66 FlightJournal.com
TAILVIEW
A Personal
History of
Warbirds
BY BUDD DAVISSONM
y own interest in warbirds goes back to the
BT-13 my father bought and parked in front of
his store to draw in customers; that was when I
was six years old. Other kids had jungle gyms to climb
on—I had a BT-13, and surplus airplanes were everywhere.
On our semimonthly trip to visit my mother’s relatives in
southeast Nebraska, we always passed by a crop-dusting
operation that had its ramp enclosed by a fence made out
of Stearman wings standing on end—at least 50 of them!
Going to college in Oklahoma in the ’60s, I found that
many country airports had AT-6s sinking into the weeds.
Those that didn’t have a Texan seemed to have rotting
B-25s. One airport had been an Air Materiel Command
depot and was a wonderful kind of junkyard. There were
four lines of wooden crates, 75 to 100 yards long. They
measured two crates wide and two high, and each held
a Merlin or Allison engine. The weeds surrounding them
held probably a dozen derelict BT-13s, a P-47, and a
stripped P-38. Bucket seats out of one of the BT-13s now
reside in the Model A Ford hot-rod roadster that sits in
my garage.
When cleaning out my parents’ home, I found that my
mother had kept almost everything from my youth. This
included the Trade-a-Plane ad I had placed as a graduating
college student and the response letters to it. The year was
- The ad read, “Before I get married and have kids, I
want my fi ghter. Looking for P-51s and P-40s. What do you
have?” I got two dozen letters, and the Mustangs started at
$1,000 and went up to $3,000 for one with a zero-time
-9 Merlin. P-40s started at $400 and topped out at $1,000!
And then there were the eight or so Corsairs and four
P-38s I ran across in Blythe, California, on the way to Los
Angeles to play a gig.
Out of grad school in ’68 and just married, I stumbled
onto a complete Mustang in Ohio ANG markings, sitting
on special shipping skids hidden among hundreds of
crates full of surplus WW II parts. It was totally military,
including the fuselage tank, armor plate, zero-length
rails, etc. I asked the salvor what he wanted for it, and
he said, “I paid $350 for it and had to have it shipped in,
so I absolutely have to get $700.” I couldn’t scrounge up
the money fast enough and found myself the owner of
a pristine Mustang that was missing only the engine. A
month later, I bought a preserved, military-overhauled
-7 Merlin for another $1,000.
Then a friend sold his Mustang for $100K and sent a
photocopy of the check around to all his friends to prove
that he had actually gotten that much.
And so it was back in the day! “And the times, they are
a-changin’!”
Th e fi rebombing company of Hawkins & Powers in Greybull, Wyoming, operated
a large number of WW II bombers for decades. Th is is why a number of them,
including this PB4Y-2 Privateer, now under GossHawk’s care and owned by SAC
Holding Corporation, an affi liate of U-Haul International, have survived to thrill
airshow audiences. (Photo courtesy GossHawk Unlimited)A number of the bigger WW II aircraft were put to
work. Spray booms on the wings indicate that this
PB4Y-2 Privateer killed its share of mosquitoes
before it was deemed useless and was abandoned.
(Photo by Fred Johnsen)