FP-1939-1941

Events vs Time

xx-xx-1939, Germany, Military budget goes to 18.4 billion marks, 60% of national budget

xx-xx-1939, China-Japan; Japan gains control of lower Yangtze

xx-xx-1939, Czechoslovakia-Germany; Germany occupies remainder of Czechoslovakia

02-xx-1939, A-20, Douglas; France orders (100) A-20 Havoc's with R-1830 engines

04-xx-1939, Defense, England; Prime minister Chamberlain, asks for conscription.

04-xx-1939, Chief of Staff, Marshall; Roosevelt appoints Marshall as Chief of Staff

04-xx-1939, P-39, Bell; Aerocobra prototype first flight

xx-xx-1939, France , Mobilize armed forces

xx-xx-1939, England, Mobilize armed forces

07-xx-1939, B-26, Martin; Marauder design initiated

08-xx-1939, Non-Aggression, Germany-Russia sign Non-Aggression Treaty

09-01-1939, War, Poland-Germany; Poland invaded by Germany using 12 divisions with 400 tanks each in sizes up to 20 ton

09-xx-1939, Defense, France had 5 mechanized divs & 5 battalions of 11 to 15 ton tanks at Maginot Line.

09-xx-1939, Defense, US had 174,000 officers and men, 45,000 stationed outside US

09-03-1939, War, France-Germany; France declares war on Germany.

09-03-1939, War, England-Germany; England declares war on Germany.

09-xx-1939, Neutral, US; Roosevelt goes to Radio with first of his Fireside Chats.

09-xx-1939, Defense, US; Roosevelt declares a state of emergency, authorizes expansion of Army by 17,000;

09-xx-1939, Defense, US; National Guard to 235,000 plus 12 million provided for trucks.

09-xx-1939, Defense, US; US still no more than 3rd rate power

09-13-1939, Poland-Germany; Poland sues for uneasy truce, subdued in less than two weeks.

10-10-1939, 93rd Sqd, H93; The 93rd Sqd is activated at March Field CA. B-17's

10-27-1939, Neutrality, Congress approves by 243 to 181 revision of Neutrality act -- we could sell arms on cash and you carry basis.

12-xx-1939, B-24, Consolidated; Liberator protype first flight

xx-xx-1939, A-20, Douglas; Havoc first production

xx-xx-1939, B-17, Boeing; Fortress first production

1940

01-01-40, Finland, TM40; Russia attacks Finland: Initial thrust is cut off and destroyed, Fins outnumbered 6:1 destroy 2 Russian Divisions in 3 weeks.

01-01-40, Russia , TM40; Stalin is 60 yrs old

01-08-40, Ireland, TM40; Police recovered 700,000 rounds of 1,000,000 rounds of rifle ammunition stolen by the IRA a short time before.

01-15-40, Songs, TM40; "Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!" 1917 ragtime tune revived by Oran Tucker & Bonnie Baker, nudging "South of the Border" on Lucky Strike Hit Parade.

01-22-40, Britain, TM40; Britain implements food rationing

01-29-40, Radio, TM40; Top programs: 1 Chase & Sanborns Charlie McCarthy, 2 Jack Benny, 3 Lux Radio Theater, 4 Fibber McGee & Molly, 5 Kraft Music Hall with Bing Crosby, 6 Major Bowes amateur hour, 7 Bob Hope, 8 Fitch Band Wagon, 9 Kate Smith, 10 Pot-O-Gold.

02-12-40, Movies, TM40; "Hunchback of Noterdame" and "Grapes of Wrath"

02-19-40, Japan , TM40; Emperor Hirohito of Japan is 39 yrs old

02-19-40, Finland-Russia, TM40; Russia Parachutes fresh troops & moves in fresh supplies into Finland.

02-xx-40, Budget, GMX; Congress trims 10% from $850 million budget, cuting airbase in Alaska and leave only 57 of 166 airplanes. They were afraid of reaction in pending elections.

02-xx-40, US Defense, GMX, Marshall asks Staff to prepare estimate of needs -- ref Gen Wedemeyer's report 09-xx-1941 & Hansell essay E01

02-26-40, Britain, -- ; German subs sink 2 British oil tankers & 1 ship with 6,000 ton of Argentine beef.

03-04-40, Finland, TM40; Fins recruit everyone possible: convicts, foreigners, women, wounded

03-11-40, Finland, TM40; Russian troops 150 mi from Helsinki

03-25-40, Finland, TM40; After 105 days Fins-Russian Peace agreement: Russia gets Naval Bases and territory to keep Leningrad out of artillery range. Cost to Russia 250,000 dead, 250,000 wounded, 1,500 tanks, 700 planes, pays Finland 128,000 /yr for 30 years for lease of territory.

04-08-40, Radio, TM40; "Gang Busters" used by police to catch crooks who emulate its events.

04-xx-40, Denmark, TM40; Germans launches 50,000 troops against Denmark

04-xx-40, Norway, TM40; Germany launches 85,000 troops & 500 planes against Norway

04-xx-40, Norway, TM40; British land force in Northern Norway and have to withdraw after 7 weeks.

04-10-40, Denmark, TM40; Denmark surrenders after 12 hours.

04-xx-40, Marshall, GMX; Marshall meets with Congressmen telling story of Army's plight across.

04-29-40, Norway, TM40; Germans capture Norwegian amunition plant. Norway 6.5 mm rifle cannot fire 7.7 mm Allied ammunition

05-10-40, Belgium, TM40; 100 German divisions invade Belgium against 24 Belgian & 19 Allied divisions.

05-10-40, Luxembough falls to Germany

05-13-40, Norway, TM40; Germany takes Norway a nation of 3,000,000 people and 35,000 modern military in 23 days. Operation outclasses 18 day subjugation of Poland. 1,500 Shock Troops take Oslo a city of 250,000.

05-14-40, Netherlands, TM40; Netherlands tried to open dikes & flood, Germans get to dikes first, Netherlands falls.

05-xx-40, Marshall, GM; Frustrated Marshall arrages with Morgenthau to meet with Roosevelt on sad state of defense. A stunned president asked Marshall to return the next day to speak of a supplemental appropriation of $657 million in lieu of the $12 million previously requested.

05-15-40, France, -- ; Germany invades France.

05-17-40, France, -- ; Guderian's German tanks had reached channel.

05-20-40, Churchill, TM40; Churchill replaces Chamberlain, promising "blood, toil, tears, and sweat"

05-27-40, Nylon, TM40; Nylon for stockings reduced to 10%, Army-Navy using most of DuPont’s output for parachutes and powder bags.

05-26-40, Dunkirk, GMX; Allies evacuate at Dunkirk, saving 225,000 British & 113,000 French soldiers. RAF lost 180 planes. French & British 11,000 machine guns, 2,400 artillery pieces, 75,000 vehicles. Churchill was left with only words to sling at Hitler.

05-xx-40, Stimson, TM40; Stimpson says, we may be next

05-xx-40, Lindberg, TM40; Charles Lindberg, part of America First movement says, "lets stop this hysterical chatter of invasion"

05-xx-40, US Defense, GMX; Congress votes $1.5 billion for defense, 300 million more than the presidents request.

05-27-40, Churchill, -- ; puts Lord Beaverbrook in charge of war production

05-27-40, US Defense, GMX, Marshall tells President & Congress, we can only muster weapons for 75,000 men. "US Army looked like nice boys with BB guns." In prior 7 years congress had appropriated barely 1 billion per year.

05-xx-40, P-51, North American; Mustang design initiated

05-xx-40, P-40, Curtis; Warhawk first Production; 13,700 would be built.

06-03-40, Helicopter, Sikorsky; Helicopters first flight by it's inventor Igor Sikorsky, now US citizen. 75 HP engine lifted it 20 ft in air and was maneuvered in all directions over a 200 ft range.

06-08-40, Ford-Rolls Royce, TM40, Edsel Ford accepted Rolls Royce order to build V1650 engines, 6000 for Britain & 3000 for US. Henry said no, he would not sell weapons to foreign countries. The Order went to Packard.

06-10-40, Belgium, -- ; Belgium Falls, Germans occupy

06-10-40, Ireland, TM40; Ireland who had not declared war on Germany now calls up it's 7,000 troops and 30,000 reservists plus 3 naval ships and puts up anti aircraft guns on roofs of stores. IRA the other government within a government is believed to be receiving money from the Nazis via the US in support of fifth column (subversive) activities.

06-10-40, France , TM40; Germans within 35 mi of Paris, there were 500,000 fresh French troops, 27 divisions, which could not get back to Paris. Paris is declared an open city, not bombed. Germans used 40, then 60, then 120 and finally 150 divisions against France.

06-14-40, France , TM40; Paris falls, 83 year old Marshal Petain seeks peace.

06-17-40, Dunkirk, -- ; 600,000 survivors in small area, in (7) days 500,000 were killed, wounded or captured. 1,000 airplanes shot down. French & British ships put up protective fire, British lost 30 warships. British lost 30,000 killed wounded or missing. 1,000 ships of all kinds carried 335,000 French & British across channel. 1,000 guns, all transport and all armored vehicles were lost.

06-17-40, US Production, TM40; Knudson of GM made war production coordinator

06-17-40, US Production, TM40; Stettinius of US Steel made materials supply coordinator

06-xx-40, US Defense, TM40; Congress authorizes an additional $1.7 billion

06-xx-40, Britain, -- , US begins shipment of all surplus Army equipment such as ROTC rifles and guns to England; .5 million Enfield rifles, mortars, machine guns all of WWI vintage.

06-xx-40, Sec of War, -- , Roosevelt selects Stimson as Sec of War

06-xx-40, US Defense, -- , Military appropriations totaled 17 billion, 9X that of 1939

06-21-40, France, -- , France surrenders in same rail car used 22 yrs before for German surrender.

06-xx-40, Japan, TPC65; Japan decides to go after resources in French Indo China & Netherlands East Indies plus British holdings if she looses. Japan plans on US not contesting their moves if Britain falls.

06-xx-40, B-29, Boeing; B-29 Superfortress design study initiated

07-01-40, Britain, -- , Battle of Britain begins, Germany bombs England every night. Hitler sets August 15 as date for Britain’s defeat.

07-01-40, France , -- , DeGaulle age 50 sets up Free French Forces in Britain.

07-xx-40, Britain, TM40; Britain sets up 1,250,000 air-raid workers, air raid shelters to withstand 500 lb bombs within 30 ft for 12,000,000 persons, 2,000 first aid stations, 190,000 ambulances, 300,000 hospital beds. Make plans to evacuate 20,000 children.

07-08-40, France , TM40; demobilization of 5,000,000 French troops begins.

07-08-40, Britain, TM40; Britain removes 95,000 people from channel Is, put up balloons at 20,000 ft.

07-08-40, Election, TM40, First ballot Dewey 360, Taft 189, Willkie 105, Vandenberg 76; third ballot Dewey 338, Willkie 259, Taft 212; fifth ballot Willkie 429, Taft 377, Dewey 57; sixth Willkie 571, 70 more than required to win

07-15-40, French, TM40; After waiting 2 week for French navy to join British fleet, British set about destroying French ships in Oran N Africa. French losses were 84% of battleships, 48% of cruiser, 16% of destroyers, 14% of submarines, 50% of sub chasers were destroyed.

07-22-40, Movie, TM40; "Andy Hardy Meets Debutante" ninth in series with M Rooney & J Garland.

07-22-40, Britain, TM40; Duke of Windsor sent off to govern Bermuda

07-29-40, Election, TM40; Democratic primary first ballot Roosevelt 946 no contest

07-xx-40, P-47, , Republic; Thunderbolt design initiated

07-29-40, Italy, TM40; Scrap Iron ordered by France is grabbed by Mussolini, of 250,000 tons he got all but 60,000. Japan had been buying 1,770,000 tons a year from US for last 3 yrs. Japan placed new order for 300,000 tons from US for deliver during summer at $16.50 per ton vs France purchase at $26.00.

07-xx-40, B-17C, Boeing first flight -- is first model to be used in combat. (35) B-17C's & D's will be flown to Philippines. 12692 will be built.

08-02-40, Media, TM40; Edward R Morrow of CBS starts radio program "London After Dark"

08-12-40, French, TM40; German dominated France gives De Gaulle a death sentence. Nazi army takes over 140 train loads of food in return for German Bonds.

08-15-40, Britain, TM40; Germany send 500 airplanes to bombs England -- the day they had set for England’s surrender. British fighters came down from 30,000 ft and ambush Stuka dive bombers.

08-19-40, Movie, TM40; "Sea Hawk" with Errol Flynn released

08-27-40, National Guard, TM40; Congress authorizes call up for one year.

08-26-40, US Forces, -- , Roosevelt visits 1st Army: saw (5) anti aircraft guns, (40) WWI 155mm guns, no automatic rifles, no anti tank guns, no Tanks. Just Broomsticks for Machine guns and rain pipes for Mortars.

08-30-40, US Defense, GM, Military planners present needs to Marshall: 2 million persons for Navy & Marines, 8.8 million for Army(included Air Corp) with 215 Divisions mostly motorized, 64,000 planes

09-01-40, Sec of War, GM; Marshall briefs Stimpson of Military needs

09-02-40, Russia , TM40; Russian ex leader Trotsky in exile in Mexico was assassinated.

09-09-40, Domestic, TM40; Wedding Ring sales up 260% due to pre-conscription marriages.

09-xx-40, Britain, -- ; Germany bombs England every night

09-14-40, Draft, Congress passes Draft Bill -- 900,000 per year for 1 yrs of service

09-16-40, Lend-Lease, TM40; past by Congress: Lend 50 old US Destroyers to Britain, they Lease Bases to US

09-16-40, Indo-China, TM40; Formerly a French Colony is a prize sought by Japan.

09-18-40, Britain, TM40; 1,500 German planes drop 4,400,000 lb of bombs on London at night. London acknowledged 400 deaths.

09-25-40, MAJIC, TPC91; Friedman team using what was known about Japanese "red" code are able to break the "purple" code. It had taken the team 18mo to build an analog of the Japanese machine -- it took them from Feb 39' to Sep 40' to break the purple code; the text of the pending Tripartite Pact binding Japan, Germany & Italy. The process was to become known as MAJIC.

09-27-40, US Forces, GM, British ask Roosevelt for 14,000 to 26,000 planes of all types. Marshall informs Roosevelt we have only 49 bombers fit for duty outside US.

09-27-40, Tripartite Pact, TPC; Japan signs Tripartite Pact with Germany & Italy; this is authorization to take French, Dutch & British holdings. Japanese Army now plans for total war.

09-xx-40, US-Japan, GM, Marshall says, "Mr President; do not antagonize the Japanese...."

09-30-40, Movie, TM40; "Dr Kildair goes Home" 5th in series with L Ayres & L Barrymore

09-30-40, Churchill, TM40; 65 yrs old Churchill starts day at 7:15 with a cigar. He is persistent -- got Lord Beaverbrook into his cabinet by calling him every 2 hrs for 36 hours.

09-30-40, N Africa, TM40; 250,000 Italians approach Egypt against 70,000 British, Australian, New Zeeland, Rhodesian & Indian defenders.

09-xx-40, P-38, Lockheed; Lightning first Production. 9536 will be built.

09-xx-40, P-39, Bell; Aerocobra first Production. 9585 will be built.

10-07-40, Production, TM40; Knudson places 7.6 billion in orders in 120 days, except for machine gun. Colt is producing full out for British. GM requested to tool up, quantity production 14 mo away.

10-07-40, Britain, TM40; London Blitz -- since Jun 10 Germans had dropped 50,600,000 tons on Britain; 6,000 factories, 1,400 in London were hit. 17,000,000 lb of bombs on ports, 700 raids on RAF fields.

10-14-40, Movie, TM40; "Westerner" G Cooper & W Brennan as Judge Bean

10-14-40, Indo-China, TM40; Indo-China is occupied by Japan. 28,000 French had exploited 23,000,000 natives, only one of 300 school boys preferred the French.

10-16-40, Registration, GM, 16 million men ages 21 to 36 register for the Draft. On paper army was 500,000 regulars, 250,000 national guard and 630,000 draftees. 10 million would follow in next 5 years. Marshall starts process of making room and advancing the most capable military personnel.

10-21-40, Movie, TM40; "Knute Rockne, All American" with R Reagan as the Gipper

10-28-40, Jews, -- ; P'etain of France issues laws against Jews.

10-xx-40, A-20B, Douglas; AAF orders (999) A-20B's with R-2600 engines; (665) end up going to Russia. 7385 will be built

11-04-40, Labor, TM40; John L Lewis Roosevelt supporter in 36, turns on Roosevelt. In 1941 says if Roosevelt is elected I will resign -- he resigned.

11-xx-40, Labor, TM40; Murray head of CIO settles Vultee Aircraft strike Downey Ca.

11-xx-40, Uniform, TM40; Army changes uniform: No more leather riding boots and spurs, no Sam Brown Belt and no more Sabers.

11-18-40, Greece-Italy, -- , Greece is attack by Italy, Greece prevails with help from British.

11-25-40, Britain, GM; Coventry, Britain’s Detroit, receives 500 ton of high explosive, 30 ton of incendiaries, on 200,000 people.

11-xx-40, P-61, Northrop; Black Widow design initiated

11-xx-40, B-26, Martin; Marauder prototype first flight

12-02-40, Britain, GM; Coventry buries 422 people 172 unidentifiable in a mass grave, three days later another 250 unidentifiable in a mass grave.

12-09-40, Movie, TM40; "Tin Pan Alley" with Alice Fay & Betty Grable

12-xx-40, Election, TM40; Wilkie looses bid for president against Roosevelt

12-xx-40, Britain, TM40; Lufwaffe dumps 4,300 tons of bombs on England

12-xx-40, Britain, -- , Submarines sinking supplies

12-17-40, Cigarette Paper, TM40, linen paper from France cut off. German immigrant Strus opens plant in N Carolina with $2,000,000 put up by US cigarette makers, to make paper from linseed flax straw previously a worthless product.

12-23-40, Songs, TM40; "The Last Time I Saw Paris" by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein is big hit.

12-23-40, N Africa, -- , British N African forces out flank and capture 38,000 Italians facing Egypt

12-23-40, Anti-War, TM40, Yale students support America First, 60,000 strong 3:1 Their arguments: 1 Germany cannot invade America even if Britain falls. 2 US can and will do business with Nazis even if necessary to catalyze the trade. 3 If US convoys British shipping, that act is sure to put us in the conflict.

12-30-40, Java, TM40; Japan moves against Java after fall of Netherlands

12-30-40, German, GM; Germany has 12 mechanized divisions with 55,000 tanks, US has one experimental Brigade

12-xx-40, P-51, North American; Mustang prototype first flight

1941

01-01-41 ABC-1 American British Conversation #1 (ABC1), secret meetings were started. These opened way for exchange of scientific research and intelligence. Britain delivered plans for Radar, blueprints for proximity fuse, and ultimately intercepts from broken German code known as ULTRA

01-06-41 Paratroops, Army began training it's first Paratroop battalion, used C-47's.

01-06-41 XB-26, Martin; Marauder first flight -- used (2) R2800 cu in engines. Hap Arnold says never mind further testing, and orders 1000 at $131,000 each. Carries 2X more than a B-17 for a range of 1000 mile. This early short winged version was called widow maker.

01-06-41 Gallup Poll, shows 60% of people support aid to Britain, only 16% going to war.

01-06-41 Fireside Chat, Roosevelt begins 15th Fireside chat at 9:30 pm over 500 radio stations, Clark Gable & wife Carole Lombard along with sec of state Cordell Hall are among those comprising the immediate radio audience. He was trying to lead the nation as he had led it in 1933. He spoke of questions most asked: How great is the danger? Who is the enemy? What is the Nazi program? Why is this war a concern of the US? What's to be done? Concluding We must become the great Arsenal for Democracy.

01-13-41 State of Union, Roosevelt delivers State of the Union speech to 77th congress & expressed four essential freedoms: 1 freedom of speech & expression -- everywhere in the world, 2 freedom of every person to worship God in their own way -- everywhere in the world. 3 freedom from want -- everywhere in the world, 4 freedom from fear -- anywhere in the world. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."

01-13-41 N Africa, British forces launch their battle singing "The Wonderful Wizard of Ozz" driving a wedge 12000 yard wide and 3,000 deep in Italian lines. Italian prisoners take now 30,000.

01-27-41 Production, Knudson asks Chrysler to build tank. Head of Chrysler asks to see one. 197 Chrysler people work 7 days a week by Aug 15 have design for 25 ton tank to be called the M-3 & receive go ahead to build 20 million dollar plant, Chryslers fee $1.00. They were given contract for 1000 at $33,500 ea

01-xx-41 A-26, Douglas; Invader design initiated

02-03-41, Detroit, Aircraft orders: GM to build B-25, Ford to build B-24, Chrysler to build B-26. Ford & GM Buick to build Pratt-Whitney engines, Studebaker to build Wrights.

02-03-41 Draftees 12 % of Draft Boards selections are rejected for medical reasons.

02-xx-41 Draftees 50,000 Draftees reporting each month.

02-xx-41 US Forces Congress authorized $64 billion in 40 & 41; adds $7 billion for Lend Lease & $3 billion for expansion of private industry.

02-xx-41 Production Chrysler plant started in corn field, will produced 100 tanks by end of year.

02-xx-41 Production Reynalds Aluminum given $250 million by government to build a plant

02-xx-41 Production Pots & Pans back to Pots & Pans: 70,000 tons of aluminum contributed for war effort could not be used for making airplanes, was recycled back into pots and pans.

02-xx-41 Oversight Harry Truman starts effort to keep things honest, some defense profits were 40% return on investment, the efforts were claimed to have saved $15 billion

02-xx-41 N Africa Taken by British from Italians

02-17-41 Lend-Lease House passes Lend-Lease bill 260 to 165

02-24-41 Britain German surface raider sunk 18 of 19 British vessels of 82,000 ton class, the last left to help pick up survivors according to German newsman aboard raider.

02-xx-41 B-25, North American; Mitchell prototype first flight

02-xx-41 B-25, North American; Mitchell first Production. 9816 will be built.

02-xx-41 B-26, Martin; Marauder first Production. 5157 will be built

03-03-41 US Forces Congress approves $4,700,000 to improve harbor on Guam, two years prior it was defeated, Congress did not want to offend Japan who would allow over flights of Rota.

03-17-41 Submarines Germany has 300 submarines hunting in packs -- can releasing up to 9 torpedoes simultaneously

03-xx-41 Hungary taken over by Germany.

03-xx-41 Bulgaria taken over by Germany.

03-xx-41 Rumania taken over by Germany.

03-xx-41 Emperor, The Japanese Army & Navy would grovel and show outward respect to the Emperor, telling him of their plans. The Emperor could not over rule. They however could implement their plans in the name of the emperor. The Japanese Army & Navy were not required to inform their Cabinet, or each other of their strengths, dispositions or intentions in peace or in war. The Japanese Army did not know in advance of the Japanese Navy's intent to attack Pearl Harbor!

03-24-41 Lend-Lease Senate passes Lend-Lease 60 to 31, public 4:1 in favor. $7 billion put up for it.

04-12-41 Yugoslavia Capital fell

04-13-41 Japan & Russia sign Neutrality Pact, lasts until Russia attacks Japan in the last three days of WWII.

04-xx-41 N Africa Bengazi taken from by Germans led by Rommel, from British who had just taken it from Italians

04-20-41 Greece taken by Germany

04-24-41 Labor Ford after violent confrontations agrees for first time ever to talk with unions

05-05-41 Anti-War Lindbergh at America First meeting said: 1 The majority of US people were opposed to US participation in the war. 2 The US cannot win this war for Britain. 3 I have constantly advocated a negotiated peace. 4 The US has an independent destiny and should keep out of war. President was asked why Lindbergh had not been called into service, he said in the Civil war neither side called up Cooper Heads who's sympathies straddled both sides. The following weekend Lindbergh submitted his resignation from the Army.

05-11-41 XB-36, Consolidated; design initiated

05-18-41 XB35, Northrop; "Flying Wing" design initiated

05-20-41 Crete Germans taken Crete with airborn troops

05-21-41 U-boats German U-boats sink first US ship in S Atlantic.

05-xx-41 Coast Guard Authorized to patrol 500 to 1000 miles beyond our coast

05-xx-41 US Forces Marshall & Admiral Stark say US unprepared for war before Mar 42 at earliest.

05-xx-41 P-47, Republic Thunderbolt prototype first flight.

05-xx-41 ENIGMA British succeed and break the German Naval "Enigma" code

06-01-41 Unions Ford workers vote 70% for CIO union representation.

06-02-41 XA-26, Douglas; Invader replacement for A-20 Havoc, ordered; used tricycle gear & R-2800 engine. 2500 will be built.

06-02-41 Bismark, GM; End of 35,000 ton Bismark & escort cruiser Prinz Eugen. Confronted by 42,100 ton Hood & Prince of Wales; Hood was sunk by lucky hit at range of 13 mi. Temporarily lost she was found and bombed by planes from Ark Royal, two torpedoes hit Bismark one disabling the rudder. British closed in and sunk Bismark. This left Germans only 3 capital ships: Tirpitz, Gneissenau & Scharnhorst.

06-16-41, Unions, TM41; North American Aviation union strike broken by president calling in army.

06-22-41, Barbarosa, -- ; Germany invades Russia with 3 million troops and 3,580 tanks. Within 72 hrs 2000 Russian planes were lost.

06-27-41, XB-19, Douglas; First flight, uses R-3350-5 engine, tricycle landing gear. Used by AAF as a flying laboratroy. Much of Boeing B-29 was developed by Douglas on XB-19. Note photo resemblance of aft section of 1936 Douglas XB-19 vs upgrade made to Boeing B-17 and B-29. B-17 initially used tail fin developed on the B-10). XB19A used Allison W-3420-11 engine. XB19A was used as cargo plane till scrapped in 1949.

06-30-41 Assets Roosevelt freezes all German & Italian assets in US

06-xx-41 B-24, Consolidated; Liberator first Production. 18190 will be built.

07-14-41 Iceland US occupies Iceland

07-21-41 Indo-China Japan demands Vichey France permit Japanese to station troops and aircraft in southern Indo China. France concedes.

07-23-41 Russia The Wehrmacht halts to regroup 250 mi inside Russia. Germans had swept over 720,000 square miles of Russia, Germans had suffered 30,000 dead and the Russians 5 million casualties, 1 million of which were prisoners.

07-25-41 Japan US bans export of aviation gasoline to Japan & to freeze Japanese assets in the US. The freeze effectively prevented Japan from buying oil anywhere forcing them to consume reserves. Japanese move troops into Indochina.

07-xx-41 Russia Roosevelt promises military aid to Russia. Marshall could not arm American forces with arms going to Britain, Russia and China

07-xx-41 Support British Generals in N Africa tell American press that American forces will be needed. American public does not go for saving Communism

07-27-41 MacArthur Marshall directs McArthur to take over US Far East forces consisting of 10,000 Army and 12,000 crack Philippine Scouts with $10 million authorized for defense.

08-09-41 Churchill-Roosevelt Roosevelt & Churchill meet secretly on board ship at Placentia Bay Newfoundland. There would be nine such wartime conferences. Hap Arnold was added to American Navy-Army staff as AAF member match British Navy-Army-RAF representatives in developing plans

08-12-41 Draft, Congress barely approves, 203 to 202, extending draftee service beyond one year. Japan takes notice, believing US not willing to fight.

08-xx-41 US Forces, Marshall informs congress we have only 40 tanks to share between 4 divisions.

08-xx-41 P-51, North American; Mustang first Production. 14490 will be built.

09-06-41 Emperor, Japanese military & Government leaders meet with Emperor and agree on policy statement "The Essentials for Carrying out the Empire's Policies" The underlying document was to wage war against the US & Britain unless the US sanctions were lifted. The Emperor responded to their intentions with: "All men ar brothers, like the seas throughout the world; so why do winds and waves clash so fiercely everywhere?" A few manly tears were shed but not a comma was changed -- the US ultimatum had left no room to save face.

09-xx-41 Victory Plan, Gen Wedemeyer's Victory Plan indicated we needed 10.8 million of which 2 million would be Navy & Marines & 8.8 million Army (including AF) with 215 divisions & 64000 airplanes. At the time Germany had 300 divisions.

09-xx-41 Hansell Provides AAF needs to the Wedemeyer Victory Plan to Marshall

10-xx-41 MacArthur MacArthur jubilant, a force of 200,000 strong and mobilized. Marshall orders Arnold to allocate 4 bomber groups of 70 planes each plus 260 fighters to Far East. McArthur was to have priority. Arnold began transferring planes from Hawaii to Philippines. Also earmarked 165 of 220 B-17's due by Feb 42 to be sent to Philippines

11-24-41 Merchant Marine, Congress authorizes Navy Gun crews to be on board merchant ships

12-01-41 US Forces, Half of all bombers and 1/6 of all fighters go to Philippines. Marshall & Stimpson were counting on claims of B-17 performance.

12-01-41 Unions, John L Lewis abruptly gives in -- submits coal miners strike to arbitration.

12-xx-41 Media, Newsman Walter Lippman proposes shrinking the Army to make it more efficient.

12-xx-41 MAGIC, Code name for Japanese intercepts, gave warnings of actions by Japanese were pending. It was thought they might attack Philippines. Marshall had shiploads of weapons such as 75mm & 105 mm guns, tanks & dive bombers en-route to Philippines, but they would be vulnerable till mid Dec.

Hdq Sqd 19^th BG March Field 1940

30^th Sqd, 19^th BG March Field Feb 1941

93^rd Sqd, 19^th BG March Field 1941

March Field CA from Interview with L/Gen J. Carpenter  Jan 1979

In the spring of 1941, the 19th moved to Albuquerque, the 47th moved to Tucson, and somebody else moved to somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley [CA], Bakersville, I guess. Later each of those groups split. That's the way we expanded the force.

Actually we didn't get any further than the one split in the 19th because we then went to the Philippines in October 1941. We flew to the Philippines, were deployed to Clark Field there. Before that, in May 1941, we had delivered a whole group of B-17s to Hawaii. On that flight I was a copilot.

T: That's one of the things I wanted to ask you. You were listed as a pilot, navigator, and bombardier.

C: In those days, in order to check out as an AC [aircraft commander] in a B-17, you had to be a qualified dead-reckoning and celestial navigator, expert bombardier, and an expert aerial gunner. You had to qualify in all of these areas before you could finally check out as an AC in the airplane. You had to be able to perform all of the functions. We didn't have officer navigators or bombardiers in those days. We had a lot of enlisted bombardiers, and all pilots became qualified. All the navigators in the group were pilots in the outfit.

T. Was that to know the equipment or because somebody could get disabled and somebody else could take over?

C: No, not really. It was because we didn't have anybody else. If you wanted to have a bombardier or you wanted to have a navigator, you had to use somebody you had. The TO&E [table of organization and equipment] didn't carry any officer navigators or bombardiers. It just carried pilots.

T: That was it?

C: Yes.

T: How many of you would be aboard?

C: There would be a navigator, bombardier, pilot, and copilot.

T: You had four officers?

C: Yes, four officers. Sometimes we had an enlisted bombardier, but no enlisted navigators.

T: Everybody was so well-qualified: was there ever any problem?

C: No problem

T: Did you fly with the same ones all the time?

C: Not then. We had crew integrity on our mass moves to Hawaii and then on our mass move to the Philippines. When we got to the Philippines, they shuffled everybody all around, and from that point on, we had crew integrity. My final qualifying flight as a navigator was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. When I finally got the airplane there, they said, "Well, I guess you are qualified as a navigator?

T: Those that didn't show up didn't qualify?

C: Didn't qualify.

T: Sir, you were also listed as a squadron intelligence officer at that time. Was that an additional duty?

C: Yes. At that time, when I was a squadron intelligence officer, I had a combat crew. I was a crew commander, and I was also the A-2 of the squadron.

T: Why did you end up in bombers? Did you ask for it?

C: No. I asked for attack?

T: Pursuit?

C: No, not pursuit, attack. I wanted to go to Barksdale Air Force base [LA] in attack. If I couldn't go there, I wanted to go to McCoy [AFB FL] or Langley. So I got heavy bombers at March.

T: The system still hasn't changed.

C: Really! This happened to both Ben Glawe and me as a matter of fact. We were chosen and on the list to remain as instructors at Randolph. Both of us had done fairly well at Randolph. I did better at Randolph probably than at either Tulsa or Kelly, and they chose me as a basic instructor. Those on the original assignment list were supposed to remain at Randolph. Apparently Washington got upset, or the GHQ [General Headquarters] Air Coops got upset over the number of Regular officers, West Pointers particularly, who were remaining in the training system. So they pulled about 20 of us off the instructor list and assigned us to various tactical units. Ben and I went to March in B-17s, which turned out to be a real good assignment. It wasn't really what I had in mind, but I enjoyed it.

T: You accompanied the 19th as a navigator on a B-17 from Albuquerque to Clark. Would you fill us in on that time frame?

C: It was a very interesting time as you can well imagine. My group commander was Eugene Eubank [Maj Gen Eugene L.], who retired as a major general some years later. At the time I reported to March, he was a major and was promoted to lieutenant colonel almost immediately. They were beginning to increase the promotions. General Eubank was one of the best teachers I ever knew in my life. He was the one who instituted this complete cross-training, bombardier, navigator, gunners, and so on. You also had to be a qualified radio operator, and you had to be able to pull a 100-hour inspection on the B-17. These were the kinds of things that we did.

He and an officer named Hilbert Wittkop [Col Hilbert M.], who was my first squadron commander in the 93d Squadron, I would say had the greatest influence on me after I got out of flying school. I lost Colonel Wittkop later on; I don't know where he is. But General Eubank I am still in very close contact with. He is retired down at Gulfport, Mississippi. I play golf with him, go hunting with him once in a while, and see him every now and then. I had a note from Mrs. Eubank the other day, and she said he is pretty hard to live with. He was born in 1893 so that would make him 86, and he shot an 82 the other day on the golf course. He has been bragging all the time I see him. I said, "Well, General, did you shoot your age again this year?" "Oh, yes, no problem. The older I get, the easier it is to shoot my age." He shot an 82 the other day, and she says he is hard to live with. A great guy, just an absolutely great guy.

At March every squadron had its navigation, bombardment, and gunnery school. There was great competition between the squadrons of the group. Eubank was the kind of guy who would come driving along in his staff car and get out, and we all knew what he was there for. He would reach in the backseat and pull out his bubble octant and come in, and we would shoot the sun for a coke with the group commander. This not only kept everybody on his toes, but the commander got to know everybody in the unit. And we all knew if you ever won a coke from the old-man you were "on" that particular day because he knew his business. He flew with every pilot in the group before he certified them as an AC. He was our commander when we went overseas. I am telling you this because it all builds up to the point that you were making.

While we were out at March, I was convinced that I would die of old age before I could ever get checked out as a B-17 commander. The guys I was flying with, people like De Rosier [Col Leo W.], "Tommy" Steed [Col Thomas W.], Birrell Walsh [Col], a bunch of those old timer’s, had been in the Air Corps for so long that they had whiskers. Everyone of them had a minimum of about 7,000 hours, maybe 5,000 of those hours in B-17s. It just looked to me like there was no way that I could ever get there. So in 1941 we split the 19th Group into cadres for these new units that I was telling you about. I managed to get myself assigned to the unit going to Tucson as a medium bomber group. There was only one officer in each squadron cadre.

The idea was that you were in charge of that cadre although you went ahead and did all the things that you were normally doing with the 19th Bomb Group. We had our own first sergeant, our own roster, and we had dummy rosters for everybody not yet assigned. Eventually we were going to fill them up. I felt that was a smart thing to do because I could see myself getting checked out in the medium bombers a heck of a lot quicker than I could get checked out in a B-17. By that time I was checked out in a B-18. We had a bunch of those around there that we flew, two-engine jobs, but not a B-17. I had myself all cranked up to go to Tucson in a medium bomber outfit, which eventually got some of the first B-25s down there. When the final list came out, however, my name was on the 19th Bomb Group roster, and I went on to Albuquerque and flew over to the Philippines with them.

It was before we transferred to Albuquerque that we picked up a complete complement of B-17s. We started training for our flight to Hawaii to deliver these airplanes to the 7th Bomb Group. Although one or two flights had been made between the mainland and Hawaii, there never had been a mass flight of this number of land-based airplanes. I have forgotten how many--but about 36 airplanes or maybe 38 with spares--we were to fly over there in May. We began an intensive training program in the winter and spring of 1941.

At that time I was a copilot. Tommy Steed was my pilot. Each B-17 had two copilots aboard, and Glawe and I were the copilots on this particular flight. We flew all over the continental United States, working not only on our engines but our cruise control and things of this nature to be sure that we could get to Hawaii. When we finally made the trip from Hamilton [Field CA] to Hickam [Field CA], we were 15 hours and 10 minutes in flight. We had to deviate on account of weather and adverse winds, and our average ground speed was only about 157 miles per hour.

We got there, and the next thing you know, we were assigned a crew from the 7th Bomb Group to transition into B-17s. Well, who should be the crew commander for the crew we were assigned but "Rosie" O'Donnell [Gen Emmett]. It was the first time he ever flew the B-17. He could fly as well as most of us who flew them over.

T: What were your major problems before you jumped off?

C: I would say that cruise control and armament turrets. Cruise control was a new subject, and we had a real sharp, young group engineering officer named "Bill" Cock, who was real sharp in this area, who got killed the first day at Clark Field. He was a real working engineer, and he developed density altitude cruise control procedures for us at that time. We were checking all these things out, and every crew needed to know exactly how his airplane would perform. It was a good thing we did, because 15 hours and CO minutes was about the limit on that airplane. We had two bull bomb-bay tanks on takeoff, and we might have been able to get another half hour out of our fuel by the time we finally got there.

The navigators assigned on that first go-around were all fairly experienced. They were pilots, but they had been navigating for a year or more, and they knew their business. We didn't have any problem there. We did have armament problems, and modifications kept coming out one after the other on the airplanes. The problem of getting the mods done at the Boeing factory at Seattle and the Air Coops depot at Sacrament in time to make the flight was, I guess, the biggest problem.

Things like putting in a bathtub turret--you probably don't even know what a bathtub turret is. In those days we didn't have a hydraulic or electrically controlled turret, and the only defense we had from below the belly was a thing that looked like a bathtub. The gunner got down in them, and he actually moved the guns by hand. It wasn't until long after the war began that we began to get belly turrets and tail turrets and nose turrets that were electrically and hydraulically operated. The major problems we had were training, modification, and materiel. We were developing our own confidence, and we knew we were going to Hawaii, so this was not very difficult.

After leaving all the B-17s in Hawaii, we came back to San Francisco on the same ship that was evacuating a whole load of dependents from the Philippines. It was a big luxury liner, The America, I recall, which had been pressed into Government service. At that time we didn't know we eventually were going to the Philippines, but we then began picking up brand new airplanes out of Boeing, Seattle and training all over again. We knew we were going somewhere, and pretty soon, about the middle of the summer, we knew we were going to be deployed to the Philippines. This time it was a different proposition.

By now, July 1941, a lot of those old pilots had been transferred out and put into the expansion units that I was telling you about, so we had a new operation going on. For instance, you had a guy named Carpenter as a navigator this time instead of being a copilot, and we began to get our first graduates from the navigation school. I had a young flying cadet navigator from Coral Gables, Florida, as an assistant. That's where the first navigator school was established. They trained in a bunch of old flying boats down there. They took off at 65, cruised at 65, stalled at 65, and landed at 61. We got these newly graduated navigators, and they couldn't move their lines of position forward East enough to navigate in a B-17. They had just been flying along at 65 miles an hour, sort of like driving your car, you know. Even though the B-17 speed wasn't high, it was about twice as fast as they had been accustomed to flying. It took them a while to adjust, but pretty soon they were navigating with the best of us.

I will never forget my assistant, however. At this point in time, he was worse than useless; furthermore, he got in my way. I had him down in the nose of that B-17 with me on the way to Hawaii. We had been flying under an overcast for a long, long time when all of a sudden we got a break in the overcast and I had a chance to take a few celestial shots. but this guy was just all over the place. I knew damn well it was still 3 hours till sunrise, but I sent him up to the astrodome with a hack watch to hack the sunrise so we could get a check on our longitude. With him the hell out of there, I was able to go to work and get a good three-star fix, which we truly needed. It was a lot of fun.

You would be surprised at the things we did in the way of training for navigation. We had to qualify as both a dead reckoning and a celestial navigator, and we took considerable pride in our capabilities. One idea was to get two or three of us down in the nose of a B-17 blindfolded. Somebody else would take off and fly for 3 hours. Everybody takes off his blindfold, no ups, no nothing. Where are we? You might be surprised that by the end of that summer if we could see the terrain I could fly for 10 minutes anywhere in the United States, and tell you where we were. We were flying then about 8,000 or 9,000 feet, mean sea level, so we were fairly close to the surface.

That stood me in good stead all my life, even after I was flying jets. As most of us know, on a route that you have flown a lot, it is comparatively simple to look out the window of the airplane and get a reasonable fix if you can see the ground for about 5 minutes. It is very handy to be able to do that anywhere in the United States.

Of course, most of our practice was on celestial navigation since we were faced with some long, overwater flying.

Radio navigation played a small part in our effort because there weren't many radio fixes en route to the Philippines. In those days we had a series of low frequency radio stations around the country on the airways in the continental United States, and they were helpful when you could receive them. When we headed west of San Francisco, however, there wasn't much except an occasional low-frequency homing beacon.

T: What was the quality of equipment in the early days prior to the state of World War II?

C: The B-17 was basically just as good then as it ever was except for the badly needed changes in defensive armament and the addition of bulletproof fuel tanks. The Norden bombsight was quite accurate for level bombing up to 30,000 feet if you knew how to operate it. We used that all during the war. As you know the strategic bombing survey of Europe and the Pacific attests to the success of that effort. In the beginning we were generally limited to general purpose bombs, but incendiaries and antipersonnnel varieties came along in short order.

The defensive armament left a great deal to be desired; however, the basic. 50-caliber, air-cooled machinegun was great. All we needed was to have some way to lay it on the target and move it around. Before the war, most of our firing was a ring and bead sight, and we really weren't too effective until the hydraulic and electric turrets began to show up.

Navigation equipment, the bubble octants we had were just superb, and we were very well-trained. I would say that a 1/2 to 1 mile error was what we could expect. That is not very good as far as precision instrument approaches are concerned, but it certainly gets you in the vicinity.

In those days we did have directional radio transmitters in the form of the old low-frequency ranges. We also had low-frequency radio compasses which were good, although you had the old 180 deg ambiguity to worry about. Bad weather with lightning and precipitation static made these aids pretty unreliable at times, and some of our instrument flying was a true sporting proposition.

Engines were outstanding. I always thought the Pratt & Whitneys were a little better than the Wrights, but the Wright 1820s did very well on the old B-17s. Our aerospace industry was basically sound, and you know the story on the difficulty of gearing it up for wartime production. But once it got geared up, it began to turn these darn things out, and they turned them out in huge numbers, and boy, they all did very well.

T: What about your radio equipment, sir?

C: Radio equipment was all HF [high frequency]--was the only thing we had. We used a trailing antenna on our airplanes all the time. They would put a big weight on the end of it, and the radio operator would unreel this long wire, and you would use that for your antenna. You had normal push-to talk radio, and I don't even know what frequency that operated on now, but it was not too good on a point-to-point conversation type thing. As far as our code communications were concerned, it was very good. We hadn't converted to VHF [very high frequency], and UHF [ultra high frequency] had not been exploited. In those early days we were still on the HF.

It was easily jammed. Our communication was completely jammed the entire time we were flying across Japanese territory in the Pacific on the way to the Philippines in October-November 1941. The Japanese knew we were in the area, and they had oriental music on all of our frequencies--loud and scratchy, plink, plink, plink sort of business--the whole time we were en route. We weren't able to do much voice communication at the time; however, we could still get through on Morse code.

With reference to aircraft designs it was basically okay, but as we gained combat experience and developed new tactics and new techniques, the systems had to be changed to take care of the situation. We did a lot of our own modification and would mount machine guns in strategic places in the nose.

T: Try them to see if they worked.

C: Go out and try them, that's right. Field modifications which we couldn't do back in the States but could do out in the field. As long as they worked, that was the main thing.

T: How was your maintenance?

C: In the 19th Bomb Group, we had the best in the Air Force. We were a very, very special and elite unit. These crew chiefs had been in the business for so long they could take one of those 1820s apart and put it back together with their eyes closed, and lots of times they had to do it in the dark, so I was glad they could. The same with our armament people. But this was a very unusual situation and shouldn't reflect the general level of training throughout the Air Coops, because it wasn't there. This was an elite unit. It has been developed and planned. It was the first unit actually deployed. The decision had been made to deploy before we got into the war. We got the equipment, the people, and the money necessary to get this outfit in shape.

It is a good thing we did because when we got over there we fought with what we had for 1 year before things started coming.

T: What was the quality of the enlisted men and the officers in the Air Corps prior to actual combat?

C: These guys were real pros, and I guess about 50 percent of our enlisted men ended up with a commission before the year was over if they ever got out of the Philippines. We left a great number of our topnotch airmen in the Philippines--couldn't get them out. We flew in and brought out as many as we could by air, but we had taken the ground echelon in by ship, and there weren't many ships sailing in and out of the Philippines in those days. It was difficult, so many, too many, of our airmen ended up as prisoners. Most of the flying officers got out one way or another.

T: You said this was an elite outfit. What I am really getting - at now, sir, is what was your opinion of the quality of the enlisted man and officer in the Air Corps overall as best. as you remember?

C: I can't tell you because that was the only outfit I was in. That's the outfit I went into when I left flying school, and I stayed with that outfit until it came back from the war in the Pacific.

T: You really didn't have a chance to judge others?

C: I didn't have a chance to judge others. I think all the way along the technical training was sound. The educational level was very low, but a lot of these airmen really knew their business. For example, I think I was the first squadron supply officer who ever surveyed a B-17. We had a B-17 crack up on a mountain peak above Palm Springs, so I surveyed this B-17. I had a tech sergeant there. Old Sergeant Howell said to me, "Don't you worry, Lieutenant, we will take care of this situation. The only thing you have to do is keep the rest of these supply officers and supply sergeants away from me. They will want to survey everything they have lost for the past 50 years on your airplane. If you let them claim all of those things, the airplane would never get off the ground." That was my job, to keep the other squadrons from coming in and unloading all of their missing blankets and silverware and watches and everything else on our airplane.

The other job I had to do was to go up and get the Norden bombsight. Nobody could handle that in those days but an officer and specially cleared enlisted men. I took a couple of airmen, and we went up there. While others were pulling the bodies out of the wreckage, we got the bombsight and all the bombing controls and hacked them out, brought them down, and disposed of them properly.

Back to the survey. After about 3 weeks, Sergeant Howell came in and said, "Lieutenant, I think if you will sign here, here, here, and here, we will be all right." So I did, and away it went to Fourth Army Headquarters in San Francisco.

We came back in about 3 weeks and said, "We don't understand why the radio operator's trunk locker was aboard." Sergeant Howell and I looked at one another and said, "You know, he used to keep a lot of frequency meters and extra headsets and things like that in that trunk locker, and he had that aboard to store his extra equipment." So we put that down on the answering endorsement and sent it in and never saw it again. A whole B-17 survey went right on through. He really knew his business. Every reg, everything else.

T: Do you remember his first name, sir?

C: No. Sergeant Howell is all I know. Some of these names I can find. I have them somewhere or other on rosters.

T: What were you doing on 1 December 1941, General?

C: An interesting story before we go to December. In October and November we flew over to the Philippines from Albuquerque, and we didn't lose a single B-17 out of the outfit. In the whole group we lost two engines One was on our airplane, and one was on another airplane in the same squadron between Port Moresby and Darwin, Australia. We went around that way. Back in those days, you couldn't go by Guam because there was no place to land. A seaplane was the only thing that landed at Guam, so we went to Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Port Moresby, Darwin, and back up to the Philippines. Two airplanes lost an engine when we came into Darwin. What we did was, the ACs got together and matched on who was going to be without two engines, and my AC lost. So we pulled an engine off our airplane and put it on the other, and they went on. We stayed in Darwin. They were going to fly some engines back down to us from the Philippines, which they did eventually, one at a time in the B-18.

The problem was simply this: we were approaching the wet season down in Darwin, and Darwin didn't have a hard surface runway. Boy, we were really sweating it out because we wanted to get those engines on and out of there before we got mired down to where we couldn't move. By golly, we dug a nine-hole golf course on that doggone place before we finally got that B-17 out. Every time we would get it up on a bench of planks and whatnot, we would go off the end of the darn thing, and down she would go into another hole. We finally got the B-17 to a reasonably solid piece of the flying field and took off just ahead of the big heavy rains and got on back into the Philippines. We arrived at the end of November, and the rest of our group had been there for about 3 weeks, I guess. We were the last airplane of the group to finish the flight.

From that point on we knew things were heating up, and most of the missions we were flying had to do with the testing of the aid defense system and the alert system of the Philippine Islands. We would fly out and come back to test the air defense network, and at the same time, we would fly reconnaissance in the surrounding area. The airplane that I inherited was a dog, and all the way across the Pacific, this thing had been blowing generators, and we weren't able to trace the trouble at all. We didn't know where the short was, but every time you would turn around, you would blow another generator on the darn thing.

A Navigation School's First Class  by Ed Whitcomb

In August 1940 a group of young men from all parts of the United States converged upon Coral Gables, Florida, to become cadets in a military navigation training program. Raised as children of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, what they wanted more than anything else in life was to fly airplanes. They had all volunteered for the US Army Air Corps with hopes for becoming pilots, but the Air Corps had other ideas. They would become navigators on the world's finest bomber, the B- 17 Flying Fortress.

The cadets did not think of themselves as warriors. None of them had ever seen a Flying Fortress. They were civilians who wanted to fly and joining the Air Corps was a means to that end. The thought of flying where man had never flown before or of bombing cities all around the world was farthest from their minds as they struggled with the intricacies of celestial navigation.

On Celestial Wings tells of the development of the first program to mass produce celestial navigators as America geared up for entry into WWII. It also tells of heartrending tragedies resulting from America's lack of preparedness for war and the fight against overwhelming odds in experiences of members of the US Army Air Corps Navigation School class of 40-A. It tells of their honors and victories and their disappointments and bitter defeats in a war unlike any that will ever occur again.

The University of Miami band blared its music through the majestic Biltmore Hotel as 44 khaki-clad cadets marched onto the stage of the big ballroom. It was a historic occasion because we were the first graduating class of professional aerial navigators for the United States' military services. We were to become known as the Class of 40-A. On stage with the 44 of us were representatives of the University of Miami at Coral Gables, Florida, the United States Army Air Corps, and Pan American Airways-the organizations that had put together America's first navigation training program. It was among the first programs of World War II in which business, military, and university personnel combined efforts in the interest of national defense.

The date was 12 November 1940. World War II had been raging in Europe for more than a year, and Adolph Hitler had sent his troops into Poland, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Fighting, death, and destruction were far away from US shores. America was enjoying peace with a president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had vowed that he would never send an American boy to die on foreign soil. Congress had passed laws enacting the draft, but the men on the platform in Coral Gables were not concerned about that. They were all volunteers who anticipated one thing: to fly!

We came in early August 1940 to what became the fountainhead of navigational knowledge.  Few people traveled by commercial airlines in those days. We came by bus, boat, train, and automobile from the crowded streets of New York City, the lonely rangelands of Montana, and the peaceful small towns of the Midwest. Many of my classmates were first and second generation Americans of Serbian, Jewish, Italian, Polish, and English extraction. It was an all-American group including, among others, the family names of Markovich, Berkowitz, Boselli, Vifquain, and Meenagh.

The class members were young men in their early twenties, bright-eyed and eager to succeed in navigation school so they could fly. We had only a vague idea of the complexities of celestial navigation. None of us had ever known an aerial navigator nor could have had any idea of the perils the future held for us. We could not have envisioned that we would be flying courses where no man had ever flown, dropping bombs on civilian cities around the world and seeing our classmates shot out of the sky.

My roommate, Theodore J. Boselli, a former champion bantamweight boxer from Clemson University, would later navigate the first presidential plane. Walter E. Seamon, son of the mayor of West Jefferson, Ohio, would also be assigned to the president's plane. George Markovich, a brilliant graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, would guide a plane called the Bataan for the great Gen Douglas MacArthur in his flights around the Southwest Pacific. Russell M. Vifquain, the blonde-headed son of an Iowa college professor, had led Iowa State University to be runner-up in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) golf competition. In the years ahead he would be with Gen Curtis LeMay dropping tons of incendiary bombs into the crowded heart of Tokyo, Japan. Jay Horowitz, a happy Jewish boy from Sweetwater, Tennessee, would suffer more agony as a prisoner at the hands of the Japanese than anyone could have imagined. These and many others were my classmates as we entered into the academic phase of celestial navigation.

But it was 1940, and we were in the city of Coral Gables. The US was at peace and our thoughts were not of war. Our home during the 12-week course of training was the stately San Sebastian Hotel at the comer of Le Jeune and University streets. In our first military formations we wore T-shirts, civilian clothes, and a variety of uniforms from previous military organizations. We were a second "Coxey's Army" ready to be molded into military men and more importantly, celestial navigators. One element of cadet life was missing. There were no upper classes, no lower class, and thus no hazing.

Capt Norris B. Harbold, a 1928 product of the United States Military Academy at West Point, was in charge of the detachment. He had a history of efforts to promote celestial navigation training in the Air Corps. We conducted close-order drill formations on the streets near the hotel where there was scant vehicular traffic. Coral Gables on the outskirts of Miami was a sleepy and almost desolate city after the big land development boom and later depression of the 1930s. There were dozens of city blocks where streets, sidewalks, curbs, and fire hydrants supported vacant lots overgrown with weeds.

The cadets marched in ragged military formations across the street to the "Cardboard College"-a group of buildings intended to serve the University of Miami until a new campus was established. The university's grandiose plans for new buildings had stopped dead with the advent of the big depression. But the temporary facilities were adequate for our 240 hours of ground training in navigation and meteorology.

The development of the navigation training program had come about in a very unusual way. Gen Delos Emmons, chief of General Headquarters of the US Army Air Corps, had been aboard a giant Pan American clipper on a fact-finding mission to Europe in 1939. All night the big silver clipper lumbered along on its flight from New York to the island of Horta in the Azores. While other passengers dozed, General Emmons observed the plane's navigator industriously plotting his course by celestial navigation. The general stood on the flight deck in awe of the proficiency of the work. Then as the stars faded away in the light of a new day, the navigator pointed to a dark mound on the distant horizon dead ahead of the aircraft.

"That is the island of Horta," announced Charles J. Lunn, the navigator.

"Amazing!" exclaimed the general.

"It would be more amazing if it were not there," replied Lunn matter of factly.

General Emmons (left)  had more than a passing interest in this feat of expertise in celestial navigation. )Ws victories in Europe suggested alarming possibilities for US involvement in the European war. The Air Corps urgently needed a lot of well-trained and highly skilled celestial navigators. General Emmons knew that there was no program in the Air Corps to do the job although the Air Corps had tried on several occasions to establish celestial navigation schools. At that time, most military flights were conducted within the continental limits of the United States. Therefore, there was little stimulus for flying officers to do more than make a hobby of celestial navigation. A few officers including Norris B. Harbold, Eugene L. Eubank, Albert F. Hegenberger, Glenn C. Jamison, Lawrence J. Carr, and Curtis E. LeMay had taken particular interest in celestial navigation, but by the spring of 1940, the Army Air Corps had only 80 experienced celestial navigators. It would need thousands to man the new bombers on order for the Air Corps. 

How many people could you teach to do this?" Emmons asked Lunn.

"Just as many as could hear my voice," was Lunn's succinct reply.

The conversation planted an idea in the general's mind. With whatever else he may have learned on his fact-finding mission to Europe, he came back to Washington, D.C., with an idea for training navigators. (Whitcomb and Lunn left)

Upon his return he contacted Juan Tripp, president of Pan American Airways and Dr B. F. Ashe, president of the University of Miami. Their meetings culminated in an agreement whereby Pan American would provide navigational training with Charles J. Lunn as the chief navigation instructor. The University of Miami would provide food, housing, and classrooms for instruction at the rate of $12.50 per cadet per week. The cadets were in place, and the program was under way even before the agreement was signed. 

Charlie Lunn seemed the most unlikely person to be teaching a university class. His academic credentials were woefully deficient. He had no college degrees whatsoever. He had never attended a college or university. The fact was Charles J. Lunn, chief navigation instructor at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1940, had failed his sophomore year at Key West High School. He was a high school dropout.

Charlie and his sister had stood at the head of their classes in grammar school and in high school until Charlie's interests turned to girls and basketball. At 16 years of age, he was a good enough athlete to draw $10 a game playing for the Key West Athletic Club team. However, as a result of his extracurricular activities, his academic standing declined to the point that he decided to leave school.

Nineteen years later, he found himself standing before a class of college-trained and educated students from all parts of the United States. Many of them had college degrees in engineering, education, and a variety of other fields. It was Charlie's job to train them in the complicated art of celestial navigation.

When Charlie left high school, his father made it clear to him that he was to get himself reinstated in high school or get a job to support himself Since he had grown weary of dull classroom life, Charlie set out to find a job.

In 1921 there were few employment opportunities in Key West for a 16-year-old high school dropout. Sponging (gathering sponges from the sea) and fishing were about the only jobs available on the island and such jobs were not attractive to young Lunn. The 7th US Navy Base, where many naval vessels stopped for fuel and water, was one of the chief employers in Key West. Charlie was unable to find a job there because 18 was the minimum age for employment with the government.

Like other boys his age, he was fascinated by the foreign ships that came into Key West Harbor. He had talked to sailors about their voyages to far away ports and learned that it would be possible to get a job as an oiler on an oceangoing ship.

So at the age of 16, Charlie took his first job oiling the engine on a freighter of the P & 0 Steamship Company plying between Key West, Tampa, and Havana. It did not take the lad very long to grow tired of his work in the steaming hot and smelly bowels of the ship. If there were any romance and adventure in that life, they completely escaped him. After a couple of trips, he applied for a job working on the top deck where he would have more opportunity to learn about sailing.

As a deck hand, Charlie was industrious and inquisitive. He asked questions and he studied books until, at the age of 18, he became third mate on his ship.

From childhood, Charlie had heard stories of shipwrecks all along the Florida Keys. Spanish sea captains with millions of dollars in treasure had lost their ships in those waters as they made their way back toward Spain. He also knew the nineteenth century tales of how some Key West natives had ridden mules in the shallow waters along the reefs at night and had held lanterns high on poles to confuse pilots into navigating vessels onto the coral reefs. Natives would then plunder the wrecks. As a result, many Key West merchants sold a large variety of exotic merchandise from such wrecked ships. Wrecking ships, recovering the cargo and selling it resulted in a thriving business in old Key West.

These stories gave young Lunn a good sense of the value of accurate navigation. He became obsessed with the importance of being able to navigate by the stars as a means of maintaining an accurate course on the sea. He studied the stars, and he studied navigation books until spherical trigonometry became commonplace as he worked to master his favorite subject. His diligence in learning the ways of the sea qualified him to be captain of his own ship at the age of 26.

In the early 1930s, an important part of the P & 0 Steamship Company's business was hauling trains from Key West to Havana. Cubans loaded the trains with sugar. P & 0 ships then transported the railroad cars laden with sugar back to Key West. From there they traveled on the railroad across the Florida Keys to US markets.

In Havana, Charlie met two people who changed his life forever. The first was an attractive, green-eyed, blond, English girl who worked as a secretary for the P & 0 office in Havana. After a year-long romance with the handsome young sea captain, she became Mrs Charles J. Lunn. The other person to change his life was Patrick Nolan, a captain for the Pan American Airways Company.

When Pan American pilots moored their flying boats in the Havana Harbor, they were generally near the P & 0 steam ships. It was a custom for aircrews to go aboard the ships to visit and enjoy good, well-prepared American food. It was on such visits that Captain Nolan became acquainted with Charlie Lunn and his expertise as a celestial navigator.

“Why don't you come up to Miami and make an application for a job as a navigator with Pan American?" Nolan asked Lunn.

Lunn said that he would have to think about it for a while. He did think about it. In 1935 a disastrous hurricane swept across the Florida Keys destroying the rail line that had previously brought the trains to Key West. The P & 0 lines moved their operation from Key West to Fort Lauderdale. It was then that Charlie made up his mind to apply for a job as a navigator with the Pan American Airways Company in Miami.

At that time, Pan American was extending its aerial routes to distant cities of the world. Among the first people to navigate Pan American's big flying boats to such distant places were Charles J. Lunn and Fred Noonan. The latter name is indelibly written in aviation history as the navigator who accompanied Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated effort to fly around the world. Although Charles J. Lunn is less well known, he had navigated the big Pan American clippers for five years before his fateful meeting with Gen Delos Emmons.

Classes began on Monday, 12 August 1940, with Charlie Lunn as the chief performer. He stood pleading with his fledgling cadets to understand the complicated procedures that he was explaining. There were no teachers' manuals. He was teaching what he had learned at sea and then modified so he could navigate flying machines. Great minds like Nathaniel Bowditch, John Hamilton Moore, Pytheas of Massalia, and many others had unlocked the secrets to using the stars for navigation. Lunn was the link between them and the thousands of young men who would be flying military missions around the world using celestial navigation.

With his fine six-foot physique, Charlie was a handsome figure in his Pan American Airways uniform. However in the classroom at the university, he often appeared in front of his class clad in a round-neck, short-sleeved, knit shirt that exposed the brawny, tattooed arms of a son of the sea.

"Don't write that down," he would plead. "You've got to get it up here in your head. Your notes and papers won't do you any good when you're out over the ocean some night." Navigating over the ocean at night seemed more like a dream than a reality to the cadets. None of us had ever been "out over the ocean" in a plane at night. Nevertheless, Charlie doggedly transferred his grasp of celestial navigation to his struggling students. Little by little we became skilled at celestial navigation.

We received 50 hours of in-flight navigation training flying from the Pan American seaplane base at Dinner Key. The base was located on the coast five miles from the university. There Pan American converted five of its twin-engine Sikorsky and Consolidated flying boats into flying classrooms for day and night training missions. There were 10 large tables in each plane with maps of the Caribbean Sea area. Each table contained an altimeter, a compass, and an airspeed indicator. A large hatch open to the sky was used for taking celestial observations.

It was said that the ancient flying boats would take off at 115 miles per hour, cruise at 115 miles per hour, and land at 115 miles per hour. Cadet Harold McAuliff described the noise the clipper made in landing as being like the sound of a truck dumping a load of gravel on a tin roof. Antiquated as they were, the planes provided a real-life environment for practicing celestial navigation.

Before a cadet set foot inside the big clipper training ships, he had to spend many hours atop the San Sebastian Hotel at night. There he got acquainted with the best friends he would ever have-the stars and planets. Cadets learned the names and the relative locations of the 50 brightest stars and the planets. Betelgeuse, Arcturus, and Canopus became as familiar as the names of the streets back in their hometowns.

In the classrooms, there were "dry runs" across the Atlantic Ocean from Miami to Lisbon, Portugal, and from Lisbon to New York. These were routes which Charlie Lunn had flown many times. Charlie provided columns of figures representing the altitudes of given stars in degrees, minutes, and seconds. He also provided columns of figures representing the hour, minute, and seconds of each observation. These were to be added and averaged manually before using the almanac and tables to establish celestial fixes along the course. Neither averaging devices nor computers were in use at the time. Navigation was an exercise in mental gymnastics that seemed to have no ending.

Academic training quickly revealed that the plane's airspeed indicator did not really measure how fast the plane was traveling. The compass did not tell the exact direction the plane was traveling, and the altimeter did not mark the actual altitude of the aircraft. As an aircraft moves through the air, navigators have to make corrections for such things as temperature, atmospheric pressure, magnetic variation, deviation, precession, and refraction. These were things that Charlie Lunn had learned for himself when he left marine navigation and took to the air.

Days and nights of work and study filled the cadets' lives. As busy as they were the cadets found time for recreation at the beautiful Venetian Swimming Pool and the then uncrowded and uncluttered Miami beach. There were University of Miami football games at the Orange Bowl and dances under the stars at the Coral Gables Country Club. In addition there were many attractive coeds on the campus to keep company with the cadets in their various activities.

Then after 12 short weeks of Charlie Lunn's intensified navigation training, there came the November graduation exercises held at the stately Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. Forty-four cadets sat on the stage at the graduation exercises. We listened to speeches by Dr Ashe, Pan American Capt Carl Dewey, and Gen Davenport Johnson. The general, resplendent in his dress blue uniform, spoke for the US Army Air Corps. Several hundred invited guests attended the ceremonies, but few family members of the cadets were present. The country was still in the grips of the depression. Few people could afford the trip from remote parts of the country even for such an important affair.

Gen Davenport Johnson, in his wisdom, spoke of the future and of our mission. “Time is of the essence," he said. "Our Air Force will be called upon to operate over much larger ranges than is the case in European operations today. If the United States should become involved in the present world turmoil and be forced to defend the Western Hemisphere, we must be able to reach out from our coastal frontiers to discover, locate, and destroy the enemy before he can get in striking distance of vital objectives within the United States." 

On that happy and peaceful night in Florida surrounded by the luxury and grandeur of the stately Biltmore Hotel and the music of the university band, General Johnson, even with a prophet's mind, could not have understood the significance of the event. In the months ahead, Charlie Lunn's 44 cadets would be navigating missions of inestimable significance. Passengers on their planes would include such luminaries as Sir Winston Churchill, Madame and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Presidents Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon Johnson, and Generals Douglas MacArthur, George C. Marshall, and Curtis E. LeMay.

Within one year, instead of defending our shores, many of us would be navigating across the world to "locate and destroy the enemy." Classmates would fly combat missions on every battlefront in World War II: in the frigid Aleutian Islands, across the sand-blown deserts of North Africa, in distant Rangoon, Saipan, and Gennany. They would navigate on the first aerial attack on Japan and later with the B-29s bum Japanese cities. They would 'seek out and destroy" V-1 and V-2 launching pads and submarine pens on the continent of Europe and help soften up the beaches of Normandy for the D day invasion. They would be prisoners of the Japanese and the Germans, and internees of the Turks. They would help in the project to dig the tunnel for the great escape from Stalag Luft III in Germany. They would travel the brutal Bataan Death March and lose classmates in the horrible Japanese prison camps.

At the commencement exercises of the celestial navigators of the Class of 40-A, General Johnson could have said, 'These navigators will follow the stars on a path of tragedy and glory unique in the annals of American military history."

I’m sure glad Sarge insisted on issuing Extra Mosquito Repellant.

Things Remembered when prior tour of duty ends

Airplane Mechanics School Chanute Field IL

Chanute Field to March Field Extracted from H. Murdoc story

My stay at March Field covered a little over a year before the 19th was re‑stationed to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I remember we were paid monthly in cash at a pay table, where pay was collected, then bills paid. Three dollars was always paid for laundry. At the end of the pay line stood a pretty, young Salvation Army lassie collecting our quarters in her drum. During my time at March, I was promoted from Private to Private First Class, and later on a 4th Specialist grade was added to my PFC. Flying pay was also added and my pay rose from $21.00 to $45.00 a month, a very social blessing.

The town of Riverside, California, became our usual off‑base haunt for social activities. There were a number of bars ranging from cheap (15 cent drinks), to standard (25 cent drinks), to deluxe (30 cent drinks). Only the tall drinks known as Headhunters, and Zombies, reached the astronomical sum of fifty cents. Dances were held every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, and were attended by many of the city's prettiest girls. Airmen were well accepted as long as they wore civvies. I tried to be at all the dances, military duties permitting. One group from Radio Section roamed once farther afield to North Hollywood and the Beaux Arts theatre to attend a live play, "White Cargo", depicting the physical and moral deterioration of British colonial officers serving in Africa. The appearance of a sarong clad, bare‑breasted Tondelayo, the corrupting siren of the play, raised the testosterone levels of the attending airmen, and the event was discussed with pleasure for many months.

Air missions were many and varied. They included boring bombing practices over Muroc Dry Lake (now Edwards Air Force Base) targets, cross‑country flights to other air fields and transitional flights to practice navigation. I enjoyed these flights. as I could turn on the radio compass, which was a powerful receiver, and listen to nice music, while using the stations for triangulation points. One cross‑country was for our unit's aircraft and crews to assemble at Langley Field, Virginia, and do a fly‑over during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration. My plane, piloted by then Lt. Ben I. Funk (now Maj. Gen. Funk, retd.), landed at El Paso, Texas, for refueling and over‑night stay. Unfortunately, the wind blew hard during the night, forcing sand into our engines. We had to make emergency stops at San Antonio, Texas, and at Maxwell Field, Alabama, trailing black smoke, to repair our engines. on inauguration day, we took off from Langley and joined the formation for fly‑over, but in sight of Washington, D.C., were forced back to base with engine trouble. We almost, but not quite, made some kind of history that day. On our return flight to March Field in a formation of five or six B‑17s, led by Major Pease, we approached the San Jacinto pass from the east. Entering the pass, clouds gathering inside the pass forced the planes lower and lower, and squeezed into a tighter formation as the sides of the pass closed in. Finally, Major Pease banked tight against the north side of the pass, and brought us around and back out, just missing the south side of the pass. Everyone swore that, if we had had our landing gear down, we would have physically scraped both sides of the pass!

Although Ben I. Funk was my favorite pilot, because he was a skillful flyer, who always had his flying well‑thought out, and left me unconcerned about safety and security, I also liked flying with Lt. Jack Adams, another skillful, but a bit more devil‑may‑care, pilot. He used to fly from March to the coast west of Los Angeles, ostensibly to check our B‑17's superchargers at sea level for accuracy. Coincidentally, in so doing we passed over water between Santa Catalina island and the mainland. Many sailboats and power‑craft filled the water, and we left occupants bobbing, and probably cursing, furiously in our wake. Flying a bit south, Lt. Adams would bank our plane to the left, just clearing the hills, and causing the cattle on those hills to run furiously to escape the "big bird"'. Milk cows probably went dry for months. Concluding all that Air Corps business, we would return to base, congratulating ourselves for a day well spent.

One incident of probable historic implications, was a day in the winter of 1941, when radio entertainer Bob Hope, with Jerry Colonna and Brenda and Cobina, brought his show to March Field. It was broadcast from the auditorium (gymnasium) with the airmen in the bleachers as audience. It was quite a thrill and a highly enjoyed event. I believe this was the first of Bob Hope's many shows that he continued to present to the troops through out the years and the wars. He will always be remembered with appreciation and affection by those troops. I also remember that Lt. Kurtz, a champion high‑diver and Marjorie Gestring, an Olympic diver gave exhibitions of their skill at the officers' pool for all grades. Of course, we enlisted personnel just had to call the lady, Marjorie "G‑String".

Another incident of more glamorous proportions occurred, when Hollywood came to March Field in making of the film, "I Wanted Wings". Movie stars, including Ray Milland, Brian Donleavy, and a young William Holden overran the flight line. The GIs' favorite was Veronica Lake of the long, blond hair, worn in a peek‑a‑boo style. She graciously bestowed her smiles in great number on all Air Corps personnel nearby, and there were more men than necessary on the line. 32nd Squadron's hangar area was chosen for most of the film making. Sound truck engineers invited radio operators and maintenance men to see their equipment, of which they took time to explain the various uses to us. When the completed movie was shown in Riverside, I paid to see it, and enjoyed viewing the portions shot on March Field.

Move to Albuquerque NM by T. Mitsos

May, 1941 the 19th Bomb Group was transferred to Albuquerque, NM. In those days, we had a choice of accepting the transportation tickets the squadron issued, or accepting cash and paying our own way to the destination. Most of the time, we accepted cash, for this gave us the opportunity to see some of the historical parts of the west.

Surprisingly, we never minded these inconveniences as we looked forward to going to a new place. On this trip we were going to be stationed in the old west, amongst the cowboys and Indians. Years of going to the Tom Mix cowboy movies had made us look forward to this trip. Chief, who was part Indian from Arizona, had told us some tall stories about Indian attacks and scalping, and we believed him.

Letter from Bud Morris to Tom Mitsos 01-04-96

Dear Tom;

It was pay day, Saturday, May 31, 1941, when we were restricted to the base at March Field. Our crews had just returned from their ferrying and checking out B-17's with the personnel at Hickham Field. They were not restricted to the base as we were. I guess the old man (?) wanted to be sure that we were all there for the transfer to Albuquerque.

I believe you were right when you said that McCool was with us and went with Gouche , unless he rode with Bill Porter, who had that coupe.

Scene at a 30th Squadron beer bust held in the Sandia Mountains. Lt. Gary (who died in the December 8th. bombing of Clark Field, P.I.) is the one playing the guitar. Bud Morris is the person at Lt. Gary's right elbow. From H Murdoc story.

We were paid off Tuesday morning, June 3rd, and given the green light to take off. I think that we gave Gouche our share of the expense money and headed for Los Vegas. Remember that you and I went with him once before and stayed at his aunt and uncles house. This time, we went directly to a gambling and pleasure joint, as all of them were. As you were the most sensible one of us, I imagine that you did not squander your money as we did. I remember wee hours Wednesday morning of laying my last dollar on a bar and the bartender set four shots on it, 25 cents a piece.

We did not have enough money for a room, so we went to a place that had small individual one room units. We found one with a car that we recognized as one of the 30th and went in through a side window. We had not gotten too much sleep when it was getting daylight and we decided that we had better get out of there. Much to our surprise, when we left by the same window we had used to crawl in, there stood the manager in the middle of the road. instead of being, arrested or threatened, he gave us hell for not coming to him and telling him that we were too broke to pay for a room. He told us that he had been in that situation before and would have given us a place to stay and pay him later. I don't know exactly, but I believe there were eight of us in the room that two had paid for.

The rest of the trip to Albuquerque was somewhat uneventful and we were dining on cheese and crackers and using what money Gouche had for gas and oil. I do remember that we passed one sign that pointed off to the left, reading "Ghost Town this way". we decided that we might as well check it out. we turned around and started up that road, a couple of our bunch was coming back and told us that it was worth seeing and wasn't too far down the road. We must have driven a half an hour and although we could see for miles could not see any kind of a town. We then decided that we had been duped and headed back to the highway. We also passed on to other cars headed that way that it was a sight worth seeing.

I believe that we pulled into Les Johnsons' Chicken in the Basket drive in with the coke out and money for fries and coffee. We became steady customers of Les. I think that he sensed we were broke and put out something with the fries.

Yours Truly Bud

T. Mitsos:  My stay at Albuquerque was also very enjoyable, for this was the first base to be established there, and the people welcomed us with open arms.

Even the banks would make loans of $50.00 to all the GI's without any credit checks. Fifty dollars in those days would buy you a used Model 'A' Ford. Don't worry, the bank got paid or you ended up in the guardhouse. All the GI's had an excellent credit rating in Albuquerque.

Albuquerque NM Jul –Sept 1941

06-07-41 30th Sqd, Move from March Field Ca to Albuquerque NM. In Sep start move to Philippines

06-27-41, 93rd Sqd, Move from March Field Ca to Albuquerque NM. In Sep start move to Philippines

7^th Materiel Sqd

May 1941 the 19^th BG was assigned to a new base set up by 7^th Material (above photo) at Albuquerque NM. In Sept all shipped by train to San Francisco. Oct 4 1941 7^th Materiel Base personnel plus 19^th BG Grd Echelon boarded the USS Holbrook, destination Unknown. They arrive Manila Oct 23 1941. 7^th Materiel operated the Clark Fld Air Base, fought on Bataan as infantry & became POW’s. About 50% survived the war.

Hawaii Sept 1941

14^th Sqd is formed under Rosy O’Donnell, ex West Point football coach, to check out in B-17s. 19^th BG personnel fly B-17D’s to Hawaii, check out 14^th Sqd crews & return to Albuquerque. Mid Sept 1941 14^th Sqd flew (9) B-17D’s 8000 mi: Hickam to Wake to Morseby to Darwin to Clark Fld.

12-06-41 38^th and 88^th Reconnaissance Sqd (become 19^th BG) in B-17E’s depart Hamilton Fld, CA. destination “Plumb” code name for Del Monte Fld, Mindanao, Philippines. 12-07-41 38^th & 88^th Sqds arrive Hawaii during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The 38^th & 88^th will make their way across the Pacific, providing reconnaissance for the Navy. They will be based at Townsville Australia, flying reconnaissance, for what becomes the Coral Sea Battle. In March 1942 they will be merged with 14^th Sqd and be renamed 435^th Sqd of 19^th BG. As 19^th BG they will fly MacArthur out of Philippines using the newer B-19E’s.

Navigator Bombardier Station in Nose Pilot – CoPilot

Left: looking aft from rear entrance, commode at rear, gun mounts on each side, “bath tub” near bottom

Right: looking down into “bath tub” at rear firing twin 50 cal guns; operator got on knees to fire

Hawaii 1936-1939

Aircraft & Engines 1938-1941

P-40 with V1710 engine, strafed Jap landings on Java B-24 (LB-30) with R1830 engines to Java 1942

The P-40 did not have a supercharger and was weighted down with a 2” thick glass plate in front of the pilot and a 3/8 in steel alloy armor plate behind the pilot. It was rugged and reliable but no match with a Zero in a dog fight – they could knock out Zeros if they could make a diving pass, they could out dive and out run at low level. They were very effective in strafing Japanese landings on Java, but there were too few to stop the many. Thanks to foreign orders they were in mass production, so P-40s were given to the Chinese and flown by the “Flying Tigers” -- ostensibly mercenary pilots hired by the Chinese, actually US pilots “on leave” for the purpose.

British LB-30s were flown by 7^th BG to Java via the Pacific. Without superchargers they could not climb over weather fronts or have enough speed for combat.

For the first time in the history of warfare these four engine bombers were able to fly global distances to combat areas. They made it possible to move combat forces long distances, over waters under enemy control. Only B-17s, B-24s, PBY’s and submarines could take personnel from and to the Philippines before and just after surrender. By the end of 1942 Gen Kenney demonstrated to Gen MacArthur that combat troops could be moved rapidly using these bombers. The Japanese did not have an equivalent.

B-25 with (2) R2250 engines, used extensively out of Australia B-26 with (2) R2800 engines, used mostly in N. Africa and Europe

The B-25 was made famous by Doolittle’s raid from the carrier Lexington against Japan in mid 1942. It was later perfected to strafe and bomb surface ships by using multiple forward firing 50 caliber machine guns. The B-17s could make long range reconnaissance flights and bomb long range targets. The B-25 were very effective for close support – they got down to where they couldn’t miss.

The B-26 was initially known as the “widow maker” until 13 feet was added to it’s wing span. With it’s new R2800 engine it was very fast and carried more bombs than a B-17. Those who flew them in combat loved them.

P-39 with V1710 engine in rear and 20 mm cannon in nose (2) V1710 engine P-38 with turbo superchargers

The P-39 did not use a supercharger, it’s V1710 engine was behind the cockpit so a 20mm cannon could be fired out the nose. It was a beautiful airplane with much appeal. Weighted down with protective armor to protect the pilot, and no supercharger it was readily shot down by Zeros. It was shipped to the Russians who loved it, they removed the armor and used it against German tanks – which is what it had been designed.

The P-38 turbo supercharger installation was one of the first of it's kind. P38s were sent to the Pacific because they were difficult to maintain, in Europe they wanted P-47s and P-51s. Both engines rotated the same direction on the P322 initial version purchased by the British, they rapidly turned right but not left. As P-38s the engines rotated in opposite directions. Propeller pitch was electrically controlled, take off with one battery low, pull became unbalanced. It was a beautiful looking and sounding plane but difficult to maintain. It was designed for long range and high altitude, in the pacific they took advantage of this and used it to shoot down Japanese Gen Yammamoto. Experience gained on building the exhaust turbines paid off when time to build them for the P-47 & B-29.

1939-1941 Engines & Superchargers

R1820 Wright used on B10, B17, B18 R-1830 Pratt Whitney used on B24, C47, P43, F2F, F4F

12cyl V1710 used on P38, P39, P40, P51

These were the work horse engines at the start of the war. The Curtis Wright R1820 & Pratt Whitney R1830 were almost identical in hp output. They were large by 1935 standards and small by 1942 standards. The Allison V1710 was a beautiful to look at as compared to the Rolls Royce V1650 with it’s wartime rough exterior. The US never funded a gear driven supercharger for the Allison, because they were used in association with turbo exhaust superchargers like on the P-38. It was replaced on the P-51 with the Rolls Royce engine because the Rolls it had been built with an engine driven supercharger and it was more practical to have the US Packard motor company build the existing Rolls Royce than modify the Allison. Typical of it’s differences were the valve covers. The Allison used then new steel inserts in the aluminum heads for valve cover hold down screws – these were never a problem. The Rolls Royce used a stud with nut, the stud had coarse threads into the aluminum block and fine threads for the nut. If the nut was mashed on the stud came out of the block and there was a chance of ruining the head. The Allison was smooth on top when working on adjusting valves, the Rolls had all those studs poking up. Packard did much to improve the way the Rolls was built.

P-38 V1710 Engine and Turbo-Supercharger Installation

This diagram and prior view of a P-38 shows that the supercharger turbine was on top behind the engine – in fact there was a steel shield to protect the pilots head in case a turbine blade came off. Many things about the P-38 were first of their kind and not used on later aircraft; such as a reed type voltage regulator, and disk brakes the cockpit cover lifted up. A group of us mechanics watched a pilot come down and take off in his P-38 – he was intent on putting on a show for us and forgot to pull down his cockpit cover. We watched as he circled and landed, coming to a halt near where he’d started. His cover was hanging by it’s frame on a balance tab you can see above and below at the center of its horizontal stabilizer. It was produced in quantity only because it was already in production.

Aircraft that won the war were designed and built after Dec 7 1941

From Hickam Field Hawaii to Clark Field Philippines by Ed Teats

When we flew out to the Philippines from Hickam Field, we knew that relations between the United States and Japan were a little strained, but we never considered that war was imminent.

That flight itself was the strongest kind of indication to us that things were really getting hot, and that we could expect some kind of a break in the situation almost any time.

My squadron did all of the survey work on the Tran-Pacific route from Oahu to the Philippines, by way of Midway, Wake, Port Moresby, Darwin and Manila.

We had an advance agent who went to New Guinea and Australia, checking on the availability of high-octane gas, servicing facilities, usability of fields, all that sort of thing -- all in preparation for the flight.

An inkling of what was up came when they told us that we were to go as a [14th] squadron. At that time there was no heavy bombardment force in the Philippines, and, from the speed with which plans for our flight were completed and the equipment assembled, it was evident that they wanted such a force in a hurry. One boy who went by boat with the ground echelon was given four hours notice to get aboard.

We left in early September, with Major O'Donnell as the squadron leader, and flew by flights in easy stages along, the stepping stones that, within three months, were to became historic islets in American history -- Midway and Wake.

It was a new route from Wake to Moresby and in normal times it undoubtedly could have attracted much attention.

The times were not normal. Our course was so mapped as to detour Ponape -- one of the main Jap bases in the eastern Carolines -- at night and at high altitude. We made hourly position reports except on the third leg of the flight, that from Wake to Port Moresby. On it, we observed radio silence until we were well clear of the island. We knew that there was "something going on" in the Jap mandated islands, in spite of the fact that under the terms of the mandate they were pledged not to develop the Islands as fortified strong points.

It was not yet dawn when my flight passed near Ponape. There was just the faintest suspicion of grayness in the east, and we could see the dim outline of the island and somewhere far below us, a flashing light, probably a navigation beacon. Later, we saw flashing lights in the Philippines that were also navigation beacons, and Jap-operated, too, but more on that later.

There were two incidents of the flight which I will always remember vividly. The first was considerably more amusing than the second.

Bill Fisher, leader of the second element of the squadron, broke an oil line shortly after he took off from Wake, and had to turn back. As a consequence, he was two hours behind us. About one hour after sunrise, when the flight normally would have been clear of Ponape by a hundred miles, Major O'Donnell broke radio silence and called for reports from the other planes. Each reported except the number one plane of the second flight. Finally, O'Donnell asked Fisher, "What's your position?"

Bill promptly came back with: "I'd hate to tell you!"

Every plane in the flight must have echoed to sub-stratospheric chuckles. We knew instantly that Bill was sitting right on top of Ponape at high altitude that very minute in broad daylight!

There are a number of Fortress pilots who would like to be in the same position over Ponape now -- with bomb-bay doors open.

It was a 2100 mile flight from Wake to Moresby, all but a mere fraction of it over the Pacific, and naturally it required careful planning.

About two hours out of Wake (and this is the second and most amusing of the incidents) part of the electrical equipment on our plane went bad. and then failed altogether. From then on the only instruments our plane had were the navigation instruments, flight instruments and cylinder head temperature gauge. For 11 of the 13 hours required to make the flight, that’s the way we flew. We had been told that, if necessary, we could land at Rabaul on New Britain Island, which was directly on our course, but not to do so unless absolutely necessary, due to wet conditions of the field.

No one on our ship had the remotest suspicion as we steamed over the island that only eight months later, Rabaul, Salamaua, Lae and the Owen Stanley Mountains formed the back bone of Papua would be our targets. We looked over the field at Rabaul and then climbed to clear the mountain ranges of New Britain on direct course to Moresby, hedge-hopped the mountains at the gap and practically coasted down the other side into Moresby. We arrived with between 2 and 2 1/2 hours of fuel remaining.

I would like to put in a plug for the navigators on that trip. Every one kept an accurate log and when we compared them, they were almost identical examples of the, finest kind of work.

Three days before we left Hickam, word came through that the flight out to Clark Field would be a permanent change of station. Prior to that, most of us had supposed that it was just .a ferry trip, and that we would "dead-head" back by Clipper.

My tour of foreign duty began in May 1939, and I imagined that I would be transferred back to the States in May, 1942, at the end of a three-year stretch, one year of which was an extension of foreign duty by request. Naturally, when I said good-bye to my wife in Honolulu, I supposed that I would see her in the spring.

We went to Manila from Australia on the butt end of a typhoon. We knew that a typhoon had passed in the vicinity of Guam, but had no radio contact with Manila and the weather for the preceding few days had been wonderful.

The squadron passed over Zamboanga on the southwestern tip of Mindanao and crossed Negros. As we approached Mindoro, the island directly south of Luzon, we saw clouds over to the east. It is a peculiar formation. There is a distinct black line in the sky between the clouds above and the rain beneath. We let down to within 100 feet of the water and bored right through, with rain drops as big as goose eggs slamming the windows. Finally, we picked up the shore line, established contact with Manila and headed straight across the bay. We weren't supposed to pass close by Corregidor (it was a restricted area), but we headed right in between the Rock and Caballo Island. We were so low we could look up to the barracks on Corregidor.

From Manila to Clark Field, we flew individually at tree-top level, right from sea-level to the field elevation.

The visibility was so low that as I came in to Clark, the control tower and the hanger line suddenly leaped from the fog and rain directly in front of me. I had to pull up sharply be clear them.

We had flown nine planes a total of approximately 7000 nautical miles -- 8050 -- statute miles and we didn't lose one, but one was disabled in the last few minutes. The rain was hammering Clark so heavily that operations had been completely suspended for three days. They hadn't even done any work on the field. One old plane was standing out there, but the visibility was so low that it could not be seen from the control tower. One of our ships hooked it taxiing after landing and ripped up it’s tail section. That was the only accident to mar the entire mass flight.

US to Philippines Sept-Oct 1941

From Albuquerque to Clark Field by T. Mitsos

10-23-41, 19^th BG Hdq, 30th Sqd & 93^rd Sqd Grd Echelon arrive Clark Field Luzon from Albuquerque NM to join 28^th Sqd who have been there since 1922 and the 14^th Sqd who arrived from Hawaii mid Sept.

The train trip from Albuquerque to San Francisco was made in a 1900 rail road car without air conditioning. While traveling across the deserts of New Mexico, Arizona, and California, the temperature inside the car was the same as that of the surrounding desert, about 120 degrees or more. We could not open the car doors or the windows to get fresh air, because the tiny pellets of hot coal ejected by the steam engine smoke stack would come into the car and hit us. They stung a lot. Our cars did not have any sleeping berths in them. There were about 80 men in each passenger car, all stripped down to their shorts and T-shirts. The car was a sweat box.

It's a good thing we made this trip in September, because we could wear our khakis in early fall. Had we made the trip after October 15, we would have had to wear our wool uniforms, which were designed to itch when the temperature got above 65 degrees F.

The officers and non-coms, Staff Sargeant and above, rode in pullman cars which had sleeping berths and more comfortable seats than the tourist cars. The last car was a club car which only the officers and ranking non-coms could use. In the club car, you could play cards and order drinks, or you could sit in a nice comfortable swivel type chair and read. There was no television in 1941.

Between the tourist cars and the pullman cars was the dining room. I vaguely remember us standing in a long chow line waiting to enter the dining car. In the meantime, the officers and non-coms were finishing their meal and heading back to their club car. Needless to say, the quality of food we received was not as good as what the officers and non-coms had.

We arrived in San Francisco and I believe unloaded in the dock area somewhere near the U.S.S. Holbrook. Here again, we had to hurry up and wait at the gangplank area. While we were waiting, the officers and non-coms were boarding the Holbrook and heading toward their staterooms.

After an hour or so, we boarded the U.S.S. Holbrook and went down to Deck F.

En-route to the Philippines, aboard the U.S.S. Holbrook

First a little about our transport ship. The U.S.S. Holbrook was a newly converted troop transport ship operated by the Army Military Transport Corps. Prior to 1941, it was called the S.S. President Taft and was a combination passenger cargo ship, owned by the President Line.

On the top deck were the first class staterooms where all the officers slept and the second deck, the one with the portholes, were the second class staterooms where the NCOs were quartered.

Deck F, six decks down, is where the 600 enlisted men were supposed to sleep. There were no portholes on this level, the lighting was very dim, and the only air you got came from the ship funnels on the top side. Needless to say, when all 600 men were in this room at night, the whole room became so hot you thought you were in a steam room. The bunks were stacked four high and were so close together that about two hundred of us slept on the top side for the nineteen days it took to get to the Philippines.

When not in use, the four bunks were folded up and lashed to the two vertical poles they were secured to. The space between the bunks looked kind of close, so we decided to try them. Mitsos climbed into the lowest bunk, Martin into the third bunk, and the other two fellows climbed into bunks two and one at the top.

Once we were all in place, three of us learned there wasn't enough room between the bunks to sleep on your side, nor could we get in and out of our bunks to go to the latrine. That's right, the three fellows sleeping in the bunks above Mitsos had to get out of their bunks first, before Mitsos could get out of his. The man sleeping in the top bunk was the only one that could climb in and out as he wished. If this ship had been torpedoed when all the men were in their bunks, half of them would have been drowned!

On the same floor was a large community latrine, with toilets on the far wall and a long urinal through the opposite wall, with water running in it 24 hours of the day. On one end of the room were the sinks and mirrors for shaving and the other end of the room were the showers.

The mess hall was also very large and included about 5 or 6 huge vats, which were used to boil vegetables and beef. The odor that came from this mess hall was not pleasant but tolerable. Lunch and supper consisted of boiled foods most of the nineteen days. The milk they gave us was powdered milk and this 1941 version tasted like flour stirred in water. Never tried their coffee, took to drinking water instead.

Breakfast consisted of powdered scrambled eggs, dry cereals, or oatmeal, and toast. We tried the powdered eggs once and that was it. Occasionally, they would surprise us and give us an apple or an orange. I lost at least 10 lb. on this trip and so did everyone else. Those that ate in the 1st class dinning room didn’t loose any weight.

The best part of the trip was lying on the top deck at night and staring at the millions of stars in the cloudless sky above. We would stare at the top mast of the ship and watch it sway back and forth amongst the stars. In no time at all, we would be sound asleep.

Bill Lowe was one of the lucky ones, he slept on the floor of his brothers state room, S/Sgt John Lowe.

October 4, 1941, Saturday

Corporal Thomas Mitsos and Corporal Harold Martin, along with 600 men of the 19th Bomb Group, consisting of the 30th, 93rd, and Hdqs and Hdqs Squadron, boarded the U.S.S. Holbrook about noon, (destination unknown) and proceeded to deck F, which was the lowest deck on the ship. We placed our duffel bags on our bunks and proceeded to the mess hall for lunch.

After our boiled beef lunch, we decided to roam around the ship to get an idea what kind of a cruise ship we were on. Every direction we went, we were stopped by a chain across the walk way with signs on them that said “CREW MEMBERS ONLY”.

On top side, we were restricted to the aft part of the ship. When we tried to go to the bow, we were again stopped by a chain with a sign which said “OFFICERS ONLY”.

About 5 PM, the U. S. S. Holbrook left the San Francisco dock and proceeded past Alcatraz Island towards the Golden Gate bridge.

Just before nightfall, we passed under the Golden Gate bridge. The bridge lights were on and all of the cars traveling in both directions had their lights on. What a beautiful sight.

As we hit the Pacific Ocean, the ship suddenly started pitching fore and aft and rolling side to side. On our starboard (right) side, our destroyer escort was also rolling from side to side, then disappear from view as if the ocean had swallowed it up. After a few seconds, it would reappear again, riding on top of a wave way above us, in the meantime, we were at the bottom of another wave.

We were now ordered to go below decks, it was too dangerous to be on topside in these rough waters.

By now, the ship was tossing heavily and rolling from left to right, to the point where you thought it might roll over. This is when about 400 of the fellows became sea sick and started heaving no matter where they were. About 200 made it to the latrine.

As the drains in the latrine became clogged, the water from the showers and the toilet bowls came into our sleeping quarters and brought all the filth along with it. The problem was compounded by the rolling of the ship because when this two inch deep smelly water hit the sides of the ship, it would splash all over us and our bunks.

A few of the fellows, who did not get sea sick in the beginning, were trying to unplug all the shower stall and latrine drains and cleaning up the mess on the floor. Martin and Mitsos were in this group. One by one we all became sea sick, but not before all the drains had been opened up.

By next morning, everyone was back to normal, empty stomachs ready for breakfast.

October 5 to 10, 1941

The rest of the trip was made on a quiet slow rolling wavy Pacific Ocean, which was about as smooth a ride as you could hope to get. The weather was also very nice so about 200 of us slept top side every night.

October 9, 1941, Thursday

Docked at Honolulu about 5 PM, but were not allowed off the ship, all we could do was stand at the railing and look at the famous clock tower and the buildings on the wharf. All of the officers, nurses and ranking non-coms were permitted to go ashore and roam around a little.

October 10, 1941, Friday

We left early Friday morning just before dawn along with a cruiser as escort. Only this time, we traveled under wartime blackout rules. We weren't even allowed to smoke on top side. From the 10th to the 19th of October, we traveled over a nice peaceful Pacific Ocean and enjoyed every minute of it. Even the food was more acceptable now. I guess our stomachs had adapted to the boiled beef and boiled vegetables.

October 10, 1941, Sunday

Arrived at Guam this morning, but again were not allowed off the ship. We had to enjoy all of this tropical scenery standing at the rail of the ship.

October 23, 1941, Thursday

Arrived in Manila in the evening and were put on trucks and taken to Clark Field.

Flight Into History by Col Ed. Jacquet

30^th & 93^rd Sqd make, “Flight Into History” arriving Philippines 2 Nov 1941.

Clark Fld PI Pre War Route B-17C,D’s of 30^th & 93^rd Sqd

One of these, half B-17C and half B-17D; half “swan” and half “goose”; becomes the Swoose, now in the Smithsonian.

Monday, 1 September 1941 (Albuquerque Field)

   I was a second lieutenant in the 93rd Squadron of the 19th Bombardment Group, later dubbed "The Suicide Group" after the start of the Globular War.

Quite a few of the boys in the 19th were married just previous to receiving orders for a foreign tour - poor lads! I'm sure glad I did not get married at the time, for this put quite a strain on them when we were required to ferry our B-17D's from Albuquerque to the Sacramento Air Depot for refitting with bottom turret guns and strengthening of the fuselage so that our side 50's could be fired without cracking the ribs and stringers. There were other minor changes to be made which usually put a B-17D in the shops for 8 to 10 days. Naturally, the crew would remain with the ship, and in California you can always have fun. Especially since we also received "per diem", or $6.00 per day extra for expenses.

Saturday, 18 October 1941 (Albuquerque Field)

The last night we spent in Albuquerque, I saw a football game with Kriel and Moore between New Mexico and Arizona. P.S. Arizona won. The next day was Sunday. I helped "Tuffy" Graham to pack a few things and say "goodbye" to Pat, his wife. He was sure in a storm. I'm glad he received unexpected orders so the leave taking was not drawn out too much. Graham's constitution could never stand it.

Left: Graham, Kreil, Jacquet before leaving. I also bought a Hallicrafter radio. It was a battery/electric type with an aerial attached. There were four wave bands to tune and a charging unit for the batteries.

Sunday, 19 October 1941 (Albuquerque to Sacramento)

About eleven o'clock in the morning, we took off from Albuquerque Field. Lt. Bill Bohnaker, my pilot, waved to his wife and away we went. The last thing I saw was Kriel's blue "convert" turning around and heading back to town. I was never to see Kriel again. He lost his life with the Flying Tigers.

Thus was Albuquerque left behind. No more packing of boxes, no more painting of numbers, no more nailing. no more freight car loading. It was a big job accomplished. The ground troops of the 93rd were already on the boats and away.

En-route to Hamilton Field, the A.F.C.E. (Automatic Flight Control Equipment) went out. We changed our destination to S.A.D. (Sacramento Air Depot) for repairs by the "experts" (?). On that Sunday night at Sacramento, I called Gloria in Los Angeles. She was the last person closely acquainted with me that I talked to before leaving. Very touching, don'tch'a know!

Monday, 20 October 1941 (Sacramento to Hamilton Field) Departure

A lot of pushing actually put the ship in condition by late Monday afternoon. We took off for Hamilton Field and arrived just before dark to join the rest of the 19th Bomb Group.

There was a lot of milling around and excitement at Hamilton. All pursuits were grounded in order to leave the taxi-ways open for our "wagons". The operations tower room was our last meeting place until Hickam Field, Territory of Hawaii. Official messages and suggestions were making the air quite warm. The Air Corps general commanding March Field made a short and impressive ceremony of "swearing in" Colonel Eubank, C.0. of the 19th, with the permanent rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Major Walsh, later dubbed "Mad Mike" by the 14th Squadron, was chief aide to Colonel Eubank and really had everyone in a quandary with all the notes he gave us to jot down; radio frequencies, altitudes, power settings, reports, courses, weights, caution in setting of turbos, etc. Later, we received a large folder with everything enclosed. These we studied in the cockpit while flying.

Our order of take-off was assigned with three minute intervals between ships and five minutes between flights. Mad Mike was to take off first and, ironically, he had trouble with his ship so he couldn't take off till later. The Colonel transferred to another ship and led the flight.

By the time we reached take-off position, tension in our ship was almost at the breaking point. The motions and signals we would make and the efforts to be gone through on the take-off were reviewed several times by Bill and me. We had the biggest load we had ever carried -- nine members of the crew, two bomb bays of gas, armor plating and guns but no ammunition. We estimated the total weight before take-off at about 55,500 lbs. Whew!

After the turbo run-up, we were all set and waiting for the sweep hand on my watch (remember the Hamilton you gave me, mom and dad) to reach the proper mark. Then, away we went down the runway. I tried to keep the manifold pressure and RPM correct while Bill kept the green lights at the end of the runway in the right position on the windshield, meanwhile checking the instruments. The ship took the whole length of the runway and finally lifted very beautifully. A big load seemed to be lifted from our shoulders at the same moment. The last thing we saw was the yellow outline lights of the bridge slowly fading into the distance. We were all alone in the black night with eleven other ships that were already out of sight. We now had thirteen hours of grinding flying until we reached Hawaii and the beautiful hula girls three thousand miles away. Oh, boy!

We flew straight ahead, gaining altitude, and turned gently over the Golden Gate Bridge. The gigantic bridge was our first and last land checkpoint till Hickam.

Tuesday, 21 October 1941 (Hamilton to Hickam)

As the night slowly wore away and dawn appeared, we saw only one sign of any human beings. It was a passenger ship about one day out of Hawaii. To us it was great since it showed that we were on course and close to Hawaii. The first indication of any land was a large mountain sticking above the clouds on the island of Oahu. We were about 8,000 feet in the air and from the check point, we knew Hickam Field was only about forty-five minutes away. Again we checked the approach procedure to the island and dropped down to get a view of the islands. Gee, they were beautiful, glorying themselves in the marvelously warm sunshine. The sea was a real deep blue, and as we got closer to the shore, it turned to a light green.

The 19th BG went from Hamilton to Clark via Hickam, Midway, Wake, Port Morsby and Darwin. More than 10,500 miles with big empty oceans, few weather stations, no in-flight refueling, little maintenance and weak radios. All (35) B-17s made it, thanks to skilled pilots, trained navigators, a good airplane and the good old "bird dog" loop antenna. Leading the mass flight was Founder Member, then Lt Col. Eugene L Eubank. Commanding the 93rd Sqd was then Major Cecil E. Combs.

Then Hickam Field with its large cement runways and big cement-steel hangars appeared and we had to concentrate on our landing. The burned gasoline lightened the ship by quite a few pounds, and Bill made a beautiful landing in spite of his fatigue. We were only anxious to get on the ground after 13 hours and 30 minutes in the air. At Hickam, we spent seven wonderful days. Kellar, Graham and myself toured the field remarking at the modern homes and barracks. We spent most of our time at the Officer's Club, taking advantage of the tropical fruits and vegetables put before us: papaya, fresh pineapple, coconut and raw sugar cane. It was fun!

Later, Graham met a friend from Riverside stationed there. Bob, Graham's friend, very obligingly lent us his car if we would furnish the gas. Bob was confined to the post anyway. Poor lad!

That's how we toured the island in such a nice style. We visited Pearl Harbor where Graham tried to take a few "snaps" but wasn't very successful. There were lots of guards.

Wheeler Field and Schofield Barracks also had us as guests. There we bought souvenirs from the cargoes of the boats from China and Japan -- large carved teakwood chests, silk-embroidered whatnots, native cloth made from coconut palm fibers with Hawaiian designs, silk pajamas and robes, etc. Schofield Barracks had a marvelous post exchange.

Honolulu took our interest next, and we drove through the residential districts to see the marvelous mansions built in such a sprawling manner. The tropical vegetation growing everywhere in abundance gave a landscape effect close to "Utopia". In one home we visited, tarantulas and chameleons were crawling all over the walls. They were pets and kept the room free from insects. Well, almost free.

King Kamehameha's statue on the public square was interesting to shoot with a candid camera. The Aloha Tower that greets incoming passenger boats took our fancy, too.

The grounds of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel were beyond compare, with beautiful groves of palm trees, etc. We swam just once at Waikiki Beach. It was very commercialized and sort of didn't live up to the travel folders. We could see Diamond Head from there, though. We did most of our swimming from Fort De Bossy near Waikiki Beach. It was for the use of the army only. That was more fun. It was here that I bought a real Hawaiian "polo" shirt.

After such a beautiful but exhausting vacation, we got our ships ready for the next hop Midway Island. We received 500 rds. of .50 cal. ammunition for each gun. That was awfully heavy, too, but the gas load was much lighter.

Monday, 27 October 1941 (Hickam to Midway)

Lt J Connally's plane Lt W. Bohnaker Pilot Lt E. Jacquet CoPilot

Connally become Group Commander of B-29s Tinian & shot down with all lost in 1945. DL

The group of (26) B-17s was split up into two echelons. The first had already left, and we were the second echelon, about thirteen airplanes. This was to help the facilities at Midway so they could gas our ships and get quarters for crews in a more spread-out manner.

The weather was good and we had a few islands to use as checkpoints. Only one rain squall was encountered in the seven hour flight. At Midway, we went through the approval signals very cautiously and slowly for we knew the Marines were watching us with "itchy trigger fingers". As we let down for a landing, there was a thirty mile an hour wind blowing with lots of birds flying around.

After the landing, the men stationed there told us it was very calm. Usually the wind hit 60 to 80 mph, as we found out later, but always prevailing from the same direction. Birds gave landing aircraft the most trouble. The runways often became slippery with their dead bodies as the planes landed on top of the roosting birds.

We stayed at Midway for five days waiting for the echelon at Wake Island to leave. They were having engine trouble. The Marines gave us the Naval Flyers Barracks to stay in. The barracks were very nice and new.

Several of us made tours of the island inspecting the defenses and getting souvenir seashells and watching the birds. Our favorite bird was the "gooney" bird. They are awfully large and heavy, about four feet in wingspread. No one knows where they go, but they spend six months at sea and six months on land during the mating season. It is fun to watch them land and take off. In their first landing from the sea, they head into the wind and set down, but then they wobble all over and fall down. They still haven't lost the motion from the ocean, you see. On their take off, they get their nose into the wind and paddle their feet on the ground, getting a running start and finally soaring into the air and out to sea.

The mating dance is known the world over for its humor. Both the male and female clumsily raise their beaks toward each other as high as they will go and prance their feet up and down very slowly, but really as fast as their awkward bodies will let them, meanwhile turning in circles. Ha-ha! Gee, we spent hours watching them. Of course, they were very tame, too, so that you could go right up to them. But watch out for the razor-sharp beak. It'll cut a man's wrist in two.

At Midway, as well as Wake, there were thousands of civilian workers constructing runways, barracks, hangars, etc. They lived from one week to the next waiting for the Clipper to bring in the mail. For each six month period they received an extra bonus. The civilians were very well paid, too, for their dangerous jobs.

Friday, 31 October 1941 (Midway to Wake)

Photos from Harry Murdoc

The flight to Wake Island was about nine hours and quite uneventful except for the two rainstorms that forced us right down to the water. We flew there for about thirty minutes-ten feet above the calm sea. Lieutenant Hoffman, the navigator, had a difficult job hitting the small pinpoint of Wake Island in the middle of the Pacific with no radio aids.

The long, grinding time was passed by playing "hearts". Bill and Hoff and I put a board between the pilot and copilot seats and used that as a table. As usual, I lost almost every game. Darn it!

At Wake we spent just enough time to catch a little sleep and load our ships with gas and oxygen.

Saturday, 1 November 1941 ( Wake to Port Moresby, New Guinea)

This leg of the trip was the longest fourteen hours and also the most exciting. Our course took us over the Japanese Mandate Islands, and we did not have permission to do so. Any error on our part would have caused an "international incident". Therefore, we chose a time when we would cross the Mandates at night. As an added precaution, we flew at 25,000 feet on oxygen without lights of any kind. The super-added precaution was our guns. No ships bothered us, so it turned out to be just another long grind. Once past the Mandates, we let down to lower altitude.

The last thirty minutes we had to climb back up to 14,000 feet to fly over the Owen Stanley Range on New Guinea. When we reached the other side of the mountains we found ourselves in a thick, smoker haze from the jungle grass fires. This was a most strange country to us. It wasn't fun looking for the town of Port Moresby on the last twenty or thirty minutes of gas. Luckily, we turned in the right direction along the coast of the largest island in the world and flew inland to the Seven Mile Aerodrome.

All we could find at first was a large clearing in the jungle. We did not realize this was the field until we saw a few other B-17's parked along the edges. Gee, what a field! We had to land uphill. As we were landing I thought the wheels were going to fly right up through the wing they were bouncing so. At the same time we disappeared twice in gullies on the runway. Of course, the Australians had done a wonderful job with this airfield using only "fuzzy-wuzzy" labor. But the field did not treat a B-17 like the lady she was.

I'll bet you could have filled a cigarette lighter with all the gas we had left. Guess there wasn't any at all!

The first thing to greet us as we taxied up to the parking area were the "fuzzy-wuzzies" (left) of the gas crew. They had metal bands around their arms and red lotus blossoms stuck in their fuzzy hair behind each ear. Their only clothing was a "Iava-Iava" or long skirt-like waist cloth. The boys were huge and terrifying. They had just come out of the jungles. They had a hand pump cart to help them a bit and they'd take turns pumping. Sweat would roll down their greasy black skins and make them glisten in the hot, hot sun.

Can you imagine how long it takes to fill a ship with 3,200 gallons of gas from fifty gallon barrels? That's right, about four hours of solid pumping. The poor boys really earned their money, too. What was their pay. Well, each boy received "two bob" (about 35 cents), one bolt of cloth, a place to sleep, plus all their food and two sticks of trading tobacco per month. Wasn't that a lot? They sure thought so.

Trucks, or should I say "lorries", hauled us to the Australian barracks near the town. We were sure tired and had visions of real nice soft beds to sleep in. The "Aussies" are rugged individuals, you know, and gave us each a blanket and showed us our bed. The bed was an iron-framed job with a metal net stretched across for a spring. Even that didn't hold us back. Without mosquito nets or anything, we spread the blanket on the bed and fell asleep before we were too wet with sweat.

None of us even stirred again till a "fuzzy-wuzzy" shook us the next morning to wake us and shove a cup of tea and a scone (biscuit to you) in our face. Just an old Australian custom but gosh the "fuzzy-wuzzies" almost scared some of the boys out of their wits. When we got off our "soft" beds we had to laugh at the imprints of the springs left in everyone's back. Americans are sure spoiled and pampered.

That day we browsed around through the town visiting the hotel, the bars, etc. The Aussies sure liked to see us, I guess, for they always invited us into a bar for a "brew". The beer was served very warm. In fact, they'd never heard of cold beer and didn't even like it. Incidentally, their beer is very potent.

Later we took candid shots of the natives. They always asked for cigarettes. Dumb us, we'd give 'em a whole package. The Aussies cautioned us not to spoil 'em so much with so many cigarettes.

The natives also had a lot of souvenirs and gewgaws to sell. When you asked the price of anything it was always "two bob". They did not seem to know anything about money. If you gave 'em one shilling or even twopence they'd be just as happy.

Sunday, 2 November 1941 (Port Moresby to Darwin)

The next morning it was time for us to be on our way to Darwin. Traveling back to the ships in our lorries we went along the beach road. There was a whole fleet of native boats, known as "prows". Just a hollow log with an outrigger attachment. The larger ones had two hollow logs with a floor on top. It was Saturday morning and the natives were coming to market. Sure did stink though, since they used the sea and the side of the boats to relieve themselves. I'll bet you it stunk for a whole mile around that area. Each man that owned a boat had about three to eight wives and a whole mess of children. On Saturday night the husband would sell his wives for the night to other natives in town. That was the husband's chief livelihood. We stopped only long enough to grab a few pictures then we left.

On our take-off we had in get uphill and run downhill no matter which way the wind was blowing. I don't see how the wheels hung on over that rough runway.

Six hours was the time to complete this leg to Darwin. We flew over the most desolate territory I've ever seen. No signs of life at all just a big sandy and sometimes grassy desert. It was in the northern part of Australia.

I lost at "hearts" again

The port of Darwin finally came into view. It was a very busy little port. The landing field was right near the bay. The runways were lined with Australian training aircraft. The whole field looked ready for a war; dispersal bays, anti-aircraft guns and all bristling with activity.

At Darwin the Aussies gave us their best barracks. We had just about enough time to catch a bit of sleep before a night take-off. First, of course, we were dragged over to the Officers' Club where we were given more beer than we could stand. To refuse would be insulting. I went to bed as soon as I could to catch some sleep but Lieutenant Hoffman didn't. I don't think he ever did get to bed. Hope he had a lotta fun. The Aussie nurses were at the party, too. Can you see why?

Sunday, 2 November 1941 (Darwin to Clark Field)

Captain Colin Kelly met us at Darwin to give us the dope on our landing field in the Philippines. We had more frequencies, approach procedures and a radio beam to guide us in.

Two ships developed engine trouble so they remained behind at Darwin. It was quite dark the night the rest of us were set to go, but the stars were obligingly shining to guide us on our way.

Lt. Hoffman gave Bill the course to fly before the take off and then he must have gone to sleep in the nose. Gee, he was tired after the night before. As the plane lights flashed down the runway and with the engines going like hell we saw someone dart across the runway. Sure couldn't figure why anyone would risk his fool neck by dashing in front of a ship like that. Later, we sheepishly found out it was only one of the numerous kangeroos (Joey) in the area that had been attracted by the lights.

Monday, 3 November 1941 (Arrival at Clark Field)

About five hours later on our course above the cloud layer Bill noticed a mountain sticking above the clouds. We were supposed to be over water. Nonchalantly Bill called Hoff out of his sound sleep and asked, "Are we over land or water, Hoff?" Hoff jumped up and rustled around in the nose looking for his maps. Finally the answer came. "We're over water." Then Bill said, "Look out over the left side of the nose and tell me how in heck that mountain got there." Gee, did that ever wake everyone up. It turned out we were flying over Borneo, way off course. When we took off Hoff had given the pilot a course ten degrees to the left of the course we were supposed to fly. With another correction we continued on our way.

The islands we flew over were beautiful to watch. Most of them are not even charted correctly. Sure was tropical and wild on each one. Our new course carried us to the city of Manila to use as a check point to find Clark Field at Fort Stotsenberg 60 miles inland.

We were anxious to see Clark Field, as we thought it would be our home for the next three years-the usual tour of foreign service. We were rather disappointed in the small, sandy field crowded with airplanes. From the air it really looked like a mess and when we were finally on the ground our expectations were realized.

Thursday, 6 November 1941 (Clark Field)

Clark Field was sure sleepy. The typical, tropical sleepiness had descended upon us as soon as we parked our ship in one of the few open spaces left. We were more or less left to ourselves to find barracks. About all we could find was a "sawallee" hut that had a few empty bunks. Incidentally, a "sawallee" hut is built of two-by-four wood framework covered halfway up the side with grass mats. The rest is left open. There are no floors. Very simple and easy to put up.

There we stayed for about a week till the officers' barracks were erected. These were also sawallee huts but they had mat-partitioned rooms inside. Each barracks had one or two boys to make the beds, shine shoes, polish brass and take care of laundry. A clean uniform was required every day with so much heat around. Usually, the "boy" had his sister or mother wash our clothes. The laundress was known as the "lavendera".

I had tailored clothes made for myself. A whole summer uniform cost about 12 pesos ($6.00) and was tailored by the Chinese or Japanese tailors at Fort Stotsenberg. Had a white uniform, too, plus a pair of riding boots. Native labor was very cheap and almost everything could be purchased below stateside cost.

We had lots of spare time to waste. Graham and I fixed up our quarters so that we could sleep in one room and have the other for reading, writing, etc. We played golf and tennis together quite a bit and rolled dice for "cokes" in the club for amusement. At night we listened to the short wave broadcasts from San Francisco on my radio while we wrote letters.

Thursday, 13 November 1941 (Clark Field)

Transportation was really hard to find. None of us had cars and no one wanted to buy one with the situation so uncertain. Graham and I and quite a few other lads bought bicycles. I bought a brand-new job. It was Japanese made. Sure looked it, too. It cost 64 pesos ($32) and was not a very good bargain at that. Our house boy fell in love with mine right away. Sure had a lotta' fun and got a lot of exercise traveling around the countryside on "bikes". Can you imagine a whole flock of Air Corps officers from majors on down sightseeing over the whole countryside on bicycles?

Our flight training didn't suffer too much at Clark Field. We had to conserve the hours on our engines because there were no more in the Philippines. We would consolidate several training missions into one flight by organizing three airplanes in a formation and running a navigation problem to a certain reef. There, we'd drop our practice bombs in formation and return home by a different route for more navigation work, often testing the aircraft warning system run by the natives.

The inside of the ship really got hot. We'd be soaked before we ever got off the ground. Everyone would take their shirts off after we left the field. There were no high ranking officers around then to tell us different. When we returned everyone was ready for a cooling swim in the mountain stream. Gee, that was fun! The water was nice and clear up behind the golf course. There were a few cobras and other snakes around, but we must have scared 'em off for they didn't stay near the pool where we were.

Wednesday, 19 November 1941 (Clark Field)

Ground training was entirely different. Huge bomb proof bays had to be constructed for our airplanes and fox holes dug near by. Tents were set up for engineering and operations with interconnecting telephones to headquarters. Each airplane was scheduled into the one hangar for an olive-drab paint job. Only one ship was ever painted. This all meant we were preparing for something to happen but we didn't know what. There were far too many airplanes on the field. The base commanding officer, L/Col. Maitland, had safety trenches dug near the runways and even had dummy pursuit planes and a B-17 constructed out of bamboo and canvas. He had them lined up in front of the officers' homes near the officers mess. They sure looked realistic. The big wooden props would turn over slowly when there was a slight wind to nudge 'em.

Tuesday, 25 November 1941 (Manila)

It was very seldom that we could get into Manila, but sometimes over a weekend a small group of us could go. That quaint ride on the "choo choo" to Manila was an event in itself. The locomotive was a 1910 Baldwin built in the "States" very quaint. The cars were of the same vintage as the engine. There were two classes of passengers -- second and third class. We rode second class in the last car and the rest of the cars were filled chock full of natives. They always traveled in whole families including pigs, chickens, aunts, uncles and vegetables and fruits to sell in Manila. They were always laughing and chattering and having lots of fun. The smoke and cinders from the engine were smothering. By the time we finally reached Manila, we really needed a shower.

At the station in Manila taxi cabs were numerous, cheap, and easy to get. They sure went like hell. Nobody even batted an eye when a taxi crashed or turned over. It was just an every day occurrence.

Of course, we were new to Manila and the first things to attract us were the souvenirs and junk. Everything you ever had an interest in brought on a lot of bargaining. If you paid the first price asked, the merchant wasn't very happy about it. Usually, you could buy something for just half of what was asked the first time.

I bought Mother a white silk bedspread -- richly embroidered from a merchant in the old "Walled City" (built by Spaniards). One weekend, we started out at 125 pesos ($62.50) and when I came back the next weekend I got it for 70 pesos ($35). I also haggled for the pillow slips that went with it, but his price was too high. I thought I would come back the next week and get 'em, but to my surprise they were gone. Sure was perplexed. It wasn't till over a year later that mom showed me the bedspread and I found out the merchant had quietly tucked in both pillow slips. Hob Hob! He was a sly old fellow at that, he was probably getting twice as much from me as he should have.

At night, we'd go to our hotel rooms and wrap our packages to send home, which sure took a lot of time. But we still got around to the various clubs and the jai alai games. These games were the national sport, like baseball in America. Betting was legal and unlimited and someone always lost or won a lot of dough. The restaurant and club adjoining were beyond comparison in modern design and lighting. To us, they were beautiful.

Monday, 1 December 1941 (Clark Field)

Coming back from the last weekend in Manila we found ourselves strictly confined to the post and on alert. That was the day General Brereton, Air Corps Commander under General MacArthur, came to Clark Field to give us the situation. He didn't know what was going to happen, but he told us to be prepared. No one knew what the Nips had on Formosa because we were not allowed to fly over the island to take pictures.

Later we found the alert was caused by unidentified ships flying around at night. All American ships were grounded except a few P-40 interceptors. The interceptors found several airplanes following the coast of Luzon, flying south without running lights as far as Manila and then turning around and disappearing north. Where did they come from? Colonel Eubank wanted to know and personally went to Manila to get permission to fly a B-17 over Formosa at altitude and take pictures. While his staff car was in Manila, it was struck by a taxi, and Colonel Eubank had his left wrist broken as well as his request refused.

The only information we had about Formosa was a drawing from a Filipino spy showing the enlarged runways and underground telephone lines. That was a lot, indeed! Permission would have to come from Washington, D.C. before we could run a reconnaissance mission. In other words, to safeguard our diplomatic relations with Japan we were to be "guinea pigs". We had to let the other side "strike first" in order to avoid having an international incident that would brand America as the "aggressor nation".

Friday, 5 December 1941 (Clark Field to Del Monte)

When Col. Eubank returned, thirteen B-17's from the 14th and 93rd Squadrons were given orders to go on maneuvers down to Del Monte, Mindanao. This would relieve a lot of congestion at Clark Field and disperse our aircraft somewhat. The 93rd Squadron always received the worst details, we thought, and so we were sent on our way on Friday night, December 5, 1941.

The 93rd felt that it always "got it in the neck". Here we had to bring tents, cots, blankets, rations, and full personal equipment and fly to a remote field with no facilities. Gee, that was terrible to look forward to field conditions for an indefinite time.

The orders were flying thick and fast. We had to get out there early that night with a full load of gas. It was 600 miles to Del Monte and we flew all night long. We had taken off so early in the night it was necessary to circle the city of Iloilo on the way south for a couple of hours till daylight appeared. The next day we located our beautiful grassy landing field and landed. Contrary to our expectations, the Del Monte Canning Company had a country club nearby with golf, tennis and a swimming pool. But we still had to live in our tents.

Sunday, 7 December 1941 (Del Monte)

Saturday and Sunday were passed in pitching tents. etc. Just plain un-laughable labor.

Status Dec 6 1941

Commentaries by D Landau

Differences: US & Japanese Pre Pearl Harbor

US mind set: The US, governed by public opinion, had experienced a severe economic depression compounded by drought and dust storms – there was much unemployment. Military spending was cut to pay for public works programs – isolationism prevailed – people felt safe between two oceans. When Germany attack Poland, Britain & France sought help. The US, wishing to avoid entanglement refused to arm or provide military assistance. Britain & France funded new US plants in order to obtain needed aircraft. Congress barely passed a draft – for one year only. Citizens send “Bundles for Britain”. A divided congress permitted “Lend –Lease” support to Britain. After France fell & London burned, congress extended the draft for one year – by one vote. US media falsely projected the US as so powerful, no one would dare attack. Japan knew the US was unprepared – and were convinced the US was unwilling to fight.

Japanese mind set: Japan, governed by their military, felt invincible, having successfully taken over Manchuria, large parts of China and fended off the Russians. Their industry had modernized and was committed to military growth. When Germany took over the Netherlands, Japan saw a Golden Opportunity, their military devised a new plan. By tradition the military planned for Japans good, their god-emperor – who had no veto power – approved their plans, and their civil government implemented the emperor approved plan. The new plan called for an alliance with Germany giving Japan rights to Dutch East Indies resources. Germany had Britain on the ropes, Australia troops were tied up in Africa and Russia was on the defensive. Japan controlled China and protected her back side with a Russian non-aggression pact. Japan prepared, using resources purchased from the US. The Japanese plan called for disabling the US with a surprise attack – confident they were immune from retaliation.

Military codes: US military code was based on European traditions. Japanese military followed ancient Asian codes – a warrior was to succeed or die – failure demanded self inflicted death. Discipline was severe: officers slapped soldiers, soldiers slapped civilians, prisoners had no rights, they were slave labor. Japanese handed out brutal treatment and expected brutal treatment if captured.

Weapons Design & Use: A US P-40 included a 3/8” nickel steel plate behind and a 2” glass plate in front to protect the pilot. The Japanese Zero was designed with thin margins, trading safety for performance. Japanese sunk British battle ships by risking pilots & bombing from deck level. The US avoided risk by climbing above anti aircraft fire, expecting the Norden bomb sight to do it’s magic & hit targets from 20,000 feet. B-17 pilots expecting to encounter fixed landing gear fighter aircraft, as used in China – were amazed to find Zeros climb above them and faster. It would take time to design, build and apply superior weapons, the ocean that protected Japan, protected US war production.

US breaks Japanese code: belatedly US began to build it’s military – Japanese intentions were known but not when and where. The US hoped they had until mid 1942 to prepare. US blocked the sale of supplies to Japan – the Japanese attack before the US was ready.

Following Pearl Harbor

Japanese believed they would win.

Americans knew the US would win.

**O**

After Iwo Jima was taken, Japanese knew the war was lost.

Their military did not have a surrender mode.

The atomic bomb actually saved Japanese lives

it forced them to face the reality of defeat.

Defense of the Philippines

US will defend the Philippines: Gen MacArthur retired as Chief of Staff and was replaced by Gen Marshall in 1939 – a week later Germany invaded Poland. Powerful isolationist insisted the US stay out of foreign affairs, in Europe and Asia. Editorial forecasts of Japan’s expansionist ambitions prompted avid isolationist to insist the US declare it would not defend the Philippines if attack. Congress settled that issue – the US will defend the Philippines.

MacArthur to the Philippines: Marshall, had been stationed in the Philippines & knew it’s defense would be difficult – it would require someone like MacArthur with his ego driven confidence to pull it off. Marshall & MacArthur knew each other well, both served in France – Marshall, on Gen Pershing’s staff, was perhaps the only officer MacArthur considered his equal. MacArthur was married to a Filipino lady and grew up there while his father commanded Philippine forces. Marshall recommended to President Roosevelt that MacArthur be recalled and offered the assignment. Roosevelt liked the idea, it separated MacArthur from the press, who were quick to quote the retired General’s opposition party political comments. MacArthur was delighted to accept the assignment, it fit his ambitions.

Building a Philippine Force: MacArthur was confident he could build a top notch Filipino force by using the proven Philippine Scouts, trained over the years by the US Army, as instructors. MacArthur was even more confident when funds were made available to build a larger force than initially planned.

Marshall’s staff plans for needs: Marshall immediately put his staff to work determining military needs in this changing world. US capability had withered to being ridiculous relative to needs. Britain & France were expressing urgent need for airplanes & more airplanes. Marshall used these findings to acquire funds from an unwilling congress. Slowly progress was made – the need was more than airplanes – it included bases and people. These plans included what was needed in the Philippines. Marshall seemed more realistic about the difficulties than MacArthur. Marshall believed it was imperative to build up air power, while MacArthur expressed little faith in air power. MacArthur was Army, he lived and breathed it – he was not exposed to European urgent demands for aircraft.

A Fragmented Philippines: Filipino recruits lived on many scattered islands, they were a fragmented, often primitive, society. Many languages were spoken, there was no common language known to all. Philippine Scouts were excellent instructors but too few for the task – MacArthur requested, and received a large contingent of US solders to train the Filipino recruits – English became the common language. Precious time was being consumed.

US Trained Soldiers Needed: By mid 1941 MacArthur realized his Filipino force was far from ready and made an urgent request to Marshall for more US military personnel – he needed them as his primary fighting force. Again Marshall responded with more US troops. It’s quite possible Marshall encouraged MacArthur to make the request – it’s known Marshall was growing more apprehensive about Japans intentions and time table.

The Philippine Card: The Japanese wanted East Indies resources primarily oil, they did not need the Philippines except to eliminate it as a base for US operations – and use it as a forward base. A map of the Philippines makes conditions more obvious. Movement of ground forces and supplies between islands must be by water or air. The MacArthur–Marshall task was to defend Luzon and it’s military bases and prevent use of other sites. Though it was difficult to defend scattered islands, they were of little use to an invading force as they could not advance except by water or air. Large distances required sea and air power.

Airplanes to the Philippines: It’s amazing that MacArthur had been confident he could fend off an proven industrial and military power by use of locally created ground forces. MacArthur seems to have continued to believe in the division of responsibility – the Navy was to defend against an invading force and the Army defeat them when they came ashore. MacArthur was known to frequently comment that he didn’t need an Air Corp to do an Army job. Even later in Australia Gen Kenney had to convince MacArthur that Air Power was a valuable weapon. Marshall’s staff had been preparing plans for the Philippines and sent these to MacArthur. These defined primary and emergency air fields to be built. It also defined the kinds and number of aircraft to be sent in addition to MacArthur’s requested Army provisions.

It was all too little and too late – reluctant US citizens had made it impossible to catch up.