Not much on his tour in Iwo Jima, but the beer story is pretty cool
FP: Then you went to Iwo Jima?
MRR: I was sent to Iwo Jima, by way of Hawaii: Pearl Harbor. On Iwo Jima I first flew P-51 Mustangs. Iwo Jima was halfway between Guam and Tokyo, 750 miles each way. We were initially sent there to fly escort for the B-29s, but the Japs just about gave up on any fighter intrusion. I remember one time they were up there, and we engaged them, but they didn't do any damage. Some of us shot down some of the Jap Zeros, as they called them. Then in the end they didn't send any fighters up, and we would do strafing missions. We would go up there to Tokyo on our wing tanks and then drop the wing tanks and fly back on our internal tanks.
FP: You had some hazardous beer runs?
MRR: Beer came in 36-bottle cases, and there was no refrigeration on Iwo Jima, not to our knowledge. What we would do, we would unload the bullets out of the wings and fill them with beer and then go up to 20,000 feet and fly around for about 20 minutes and come back down and it would be ice cold.
