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Show Yank Fliers Use Boyhood Tricks Apply Lessons . Learned From Tinkering on Farm To Problems of War. 1 TOPEKA, KANS. How American Ameri-can airmen are applying lessons learned from boyhood tinkering on toe farm to the job of speeding the war on a score of overseas fronts, is described by Lieut. CoL J. H. Chamberlin of the army air forces, In an article in Capper's Farmer. "A surprisingly large percentage of the men in the army air forces overseas have rural or small community com-munity backgrounds," writes Colonel Colo-nel Chamberlin. "These men in early life learned to do for themselves, them-selves, to handle problems with equipment at hand, or to make their own. Their resourcefulness runs all the way from humorous improviza-tions improviza-tions to the highest type of military leadership under fire. "Capt Don Gentile, a top AAF ace who has destroyed 30 Nazi planes, and who holds the nation's highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, is from Piqua, Ohio. It is but a stone's throw from the rural neighborhood where the writer was born. They Used Their Heads. "Lieut. Charles F. Pratte is from i Warren, R. I., a town of 8,000. His heavy bomer, "The Belle of Texas' was in a running battle with 30 Jap fighters. The bomber returned home, but the hydraulic system had been shot away and the brakes were useless. use-less. How to stop this 25-ton bomber? bomb-er? As the plane landed and sped down the runway. Lieutenant Pratte released two parachutes which billowed bil-lowed out and stopped the plane just short of the end of the runway and a crash. "In the Mediterranean theater is Sgt. Maurice Madden, an aviation mechanic from Gillespie, HI He had been a farmer and knew how to conserve his energy. He had to make long trips to and from the hangar electrical shop to planes scattered down the field or in distant dis-tant revetments, so he decided to bring the shop to the planes. From mechanical odds and ends salvaged from damaged aircraft, he built an efficient mobile electrical shop, and his friends named it 'The Doodlebug.' Doodle-bug.' It is a time and labor saver that puts planes back in the air far more quickly than would otherwise be the case. He Knew About Bees "Sgt. Eddie Lake was a member of a B-25 bomber crew in Tunisia. One day a swarm of bees invaded the plane. No one could go in or out. But Sergeant Lake had grown up on a farm and knew what to do. Undismayed, he put on gloves, scooped up a swarm of bees, and started an apiary of his own in a bomb-fin box. "At an air service command bas In India, four Liberators were temporarily tem-porarily grounded as there were no replacements for broken cannon can-non plugs generator insulators the size of a silver dollar and an inch thick. No substitute seemed to work, until a farm-minded soldier watching watch-ing a water buffalo plodding along a road got an idea. As a boy he had seen knickknacks made of horn. From a farmer he bought a pair of horns for one rupee and a test cannon plug was sawed out. It resisted re-sisted 220 volts without arcing; and a blowtorch didn't scorch it. The next morning the four Liberators took off, with cannon plugs sliced from the horns of water buffalo!" |