As the fuel gauge neared empty aboard his C-46 Commando cargo plane over the Pacific in 1944, 2nd Lt. Donald Stinson thought about how a famous flier, Eddie Rickenbacker, had helped six other men stay alive while drifting in a vast ocean.

A seagull that landed on top of Rickenbacker’s head soon became lunch, a spot of luck Stinson wasn’t sure would break his way after imagining his C-46 — drained of gas by a bad headwind en route to Hawaii — going down in the middle of nowhere.

“So thinking about having to ditch our airplane and get into a life raft, I decided to eat my sandwich,” he wrote in a self-published book, “The WWII History of Donald Stinson — A C-46 Pilot in the Pacific.”

“I looked over at my pilot. He was sweating profusely,” wrote Stinson, a retired San Antonio school district cafeteria director. “He looked over at me and became unglued, cussing like a sailor. ‘How can you eat when we are about to ditch?!’ I should have offered him the other half of my sandwich.”

On Saturday, after receiving six decorations earned during World War II but never presented to him, Stinson chuckled at the memory, recalling over bites of — yes — a sandwich, one mostly eaten, “I’ve never seen anybody perspire like he did.”

Stinson, 93, received an Army Commendation Medal, American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with four bronze service stars, the World War II Victory Medal, the Philippine Liberation Ribbon with one bronze star and the Honorable Service Lapel Button.

The ceremony was full of light moments as U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, read each award while an aide presented them to Stinson, who is most proud of his later role supervising the implementation of the free federal lunch program in the San Antonio school district.

The year was 1967, and the action so controversial only one food supervisor supported it.

“Four of the five supervisors that were against the new lunch program retired,” Stinson wrote in the book. “One even said she was going to run for the school board so she could fire me.”

Donald David Stinson joined the Army Air Forces after talking with a couple of servicemen at the Double Dip, an Amarillo restaurant started by his dad during the Depression. He did his basic training in San Antonio and finished flight instruction at Ellington Field in Houston before joining the 7th Combat Cargo Squadron.

His near disastrous flight to Hawaii came in September 1944, but it had a happy ending when the crew found a remote airfield on Maui. They rested three days before heading to Australia, making a series of island hops along the way.

At Fanafuti, a Pacific atoll, they saw evidence of a bitter war — damaged American and Japanese planes, some of them sticking out of the water adjacent to the airstrip. The job involved flying men and materiel ever closer to Japan’s home islands, but the supplies weren’t always grenades and bullets.

On one run near New Guinea, where Japanese troops still occupied territory, they were part of a group of planes charged with bringing 20,000 cases of beer to thirsty Marines and GIs. Upon landing, a loading officer scoured the plane after checking through the manifest and realizing he was six cases short.

“We told him they must have miscounted at Finchhaven,” Stinson wrote, referring to his base in Australia.

The crew had hidden the extra cases of beer in a compartment below the cockpit.

The crew later found an idled C-47, decided it was airworthy and painted it green. They called it the “Green Hornet” and crews often made beer runs in it to Australia, but soon an agitated 5th Air Force got wind of its existence and sent out a memo.

“It instructed everyone to ‘report immediately any information you have about this unauthorized plane seen flying around,’” Stinson wrote.

There were sober moments, too.

Sleeping on cots underneath the wings of their plane one night on Okinawa, the crew was awakened by the sound of an enemy plane. It was a kamikaze and took aim at one of the aircraft on the ground, but fell 300 to 400 feet from their C-46. Stinson and his men eyed the dead pilot and then noticed that his bomb hadn’t detonated.

They quickly walked away.

Later, Stinson’s crew was sent to fly Army nurses out of the Philippines after special forces rescued them. The women, like other Japanese prisoners, were malnourished.

“In fact, he said that was one of his war memories he was most proud of,” said his daughter, Kim Barker, 61, of San Antonio.

“They were in pretty bad shape.”

On the taxiway before dawn with wounded soldiers in his cargo hold, Stinson was told to wait for a P-61 Black Widow, a new twin-engine fighter, to take off. An oil tanker rolled onto the runway just as the plane started to take off.

“The sky,” he wrote, “lit up with a big ball of fire.”

There was the mission when one of the landing gear collapsed as they landed. The plane skidded off to the side of the runway, but Stinson — the command pilot —pressed on the right brake and one of the rudders to keep it from careening out of control.

The plane caught fire.

“And so I hollered, ‘Get out!’” Stinson said, laughing as he remembered the co-pilot jumping out of one of the cockpit windows and rushing past a spinning prop.

“They took us to the hospital and gave us a shot of whiskey,” he smiled.

sigc@express-news.net