JOHN WAGGAMAN
Age: 88
Born: Oct. 28, 1923
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Residence: Rancho Mirage
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps; 33rd Fighter Group; 79th Fighter Squadron
Years served: August 1942-August 1946
Rank: First lieutenant
Family: Wife Noreen; two children, Jim Waggaman of Encinitas and Floyd Waggaman of Philadelphia
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Navy veteran Jack Marlin of Palm Springs
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii.
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Fighter pilot John Waggaman had to bail out of his P-38 twin-engine fighter plane after taking on enemy fire during a mission in the China-Burma- India theater of war.
“We just got our P-38s for the first time,” Waggaman said. “I was leading the mission.”
The engine started to fail, and Waggaman had to think about getting out of the aircraft.
“I didn't want to go down in the jungle,” he said.
He maneuvered his plane near a dry river bed and prepared to bail out.
Waggaman said he opened the cockpit hood, got out on the wing and slid off the plane.
“It was just automatic,” he said. “You did something and the next thing you know, you're floating down in a parachute.”
Waggaman, who landed safely on a sandbar, was thankful his canine companion wasn't on that flight.
“That was the one day I didn't take my little dog,” he said.
Waggaman's dachshund — he picked up the little guy while he was on leave in Darjeeling — accompanied the pilot on a couple of missions.
“He'd just lay down between my feet,” he said.
He named his new dog Major, after a dachshund he had in Santa Barbara when he was a young boy.
Things could have ended ended differently for Waggaman if Major had been riding along that day.
“I probably would have tried to land the plane on the sandbar,” Waggaman said.
Waggaman said he didn't think he'd be able to hold on tight enough to Major when the parachute snapped open.
“That would have probably jolted the dog right out of my arms,” he said.
It took Waggaman a few days to rejoin his group, and during that time, Major lost his appetite.
“He wouldn't eat until I got back,” Waggaman said.
Waggaman decided to become a fighter pilot, “Because I saw pictures of the P-51 and I fell in love with it and wanted to fly one,” he said.
Waggaman ended up piloting P-40, P-47 and P-38 fighter planes, but the P-51 is the only one he never got a chance to fly, he said.
Most of Waggaman's pilot training took place in California, including preflight training in Santa Ana, primary training in Oxnard, and basic training in Lemoore.
Then it was off to Tucson for advanced training, where he learned to fly aircraft with retractable landing gear. Fighter pilots also spent a couple of weeks flying P-40's.
Finally, Waggaman was sent to Florida, where he trained in P-47 single-engine fighter planes.
“The P-47 was a huge monster of a plane,” he said. “I thought, ‘I'm supposed to fly that thing alone?'”
He was soon sent overseas for combat duty.
“We ended up in Foggia, Italy,” he said. “We flew P-40s in missions over Yugoslavia.”
Later, his fighter group was sent to Naples, where they flew cover for the Anzio beachhead landing.
“At the end of the war, we were in Burma and Assam — the forgotten part of the world.”
In the China-Burma-India theater of war, his fighter group flew airdrome protection for the B-29s bombing Japan.
Waggaman also flew a couple “off the books” missions on the side.
“The colonel made a deal with the local warlord. Chiang Kai-shek (military leader of China) would not give us gas for our squadron. The colonel made contact with a Chinese warlord. The warlord got 90 octane gas in 50 gallon barrels.”
The barrels were put in the river and the current would take them to the other side, where they were picked up by U.S. airmen.
Waggaman and some of the other fighter pilots returned the favor.
“We ran off to do some work for the warlord — to fight a mini-war he had with another warlord to get control over some land,” Waggaman said.
Waggaman, one of the founders of the Palm Springs Air Museum, became a professional photographer following the war.
He was hired to photograph American art and architecture — a program funded by the Carnegie Corporation.
“They gave me a list of building and homes to photograph,” across the country, he said.
After two years, Waggaman had captured 2,000 images that were eventually converted into color slides and distributed to university art programs.
He also photographed art collections at museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was commissioned by the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art to photograph California artists.
His art photographs also appear in a book published in 1969 by the Timken Art Gallery (now Timken Museum of Art) in San Diego.
