Some Airplane Stories and History of a WWII Pilot in the Aleutians

Lewis "Pat" Patteson is a WWII US Navy pilot and member of the "Blind Foxes" VP-135 who 1st flew the PV-1 Ventura aircraft from the Aleutian Islands. Pat also flew PBY's and PV-2 Harpoon aircraft. Pat is a veteran of several combat and reconnaissance missions and has some great stories and personal photographs in this book. Here's a short interview with Pat: "I'm Pat Patteson. I'm awaiting my 100th birthday. I was a Navy pilot and graduated with my gold wings from Corpus Christi, Texas, and was immediately sent to the Pacific and ended up in the North Pacific after training at Whidbey Island in a new airplane to the Navy. This time, instead of PBYs, they were going to introduce a land-based patrol plane, the Ventura, and we were formed into a 15 plane squadron and replaced most of the PBYs that had been on patrol in the Aleutian Islands. We were sent to that first, to the Aleutian Islands. It was Adak, then Amchitka, then Attu. And we flew photo reconnaissance. That was our job. Our intelligence people at the Pentagon had very little information about the Japanese forces in the Kuril Islands. They had just taken the islands of Kiska and Attu. This was six months after Pearl Harbor. I flew in three photo reconnaissance squadrons, all of them VPB-135. In 1943, I came back, reformed with new pilots and new planes; in 1944, better equipped with more photographic equipment and, finally, in 1945, in a PV-2 squadron formed again and trained at Whidbey Island. When the war was nearing its end on VJ Day, I was on Attu and most of us stayed inside our huts rather than get out where the celebrations were going on. I was one of the first to return and be separated from the Navy. I flew a plane all the way from -- with a copilot and a crew of other seamen and officers, back to the states. They had been eligible for discharge and I took them and dropped them off from Seattle to Burbank to Phoenix to El Paso and then into Abilene, Texas. So my war days were settled very quickly and I returned to school. I had been taken out of college after two years of credits and I got to civilian life and after my sojourn with the Navy. Thank you."