A Recollection From David Singleton
On June 11, 2000, I learned that Tom Stenger had died. His death brought to mind an episode when we were newly in Taclobin, Leyte. Four of us were on standby alert in the operations room when we scrambled. Capt. Otto Carter was our flight leader. We scrambled and Otto took off. I was his wingman and was about to take off when a red flare was fired at the opposite end of the runway stopping the three of us from taking off. I looked over at the element leader, Walter Abraham, and noticed that blood was dripping from his nose. An enemy plane had dropped "frag" bombs on the end of the runway where we were waiting, with our cockpits open, to take off. The fourth man in the flight was Tom Stenger. Years later at a reunion I learned from Tom that in haste while taxiing to scramble he had nosed over his plane and thinking he may have hit the tip of his plane's propeller in the sandy soil, Tom said that he climbed out of his plane to try to determine if his prop had been damaged. Apparently he felt it wasn't damaged and had pulled up to the flight line to take off with us. Walter rightly received a purple heart for his sliced nose. Otto had no idea what had happened to his flight until after he landed. The Japanese plane had continued to fly down our runway and was hit and downed by ack-ack just beyond the runway. In addition to Walter's nose the fragmentation bombs had damaged several planes parked around the runway.