The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (6 page)

On June 21, 1943, Charles Watry was officially appointed an aviation cadet. He moved to preflight training at a training base near Santa Ana, California, while other trainees went to the bombardier/navigator preflight squadrons. The appointment to the rank of aviation cadet put him on a par with West Point cadets and Annapolis midshipmen. He was paid $50 a month, plus $25 for flight pay. He got to trade in his buck private’s uniform for an officer’s uniform, without the commission stripe on the lower sleeves. He attended classes in navigation, mechanics, and the rest, and did the preflight training. When he finished it was off to primary school. Of the original 4,931 members of his class, 787 had washed out.13 Walter Malone Baskin was born on Christmas Day 1924 on a cotton farm near Greenville, Mississippi. When he was in his teenage years, an air show came to Greenville. Watching the graceful and colorful swooping and rolling stunts of the World War I airplanes, he was hooked. At the time of Pearl Harbor he was a premed student at Millsaps College in Jackson. He almost immediately signed with the Air Corps to be an air cadet. Like McGovern, he had to wait until February 1943 before the Army Air Forces called him into active duty. He did his primary training at Maxwell Field, Alabama.

Baskin described his day in a March 6 letter to his parents: “They really put it to us. We get up at 5:00 A.M.- shave, make-up bed, clean room and go to formation. Then we fall out and come back to the room and polish brass & shoes, and tidy up the room then fall back out to chow formation. After breakfast is lecture and then drill, then exercise, then more drill then dinner, then immediately after dinner we go to classes until 4:30 P.M. then drill ‘til supper. After supper we have two hours to study - but we have no time to study - every night we must wash our tie, wash our belt, polish all our brass and bathe.

We polish our shoes at least 10 times a day with polish.”14

Baskin trained on an AT-10. “It really flies easy,” he wrote his parents. “They don’t pay much attention to how you fly here, it’s procedure that must be perfect.” In October 1943, he did his first solo in the plane. “There are few things in the world that can compare with the feeling of accomplishment in making the first solo” was a saying of the air cadets. Baskin was training, or marching, or taking classes from 7:00 A.M. until after midnight: “There has not been a minute we could call our own.” Among many other things, he went into a chamber to prepare for flying at high altitude. Oxygen was pumped out of his chamber and he went “up” to 30,000 feet, where he stayed for an hour. He took off his mask so he could “get the feel” of oxygen deprivation. “That would certainly be a pleasant way to die,” he told his parents. “You just drift off and feel fine all the time.” Then up to a simulated 38,000 feet for fifteen minutes, to experience the “bends,” which felt to him like a severe case of rheumatism. Some men were temporarily blind and dizzy. But all recovered.15 John G. Smith was born in 1923 in Chicago. As a boy, model airplanes were his hobby. By the time of Pearl Harbor, he was on the track team at Notre Dame, but he immediately signed up to be an air cadet. He was called to duty in February 1943 and was lucky - he was sent to Miami Beach for his basic, where he and the other trainees had their barracks in a resort hotel on the beach that the Army Air Forces had commandeered. Smith drilled, did KP and guard duty. He walked his post on guard carrying a wooden rifle. He remembered the first of many warnings he received on VD. After a movie with graphic lessons about what could happen, a chaplain warned the trainees at length about the temptations that would come, then concluded by saying he firmly believed that “no one here would give way to the weakness of the flesh.” When he finished, the flight surgeon got up to say, “The padre is right, and I’m sure all you fellows will stay away from the girls, but . . .” and proceeded to give his VD lecture.  Following basic, Smith and his class went north to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for the College Training Detachment program. They were billeted in a women’s dormitory, four to a room. Smith felt that this was just marking time because the Army “had called up more people than the system could accommodate and had to find a place to put them.” The high point in his CTD program came when he received the designation “aviation student.” It did not mean anything in terms of rank but it was an assurance that if they did not wash out “we would eventually see an airplane.” In May 1943, it was off to Nashville for classification. He remembered the psychologist’s questions. In one case, a married interviewee was asked how many times he “got” his wife on the first night. One, the man replied.

“What was the matter?” the psychologist asked, then added, “I got my wife six times.” The man blushed, thought, and replied, “But you see, sir, my wife was inexperienced.”

Smith survived the classification period and went to his preflight training school at Maxwell Field. He learned Morse code, aircraft identification, chemical warfare, the use of gas masks, and more. He and the other 1,000 men in his class marched everywhere in formation. Those marches, and the retreats while the flag was lowered, helped give the men a sense of solidarity. Smith especially responded to the march in review by the entire class, with its saber salute and “eyes right.” He never tired of it: “There was drama and a feeling of common endeavor.”16 In late 1943 C. W. Cooper was executive officer in a company of the 2nd Filipino Infantry. The Army was building up teams of Filipinos to go back in the Philippines, so it would take a few men from the division almost daily to form up the teams. The division was shrinking in size, until it seemed it would almost disappear. Lieutenant Cooper wanted to get into the war, not train young men but lead them in combat. The AAF, by that time, was losing officers as casualties or POWs at an unsustainable rate in the Eighth Air Force stationed in England and flying missions over Germany. It badly needed replacements as pilots, bombardiers, and navigators. At Christmas 1943, Cooper saw a notice on the bulletin board asking for volunteers. He signed up at once.  Cooper was able to skip basic and go directly to classification at Santa Ana. He scored well and qualified for pilot, bombardier, or navigator. For his preference he put down navigator - he had a civil engineering education at Texas A&M and figured that was the best-related area for him to be in when the war ended. He got his wish and was sent off to San Marcos, Texas, for navigation school.17 Roland Pepin got through the basic class in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then it was off to Michigan State College for primary. More marching, more tests, more classification, but he also learned to fly in a Piper Cub airplane. On his first flight he felt a mixture of excitement and fear before taking off, but “the separation of wheels from the ground was the most thrilling moment of my then young life.” He flew three hours once a week. The men had to solo to pass and about a fourth washed out. Pepin passed. After classification was complete, he chose navigation school, because at that time, late 1943, there was a three-month delay for those going to flight school while those going to become navigators got started immediately. He wanted to get started as soon as possible. He also feared the war could be over if he didn’t get into it right away.18 Cooper, Pepin, and all other navigator trainees learned how to figure out where they were from dead reckoning (assuming position from the readings of the aircraft instruments), visual (plotting the position from viewing landmarks), loran (plotting the position from long-range radio signals), and celestial (finding the position from observation of the sun, moon, planets, and stars).  Celestial was the most difficult to learn but also the most reliable, especially over oceans.

There was lots of ground school, but lots of flying in AT-7s as well. The trainee made twenty navigation flights, logging 100 or more flying hours.  Training planes carried three students and an instructor, plus a pilot. Day and night flights were flown. There were point-to-point courses, problem missions such as rendezvous, search, and patrol flights. There were more than 50,000 students with a peak monthly output of more than 2,500.19 Cooper recalled being in the air when the instructor would say, “Put your head down on your desk.” After an hour, he’d say, “Okay, find where we are and get us back to base.” Cooper shot a fix on Polaris with his sextant to get the latitude of the plane, then used a radio beam and the radio compass, which would point toward the station. But generally he used dead reckoning. The plane had a device that gave him the wind drift. Over the intercom he would tell the pilot to make a correction, flying just off the straight line (called “crabbing into the wind”) to where he wanted to go because of the effect of the wind. There were accidents. Cooper recalled that the man everyone thought of as the ace navigator in his class took his plane into a mountainside.  In May 1944, the Army Air Forces issued a brand-new sextant called the B-12.  Celestial navigational errors diminished considerably with its introduction. It was so secret that the AAF issued each navigator his own sextant, to be guarded and kept in his possession always. In addition the navigators were issued celestial navigational tables - forty books - that covered the world.  Pepin graduated on July 31, 1944, a little more than a year from his induction.  He had earned his navigator’s wings and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the AAF. Cooper was about to be graduated when his superiors called him in and said, “You’ve been getting sick on some of your flights.” Cooper admitted it. They asked, “Are you sure you want to continue flying?” “Sure,” was Cooper’s reply. In October 1944, he got his navigator’s wings.20 Donald P. Kay was nineteen years old and a student at Penn State College on November 10, 1942, when he enlisted in the AAF to become an air cadet. He had wanted to be a flier all his life. In early February 1943, he joined John G.  Smith in Miami Beach, lived in a hotel, ate his meals in the hotel dining room, and got through basic. Then off to CTD at North Carolina State College in Raleigh, then to Nashville to the classification center. He qualified and picked pilot as his preference. His primary pilot training was at Ocala, Florida, in a PT-17 Stearman. He managed to solo, but after four check rides he washed out. He still wanted to fly, so he said he would like to be a bombardier and was selected.21 First Kay went to aerial gunner school, a six-week course at Eagle Pass, Texas.  All bombardiers were trained to take the place of any gunner - waist, nose, tail, in the top or the belly turret - and also to serve as armament officer.  Then he went on to bombardier school. He did okay there until they began practicing at night. But he stuck to it, because “having washed out once, I didn’t want it to happen again.” He graduated and got his commission.22 Richard Rogers wanted to be a pilot, but as he put it, the AAF “had pilots out their ears. I don’t think any of us in my group made pilot training. They needed bombardiers and navigators.” He was sent to the bombardier-navigator school at San Angelo, Texas, where he took bombardier training, then gunnery school. Next came Biggs Field at El Paso. At least he got to fly - by August 1944 he had logged 252 hours in the air.23 Robert “Ken” Barmore, born December 27, 1921, was in junior college in Newark, New Jersey, in 1941, taking courses in meteorology and navigation and aircraft engines. In 1942 he signed up with the AAF, but before his first written exam “I was scared silly.” He should have been - he failed. A month later he had a second chance, and he “wanted to get into aviation so badly” he studied. He passed. He was called up in February 1943 and sent to Nashville for classification. He had never been out of New Jersey in his life, so the twenty-four-hour train ride “was kind of a traumatic experience.” From Nashville he went to Maxwell Field for preflight school, where he had his first ride in an airplane. Then to South Carolina for primary flight school.  Barmore began to fly. “My instructor wasn’t very good, actually.” Three of his five students washed out. “His idea was to go as high as the PT could go and get it upside down and then glide. You’d be hanging there with your feet up in your face. Boy I hated it. I knew right then and there I was never going to be a fighter pilot. I knew that.” He passed his twenty- and forty-hour check and went on to Shaw Field, Sumter, South Carolina, for basic flight school.24 Robert Hammer was a sergeant in the Army. He volunteered for the AAF and went to the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center. When he lined up for the first inspection, the St. Louis Cardinal baseball star Enos Slaughter was in front of him. Slaughter was asked why he had signed up for the AAF. “I thought I might get to stay in the States and play baseball,” he replied - and he got what he wanted. Hammer’s answer to the question was, “To get out of the States and do some fighting.” He too got what he wanted. He went through the training, then into the air - his first time ever - in a PT-19. He had eight hours in the air and didn’t like being a pilot. He fouled up his landing patterns and was washed out.

The base commanding officer called Hammer in and asked if he would like to be a navigator. Hammer asked how long the training time would be. The CO told him a few months. He asked what else was available. Bombardier - which meant an additional few months. Anything else? Radio operator - only a six-week course.  Hammer picked radio operator. He was sent to radio school at Scott Field, Illinois, just east of St. Louis. There he learned the parts of a transmitter and receiver, made a receiver, and became proficient in Morse code.25 Nineteen-year-old Howard Goodner, like Hammer, didn’t make it to pilot training, so he also selected radio. He went to school in Illinois, where he learned electronics, mechanics, code, and the workings of a radio. He mastered the internal electronics of the radio, built generators, studied vacuum tubes and amplifiers, transformers and transmitters. He learned to disassemble a set, then reassemble it blindfolded. Morse code was hard for him, as it is for most people. “The sounds come through earphones,” he wrote his parents, “and they sound like a swarm of bees.”

Goodner became so proficient that the Army Air Forces offered him a posting as a radio instructor. He was tempted, as it meant no one shooting at you and you got to stay in the States. “I would take the job,” he told his mother, “but you stay here too long.” So he declined, explaining, “I guess I just didn’t want it. I couldn’t take it and stay here while Tom [his brother] is across and all the others too. I guess if you were a boy you would look at it the same as I.” She didn’t.