In Their Own Words

Russ Thomas 

U.S. Navy

WWII

Alaska, Phillipines, Guam, Tinian

 Of Runways and Babies

The runway was finished, but the lights still needed to be hooked up. In the dark Alaskan months, that was a critical factor. 

The engineers were enjoying a break from work, warm in the barracks when the sound of a plane circling the area sent them outside to check it out. Friend or enemy was impossible to determine, but Russ ordered the men to line the runway with jeeps, armed and ready, lighting the newly made runway, just in case it was one of ours in trouble.

Landing without incident, the pilot and his passenger, a doctor, expressed their heartfelt thanks to the corpsmen, explaining the airstrip was marked on his new map, but they couldn’t see the landing strip until they saw the lights. Almost out of fuel, they would have crashed had the engineers not showed them the way.

The next morning the pilot stepped outside of the barracks to check his plane and promptly fainted when he saw how close they had come to crashing into the steep mountain ranges circling the runway.

Years later and back in the US, Russ’ pregnant wife was having a checkup with a new doctor who had a beautiful picture of a snowy mountain range hanging on the wall in his office. Commenting about the picture, he told her his story about landing on an airstrip in the dead of night. . .

Their Own Words briefly describes a specific historical story told during an APHA interview that is used as short stories for the media.