOW, how about just finding out at age 63 that you Dad is still alive and you get to meet him, for the first time!! Sadly Dads mom, my grandmother, passed away about 15 years ago.
This is only a brief time line and series of actual events. There are so many more coincidences and events that I discovered and even the road to discovery that it will send chills up your spine.
December 2006 my wife and I had a baby girl who is destined to become not only a 4th generation pilot but a 4th generation Warbird Pilot. Someday she will fly our plane that is just like the one my grandfather trained in back in 1941 at Randolph Field, TX. The legacy must continue.
He also flew B-24's after 17's. Again he was plane captain. Here is his crew with him standing on left.
Chuck Wahl
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