Army & Navy: Photo Pop

“Pop” Polifka was grounded. “He fought like a stuck pig to dice Cassino,” said an officer on Lieut. General Ira Eaker’s staff in Italy, “but the General just wouldn’t let him go on another mission.”

Pop, who is 33-year-old Colonel Karl L. Polifka, had been “dicing” (mapping territory by aerial photography) for years, had flown 125 missions over enemy-held territory, both German and Jap. Eaker figured Pop was too valuable to lose, thought he had better ground him before Pop’s luck ran out.

High and Hot. It was seven years ago that Pop, whose mother was a Russian, whose father was a Czech, quit the construction business in Oregon to become a Regular Army Air Corpsman and specialize in photo work. As a captain in 1942 he went to Australia, commanded the first P-38 squadron to be used in his kind of work. The P-38s then had more bugs in them than a doughboy’s blanket. The high, hot flying of recon work burned them up! Some of Pop’s Lightnings exploded in midair.

Pop improvised with bombers. In April he and his Liberator crew spotted an enemy fleet gathering in Rabaul harbor, gave a warning that enabled the U.S. Navy to intercept and smash the Japs’ task forces in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

He was transferred to Europe. Over jagged, mountainous terrain, Pop and his boys sometimes hurtled only 300 ft. above the ground, sometimes hurtled through the stratosphere, uncovering enemy secrets, with their lenses mapping Italy from the toe up. One of his pilots made six low-level missions through enemy ack-ack around Mt. Cairo, finally got the pictures the Allied commanders needed before they began their attack. Pop himself did much of the photo work on the Anzio beachhead.

A Million a Week. The work is no picnic. The improved P-38s which Pop’s boys fly are unarmed; guns and ammunition slow them up too much. Photo recon pilots have to depend on speed and cunning to escape.

For young pilots who think they would rather fly in combat Pop has a philosophic and persuasive argument: “The average fighter pilot, if he’s lucky, knocks down ten enemy planes before his flying career is over. The average P.R. pilot at the end of 50 missions will have photographed 1,000 targets, which is a hell of a lot more important.”

Among Pop’s pilots was the French flyer-novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Flight to Arras), a veteran of 13,000 flying hours. The physical strain of stratosphere flying finally proved too much for 44-year-old Saint-Exupéry. He tried gamely to keep on but finally had to give it up. It is a young man’s racket.

Now Pop has to give it up too, although he is by no means at the end of his trail. In Italy Pop Polifka still bosses Allied air reconnaissance—but from the ground, not from a P-38.