My older brother, Bud Ellis, was quite a character.
He was a great student, athlete and had a great personality. He would try just about anything, and I, six years younger, thought it was all normal.
Once in a tree over a brook behind our house in South Portland, he climbed up and sawed off a limb while he was straddling it.
Unfortunately, he sawed the limb off between him and the trunk of the tree. Down he went into the shallow brook, rendering himself unconscious. He came to and walked away, sopping wet but otherwise OK.
He was a quarterback for the South Portland High School football team, a high jumper and runner for the track team, graduating in 1941.
The principal at SPHS, long after Bud had graduated, called my mother and told her that due to an error made by the school, he actually should have been the valedictorian.
The Second World War broke out and Bud went to work as a welder at the South Portland Shipyard building Liberty ships.
As a welder, he once got a flash in one eye. He was afraid it would hurt his chances to get into the Army Air Corps to become a pilot.
It didn’t, and as soon as he turned 18, he was accepted into flight training. He got his wings and became a fighter pilot.
My mother, Irma Ellis, was able to go to Maxwell Air Force Base to see Bud get his pilot’s wings. As part of the graduation ceremony of over 2,000 pilots, the top-rated six pilots were selected to perform a flyover of the ceremony — he was chosen.
He went into advanced training and as part of his regimen he had to take off from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and fly blind at night to a landing strip in the Midwest. He flew blind on instruments only and immediately after refueling had to return to Eglin AFB in Florida.
I was amazed and at my age couldn’t comprehend how anyone could fly a plane without seeing anything outside the cockpit.
Next, he was sent to Quarry Heights AFB in Panama, where he flew P-40 fighter planes over the Pacific Ocean in search of Japanese submarines.
On one of these flights, he was for some reason flying upside down and the controls locked. He couldn’t get the plane turned over and was forced to bail out.
The plane descended until it crashed on the beach and into the woods. He landed in shallow water and waded to the wreckage, where he placed one foot on the remains of the plane, placed his hand over his heart and did his imitation of Napoleon.
He was reassigned to North Africa, where he flew Lockheed Lightning P-38s on photo reconnaissance missions over the Ploesti Oilfields in Romania.
He would return with the photos and Romania would be bombed the next day. He told me in a letter from Africa that he wanted to see how fast the P-38 could really fly. While on a practice flight, he put the plane into a dive heading straight for earth. He said in the letter, “Robart,” his nickname for me, “I had that plane flying over 600 miles per hour when I had to pull up or crash.” He temporarily blacked out but woke up in a few seconds and landed the plane safely.
While in North Africa, he and some friends commandeered a Mercedes Benz limousine that used to belong to German Field Marshal Gen. Erwin Rommel, who had to leave Africa in a hurry after the Allies arrived. I have a photo of him with that car.
Then came the day my mother had feared. On Thanksgiving morning, 1943, we received the official notice. We later got word that after his sixth recon mission, his plane was shot up and was flying on only one engine.
He was told to bail out because they could get all the planes they needed but they needed pilots. He told the base on Corsica, where he was diverted because of the condition of the plane, that he could fly it in and land it.
The base commander, in a letter to my mother, told her they heard the plane approaching, suddenly there was dead silence, followed shortly by an explosion.
The plane was a complete washout and my brother was gone. He was 19 years old. He is buried at the U.S. Military Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy.
– Special to the Press Herald
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