Today marks the 62nd anniversary of Capt. Colin Kelly's sacrifice... our first hero of the War in the Pacific. A few points, if I may:
1) He
did not ram his plane into a Japanese battleship; even my mother, who was a teenager at that time, repeated this story for me, well into the 1990's. He and his crew did hit a Japanese warship; the identity of which, to this day, is still disputed. A best guess is that the ship was hit, but did not sink, although Kelly's crew did report major damage was inflicted...
2) While approaching Clark Field on his return, his plane, a B-17c, was shot down (by Saburo Sakai, in fact!
; Kelly's heroism was that he kept the plane
flying and steady after ordering his crew to bail out...
3) The Japanese pilots, after shooting down the B-17c, attempted again and again to machine gun the parachuting crew (they were not successful in this, fortunately)...
4) He was
not awarded the MOH, but a DFC instead (despite the efforts of his surviving crew to have the medal upgraded)...
Lastly,
5) To this day, there is still some dispute as to whether or not Kelly's B-17 broke up in the air, or crash landed more or less intact (for it suffered two explosions, one in the nose, the other amidships); it just proves how unreliable eyewitnesses
and participants can be...
Since this is a website dedicated to WW1 aviation, are any Forumites aware of a connection between our presence in the Philippines and the USAS? Well, on Corregidor, you'll find Kindley Field-- named after
Field Kindley ("Field Kindley Field"?); interestingly enough, Kindley Field was designed for airships!
Respectfully submitted,
Captain Lewis