During WWII, I spied a short note in a magazine saying that the major was ferrying cargo/transport planes across the Atlantic to England. Then, seemingly, he dropped from sight. I’m surprised so little has been written about such a colorful character. Do you happen to know how the good major ended his days?

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James Bassett
Toledo, Wash.

Editor’s note: Born in Wisconsin on April 18, 1900, Fred Lord served in the 3rd Texas Infantry until he was found to be underage. He then went to Canada and, using a doctored birth certificate, got himself into No. 79 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, in March 1918–a month before his 18th birthday. He scored 12 victories and rose to flight commander before he was wounded on October 17, 1918. He flew RE-8s with the Royal Air Force in Russia in 1919, barnstormed in the United States throughout the 1920s and flew Breguet 19s as a volunteer in the Spanish Republican air force in 1936. Barred from U.S. service because of his time in Spain, he rejoined the RAF and was posted to his old unit, No. 79 Squadron, before the authorities discovered he had used another forged birth certificate–this time to downgrade his age! He then spent the rest of WWII doing transatlantic ferry work. After all those adventures, Fred Lord met a tragic end; he was murdered by a vagrant in California in 1967.

B-24s vs. Zeroes

With great interest I read about the Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero’s maneuverability problem in Jim Rearden’s “Enduring Heritage” article in the November Aviation History. The fact, as noted in his article, that the ailerons froze above 200 knots and high-speed rolls to the right were much more difficult than to the left probably saved my Consolidated B-24 crew one night in 1943 over Bougainville’s Kahili Airfield and the huge, strategically important adjoining harbor in the northern part of the Solomon Island chain.

Navy planes were planting mines in the harbor that night. Our 370th Bomb Squadron B-24s were tasked with drawing the Japanese defenders’ attention away from the harbor by harassing the enemy from above. We didn’t have many planes, so each crew was assigned a target period of about 20 or 30 minutes.

My crew had a 30-minute time span sometime after midnight. We knew the area by heart, having bombed it several times before. The preferred altitude was 10-11,000 feet, which supposedly was a bit too high for their light guns and too low for good accuracy with their heavy stuff. Although their searchlights were strong, they usually seemed to have trouble finding us. But that night they nailed us. We had made four or five passes over the airfield at about five-minute intervals, dropping one or more 500-pounders each time on revetments, gun emplacements, searchlights and any other lucrative target that was visible. We timed our runs so we could draw the lights up to us when they dropped down to the harbor surface, obviously hunting for an intruding Navy minelayer.

We had been briefed about their night fighters. If the anti-aircraft guns suddenly went quiet, it meant only one thing–their night fighters were up and had us spotted in the lights. (They obviously didn’t want to hit their own planes closing in.) On several occasions we had seen the terrible effects of this tactic, played in reverse, on Guadalcanal, when friendly fighters had shot Japanese bombers right out of the apex of our lights.

When one of my gunners in the back yelled on the intercom, “Skipper, the guns went quiet,” we reacted immediately. My bombardier, Jeff Newman, salvoed the remaining two bombs. I didn’t have to ask the co-pilot, “Harpo” Marx, for full power. He had those Pratt & Whitneys at 2,700 and 50 inches in about 10 nanoseconds. We were headed east at the time, so I peeled off to the right toward home. Jeff estimated later that we had about 20 lights on us. All I know is that we were blinded in the cockpit as our B-24 rolled over to the right. When I ducked down and tried to shade my eyes, I noted with some trepidation that the airspeed indicator was in the red and the altimeter and rate of descent were winding off the dials. I saw we were headed south, so I pulled off a lot of power and gradually leveled off as we escaped the lights. As the airspeed dropped back below 300 and the lights lost us, we began to feel we were pretty well out of danger.

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