News

Eighth Air Force veterans remember Pearl Harbor

Billy Welch, a P-51 pilot, and Dudley “Duke” Brown, a B-17 top turret gunner, display the French Legion of Honor medals they received in Charlotte on Nov. 11.

By Bill Moss, Published: December 6, 2015

The Eighth Air Force Historical Society met a week after Veterans Day, the national observation inspired by the surrender on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 to end “the war to end all wars.”

The Eighth Air Force veterans focused instead on another important day in U.S. history, the one they all remembered.
“Where were you,” local society president Lawrence Goldstein asked the gathering at the Bay Breeze restaurant, “on Dec. 7, 1941?”
The World War II veterans may have forgotten a birthday or a friend’s name but they remembered where they were when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
“I was in a little place (in rural Florida) washing my ’32 Chevy and my dad came out and sat down and watched me,” said Billy Welch, a P-51 pilot. “He said, ‘We’re in the war.” I said, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘I just heard it on the radio that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.’ I said, ‘Where’s Pearl Harbor?’ He knew. ‘It’s a territory of ours.’
“I went from high school straight to the war,” he added. “Next thing I know I’m flying combat missions out of Europe getting shot at.”
Teenage boys did what teenage boys did a lot more often back then.
“I was doing the same thing,” Dudley “Duke” Brown said when Welch finished. “I was washing my car outside and I had the car radio on. I heard it outside so I ran inside to tell my folks.”
Goldstein, who flew fighter jets escorting bombers, was lying on his bed at home in Brooklyn listening to a New York Giants baseball game when the play by play announcer was interrupted. “All military personnel report to their units immediately,” the announcer said. “Then they broke in with the news broadcast about the attack,” said Goldstein, who was discharged as a tech sergeant.
Welch served in the 361st Fighter Group under Thomas Jonathan Jackson “Jack” Christian Jr., the great-grandson of Stonewall Jackson and a 26-year-old West Point graduate. “He was the youngest group commander at that time.”
Welch cracked up a P-51 on a training takeoff.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry I tore up your beautiful new plane,’” Welch recalled. “He said, ‘I can get a new airplane tomorrow but I can’t get another you.’”
Months later, “we were bombing a place in northern France,” he said. “He was dive-bombing and he got hit on the way down. That was the guy whose airplane I tore up that day.”
Christian died on Aug. 12, 1944, while the 361st was bombing the station of Boisleux-au-Mont near Arras, France.
Billy Welch remembered.
Pearl Harbor is sealed in the memory bank of members of the Eighth Air Force Historical Society. The WWII remembered that day and many days that came after.