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My Father took these shots while this aircraft was visiting his base, (I think he was at Langley) for some reason:

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He overstepped his authority when he climbed on the wing and took the cockpit shot..  He got busted by the M.P.s and had to explain to his commander why he did it.  

 

 

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I am fairly certain it is the YP-37, not the XP-37. It has the elongated fuselage with the cockpit moved forward in an attempt to correct the dismal forward visibility of the XP-37, and I am also fairly certain it has the improved supercharger. The original one was notoriously unreliable. This is the beast that gave rise to the P-40! 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 5/28/2020 at 8:06 PM, ikar said:

My Father took these shots while this aircraft was visiting his base, (I think he was at Langley) for some reason:

He overstepped his authority when he climbed on the wing and took the cockpit shot..  He got busted by the M.P.s and had to explain to his commander why he did it.  

 

Very cool photos. Thanks for sharing them.

 

 So I'm curious, what was his explanation to his commander? Obviously they let him keep the photos.  That would have been like taking unauthorized photos of a visiting F-35 today.

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Well, he never really explained the exact reasons, but I have all his ribbons and things.  He had the usual stripes, his cross with the weapons he was awarded, plus one strange looking device that was serving the same basic purpose but was more technical looking and had a metal bar underneath it saying photography.  I know he had gotten in trouble concerning his photographic work when he took his commander's official photo and superimposed a dog's head on it.  Maybe they had built a relationship over time.  I know he had a penchant of taking shots where he shouldn't be with the pictures of the experiments in developing tricycle landing gear.  He had some where they would grab a bi-plane and run some poles trough the fuselage and attach a wheel on the end that would make the tail wheel stand way off the ground.  He took shots like these usually while everybody was looking at the aircraft and he was behind them shooting over the staff car.  Sometimes you could see the chrome strip going down the hood in the picture.  However he did it he managed to keep out of trouble.  This may be part of the reason he ended up in the O.S.S. later.  He didn't even tell me that he was with them until about a year before he died.  So how he managed it will have to remain a mystery.But he went from photography, to C-47 pilot as a N.C.O., to other things  until the end of the war.

 

 

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It's interesting that so many of these guys never talked about what they did during the war. I mean I know there were some terrible things that they would rather forget, but there must have been some exciting stuff and even occasional fun times too. Maybe the secrecy was just drilled into them so much that they never even considered about talking about it even decades later. Maybe they just wanted to try to forget about war altogether. 

 

 I knew a girl who's dad was in the Merrill's Marauders. She never knew until right before he died. 

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