All my tribulations in World War II derived, ultimately, from my resolve not to be a combat infantryman. In the mid-1930s, in the depths of the depression, when I was earning $15 for working a seventy-hour week in a grocery store in my native St. Louis, I gradually became aware that war clouds were gathering in Europe and sensed that a major war there might eventually involve the United States. If war came, I wanted to be in the air corps rather than in the infantry. Though only the aged recall it now, in the 1930s memories of World War I were still fresh among people in early middle age, and that conflict was still avidly discussed. Aviation had a lot of glamour in the 1930s, but slogging in muddy trenches under shellfire, vividly remembered from the Western Front and recounted endlessly, had absolutely none. I yearned to be a military pilot, but I lacked the required two years of college; so I lowered my sights and aspired to become an aircraft mechanic instead.
These sentiments assumed tangible form on a cold, sunny day in January 1939 when two friends and I climbed into a boxcar in a St. Louis freightyard and headed south. We hoped to get to Randolph Field, an air base near San Antonio. A couple of weeks later we enlisted there in the army air corps. Training was prosaic, and life as a KP and latrine orderly was dull. One day I tried out for the camp baseball team but got no response from the coach. Then I went over to the St. Louis Browns training camp in San Antonio for a tryout with the pros. This time those in charge showed some interest in me, but my first sergeant refused to give me time off to go back for a second session. Thus ended whatever chance I might have had to be enrolled one day in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
But, as gamblers know, neither good nor bad luck lasts forever. By the end of 1939 I was assigned to the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron, then stationed at Hamilton Field, California. Even better, I was sent to school for a six months course in aviation mechanics, from which I returned a staff sergeant.
It seems to me that draftees, who are usually reluctant soldiers at best, never have any idea of the esprit de corps that can exist in a first-class regular outfit composed of men who know what they are doing and like it. In the Twenty-first everybody—cooks, clerks, mechanics like myself, and pilots—took pride in what they did, got on well with the others, and never worried about doing more than someone else. No doubt this happy condition owed much to our commanding officer, Capt. William E. (Ed) Dyess, a splendid flyer and a man whom we all liked and respected.
For more than a year at Hamilton I worked on the latest U.S. fighter planes (P-40 Tomahawks) and other aircraft, assembling and disassembling them, inspecting the work of others, managing repair crews, and getting in some flying time. But despite the pleasant surroundings and the satisfaction one feels when doing something worthwhile, I grew restless and began to look for adventure. Once I volunteered for service as a civilian mechanic in Gen. Claire Chennault’s famed “Flying Tigers” in China, only to be turned down because I had applied after the quotas were filled. Then, on November 1, 1941, our outfit was sent to the Philippines.
Soon after the war began five weeks later, I was swallowed up in the battle for Bataan. Ironically, immediate needs compelled me to become an infantryman and to learn to fight with a rifle, precisely the fate I had taken such pains to avoid by joining the air corps.
Before the struggle for Bataan commenced, I lost all contact with my family. They did not know I was one of the thousands of Americans who surrendered after that struggle, or that I endured the Death March that followed. Fortunately, they were also unaware of the atrocities visited on me by the enemy, much less the savagery I witnessed as a prisoner which led me to escape and fight as a guerrilla until the American liberation forces returned to Luzon on January 9, 1945. The many hardships I endured were insignificant when compared to the anguish of my parents and sisters. They were left to wonder, day by day for three long years while I was listed as missing in action, whether I was dead or alive. It would be six and a half years before I would actually see any of them again.
Somewhere along the line my father, swayed by the opinions of his friends, decided that I was dead; but this my mother never accepted. She wrote to me repeatedly, disregarding each returned letter marked “Undeliverable.” She wrote to one government office after another, to the Red Cross, and to a fighter pilot in the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron, Maj. Samuel C. Grashio, following his escape from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. Finally, on November 24, 1944, my parents received an official War Department message informing them that I was alive and safe with guerrilla forces.
No matter how tough it was on me, it must have been worse for my folks. How much, I never realized until my own son Gregory spent two tours of combat in the air over Vietnam. Though he was never wounded, I imagined him aboard every American aircraft reported shot down. I wanted so badly to trade places with him because I realized it would be easier fighting than worrying.
To those today who have relatives or loved ones missing in action, maybe it would be best to assume as did my father and to proceed with your lives. If at some later date you are proved wrong, you will be forgiven as I forgave those who assumed I had been lost forever.
RAY C. HUNT