Story of service
Paul Marshall was soaring through thick clouds over the Philippine Sea during World War II when he ascended to find clear skies above and, as luck would have it, four Japanese bombers flying nearby.
While his F-5 twin engine fighter plane was quick, it wasn’t armed, and Marshall didn’t have a lot of options.
“There wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it, all I had was a .45 pistol,” he said, laughing. “So I went back into the clouds so they couldn’t find me.”
During the war, Marshall flew photo reconnaissance missions for the U.S. Air Force, flying trips like this a few times a week for eight or nine hours per mission. His aircraft was stripped of the usual armaments and fitted with cameras in the nose, and Marshall’s job was to fly over enemy territory and take photos of the scene before an attack was planned and after the attack was carried through.
“Nobody really wanted that because you didn’t shoot guns and you didn’t drop bombs – you just took pictures,” he said.
Marshall, 92, recently sat down with the Pilot to share stories about his life and military service. He has lived at The Springs at Whitefish for 10 years.
Originally from New Albany, Indiana, Marshall was drafted in November of 1942. He was 18 and finishing up high school at the time.
His initial wish to be a pilot was denied when the Air Force didn’t need extra hands, but a couple months later Marshall realized his commanding officer was from the same town and school and so he asked him put in a good word.
“I told him my story and I’ll be darned if he didn’t get me into cadet pilot training,” he said.
Marshall was shipped to Santa Ana, California, for his pre-flight training before heading to La Junta, Colorado. He started flight training at Thunderbird Field in Glendale, Arizona, where he learned to fly a Stearman biplane. Then he headed to Bakersfield, California, where he learned to fly B-25 and P-38 twin engine fighter planes and was assigned to photo reconnaissance work.
As a second lieutenant in the Thirteenth Air Force, Marshall was sent to Biak, New Guinea, and Morotai, a key island in the United States’ New Guinea campaign.
“That was one of the most interesting jobs I could have had in the Air Force. You flew by yourself, they gave you the target and you hoped you could find it, because they were long missions,” he said.
He picked up a brand new F-5, the camera-fitted P-38, and named it Passionate Witch, a snarky response to a “dear John” letter he’d received. In total he logged around 1,000 hours of flight time, cruising through the skies over New Guinea at speeds of 300 to 400 miles per hour.
“For the day, that was a pretty speedy airplane,” he said. “We covered a heck of a lot of ground.”
Flying by himself outside of combat situations, Marshall said it wasn’t all that exciting at times.
“I got into very little enemy action, nobody would go after a lone airplane. I was so much faster than they were. The P-38 could climb like a homesick angel, almost straight up,” he said.
Marshall was still stationed in New Guinea when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945. After the war concluded, he was sent to Formosa in the Philippines to continue taking aerial photos of Japanese prison camps.
By spring of the following year, he returned home. Marshall joined the Air Force Reserve at Fairfax Field north of Kansas City, Kansas, where his parents were living at the time. The best part was that he and other pilots were allowed to fly within a 500-mile radius of the airbase.
“You could make some nice trips. And I was single and in college so, I had time to do things like that,” Marshall said.
At college in Manhattan, Kansas, Marshall studied agriculture and met his wife-to-be, Phyllis. The two married, settled down and had three children, Paul Jr., James and Barbara. Marshall worked in sales for W.R. Grace for nearly three decades before retiring.