Autobiography of Jesse Stay

BEGINNINGS

I was born on July 20, 1921 in our small brick farm house on the family's eighty acre farm, just west of the Denver Rio Grande and Western rail road tracks, on the Draper-Riverton cross road in Draper, Utah. I was the youngest of twelve children. Mother had four boys, seven girls and then me. I have always been grateful that she didn't stop at eleven.

When I was a year old I moved with my family to a big house on Seventh East in the town of Draper. My earliest memories are about our life in this home. We lived there until I was six years old. I remember herding our cow,"GB," on the side of the road while she grazed. I had a mean billy goat that I had to lead down the road to a patch of willows to graze and I had a horrible time trying to make the goat go where I wanted it to go. I was also given a black lamb to raise. I learned to love the lamb and it would follow-me everywhere. It broke my heart when we sold it to be butchered after it was grown. I got twenty dollars from the lamb, which my parents put in the bank for me. I bought my first suit with this money when I was fourteen years old.

I entered the first grade in the Draper elementary school but only attended this school for a few months before we moved to Salt Lake City to be near my father's work.

We moved to Salt Lake in the winter of 1927 and lived in a house my dad bought from his uncle Thomas Woodbury at 1858 South Fourth East. It was also a big brick house which we needed for our big family. Myla and I were enrolled in the Whittier grade school. Lois and Nina were in high school. Doris was going to the LDS Business College and Mary was in training as a nurse at the LDS Hospital. We lived in Salt Lake City for three years and during this time Carroll came home from his mission and Lorna's Husband, Henry Vandenberg was badly hurt in an automobile accident and they came to live with us with their two little children, Harry and Joyce. They lived with us for eighteen months. Henry was in bed and needed constant ,care. He had a broken back and was paralyzed from the waist down. He also had a broken arm, and crushed kidneys. Lorna took him back to Michigan to see his father and he died in Michigan.

For many years my father was the Salt Lake County horticulturist. It was his responsibility to control noxious weeds and to promote good agriculture in the county. One of the major activities of our summers was to help him prepare the Salt Lake County agricultural exhibit at the Utah State Fair.

Ivan and Hobert were working in Huntington Park, California and when Mary finished her nurse's training she and Lorna moved to California where they both went to work for the Mission Hospital in Huntington Park.,, Mary as a nurse and Lorna in the Laundry. They rented a house near the hospital and Lorna kept house for Ivan and Mary. Hobert was married and lived a few blocks away. Within a few months, Doris completed her training at the LDS Business

College and also went to California where she found work in the same paint company with Ivan. The depression hit in 1929 and Carroll soon joined the rest of the brothers and sisters in California to look for work

In 1930 Dad had a difference of opinion with his boss over the need to destroy some noxious weeds on his boss's property and Dad lost his job. We then sold our home in Salt Lake City. Lois and Nina stayed with relatives for the school year and in March of 1931, Mom, Dad, Myla and I traveled to California in a Model T Ford. It took us three days to make the trip. The roads were dirt or under construction for many miles and even on good roads our fastest speed was about twenty-five miles an hour.

When we arrived in Huntington Park we all moved in together in the small house with my older brothers and sisters. I entered the fourth grade at the Miles Avenue School where I went until the end of the school year.

Dad had found and bought a house for the family at 3329 East Flower Street in Huntington.Park. During the summer of 1931 we left part of the family in the little house by the Mission Hospital and the rest of us moved into the Flower Street home. During that summer and the next winter, Dad built another house in the back yard of the Flower Street home. This house had four bedrooms and a bath room. When it was completed we all moved in together. There were thirteen of us including Lorna and her two children. In addition there were almost always visiting relatives from Utah or Idaho staying with us, looking for work. It was not unusual for there to be eighteen or twenty for the evening meal.

These were very difficult times for us financially. Ivan, Doris and Mary were working regularly and Lorna worked most of the time but the salaries were small and there were a lot of mouths to feed. They kept the family going until Dad was able to find work as a custodian in the Huntington Park City Hall. Mom, Dad and I would clean the church house each week for a small amount of money and Mom would work at the Salvation Army occasionally for groceries.

In the middle and late thirties all of my older brothers and sisters except Myla and Lois got married and moved away. We then rented our front house to a family for $25 per month and Dad, Mom, Myla, Lois and I moved into the house Dad had built in the rear. We made one of the bed rooms into a living room and another into a kitchen. Dad and I built two more bed rooms and for the first time in my life I had my own bedroom behind our garage.

After we moved to the Flower Street home, I went to the State Street Grade School for the fifth and sixth grades and to the Gage Avenue Junior High School for the seventh and eighth grades. In March of 1933 we had a severe earthquake which destroyed many of the buildings in our area. The schools were badly damaged and had to be condemned. The Huntington Park High School burned down and had to be rebuilt. For this reason we went to school in tents for the remainder of the fifth and sixth grades and in temporary wooden classrooms during Junior High school. The high school was almost rebuilt by the time I entered in the fall of 1936, though there were still a number of temporary wooden classrooms.

It seems that we were always short of money. I cut two or three lawns each week, sold Saturday Evening Post magazines to a regular route of customers and also on the side walk in front of a neighborhood market. I cut the lawn for Dad around the City Hall and in the park next to it. I also worked as a lab assistant for the Chemistry teacher during my last two years in high school. Myla was two years ahead of me in school and was a good student. She set the standard for me and we were both life members of the California Scholarship Society.

Our family attended church regularly. Dad was an active High Priest and taught the High Priest Class for a number of years. All of my brothers and sisters remained active in the Church except Ivan and Doris. They were both in the paint business and stopped going to church in their adult life.

Mother and Dad were both very loving to me. We were never a very demonstrative family but I knew I was loved. My tenderest memories of my childhood are memories of my mother rocking me in her big rocking chair when I was six or seven years old and singing to me. I remember the songs; "I Don't Know Why I Love You But I Do,," "My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown," "After The Ball Was Over." Mother had a wonderful sense of humor and could always look on the bright side of things. She had a saying for every occasion, many of them picked up from her English mother and father. I will always be grateful for her influence and love.

When I was a Deacon and Teacher in the Aaronic Priesthood in Huntington Park, there were many other boys in my quorums. When I was a Priest in Huntington Park Ward and later when the ward was divided and we were in the Walnut Park Ward, I was often the only one in attendance at Priesthood and MIA meetings.

During two summers between high school and college and after my first year at UCLA I worked in the California Furniture Factory in Bell, tailing lumber off of a rip saw. I earned enough money at this job to buy a 1934 Chevy sedan.

In the fall of 1939 I entered UCLA as a Pre-Med student. Each day for two years I would take Myla and three or four other students twenty-five miles each way to UCLA and back. The other students would pay enough for their transportation for me to buy gas. The car often went without needed repairs, however, and we drove many times through the middle of Los Angeles traffic with hardly any brakes. While I was going to UCLA I worked at two National Youth Administration funded jobs. I worked in the reserve book room in the university library and also took care of the animals being used for experimental work in the Zoology department. These jobs gave me enough money to stay in school. Since UCLA is a state university tuition was only $25 per semester which made it possible for almost anyone to get a college education if he wanted it.

During these first two years at UCLA our social life centered around the Church club, Lambda Delta Sigma. We met once a week at 5:00 p.m. in the religious conference building just off campus. We were given religious instruction by Dr. G. Byron Done. We had some social activity almost every week-end and each summer.

After I had finished my second year of Pre-Med school, I decided I didn't want to dedicate my life to medicine but didn't know what I did want to do, so I was at loose ends. In June 1941 some US Army Air Corps recruiters came to the UCLA campus to recruit students for the Army Flying Cadet program. I had always wanted to learn to fly and I knew that I would be drafted in a couple of years, so I signed up. I had to drive out to March Field in Riverside, California to take my physical examination. I drove out with a long time friend, Howard Hopper because my eye exam required that my eyes be dilated and I wouldn't be able to drive home. I passed my flying physical except for my weight. I had always been skinny and at six foot two inches and 125 pounds the doctor told me that I was sixteen pounds under the minimum allowable for a waiver. He told me to come back in six weeks with my sixteen pounds and he would pass me.

I went back home and began to stuff myself for six weeks. I drank malted milks every day, ate huge meals and snacked all day long. Someone told me that if I would drink a glass of milk every hour for twenty-four hours I would gain five pounds. So I set my alarm and woke up every hour all night for my glass of milk. Needless to say I couldn't stand to look at a glass of milk at the end of the twenty-four hours.

On the day I was supposed to go back to March Field, I got up early and had a huge breakfast, took three pounds of bananas to eat on the way and Howard and I started for March Field. When we arrived, full of bananas, we went to the base exchange and had a big malted milk. I could hardly waddle when I arrived at the hospital for a weight check. To my dismay, hen I stepped on the scales, I was still six pounds short of my minimum weight. I guess, with the war threatening, they wanted pilots pretty badly because the flight surgeon told me to come back at one o'clock with my six pounds.

I knew that if I could drink a gallon of water I would gain seven pounds so I went out and started to drink. I got so that I could feel the weight of my stomach on my esophagus and every time I took a drink of water I would have to go to the bathroom. I felt as if I were losing ground. In any event at one o'clock I went back in and stepped on the scales and I was still one pound short. I told the doctor that I could go out and drink another pound of water so he added a pound to my weight and let me pass. On the way home from March Field after that experience, we had to stop at every service station, tree and fire hydrant between Riverside and Los Angeles.

HELEN LELA VALANTINE

In the July of 1941 the whole Lambda Delta Sigma club from all of the campuses in the Los Angeles area went camping, with proper chaperons, of course, at Barton Flats, near Lake Arrowhead. It was here that I first became acquainted with Helen. She was a student at Los Angeles City College and the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I had noticed her at some of the inter- school activities previously but didn't think there was any chance that she would be interested in me. She seemed to be going steady with another fellow. This other guy was not at this particular camp-out and Helen and I and two of our friends went for a hike together. That was the start of an eternal love affair.

I had also been going rather exclusively with another girl who happened to be back east on vacation with her family at this time. I broke up with her and Helen broke up with the boy she had been going with and we both knew we were in love with each other.

By the time I met Helen in July I had received my orders to report to Lackland Army Air Base in San Antonio, Texas on 7 November 1941. I didn't have much time with her before I had to leave. We had a wonderful time together for the rest of the summer and I knew that she was the one for me, even though she was still making up her mind.

Although I had lived almost twenty years before, my life really began when I met Helen. Our love for each other has been constant and unwavering from the first day we got to know each other, though it took some time for Helen to realize this. Through more than fifty years of marriage, long separations, seven children, a gaggle of grand children and great grand children, I have always known that she loved me as I love her. We went together for four months in the summer of 1941 and when I left for aviation cadet flight training in November, she cried at the railroad station.

ARMY AIR CORPS TRAINING

I was to be gone for eight months and we had made no promises. I occasionally went out with girls while I was in training but found no real pleasure in their company. Helen began dating a defense worker and he convinced her that they should become engaged.

I still felt she loved me, though, and when other cadets would ask me if I was planning to get married when I graduated I would say "no but my girl friend is."

I enlisted as an Army Air Corps Flying Cadet on November 7,1941. One month before Pearl Harbor.

I received my commission as a Second Lieutenant and my pilot's wings in the Army Air Corps at Lubbock Texas Air Base on 3 July 1942 and went home for a ten-day leave. Helen and I were married in the Huntington Park chapel on July 13. I have always marveled that such a beautiful and wonderful girl would marry me. She has been my greatest blessing.

We were assigned to the Salt Lake City Replacement Depot for three weeks while my orders were being processed for a permanent assignment. We were planning to be sealed in the Salt Lake Temple at the time but it was closed for the summer vacation and I had used up my leave. When my orders came, I was assigned to the air base at Walla Walla, Washington with the 91st Heavy Bombardment Group where I became a co-pilot on B-17 Flying Fortresses. The group was undergoing combat crew training in preparation for an overseas assignment. One of the B-17s in our group was the now famous "Memphis Belle".

We were very happy for a month and a half in our tiny basement apartment across from Whitman college. We spent much of our free time with a former classmate of mine in flying school and his wife, Bob and Pat Shaw. They were also newly married and being natives of Walla Walla, they knew all of the favorite picnic spots in the beautiful mountains near the town.

At the end of August the group was ready for combat. Bob Shaw was put on a combat crew and I with a number of other copilots was reassigned to Ephrata Washington for B-24 Liberator training. The 91st group was sent to England where they participated in the first daylight bombing raids over Germany with great losses. Bob eventually became a squadron commander and came through the war safely.

I joined the 307th Bombardment Group in Ephrata and was immediately assigned as a co-pilot on a B-24 combat crew. This group was also getting ready for an overseas assignment and our training, was very rigorous. We flew night and day. Ephrata was a very small town of less than six hundred inhabitants. There were more than six thousand of us stationed at the air base, so married housing was a bit limited.

I had left Helen in Walla Walla until I could find a place for her to live. I had been in Ephrata for about a week without success when I received a telegram from Helen saying she would arrive on the afternoon train. I was scheduled for Link instrument training that afternoon but I went AWOL to meet Helen. I had no place for her to stay and she had to spend the first night on a bed in the hall of the small hotel. When I returned to the base after getting her settled, my squadron commander confined me to the base for a week for missing my training schedule. Helen found a house where she could sleep on the davenport for $65 per month and spent the rest of the week there. She would come out to the base to be with me during my free time and then take the bus back to town in the evening. After a week of this torture, I was finally able to get off the base and look for a decent place to live.

One afternoon I was walking down the street asking every one I passed if they knew of a room we could rent. A man mowing his lawn suggested that I ask a lady who lived a few blocks out of town. I found that the lady's husband had just been sent overseas and she rented us her five room house for only $25 per month. She worked during the day, took supper with us and lived in one of the bedrooms. We had the rest of the house to ourselves and it was wonderful, even though we didn't get to spend much time together because of my weird flying and training schedule.

In September of 1942, our group was considered to be combat ready and we received orders to Sioux City Iowa to pick up new airplanes prior to going over seas. The group traveled to Sioux City by troop train and Helen went home to Los Angeles to visit her folks before joining me in Sioux City about a week later.

Again we were flying all hours of the night and day so it was difficult to be together. I found a room in a hotel for a few days but when I came back to the hotel after flying one afternoon, Helen had checked out and I didn't know where to find her. I knew she didn't know when I would be in town, so I could think of nothing to do but tear my hair in the hotel lobby. About an hour later she showed up. She had found and rented a third floor, walk up apartment in a residential section of town. We bought a huge Big Ben alarm clock to wake me up at the odd hours I needed to get up for flying and moved in. By this time Helen was a couple of months pregnant with our first child and all of the cooking odors from the first two floors would find their way into our apartment. Consequently, she was uncomfortable much of the time.

TWENTY-NINE MONTHS IN THE PACIFIC WWII

Early in October of 1942 the 307^th Bomb Group received orders to fly to McClellan Army Air Base in Sacramento, California to receive final modifications on our airplanes before departing for Hickam AAB in Hawaii. Helen took the train back to Los Angeles from Sioux City, Iowa. This was the beginning of a twenty-nine month separation. During this difficult time, we were sustained by our love for each other, our letters, our faith in the Lord and His love for us.

I was assigned as a co-pilot on a B-24 Liberator, four engine bomber. All of our pilots and crew members were very inexperienced and unprepared for the rigorous flying and combat experience that was ahead of us. Most of the pilots in our 307th Bombardment Group had less than eighty hours of multi-engine experience since graduating from flying school. This inexperience proved very costly. Shortly after arriving in Hawaii, I was assigned to quarters in a barracks with fifteen other officers who were also crew members in our squadron. Of these sixteen officers, there were only four of us alive when the war ended and two of these four, Russell Alan Phillips and Louis Zamparini, crash landed in the Pacific and spent two years in a Japanese prison camp.

We arrived at Hickam Field on the island of Oahu on October 15, 1942 and we were immediately assigned to fly sea search missions for 800 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands looking for Japanese ships. This was part of the Hawaiian defense posture. On these missions we would fly under the clouds, usually less that 1000 feet above the water and often only a few hundred feet high. We would fly on an assigned course north for 800 miles then west for 100 miles then south back to Hawaii. In this manner we would cover a pie shaped sector of the Pacific in about ten and a half hours. We had no radar at that time and we depended on visual coverage of our sectors. Our normal schedule was to fly a search mission every other day. I flew more than fifty of these missions while I was in Hawaii.

In December of 1942, we began training for an attack on Wake Island and on Christmas Eve the 307th Heavy Bombardment Group, with 24 airplanes, launched an air attack against Wake Island. This was the second land based air attack against Wake Island of the war. We took off from Midway Island at dusk.

The plan was to assemble above the clouds and fly to Wake Island in a night formation and to attack Wake in a coordinated formation approach.

The instructions for the penetration of the overcast over Midway were confusing and the formation never got together. We all arrived over the target within a few minutes of each other, just before mid-night. With our lights out we couldn't get together so we bombed the island individually. This probably confused the Japanese gunners more than if the attack had gone according to plan. We were fascinated by the tracers coming up at us. It was the first time we had been shot at and it all seemed unreal. We were more afraid of running into another B-24 than we were of the Japanese gunners so we dropped down from our assigned bombing altitude of 8000 feet and dropped our bombs at 2000 feet. In spite of the confusion, none of our planes were lost on this attack, though a reconnaissance flight that went out the next day to assess the damage never came back. I flew as co-pilot with Les Scholar on this mission.

I also flew as co-pilot with Les Scholar on two fifteen and a half hour missions from Canton Island to photograph and bomb the Japanese installations on Tarawa. There were no other planes on these missions. We crossed the equator and the international date line on these two long flights.

In April of 1943, I was checked out as a first pilot and given a crew. All of the combat crews from the 307^th Bomb Group were transferred to the 11^th Bomb Group which had just returned from Guadalcanal where they had been flying B-17s.

On April 20, 1943, the 11^th Bombardment Group flew to Funafuti, in the Ellis Islands and that night launched an attack against the Japanese phosphate plant on Nauru Island. Two days later we launched a night attack against the Japanese air base on Tarawa. On this mission, I was flying as co-pilot to the Squadron Operations officer, a Captain Ernest Carey. He became confused on our flight to Tarawa and we never found the island so we dropped our bombs in the ocean and flew back to Funafuti.

We were scheduled to remain at Funafuti for several days and continue bombing Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, but the night after we bombed Tarawa, we were all asleep in our tents on this tiny atoll when the air-raid alarm sounded. Captain Carey asked "What do we do now?" I said,, "I don't know what you're going to do but I'm going to find me a hole." We were all in our underwear dashing about in confusion between the coconut palms in the moon light as the bombs began to fall. We were bivouacked around a white church and the Japanese bombers obviously were using the church as an aiming point. They crisscrossed the island several times, dropping five or six bombs on each pass. They knocked out our anti-aircraft guns on an early pass, hit our ammunition and bomb dump, and destroyed a couple of B-24s in bunkers near the runway.

I found a small depression which the natives had dug around a seedling coconut tree and started digging with my hands and helmet. By morning, I was in the bottom of this hole and there were four others in the hole with me. The sticks of bombs would be dropped at about one hundred foot intervals, starting on one side of our bivouac area and ending on the other. After

counting the explosions as they approached our area, it was always a relief to hear the next one burst on the other side of our hole. One bomb hit about twenty yards from where I was dug in. It hit an ammunition truck and killed the two men on the truck. Shrapnel from the bomb and parts of the truck, including body parts, flew over our heads through the palm trees and landed on the other side of our hole.

There was a brief pause in the bombing and our Squadron commander called a meeting near the church to assess the damages. Before he had a chance to say a word we could hear another wave approaching and the meeting broke up by common consent as we all dove for cover.

Our crew chief, Master Sgt. James Deardon, spent the night on the beach of the lagoon, digging and cursing the generals for getting us into this mess. When morning came, he found that the two generals in command were in the next fox hole and had been digging along side of him during the bombing.

This was a terrifying experience and I often thought of this night as we dropped bombs on the Japanese islands of the Central Pacific.

This raid was a complete success from the Japanese point of view. They completely destroyed our capability to attack. Our bombs and much of our support equipment were destroyed. The next day we re-fueled our airplanes and flew back to our bases in Hawaii.

On 28 June 1943, we were to bomb the Japanese phosphate plant on Nauru from Funafuti. I was scheduled to be the number three plane in the lead element of a six plane flight. We were taking off at night with a maximum load of bombs and fuel. The first plane took off and crashed back in the ocean and exploded. We quickly reorganized the formation with the number two plane, flown by Lt Holland of the 26^th Sq., scheduled to lead. He took off then I took off and four other planes followed. The next plane also crashed into the ocean immediately after take off. After the second crash, they canceled the mission. Four airborne planes returned and landed but Lt Holland and I didn’t receive the cancellation message and we continued on course to Nauru. We tried to stay together but flying night formation through weather in a four engine bomber is almost impossible so we became separated and arrived over Nauru just after dawn and bombed individually.

We had been having trouble with our bomb bay doors creeping part way closed which would open a limit switch and not let the bombs fall. Since it was no fun to go over the target the second time in order to drop the bombs, we had wired around the limit switches so that the bombs would drop even if the bomb bay doors were part way closed. On this particular mission the bomb bay doors crept part way closed on the bomb run and we dropped a load of fragmentation bombs through the partially closed doors, tearing the doors part way loose from the plane.

We were attacked by five Zeros and the bottom turret gunner was only partially effective, because every time he would turn around to the front the gun barrel would hit the flapping bomb bay doors.

In order to protect our underside from the Zeros we dropped down to a few feet above the ocean and flew at this altitude until the Zeros broke off. When we got back to Funafuti, Brigadier General Truman H. Landon, Commander of the Seventh Bomber Command, was there to great us as we got off the airplane.

We bombed Wake Island a second time on July 24, 1943. On this mission I was scheduled to lead the second element of three planes in a squadron formation of six B-24s. The first element was to be in a "V" formation of three airplanes and the second element of three planes in echelon tucked in close behind. The lead airplane of the second element was to fly in the center of the "V" of the first element. The night before the mission, our Squadron Commander, Major Earl J. Cooper, asked me to lead the squadron and Lt. Cason, flying “Cabin in the Sky,” who was previously scheduled to lead would take my place as the lead of the second element in the formation.

Our plan was to take off from Midway in the early morning, circle the other island of the Midway atoll and join up with two other squadrons from the Group and all fly together to bomb Wake. We took off on time and circled the other island but the other squadrons were delayed and because of fuel considerations, we couldn't wait for them. Lt Schmidt, flying as wing man in the second element, had to turn back because of engine trouble. We took off on course for Wake Island with our squadron formation of five B-24s. As it turned out, we were the only ones to reach the target that day. The other squadrons were turned back by weather which we had been able to penetrate.

When we arrived over Wake Island and started our bomb run, we could see a swarm of Japanese Zero fighter planes climbing to intercept us. We penetrated the anti-aircraft fire without any damage and dropped our bombs on the runway and aircraft bunkers. As soon as we cleared the island we were jumped by twenty-five or thirty Zeros. We had a running battle with the fighters for about thirty minutes. During that time, a Zero coming up from below rammed “Cabin in the Sky”, the lead plane of the second element, and it crashed in the sea. The plane on my right wing flown by Lt. Thompson, had a twenty- millimeter explosive shell explode in the instrument panel, severely wounding the pilot and knocking out all the planes engine instruments. The co-pilot pushed the wounded pilot out of the way of the flight controls with one hand and flew the plane with the other. He had no instruments so he pushed the throttles forward and got ahead of the formation.

About the same time, the plane on my left wing had an engine shot out and because he was flying on three engines he fell behind the formation. The pilot on this plane was Joseph Gall. We later learned that one man had been killed and two others badly wounded. One of the wounded men later died in a hospital on Midway.

The remaining wing man, Lt. Dwyer of the 98^th Sq., in the second element was in good shape and two good airplanes, his and mine, tried to protect the planes that had been hit. After the Zeros broke off, we gathered our formation back together and flew for seven hours back to Midway. Three of the four planes landed without incident but the plane with the one dead and two wounded men aboard couldn't get his landing gear down and landed on it's belly. No one else was injured but the plane was destroyed. This plane was the "Daisy Mae," The plane in which I had flown to the Pacific from Hamilton Field in San Francisco in October, 1942.

During forty combat missions, I lost five airplanes who were flying on my wing and the only damage to my airplane during all of these forty missions was one small 7.7mm hole in the bottom of our plane on this raid on Wake Island.

When we returned to Hawaii after this raid, I was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, with a personal citation from Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander of the Pacific Fleet.

Another mission out of Funafuti is worth remembering. It was on Dec. 20, 1943. We were bombing Maloelap Island in the Marshall group. This was shortly after we had taken Tarawa and the Japanese were able to bomb Tarawa from Maloelap. Our squadron was scheduled to bomb the target in three flights of three planes each. I was leading the second flight. We were to bomb from about twelve thousand feet at approximately noon. My right wing man was scheduled to be Les Scholar, my former pilot. After eating dehydrated rations for several weeks. The Navy had unloaded a hundred or so cases of fresh eggs on our beach. Since we had no refrigeration, we were encouraged to eat as many fresh eggs as we could before they went bad in the heat. We were all hungry for fresh eggs so we didn't need much encouragement. Dehydrated anything tasted horrible in those early days of dehydrated food but dehydrated eggs were the worst tasting of all dehydrated foods. In any event, Les Scholar had eaten several dozen fresh eggs in the few days before this particular mission and he began to swell up with an allergic reaction. The flight surgeon did not know he had eaten so many eggs and did not know what he was allergic to so he grounded him and eventually sent him back to the States where they found that he was allergic to fresh eggs. That ended the war for Les. We all should be so lucky.