TWO
THE SINGLE EVENT that changed my life happened on a sunny, cloudless Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1939 in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Like most of my generation, I didn’t give much thought in 1939 to the troubles that were building “over there” in Europe and in Asia. The important pursuits of my life were in the U.S.A., which was secure and stable. For almost half of my twenty years, one man had been president. He was a reassuring presence who had brought us through the Great Depression. For this, he was idolized by my parents and their working-class friends and neighbors. His picture hung over our dining room buffet, next to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, where Mr. Roosevelt watched over our family dinners every Sunday afternoon. One day in the not-too-distant future, my mother would hang another picture on the opposite wall. She would cut it out of the Boston Post, and it would show five marines raising the American flag over Iwo Jima. But for the time being, “America First” was the refrain, which was fine with me. And even if worse came to worst on the Continent, I figured we could always shore up the English and French and let them fight their own war.
My friend Charlie McCauley had other ideas. He was twenty-one, and with the new peacetime draft, it was only a matter of time before he would receive personal greetings from President Roosevelt inviting him to a preinduction physical for the army. But Charlie didn’t want to be a gravel scratcher. “I’m not going into the infantry,” he insisted when we talked about the draft. “I’m going to be an air cadet.”
Toward that goal, Charlie was planning to take his first ride in an airplane on that sunny afternoon in Quincy, and he wanted me to tag along. I sat on my front porch waiting for him to pick me up. Our two-story, wood-shingled house was not unlike most of the houses on our street. In our neighborhood, just ten miles south of Boston, almost everybody knew everybody else. Charlie lived two streets over. His brothers played with my brothers. During the summer, we all congregated on the street to play kick-the-can or to toss bubble gum cards from the curbstone after rubbing them with candle wax for added weight, investing in each toss all the gravity of a World Series game. I was watching just such a championship match across the street when Charlie pulled up in his father’s car.
I hopped down the front steps and got into the passenger seat. Nice automobile. A shiny 1935 gray Plymouth four-door. Charlie had elbow-greased the shine as the price of borrowing the car. I noticed that he seemed a little nervous. “Hey,” I thought, “maybe he’s afraid of actually going up there.”
“You know,” Charlie said as we headed in the direction of Dennison Airport, “you really ought to think about being an air cadet, too. You’ve only got one year left.” Because I was his best buddy, it seemed only right that Charlie would keep pushing me to enlist in the air corps with him.
But my priorities were elsewhere in 1939. The draft was not my immediate concern. It could be another year before I reached draft age, and a lot could happen in a year. Certainly the combined armies of England and France could stop Hitler. I’d read that France had the biggest and best-equipped army in the world. And the sun hadn’t set on the British Empire yet, either. As for Japan, Asia was an even more distant place, six thousand miles away from the United States. How could Japan threaten us? Thus armed with the confidence of a twenty-year-old kid in safe and predictable surroundings, I encouraged my friend to fly. It would be an exciting way to spend his next few years.
I was working on my future, too. Since graduating from high school I had moved up in the wholesale leather business to become a salesman covering western Massachusetts and New York State. For an ambitious young man, it was a great job with limitless opportunities and good commissions. My boss, Jim Kelley, told me I was a born salesman. But I felt, really, I could be a born anything. All I had to do was keep focused on my goals, get along with people, and keep a sense of humor. To earn a bachelor’s degree, I was taking evening business courses at Boston University and Burdett College. For now, I would learn my trade. Later, I would I have my own business. My life was on course.
“What do your parents think about you flying airplanes?” I asked Charlie as we approached the fence marking the outermost corner of the airport. Dennison was a private airport that adjoined the Squantum Naval Air Station. It was only a postage stamp with a half dozen or so open-cockpit airplanes.
“My dad said he doesn’t know anything about flying,” Charlie answered. “He said it looks dangerous to him. My mother is all upset.”
When I’d told my father where Charlie and I were going, he’d just said “Be careful.” Although he had never been in an airplane, I was sure he wouldn’t be afraid of flying. He was confident. Even during the depth of the Depression he always found work. When everyone stopped building in 1929 he had to close his plumbing and heating business, but he managed to pick up odd jobs and do a little contracting until he was able to start up a business again. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor, either.
In 1926 we moved from a rented house near downtown Quincy into our own home. I was the second oldest of six children, five boys and one girl. Our home was dominated by Catholicism, patriotism, and belief in hard work and individual responsibility. Education was valued as a privilege. My mother and father encouraged us to be the best our abilities allowed. When I was a student at St. John’s Elementary School, I won the Greater Boston Spelling Bee at Faneuil Hall three years in a row. I remember that my parents were so proud they showed my gold medals with the red, white, and blue ribbons to just about every Irish man and woman in Quincy. I still have and treasure those medals.
My father used our Sunday dinners, when he had a full audience and our undivided attention, to teach us life’s lessons by quoting the Bible or telling us one of Aesop’s fables. My favorite fable was the one where the wind and the sun were watching a man who was walking along wearing a heavy coat. The wind and the sun began arguing over which of them could make the man take the coat off. “I’ll blow it off,” the wind told the sun. But the harder the wind blew, the tighter the man held the coat to him. Then the sun tried. It smiled and shone. Soon the man began taking off his coat. “Now, learn your lesson accordingly,” my father would say.
My father would also tell us about our great-grandfather, Jack Sweeney, who came to America from County Cork in 1850 with the wave of immigrants who were escaping the potato famine. “When young Jack Sweeney arrived in America,” my father would say, “the owners of the giant Lawrence Textile Mill met him at the docks. They were looking for one hundred men to work in the mill. Grandfather worked six days a week, ten, twelve hours a day, for ten dollars.” One winter afternoon Jack Sweeney decided to use his ten-minute break to run across the street for a quick beer. He rushed back to work and began to sweat in his union suit, the heavy woolen underwear he wore to ward off the cold and draftiness of the factory. A few weeks later he died of pneumonia, a young man. “He still owed money to the company store when he died,” my father would say.
The city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, was named after the mill owners. The adjacent city of Lowell was named after the Lowell family, who also owned mills. I was born in Lowell on December 27, 1919, in the house of my maternal grandmother, Mary “Minnie” Murphy. In those days, young Irish brides didn’t go to the hospitals to have their babies. They went home to their mothers’ houses.
My first job, at the age of ten, was as a paper boy. We were all expected to work and contribute to the household. In no time I had a lock on all of the routes in our area and knew many of the families I delivered to. Around that time my father also started letting me go to work with him after school and on Saturdays as his “assistant.” It was fun being with him. On the way to a job he would tell me about his father, Jack Sweeney. “Your grandfather was the best plumber in Massachusetts in his day,” he would remind me. “He installed all of the plumbing and heating at Phillips Exeter Academy for Stone and Webster when the school was being built. Exeter,” he explained, “is where the wealthy families send their sons to prepare for Harvard. He did such an outstanding job there, he was asked to do the same thing for Phillips Andover Academy.” I was pretty impressed.
When I was fifteen I landed a plum job as a caddie at the Wollaston Golf Club. Wollaston was “the club” for the successful and politically connected Irish of the time. Excluded from the exclusive Brahman clubs, the Irish created their own clubs for men of accomplishment. The tribal character of Boston was very much alive then. For me, the tips were great, and I observed valuable lessons about the ways of business and life: being polite and courteous pays dividends; first impressions are lasting; trust is crucial to relationships.
I caddied for Massachusetts governor and former mayor of Boston James Michael Curley. He was a big tipper and a spellbinding raconteur who was always the center of every foursome. I also caddied for the future Francis Cardinal Spellman, a gracious and charming man. These men of prominence were heady company for a fifteen-year-old. The last time I saw Bishop Spellman at Wollaston was in 1935. Ten years later I would meet him again on Tinian Island in the Pacific.
Boston’s leather district was only a thirteen-minute ride from Wollaston by steam commuter train from South Station, so quite a few leather company executives were members of the club. One vice president, Bill Kelley, offered me a job at his company after I finished high school. The problem was that his company, Salomon and Phillips, was headquartered in New York City. When I graduated from North Quincy High at seventeen, my mother wouldn’t let me take the job. “New York is too fast a town for a young boy,” she insisted, despite my pleas. So I didn’t go. Luckily for me, though, about three months later Bill’s brother Jim set up a Boston branch and offered me a job handling a few small accounts in Boston. I was on my way.
Charlie pulled up to the road leading to the Squantum Naval Air Station and turned at the entrance to Dennison Airport. A sign offered a five-minute airplane ride for two dollars. We bought two tickets and headed toward the strip. A few open-cockpit biplanes were parked along one side of the strip. On the other side was a small wooden building where we found the pilot. He was wearing overalls that looked like a flying suit, a leather jacket (civilian), and a fitted leather helmet with goggles raised up on his head.
“Ready to go up?” he asked.
“Sure,” Charlie answered.
We followed the pilot to an airplane that had yellow wings and a blue body. There was a single seat for the pilot in the rear and a seat wide enough for two people in the front.
The pilot asked us, almost as an afterthought, if we had ever been in an airplane before. “Just relax. I’ll take it nice and easy,” he said. “A few turns around the field, out toward the ocean, and then back. Nothing to worry about,” he assured us.
We climbed onto the wing and into the front seat. “Fasten the belt,” a voice called from the rear.
“How high are we going?” Charlie asked.
“About a thousand feet. We’ll do eighty, ninety miles an hour . . .”
“Wow.”
The airplane taxied out to the center of the field and started toward the other end, gaining speed. We lifted off the ground.
As we climbed up into the clear blue sky, a feeling of elation overwhelmed me. I felt the air rushing by. The sense of breaking away from the bounds of the earth filled me with awe. I looked left, then right. I had a wondrous perspective of the earth below. Familiar places were unfolding as a single whole. I could see it all. And we were still climbing into the space above. Effortlessly, the airplane banked gently to the left. My sense of place and being expanded. I was flying.
All too soon I felt the full weight of gravity pulling us back to the ground as the pilot brought the plane to a landing. I stepped onto the strip feeling weightless, feeling like I wanted to get back into the air. I looked up at the sky and knew my life would never be the same.
Charlie McCauley and I studied for four months to prepare for the air cadet entrance exams. English, history, physics, geometry, trigonometry. The physical and academic requirements were rigorous. All through school I had ranked in the top 10 percent of my college preparatory class. I had studied advanced mathematics and taken four years of Latin and French. The academic exams would take eighteen hours over two days. I felt I could handle them. As for the physical exam . . . I was six-feet-one, one hundred and eighty pounds, and I was in pretty good shape.
We arrived at the army base in South Boston in early October 1940 to take the exams, the first of many hurdles that were intended to weed out the majority of young men competing for wings. A lot had happened in a year. Hitler and Stalin had carved up Poland. Russia had invaded Finland. The Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe had swept through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Hungary, and Romania. England stood alone. The Battle of Britain raged as we read the daily accounts of the bravery of the Royal Air Force in beating back the Luftwaffe. Yet I still didn’t think the United States would get involved, and neither did my friends or family. As I look back, I am amazed at how oblivious we all were.
A month later, I received a letter from the War Department informing me that I had been accepted into the Air Corps Flying Cadet Program and had scored in the top 10 percent. Some 50 percent of those taking the test hadn’t passed, and of those who had, a few failed to meet the physical standards. Charlie McCauley had passed the exam but failed to meet the “sufficient weight” requirement. He was underweight. Since the army allowed one postponement of enrollment, I decided to wait until my pal and I could go together. I requested a postponement to April 1941. Ironically, Charlie never did meet the weight requirement and was eventually commissioned in the Army Signal Corps.
I wasn’t twenty-one yet, so I needed my parents’ signatures to join. My father signed, but my mother would not. I’m not sure whether she worried that we might go to war or whether she was terrified at the thought of my flying an airplane. She knew no one who flew. In fact, hardly anyone she knew had ever been in an airplane. I tried every approach to get her to agree. First I stressed the security of the military. Then I told her I’d have a prestigious position as a pilot—I’d be an officer and a gentleman. She didn’t budge. Finally I told her that I had to fly. If I didn’t, I would never be happy. Without another word, she signed the paper. Then, for the next few weeks, she cried every night at the kitchen table, questioning if she had done the right thing and pleading with me to reconsider.
On a cool April day in 1941, just before noon, my mother and father saw me off at Boston’s Back Bay Station on Dartmouth Street. I was leaving for Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I had never been out of New England. I had bought a worsted wool double-breasted glen plaid suit at Hyman Brothers in Boston for the trip. My mother had picked out a sky-blue silk tie that, she said, matched the color of my eyes. I looked the height of style.
About thirty other cadets-to-be gathered on the platform, clustered in small groups with their families. Precisely at noon an army sergeant barked for us to listen up. The men formed around him in a loose semicircle. As he called our names, we stepped forward and were given a ticket. Surveying the mass of eager faces, he pointed to a man standing toward the rear of the group who seemed to be older than the rest of us.
“What’s your name?” the sergeant demanded.
“Jim McDonald, sir.” Jim was twenty-seven and soon to be my fast friend. Unbeknownst to us all, he would also soon complete almost as many bombing missions as he had years.
The sergeant grimaced. “Well, McDonald, you’re in charge of this group. It’s your job to make sure they all get back on the train at each stop.”
“Yes, sir.”
The sergeant grimaced again. “A piece of advice. Don’t call me or any other noncom ‘sir.’ I’m no officer. I work for a living.” With that he left the platform and disappeared into the recesses of the station. We boarded the train, headed for Alabama and Primary School.
The train stopped in Hartford, New York, Baltimore, and Washington. At each stop we picked up a few more cadets until our group numbered one hundred. Of this group, 50 percent would wash out of the program over the next several months. I felt excited, exhilarated, and fearful that I might fail. I thought nothing could be worse.
On Wednesday, a day and a half after we’d left Boston, we arrived at Van de Graaf Field in Tuscaloosa at nine P.M. A noncom went through the cars and rousted us onto the platform. Portable lights illuminated the area with a yellowish glare. As I stepped off the train, I was overcome by the acrid smell of sulfur coming from a local paper mill and the stifling humidity of the sultry Alabama night. Being dressed in a wool suit didn’t help. But at least I would make a good first impression.
Three officers and several upperclassmen stood along the edge of the platform looking stern. A voice—I couldn’t tell whose—ordered us to form a straight line and drop our bags to our left. A seemingly simple task for such intelligent fellows as us. However, a great deal of bumping and confusion ensued before we could stumble into something resembling a line—and a significant realization. We collectively recognized that we were in for something totally new. From that moment on, we would go everywhere in formation, we would do everything as a unit. Conformity would be expected, independence discouraged. This is the way of the military. It is a way that instills in every soldier the truth that all our lives are dependent on each other—that we are engaged in a serious business with serious consequences.
As instructed, I had brought only the clothes on my back and a change of underwear. Picking up the small overnight bag, I was marched with my unit to the barbers. In a matter of moments I looked remarkably like every other cadet. We were quickly marched to our barracks and tucked away for the night. So far I thought I was doing pretty good. As was my habit, I had no trouble drifting into a deep sleep.
At five A.M. we were startled out of our slumber. “Move, move, move!” reverberated throughout the barracks. There was a heaviness in the air even at that early hour that promised another hot, humid day. Standing in the first light of dawn, I got my bearings. There were four one-story wooden barracks, each accommodating fifty double-bunked cadets, our group and a group of one hundred upperclassmen. Each barracks had only five toilets, with the result that many of us did not get a chance to visit those facilities on that first morning before being herded outside. We learned to solve this problem through cooperation and order—which was the intent of the exercise.
Each barracks appeared to have been newly constructed and was spick-and-span. We were on a civilian field under contract to the army. Because the army had very few experienced pilots, and certainly not enough to train and evaluate cadets at Primary School, our instructors would also be contract civilian pilots. What we were unknowingly part of was a major buildup of the military orchestrated by General George Marshall. He, in contrast to most of his contemporaries, recognized the inevitable.
Unlike military bases and airfields, this civilian airfield had no supply depot. We would be required to purchase our uniforms—two sets of khakis, a hat, socks, underwear, and a pair of shoes—from a local purveyor recommended by the lieutenant in charge, who happened to be a local boy and a cousin of the store’s owner. For the next three days, however, we would drill in our civilian clothes. For me this meant marching around in the hot Alabama sun in a worsted wool double-breasted suit.
As we stood in formation, the sergeant walked slowly down the line. He stopped by me. Leaning in close, in barely a whisper, he asked in a soothing voice, “Isn’t that outfit a bit warm?”
“Yes, sergeant, it is.”
“Take it off!” he bellowed.
I slipped off the jacket and held it. But the sergeant meant I was to get rid of it. The thought of dropping my brand-new jacket onto the dusty field caused me to hesitate. The wrong reaction. After a barrage of invective that froze me in place, the jacket slipped from my grasp.
The sergeant stepped back and surveyed the scene. There I stood, navy blue suspenders holding up my pants.
“Son, are you some kind of jackass or are you just dressed up like one?”
Before I could respond, he barked that I take the suspenders off. Now my beautiful new suit jacket and my stylish suspenders lay in a heap beside me. My transition to military life was getting off to a rocky start. I’d wanted to get noticed—and so I had.
The seemingly endless, monotonous marching began on the airfield ramp in the blazing sun. We were harassed without letup. As I marched, my pants kept falling down. Each time I grabbed them the drill instructor yelled for me to put my hands by my sides. Somehow I managed to keep my hands beside me and still hold up my pants.
I knew we were being tested, that it would be tough. It was part of the ongoing ritual of weeding out those who couldn’t cut it. But I was going to be a pilot.
On Saturday afternoon we purchased our uniforms. When we arrived back at the field, we were issued our flying suits. We would begin flight training Monday morning.
Primary School was the place to find out if a cadet had the aptitude and temperament to be a pilot. Some cadets would wash out immediately. Others might not wash out until after a substantial amount of flight time. We were being evaluated at every stage. Some of the criteria were objective and easy to understand. Some of them were highly subjective on the part of the instructors. They were looking for pilots—for a quality that can’t be quantified or even explained. Some guys had it and others didn’t. Being a pilot is what you are, not what you do.
On Monday morning I reported to my flight instructor as ordered. He and I walked out to an open tandem-cockpit Stearman PT-17. The pilot sat up front, the student in the rear. There were dual controls in the front and rear cockpits. A gosport allowed the pilot to talk to the student, but the student couldn’t speak to the pilot. There was no radio in the airplane, no means of communicating with the ground. Strict adherence to air discipline was required. All airplanes in that area had to maintain defined traffic patterns of precise position and altitude, particularly on takeoff and landing.
My instructor went through the basics in a clipped and mechanical manner. He might have been a civilian, but in his attitude and bearing he was identical to the drill instructors. There were no reassuring words or pleasantries, just the unspoken imperative: Pay attention; your future here, not to mention your life, depends on it. This would be the first time since Charlie’s and my flight at Dennison that I would be airborne.
It was a wild ride, and I loved it—even though I didn’t know whether I was afoot or on horseback, as the expression goes. I had no idea where we were in the air. I just saw trees and fields and hills. The airplane dipped and rose and dived and banked. My reverie was suddenly broken by the instructor’s voice coming through the gosport. “Sweeney,” he commanded, “take us back to the field.”
Take us back to the field? I didn’t know where the hell we were and this guy wanted me to take him back to the field? Not to mention that I had no idea what to do with the controls in front of me.
Again: “Sweeney, don’t you know where you are?”
Then without warning he flipped the airplane upside down. “Look down, you stupid bastard. The field’s right below us.” This was part of the routine. In the beginning they harassed us. Later they would be more soothing, wanting to bring along any cadets they thought had promise. For the next ten weeks the cadets flew in the morning and attended ground school in the afternoon. It was totally up to the instructor how fast to move a cadet along. In my case, advancement came rapidly.
Surrounding the main airstrip, in the neighboring countryside, were four auxiliary airfields—well, not exactly airfields. They were open pastures the government had rented from local farmers. Over these fields I practiced takeoffs and landings, flew traffic patterns, and perfected other basic flying maneuvers—like the Immelman. Named after a German pilot, this maneuver required sudden acceleration, then a turn up over the top so that the plane was upside down, and then a roll out, bringing the airplane quickly right side up again. For the split S, I rolled the plane on its back and took it down through a maneuver that brought me heading in the opposite direction.
Two weeks into my training, the instructor flew to an auxiliary field, where we landed. As was their practice, the pilots never told cadets when their first solo flight would be. For me, that was the day. The instructor stepped out and told me to take the controls up front. I was exhilarated. The idea that I would be on my own didn’t concern me. I concentrated on the task ahead. The instructor carefully explained what I was to do. Take off. Make a series of banking turns around the field in a particular pattern. Make an approach and watch for him.
Sitting at the controls, I aimed the airplane in the proper direction and eased the throttle forward. I reminded myself to focus on the patterns and my airspeed, to watch the throttle setting and my approach speed. I lifted off. I was flying! I went through the designated patterns and made my approach. The instructor waved me off and gave me the signal to do it again. Then he waved me off two more times. He was letting me fly.
On my landing, he greeted me with a big grin and a handshake. Later, as a sort of graduation present, he took me on my wildest ride to date. He introduced me to what real pilots are—ironically, not conformists, but thinking individuals who push themselves and their airplanes. It’s a strange dichotomy in the military that the very qualities that make a great pilot chafe against the rigidity of the military structure. We flew six feet off the ground, through trees, under bridges. None of this was approved army procedure.
Our ranks were thinning out. Some guys never got over or learned how to control the nausea they experienced in the air. Others couldn’t master the basics of flight. And others, in the opinion of the instructors, just didn’t have it in them to be pilots. The training got more intense.
I made it through Primary School and was shipped off to Basic Training at Gunter Field in Montgomery, Alabama. We received the government-issue slate-blue uniforms flying cadets wore. We now looked, thought and acted like military men. I received my first “command”; I was appointed sergeant major for my squadron. My duties were to maintain discipline within the sixty-man group and act as the implementor of the orders and commands of the squadron officers.
The Basic Training intensified—relentless marching, physical conditioning, and military tactics. The upperclassmen tormented us constantly. They were worse than the drill instructors. This was understandable, because although they had gone through the same training and, you might assume, would have some empathy for us, they now considered themselves to be part of an elite group that wanted to maintain its elitism.
Our first day at Gunter was memorable. We were all in great physical condition and pretty sure of ourselves. Perhaps to disabuse us of this idea, the drill instructor took us out onto the parade grounds. Under the blazing summer sun, we marched and drilled in close formation for hours. Some men passed out and were taken to the infirmary. Yet our shared exhaustion and communal suffering were drawing us closer together. Everything we did was precise and undertaken as a unit, not because we thought about it but because we now were one. That night I ached like I’d never ached before. The pain in my joints and muscles was extreme. It was the worst night of my life. But I still had no reservations that this was precisely where I wanted to be. These trials and tribulations would make me stronger.
The flying was heaven. We got to fly the Vultee BT-13, a much heavier airplane with a closed two-seat tandem cockpit, a radio, and above all else, speed. Our study of aviation became more advanced and detailed. Night training was the most exciting. The first time up, we went with the instructor. After that, we were on our own. Sent up into the blackness, we bored holes in the sky in predesignated zones to get comfortable flying without reference to visible landmarks or a horizon.
Ten weeks came and went in a flash. More of our comrades washed out. A common problem for some was the occurrence of “ground loops.” In a ground loop, the pilot lands, everything has gone right, but he has a lapse in attention and assumes that the flight is over, when, in fact, the props are still turning. He lets up ever so slightly on the controls, and the airplane spins about one hundred degrees. If he’s lucky, that’s all that happens. More often than not, he might catch a wing on the ground and damage the aircraft. Ground loops are gross errors of coordination.
My Advanced Flight Training took place at Barksdale Field in Shreveport, Louisiana. Barksdale was a multiengine school. About 25 percent of the cadets were assigned to multiengine schools (bombers) and the rest to single-engine schools (fighters). The extent of the overall military buildup was now obvious. Having survived ten weeks at Primary and ten weeks at Basic, I now had the luxury of being able to observe my surroundings. Everywhere I looked was a beehive of activity.
Barksdale had been created to meet the training demands for new pilots, as had Gunter and Van de Graaf. Up to this time the army had had three training facilities scattered in the West. Of course, the army still wasn’t sure what to do with airplanes, but even the most hardened soldier thought they might be useful.
Barksdale was a regular army air corps field, complete with permanent housing, a golf course, clubs, and commissaries. There was an active bomber wing assigned to the field. We were still part of the military—the formations, strict schedules, and military discipline—but the harassment, tormenting, and tribulations subsided. We had made it. All that remained was completion of Advanced Training and a commission in the Air Corps Reserve.
Although we were still cadets, the world looked on us as pilots—and all that that implied. With a reputation as “sports,” cadets were offered deals by local car salesmen on high-performance convertibles—twenty-five dollars down and seventy-five dollars a month. The parking lot at the field was a sea of brand-new convertibles.
We trained in B-10s, B-12s, and B-18s—all obsolete. But mostly we flew the Lockheed Hudson, a state-of-the-art patrol plane with an unusual design, manufactured in Long Beach, California. All the systems in the Lockheed Hudson had been designed to British specifications. The planes were delivered to us, we logged three hundred hours of flight time in each one, and then they were flown to the Northeast for shipment to Canada and then to England. The reason we flew the planes before shipment was simple. Congress had not authorized the sale of weapons to Britain. Under Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Program, only used war matériel could be legally delivered. Once we put three hundred hours on the Hudsons, it was legal to give the “used” airplanes to the British via Canada. It was a “happy coincidence” that the instrumentation and systems were of British design.
Halfway through training I received my assignment for after graduation. I would be a ferry pilot. I would take delivery of Hudsons and A-20s, the “Boston Bombers,” at the Lockheed and Douglas factories on the West Coast and fly them to shipping points in the Northeast. It was a cream puff assignment. I would be a commissioned officer in the army air corps, share an apartment in Laguna Beach, and fly around the country, getting paid for what I loved to do. I couldn’t have asked for more. I must admit a certain swagger crept into my gait.
My class was scheduled to graduate in five days. For the first time, the officers’ golf course was open to us. After Sunday mass and breakfast, a group of us played a round. It was early afternoon when we walked into the lounge. We could immediately see that something was wrong. The conversation at the bar was animated as a tight cluster of officers crowded around a radio. I couldn’t make out what the announcer was saying. An officer noticed my group standing there and said, “The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”
I was stunned. I instantly visualized Hawaii, sitting in the middle of the Pacific. The Japs might attack the Philippines. That would make sense. But not Pearl Harbor.
Reality quickly set in. We were at war. No one at the field knew exactly what to do. Each of us was issued a weapon and assigned guard duty. Sabotage became the main concern. Anything was possible, even an attack on Shreveport. Security at the field was increased. A panic initially gripped the country. Rumors spread and multiplied. Phone lines were jammed. It took me a day to reach my mother, in Boston. She was terrified. Although an invasion on the West Coast seemed more likely, one rumor had a German bomber force heading for the East Coast to wipe out major cities. It seemed far-fetched that any airplane would have that range. But who knew? Maybe the Germans had been working on a secret airplane.
Reports of actual damage at Pearl were sketchy. It would be several weeks before the government acknowledged the actual calamity that had taken place. Most of our Pacific fleet and thousands of sailors lay at the bottom of the harbor. Some navy men had been entombed in their ships where they could not be reached. Their clanging, a sign they were still alive, lasted for seven or eight days before it was silenced. Only three aircraft carriers were left between Japan and the West Coast. And with each passing day the news grew worse as the Japanese moved against our forces in the Philippines.
On December 12, 1941, my class graduated as scheduled. My earlier orders were canceled. One other classmate and I were assigned to the Jefferson Proving Grounds in Madison, Indiana. The rest of my class was assigned to units preparing for overseas duty. On the morning of December 14, with a single gold bar on my right collar and a shiny set of wings on my chest, I boarded a train to start the war in the cornfields of Indiana.