James T J Fitzgerald Jr
Military
Curtis Shepard collection
Object Number - UPL 75340 - Picture James T Fitzgerald
James Fitzgerald served as a pilot with the 78th Fighter Group. He was taken as a Prisoner of War (POW) when his P-47 (serial number 43-25536) crashed near Brias.
Connections
See how this entry relates to other items in the archive by exploring the connections below.
Units served with
- Unit Hierarchy: Squadron
- Air Force: Eighth Air Force
- Type Category: Fighter
Aircraft
- Aircraft Type: P-47 Thunderbolt
- Unit: 78th Fighter Group 82nd Fighter Squadron
Places
- Site type: Airfield
- Known as: "Duckpond"
Events
| Event | Location | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Other Prisoner of War (POW) |
8 August 1944 - 10 August 1945 | ||
|
Based 2nd man to break the sound barrier |
24 February 1948 - 24 February 1948 | Lt. James "Jim" Thomas Fitzgerald, Jr., a veteran of the 82nd fighter Squadron was the second man to break the sound barrier behind Chuck Yeager. He achieved his historic flight on February 24, 1948. In June 1946, Jim was selected to take a P-80 "Shooting Star" (an area of testing he had been involved with) to the Birmingham (Alabama) Air Carnival, one of the first big post-war air shows. While there, he was introduced to the President of the TACA Air-Ways of South America, who was in turn introduced to his secretary, Miss Lillian Odette Pankey, of Mobile, Alabama. A few weekends later Jim flew to Mobile and told this pretty redhead that she was the girl he was going to marry. After a year of Dayton-to-Mobile flying, he persuaded her that he was right, and on July 4, 1947, they were married. On May 15th of the next year, their son, James Thomas Fitz-Gerald, III, was born. At the time of their marriage Jim was assigned to the Air Material Command at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, but stationed temporarily at Air Tactical School at Tyndal Field in Panama City, Florida, restlessly counting the days until he could return to Wright Field, where research on a new rocket plane, the Bell X-1 was going forward. Shortly after his return to Wright Field in the fall, he was assigned to that project and transferred to Muroc Base in California. Here, in October 1947, the tiny X-1 made history when it pierced the sonic "wall", flying faster than the speed of sound. Jim described the X-1 as "the most thrilling thing I ever witnessed in flight." Loving his flying as he did, Jim didn't seem to consider it at all unusual that he should be the one to follow Captain Chuck Yeager in flying higher and faster than anyone else in the world. It remained for Yeager to be the one to tell Jim's family that Jim had exceeded the speed of sound, not after several attempts but on his first flight in the X-1. In June 1948, Jim was once again awarded the Air Medal by the Secretary of the Air Symington. | |
|
Based |
8 August 1944 |
Revisions
ww2pow.info website: http://www.ww2pow.info/index.php?page=directory&rec=64701
Combined three entries for James T Fitzgerald into a single entry. This entry now includes information from the following sources:
Ted Damick, VIII Fighter Command pilots list
MACR 7450 / Paul Andrews, Project Bits and Pieces, 8th Air Force Roll of Honor database
This entry originally had Fitzgerald listed as KIA but the Little Friends website agrees with the sources in the other entries for Fitzgerald, that he was in fact taken as a Prisoner of War: http://www.littlefriends.co.uk/78thfg.php?action=list_records&sort_orde…
Drawn from the records of the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, Savannah, Georgia / MACR 7450
