Bomber Pilot Page 4

  When I got back that night I learned that three cadets had gotten themselves lost by taking the wrong light lines. Another flew past Corpus Christi and out into the gulf; he had turned back just in time to make it into the Corpus airport before his gas gave out. If it hadn't been for Lieutenant Herbine's early instruction in beam procedure I might have been as badly lost as any of them.

  A week or so before graduation at Kelly a man representing a San Antonio paper was scouting the cadet corps for feature material about various cadets who were following in their fathers’ footsteps at the time of their entry into the Army. Some of the boys told him I had acted as county judge of Franklin County, Kentucky, and that my father was a circuit judge. When the feature came out there was a bit about me with a cartoon, giving my name and a few particulars on the judge angle. A few days later I got a note from a man named Robert Ardrey running something like this: “I saw the bit in the paper about you. Your name and mine are sufficiently unusual to make me wonder which of us had an ancestor too stupid to know how to spell his name. Would you come to dinner?” The note explained that he was a writer who had come to San Antonio to have a quiet place to work on a play.*

  Shortly after I got the note I called him and fixed a time to see the Ardreys. On the evening of our dinner engagement I put on my slightly fast-track garb of tweeds and flannels. Adding what I thought was a particularly glossy point, I had a pocket watch in my breast pocket with my Phi Beta Kappa key dangling carefully from my lapel—I had seen Roosevelt wear his key in such a fashion. I also wore a Roosevelt type hat, brim turned up all around and creases in the side. I found Bob Ardrey and his wife, Helen, to be delightful. Helen told me later when I knew her better that Bob detested the wearing of Phi Beta Kappa keys. He had thrown his own away, but had forgiven me for what he considered a sin, and we got on well from the beginning.

  I recall on one visit Helen offered to do any sewing I might need done. I confided to her that I had a theory about darning socks: that when a sock wears through in one place it is usually so thin in others there is little use to darn it. I did not buy fine socks, and I never had them darned. When they wore through, I threw them away.

  I had this “theory” of mine thrown back in my face some time later. I was frequenting the Anacacho Room of the Saint Anthony as often as I could get out to go dancing. I was in the final throes of cadet life and putting on a burst of effort to see each spare moment packed with the proper amount of celebration. Emil Coleman and his musicians were pouring out their lush tangos, rhumbas, and Viennese waltzes at the Anacacho Room, and on the evening of my embarrassment I was spinning around with a lovely blond lady named Lydia Hickox. Lydia was visiting in San Antonio and causing quite a stir, partly because she was charming and partly because she was from New York and a product of Miss Chapin's School. She loved to take off her shoes to dance, and had been dancing shoeless for a while when I decided I would be sporting and take mine off too. Together we spun around in big circles trying to do the Wiener Waltz in a manner as continental as possible when I noticed snickers spreading among the guests at the tables. I looked down and caught sight of a toe peeking out of one of my black socks.

  At the Kelly Field graduation exercises several speakers talked about our duty to go out and show the world, and said these were the days when “so many owed so much to so few.” I noted that most of the speakers evidently thought we were preparing for war. We were not merely engaged in a large pilot training program to enable the class to shift to civilian jobs with the airlines. As first captain, I also was called on to make remarks. I don't remember much of what I said, but it was something like this: “In the United States we have come to consider ourselves the immaculate protectors of what we call liberty. Whether we actually are would bear a great deal of discussion. But now we meet a great challenge to our system and are fast plunging toward a chaos which engulfs much of the rest of the world. We shall fight and what we fight for may be right, and some of it doubtless is wrong. We may win, though that is by no means certain. Let us only hope that, win or lose, those things which are undeniably good within us will survive in a new world of peace.” I couldn't express what I felt, and when I finished I felt I had botched it.

  The evening of graduation day we had a party for the class at the Gunter Hotel. Earlier in the day Helen Ardrey had pinned a pair of silver wings on my proud breast and that evening I had Bob and Helen as my guests at a table where many of my friends and classmates were seated. I had decided this party was solely for the enjoyment of the brand new crop of shavetails. We would pay no attention to the brass. But shortly after the party was under way, Colonel Harmon, commandant of Kelly Field, got up from his table and came over to ours. I got up with some surprise as he said, “Lieutenant Ardery, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed those splendid remarks you made at the graduation ceremony this morning.” I must have looked embarrassed and awkward, because when the colonel left I noticed that Bob and Helen were laughing at me.

  After graduation we had several days to wait around Kelly Field for the orders to come out directing us to our next duty. We were given slips to fill out giving our first, second, and third choices. I asked first to be sent to the Philippines. My second choice was Hawaii and my third, Puerto Rico. I felt those in the Philippines would be the first to see action. And I asked to be assigned to pursuit-type aviation rather than heavy, medium, or light bombardment or observation.

  After about three days the orders began coming in. I was not on any of the first lists directing groups to the Philippines and Hawaii. Perhaps I was to be on a later order sending still more of our group to one of those places. But then came the lists of those assigned to instruct. I was designated to go to Goodfellow Field, San Angelo, Texas, where a basic training school had just opened. Of all places I did not want to go, San Angelo was about tops. If I had to instruct—which I did not fancy in the least—I wanted to stay in San Antonio, preferably at Kelly Field. But a man's personal preference apparently did not enter the picture at all. Lieutenant Herbine commiserated with me over the sad lot of instructing. But there was a twinkle in his eye which let me know he had deliberately recommended me to instruct after my asking him so many times not to, and after his virtually promising me he wouldn't. When I asked him about it he said, “You'll get in the scrap soon enough. If you get an extra thousand hours of flying experience under your belt before you do, you may have a chance to come through. Otherwise your chances will be slim.”

  I was ordered to San Angelo and to San Angelo I would go. I might just as well take myself in hand and adjust my attitude about it to be happy if I could. Again I loaded mother's car with as many classmates as it would carry and set forth to our first assignment as full-fledged pilots. I might have to be an instructor, but I would never again have to be a lousy dodo, or a dumbjohn, or a gadget. I was a second lieutenant with shiny gold bars and the silver wings of a pilot.

  * * *

  *Today's aircraft are almost all designed with tricycle landing gear; that is, two main gears under the wing and a nose gear under the nose. It is almost impossible to ground-loop such a plane. But the old configuration with a tail wheel in place of the one under the nose made ground looping a distinct possibility, which I conclusively proved.

  *Robert Ardrey, playwright, screen writer, novelist, and anthropologist is possibly best known for his play Thunder Rock and one of his books on anthropology, The Territorial Imperative.

  2

  The Merry-Go-Round

  San Angelo was then a town of about 30,000 in the eastern beginning of what is called West Texas. It is about 225 miles northwest of San Antonio. The land is high and cool. Less of the moisture-laden gulf air gets over this part of Texas than over San Antonio. The temperatures are not so mild, but since the weather is drier the heat of summer is not particularly oppressive nor the cold of winter so penetrating. It is good ranch country and produces cattle, sheep, and goats; it is a substantial wool and mohair market. There is something he
re of the old West as it is depicted in the movies. For a time I continued to chafe at being relegated to flying “maytag messerschmitts,” and instructing “gadgets” instead of going out to conquer the sky and the enemy in a fast pursuit ship. But I liked San Angelo.

  A day or two after we arrived we were given routine check rides by the ranking instructors. Only a few classes of cadets had gone through the school before our arrival, and it was just beginning to expand. So the process of preparing us to instruct was hastened. Our basic trainers were the new Vultee BT-13s and BT-13AS. They flew almost like the North American basics we had at Randolph, but we had forgotten a lot about flying basic trainers, and by the time we were faced with our first class of students we had hardly learned how to make proper landings in them.

  In those days the life of an instructor was easy. Usually three or four students were assigned to each instructor. That meant that ordinarily there were only three or four hours of flying per day for each of us. After some of the students checked out solo we would fly even less. Frequently one student of the group would be eliminated, lightening the instructor's burden. Aside from the duty of flying there was little for most of the flying officers to do. Occasionally each of us would come up on the roster for post officer of the day, or airdrome officer. There were a few extra duties, but generally speaking the life was unbelievably simple. As soon as duty hours were over we would change to civilian clothes and go to the officers’ club or to town.

  I decided that since life was so easy, the least I could do was to get all my students through. I believed there wasn't one boy in a thousand who could complete the course necessary to get to basic school and not have the ability to finish basic training. The only question in my mind was whether I would have the patience to concentrate on the slow students and keep them fairly well up with the rest, since all students had to finish in a certain time. Many of the instructors who had been at San Angelo a long time were infused with the old system of profuse eliminations: if you had two students who were average and one who was below average, you eliminated the weak one before he got a chance to solo. This practice was supposed to keep the level of proficiency of graduate pilots high. I believed flying to be so basically simple that by the time a group of students got out of the advanced school there was not much difference in their flying ability. I set to work to prove my confidence justified.

  After my first class was sent on to advanced school I got a break. My name came to the top of the roster of pilots to go to California to pick up new planes and ferry them back to San Angelo. Five pilots went out from Goodfellow Field to the Vultee plant near Los Angeles to bring back five new BT-13s. At that time the ferry command was not the extensive organization it later became, and these small jobs of transporting trainer planes fell to the instructors at the fields where they were to be used.

  Ferrying trips were much sought after because the Vultee Company paid expenses at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel for all ferry pilots coming in for aircraft. The arrangement grew out of an old crating charge normally tacked on to the price of airplanes. When they were delivered flyaway at the plant the crating charge was saved and the saving was applied to the pilots’ expenses.

  When we arrived to pick up our airplanes we had to wait a day and a night before they were ready. There was a shortage of test pilots at the Vultee factory and at that time all new ships had to be test-hopped. We were asked if we would volunteer to test our ships. Most of our group declined. Lieutenant Bailey, another beginner pilot, and I volunteered. Bailey was a classmate from San Diego who had been assigned to Goodfellow Field at the same time I had. I had become more and more closely associated with him, being in the same flight for instruction, and better acquaintance made me like him. He was a smiling, slightly rotund fellow with blue eyes that crinkled in the corners when he laughed. He seemed to think as many things had interesting or funny angles as I did.

  We seized this opportunity to call ourselves test pilots. It never occurred to me that my airplane might not fly, or that there was any real need to test it to see if it performed any differently from any other basic trainer. So I flew all over greater Los Angeles, never being able to see anything through the fog except a very narrow area immediately underneath me. Forward visibility was practically zero. I lost Bailey and never saw him from the time I took off until after I landed. When I got back I asked one of the other fellows who came out with us why he didn't volunteer to test a new ship. The reply I got was, “Hell, that's not our job. The next time we come out here they'll want us to put in a coupla’ hours work on the assembly line.”

  That same afternoon we took off in our bright new blue and yellow ships. When we arrived over our home air base at Goodfellow Field the next day we put on the customary, long “rat race” before landing. At that time the air base was new enough that people all over town hearing the noise would come out of their houses, look up and say, “The boys are back from California.” It was lots of fun to get in a wide lufbery circle and buzz around the field in all sorts of wild-looking maneuvers. We would dive and zoom and climb in high chandelles and do slow rolls in the big circle around the field. A basic trainer makes more noise than many a larger airplane, chiefly because of its two-bladed propeller. We all put our props in low pitch so they would make more noise and created sound effects like a showing of Hell's Angels at the Bijou.

  When I landed I was met by a cadet who was an old friend from Lexington, Kentucky. He was in the class of cadets ahead of the one I was instructing and he was just graduating from basic. This happened to be the Saturday his class had its farewell dance. He said he had a date for me and a place saved at his table for dinner. I was tired, but easily persuaded. Early that evening I was scanning the dance floor and the crowds in the dining room for someone spectacular. I was seated with my blind date and several others in a lounge adjoining the ballroom when I felt an exceedingly strong impression that there across the room was a startlingly beautiful girl. I asked and was told that her name was Anne Tweedy; she lived with her widowed mother on a ranch at nearby Knickerbocker.

  She was small—about five feet four. She had long, dark hair falling about her shoulders, and she wore a beautiful long, green dress that looked like it might have been Mainbocher. She had features so perfect that it seemed almost the face of a cameo. She wore a little circular gold pin at the neck of her dress. Otherwise her costume was of Grecian simplicity. I managed to get introduced to her and spent the rest of the evening competing for her attention with her many other admirers.

  The next morning was Sunday. I didn't feel good, but I woke early. I couldn't remember the name of the lovely girl I'd met, though I could remember everything else about her. The more I tried to think of the name the more it annoyed me. Finally I got out of bed and went downstairs to the telephone. I took the book off the hook and went back to bed with it. There I started with the A's and slowly proceeded to read right through. I knew if I came to the name I would remember it. It was a big telephone book for a town the size of San Angelo. I got almost to the end of the book without seeing a name that rang a single bell. Then a page or two from the very end I came to the name, “Tweedy, Mrs. J. L., Knickerbocker Ranch, Knickerbocker.” That was it! It was still pretty early, and I knew she wouldn't remember me, but at least I should have a chance to talk uninterrupted.

  I got the Knickerbocker Ranch and asked for “Miss Anne.” Yes, she was there, wait a moment. When she answered in her husky voice and eastern finishing school accent, I could almost see her as she was on the dance floor: green and gold and gorgeous. Were there any movies she would like to see? She didn't think there were any particularly good movies showing. What should we do? I was a little surprised and pleased when she consented to go to a drive-in for a beer. The president was making a radio talk I had wanted to hear, but I had more or less given it up. Certainly, I thought, Anne wouldn't be the sort who would be interested in hearing the president. As a matter of fact she was. We had a beer and listened.

 
After the speech we drove out to Goodfellow Field. As yet Anne had not discovered the fact that I was an officer. She thought I was a cadet. She managed to cover her surprise when we went into the officers’ club. We had a nice radio-phonograph, and I knew just the record for this occasion. It was Xavier Cugat's “Night Must Fall.” Anne was good at rhumbas. I tried to behave like an Arthur Murray honor student, and I had a marvelous time.

  From then on I saw her as often as I could. I was pleased with everything I learned about her: from the fact that she was smart as well as beautiful to the fact that, like me, she enjoyed listening to the radio fireside chats of FDR.

  In those summer days of 1941 I found life quite exciting— attributable largely to my interest in Anne, but also to great thrills in flying. The Germans that June reversed themselves and declared war on Russia. Most Americans were delighted but no less confused by that declaration than by the non-aggression pact it violated. As for me, I had definitely given over the idea of being a great geopolitician in favor of becoming an average pilot.

  My flying with students was a lark. Yet I didn't get enough flying with them during the week to quench my thirst for it, and several of us went each Saturday to take airplanes up for our own amusement. My friend Alan Bailey and I flew nearly every Saturday afternoon. We would rat-race with each other by the hour, rolling and diving in and out of the white, billowy cumulus clouds doing everything we knew. It was a sort of follow-the-leader with each trying to outdo the other. This flying was great training for us; it helped to pile up hours in our log books and afforded us much pleasurable relaxation.

  Another assigned duty I had shortly after my arrival was that of defense counsel on both of the courts-martial of our base. Soon I was made an instructor in military law in the ground school, and this, too, went along with my work in the military courts and my full quota of students at the flying line. I had the time for it all, but I found military law a little stagnant compared to the dynamic branches of law in the civilian world.