"Stas" wrote:

Bill Thompson wrote:

My Dad served in Alaska during the war (he drove a
mail truck along the AlCan Highway for APO 985).
From what he said, I doubt that a Soviet pilot would have
had the time for a romance. Russian pilots evidently had
orders to get home as fast as they could; Dad saw a few
P-39s crash on take-off, and heard from American ground
crew that their pilots sometimes ignored instructions to
warm up the engines in cold weather.

Bill, was it in town of Ferbencs (spelling?)?

Fairbanks.

I read that Russian
pilots were stationed there, but not allowed to go into the town
alone, only in groups. And had problems with breaking this order.

Can I find more stories, like memories, facts, documents, about that
episode of the war on Internet?

I did a Google search for "Alsib" (Alaskan-Siberian Route) and came
up with 1500 hits. Some of them a

http://www.malmstrom.af.mil/library/...romhistory.asp

http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/fac...et.asp?id=1668

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/a...krev/hays.html

(book review: "The Alaska-Siberia Connection: The WW II Air Route"
by Otis Hays, Jr.)

http://777avg.com/unithistory/

(American volunteer pilots fighting in the USSR)

http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/aviation/lad.htm

http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/englis.../p39/index.htm

(P-39 recovered from a Siberian lake)

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/VII/AAF-VII-6.html

http://www.veteranstoday.com/article671.html

(A pilot's experiences, including the Alaska-Siberia flights)

http://lyceum.istu.edu/alsib/

(A Russian site, in English)

http://www.mtgrea.ang.af.mil/history.html

(Gore Field, Montana--starting point of the AlSib route)

http://www.rossica.org/Samovar/viewthread.php?tid=176

(Russian units on the AlSib route)

http://fairbanks-alaska.com/eielson.htm

(another base on the route)

http://www.aviation.ru/articles/land-lease.html

(information on types of planes which flew the AlSib route)

http://kingcobra.quickseek.com/

(US/USSR cooperation in flight-testing the P-63)

What else your Dad told you interesting from that time?

For the most part, he wished that something interesting had
happened while he was there. He was sent to Alaska in the
fall of 1942, and his Army Post Office unit was a rear-area
service. (They were issued Springfield 1903 rifles; these were
confiscated after someone got bored and shot at a passing train.)
At one point his unit was evacuated; it wasn't until fifty years
later that he learned it was because of a false alarm over a
threatened Japanese invasion. His rank was T/5 (Technical
Corporal) and nobody explained anything to him.

I scanned his photo album last year. His parents sent him a
some clippings from his hometown newspaper, including a few
pictures from the Alaska-Siberia route. They're large but I'll
post them.

--Bill Thompson