I had a roommate in college who was trying to get a flying class together. He needed one more person, and I told him I didn’t want to do it, but if he couldn’t find anyone else I probably would; so he got me into it. I took up flying with that class under government sponsorship, and with that I made a commitment to go into the service after the course. The result was that I got to choose if I went into the Navy Air Corps or the Army Air Corps. I must have been nineteen or twenty and in my second year of college at Southern Arkansas University. I grew up in a family in Arkansas where we didn’t even have a family car, so I learned to fly before I had a driver’s license for a car.
The war had started during my sophomore year at Southern Arkansas University. On December 7, 1941, we were all gathered around a radio in a professor’s room on our floor of the dormitory. He was our history prof. We had a National Guard unit there that was activated almost immediately. I was lucky I hadn’t joined them, because I was playing football and didn’t have time to work out with them. So I took the CPT, Civil Pilot Training, and had primary and secondary training, and then waited to be called. I was called up in December, on Christmas Eve of 1942, and chose Navy. Then I went to preflight school at the University of Georgia, and primary flight training at Peru, Indiana, and down to Pensacola, where my girlfriend and I finally got married. I met her through my roommate at college, and she was going to Purdue then, but I was afraid I’d lose her so I married her. I was committed but she wasn’t, so I had to take her out of circulation! And we’ve been married for sixty years.
So, I went through flight training at Pensacola and was trained as a carrier pilot flying the SBD dive-bomber. Just as my squadron was being called to go out to the Pacific, they kept me there as an instructor. So, I didn’t go out with the guys I trained with, and I think about half of my buddies who went out flying off carriers never made it through the war. While I was an instructor there at Pensacola we had a number of big-time athletes come through. One was Ted Williams, the baseball player. He was a student of mine and he came through pilot training. I knew him well because I had given him a number of flight instruction lessons. It turned out that I was the guy who gave him his final flight to determine whether he got his wings or not. I remember that after the flight— and he passed it with no problem—we went and parked the plane under a tree and ate pecans and talked about baseball. I really admired him because he was in there to go to war. He didn’t want to play on the baseball team there. He said he didn’t get into the military to play baseball, and that they had already taken that away from him. He was pretty bull-headed about that, and they would have kept him there if he’d have played baseball for the Navy, but he wanted to go overseas.
We had a lot of training accidents in Pensacola, and I had some good friends killed there. They were learning to be navigators with a little plotting board in their laps while flying those planes, and if you didn’t figure right you could easily go 180 degrees in the wrong direction. And that’s what caused some accidents there. They’d be out over the Gulf, and instead of coming home they’d go the other way, and that would be it. You wouldn’t see them again.
One of the most dangerous things I did there involved training some English pilots who had come over. These guys weren’t afraid of anything, and they were pretty careless. I remember practicing night carrier landings sitting in the back seat of an SBD with them flying those planes, and I got scared plenty good! Night carrier landings are the toughest flying of all, because you have seven flare pots on each side and that’s all the lighting you have, and you were trained in the Navy to land the plane in the first 300 feet. But to come in and land without any other point of reference except for those flare pots, that was the toughest thing of all.
They trained you to get out of a sinking plane if you went in the drink off a carrier. They had a thing called a “Dilbert Dunker.” Dilbert is the Navy’s idea of a dumb pilot, and he was always doing the wrong things, like landing with the gear up and things like that. For this Dilbert Dunker, you would go down a slide in a mock-up cockpit into the water and it would flip over and then you had to get out. They figured if you could get out of that thing—and it wasn’t easy—you could get out of an SBD in the ocean.
One day another friend of mine and I checked out a couple of SBD dive-bombers to go for an overnight flight to Shreveport, Louisiana, and back. But it was really so I could go see my girlfriend. This was before we were married. We gassed up in Shreveport and flew to Arkansas where my girlfriend was, and we landed those planes on a little cow pasture airport that didn’t even have blacktop. We’d circled the house where she lived, and her mother had seen the planes and come out to the field to look at them. I asked her mother if she wanted a ride and she said yes, so we put her in the backseat and I took her for a ride. And they’d have kicked me out of the Navy for that if they’d have found out! Then we put on an airshow in my little hometown about sixty miles away. We flew up there and put on an aerobatics show like they’d never seen! They had this little two-story schoolhouse on the hill, and I was flying right by the second-story windows waving at my old schoolteacher. It shows how immature you are at that age. It was dumb! I would have ruined my whole career if they’d have found out about it back at Pensacola. I was glad I flew around that small town where I knew people, because the superintendent of schools said he didn’t care who it was, he was going to report us. But my little brother heard it and told my parents and they talked to a few people, and the school board had a meeting and told the superintendent not to report those guys. We didn’t do any harm. If I hadn’t known anyone in the town, that superintendent would have reported me for sure.
After a while as an instructor I asked to be put into multi-engine training, because it looked like the war was going to be over before too long, and I thought if I had multi-engine I might want to be a commercial pilot. So I took multi-engine training, and that’s what I went overseas with. I was flying out of Honolulu all over the Pacific islands picking up hospital patients. I was flying a four-engine plane, the C-54, which was the same as a civilian DC-4. I was based at John Rogers Field on Oahu, a Naval Air Station right next to the commercial airport. I lived in barracks on the base. Hawaii was great. We’d check every morning to see whether we had to fly or not. If we didn’t we’d go out and do something. I had just taken up golf a year or two before and I remember going to the Wailai Country Club, and they’d let us play that club with no fees or anything. Waikiki was awfully nice. The Navy took over those hotels and converted some of them into hospitals and some for recreation. We also played a little baseball. But I was flying most of the time. We were in the Naval Air Transport Service, or NATS. SO even though I was trained and ready to go as a carrier pilot, my active duty in the Pacific was as a transport pilot.
My most exciting excursion was when I went into Okinawa while it was still under attack. We hauled out a load of mental cases, psychological breakdowns, so we had to haul them back. That was a rough flight, and those guys were in bad shape and heavily sedated. We’d bring these guys back to Hawaii to hospitals. We went to islands all over the Pacific. I remember Guam and Kwajalein and Samar in the Philippines. We also landed at Johnston Island. That island was just about all airstrip, and the reef was real shallow all around it. The runway was so short that if you didn’t make a good landing you’d go into the ocean, and there were a lot of wrecked airplanes in the shallow water all around that island. If you had an accident, the deal was that you were stationed there from then on. You didn’t want to end up living on Johnston Island, so that was a real inducement to make a good landing there!
I was a teetotaler, but everyone down in the islands on duty wanted something to drink. So we would pick up a stash of bourbon and take it with us out of Hawaii, and you could swap it for most anything out in the islands—it was really valuable! But the main thing we got out of it was good food. We’d land on some island and talk to the cooks at the Officers Club and make a deal for their best meal for a fifth of bourbon. Otherwise they’d just feed us sandwiches or worse. And they didn’t have much freshwater to bathe in on those islands, so we could get a freshwater bath for a fifth of bourbon. And that tells you how much we liked freshwater baths in the tropics! Brackish water isn’t much fun for bathing.
The range of a C-54 aircraft wasn’t that great, and we’d usually fly eight hours at a stretch at most. Because of that we had to land at a lot of islands to refuel. If need be we could fly up to eleven hours, but we usually just flew eight. We were very aware of the “point of no return,” or the equal-time point. That’s where you get halfway there and have to decide whether to keep going or to go back.
Something that bothered me a lot was that I’d been trained as a combat pilot and had to learn how to bail out of an airplane, but on these transports we didn’t even wear parachutes. That’s because you couldn’t get out of that C-54 anyway. And we were defenseless with no guns, but we were flying through enemy territory sometimes. Plus, you were depending on your navigator to find these little islands from hundreds of miles away with very crude navigational devices. If you got in bad weather and couldn’t find a star for navigation, you didn’t know where you were. So the real scare was whether you were going to get to the next island, and if you had to fly through any kind of weather.
I had one real close call with the weather. We left Samar in the Philippines headed for Guam, and we flew right into some real rugged weather. I remember we lost altitude from 21,000 feet down to 7,000 feet without any control. We were just being tossed around inside the clouds. When we finally got control again we were trying to figure where we could be, and we didn’t know. We knew we were going to run out of gas if we couldn’t find Guam. We were talking this over, and just then we saw a little flash of light through the clouds. So we said, “Let’s go down and see what that is.” We thought we were a good hour and a half from Guam, but we got down low to where we had seen that light, and that was Guam! If we hadn’t seen that little flash of light we would have flown right over Guam and on for another hour and a half, and we’d have had to ditch in the ocean. There was no way we’d have gotten out of that.
Several times we would lose one of the four engines when we were between islands way out over the ocean, and that was always scary. But the really frightful thing I felt was that we were defenseless, and we couldn’t bail out of the plane. Ditching it in the water was the only way to get out of it. We had guys in our group who ditched C-54s, and some got out and some didn’t. We also had a lot of times when guys would take off and head out for some island, and you’d never hear from them again. They’d just vanish.
When we were hauling wounded we usually would have a couple of nurses back there taking care of them. They would try to keep the guys under sedation and under control; that was the main thing. We sometimes had problems with the patients. Some were difficult to control, and it was uncomfortable. The planes had no heat in them, so they’d get cold. The nurses would try and give them blankets to keep them warm. Sometimes there would be a lot of noise coming from back there in the plane, some yelling, and that was commonplace, you know, groaning or yelling from the pain or from anxiety. For the mental cases they would sedate them real big time. But I mostly stayed up in the cockpit—that was my job—and the nurses took care of the wounded in the plane.
I guess of all those islands I liked Guam the best. It was well-populated and a huge American base. That was the place I saw an old Marine buddy from Pensacola who was in a Corsair fighter squadron. We met up and had fun together. He and his wife had known me and my wife, and we had been real close at Pensacola. He was my only real buddy from the military that I kept in close contact with after the war, and I was in touch with him until he died a couple of years ago.
I never was a committed flyboy. Flying an airplane wasn’t something I had grown up always wanting to do. I found it exciting and I enjoyed it and I sure thought it was better duty than something else, but I’m not much of a military guy. With my crews out there in the Pacific, I always made a gentlemen’s agreement with them to show military bearing when anyone else was around, but when we were together, Just us on the crew, we were all good old boys.
My best buddy—a kid from the same little town as me, went through every grade of school with me, played ball with me—he got in the Army Air Corps, and I got word while I was out in the Pacific that he had been killed over Germany. From that day on I was ready to come home. I don’t know why that affected me so much, because I had seen a lot of bad situations, but they were people I wasn’t that close with. But once it was George, that hit me. So I figured I had enough of flying. After things ended in August of 1945, from then on we knew we were on borrowed time out there. The mechanics weren’t doing work as good as they had when the war was still going on. We seldom ever took a trip without losing an engine after the war ended. As a matter of fact, I came home from Honolulu on a ship. I didn’t even fly back. I felt my luck had all run out. I’d had enough. I got out of the Navy when I got to California. They were giving three of us physicals before we got out, and neither of the other two could give a urine sample so I loaned them one. That was my last good deed in the Navy!
I think the biggest thing I got out of the Pacific war was the G1 Bill. When I got out I got to go to a good law school at Columbia University in New York City. And I grew up. After all this time I think I could still get into an SBD and fly it. They had an airshow over here a while ago and they had an SBD. I took a look at it, and it looked real familiar. I didn’t fly a plane for quite a while after the war, until I was flying back to see the Indianapolis 500 one year with a guy, and he let me fly the plane for a while. And it’s amazing, it’s like the old thing about riding a bicycle. You take the controls and it’s the same kind of touch. It comes right back to you.