1st LT JAMES LUMA

JAMES LUMA WAS AN AMERICAN PILOT who flew for a Canadian squadron in World War II in a plane built of wood. Growing up in Helena, Montana, Luma was fascinated by airplanes—building models, reading about flying, and nurturing a dream of becoming a pilot himself. It wasn’t until the end of his freshman year at Carroll College that he decided not to wait any longer to make this dream come true. He thought first of joining the U.S. military, but with war still safely isolated in Europe, the Army Air Corps was highly selective about recruits. One of the criteria that the nineteen-year-old Luma could not meet was the requirement that a cadet be at least twenty years old. He had a stroke of good fortune when he was hitchhiking back to Mon-tana after visiting his parents, who then lived in Seattle, to be given a ride by an American who worked as a flight instructor in Canada. This man told Luma that the Royal Canadian Air Force accepted U.S. citizens older than eighteen with their parents’ approval. Luma recalls practically yelling, “Stop the car!” He hitchhiked back to Seattle, got his parents’ permission, and pawned his watch for ten dollars to pay for the bus ride to British Columbia. Luma joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in Vancouver in July 1941 and received his wings the following May. He was sent to England in May 1943 and began training in Night Intruders. He transferred to the U.S. Army Air Corps in June because he wanted to qualify for the ten-thousand- dollar life insurance policy offered by the U.S. War Department, and was then re-posted to the RCAF’s 418, the Night Intruders—wearing an American uni-form but serving in a Canadian squadron. The 418th flew the de Havilland Mark VI Mosquito, a twin-engine fighter- bomber that British flight engineers had designed in the mid-1930s to be made of wood—a core of balsa with thin laminations of hardwood—because of anticipated wartime shortages of aluminum and other metals. It made a dramatic mark on the air war in Europe, but failed when the British sent it to Burma, because of the tropical insects that feasted on the glue holding its wood laminates together. Built for a two-man crew—a pilot and a nav-igator—the Mosquito was the fastest plane in the European theatre until the

introduction of the P-51 Mustang with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. It was also one of the deadliest, with four .30-caliber machine guns in the nose and four 20-mm cannon in the lower fuselage. It was the premier Allied Night Intruder, stalking the bombers the Luftwaffe sent on night raids and the German night fighters that pro-tected them. Photographs taken at the time show the youthful Luma in his fleece flight jacket, pen-sively smoking a pipe beside his plane “Moonbeam McSwine,” named eccentrically by the Canadians after a character from the “Li’l Abner” comic strip. The Germans feared the Mosquito and exper-imented with a variety of countermeasures to stop it—sending up decoy planes bristling with gunners and armament to lure it into a confrontation; set-ting up counterfeit airfields with replica aircraft lit by phony landing lights to lure the Night Intruders into a trap of antiaircraft batteries. But the Mosqui-to continued to take a toll on German aircraft. Targets were selected by British intelligence, often using information relayed by French Resis-tance agents. Missions were confirmed at the last minute. Luma spent twenty-seven fruitless nights in the ready room before he was finally scrambled. He went on seventeen Night Intruder missions before making contact with the enemy. The first German plane he saw was his first kill. It came on January 21, 1944 when Luma and his navigator were flying over the German base at Wunstorf looking for targets of opportunity. Nor-mally Luftwaffe pilots, knowing that Mosquitos might be lurking in the darkness, were careful about any light that might give them away. But Luma and his navigator spotted the faint glimmers of light on the nose and tail of a plane just taking off. (The pilot was careless, Luma would later theorize, because he was an Ace who had taken down seven British bombers that night and was anxious to get back into the air after refueling to shoot down more.) Luma let the twin-engine Messerschmitt 410 heavy fighter pass below him and gain altitude. As he approached it, he had a moment of “buck fever” because it was his first combat, and overshot it. Low- ering his landing gear to cut his air speed, he circled around, lined up behind the 410, fired a short burst, and pushed his stick forward to escape the debris from the fireball.

Three weeks later on February 13, Luma caught up with a lone He 177 bomber “down moon” in a bright night sky. (“We didn’t like a full moon,” he later remarked, “and always tried to apply for leave when it appeared.”) For some reason the bomber’s tail gunner didn’t see them and Luma shot the 177 down after following it for several miles. On March 6, on a mission near Spain’s border with France, he got his third kill—an unsuspecting Fw 190 fighter. During this engagement, the Mos-quito’s starboard engine went out and Luma had to fly six hundred miles back to his base in England on one engine. As he skimmed the choppy waters of the Channel at five hundred feet, he was tracked by British radar and an air-sea rescue plane waited with its engine idling in case he had to ditch. On March 21, Luma led a rare daytime mission— called a “daylight ranger” by the Night Intruder pilots—along with another plane to strafe an enemy airfield on the French-German border. Relying on the Mosquito’s speed to get in and out, they made two swift passes, destroying several German planes on the ground, and then pulled up and headed for home. While still over French territory, he saw a Ju 34 single-engine transport and shot it down. Then, twelve minutes later, he opened fire on a Ju 52 tri-motor transport, destroying both its engines and sending it down. After these last kills, which made him an Ace, Luma was transferred to photo reconnaissance, fly- ing weather missions over Berlin with the U.S. 802nd Reconnaissance Group, where he served until the end of the war in Europe. After the war James Luma followed his nose for adventure in his work as a commercial pilot. He flew transports for Korean National Airways during the war in Korea; for Air Ventures in Katanga during the civil war in Congo; for Vietnamese Air Trans-port during the war in Vietnam; and for Trans Med-iterranean Airways in Lebanon. He was flying 707s for Air Berlin when he hit the mandatory retirement age of sixty in 1982.

Special Thanks to Wings of Valor author Peter Collier and photographer Nick Del Calzo.

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