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They made their first combat mission on Sept. After weeks of waiting for airplanes, they moved to France and joined the fight in the fall of 1944. They took the Queen Elizabeth across the Atlantic to England and were assigned to the same squadron and the same tent. “Probably a dumb thing for me to do,” he says.
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He told his superiors that he wanted to remain with his buddies and enter combat instead. That would have kept him out of combat, but Sharp wasn’t having it. Sharp earned a reputation as an aerial sharpshooter, and when training camp concluded, he was assigned to remain in the U.S. They were inseparable and quickly earned their nickname: The Three Musketeers. They were all from Utah and all Mormons whose idea of a good time was a root beer float. “We think the same about everything and like the same things.” They met Don Evans, who grew up in Lehi, at Harding Field. “Sharp and I are practically a carbon copy of each other,” Kelly wrote home to his mother. Their friendship was cemented when they shared a seat on a long train ride to their next training assignment at Harding Field in Louisiana. Sharp and Jerry Kelly, another Salt Lake native, met for the first time while they were training at Luke Field in Arizona. “Flying a fighter plane seemed like the ultimate in speed and more fun than marching, camping out and getting shot at on the front lines.” “I always liked to drive fast and enjoyed pushing my 1935 Ford Coupe to its limits,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d make it through the war, but every time I got in the cockpit, I’d think, 'This is not the day I’m going to die.'” They made strafing runs at 400 mph and less than 200 feet off the ground, which left no option for bailing out, and little margin for error, which is why some planes simply plowed into the ground. Fighter pilots faced numerous deadly hazards - fire in the cockpit, enemy fire from the ground and air, crash landings, trees and telegraph poles. One researcher counted 31 pilots from the 397th who were killed from 1943 to 1945. The (U.S.) Army put flaming orange panels on their vehicles so we’d be able to identify them.”Īt one time he kept a list of all the pilots who passed through his squadron, and one by one many of them disappeared in battle.
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Sometimes it was difficult to determine who was who. “The Army would call in a target and we would strafe the woods or shoot up a tank or cars on the road or whatever was moving, people included,” he says. The P-47s carried 1,000- and 500-pound bombs, as well as. “You do dumb things in combat, because what does it matter? You figure you’re going to die every day.”Īs part of the 368th Fighter Group and the 397th Fighter Squadron, he provided aerial support for ground forces. “I pulled back on the stick as hard as I could,” he says. On one bombing run, he dived so low to the ground that as he pulled up he scraped the tops of the trees. Sharp survived 78 combat missions in Europe and emerged unscathed, although there were close calls. The rest of them, I guess they’re all dead. “The only one I flew with who’s still alive that I am aware of is Bill Wright,” he says. Some 372 WWII vets die each day.įor years Sharp stayed in touch with many of his fellow pilots from the war, but not anymore. At the outset of the year it was estimated there were about 558,000 American WWII veterans who remain alive out of the original 16 million Americans who served. When Veterans Day rolls around each year, the news stories appear like clockwork about a dwindling natural resource. “That’s the way it goes when you get to be 94.”
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Otherwise, his name describes his mind, still sharp and agile. The knees are going, too, which is why he had to give up his daily 5-mile walks. His eyes - which made him so skilled at aerial gunnery that the military tried to keep him from the war to train pilots at home - are fading, hampered by the triple crown of vision troubles: glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration. The man who once executed tree-top dives and rolled his plane through the sky with precision can no longer even drive a car to the store. He was still driving a car until he just recently handed in his driver’s license.