"Wild" Bill Kelso (born in 1911) was an American pilot who was capture by the Japanese in the early days of World War II.
Biography[]
Kelso was born in San Francisco in 1911, the son of a Catholic Irish-Albanian family. In 1940, he joined the US Air Force. On 13 December 1941, Kelso flew from San Francisco because he supposedly saw a squad of Zeros in the skies of the Bay. He followed the Japs to Death Valley, where he landed his Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter near a roadside store and gas station, which he accidentally blew up while refueling.
Later that evening, Kelso arrived to Los Angeles with his communication radio broken, which caused him to be mistaken as a Japanese Zero; this started the Battle of Los Angeles. Kelso pursued another plane wich was driven by another US Army officer Loomis Birkhead and General Joseph Stillwell's secretary Donna Stratton. Kelso chased their plane and shot it down, causing it to crash into the La Brea Tar Pits. He then spotted a submarine near the amusement park, but before he can return to attack, his plane was shot down by a patrol mistaking it for an enemy plane.
On Hollywood Boulevard, Kelso crash-landed his plane on the street, informed a group of soldiers about the submarine, and then he stole a Harley-Davidson sidecar motorcycle after informing general Stillwell. Kelso drove off the pier with the motorcycle. He swam to the submarine, where he was captured by the Japanese; undaunted, he declared, "Turn this tub around! You're takin' me to Tokyo!". He was rescued in 1945 from a Japanese POW camp.