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The Elusive Wingman Fish
William Hudson Fish Jr was born in Brooklyn on the Fourth of July in 1916, before the US entered the First World War but in prime time for the Second. At some point the family moved to Newtonville, an upscale suburb of Boston, and the lad graduated from Newton High School about 1934. Whatever William Senior did for a living, the family evidently didn't suffer in the Great Depression, for young Bill enrolled at Maine's Bowdoin College, where he joined a fraternity, majored in English, played varsity and intramural sports, and worked on the student newspaper. His Social Security card was issued in Maine, so perhaps he also held a job on campus or during the summer.
He graduated from Bowdoin in 1938 and joined the US Navy as a flight cadet. After he earned "wings of gold" at Pensacola, the US began edging closer to the war in Europe, and I've seen suggestions that Ensign Fish flew a Consolidated PBY Catalina in what President Roosevelt oxymoronically called the "Neutrality Patrol," out to 300 miles off the east and west coasts. By May 1941 the patrol was extended to the east coast of Iceland, so that it included most of the Atlantic Ocean. Future Flying Tigers like Tex Hill and Eddie Rector did similar work, flying dive bombers from the deck of the USS Ranger. They were told to report their sightings "in the clear," so that British destroyers could use them to attack German submarines and surface raiders. When recruiters for the American Volunteer Group looked for pilots that summer, they had especially good luck with the Neutrality Patrol.
In Burma, Claire Chennault had his three squadrons shaped up on November 1. Bill Fish's name appears on none of the rosters, which makes me suspect that he was a late volunteer and sailed to Asia on Klipfontein in October. Notoriously, this was the transport that delivered ten pilots, including several who'd flown Catalinas and had considerable difficulty making a three-point touchdown on asphalt, being accustomed to flare for landing while still high above the water. Chennault was so annoyed by the resulting damage that he fired off a letter to his recruiters: "I prefer to have the employment quotas partly unfilled than to receive pilots hired on the principle of 'come one, come all.'"
In time, though, Fish qualified in the Tomahawk and was assigned to the 2nd Squadron Panda Bears, which was made up mostly of Navy and Marine pilots trained at Pensacola. His plane was P-8110, the tenth assembled ar Mingaladon airport in Rangoon, bearing the fuselage number 42. On February 1, he deployed with the squadron to Rangoon but wasn't named in any combat reports that I have seen. Indeed, his next mention in the AVG record came on March 10, when he and four pilots from the 3rd Squadron were tasked to fly replacement Tomahawks down to the AVG's fall-back airfield at Magwe. Unable to refuel at Lashio, they turned back to Loiwing on the Burma-China frontier. One by one, they ran out of gas and had to crash-land. Fish's plane and another could be salvaged, but the others had to be cannibalized for spare parts.
On April 1, the governor of Yunnan province gave a dinner for the AVG at Kunming, and Charlie Bond noted in A Flying Tigers Diary that he sat beside "Willie Fish." And on April 10, along with Tex Hill and Pete Wright of the 2nd Squadron, Fish flew one of the detested "morale missions" over Chiang Kai-shek's soldiers who were holding the line in eastern Burma. Their job was to display the Chinese sun painted on the underside of their wings, which meant they were low enough to be hit by Japanese rifle fire.
And that, to the best of my knowledge, was the whole of Bill Fish's contribution to the Flying Tigers. His service ended in May with a medical discharge. He was one of the first AVG veterans to reach home in good standing, and he clearly liked talking to reporters, so his trail becomes easier to follow thereafter. He'd been sick in China, he told a Chicago reporter, from "tropical diseases," probably dysentery. Much the same information appeared in several newspapers, including an especially lavish feature in the Springfield, Mass., Union-Republican on July 19, 1942:
The article was attributed to "Lieutenant" Fish (no doubt his final Navy grade) and noted that he'd soon be joining the U.S. Army Ferry Command. Well, not quite. He was already in Miami, in fact; he had registered for the draft, married Margaret Small, and gone to work for Pan American Ferries, whose pilots were flying Lend-Lease bombers from Florida to Brazil and on to Africa, where they turned the planes over to British and Russian pilots and then hitchhiked home.
There's no evidence that Bill Fish flew any of these missions, and by January 1943 he was working for American Export Lines Lines in New York City. Happily, Brad Smith was able to find crew manifests for AEA, which owned three handsome Sikorsky VS-44 flying boats. In the 1930s such craft had been regarded as the only safe vehicles for trans-Atlantic passenger flight, and of course they had the great advantage of not requiring a prepared runway. The VS-44 was smaller but faster than competing versions from Martin and Boeing, and in the end only four were built, one as a prototype patrol boat for the US Navy, the others as passenger planes named Excalibur, Excambian, and Exeter. Since AEA was owned by a steamship company, the flying boats were delivered with first-class accomodations: Their "standard of luxury," says Wikpedia's entry on the VS-44, "boasted full-length beds, dressing rooms, full galley, snack bar, lounge and fully controlled ventilation." In AEA service, the flying boat had a crew of eleven, including purser and stewardess, and carried as many as thirty-nine passengers.
Fish's first appearance on Brad's manifests was a return flight on January 21, 1943, when an AEA flying boat made a water landing at the Naval Air Station at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. He must have made the eastbound journey several days before, New York to Newfoundland to Iceland to Ireland to the south coast of England, where London-bound passengers disembarked after two days en route. (Alas, the eastbound rosters haven't turned up.) On that occasion, Fish served as third officer, meaning a qualified pilot who relieved other crew members on the long passages but typically wasn't entrusted with the controls for takeoff or landing. Apparently AEA flew one such round-trip each week to Europe. The company was now down to two aircraft, Excalibur having crashed and sunk the previous October while taking off from the Bay of Exploits in Newfoundland, killing five crew members and six passengers.
Altogether, the manifests show Fish making twelve round-trip flights for the company over the next eighteen months, mostly as the copilot and mostly on the North Atlantic route, though there were also four southern crossings to Port Lyautey in North Africa.
In the 1930s, American Airlines had become the country's first and dominant transcontinental carrier, and by 1939 a New Yorker could board a Douglas DC-2, fly to Memphis, and there change to a DC-3 "Skysleeper" for an overnight passage to Los Angeles. With intermediate stops, the journey took more than twenty hours. Pan American World Airways had meanwhile become preeminent flying to Latin America and to Asia, equipped exclusively with flying boats. A third company, Trans World Airlines, had developed extensive routes in the US and after 1941 became a wartime contractor to the US military. By the war's end, the three companies were ready to compete head-to-head, carrying passengers to Europe on land-based aircraft.
American simply bought AEA and operated it as a subsidiary dubbed American Overseas Airlines. (Some of its planes bore the more honest name "American Airlines Service.") The company was now based at LaGuardia's Marine Air Terminal and equipped with the time-tested but unpressurized Douglas DC-4, which had proved its worth flying the oceans for the US Army and Navy. Indeed, all of AEA's planes had been converted from military transports and given a civilian coat of paint. Pan Am and TWA leapfrogged the DC-4 by opting for the dolphin-like Lockheed Constellation, which had a rudimentary pressurization system enabling it to fly at a somewhat higher and smoother altitude. The Connies went into service in February 1946, again converted from wartime variants.
Pappy Paxton and others had formed a group to lobby (unsuccessfuly) for veteran's benefits for "honorably discharged" AVG pilots and ground crews. Fish was included in Paxton's list, with his home address shown as Stony Brook on the prosperous north shore of Long Island. Indeed, AOA proved to be quite a haven for former Flying Tigers: I also see the names of Bob Neale, George Burgard, Buster Keeton, Hank Geselbracht, Freeman Ricketts, and John Hennessy as carrying the mail to Europe under AOA's postal contract.
Bill Fish soon moved up to captain. On July 6, 1946, he stopped off in Boston to pick up the first trans-Atlantic passengers from Logan Airport, before continuing to Newfoundland's Gander airfield, Iceland's Keflavik, Ireland's Shannon, and finally a former RAF airfield on the south coast of England -- a rough and noisy journey, bumping through the clouds at 9,000 feet. The Boston Globe put his photo on the front page.
In 1950, American Airlines gave up the attempt to compete on the North Atlantic route, selling its AOA subsidiary to Pan American. Fish may have left the airline by that time: his final New York arrival on the available crew manifests came in from Iceland on May 12, 1948.
Margaret Fish died in 1958 in Boston, though the family apparently lived in Setauket on Long Island, not far from their previous home in Stony Brook. Bill was left with the care of four children. He married again the following year to Virginia Fuller Colt, who had three children of her own. She too may have lived in Setauket, since that was the site of their "quiet family wedding," according to the society page of the Boston Globe. They honeymooned in Italy, whether as a couple or en famille wasn't reported. They would have two children of their own.
Bill Fish then vanished from the public record, though Brad did find an obituary published, of all places, in Park City, Utah. The Park Record reported that he had "died peacefully" on October 28, 1987, which was of interest because he'd worked in Park City from 1977 to 1980 as a real estate agent. He must then have returned to the East Coast, for he seems to have died at Mather Hospital in Port Jefferson, New York, not far from where he'd lived first with Margaret and later with Virginia, and final address was in nearby Stony Brook. Virginia survived him, as did nine children and nine great-grandchildren. RIP! -- a life with gaps, but apparently well lived.
(If you can add anything to Bill Fish's life story, please send an email. Blue skies!)
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Posted October 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Brad Smith and Daniel Ford; all rights reserved. This site sets no cookies, but Mailchimp and Amazon do, if you click through to their services. I never see those cookies.