Alpine residents Bill and Betty Ridenour spent Sept. 2 flying in a vintage WWII C-53 airplane, the Doll during an event hosted by the Commemorative Air Force Inland Empire Wing to commemorate V-J Day.
“This is a flight to celebrate the end of World War II in Japan. It’s been 75 years but I was there at the time. They had dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki while we were getting ready to go in for the invasion on the fourteenth of August. Then, the Japanese decided to surrender,” Ridenour said.
Historically, Emperor of Japan Michinomiya Hirohito surrendered on Aug. 15 but did not formally sign a peace treaty until September 2, 1945.
The 97-year old veteran said his crew was the first one to arrive in Tokyo bay as the 1945 peace treaty was signed.
The Commemorative Air Force Inland Empire Wing organized last week’s flight around multiple destinations throughout Southern California including the Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles and the Queen Mary Cruise ship, used to transport troops during World War II.
Ridenour said the Doll was just one aircraft used for the event and that the flight was not in the original 75th anniversary celebration plans.
“As WWII veterans, we were planning on a trip for Hawaii, going to the Missouri which is the battleship where they signed the peace treaty in Tokyo Bay, then the virus hit and they had to put out the restrictions.
The Wing came up with this instead,” Ridenour said.
He said the entire trip was almost exactly eleven hours long with stops for food along the way at several landing points.
“My wife, Betty is one of the original Rosie the Riveters from 1941 so they asked us both to take this flight. We have freedom today because the women went to work while we men were all getting shipped off to war.
It was a great thing, all of us coming together in the 1940s,” Ridenour said.
After the event, Ridenour said it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“It was quite an experience, really it wvs very good. We left here and were taken up to Riverside where there were about seven other World War II Veterans. We had a short meeting, got to know each other, then went out and got on a two-motor plane that the paratroopers jumped out of in the 1940s, the same kind they used on June 6, 1945 in Normandy,” Ridenour said.
He described the plane as noisy, with metal seats along the sides and a hollow center where “the paratroopers used to walk down the middle of the plane. They’d clamp onto the rope of their parachute, then walk to the back door and jump out,” Ridenour said.
He said the Veteran advocates who accompanied them on the flight are active and that he and his wife enjoyed telling them their stories of how they grew up, where they took their training, how things were 75 years ago.
Ridenour said it was a one-time experience to fly in the historic planes at his age.
“I’m so thankful they asked us to go.”
