KOLOA — “A colonel friend of mine — he’s dead now — but he came over there and flew my wing. And we were over Munich — saw two JU-52s takin’ off. I told him — Turkey Wilson was his name — I said, Turkey I’ll take the first one you take the second one. So I rolled over from about 20-25,000 feet. I had that 51 (P-51 Mustang) going just as fast as it would go, you know. And the guy took off, stuck his gear up, psshhhhwww, off he went.
“Turkey — this was ‘bout his third or fourth mission — so he comes down there, and sees the guy, and, $#!%, he starts shootin’ about 15 miles outta range. He lobbed a tracer across the guy’s nose, and the guy turned. He turned inside of him and shot him down.”
That story happened sometime in the early part of 1945. Thomas Batey was then a 20-year-old 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force with the 319th Fighter Squadron. Between July 1944 and May 1945, Batey flew 50 combat missions over Europe, providing air support for ground troops advancing northward through the peninsula. Tens of thousands of soldiers on the ground died. Casualties are estimated in the hundreds of thousands. The air was also dangerous.
Seventy-five years ago today, over 150,000 soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy, located on the northern coast of France. It was D-Day, the largest amphibious invasion in the history of the world. Young men on both sides killed each other by the thousands.
Batey would have very likely ended up on that beach if he hadn’t skipped school. Instead of going to class at Anacostia High School in Washington, D.C., on a winter morning in January 1942, Batey and a friend went to a local masonic lodge and took the Air Force aviation cadet exam.
“I passed it, and Ralph Barber flunked it,” he said in an interview Wednesday afternoon in the living room of his home.
He sat facing a wall of windows framing golf course fairways, palm trees, a narrow but deep swimming pool in his backyard and mildly threatening rain clouds. He is 95 years old.
By the time D-Day rolled around, Batey was finishing his fighter pilot training. He heard about the operation, but said, “All I could think of was, thank God I got in test pilot school or I’d have been one of those crosses over there.”
The vast majority of the D-Day survivors have since joined their brothers in one way or another. A clerk at the veterans affairs office in Lihue, said the last Kauai resident she knew of that fought on D-Day passed away less than a year ago. But the invasion of Normandy was only one part of a massive effort to put an end to the Nazis.
A month after Allied troops fought their way up the French beachheads — by this point in the Normandy invasion, casualties on both sides were approaching the six figures — Batey and a dozen or so other brand new officers landed in Naples, Italy after two weeks at sea.
The next day, a six-axle truck carried them to the other side of Italy’s boot. Days later, Batey was in the air, flying in formation with three other P-51 Mustang fighter pilots, tasked with protecting B-24 bombers from German air attacks.
He flew 50 missions over the next 10 months, weaving through exploding anti-aircraft mortars and dodging German fighter pilots. Occasionally, he dipped down to 20,000 feet, took off his oxygen mask, and smoked a cigarette.
“You know, I often wonder how the hell I’m still here,” he said. “The real heroes didn’t come home.”
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Caleb Loehrer, staff writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cloehrer@thegardenisland.com.
