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The last dogfight

There I was, down at Piper, familiarizing myself with the archives. I’ve been doing a little volunteer work down there, trying to help out a bit, and I’m learning where everything goes. Stacey, one of the employees, made a comment to me, mentioning that she could recall hearing that the last dogfight of World War II was done in a Piper airplane.

I’m always interested in things like that: cool stories with some connection to Lock Haven. I sort of mentally filed it away to be looked into later. And then, 10 minutes afterward, I was going through one of the file drawers in the archives and I found the file: “The Last Dogfight.”

Well, now that I had the whole file, there was no way I could pass that up, especially with the Fly-In coming up next week. I’ll be down at Piper volunteering, so come and visit me!

According to the “L-4 Grasshopper Wing Newsletter” from the fall of 1994 by Wayman Dunlap, it happened in late April of 1945, toward the close of World War II. Two soldiers in the 71st Armored Field Artillery Battalion, Lieutenant Duane Francies and his co-pilot Lieutenant William Martin, were flying over Germany, watching below as huge lines of German refugees went to surrender to the Americans before the Russian military could take them prisoner. The two men were in a Piper L-4, the military version of the J-3 Cub, Piper’s most well-known plane.

They spotted an enemy plane trying to escape, flying toward the east, in the direction of Berlin. It was a German Fieseler Storch, a plane invented for the purpose of messing with my spell-checker. Also for observation during the war. And the L-4 was also an observational plane, created for gathering information only. It had no weapons on it; the main mission of that particular plane was to observe the enemy and then radio down to the ground crews. Once the enemy was sighted, or the L-4 was fired upon from the ground, it would climb to at least 1,500 feet and direct artillery from the ground units onto the enemy.

They hadn’t planned on getting into any kind of dogfight that day, either. Their mission had been to look out for German soldiers on motorcycles, and then fire at them with their standard-issue .45s.

“We had shot several times at motorcyclists, and gotten a couple,” Francies said in the newsletter interview. “Or at least they wrecked their bikes and went flying. We never hung around to see what happened.”

If the .45s were good enough for motorcycles, they’d work on another airplane, too, reasoned the pilots.

“Let’s get him,” Francies shouted.

They opened their windows – a more complicated process on a plane than in a car – and began firing at the enemy plane, going through at least two clips each. (For those of us who are bad at math, “two clips” translates roughly into “more bullets than you’d ever want fired in your direction.”)

They hit the fuel tank on the Storch, put a bullet into the co-pilot’s foot, and broke the windshield on the Storch. Francies said, “We put two slugs into the windshield and it collapsed inward and cut the pilot superficially a couple of times in the face.”

The German plane was trying to outmaneuver the L-4, but couldn’t, and wound up spiraling down into a pasture. It dug a wing into the ground and flipped, cartwheeling into a field of beets.

The pilot ran and hid behind a pile of harvested beets, but the Americans took both the pilot and co-pilot prisoner. Both of the enemy soldiers were talking, but since it was in German, they weren’t exactly getting their point across. Francies and Martin took the Germans to a nearby tanker crew and turned them over. And that was how the final dogfight of World War II ended – with a Piper plane.

Francies had taken the pilot’s wings from his tunic and gathered up a large German flag from the Storch. He kept them both. He got a small mention in “Stars And Stripes” magazine, and in 1966 was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for the fight.

As for the Germans, they had the dubious honor of being shot down in the last dogfight of World War II – by an unarmed plane. And as for me I’m thrilled to know that plane was made in my city.

Lou Bernard is a Lock Haven resident with a keen interest in the history of this area. He is adult services coordinator at Ross Library and may be reached at ross13@rosslibrary.org or 570-748-3321

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