Another Temple Bowling War Story
Not all of my favorite uncle’s adventures flying his Lockheed P38 Lightning were as amusing as his State-side stories.
One mission in Germany that Temple didn’t tell us about with the usual pride and twinkle in his voice could easily have been his last. A Nazi Luftwaffe fighter jumped him from above. At the time, he was punishing the steam locomotive of a speeding freight train, and all his attention was on the bright, flaming tracer bullets from his 50 caliber machine guns searching out his target.
He told us he had violated a key rule for survival in aerial combat, “Keep your head on a swivel.” Meaning, to constantly look around you for enemy aircraft. “I don’t even know what type of plane shot at me,” he confessed with great embarrassment.
Bullets punched through his cockpit in the central fuselage and hit the starboard engine nacelle, starting a fire there. With the flames becoming more dramatic, he prepared to bail out and jettisoned his cockpit’s canopy. As things happen, the fire suddenly flamed out and he found his ship flyable.The bullets had not touched him. Both engines roared on. He set a course for his base airfield which was, unfortunately, beyond some low mountains.
That long flight without a canopy, but especially flying in the cold, high-altitude air as he crossed the range, nearly did him in. When he arrived at his airfield beyond the mountains, he found he was so cold and stiff he could hardly move the control stick. His first attempt at a landing went so poorly he had to pull up. The best he could manage to line up for his second approach, pushing his body as far as he possibly could, was a mile-wide circle. However, that was good enough, and he got his ship on the ground safely.
The next day, his wingman and his flight mechanic asked him to climb back into his aircraft. Then they slipped broom handles through each bullet hole from the left top edge of the cockpit through a matching hole in the bottom right side. Astonishingly, there sat Temple with wooden poles pinning him in place, but never touching him. “They didn’t even rip my flight suit,” he told us after the war, safely back in Connecticut.
