Capt. Jack 'Johnny' Walker - Pilot / Ace

97th Fighter Squadron, 82nd Fighter Group

A Distinguished Veteran

Jack Walker was born on July 7, 1920, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and grew up in West Hollywood, California. While attending Pasadena Junior College, he learned how to fly through a program initiated by President Roosevelt called the “Civilian Pilot Training Program”. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, and received his training in the Cessna AT-17 Bobcat, also known as the “Bamboo Bomber”, at Stockton Training Field, California. On May 21, 1942, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, and was transferred to McCord Air Base in Seattle, Washington and the 55th Pursuit Group. “Sitting on the flight line were 12 new P-38 Lightnings (specifications), and at first I didn’t want to fly those things. I lived in Pasadena, and the Lockheed test pilots were crashing in the P-38 right and left! After 10 hours of classroom training, the instructor took each of us out to a P-38, sat us in the cockpit, blindfolded us, and had us do a complete cockpit check. Most of us failed, so it was back to the classroom for more instruction.” He was assigned to the 82nd Fighter Group, and flew 51 combat missions over North Africa and Italy in his P-38 named “Elaine III”. He is credited with five air-to-air victories. After the war, he flew P-51s (specifications) and F-80s with the California Air National Guard, and spent a total of 31 years in the Air Force Reserves, retiring as a Colonel. He was also a teacher and coach for 30 years. He was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with twelve oak leaf clusters, and the French Croix de Guerre.

The following is from an interview with Jack Walker on July 26, 2003, in El Cajon, California.

“After arriving in Scotland, we were sent to a RAF field in Ireland, and when we arrived, there were only five Spitfires at the field, no P-38s. We all got some time flying the Spitfire, which was very light and easy to fly compared to the P-38, but very hard to land. We ‘Yanks’ cracked up the five Spitfires in short order, and the Brits had tears in their eyes. One of the RAF pilots, who had an eye patch after being injured in the Battle of Britain, told me to ‘stir the puddin’, which meant to slightly move the stick in a circle right before landing, and it worked; the Spitfire landed smoothly after that. We got on a train and headed to Belfast, where Lockheed had sent mechanics out to assemble our P-38s. We were told to check them to see if everything worked, and then test fly them. If they were not perfect, we were told not to accept them. Well, nothing worked on my P-38, so they rolled the planes back into the hanger. Jimmy Doolittle showed up and was so mad he fired half the Lockheed employees. They finally got them fixed, rolled them out of the hanger, and the first pilot took off, kept it on the deck, and then pulled straight up into the overcast. He came back through the overcast after doing a loop, and plowed right into the runway. We finally got the group airborne headed towards North Africa, with three groups of twelve P-38s. I was in the last group and ‘tail-end Charlie’, so I had to fly fast to keep up, and my gas gauge was going down quickly. We were headed towards Lands End at the tip of England, when I saw a small RAF field and told the flight lead I had to land. Another P-38 pilot was low on gas as well, and he landed on the short field before me, kicking up lots of water. When I landed, I had no way to stop, and skidded into an elevated railroad track on the far end of the field. The plane went over the track and down onto the beach. A British guard came up and said, ‘Hey Yank, get out before the plane burns’. I climbed up on the tracks only to see another Brit with a mine detector. I had crashed a brand new P-38 onto a beach near a minefield!”

“I saw my first combat mission in February, 1943, and a month later, I shot down an Italian Cant-Z flying boat in North Africa. In April, 1943, we were escorting a group of B-25s doing a sea sweep, looking for ships in the Med. The 1st FG was flying top cover above us. Suddenly, we noticed all these drop tanks dropping through our formation. The P-38s in the 1st FG had dropped them and were diving down on a group of enemy aircraft coming straight at us. It looked like a bunch of bees coming at us, and turned out to be JU-52s coming to deliver fuel to Rommel. P-38s were going through the formation, and I was flying wing for Captain Peterson. I had to turn off the radio as everyone was screaming. I flew around and approached from the back, and shot down two of the JU-52s. Next thing I new, I was flying alongside a Stuka! I moved away from him when two ME-109s went diving past me. I had the throttle wide open and was running low on fuel, so I started for home. Two P-38s from the 1st FG joined up on me, and we made an emergency landing at an RAF Sea and Rescue base called ‘Bone’. I borrowed a British hand crank phone and called in my two victories. When I got back to my base, the British had called to report my two victories, but intelligence determined there were too many kills being claimed that day, so they got everyone from the 1st and 82nd FG together, and one of my victories was taken away. One day British Intelligence came to our base and asked how the 82nd FG was doing in combat against the Germans. We were doing terrible, and those yellow-nosed ME-109s were really good. The Brits informed us that the pilots flying those yellow-nosed 109s were hand picked Luftwaffe pilots from the Battle of Britain. Years later, I found myself standing next to an Me-109 pilot, in front of a yellow-nosed BF-109 at an air show! In July, 1943, I shot down an ME-109 near the coast of Sicily. It caught fire and B-26 crews confirmed my victory. My fourth victory was an FW-190 near Scopalge, Bulgaria. I shot at him from long range, and suddenly, he bailed out. He went by me and I noticed he had on a nice leather suit. He must have bailed out when he saw the tracers go by him. Every time I shot, I looked behind me, as I was always worried about someone behind me. We had mirrors in the P-38s, but the enlisted men would take them to shave with. On a mission to Sopia, the capital of Bulgaria, the B-24s had dropped their bombs when I noticed an ME-109 coming up from behind them. He hadn’t seen me, so I came up behind him, and fired. He dipped down, so I pushed the nose over. He did a snap roll, and I thought his canopy went under my plane. They gave me credit for a ‘probable’, so I wasn’t given Ace status. Many years later, a group doing research on pilots who had four victories and a probable contacted me to gather more information for possible Ace status. I thought my wingman had been killed in the Vietnam War, and the Germans had no records of the incident over Sopia in which I shot down the ME-109. Without the eyewitness account of my wingman or records the Germans kept confirming the operational losses on the Sopia mission, there was no way to change the "probable" to "confirmed". It turns out my wingman, Al Snider, was indeed alive and living in Arizona, and he remembered the mission in great detail. As he said to me, 'that was the day you became an Ace'. He wrote a letter documenting the event, and almost 50 years later, I was awarded 'Ace' status.