COLORADO SPRINGS — Historians have described America’s victory in the war that ended 70 years ago Saturday as a symphony of men and machine.
The bravery of a generation grasped America’s industrial might to topple first Germany, then Japan.
A worker at WestPac Restorations in Colorado Springs summed it up more succinctly while putting the finishing touches on a World War II Lockheed P-38 Lightning.
“That’s Superman,” he said, pointing to 100-year-old Frank Royal, who was observing restorations of the twin-engine fighter. “This is his cape.”
It was more than a cape for Royal. In New Guinea in 1942, that plane, now called White 33, was a lifeline. The roar of its twin 12-cylinder motors gave him confidence that he could do his job and survive.
“It was like music,” Royal said last week after reuniting with the plane he flew in World War II.
The P-38 was scrapped and buried in Papua New Guinea after a World War II combat incident that came after Royal had gone home to a job at the newly built Pentagon.
Generations later, it was dug up as buried treasure and shipped to Colorado for repair at WestPac, where owner Bill Klaers and his team have become the nation’s most renowned restorers of World War II planes.
Through luck or fate, Royal came to visit WestPac and the adjacent National Museum of World War II Aviation. He told Klaers he had flown P-38s in the Pacific. After talking, the two realized that Royal had flown the plane WestPac was restoring.
Royal was born in Colorado during World War I. Raised on a ranch outside Rocky Ford, he had an idyllic rural childhood, but it didn’t last.
“The ’29 crash nearly wiped out my parents,” he said. “Then came the Dust Bowl and the Depression.”
At 16, Royal hit the road to chase his dream of becoming a doctor. He worked odd jobs around the country and picked up a private flying experience after working with a barnstormer. He returned to Colorado and started college at the University of Colorado.
“If I didn’t sleep very much and if I didn’t eat very much, I could stay in college,” Royal said.
To make ends meet, he joined an Army program for would-be flyers in 1940.
“That began 30 years in the U.S. Army Air Corps,” Royal said.
It was an air service ill-prepared for the task it would face after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and propelled America into war in 1941. Royal and his colleagues battled advanced and nimble enemy planes with relics. A lieutenant when the war came, Royal was sent to the Pacific in the much-maligned Bell P-39 Airacobra.
“It was not the right airplane,” Royal said.
Royal gained a souvenir from service with the P-39 — a piece of propeller with a Japanese bullet hole in it.
“I came near to buying it in a P-39 on July 4, 1942,” Royal remembered.
The P-39 was designed as a high-altitude fighter built for speed. Then the design was modified. Its supercharger was removed and armor added, making it heavy and sluggish. When Royal and his wingman were jumped by lighter, faster Japanese Zeros on Independence Day, they had little chance.
His comrade was gunned from the sky, and Royal wound up in a furious dog fight near his friend’s descending parachute. When his friend hit the ground, Royal dropped the nose and raced for home in the treetops. His planed was scrapped after he landed — there were too many bullet holes to patch.
“Fifty percent of the pilots who went over with me didn’t come back,” Royal said.
Back in the United States, a solution for harried pilots like Royal was coming off production lines. The P-38 Lightning had been an experimental plane when the war started. The sleek Lockheed design was faster than anything else in America’s inventory.
And it was lethal, with four heavy machine guns and a cannon clustered in its nose.
“We swear that Lockheed engineers were space aliens,” Klaers said as he looked over White 33, which has been in his Aviation Way shop in various stages of reconstruction for years.
Klaers and his team have battled to recreate the fighter from junk pulled from the New Guinea jungle. Along the way, they’ve studied every piece of the craft, with thousands of pages of engineering drawings of each nut, bolt, rivet, wire and washer. Many pieces for the plane have been hand-built at WestPac to exact Lockheed specifications.
Work on White-33 is about 90 percent complete now. The engines are installed, and the wings have been re-skinned. The only item going into the plane that isn’t original is a modern radio.
“Yes, this will fly,” Klaers said.
At times, it has seemed like the P-38 would never be finished.
“This is a completely different animal,” Klaers said.
One factor driving a fevered pace at WestPac is Royal. While the World War II flyer is healthy, he is 100. And everyone in the shop wants to make sure Frank Royal can see his old plane fly.
