Paladin, that's an awesome story and I'm glad you had the opportunity to meet the man.

Hoser, a lot of people talk down about the P-40 Warhawk because they try to compare them to the later fighters of the war like the P-51 or the Corsair. Totally unfair. There are a lot of Japanese pilots that would tell the P-40 nay-sayers that it was a pretty good fighter for it's time...if they had survived their P-40 encounters, that is.

I have a couple of WWII planes I'm really proud of. I have a model P-51 signed by Yeager, I have a model of the Memphis Belle signed by Robert Morgan (he passed away a couple of years ago), a very nice original oil of one of the Tuskegee P-51s and a print of an ME-109 signed by a German general (and fighter ace) who's name slips my mind right now.