The wild blue.
The men and boys who flew the B-24s over Germany.
Stephen E. Ambrose.
AUTHOR"S NOTE
I HAVE BEEN A FRIEND and supporter of George McGovern"s for nearly three decades. I knew something about his career in the Army Air Forces, which I always felt he could have used to more effect in his 1972 presidential campaign. Politics aside, I had long been an admirer of what he had done in his B-24 bomber. He seemed to me to be a good representative of his generation, a man who had risked all not for his own benefit but to help bring about victory. In the summer of 1999, McGovern, his wife, Eleanor, my son Hugh, and I were together for dinner. In the course of the conversation, McGovern said he had done some interviews recently with reporter Michael Takiff, who was interested in doing a book on McGovern"s World War II career. I said that was a fine idea and told McGovern to tell Takiff that he should open with the story of the bomb McGovern"s B-24 dropped on a farmhouse inAustria , and the sequel. McGovern replied that he wished I were writing the book and asked if I would do it. I hesitated, not out of any lack of interest but because Takiff had already begun his work. McGovern urged me to talk to Takiff to see if he would yield to my being the writer and if he would provide me with copies of his interviews with him. I did and Takiff agreed. So I told McGovern and my editor, Alice Mayhew, that I would do it.Alice liked the idea - she is McGovern"s editor as well as mine - but said that it should be a book not only about McGovern but also about the men with whom he served. As always - or at least almost always - she was right.
I have long wanted to study and write about the American airmen of World War II. Previously I had written books about the high command in the European war, then turned to the men on the front line - a British airborne company (Pegasus Bridge ) and an American Company of the 101st Airborne, E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (Band of Brothers). In a book ent.i.tled D-Day and a follow-up called Citizen Soldiers, I had studied the role of junior officers and enlisted men fighting on the ground. In the course of preparing those books I had interviewed many of the men doing the actual fighting. What I wanted to do next after a book on the first transcontinental railroad was a book on the American airmen, not those at the top of the command structure but the men who flew the bombers.
How did they do it? That was my question. McGovern and his crew and his squadron, the 741st of the 455th Bomb Group of the Fifteenth Air Force, seemed a good way to try to answer at least part of the question. My resolve was strengthened because of my respect for George McGovern and his men; my curiosity about how a son of South Dakota became, at age twenty-two, a bomber pilot; my interest in how American designers and workers and the industrial plants created the world"s greatest air force; my wanting to learn about the strategic air campaign and how it was planned and carried out; and my desire to tell readers the story of how the leading opponent of the Vietnam War was, in World War II, a distinguished bomber pilot. So I went to work. I did a lot of reading, of both books and memoirs. I am in the deepest debt to all those who have written about the air war, or their own experiences, including but not limited to all those cited in the notes and bibliography. Most of all I need to thank and acknowledge my grat.i.tude to Michael Sherry, author of The Rise of American Air Power, Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, editors of the seven-volume official history, The Army Air Forces in World War II, and Colonel Horace Lanford, USAF, who did a four-volume mimeograph work ent.i.tled "741st Bomb Squadron History." I also deeply indebted to my college fraternity brother and lifelong friend Jim Burt, an Air Force pilot after graduation, who read the ma.n.u.script and saved me from many errors. Hugh and I did a lot of interviews, with McGovern and his surviving crew, with the pilots and men of the 741st Squadron and the 455th Bomb Group and others, each listed in the Acknowledgments. We are grateful to all of them. On October 9, 2000, Hugh and I rode in a B-24 and a B-17. We got to sit in the co-pilot"s seat and fly the airplanes. It was an extraordinary experience. We thank the Collings Foundation (Box 248,Stow ,Ma.s.sachusetts 01775), who made it possible. The foundation flies the two bombers to airports around the country so that everyone, especially children, can experience the thrill of examining and flying in a World War II airplane.
The B-24 is the only one still flying. The foundation paid $1.3 million and required thousands of hours of volunteer labor to restore and reconstruct this 3 vintage plane called Dragon and His Tail, with appropriate artwork on the nose. Thousands come to see, and a few get to ride, in the B-24 and the B-17. They can climb from fore to aft inside the planes, into the nose and tail gunner turrets. They can sit at the bombsight, or at the radioman"s position. They can move forward or aft on the catwalk, see the bombs in their rack, or the oxygen tanks and everything else. On the B-24 the waist windows are open. In flight, wind streams flow through the planes to the tail.
Although Hugh and I went up only a couple of thousand feet, on a lovely October day in centralPennsylvania , fromWilliamsport toHarrisburg , it was cold. The flights in the big craft were b.u.mpy, noisy - and a perfect delight.
Hugh and I got to fly thanks to the children of the Makos family - some still in high school, others getting started on their college educations - who have created the magazine Ghost Wings, which is written and published by them. It is devoted to airplanes of the past and the men and their planes of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War. Educating our children about how their freedoms came about is a sacred cause to me, so naturally I was drawn to the magazine. Now my debt to Ghost Wings includes what the family did to make our trip toWilliamsport so special.
Flying the B-24 and the B-17 from the co-pilot"s seat, even in smooth weather - little wind, few clouds - made Hugh and me realize how c.u.mbersome the bombers are, how long it takes for them to respond to the controls, how difficult they are to turn. But the flying brought smiles to our faces and joy to our hearts, smiles as big as all outdoors and joy as deep as the ocean. It was an experience with machines that could be compared only to being at the controls of a locomotive going up theSierra Nevada . And it increased beyond measurement our respect for and admiration of the pilots and crews who flew those planes on combat missions that lasted six, eight, or ten hours. We encountered no flak. There were no enemy fighters shooting at us. We don"t know how the airmen did it - but we appreciate what they did even more than before. My uncle, Ty Ambrose, was a twenty-one-year-old co-pilot on a B-26 in the Eighth Air Force. In June 1944, he married Sabra Jean Starr, his girlfriend atIllinois State Normal University .
Then he went overseas. On September 16, 1944, returning from a mission over the Continent, his plane crashed on landing inEngland and blew up. His body was never recovered.
My wife, Moira, who helped as she always does, in the research and in being the first to read or listen to a chapter, commented that what struck her most was how young the airmen were. Georges Clemenceau put it best. In a 1944 letter to Tex McCrary, author of First of the Many, Bernard Baruch quotes Clemenceau, who wrote, "They were kittens in play but tigers in battle."
PROLOGUE.
THE B-24 WAS BUILT LIKE A 1930s MACK TRUCK, except that it had an aluminum skin that could be cut with a knife. It could carry a heavy load far and fast but it had no refinements. Steering the four-engine airplane was difficult and exhausting, as there was no power except the pilot"s muscles. It had no windshield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his head out the side window to see during a rain.
Breathing was possible only by wearing an oxygen mask - cold and clammy, smelling of rubber and sweat - above 10,000 feet in alt.i.tude. There was no heat, despite temperatures that at 20,000 feet and higher got as low as 40 or even 50 degrees below zero. The wind blew through the airplane like fury, especially from the waist gunners" windows and whenever the bomb bay doors were open. The oxygen mask often froze to the wearer"s face. If the men at the waist touched their machine guns with bare hands, the skin froze to the metal. There were no bathrooms. To urinate there were two small relief tubes, one forward and one aft, which were almost impossible to use without spilling because of the heavy layers of clothing the men wore. Plus which the tubes were often clogged with frozen urine.
Defecating could be done only in a receptacle lined with a wax paper bag. A man had to be desperate to use it because of the difficulty of removing enough clothing and exposing bare skin to the arctic cold. The bags were dropped out of the waist windows or through the open bomb bay doors. There were no kitchen facilities, no way to warm up food or coffee, but anyway there was no food unless a crew member had packed in a C ration or a sandwich. With no pressurization, pockets of gas in a man"s intestinal tract could swell like balloons and cause him to double over in pain. There was no aisle to walk down, only the eight-inch-wide cat-walk running beside the bombs and over the bomb bay doors used to move forward and aft. It had to be done with care, as the aluminum doors, which rolled up into the fuselage instead of opening outward on a hinge, had only a 100-pound capacity, so if a man slipped he would break through. The seats were not padded, could not be reclined,1 and were cramped into so small a s.p.a.ce that a man had almost no chance to stretch and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was done to make it comfortable for the pilot, the co-pilot, or the other eight men in the crew, even though most flights lasted for eight hours, sometimes ten or more, seldom less than six. The plane existed and was flown for one purpose only, to carry 500 or 1,000 pound bombs and drop them accurately over enemy targets. It was called a Liberator. That was a perhaps unusual name for a plane designed to drop high explosives on the enemy well behind the front lines, but it was nevertheless the perfect name. Consolidated Aircraft Corporation first made it, with the initial flight in 1939. When a few went over toEngland in 1940, the British Air Ministry wanted to know what it was called. Reuben Fleet of Consolidated answered, "Liberator." He added, "We chose the name Liberator because this airplane can carry destruction to the heart of the Hun, and thus help you and us to liberate those millions temporarily finding themselves under Hitler"s yoke."
Consolidated, along with the Ford Motor Company, Douglas Aircraft Company, and North American Aviation - together called the Liberator Production Pool - made more than 18,300 Liberators, about 5,000 more than the total number of B-17s.* The Liberator was not operational before World War II and was not operational after the war (nearly every B-24 was cut up into pieces of sc.r.a.p in 1945 and 1946, or left to rot on Pacific islands). The number of people involved in making it, in servicing it, and in flying the B-24 outnumbered those involved with any other airplane, in any country, in any time. There were more B-24s than any other American airplane ever built.2 It would be an exaggeration to say that 5 the B-24 won the war for the Allies. But don"t ask how they could have won the war without it. The Army Air Forces needed thousands of pilots, and tens of thousands of crew members, to fly the B-24s.
It needed to gather them and train them and supply them and service the planes from a country in which only a relatively small number of men knew anything at all about how to fly even a single-engine airplane, or fix it. From whence came such men? *TheUnited States utilized primarily five bombers during the war.
The B-17 was a four-engine bomber that could carry three tons of bombs a distance of 2,000 miles at a cruising speed of 187 miles per hour. Top speed was 287 miles per hour. It had a single tail and a tail wheel. It was armed with thirteen .50 caliber machine guns.
The B-24 was a four-engine bomber with twin tails and a nose wheel. It could attain a speed of 303 miles per hour; cruising speed was 200 miles per hour. It had ten .50 caliber machine guns and could carry 8,800 pounds of bombs. The B-25 was a twin-engine, twin-tail medium bomber with tricycle landing gear. It was the bomber used on the famous Doolittle raid onTokyo . It could carry 3,000 pounds of bombs. It had six machine guns, and some models carried a 75 mm cannon in the nose. Its top speed was 275 miles per hour. The B-26 was a twin-engine, single-tail bomber and had a top speed of 317 miles per hour. It had a dozen machine guns and could carry 5,000 pounds of bombs. The B-29, which came into action in 1944, was the largest combat aircraft of the war. It had eight .50 caliber machine guns in remotely controlled turrets and a 20 mm cannon in a manned tail turret. It could carry 10 tons of bombs. It was pressurized and could fly in excess of 30,000 feet at a top speed of 365 miles per hour. Its maximum range was 5,830 miles.
CAST OF CHARACTERS.
MCGOVERN"S CREW Richard Farrington, a B-24 pilot George McGovern, pilot Howard Goodner, a B-24 radioman Ralph "Bill" Rounds, co-pilot Robert Hammer, a B-24 radioman Kenneth Higgins, radioman Francis Hosimer, a B-24 pilot Carroll Wilson "C. W." Cooper, navigator Art Johnson, a B-24 waist gunner Isador Irving Seigal, tail gunner Donald P. Kay, a B-24 bombardier William "Tex " Ashlock, waist gunner Horace W. Lanford, first commander of 6 the 741st Squadron Robert O"Connell, nose gunner Francesco Musto, a Cerignola resident who worked for the Americans Mike Valko, flight engineer Charles Painter, a B-24 pilot William McAfee, ball turret gunner Roland Pepin, a B-24 navigator Sam Adams, navigator and bombardier Guyon Phillips, a B-24 pilot Marion Colvert, navigator Anthony Picardi, a B-24 crew member John B. Mills, tail gunner Joe Quintal, athletic director in Mitch.e.l.l, South Dakota Norman Ray, fromCuster ,South Dakota , who persuaded McGovern to take Civilian Pilot Training, then became his instructor on the B-24 before becoming a B-29 pilot OTHERS Glenn Rendahl, a B-24 pilot Art Applin, a B-24 tail gunner Harold Schuknecht, 741st Squadron flight surgeon Robert "Ken" Barmore, a B-24 co-pilot Walter Shostack, a B-24 pilot Walter Malone Baskin, a B-24 pilot John G. Smith, a B-24 pilot Henry Burkle, in command of ground crews in Cerignola William L. Snowden, Cool"s replacement as commander of the 455th Bomb Group Robert S. Capps, a B-24 pilot Ed Soderstrom, a B-24 pilot Kenneth A. Cool, first commander of the 455th Bomb Group Howard Surbeck, a B-24 pilot with whom McGovern served as co-pilot for his first five missions Donald R. Currier, a B-24 navigator Mel TenHaken, a B-24 radioman David R. Davis, designer of theDavis wing for the B-24Charles Watry, a C-47 pilot Vincent f.a.gan, a B-24 pilot
CHAPTER ONE - Where They Came From.
THE PILOTS AND CREWS OF THE B-24scame from every state and territory inAmerica . They were young, fit, eager. They were sons of workers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, businessmen, educators.
A few were married, most were not. Some had an excellent education, including college, where they majored in history, literature, physics, engineering, chemistry, and more. Others were barely, if at all, out of high school.
They were all volunteers. TheU.S. Army Air Corps - after 1942 the Army Air Forces - did not force anyone to fly. They made the choice. Most of them were between the ages of two and ten in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh flew theSpirit ofSt. Louis from Long Island toParis . For many boys, this was the first outside-the-family event to influence them. It fired their imagination. Like Lindbergh, they too wanted to fly.
In their teenage years, they drove Model T Fords, or perhaps Model A"s - if they drove at all. Many of them were farm boys. They plowed behind mules or horses. They relieved themselves in outdoor privies.
They walked to school, one, two, or sometimes more miles. Most of them, including the city kids, were poor. If they were lucky enough to have jobs they earned a dollar a day, sometimes less. If they were younger sons, they wore hand-me-down clothes. In the summertime, many of them went barefoot. They seldom traveled. Many had never been out of their home counties. Even most of the more fortunate had never been out of their home states or regions. Of those who were best off, only a handful had ever been out of the country. Almost none of them had ever been up in an airplane. A surprising number had never even seen a plane. But they all wanted to fly. There were inducements beyond the adventure of the thing.
Glamour. Extra pay. The right to wear wings. Quick promotions. You got to pick your service - no sleeping in a Navy bunk in a heaving ship or in a foxhole with someone shooting at you. They knew they would have to serve, indeed most of them wanted to serve. Their patriotism was beyond question. They wanted to be a part of smashing Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, and their thugs. But they wanted to choose how they did it. Overwhelmingly they wanted to fly.
They wanted to get off the ground, be like a bird, see the country from up high, travel faster than anyone could do while attached to the earth. More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones, more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from the earth and opened the skies. They were astonishingly young. Many joined the Army Air Forces as teens. Some never got to be twenty years old before the war ended.
8 Anyone over twenty-five was considered to be, and was called, an "old man." In the twenty-first century, adults would hardly give such youngsters the key to the family car, but in the first half of the 1940s the adults sent them out to play a critical role in saving the world.
Most wanted to be fighter pilots, but only a relatively few attained that goal. Many became pilots or co-pilots on two- or four-engine bombers. The majority became crew members, serving as gunners or radiomen or bombardiers or flight engineers or navigators. Never mind. They wanted to fly and they did.
This is mainly the story of one airplane and the men who flew it. It draws on other experiences of other men and other planes in the U.S. Army Air Forces, but basically it is about a B-24 bomber named the Dakota Queen, its crew and squadron pilot George McGovern, and the 741st of the 455th Bomb Group. They were neither typical - how could they be in an air force that numbered thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of crew members? - nor unique. On July 19, 1922, in the Wesleyan Methodist parsonage in Avon, South Dakota, George Stanley McGovern was born. He had an older sister, Olive, and later a younger sister, Mildred, and then a younger brother, Larry. George"s grandfather, born in Ireland, had served in the Civil War on the Union side and then was a coal miner. George"s father, Joseph, born in 1868, had been a professional baseball player in the St. Louis Cardinals" organization but because of his Methodist religion he was disturbed by the amount of drinking and gambling and wild women a.s.sociated with his team. He gave it up when he heard a "call to preach" and went to a Methodist seminary in Houghton, New York. Upon graduation he volunteered to go out to the Dakotas. There he used his handyman skills to build churches - some of which still stand - where he preached. His first wife died, leaving him childless. When he was fifty years old he married Frances McLean, a twenty-eight-year-old who was a soloist in his church and had a beautiful voice.
In 1927, when George was five years old, the family was living in Canada. When Lindbergh made his flight, as he recalled it, "the news just saturated all the conversation, newspapers, the radios. I remember that flight as though it was yesterday. Pictures of Lindbergh with his helmet and goggles were on the front pages. I just thought he was the most glamorous creature on G.o.d"s earth. I grew up thinking Lindbergh was our greatest American."1 In 1928 the McGoverns moved to Mitch.e.l.l, in eastern South Dakota, a town of some 12,000 residents, where Joseph continued in the ministry. In all his life, George never heard his mother call his father by his first name (he did hear her say "dear," once at least). There were few displays of affection, even though they were devoted to each other and their children. There was no extra money and precious little of it at that - Joseph never got as much as $100 a month in salary from the church. He did get a sack of potatoes from a farmer in his congregation, or a bushel of apples, or a crate of eggs, or some beef or pork. He supplemented his income by buying old houses, fixing them up, and then selling them, and he managed to buy a home in Mitch.e.l.l on the corner of Fifth and Sanborn, where George grew up.
George was a "preacher"s kid," but unlike some others in that category he had no wild streak. He was an average student whose one fling was going to the movies, which were forbidden to good Wesleyan Methodists, but he went anyway. He went pheasant hunting too, as most South Dakota boys did. It was his father"s pa.s.sion and his father taught him how to shoot a shotgun, a 16-gauge single-barrel. While hunting he saw dust storms turn the sky black. He saw hordes of gra.s.shoppers eating the crops and even chewing their way through hoe handles. In town he saw banks and stores close their doors in bankruptcy. Once, while hunting with his father, he saw a farmer named Art Kendall sitting on the steps of his back porch, tears streaming down his face. Kendall explained to McGovern"s father that he had just received a check from the stockyards for that year"s production of pigs. The check did not cover the 9 cost of trucking the pigs to market. By the time McGovern entered high school, nearly one farmer in five had lost his land to foreclosure.2 In high school, Joe Quintal was the athletic director of four elementary schools, the junior and senior high schools, and coached the school"s football, basketball, and track teams. He also taught the gymnastic cla.s.ses at the elementary schools. An excellent athlete, he had been the quarterback for the University of South Dakota. McGovern describes him as a "very articulate, intelligent man. I both admired him and feared him." One of the exercises Quintal had his seventh-grade gym cla.s.ses do was to dive headfirst over a leather sawhorse and do a somersault. "You had to run at full speed," McGovern remembered, "dive over, tuck your head, hit the mat and roll." McGovern couldn"t bring himself to do it. He would run up to the sawhorse "and I knew I"d break my neck if I went over the top." So when he got to the sawhorse he balked. Not once, not twice, but a number of times.
Quintal blew his whistle. "Mac, come here," he shouted. "What"s the matter with you?"
"Well, Mr. Quintal, I just can"t do that."
"What do you mean, you can"t do it? Have you seen these other boys going over that horse? You"ve got a pair of legs, a pair of arms, don"t you have the same equipment they do?" McGovern said again that he just couldn"t do it. "You want me to tell you why?" McGovern said he would like to know.
"Well," Quintal said, "you"re a physical coward - that"s why." The entire cla.s.s, some sixty or so students, was watching. "I was just mortified to tears," McGovern recalled. But he still couldn"t do it.
Quintal "really made me feel that I was a coward. That haunted me." When he entered high school, he was determined to do something in athletics. A fast runner, he joined the track team, where he set no records but did make a respectable showing. Still he would get flashbacks to the sawhorse incident.3 In 1940, after graduation, McGovern entered Dakota Wesleyan College (enrollment: 500), just down the street from his family home. The war was on in Europe and China. To get prepared, the U.S. government had inaugurated a program called Civilian Pilot Training. The idea was to augment the nation"s reserve of pilots with at least some introductory training of new civilian students. There was an opportunity to start a CPT program at Mitch.e.l.l Field, just outside town. McGovern"s fellow student and friend, Norman Ray from Custer, South Dakota, was desperate to fly. They were in the same freshman cla.s.s. Ray was so poor that when he showed up at Wesleyan he had an old pair of ratty tennis shoes, blue jeans, and a couple of T-shirts. One day McGovern told him he ought to ask a girl for a date.
Ray replied, "George, I can"t afford to date." "Well, if you go down to the College Inn all you need is ten cents," McGovern pointed out.
"Well, I haven"t got ten cents."
He certainly had the desire to fly. The requirement was to have ten students enrolled before the course - which included ground school instruction as well as flight training and carried college credit - could begin.
The CPT would supply the airplane and pay the instructor. So Ray went around talking to all his friends.
He persuaded nine of his fellow students, including one woman and the eighteen-year-old McGovern, to sign up.
McGovern had never before been up in a plane but he agreed to be one of the students because he felt, "If I can fly an airplane that will show Joe Quintal that it isn"t heights that I"m worried about, that I"m not too cowardly to fly a plane." He had to pa.s.s a physical, discovering in the process that he had good depth perception - and he found out later from other physicals that he would score almost off the charts on depth perception. The plane was a single-engine Aeronca, built in Middletown, Ohio, with a front and rear c.o.c.kpit. The instructor, Cliff Ferguson, a big, bulky, heavyset man, sat in front. There were two sets of controls, and they were connected so Ferguson could overwhelm the student and take control if he needed to. On McGovern"s first flight, when Ferguson opened the throttle for takeoff, "I was scared to 10 death - terrified." He thought, What the h.e.l.l have I gotten myself into? I just can"t do this. It was a typical South Dakota day, with lots of wind. The wings were fluttering and the plane was bouncing. Ferguson nevertheless told McGovern that he was in control. Toward the end of the lesson, he told McGovern, "You"re doing okay."
McGovern continued the course, though "I was even more terrified in subsequent lessons when he demonstrated spins and stalls." Still, "Big Cliff would give me a little signal that I was doing okay, and nothing made me happier." After eight hours of instruction, Ferguson told McGovern that he had good coordination and was making good landings. Taking off and landing were two of the hardest things for a student to learn, but McGovern knew how far the plane was off the ground, when to level off, how to land the plane on its two front wheels, then gradually set the tail down onto the rear wheel. So Ferguson told him, "You"re ready to solo." It went well. McGovern circled over Mitch.e.l.l, gazing down at the water tower, the Corn Palace, and the Wesleyan campus, then over Lake Mitch.e.l.l. When he landed he had a sense of exhilaration and a determination that if America entered the war and his time to serve came, it would be in the Army Air Corps.4 In the fall of 1941 McGovern, then a soph.o.m.ore with his flying cla.s.ses completed, saw B-24 bombers for the first time. He watched them going overhead - they were based in Omaha, Nebraska - on practice missions. The pilots used the Mitch.e.l.l Airport runway as an auxiliary landing field. He saw no fighter airplanes, nor any B-17s. Occasionally McGovern would see one or two B-24s land. They were big and c.u.mbersome but impressive. He never got aboard one. He never thought, Someday I"m going to fly one of those birds. But he noticed and did think, Those pilots are really something.
The B-24s and the pilots that McGovern saw were brand-new. The United States in 1940 and 1941 had only minuscule armed forces. The Navy was the best off, but its fleet was badly outnumbered and outgunned by the j.a.panese, not to mention the British. The U.S. Army at the beginning of World War II had fewer than 200,000 men (26,000 of them in the Army Air Corps), which meant it ranked sixteenth in the world, right behind Romania. The Army was pitifully smaller than the millions of men in the j.a.panese, German, and Italian armies. By June 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps had been built up to 1,257 combat planes, nearly all of them inferior to the j.a.panese Zero, which outnumbered them anyway, and to the GermanLuftwaffe "s fighter fleet, which was four times larger than the American fleet and growing rapidly.
When the war began in Europe in September 1939, the Depression continued to grip America. The unemployment rate was 25 percent. Those with jobs were earning only a little more than $100 a month.
There was no unemployment insurance, no welfare paid for by the government, no antibiotics. Most diseases were life-threatening. Transportation was by automobile, bus, or train, slow and crude. Nearly all roads were two lanes. Few people traveled. What money they had went to feeding, clothing, and housing themselves.
In technology, America was far behind the Germans and j.a.panese, especially in airplanes. Commercial air travel was for a privileged few wealthy people and not reliable at that. The new twin-engine Douglas DC-3 was the most advanced plane. It carried twenty-one pa.s.sengers. It took twenty-four hours to fly from New York City to Los Angeles, but only when weather permitted, and even then the DC-3 had to make three refueling stops along the way. It could make 155 miles per hour and had a range of 900 miles, at best. The pa.s.senger cabin was not pressurized. There was no oxygen available for pa.s.sengers.
It cruised at 10,000 feet, with a maximum of 15,000, which meant it flew in the clouds much of the time.
There was no radar and what little electronic navigation aids were available were poor. They consisted of low-frequency radio beams that the pilots could follow, but they were almost useless in bad weather, as the radio signals were jammed by static from radio waves emitted by thunderstorms. There were light beacons on the waves that the pilots could use as navigation aids, but they too were useless in bad weather.
11 By late 1941, there were only a few civilian pilots or crew members. Of those who later served in the Fifteenth Air Force, an estimated 85 percent had no prior military experience, nor had they ever been in an airplane.5 McGovern was lucky, but he had been off the ground only eight times and that had been in a single-engine plane with no armament. Those who served in the Fifteenth Air Force came from all forty-eight states and the territories of Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, and had different backgrounds and experiences. Ralph C. "Bill" Rounds was born in 1924 in Wichita, Kansas. His father owned a lumber business and was a wealthy man. Rounds was handsome and enthusiastic, especially for girls and airplanes. He was a wisecracking prankster, the image of a devil-may-care flyboy. His desire was to be a fighter pilot. His life experiences, his att.i.tude, and his personality were completely different from McGovern"s.6 Kenneth Higgins was born in 1925 in Dallas, Texas. In 1941 he was a junior at Highland Park High School. He would give anything to learn to fly. Robert Hammer, born in 1923, one of five children, was a North Dakota boy. His father was a trapper and hunter. In the harsh wintertime, Hammer recalled seeing muskrat pelts hanging to dry from wires stretched from wall to wall in nearly every room in his family house. Death was ever present. As a seven-year-old, he saw his twoyear-old sister die of pneumonia. When he was in fifth grade, his mother died in childbirth, as did the baby. Another sister died in 1938, of strep throat.
Hammer made what money he could, when he could. In the summer, he would walk seven miles to the local nine-hole golf course. School was a mile away; he would walk in the morning, return home for lunch, walk back to school, then home, so the seven miles wasn"t much. He would caddy, at 25 cents per round. In high school, he got a job at the Dakota Hide and Fur firm, packing wool, stretching jackrabbit hides, loading rabbit meat for shipment to mink farms. He was paid 25 cents per hour, which was somewhat better than he got working in the harvest fields from sunup to sundown, hauling bundles, field pitching, and shocking, at $1.50 per day. When he was fifteen years old he had lied about his age to get into the Citizens Military Training Camp, which he attended for three summers, learning how to march and a bit about being an infantryman. Hammer had never been out of North Dakota, but by the time of his high school graduation, in 1940, he was eager to see the world and wanted to join the Navy to do so.
But he was only seventeen and his father refused to sign the papers. How about the Coast Guard? No.
The Army? No. "So I finally decided I would have to be content with seeing North Dakota."7 Roland Pepin was born on July 4, 1924, and was three years old when Lindbergh made his flight. Pepin"s father bought him a pedal-type airplane toy "and a little Lindy flying suit complete with leather helmet and goggles." From then on, he built and drew airplanes. He was determined to join the Army Air Corps as soon as he was old enough.8 William V. Barnes and his twin brother, Robert N. Barnes, were seventeen years old in 1941, attending a small military school in Texas. Naturally they were in the ROTC, where they learned the rudiments of being soldiers.9 Walter Shostack, born in 1919 in Constantinople, was the son of a pilot in the czar"s air force in World War I. Both his grandfathers had been generals in the czar"s army. His father was shot down on the Turkish front. He survived and, to escape the revolution, went to Turkey. In 1923, together with his family, he emigrated to the United States. Walter grew up in New York City. At first he and his parents spoke no English. They fed themselves and found shelter by selling his grandmother"s jewelry. His father went to work making airplanes. When he was old enough, so did Walter, who moved to Detroit for his job. There he met a Hungarian girl, whose father, Stephen Balogh, had emigrated to America shortly after World War I began to avoid conscription in the Hungarian army.
He married and in 1920 had a daughter, whom he named Aranka Gizela, Hungarian for Gold Grace.
Walter met her on a blind date arranged by his friend, Stephen Balogh, Jr. Both young men graduated from the Manhattan School of Aviation Trade and got jobs at Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio. Before entering the service, Shostack married Gold Grace.10 Eugene Hudson was born in 1922 in Los Angeles.
His father was a Lutheran minister in Beverly Hills, right on the edge of Hollywood. Hudson graduated from Fairfax High School in 1940 and entered Los Angeles City College. His brother had joined the Air Corps in 1938, which fired his imagination after listening to his brother"s stories. Hudson worked the midnight shift at Douglas Aircraft while going to college. He was a riveter working on the XB-19, an experimental bomber. Speaking for himself as well as his friends, Hudson remarked, "We all had a flair 12 for adventure."11 Carroll Wilson Cooper was unusual in the Army Air Forces. He was older than most and had been in the military before the war. Born on May 10, 1917, in McCaulley, Texas, he was the fifth child of Sam and Fannie Cooper (one of his older brothers had died as a youth). His father was a stout Baptist so he named his fifth child after a Baptist leader, Carroll, and he was a staunch Democrat, so he gave his son as a middle name Wilson, after Woodrow Wilson. As a boy, Cooper discovered that his first name was commonly a girl"s name, so he went by "C. W. Cooper." Although his father had a dry goods store and the first car in town, C.W. suffered the misery of going to the two-hole privy, or outhouse, in the middle of the night, until he got a porcelain pot - usually called a "thunder jug" - that was kept under his bed. In the daytime he put it outside in the sun to sanitize it and air it out. When his folks got an indoor bathroom, C.W. thought it a good improvement, especially since his mother no longer gave him his Sat.u.r.day night bath in a galvanized wash tub in the kitchen. "We took a bath every Sat.u.r.day night whether we needed it or not." His meals were filling but frugal. He drank "blue john," milk mixed with water. His noon meal was often red beans, but sometimes his mother would fix lima beans as the main, and often only, course. The evening meal was usually corn bread and blue john. When he went to Tonkawa Boy Scout camp, near Buffalo Gap, for two weeks, he gained ten pounds thanks to the food.
He also grew tomatoes, not so much to eat as to sell at 5 cents a pound.
Church functions were his social life. Sometimes these were allday singing, but they included a picnic prepared by the ladies. The tables under the arbor would groan under the weight of fried chicken, chocolate cakes, apple and lemon meringue pies, iced tea, and much more. It was dusk before it was time to leave. C.W. remembers his father cranking the Model T Ford to get it started. As C.W. was left-handed, he made a vow that when he grew up he would become rich enough to buy a car that cranked left-handed. He never got that done, although he did start driving a car when he was thirteen years old. While working on the wheat harvest, he was awestruck by the big threshers and the steam tractor. "It was a sight to see," he recalled, "with chaff and wheat going every which direction and the huffing and puffing machines creeping along on their iron-cleated wheels." He was a teenage boy when he saw his first airplane. It had crashed on the roof of a house next to the pasture it had been trying to use as a landing field. C.W. made a s.e.xtant out of cigar box wood, and used the same material to build planes that he put on a string and flew using a fishing pole.
The Cooper family took two vacations. One was to Lampasas, Texas. By starting at sunrise and driving until dark, they made the 300-mile trip in two days. C.W. and his parents slept beside the road. Once his father followed some dim car tracks through a pasture until the track ran out; he turned around, finally found a farmhouse, and asked where the road was located. The other trip, to Chicago, was much longer, in the family"s first Model A Ford. The people in Chicago pointed at C.W."s overalls and his bare feet and laughed. For him, the big thrills were riding on the elevated train, a visit to the Marshall Field Museum, and another to the top of the Wrigley Tower. After all that traveling, C.W. decided he wanted to see the world, and there was no way better to do that than as a naval officer. So in his junior year in high school he began to improve his grades to reach his goal, and went to work for Charles L. South, who was running for Congress. If he made it, South could appoint C.W. to Annapolis. C.W. delivered circulars for South and did odd jobs. In school that fall he tried out for the football team, figuring that would improve his chances for an appointment, but as he weighed only 117 pounds that didn"t work. So he joined the track team, without any great success. When he graduated from high school, Congressman South had already given out his Annapolis appointment. At his father"s suggestion, C.W. went to junior college to take a year of engineering. There he was in ROTC and found that the military life was for him.
He gained honors for being in the best-drilled squad and platoon and was in the Honorary Corps of Cadets. That summer South gave him his appointment to Annapolis, but by then C.W. was two weeks too old to be accepted. But his grades were good enough to earn him a scholarship to Texas A&M.
More ROTC, more drilling, lots of studying. Together with four others, Cooper bought a used Model T for $40. After a year or so the partners decided to sell it back, but it died about a block from the dealer.
He gave them $25 for it anyway. Cooper smoked Bull Durham, which cost 5 cents a bag, except on 13 Sat.u.r.days when he would treat himself to a 20-cent pack of Lucky Strikes. A&M was a military school.
When Cooper graduated in 1941, he got his degree in civil engineering one day and his commission as a second lieutenant in the infantry of the U.S. Army the next.
His first posting was as a.s.sistant provost marshal at Camp Bowie. Then it was off to the Fort Benning Infantry School, called Fort Benning"s School for Boys by the young officers. The training in that summer of 1941 was haphazard at best. When the cla.s.s was completed, Cooper was asked to give his choice of three places to go, Camp Roberts in California, Fort Dix in New Jersey, or Camp Walters in Texas.
Camp Walters was only 100 miles from his home. He had been in the Army long enough to know how things worked, so he put down Roberts as his first choice, Dix as his second, and Walters as his third.
Sure enough, exactly as he hoped, he was a.s.signed to Camp Walters.
There he was a.s.signed to train a platoon in a heavy weapons company. The men were mainly hill boys from Kentucky and Tennessee. Some of them, according to Cooper, "were not too sharp." But in the fall of 1941 he could feel America getting closer to entering the war and he was sure they would be sent into combat, so he got the platoon together and said, "Look fellas, this is going to be h.e.l.l on you. You"re going to hate me before this is over because I"m going to work you as hard as I can to get you ready for combat because I don"t want your blood on my hands." On December 1, the thirteen-week training period was over and a couple of days later the platoon was ordered to the Pacific. "I fought back the tears as I shook their hands as they went to the troop train to go." That fall, Cooper was promoted to first lieutenant. As a reward, he got additional duty as morale officer for the battalion, responsible for court-martial cases as well as morale. In his first month in the job, he had sixteen courts-martial. He thought, Something has to be done about this. I don"t want to spend all my time on these cases, especially as they were mainly fistfights, drunks, and AWOLs. The cause, he decided, was that the enlisted men had nothing to do on their off hours. He decided to use the battalion officers and enlisted men"s fund, with about $3,000 in it, to do something about that. One of the new privates had been the leader of the Hardin Simmons Cowboy Band. Cooper called him in and asked if he would organize a band. "Would I?" the private responded. "You bet! This is great!" He started to recruit players. One private had played accordion in a nightclub in California. Cooper spent $8 to get his instrument shipped to him at Camp Walters. There was a carpenter in the battalion; Cooper bought the wood and he put together music stands. Cooper found an artist who designed a battalion crest and painted it on the stands.
He bought sheet music for the band.
At that time there was a play on Broadway calledLife Begins at 40. The bandleader found some men who thought they could sing and put on a play he calledLife Begins at 5:30. The regimental commander came to opening night. He sat in the front row with his staff and the other high-ranking officers beside him. The play featured dancing and singing "girls." One two three kick, one two three kick, and so on.
The girls wore sarongs and their GI shoes with their hairy legs bare. They wore new white mops for hair and had a black missing tooth painted on. For bras, they used halves of grapefruits, big ones, tied around their chests. They were doing their one-two-three-kick routine when, as per plan, one of the bra strings broke and the grapefruit dropped into the commander"s lap. Corny though it was, it sent the audience into peals of laughter.
Cooper found a just-graduated West Pointer who had been middleweight boxing champion at the Point.
He set him to putting together a boxing team. Cooper found a quarterback from Oklahoma and a big guy, a coal miner, from Indiana "who could catch any pa.s.s that was thrown to him." They became the nucleus for the football team. Cooper used the fund to buy equipment. He also bought a new pool table and put the carpenter to work making writing tables so the men could write home to their parents.
Court-martial cases dropped to zero. Cooper had $300 left in the fund. In late November, the battalion commander called him in and said, "Lieutenant, we need a public address system for the training here.
14 It"s a lot of red tape to get one through the normal channels. Use that $300 in the fund to buy a PA system for us to use in training. You can justify it by saying that you need it for the entertainment of the enlisted men."
"Sir, I can"t do that," Cooper replied. "The men need athletic equipment, new music for the orchestra, and more. I just can"t do it." "Lieutenant," the commander shot back, "I don"t believe you"re hearing me.
I want you to buy a PA system." Cooper again refused, popped him a salute, did an about-face, and got out of there. A couple of days later he got orders to go to the 2nd Filipino Infantry. That was how things were done, at least much of the time, in the prewar U.S. Army.12 Every American born before 1936 remembered exactly where he or she was when they heard the news that the j.a.panese had attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. George McGovern was in his second year at Dakota Wesleyan. It was a liberal arts school that emphasized philosophy, history, English literature, foreign languages, and the arts.
He was taking a required course in music appreciation taught by Robert Brown from Oberlin College.
Brown was a violinist. He a.s.signed his students to listen every Sunday to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra"s radio concert on NBC and write a critique. Nineteen-year-old McGovern was listening and writing notes, saying he thought the violins should be a bit more prominent - "Strictly BS," he recalled, but "I don"t know how Brown thought a bunch of college soph.o.m.ores were going to critique the New York Philharmonic" - when the program was interrupted with the news flash that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. "I have to confess I"d never heard of Pearl Harbor, didn"t even know where it was." But he could tell from his father"s reaction and the way he turned the radio up that it was a serious matter. That afternoon he decided that he would have to be involved in the war.
The following day, at school, "everyone was talking about it." The instructors had maps to show the students where Pearl Harbor was and what it meant. McGovern knew that his decision was correct, that "there was no logical alternative to this than for all of us to get involved." Some of the Dakota Wesleyan students already were in the service. Norman Ray, who had persuaded McGovern to take the Civilian Pilot Training course the previous year, was already in the Army Air Corps, and another student, John Nowling, a star on the college"s football team, had been killed in a training accident. McGovern talked to the others who had been in the course and to a couple of faculty members, and made up his mind. Along with ten fellow students, he decided to drive to Omaha to enlist in either the Army Air Corps or naval aviation.
They borrowed the president"s car and the dean"s car - "In a little school you can do things like that," he recalled, and indeed the students called many of the faculty by their first names - to drive down to Omaha. Their only question was, the Army or the Navy? They debated all the way to Omaha. Being from South Dakota, they were all land lovers and had an instinct that it was better to be landing and taking off from the ground than from the water. Still, there was a sentiment that the enemy couldn"t bomb you as easily on an aircraft carrier as at an air base. But shortly after they had parked the cars and began looking for the recruiting stations, one of the young men said he had heard that if you joined the Army Air Corps you would receive a free meal ticket for the cafeteria next door. On the basis of that unsubstantiated rumor, all ten joined the Army Air Corps. The rumor turned out to be true, and they got a lunch worth about 75 cents. "It wasn"t bad," McGovern commented. "Roast beef, gravy, and mashed potatoes."
They were not sworn in, but they did sign a statement that it was their intention to be in the Army Air Corps and agreed to report when called. The statement made them exempt from the draft. The Army did not have the airfields and training planes or instructors to take them in as yet, but they were Air Corps property. They returned to Mitch.e.l.l and school, thinking they would be called up in two or three months.
On December 7, 1941, Bill Barnes and his twin brother, Robert, were on parade with their ROTC unit for parents day. The news from Pearl Harbor was broadcast over the loudspeakers. "We have vivid 15 memories of the moment," Barnes said.13 As soon as they were eighteen they signed up for the Army Air Corps, but were not called into active duty for a year. Neither twin had a driver"s license because their parents were too poor to own a car.
Seventeen-year-old Bob Hammer, who had been unable to persuade his father to sign a permission form to let him join the Navy, Coast Guard, or Army because he was too young, found that Pearl Harbor changed all that. On December 8, with his father"s approval, he enlisted in the Army. Hammer never forgot his dad"s parting words: "I hate to see you go, Bob, but I wouldn"t give 2 cents for you if you didn"t."14 Seventeen-year-old Roland Pepin was a junior in high school. On December 7, 1941, he and his parents were reading the newspaper and listening to the radio when a news flash reported what had happened at Pearl Harbor. He decided at that moment to get into the armed services. "All of my cla.s.smates," he found out the next day, "including myself, could not wait to turn eighteen and graduate so that we could enlist and do our share to fight the war." There was a government program that allowed seventeen-year-olds to sign up and pick their branch of service, but they would not be inducted until they graduated. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Pepin signed with the Army Air Corps. In mid-June 1943, he graduated from high school at La Salle Academy. On July 4 he celebrated his eighteenth birthday. On July 17 he was sworn into the military.15 Nearly all those who signed up with a promise to the Army Air Corps, and those who enlisted in the other services, wanted to fight. Now. At once. But the armed forces were not ready for them. C. W. Cooper remembered Lt. Galil Hannah, who came to Camp Walters shortly after Pearl Harbor. Hannah had been born in Egypt and came to the United States when he was eleven years old. When he was seventeen his father gave his permission for him to join the Army.
He went to Panama, in the infantry, where he learned jungle warfare. Then it was back to the States to officer candidate school, where he earned his commission and was sent to Camp Walters.
As Cooper recalled it, when Hannah reported, he didn"t say, "When do we eat?" or "Where do I sleep"
or "When do we get paid?" Instead he pounded on Cooper"s desk and asked, "When can I go into combat?" Every day he came in to demand,"When can I go into combat?" Cooper reported each request to his commanding officer, who soon had enough. He told Hannah, "The next orders that come in, you"re going to be on." The next orders were for a lieutenant to report to Attu, Alaska. As Cooper later put it, "Here this guy"s trained in jungle warfare. He spoke Arabic fluently. He was perfect for North Africa or, failing that, Guadalca.n.a.l. And the Army sent him to Attu."16 Nearly all the young men who had signed up to join the Army Air Corps had to wait, often for a year or more, for the Air Corps to have enough airfields, airplanes, instructors, and barracks to start training them. McGovern continued his education at Dakota Wesleyan. There he met and fell in love with Eleanor Stegeberg from Woonsocket, South Dakota. Among other attributes, including good looks, she had beat him in a debate in high school and outscored him in a test on current events at Wesleyan. In the first year of the war they got engaged, agreeing that they would not marry until the war ended. Stegeberg"s family was poor, so after her first year in college she dropped out to work as a secretary for a lawyer. A friend of McGovern"s, Robert "Bob" Pennington, had joined the Army and was in training. He was dating Ila, Eleanor"s twin sister, and wrote McGovern to ask about their father. In reply, McGovern wrote that "he is a very different sort of person. His life was practically ruined when their mother died as he loved her more seemingly than life itself. He is consequently a little inclined to be brusque and a little unfriendly when you are first introduced to him. If you can just dig beneath that reserve and aloofness, you"ll find a heart there as big as your head. I think that the twins get that everlasting reserve of theirs from this same trait in their dad. Mr.