World War II veteran fought with his mind, not with a weapon

"Barnard H. “Barney” Bissinger is a World War II veteran, but the weapon he used was not a rifle but a sliderule and a trained mind.

Bissinger was part of a near-mythical group of warriors in China called The Flying Tigers. The group is most famous for the exploits of its fewer than 100 P-40 fighter planes and pilots, but Bissinger’s work was in the rarefied atmosphere of mathematics.
The original Flying Tigers, formally named the American Volunteer Group, were technically an arm of the Chinese Air Force, but consisted of volunteer pilots recruited from the U.S. military.

Bissinger, now 91, was one of a band of nine academics brought in as volunteers to work behind the scenes about a year after the AVG was absorbed into the U.S. Army Air Force in July of 1942.

He spent a lot of his time calculating how best to get supplies over the lofty Himalayas mountain chain from India to their tiny base of Hunming in western China. “A lot of it was about gasoline,” Bissinger said. “All our gas had to be flown in over the “hump.” ... By the time we got the gasoline ... its cost to us was between $30 and $40 per gallon. Gas was like gold.”

Bissinger also analyzed bombing accuracy and developed cruise control procedures for aircraft, with the target of squeezing every drop of gas for all it was worth."

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World War II veteran fought with his mind, not with a weapon | Breaking Midstate News with The Patriot-News -