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December 28, 1954

Dear General Davis:

My congratulations on your promotion are belated, but nethertheless sincerely meant. I did not see the announcement in the papers but was told about it later. You certainly earned your right to wear the stars. May I say that nothing would give me greater pleasure than to serve under you again.

As you probably heard, Willie Williams (A-3, 4th FIW) and I were held at Fuchu for a month trying to get out. I got back to the ZI one day before my years was up, however - so I have no complaints. If I had known this, though, I could have taken advantage of a friendship with Col Williams and Lt Col McNulty of the 315th TCW and made some good trips throughout the Far East.

I have been corresponding with Lt Daily, my assistant ops officer, so am abreast of the changes in the 4th and 51st wings. I sure hated to see them change the designation of the 39th while some of the older heads were still in it. May I express my thanks for your fixing me up with a Commendation Ribbon. I deeply appreciate it.

I arrived at George in the middle of July and started work as the Wing D.O. We've been flat on our ---s since then for lack of flyable aircraft during the conversion to F-100 and even more so since they have been grounded. Col Laven is organizing a group under the wing with F-86Hs as interim aircraft and they look much better to me than the F-100s. If our units has that plane during combat with slats on it -- man - the advantage we could have had!!

Everything here points to the fact that we are training individuals in 9AF instead of units (they lose over a 1000 men a month to quotas) and it is getting to be highly irritating. Even our flying operations is more likely a flying club than a military unit.

Do you have knowledge of any vacancies for training the JAF? I believe that much of our future will depend on them and the Germans, especially since France is resisting putting the sinews in the alliance which would give it meaning. I'm ready to go back overseas where training [[underlined]]units[[underlined]] is a primary function with a minimum of outside detractions. I should like a job, as I stated, training the JAF units