SIX
I WAS BACK in the heartland of America with a new title, director of standardization. From the cornfields of Indiana to the cornfields of Nebraska.
Paul Tibbets had been named director of plans for General Frank Armstrong at Grand Island, Nebraska. Once the military had ordered production of sixteen hundred B-29s even as the bugs were still being worked out, the need for flight instructors to train the pilots to fly them was pressing. General Armstrong assigned Tibbets to oversee the development of a flight instructors’ school. I would identify and standardize all procedures for the operation of the aircraft.
By that time it was the summer of 1944, and the tides of war in Europe had shifted to our advantage. The Allied forces who had landed at Normandy were pushing forward into France without serious opposition. Victory seemed certain. Some thought it would come soon. But the world would soon learn, at the Battle of the Bulge, that the Germans were still formidable. Underestimating the will of the German army would prove to be a tragic miscalculation, paid for with the lives of tens of thousands of young American boys. Much suffering lay ahead, especially as our full attention turned to the war in the Pacific.
For our new assignment, I had a staff of assistants responsible for each of the operational areas of the aircraft: pilot, navigator, flight engineer, bombardier, gunners. Every operational step required to fly the B-29 had to be identified, broken down into its constituent parts, and standardized so that crew members could be interchangeable from one B-29 to another or from squadron to squadron. The work allowed me to continue racking up hours in the B-29 and to develop a detailed knowledge of every nut, bolt, and weld in the airplane. By this time, when I was at the controls I felt like I was part of the airplane—as if it were my second skin.
Life at Grand Island was uneventful. My wife, Dorothy, and I had an apartment downtown. We socialized with some of the guys who had come up from Eglin, but Paul Tibbets and I saw very little of each other. Our duties kept us both busy.
I had met Dorothy at Eglin. She was a nurse at the base hospital—and coincidentally was from Woburn, Massachusetts. We were introduced by the senior chaplain for the base, Father Harrington, who was also from Massachusetts—Waverly. The Massachusetts connection was perhaps a sign, although our initial meeting was a bit strained.
One day Father Harrington invited me to accompany him to the nurses’ quarters at Eglin to get the altar linens, which the nurses laundered every week for the chapels. As we approached the laundry room, a group of nurses came walking toward us from the ward across the way. Having the genetic wit of any Irishman, Father Harrington decided it would be good fun to introduce me as “Father Sweeney,” a newly arrived priest. Perhaps in deference to the good father, or because my propeller insignia resembled a cross, the group seemed to accept his introduction.
“Good evening, Father,” they greeted me in unison.
What attracts one person to another is often a mystery. For whatever reason, my attention was immediately drawn to Dorothy McEleney. Maybe it was the sparkle in her bright blue eyes, or her warm, shy smile. But there I was, speaking to her in the person of Father Sweeney.
“Wait a moment. If I may, I’d like to ask you a question,” I said, jumping into my new role with a most solicitous tone.
“Yes, Father?” she responded.
“Do you write to your mother every day?” I queried, wondering to myself where I’d come up with that one.
“Why . . . almost every day, Father.”
“Good. Good. And where are you going tonight?” I probed.
“To the movies,” she answered quietly.
“Do you have a date?” I pressed.
“Yes,” she said, now less certain.
“Is he Catholic?” I asked in a serious but benevolent tone.
She stammered nervously for an instant and then confessed, “I don’t know, Father . . . But he’s very nice—”
I held up my hand as if to calm her concern and said, piously, “Well, you be careful.” She nodded and promptly took the first chance she got to gracefully flee from my presence.
Happily, she was a good sport and quite forgiving when we started to date. I eventually proposed marriage and she accepted, but with one proviso—she wanted to be married at home. In wartime most couples got married at the base chapel because getting leave to go home was difficult. With both of us in the army, the chance of our getting leave at the same time was nil. But Dorothy was insistent that she wanted to get married with her family and friends in the church she grew up in.
I spoke to Colonel Waugh.
“I can’t give you any leave, Chuck. There’s a war on,” he said.
“Sir,” I offered, “I’m scheduled for more navigational training flights.” Since routine training was required, it should make no difference if I bored holes in the sky over the Deep South or in a northerly direction.
The colonel shook his head, and with a barely visible smile said, “Go ahead.”
I gassed up a B-25, filed my training flight plan, arranged to place a certain nurse on the crew for the mission, and off we went to Boston. Dorothy was married in a flowing white wedding gown with her friends and family in attendance.
I’ll wager, though, that she was the first woman to ever spend her honeymoon on board a military aircraft.
At Grand Island, Colonel Tibbets’s guiding hand was always evident. Shortly after arriving there, he recommended to General Armstrong that I be promoted to major. Armstrong endorsed the recommendation and sent it along to the Second Air Force at Colorado Springs for approval. It was promptly returned “Denied,” because the quota for majors in the entire Second Air Force had been filled.
The denial sent Armstrong into a spin. He knew that within the army there was a barely concealed antipathy—jealousy, even—toward the air corps. One manifestation of the attitude had been an aversion to promoting pilots. Theater commanders like MacArthur were notorious for routinely denying promotions to airmen. For the general officers who’d risen through the ranks in the age of the cavalry, the air corps was an intruding burr in their saddle. They had never grasped the strategic value of airpower. In Europe, Eisenhower ordered LeMay to bomb railroad trains while LeMay argued that he should be bombing the factories where the locomotives were manufactured. It was a battle of wills that would not be resolved until the air corps became independent of the army after the war.
So for Armstrong, more was at stake than my little promotion. He had the reputation—and the power—to throw his weight around. A member of his staff told me later that he personally called the War Department and made it clear that in the future if he sent a recommendation for promotion, he expected it to be approved. Period. My promotion was summarily approved.
The issue again surfaced when two seasoned combat pilots returned from the Pacific and joined my staff. Those guys had extraordinary flight experience and had been in some pretty heavy combat. Yet each had been frozen in rank as a first lieutenant while other army officers raced past them up the chain of command. It was a disgrace that these combat veterans had been repeatedly denied promotion within General MacArthur’s theater. I brought the problem to Tibbets’s attention and, with his permission, to General Armstrong’s group operations officer.
Armstrong promoted them both to captain on the spot, waited a week, and then promoted them to major. Bing. Bing. The army might have thought the flying machine was not there to stay, but Armstrong was making it clear that a new day was coming for the airplane and the men who flew it.
Up to this point, my two and a half years in the military had been a series of assignments unencumbered by excessive supervision from above. Each posting I had been given was just slightly outside the usual chain of command, allowing me extraordinary freedom to carry out my assignments. I knew without question this was because I was part of Paul Tibbets’s team. I felt a bond with Paul Tibbets and a true sense of loyalty to him, which he reciprocated. He extended me respect and understanding and confidence. The time we had spent together at Eglin became the foundation of our relationship, which would carry me with him toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After we relocated to Grand Island, Colonel Tibbets and I lost our utility airplanes which we had so inconspicuously acquired at Eglin. While we were working at Eglin, Tibbets had been ever resourceful. One late afternoon I greeted him on his return there from one of his many trips to Marietta, where his administrative offices were located. He taxied up in a brand-new, twin-engine, ten-passenger Lockheed Vega B-34, a fast, versatile airplane.
“Nice airplane, boss,” I said, and then added as a joke, “You think I could get one, too?”
“If you’re a good boy, I’ll see what I can do,” he responded jokingly.
“I’ll see that it gets logged on our inventory,” I said to save him the trouble of doing the paperwork. All aircraft in the military must be accounted for by being officially placed on the inventory of aircraft located at every base. The airplane then is assigned at each base to a wing or squadron.
“Chuck, I think we want to keep this one off inventory for a while. I’m going to use it as my utility airplane, and it would be simpler if we leave it unassigned,” he replied in a most convincing manner.
Translation: I don’t want to share this airplane with anyone, and I want to use it whenever I want.
“No problem, boss.”
In about a week Colonel Tibbets called me in and told me he had located a B-26 in Dayton that I could get. This one would also be off the inventory. In short order we became the only pilots in the military then or now, to my knowledge, to have control of our own utility airplanes.
This gave me unprecedented freedom of movement, a privilege I was careful not to abuse, but our testing at Eglin was winding down and we had free time. I asked Tibbets if I could take some time off and fly to Boston ... on another training flight. As is the custom, I let it be known that anyone who needed a lift going in that direction was welcome. Dorothy managed to get a couple of days’ leave, and so we, two officers, and three enlisted men from the Boston area headed home.
I stopped at Philadelphia and then at Mitchell Field on Long Island. The weather on the way up the coast was perfect. After leaving Mitchell, we received a weather advisory of a surprise nor’easter in the Boston area. Prudence dictated a return to New York or maybe landing in Hartford. But I was at that stage in my life when I believed a little bad weather sure as hell wasn’t going to stop me from getting home. Many pilots with this mind-set suffer from a fatal affliction known as “gethomeitis.”
Over my radio came the order to return to Mitchell. I did what any pilot who is full of himself would do. I pressed the throat microphone close to my neck and responded, “Do not copy. Say again.” They said it again as clear as a bell, but my “gethomeitis” was now affecting my hearing. I turned the radio off.
I proceeded toward New Haven. The weather was getting worse real fast. Ice began to build up on my wings. The airplane had no de-icers; it had been intended for local use in Florida. The solution to my problem was either to climb higher to drier air, which would rid the wings of the ice, or to swoop down to below 1,000 feet, where the temperature was warmer. I was locked into a preset FAA altitude that precluded me from climbing in this very busy air corridor where other assigned military and civilian aircraft were flying. Going below 1,000 feet at two hundred miles an hour in visibility of less than half a mile presented the prospect of catching a steeple or maybe running into a hill.
Down I went. Because of reduced visibility and my maneuvers to free the wings of ice, I was no longer sure of my location and I was positive air traffic controllers had lost me. The best I could do was hold a compass bearing that I knew would get me to Boston Harbor. The visibility grew worse as the snow picked up in the stiff northeasterly winds. At rooftop level, I pressed on toward home. Out of the haze I saw the harbor. The closest airfields were the naval air station at Squantum or Logan Air Field, which in those days was the size of the old Dennison Airport—a postage stamp. B-26s were specifically prohibited from landing at Logan because of its short runway. So Logan was out. Squantum wasn’t any better lengthwise—it was only four thousand feet long. For obvious reasons, the Navy didn’t believe in long runways. I located Wollaston Bay and the Wollaston Yacht Club, which led me right to the Squantum Naval Air Station. Without clearance, I took it in. As we touched down on the ice-encrusted tarmac, I knew we were going to use every inch of the available runway. We didn’t go into the bay, but if we had gotten any closer to the end, a swift kick would have tipped the airplane into the water.
I had needed the grace of God—and some great good luck—and both came through. Or, as a true pilot would say to his buddies over a few beers, “Superior skill and cunning saved the day.”
I had, in fact, done a superb job of flying. But the need for such skill had been the result of a poor decision born of supreme arrogance in my ability as a pilot. The truth is, I could have been a small headline in the local newspaper the next morning, another statistic of pilot error.
Everyone at Squantum knew me. I had flown in there often. They all thought I had done a great job, an opinion that was not universally shared at that moment. As soon as I walked into the operations hut, the officer of the day handed me the phone. On the line was the military detachment officer, a captain, in charge of Logan. His tone and attitude were frostier than the weather beyond the snow-whipped windows.
After formally identifying himself and getting some particulars on who I was, he proceeded to lay me out in lavender. “You ignored a direct order to return to New York,” he bellowed at me. “Civilian traffic has been tied up for over an hour. Everything’s been stopped because of you. You had no clearance. We had no idea where you were.” Rat-a-tat-tat . . .
He was, of course, 100 percent right. But I was so glad to be alive that I remained unshaken as his invectives escalated; this seemed to infuriate him further.
“I’m filing a report on you,” he said, spitting out the ultimate threat. I still didn’t respond, only because I had no plausible excuse.
Then he said something that triggered an ill-timed attempt at humor on my part.
“I know you came up to see your girlfriend.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
“No sir. I did not. I brought my girlfriend with me on the airplane,” I said evenly. It was the absolute truth.
That did it. “Captain,” he said, “enjoy your flight home, because if I have anything to say about it, you won’t ever fly again.” Then he hung up.
The next two days at home were heaven. I put the unpleasant military detachment officer from Logan out of my mind.
On the way back to Eglin, I made one stop at White Plains, New York, where Dorothy and I hoped to visit with my old friend Bill Kelley. But he had left for Miami to catch a flight to Buenos Aires on business. His wife asked if there was any way I could see him off. I assured her I would try.
When I arrived back at Eglin, I found that Colonel Tibbets had gone up to Marietta. I wanted to check in and let him know everything was fine and ask for some more time off so that I could see my buddy off in Miami.
I got him on the phone and we engaged in some general conversation. Then I popped the question, expecting a perfunctory yes, having totally forgotten about the unpleasant incident with the captain from Logan.
“Chuck, I have in my hand a five-page report detailing multiple violations,” he said. Without pausing, he proceeded to read the entire report to me, word for word.
I’m not sure if he expected a defense of some kind, but I thought a direct and simple response would save a lot time. “Boss, he didn’t leave a thing out. It’s one hundred percent accurate.”
The silence on the other end of the line remained fixed. I decided to press on. “Boss, that night reminded me of the time you and I were coming around Stone Mountain in that storm, trying to land at Marietta without clearance. Remember how mad they were when you—”
“All right. All right,” he relented. He even added that I could go down to Miami.
Without trying to engage in a lot of amateur psychological analysis, I must say that I believe Tibbets respected my flying ability under those trying circumstances while at the same time recognizing the foolishness of my actions. But that very foolishness had a flip side, the quality of being able to overcome a problem, do the unconventional, and succeed. In combat, that quality can make the difference between success and failure. What is foolish in peacetime can become a virtue in war. I believe the incident helped solidify his belief in me as a pilot.
When we left Eglin, Tibbets and I brought our two utility airplanes to Grand Island, where we naturally expected to keep using them. Sometime after we arrived, however, the base commander inquired of his operations officer why two airplanes were always at his base even though he had no records for them. Taking the judicious course, Tibbets suggested that we turn in our utility airplanes while the turning in was good.
In a few short months, however, we would have our own private air force.
My most memorable encounter at Grand Island occurred when I was assigned to give General Curtis LeMay a complete course in the B-29. The reputations of some men precede them in the same way the fear of a typhoon or other force of nature precedes the cataclysmic event. LeMay was such a man—tough, brilliant, and demanding. He expected perfection and tolerated nothing less from his subordinates. As with all such large personalities, stories circulate from person to person that are part myth and part truth. In my opinion, the most insightful story, whether true or not, went like this:
General LeMay was never without a cigar clenched in his teeth. Smoking is not permitted near a parked airplane; any open flame or spark could potentially set off an explosion. One day LeMay was inspecting aircraft on the flight line. He hadn’t bothered to extinguish his cigar as he approached one of the parked airplanes. The crew chief responsible for this airplane politely reminded LeMay that his cigar might cause the airplane to explode. In his usual gruff tone, LeMay barked, “It wouldn’t dare,” then proceeded to conduct his inspection, confident that the laws of nature didn’t apply to him.
Paul Tibbets rang me up at home late on a Friday evening to tell me that LeMay would be at the base on Monday morning. “He’s preparing to take command of the Twentieth Air Force, which is in the Marianas, to start missions against mainland Japan. I want you to take him through the training course personally,” he said. “Meet him at the airplane at oh-eight-hundred.”
As I hung up, I didn’t quite focus on the task being assigned as much as on the fact that Paul Tibbets had once again selected me to carry out an important assignment. But then the enormity of training Curtis LeMay hit me. At eight A.M. Monday the typhoon would strike.
I arrived at the flight line very early. The crew chief was already there, and as he and I walked around the airplane, my crew started to assemble. I lined them up in anticipation of a formal inspection by General LeMay; such an inspection would be customary for a senior officer. At precisely 0800 the army staff car pulled up to the airplane. An aide jumped out of the front passenger side and in a single flowing movement he opened the back door and snapped to attention. I called my men to attention.
Grabbing a handle on the door with one hand and the door jamb with the other, the general lunged out, cigar first. LeMay was a beefy man, but quite agile. After taking a few steps toward me, he stopped and placed both hands on his hips, ignoring the salute all of us present held as we awaited his response. He surveyed his surroundings, his round face set in a scowl. His eyes were narrowed as if focused on some offending matter. He returned a perfunctory salute.
He removed the cigar from his mouth, and his gaze came to rest on me. Military protocol dictated that I speak. “General, my crew is ready for inspection.”
“You got any airplanes in that hangar?” he rasped.
“Yes, sir,” I replied smartly.
“Good. Dismiss your crew. We’re not going to fly today. We’re going to sit in the cockpit and you’re going to tell me everything you know about this airplane—every nut, bolt, gauge, and rivet,” he commanded in a loud, clear tone.
I was in shock. I had expected to take him up and demonstrate the capabilities of the B-29. I was totally at home in the air. In the hangar, one-on-one with LeMay, I wasn’t so sure. I had never conducted an extemporaneous lecture on the B-29 while sitting on the ground. And LeMay was legendary for reaming subordinates who were ill prepared.
“And bring the flight engineer,” he added, moving past me into the hangar.
We settled into the cockpit of a B-29 sitting in the hangar, LeMay taking the left seat. For the next three hours he peppered me with an endless stream of questions: “How many generators are on each engine?” “Where are they?” “How does the fuel feed into the cylinders?” “How does the cooling system work?” “What about the hydraulics? . . . the brakes ... ?” A short break for lunch and then three more hours. He didn’t want me to tell him how to fly this airplane, he wanted to know this airplane, to understand the finite mechanics of the multiple systems that when put together made it what it was. I respected his insight. As commander of the Twentieth Air Force, if he were to use the B-29 effectively, he had to know it.
I was amazed at how much I knew about the plane’s inner workings. LeMay never said anything one way or the other about my performance. He didn’t compliment or criticize. I didn’t know if I was alive or dead with him. I concluded that I must have done a good job. He hadn’t thrown me out of the airplane. And his last words of the day were, “Tomorrow we go up.”
The next morning, perhaps out of some sense of following protocol with his instructor, he asked me, “Where do you want me to sit?”
I confidently replied, “Sir, take your choice.” As if there had been any doubt, he settled into the left-hand seat. I knew I could fly the plane from either the pilot’s or copilot’s seat, so my relative position wasn’t important—to me.
On this day we would fly two three-hour missions, one in the morning and one in the evening. As we went through various maneuvers, LeMay listened to my commentary and instructions with little or no comment. He was all business. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I could almost hear the gears in his mind whirring.
The day before, as we’d sat in a B-29 cockpit on the ground, looking out the nose canopy, I’d explained to the general a phenomenon known as parallax. On a B-29, unlike other aircraft of the time, the pilot looked out through the curved Plexiglas that surrounded the entire cockpit instead of through the conventional flat windshield. This curve caused a distortion for the pilot in which images appeared a little to the left of where they actually were, especially on the approach when landing. If the pilot failed to compensate, he’d actually land off center from where he thought he’d touch down. The parallax was even more pronounced at night, when the pilot was relying on boundary lights to fix his point of touchdown. But until a pilot experienced parallax, it was a hard concept to grasp.
At the conclusion of the morning mission LeMay landed without incident, a little off the center line, but nothing to comment on.
As we completed our night mission, the general began his approach. In the distance ahead we could see the landing beacons and the boundary lights on each side of the runway. To me, it was obvious he was making the same mistake every pilot makes the first time he experiences parallax at night. The closer we came to the runway, the more apparent it became that he would be off center and would end up landing half on the runway and half in the mud. But he wasn’t making any adjustment. As the instructor, I could have stepped in or even taken over the controls. But I didn’t. I let him continue to make his own mistake to allow him—and me—to see how he’d react.
We were at a critical moment. In a few seconds we’d be committed and would not be able to pull out. I surreptitiously moved my hands on the controls, ready to take over. I wanted him to benefit from this error, but not to the extent of risking a crash on touchdown.
I’ll be a son of a gun if LeMay, when he realized a problem had developed, opted to give it full throttle, pulled out, and retracted the gear. He did the smartest thing a pilot can do. It is an old flying maxim: When in doubt, go around. But so many pilots ignore that simple truth and fly themselves into the ground.
Around we went, and on the second approach he landed dead center on the runway. Although he didn’t say so, I believe he appreciated my letting him learn from the mistake rather than stepping in and correcting it.
On our last day he ordered up three B-29s to do some formation flying, which was something that would be of great importance to him during operations against the Japanese mainland. We did fast climbs to 30,000 feet, descents, and banking maneuvers. He wanted to get a feel for what this massive airplane could do under stressful conditions in flight with similarly massive airplanes in formation.
It was moments after a rapid climb from 8,000 to 30,000 feet that an explosive sound ripped through the fuselage. A rear window had blown out due to some minor breach in the integrity of a seal or perhaps a crack in the window. Whatever it was, the internal pressure blew out the window with explosive force. Everything that wasn’t nailed down in the cabin was sucked out the hole: paper, cushions, equipment, upholstery on the walls, everything. It was fortunate that the entire crew had their safety belts on. The sudden decompression could suck a man out if he wasn’t strapped in securely.
I immediately knew what had happened. Reaching for my oxygen mask, I looked over toward LeMay, who was also strapping on his mask. No questions, no hesitation, no panic. He was dealing with the situation as if he’d been born inside a B-29. Gradually he descended to a lower altitude.
After landing, I offered some comment about what a pleasure and an honor it had been to fly with him, and I wished him good luck. In usual form, he grunted something that sounded like “All right, kid” and walked off.
I took it as a high compliment, indeed.
In a few weeks, General LeMay would commence operations with an air force of eight hundred to one thousand B-29s that would culminate in the spring and summer of 1945 in massive firebombings of Japanese cities in an attempt to force the Japanese to surrender.
Thus, I fully expected that I would finish the war tucked away in Nebraska or in some other equally uneventful place. So I didn’t make much of it when Paul Tibbets went down to Colorado Springs to report to General Ent. Maybe we’d get another assignment to test more B-29s or train more pilots somewhere.