Tell a little about yourself and interest in WWII Pacific history
I was born in China, the son of a American Diplomat. We lived in Mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, Philippines and Thailand so I got a very early age view of the fall out of the Pacific War. For example I met my father's Chinese History Professor from Harvard when I was ten and he showed me the scars on his hands from when he was crucified to the door of a barn, bayoneted and left to die in China when he was a young man by the Japanese in the 1930s. My Uncle was in the 1st Marine Division on Peleieu and Okinawa and we had the Japanese rifles and war relics in the house my whole childhood and I have studied it since then and amassed a stupid amount of knowledge about the Pacific War.
Tell about History Flight and how it came about and what is its mission
We started the non profit, History Flight, to preserve a iconic era of American Aviation History and to use the selling of rides in our restored WWII airplanes to fund the search for America's 78,000 MIAs from WWII. Other than being a good family man and a good citizen of this fine country, this project is one of the best things I have ever done in my life.
We take our B-25, our T-6s and our Stearman biplane barnstorming across America (like my grandfather did in the 1930s) selling rides to support the organization and we use the operating profit to fund the search for America's MIAs from WWII. It is a very time consuming and difficult endeavor but worth the while. We have flown all over America and met thousands of neat people and we have funded over ten thousand hours of research in the US National Archives and National Personnel Records Center and US Marine Corps Archives and we have funded active search programs in the Pacific at Truk, Yap, Tarawa, Marshalls and Palau.
History Flight operates a B-25H "Birdee III" 43-4106, a T6 a SNJ and a Stearman, all of which have interesting histories. The B-25H was in the states in the war at McDill AFB and was sold surplus to the Bendix corporation after the war with 568 hours of flight time on it. Bendix used our B-25 as a airborne test bed for developing wheels and brakes for the century series fighters of the cold war and to develop the landing gear for the B-52. All of these new gears were strapped onto our aircraft and tested for their design quality. Then the B-25 was sold to a farmer who parked it in his field for 20 year until some folks in Chicago decided to restore this very unique airplane. The only flying B-25H in the world.
Speak about your work with MIAs researching and finding them?
I have always been deeply interested in the pacific war history my entire life and I was invited to join the MIA recovery group The Bent Prop Project in 2004 and it was a watershed moment for me. We decided to shift the focus of our organization from just preserving this iconic era of American aviation history to using the ride sales to fund the search for the missing. We have raised and spent a significant amount of money to these purposes and achieved some serious results.
It is important for me to be personally involved because I have a ridiculous amount of knowledge and sensitivity for the subject. People like my self and History flight are important to this process because the Department of Defense decided in the 1950s to write off the WWII missing and extremely little was done to try to actively research or search for them until recently. I have a Pentagon strategy paper in my office from 2006 that lists the priorities for the recovery of America's MIAs and WWII MIAs are at the bottom the their priority list even though it is their biggest problem. It wasn't until the Vietnam era veterans began advocating for the return of their comrades that the MIA issue even had the slightest importance to the powers that be in the pentagon. That is why we are important because we advocate for 78,000 missing Americans that the US Government and Military seem to care little about. It never ceases to amaze me how there are 1000 MIAs from Vietnam and that puts a MIA flag over every post office and State house yet no one seems to know or care about the 78,000 MIAs from WWII. We care and we put up the money and the expertise to make some serious inroads into this double tragedy.
