. . During Rudy Golling’s long military career, he served first in the Army during WW II and then in the Air Force during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He retired from active duty in 1974, after thirty years of service. Air Force work is often technical and highly skilled; Rudy’s
. . Bob Gale After graduating from Dartmouth College in May 1942, Bob Gale applied to become a Navy cryptographer. He failed the physical because of his glasses and a shoulder injury. He volunteered for the Army Air Corps and eventually was assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). He
. . Augie Friedrich Augie Friedrich was a tail gunner in the Army Air Corp during WWII. He completed thirty-five missions, but his third mission was one of the most memorable. They had taken some gunfire on the mission and it was rough going—an engine was out, the intercom was
. . Wendell Freeland Wendell Freeland was a member of the famed group of African American WWII flyers we now call the Tuskegee Airmen. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 as a student at Howard University. A bright and ambitious student who grew up in a poor, segregated
. . John Francis John Francis of Blairsville, Pennsylvania was an engineering student at Penn State during WWII. Sign up to join the army now, an ROTC commander urged him, and he’d get some credit for his schooling before being drafted. It seemed like a deal. After basic and artillery
. . Ralph Fisher During WW II, Ralph Fisher spent thirty-one months overseas, serving in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany. Immediately after basic training he was placed in the Army’s 402nd Anti-Aircraft Battalion, with “not much training,” he says—a fact that might have had dire consequences for the entire
