Bomber Pilot Read online

  I finished instructing my second class of cadets and the season was wearing into early fall when I got my first long-awaited opportunity to go home. I had said goodbye to my father about twelve months before, and the longing I felt to see him and my mother had grown stronger every day. I had thought a thousand times of mother and how I hadn't even been able to say goodbye to her. I wanted to take the car to her and apologize for the way I had gone off to the Air Corps practically without warning. The car was not exactly new now, but when I had it washed and polished it looked very fine, all black and chromium and glisteny with the best of gadgets. Auto knickknacks are so characteristic of America I almost feel a sort of patriotism about them. I was homesick for the sight of Saturday night on Main Street in Paris, Kentucky, and the numerous beat-up cars with as many as four or five radio aerials, fox tails flying from all of them.

  I said goodbye to my cadets and, of course, to Anne, set forth early one morning, drove all night, and got in about noon of the next day without making a single stop of more than fifteen minutes. I well remember my joy when I rolled up the gravel drive to the big white house and mother and dad came out to meet me.

  I gave mother the car, scoffs of my friends to the contrary. She was charmed with it, and I think the more so because of a few scratches, the stickers on the windshield, and other faint mementos of Lincoln, Randolph, Kelly, and San Angelo.

  Mother had a pretty good Oldsmobile which she gave to me. It had a good many miles on it and would have to be traded in shortly, so I decided to take the Olds and see if I could trade it right away to avoid driving it back to Texas. At that time I had about five hundred dollars in the bank and that was all. I looked all over Paris and all the nearby towns for a possible trade-in. On Main Street in Lexington I saw a shiny new Plymouth station wagon in the window of a garage, and learned the price was $1100. The next day dad and I went to the Lexington garage with the old car. The salesman offered me the station wagon for my car and $500. Clearly it was too much and I couldn't have the station wagon. When I reported to dad he said, “What's the matter? I think you ought to take this car—how much does he want?”

  “At least a hundred dollars more than I can pay him now. Let's go home.”

  Dad reached in his pocket and pulled out five new twenties. “Here,” he said, “I would not have it any other way. This is a present from me which I insist you accept.” The little red wagon looked three shades brighter than it had the moment before.

  The next morning I loaded my luggage into the station wagon and set forth to Texas. Saying goodbye to mother and dad, I was at last feeling settled and comfortable about being a pilot in the Air Corps because they seemed completely reconciled to it. I drove away from Lexington relaxed.

  At that time on the verge of the autumn of 1941 the storm clouds were so ominous that even the most shortsighted could see them. Soon the storm would break, and then soon after it would all be over and I would come back to Kentucky unharmed. I was sure of that. The white fences and rock walls spun by for a while, and then were gone as the Bluegrass was behind me.

  One Saturday afternoon shortly after my return I looked for my good friend Alan Bailey to go down to the Gunter Music Shop to listen to some new records. Bailey and I both loved music, and we spent an hour or two a week in the music shop playing all the new records that had arrived since our last trip. We were commissioned to buy for the officers’ club. Also, I had a radio-phonograph, and we would buy many things to play on my machine which we liked but which might not be generally popular. When I walked into the officers’ club I was told that Bailey had just been looking for me to go flying with him but, being unable to locate me, had taken an Infantry lieutenant for an afternoon hop. In town I bought a set of records of the “Scheherezade Suite.” I knew Bailey would enjoy them as much as I, and as I returned to my room I inquired whether he had come in from his flight. No one had seen him. I went to my room to play the records. After about half an hour Ben, the old Negro janitor, came to my door. He had trouble on his face.

  “Did you hear ’bout Mr. Bailey?” he asked.

  I looked at Ben and without asking, I knew what he meant. I could see that he was sorry to tell me because he knew how much I thought of Alan.

  “What happened?”

  “Don't know, sir. But they said he came down near a ranch house somewheres south of here. Both him'n the other officer killed.”

  The ship had crashed and burned, leaving little that was recognizable as an airplane with two occupants. Two days later I escorted Bailey's flag-draped coffin home to his parents in San Diego.

  After Bailey's death a lot of fun went out of my flying. If my joy in it was less, my attention to it was more intense, and my determination just as great to see my students become pilots. I had one of the toughest problems yet to confront me in the person of a big, beefy fellow named Dean Foster. Dean was delightful, but one of the most inept fliers I ever saw. The first day we met he told me he had just barely squeaked through primary training and had been the champion ground looper of his class. I felt in him something of a kindred spirit. During the early phase of his training I saw clearly what I might expect. On his landings Dean was inclined to let the ship get away from him because he failed to make quick corrections. He was not alert enough on the rudder to keep the nose pointed absolutely straight ahead until the ship stopped rolling. He set the plane down without getting the wings perfectly level, he failed to correct for drift, and he made many other mistakes the avoidance of which should have become second nature to him at primary school.

  When Dean was given a check ride by the squadron CO the report was a suggested washout for him, but I didn't put him up for the fatal ride with the stage commander, the necessary preliminary to elimination. I kept plugging along with him and by the time his next check ride came along he passed. Dean finished as a solid flyer. I kept check on him after he left our school and I found he went through advanced school in great style. I think after his graduation he became the first of my students to check out as first pilot of a four-engine bomber. He could fly one a long time before I could. I continued to hear from him and I was pleased with his success.

  Sometimes after four continuous hours of flying with students I would get out of the airplane unnerved. It was a nervousness that came from correcting again and again the same mistakes made by four different students in four successive hours. After the day's last flight I would go immediately to the instructors’ room, change clothes, and make out the grade slips. Then if I had calmed down sufficiently to be helpful to them, I would meet the boys in the outside flight office and talk with each student, pointing out his mistakes of the day. Sometimes, however, I would wave my way out the door saying, “See you guys tomorrow.” On such occasions I would meet them when I was fresh before the first flight the next day, and go over all the points I might have covered the day before. I tried not to talk to them unless I could be sensible and calm instead of irritable and upsetting.

  I knew several instructors who used the verbal abuse technique of instruction. They seemed to believe it brought results. I didn't. I felt the boys knew when they had done poorly and that knowledge was punishment enough. The result of my tolerance was that as the need for pilots grew, I frequently found myself with someone else's problem cadet on my hands. In the earlier days when an instructor put a cadet up for his elimination ride, events from there on out were cut and dried. There were practically no instances of cadets being given another chance. But from the fall of 1941 to the end of my work at basic school it was not unusual for a cadet on such a washout ride to “beat the stage” and be given a try with another instructor. During each of my last three classes I was handed one or more of these lagging gadgets. I liked helping them, except for the fact that it made me fly my pants off to give enough instruction to keep my own students going and pull the extras out of the lurch.

  In spite of my efforts to be gentle and understanding, toward the beginning of winter in 1941 I had a spell of very ba
d instructing. Sometimes I flew an hour or so without quite knowing what I was doing. I would sit in the back seat of the airplane gazing away at the billowing cloudbanks around me in a daydream. Clearly, I was in love. I knew I wasn't the marrying kind and that, I suppose, was what made it tough. I had never lost my determination to get out of instructing and to get into a tactical flying command. I still preferred service in a fighter squadron. I had a war to fight, and every day that passed made it clearer that the war was upon us. I had come close to marrying once, and that was another thing that made me shy away from the subject. I guess it was a little peculiar for anyone as girl-conscious as I had always been to get to be almost thirty years old and remain a bachelor.

  But I knew I would be no good as a husband now. If I lived through the war then marriage would be just the thing for me. Now I must get set to fight. That decision was final. It was so final that each day when I went out to fly I would not notice what was happening in the plane until suddenly I would find we were on the ground. I would get out and tell the student that I would see him in the flight room, and then like as not I would forget and leave the flying line without exchanging another word with him. But this thing grew and grew, until it was having a very marked effect on my sleep and my digestion, as well as giving me an air of complete preoccupation about my work. I had heard about such things before and not believed them.

  One night I telephoned Anne. We had arranged to go to a movie together, and I told her I was coming early to take her to dinner. I went to the big old house on Twohig Street where she used to stay when she came to town. She answered the doorbell and together we walked in an unusual silence down the steps to the curb where the little red truck was parked.

  She got in and I walked around and slipped under the wheel beside her. I felt for a moment as if I were pulling out hard from a screaming dive and about to black out. Then in an instant of horrifying anxiety and a voice that sounded like no one I had ever heard before, I said : “Anne, will you marry me? You've got to. Don't answer now. We will have dinner and talk about it.”

  Anne replied with a calmness I would have given anything to equal: “I don't know, but I don't believe I will.”

  The next morning when I saw Anne I was confident things would be all right. I gained confidence from her manner, but I still seemed to be acting like a man with a high fever and in somewhat of a delirium. That day at the ranch I received the final approval. My excitement blew its top. I had a long and delightful talk with Anne's mother, in which I assured her that I had practically not a cent in the world, but only a devotion to her daughter that was the most unbounded impulse I had ever sensed. She laughed at me. She was a sentimentalist. I think I must have convinced her I was passable when we first met and yapped at each other all afternoon about politics. From the time of the engagement, at her suggestion, I have called her Eva.

  Anne's brother Joe had a cadet visiting him who had been his classmate at Yale. His name was Jake Doar. I liked Jake immediately. Before lunch that day when the members of the family, guests, cousins, and all were assembled in the living room of the ranch house, Eva opened the bar and called on Jake to give a fitting toast. He gave one I had never heard before, but have heard many times since: “Amor y pesetas y tiempo para gastarlas”—“Love and money and time to spend (waste) them.”

  That weekend was in the middle of November. Anne and I decided to try to have the wedding early in December so that it would come at the finish of my current class of cadets. I would be able to get leave and we could go to Kentucky. Events followed each other in such rapid succession that I was completely lost in a maze of detail until Saturday, December 6, the day set for the wedding. What had me up in the air were strings of parties, wires of congratulations from friends, wedding gifts, and many other things that gave me a stark conviction I was really going to get married. They half scared me to death.

  Anne got wire after wire from her friends in the East, all of which said: “We wonder if your fiancé knows how lucky he really is?” I remember only one wire of congratulation I got. It was from Edward F. Prichard, Jr. of Paris, Kentucky, a friend of mine since childhood, then working as secretary to the attorney general in Washington. In a newspaper announcement of the engagement he had read that Anne's grandfather was one of the founders of the American Tobacco Company, and he joined that point with an antitrust suit the government was then leveling at all the big cigarette manufacturers. Prich said in his wire only this: “Best wishes stop Don't count on the American Tobacco Company.”

  In the midst of such incidentals I found myself hard upon the day of solemn pronouncements. I stood whitefaced with parched throat in the vestry room of the Emmanuel Episcopal Church looking out into the rows of pews through a crack in the door. Ninety percent of the guests were friends of Anne's family—ranchers, business people, and generally civilians. I knew only a few of them, but on the front row and staring directly into the crack in the door from whence I peered were four fine-looking young men, resplendent in the blue uniforms of aviation cadets. Their names were Nichols, Nowak, O'Sullivan, and Poole. They caught a glimpse of me through the crack, and I could see broad smiles spread over their faces. I must have looked more like a wraith than their instructor. All I wanted was to get the spectacle over, grab up my pretty bride, and get both of us out alive if possible.

  That was done in a manner which is now very hazy in my recollection. I do remember as I walked up the aisle with my gorgeous Mrs. Ardery that we saw a row of Mexicans in the back of the church and more just outside the door. They were some of the good people who had known Anne since her birth and had loved her to the extent that they were completely unreconciled to her leaving the ranch with a transient like me. They wept copious tears that their Anita should meet such a fate.

  We drove back to the ranch house for the reception and at each of the three gates on the ranch road was a mounted Mexican boy with a big hat and a look of utter desolation on his face. We got changed, got the bags in the truck, and started for Kentucky. In the ranch house the reception was going strong as we left. Late that Saturday afternoon, December 6, 1941, war was a far cry from our thoughts.

  The first evening we spent in Dallas. The next day, Sunday, December 7, we drove on. Not far from Little Rock, Arkansas, we stopped for gas at a filling station. The proprietor was a talkative man, and while filling up the tank he said, “What do you think about those Japs?”

  “What about them?” I asked.

  “They just bombed Pearl Harbor, didn't you know? Must have done a hell of a lot of damage. All Army men ordered back into uniform immediately and all Army leaves canceled, radio says.”

  Anne had heard the conversation. She sat in the car and said nothing. As I got in and drove off I said, “Well, I suppose we better stop in Little Rock. I'll call the field and see if I have to return. If I do we won't leave until tomorrow morning.”

  In the lobby of our hotel there was a fever of excitement. By telling the operator it was a matter of military urgency I managed to get a call through in about two hours. I talked to the director of operations, who said, “Go on, if we need you we'll wire you in Kentucky, but I think you should be able to get the leave that's coming to you.” Two minutes after I hung up Anne and I were as happy as before we got the war news, and much more excited.

  The next day we drove on. As we drove Anne sang a song I have always associated with that trip. She had a sweet, husky voice, and sang it over and over again. It was “Room with a View.” We stopped about noon and bought a paper. As I drove along Anne read it to me. It was full of stories about the attack written in the same vein as the president's speech to Congress. The attack was pictured as shocking, a “stab in the back.” I felt we could scarcely expect a nation so much weaker than we to present a signed and sealed formal document giving ample warning before the attack. My feeling was that the attack was an act of war and as such was as fair as acts of war may be expected to be.

  I imagine that everyone who was in unifo
rm at the time felt very keenly the confusion that existed on all sides. As I had guessed, when I returned to Goodfellow Field things were in such an uproar that I wasn't even noticed as being present for a week or ten days. The new class of cadets I was to instruct had not come in and there would be nothing for me to do until they did. In the stress of wartime emergency that was regrettable, but true. Finally the storm began to subside and the policy emerged of a gradual speedup of the same procedures we had been following. We had been on the right track and the beginning of the war required no great change, except that everyone had to work harder.

  As the beginning of 1942 came and passed I fell ill with one of the worst maladies that can beset an Army officer. I found myself sweating out my promotion. I had been promoted to the rank of first lieutenant, Infantry Reserve, more than four years before, but now I was a second lieutenant, Air Corps. I wasn't allowed to take my pilot training “in grade” and had to consent to “reallocation” of my commission from first to second lieutenant to get my rating as a pilot. Officers of the regular Army of other branches than the Air Corps were permitted to go through pilot training in grade, but this privilege didn't at that time extend to reserve officers. That was at length rectified. One day the bulletin board carried a memorandum from the War Department saying that all reserve officers who had previously held higher rank in another branch, but who had surrendered rank to take a rating, would be promoted back to rank previously held. And so in early March I was made a first lieutenant Air Corps. A first lieutenant Air Corps, especially a pilot, was a rather splendid figure in those days.