1St LT JAMES LUMA

1st LT JAMES LUMA Special Thanks to Wings of Valor author Peter Collier and photographer Nick Del Calzo. Be the first to get your copy of world-premier book Wings of Valor beautifully immortalizing the stories from these brave Americans. JAMES LUMA WAS AN AMERICAN PILOT who flew for a introduction of the P-51 Mustang with the Rolls-Royce Merlin Three weeks later on February 13, Luma caught up with Canadian squadron in World War II in a plane built of wood. engine. It was also one of the deadliest, with four .30-caliber a lone He 177 bomber “down moon” in a bright night sky. (“We Growing up in Helena, Montana, Luma was fascinated machine guns in the nose and four 20-mm cannon in the lower didn’t like a full moon,” he later remarked, “and always tried by airplanes—building models, reading about flying, and fuselage. It was the premier Allied Night Intruder, stalking the to apply for leave when it appeared.”) For some reason the nurturing a dream of becoming a pilot himself. It wasn’t until bombers the Luftwaffe sent on night raids and the German bomber’s tail gunner didn’t see them and Luma shot the 177 the end of his freshman year at Carroll College that he decided night fighters that pro-tected them. Photographs taken at the down after following it for several miles. not to wait any longer to make this dream come true. He time show the youthful Luma in his fleece flight jacket, pen- On March 6, on a mission near Spain’s border with thought first of joining the U.S. military, but with war still safely sively smoking a pipe beside his plane “Moonbeam McSwine,” France, he got his third kill—an unsuspecting Fw 190 fighter. isolated in Europe, the Army Air Corps was highly selective named eccentrically by the Canadians after a character from During this engagement, the Mos-quito’s starboard engine about recruits. One of the criteria that the nineteen-year-old the “Li’l Abner” comic strip. went out and Luma had to fly six hundred miles back to his Luma could not meet was the requirement that a cadet be at The Germans feared the Mosquito and exper-imented base in England on one engine. As he skimmed the choppy least twenty years old. with a variety of countermeasures to stop it—sending up waters of the Channel at five hundred feet, he was tracked by He had a stroke of good fortune when he was hitchhiking decoy planes bristling with gunners and armament to lure British radar and an air-sea rescue plane waited with its engine back to Mon-tana after visiting his parents, who then lived in it into a confrontation; set-ting up counterfeit airfields with idling in case he had to ditch. Seattle, to be given a ride by an American who worked as a replica aircraft lit by phony landing lights to lure the Night On March 21, Luma led a rare daytime mission— flight instructor in Canada. This man told Luma that the Royal Intruders into a trap of antiaircraft batteries. But the Mosqui-to called a “daylight ranger” by the Night Intruder pilots—along Canadian Air Force accepted U.S. citizens older than eighteen continued to take a toll on German aircraft. with another plane to strafe an enemy airfield on the French- with their parents’ approval. Luma recalls practically yelling, Targets were selected by British intelligence, often using German border. Relying on the Mosquito’s speed to get in and “Stop the car!” He hitchhiked back to Seattle, got his parents’ information relayed by French Resis-tance agents. Missions out, they made two swift passes, destroying several German permission, and pawned his watch for ten dollars to pay for the were confirmed at the last minute. Luma spent twenty- planes on the ground, and then pulled up and headed for bus ride to British Columbia. seven fruitless nights in the ready room before he was finally home. While still over French territory, he saw a Ju 34 single- Luma joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in scrambled. He went on seventeen Night Intruder missions engine transport and shot it down. Then, twelve minutes later, Vancouver in July 1941 and received his wings the following before making contact with the enemy. The first German plane he opened fire on a Ju 52 tri-motor transport, destroying both May. He was sent to England in May 1943 and began he saw was his first kill. its engines and sending it down. training in Night Intruders. He transferred to the U.S. Army It came on January 21, 1944 when Luma and his After these last kills, which made him an Ace, Luma was Air Corps in June because he wanted to qualify for the ten- navigator were flying over the German base at Wunstorf transferred to photo reconnaissance, flying weather missions thousand- dollar life insurance policy offered by the U.S. War looking for targets of opportunity. Nor-mally Luftwaffe pilots, over Berlin with the U.S. 802nd Reconnaissance Group, where Department, and was then re-posted to the RCAF’s 418, the knowing that Mosquitos might be lurking in the darkness, were he served until the end of the war in Europe. Night Intruders—wearing an American uni-form but serving careful about any light that might give them away. But Luma After the war James Luma followed his nose in a Canadian squadron. and his navigator spotted the faint glimmers of light on the for adventure in his work as a commercial pilot. He flew The 418th flew the de Havilland Mark VI Mosquito, a nose and tail of a plane just taking off. (The pilot was careless, transports for Korean National Airways during the war in twin-engine fighter- bomber that British flight engineers had Luma would later theorize, because he was an Ace who had Korea; for Air Ventures in Katanga during the civil war in designed in the mid-1930s to be made of wood—a core of balsa taken down seven British bombers that night and was anxious Congo; for Vietnamese Air Trans-port during the war in with thin laminations of hardwood—because of anticipated to get back into the air after refueling to shoot down more.) Vietnam; and for Trans Med-iterranean Airways in Lebanon. wartime shortages of aluminum and other metals. It made a Luma let the twin-engine Messerschmitt 410 heavy fighter He was flying 707s for Air Berlin when he hit the mandatory dramatic mark on the air war in Europe, but failed when the pass below him and gain altitude. As he approached it, he had retirement age of sixty in 1982. British sent it to Burma, because of the tropical insects that a moment of “buck fever” because it was his first combat, and feasted on the glue holding its wood laminates together. overshot it. Low- ering his landing gear to cut his air speed, he Built for a two-man crew—a pilot and a nav-igator—the circled around, lined up behind the 410, fired a short burst, and Mosquito was the fastest plane in the European theatre until the pushed his stick forward to escape the debris from the fireball..

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