BILL AND RUTH COPE
ARMY AIR FORCE

ABOVE: Bill and Ruth Cope in Hawaii, 1941.

BILL: I graduated in 1938 from a small Methodist college in northeastern Ohio called Mount Union. I was a three-letter man.

I got a job with the state after I graduated, but it wasn’t much and the pay was bad. One day a flyer came through and made the Army Air Corps sound romantic and travel-oriented, plus it sure was more money. It was a good thing I had a college degree because that was one of the requirements, and I joined. Pretty soon I was in flight school, and I was surprised when they washed out about half of my class in 1940 for various reasons.

In June of 1941 I finished flight training, and as a brand-new second lieutenant I got a dream assignment: bomber pilot at Hickam Army Air Base in Hawaii. It was wonderful! Hawaii at that time before the war was so quiet and serene—just beautiful. We did flying training in the mornings and hit the beach in the afternoon! My training began in the old B-18 twin engine bomber built by Douglas. That plane was slow and would have been a sitting duck for Japanese Zeros. We could only crank it up to 130 mph, and we had no guns.

So there I was in Hawaii, driving a convertible that wasn’t paid off, and we get word of some girls coming in on the Lurline from California. So of course off we went to the dock.

RUTH: I had just graduated from Cal Berkeley. I had been in the drama department. Gregory Peck was a classmate of mine and a friend—the drama department was really small then. We could tell he had talent and would make something of himself. For years people kidded me and wanted to know why in the world I picked Bill over Gregory Peck! But I don’t regret it anymore—Gregory has died and Bill is still here, so I guess I made the right choice!

So these pilots were there to meet us at the dock when we got off the ship. There were five of us girls from Cal. I had a friend from Montana who was stationed at Hickam, and he alerted the rest of them to our arrival. Bill had this convertible and we spent a lot of time together during the two-week vacation. At the end of the two weeks I told the other girls I was going to stay in Hawaii. This came as a shock to them. They all had new jobs and boyfriends to get back to. But I had lost my parents in 1938 and there was no one to tell me not to do it, so I stayed.

BILL: There I was, a pilot with a convertible. What could she do?!

RUTH: Bill was stationed out at Hickam and I got a room in a boarding house in Honolulu. He would lend me his car and I would drive it back to town, and he would stay out at the base. It took him a month to ask me to marry him. We were married on Thanksgiving weekend, November 26, 1941.

BILL: On my first date with Ruthie, I was madly in love with her, of course, but I had this ego thing with girls, and I had this convertible, so on our first date I parked and I said to her, “I love you, take off your knickers.” And she wouldn’t do it!

RUTH: I think I was the first one who ever turned him down! Bill always tells everyone I married him for his convertible. That may have been true, but then I found out it wasn’t even paid for!

BILL: SO of course I wanted to marry her—it was love at first sight. I proposed to her on the terrace at the Hickam officers club. I finally said I’d like to marry her but I couldn’t afford it. I was paying for a car and uniform. So she said, “Well, I have $1000 in cash—will that help?” I said, “That’ll do it!” We were married in what passed for the chapel in the officers club. They had a little altar at one end of a room with slot machines at the back. All the lieutenants were playing the slot machines while we were up there getting married. Then we had the reception out on the terrace at the officers club. The officers club, terrace, and the room we were married in are still almost exactly like they were in 1941. No more slot machines though.

We moved into our quarters at Hickam, a two-story building, and our unit took the two levels on one end of it. Our windows looked out at Pearl Harbor in the distance. You could see the ships in the harbor then because at that time Hickam was a new field and there were no trees yet. When you drive by that building today, and it’s still there and looks exactly like it did when we lived there, the trees are all big now, and you can barely see across the street!

On December 6 I had the dubious honor of being Officer of the Guard with orders to inspect the Hickam flight line before and after midnight to see that all the planes were lined up wing tip to wing tip, with guards on duty to keep an eye out for saboteurs. This was the sad story for military aircraft over almost the entire island. There were a few fighters that were dispersed to northern Oahu, and a few pilots from Wheeler Field got up there and were able to take off, and they shot down eight enemy aircraft. One of these guys is my close friend Col. Rasmussen, from flying cadet days. He was our best man. We still see each other, and he ended up being quite a watercolor painter in Florida.

So, I had gone off duty at midnight of December 6. The next morning Ruth and I were still in bed reading the paper when we heard loud explosions from Pearl Harbor. I said the Navy must be practicing close today. Then I looked out our second-story window—and remember we could see all the way to the harbor—and I could see explosions and ships burning. None of this made any sense, and we were sitting there wondering who, what, and why. Then one of the enemy planes came zooming over real low, coming at us from the direction of the harbor, and flew right over our quarters. As it went over we could see the Rising Sun on the fuselage. I yelled out, “My God, it’s the Japs!” As we looked out the window we could see the Arizona rise up out of the water as it exploded.

RUTH: So Bill jumps up out of bed and is running around getting his uniform on. Usually when he would go over to the base on duty he was in uniform with a tie on. That morning he just threw his uniform on and was heading down the stairs to the door when I yelled at him, “Come back, come back!” And he said, “What do you mean come back?” And I said, “You forgot your necktie.” I don’t know what I was thinking. He just turned around and I’ll never forget the look on his face. He was probably thinking, “How did I ever get involved with this dumb-o?” Then he ran out the door. That’s the last I saw of him for the rest of the day.

So there I was alone, and the raid was going on, and the only thing I could think of to do was to start vacuuming! This seems ridiculous now, but that’s what I did. But then the power went out, and that was it for the vacuuming. Then the phone rang and they wanted me to report to the base hospital. I told them I wasn’t trained for hospital work—not that I was trying to get out of anything, but to let them know I wasn’t really qualified to do anything in a hospital. So, they say, “Can you wash dishes?” and of course I knew how to do that, so that’s what I did the rest of December 7—I washed dishes in the Hickam base hospital. Since the power was out, their big automatic dishwashers weren’t working and the dishes were piling up and somebody had to do something with them.

BILL: I ran over to the flight line, which wasn’t that far away from our quarters. As I got close, a flight of enemy high-level bombers dropped bombs on the hangers and aircraft that were around there—big explosions everywhere. What I would normally do when I was coming off Officer of the Guard—I had come off duty at midnight the night before—was that I would go to the Operations Building the next morning and report off duty. So that’s what I figured I’d better do. I go in there and the only one in the office was a crusty old lieutenant colonel sitting at a desk. There was debris from the bombed building falling on his head, and explosions all around. He was just sitting there, frustrated and mad, and looking for someone to take it out on. I smartly saluted and said, “Lt. Cope reporting off duty, sir!” And he just exploded! He yelled, “Get the hell out of here!” And that’s exactly what I did.

But back outside the field was complete chaos. No one knew what to do. We had no plans for how to respond to this type of assault. Everyone was just wandering around looking for something to do. We all agreed we needed guns of some sort, but no one could find the key to the armory. All of the airmen who were authorized to drive had gotten into the motor pool, jumped into just about every vehicle in there, and were wildly motoring around the base. I stopped one truck driver and asked him where he was going. He said, “I don’t know, but every one else is going!”

Finally someone got into the armory, and later that day an airman posted a pom-pom type antiaircraft gun outside my window and was pom-pomming into the air. I opened the window and said, “What are you shooting at?” He yelled back at me and said, “I don’t know—everyone else is shooting.” But this had fatal consequences. Later that evening Navy aircraft were coming in from one of our carriers to land on Ford Island. Thinking they were enemy aircraft, a few of them were shot down by our own antiaircraft guns.

So, after December 7 the base was a mess and we had no planes to train in, and it was very frustrating. But a few of the old B-18s were still more or less in one piece. They were patched and wired together, and we finally started flying search missions.

RUTH: I finally saw Bill again late in the evening of December 7. We were more worried about Bill’s family and my aunt and uncle in Montana and that they’d be wondering what had happened to us. After December 7 they were talking about evacuating all the wives back to California. But then I got a job with the WARDS. This was a group of military wives and civilian women, and we plotted radar sightings of all aircraft around Oahu Island. The intention was to avoid shooting down our own aircraft by tracking and identifying every aircraft that was in the air around Oahu. We worked up at Fort Shafter. This was top secret work, and I couldn’t even tell Bill much about what I was doing.

BILL: After December 7 we started getting more of the new B-17s. They were great planes. I wouldn’t be here today except for the durability of the B-17. During the Battle of Midway we flew our B-17s up to Midway and gassed up and then went out looking for the Jap fleet. But they were taking evasive action and were headed for home. We didn’t have much luck bombing them because our bomb sight was designed to aim on a fixed target, such as anchored ships or buildings. I had an engine go out and came home on three.

RUTH: But if they had taken Midway, you wouldn’t have had any place to re-fuel.

BILL: Yeah, if they had taken the island I wouldn’t have had any place to land. I didn’t have enough gas to get home.

RUTH: I found out I was pregnant the weekend of June 6, 1942, and I remember it because it was the week of the Battle of Midway. I plotted Bill out in the Battle of Midway. He never got to see where I worked. It was all top secret. He said, “I’m going to be out of town for a few days and I can’t tell you where I’m going.” And I couldn’t tell him I knew where he was going! The timing came out perfectly because he took off for New Caledonia about the time I headed back to the States and was getting ready to deliver our first daughter.

World War II strengthened our marriage. We became an Air Force family—career Air Force. We were in the military. We had everything go wrong that could have gone wrong for us. We had just been barely married when we were separated in June 1942. If you really wanted an excuse to see that the marriage was going wrong, that would have been it. But we stayed together and we’re still together.

BILL: She was in the hospital in the States having a baby, and they asked her how long her husband had been overseas. And she says, “Over a year.” And they said, “Ohhh? Oh, really! He’s been gone over a year and you’re having a baby now?”

RUTH: I didn’t say that I had been over in Hawaii with him nine months earlier!

BILL: In 1942 the Japs had starting building an airfield on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. So we flew our B-17s from Hickam to Fiji, and then on to New Caledonia. I was bombing Guadalcanal from New Caledonia, and then a little later we moved to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. The Seabees would go ahead of us and carve out runways in the coconut groves. We didn’t have much in the way of supplies. Sometimes we would sleep under the plane wings, poured gas into the tanks by hand, ate powdered eggs and powdered milk. I didn’t get malaria. But I hoped I would—I let the mosquitoes bite me! I figured they’d send me home!

RUTH: When he came back home he weighed 125 pounds though.

BILL: Remember I said we had trouble hitting ships with bombers because of the fixed bombsight? Well, I ended up hitting a Japanese ship by mistake. Here’s how it happened. The Japs brought four transports down “The Slot” with supplies for their troops. They anchored off the part of Guadalcanal they controlled and were off-loading to small boats that would take the supplies in to the beach. A request came to our squadron of B-17s to come from our base in Espiritu Santo to bomb these transports. We flew up there—it took several hours to get there from Santo— and we were coming in over Iron Bottom Bay to hit them. I was flying on my squadron commander’s wing, and my bombardier was supposed to watch and drop our bombs when the lead plane dropped. It was called pattern bombing. As we got near the target, we saw that the transports were being protected by what looked like battleships, cruisers, and destroyers and they were throwing up a lot of ack-ack. We were getting some hits, and then a half a dozen Zeroes came at us head-on, and they were firing at us. I knew my bombardier was firing at the Zeroes with his nose gun and I was afraid he wouldn’t dump our bombs at the right time. So I called down and said, “Get ready to get those bombs away.” All he caught was “bombs away.” He thought we were in trouble, so he dumped our bombs. They ended up hitting what looked like a battleship and seriously damaged it. Our Navy later finished it off. Of course, I couldn’t see what had happened under us to our bombs. When we got back to base, I was apologizing for dropping early when some of the pilots behind us came in and were congratulating me for hitting the battleship! It was all by mistake, but we hit it! This got no publicity because there was no media in the area at the time.

Most of the time we were flying search missions for the Navy to try and spot the enemy carrier forces. Eight- and nine-hour flights, and come back and hope we could find our island. Finding the island was a greater worry than Zeroes. The Zeroes were hesitant to attack us because of the ten .50-caliber machine guns we had on the plane. They didn’t know we couldn’t hit anything.

After thirty-five missions in the Solomons’ combat zone, I returned to the States and received a Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals. The rest of the war I had operational and inspection jobs.

Bill stayed on and made a career in the Air Force. In 1948 he participated in the Berlin Airlift. Bill and Ruth enjoyed their years in the Air Force in spite of the many moves. They feel the experiences enriched their lives and those of their two daughters.

And Ruth did see Gregory Peck again. “After twenty-five years I ran into Gregory Peck at a fundraiser in Fresno, where we happened to be stationed at that time. And he said, ‘Oh, Ruthie, the years have treated you so well.’ I don’t know what he told his French wife—he told her in French who I was, but I don’t know what he said about me.” Bill and Ruth ended up moving back to Hawaii where it all started for them, and they volunteer at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.