By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Jim Fitzpatrick, Mack Morris and Newell Woodworth are old men now, far removed from the dangerous work they did more than 70 years ago as pilots in World War II.
Yet those moments, and their memory of them, remain as vivid as they were at the time they happened — stories they shared at the Nassau Club on Tuesday with family and friends listening.
“I was one of 10,000 Americans who couldn’t wait to get over there and go at that guy in Berlin,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, who flew a B-17 bomber in the European theater. “I was one of them. And we all knew it was one-way ticket. The chances of coming home, unless you had been seriously injured, were one in 25.”
In their reminiscences, they wove in humor in telling of places and people from those days.
Mr. Woodworth recalled how his flying career got started by going to the Navy enlistment office at a post office in Syracuse, New York, and telling the Naval officer at the front desk that he wanted to be in the Naval Air Corps. It was an inauspicious start.
“He said, ‘Smile, mister.’ So I smiled. He said, ‘There’s no oxygen mask that’ll fit that face.’ ” Mr. Woodworth said.
He ultimately joined the Army Air Corps, also sent to serve in the European theater, in a P-47 plane. One mission, he recalled, was to go find Gen. George S. Patton, “because he wouldn’t call back.”
“The only thing that could stop that guy was running out of gas,” said Mr. Woodworth, a decorated pilot who flew 44 missions in all.
Pilots had to deal with all sorts of hazards, dangerous work that carried risks. “You never knew what the weather was going to be, except you knew it was going to be bad when I was flying,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.
He eventually would be shot down and made a prisoner of war. Once a POW, he remembered one day feeling glad that he had been shot down, “glad that I’m not part of this.”
“It was wanton destruction beyond anything imaginable by anyone in this room, including me and all of you,” he said.
Earlier in his remarks, Mr. Fitzpatrick said he felt the allies won a war of attrition against the Germans. “We didn’t beat the Germans by being better,” he said. “We beat them by having more, a whole lot more.”
Yet in recalling those days, the memories could still produce raw emotions.
“The most important people in America for the war were the production companies mass producing the planes, the tanks and so forth and the mothers and fathers who pitched in 100 percent … ,” Mr. Morris said. “They were the heroes as well,” he said, as his voice broke up.
