Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
2:42 | He had just arrived in India. Aircraft mechanic Ralph Way got the unenviable task of guarding a crashed plane that was burning with a dead pilot visible in the cockpit. What he witnessed really got to him.
Keywords : Ralph Way aircraft mechanic India crash pilot
He was trained in the Army Air Corps as an aircraft mechanic, specializing in hydraulics. Ralph Way would put his training to work in Karachi, which was in India at the time. He serviced cargo planes flying over the Himalayas to supply the war effort against the Japanese in China.
India was the strangest country Ralph Way had ever seen. The beggars and the street vendors were very odd to him. Most of the town of Karachi was off limits to the men, who had only a USO club to fight the boredom.
Flying over the Hump, the Himalayas, tested the abilities of both pilots and planes. The maneuvers required made small loads a necessity. Ralph Way was part of the ground crew, but he needed flight time to get the flight pay, so he would hitch rides to get in his hours.
The men at the air base in India were due for some badly needed R&R, so they were shipped off to a rest camp. Ralph Way remembers watching the monkeys in the trees and thinking how nice it would be to have one of those monkeys. How, exactly, could you make that happen?
Ralph Way was an aircraft mechanic in India, maintaining cargo planes. He recalls one incident in which a pilot couldn't tell if the landing gear was up or down. That was resolved successfully, but there was another incident regarding propellers which did not end so well.
Ralph Way recalls two things from his service in India which made him laugh. One of them left an aircraft dangling from utility pole wires, another left him in water up to his knees.
Aircraft mechanic Ralph Way would hitch rides to keep enough time in the air to get his flight pay. On one of these flights, he noticed that there were two more planes taking off at the same time and he began to get a little worried, but it was too late to back out.
When he was issued his first winter dress uniform, Ralph Way was very dissatisfied with the slacks. He improved the situation, but it left him nearly broke.
It took four days to send him to war by plane, but when the time came to return from India, Ralph Way spent a month on a ship. At home, he got married and went to college, thanks to the educational benefits from Uncle Sam.
