The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (7 page)

Like all radiomen, Goodner went to gunnery school, in his case to Panama City, Florida. There he shot skeet with a shotgun, then progressed to firing from moving platforms, first with small arms, then with automatic weapons and finally heavy machine guns. He learned how to operate the power-driven turrets, how to sight and swing them and their twin .50 calibers. The total number of men who graduated from gunnery schools was nearly 300,000, more than for any other AAF specialty except aircraft maintenance.

Goodner completed gunnery school on January 12, 1944, finishing in the top 2 percent of his class. His superiors thought he should reapply for the air cadet program. He said no, because learning to be a pilot would take too long. He wanted to get into the war. “Don’t worry,” the squadron commander assured him, “you won’t miss the war.” Goodner again said no.26 George McGovern was in love, and terribly lonely. He and Eleanor had decided they would wait until the war was over before getting married. Through correspondence, the couple agreed to move the date forward to the day he got his wings. That resolution also faltered. When he was at Muskogee, they decided to get married as soon as possible. In a letter to Bob Pennington, McGovern wrote about his reasoning. He knew it was going to be “tough on Eleanor at times, but she’s got plenty of spunk.” Besides, “I honestly believe, Bob, it’s the best thing for both of us that we get married as soon as we can. There’s just one reason why I think so, and that is we’ve simply got an old fashioned love affair on our hands, and it’s pretty hard to stop love even for a war.”27 Why wait?  Well, first because the would-be pilots had been told not to bring their wives to Muskogee because there were no rooms available for rent and the hotels were full. Besides, the men had to live on the post and could only be with their wives Saturday nights and Sunday until 6:00 P.M. Nevertheless, McGovern walked through town, knocking on doors, asking if the residents had a room for rent. An elderly couple said they did. A few days later McGovern got a telegram saying that his father had anemia and the Red Cross was recommending that he go home.

He got a three-day pass.28

His decision to get married right away wasn’t typical, but it wasn’t unusual either. The men in the armed services knew they were going into a combat zone, whether in North Africa, Europe, or the Pacific, and there was a chance - maybe a good one - that they wouldn’t come back. They wanted at least a taste of married life, and for those like McGovern who had a strict, religious upbringing, it would be their first, perhaps only, chance to experience a sex life with the woman they loved. Air cadet Walter Baskin wrote his parents in June 1943, “It seems that all these cadets have the marrying craze. All those who were not already married seem to be getting married as quickly as they can.”29 McGovern took a train to Mitchell. His father had recovered, so the family, plus Eleanor, drove to her hometown, Woonsocket, and on October 31, 1943, Reverend McGovern presided at the marriage ceremony. The couple spent their wedding night in George’s old room in his family house in Mitchell. The next evening they boarded another train and went off to Muskogee. Between them, they had one bag.  The train was full, as most trains were throughout the war - soldiers, young mothers with crying children, and others - so the McGoverns sat on their bag.  But as they changed trains in Kansas City, McGovern put the bag down to check in at the ticket office. Someone stole it. They looked but couldn’t find the thief, and at noon they boarded their train. Again, no seats were available. “I looked at Eleanor and her lip was quivering - then she started to cry.” McGovern did too - “We both just bawled.” When they were drained, McGovern looked at his wife, and she at him. “We started laughing at each other. I said, ‘Look, a suitcase full of what we had is not the world’s biggest loss.’” Eleanor said her mother’s wedding veil was in there and again there were sobs.  They got into Muskogee after midnight. McGovern had to fly at 6:30 A.M. on his forty-hour check ride. They had no pajamas, no change of clothes, no alarm clock. The couple who had rented McGovern the room got up, fixed some food, and talked. The young couple told them their problems, particularly the check flight. The old gentleman said he would take care of it. He set his alarm for 5:00 A.M. and drove McGovern to the air base.

As McGovern climbed into the cockpit for his check, he thought there was no way he could do it. He was sure he would be washed out. It turned out to be the best check he ever had. Many others had already washed out. Many others still would.  McGovern felt that lots of them washed out “as we got into the flying part of it and they just couldn’t execute - didn’t mean they weren’t capable, highly intelligent guys - but they just couldn’t function and do the things you had to do in an airplane.”

The senior base medical officer brought all the cadets, some 2,000 of them, into an auditorium for a talk on sex and VD. The men were young and wanted sex. The doctor said that when they got their wings and commissions they would have all kinds of opportunities for sex. He told them to be careful and always wear their condoms. The AAF didn’t want any of them to be sick. “I know a lot of you are saying, ‘That’s not going to happen to me,’ but my experience is that just about every man given the right circumstance is going to yield, and every one of you is vulnerable.” McGovern thought, There’s no way he’s talking about me, I just got married, there’s no way I’m gonna cheat on Eleanor. He had hardly had the thought when the doctor went on, “The most vulnerable guys are going to be you married fellas, because you’re used to sleeping with a woman and you’re going to miss it more than the single fellas.” Not me, McGovern thought.30 “Here I was a new bride,” Eleanor later said, “and George was a new bridegroom.” They didn’t see much of each other, but on occasion the wives could come to the lounge on the base. “The husbands were all carrying books,” she recalled. “They insisted that we help them cram for the tests. They’d ask us to test them on this, and test them on that. It was interesting to look around and see all the wives with books in their laps, asking their husbands questions for the test.”31 After Muskogee, McGovern went to Coffeyville, Kansas, where he again tramped the streets until he found a kind old lady to rent a room for Eleanor. He got to fly the Basic Trainer 13 - a BT-13. It had a radial engine and was a powerful plane that he liked very much. It had a stick, not a wheel. “When you opened that throttle and started down the runway,” he recalled, “that plane just fairly jumped.” It had far more power and much more speed than the previous planes he had flown: “It brought you definitely to a different level of flying. It required considerably more skill to handle.”

Not every pilot had that skill. It was at Coffeyville that McGovern saw his first pilot killed. The officer had pulled up too fast on takeoff and stalled into a nose drop. “He just hit the runway - justbang. I was standing not too far from there. The fire engines were out in what seemed to me to be nothing flat.  But when they pulled him out of the plane his body was just like a lobster.”32 Cadet Charles Watry wrote that an accidental death led to a cadet saying, “That is the hard way out of the program.” One of his classmates was practicing S turns along a road. A twin-engine plane was doing the same thing. They had a midair collision. One of the propellers of the twin-engine craft cut off the tail of the classmate’s plane, which crashed, killing him. In total, the AAF lost 439 lives in the primary flight schools during the war. In basic school there were 1,175 fatalities, while in advanced training - flying bigger, faster airplanes, with more complicated training - there were 1,888 deaths.33 McGovern had the skill and the luck to survive and advance. He felt he was learning, gaining all the time, doing things he could not possibly have done three months earlier, including loops and spins and rolls. He had a lieutenant as instructor - no more civilian instructors. The military instructors were usually combat veterans, some of the best the AAF had. That is what McGovern thought of his lieutenant - one of the best.34 In the AAF, it was said, pilots often forget the names of those they flew with, but they never forget the names of their instructors. “Mine was really tough,” Ken Barmore said. He had been negative toward his first instructor, a civilian, but now he had a military flier. His name was Lieutenant Chilton.* “Boy, I would have followed that guy anyplace.” Once, in basic school, Barmore was doing solo acrobatics and went into a spin. “I couldn’t get out of the darn thing and I was getting panicked.” He thought he would have to parachute to safety. “Then for some reason it was just like my instructor was there, telling me, Now just calm down, pull the power back, neutralize the controls, go through your spin recovery procedure.” He did, regained control, and landed without a hitch. “What happened?” Lieutenant Chilton asked. Barmore told him. “He was pretty happy that I had done what he wanted me to.”35 After completing the three months at basic school, McGovern went on to advanced school. It was at that point that his class split, with the men being prepared to become fighter pilots going to one base, the bomber pilots to another.  McGovern went to a twin-engine school at Pampa, Texas, in the Panhandle.  The AAF used a combination of factors to make the selection. First was the current need for fighter and bomber pilots. Then came the aptitude of the student and his physique. Some men were too big for a fighter cockpit. Further, the AAF assigned to twin-engine advanced school all men with the physical capabilities to handle the heavy controls of the bombers. Finally, and hardly used at all in making the selections, was the cadet’s own preference. More men wanted to be fighter pilots, but their numbers exceeded the demand for them.36 Before leaving to go to Texas, the McGoverns had “a little celebration” with the couple living in the next apartment. McGovern wrote Pennington, “Even Eleanor and I got thoroughly drunk. It was Eleanor’s first time and my third. Believe me I’ve never seen anything funnier than Eleanor that night. She swears she’ll never touch another drop, but I had so much fun watching her and listening to her rattle off Norwegian poetry that I’ll probably talk her into it again. She’s just as sweet drunk as she is sober, and much more of a comic.”37 At Pampa, McGovern flew the AT-17 (Advanced Trainer 17) and the AT-9. The AAF had originally developed the AT-9 as a twin-engine combat attack plane, but did not like it and sold it to Mexico. When the war brought about a desperate need for training planes the Air Force bought the AT-9 back.  It was on the AT-9 that McGovern learned to fly with the instruments on a twin-engine plane. He had a gyro that showed the airplane’s attitude, such as nose up or wing down. He learned to fly formation, how to do night flying. He shot landings, setting down, then taking off without cutting the engines or coming to a stop. All kinds of things. He would take off and his instructor would get him to look out the left window and then shut down the engine on the right. McGovern had to recover and get the plane back on the level and flying straight ahead with just one engine. Or coming in for a landing, the instructor would suddenly pull the power on the left engine, producing drag on that side.  He would take the AT-9 away from the field and make McGovern find his way back - he had to remember the terrain sufficiently to get to the airfield.38 In pilotage, navigation techniques involved relating what was on the map to what the pilot saw on the ground. Railroad lines were most helpful - they were called the “iron compass.” The names of small towns on water towers were excellent navigation aids. So were instruments. The trainees learned how to use them on a Link trainer, a small airplane set on a stand that could simulate actual flight.  The inside of the Link was totally dark, except for the lighted instruments.  John Smith recalled learning about vertigo on his Link, and later in real flying. “The semicircular canals in your inner ear are your primary balance mechanism,” he noted. “They are tuned to your eyes and gave you a sense of balance. But if in a Link or a night flight, when your eyes lose their reference points, they can fool you.” If Smith made a turn when he couldn’t see, then returned to a straight and level path, his inner ear would not get the signal and would tell him he was still turning, so “instrument flying requires that you trust your instruments and ignore your senses.” He also learned to use radio communications between the aircraft and the control tower.39 The hardest part was night flying in formation. “Beginners in formation always overcontrol,” Watry pointed out, “fighting to hold the proper formation position with wild bursts of power, followed by sudden frantic yanking of the throttles rearward when it appears that the wing of the lead plane is about to be chewed up by the propeller of the airplane flying the wing position.” Beginners tried to hold lateral position using only the rudders, but as Watry said, in that case “the airplane is likely to wallow through the air like a goose waddling to its pond.” It was worse at night. The wingman would try to stay in proper position when all he could see was a white light on the tail of the lead plane. To Watry, it seemed his airplane “floated in a void.” If there were no lights on the ground and clouds were overhead, there would be no indication of movement.40 Because of the number of accidents, Eleanor and the other wives, living alone except on the brief weekends, were worried sick about their husbands. Every time they heard a crash or a fire engine, they were almost petrified that their man had gone down.

McGovern worked hard at his training. He had to, as he realized from reports coming out of England about the Eighth Air Force and the stories he heard from returning veteran pilots about what combat was like. And he knew the dangers of flying from the number of accidents happening around him. In October 1943, air cadet Ken Barmore was in advanced, flying an AT-9, when he got word that two of his best friends from high school were killed in a B-24 crash at Elk, California, while they were on their last training flight before going overseas.41 Not all accidents were fatal, but some were, and none were comical except once when an air cadet pilot got lost in his formation on a black night. Others were also lost and trying to find the lead plane. “It was awful,” McGovern said.  “People were scared to death.” So this one pilot saw a little white light ahead.  He started flying toward it, thinking that was the light on the wing of the lead plane. After a couple of minutes, his co-pilot tapped him and said, “You’re going 400 miles per hour.” The AT-9 could only do 150 mph. The pilot realized that what he was doing was mistaking the light, which was in fact on the ground, as being from the lead plane, and he had his AT-9 in a sharp dive. He pulled back hard, figuring that would pull the plane up, but as McGovern said, “That’s not the way it works - if a plane is going down and you pull the nose up, the plane keeps mushing down for quite a ways, until it loses its downward motion.” Exactly that happened. The plane hit the ground, a big pancake in a plowed field. But the pilot, thinking he had hit the lead plane, ordered the co-pilot to bail out. The co-pilot promptly did so only to discover that his jump from the wing to the ground was over in about three feet. He yelled to the pilot, “Don’t jump, I’m in a cornfield.” The pilots walked back to base. The next day a truck had to pull the plane out to a grassy spot where it could take off. That night, according to McGovern, “I’ve never seen a human being so mad or so scared” as the colonel in charge. He pulled the trainees into the briefing room - about 150 of them - and said, “I want you sons of bitches to turn around and look at the guy next to you, because you’re looking at the biggest asshole you’re ever going to see in your life - and so is he.” The colonel said he ought to wash the entire class out. He called it the worst class ever at Pampa. “There isn’t one of you that deserves to get your wings.” There were other problems. McGovern was now an air cadet, making $125 per month.  Eleanor was supposed to get $75 of that, but because of some bureaucratic screwup, she didn’t, while George received only $50. So she lived on the $50, as best she could, while he lived on the base. They were too proud to tell their parents that they needed help. Instead, Eleanor lived mainly on crackers and peanut butter. “She doesn’t eat much anyway,” according to George, and the peanut butter filled her up cheaply. That went on for three months. To buy civilian clothes and other necessities, and to expand her diet, she got a job as a legal stenographer with a law firm.