copilot now. I had to learn to handle the C-47 in ways I had never done before. We practiced landings on a 2,000 ft. strip at Sienna. This strip looked like a dumbbell. There was a concrete circle at each end of the strip. We flew a really tight pattern on those landings at about 200 feet above ground and we would shoot twenty to twenty-five landings per hour.

Every day there was a courier flight from the Group. This flight went up to Pisa and Florence, then down to Rome and Naples and returned. Its prime purpose was carrying mail and personnel. Then, there was the evacuation of wounded missions. These were usually from Pisa or Florence down to Naples. Here we would turn the unlucky soldiers over to the Air Transport Command who flew them back to the States. The Air Transport Command, which later became MATS, for Military Air Transport Service, had excellent public relations. Sometimes we would get newspapers from the states, where there would be pictures of wounded being evacuated by the ATC in Italy. We would recognize the airplanes as ours. The ATC crews never got any closer to the front than Naples, but their PR people had them doing the whole show.

The Italian Front during most of the winter of 1945 was static in the Po Valley just North of Florence and Pisa. For the ground troops this kind of holding action is most difficult. There is no major push to capture anything from either side, yet patrols were constantly being fired upon causing casualties nearly every day. We were flying combat missions nearly every day. Any mission across the bomb line qualified as a combat mission. Most of these missions were resupplying the Italian partisan troops up in the Italian Alps. I was along on five of those missions as a copilot.

The British were better at intelligence than were our people. There was a British officer who we would drop by parachute along with the freight and a few weeks later he would show up in our officer's club. I didn't envy him one bit.

Some of those missions were really hairy. We usually didn't have enemy action to contend with but those mountain valleys were narrow. We would skid the airplane up close to one side of the valley to achieve a steep bank, then pour on the power while pulling into the tightest turns we had ever flown while watching the mountain on the other side of the valley coming at us. We had to get down low enough in the valleys for the drop to be accurate.