John Mitchell, fighter pilot
Courtesy of the Mitchell family
SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN MITCHELL, STRUGGLING FOR DAYS with a head cold, was more than happy when he spotted the runway at Hamilton Field down below. For two hours he’d been flying maneuvers in the Curtiss P-36 Hawk, a single-winged fighter that could reach speeds of 300 miles per hour but cruised most comfortably at 250 miles per hour. He’d taken it up to 20,000 feet and higher—the monoplane’s ceiling was 30,000 feet—and it was in the thin air that his head had bothered him the most. He probably shouldn’t have even flown that day, and now all he wanted was to get onto the ground as fast as possible. But as he descended, a bolt of pain shot through the right side of his head and bored into his temple. He had dropped down too quickly, and he nearly screamed as he pulled up to 10,000 feet as quickly as he could. He stayed there and slowed his breathing until the throbbing stopped. Then he tried again, this time taking the plane down ever so slowly. Not a good day in the sky, he later told Annie Lee. “My cold bothered me so much I really didn’t enjoy it.”
Which was unusual. Ever since he’d enlisted, John Mitchell had enjoyed flying to the utmost and had a hard time sitting around when he could be in the sky. Mitch, as everyone called him, had moved from Moffett to Hamilton Field in early September 1940 and for the next six months had trained at that Army Air Corps airstrip twenty miles north of San Francisco. He had settled into the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, or BOQ, a snow white stucco structure built on a hill that overlooked the base. From the small porch of his second-floor apartment he looked out onto the three tennis courts reserved for officers only, the base’s outdoor swimming pool, and, in the distance, San Francisco Bay. The Officers’ Club, a short walk away, was “something to write home about,” which he did, describing the club in detail for Annie Lee—the bar, the game room, the Ping-Pong tables, and the expansive dining room. “It’s just too wonderful for words.” The living situation beat Randolph Field in Texas by a mile and reminded him of Hawaii. “Flowers are growing everywhere.”
His raison d’être, though, was flying. He belonged to the 55th Fighter Squadron, one of several squadrons making up the 20th Pursuit Group. New pilots assigned to other flying groups continued pouring into Hamilton, eventually overcrowding the base, as the Army Air Corps moved to rapidly build up its overall pilot numbers. Likewise, the development of new fighter planes had taken on a sense of urgency. Mitch briefly flew the P-36 but by mid-October 1940 was switched to the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, considered more agile in combat at low to middle altitudes, which the government had put into large-scale production. With war seemingly on the horizon, he was eager to pile up training hours. With each passing month, the fighting overseas had proved disastrous for the Allies. In early May 1940, the Netherlands had surrendered to Germany. In late May, British forces had retreated en masse to France’s port city of Dunkirk, and more than 850 civilian-owned boats had crossed the English Channel to help with an all-out evacuation, the largest military evacuation in history. Belgium had fallen to the Nazis before the month had ended. The US government, meanwhile, had earmarked millions of dollars for a new massive military buildup. Then Norway had fallen in June. In August, the German Luftwaffe had begun bombing England, and in September, it had targeted London. By the end of the month, just as Mitch was moving to Hamilton, the nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a Tripartite Pact, which stipulated that an enemy to one nation was an enemy to all three. Around Hamilton Field there was a steady hum about war. “Yes, our war situation grows more serious each day,” Mitch wrote Annie Lee days after the Tripartite Pact was signed. The next week he added, “Really looks as though we are heading for a war of some kind.” It was a betting man’s odds that US involvement was inevitable; the question was when.
Mitch was part of the rush for new fighting men. He aimed to be ready, but his eyes didn’t lie; during exercises at Hamilton Field he observed the occasional failure of men and machines. Flying could be a risky and dangerous business, especially at a time when hundreds of untested pilots were hurrying to train in relatively untested planes. One day it was a buddy of his, a pilot named Jack Jenkins, whose engine cut out right after he’d taken off. He was forced to land the P-40 in the bay. Luckily Jenkins wasn’t hurt, Mitch told Annie Lee later, “but this is the second motor failure we’ve had recently.” Lucky, too, was a pilot from another squadron, who, after landing, started on a ground loop and gunned the engine, thinking it would straighten out the plane. Instead, the plane stood up on its nose, probably because the pilot hit the brakes too quickly. The pilot came out unscathed, and the plane suffered only minor damage. Then there was the pilot who came in too low. He scraped the embankment at one end of the airstrip and sheared off his landing gear. He was forced to keep going and fly to a bigger airfield in Sacramento, where he could land without wheels. Mitch had his own scary moments as well. He was flying a P-40 one day at 20,000 feet and had been at that high altitude for about an hour. It was thirty below zero outside, and he was freezing. His engine suddenly cut out. Ice had apparently formed in the carburetor. He feared he was going to have to make a forced landing. But once he took the plane to a lower altitude, the engine fortunately kicked in again.
Not so lucky was a pilot from another squadron at Hamilton. His P-40 stalled at 12,000 feet and went into a fast-descending spin. The pilot bailed out in a parachute, but as he exited the cockpit, he struck the plane’s tail. The multiple injuries he sustained landed him in the hospital for six weeks. Some of the mishaps were worse. In late October, Mitch joined an aerial search party for two fliers who’d disappeared after taking off from an airfield in Oakland en route to Monterey, only a hundred miles away. He and the other pilots buzzed over the ground at about twenty feet high but found nothing. The two pilots were never seen again. Several months later, two rookie pilots learning to fly the P-40s collided in midair and were killed instantly. Neither pilot had seen the other. “You may have seen something about it in the paper already,” he wrote Annie Lee.
Mitch was sympathetic to those calamities, but only to a point. He firmly believed that airborne troubles were mostly man-made. “Nine-tenths of all these accidents are due to actions of the pilot and not to some failure of the airplane,” he said. “If a fellow is alert and keeps his head up, I see no more danger in flying than anything else. It’s the fellow that goes to sleep at the switch that gums up the works.” He was especially wary of the veteran flyboys at Hamilton who didn’t hesitate to fly while hung over. “I sure would hate to have to ride with some of these older officers after they spent a night at the club,” he said. “They are really not fit to fly and yet they do it.” Mitch was hardly a prude, but flying was deadly serious. He’d stick to the “old rule of no drinking 24 hours before flying.”
But beyond the periodic misfortune, Mitch embraced the training days, knowing full well he faced a steep learning curve. When he was on duty, the usual routine was to fly in the morning and attend ground school in the afternoon. One day not long after his arrival he saw he was on the list of pilots scheduled for “acrobatics,” in which the pilots practiced a variety of stunts such as loops, slow rolls, snap rolls, and spins. Fighter pilots relied on aerobatic maneuvers to survive—and hopefully win—dogfights. Seeing his name, Mitch at first felt a pit in his stomach; he had not performed any acrobatics in either a P-36 or the new P-40s. He awoke the next morning feeling anxious. But after only a week of drills, the early apprehension seemed a distant memory. Suddenly acrobatics were lots of fun, and he wrote to Annie Lee excitedly about one exercise on the morning of Thursday, October 1, when he had flown in formation with two other pilots. “We did loops, slow rolls, Immelmanns and chandeliers together, and it looked very good.” The flight leader afterward praised Mitch, telling him it was the best he’d done so far. Mitch began looking forward to the sessions when he and other pilots were performing the coordinated stunts, one of which was called the “rat race,” in which he and five other pilots lined up in the sky, one plane right behind the other. It was a game of follow the leader, he told Annie Lee: “The leading plane does all sorts of things and we have to do them in order to stay with him.” Mitch seemed like a kid at play.
Other mornings, Mitch took the plane up to 20,000 feet and higher—nearly four miles into the blue—where he would fire his machine guns to test their functionality, the worry being that below-zero temperatures might hamper them. He found that most of them worked fine. Or he’d see if he suffered from any of the sinus and ear troubles high-flying pilots sometimes experienced when descending sharply. He’d dive from 20,000 feet to 10,000 feet in a single dive, as fast as he could. The instructors at the ground school had suggested tips to avoid difficulties, but Mitch found he didn’t need them. The fast, deep dives, he said, “really had no effect on me.” He liked the high altitudes, the big sky with so much to see. During a longer flight over interior California, he passed over snowcapped mountains that rose 10,000 feet into the air, and later that same day he cruised over miles of barren desert. “I fully enjoyed every bit of it,” he told Annie Lee. Flying off the California coastline, he’d spot a navy destroyer or aircraft carrier heading for Hawaii, where construction at Pearl Harbor was nearing completion. Hickam Field had been built specifically as a new base for the Army Air Corps, while the Navy controlled Ford Island. Following fleet exercises in the waters off Hawaii in 1940, the Navy had decided to keep its entire Pacific Fleet permanently based at Pearl Harbor.
With acrobatics, simulated dogfights soon followed, which Mitch relished for their competition, even if he was a novice and, after a mock dogfight against his squadron commander, had to admit he wasn’t very good. The veteran commander got onto Mitch’s tail within minutes of their start. Mitch maneuvered to shake him off, but the commander got right back onto him, bearing down. No matter what Mitch tried, he was outfoxed. “Naturally he has had a lot more experience,” he conceded. In late October, when he got the chance to pilot a P-40, he wasn’t afforded the luxury of taking the plane up for an hour or so to get used to it. He was ordered to get into a dogfight against one of the veteran fliers on the base. Once again his inexperience showed. “He got me the first time and then I got him. We decided to try the third time and I had him again, but relaxed for a couple of minutes and he got on my tail and I was unable to shake him off.”
Initially Mitch wasn’t impressed with the P-40—“Uncle Sam’s prized possession,” as he called the much-anticipated fighter plane. It handled okay and was faster, but “they have tried out the P-36 against the P-40s and every time the P-36 comes out the winner,” he informed Annie Lee. Even so, he flew mainly a P-40 for the remainder of his time at Hamilton Field, and with repetition he became more competent and, just as important, more confident. He experienced a breakthrough of sorts during a ten-day training trip to Muroc Dry Lake, about four hundred miles away. From a training perspective Muroc was ideal—a dry lake bed about fifteen miles long that could be bombed and strafed relentlessly. From a lifestyle perspective Muroc was grueling. “Real dusty, rattlesnakes and varmints—worse than Texas,” Mitch joked to Annie Lee. The daytime temperatures soared into the nineties, while the nights turned cold, Mitch and four other pilots cramming into a tent shaped like an upturned ice cream cone to fit a small stove to keep warm, with a stovepipe sticking out of the tent’s top. Mitch was huddled there on election eve, November 5, 1940, struggling to hear the voting results on a radio with lousy reception that belonged to another pilot. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt easily outpaced his Republican challenger, Wendell Willkie, for what would be an unprecedented third term in the White House. Mitch was curious but didn’t much care who won. “It doesn’t particularly matter to me, though I think Roosevelt will lead us in to war,” he told Annie Lee in a letter he wrote using his knees as a desk.
For ten days Mitch didn’t shave or have to wear a tie, as he was required to every day at Hamilton, and he was able to go around just about any way he wanted to. He trained hard, waking up in the dark to get into the sky by 5:00 a.m. to practice maneuvers and shooting before the air got rough due to the heat. “I have never had so much fun flying since I have been in the air corps,” Mitch said. “We buzzed the camp every day and then there were trains running by about ten miles from camp that we buzzed all the time, to say nothing of coyotes and jack rabbits.” Formal training for strafing runs was virtually nonexistent; everyone was basically learning on the job. Mitch relied on instinct and, after firing the plane’s .50-caliber machine gun at the desert targets day after day, found he had a knack for it. He ended up with the second highest gunnery score in his squadron. “I’m bragging,” he told Annie Lee, “but I really can’t help it as some of these fellows have been flying for years and firing every year and sometimes several times a year.” Mitch came away from the exercises upbeat. “I am beginning to believe that I actually know a little bit about flying,” he said. “We have finished our training and I guess we might now be considered full-fledged pilots.”
His superior officers were beginning to take notice. One was a fellow southerner, a Virginian named Henry “Vic” Viccellio, whose grandfather, like Mitch’s, had fought in the Confederate Army. The two had met not long after Mitch’s arrival at Hamilton. Captain Viccellio, three years older, had been around awhile, enlisting as a private in 1934, the same year Mitch had concocted his unsuccessful scheme to get into West Point by joining the Coast Artillery Corps in Hawaii. Viccellio had served in the 20th Pursuit Group at Hamilton but more recently had been promoted to commander of a fighter squadron in the newly formed 35th Pursuit Group. Watching Mitch train from a distance, Viccellio sensed that the flyboy from Enid had the right stuff to lead. Indeed, early in 1941, as rookie pilots continued to swell the ranks at Hamilton, Mitch was one of the pilots tapped to help jump-start the new arrivals, even though he was only four months into his training. He complained to Annie Lee, “These new boys are as bad if not worse than we were with the planes.” But they were crocodile tears. Mitch stepped up, knowing he must be doing right to be chosen for the added responsibility.
It was also in January 1941 that John Mitchell flew his most complicated training exercise to date, one he would never forget. He was part of a twelve-plane formation whose mission was to track down an enemy bomber that had penetrated their airspace. To make matters worse, the bomber was flying with an escort of fighter planes. Mitch’s formation found the bomber easily enough, and the twelve planes went into a circle with one plane right behind the other so that the enemy planes could not get on their tail and shoot them down. By that time, Mitch had found flying in formation at once challenging and rewarding: each man had to do his part, and if he didn’t the whole formation got messed up. In the exercise, the enemy fighter planes took runs at the formation, but they could not break it and would have to pull off again. The planes in Mitch’s formation would try to get the attacking planes without pulling out of the circle too much. Both sides jockeyed that way for a few minutes. Then Mitch saw his flight leader suddenly make a move, pulling out to the side to catch the bomber. Mitch didn’t hesitate: “I went with him.” He and his flight leader zeroed on the bomber and got it, firing their guns’ fake bullets. But two enemy fighter planes were on Mitch and his flight leader in an instant, and the four planes went around and around trying to hit one another. That went for a few more minutes, when everyone else called it quits. But not Mitch. He kept on fighting, locking into a dogfight, his P-40 and a single enemy fighter chasing each other. The radio crackled with instructions, but Mitch kept going, performing aerobatics to get an edge against his enemy. He finally stole a look around and saw that everyone else was gone except for him and the enemy plane. He was stunned and headed home.
The intensity he’d brought to the moment surprised him afterward. He realized that the radio call had been to tell him the exercise was over, return to base. But he’d been in a zone. “I didn’t hear it and kept on dogfighting.” In the end, he’d shown resolve and a focus proving that he was emerging as one of the squadron’s best and brightest. And though he didn’t know it at the time, he’d participated in an exercise foreshadowing a real-life mission that would someday come his way.
BEING STUCK ON THE GROUND WHEN HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE flying was the worst. It might be due to unexpected bad weather, a bout of the flu, or a propeller malfunction. If he was unable to go—no matter what the reason—he was miserable. He’d kill time shuffling around the hangar, learning about supply, armaments, and the paperwork necessary for flying missions, but without flying it was all a big bore. When he got home at 4:00 p.m. he was in no mood to talk to anyone.
But if he was off duty, when flying wasn’t even an option, that was different. He did his best to make the most of his free time. He took up badminton, tweaking the swing he’d used to smash a tennis ball across the clay courts in Enid to hitting a birdie. His main sport, though, was basketball, and in a matter of weeks at Hamilton he was on the court practically every night. He started on two teams, coached the 55th’s squad, and refereed games in a town league in nearby San Rafael. Like a sports reporter, he kept Annie Lee updated on wins, losses, and his teams’ run for league championships. He proudly reported leading the officers of the 55th Squadron to an easy victory over the officers from the 77th. “Boy did we lay it on them. Beat them 20 to 4. That certainly should be enough exercise for one day, but I have to call two basketball games tonight in the San Rafael league.”
When the California weather was sunny and clear, Mitch would often joyride in the secondhand convertible he’d bought with a bank loan and had driven cross-country to Hamilton Field. He’d put the top down and whiz along the coastal roads. Sundays usually featured a feast at the Officers’ Club—a dinner buffet of roast veal, fried chicken, fried scallops, potatoes, peas, giblet gravy, celery, tomatoes, and shrimp. Thinking of Annie Lee’s mother’s specialty at her Uncle Joe’s family cookouts, Mitch said, “Needless to say I availed myself of fried chicken.” Drinking was usually on the off-duty agenda. Three miles from the base, on the way to San Francisco, was a roadhouse—an eating spot with a bar—that became a favorite. On a Saturday night, Mitch might start with a few drinks at the base and then head out with friends. “Before the evening was over we were all drunk and wandering around everywhere,” he reported to Annie Lee. Nights like that often ended in a fog of booze, with women sometimes coming into and out of the picture, then a wicked hangover and a promise. “I think that will be my last drinking for a while,” he’d write.
Hard as Mitch tried to have fun—and he surely did—at some point during his partying his thoughts usually turned to Annie Lee. Often the trigger was the moon—little Johnnie Bill’s moon, which, after he’d fallen for Annie Lee Miller of El Campo, Texas, had become their moon. It could be a half-moon. “The old moon is half full tonight,” he wrote Annie Lee one night, “and it’s funny how romantic a fellow gets when he sees a moon.” Or it could be a disappearing moon. “The rain has shut out the moon completely,” he wrote another time, “but not before I got a good look and could think of you.” Or it could be a new moon: “The moon is beginning to be full again and whenever I look at it I think of you.” Or, of course, it could be a full moon. “The moon shines so brightly out here,” he wrote, “and I see that old moon and think how much I would like to see you tonight.”
Annie Lee was never far from Mitch’s thoughts.
AS SOON AS HE ARRIVED IN CALIFORNIA, HE WAS AFTER ANNIE LEE to send him a photo. “Hurry with that picture,” he wrote at the end of one letter. Two days later he said, “I’m patiently waiting for that picture,” and the next week, showing hardly an ounce of patience, he said, “I can hardly wait until it gets here.” Annie Lee told him that she was having a photograph taken and would send one as soon as possible. When a big envelope arrived, Mitch melted. “Here I sit looking at the sweetest thing the Lord ever created! She’s got the cutest dimple in her chin, to say nothing of a most bewitching pair of eyes.”
Mitch and Annie Lee wrote a lot, keeping count of their correspondence like a couple of love-struck teenagers. If several days passed without a letter, Mitch complained, wondering if Annie Lee had fallen ill or, worse, that her feelings had changed. But then a letter would show up. “Just when I was beginning to think you didn’t love me any more I got your sweet letters.” In his missives Mitch described flying, sports, partying, and his love for her. They told each other what books they were reading and what movies they’d seen. Mitch recommended the romantic comedy Third Finger, Left Hand, a new release starring Myrna Loy as a successful fashion journalist. “I thought it was really funny,” he said. “They cut a couple of capers that had me almost rolling in the aisle.” He decided that Wyoming, a western starring Wallace Beery, was lousy, and even worse was the movie Dr. Kildare Goes Home, starring Lew Ayres, Lionel Barrymore, and Laraine Day.
Mitch mostly went to the movies in San Rafael with his roommate, a pilot named Ben Bowen. The two had met during training in Texas. The outings turned into a threesome, however, once Bowen met and began dating the daughter of a marine captain. Mitch was now the odd man out, and he would end up sitting off by himself in the darkened movie theater, longing for Annie Lee. The upside—if there was one—was that he was taken with Bowen’s girlfriend, and seeing her and Bowen together brought into focus his feelings for Annie Lee. He liked that Bowen’s girl was down to earth, “not at all sophisticated and is really sweet,” he wrote Annie Lee. “The reason I love you so much, you are what you are, sweet and friendly and try to get along with everyone, without any high-handed stuff.”
Navigating long-distance love wasn’t easy, though. Mitch and Annie Lee had known each other only a few months. Each might have fallen hard for the other, but by midsummer they were separated. Their relationship became a roller-coaster ride as they worked to make sense of their feelings while hundreds of miles apart. Intensifying matters for Mitch was that two of his best friends at Hamilton Field were on track to get married. One of them, Ben Brown, had been dating his girlfriend for quite a while, so when they announced a wedding date for January 1941, Mitch was not at all surprised. Plus he was asked to serve as the groom’s best man. But Mitch was startled by the speed with which his roommate, Ben Bowen, and the captain’s daughter went from dating to embarking on a road trip to Reno one weekend in early December to get married. And just as they had watched movies as a trio, Mitch accompanied them to Nevada, where he stood as his roommate’s best man—further confirmation that he was someone his friends could count on. “I hope everything turns out o.k.,” Mitch wrote afterward. “Seems like it is happening too fast for me.”
Even so, talk of marriage began appearing in Mitch’s letters, a topic that for him and Annie Lee was thrilling—or not—depending on the moment. “I become more firmly convinced every day that married life is the life for me” was the way he leaned into the matter in one of his first letters from California. In October 1940, he drove into town to buy Annie Lee a present for her November 2 birthday, and while at the jewelry store he also sprang for an engagement ring. He had no idea when he was going to give it to her, and certainly he had no plan for marrying, but he wanted to be ready when the time came. His plan for her birthday present, meanwhile, couldn’t have turned out better. In her letters, Annie Lee had said nothing to him about her upcoming birthday. He didn’t know why, but it turned out that she was testing him, to see if he’d remember on his own. Mitch did not disappoint. From the base, he made arrangements for a Waltham seventeen-jewel gold wristwatch to be delivered to her first thing the Saturday morning of her twenty-fourth birthday—as a total surprise. “It’s very simple but I’m crazy about it,” Annie Lee gushed to her Aunt Ludma when the package showed up at her apartment at 8:00 a.m. Mitch had passed the test with flying colors. The gift, said Annie Lee, made for “the happiest birthday I have ever had.”
But thoughts of an engagement were tricky. They both saw other people and were fairly open about their “dates.” Army and navy fliers stationed at bases near San Antonio called on Annie Lee and her cousin Josie at the apartment they shared. The cousins double-dated, or Annie Lee sometimes dated by herself. Mitch chided her, although he couldn’t complain. He went out plenty. Off duty, he and his friends would pick up single women, hang out, drink, and dance. He insisted that it was all in good fun and wanted to blunt any thoughts Annie Lee might have that something more was going on. “I’m not stepping out on you that way,” he said. At one point Mitch even floated a rationale for both of them going out: it was a way to cope with the loneliness of loving someone far away. “The gal can still be faithful even though she has a date every now and then.” Yet while condoning dating, he continued to allude to their possible engagement. “It’s a serious step to take, isn’t it honey? But I’m sure I have never been in love before and I am now.”
Most agonizing were Mitch’s efforts to reunite with Annie Lee, only to see his plans come undone. In late November, he’d hoped to log what was called “cross-country flying time” with a trip to San Antonio. But the idea never came to fruition. The only flying he did around Thanksgiving was a quick round-trip to Muroc Lake to deliver mail. While Annie Lee visited with her many relatives at her parents’ home in El Campo on Thanksgiving, Mitch had an uneventful day, driving for two hours in the afternoon with a friend who had a shack off in the woods. They took along beer and sandwiches, hiked some trails, and fooled around with a .22-caliber pistol, shooting at targets they set up on trees.
Christmas was even a bigger deal. In late October, Mitch announced that he expected to get a short leave and was aiming to catch a plane ride to San Antonio with some other pilots bound for Texas for the holidays. He excitedly mentioned Christmas in nearly every letter, but in early December his tone began shifting from confidence to worry. Then came the back breaker: the week before Christmas, he found out he’d been assigned duty as Officer of the Day on Christmas Day. Worse still, the commanding officers had ordered that no one was allowed to travel more than two hundred miles from Hamilton Field over the holidays, which meant that even if Mitch could find a replacement, he could not go to Texas. He got into an argument with his squadron commanders but made no headway. He was so mad he considered sneaking away, but then he thought better of it. “Though I am not too much in love with this man’s army I still have no desire to get kicked out,” he explained to her. Instead of being able to give Annie Lee her presents—a white bathrobe and matching slippers—in person, he rushed to mail them. Annie Lee, in turn, mailed him presents: a shirt, tie, and leather wallet. They managed to talk on the telephone, but that hardly healed the wound of not being together on Christmas Day. Annie Lee expressed her disappointment, especially after all the buildup and promises. Mitch became defensive. “You talked as though I could help it,” he wrote to her afterward. “I am just as downcast as you.” He was so frustrated by the busted Christmas that he blurted out something to Annie Lee he’d never said so directly: “I have a very potent suggestion: Let’s get married!”
Annie Lee sidestepped the proposal. It hung in limbo throughout a winter of ups and downs, as Mitch pressed for a commitment and Annie Lee equivocated—until one night in early March 1941. Annie Lee had agreed to go out with an old boyfriend who was in the service and happened to be back in town. She saw much to admire in her date and did enjoy his company at dinner. But while they were out, as she later told her aunt, she realized, crystal clear, “I miss Johnnie so much that I know for sure that it’s Johnnie I want.” From then on it seemed as though they were back on track. The Christmas debacle was behind them, and Mitch took to giving pep talks. “Just remember there is always tomorrow and let’s play Scarlett O’Hara,” he said, playing off the line from Gone With the Wind: “After all, tomorrow is another day!” He began talking up the summer, when he was certain he’d finally get time off. In fact, he had a trick up his sleeve to surprise Annie Lee on Easter: without telling her, he’d gotten permission for a ten-day leave and arranged to hitch a ride on a transport plane leaving from Sacramento for San Antonio. He couldn’t wait.
Except that once again, fate intervened, because on the first Friday in April 1941, it turned out that his commanders had a surprise for him. He was called in and informed that he’d been chosen to go overseas on a special mission—he and three other pilots from the hundreds of fliers at Hamilton Field. They weren’t told where they were going—although either England or China was a safe bet. And they were told not to leave the base, not even to fly, because their orders could come in at any moment.
“It was a great honor to be selected,” he later wrote.
Mitch did not protest that time, even though his Easter trip was dead. He broke the news in an urgent letter to Annie Lee, including the fact that the mission had “turned upside down” the surprise visit he’d planned. But this was what he’d trained for, he said, “an actual taste of warfare.” He hoped she’d understand. They would have to wait. “I told you that this was a here-today gone-tomorrow world we were living in, and today it really looks that way.”