American Valor Quarterly Issue 9 - Summer 2012 | Page 30

another bit the dust. Having cleared the
air, we proceeded to Lingayen Gulf and
bombed the shipping in the bay. Pulling
out of my dive, I spotted another twinengine bomber out over the sea.
Calling it out, I pulled in front and headed
for the enemy plane. We flew for quite
some distance until someone in the group
came on the radio. “Does anyone else see
a plane out there?” he asked. No one
answered. By this time I could see the
meatballs on the wings. This was also the
first time I realized that I had considerably
better than twenty-twenty vision.
“Stick with me another thirty seconds, and
if you don’t see it by then, we’ll give it
up,” I replied. By this time, I could see
the pilot. We continued a short time, and
I made a run on the plane, splashing it.
We turned back toward land with my
section leader flying as my wingman. We
crossed the beach, and I spotted another
twin-engine bomber, no doubt left from
the big fight, trying to sneak away at very
low altitude. I called him out.
Masoner replied, “Go get him. I’ll cover
you.”
I slipped down to find that the guy was
flying about five feet above the ground
down a dirt road that was tree lined and
just wide enough for him to stay between
the trees. There was no way to get a shot
at him. In addition, the plane had the twin20mm gun turret on the top. He was
roaring away at me, and I couldn’t get a
shot.
I couldn’t let him get away, so I side
slipped down behind him and yawed the
plane to try to get a burst into the wing
up next to the Princeton and took the
crew off. Not long after, it sank.

When we broke out of the clouds, he
found himself directly behind the Jap
fighter and let go with his two forwardfiring .50-caliber machine guns and
downed him immediately. We didn’t
know what to do with this turn of events,
and after much thought we decided to
make a sitcom out of it. How else can
you explain a bomber shooting down a
fighter?
I enlisted the help of both Bruce Williams,
who had been a journalism major in
college, and the Associated Press
correspondent who was aboard. In
addition to his experience, he had a
typewriter and knew how to type. The
dive-bomber pilot who shot down the
Zero was named Parker, so we named
the series Zeke Parker, Boy Hero, Zeke being
the code name for the Jap fighter. We
worked up a theme song, “Let Me Get
One Of Those Yellow Bellies, I’ll Beat
Him Red, White, And Blue”.
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