My Life is the American Dream

Flight Journal, Dec 2004 by Cleaver, Thomas McKelvey

"I managed to run into the woods before they spotted me," Pisanos relates. "I had no idea where I was or what I was going to do, when I burst through some bushes onto a little country lane, and there was a French farmer with a cart full of hay." The farmer motioned Pisanos to the cart, hid him and drove off before the German troops could arrive.

Pisanos was far from safe. "When we got to the farmhouse where the local Resistance was, they wouldn't believe I was an American because of my accent." This was not an unfounded fear, as the Germans often attempted to introduce a "ringer" into an escape network to capture those who assisted. "I lay in the barn for three days with my shoulder hurting so badly, I could barely move," says Pisanos. At last, the leader of the local group came to him and asked for the code word each Allied pilot was given so the Resistance could identify him with London. "An hour later, he came back, and everything was all smiles."

Pisanos was examined, and it was diagnosed that he had dislocated his shoulder. The Resistance hadn't any doctor they could trust. "A countess was in the group, and she had them dress me like a peasant. She took me to the airfield we had attacked, where she told the Germans how this stupid Greek peasant boy had fallen out of an apple tree and needed his shoulder fixed." Pisanos smiles as he tells the story of how he got his medical care. "My shoulder was fixed by a German civilian doctor!"

Pisanos ended up in Paris and then hoped he would be picked up by an RAF Lysander, near the coast. With the invasion coming, he tried three times to make the rendezvous. Among the many adventures he had with the Resistance, one night stands out: "I was with a very disagreeable RAF sergeant in a flat owned by a concert pianist who lived with his mistress. He assured us we'd be safe for the night, but I wasn't sure." When he was shown that the only hiding place was a portico outside the rear bedroom, 10 feet above the sidewalk, he lost all desire to sleep.

"About 11 o'clock, there was pounding on the door. We knew it was the Gestapo." The Germans searched but didn't find anyone. Outside, Pisanos and the wing commander had jumped from that portico to the next one. When the Gestapo pounded on the door of that flat, they made the leap to the next portico in line. "We did that all the way to the end," he relates, "and then there was no place to go; it was too far to jump down. The Germans were at the door. When a guy opened it, they arrested the fellow who was the informer who told them we were there!"

Pisanos witnessed the liberation of Paris that August, and then returned to Debden airfield in southern England. As an escapee, he had his choice of duty stations. On hearing that his friend Don Gentile was now a test pilot at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, he volunteered for the same duty.

"I got there in time to be best man at Don's wedding," Pisanos relates. While there, the dashing young Greek war hero was introduced to Sophie, a Greek-American girlfriend of Gentile's wife. He courted her on weekends because the new maintenance officer at the field left his convertible behind when he flew off to visit his wife, who lived with his family.