CJ30P-I

U S Air Force

Oral History Interview

K239.0512-1110

Lt Gen John W. Carpenter III

9-12 Jan 1979

Interviewers

L/Col Arthur W. McCants Jr

Maj Scottie S. Thompson

Historical Research Center

Office of Air Force History

Headquarters USAF

.........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 hate 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 oldman 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 oldtimers, 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 cadge 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. I t 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 theme, 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 brandnew 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 ca., 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 fob 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 dowry 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 l mile error was what we could expect. That is not very good as far as precision instrument approaches ace 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 fad 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 machineguns 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.

On one particular day, I guess, about 5 December or something like that, my squadron, the 93d, was ordered to disperse down to Del Monte, which is on the big Island of Mindanao. As usual my airplane was out for a generator so I stayed on Clark with the ground echelon. Finally I got the generator fixed. I was the senior officer present at Clark in the 93d Squadron on the morning of 7 December--it was 8 December out there--and word came around to report to group headquarters. They said the Hawaiian Islands had been attacked and Hickam was gone. At that time we didn't have any orders and couldn't do anything. Our commander, then Col E. L. Eubank, tried to get permission to load up and go bomb the Japs--no way. They said, "All right, we are not going to get these airplanes caught on the ground here; everybody get out and go." They assigned reconnaissance sectors For the different airplanes. We all took to the air, all except my aircraft which was out for generators. There wasn't another airplane on the ground, and everybody got to work. They finally got my airplane fixed.

We got in the air and headed out to our assigned sector. I was up just at the far reach of my reconnaissance flight just about to turn around when the word came through on radio, a recall for all airplanes. This was just before noon. The rest of the B-17s were fairly close in by that time, and they came on in and landed. When I finally got back, all the other airplanes were on the ground. We came down through the clouds out over the mountains there. and one of my crew said, "Look there, there is a big thunderstorm right over Clark Field," and sure enough here was this big thunderstorm. Only it wasn't a thunderstorm. All. our airplanes on the ground were burning, and this was the smoke going up for all the world like a big thunder bumper over the airport.

About that time we began to get word over the radio that things weren't all they were cracked up to be and somebody, as a matter of fact an officer named "Freddy" Crimmins [Col Fred T., Jr.], had climbed back up in the control tower and called. My airplane and another were circling around out east of the field. This other airplane--a fellow named Earl Tash [Col Earl R.] had come up from Mindanao, and he was going to land there for some repairs that couldn't be accomplished at Del Monte. They said from the tower, "We are under attack. Better go elsewhere to land." Tash managed to get his gear up when the Jap fighters jumped him, but he got away from them and headed on down to Mindanao as he had enough gas. I didn't have enough gas to make it, and I still didn't really know what was going on.

We had a standard approach procedure where we would come in on a heading from Mount Arayat on the plains to the east of Clark. With your gear down, the ack-ack [antiaircraft fire] weren't supposed to shoot at you. We had an Army National Guard outfit from Albuquerque just recently transferred over there, and they couldn't tell a four-engine airplane from a single-engine airplane and would fire on anything that approached the field. We had to be very careful to return in accordance with the proper approach procedure. Here we were with gear and flaps down headed into Clark Field below

500 feet. About that time the Jap fighters hit us. We thought all the Jap aircraft were gone, but back no. Their bombers had been over and done all the damage, and then waves of fighters hit the place, one after another. There we were gear and flaps down, gun stowed--fat, dumb, and happy-- between two of the waves. The thing I was worried about was I didn't have much runway. I had only about 1,200 feet left undamaged and was concentrating on setting it down on the edge of the Field, and here came these fighters.

First off we thought they must be P-40s out of Nichols Field, then all of a sudden, we realized those little red lights that were flashing on the front end of the wings weren't playing. About that time a fighter went by, and I could see the Rising Sun on his wings. We threw everything to the firewall, got the (gear and flaps up, and fortunately nobody was hit in my airplane. We took a few bullets and headed back up into the clouds, and that's all I could do. We then knew that Nichols had been bombed, and I didn't have fuel to go anywhere else. We hid in the clouds over on the other side of Mount Arayat until I was just about empty and then came in and landed at Clark. Fortunately the air raid was over for the moment, and we could concentrate on putting it down on a short runway.

I had the only airplane that would fly at that time. Everybody else was burned or out of commission. We loaded up and started on a reconnaissance mission to try to find out what was going on up toward Taiwan because that's where we knew they were coming from. On my previous mission I had been flying cut north and east of Luzon, and we didn't pick up a thing. Of course, you have to remember we had no radar in those days. All sightings had to be visual.

The Japs chose a very good time when the intertropical front covered their approach route. They were almost completely under cloud cover from Luzon northward to Taiwan, and that's where they were, right there under the clouds. my job was to go up and see if we could take pictures of what was going on up in Taiwan. Even after the initial attack on Clark, we were not allowed to take on a load of bombs--afraid it might be provocative, I guess! So off we went to attack the Japs with a couple of handheld cameras.

About halfway up there my generators went out, and I had to abort, but I never would have made it to Taiwan. They would have murdered me, single airplane all by itself. I will never forget my briefing. The briefing officer, the group operations officer, said, "I want you to go up there and take some pictures, and you had better stay up around 20,000 feet. I don't think they can get you up there." Every fighter they had was very active at that altitude and higher, but I was going to go in over Taiwan at 20,000 to take some pictures.

M: Didn't he know that, sir?

C: No. I was the squadron intelligence officer, and I agreed with him. From all the information we had, they had a bunch of old mixed-gear airplanes that could hardly fly above 10,000 feet. That was the word that we had.

T: What was your intelligence at the time?

C: Very unintelligent. The United States is notably poor on intelligence, and you just tick them off--Hawaii, Clark Field, Korea, and Vietnam. We guessed wrong on practically every important enemy intention, just real poor. I don't know how we can be so poor, but we are. One of the reasons is this Select Committee on Intelligence that we have out of the Congress and the current President who wants everything laid out where everybody in the world can see it. This is a syndrome of the current American public, and it is no way to operate a military operation as you well know. This is one of the things that worries me about the nation today. we don't know what is going on around the world. Unless your policies in Washington change significantly, we never will know what is going on in the hotspots of the world while everybody else will know exactly what we are doing because we will release it to them under the Freedom of Information Act or something equally as stupid. But that has nothing to do with my previous career. This has to do with what I worry about concerning the future of the nation.

T: Once you realized what had happened and once you had heard of Hickam, what had taken place right there at Clark, what were your feelings? Was it just plain disbelief?

C: No. We talked about these possibilities. We actually felt something like this was coming. We were convinced that, with our B-17s, we could fly back and forth across the China Sea and sink anything the Japs could send down with just our one group of bombers. We were convinced that we had no problems at all. Our esprit was high; we knew we could do the job. the only problem was they killed off over half our B-17s in one fell swoop. The only airplanes remaining were mine and the ten other airplanes down on the big island; that was all. They killed all the rest of them off, so we didn't have a full opportunity to try our strategy, but we weren't concerned. We figured we could hack this course.

The other thing of which we were convinced was that, immediately after the Japs attacked, the biggest convoy you ever saw in your life was starting out from San Francisco to come over and reinforce the Philippines. We were going to take care of this thing in short order. I suspect that particular belief--and I don't think it was just a hope, I think it was really a belief on the part of most of our people in the Philippines that any day reinforcements would arrive--is what kept them alive and fighting as long as they d id.

The thing that really upset all of us was the loss of the airplanes and then the loss of so many of our crews on the ground the first day. They called all the bombers back to Clark. Everybody was at lunch in the mess hall, and the Japs dropped a couple of bombs on the officers mess, and boy, they really wiped the place out. All of us had close friends, of course, that we lost, and everybody, I guess, was in sort of a state of shock. But those who remained operated smoothly and got the airplanes in shape, and the ammunition and the bombs on board, and we were off working the problem as soon as higher headquarters gave us permission to go on bombing missions.

T: I would assume that most of the men had the same feelings?

C: Oh, yes. They were gung ho.

T: Just ready to go?

C: Yes.

T: How did the Filipinos take this? What were their feelings?

C: It was sort of interesting. It was just like the general population anywhere during wartime. They are just caught up in it. Now if you refer to the Philippine Armed Services, they were sharp, and they responded immediately. The Philippine Air Force was equipped with P-26s, but they flew those against the Jap fighters and bombers and did reasonably well. MacArthur [Gen of the Army Douglas] had the Philippine Constabulary cranked up. You remember that he had been recalled to active duty and was in charge of all our forces over there. The Philippine Constabulary was elite troops, but the Philippine Army hadn't been whipped into shape yet. He had started working on them, but the Japs got there before we really got the Filipinos in good shape. The constabulary did a great job, and they were the ones who really were trained. Everybody did his job and worked together. On the whole our forces reacted like real pros, or they couldn't have lasted as long as they did. As far as those of us at Clark Field were concerned, we were so damn mad at the Japs for coming in and at ourselves for allowing it to happen that we were going around collectively kicking one another in the tail all the time and wanted to do anything we could to get even. The motivation was pretty high to do something to get back at those characters for what they had done to us.

M: What created the recall? What it a weather recall for all your recon to come back in?

C: No. and I am not sure even today what created the recall. I have two or three books on actions in the Manila Headquarters that first days but none are specific on this point. My own opinion is: I believe General MacArthur and General Sutherland [Lt Gen Richard K.], his chief of staff, were concerned over the fact that they had no orders from Washington that, war had been declared. General Eubank--I guess he had been made the bomber commander by that time-- was down in Manila trying to get some orders to allow us to load bombs and go after the Japs when this was all going on. The recall may have been because he thought he was going to get that permission. While on reconnaissance we weren't allowed any bombs at all. We had defensive armament only, had machine guns loaded, but no bombs aboard by orders of the Far East Command, General MacArthur. I just would hesitate to put any credence on any one of the many stories I have heard. The best that I have been able to determine is, everybody who has explained why we were recalled did it in a context to be sure that he wasn't involved in that recall.

T: It has been said that General O'Donnell was somehow of another caught with his pants down in this particular situation, and like you said that may be fair or may not be.

C: In May 1941 we flew a full complement of B-17s, Cs I think, to Hickam to equip our heavy bomber group there. You remember that I told you we checked him out over there. Then he took the 14th Squadron over to Clark, and we only took two squadrons of the 19th. When we got to the Philippines, we consolidated, and the 14th was one of our 19th Group Squadrons. When we arrived there he was still the 14th Squadron Commander. General Eubank, then a Colonel, was the group commander. Then when General Eubank got to be bomber commander, O'Donnell then became the group commander, and I suspect that he was the group commander on 8 December, but he didn't have anything to do with the recall. That was done on call from higher headquarters somewhere along the line.

T: You felt like you let it happen, and you kicked yourselves, and you wanted to kick everybody else and especially the Japanese. That was the feeling I was trying to get.

C: We also wanted to kick the Army types down in Manila. We couldn't get them off the dime. You may know this. I think people have told you this before. MacArthur had no use for air. He didn't know how to use it, and it wasn't until George Kenney [Gen George C.] came over to Australia the following year and was put in charge of the Air Force troops that, finally, he got MacArthur to see what air could do for him. Those early days were sad as far as MacArthur was concerned. We went up and got him out of the Philippines. I didn't; I was on the way up in another airplane on a mission out of Darwin against one of those little islands where the Japs were holed up. We were pretty well disorganized by that time. This was long after we had been chased out of Java, and we flew with whatever we could get. We had three airplanes that then joined up with a bunch of Australian Hudsons and bombed the Japs.

As I was passing through Alice Springs on my way north, MacArthur came out with a guy named Frank Bostrom [Col Frank P.]. He was the pilot of the airplane that brought him out. He had been ordered out by the President, of course. He came by PT boat [torpedo boat] from Corregidor to Del Monte down on Mindanao Island, and our boys went in and picked him up. He came out, and as soon as he got to Alice Springs, he got on a train, little old narrow-gauge railroad. He wouldn't fly in an airplane another inch. He and his wife and little boy got on that train and went into Melbourne. All of our boys were going right on into Melbourne on the next hop. They were there 2 days ahead of him. He just didn't like airplanes.

T: What were the confidence levels in yourself and your country at that time?

C: Never failed. Always tomorrow. They must be there; we just don't have the word; they are coming; everything is great.

T: Radio silence, they couldn't talk to us and let us know anyway?

C: Yes. This will come out later as I tell you about what happened a little later on.

C: The point of confidence that you asked me about, I did look into my diary, as a matter of fact, on that area, and I don't think the confidence ever failed, as far as I can recall, as long as I was in the Philippines. I did notice a note of two in my diary about rumors. It turned out that we did have--we really haven't gotten that far in my narrative yet--pretty good shortwave communications with the States. We got about three newscasts per days and my note in the diary said we would generally get one of them fairly loud and clear and the other two generally were jammed by the Japanese. The note I had there was that it is the same everywhere and always has been, I suppose, that you have to fight rumors. Somebody who listened to the news or heard someone who had listened would start a rumor, and everybody would add to it as it went along. So what we tried to do, as long as I was there and in command of the ground echelon, which I was later on, I insisted on a squadron meeting every day in which we gave them the news we had been able to get from our shortwave broadcast. But the confidence never waned. Everybody was sure that one day airplanes would come, ships would come, and we would turn around and go right back up through the Philippines. That was done much, much later, years later. Those were about the only things I picked up that we had chatted about before.

T: Yesterday we also talked about the quality of the equipment during your flying training. At the entry of the United States into World War II, what was the quality of the Air Corps, the quantity of the Air Corps, the R&D [research and development], as much as you knew at that time?

C: As far as the quality of the equipment was concerned, it was good, and it stood up under some pretty rough situations out in the Pacific where I was. Again, as I said yesterday, we lacked belly and tail turrets on the airplane which came along fairly rapidly as a matter of fact. You may or may not recall that B-17s didn't even have tail guns when we started the war, but they came right on in the next few months. Some of the airplanes we started getting down in Java, which was only in January and February 1942, began to come in with tail guns and then tail turrets, and then finally the turrets began to work as far as nose and belly turrets were concerned. But the major lack we had was in defensive armament. there was just no doubt about it.

Communications equipment was okay, I guess, and I have to say I guess because I was not a communicator. I really didn't know much about the state of the art at that time or the state of the possible then. I guess we got along. We were able to communicate. Particularly our shortwave communications were good. Voice communications between airplanes were, certainly compared to today's situation where you just talk into your oxygen mask, and it just comes out fine. We had nothing like that, of course. However, we had an old push-to-talk, low-frequency band radio, but it was not very good. Compared to what was available, I don't know. That may have been the best available in the state of the art at that time, but I couldn't say. But it wasn't good. We could have used better voice communications ship-to-ship and airplane-to-ship, air-to-ground, and aircraft-to-aircraft.

I did mention to you yesterday that while I was at March Field--it was called March Field in those days rather than March Air Force Base. It was the jump-off place for all the aerospace industry that was in the Los Angeles area. As a matter of fact, I can remember Colonel Umstead [Stanley M.] bringing the B-19 into March on its maiden flight from the Douglas field over in Los Angeles. He brought it in there, and he was the chief bomber test pilot of the Air Force at that time. He was Gen "Stan" Umstead's [Lt Gen Stanley M., Jr.] father. I can remember that airplane coming in. We were particularly interested in that because I had watched it. I had been over to the Douglas plant two or three times and had seen it under construction. We were in the heavy bomber business, and here was the biggest airplane anybody had ever seen, that B-19 that came in.

T: You talk about going over and watching them build the airplane. Just how much did you get to go over and watch them build?

C: The airport at the Douglas plant--and I can't recall the name of the little field--was one of the airports that we normally used in going in and out of the Los Anqeles area. At that time the B-19 had been rolled out. It had been under construction for quite sometime. I was at March just the year; I saw it fly in on its first flight. It had been under construction for a long time, so I guess the answer was that the rollout had already occurred, and what I was really watching was the tail end of the preparation for acceptance and flight out. We saw all manner of other aircraft come out of there. They were building A-20s, B-25s, and Lockheed's Lightning [P-38].

I recall a very interesting thing that I mentioned briefly to you yesterday. We had several British crews that we were training at March on the B-17. You may recall the US Air Corps furnished the British some B-17s before we ever got into the war. These RAF [Royal Air Force] crews were at March. We were checking them out, and here comes, I guess, one of the first Lightnings that had come off the line. We hadn't seen too many of them ourselves. We knew what they were, of course. The British had never seen them; certainly these bomber pilots that we were training had not seen them. They took a look at it as it came in and sat down, and we said, "Oh, isn't this the greatest thing you ever saw in your life?" We thought this was going to be the hottest fighter that ever came off the line. Their question was, "What are you going to use to escort it?" We went to some pains to explain to them it was going to be an escort airplane itself, but they shook their heads. They didn't think it would ever make it.

They were at that time buying Mustangs, P-51s, which I don't think even had a US Air Force designation. As you recall the history of that airplane, we turned it down, and the British bought it. In those days we saw some of the Mustangs coming through March that were being turned over to the British. Finally about that time, I think after the British used them a little bit, our people saw the light, and we began to order some ourselves.

This was the closest I came to observing the research and development effort, and of course, that was the end of the R&D. This was the beginning of production that I was observing at that time.

T: Going back to the attack on the Philippines, do you recall what the air defense was like in the Philippines in those days? Specifically around Clark.

C: I don't know what it was like elsewhere. First of all there was a warning net, which I mentioned the other day, and I checked my log here a little earlier.

There was an air defense net, and we spent quite some time prior to the outbreak of the hostilities in flying missions just to test the net. In other words they had Filipino stations along the coast and up in the mountains and all this sort of thing, all of which supposedly had radio contact with the Central Air Defense Control Area. I was just a GI, a combat crew pilot, at that time, and I never got any of the reports. The only think I knew was, that was what our briefing was. We went around to test all of these things. The only thing I can tell you in the proof of the pudding was that we didn't get any warning when the Japs struck. As a matter of fact, there was one area, particularly on the coast, which had fairly successful reporting previously that the Japs struck first. Well, I don't know whether they knew. They probably knew it was one of our reporting areas, and they decided to destroy it before coming to Clark and Nichols. The early warning system didn't work!

As far as armament, the air defense around Clark Field consisted of a regiment of New Mexico National Guard, which had been deployed over there just about the same time our ground echelon had, and they had the then standard 3-inch antiaircraft guns. Most of the time, as I think I mentioned yesterday, they couldn't tell a four-engine airplane from anything else, and they would shoot at anything that flew.

T: Did they knock anything down?

C: They knocked down some Japs. Yes, they did. Fortunately they never did knock down one of our airplanes. They shot at us often enough but were not very successful. Actually I would say that more Jap airplanes were damaged and shot down by .50-caliber machinegun fire manned by our aerial gunners on the ground. We would set mounts up all around the place. That was the only effective defense we had.

T.. Were these the guns you had taken out of the airplanes that were destroyed?

C. That or we had a lot of them in our armament shops. They were actually aerial guns, and of course, they were air cooled. They got pretty hot when you fired them without air passing over them. But we set up, actually manufactured, a great number of mounts, and our gunners would get out there whenever the air raid siren went off and lie in wait for them. Particularly when coming down strafing, these types of mounts were quite effective. Of course, as far as bombers were concerned, which always came over fairly high, it didn't do any good. We had to depend on the antiaircraft troops, who weren't very effective.

I guess I was on the ground there after about 3 days of the war when my airplane was destroyed, which I will tell you about in a minute, until the end of January. I don't think I saw more than about three Japanese airplanes shot down by antiaircraft. I saw maybe eight or ten shot down by machinegun fire.

T: Were they hitting you pretty steady, sir?

C: Regularly, three or four times a day.

T: It would seem that you wouldn't have a lot left to be destroyed.

C: Of course, they were then working over the ground troops and whatever else was there.

T: Carry me from that time until the time you were evacuated to Java by sub.

C: I mentioned yesterday that the day after the Japs hit I was sent on a mission to Formosa, and again the generators on my doggone airplane went out. I had said I was lucky, because I was reading my diary about that particular day, and the notes that I had on it indicate we were very unhappy because we had to turn back. The comment I made was, "Once you get started, you know, you want to keep on." I guess it was a pretty good thing I did because I don't think I would have had much chance against that hornet's nest up there and certainly not at 20,000 feet over Formosa. The next day, which was the third day of the war; we knew that the Japs were landing, and we knew in general where they were landing, up and down the coast in the Lingayen Gulf and near Aparri on the north coast of Luzon. However, we weren't able to really get together a coordinated attack. The rest of the B-17s in my squadron, which had been down on Mindanao, came on in and began staging out of Clark as soon as we got the bomb craters on the runways filled. Sometimes we would send out as many as two or three airplanes together; sometimes we would send maybe just one. Whatever we could load up with fuel and bombs we would send out, and we would bomb what was available.

As a matter of fact, I was looking at the group log--I have a copy of it--and the group log only has two missions on a given day. I happen to know personally that on the second day of the war and the third day of the war I flew four missions just as fast as they could recycle us. On the third day of the war, in the afternoon, I had been up to Lingayen gulf, and we came back, and I was briefed for the next mission while my airplane was being serviced. We were just ready to go, came out of the operations shack there, walked over to the airplane, and a flight of three P-40s which had come up from Nichols Field was taking off. it was in the dry season in Clark, and it was a sod field. It was pretty dusty from all the use that it was getting at that time. The number three guy--they were still flying three element pursuit formation in those days--and the third guy in the element got disoriented in the dust and got off course on his takeoff and ran right through my B-17 and hit the wing. It was over in the revetment there, camouflaged. It wasn't a real revetment either; it was a camouflaged area that we tried to fix up with nets and so on and completely serviced. We were walking out to take off on a mission. He hit it just outboard of the outboard engine, took off the wing, went right through, and broke our back right about halfway down the fuselage. He turned around 180 deg facing the other way, and we ran over there. I was expecting it to burst into flames any moment. We ran over there like crazy, and we thought we would pull him out. There wasn't anything left of that fighter except the pilot's seat, and he was sitting strapped in it. His right hand was on the stick; his left hand was on the throttle; there wasn't anything left of that airplane. He looked at us, and we looked at him. He reached down and undid his safety belt and got out and said, "Goddamn," walked away, and I haven't seen him since. I don't even know who he was. He ruined my airplane, and that was a serious situation because that was my means of escape from the Philippines. So I had none from that point on.

By the way, we had moved our ground echelons out from Clark field on a river called the Bamban River and set up a camp out there. The Japs used to come by and strafe us about three times a day. Every time they made a pass at the airfield, they would strafe the camp, but we all had pretty good slit trenches, and we didn't lose many people as a result of it. But every time an airplane came in to be repaired, serviced, or whatever, my crew and I were on hand saying, "Aren't you very tired? Don't you want to rest a while and let us take this next mission?" We wanted to get our hands on an airplane again, but you can bet your boots that they all said, "Oh, no, I am not tired. " He might have flown five missions that day, but he wasn't about to get out of his airplane because he knew what was going on. So there we were.

Suffice it to say that at the time we were ordered to evacuate Clark and go down to Bataan, I was still there on the ground with about four or five others of us who were first pilots, as we called the aircraft commanders in those days. All manner of navigators, gunners, and everything else were just as eager as could be to get back in the air because all those airplanes had gone. We only had about one squadron's worth flyable left at that time.

We got word to evacuate Clark on Christmas--the first time I really knew anything unusual was going on. Even as today the troops were always fed turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the dinners are pretty doggone good. Well, we got word to feed our troops turkey on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. We were actually using field kitchens at the same time since we had evacuated the barracks area. They cooked up a big Christmas dinner, and we fed all the troops. I drew the chore of being train commander for the evacuation for all ground troops remaining at Clark. A few went by truck. We went down to this little old station and got aboard these Filipino narrow-gauge trains, and away we went. I knew the name of the stop that we were supposed to get off, which was our destination, and I knew from that point on we were to head south on a highway that was marked on the map going into Bataan. I had never really been down in that area and didn't know where I was going. the main thing I didn't know was how the train got there, and this turned out to be a sad situation. I got everybody loaded on the train, and the engineer pulled the engine out. There wasn't anybody apparently in charge except the engineer and the fireman and me, and away we went. The first thing you know, we pulled into a station, and we stopped. I went up to see what was going on, and the engineer said, "This is as far as I go. I unhook, and another engine picks you up." Well, that seemed all right. But when this happened about three times, I began to get suspicious. About midnight the group exec, Lt George Verity, and I went up there, and these guys were going to turn us loose in some little stop that I didn't even know on the map. I said, "No, we are not going to do this." "Oh, yes, we have to leave." So at the point of a .45 automatic we said, "You are not going anywhere except, " whatever the name of the place was. The two of us held the automatics on these guys until we got to this little stop that turned out to be the end of the line as far as the railroad went toward Bataan.

When we got there we found out what the problem was. The language barrier made things difficult. It turned out that all night long, unbeknownst to us but known to the train crews, we had been trailing, not very far away, an ammunition train that had been loaded and headed down toward Bataan. As soon as daylight came, the Jap fighters were out trying to get that ammunition train. These lads didn't want to be anywhere close to where the ammunition train was. When we pulled into this little end-of-the-road thing, we unloaded, and you never saw a train get out of there as quick in all your life. As a matter of fact, some of us had to jump off the train because he had it in reverse and was headed back out almost immediately.

I collected this rabble I had and all of the ground echelon, and we headed over toward the highway to go down to the kilometer post where I was supposed to meet the rest of the unit. We hadn't walked but about 3 kilometers--I guess it was the first rest or some such as that----

C: We were at the first rest stop, and here arrives, by staff car, a full colonel. You recall, at this time, I was a first lieutenant in charge of all these troops, and the colonel said, "Where do you think you are going? I said, "I am going, as ordered, sir, to kilometer post number," whatever. He said, "You mean to tell me you are taking all these able-bodied men and leaving that ammunition train up there completely loaded?" I said, "I don't know anything about that ammunition train, sir, except that I saw it there as we got out." He said, "I order you and your men to go back and unload that ammunition train," so we did. We turned around and walked back the 3 klicks and unloaded the ammunition train.

It was Christmas Day, 1941, and here we were starving to death, nothing to eat since turkey dinner the day before. It turned out this was a pretty good move because were two or three boxcar loads of C-rations. We finished unloading the ammunition train; we broke open the C-rations. The ammunition train had its own locomotive there, and by using the hot water out of the boiler of the locomotive, we had hot coffee and heated up our beans and a few other things. That was our Christmas dinner that day. It wouldn't have been so bad, but I got right back down to the same kilometer post about 3 klicks away, headed out late that afternoon, and the Japs came over and strafed the ammunition we had stacked over there and blew it all up. It never got anywhere.

T: Who was going to use the ammo? Do you know?

C: It was a conglomeration. There was both aviation ammunition and ground ammunition. Mostly I think it was, as I recall, caliber .50 and caliber .30 machinegun rounds that we could have used in our ground guns, and there was some other. I think there was some ammunition the antiaircraft people had been using, 3-inch antiaircraft ammunition.

T: What kind of weapons did you have?

C: Everybody had a rifle. We had issued rifles all around to everybody.

T: The old M-l ?

C: Yes. A lot of Springfields still.

T: When you were on the train, did you run into any type of resistance.

C: No.

T: None at all?

C: No. This was all Filipino- and American-held territory that we were leaving. The Japs had landed up on the north and northwest coast of the island, and they were headed down. Although they had attacked Manila and had pretty well blown it up by air, there weren't any Japs there at that time. They were, however, moving in from the south. About the time we got to Bataan, they had taken Manila. During that period, the area between Clark and Manila was friendly territory.

T: When did you actually get down to Bataan?

C: Christmas night. Shortly after this trucks from our unit that had come by road picked us up, and we didn't have to march all the way down the peninsula. We went on down to whatever kilometer post it was and made camp there and started our existence as ground pounders.

We were assigned to a beach defense area, which actually turned out to be on the Manila Bay side of Bataan. They had the whole perimeter divided up, and the actual Frontlines were, of course, sort of up north across the head of the peninsula, but all of the perimeter was divided up into beach defense areas, and we were assigned one of those beach defense areas which we defended the whole time. We manned the gun positions and foxholes, and we had quite a bit of infiltration.

There were no great attacks at the time down in that area. They were all coming down from the north. The Japs kept trying to infiltrate and flank us and send in small parties and whatnot. These were the kinds of things we were in the business of repelling on our beach sector.

At the same time we were at a place called--just near a little town called Cabcaben, but the actual barrio or the area we were in was a placed called Bole, with an accent on the e. It was in a little valley there, and where that valley opened out toward the bay, we constructed an airfield, a B-17 field. That's how we spent most of our time the next month, establishing hardstands for airplanes and stocking them. We had bombs, ammunition, gas, anything you could think of that was necessary to refuel and turn around a B-17 unit. We were convinced that B-17s were going to come in any day, maybe thousands of them, and we wanted to be ready. We had engineer troops there with their bulldozers that actually did all of the construction word on the runway. We had a good runway of about a 300-foot wide strip there and 5,000 feet long. We had hardstands so we could pull the airplanes off, service them, and turn them abound.

T: Were you being harassed during this time by the Japanese fighters?

C: Every day, two or three times. It was just a milk run, and they were beginning to concentrate more on Corregidor at that time than anywhere else. They could see what was going on down there, and every time they would go to and from, particularly the fighters--the bombers would mostly go to Corregidor or Mariveles, which is the port on the very tip end of Bataan--they would always strafe up the valley as they went both ways, just to take a pass at us. I guess we were an alternate target or a target where they expended the remaining ammunition or something of that nature. Most of it was strafing. As a matter of fact, I don't recall any bombing attacks as such. There may have been some dive bombers that were deployed against us.

Then one day they came around and said they wanted all of the B-17 first pilots to report to Colonel George [Brig Gen Harold H.], who was the senior Air Force officer in the peninsula headquarters. We did, and after much, I would say, not very clever G-2 work of trying to hide what was going on, in twos and threes, they got us over to Corregidor. We were over at Corregidor for 2 or 3 days. In the middle of one night, they took us down through the tunnel and put us on the old Sea Wolf submarine, which was pulled up there, and away we went for Java.

T: Was that your first time aboard a sub?

C: It sure was.

T: What did you think of that?

C: It looked mighty good to me. It was a big old black thing about as long as a football field, and it was a way to get out of the Philippines, and I was delighted. They had about, as I recall, 20 or 30 Air Force types aboard, 8 or 9 out of the 19th. All were aircraft commanders that had been left behind. There was a dive-bombing outfit there under then Maj "Reggie" Vance [Col Reginald F. C. ]. Reggie Vance and about five or six, maybe more, of his pilots were aboard the submarine with us. Then there were some specialists whom the unit had asked for. I have forgotten what they were, maybe bombsight men or electronics guys or something of that nature that they needed, and they pulled those people in, and away we went.

The submarine also had aboard it a great amount of the gold that belonged to tee Philippine Government. The Philippines had moved their 301d stocks over to the rock, and they loaded those things aboard. Another interesting thing they had aboard was quite a supply of quinine seeds. I am not just sure what kind of plant quinine comes from, but this is what they had. You recall we were required to use Atebrin during the war to combat malaria. They had hoped to transport these seeds out and start growing their own quinine, whatever plants quinine comes from, but I don't think they were very successful, because I took Atebrin the nest of the war, and I don't know what they did with them. They got them down to Java. Maybe they got stuck in Java, because we got chased out of Java in short order, you may recall.

T: Did you ever get sick while you were over there? Did you ever have any problems?

C: No. Well, I did after I got to Australia, and that is the only time I was sick the whole time I was over theme. I came down with dengue fever, had a bout of dengue, and that is really tough. Fortunately I was in Melbourne at the time, and they brought me in to one of the Aussie hospitals. I was in there about 10 days and finally came on through it all right.

T: What were your personal feelings, sir, when you left the Philippines ?

C: My feelings were as you might imagine. Here I had been working for the last month to establish a flying field there. I said to them--well, I didn't say anything to them because I wasn't allowed to tell them. They didn't even know we were going. I reported to a place in just normal day-to-day traveling around and just didn't come back. The only indication to them that maybe something was different was, I turned command of the ground echelon over to Maj "Mo" Daly [Col Maurice F. ], who was a very famous guy in the Air Force at that time. He was an old football player from West Point along about the same time as Rosie O'Donnell, and he was there in the Philippines, not in our outfit, but he took command of the 19th ground echelon when I left.

The reason I had to be in command of the outfit was, we were training these airmen to be infantrymen. I was the only officer in the ground echelon there who had ever had any infantry training at all, and that had been at the Military Academy.

T: That was a question--what prepared you for that? But you answered it.

C: I noticed from the notes in my diary that I felt woefully unprepared, and I wished I had known a lot more, but at least I knew more than anybody else. So they turned command of the ground echelon over to me. As long as we were there in this infantry situation, I ran the outfit. I turned command over to Mo Daly just the day before I left there, but people still didn't know we were leaving because this was a normal sort of thing. We were just getting really organized there for a ground type of defense, and here was a senior officer that should come in and command the group. I had just fallen into it because I was the only one who knew anything about infantry tactics. I felt I was going to go out and get a whole hatch of airplanes and lead them back into this field I had built. I was perfectly prepared to come in there with a bunch of B-17s, stage out of there and go on, not knowing what the situation was down south, how many airplanes there were or weren't. So that's the way that would have worked out. I had no qualms about leaving, because I felt this was a way to get more of these people out. I got aboard the submarine, and I was delighted to see it.

We came right down through the Battle of Makasar Strait. The submarine commander was Comdr "Freddy" Warder [Rear Adm Frederick B.], whom I have seen in just the last couple of years. I lost him for a long time and ran into him down in Florida. He and I had an old reunion. He is a retired rear admiral. As we came out of there, he had orders not to engage in any hostilities because of all this junk he had aboard--us, the people, the gold, the quinine seeds, and everything else. His job was not to fight but to get us down to Java. That made the submarine crew very unhappy, because here is all this activity going on around them. We got picked up on two or three occasions, and I am not sure they were all Japanese tin cans, but there were tin cans dropping all around us. That really shakes you up in a submarine when those depth charges come.

T: How long were you aboard the sub, sir?

C: I think it vas 7 days and 1 nights, if I am not mistaken, but I can tell you exactly. We departed there on 29 January 1942. You just might be interested in this. The diary I kept was in the form of writing to my wife every night. I said:

For the next few days, I will write in general about this trip of ours, mainly because, as far as everyone on board is concerned, there are no days as we ordinarily know them. When we finally got word we were leaving Corregidor, we left in the night by twos and threes to escape detection. We went through a maze of tunnels in the solid rock and along little passages hardly large enough to pass a man. It was all very well planned, and I don't believe anyone knew where we were going other than those who were supposed to know. Finally we came out on a dock in the dark, and there lay this long, sleek black job as long as a football field and very slim and businesslike. We shipped aboard, and she immediately pulled out for places unknown. We slipped out of Manila Bay and headed south. Each day we submerged and stayed down just before daylight until after dark. That arranged it so we didn't see the light of day the whole trip except through a periscope. This is a large submarine, over 300 feet long and carries a crew of 70. Normally it is not too crowded.

With the extra 25 passengers...

I didn't know how many there were, but I had it written there.

....... we have on board, it is pretty bad. The last 2 hours before we surface in the evening, the aid becomes pretty foul, and it is really a relief to get up. With so many of us here, we have to share bunks with others, and we have a schedule which gives each man at least 8 hours in 24. Consequently men are sleeping all hours of the day and night, but that doesn't make any difference because it is always dark down here, and the light we have is artificial. All day we run on batteries and make only about 3 knots under the surface.

You see how things have changed nowadays.

All night on the surface, we run on diesels and charge the batteries while we are running about 17 knots. It took 8 days to make the trip. Time seemed to pass quickly enough. The food is delicious, and we have everything you can imagine except ice cream. They bake all night every night in the galley and turn out all sorts of breads, cakes, pies, and cookies.

I didn't mention it, but we had been on two meals a day, and they didn't have much food to eat there on Bataan and Corregidor.

Croxton, [Lt Col Warner W., Jr] has been sick ever since we got on board and seems to be getting worse instead of better. We plan to leave him in a hospital in Surabaja when we land there.

T: Who was that again, sir?

C: Warner W. Croxton. He was a first lieutenant, a classmate of mine at the Academy.

T: Brings back old memories, doesn't it?

C: Yes.

We have a flight surgeon with us named Doctor Morocco who is about as useful as a sixth finger. I can't figure him out except that he is probably the worst flight surgeon I ever saw. Does absolutely nothing except sit around and beat his gums. Several of us have trouble with our ankles and knees swelling down here. They are not sore, just swelled. Someone suggested that we might be pregnant, but it hardly seems reasonable.

Then I have a bunch of blank days. I guess that was when we were in that doggone--yes. "On 2 February we disembarked at Surabaja."

T: That must have been a grand time to get out of there, wasn't it? I mean even though it was so pretty when you first saw it, you were ready to leave the Philippines. It must have been a grand day to pull up to the dock and disembark.

C: Yes. It is a big seaport in Java. Cot Frank Kurtz [Frank A.]--you probably have heard that name--of the so-called The Swoose fame, met us there and took us on down.

T: You moved around quite a bit.

C: Really not so much. Our unit, the 19th, also a bomber command at that time--they had two groups--was expecting their airplanes in the Philippines, and they didn't get to the Philippines, but some of them were in Java. Our headquarters was at a place called Singosari Air Base at a town called Malang. That was our headquarters the whole time we were in Java, although we flew in and out of several other bases around the island.

The reason they wanted those of us who were ACs out of the Philippines was they were beginning to get B-17s for replacement over the Africa route. They flew down to Brazil, to Belem, and across to Africa, on across the middle of Africa to India and then on into the East Indies. The pilots that were bringing those airplanes over just had a trip around the field and a pat on the back, and away they went. They had never seen a B-17 more than a week or so before they headed out for the Southwest Pacific area. They were eager to get those of us who had some experience in the airplane to get down there and fly. So we did, and we stayed there as long as the airplanes were flying.

We attacked Jap shipping and not only shipping but primarily the Jap Navy who was at that point coming down from the Philippines and engulfing all of the East Indies. The Japs knew where we were, and they attacked us once or twice a day. We would try to get a flight off in the interim, and you would generally land, and here the Japs would be with their fighters strafing the place when you got there. It was a dicer time all right. We generally managed to get about six to nine airplanes airborne every day for the month that I was there. I got there on 1 February, and I believe I left there the end of March. I can't remember--that's immaterial--when they chased us out.

At the time we left I don't think we had more than two or three airplanes in the entire group that could fly at high altitude. In other words the superchargers or something were wrong and gone out of them, and we weren't very effective, I can assure you, by that time. We had been reasonably effective up until then. Then we got word that we were to evacuate to Australia, and away we went. By that time again I had no airplane. I was just sort of an extra crew. As a matter of fact, when I left there, I was in charge of the ground echelon again from Singosari up into another area from which we were departing, and I can't recall the name of the airport, but I think it was Badung. I came out of that place in the back end of a B-17, one of the last B-17s that left. We could see the Japs coming in from down the road as we took off, and they fired at us, and we fired back at them.

The pilot on that particular airplane was Fred Key. You may or may not have heard of the Key brothers, Fred and Al. I believe their light plane endurance record is still standing. Nobody has ever bothered to break it. Two boys from Meridian, Mississippi, who were in the Mississippi Air Guard at the time war broke out.

We came on down to an airport named Broome, Australia, which is up on the northwest coast of Australia out in the middle of the boondocks. We staged out of there. As I recall I went from there to Perth and from there to Melbourne. The object of the exercise was to get as many of us to Melbourne as we possibly could, and then we regrouped and reformed and left from there.

While I was in Melbourne, I told you I had this attack of dengue fever, and I remember I was just out of the hospital when I headed out up to Darwin to fly another combat mission. That was the one that I mentioned the other day where we passed the group that was bringing MacArthur out of the Philippines at a place called Alice Springs. We headed back to the wars. This went on for quite sometime until we finally got ourselves reorganized and again became a group.

By that time the Japanese had taken over all of the East Indies, and they were down into Rabaul. They were beginning to go down toward Guadalcanal, and they were giving New Guinea a hard time. The Australians were pretty well convinced they were just coming right on down to Australia. The game changed a little bit then, and we were redeployed toward the thrust the Japs were making toward Guadalcanal and New Guinea toward Port Moresby. Japs wanted to cut off all the supplies coming from the States. Our unit was redeployed to northeast Australia, and I was the squadron operations officer then of the 30th Squadron. In the reorganization, I changed squadrons. I had been in the 93d before.

T: You also had been promoted along this line?

C: At that time I was still a first lieutenant. I didn't get promoted--that was an interesting thing. Those of us who had been over there fighting the war for almost a year were still first lieutenants, and my classmates who were coming over from the States were majors. I couldn't quite see the percentage in this. As a matter of fact, I was still a captain when I came back after a year of combat. Of course we had a TO&E--only so many lieutenants, majors, and captains there in the unit--and they kept sending majors over so there wasn't any room for any further promotion.

C: Just one more thing I wanted to indicate. Up until this time, our bombardment over there wasn't very effective simply because we didn't have much to work with. We were more an annoyance to the Japanese than anything else. Every once in a while, we would make a good strike, but I am sure it didn't bother them very much. They had to be on their toes. They never knew when it was coming, but just by the lack of numbers, we weren't delivering many bombs even though the bombs might have been on target every time, which I am sure they weren't.

Commencing about March 1942, with this reorganization that I indicated, reorganized and reequipped, we then began to be a highly effective unit. The effectiveness of the 19th Bomb Group in the Southwest Pacific began at that time. I know just from my own experience when we went on a mission we knew where we were going, we knew what we were after, and we got what we were going for. I guess from that point on I must have flown about 60 missions in addition to the ones I had already flown when I got there. Those were certainly the most effective that we had ever flown. The reason it is so interesting is, as has been said before, we fought with what we had, and we didn't have very much, and we weren't doing much good either.

T: How did you fare against the Japanese fighter forces?

C: Very well. We didn't lose too many aircraft to fighters. We left Java, and about that time nearly all of our airplanes were being equipped with tail guns. We didn't lose an airplane to fighters for the next 4 or 5 months, I guess, maybe one now and then. Most of the ones we lost were to ground fire of some kind, antiaircraft fire, so we pretty well held our own to fighters. Even later on I only know of about three airplanes in the group during the rest of that year that we lost to fighters. One was an airplane flown by a friend of mine named Hart Pease [Capt Hart, Jr.]. Pease Air Force Base [NH] is named for him, Medal of Honor winner. I was on a mission with him when it happened as a matter of fact. A fighter got to him and cut one of his wings off, and we were way out over the water at about 20,000 or 25,000 feet, and he went in. We managed to chase him most of them away. We had a lot of bullet holes in our airplane, and we lost lots of crewmen that were wounded or killed in the airplane, but the airplanes generally got back.

T: Do you ever look back, General, and wonder how you made it, why you were lucky enough to make it, why it was not you and someone else?

C: Yes. As a matter of Fact, during that time, I used to ask myself that question from time to time, and I guess it was fairly simple as far as I was concerned. After about 6 months of the thing, after I had really gotten into the Lousiness, I was convinced sometimes that I wasn't coming home anyhow. It really didn't make much difference at that time, and I began to be an effective combat man. Then I stopped worrying about it, and I did what I knew had to be done, and I would say that I was twice as effective from that point on as I had been previously. It didn't bother me one way or the other.

I was very proud of one thing; I never lost an airplane off of my wing the entire year I was over there leading the unit in combat. This guy Pease was on somebody else's wing; he wasn't on mine. He was in the 93d Squadron. I was leading the 30th Squadron at that time. I think a lot of it had to do with being combatwise. I knew a lot of people that I thought had more guts than brains, and I felt it was much smarter to live to fight another day than it was to go doing something foolish. If the results were required but if they weren't required at that time, I would rather come back again sometime and hit them again.

T: Did you have any superstitions, General?

C: I am sure I did, but I can't remember what they were at the time. Every unit has its own, you know. I didn't have anything, like a rabbit's foot or a cap, that I always wore on a mission or anything like that.

T: Did you ever paint your airplane of name it?

C: We named all of our airplanes, but generally the airplane was named before it got to us. The crew that ferried it over had named it, and they generally put pictures on it and all that sort of stuff like that.

T: Normally a good-looking girl.

C: Yes. One I recall that I flew a lot was an airplane named Et Torn. As a matter of fact, I cracked up Et Torn onetime taking it into a short field up in northeast Australia, but I didn't name it. One of the maintenance men came up with the name and put it on there. I didn't have a specific name that I named any airplane myself.

From that point on, when we really started getting airplanes after I had left the Philippines, I was the squadron operations officer, and I didn't have a specific airplane, nor did I have a specific combat crew. When I flew a mission, generally what I would do was, I would pick a crew, a lead crew, and I would kick the copilot off, and I would fly the airplane and put the pilot in as my copilot and take the crew along. In those days we didn't have the luxury of having an airplane per crew. We flew what airplanes were in commission.

T: All this time now you thought you were going to be there for the duration of the war. Did you have a number of missions?

C: No, no tours.

T: No l-year tour or 18-month tour or anything like that?

C: No, not in the Pacific.

T: What I found very interesting, you felt like you became combat effective after you decided, "Hey, I may not make it back so I might as well really get down to the nuts and bolts." That was one of the criticisms that was often heard about Vietnam, the l-year tour.

C: It was sort of interesting. I went back later to the Marianas in a staff position, and I flew some of the big burns over Tokyo. Then I came back again, and I was scheduled to pick up one of the redeploying units from Europe and retrain it as a Pathfinder unit in the old A-26, the Douglas, which later became the B-26. Gen Caleb Haynes [Maj Gen Caleb V.] was the First Air Force Commander at the time. He had me all lined up on that. I even knew where I was going. We were going to train down at Lake Charles, Louisiana. At that time they could see the end of the war coming and General Arnold [Henry H.] had made that famous decision--nobody else could go back overseas until everybody who hadn't been in the same AFSC [Air Force Specialty Code] went. That was it; the unit never did get to Okinawa. It wasn't necessary, of course. But I don't know, I just always sort of felt like when something was going on I would rather be there and be making some sort of contribution.

T: Why was the 19th returned to the United States?

C: I really have no idea, but if I were asked to guess, I would say they felt this unit was the most experienced they had as far as operations in that part of the world. They brought them back to enrich the mixture back here in the States and use them for training purposes.

T: They did not bring back the aircraft?

C. No. Brought back some.

T: More or less just to get the people back?

C: More or less to get us back, yes. I was just thinking, I didn't come back in a B-17. I came back on the Air Transport Command somehow or other. I didn't fly my own airplane back, and I can't remember when they redeployed this outfit. I don't think they did. Any combat capable airplane, they weren't about to bring back to the States. They still had a B-17 unit there, although mostly they were bringing in B-24s in the Southwest Pacific. There was one other B-17 unit, the 43d Group, still in the theater when we left. We probably brought back a bunch of war-weary planes just to get the troops back.

T: All right, sir, do you have anything else you would like to say about your combat time?

C: Well, it is just more of the same.

T: I note from December 1942 to February 1943 you were a test pilot at Eglin [Field] FL.

C: Right.

T: Did you have any leave time to spend with the family, with the wife?

C: When I got back?

T: Right, sir.

C: Yes, I did. That was sort of over Christmas time in 1942.