The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (3 page)

The B-24s and the pilots that McGovern saw were brand-new. The United States in 1940 and 1941 had only minuscule armed forces. The Navy was the best off, but its fleet was badly outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese, not to mention the British. The U.S. Army at the beginning of World War II had fewer than 200,000 men (26,000 of them in the Army Air Corps), which meant it ranked sixteenth in the world, right behind Romania. The Army was pitifully smaller than the millions of men in the Japanese, German, and Italian armies. By June 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps had been built up to 1,257 combat planes, nearly all of them inferior to the Japanese Zero, which outnumbered them anyway, and to the GermanLuftwaffe ‘s fighter fleet, which was four times larger than the American fleet and growing rapidly.

When the war began in Europe in September 1939, the Depression continued to grip America. The unemployment rate was 25 percent. Those with jobs were earning only a little more than $100 a month. There was no unemployment insurance, no welfare paid for by the government, no antibiotics. Most diseases were life-threatening.  Transportation was by automobile, bus, or train, slow and crude. Nearly all roads were two lanes. Few people traveled. What money they had went to feeding, clothing, and housing themselves.

In technology, America was far behind the Germans and Japanese, especially in airplanes. Commercial air travel was for a privileged few wealthy people and not reliable at that. The new twin-engine Douglas DC-3 was the most advanced plane.  It carried twenty-one passengers. It took twenty-four hours to fly from New York City to Los Angeles, but only when weather permitted, and even then the DC-3 had to make three refueling stops along the way. It could make 155 miles per hour and had a range of 900 miles, at best. The passenger cabin was not pressurized.  There was no oxygen available for passengers. It cruised at 10,000 feet, with a maximum of 15,000, which meant it flew in the clouds much of the time. There was no radar and what little electronic navigation aids were available were poor.  They consisted of low-frequency radio beams that the pilots could follow, but they were almost useless in bad weather, as the radio signals were jammed by static from radio waves emitted by thunderstorms. There were light beacons on the waves that the pilots could use as navigation aids, but they too were useless in bad weather.

By late 1941, there were only a few civilian pilots or crew members. Of those who later served in the Fifteenth Air Force, an estimated 85 percent had no prior military experience, nor had they ever been in an airplane.5 McGovern was lucky, but he had been off the ground only eight times and that had been in a single-engine plane with no armament. Those who served in the Fifteenth Air Force came from all forty-eight states and the territories of Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, and had different backgrounds and experiences.  Ralph C. “Bill” Rounds was born in 1924 in Wichita, Kansas. His father owned a lumber business and was a wealthy man. Rounds was handsome and enthusiastic, especially for girls and airplanes. He was a wisecracking prankster, the image of a devil-may-care flyboy. His desire was to be a fighter pilot. His life experiences, his attitude, and his personality were completely different from McGovern’s.6 Kenneth Higgins was born in 1925 in Dallas, Texas. In 1941 he was a junior at Highland Park High School. He would give anything to learn to fly.  Robert Hammer, born in 1923, one of five children, was a North Dakota boy. His father was a trapper and hunter. In the harsh wintertime, Hammer recalled seeing muskrat pelts hanging to dry from wires stretched from wall to wall in nearly every room in his family house. Death was ever present. As a seven-year-old, he saw his twoyear-old sister die of pneumonia. When he was in fifth grade, his mother died in childbirth, as did the baby. Another sister died in 1938, of strep throat.

Hammer made what money he could, when he could. In the summer, he would walk seven miles to the local nine-hole golf course. School was a mile away; he would walk in the morning, return home for lunch, walk back to school, then home, so the seven miles wasn’t much. He would caddy, at 25 cents per round. In high school, he got a job at the Dakota Hide and Fur firm, packing wool, stretching jackrabbit hides, loading rabbit meat for shipment to mink farms. He was paid 25 cents per hour, which was somewhat better than he got working in the harvest fields from sunup to sundown, hauling bundles, field pitching, and shocking, at $1.50 per day. When he was fifteen years old he had lied about his age to get into the Citizens Military Training Camp, which he attended for three summers, learning how to march and a bit about being an infantryman.  Hammer had never been out of North Dakota, but by the time of his high school graduation, in 1940, he was eager to see the world and wanted to join the Navy to do so. But he was only seventeen and his father refused to sign the papers.  How about the Coast Guard? No. The Army? No. “So I finally decided I would have to be content with seeing North Dakota.”7 Roland Pepin was born on July 4, 1924, and was three years old when Lindbergh made his flight. Pepin’s father bought him a pedal-type airplane toy “and a little Lindy flying suit complete with leather helmet and goggles.” From then on, he built and drew airplanes. He was determined to join the Army Air Corps as soon as he was old enough.8 William V. Barnes and his twin brother, Robert N. Barnes, were seventeen years old in 1941, attending a small military school in Texas. Naturally they were in the ROTC, where they learned the rudiments of being soldiers.9 Walter Shostack, born in 1919 in Constantinople, was the son of a pilot in the czar’s air force in World War I. Both his grandfathers had been generals in the czar’s army. His father was shot down on the Turkish front. He survived and, to escape the revolution, went to Turkey. In 1923, together with his family, he emigrated to the United States. Walter grew up in New York City. At first he and his parents spoke no English. They fed themselves and found shelter by selling his grandmother’s jewelry. His father went to work making airplanes. When he was old enough, so did Walter, who moved to Detroit for his job. There he met a Hungarian girl, whose father, Stephen Balogh, had emigrated to America shortly after World War I began to avoid conscription in the Hungarian army. He married and in 1920 had a daughter, whom he named Aranka Gizela, Hungarian for Gold Grace. Walter met her on a blind date arranged by his friend, Stephen Balogh, Jr. Both young men graduated from the Manhattan School of Aviation Trade and got jobs at Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio. Before entering the service, Shostack married Gold Grace.10 Eugene Hudson was born in 1922 in Los Angeles. His father was a Lutheran minister in Beverly Hills, right on the edge of Hollywood. Hudson graduated from Fairfax High School in 1940 and entered Los Angeles City College. His brother had joined the Air Corps in 1938, which fired his imagination after listening to his brother’s stories. Hudson worked the midnight shift at Douglas Aircraft while going to college. He was a riveter working on the XB-19, an experimental bomber. Speaking for himself as well as his friends, Hudson remarked, “We all had a flair for adventure.”11 Carroll Wilson Cooper was unusual in the Army Air Forces. He was older than most and had been in the military before the war. Born on May 10, 1917, in McCaulley, Texas, he was the fifth child of Sam and Fannie Cooper (one of his older brothers had died as a youth). His father was a stout Baptist so he named his fifth child after a Baptist leader, Carroll, and he was a staunch Democrat, so he gave his son as a middle name Wilson, after Woodrow Wilson. As a boy, Cooper discovered that his first name was commonly a girl’s name, so he went by “C. W.  Cooper.” Although his father had a dry goods store and the first car in town, C.W. suffered the misery of going to the two-hole privy, or outhouse, in the middle of the night, until he got a porcelain pot - usually called a “thunder jug” - that was kept under his bed. In the daytime he put it outside in the sun to sanitize it and air it out. When his folks got an indoor bathroom, C.W.  thought it a good improvement, especially since his mother no longer gave him his Saturday night bath in a galvanized wash tub in the kitchen. “We took a bath every Saturday night whether we needed it or not.” His meals were filling but frugal. He drank “blue john,” milk mixed with water.  His noon meal was often red beans, but sometimes his mother would fix lima beans as the main, and often only, course. The evening meal was usually corn bread and blue john. When he went to Tonkawa Boy Scout camp, near Buffalo Gap, for two weeks, he gained ten pounds thanks to the food. He also grew tomatoes, not so much to eat as to sell at 5 cents a pound.

Church functions were his social life. Sometimes these were allday singing, but they included a picnic prepared by the ladies. The tables under the arbor would groan under the weight of fried chicken, chocolate cakes, apple and lemon meringue pies, iced tea, and much more. It was dusk before it was time to leave.  C.W. remembers his father cranking the Model T Ford to get it started. As C.W.  was left-handed, he made a vow that when he grew up he would become rich enough to buy a car that cranked left-handed. He never got that done, although he did start driving a car when he was thirteen years old.  While working on the wheat harvest, he was awestruck by the big threshers and the steam tractor. “It was a sight to see,” he recalled, “with chaff and wheat going every which direction and the huffing and puffing machines creeping along on their iron-cleated wheels.” He was a teenage boy when he saw his first airplane. It had crashed on the roof of a house next to the pasture it had been trying to use as a landing field. C.W. made a sextant out of cigar box wood, and used the same material to build planes that he put on a string and flew using a fishing pole.

The Cooper family took two vacations. One was to Lampasas, Texas. By starting at sunrise and driving until dark, they made the 300-mile trip in two days. C.W.  and his parents slept beside the road. Once his father followed some dim car tracks through a pasture until the track ran out; he turned around, finally found a farmhouse, and asked where the road was located. The other trip, to Chicago, was much longer, in the family’s first Model A Ford. The people in Chicago pointed at C.W.’s overalls and his bare feet and laughed. For him, the big thrills were riding on the elevated train, a visit to the Marshall Field Museum, and another to the top of the Wrigley Tower.  After all that traveling, C.W. decided he wanted to see the world, and there was no way better to do that than as a naval officer. So in his junior year in high school he began to improve his grades to reach his goal, and went to work for Charles L. South, who was running for Congress. If he made it, South could appoint C.W. to Annapolis. C.W. delivered circulars for South and did odd jobs.  In school that fall he tried out for the football team, figuring that would improve his chances for an appointment, but as he weighed only 117 pounds that didn’t work. So he joined the track team, without any great success. When he graduated from high school, Congressman South had already given out his Annapolis appointment. At his father’s suggestion, C.W. went to junior college to take a year of engineering. There he was in ROTC and found that the military life was for him. He gained honors for being in the best-drilled squad and platoon and was in the Honorary Corps of Cadets. That summer South gave him his appointment to Annapolis, but by then C.W. was two weeks too old to be accepted.  But his grades were good enough to earn him a scholarship to Texas A&M.  More ROTC, more drilling, lots of studying. Together with four others, Cooper bought a used Model T for $40. After a year or so the partners decided to sell it back, but it died about a block from the dealer. He gave them $25 for it anyway. Cooper smoked Bull Durham, which cost 5 cents a bag, except on Saturdays when he would treat himself to a 20-cent pack of Lucky Strikes. A&M was a military school. When Cooper graduated in 1941, he got his degree in civil engineering one day and his commission as a second lieutenant in the infantry of the U.S. Army the next.

His first posting was as assistant provost marshal at Camp Bowie. Then it was off to the Fort Benning Infantry School, called Fort Benning’s School for Boys by the young officers. The training in that summer of 1941 was haphazard at best. When the class was completed, Cooper was asked to give his choice of three places to go, Camp Roberts in California, Fort Dix in New Jersey, or Camp Walters in Texas. Camp Walters was only 100 miles from his home. He had been in the Army long enough to know how things worked, so he put down Roberts as his first choice, Dix as his second, and Walters as his third. Sure enough, exactly as he hoped, he was assigned to Camp Walters.

There he was assigned to train a platoon in a heavy weapons company. The men were mainly hill boys from Kentucky and Tennessee. Some of them, according to Cooper, “were not too sharp.” But in the fall of 1941 he could feel America getting closer to entering the war and he was sure they would be sent into combat, so he got the platoon together and said, “Look fellas, this is going to be hell on you. You’re going to hate me before this is over because I’m going to work you as hard as I can to get you ready for combat because I don’t want your blood on my hands.” On December 1, the thirteen-week training period was over and a couple of days later the platoon was ordered to the Pacific. “I fought back the tears as I shook their hands as they went to the troop train to go.” That fall, Cooper was promoted to first lieutenant. As a reward, he got additional duty as morale officer for the battalion, responsible for court-martial cases as well as morale. In his first month in the job, he had sixteen courts-martial. He thought, Something has to be done about this. I don’t want to spend all my time on these cases, especially as they were mainly fistfights, drunks, and AWOLs. The cause, he decided, was that the enlisted men had nothing to do on their off hours. He decided to use the battalion officers and enlisted men’s fund, with about $3,000 in it, to do something about that.  One of the new privates had been the leader of the Hardin Simmons Cowboy Band.  Cooper called him in and asked if he would organize a band. “Would I?” the private responded. “You bet! This is great!” He started to recruit players. One private had played accordion in a nightclub in California. Cooper spent $8 to get his instrument shipped to him at Camp Walters. There was a carpenter in the battalion; Cooper bought the wood and he put together music stands. Cooper found an artist who designed a battalion crest and painted it on the stands. He bought sheet music for the band.