1st Air Commando Transport Pilots
My aunt Vaso with Jesse Hepler and Bill Cherry at a 1st Air Commandos reunion. Bill Cherry was the head of the 1st Air Commando transport section. He was also the pilot who successfully crash landed and survived for 3 weeks in a raft with Eddie Rickenbacker and others. Patt Meara said that after spending all that time in "the deep" Bill Cherry was the most "catastrophe-prepared" individual you have ever met. Read this fascinating story of survival at https://www.historynet.com/eddie-rickenbacker-and-six-other-people-survive-a-b-17-crash-and-three-weeks-lost-in-the-pacific-ocean.htm
Jacob Sartz, second in command, shown here with Grace Kelly on the October 9, 1944 cover of Life
magazine.
----------------
from The San Diego Union, Sunday, February 27, 1994, by Hugh Crumpler
"Cherry’s second in command was Jacob B. Sartz, one of the storied transport pilots in the early days of China-India-Burma theater.
Sartz was a hero and an Air Corps legend from his work as a C-47 pilot in the early days of transport flights between India and China. He had once knocked out a porthole window of a C-47 and shot down a pursuing Japanese plane with a tommy gun.
Sartz also was generally considered to be the sartorial model for the pilots. His style-setting uniform was a collapsed Air Corps hat, Indian-made bush shirt and GI khakis with at least one pant-leg tucked into a pair of non-issue mosquito boots.
The uniform was completed with a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster and a Thompson sub-machine gun tucked in the crook of one elbow. Aloft or aground, the proper transport pilot smoked a fat cigar."
My uncle, C-47 transport pilot Jesse Hepler, continued to smoke a cigar for the rest of his life (but in the garage, not the house!)