CHAPTER TWO

Training

McGOVERN RODE THE TRAIN DOWN to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, where the following morning he was sworn into the Army. He took the oath and became a buck private. After a couple of days of just waiting around, it was south to Jefferson Barracks just outside St. Louis. The men called it JB. It was located in a series of ravines and hills. It was cold. When it wasn’t snowing, it was raining. Mud was everywhere. JB, like most other AAF bases built during the war, was constructed according to Army Air Forces Chief of Staff General H. H. “Hap” Arnold’s insistence that the bases be models of “Spartan simplicity.” There were two dozen want-to-be air cadets in each tar-paper barracks. Their average age was nineteen.¹

They were issued their uniforms, shoes, mess kits. For many of them it was their first time away from home, which made them susceptible to diseases. Illness became so prevalent that the cadets took to calling one street Influenza Valley, another Pneumonia Gulch. Nevertheless they were there to learn the difference between the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way of doing things, so they had little time to get acquainted. Instead they drilled.

The old sergeants were there to teach them how to keep their barracks clean, their uniforms ready for inspection at any time, how to march, shoot a rifle and a pistol, march some more, obey verbal commands. To the sergeants they were just another bunch of buck privates that needed to be shaped up. “And so the yelling and hollering began,” McGovern said, “and the nonstop four-letter words.”

The drilling was nearly continuous. If a man reported for sick call, and many did at first, the sergeants regarded him as—and called him—“a f—k off.” McGovern was lucky. He was in good health, and his sergeant, named Trumbo, although he enjoyed drilling all the men—he called them “you smart college guys”—still had a streak of kindness in him. Sergeant Trumbo taught them close-order drill. He taught them to run as fast as they could, then throw themselves down behind a fence, a rise in the ground, or into a hole. How to put on a gas mask. And more. From dawn to dusk and into the night. They ate, then collapsed on their bunks. They woke up to reveille and started over again.

One Saturday night McGovern had the only experience he enjoyed at JB. He hopped a bus for the thirty-minute drive into St. Louis. Walking around alone, he found himself in front of the St. Louis Opera House. A uniformed attendant grabbed his arm and said, “Soldier, how would you like to hear a great American sing?”

“Who?” McGovern asked.

“Marian Anderson,” the attendant replied. McGovern knew the name and the fact that the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to allow her to sing in Constitution Hall in Washington because she was black. “Of course the professors at Dakota Wesleyan made sure we knew about that and properly condemned it and what a great woman she was.” So McGovern said yes, sure. Anderson had asked that a representative of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard join her on the stage. She had them stand in a semicircle behind her for the entire two-hour concert. She chatted with them between songs, which was a big thrill, but the biggest was hearing her sing.

“I don’t think I’d ever heard such music and never again would hear anything so beautiful,” McGovern recalled nearly a half century later. When she concluded with “America the Beautiful,” the servicemen and everyone in the audience wept. Some were visibly sobbing. To everyone present, that was what America was all about. “That was one of the great moments of my life.”²

The privates continued to march and otherwise learn the rudiments of soldiering. After thirty days, they shipped out, their destination colleges and universities all over the country—there were 150 schools involved—for five months of testing and ground school training. McGovern went to Southern Illinois Normal University in Carbondale. There it was dorms rather than barracks. McGovern was one of 125 living in Anthony Hall, all from the Great Plains and upper Midwest. The same number lived in other dorms. Many of those men were college students from New York City and they called the rural boys “shit kickers.”³

The Army Air Forces had by then become what was called the largest single educational organization in existence. It had a total strength of just over 20,000 when the war began in Europe, representing a bit over 10 percent of the Army. By 1944 it was up to 2.4 million personnel in its ranks, almost one third of the total Army strength.⁴ Nearly all of them had to be taught highly specialized skills, beginning with pilots. This put an enormous strain on the AAF. To respond, it had an apparently unlimited budget. “Everything is expendable in war,” Eisenhower once said. He added, with a grin, “even generals’ lives.” And went on, “so long as you win.”⁵ The only limitation on the AAF’s purchases was the capacity of American industry to manufacture airplanes of all types, plus supplies and equipment. In manpower, there were no apparent limits. The AAF built barracks and airfields. It rented college dorms and hotels. It hired civilian instructors. It spent more than $3 billion 1940s dollars in the course of the war. All this and more was done by a prewar cadre that had never seen more than a few aircraft flying in formation at one time. The AAF put the potential air cadets through a multitude of physical and mental tests before embarking on about as rigorous a training program as could be. During the first months of the war it wanted to graduate 30,000 pilots a year, along with even more thousands of bombardiers, navigators, engineers. By October 1942, the goal was up to 100,000 pilots a year, and proportionally more crew. The AAF determined that it needed one million air cadets to reach its goal.

For the men being tested, the most feared word was “washout.” The process began immediately—slightly more than 50 percent of them failed either the initial physical or written tests and were packed off to the infantry. The AAF expected that result, and further that more than 40 percent of those left would fail to complete the courses of Primary, Basic, and Advanced schools.

To reach the required numbers, the AAF’s policies evolved. On December 10, 1941, Chief of Staff Arnold dropped the requirement that all air cadets had to have completed two years of college—he substituted a qualifying test to replace the requirement. In mid-January 1942, he dropped the ban on married applicants for the air cadet program and lowered the minimum age from twenty to eighteen. The new policy greatly stimulated enlistment and for a year or more those inducted as aviation cadets greatly exceeded the AAF’s capacity to train them.⁶

In November 1942, Charles Watry was eighteen years old. Congress was about to lower the draft age from twenty to eighteen. He and some others his age decided, “There was no way we were going to allow ourselves to be drafted into the infantry,” so they presented themselves to the examining board, where they were given test booklets and answer sheets for the Aviation Cadet Qualifying Examination. The test would reveal how quick they were to understand directions and whether they could follow instructions accurately. There were reading comprehension sections and others testing mathematical and mechanical skills, judgment and problem solving, and leadership potential.

Watry passed and signed a paper signifying his intention to join the AAF as an aviation cadet. A couple of days later, on November 13, Congress, as expected, lowered the draft age. Watry was worried, since he was still not enlisted in the Army. He asked an AAF sergeant when he should report. Don’t worry, he was told, it would be soon. He still worried.

On December 4, he was told to report for enlistment, and did. The next day, Franklin Roosevelt issued a presidential executive order terminating all voluntary enlistments, to be effective after December 13. McGovern was already signed up; Watry got in just under the wire. By then, there was a pool of more than 30,000 potential cadets, with another 20,000 officers and enlisted men awaiting training as well. The AAF was enlisting 13,000 men per month as air cadets, but it had only enough space, equipment, and instructors to train 10,000 a month, so 3,000 of the potential pilots were stuck in the enlisted reserves, doing what McGovern and so many others did at JB.

Watry was placed initially in the College Training Detachment program, really a holding ground, at Nebraska State Teachers College in Wayne, Nebraska. There were 300 men in his CTD. Most were in their late teens or early twenties and together, in Watry’s judgment, “they were as talented a group as I have ever known.” After that, it was on to the classification phase of training. They went through a day-and-a-half-long battery of tests, as did McGovern and all the groups at their various campuses. Developed by psychologists, the first part tested a man’s general knowledge, graph and chart reading skills, understanding of the principles of mechanics, ability to read maps and photographs, speed and accuracy of perception, and understanding of technical information. The second part measured motor coordination, steadiness under pressure, finger dexterity, and the ability to react quickly and accurately to constantly changing stimuli. The third part was a private interview with psychologists, with such questions as “Do you like girls?” and “Do you wet the bed?”

Then there was another physical examination, “the most stringent possible.” In Watry’s words, “The physical exam is the single most critical event in a military (and commercial) pilot’s career.” Some of the flight instructors bragged that they could teach almost anyone to fly, but as Watry pointed out, “The number who can pass a flight physical is a far smaller group.” AAF-experienced pilots took the exam every year (today’s airline pilots take one every six months) and they always approached it with fear. To flunk meant you would never become a pilot, or continue to be one. A sign over General Arnold’s door reinforced the point: “The Air Force’s Business Is to Fly and Fight, and Don’t You Forget It!” The men were tested on pulse rate and blood pressure before and after exercise, and much else besides.

The eye testing was critical. The men were tested on color perception, distance vision, near vision, accommodation, and other problems. The most feared of the eye tests was the one that caused the most rejections, depth perception, which was tested in a variety of mechanical ways. That was the one McGovern passed with ease. Some 20 percent failed and became washouts, departing the base that day, as the AAF figured it was not good for the man’s morale to remain with those who passed. They still wanted to fly, so most of those who washed out volunteered for aerial gunnery training, radio operator training, or flight engineer training. By 1944 almost every one of the six enlisted crew members of a B-17 or a B-24 were washouts from the cadet program.⁷

In Kenneth Higgins’s primary training he had civilian instructors, but an AAF officer, a lieutenant, would go up with him on his check ride. It was on a small, single-engine plane, a Primary Trainer 19 (PT-19) it was called. On the check ride, the magneto quit. The lieutenant told Higgins to make a turn. He couldn’t. “I didn’t have any power. The thing wouldn’t go. We couldn’t climb. I couldn’t get the magneto working and I’m going into the mesquite trees.” The instructor kicked the rudder and got the plane working again “and we came in sailing downwind and landed all right on the field. It came in hot, but we made it. I couldn’t have done that in a million years, but he had flown for a hundred years.”

The consequence was another check ride for Higgins, with another officer. “Lieutenant Gates, I’ll never forget, he hollered at me all the time, beat my legs with a stick. So finally he said, ‘Land this SOB and let me out.’” Higgins did, and Gates told him to take it up himself. “I can do that,” he said, “and I hoot and hollered and was singing to myself as I soloed.” So he graduated and went on to basic training, with a bigger plane. There he had an instructor who was teaching his first class “and he wasn’t very good.” After more testing, Higgins washed out. Still wanting to fly, he went to radio school.⁸

After the mental and physical exams, the men who passed were asked to list their preferences—pilot, navigator, or bombardier. Those who put down pilot—a vast majority—figured you needed a top score to qualify, but in fact the AAF took its navigators from those who scored the best. When a man finished his ground school, the AAF placed him in a training program, with top priority given to his aptitude for a type of training as revealed in his classification battery of tests. Second priority went to his personal preference. Third went to quota available (in 1944 the order of priority reflected the AAF’s ability to attract young men—many quotas were already filled, so the priority became quotas first, then aptitude, and finally, if at all, individual preference).

The parents or wives of those who had passed received a form letter—stamped on the outside “GOOD NEWS” to allay fears that something bad or terrible had happened—that notified them that their loved one had been selected for pilot (or bombardier or navigator) training. It outlined the program he would be going through before receiving his wings. The last paragraph read, “A pilot occupies a position that requires sound judgment, a keen and alert mind, a sound body, and the ability to perfectly coordinate mind and body in the flying of the airplane. It is imperative that the men who fly our military aircraft possess these qualifications, for upon their skill will depend in large measure the success of our war effort.”⁹

McGovern spent five months at Carbondale for his ground school training. The physical training program, and the academic studies, were “the toughest I’ve ever experienced.” In the mornings, he studied meteorology, navigation, mechanical arts, all taught by college instructors. There were frequent quizzes and examinations, and thus more washouts. After a noon meal, the physical part began. Norm Campanella, a coach at Southern Illinois whose tumbling team had placed first in the nation, was the instructor. He quickly had them doing push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, knee bends, exercises of the waist, running in place, pushing forward with hands on a wall while pulling the head back. At the end of a few hours of such exercising, the men had to run five miles. There was no getting out of it—Campanella followed behind the slowest man in his aging Chevy. If a man said he had a stitch in his side, Campanella would say, “Try to run that out if you can.”

The following day, more of the same. McGovern said that at first he could not see the point of pushing would-be pilots like that, but after it was over, he decided that Campanella “had us hard and in shape—every muscle in our bodies.” Decades later he declared that Campanella had “made a bigger contribution to saving our lives than any other single person.”

Almost every Sunday, McGovern went to the Methodist church. There were Catholics and Jews attending as well, partly for the sermons from a big, jolly, fat minister, partly because the minister formed them into a separate choir—some seventy-five men strong—and had them sing such songs as the Air Force hymn, or “The Little Church in the Wildwood,” or “America the Beautiful.” For a third reason, the minister had the families in his congregation take one of the men home, every one of them, for Sunday dinner—fried chicken, vegetables, bread, gravy, pies, and ice cream.¹⁰

In the fall of 1943, on completing the course at Carbondale, McGovern went to the San Antonio air base. There was more physical conditioning, but not much more—the AAF was simply holding him and the others until it was prepared to train them in flight school. McGovern’s group included two or three All-American football players. There were lots of touch football games, done in military style—the instructors would divide the students into groups. McGovern would find himself opposite a guy who was a starter at Notre Dame or some fleet-footed halfback from Southern Cal. “And you really had to hustle just to keep from looking like a fool. When those guys touched you they’d hit you a belt that would knock you off your feet.” He was at San Antonio for two months.¹¹

Then it was off to Muskogee, Oklahoma, to begin to learn flying the Army way. There was a dirt runway there, at the edge of town, Hatbox Field. The instructors were civilians—the AAF didn’t have enough pilots yet to use its own. McGovern had an old bush pilot, Herb Clarkson, who always had a cigar in his mouth and wore a leather jacket. “The instructor had dictatorial powers,” he said. “Our fate was in his hands.” In Clarkson’s view, “McGovern was unusual in that I never saw him angry. A lot of them would show it, especially after I chewed them out, but McGovern never did.”¹² The airplane was a primary trainer—PT 19—not much different from the Aeronca McGovern had flown in the Civilian Pilot Training program at Mitchell. It had two open cockpits with the student in front, Clarkson in the rear. The PT-19 had no canopy, so the trainee and instructor wore goggles and helmets. As he was one of the few who had soloed a plane, McGovern found the twelve weeks of training to be relatively easy and was generally rated first in his class.

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 Mill-saps 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.

Like all radiomen, Goodner went to gunnery school, in his case to Panama City, Florida. There he shot skeet with a shotgun, then progressed to firing from moving platforms, first with small arms, then with automatic weapons and finally heavy machine guns. He learned how to operate the power-driven turrets, how to sight and swing them and their twin .50 calibers. The total number of men who graduated from gunnery schools was nearly 300,000, more than for any other AAF specialty except aircraft maintenance.

Goodner completed gunnery school on January 12, 1944, finishing in the top 2 percent of his class. His superiors thought he should reapply for the air cadet program. He said no, because learning to be a pilot would take too long. He wanted to get into the war. “Don’t worry,” the squadron commander assured him, “you won’t miss the war.” Goodner again said no.²⁶

George McGovern was in love, and terribly lonely. He and Eleanor had decided they would wait until the war was over before getting married. Through correspondence, the couple agreed to move the date forward to the day he got his wings. That resolution also faltered. When he was at Muskogee, they decided to get married as soon as possible. In a letter to Bob Pennington, McGovern wrote about his reasoning. He knew it was going to be “tough on Eleanor at times, but she’s got plenty of spunk.” Besides, “I honestly believe, Bob, it’s the best thing for both of us that we get married as soon as we can. There’s just one reason why I think so, and that is we’ve simply got an old fashioned love affair on our hands, and it’s pretty hard to stop love even for a war.”²⁷ Why wait? Well, first because the would-be pilots had been told not to bring their wives to Muskogee because there were no rooms available for rent and the hotels were full. Besides, the men had to live on the post and could only be with their wives Saturday nights and Sunday until 6:00 P.M. Nevertheless, McGovern walked through town, knocking on doors, asking if the residents had a room for rent. An elderly couple said they did. A few days later McGovern got a telegram saying that his father had anemia and the Red Cross was recommending that he go home. He got a three-day pass.²⁸

His decision to get married right away wasn’t typical, but it wasn’t unusual either. The men in the armed services knew they were going into a combat zone, whether in North Africa, Europe, or the Pacific, and there was a chance—maybe a good one—that they wouldn’t come back. They wanted at least a taste of married life, and for those like McGovern who had a strict, religious upbringing, it would be their first, perhaps only, chance to experience a sex life with the woman they loved. Air cadet Walter Baskin wrote his parents in June 1943, “It seems that all these cadets have the marrying craze. All those who were not already married seem to be getting married as quickly as they can.”²⁹

McGovern took a train to Mitchell. His father had recovered, so the family, plus Eleanor, drove to her hometown, Woonsocket, and on October 31, 1943, Reverend McGovern presided at the marriage ceremony. The couple spent their wedding night in George’s old room in his family house in Mitchell. The next evening they boarded another train and went off to Muskogee. Between them, they had one bag. The train was full, as most trains were throughout the war—soldiers, young mothers with crying children, and others—so the McGoverns sat on their bag. But as they changed trains in Kansas City, McGovern put the bag down to check in at the ticket office. Someone stole it. They looked but couldn’t find the thief, and at noon they boarded their train. Again, no seats were available. “I looked at Eleanor and her lip was quivering—then she started to cry.” McGovern did too—“We both just bawled.” When they were drained, McGovern looked at his wife, and she at him. “We started laughing at each other. I said, ‘Look, a suitcase full of what we had is not the world’s biggest loss.’” Eleanor said her mother’s wedding veil was in there and again there were sobs.

They got into Muskogee after midnight. McGovern had to fly at 6:30 A.M. on his forty-hour check ride. They had no pajamas, no change of clothes, no alarm clock. The couple who had rented McGovern the room got up, fixed some food, and talked. The young couple told them their problems, particularly the check flight. The old gentleman said he would take care of it. He set his alarm for 5:00 A.M. and drove McGovern to the air base.

As McGovern climbed into the cockpit for his check, he thought there was no way he could do it. He was sure he would be washed out. It turned out to be the best check he ever had. Many others had already washed out. Many others still would. McGovern felt that lots of them washed out “as we got into the flying part of it and they just couldn’t execute—didn’t mean they weren’t capable, highly intelligent guys—but they just couldn’t function and do the things you had to do in an airplane.”

The senior base medical officer brought all the cadets, some 2,000 of them, into an auditorium for a talk on sex and VD. The men were young and wanted sex. The doctor said that when they got their wings and commissions they would have all kinds of opportunities for sex. He told them to be careful and always wear their condoms. The AAF didn’t want any of them to be sick. “I know a lot of you are saying, ‘That’s not going to happen to me,’ but my experience is that just about every man given the right circumstance is going to yield, and every one of you is vulnerable.” McGovern thought, There’s no way he’s talking about me, I just got married, there’s no way I’m gonna cheat on Eleanor. He had hardly had the thought when the doctor went on, “The most vulnerable guys are going to be you married fellas, because you’re used to sleeping with a woman and you’re going to miss it more than the single fellas.” Not me, McGovern thought.³⁰

“Here I was a new bride,” Eleanor later said, “and George was a new bridegroom.” They didn’t see much of each other, but on occasion the wives could come to the lounge on the base. “The husbands were all carrying books,” she recalled. “They insisted that we help them cram for the tests. They’d ask us to test them on this, and test them on that. It was interesting to look around and see all the wives with books in their laps, asking their husbands questions for the test.”³¹

After Muskogee, McGovern went to Coffeyville, Kansas, where he again tramped the streets until he found a kind old lady to rent a room for Eleanor. He got to fly the Basic Trainer 13—a BT-13. It had a radial engine and was a powerful plane that he liked very much. It had a stick, not a wheel. “When you opened that throttle and started down the runway,” he recalled, “that plane just fairly jumped.” It had far more power and much more speed than the previous planes he had flown: “It brought you definitely to a different level of flying. It required considerably more skill to handle.”

Not every pilot had that skill. It was at Coffeyville that McGovern saw his first pilot killed. The officer had pulled up too fast on takeoff and stalled into a nose drop. “He just hit the runway—just bang. I was standing not too far from there. The fire engines were out in what seemed to me to be nothing flat. But when they pulled him out of the plane his body was just like a lobster.”³² Cadet Charles Watry wrote that an accidental death led to a cadet saying, “That is the hard way out of the program.” One of his classmates was practicing S turns along a road. A twin-engine plane was doing the same thing. They had a midair collision. One of the propellers of the twin-engine craft cut off the tail of the classmate’s plane, which crashed, killing him. In total, the AAF lost 439 lives in the primary flight schools during the war. In basic school there were 1,175 fatalities, while in advanced training—flying bigger, faster airplanes, with more complicated training—there were 1,888 deaths.³³

McGovern had the skill and the luck to survive and advance. He felt he was learning, gaining all the time, doing things he could not possibly have done three months earlier, including loops and spins and rolls. He had a lieutenant as instructor—no more civilian instructors. The military instructors were usually combat veterans, some of the best the AAF had. That is what McGovern thought of his lieutenant—one of the best.³⁴

In the AAF, it was said, pilots often forget the names of those they flew with, but they never forget the names of their instructors. “Mine was really tough,” Ken Barmore said. He had been negative toward his first instructor, a civilian, but now he had a military flier. His name was Lieutenant Chilton.^II “Boy, I would have followed that guy anyplace.” Once, in basic school, Barmore was doing solo acrobatics and went into a spin. “I couldn’t get out of the darn thing and I was getting panicked.” He thought he would have to parachute to safety. “Then for some reason it was just like my instructor was there, telling me, Now just calm down, pull the power back, neutralize the controls, go through your spin recovery procedure.” He did, regained control, and landed without a hitch. “What happened?” Lieutenant Chilton asked. Barmore told him. “He was pretty happy that I had done what he wanted me to.”³⁵

After completing the three months at basic school, McGovern went on to advanced school. It was at that point that his class split, with the men being prepared to become fighter pilots going to one base, the bomber pilots to another. McGovern went to a twin-engine school at Pampa, Texas, in the Panhandle.

The AAF used a combination of factors to make the selection. First was the current need for fighter and bomber pilots. Then came the aptitude of the student and his physique. Some men were too big for a fighter cockpit. Further, the AAF assigned to twin-engine advanced school all men with the physical capabilities to handle the heavy controls of the bombers. Finally, and hardly used at all in making the selections, was the cadet’s own preference. More men wanted to be fighter pilots, but their numbers exceeded the demand for them.³⁶

Before leaving to go to Texas, the McGoverns had “a little celebration” with the couple living in the next apartment. McGovern wrote Pennington, “Even Eleanor and I got thoroughly drunk. It was Eleanor’s first time and my third. Believe me I’ve never seen anything funnier than Eleanor that night. She swears she’ll never touch another drop, but I had so much fun watching her and listening to her rattle off Norwegian poetry that I’ll probably talk her into it again. She’s just as sweet drunk as she is sober, and much more of a comic.”³⁷

At Pampa, McGovern flew the AT-17 (Advanced Trainer 17) and the AT-9. The AAF had originally developed the AT-9 as a twin-engine combat attack plane, but did not like it and sold it to Mexico. When the war brought about a desperate need for training planes the Air Force bought the AT-9 back.

It was on the AT-9 that McGovern learned to fly with the instruments on a twin-engine plane. He had a gyro that showed the airplane’s attitude, such as nose up or wing down. He learned to fly formation, how to do night flying. He shot landings, setting down, then taking off without cutting the engines or coming to a stop. All kinds of things. He would take off and his instructor would get him to look out the left window and then shut down the engine on the right. McGovern had to recover and get the plane back on the level and flying straight ahead with just one engine. Or coming in for a landing, the instructor would suddenly pull the power on the left engine, producing drag on that side. He would take the AT-9 away from the field and make McGovern find his way back—he had to remember the terrain sufficiently to get to the airfield.³⁸

In pilotage, navigation techniques involved relating what was on the map to what the pilot saw on the ground. Railroad lines were most helpful—they were called the “iron compass.” The names of small towns on water towers were excellent navigation aids. So were instruments. The trainees learned how to use them on a Link trainer, a small airplane set on a stand that could simulate actual flight. The inside of the Link was totally dark, except for the lighted instruments. John Smith recalled learning about vertigo on his Link, and later in real flying. “The semicircular canals in your inner ear are your primary balance mechanism,” he noted. “They are tuned to your eyes and gave you a sense of balance. But if in a Link or a night flight, when your eyes lose their reference points, they can fool you.” If Smith made a turn when he couldn’t see, then returned to a straight and level path, his inner ear would not get the signal and would tell him he was still turning, so “instrument flying requires that you trust your instruments and ignore your senses.” He also learned to use radio communications between the aircraft and the control tower.³⁹

The hardest part was night flying in formation. “Beginners in formation always overcontrol,” Watry pointed out, “fighting to hold the proper formation position with wild bursts of power, followed by sudden frantic yanking of the throttles rearward when it appears that the wing of the lead plane is about to be chewed up by the propeller of the airplane flying the wing position.” Beginners tried to hold lateral position using only the rudders, but as Watry said, in that case “the airplane is likely to wallow through the air like a goose waddling to its pond.” It was worse at night. The wingman would try to stay in proper position when all he could see was a white light on the tail of the lead plane. To Watry, it seemed his airplane “floated in a void.” If there were no lights on the ground and clouds were overhead, there would be no indication of movement.⁴⁰

Because of the number of accidents, Eleanor and the other wives, living alone except on the brief weekends, were worried sick about their husbands. Every time they heard a crash or a fire engine, they were almost petrified that their man had gone down.

McGovern worked hard at his training. He had to, as he realized from reports coming out of England about the Eighth Air Force and the stories he heard from returning veteran pilots about what combat was like. And he knew the dangers of flying from the number of accidents happening around him. In October 1943, air cadet Ken Barmore was in advanced, flying an AT-9, when he got word that two of his best friends from high school were killed in a B-24 crash at Elk, California, while they were on their last training flight before going overseas.⁴¹

Not all accidents were fatal, but some were, and none were comical except once when an air cadet pilot got lost in his formation on a black night. Others were also lost and trying to find the lead plane. “It was awful,” McGovern said. “People were scared to death.” So this one pilot saw a little white light ahead. He started flying toward it, thinking that was the light on the wing of the lead plane. After a couple of minutes, his co-pilot tapped him and said, “You’re going 400 miles per hour.” The AT-9 could only do 150 mph. The pilot realized that what he was doing was mistaking the light, which was in fact on the ground, as being from the lead plane, and he had his AT-9 in a sharp dive. He pulled back hard, figuring that would pull the plane up, but as McGovern said, “That’s not the way it works—if a plane is going down and you pull the nose up, the plane keeps mushing down for quite a ways, until it loses its downward motion.”

Exactly that happened. The plane hit the ground, a big pancake in a plowed field. But the pilot, thinking he had hit the lead plane, ordered the co-pilot to bail out. The co-pilot promptly did so only to discover that his jump from the wing to the ground was over in about three feet. He yelled to the pilot, “Don’t jump, I’m in a cornfield.” The pilots walked back to base. The next day a truck had to pull the plane out to a grassy spot where it could take off. That night, according to McGovern, “I’ve never seen a human being so mad or so scared” as the colonel in charge. He pulled the trainees into the briefing room—about 150 of them—and said, “I want you sons of bitches to turn around and look at the guy next to you, because you’re looking at the biggest asshole you’re ever going to see in your life—and so is he.” The colonel said he ought to wash the entire class out. He called it the worst class ever at Pampa. “There isn’t one of you that deserves to get your wings.”

There were other problems. McGovern was now an air cadet, making $125 per month. Eleanor was supposed to get $75 of that, but because of some bureaucratic screwup, she didn’t, while George received only $50. So she lived on the $50, as best she could, while he lived on the base. They were too proud to tell their parents that they needed help. Instead, Eleanor lived mainly on crackers and peanut butter. “She doesn’t eat much anyway,” according to George, and the peanut butter filled her up cheaply. That went on for three months. To buy civilian clothes and other necessities, and to expand her diet, she got a job as a legal stenographer with a law firm.

Just before his graduation, McGovern said he wanted to fly a B-24 but that he would be happy to be a B-17 pilot. At the ceremony, the colonel who had berated the cadets and characterized them as the worst class ever said that this was the finest class that had graduated from Pampa. The men found a manila envelope on their chairs. It contained their commission—“Second Lieutenant, Army of the United States”—and their wings. Another document rated them as pilots. Still another was a personnel order that required them to participate in regular and frequent aerial flights. Charles Watry considered that a bit redundant: “That’s what we came to do—wild horses couldn’t hold us back now!”⁴²

Eleanor was at the airfield to pin on George’s wings. The new and exuberant fliers marched past the reviewing stand, singing the AAF song, really belting out the line “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder.”

McGovern looked at his assignment—Liberal, Kansas.⁴³ Eleanor went with him. “I became a camp follower,” she later said. “Ten weeks here, twelve weeks somewhere else.” She again rented a small room and saw her husband on Saturday nights and during the day on Sunday.⁴⁴

Liberal, Kansas, meant McGovern would be learning to fly B-24s. He was pleased. Others were not. Watry had put down the two-engine P-70 night fighter as his first choice, the P-61 Black Widow as his second, and the B-25 two-engine bomber as his third. But like 262 out of 290 of his classmates, he was assigned to Troop Carrier Command. Troop Carrier flew C-47 transports, either dropping paratroopers or towing gliders. “It was a great disappointment to all of us.” They wanted combat in modern warplanes, not hauling paratroopers in an airplane that had been around for years (it was the DC-3 in civilian use). The twenty-eight cadets in Watry’s class of 290 who got their first choice of aircraft assignments were the only ones who had asked for four-engine bombers.⁴⁵

Lt. Walter Baskin had the same fate as McGovern but was not happy. “I have been assigned to a B-24,” he wrote his parents. “That’s just about as far from what I wanted as anything could be, but I can still hope.”⁴⁶ On his graduation, John Smith was asked to list his choices. Knowing that his list would count for naught, he nevertheless put down the A-20 Havoc, which although a bomber had near-fighter performance and a tight turning radius. It had a crew of three, enough to keep the pilot company but not a crowd to look after, as the B-17 and B-24 pilots had to. It had a relatively limited range, so the pilot wasn’t up in the air all day. As for his other choices, Smith wrote, “If you are out of A-20s, it’s all right, I’ll just go home.” He was assigned to a B-24.⁴⁷

Whatever their assignment, the newly commissioned officers and pilots had something to point to with pride. Of the 317,000 men who entered AAF pilot training in World War II, that is, after passing their mental and physical examinations, 193,440 were successful in graduating from advanced. More than 124,000, or about two out of five, washed out along the way, most of them in primary, fewest in advanced.⁴⁸

The AAF in World War II recruited and trained the world’s largest air force. The training was exemplary. On average, before going into combat, the men had 360 hours of flying time. For German pilots and air crews, the average was 110 hours. For the Japanese, Italians, and Russians, it was even less. The three times or more experience in the air of the Americans showed up graphically in the results of air combat during the height of the air war, 1944 and 1945.⁴⁹

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^II Chilton was killed in France in 1944, flying a P-47 in combat.