Pilot Training

 

In my third year of college the dorm I lived in was emptying out as people were drafted. The Korean war was going full tilt, and though MacArthur's Inchon landing had succeeded, as the semester drew to a close the Chinese were swarming across the Yalu. I decided I didn't want to walk. I'd been a sea scout, and I checked the Navy's submarine program, but there weren't any openings, so I took the tests and the physical for the Aviation Cadet program and was accepted.

Being accepted for the Cadet program didn't get you off the draft hook. There was going to be a delay before I'd actually be assigned to a cadet class, and during that time I was vulnerable to involuntarily being turned into an Army grunt. I could have enlisted in the Air Force right away to avoid the Army but I decided to take a chance. After the semester ended in late December I started looking for a job. Richard came up with a solution. He was working for an outfit that moved new cars from the Detroit factories to the boat docks, railroads, and dealerships around Detroit. The work paid reasonably well, so I applied and got hired.

Eleven or twelve guys would pile into a beat-up delivery van with a big, wooden bumper up front and benches along the sides in back and be driven to the factory. Arriving at the factory, each of us would grab a car and with a bellwether car in the lead we'd zoom through the streets of Detroit in trail, usually doing ten MPH or so over the speed limit. The van would bring up the rear. Each car had one gallon of gas in it when it rolled off the line, so if there'd been some in-factory testing on it you might run out of gas before you got to your destination. That's why the van was bringing up the rear. If you ran out of gas the van driver would stop, pour a dollop of gas into your tank and, if the car wouldn't start right away, give you a push with that big, soft wooden bumper. Then you'd be off to the races with the van behind. With luck and some serious speeding you could catch up with the group. As far as I know nobody in one of those daisy chains ever was pulled over for speeding. To put it as politely as possible, I suspect the owner of the business "knew" the chief of police pretty well.

Sometimes you'd get called out at night to make a delivery. One night after we'd dropped off some cars at a rail yard and were in the van on the way back to the office, the crazy who was driving the van came up behind a woman who was poking along well below the speed limit, put the van's big, wooden bumper against her car and started pushing her. Looking back it's hard to believe we didn't all end up in jail.

When March, 1951 rolled round and I turned 21, I was beginning to really worry I'd be drafted, so I quit the job, enlisted in the Air Force, and reported to Selfridge AFB along with a bunch of other enlistees. We were hauled to a railroad station and put on a train for Sampson AFB in New York. For some reason the recruiting sergeant handed me the paperwork and I was in charge of the group.

Sampson AFB, New York

Sampson stopped being a storage facility for the Department of Agriculture and became an Air Force basic training facility at the end of 1950, so when I got there in March, 1951 it was pretty primitive. The drill sergeants were primitive too since they'd recently been thrown into that job. Once we got off the train we were formed up in a line to march to a marshalling area, and since I had the paperwork I was put at the head of the line. A sergeant brought up the rear. Part way to our destination some crazy pulled out of the line and jumped me. I'll never know why. The sarge pulled him off and diverted him to somewhere else, probably the nether world. Never saw him again.

I won't dwell on basic training. These were the days before we had kinder, gentler basic training for a coed military. I got sick — probably mononucleosis, the kissing disease, which had hit me earlier at U of M for a while, though, sadly, I hadn't kissed any girls there — and spent a week and a half in the infirmary. Once I got out I was assigned to a new "flight," and my new drill sergeant (actually he was a two-striper) was kinder and gentler than the first guy, but not by much. It was a weird bunch. There was a guy from Queens in New York City who believed that if you traveled west of the Mississippi you had to go by stagecoach. Many years later, when Sampson no longer was a training base, two of us flew in with a gooney bird — a C47. While the other pilot took care of some business in the local area. I wandered through the deserted barracks I'd lived in and chatted up a few ghosts.

Once basic training was over and I got my stripe I was shipped to Reese AFB, outside Lubbock, Texas. Reese was a multi-engine training base where pilot training was carried out with a bunch of beat up B25's left over from WW II. Theoretically I was assigned to aircraft maintenance, though I didn't know a damn thing about aircraft maintenance. The assignment actually was intended to store me until my cadet class started, and neither I nor the other guys in my barracks had much to do. I don't remember the name of the guy who bunked next to me, but he was a farm kid with a great sense of humor who pretended he couldn't count above two. He'd always count: "One, two… many," and stop. Some evenings the two of us would ride a bus into Lubbock and hit a couple bars (we couldn't afford to hit many). Sometimes we'd be on the streets in the middle of the night waiting for a bus back to the base when my friend would start calling hogs and I'd join in: "soooeeee… soooeee." We didn't attract any hogs but we did annoy a few passers-by. Next morning we'd take our hangovers down to the flight line, climb into an idle B25 and spend some time sucking oxygen.

Moultrie, Georgia

Finally, in late August, 1951 I got my assignment to cadet class 52G, and was given a train ticket from Lubbock to Moultrie, Georgia. I had to switch trains in Albany and the "train" for the last fifty miles into Moultrie was a single car that stopped at every highway crossing. It reminded me of a Detroit streetcar. From "downtown" Moultrie I was hauled out to Spence Field, one of nine primary pilot training bases scattered around the U.S.

Training started the first of September with a month of "preflight." During preflight you didn't fly airplanes. Instead, you marched, did calisthenics, took beginning classes in things like navigation, meteorology, basic aircraft engine mechanics, Morse code, and memorized meaningless crap you were required to parrot back to upper-classmen who always were screaming at you. When you walked you were required to walk at attention and make square corners. When you ate you were required to sit at attention, look straight ahead, raise your fork or spoon with square corners, and not talk unless you were asking to have something passed to you. Since you couldn't move your head, only the things directly in front of you were visible, so you didn't necessarily know what you might want passed. This restriction supposedly was intended to improve your peripheral vision. Looking back from the cadet preflight routine, what I'd thought was tough basic training now seemed like kindergarten. A bunch of people gave up and washed out of preflight without ever getting into an airplane.

Finally, we became fourth-classmen. We still had to walk at attention, turn square corners, and all the rest of the crap we'd been doing in preflight, but we actually began flying. Each group of four cadets was a "flight," and was assigned to an instructor. My instructor was a guy named Harold Strutz. We had a bunch of our European allies as well as Americans in the school. In this picture Strutz is stage left and on his left are a Swiss, a Dane, and two Americans, including me. For some reason, Jacques Florin, a Belgian (whose picture I don't have) and I hit it off right away and became good friends. Jacques taught me to swear in French.

During the Christmas season we were able to take a two-week leave. For a year or so I'd been going with a Finnish girl named Maria Lempio, a close friend of my cousin, Virginia. During that leave I asked Maria to marry me. She didn't give me a straight answer, and there were a couple nights she couldn't (or wouldn't) go out with me. I was going to gatherings at various friends' houses and they weren't stag affairs so I wanted a date. My brother, Richard said, "You could ask Autumn Smith. You'd like her." I was way too shy for a cold call to Autumn, so since Autumn was in Rich's class, he called and pretended to be me. She agreed to a date, and Rich was right, I did like her. We went out a couple times, and after I got back to Moultrie I did a lot of thinking and realized I really, REALLY liked her. We started writing to each other and every time I read one of her letters I liked her even more. To jump ahead a few months, one evening while I was at Webb AFB (see below) I called her from the pay phone outside the headquarters building and asked her to marry me. She said, "Yes," and that night, still going around in a glorious cloud, I wrote a letter to Maria telling her I was going to marry someone else. Got an answer a couple weeks later which pretty much politely said, "I couldn't care less."

After a month and a half you moved up from fourth class to third class. Another month and a half and you became a second-classman. Finally, a month and a half later you became a first-classman and you had the run of the place. By then you'd have logged about sixty hours of flying time and you thought you were a pretty hot pilot, though Strutz used to remind us: "There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." Weird things always were happening during primary pilot training. One day I was taxiing out in a T6 when I saw an airplane taking off on the wrong runway. The tower called him: "Aircraft taking off on the wrong runway, what is your call sign?" The guy came back: "Hey, I may be dumb, but I'm not that dumb." They never found out who he was.

Struggling through all this we learned to help each other avoid the down side of things, and we made some really close friends. Here are a couple of mine: Dick Jocylen on the left, and John Everage on the right. Both of them went through single-engine jet training with me at Big Spring, and then went to F86 gunnery school. In gunnery school, when Dick started to pull up from a high-angle dive bomb run the stick grip came off in his hand and he augered straight in.

My closest friend through primary was Joseph C. (Clint) Fiedler, who was from Benton Harbor, Michigan. He was planning to become a tennis pro after his Air Force commitment was up and he was by far the best tennis player I've known. On one long weekend his folks drove down and I joined the family for a two-night car trip to Florida, where his dad shot this picture.

Finally, the last day of primary came and I made my last flight. When I got back on the ground I turned in my parachute and sat down in the briefing room to wait for Clint so we could go to dinner together. After a while an instructor came by and told me to go on to dinner. Clint and his instructor had been "buzzing," flying low to the ground, which we weren't supposed to do. They'd hit something. The airplane was destroyed and both of them were killed. Next day I was called in and asked if I'd be willing to accompany Clint's body home for burial. I rode the train to Benton Harbor, checking the baggage car at each stop to make sure the casket was okay. Before the burial ceremony Clint's mother wanted to look inside the casket and say goodbye. It was her right and it was a close call, but I talked her out of it. I knew she didn't really want to see what was in that casket.

Our own Clint is named after Clint Fiedler.

Big Spring, Texas

When I got back to Moultrie my assignment was waiting for me. I'd hoped for single-engine training, and I got it. I was assigned to Webb AFB at Big Spring, Texas to learn to fly jet fighters. If you watch the movie, "The Midnight Cowboy," you'll see some shots of Big Spring. As one friend put it, commenting on the local ecosystem: "If it grows it'll stick ya; if it crawls it'll bite ya; if it flies it'll sting ya."

At Webb we became fourth-classmen again, but being on the bottom didn't involve the kind of crap primary training had included. At this point, instead of trying to make sure you had the staying power for the job, training was about learning to fly what, for those days, were pretty advanced aircraft. We didn't start in jets, though. We started in the T28, which was a big jump up from the T6, and looking back, was the second most fun airplane I ever flew. In the T28 you could pull six or seven g's in a loop or a steep turn and drain all your blood down to your feet without harming the airplane. We did a lot of aerobatics with it and started to learn formation flying.

Finally, we graduated to jet training and began flying the T33, which, essentially, is a two-seat F80. Of all the flights I made out of Big Spring, these two stand out in my mind:

One was a solo flight in which I was supposed to do a series of loops, rolls, Immelmanns (Google it), and other maneuvers. Almost all the T33's were equipped with tiptanks, but the one I got that morning was a "slick" with no tiptanks. Until that morning I'd never flown a slick T33. I rolled down the runway at full power and the airplane started "porpoising." The nose-down angle to the runway got steeper and steeper with each bounce and I was sure I'd had it. I pulled back the power, expecting to slide off the end of the runway, but as soon as the power came down a bit the airplane started to fly. I brought the power back up, climbed on out to the training area, and proceeded to run through the aerobatics. That near-miss illustrated what a very experienced pilot once said to me: "The airplane will fly just fine by itself. It's pilots that cause problems."

The other experience I'll never forget was a solo cross-country night flight at about 25,000 feet. As I proceeded along the preplanned route it began to seem as if the lights on the ground were growing dimmer and dimmer. I checked my oxygen mask to make sure it was snug and secure. Then I reached down to where the oxygen hose connected to its source along the floor. It was disconnected. I pulled the cord on my bailout bottle — a small oxygen bottle secured to your parachute and connected to your mask, to keep you from passing out in the chute on your way down from high altitude. A couple deep breaths and the intensity of the cockpit lights and the lights on the ground came booming up. I reached back down, jury-rigged the hose connection at the floor, dumped the nose of the airplane, descended to 7,000 feet, and flew home. It was a preview of something very bad that happened later in Korea.

But in spite of our serious training we still were 22-year-olds. Just kids. As first-classmen we were in a barracks that actually had rooms and we were two to a room. One Saturday of a long weekend when the brass was away, a guy in my barracks knocked on the door of his buddy who lived next door, and when his neighbor opened the door gave him a face full of water from a squirt gun. The squirtee and his roomie dug up some squirt guns and returned the favor. Before long one of them hauled out a fire extinguisher (they were just big water cans with pumps), and the battle was joined in the hall. After a while, after everything appeared to have settled down, the guy who'd started the war took a knife and drilled a hole through the sheetrock wall between the two rooms, poked the fire extinguisher's nozzle through the hole and started pumping away. The two guys in the other room drilled a second hole, dragged in a second fire extinguisher and started firing back. It took them all of the next two days, working full time, to mop up the water, dry out their beds, and patch the holes in the wall so they didn't show.

Finally, on October 25, 1952 we graduated and got our silver wings, our second lieutenant's gold bars, and rushed out of the ceremony to hand the traditional five bucks to the first enlisted guy who salutes. My folks and Autumn had driven down for the ceremony. We drove back to Michigan, and a couple days later, on November 1st, Autumn and I were married. Autumn's dad gave us a wedding present choice: We could take $500 cash, or a car. Autumn already had a beat-up Chevy coupe, and, in those days, $500 was a lot of money (roughly the equivalent of $4,500 today in 2015), so we took the cash and drove off on a brief honeymoon through northern Michigan, where, unbeknownst to us, Clint's life began.

Pinecastle AFB — F80's and F84's

Even though we'd graduated, the Air Force hadn't decided what our next assignments would be, so we had to go back to Webb. We drove down in Autumn's car. On the way the car overheated. I was lucky enough to find a reasonably-priced radiator shop in a northern Texas town, but as I remember, we spent one night in the car. At Webb I got my assignment to F84 fighter-bomber training at Pinecastle AFB, which was just outside Orlando, and nowadays is Orlando International Airport. But I had to wait a month or so before my class would start, and in the meantime I had to bum flying time to keep my proficiency up. We found a rental house — a converted garage on an alley — that was reasonably priced and reasonably comfortable and settled in. Its only problem was that when the bed was down you had to climb over it to get to the bathroom.

Finally, it was time to report to Pinecastle. We drove down as early as we could so we could house-hunt, and were fortunate enough to find a pretty cottage behind a house on a lake. Someday I've got to remember to look for letters from that period and see if I can find the address of that place.

We started gunnery school in F80's. The F80 was the United States' first jet fighter, and Pinecastle had some of the earliest of the bunch. At various times I flew tail numbers 003, 006, and 012, the third, sixth, and twelfth United States jet fighter. There were three varieties of F80: A, B, and C. The A and B versions were missing a device we called a "Bendix." If you were flying a bird without a Bendix and you advanced the throttle too quickly you could flame it out, which meant your engine quit. The C version with the Bendix was more comfortable to fly. Since none of these aircraft had ejection seats the only way to bail out if you got into real trouble was to jump over the side and hope you didn't get hit by the horizontal or vertical stabilizer.

I was lucky enough to get Buck Pattillo as an instructor. Before they came to Pinecastle, Buck and his twin, Bill had put together the "Skyblazers," an aerial demonstration team that was the predecessor to the Thunderbirds. Buck went on to become a Lieutenant General, and Bill a Major General. Buck got our enthusiasm and our confidence up and, among other things, taught us to do aerobatics in close formation. I remember one day when we were doing a low-level mission and our flight of four flew low over a car on a back road. The car came to a screeching halt. Two adults and two kids jumped out, and they all waved at us as we circled them.

Sometimes we'd go to a gunnery range on the East coast that had a target in the middle of a small bay. That was fun because when you fired your 50 caliber machine guns you could see exactly where you were hitting. One day I came back from one of those coastal missions very low on fuel. I got clearance for a straight-in approach and as I taxied off the runway the airplane flamed out.

Buck was pretty laid-back. There was a fuel switch, I'll call it the I95 switch — I know it was an I something switch — that you had to remember to turn off after you shut down. One day after a flight we were debriefing when a crew chief came up to the table and asked one of the guys if he'd flown a particular airplane. The pilot allowed as how he had. The chief said, "Sir, you forgot to shut off your I95 switch and the airplane burned up on the ramp." Pattillo turned to the guy and said, "Yeah, you gotta watch that."

Before you accepted an airplane for flight you'd do a thorough walk around to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be. Checking the elevators wasn't part of that inspection, but one morning we were getting ready for a high-angle dive bombing mission and as I walked past the tail of my F80 I reached up and casually gave the elevators a flip. They locked in the up position. I went back to operations and reported the problem. They immediately grounded all the F80's and ran them through a thorough inspection. Mine turned out to be the only one with a problem. A counterweight had broken loose and was floating around inside the horizontal stabilizer. If I'd flown that airplane I might have ended up the same way Dick Jocylen did.

We had our accidents. A friend named Jim Cooksey, who'd gone through the whole program with me since Moultrie, was flying an F80 and evidently didn't notice that one of his tip tanks wasn't feeding. The result was one full tank and one empty one. At low altitude he rolled into a sharp turn with the heavy tank on the low side, couldn't roll back out, and went in.

Finally we graduated to F84's. It was a rugged, heavy airplane. I didn't enjoy flying it as much as I'd enjoyed the F80, but for combat it had some advantages, the main one being that it could absorb a lot of damage without falling out of the sky. The F84's unofficial name was the "Thud" because when you landed, it paid off (stopped flying) abruptly and had a tendency to thump onto the runway.

Finally, we were finished and we got our assignments. Mine was to the 58th Fighter Bomber Wing at Taegu, Korea, but I had a month's leave coming before I had to report to the west coast for shipment overseas. We loaded up the car and headed back to Michigan.