Warbird Information Exchange

Only if you lie to me and tell me they can't see well enough to have good aim!

Steve

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"Any excuse is good enough if you're willing to use it!"

I'm with Beachgirl 100% on this one. I have talked with a lot of RNZAF veterans who were in the Pacific, based in some of the same places as these Corsairs were at.

I've also read a few books by pilots and groundcrews there with the RNZAF. What the lovely photos do not convey is that the heat was so intense during the day that to touch your bare skin on the aircraft skin would burn you if you were not lucky. If you dropped a tool like a spanner onto the wing you'd have to wait till later to pick it up as it'd be too hot. The temperatures measured inside cockpits and worse inside the bombers like Hudsons and Venturas were upwards of 50 degrees Celcius, which for the Farenheit people is fricking hot. 60 degrees is about as much as a human can stand, and the temperatures around midday approached this.

Fine for the aircrew who jumped in, experienced the heat for a bit and then took off getting a cooling breeze through. But for the erks who sat all afternoon doing rewiring or whatever, not a pleasant place to be.

Of course there were the sudden tropical downpours that cooled the place down but also turned the solid ground to slushy mud instantly, and the rain also brought out the bugs, many of them carrying diseases that could kill a man.

After a day's work they'd line up for a dinner of substandard mush, and drink green tea that was apparently simply awful to NZ'ers tastes. They then slept in tents infested with bugs and rats and all, and if it rained the water ran through under their strectchers. And of course Washing Machine Charlie came over during the night with its unsynchronised engines and dropped a few bombs, not with much intent to cause destruction but to break the sleep of the airmen below. They had to get up and jump in foxholes sometimes two or three times a night. At places like Guadalcanal they also had Japanese snipers hiding in the jungle around the airfield too, long after the main Japanese force had been pushed out.

Another factor for the Kiwis in the early deployments to the pacific was they had a lot less resources and equipment than the Yanks did there and were often forced to beg and scrounge off the Americans just to have the basics, as our country was under-prepared for Pacific war when all NZ's efforts had been already sent to the war in Europe since 1939.

One of the veterans I talked to told me how difficult it was to eat there, he said the flies buzzed around your fork and you had to shoo off every mouthful. One time he had a large blowfly fly into his mouth and he choked on it, so badly he couldn't stop coughing and wretching and had to go to the MO. As he told me this he began to cry as the memory of it was too much, something he'd blanked out. He said he thought that he'd survived 6 months so far in the war zone and was going to be killed by a ruddy blowfly!

The Pacific War zone has to have been the worse for living in. Those who were in Britain fighting the Germans sure did some tough flying but at the end of the day lived in comfort and enjoyed the local pubs and girls, etc. I think even the Western Desert theatre of war was not as bad as the Pacific. It shows a amazing resilience of the human spirit. I admire those men who served there greatly, especially the groundcrews who served there a year rather han the three month stints of the aircrew.

Kia Kaha.

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Dave
Thanks for the info!
I had forgotten about the bugs in the Pacific, YUCK!

Steve

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"Any excuse is good enough if you're willing to use it!"