October 1, 1998
Ok you guys, I guess I'll have to keep posting these, since I got a lot of requests to keep them coming. Thanks. For any newbies, my father, a longtime military and GA pilot passed away recently, and I've been posting the best of his flying stories as a memorial.
Dad was an instructor at a large number of bases in California and the Southwest during WWII. We lived in Bakersfield for a short while, twice (I moved 23 times before I got to high school), while Dad was stationed at the local air base. One morning the Base Commander called him into his office and shut the door. "Captain," he says, "we have a serious problem over at the Officer's Club." "Oh?" says Dad, "what's that, Sir?" "We're almost out of whiskey," replies the CO, "and I can't get us any more for at least a month." Now this was serious business. "What should we do, Sir?" asks my father, pretty sure he knew what was coming. "I want you to select a crew you can trust, draw enough money from the bursar, and fly a B-25 up to Canada and fill it with booze. Here are the authorizations you need. This mission is top secret. You are to tell no one where you're going. You are to return here tomorrow night, taxi to the far end of the field, and wait while a crew comes out to unload you. No one must ever know about this; is that clear?" Dad looks him in the eye. "Isn't this illegal, Sir?" "There's a war on, Captain," replies the CO, "and sometimes we have to bend the rules. I will tell you this: if anything goes wrong, you are completely on your own. I will deny all knowledge of this mission. Is that clear?" "Yessir" says Dad, with a sinking feeling in his stomach.
So Dad grabbed a friend he thought he could trust, selected a couple of airmen they knew well, and headed for Canada in the B-25. They landed at a small strip near a moderate sized town in British Columbia, figuring to avoid big cities like Vancouver, but a large enough town that it would have some good-sized liquor stores. They paid someone at the strip to drive them into town in a pickup, bought 50 or so cases of whiskey at as few different locations as they thought could get away with, and took it back to the field. They were sure the Mounties were going to turn up any minute. They then had to figure out how to put all this weight into an aircraft designed to carry its payload slung from bomb racks. They distributed the load as best they could, but had to put quite a bit of it on top of the closed bomb bay doors. All the way back to Bakersfield, they were sure the bomb bay doors were going to let go and drop their load of whiskey somewhere sensitive, like all over the runway when they landed. Dad made the most gentle touchdown he could possibly make that night, and was really relieved when the truck that met them at the end of the runway was not full of MP's.
Morale in the Officer's Club stayed high, and we won the war. The only fallout from the entire mission was a few days later when one of the maintenance crew was found drunk on duty behind a hangar with half a bottle of Canadian Club in his hand. He claimed he'd found it in a B-25, but no one believed him.
Bob
Copyright Ó 1998 Robert T. Chilcoat