THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Command performance dawn religious service and staged publicity photograph, Easter 1944, at Hendricks Field, Sebring, Florida, where my father was then a student pilot in the B-17 bomber. A few months later, he moved on to Kansas for pilot training in the B-29. I, who was but two months old at Easter, 1944, went back [...]

Sunk on purpose by Navy Skyhawks in 1968, she lies somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific off Baja, CA. But while she lived, as related in Little Ship Big War, The Saga of DE343, she was a microcosm of World War II and its civilian and professional sailors. Even down to her irascible captain [...]

Deck view of an LSMR, from this hobbyist’s page. New stuff to me, these special ships carrying rockets to support troop landings, encountered in Little Ship Big War, The Saga of DE343, by Edward Peary Stafford. Good book it is, with much day-to-day detail of life aboard a destroyer escort in the last months of [...]

Private version of the Texan (distinguishable from the Harvards sold to UK, NZ and Canada by its lack of an exhaust pipe extension from the cowling) the ubiquitous pilot trainer of World War 2.

It never gets this cold in Cuero, southeast of Austin, but these boys are headed to altitude in open cockpits. Taken at the former Cuero Army Air Field in 1942 when this was basic pilot training. I do not subscribe to the "greatest generation" baloney, which I think mainly scorns Korea and Vietnam veterans, but [...]

I’d heard of this classic essay by Vannevar Bush (who was apparently unrelated to the later presidents) a few times but never read it until recently. Written in 1945, it summarizes some of the ways in which science helped win World War II (without getting specific about radar or much else, however) and what it [...]

We had a power surge at the rancho the other day, from an electrical transformer on a nearby power pole that inexplicably burst into flames. The upshot was no harm to our computers, but our microwave started arcing when we used it. The GE tech who came to fix it said it would be cheaper [...]

We had a power surge at the rancho the other day, from an electrical transformer on a nearby power pole that inexplicably burst into flames. The upshot was no harm to our computers, but our microwave started arcing when we used it. The GE tech who came to fix it said it would be cheaper [...]

We had a power surge at the rancho the other day, from an electrical transformer on a nearby power pole that inexplicably burst into flames. The upshot was no harm to our computers, but our microwave started arcing when we used it. The GE tech who came to fix it said it would be cheaper [...]

Continuing my informal look at Texas fighter aces that began with Mustang pilot Richard Candelaria. Wing Commander Wade is the leading American ace in any foreign air force, in his case, the Royal Air Force of World War II. He was born in 1915 in the East Texas hills around Broadus, on the Texas-Lousiana state [...]