Rough War by Walt Shiel

Paul continued his report on their 21 June C-46 flight:

We landed in Agra at 1:30 and lit out for dinner. At the swell officers mess, I saw (or we saw) our first white woman in the form of a Red Cross worker. She sure looked good! And the dinner!! After living for months on dehydrated food and corn willy, the dinner of real fresh beef, fresh potatoes, salad, kidney beans, ice tea, butterscotch and chocolate pie sure tasted our of this world. This was also the first ice we’ve had. None of us could hardly move away from the table. The officers around us sure got a kick at watching us eat! We wanted to stay over here in Agra—to eat some more and to drink some real Scotch whiskey! But we had to keep going, so took off again at 2:30. My right ear is bothering me again—bad.

In letters home and in earlier diary entries, Paul had noted problems with a repeated ear ache. That evening, they continued their aerial trek:

At 5:30 p.m., we are crossing the “Great Sand Desert” and a terrific dust storm is raging. Even though the sun is shining, we can see nothing, and the pilots are flying blind—on instruments. Rough! We hit Karachi at 6:30—hotter’n hell and very dusty with sand over everything. We got our bunks in the transient officers area (which was a dust bowl) and hit for town—the first in 9 months for us. We fairly gorged ourselves with ice cream, steaks, ice cream, scotch, ice cream—and so on through the night. Mike Navarro, a Latin-American and a”great” lover, went out and got a date with an Anglo-Indian gal, but the rest of us are true to our wives—and stagged it! (Seee?!) We “slow-timed” our new P-47s for 4 hours during the three days we stayed there, and most of the time we just ate!

On 25 June, Paul and the other pilots boarded their new P-47s and started back to Assam to join the rest of the 90th FS:

We took off at 9 this morning for Agra and had a hell of a time going across the desert. Much dust and plenty clouds. We got lost a bit—ended up in New Delhi but just got our bearings and headed for Agra—landing about 12:30. We ate, then went sightseeing to the Taj Mahal. I got (as did we all) pretty well plastered tonight on Scotch! (Hic)

Paul Eastman’s 1944 photo of the Taj Mahal