Here is a high-res scan of the actual photo that my father, Fred V. Brandt, carried in his wallet for 54 years. Click on the thumbnail to download the 2 MB file.
The thumbnail is only slightly smaller than the actual photo. My father had a very inexpensive camera, even for 1945. Here is the actual size of the photo:
The photo is worn from being carried in Dad's wallet, and from several trips through the washing machine. From the time I showed an interest in his wartime experiences, probably about 1963, Dad told me the P-47 in that photo was his airplane. He had better P-47 photos, like the one of 44-32749 L3-N which he said was George Chin's airplane:
But he carried the one of L3-O because that was his plane. As I was growing up, I built several models of 44-32749 because that was the photo Dad let me keep and photo-copy, and because I could read the serial number on that photo. I was frustrated trying to read the serial on L3-O. You can see why. For some reason, I never noticed the OD vertical and horizontal tails clearly visible in the photo.
Dad died in 1999, two days after his 76th birthday. I very much regret that I didn't notice the book by Roger Freeman and the model by Hasegawa that came out in 1996 and featured L3-O, his P-47. I would have loved to see his reaction at so much attention being heaped on his plane. As far as I know, he never knew about the model or the book before he died. My first awareness of the attention L3-O was getting came when the Post Office issued a stamp with a P-47 on it in 2005. I bought lots of sheets of stamps and even the special framed art print and had them for several years before it registered with me that the P-47 on the stamp could actually be Dad's plane. The glossy black empennage on the plane in the painting just didn't seem right. (It wasn't! The actual tail was olive drab and gray, replacement parts from older P-47s.) When my brother found the photo, still in Dad's wallet in a box of his things, and I saw the olive drab tail, I was convinced. Since then, I have made a project of documenting every bit of information I can find about the 406th Fighter Group in general and the 512th Fighter Squadron in particular. This website is part of that project. Of all the hundreds of photos I have uncovered, I have never seen another 512th FS P-47, or even another 406th FG P-47 that was bare metal with the entire empennage olive drab and gray. I am positive that "Angie" and Dad's L3-O are the same plane.