Leon Frankel Narrator

Thomas Saylor Interviewer

October 8, 2002 Leon Frankel home St Louis Park, Minnesota

TS: Today is the 8th of October 2002. First, Mr. Frankel, thanks very much on the record for taking time to speak with me today. I appreciate it very much. I LF: My pleasure.

TS: I know briefly from speaking with you before we started to record that you were born in St. Paul, Minnesota, the youngest child of parents of RussianGeneration extraction,Part on the 5 th of September 1923. You attended school and graduated from Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul in 1940, and you briefly attended the University of Minnesota before enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Before you enlisted, the U.S. did become involved in World War II, specificallySociety after [the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on] December 7,1941. Let me ask you, what were you doing when you first heard that news? Project: LF: As you know, it was a Sunday morning.Greatest And the S unday morning ritual was that a friend of mine by the name of Sonny Zuckerman, our ritual was to go to a pool hall on Sunday morning, known as Bilbo’s, in St. Paul. It was like a famous hangout for everybody. Of course, we were at the pool hall when the news came over the radio thatHistorical the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I was eighteen at the time. I remember Sonny and I both looking at each other, and of course the draft was on prior to this and a lotHistory of our friends and people we knew had gone into the Army. We both looked at each other more or less with the same thoughts that it looks like, being of eligible age, sooner or later we’re going to wind up somewhere in the military. That’s where we were when it happened.Oral It was qui te a shocker. Quite a shocker. Most people had never heard of Pearl Harbor.Minnesota's Didn’t know where it was. Slowly but surely we started hearing the news of what took place there and it sounded pretty devastating. Minnesota TS: The people in this pool hall and a number of other people were around. Could you identify a certain mood among the people in the place?

LF: Yes. I think they all felt about the same way we did. They just didn’t know what to make of it. It was such an overwhelming event. We knew that there were all kinds of negotiations going on. Japanese envoys were in Washington [D.C.]. And there was all kinds of talk about this, that and the other. War seemed like such a far off—it was going on in Europe, of course. Places in Asia. But we never thought we’d ever be affected by it.

11 TS: Now you were living at home with your parents still?

LF: Yes.

TS: How did your parents react to this news?

LF: They were frightened. Of course, my dad lived during World War I. But being married and having a couple children at the time, he was exempt from military service. I had an uncle, his brother, who had gone off in World War I and was killed in France. I tracked him down. He left from Toledo, Ohio. He was the art editor of the Toledo, Ohio Blade newspaper. He was a painter. He didn’t have to go, but he volunteered, and he wound up as a sergeant major in the Army. My dad used to talk about him all the time. I finally tracked him down. He was in every major battle that United States fought in World War I. He’s buried in St. Paul. My grandfather had a little money back in those days and he had his body shipped from France to St. Paul. And he’s buried in the Sons of Moses Cemetery on the east side of St. Paul. My UncleI Eugene. My brother was named after him.

TS: Once the U.S. joined the war, got involved in the war, did thoughts cross your mind that, “I’m going to be drafted,” or were you anxious to volunteer?Generation Part

LF: I had heard all these stories. After all, I was a World War I baby. I was born just five years after the end of World War I. About trench warfare. I said, “There’s no Societyway Leon is going to fight World War II in the trenches.” I’d always been fascinated with aviation. So in the back of my mind I said, “When the time comes . . .” Of course, we all had to register for the draft, and being eligible— Project: Greatest TS: So you had a draft card already?

LF: I had a draft card already. 1-A [draft classification]Historical and the whole bit. I said, “I’m not waiting for the draft. I’m going to enlist in the Army Air Corps if they’ll take me.” So this was about in July or August of 1942. TheHistory recruiting office at that time was in Minneapolis. In order for me to get to Minneapolis, I had to take the streetcar from St. Paul to Minneapolis. I got kind of dressed up and I went to my usual spot, the pool hall down there on Fifth and Minnesota, somewhere in that area.Oral It’s no longer there. Cardozo’s Department Store was next door to it. No, on Wabasha.Minnesota's Anyhow, I went into the pool hall and I bumped into a buddy of mine by the name of Red Fogarty. Norville J. Fogarty. Never forget him as long as I live. He had never seen me dressed up. We never dressedMinnesota up. We had on our clothes that we hung around in.

He said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m on my way to try to enlist in the Army Air Corps.” So he said, “Oh, you got to be out of your mind! Why don’t you join the Navy Air Corps?” I said, “Well, gee, I never thought about the Navy. But don’t you have to be a college graduate and meet all these—?” “No,” he says, “they’ve lowered the standards, and if you’re a high school graduate and you can produce three letters of recommendation from prominent citizens in the community and you pass the physical and all the other examinations.” And he says, “The Navy is the greatest.” And he pulled a card out of his pocket showing me that he had enlisted in the V-5 Program [military services training program]. Waiting to get called. That moment in time I

12 changed from the Army Air Corps to the Navy Air Corps. It was just like, we have an expression in Yiddish called beschert—it was fated to be. That I bumped into Red Fogarty and he steered me into the Navy Air Corps.

TS: He was a fork in the road. If you hadn’t run into Red Fogarty you’d have gone to join the Army.

LF: I’d have gone to join the Army Air Corps. In the meantime, Red goes into the Navy V-5 Program and washes out in primary flight training. [Laughs] I bumped into him on my first leave and he’s wearing a sailor suit. Then I bumped into him again and I said, “What happened to you?” He said he washed out in primary flight training. He ended up as an enlisted sailor in the U.S. Navy.

So I went over to—the Navy had their recruiting set up at Wold-Chamberlain Field [in Minneapolis]. They had a Naval Air Station there, and I took the streetcar andI went out there and filled out all these papers and waited to get called for a physical, which I passed just barely because I had torn up my knee playing basketball one time. To this day I’ve never had it repaired. I’m sure it was an ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] because my son did the same thing a few years ago. I managed to do the squats and go homeGeneration with a swollenPart knee and packed it with ice. I got through the physical all right.

TS: You weren’t going to tell them? Society

LF: No way. And years later I felt it, because when I would fly I would have to push the seat back and stretch my legs out because my left leg wouldProject: get tired. Even to this day. Anyhow, I passed it. I got three letters of recommendaGreatesttion from three prominent citizens, upstanding citizens, and then I got called before an examining board. It consisted of a psychiatrist and some Naval officers and they stand you up in this big room. Just you all by yourself. And these guys are all sitting around this table and they start askingHistorical you all these questions.

TS: You were standing up and theyHistory were sitting down.

LF: They were sitting down. “Tell us about yourself.” I looked at this guy and I don’t know what—what do you sayOral when somebody says, “Tell us about yourself?” This, that and the other. I don’t know.Minnesota's Anyhow, I fumbled my way through it and they guy says, “Okay. That’s it. Go home and we’ll call you.” And sure enough, I got a call in a week’s time saying that I’d been accepted, and to come overMinnesota and get sworn in. So I went over there. There was a bunch of other people and we all raised our right hand and took the oath of allegiance and were sent home. They had nothing for us to do. He says, “You go home and you stay there. Just go about your regular life until you hear from us.”

TS: So you’re on a wait list almost?

LF: Yes. Sworn in. I got my card showing that I had enlisted in the V-5 Program, and just wait until you hear from us.

13 TS: You had two brothers, but you were the youngest.

LF: I was the youngest. Both of my brothers were 4-F [draft classification, exempt from service for medical reasons]. My oldest brother had some physical condition, which precluded him from being in the service. He is six years older than me. And my other brother had a crippled hand. He was burned when he was a kid, in a fire, and his hand stayed together, so even though he was a good athlete and a great student he wound up as a teacher at Mahtomedi High School. He taught thirty years there in English literature. He wrote poems and he wrote stories. He was very talented. He was the smartest Frankel.

TS: How did they handle being 4-F?

LF: They felt very, very badly about it. They really did. They kind of looked up to me as representing the Frankel family, and followed my exploits, and were very proud of everything that I did. I

TS: So they were, in a sense, living the war almost through your experiences?

LF: Exactly. They would write to me and when I’d comeGeneration home theyPart were showing me off to all the neighbors and this and that. Of course, my father was extremely proud of me. They were very frightened all the time I was in the service. My father used to say every time he walked past the synagogue on the way, he owned a little grocery store, and he had to passSociety the synagogue on the way to the store every day, and he would say a prayer as he went by. I used to tell him, “You pulled me through.” Project: TS: How did your folks react when youGreatest first told them you were joining the service?

LF: They were frightened, just like I’m sure all parents were at that time. But they accepted the fact that I was going to get either drafted or go intoHistorical something that I wanted to be in. I loved aviation. I once had a flight in a Piper Cub where I paid two bucks and they’d fly you around the city in those days, and I was just thrilledHistory about it. I said, “Oh, this is for me. I just want to get into aviation if I can.”

TS: So your folks grudginglyOral accepted that fact that you were either going now or going later? Minnesota's LF: Exactly. Minnesota TS: Which maybe made it easier?

LF: Right.

TS: Did your two brothers continue to live at home during the war?

LF: Yes. They both lived at home. And my brother Gene had graduated the University and got his teaching degree and was off. As a matter of fact, he taught at Cretin [High School] for one year, over in St. Paul. I used to kid him and call him Brother Eugene. He was a Jewish boy

14 teaching at a Catholic high school, but he said he had no discipline problems at Cretin because he didn’t have to put up with all the nonsense they did in public schools. He was once told if a kid gets out of line just take him out in the hall and bash him. You’ll never hear a peep out of anybody. Just smack him in the mouth. Of course, he never did, but he was given more or less carte blanche on discipline.

TS: Now, of course, things have completely turned around.

LF: Oh yes. You can’t look askance at them or you’ll wind up in a court of law.

TS: Now you were up in Hibbing, Minnesota doing civilian pilot training (or CPT) for a number of months. Then you went through a number of different training programs: Iowa University, then in Kansas, and you were in Florida. At this time, the Jewish population in the United States was rather small. Did you ever identify what you consider to be discrimination [due to] the fact that you were Jewish? I

LF: As a matter of fact, as a pilot in the Navy we had to take a psychiatric examination every six months. The first thing the shrink would ask me was the exact same question you asked me. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I know a lot of the guys wentGeneration down Partsouth in the Army and they ran into all these rednecks and all this kind of stuff, but it seemed like the guys that I was with were all in the same boat. They were high-class bunch of guys. A lot of them were college graduates. They were, I would say, more or less the cream that had risenSociety to the top. Absolutely not. There were two Jewish pilots in the squadron I was in that I mentioned earlier, Wally Jacobs and myself. There was absolutely no discrimination. None whatsoever. Project: TS: What about other minorities in theGreatest service? Among the pilot training program were there blacks, for example?

LF: I know of no black pilot that I went through flightHistorical training with. Hundreds and hundreds of pilots that I saw. I remember one Indian. And they really pushed him through because he was a chief, a Comanche chief from OklahomaHistory or some thing. And as bad as he was, they wanted to graduate him. And they did. I don’t know what happened to him afterward, but I heard all kinds of stories. But there was not a single black aviation cadet that I recall. Oral TS: Did youMinnesota's come into contact with blacks during your time in flight training programs or when you were on board the aircraft carriers Lexington or Yorktown? Minnesota LF: Yes, but they did menial jobs in the Navy. The Navy was very discriminatory. They had one black fellow that sort of took care of our food that we had for the pilots. Like a steward. They were stewards aboard ship. But during attacks on the ship they had positions to take in addition to their other duties. They would man guns and do all these other things, but when they weren’t they were doing—I don’t even think I remember seeing a mechanic that was colored.

TS: How did you observe relations or interactions between whites and blacks on board the ships you were on?

15 LF: I think they got along very well. I think they got along very well. I don’t remember any incidents. I think we had more fights with the Marines than we did with anybody of color. There was always inter-service rivalry. We used to tell a story about a sailor who would curse his ship all the time he was on it, but get him ashore in a bar and have somebody say something disparaging about his ship, and then you’ve got a fight on your hands. But aboard ship he would curse everything from the captain on down to some poor slob in the engine room. [Laughs]

TS: Right. Now you had Marines on your ships, right?

LF: Sure. There was a whole Marine contingent on every aircraft carrier. What they did there I have no idea, but they were there.

TS: They were there on every ship?

LF: Yes. At least the ones I was on. I

TS: You spent a lot of time in the South, in Florida—a number of months in Florida. What was your impression of the South? GenerationPart LF: It was new to me. I remember taking the train. As a matter of fact, my closest buddy in the service was Grady Jean, who came from south Arkansas. He was my really first contact anybody from the South. We used to kid each other about the Civil War and all thatSociety kind of stuff, but everybody got along well. We were all on the same team. I remember going on a train once from Olathe, Kansas to Florida. Grady and I were on the same train and stopping somewhere and getting off the train to have breakfast. They were puttingProject: grits on my plate and I turned to Grady and I said, “What in the heck are these?”Greatest I tasted them. I hated them. Of course, he ate everybody’s grits, because he thought that was the greatest thing in the world. [Laughs] That was my first experience. Historical The accents killed me. I just loved those southern accents, especially the girls. I had no problems getting along with the people in FloridaHistory or Alabam a. As a matter of fact, I was treated royally in Alabama. When I was going through advanced flight training, I met a girl who was working as a Red Cross hostess at an airbase there. I happened to be there that day with a buddy of mine. She invited he and I to spendOral the weekend with her parents out in the country. We went there. They had a son Minnesota'saway who was an officer in the Army. They were just marvelous, marvelous people. I thought for a while that a romance was going to spring up between her and I but unfortunately nothing happened. We spentMinnesota the weekend there and they said they would love to treat you the way we would love to have our son treated, if he was away from home. The people were just marvelous. [Pauses] Civilians were—I could have wound up as an alcoholic if I’d have accepted every drink that was offered to me at a bar.

TS: In the South.

LF: Anywhere. Anywhere. People would grab you off the street and throw you in their car and take you home and feed you. It was a different world with the uniform on. You were a king. Especially when I came home and I had a chest full of medals and all the ribbons. I would walk

16 into some place and eyes would pop. Even in the Navy. If you had the Navy Cross [award for valor] and you walked into an office, everybody was at your disposal, your command. It was unbelievable.

TS: Was there a combat ribbon you wore that indicated Navy Cross?

LF: I wore the ribbon, which is blue and white. Of course, everybody in the Navy recognized it. When they spotted that it was, “What do you need? What do you want? What can we do for you?”

TS: So that was a door opener.

LF: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Just like the Navy wings. I’d tell you something, but you’d probably put it in your project. Admiral Murray, who was the head of the Navy V-5 Program at the time when we got our wings and graduated Pensacola, pinned our wings ofI gold on and says, “Here’s your leg spreaders.” [Laughs]

TS: Can you comment on that? Was it—were women impressed by uniforms, by pilots? GenerationPart LF: Especially. Yes. For one thing, you had more money than the poor enlisted slobs did. We got more pay. We got a couple hundred bucks a month, and went up to close to three hundred. A lot of money then. When you were flying you got fifty percent more paySociety for hazardous duty pay.

TS: I remember hearing an infantryman tell me he started at twenty-one bucks a month, and here you were getting close to three hundred. Project: Greatest LF: Yes. It started out at twenty-one dollars a month. That’s what they used to joke about. But, yes, I was making as a cadet more money than a sub lieutenant in the [British] Royal Navy, because we trained with these guys when we wereHistorical down in Fort Lauderdale. They were making about fifty, sixty dollars a month, a sub lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and I was making close to three hundred dollars. Two [hundred]History seventy-five [dollars]. I was shipping money home, and my dad was banking it for me. When I came home after the war he had four thousand dollars in the bank waiting for me. A lot of dough in 1945. In 1945 I bought a brand new car with two thousand of it. I had moneyOral to burn, going to school with the GI Bill. Minnesota's TS: So you were thinking ahead, weren’t you, to the time after the service. Minnesota LF: I said, “If I survive I’ll have all this money waiting for me when I come home. If I don’t, my family will have it.” I didn’t need the money. I had nothing to spend it on, because my daily expenses were all covered. Uniforms were all paid for. Everything was paid for. Maybe I took out twenty bucks out of my pay just to have it in my pocket. The rest I would send home with these money orders. My dad would bank them for me. It was really neat. Send me an accounting every few months of what I was accumulating. He was very judicious about handling it.

TS: Were you helping your folks with money every month, or were they getting by okay?

17 LF: No, they were getting by fine. My dad had a little grocery store. They wanted for nothing. They were not poor but they weren’t rich. Just struggling along like everybody else did during the Depression. Everybody sort of looked after everybody back in the old neighborhood where Bert Sandberg [a friend of Leon’s, also interviewed for this project] and I grew up. If somebody needed coal or heat or something, somebody went in and helped them. My mother used to stack up sandwiches on the back porch for transients to come by. They always knew they could come by and have a meal.

TS: A sense of community.

LF: Yes. Just help yourself. She would stack up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or whatever she had in the house and just put them out on the back porch, and one would tell the other, “There’s a house over here where you can get a meal.” They would come by and just help themselves. I TS: How the world has changed!

LF: Oh, yes. Tell me about it. GenerationPart TS: You did a lot of flight training and you were away from home for a long time. Was that your first time away from home for a long time? Society LF: First time in my life. When I took the train up to Hibbing it was the first time I had ever left home. Project: TS: What was it like being away fromGreatest home like that?

LF: I was a little homesick. I didn’t know how to react until I met up with these other guys up at Hibbing who were also in the same boat. We sort ofHistorical looked after each other. One came from Duluth, another from—they were all Minnesota boys. We went through this schooling, and there was a camaraderie developed. AndHistory the town just took us in. We were the only semblance of military in Hibbing at the time. They just took us under their wing. We were like—unbelievable.

TS: I was going to ask Oralyou about that, because you’re the first person I’ve met that had any connectionMinnesota's with the base up in Hibbing. Were you living on the campus of the college there or were you living in town? Minnesota LF: No, they put us up in a hotel. They gave us hotel rooms and they fed us at the hotel.

TS: That was on Main Street in Hibbing, wasn’t it?

LF: Yes. It wasn’t the Androy Hotel, which was like the number one hotel. I went through this with Rudy Perpich [later governor of Minnesota]. May he rest in peace. One time, Bert Sandberg brought me into his office when Perpich was governor of Minnesota. I started rattling off names of some of the people I knew up there, and he knew everybody up there. That was his hometown. I told him about Mr. Lukens, who was the famous swimming instructor, and how he broke all

18 kinds of records. And Mr. Savage, called Doc Savage after the Pulp Magazine. And I remembered getting invited to their homes on Christmas.

TS: So they invited you guys to homes on Christmas?

LF: Yes. 1942, I was invited to the Savage home for Christmas dinner. It was kind of a strange feeling, because I had never been away. Everyone couldn’t have been nicer.

TS: Can you give another example of how the town of Hibbing made you guys feel welcome?

LF: They gave us some kind of a uniform. It wasn’t an official uniform. It might have been something left over from the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression era work creation program the Roosevelt administration] days. It was a kind of a green thing and had a cap. We had kind of like wings on. As I say, we were the only semblance of anything military. All the eligible males were all gone away from town, so we were dating the local girls.I On Saturday night somebody would volunteer a car and we would go out, do all the [Iron] Range towns, Virginia and Eveleth, and different bars and stuff like that. Everyone made us feel very welcome.

TS: So even though it was winter up there it sounds like Generationyou had a prettyPart warm feeling about Hibbing.

LF: Oh, yes. I had a strange experience up there one time. We were flyingSociety Piper Cubs [single engine plane, used as trainers] with wheels and there was snow on the ground. A lot of snow. It was winter and Hibbing is buried in snow. We were practicing. I only had a few hours solo and I was sent out one day to practice spins. So I wouldProject: go out to a crossroad and put the airplane in a nosedive. No, first you stall. The noseGreatest drops and you get over a road and you do about three or four turns and then you take it out of the spin. I got disoriented and I started looking around and I couldn’t find the field. Everything was white and it started to snow. I panicked. This was only out on my second or third solo. I started flying aroundHistorical and the gas gauge indicator started going down and I didn’t know what to do. History So I decided the best thing to do is try to come down and land somewhere so I looked around for what would be a nice smooth landing area. Some farmer’s field. There were no trees, nice and smooth. It was snowingOral and I didn’ t realize the snow was over plowed furrows. I came down in a field. Of course,Minnesota's no skis on the airplane, just wheels. And the airplane rolled along about fifty feet and flipped over and set down. I wasn’t hurt. I was hanging upside down in the airplane trying to figure out how toMinnesota get the heck out of it. Of course, I had my seatbelt on. I pulled the seatbelt and I went crashing right through the roof of the airplane. I just fell down. It was canvas so I tore my way through and climbed out, and I spotted a farmhouse about maybe 100 yards away, 150 yards. I walked over there. Wasn’t dressed for winter, because I wasn’t planning this. This was kind of unexpected. I had on a jacket and a cap and just shoes. Nothing special. Didn’t even have a flight suit on.

I made my way to this guy’s house and I pointed to the airplane out there and he could see it in his backyard out there. He said he didn’t have a phone. He was living by himself. He said his neighbor had a phone, so he gave me a pair of boots and a jacket and some mitts, which I didn’t

19 have, and he and I and his dog started out to the neighbor’s house, which was about half a mile away. Trudging through the snow. We got to his house and he had one of those crank phones, so he cranked it up and he called the operator and got the airfield. By this time they were panicking back there because I hadn’t returned. They didn’t know where I was. I told them everything was fine. They came and got me. And the next day they sent some people out there because I had busted the prop and tore off the fuel pump or something in the engine.

[Tape interruption]

LF: They righted the airplane and put skis on it. They righted the airplane. They put a new propeller on it, they made sure everything was okay, and they flew the airplane right off the field and back there. The next day I was reading a local newspaper—the name of the town that I came down near was Forbes, Minnesota. I never heard of it, just a little town, maybe fifty people. And the Hibbing paper came out and said, “Local pilot killed in a crash near Forbes.” I TS: They got a little something wrong there, didn’t they?

LF: Yes. Right. I remember that Mark Twain said, “The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.” [Laughs] Anyhow, they had me killed there.Generation After goingPart through another orientation on how to find my way back, it never happened to me again. It didn’t scare me. I went back up the next day. Society TS: It could have ended a lot worse than it did.

LF: Oh, yes. I didn’t get hurt. I might have bangedProject: my lips or something on the seat in front of me, but I really didn’t get hurt at all. Greatest

TS: Luckily. After a number of months training in Florida, you did receive your wings and were commissioned as an ensign [Navy equivalent of ArmyHistorical second lieutenant]. You then had to make a decision what kind of plane you wanted to fly. How did you make that decision? History LF: I was stationed during my advanced flight training at a field called Barron Field, which is actually in Alabama but it’s part of the Pensacola complex. They had outlying fields all over the place. Whiting Field, BarronOral Field, I can’t even remember some of the names. We were doing our advancedMinnesota's flight training flying SNJs, which the Army Air Force calls AT6s [both single- engine trainer aircraft]. The Navy called them SNJs. I was just about at the point of graduating when a British Naval officerMinnesota flew in with a TBM [single-engine torpedo bomber] and landed there for whatever reason. I have no idea why.

TS: Now, for the record, a TBM is a torpedo bomber. Originally it was called a TBF, but now it was being made by General Motors, and was called a TBM. It is a three-crew torpedo bomber.

LF: Right, a torpedo bomber. So my buddy Grady Jean and I started a conversation with this British naval officer, and we were really impressed with this airplane. We had never seen one before. He started telling us how diverse the airplane was and the things that it could do. It could carry bombs, torpedoes, rockets, and machine guns, and could lay mines. It could do everything.

20 Very versatile. Completely versatile. I looked at Grady and he looked at me. We originally had decided we were going to go into fighter planes, which most of the Navy pilots did. We made up our minds right then and there that we were going to opt for torpedoes. So we went to the commanding officer of the base, who was a famous Navy ace by the name of McCampbell. We told him what our decision was. This was the guy we had to tell it to, and he would send us on to our next posting. He spent the next hour trying to talk us out of it. [Laughs]

TS: Why was that?

LF: He wanted us to be fighter pilots. He wanted everybody to be a fighter pilot, because he was. We just stood our guns and said, “No, we wanted to stay as torpedo bomber pilots.” He said, “Okay.” And he signed us off and said when we graduated we would be sent to our operational training to learn to fly the TBM.

TS: Was it really your decision to make then? I

LF: At that point it was, even though when we graduated they were short of pilots in the Marine Corps. So they went down the line of the graduating pilots and just pointed at you and said, “You’re a Marine.” If they didn’t get enough volunteers forGeneration the MarinePart Corps they just went like, every fourth guy. They skipped me and went—I think they were only short—out of our graduating class, they were only short maybe three or four that they needed for the Marine Corps. These guys were happy to go into the Marine Corps because theySociety had heard that the Marines were advancing faster than the Navy was. So the guys that opted for the Marine Corps I bumped into maybe a year later, and I was a [lieutenant j.g.] and they were still second lieutenants, so they didn’t advance as fast as they Project:thought they might. Greatest TS: So it backfired in that respect.

LF: It backfired. So, if they didn’t get enough, theyHistorical just pointed at you and said, “You’re a Marine, you’re a Marine and you’re a Marine.” That was it. You had no choice. History TS: They had enlisted in the Navy, but suddenly they were just pushed in the Marine Corps?

LF: Just pushed into theOral Marine Corps. Minnesota's TS: And the Marine Corps flew off of carriers much the same as you guys did, right? Minnesota LF: They did, but most of them were land based. There were very few Marines that flew off of carriers.

TS: So they were on the islands. As the Marines advanced, they would move their bases forward too, I guess?

LF: Exactly. Right. In fact, one of the pilots that flew with us in Israel in 1948 was Chris McGee, who was with the famous Black Sheep squadron.

21 TS: Right. That’s Pappy Boyington’s squadron [Gregory Boyington, Marine Corps fighter pilot in the Pacific and POW in Japan after being shot down in 1943].

LF: He was second to Pappy. He had nine and a half airplanes to his credit, and of course Pappy was the number one guy. I flew with Chris in Israel in 1948. He got the Navy Cross, too, for shooting down five Japanese planes on one hop. There’s another story. His son wrote a book about it, which I have downstairs. You’re welcome to borrow it any time.

TS: Thank you. When did it become apparent to you, Leon, that you were going to be sent to the Pacific and not to Europe?

LF: Of course, the Navy—I shouldn’t say exclusively operated in the Pacific, but the odds are that if you went in the Navy, you would wind up in the Pacific. Although there were a lot of carriers operating in the Atlantic. They were on anti-submarine patrols. And during invasions and stuff there were carriers there, but it just seemed like that would be the placeI to end up, in the Pacific.

TS: How did the Navy prepare you for the war? In descriptions of the Japanese, I mean. How was the enemy portrayed to you? GenerationPart

LF: As less than human. You create an image of what you’re up against. When you attacked a ship or attacked an airbase or attacked something, you were attacking anSociety airbase. As far as you were concerned, there were no humans there. There were no humans involved. You attacked a ship. You were elated that you sunk the ship. I got a torpedo hit, and a ship went down [reference to sinking of the Yahagi, April 7, 1945]. There wereProject: eight hundred Japanese casualties on it. Never thought anything of it. Never thoughtGreatest anything of it. They were fighting me; I was fighting them. I was doing my job, and they were doing theirs. That was it. It was a very dispassionate type thing. You became so disciplined that even in the middle of an attack the calmness that would come over you was frightening. You were soHistorical busy doing different things in the cockpit and lining up your bombs and your attack that you couldn’t get excited. You never got excited. Everything was very calm and relaxing.History

TS: There wasn’t this human aspect of, “I’m bombing a human target.” Oral LF: No. Exactly.Minnesota's You were shooting down an airplane. It’s an airplane. There’s nobody in it. It’s just an airplane. Minnesota TS: That’s interesting.

LF: Yes.

TS: Were there presentations or filmstrips or something that sort of helped to ingrain this vision of the Japanese?

LF: We used to hear stories about previous invasions and the tenacity of the Japanese fighter, that they were dying for the Emperor, and he was a tough foe to fight because anybody who’s

22 prepared to go to heaven is a tough guy to fight. It’s like the Palestinian suicide bombers. They know they’re going to heaven and getting seventy-two virgins when they get there. So, yes, he’s a tough foe who won’t surrender. We just did everything to keep from falling into their hands. This, George Bush [Senior] tells in his memoirs, when he got shot down near the [Pacific] island of Chichi Jima, he’d heard that the commanding Japanese officer on Chichi Jima used to kill the pilots and eat their livers. After the war he was tried as a war criminal and hung.

TS: So these kinds of stories made the rounds of the guys.

LF: Yes. Right.

TS: There was a sense of intimidation about the Japanese?

LF: Yes. Foreboding. You just didn’t want to fall into their hands. Do anything to keep from being a prisoner. Anything. I

TS: You trained on torpedo bombers, Leon, and by early 1945 were posted to the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. GenerationPart LF: Yes. The air group which I was assigned to, Air Group 9, we trained for months and months in Pasco, Washington, and then we went to San Diego and did carrier training there. The first time I was on a carrier. We used to do field carrier landing practice. TheySociety had a field marked off the size of a carrier deck and a landing signal officer, and we would just keep going round and round and practice carrier landings. Finally they took us out for five days on a small carrier to qualify. We had to get twenty-five landings beforeProject: they would let us take our crew. The crew didn’t go with us. I had two crewmenGreatest that were assigned to me. I did some of it there and some of it in Hawaii. I finished up my twenty-five landings in Hawaii. We had to qualify on this carrier. Then we did two night qualifications on a different carrier. We went out at night and landed on the ship at night, which was kind of scary.Historical

TS: How about taking off and landingHistory on a carrier? Do you remember the first time you took off from a carrier and landed?

LF: Yes. My first launchOral on a carrier was on a catapult, not a deck launch. I was strapped in the airplane, andMinnesota's you turn it up to full power and full right rudder, full nose down on the trim pads, pull the stick back as far as you can and hold your right elbow in your stomach. Put your head back on the headrest, full throttle,Minnesota and you’re in this catapult. When you’re ready to go you just wiggle the stick and they blast you.

TS: How is this catapult powered?

LF: Steam.

TS: So it really rockets you down to the end of the runway?

23 LF: I mean you almost black out. Your face is sucked right down, it’s such a G force. You go from a dead stop to flying in less than 150 feet. You are flying. So then, of course, the first thing you have to do after you get in the air is start reversing everything that you’ve done on the deck. You have to straighten the trim pads out. You have to pull up the flaps. You have to get the landing gear up. You have to make a fast turn off the deck so your slipstream doesn’t catch the guy behind you. Then you have to join up with the other airplanes in the formation. It’s all precise. It’s just like a quarterback practicing a play. Each guy goes out. In seventy seconds the pilot starts a one-needle width turn, and this guy joins up on him until you reach the ship and there are fifteen planes in perfect formation after they launch. Each one takes about a minute.

TS: So they can really get these things off in a hurry.

LF: Oh, yes. You would launch a whole air group inside of maybe fifteen minutes.

TS: Now before catapults, these guys had to put these things in the air on the plane’sI power?

LF: That’s right.

TS: How much more difficult was that? GenerationPart

LF: Depends on the wind. They tried to get 35 knots [wind speed] coming down the deck so the ship was probably going 20, 25 knots, and of course they go into the wind.Society So a deck launch, if you’ve got 450 feet, it’s easy. You’re flying. Your flaps are full flaps down and full power, and the guy waits until the ship is on the rise because of pitching, going up and down. So as soon as the thing starts coming up, he gives you the go aheadProject: and you release the brakes, and you go down the deck and you hit it on the upslope.Greatest Then when you get off and make your turn, he sends the next plane out and so on until you’ve launched your air group.

TS: Is that easier from your perspective, as a pilot,Historical than doing a catapult launch?

LF: I liked the catapult because thereHistory was no—you knew you were flying when you hit the end of it. Sometimes, like our SB2Cs, our dive bombers, were very sluggish. One day two of them went into the water. Couldn’t get enough air speed. So they stopped launching immediately. The SB2Cs—we used to callOral them the “Beast”—they just didn’t have enough. There was not enough wind comingMinnesota's down the deck. It was a big ungainly airplane, and one right after the other, two of them went right in the water. They just stopped all launches. I actually liked the catapult. Minnesota TS: With a shorter deck. How about when you come in to land?

LF: Same thing. You are coming into a deck that’s pitching, and your life is in the hands of a guy down there with a paddle in each hand, the landing signal officer. Literally, your life was in his hands. I met our landing signal officer at the reunion in 1988. He’s since passed away. He used to say, “I’m going to give you a few extra knots for the wife and kiddie,” because when you hit the deck or the ramp to make your landing if everything is okay and he gives you the roger (which is both arms extended straight across, you’re not high, you’re not low, you’re perfect), he gives you a cut.

24 The nose drops, and as soon as the nose drops you start pulling back on the stick and your tail hook catches the arresting wire. Then you just gently, you sort of go forward. Then when it stops, a crew comes out and pushes the airplane back and you retract the tail hook. Then they wave you forward and park you, because we didn’t have cantilevered decks like they have today where you can land and take off at the same time. Ours were just one straight shot, so you had to get the planes landed and park them and get everybody landed. Then before you could launch another strike you had to push them back to the rear of the ship to start another launch.

TS: So the tail hook caught on a cable and that really was the braking power?

LF: That was the braking power, right. You would chop the throttle right off, and the nose would drop. The TBM had great characteristics when it came to landing. It was an easy airplane to fly. Once you chopped the throttle, the nose would drop. And I was good. I was very skillful. Never got a wave off in all the time that—I had sixty-seven landings. Never blew a tire, never had a wave off. I

The only time I got a wave off is when the guy I flew on his wing, his machine guns went off accidentally on the deck and killed a bunch of people. A guy I flew wing on, name of Clyde Lee. He landed just before me, and I got a wave off and I couldn’tGeneration imaginePart why. I see all kinds of people scurrying around the deck and I took the wave off and went out and started flying around and flying around along with everybody else. They called it the lost sheep area. They kept everybody flying until they had cleared the deck. And after I landed I wentSociety into the ready room and I see him with his head in his hands, bent down and crying. I said to someone else, “What happened?” And they told me that he accidentally squeezed the trigger. Even though everything was turned off. All the electrical was off. It shouldn’tProject: have happened, but it fired. It got off about fifteen rounds and killed our engineeringGreatest officer, shot an arm off our engineering chief and wounded nine others.

TS: How did he deal with that? Historical

LF: It wasn’t easy. He grounded Historyhimself for over a month and we begged him to come back, because we needed him. He was one of the most skilled pilots in the squadron. And, as I say, he was my leader. I flew wing on him, Bill Patterson and I. We finally got him back into the air. It was very traumatic for Oralhim. I went to his wedding. After the war he got married in Burlingame, California,Minnesota's and we all went to his wedding. I used to get Christmas cards from him and hear from him once in a while. [Pauses] It was just terrible. Minnesota TS: Do you remember your first combat mission?

LF: Yes, very vividly. First, one our task forces sailed from Ulithi [Atoll, in the Central Pacific], and I knew it was a huge operation. We heard about Iwo Jima [invaded by U.S. forces, February 1945]. Didn’t know what it was, but we saw—we had maps of Iwo around the ready rooms showing us this little island. They were going to have an invasion of Iwo Jima. I thought this was great. We’re going to go up and have a real cushy mission. Go up on this one and start dropping bombs on some little island. Marines are going to take it, and that’s going to be our first one.

25 After a couple days at sea, all the pilots were called into the wardroom, which is where we ate and sort of a social hall where everybody met. Our meals were there. Played cards there, music, everything. That’s where we hid during kamikaze attacks, too, in the wardroom. We were there and the commanding officer of the air group, Phil Torrey, announced to us that we were on our way to Tokyo. There was a hoot and a holler. Everybody let go. It was the first Navy raid on Tokyo since Doolittle went up there in 1942 [reference to James Doolittle-led raid on Tokyo, launched from U.S. carriers], which was not a Navy raid. That was an Army [Air Corps] raid. So this was the first time the Navy was going up there.

The whole mission was to neutralize as much of Japan’s air force as we could before the invasion of Iwo Jima. They didn’t want to be harassed by it [during the invasion]. So our targets were airfields, any installation pertaining to aircraft, aircraft factories. They launched the first strike, fighters that went off early in the morning. We were listening to it on the radio. The Japanese fellow on the radio was giving—he was sort of like the Jane Fonda of Japan. They were doing their morning exercises. I

TS: Morning exercises?

LF: Yes. We were listening to this whole thing. All of a Generationsudden we Parthear these excited Japanese voices, voices on the radio. We knew our fighters had reached Japan. So the first launches were fighter sweeps. They went up to shoot up airfields and airplanes in the air, whatever they could find. Then after they made one or two sweeps, then they sent the bombersSociety off. That’s us. Our target was the Nakijima Aircraft Factory at Ota, Japan, which is about eighty-five miles northwest of Tokyo, along the Toni River. We crossed over Japan. I saw Mount Fuji in the distance. Sort of looked like California; it was beautifulProject: and green. We’d been at sea for a long time and this was the first time I’d everGreatest seen—it was kind of exciting.

The torpedo squadron was the base formation. Everybody forms around it. The dive bombers were behind us, the fighters take up their positionsHistorical above and in back. We led the mission. We led the strike. As we headed in toward our target we got jumped by about forty or fifty fighters. I saw my first airplane being shot down.History Then our fighters got behind the Japanese fighter there, and I see smoke streaming off the Japanese fighter and they went right past me. I’m looking out and I was like a guy seeing a deer for the first time. I’m just fascinated by the whole thing. Oral TS: You’dMinnesota's known about this stuff for years, really, and suddenly it’s happening outside your window. Minnesota LF: I’m looking out there and I see these two airplanes making straight for the deck. Blue one [American plane] in back and a red one [Japanese plane] in front. All of a sudden smoke is coming off the red one, and the blue one makes a gentle pull up and this guy, like five hundred miles an hour, smacks into the ground. And flak is exploding all around us. They were shooting. They had anti-aircraft guns protecting this factory. The flak had multi-colored explosions so each battery could probably track its own shells. So there were red and blue and green and yellow explosions all over.

26 TS: When flak is going off around you and you see hostile aircraft, what went through your mind?

LF: It was almost surreal. Actually, it was just like it wasn’t happening; it was like I’m watching a movie. This is not taking place. It’s not taking place against me or anything. It’s almost three- dimensional. I’m outside of this action and saying, “Oh my God, if they’re all like this, I’m not going to make it. Holy gee!” The factory was enormous. I’d never seen anything so huge in my life. It must have covered hundreds of acres. It was big. We started our breakup at about 15,000 feet and 18,000 feet, and picked out one of the buildings as a target. We were carrying 250- pound bombs.

TS: How many did your plane carry of those?

LF: I think there were ten. I TS: Could you release those individually or all at once?

LF: We could salvo them. Or actually, what you did is, they were set in a sequence, a preordained sequence, so when you pushed the release allGeneration the bombsPart would go, but they would strike the ground at different intervals. These also had delays on the bombs so they didn’t explode immediately. They had a twenty-five hundredths of a second delay on them. The idea was to penetrate the roofs of the factories and explode on the inside. TheSociety roofs were corrugated metal so it worked out just great. We put the factory completely out of commission.

On the retirement, our rendezvous point was acrossProject: the Toni River at this town. If we got separated we were all supposed to joinGreatest up there, at this rendezvous point. In the meantime, the fighters are pouring in. My gunner is shooting at them. Everybody is yelling and planes are getting knocked down all over the place. A Japanese fighter dove underneath my skipper’s airplane and smacked right into his propeller with Historicalhis wing. The Japanese fighter lost his wing and went spinning crazily into the ground. I didn’t know it was the skipper at the time. I saw what was happening so I pulled alongHistory side the plan e. Then I see it’s our commanding officer and two of his blades of his prop were bent out like bananas. But it was still flying. He could still do about 1,400 RPM [rotations per minute], barely keep it chugging along. I pulled over along side of him and I throttled backOral and I dragged my feet. I did everything to slow down. In the meantime,Minnesota's we were fending off attacks. I herded him out to sea and back to the ship and he put me in for the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] on my first mission. Minnesota TS: What about fear? From my perspective, I think I would be scared to death.

LF: When you’re first out there you’re not afraid. The longer you’re out there, the more apprehensive you get. The squadrons that were out there before—we had one air group that was supposed to be following us into the target. At the last minute he called up and made a left turn and went after a Japanese airfield, because he saw the flak ahead of us. They’d been out there for six months. The Hancock [U.S. Navy aircraft carrier] group made a turn and went after some airfield south of where we were, which was a little softer target.

27 TS: So more experience didn’t make one less apprehensive, it made them more apprehensive?

LF: More apprehensive. You get a nineteen-year-old kid—they’re indestructible. Nineteen or twenty years old. “It’ll happen to somebody else, but it ain’t going to happen to me.”

TS: Did you feel that way too?

LF: Absolutely. Just very relaxed and calm, and things were happening.

TS: You saw planes getting knocked down, but it wasn’t going to be you.

LF: It wasn’t going to be me. No.

TS: Leon, you flew twenty-five combat missions in the Pacific. How much did you attribute to luck and how much to skill? I

LF: Skill we all had. We were all pretty well trained. You knew what you had to do. You were pretty disciplined. I’d had missions that I’d been on that I deserved the medal and I never got even a mention. That comes with the territory. I once ranGeneration a tank dry Partin the middle of a dive on a target. Didn’t realize. It showed forty gallons in the tank. We were supposed to switch over to a full tank. It was procedure. Sure enough, I drop my bombs, I’m just pulling out away from the target, and the engine quits on me, two hundred feet off the ground. I immediatelySociety switched tanks and I hit the emergency fuel pump. In the meantime, everybody went past me. I thought I was going in the water. I thought this was it. I was going in. I was prepared to make a water landing. The engine kicked over. It started up and Project:I caught up with everybody else. Greatest One time I got separated in the clouds. We were attacking a Japanese airfield and I attacked it by myself. I attacked it and I pulled up and I was circling out there. What the hell happened to the other twelve guys? About two minutes later they cameHistorical chugging by. In the meantime, I had attacked this airfield all by myself. We all got separated in the clouds. It didn’t always go off like a touchdown. You have to improvise.History Like when we attacked the Japanese fleet that time off of [the Japanese home island of] Kyushu [on 7 April 1945] and we sank all those ships. There were guys who couldn’t make it back because they didn’t have enough fuel. Six-hour flights, we had drop tanks. Up until thenOral the longest flight I had ever been on was four hours. Minnesota's TS: And the one on that day against the fleet from Kyushu was six hours? Minnesota LF: Six hours. I took off at noon and landed at six o’clock at night.

TS: Three hours out and three hours back.

LF: Yes.

TS: And the actual combat sequence wasn’t all that long, was it?

28 LF: The actual combat sequence couldn’t have been fifteen seconds, maybe thirty tops. Tops. From the time we broke up, dropped our torpedoes, got the hell out of there and reformed.

TS: Making a torpedo run is different than dropping bombs, right? You do different things?

LF: Right. Dropping bombs, you’re in a steep angle. Sort of using the airplane as a guide, because you are the bombardier, too. You have to line up the target based on the nose of the airplane and the attitude that it is, and hope that your bombs will hit.

TS: Was there a bomb sight in your airplane?

LF: No. We had a gun sight, but you did it sort of by dead reckoning. You just lined up the target as you went in. We couldn’t dive bomb. Our airplanes couldn’t handle the stress. We did what we call glide bombing. You got into about a forty-five degree angle. Dive bombers came right straight down. But they were made for that. I

TS: They could handle the stress?

LF: They had certain kinds of flaps, special flaps that theyGeneration would open,Part and they could turn. Once we committed ourselves, that was it. You couldn’t turn the airplane. So when I committed myself to dropping a torpedo on this cruiser [during the April 7th mission], I couldn’t turn. So I went right over the ship about fifty feet. Almost right into the mast. Society

TS: How close to the water were you? Project: LF: We got new torpedoes when we Greatestwere out there that were much better than the ones that they had had in the early part of the war. These torpedoes you could drop from about five to six hundred feet. Historical TS: That’s quite different that having to go water level. History LF: Yes. You could drop the torpedo going fast.

[Tape interruption] Oral Minnesota's LF: It had a wooden cover on the nose of the torpedo and it had wooden fins on the tail of the torpedo. It made it aerodynamic,Minnesota so when you dropped the torpedo going, say, 250 knots at 500 feet, the torpedo would hit the water and the wood would peel off. It was just plywood. The torpedo would make a hot run right at the target. In the old days they would drop a torpedo and the darned thing, if you didn’t drop it, it would enter the water at 26 ½ degrees at 100 feet, and it wouldn’t run.

TS: So it was fickle and difficult to use, it sounds like.

LF: Yes, the first ones. The guys at the [1942] Battle of Midway, every torpedo plane got shot down. There was only one survivor out of Torpedo Squadron 8: Ensign [George] Gay.

29 TS: A suicide mission, it sounds like.

LF: It was. Those were suicide. I used to tell people I flew torpedo bombers. “You what? You survived?” I said, “It was a lot different when I was out there.”

TS: Just a couple years made all the difference.

LF: All the difference in the world.

TS: The mission on the 7th of April 1945, that was your only torpedo mission, I think you said.

LF: The only one. We trained for dropping torpedoes in Whidbey Island, Washington. They had a boat that used to do nothing but go back and forth in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The boat was about three hundred feet long, or two hundred feet long. They had torpedoes that we would drop and then they would surface afterwards to be retrieved. They had to be droppedI twice before the Navy would accept them and take them to the fleet. So these were official torpedoes with out a warhead. That’s how we trained. If you got a hit, the torpedo would go underneath the boat and then later on it had some kind of a—something buoyant in it that would surface it and give off dye markers, so they could locate it. GenerationPart

TS: So the torpedoes that you actually dropped had been tested twice before you actually used it in a mission. Society

LF: It was going to work. Everybody who dropped a torpedo in our group got a hit. Project: TS: Can you recall the torpedo strikeGreatest against the Japanese cruiser Yahagi on 7 April 1945?

LF: Sure. We came upon the Yahagi. There was a destroyer along side of it. Yahagi had been attacked earlier and was spewing oil. Historical

TS: Was she still under way? History

LF: Yes. The ship was—it was right side up and moving, and the destroyer was along side of it. When we arrived on theOral scene it was part of this task group that the Japanese had sent down to Okinawa,Minnesota's built around the Yamato, the world’s biggest battleship. I have a book written by the captain of the ship I sank. I’ve got it downstairs. You’re welcome to read that. Minnesota When we got to the scene, our squadron commander at that time was Thomas Stetson, because our CO [commanding officer] was killed over Okinawa earlier, a couple days earlier. Tom was leading this strike. There were thirteen planes in our group. He decided to take six of them after the [battleship] Yamato and the seven of us that were led by Clyde Lee (whom I flew wing on, so we were in front) were to go after the cruiser and the destroyer.

So they went after the Yamato and we left them. We split. The Yamato was a few miles away, several miles away. I was flying. We were paralleling the course of [Yahagi]. The cruiser was going this way, and we were going this way, the same way. When we got along side the cruiser,

30 off a few miles, Lee pointed at it and gave the break up signal. I was on his left wing, so I was the first plane in the attack. I put my nose down and I headed for the cruiser, and I could see it was just barely moving, so I didn’t have to lead the cruiser or anything.

TS: Because she wasn’t moving very fast?

LF: It wasn’t moving very fast. If the cruiser was moving, I would have to drop the torpedo so it would make an intersecting run and hope that it would hit it. But I saw that the cruiser wasn’t moving very fast. I called my radio operator, who had a radar scope—I didn’t have one—I told him to let me know when we hit fifteen hundred yards. Awful close. So he would call out the range to me on the radarscope. He had it on his scope. Because I was too excited, I didn’t want to drop, because the torpedo had to run three hundred yards in the water to be armed. The Japanese torpedoes were armed instantaneously. They dropped a torpedo, just drop it anywhere and if it hit it exploded. Ours didn’t. Ours had to have a certain length of water run before it was armed. I TS: So if you got too close—?

LF: It would just be a dud. So I told him I wanted about two thousand yards. Then I would be ready for it. I remember his voice was kind of nervous asGeneration he was readingPart off the range because he couldn’t see anything. He’s buried in the back of the airplane. He can’t see, and my gunner is looking the other way, too. I’m the only one looking forward. So I head right for the cruiser, and there’s flak coming up from the cruiser and the destroyer. I don’t pay attentionSociety to it.

TS: How do you not pay attention to that? Project: LF: You just don’t. This is your target.Greatest [Admiral] Farragut [19th century U.S> naval commander] once said, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” There’s no deviation. I’m going after it, hell or high water. So I just kept going and he gave me the range. I was right on it, and I pressed the pickle [torpedo release button]. I could feel it in theHistorical airplane. I mean, you’re dropping two thousand pounds suddenly, and the airplane kind of jumps up a little bit. I closed the bomb doors as fast as I could, and I couldn’t turn—IHistory was going too fast.

TS: So you had to fly straight ahead continuously, over the ship? Oral LF: Continuous.Minnesota's “So,” I said, “the only route to go is to go right at the cruiser,” which I did. I went right at it. And just as I got along side I was two hundred feet off the water at the time. I could see guys running aroundMinnesota the ship. I almost hit the main mast on the cruiser. I just made a fast turn and I went right over the front of the cruiser. And then I started jinxing as hard as I could, moving back and forth, because they were shooting at me and there were guys coming in behind me. Of the seven guys that made the original attack, five of them hit the cruiser. And the other two torpedoes there was something [that] malfunctioned as far as the dropping.

TS: They couldn’t get rid of the torpedoes?

LF: Couldn’t get rid of the torpedo. So I saw four water spouts [explosions indicating hits]. I turned around and looked, and I could see our torpedoes hitting the cruiser. I don’t think it stayed

31 afloat a minute after it was hit. It just busted up in pieces. The two guys went around that didn’t drop on the first run to go after the destroyer. They went around. And on the run on the destroyer only one was able to drop on the first time around. I’m not sure whether he hit or he missed. One of the guys went around a second time and he got a hit on the destroyer. Then we all joined up. A lot of other airplanes from other groups joining up with us and as we gathered together we could see the Yamato off in the distance being attacked.

All of sudden, there was this tremendous explosion. The sky was just blood red from horizon to horizon. The Yamato just blew up. You know that mushroom cloud that you see over the atomic bomb? Exactly. This huge mushroom cloud rose up. There were 2,200 or something on there. I don’t think there were 200 survivors. Most of them went down. A lot of high ranking. But anyhow, I was a witness to that explosion. It was awesome.

TS: Could you hear it or feel it as well? I LF: No, you couldn’t. We were just far enough away, so we couldn’t hear it or feel it, but I could see it. I could see this [explosion noise]. It was a cloudy day and this red just radiated out from both ends of it to the clouds. It was just awesome. Just awesome. GenerationPart TS: You received the Navy Cross that day, is that right?

LF: Yes. Society

TS: What does the citation include as far as why you got that? Project: LF: Well, you know, for doing what GreatestI did and bringing my plane and crew through unscathed in the face of intense anti-aircraft fire at point blank range, and putting a torpedo into a Japanese cruiser and contributing materially to the sinking of the ship and so on and so forth. Historical TS: You mentioned on the ship. You were on two carriers before the end of the war. Off Okinawa kamikazes were a seriousHistory problem for the Navy. Was there a time that a ship you were on was hit by a kamikaze [Japanese suicide aircraft]?

LF: Yes. Yorktown wasOral hit. The pilots were supposed to disperse in the ship, because they didn’t want us allMinnesota's together.

TS: So you were supposedMinnesota to go to different parts of the ship.

LF: Different parts of the ship. My part of the ship was in the wardroom, which was maybe two or three decks down. The ready room was right below the flight deck. That’s not a very safe place to be when the flight deck is about an eighth of an inch thick.

TS: They weren’t thick, were they?

LF: No. Just wood on top of a little metal. So during general quarters, when we were under attack, our job is to disperse. But that day I had been hiding under tables in the wardroom all the

32 time we were attacked. We knew how close the kamikaze was by the sound of the guns that were being fired. When he was off a long ways, the five inch guns would be shooting, the main battery. When he got closer, then the forty-millimeters would start, the forty quads. Then when he got on top of you, the twenties [twenty-millimeter guns] would start going. So when the twenties were going you knew he was right there.

TS: You could hear these guns?

LF: You could hear the guns, so everybody would dive under the tables. I got tired of that, so this one day I went up on the flight deck during a kamikaze attack. We were attacked every day. Day and night. Nonstop. Twenty-eight days out of the month of May [1945]. Never stopped. Night and day. Come over at night. Come over in the daytime. So I went up on deck and I saw four kamikazes coming down. One of them hit the Intrepid. I saw that. I watched him go right into it. I went down to the wardroom to report to my skipper, The Intrepid just took a—zoot suiter we used to call them, because the Japanese dressed up in ceremonial costumes.I Remember the zoot suit [1940s fashion], the zoot suiters? Okay, so we used to call the kamikazes zoot suiters.

So I was there and a second attack came in, and the guy hitGeneration the side Partof us [our ship Yorktown] and killed a lot of people, a lot of sailors. I was fortunate. Fortunately it was a glancing blow, but it did a lot of damage to the ship. It’s recorded in our [Air Group 9] memoirs. There were a lot of carriers hit, but the Japanese used to come over, and we had picket destroyersSociety [in advance positions, like lookouts]. They would station these radar picket destroyers maybe sixty miles or so ahead of the fleet towards Kyushu [Island], because that’s where most of them were launched from. Every other day we were going up and makiProject:ng raids on Japanese airfields up there, trying to knock out as many airplanes as weGreatest could. But they were always—they had hundreds of them. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of volunteers. That particular day, as I say, we got hit, but it didn’t put us out of commission. Historical TS: Once the kamikaze hit the ship what happened on board the ship? History LF: We were almost hit by kamikazes when we were at anchor one time, in Ulithi [Atoll]. Either two or three twin-engine bombers came from over a thousand miles away. We were sitting there at night watching moviesOral in the hangar deck of the Yorktown, and we were along side the RandolphMinnesota's. There were hundreds of ships there in this anchorage. And all of a sudden general quarters sounds and we all jumped up from the movie and a twin-engine bomber went right over our flight deck, maybe fiftyMinnesota feet above us, and smashed right into the ship along side of us. Could have been us. It hit the Randolph. Fire and flames and explosions. The other twin-engine bomber crashed into an island there that had a runway on it with lights on it. He thought it was a ship. So he headed for it. These guys came—they were wearing winter flying suits. You know, they found remains. This was our first experience with kamikazes. This was before we ever got into battle even.

TS: That time on Okinawa, that was the only time the ship you were on was actually hit?

33 LF: Yes. The first ship that—the CV 5, which was the first Yorktown, was sunk at either Coral Sea or someplace else. Somewhere off Guadalcanal [both in the Southwest Pacific, scenes of battles in 1942]. This was CV 10, the replacement for that ship. And the first Lexington was sunk, too—I was on the new Lexington, CV 16.

TS: You flew a number of missions supporting the invasion of Okinawa. Typically, what were those missions about? Were there airfields to bomb, or were you bombing positions, or what?

LF: We would get a map every day moving the Marines’ positions, a big map. In fact, I still have it downstairs. And take out a crayon and mark on the map. We were given pictures of each area. They were marked off in maybe fifty-yard squares, and across the top of the picture would be letters of the alphabet just like a road map, and on the side would be numbers.

TS: Like grid coordinates. I LF: Exactly. So when you left the ship you were directed to targets by ground controllers, Marines on the ground. They’d tell you go to such and such a number. You’d flip through your pages and go to, say, A-5. GenerationPart TS: So a very specific spot.

LF: Very specific spot. They would even mark it sometimes with coloredSociety shells so you knew exactly where it was. Because one of the worst things you could do, as far as morale was concerned, was drop on your own people. Which happens and has happened a lot. As a matter of fact, after the raids on Japan, a few days later the invasionProject: of Iwo Jima took place. We supported the landing. We were briefed by a MarineGreatest colonel. He came aboard ship and he told us how important it was to knock out these defenders. And I’ll never forget his last words before he left the ship. He said, “Every Jap machine gun you knock out will save the lives of fifty Marines.” It stuck with me. So, anyhow, we got over there and Historicalwere given a target. A machine gun was holding up a Marine advance. We were carrying five hundred pound bombs, four of them. So I made several passes over to makeHistory sure that I had it marked specifically. I didn’t want to drop on our people.

TS: Could you drop thatOral accurately? Minnesota's LF: From low. We were bombing very low. There was a very low ceiling that day. It was a lousy day. You couldn’t get steep,Minnesota you had to come in very shallow. It was easy to hit under those circumstances. So I got real low on about my third or fourth pass, and I could hear clanking in the airplane. I didn’t know what it was. So finally I came around and dropped my bombs, and I get back to the ship and landed and was taxiing forward. Everybody on the flight deck is pointing at my airplane. So I taxied up to the parking area and I got out of the airplane. We must have had fifty machine gun holes in the airplane, but nothing hit us. Nothing hit anything vital.

TS: That’s amazing.

34 LF: Yes. A machine gun on the ground was [firing up at us], because I was only five hundred feet and going very slow.

TS: So from that altitude they could hit you.

LF: Oh, easily. I was a sitting duck. I heard this clanking, but I didn’t know what the heck it was. Sure enough, I got hit by a machine gun from the ground.

TS: And you weren’t hit.

LF: I wasn’t hit. My crew wasn’t hit. Nothing vital in the airplane was hit. There were holes in the wings, holes in the fuselage.

TS: You were never wounded in action, were you? I LF: Never. Closest I came to it was when that kamikaze hit us [on Yorktown]. I was playing gin rummy with a friend of mine in the wardroom and a fluorescent fixture came down and hit me on the head. GenerationPart TS: Well, if that’s as close as you got—

LF: I was going to put in for a Purple Heart, but I thought that would beSociety a little ballsy, so I didn’t do it. [Laughs]

TS: Fluorescent light injury. [Laughs] Project: Greatest LF: Fluorescent light fell on my head playing gin rummy. [Laughs]

TS: You flew twenty-five missions, but when the Historicalwar ended against Japan you were not on the Yorktown anymore. History LF: No. I came home and I went to Jacksonville, Florida. I didn’t know the war was going to end. This was in July of 1945, and my next assignment was to be a group leader. I was going to pick up three graduatingOral ensigns from Pensacola, and train with them. I was going to be their leader, andMinnesota's I was going to take them back out to the fleet, for the invasion of Japan [planned for Fall 1945; cancelled after surrender]. Operation Olympic. I’d already seen the plans. Minnesota TS: So you knew what was coming for yourself.

LF: Oh, yes. The invasion and capture of Japan, which would have been devastating. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, but I happened to wander into the combat information center and there laid out on a table, a long table, were all the invasion plans.

TS: Where was this?

35 LF: On the Yorktown. We were the flag of Task Force 58, and Admiral Radford was aboard. They must have had a briefing session, and I wandered into the combat information center and looked down at the table. Everything marked “Top Secret” and “Operation Olympic, the Invasion and Capture of Japan.” Right in front of my eyes.

TS: So when you were in Florida training with these guys—?

LF: I never got that far.

TS: You never got into Florida?

LF: I got to Florida. I got to Jacksonville. I was home when the war ended. I was home on leave when they dropped the big one [the atomic bomb]. I still had to go to Jacksonville, because there was a separation center there. I TS: Right. Where did you experience V-J Day? In Jacksonville?

LF: No. I was in St. Paul, home on leave. GenerationPart TS: Before you went to Jacksonville?

LF: Right. It was wild. Society

TS: What do you remember about V-J Day? Project: LF: All I remember is everyone runningGreatest out in the streets. It was just like Joe Louis [the boxer]—we used to run out in the streets when he knocked somebody out when we were kids. It was just hilarious. Everybody was excited. My mother and my father, the war was finally going to be over. This and that. That was it. Then it sort ofHistorical calmed down, and everybody was waiting to come home. History TS: You arrived home in St. Paul not long before that, then.

LF: That’s right. I wasOral home on leave. We came home as passengers on the [aircraft carrier] Hornet. WeMinnesota's had gone through a huge typhoon, in June of 1945. It just devastated the fleet. It smashed Okinawa. Tipped ships over, smashed carriers. We rode through the fringes of the typhoon. We were lucky. ButMinnesota there were destroyers that capsized, and cruisers that had the bows knocked right off of them. These monstrous cruisers. The Hornet had the flight deck smashed. The whole forward part along with a couple other carriers.

So the Hornet was due to go back to the States, and we picked up the Hornet in the Philippines. We pulled in there. They had a big anchorage set up there. We were due to go home, so we were passengers on the Hornet and the Hornet stopped in Hawaii for a while and then went on to San Francisco. That’s where my flight leader, Clyde Lee, got married, and we went to his wedding in Burlingame. Finally I was able to get a flight home. I was there at home on my first leave from active duty when the war ended [in August].

36 TS: It had been a long time since you had seen your folks, right?

LF: Yes.

TS: How was it to see your folks and your brothers again?

LF: I walked in on my mother. She was in the kitchen. I’ll never forget the look on her face because I didn’t let her know that I was going to be home that particular day. She just knew that I was in California, that I had called. I somehow hurriedly managed to get a flight out. Most of the time you had to take a train, which was like a five-day trip in those days. I managed to get a flight out and walked in, came through the back, through the kitchen door and she was bent over the stove doing something. I came up behind her and sort of grabbed her, and she turned around and she almost passed out. I remember that. [With emotion] Funny, I never remembered it up until now. [Pauses five seconds] You really triggered something. I TS: Your brothers, they were there. Did they ask you about what you had been doing, what you had gone through?

LF: Yes. For someone who hadn’t been out there it’s difficultGeneration to explain.Part It is very difficult to tell the emotions and excitement. I started the University [of Minnesota] and I started having nightmares. I’d fight every battle every night. So finally I went to see a shrink at the University. He was the head of the psychology department. He said, “You know, I’veSociety had five hundred of you guys come through here this week. Let me explain something to you. You’ve just gone through three years of the most exciting thing that could ever happen to a human being and all of a sudden, boom! You’re back to so-called normal.Project: It’s going to take you—maybe never—to rehabilitate yourself.” He said, “Get yourselfGreatest a girlfriend. Get some diversions. Find something to do.” I said I was in the Reserves. He said, “Stay. Continue to fly. You love to fly. Don’t drop out.” He encouraged me to stay in the Reserves, which I loved. I was in it until I had a couple of kids and my wife was starting to get nervous. She Historicalmore or less insisted that I get out. I didn’t want to put up with that. So in 1959 I opted to get my final discharge. History TS: Let me ask you about readjusting and nightmares and similar things. You had some dreams at night, things that recurred in your mind? Oral LF: Yes. Minnesota's

TS: If I can ask, what kindMinnesota of images or things came back to you?

LF: One of the most traumatic experiences I had was during an attack on Okinawa. We were attacking an airfield that day. For some reason or other I was scheduled to fly on the wing of our skipper, our commanding officer, Byron Cook. The attack was to be coordinated with our fighters. What we were supposed to do is get into single file, one behind the other, and to do as much damage to this particular airfield as we could. We were carrying five hundred pound bombs, we were carrying rockets. The fighters were supposed to go down just in front of us and suppress any anti-aircraft fire by strafing the target. Off to the right was the airfield. We were all

37 stretched out in tandem, one behind the other, and I was the second airplane in tandem right behind the skipper.

We were not close. Maybe—it’s hard to say, but it wasn’t formation flying. We were separated comfortably, so you didn’t have to worry about the guy in front of you. Of course, the target was off to the right, so everybody was sort of looking at the target and the fighters. For some reason or other there was one fighter of ours in our squadron, he got out of position. He was supposed to come down and suppress the anti-aircraft fire down there, and he came flashing across and ran right into my skipper’s airplane. Right in front of me. I looked up and just had time to react. We were that close. And I pulled back on the stick as hard as I could, and as I went past and I could feel the heat from the two airplanes.

There was a big explosion. The blue airplane, the TBM, one wing was completely off; it was brown. The flames just peeled off all the paint. It was hanging like suspended in the air and was just heading right straight for the ground. I didn’t see the fighter. I didn’t see whatI happened to that fighter. I was shaking. I immediately made a quick turn. I was carrying eight rockets, which I was going to fire two at a time. I turned it on salvo and I fired all eight of them at once and got back to the ship. I was one of the first ones that landed, and I went into the ready room to report that our skipper had just been killed along with his two crewmen.Generation Part

It turns out that the fighter pilot survived. He made a landing. This was several days before the invasion of Okinawa [on 1 April 1945]. He walked off the island. KilledSociety a couple of Japs with a pistol he was carrying, and was picked up by one of our minesweepers off the east coast of Okinawa. Even had moving pictures of him wading out to the minesweeper. His name was Fox, Fred Fox. I’ll never forget him as long as I live. HeProject: didn’t do it on purpose, but just one of those things. I used to have nightmares aboutGreatest that. That was the most traumatic thing, I think.

TS: Seeing that right in front of you. Historical LF: Right in front of me. There it was. Boom! And it just—in an instant. That would be a recurring theme all the time in myHistory dreams.

TS: Were these dreams that woke you up, Leon, or that you remembered in the morning? Oral LF: I thinkMinnesota's I would wake up. I remember my wife giving me a shot with her elbow when I might have yelled out or something in my sleep. That happened several times. Minnesota TS: You were married in 1951, which means these images were in your mind for a long time after this.

LF: Oh, for years. I still have them. Every once in a while I have the craziest dreams about flying and combat and all these various other things. After all, I was in three wars. I went back [to Israel during] the Gulf War in 1991. I was in Tel Aviv during the [Iraqi] SCUD [missile] attacks. That’s another story.

TS: Yes. Did you find that…?

38 [Tape interruption]

TS: Did you find that these dreams or nightmares decreased over time? Just gradually went away?

LF: I think so. I haven’t had one in a long time now. I still take part in the air shows. I’m called upon to speak to different groups, like Bert [Sandberg] is. We start reliving some of our old experiences, and somewhere in the subconscious, it starts coming to the fore, and you start remembering some of these weird things.

TS: That makes them more active again?

LF: Yes, exactly. The stimulation from—like every summer, I go to [the air show held at] Flying Cloud Airport [in Eden Prairie, MN]. They have this huge air show out there, and I’m invited as a guest all the time to sign autographs and stuff like that. It sort of stays with you.I The old cliché, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.

TS: So the war experience stays part of you. GenerationPart LF: Oh, yes, sure. You can’t—it’s too dynamic an experience to just say—it’s not like an auto accident or something like that, which could be traumatic, too, depending on your other experiences. Society

TS: The war experience was longer and it was repeated at many—? Project: LF: Exactly. And you knew what youGreatest had to look forward to every day. If you weren’t hiding from them, they were hiding from you. I sprinted that hangar deck, which is almost a thousand feet long, in about nine seconds. I don’t think Jesse Owens could have caught me during a kamikaze attack. Running down the hangar deck toHistorical a place of safety. I didn’t think I could run that fast. And at night they’d come over and drop flares. You could read a newspaper by the flares, and our night fighters wouldHistory be out there shooting them down left and right. It was wild. The kamikazes would come over morning, noon and night. We were in general quarters, I think, in the month of May, twenty-four/seven. Oral TS: WhenMinnesota's you got back to St. Paul (you were discharged from active duty in September 1945) how had St. Paul changed as a result of the war do you think? Minnesota LF: Everybody was drifting back. Do you mean physically?

TS: The kind of feeling you got in St Paul. After all, you had grown up in St. Paul. You’d been there all your life.

LF: You’d meet up with your old buddies who were off in Europe or some other place and share war stories. And then everybody started going about their lives again. I went to school. This guy went to work at the Post Office. Another guy would go back to his family business, like Bert Sandberg. Everybody had an agenda. I started going to the University [of Minnesota] in the fall

39 of 1945. I started even before they even had a GI Bill set up. I thought, “This is what I want to do.” I was going to be a lawyer. I was fortunate enough to get into law school with my service- connected credits. Taking them all together, I started the University as a senior. All I had to do was take couple of courses and I was admitted to law school, which was a big break. [Then] I just became disenchanted with school, and the lure of making money was a little stronger than law school. A friend of mine was jockeying cars out of his house. He was getting cars, fixing them up, and selling them out of his house and making a lot of money.

TS: There was a market for used cars, wasn’t there?

LF: Oh, unbelievable. He and I hooked together and started doing it and finally opened up a car lot, the two of us, in East St. Paul, about two blocks from the capitol. Right on University Avenue. Then we discovered North Dakota, because the buyers we were getting were all coming from North Dakota. So we went to the buyers. We went out to Minot [city located in north central North Dakota]. It was great. We were there for about three years. OpenedI up a car lot out there and ran it to the end. Then we went our separate ways. He got married and started raising a family and I came back and started going to work.

TS: From talking to you earlier I know that you ended upGeneration in Israel inPart 1948. You’re the first person we’ve talked to that has that experience. How in the world did you end up as a fighter pilot in Israel in 1948? Society LF: In 1948 I was sitting in Minot, North Dakota, on a used car lot, having the time of my life. Girlfriends coming out of the woodwork, single, cars at my disposal, money. I was living in a fool’s paradise. Project: Greatest TS: You were twenty-five years of age with a lot of stuff behind you already.

LF: Yes. I got a phone call. Of course, I knew whatHistorical was going on. The newspapers. We knew about the Holocaust. Jews were trying to survive. I felt very strongly about that even though I’m not a religious person. I didn’t haveHistory much of a religious background. We were semi-secular, but you always knew you were Jewish. Growing up in my neighborhood, it was very [heterogeneous]. We could field eleven guys on a football team and there were no two nationalities the same. OralThere were Irish and Swedes and Norwegians and blacks and Jews and Italians, andMinnesota's we all got along. It was great. It was just one happy family. To this day as you know, Bert Sandberg and I remember those days very fondly. Anyway, I was sitting in Minot, North Dakota, and I got a phoneMinnesota call from a guy in New York. How he got my name, I don’t know. I can only surmise that they were going through lists of former Jewish pilots.

TS: You think they just found you that way? You didn’t know this guy who called you?

LF: No. I had no idea who he was. He identified himself. He said his name was Steve Schwartz. He was with an organization called Land and Labor for Palestine, which was a front for recruiting and all these other things. He said, “They are in desperate straits there. The Egyptian Army is closing in on Tel Aviv, and the only chance we got of survival is, we’ve got to get pilots over there. We have airplanes. We have nobody to fly them.” And he really got to me. He must

40 have said something right. I looked at my partner and I told him how I felt. He said, “Well, Leon, you’re free to do anything you want.”

TS: Was your partner Jewish, by the way?

LF: Yes. He was a pilot. He flew B-17s in World War II. I went to him and told him how I felt. He said, “You’re free to do anything you want. But if you go, you’re going to have to give up your end of the business.” So I said I’d be willing to do it. Just so I know it was there if I came back. We agreed to that. I gave him power of attorney so he could sign title cards and do all the things in my name. It was the only way he could operate. In the meantime, I was told to contact a fellow in St. Paul who was their representative of Land and Labor in St. Paul. He was an accountant. I don’t even remember his name. He’s long gone. He arranged for me to obtain passage to Italy, to Rome. So first I had to get a passport, which I never had. I had no reason for one. So now each step along the way, this was all done very clandestinely because the FBI was after all these guys, because there was an arms embargo, a neutrality act at theI time.

TS: Right. So that’s why the “Land and Labor for Palestine” front.

LF: Yes. It was a front for recruitment. And through all thisGeneration time I wasPart in the Navy Reserve, in an active Reserve squadron stationed at Wold-Chamberlain Field [in Minneapolis].

TS: So the clandestine nature of what you were doing was even more important.Society You didn’t check with the Navy first.

LF: Right. I didn’t say anything. I just went to myProject: commanding officer out there. He was a nice guy. I told him I was going to take a Greatestleave of absence and I wanted to come back. He said, “Any time—just extend your Reserve duty another six months,” or however long you were gone. We had a terrific group of guys out there. I still bump into a couple of them every once in a while. But when I got my passport, all of a sudden, whenHistorical I was going in the passport office in New York, the guy started pulling out papers that he wasn’t giving to anybody else. I was in a line with a bunch of people and he startedHistory reaching in his desk and pulling out papers, which I started signing. One of them said, “I will not bear arms for a foreign government.” Another, “I will not vote in a foreign election. I will not do this, I will not do that, under penalty of losing my citizenship.” Oral Minnesota's TS: Did he identify you as a Jew? Minnesota LF: I don’t know how he knew. Obviously, he spotted me. I don’t know if I stood out. Why is this young kid all of a sudden taking off to go to Italy? I had a passport with an Italian visa on it, a French visa, all these visas in there, and I gave him some cockamamie story that my brother had gone away from home and my mother wanted me to stop him from getting married to some Italian girl, and I was on my way to Rome to see if I could break up the marriage. Some wild story that I concocted.

In the meantime, I signed all these papers. So he gives me my passport. I’ll refer to him as [unclear]. And later he arranged for me to get a flight out of New York to Rome, which was our

41 next stop. We had a base there. Actually, the center of our activities was in Rome. From there they would disperse everybody in different directions. I remember the flight over there on a TWA Constellation. Remember the old three tails? Connies. I sat next to an Italian movie producer who was taking the The Outlaw over there, the famous movie that Howard Hughes made with Jane Russell. He was delivering it to Rome. I sat next to him on the flight over. The reason I bring up his name is because I had a whole suitcase full of cigarettes that I was taking with me, and he got me through customs by slipping the guy two cartons of cigarettes to get me through.

TS: I see. Cigarettes were going to be a way of opening doors, or an ersatz currency when you got there.

LF: Yes. Plus the fact that I smoked a lot at that time. Somebody told me to buy cigarettes, because you can’t get them in Europe. So I went out and filled up a whole bag—I must have had twenty cartons of cigarettes. I was going through Italian customs, and this guy’sI jaw dropped when he saw the cigarettes. Señor Renato Seccia saw what was going on, and he ran over, grabbed two cartons, and handed them to the guy. The guy closed up my bag and whipped me through. That’s the way it works. I was green, I didn’t know. I got to Rome. Each step along the way you only knew the next person that you were going Generationto contact. PartYou didn’t know the whole organization. You had no need to know.

TS: That’s right. Society

LF: So then I contacted the people in Rome, and they sent me to Sicily. When I was in Sicily I received word to go to Czechoslovakia. That’s whereProject: we hooked up to learn to fly the Avia S199s. Greatest

TS: As I learned from you earlier, this plane was based closely on the World War II-era German Messerschmitt 109. Historical

LF: Right. The Czechs were makingHistory them, but it was not the same airplane that the Germans flew in World War II. By the way, when Steve Schwartz was recruiting me from New York, when he told me he had airplanes, the first question I asked him was, “What kind of airplanes do you have?” He said, “I Oralcan’t tell you, but they’re at least as good as what the enemy’s got.” Which wasMinnesota's the biggest lie the world has ever known. I’ll never forget that. If he had told me what they were, I probably wouldn’t have gone. At least as good—that’s all I need. I’m not asking for anything but a levelMinnesota playing field.

TS: You went to Czechoslovakia in 1948 to learn to fly these planes?

LF: Yes. The airplane took me from Sicily to Prague, and I landed and was met at the airport and taken to a hotel where another contact met me. Put me up in the hotel in Prague and I spent about three or four days in Prague, this great, beautiful city. Had a wonderful time. Met a lot of nice ladies and went to bars and did all kinds of things. Did that in Rome, too, by the way. Anyhow, the next thing I know I’m on my way to an airbase in western Czechoslovakia called

42 Ceske Budejovice. It’s right on the Austrian border. That’s where the beer Budweiser came from.

TS: Yes. In German the city is called Budweis, thus the beer is called Budweiser.

LF: Ceske Budejovice. There was a big Czech airbase there where they trained their pilots.

TS: This is a former German airbase, is that right?

LF: It could have been. It was a big base—big field, hangars, and all kinds of facilities. We had three Czech pilots who could speak English. One of them was just in New York a few weeks ago where I was invited to see him again. Captain Bilek. They had a big deal at the Czech embassy, because they are doing a whole thing about their helping out Israel in the war for independence. Truth be it known, they did it for the money. I TS: They were getting something out of this, weren’t they?

LF: Yes. They were getting something out of it—they were charging forty thousand dollars for airplanes that weren’t worth forty cents. [Laughs] And theyGeneration were chargingPart ten thousand dollars to train each pilot. We got five hours of training.

TS: That’s what you had? Five hours? Society

LF: Five hours of training. Anyhow, no shooting, no nothing. No formation flying. Just a couple of dual flights, a few solos, and you were on your Project:way to Israel. Greatest TS: You weren’t in Czechoslovakia very long, were you?

LF: No. In Czechoslovakia just a very short time. HistoricalOne day we were told that we were leaving. There were three of us going through at the same time. They would straggle through, two or three or at a time. History

TS: In stages almost. Oral LF: Yes. Minnesota'sI wasn’t one of the first guys over there, but I was close to one of the first. In fact, when I arrived in Israel it was during the first truce. They had already stopped the Egyptians about ten miles outside of MinnesotaTel Aviv and I thought the war was over.

TS: This was June 1948 now?

LF: This was June 1948. They were trying to negotiate a cease-fire. I thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m going to turn around and go home.” But it just didn’t work quite that way. The truce was being violated every day. I remember my first mission in Israel.

TS: How soon after you arrived there did you have this first mission?

43 LF: I’m going to have to check. I have my flight log from there. I’m going to have to check. It was not long after I arrived there. We wound up in a field, an airfield that they had set aside for us. Our squadron was known as 101. We took the designation as being the first squadron. We called it 101. We had a squadron insignia. Painted our airplanes—the noses red candy stripes and the tails. We could identify us from the enemy in our combat. We were sent to this field right outside of Herzlia, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv about fifteen miles north of Tel Aviv. Today it’s a very upscale, one of the most upscale neighborhoods in all of Israel. There’s a city there where the homes start at about a million bucks.

In those days it was a farming community and we were put up in a pension and they looked after us. A man and his wife. We each had separate rooms there and they cooked for us and kept us there. We would report to the airfield and we were assigned to do so everyday. We would go on standby. So one day I’m sitting by my airplane on standby across the field from the operations tent, and three very excited guys come charging out to where I was sitting in a jeep. We had no communication between the airplane and the operations tent. He says, “Get readyI to go!” I said, “Go where?” He says, “There’s some Egyptian airplanes bombing one of our settlements in the Negev. Go get them!” [Laughs] Just me.

TS: Just you? GenerationPart

LF: Just me. We never got more than four airplanes in the air at any time. That was the maximum effort, four fighters. Most of the time we went by ourselves orSociety maybe two. Halfway through, one of the guys had to drop off because the had engine problems or some other problem. We lost a lot of people, the highest number of casualties of all the volunteers that came over in Army, Navy, Air Force and everything. WeProject: had nineteen pilots that never made it back. I had no maps; I didn’t know where I wasGreatest going. Beautiful sunshiny day. I jumped in the airplane. They cranked it up. It’s got one of those inertial starters. Put on our flying suit, my helmet. I had no communications with anybody. I took off and I headed south. That’s where the Negev Desert is. I was flying at about twelve thousand feet. We Historicaldidn’t have oxygen.

TS: So you couldn’t go too muchHistory higher than that, could you?

LF: Not much. Twelve thousand you were safe. I started looking around for them. I couldn’t find them. Oral Minnesota's TS: A needle in a haystack though, isn’t it? Minnesota LF: Yes. You’re looking for bombs, maybe explosions on the ground that would indicate there were airplanes above us. I flew around for maybe a half an hour, forty-five minutes. The range on these things was just a little over an hour. That was all the fuel you could carry. They didn’t have fuel gauges on these airplanes.

TS: No fuel gauge?

LF: No fuel gauge. All you had was a warning light. When you got down to about ten minutes fuel or fifteen minutes, this warning light came on. That was the only indication. So you had to

44 fly by your wristwatch. That will lead me to another story where I crashed, but that would come a little later. Anyhow, that was my first experience. Here I just came out of a Navy Air Force where we went on two thousand plane raids in the most sophisticated planes in the world and here I’m sitting in this Mickey Mouse airplane. This is crazy.

TS: Did you see anything on that first mission?

LF: Nothing. Nothing. And I remember asking Ezer Weizman [later president of Israel], who was born and raised there. This was before this mission. I said, “What happens if I have to make a forced landing somewhere down there?” I had heard these Arabs didn’t treat pilots too kindly. Some really scary stories. And it happened to a couple of our guys. Anyhow, I carried a .38 [caliber pistol] with me. Truth be known, there was only one reason I carried the gun—to kill myself. Oh, yes, I wasn’t going to be taken prisoner. Anyhow, I said, “If I have to make a forced landing or bail out, if the parachute even worked, what do I look for?” He says, “We got settlements all over the Negev. If it’s green, it’s Jewish. If it’s brown, it’s Arab.”I So aim for the green. Just remember, if it’s green it’s Jewish; if it’s brown, it’s Arab. That’s the only instructions I had. No maps, no nothing. No front lines, no this, no that. Nothing.

TS: A total fly-by-night operation. GenerationPart

LF: It was, yes. To this day they call it FUBAR Airlines, which means (I’ll use the nice word) “fouled up beyond all recognition.” Society

TS: The pilots you were there with, Leon, where did they come from? Project: LF: All over the world. We had guysGreatest that flew in the RAF. They all came for different reasons. We had adventurers that just came there for the adventure. We had South Africans. We had Canadians. Oh, some of the best pilots in the world were the Canadians. They were the best. We had Buzz Buerling, he was the leading ace in CanaHistoricalda. He flew in Israel in 1948. Unfortunately he got killed before he got in to combat. He got killed in Rome. Had an accident. Took off one day in a Norseman and crashed. HeHistory was called th e White Knight of Canada. He’s a legend in Canada.

TS: He was killed in a Oralpractice mission? Minnesota's LF: Yes. He just took off in a Norseman one day out of Ciampino Airport outside of Rome and crashed. To this day, peopleMinnesota think the airplane was sabotaged by somebody, but they’re not sure. Then we had three tremendous pilots who had flown off of Malta and had all kinds of German planes to their credit. They came in a little bit later. In fact, they came in when I was leaving. With the unlikely Jewish names of Doyle, MacIlroy and Wilson. [Laughs] Anyhow, they went back to Canada. I met them in 1986. We had a reunion and they’re the most terrific guys. Just super guys. They’ve all passed away.

TS: How would you describe the reason why you were there?

45 LF: I went for—because my conscience drove me to do it. I was in a position to help and I felt I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t go and do it. I almost didn’t make it out the front door. My mother went into hysterics. Here her son had just come back from three years of war, and now I was leaving the house to go off to another one. She started crying hysterically and threw herself on the bed. I got to the front door and I was crying. If I had turned around and gone back, that would have been it. I just kept on walking. I made up my mind and nothing in the world was going to stop me. It was just—it was very traumatic.

TS: Was your dad around at that time as well?

LF: No, he was at work. He was at the store. He knew I was going. I had told him I was leaving. He just more or less accepted it. I was three times seven and could make up my own mind. But my mother was just beside herself.

TS: Did you stay in touch with your folks and other loved ones while you wereI in Israel?

LF: All the time. We wrote and I used to get letters from them. I’d write them constantly. Write my partner constantly. We stayed in touch. All in all I did twenty-five trips when I was over there. I did a lot of photo missions for the Army, which IGeneration did by myself.Part They’d put a camera on the belly of an Avia S109. By the way, the Messerschmitts were known as the Knives because Messer in German is a knife. The bombers were called the Hammers. So that’s how we called the Hammers and the Knives in that code talk. Society

TS: Would you characterize any of the missions that you flew there as combat missions, where you did see other planes? Project: Greatest LF: Oh, yes, sure. I was shot at a few times on these photo missions. I flew cover for the bombers when they bombed Gaza on a couple of occasions and there was flak coming up from the ground. But the most memorable one was the oneHistorical during the—I forget the name of the operation. It took place in October where they were trying to push the Egyptians completely out of the Negev. They were in an area,History in a town called Falluja.

TS: The Negev is in the south of present day Israel. Oral LF: Right.Minnesota's Southern Israel today. The Egyptians were there and they were trying to push them out so they could get that area as part of Israel because there was no defined boundaries at the time. Everybody was scramblingMinnesota trying to get the best deal they could. That’s why the truce kept being violated. We would send a convoy led by the U.N. down to one of our outposts that was under siege. Even though the U.N. was leading it in their jeeps they would be attacked by the Egyptians. So that was our excuse to go off and start bombing them again. This took place every other day. There would be a truce. Then they would break the truce or we’d break the truce. There was always somebody violating it.

As a matter of fact, Mickey Marcus, the one that they did that movie about, Cast a Giant Shadow, that Kirk Douglas played the part of the American general that went over there and got shot by one of our guys accidentally. I helped load his body on the plane coming back. So

46 anyway, I’m getting away—so this Operating Horeb, I believe it was called but I’m not a hundred percent sure, was to try to push them out. We were going down there because the Egyptians were sending up fighters from El Arish, which was their big air base in the Sinai. There was air-to-air combat taking place. I went out one morning on the second flight that morning.

TS: By yourself?

LF: By myself. No, actually I started out with another guy but he had engine trouble. I don’t know if he had engine trouble but he had engine trouble. [Laughs]

TS: I got it. Sounds like a wise thing to do. To have engine trouble.

LF: He had engine trouble. He’s a good buddy of mine, but I don’t bring this up. He said he heard some kind of noises. So he went back, and it was just me. So I get downI there near Falluja, and just as I arrive on the scene I see two airplanes in mortal combat in front of me. There was a Spitfire [single-engine fighter plane] in front.

TS: The Spitfire was an Egyptian plane? GenerationPart

LF: Egyptian. And I see a [Israeli Messerschmitt] 109 in back of him knocking chunks off of him. I see parts flying off the Spitfire and I look around and I see anotherSociety Spitfire, Egyptian Spitfire, also below me. I was never a fighter pilot, but I learned these things in my advanced training down in Pensacola, these different runs that you make on a target. Opposite over, opposite under, side slopes and all these different Project:things the fighters used to use. I remembered one called an opposite over, where youGreatest roll the airplane on its back and this guy is heading in the same direction and you pull it through. And you time it so that when you get around you’re behind him and you can start shooting at him. In the meantime, I find out later it was Rudy Augerten, whose picture I’ve got downstairs, he shotHistorical this Egyptian Spitfire down. And I rolled the airplane over on its back and I pulled it through and by the time I got around he was halfway to Cairo. [Laughs] The timing wasHistory horrendous.

TS: The idea was right, but the timing was off. Oral LF: Yes. Minnesota'sHe must have seen me, and he just lit out for home because that was the tactics. They didn’t want to fight. They had no reason to fight, the Egyptians. I don’t blame them for bailing out. I was as scared as he was,Minnesota but he took off and headed back to Cairo and I followed him for a ways until he became a little speck in the sky. I had no way to catch up to him.

TS: His plane was faster?

LF: Oh, much faster. He had a head start on me, besides. I had to get back to my field. I had been gone for a while, and I couldn’t chase him very far or I’d wind up in Egypt. I’d still be there. So I turned around, and by this time I had lost Rudy. He saw me go after the guy and he shot down this plane and he headed back to our field at Herzlia. I started back, and all of a sudden the red light gauge came on. I’ve got about ten minutes, and I’m really in the south of

47 Israel. There’s no way I’m going to make it back to Herzlia, I don’t think. I don’t know. I don’t want to come in dead stick with that mother, because you’re dead. If that engine quits, you just go right straight into the ground. There’s no getting out of it. In a 109 you’re locked in—it’s not a sliding canopy. You can’t get out. There’s no way out. The canopy goes over from right to left and a big bolt locks it in.

[Tape interruption]

TS: So the canopy is bolted closed?

LF: Bolted closed. Now the procedure for getting out of the airplane is, there’s a release right near the bolt. If you pull it, it’s supposed to pull the hinges off on the other side and then you push the canopy off entirely. Just push it away from the airplane. I know I’m not going to make it back, so I decide I’m going to land in a field that I knew of. It used to be a big British air base and I know it’s ours. We have a contingent, a small group of people who stay Ithere. I don’t even know what they used it for. They used to fly Piper Cubs [trainer aircraft] off of it to relieve some of the garrisons in the south and drop supplies and transports used to fly, but we didn’t use it for a firebase. It was a huge field. The first time I’d landed this thing on runway. We’d always landed and taken off on grass fields. GenerationPart

TS: A real airfield. Society LF: Yes. The 109 has the landing gear toed in like a guy with pigeon toes, to operate on a grass field. The wheels were out like this and toed in a little bit. So I landed and made a good landing. No problems. Taxied up there and was waved intoProject: a revetment by one of the guys and I told him what my problem was. They sent a truckGreatest out with fuel and fueled the airplane up and I noticed there was a little oil leak coming out from my cowling. So I called this Israeli mechanic over and pointed it to him. He could speak a little English, but not enough. He took off the section of the cowling and got under there with a screwdriver. HeHistorical said, “Fixed.” I remember him holding up his hand and giving me the high sign, “Fixed.” So I got in the airplane and he started it up for me. I went out to the runway. I didn’tHistory know this, but when I took off there was a black cloud pouring out from under the airplane. Lost all the oil on the takeoff. So whatever he fixed, he didn’t fix. So there I was about fifteen hundred feet, and the engine started running rough. I don’t know I’m losing the oilOral until the engine started running rough. Minnesota's TS: No oil pressure gauge, right? Minnesota LF: No. I looked down at the oil pressure gauge and it was zero. I had been flying since 1941 or 1942 and I had never seen an oil pressure gauge read zero. So I thought there was something wrong with the gauge, so I started rapping on it with my knuckle. It didn’t move. Then I started smelling smoke. Started coming into the cockpit. I still smell that same smoke. It’s in my nose; it never left me. I said, “Leon, you better look for a place to come down buddy. You’ve had it.” So I look around and I’m right near what is now Ben Gurion Airfield. Not far away was Lydda at the time (then it became Lod, then it became Ben Gurion).

48 I remembered that we had captured Lydda a few weeks before. I thought that we had captured it. So I started heading toward the east-west runway of Lydda and the airplane kept losing power. I knew I wasn’t going to make it. So I started going through the procedure of—there were no flaps. No flaps. So I tried to get rid of the canopy. I pulled the thing that’s supposed to release the hinges and I pushed up on the canopy and all it did was flop over on the side of the airplane and just laid there which made it worse. I ruined the aerodynamics of the airplane. This huge canopy is laying on the side of the airplane, and I’m heading toward the east-west runway and getting lower and lower and lower, and I saw that there was no way I was going to make it. There were two big orange groves and a clearing sort of between the two orange groves, and there was a big gully, and I’m heading right for the gully. Full of huge boulders.

I just made it across. My tail hit five feet from the edge of the gully and I slid along on my belly. Dirt goes flying back. My legs got jammed back because the rudder pedals got jammed back. Got a face full of dirt. The airplane went up on its nose. There’s fire coming out of the engine. Flopped back down on its belly. Wheels up, of course. I climbed out of the airplaneI as fast as I could. Took off my parachute. Set it down and left this engine burning and started to walk away from the airplane. I had a flying suit on and I had a sweater on. Because when I had taken off in the morning, it was cold. I had a .38 with me, my .38 that I always carried. And all I knew was I had to walk west, away from Jordan. So I started walkingGeneration west and itPart was hot. It was about, now it’s getting to be about nine, ten in the morning. The sun is out and it’s really getting warm. Took the sweater off and tied it around my waist. I came to a road. Oh, by the way, I’d gone through a town, which had been under siege. There were all kinds of signs around,Society but I don’t read Hebrew. I had walked through a minefield. [Laughs]

TS: Thank God you couldn’t read Hebrew. Project: Greatest LF: I didn’t know it, so these signs were all warning that there were mines there and to be careful and walk in certain places and it was all deserted. There were no human beings around. Just smashed buildings and quiet. I kept walking westHistorical and I came to a road and the road was heading northwest. A dirt road. So I says, “I’ll get on this road and start hoofing it.” History All of a sudden, off in the distance I see a truck with soldiers in the back of it coming down the road. I don’t know if it’s ours or Jordanian. So I jumped into the ditch. I don’t know what I was going to do. I pulled outOral my .38 and I laid there in the ditch so they couldn’t see me. When they were aboutMinnesota's a hundred yards away I could hear Hebrew being spoken. Some guy was yelling something in Hebrew to the driver. So I jumped up and started waving my arms and they stopped. They were Palmach.Minnesota These are like the shock troops, the number one elite troops of Israel. Had seen the airplane go down and were heading out towards it. They threw me in the back of the truck and I tried to explain to them what happened.

They took me to the police station at a town near there called Petah Tikva. The chief of police was Ben Gurion’s son, Amos Ben Gurion. They took me into the station and I met his wife, who was a nice Irish-Catholic girl that he had met when he was going to school in Cambridge or Oxford or something in England. There were two or three of the cutest little blonde Israelis you ever saw running around. They phoned up the field and told them they had me and that they were going to return me that afternoon. I hung around the police station and that afternoon they put me

49 in a jeep. I wasn’t feeling too good. I had cracked up this airplane. My back was kind of stiff; my neck was kind of stiff.

They put me in this jeep and drove me back to Herzlia, and when I got there I looked out on the field and there was an airplane burning out on the field. I found out when I got there it was our commanding officer—he had come back from a mission and apparently couldn’t get his gear down. He started rocking the airplane real violently to try to shake the gear down and put it into a stall and crashed on the field. He left a pregnant, eight-month or nine-month pregnant wife standing there waiting for him. She saw the airplane go down but she didn’t know it was him. He was there, still in the airplane. They hadn’t gotten him out.

So the next day we went to his funeral. We were coming back from the funeral and I went into shock. I started stiffening up all over, my whole body. I could feel it. I couldn’t move my arms, couldn’t move my legs. I was totally—I thought I was paralyzed. I said, “Get me to a doctor.” So they drove me to some little clinic there in Jaffa. The doctor started giving meI some kind of—I don’t know if it was a tranquilizer or what they had back in 1948, but it did do the job. They kept me there for three, four days until they saw that I was okay. By this time the battle in Falluja had pretty well wrapped up. GenerationPart By the way, you know who one of the captives was in Falluja? [Gamal Abdel] Nasser. He later became the Prime Minister of Egypt. He was like a major or something, and they had them completely surrounded. And the U.N. finally got a truce like they did inSociety 1973 that saved the 3rd Egyptian Army that was completely encircled by Ariel Sharon. The same way. Anyway, that was my last trip. I went before the so-called board there. By this time, pilots were coming in, replacements. I said, “I want to go home.” They hadProject: a meeting and said, “Okay.” Greatest TS: You stayed until November of 1948. Why didn’t you stay in Israel?

LF: I had a business back in America. I had family.Historical I wanted to get back to my business. It was doing well. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought of maybe some day coming back and maybe settling down there. I wasn’tHistory really that gu ng-ho. I wasn’t a Zionist. There’s an old joke that used to go around. A Zionist is an American Jew who extracts money from a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine. [Laughs] I wasn’t a Zionist. Bucky, on the other hand, this other guy that I heard about, Oralhe was a Zionist. He went to all the youth stuff in Chicago and to this day he’s still aMinnesota's Zionist. So for him it was a completely different.

TS: How did you feel whenMinnesota you left Israel? What did you feel you had accomplished there?

LF: I felt that I did—I came home knowing that I did what I came there for—to save the remnants of the Jews that were left in Europe. I was a small part of it. I jokingly tell people I was on a Jew-saving mission. [Laughs] You know, it’s crazy, and I know you’re going to think I’m ready for the rubber room. When I got off the airplane from Czechoslovakia and I landed in Israel and I got off the airplane, I knew I had been there before.

TS: Really?

50 LF: Yes. It was déjà vu all over again. Maybe with Joshua, I don’t know. Everything was familiar. I wasn’t a Zionist. I didn’t go to Hebrew school. I didn’t read anything. I didn’t know anything about it. But everything seemed to be familiar. It’s the weirdest feeling. I’ve told people about it. To this day I say, “I climbed out of that airplane; it was at night, and all of a sudden I just felt like I had been there before.”

TS: Leon, back to the subject of your World War II experiences. When you were in the Pacific, you were in the service for a couple years. What did the war mean for you personally at the time?

LF: It’s really hard to define. We were all, everybody, back in the home front, whatever anyone could do. My father used to stand in line just to buy stuff that was rationed, just so he could sent it to me. Everybody was in this thing together. I think it’s probably the most unified this country has ever been in its history, maybe since the Revolution. Certainly not the Civil War. We really felt very, very proud of our accomplishments, and especially when I got a letter from Admiral Forrestal. He wasn’t an admiral, he was Secretary of the Navy and became SecretaryI of Defense. He committed suicide, by the way, afterwards. I got a letter from Forrestal, thanking me for everything we had done. “For all these things you should be as proud as long as you live. For what you guys accomplished.” Really felt good about it. GenerationPart Other than that I really—it’s very difficult to define. It’s hard to tell people exactly what took place in those days, because unless you were there personally and took part in it, and saw the killing and the mayhem and people just throwing themselves into the mostSociety horrendous situations in battles unhesitatingly, you just—you think of Iwo Jima and those Marines down there. Or Guadalcanal. I didn’t know what was going on, on the ground, luckily. I would drop bombs and go back to a nice clean ship. The only time I ever Project:landed there was, I had to take the news guys over there one time, and I brought a load,Greatest a bomb-bay full of bread, because I figured I’d feed a few Marines when I got there. We had fresh rolls and bakery every day on board the ship. We sat in a beautiful wardroom and had music. A different world. When they interviewed our commanding officer once for an interview, they askeHistoricald him to describe carrier warfare. He said, "It’s a gentleman’s way to fight a war.” We didn’t know any of the dirt and what was going on down on the ground until afterwards.History

TS: And the chaos and terror that might have been on board the ship was certainly when the kamikazes hit. But thatOral was an isolated incident, wasn’t it? Minnesota's LF: Yes. I didn’t know what went on, on the [aircraft carrier] Franklin. I saw it get hit. There were obviously dead peopleMinnesota and all kinds of things going on, but I wasn’t an eyewitness to it. We had a few people get killed [on the Yorktown]. I was at funerals all the time on the ship where they dump them over the side and say a prayer and everything. I knew that not everyone was going to survive, but we weren’t that close to the actual smells and sounds like these guys on the ground.

TS: Which changed the experience?

LF: Exactly. Exactly.

51 TS: Let me ask then, this final question. What’s the most important way that the war changed your life?

LF: Unbelievable. You went from a kid where the most important thing in the world was scoring a basket in basketball or making a good tackle in football, to all of a sudden the priorities in life changed. Things that were important became unimportant. And to this day I always use that expression, “Don’t sweat the little things.” Life and death, as far as I’m concerned, is the most important thing in the world.

TS: I hear you saying it changed your perspective, really, on how you deal with day-to-day life.

LF: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you know, things happen. This happens, that happens. You get a little annoyed that the refrigerator breaks down, or the washing machine goes haywire, the TV isn’t working just right. I see people going nuts—they get road rage because some guy cuts in front of him. I say, “Screw you, buddy. Go ahead. Who needs it?” I don’t try toI push my way into these things. “Go ahead if it will make you feel better.” I don’t battle them. I see some of these aggressive young girls driving like they’re kamikazes. Be my guest. I try to instill it in my grandchildren, “Don’t get mad, get even.” [Laughs] GenerationPart TS: So something that you kept with you. You were twenty-two when you got out of the service. By that time you had been through a lifetime of experiences and you were the age of a college student. Society

LF: As I say, that has kind of molded my thoughts. Material things can be replaced, they can be fixed. I see some of these people on television, andProject: I really admire them. Their house is destroyed in a flood or a tornado or something,Greatest and they stand out there and say, “Look, it’s just a house. It’s just this, it’s just that. We’ll rebuild it. We didn’t get hurt. My family is fine, the pets made it through okay, that’s what’s important.” When I see those people, I think they’re the most courageous people in the world. I couldn’t handleHistorical it. If my house got destroyed and all my things that I’ve accumulated, I think I’d go berserk. I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t. But I see those people and I admire them. AndHistory I admire these policemen and these firemen, these guys who unhesitatingly went into the World Trade Center [in New York on September 11, 2001] to try to save peoples’ lives. They didn’t give a second thought to what could happen to them. To me they’re real heroes.Oral We’re not heroes—we survived. Heroes are the poor slobs that are still out there. Minnesota'sThat’s how it’s molded my thoughts and my beliefs.

TS: Leon, I’ve enjoyed veryMinnesota much listening and having this conversation with you. Thank you very much.

LF: My pleasure. What you’re doing, I think, is very, very important, because when we’re gone nobody’s going to know the story first-hand.

TS: That’s why I’m doing this.

LF: When we were in school we’d read history books. What does it mean? 1066 A.D. was the Battle of Hastings. It was a date and a battle. What does it mean? It might have changed the

52 course of history, which it did. It’s probably one of the most important dates in the history of the world. All we know is dates and places. They have no meaning to us, no feeling. We couldn’t identify with it. But this is something that we lived through and we can identify with it, and we can admire these guys that are going off and doing it today knowing what can possibly be waiting for them on the other end.

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Historical History

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