I flunked out of two colleges,” Robert Lee Scott Jr. admitted in his memoirs, though having “preemptively dropped out” would have been technically more accurate. “Then I did something few college failures do: returned to high school for the rudiments of learning I had missed. I had to have been learning a little even to have gone back for what I called my ‘postgraduate courses,’ and I think I was spurred on by the tears I saw in my dad’s eyes. He was a Clemson graduate, class of 1905. It was a military school and he wanted me to attend it.”
He goes on to say that they settled on his trying the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, which is known as the “West Point of the South.” This lasted only a brief time, for he again dropped out and came home, announcing that he had “decided to attend the real West Point.”
As competition for the service academies was fierce and most who entered did so through congressional appointments, this seemed an impossible fantasy, and a source of immense consternation for Robert Scott Sr., who thought his son a budding failure. However, the younger Scott was a young man with a plan. He had previously joined the Georgia National Guard, and knew that he could resign and transfer to the regular army, which would make him eligible for a West Point prep school that would give him a crack at a backdoor entrance. This scheme worked, and Robert Lee Scott found himself as a member of the Class of 1932 at the US Military Academy.
He spent the summer of his graduation year attempting to duplicate the entire route of Marco Polo on a Soyer motorcycle that he bought in Cherbourg, France. He made it across Europe and most of Turkey before halting his expedition near the Soviet border and turning back.
That autumn, Scott’s long-imagined goal of becoming a US Army Air Corps flier began to take shape at Randolph Field, one of the flight training bases that fed into the advanced flight school at Kelly Field or Brooks Field on the other side of San Antonio, Texas.
It was also during that time that, like so many other Air Corps flying cadets passing through San Antonio, he met his future wife, Catharine Rix “Kitty” Green. Indeed, as he reminds us in his memoirs, San Antonio in those years had earned the reputation as the “mother-in-law of the Air Corps,” because so many of its men met their wives there.
After earning his wings, but still a bachelor, Second Lieutenant Bob Scott reported to his first duty station, Mitchel Field, New York, in October 1933. Almost immediately, he incurred the wrath of his commander for racking up thirty-two hours of flying time during his first week when the maximum was supposed to be four hours a month. An aging former cavalry officer, he told the exasperated flier that the Great Depression was on, budgets were tight, and conserving fuel and time on airframes was more important that giving pilots the skill they needed to become experienced pilots.
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While Scott made his way into the sky by way of the US Army’s service academy, Greg Hallenbeck, Jim Howard, and Tex Hill were among the thousands of young men of their generation who became naval aviators, thanks to the Naval Aviation Cadet program. Authorized by Congress in April 1935, the program provided for flight training for civilian college graduates and a road to being commissioned in the US Navy or Marine Corps.
Having graduated from the University of Washington in 1934 in aeronautical engineering, Hallenbeck had settled down and married nineteen-year-old Helene Wickstrom, a girl from Coos Bay, Oregon. He took a job as an engineering draftsman at the Boeing Company, but soon realized that he wanted to be a lot closer to flying than sketching aircraft components on drafting vellum. His commission in the US Army Reserve was in the Coastal Artillery, and he was stymied in his efforts to transfer to the US Army Air Corps. The Naval Aviation Cadet program opened the door of opportunity for him.
One catch for Hallenbeck was that the program did not accept candidates who were married. In the meantime, however, he had applied for and received his birth certificate, and had realized—evidently for the first time—that he was not Gregory Hallenbeck, but Gregory Boyington. His birth name had never been legally changed. Because there was no record of a “Gregory Boyington” having been married, Gregory Boyington was able to transfer into the US Marine Corps Reserve and be eligible for Aviation Cadet training!
In February 1936, Boyington reported to Naval Air Station, Pensacola, in Florida for flight training, earned his wings in March 1937, was commissioned as an active duty Marine Corps second lieutenant four months later, and was assigned to fly Grumman F3F biplane fighters with Marine Fighting Squadron 2 (VMF-2).
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In 1937, during his senior year at Pomona College, the Naval Aviation Cadet program came to the attention of James Howell Howard. In his memoirs, he wrote of a warm spring evening of daydreaming when his mind settled on “a talk that had been given [at the school one] evening by a recently graduated naval aviation cadet who was touring college campuses to recruit applicants for aviation training at Pensacola, Florida. . . . Some twenty of us crowded into the room, where we were met by a young man dressed in the dark blue uniform of the US Navy, with a single gold stripe on the cuff of each sleeve and gold wings on his left breast. . . . He told of a program in which, if we passed the exacting physical exam, personal interview, and scholarship requirements, we would be given thirty days of primary flight training and a month of ground school during the summer. Those who passed would be sent on to Pensacola for a full year of training. After graduation they would be designated naval aviators, commissioned officers in the Naval Reserve, and assigned to squadrons in the fleet—perhaps even to a carrier.”
Howard explained that he and his classmates “were dedicated, almost servile, to their intended careers. At the time I planned to follow my father into medicine, which meant six years of medical school and internship—an exercise I didn’t look forward to with much anticipation. . . . I felt I would not be happy following the road of tradition and respectability that the field of medicine offered. I needed to ask myself if my goal in life might not be different. . . . I made up my mind then and there that I wanted to do something exciting and challenging. The incident that forced me to rethink my career was, of course, that evening’s talk by the young naval officer. I knew that the path to being a naval aviator had many treacherous and devious turns. If I could make it, I was sure I’d find romance and adventure of the highest order!”
He became a cadet immediately after graduation and began flight training at Pensacola in January 1938, surrounded mainly by graduates of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. After running up 377 hours in trainers and operational aircraft from F3F and F4B fighters to TBD Devastator dive bombers, Howard earned his wings as a naval aviator in January 1939.
“The misfits and those lacking self-discipline were eliminated by giving them enough rope to hang themselves,” he wrote of his year at Pensacola. “The weeding-out process took its toll, not only on the flight line but during off-duty hours. By the end of our tour at Pensacola, the cadet battalion had developed into a well-regulated group that reflected the Navy stamp of approval. From here, we went out into the active duty world alone and separated from the homogeneous atmosphere of cadet life. . . . New and intriguing associations were about to begin. I was now right where I wanted to be.”
His first assignment was to Fighting Squadron 7 (VF-7) aboard the carrier USS Wasp (CV-7), but because the ship’s delivery was running late, he was diverted to VF-2, assigned to the USS Lexington (CV-2) at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego for carrier landing training. When the Wasp was further delayed, Howard was among those reassigned to VF-6 aboard the USS Enterprise (CV-6), which was destined to be the most decorated American warship of World War II. His introduction to the “Big E” came as he landed his F3F on her flight deck as the ship was under way at sea between San Diego and Pearl Harbor.
Over the ensuing weeks, the men of the “Fighting Six” were engaged in continuous combat training missions—bombing and gunnery—alone and in conjunction with the bomber (VB-6), torpedo (VT-6), and scouting (VS-6) squadrons aboard the Enterprise. It was not all work and no play while the ship was operating out of Pearl Harbor, though. There were dances at the “pink palace,” the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, on Waikiki Beach—replete with smiling hula girls—and in his recollections, Howard writes effusively of the spectacular scenery over which he and his fellow pilots flew on training flights over the outer islands. Redeployed to Pearl a second time after a stint at North Island, Howard even took up surfing.
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While the US Navy initiated its Aviation Cadet program in 1935, the US Army had a similar program that dated back to 1907. The Flying Cadet Pilot Training Program, which had reached its peak during World War I but had declined in scope in the 1920s, was like the program of the sister service, seeking unmarried men with at least two years of college or three years’ experience in a technical field that would be useful to aviation. The Navy program, meanwhile, required a college diploma.
That Charles Rankin Bond had no college degree was not for want of his having tried. In 1935, he had enlisted in the US Army to go to the US Military Academy prep school at Camp Bullis near San Antonio. However, West Point took only a handful of graduates of the USMA prep schools, and Bond was not in that handful, so he decided to try for a slot as a flying cadet.
This time his efforts were met with success. In March 1938 he was accepted, and a month later he had soloed in a Stearman PT-13. He moved on to P-12 fighters, which he greatly enjoyed, but in January 1939, after being commissioned as a second lieutenant, he was assigned to the bomber side of the Air Corps and ordered to report to the 2nd Bombardment Group at Langley Field in Virginia, the only unit equipped with the new B-17 Flying Fortresses.
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Given that the Air Corps cadet program was headquartered at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Tex Hill’s hometown, it was only natural that this was his first stop when he decided to become a pilot courtesy of the US armed forces. Indeed, he had already met a number of cadets who had visited his home while courting his sister Martha.
Hill’s biographer Reagan Schaupp writes that in the spring of 1938, “the Army’s aviation program included a battery of written tests, medical exams, and interviews by Army psychiatrists. Tex waded through them all, then returned to await the results. A few weeks later they arrived: he had failed to qualify. No reason was given, and Tex never learned it.”
The fact that he had almost completed his degree at Austin College, got him to first base when he decided to visit the Navy recruiter on his rebound from disappointment. As Schaupp notes, the Navy exams “were essentially identical to the Army’s as far as Tex could tell, and once again, he played the waiting game back at Austin College. This time, however, the news was good.”
As with Boyington and Howard before him, Hill passed through the Naval Flight Training at NAS Pensacola. Like nearly every pilot who earned his wings as a naval aviator at Pensacola in 1939, Hill had dreams of being a fighter pilot, but instead, he found himself assigned to fly TBD Devastator torpedo bombers with Torpedo Squadron 3 (VT-3) aboard the USS Saratoga (CV-3), the sister ship of the USS Lexington, aboard which Jim Howard had served briefly.
Like the Enterprise, where Howard made his home, the Saratoga was assigned to the Pacific Fleet, so operational training was divided between being ported at North Island and at Pearl Harbor. While operating out of Pearl Harbor, Hill and VT-3 participated in the exercise known as Fleet Problem XXI. Between 1923 and 1940, the Navy’s annual large-scale combat exercises were known as “Fleet Problems,” as in arithmetic problems. Reagan Schaupp reminds readers of the irony that Fleet Problem XXI, conducted in the spring of 1940, involved a scenario in which a foreign naval force would attack Pearl Harbor. It was no secret that the only naval force capable of such a thing was the Imperial Japanese Navy.
After Fleet Problem XXI, Tex Hill was reassigned—from torpedo bombers to dive bombers, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Fleet. Assigned to Scouting Squadron 41 (VS-41), he transitioned to Vought SB2U Vindicators and shipped out aboard the USS Ranger (CV-4). After being a part of mere exercises in the Pacific, Hill now found himself at war in the Atlantic. The North Atlantic was alive with “wolf packs” of German U-boats, and although the United States was not yet a declared combatant, the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet was tasked with escorting the supply convoys crossing the Eastern Seaboard to the embattled United Kingdom. For Hill and his fellow airmen, it was a reconnaissance mission. Royal Navy warships, also part of the escort detail, did the shooting.
Spotting and shadowing U-boats was part of a tedious routine punctuated by brief moments of excitement, but as when the men were operating out of Pearl Harbor, it was not all work and no play. The diversions available during tropical port calls in Bermuda matched those of Waikiki.
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After he had graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1935, Robert Tharp Smith had gone on to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, which is where he was when he decided to take to the sky. Because the US Army Air Corps Flying Cadet Pilot Training Program did not require a college degree for admission, Smith might have simply dropped out, but after he took the tests—and passed—the Air Corps allowed him to finish his last few months at Lincoln before reporting for duty. His first assignment was to primary flight training at Santa Maria on California’s central coast, where, coincidentally, Bob Scott was one of his flight instructors.
It is still common for men to earn lifetime nicknames in the early days of their military careers, and it was at Santa Maria that he earned his service nickname.
“While I had always been called Bob by my family and friends, it was not long after my flying training began that my classmates began calling me ‘R. T.,’” he recalled in his memoirs. “There was a very simple reason for this; there were three Smiths in my class, and the cloth name-tapes sewed on the left breast of our uniform shirts read, ‘Smith, B. P.,’ ‘Smith, F. M.,’ and ‘Smith, R. T.’ That’s the way they were called out whenever we had to respond to a roll call, which was several times a day, and since our initials were constantly on display while our first names were not, our classmates adopted the easy way out. As time went on Bernard P. was often called ‘Beep,’ and Frederick M. was occasionally called ‘Fum.’ By the same logic it would appear inevitable that I would become ‘Art,’ or ‘Artie,’ but strangely enough that never happened; it was always just ‘R. T.’”
As had been the case for Scott, Boyington, Howard, and Hill, R. T. Smith later recalled the joy of flying, writing that his first solo flight in a Stearman PT-13 was “easily the greatest thrill I’d ever experienced, difficult to describe, but a feeling which all pilots know and remember.”
However, as he progressed toward advanced training, a disappointment loomed in the form of a regulation decreeing that pilots taller than five feet, ten inches, could not fly in the cramped cockpits of fighter aircraft—which was the dream of every kid who had grown up devouring pulp fiction about World War I fighter aces. It was, he recalled, “as if the musicians union had told Tommy Dorsey he couldn’t play trombone because his arms were too long.”
A second roadblock of frustration confronted him as he finally graduated from advanced training and awaited his duty assignment. Smith was a victim of his own skill as a pilot. The saying goes that “those who can, do, while those who can’t, teach.” In the Air Corps, it was exactly the opposite. Those who were the most skilled of pilots were retained as flight instructors. Instead of going off to an operational unit, R. T. Smith was ordered back to Randolph Field to teach.