Interview by Daniel Jackson, July 30, 2008
Mrs. Kagan:
Hello?
Daniel Jackson:
Hi, ma’am. This is Daniel Jackson from the Air Force Academy.
Mrs. Kagan:
Okay. Hold on a second, would you please?
Daniel Jackson:
Oh, no problem. Thanks.
Stanley Kagan:
How are you?
Daniel Jackson:
I’m fine. Sorry I’m a little late. I just got back from the airfield.
Stanley Kagan:
Okay. It’s okay, it’s okay. Are you ready to ask some questions?
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah, I’m ready if you’re ready, sir.
Stanley Kagan:
I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. Well, to start things off, how did you end up in China?
Stanley Kagan:
Oh, well, how’s your history of World War II?
Daniel Jackson:
Pretty good.
Stanley Kagan:
Okay. You know that the B-29s were first based not in China, but in India on the other side of the Hump, the other side of the Himalayan Mountains. Are you familiar with that?
Daniel Jackson:
Right, Operation Matterhorn?
Stanley Kagan:
Operation Matterhorn was what? I don’t know—
Daniel Jackson:
That was the B-29s.
Stanley Kagan:
Before the B-29s went to the Mariana Islands, they were based in China. Oh, they were based in India, but they flew over to Chengtu, China, where the Chinese had built eight airbases. The odd-numbered ones, one, three, five, and seven were bomber bases. The even ones, two, four, six, and eight were fighter bases and the fighter bases were for day fighters, basically. Actually, they were all based in India, but they flew over the Hump, loaded up, topped off the tanks, bombs, everything else, and then proceeded to fly eighteen-hour missions to the southern islands of Japan. They couldn’t reach the mainland, the main island, I should say. They could only get as far as the southern islands. That was a nine-hour trip one way.
So, General Chennault and the Fourteenth Air Force pretty well controlled the skies at day by this time. This is now in—let me see. This is June of ’44 now, roughly. Give or take a month one way or the other. And they couldn’t control—they didn’t have any night fighters so they didn’t control overnight bombardment. So, the 426th, we didn’t know where we were going. Nobody knows what’s going on during wartime. They just tell you after the fact and we wound up in Chengtu to protect the bomber bases there from night bombardment. Okay? And we were pretty damn successful. We had—I don’t know if it was five nights out of six nights or six out of seven nights, but every night for a week or so, we shot down—we, that’s the pilots and the radar observers—shot down one Japanese bomber. And at the end of that time, they stopped bombing at night. That’s how we got to China. Now, if you mean how’d we get there physically?
Daniel Jackson:
Well, how did you get there? How’d you end up there?
Stanley Kagan:
I was in the original cadre of 426th. My MOS was 759, which is radio mechanic operator VHF, very high frequency, which in those days was invented by the British actually, control net systems over the British Isles. I won’t go into details of the set or anything else, but it was also used in conjunction with a directional antenna.
So, I was in the original cadre, which was formed in January of 1944 at Hammer Field in Fresno California. And then we went from there to Salinas, California. We didn’t have any planes or anything. They had one older B-25 that they used just to get their flying time in. You know, four hours a month and you got flight pay. Moved to Delano, California. At Delano we got one, it was an XP-61. It was experimental at that point. You remember that P-61?
Daniel Jackson:
Right. Northrop P-61. And you guys had the A models in China, right?
Stanley Kagan:
That’s right, yeah, yeah. I think we got one B, maybe two Bs. We never saw it. We never got one with a turret, that’s for sure. They originally designed it for a three-man ship: the pilot, the radar observer in the back, and the turret operator in the middle. But those turrets were GE electric turrets, which were the same turrets being used in the B-29s. The B-29s had a much higher priority than we did, so all the turrets that GE, General Electric, shipped to where they were building the B-29s. So we never got a single one with a turret.
The turrets created some problems, by the way, in themselves because they never quite solved the problem of buffeting. The turret was okay in the forward position, but once they turned it one way or the other, it started creating bad airflow and the ship would rock a little bit. I don’t know if they ever solved that problem. But I never worked with a turret anyway, so it’s academic, basically.
We left Delano on January 5, 1944. We didn’t know where the hell we were going. We got on a troop train. They don’t tell you anything. On a troop train and wound up in Camp Patrick Henry, Newport News, Virginia. We must’ve taken seven to days. That was our point of embarkation and we were there for, I don’t know, maybe two weeks or so. We boarded a troop transport.
Anyway, where was I? We were in Newport News, Virginia, right?
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Stanley Kagan:
Sometime late in June. Am I talking too fast, or is this what you want to know?
Daniel Jackson:
This is fine, actually.
Stanley Kagan:
Did I answer your question?
Daniel Jackson:
I’m recording this all on a digital voice recorder, too, so don’t worry about talking fast. I can go back and listen to it as many times as I need to.
Stanley Kagan:
Okay, great. Here’s the irony of this whole thing: We leave Newport News, Virginia, head due south, and go back through the canal, back into the Pacific where we practically started. We were in Delane, California. It’s one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. We were a hundred miles from the port of embarkation on the West Coast. They put us on a troop train. We go a week, ten days on a troop train to Newport News, Virginia. Then to a ship that went back out, down south, two days, three days, through the canal zone on July 4th, 1944, back where we were, ended up a few hundred from Los Angeles, basically.
Anyway, no convoy, no nothing, this was a fairly fast ship. As I remember it, the ship made about twenty, twenty-one knots, which was pretty fast in those days for a troop ship. So no escort, no convoy, nothing of that nature—all by our lonesome. And god knows when, but sometime we finally got to Melbourne, Australia, but we weren’t allowed off the ship. They loaded up some water, some fuel, I guess, and then headed northwest, I guess it was, from there to Bombay, India.
And we got to Bombay on August the 10th, 1944. So if you do the arithmetic, it’s about forty-five days worth on that ship across the equator, that whole business with the rituals for crossing the equator. I forgot what they call it now. And landed in Bombay on the 10th of August. It was brutally hot and be that as it may, off the ship at Bombay and dragging two duffle bags, a gas mask, a carbine gun, a helmet liner—who knows what else. Trudged about a hundred yards over to a railroad siding there where we got on a troop train again and crossed India going west-to-east now and headed for Calcutta, or just outside of Calcutta, there was a place called Kanchipara, which was the reception center for all troops entering India.
I must tell you that if you’re not aware of it, that all the railroads in India at that time, at least in those times, had different gauges. There wasn’t a standard gauge, so we must’ve changed trains at least once a day it seems, and it probably took us about seven days, I remember, to get to Kanchipara, which was just outside of Calcutta. Just tents and lots of [inaudible]. So we were at Kanchipara for—I was trying to remember how long now. We had no planes. We had nothing at this point. I’d say the best part of a month, maybe three weeks or so.
Then they ship us up to a place called Ondal, O-N-D-A-L, which had a strip. And again, we got one B-25, as I remember, which everybody had to use just to get their flying time in. And from Ondal, we were transferred to—I’ll give you two names, I don’t know which sequence—a place called Pandaveswar and another place called Mataganj. I don’t know which sequence. And at one place, we got to see a P-61. Had, I think, maybe one or two B-25s at this time. That’s about it.
And finally, in—this is October now. We arrived on August 10th. That’s two months already that we’ve been fooling around different places and doing much of nothing. They finally send us over to Chabua, which was one of the many stations on the west side of the Hump, west side of the Himalayas, which you departed for over the Hump to China, to Kunming, basically.
So, forty of us, I remember in the C-46, no chutes, no anything—no seats even, just laying on the floor, basically. Crossed over the Hump to China to Kunming from which we were then flown up to Chengtu, to A-4, which was a place called Shwangliu, which is just outside of Chengtu. And then we’re sitting around again. We’re waiting for planes. We’re doing nothing, playing bridge.
I guess in October—must’ve been. Maybe I’m ahead of myself. Maybe we were only about six weeks later, someplace soon after that. We had noticed that the planes arrived by boat, disassembled and they’re back in Calcutta now. Or just outside of Calcutta at—God, what’s it called? Not Barrackpur. There was a huge old dirigible. You know what a dirigible is?
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah. Are you talking about Agra?
Stanley Kagan:
But the Hindenburg was the one that crashed at—but there’s a huge hangar down there where they assembled the planes that went out. So we sent—I don’t know how many people went down. We had to fly back to Chengtu, fly over the Hump to Chabua and get flown back to Calcutta. And a lot of our aircraft mechanics and we must have had some other ordinance people and communication people on it. It’s kind of hazy at this point, but they assembled the twelve planes. Came in and they were assembled there and then flown back by our pilots back up to Assam, which is now Bangladesh, basically [sic]. Then over the Hump to Kunming which was the headquarters of the Fourteenth Air Force and that’s in Yunnan province which is the most south-westerly in China, and then up to Chengtu, which is also in the west, but more central-west. And that’s where we started operations finally about—I’m guessing—early November, maybe. As I told you, in a week’s time, we’d gotten, I don’t know, five or six Japanese bombers and that was the end of night bombardment.
So we were sitting around doing nothing again until somebody came up with the bright idea of doing what they called at that time night intruder missions. And we dispersed planes to forward bases. I wound up in a place called—well, you may know Hsian, which is today a big tourist attraction because that’s where they found all those terracotta statues from god knows which dynasty there. Now it’s a huge tourist attraction. It wasn’t those days, but it was the most north-westerly base we had in all of China and we had four planes up there. We kept changing planes around and kept changing personnel around and we flew from forward bases like Liangshan, Hangkang, Mengxi—I mean, there must’ve been ten different places. I can’t remember all the names already at this point. And that was the night intruder mission. Because Chennault and the day fighters really controlled the air at this point, the Japanese could only move equipment, personnel, et cetera at night because they couldn’t move it in the daytime. Every train that moved got shot up, every barge that moved, some river traffic, all that stuff, so they started doing it at night.
And all the P-61s would do would be to go out after dusk, so usually around eight, nine o’clock at night, and work a section of road or a section of railroad track that was known until they saw headlights or some motion or something, and then just go down and shoot the best they could ahead of them. Do it wherever they could. And that was night intruder missions. So, I don’t have the history in front of me. I’ve got it someplace, but we were credited with 116 horses, twenty-three locomotives, not counting trucks. That’s what went on from I’d say from about the first of the year, roughly from January 1st through the end of the war in August of ’45, basically.
I spent almost all that period of time, almost all that period of time in Hsian, Now called Xi’an. They keep changing the spelling and the pronunciation.
But that’s the story of the 426th. Basically, we were sent there to protect the B-29 bases from night bombardment. And we were quite successful at it in a short period of time. And the rest of the time, we were used for these so-called night intruder missions. I might say that—I might add—we didn’t fly that many sorties because gasoline was the most precious commodity in all of China. I mean, we never had enough gas. I know we didn’t and General Chennault wasn’t thrilled to see us there because it took away from his day fighters, what little gas we got.
So to the best of my knowledge, at least from Hsian, we never flew more than one flight a night. And there was some nights we didn’t fly any because gas, the inventory was getting low, so you had to keep a certain amount on hand, but never more than one flight a night. That was the story. So any questions?
Daniel Jackson:
Yes. And actually, I actually just got back from China. I was there for six weeks.
Stanley Kagan:
Were you? Where?
Daniel Jackson:
All over the place. We flew into Shanghai, went to Nanking and did summer language immersion there. So I took some Chinese classes there.
Stanley Kagan:
Oh, Nanjing.
Daniel Jackson:
In Nanking. Yeah, Nanjing.
Stanley Kagan:
Yeah, I know it. Okay, yeah. That’s a big university town.
Daniel Jackson:
Right, right. And then from there, we took a weekend trip to Guilin.
Stanley Kagan:
Okay. So you saw the sugar cones.
Daniel Jackson:
Right, right.
Stanley Kagan:
Yeah, all right.
Daniel Jackson:
And we took another weekend trip to Xi’an.
Stanley Kagan:
Ah, okay. Did you see the terracotta statues?
Daniel Jackson:
I did. It was a nice town too. I liked the climate there a lot better than on the east coast.
Stanley Kagan:
It’s a little bit higher up over there. Yeah, it’s a lot higher up. If I remember correctly, Hsian’s about four or five thousand feet up on a high plateau. And actually, it’s not that far from the Himalayas either. If you look at a land map—I’ve got a bunch of them downstairs. If you look at a land map with the forty-nine-mile squares on it and whatnot, at Chengtu and at Hsian, you’re in a rising plateau basically, and the Himalayas aren’t that far away at that point. The next square jumps like, I don’t know, from four or five thousand feet to eleven, twelve. The next square is up to eighteen or nineteen thousand at the highest elevation. And it’s really in the shadows of the Himalayas there. That’s why it’s much cooler. It’s much more pleasant, yeah.
Daniel Jackson:
It’s much drier too. It’s not quite as muggy.
Stanley Kagan:
Let’s see. Did you go to Kunming?
Daniel Jackson:
We did go to Kunming.
Stanley Kagan:
You did go to Kunming.
Daniel Jackson:
And we went to Lijiang while we were out there too. We went to Beijing and Hangzhou and then to Hainan Island.
Stanley Kagan:
Oh.
Daniel Jackson:
And we had a stopover on the way to Kunming in Chongquing.
Stanley Kagan:
Oh, right. Right, right. It used to be Chungking in the old days.
Daniel Jackson:
Right, right.
Stanley Kagan:
Yeah. How much time did you spend in each town? A couple days?
Daniel Jackson:
In each place?
Stanley Kagan:
Yeah.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, the deal was that every week from Monday until Thursday morning, we would have language immersion classes in Nanjing.
Stanley Kagan:
Oh, okay.
Daniel Jackson:
Then from Thursday afternoon until Sunday night, we’d take weekend trips.
Stanley Kagan:
Right, yeah. So on the weekends, basically.
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Stanley Kagan:
I see. Okay, yeah. Yeah. The old field at Hsian was out by a place—I don’t know the name of it—it’s about thirty-five miles outside of Hsian, so quite a long trip into the city. Though the city’s gotten much larger than what it used to be, but the airfield is inside the city limits today. And it’s just outside the wall. You know, Hsian has that wall around it. It’s a walled city. And just outside wall and just northeast of the walled city, which is downtown basically, is the old field, which was used until, I think, 1991. Let me see. It goes back. We first went back in ’91, right, and it was still there. They used that old field as their local airport for a long time until they built this new thing, which is miles and miles out.
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah. Takes like two hours to get there.
Stanley Kagan:
It was very close to downtown, basically. In those days it was a much smaller place. Anyway, go ahead. I’m sorry to interrupt.
Daniel Jackson:
No, no. That’s okay.
Stanley Kagan:
So fire away if you’ve got any questions.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, what exactly was your role in the squadron?
Stanley Kagan:
Okay. I was a 759, which was radio operator mechanic, VHF. You got to picture you’re in China now. It’s 1944-45 and you go out at night. And actually, the radar observers are supposed to keep track of all turns and twists you make, but it’s dark. There were no radio stations. There are no range stations. There are no anythings. There are no navigation aids whatsoever, period! But we had a portable homing station that we set up any of the fields—not all of them because there was not enough to go around. We only had a few. We did set one up in Hsian on the highest spot we could find there. Are you familiar with VHF?
Daniel Jackson:
Yes.
Stanley Kagan:
It’s line-of-sight transmission, so the higher up they are, the longer the range. So, if indeed they got lost, they’d call us. We had a very, very strange—I shouldn’t say strange. Our call sign: Happy Homer. Isn’t that original? Happy Homer? As soon as they called, we manned the station up the little hill just off the field and we had a directional antenna. So once they were on their way back, they’d call in for a checkup of their heading and the antenna was on a compass rose so we were on the same page and we’d give them a heading. Five minutes later or ten, when they got in range, we’d have them put the field lights on and they’d land. But you’ve got to realize there’s no place In China where you could tune into a broadcast station or triangulate the way you would—I shouldn’t say the way you would. I’m 50 years behind the curve, so bear with me. But in the old days, domestically here, even before there were range stations, there were radio stations. All he had to do was triangulate the three different stations and he could pretty well tell where he was. They had nothing like that in China. And no range there. We call them VORTAC stations today.
So all we had was this thing called a directional antenna. And what it was, was a reflector which if you pushed the switch on the revolving part of the antenna, it cut out the reflector so that if the signal dropped off, it meant that you had the reciprocal—no, no. If the signal dropped off, that was right, the right heading. But if the signal increased, it meant the reflector picked it up, it was the other side, so you knew that they’d passed over you already. It was on the other side of the compass.
That was the job. There were two of us there. My old buddy Bart Sheen, who is long since deceased, unfortunately, and we ran the homer at Hsian from—I don’t remember, but it was in ’45 until the end of the war, basically. That’s what happened.
By the way, we had a squadron history made, for what it’s worth. How’d you get my name originally?
Daniel Jackson:
This is the fourth paper that I’ve written on—well, right now, this book that I’m working on, I’ve been working on that for over a year now.
Stanley Kagan:
Right.
Daniel Jackson:
And one of the guys I interviewed originally gave me a directory for the Fourteenth Air Force Association.
Stanley Kagan:
Ah, okay, okay. Who are you working with, by the way? Someone from the 449th?
Daniel Jackson:
I’ve talked to all the surviving members of the 449th, actually. I’ve talked to about—
Stanley Kagan:
I’m trying to remember the name of the guy from Dallas, Texas who I went with on one of the trips to China and I can’t remember his name. But he’d be a good source of information.
Daniel Jackson:
Probably Dick Maddox.
Stanley Kagan:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. What’s his first name, Maddox?
Daniel Jackson:
Dick. Richard Maddox.
Stanley Kagan:
Not Greg. Greg Maddox pitches for the Cubs, no. Maddox, Maddox, Maddox. White hair and Dallas, come on. What was his first name, you remember?
Daniel Jackson:
Richard, Dick.
Stanley Kagan:
Dick Maddox. That sounds about right, I guess. Sometimes, as you know, we have a little problem with memory and everything else now. But Dick was—yes, he would’ve been a good source if he’s still alive. I don’t know. Is he still alive?
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah, he’s still around. I just talked to him last week, actually.
Stanley Kagan:
Pardon?
Daniel Jackson:
I just talked to him last week, actually. He’s doing good.
Stanley Kagan:
Okay, good. Okay, great, great, great. That’s good. We actually sat across the aisle from one another on the ’91 trip to China. Yeah. I saw him subsequently at reunions and everything else. We had a squadron association. We ran I think about seventeen or eighteen reunions starting in ’72 or ’73, alternate years, but we’re down to twenty-seven or twenty-eight on the mailing list. The rest are—well, we didn’t ever have all of them because we started late trying to start this thing up, so we lost half of the members between ’45 and ’72 or ’71. We lost half the members and just couldn’t trace them. But we had 108, 110—something like that—on the mailing list at the peak and we’re down to about twenty-seven or twenty-eight now.
Now that we lost Jerry Harris who was one of the pilots up at Hsian just back in June sometime. But Jerry was always—we’d see him at reunions, but we’d also see him at—the Fourteenth Air Force, had a Memorial Day weekend in Washington DC.—actually, across the river in Arlington—every Memorial Day since 1950-something-or-other. So we’d see Jerry at the memorial in Washington every year. Nice guy. Great guy. Great guy. He had a storied career, by the way, just for whatever it’s worth. He stayed on and the Air Force sent him to finish his college, which he did at the University of Southern California. Where are you from, by the way?
Daniel Jackson:
Colorado Springs.
Stanley Kagan:
Where are you from originally?
Daniel Jackson:
Colorado Springs.
Stanley Kagan:
Oh, really? You’re bred and grown up in the shadow of the Academy?
Daniel Jackson:
Pretty much. I was actually born in Worcester, Massachusets, but my parents are both from Tuscon, Arizona, so that didn’t last long. So we moved out to Colorado when I was pretty young, so I’ve pretty much lived here all my life.
Stanley Kagan:
We had one of our reunions in Colorado Springs, probably in the ’80s or ’90s, someplace back then. But anyway, I get off the track. That’s what happens with us old-timers. I forgot what I was about to say, but it was—oh, Jerry. Yeah, yeah. He wound up getting his degree. When he got his degree, they sent him to Montreal, California to head an all-weather—it was another night-fighting outfit—all-weather intercept, or something like that. When he got up there, he found out he was the only guy there that ever had flown a plane at night! None of the others ever had flown at night. Amazing. And then, he wound up in the Berlin Airlift, and he wound up in Korea, and he wound up in Vietnam, and a tour of duty in Washington at one point or another, and retired after thirty-two years as a full-blown colonel and played golf ever since. Nice guy. Good pilot. Decent human being.
Another one of our survivors is Donald Kohn, from just outside of Sacramento, California, who keeps sending me all kinds—he forwards all kinds of emails to me and today’s email had the crash of the B-2 at—where the heck was that?
Daniel Jackson:
It was in Guam.
Stanley Kagan:
Then the analysis of why it crashed, and an amazing story that the airspeed indicator works on pressure and somehow or other some weather got in there. Why it wasn’t weather-patched is beyond me. And so it gave a faulty reading and what happened is that the plane’s takeoff speed’s supposed to be 155 knots, which is what the indicator showed, but it was only going 35 kmots when it settled. What the computer said when they recovered the box and all that business. And then the plane, they tried taking off, but it didn’t go off. But the indicator said 155 knots and so the computer says, “We’re going 155 knots, it should be a nose-up attitude.” So it put the nose up and of course, then it stalled. Luckily the pilots both ejected and here comes the plane. The pictures show it flat as a pancake on the runway somewhere. But instruments—you can get funny readings sometimes. It’s a crazy world. Crazy world. Don, he was a P-61, one of the replacement pilots also that came in. All right.
Okay, I’m sorry. I tend to wander off, but you’ll forgive an old timer.
Daniel Jackson:
That’s okay. That’s okay.
Stanley Kagan:
So, if you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask. And do me a favor, whenever the book is finished, send me a copy. I can buy it. Okay?
Daniel Jackson:
Will do. I’m hoping to finish up. I have a rough draft. Well, I have a second draft done already that a couple of publishers looked over for me, so now I’m making some corrections and some additions that they suggested. And I talked about the Ichi-Go Offensive when the Japanese drove into China with half a million troops in 1944. The 449th gets, every night at the forward airbases, there were night menace raids from the Japanese bombers.
Stanley Kagan:
Right, right, right.
Daniel Jackson:
So I thought it would be worth mentioning.
Stanley Kagan:
We had forward detachments at places called Hangkang, Laohokow. They all were more easterly than Chengtu. But Hsian was northwesterly based, so I know what happened up there, but not at too many other bases—or who was there even at what time. Because most of the squadron—our headquarters was still Chengtu, but most of the squadron was dispersed over this broad area of China at different places in different times, so it’s kind of hard to put the whole picture together, I would guess. By the way, you mentioned the Ichi-Go campaign, right?
Daniel Jackson:
Yes.
Stanley Kagan:
My older brother, who is deceased now three years, was in the 308th Bomb Group, which was the only heavy bombardment group in China. And he had to evacuate Kweilin and then Luchow. You’ve researched about the campaign, I presume? And actually, a very close friend of mine, a former president of the Fourteenth Air Force Association, Hal Fenton is also in the 308th—a different squadron, the 425th, in the bomb squadron. And they had to evacuate. I had a third friend over there who was in finance or something. He too evacuated Kweilin and Luchow because that was part of the Ichi-go campaign there. And if you haven’t read—what the hell Teddy White’s book was called? The Mountain Road, is it?
Daniel Jackson:
The Mountain and Road? Yeah.
Stanley Kagan:
That’s White’s book, isn’t it? Yeah. That has the whole story of the evacuation and the retreat. But anyway, it’s an interesting story, but very few people who know about it.
Oh, I got a question for you. What made you pick the 449th? Did you know somebody in there or somebody’s father or what?
Daniel Jackson:
It’s kind of an odd story. I guess it kind of just happened. For one of my history classes, I wrote a paper about the Fourteenth Air Force in general and my thesis was the American Air Force beat the Japanese Air Force in China because of superior leadership.
Stanley Kagan:
Oh, yes. Without question. Superior tactics, superior everything, yeah.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. And so I went through and I was going through each of the factors that could’ve contributed to victory to show that leadership was kind of the one that pushed it over the top.
Stanley Kagan:
That’s right. Chennault was a brilliant tactician. A brilliant tactician, but a strategist also. He kept moving pawns around. The Japanese had four times more planes than we had. Yeah. He was a bright guy. Bright guy. The 449th, to the best of my knowledge, was the only squadron in China that used P-38s. That’s other than the photo P-38s but for the actual aircraft, for fighter planes, I think the 449th was the only squadron that had P-38s.
Daniel Jackson:
And I didn’t actually know, at the time that I was writing this paper, that there were any P-38s in China. I thought it was all P-40s and then all the P-40s got replaced by P-51s.
Stanley Kagan:
51s, right. Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Jackson:
I was going through an organizational chart for the Fourteenth Air Force because I was putting together a comparison chart showing the different statistics from the different airplanes, Japanese and American, to show that they were more or less equal for most of the war, and I saw that there were P-38s in there. I thought that was weird, so I ended up having a really old Fourteenth Air Force Association newsletter. It was from 1996. But I was able to get ahold of five guys from the 449th with that and they got me in touch with more people and I just started.
Stanley Kagan:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know how they ended up there or what, but the rest were all P-51s—or all P-40s originally, then P-51s. I don’t know how they got there—somehow—but they were there. There’s no question about it. They were there. Okay, Cadet Jackson—Daniel, if I may call you Daniel.
Daniel Jackson:
You may.
Stanley Kagan:
Or Dan. Anytime you got a question or anything, feel free to call. I hope that I have information that makes sense to you, but that’s the best of my knowledge. Okay?
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I appreciate it, sir. I’ll send you an email and if you have contact information for anybody else that you know that could be of help too, you can email that to me.
Stanley Kagan:
Sure.
Daniel Jackson:
And I will be sure to keep you in the loop as far as what happens with the book.
Stanley Kagan:
Great. Great. Thanks very much. Good to talk to you, buddy. Good luck.
Daniel Jackson:
Good to talk to you, too. Thank you, sir. Have a good day.
Stanley Kagan:
Right on. Bye-bye.
Daniel Jackson: Bye.