July/August Dakota Territory Air Museum P-47 Update

This month, work continued on fuselage systems, the ailerons were riveted, and work was begun on the exhaust system. Some of the ducting for the turbosupercharger was fitted in conjunction with the exhaust system.

The landing gear on the P-47 is massive, as befits such a large fighter. Most of the work restoring the gear has been completed.

Even at this stage of the restoration, small parts are still being fabricated. One example is the cover for the gun bay heat baffle.

There are so many complex systems on the P-47, and the exhaust system is no different. It has to flow back through the turbosupercharger to power that assembly before the exhaust gases are finally expelled.

42-27609 was operational in the combat area of Papua New Guinea from late May to the first part of September of 1944.

The 35th Fighter Group first received P-47D-23RAs in late June. They were the first Fighter Group to list the D-23 in their squadron history inventory pages. The 35th experienced a quiet period for combat during June and July of 1944, but combat missions increased greatly with the beginning of August.

“On June 25th, 7 new P-47D-23RAs arrived from Finschaven. Seven more were added two days later but no missions were flown until August 3rd, when glide bombing was introduced against Japanese positions on Noemfoor Island and the Vogelkop Peninsula. For the first time, 500 pound bombs were used on the underwing shackles, doubling the P-47’s offensive load.”¹

42-27609 was very possibly one of those first 27 D-23s.

The 39th Fighter Squadron experienced a change in command during this period. Major Harris Denton turned the squadron over to Major Richard Cella. The first mission Major Cella commanded was a 900 mile flight of 26 P-47s from Nadzab to Noemfoor to cover the building of airfields on Middleburg Island. Over the next 6 weeks, the 39th guarded against the occasional raiding of Japanese soldiers during their tenure on the island.

On August 9th, their first operation from Noemfoor took place as two flights of P-47s covered a convoy off Cape Sansapor. Similar missions filled the next few days until August 20th when the squadron went out on a fighter sweep to the Moluccas, led by Captain Gordon Prentice. “With a flight duration of 5 hours and 20 minutes, it was the longest P-47 mission flown by the 39th (and probably any other Fifth Fighter Command unit) up to that date. No longer would the skeptics berate the P-47’s range. Later in the year, with three external tanks and a technique of controlling their cruising speed with propeller pitch, as demonstrated by Charles Lindbergh, the squadron registered missions up to eight hours.”²

The 39th and the rest of the 35th Fighter Group had moved 900 miles west during this time. The next big jump would be to the Philippine Islands later in 1944.

^{1 John Stanaway, Cobra in the Clouds, Historical Aviation Album 1982, Temple City, CA, p.28
2 John Stanaway, Cobra in the Clouds, Historical Aviation Album 1982, Temple City, CA, p.29}