Joe Foss, Flying Marine

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What makes humans grow up to be the people they become? It's one of the questions we ask when we open a biography or autobiography. Here's a story that tells about the making of a fighter pilot in World War II.

Joe Foss, Flying Marine

Joe Foss in the air in World War II.

I fought Japs1 for sixty-three days in the skies over the Southwest Pacific. In that time they say I shot down twenty-six planes, the same as Eddie Rickenbacker2 got in 1918. The incredible luck that brought me through those battles and home again, when plenty of better men died, is something that still keeps me awake at night, wondering. My number seemed to be up time and again. But always I managed to squeak through. Not a Jap bullet touched me. Malaria was the thing that finally brought me down.

For a farm kid who always liked to shoot and who ached at the very sight of an airplane, a fighter pilot's life is the most fun there is. I wouldn't trade the memory of those sixty-three days for anything. Before the war is over, I hope and expect to get some more cracks at the fellows who started this mess.

A newspaperman once summed up my story like a golf score card by stringing a few figures together. The result looked like this3:

Date Planes
Oct. 13 1 Zero
Oct. 14 1 Zero
Oct. 18 3 (2 Zeros, 1 bomber)
Oct. 20 2 Zeros
Oct. 23 4 Zeros
Oct. 25 5 Zeros
Nov. 7 3 (1 Zero, 2 reconnaissance biplanes)
Nov. 12 3 (2 torpedo bombers, 1 Zero)
Nov. 15 1 reconnaissance biplane
Jan. 15 3 Zeros
Total 26
Feeding farm animals before the war.

I guess the story properly begins with events in the north bedroom of a little white farmhouse four miles east of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The date was April 17, 1915, and I was
born that day. That made me twenty-seven years old in 1942 – almost too old to be a fighter pilot. In fact I had to do a lot of talking to get behind a gun at all. They wanted me to use a camera in a reconnaissance plane.

As a boy I roved the countryside, hiking, snaring gophers, climbing trees, and checking birds' nests. Mother says I gave her a bad moment when I was four years old by climbing
to the top of the windmill and refusing to come down. She is doubtless correct. Every farm youngster does that.

I first took to the air at about seven. It was my first year at country school, and we were playing follow the leader. When my turn came to lead, I walked up the superstructure
of a little bridge that crosses a creek. Below, in the middle of the water, was a little island. I jumped. The trip time exceeded expectations, and when I finally struck, one knee hit the side of my face and drove a tooth through my puss4. Everybody else had sense enough not to follow.

Editor's Note: Whether this book should be used to encourage adventurousness in kids, or as a cautionary tale to farm parents, is left to the reader's discretion.

The Literary Corner Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

29.08.16 Front Page

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1This excerpt has not been redacted for sensitivity issues, and the Editor will not comment on the ironies and philosophical issues involved in this account. It was published in 1943, 'produced in conformity with war-time economy standards.' You can read the whole thing at Joe Foss, Flying Marine on archive.org.2Eddie Rickenbacker (1890-1973) was a leading fighter ace in World War I. He was also an early race car driver and pioneer in commercial aviation. He was most famous during World War II for spending 24 days adrift in the Pacific with other crewmen after the B-17 he was flying in was forced to ditch in the ocean.3Bluebottle take note.4'Puss' is antiquated US slang for 'face'.

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