My Life is the American Dream

Flight Journal, Dec 2004 by Cleaver, Thomas McKelvey

THE EXPLOITS OF FIGHTER PILOT SPIROS "STEVE" PISANOS

Born in 1919 in Athens, Greece, the third of six sons of a subway motorman, young Spiros grew up expecting he would) follow in his father's footsteps. At age 12, he met his destiny when he saw a biplane from the Greek Air Force fly over his neighborhood. "He came around and flew so low, I could see the pilot in the cockpit, and he waved at me. I said to myself right then, 'I'll be an aviator and nothing else!'" From that day forward, young Spiros would slip away from school and go to the airfield to watch the planes. "I'd sneak into the aerodrome to get close to the airplanes, and I once begged one of the pilots-an NCO I had met at the field-to take me up in an Avro 504; but boy, no luck!" Upon graduation from high school, he wanted to go to the Air Force Academy but lacked the qualifications. "I decided to leave Greece and go to America to fulfill my boyhood dream."

TOO POOR TO PAY FOR PASSAGE, Pisanos first attempted to stow away on the Italian liner Rex, but he was caught. At 18, he signed aboard a freighter as an assistant fireman. The ship departed Piraeus on March 25, 1938, bound for Baltimore, Maryland, with a stop in Oran, Algeria, to pick up a load of iron ore. He shoveled coal across the Atlantic. Arriving in Baltimore in mid-April, he jumped ship. Now an undocumented immigrant with $7 in his pocket and speaking no English, he caught the train to New York City, which he knew about from the movies back home. There, on arrival, he met two brothers from Cyprus as he left Penn Station. "Two days later I was working in a bakery.

"I knew I had to learn English before I could fly, so each day on the streetcar, I read the New York Post with the help of a Greek/English dictionary." Within six months, he felt ready to begin flight training at Floyd Bennett Field. A one-hour lesson cost $5; at the time, his pay was $15 a week. "After I soloed, I moved to New Jersey, where I found a better job and a cheaper flight school."

By 1941, Greece had fallen to the Nazis; Pisanos, with 170 hours in light planes, joined the RAF through the clayton Knight Committee in New York. After flight training in Glendale, California, and combat training in the UK, the newly-minted pilot officer was assigned to 268 Squadron RAF and flew several missions over Holland. Later on, he found himself in the 71 Eagle Squadron. He was soon flying missions in Spitfires across the English Channel and beginning to build a reputation as a levelheaded, reliable pilotan accolade he carried throughout his career.

By August 1942, it had been decided that the Eagles would join the USAAF. When his paperwork was being processed, the fact that he wasn't an American citizen became known. "The American ambassador learned that Congress had just passed a law that said if an immigrant joined the U.S. armed forces, he could become a citizen immediately." On May 3, 1943, Spiros Pisanos became the first immigrant to take advantage of that new law and was sworn in outside the U.S. The son of the poor Athens subway motorman was not only a pilot but also an American citizen and a commissioned officer by Act of Congress.

The three Eagle Squadrons, now the 4th Fighter Group, were soon equipped with the P-47 Thunderbolt, a fighter most of them disliked after the agile Spitfire. Not Pisanos. "I liked the P-47," he says. "It was big and powerful, and it had eight machine guns. If you put the sight on the other guy and held it there, you had him." He named his 334th FS-P-47D Miss Plainfield (a girl whom he never met, but she wrote letters to him). In late February 1944, the 4th FG transitioned into the P-51B Mustang; Pisanos was an element leader. At Debden, he was best friends and roommates with another former Eagle and a son of immigrants, Don Gentile.

March 5, 1944, dawned as the day the 4th might get a chance to show what the Mustang could do. Bad weather over the Continent had forced the cancellation of the first daylight mission to Berlin. But on March 5, they were briefed for a mission to Bordeaux-far beyond the previous range of Allied fighters that operated from England. The 4th, along with the new 357th FG (another P-5!-equipped unit in the 8th Air Force), would escort 200 bombers in a mission against the U-boat pens. The Luftwaffe rose to meet the challenge, and in the fierce air battles that swirled around the bomber formation, Pisanos downed two Messerschmitt Bf 109s.

Elated that he was now an ace, he returned to link up for the trip home but couldn't find any of the other Group members. Alone, south of Le Havre, he ran into trouble. "All of a sudden, I was surrounded by flak bursts, and then the engine quit." The Merlin had been hit by shrapnel. Pisanos had no choice but to bail out. "I tried to jump, but my parachute was caught on something in the cockpit. As I tried to get it loose, the plane went into a dive, and that put out the fire. Then I realized I was too low to jump and tried to get back into the cockpit to crash-land," but the parachute harness was so twisted that he couldn't climb in! "My only chance was to grab the stick and make as gentle a landing as I could," Pisanos explained. His last memory before the crash was lining up to set down in an open field. "When I came to, I was lying in the middle of the field, the plane was aflame at the other end, and my shoulder hurt like hell." As if that wasn't enough, he heard German voices and saw troops approaching the crashed Mustang.