Flyboys

by James Bradley

  The idea involved the Flyboys.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Flyboys

  We were all teenagers or barely into our twenties, totally naive to the ways of the world. Our patriotic goal was to get even for Pearl Harbor. All forty-eight states were united. Aviators would be needed to defeat Japan. We were the Flyboys. . . .

  — Pilot Lou Grab, quoted in George Bush: His World War II Years

  THE original Pearl Harbor Day found George H. W. Bush walking across the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, his boarding school. George was seventeen years, six months old, president of his senior class, a BMOC—big man on campus. He was also captain of the baseball and soccer teams, a playing manager of the basketball team, treasurer of the student council, deputy housemaster, and a member of other boards, societies, and teams.

  George’s family was wealthy and well connected. If any young man in the United States “had it made,” he did. His father, Prescott Bush, was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, the nation’s largest private bank. Young George had already been accepted at Yale. He was a thirteenth cousin, twice removed, of the future Queen Elizabeth. The prestigious Walker Cup, for international golfing competition, was named after his grandfather. With Yale on the horizon, with solid wealth backing him and important contacts willing to smooth his way in the world, George was on track to a golden future.

  On that walk across campus, someone shouted the shocking news of the surprise Japanese attack and George decided then and there to chuck his privileges. He later admitted, “I didn’t fully comprehend world affairs,” but he remembered distinctly having “the typical American reaction that we had better do something about this.”

  Recalled George, “There wasn’t any doubt which branch of the service I’d join. My thoughts turned immediately to naval aviation.”

  Halfway across the country, another future Flyboy—Floyd Ewing Hall—leading a very different life than George Bush’s, marched off to his Sedalia, Missouri, hometown post office to sign up to fight. Floyd was twenty-one years old, skinny, with brown hair and eyes. Floyd had graduated from Sedalia’s Smith-Cotton High School on May 18, 1939. He followed his dad—a welder—into employ at the Missouri Pacific Railroad yards, Sedalia’s largest employer with seven thousand workers. Sedalia was a railroad town: The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad and the Missouri Pacific Railroad had repair shops there. Sedalia, roughly in the center of Missouri, was a city of twenty thousand people, with a skating rink, a pool hall, a bowling alley, and a few bars. Floyd’s brother James Hall remembered there were two seasons in Sedalia: “We had winter and summer—cold and hot.”

  Vivian Dalton Long remembered Floyd as “a good boy, clean and wholesome-minded.” Floyd grew up across the street from Vivian and played pinochle with her. “Sedalia,” recalled Long, “was a friendly, wonderful place to live. You could walk safely late at night. That was years ago, when neighbors sat on each other’s porches and visited.”

  Floyd was typical of the hardworking American kids spawned by the Depression. “Floyd didn’t play sports,” remembered his brother, “because he didn’t have time.” Floyd’s first official job was as a soda jerk in the malt shop in the Tullis-Hall Dairy. It was a popular spot in the small city. “You’d go out there on a hot summer day,” James said, “and you’d see everybody you knew licking an ice-cream cone.” Floyd’s friend Elwood McKinney remembered, “After the big shots left, Floyd would give me all the ice cream I could eat. He was a good guy.”

  A hard worker, Floyd had some change to throw around. “I used to polish his shoes for a nickel,” Floyd’s sister, Margie Hall, remembered. “I’d make those shoes shine. I worked so hard on them. I thought I was rich.”

  One day Floyd’s father blew his stack over his son’s spending habits. Floyd had pooled his money with that of his buddy Howard Herring and bought a used convertible Model T. His father thought they had been entirely too extravagant. He focused his anger not on his son but on the man who had sold Floyd the car. “Dad,” remembered James Hall, “went down to the dealer and bawled him out for charging so much. He thought they held him up. The car cost thirty-five dollars.”

  Floyd loved the car, often brushing the snow off the frozen seats in the winter to drive it to school. No one realized it at the time, but America would soon benefit from the many young Floyd Halls who had fallen in love with their automobiles. America would fight a highly mechanized war in World War II, and airplanes—the key to that mechanized war—were the most sophisticated machines of all. “For the Allied air forces it was a priceless advantage that Western economies were firmly in the era of the internal combustion machine.” World War II military aircraft would be complex, expensive, and of vital importance. These warplanes would require many tinkerers to serve as pilots, air crews, and maintenance workers. Floyd working under the hood of his thirty-five-dollar investment or a farm kid fixing the family tractor would later help America win the air war. Japan, by contrast, was much less mechanized, exposing many fewer of its young men to machinery. “It was a bad omen when on March 23, 1939, the original Zero prototype was disassembled, loaded into oxcarts, and moved over poor roads to the large naval air base at Kagamigahara prior to its initial flight.”

  “We enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor,” Floyd’s friend Willard Chewning recalled. “We were called up a week later on December sixteenth. We boarded a train to Saint Louis together. There were different recruiters for each service, and we just got in line for the navy.” Floyd’s brother said, “There wasn’t anything my folks could say. Floyd was twenty-one; he was an adult.” On the line “Reason for Enlistment,” Floyd wrote, “Serve Country.”

  In Saint Louis, the navy examiners noted that Floyd Hall stood all of five feet seven inches tall and weighed 128 pounds. Just old enough to vote, the young man from Missouri was now one of thousands of American boys who were off to win the war.

  It was hardly surprising that boys in the early 1940s wanted to fly. Most of the Flyboys who flew off aircraft carriers in the northern Pacific in 1944 and 1945 were born in the early 1920s and grew up in the golden age of the airplane. In an era when the original “horsepower” was still making its transformation to the mechanical variation, airplanes and the airmen who flew them were impossibly exciting for impressionable young American boys. They read war stories in the pulps about World War I pilots like the Red Baron and Eddie Rickenbacker. One of the only scientific studies on the subject of bravery, The Anatomy of Courage, predicted in the 1920s that “future adventurous young men who sought glory in war would tend to seek it as pilots.”

  The most famous man in America—arguably the most famous man of the twentieth century—was an aviator named Charles Lindbergh. As a distracted college student, Lindbergh was forever changed by his first ride in an airplane. Remembering it later, he said he felt as though he had lost “all conscious connection with the past,” that he lived “only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.”

  Flying was the next new thing and had a Wild West thrill about it. Even though he had only eight hours of flying time behind him and had never soloed, Lindbergh didn’t have to show a pilot’s license when he purchased his first airplane. “They didn’t ask to see my license,” Lindbergh explained, “because you didn’t have to have a license to fly an airplane in 1923.”

  Lindbergh became a barnstormer, dropping into towns to give exhibitions and sight-seeing flights. He and his fellow travelers would perform “death-defying stunts upon arrival to lure the customers and again upon leaving so they felt they had received their money’s worth.” About risking his life, Lindbergh decided, “If I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”

  On May 20, 1927, Lindbergh readied his Spirit of St. Louis airplane at Roosevelt Field on Long Island for his solo cross-Atlantic flight. The editor of Aero-Digest asked if the five sandwiches the young man had
packed were enough. “If I get to Paris,” Lindbergh said, “I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more, either.” His mother told the press, “Tomorrow, Saturday, a holiday for me, will be either the happiest day in my whole life, or the saddest.” As the world went to sleep that night with Charles Lindbergh somewhere over the Atlantic, “modern man realized nobody had ever subjected himself to so extreme a test of human courage and capability as Lindbergh. Not even Columbus sailed alone.”

  When Lindbergh circled an airfield outside Paris thirty-three and one half hours later, he was astounded to see 150,000 people waiting for him. The huge New York Times banner headline blared, “LINDBERGH DOES IT!” and his incredible feat filled the first five pages of the newspaper. President Coolidge dispatched a navy transport to bring Lindbergh and his plane home. When the new world celebrity docked at Manhattan’s Pier A, there were 300,000 people waiting. New York City’s offices, schools, and the financial exchanges closed for “Lindbergh Day.” Four million people lined his ticker tape parade. Coverage of his reception consumed the first sixteen pages of the next day’s New York Times.

  Lindbergh’s autobiography was a blockbuster bestseller. His story appeared in textbooks, and schoolkids wrote essays in praise of Lucky Lindy’s bravery. When he toured the country, an estimated thirty million spectators—one quarter of the nation—turned out. A new magazine called Time tried to boost sales with a “Man of the Year” edition at the end of 1927. The honoree was Charles Lindbergh.

  “I was seven years old when Lindbergh flew the ocean,” remembered Flyboy Ed Baumann of the Bronx, “and he was my hero. He was the ‘Lone Eagle.’ Even at that age I could recognize that Lindbergh did what no one else would do.”

  Bruce Hayes of Brooklyn knew he wanted to fly long before WWII came along. As a boy he cut pictures of airplanes out of newspapers. He told me he still has the scrapbook in which he pasted them. “I was five years old when Lindbergh’s cruiser threw its hook at the New York pier. His plane was on the ship. That was the beginning of my love affair with flying.”

  Some fell in love from afar. Young Charlie Brown from Kingwood, West Virginia, saw airplanes only in newspapers and movie reels, but that was enough to convince him to enlist in the navy’s flying program in August of 1942.

  Airmen were the coolest of the cool. Archie Clapp, who later flew in the Pacific, told me, “I grew up in Miami and my girlfriend’s father was an Eastern Airlines pilot. He was the hero of the neighborhood.”

  Boys across the country constructed model airplanes and dreamed of their future in the Third Dimension. “I was one of those kids who built model airplanes,” Ed Baumann told me. “I sent in ten cents to join the Junior Birdmen of America, an organization of model builders. I still have the card.”

  “My brother and I,” recalled Flyboy George Heilsberg of Jersey City, “used to make model airplanes and sell them for ten cents each. We studied all the books about them. I knew more about recognition than trained sailors. We loved airplanes.”

  The sketches of airplanes that grace the first page of each chapter in this book are the handiwork of Grady York, who grew up at 1058 Dyal Street in Jacksonville, Florida. Why and how Grady first became interested in planes no one remembers. But when he enlisted on February 6, 1943, he listed only one item on the line for “Leisure-Time Activities.” He wrote, “Scale-model airplanes.”

  Grady York certainly did not look like he had the physical wherewithal to help win a war. On enlistment day, he stood only five feet four inches tall and weighed just 106 pounds. But World War II was the first conflict that truly prized combatants of small size like Grady. War in the Third Dimension required gunners and radiomen who could scrunch up in tight, confined spaces behind the pilot. Grady fit the bill.

  “He was a nice-looking fella,” his sister Pearl York Diffenderfer told me. “He always wore nice clothes. He had pictures of himself with different blondes who knew him.” Photos of Grady show an attractive youth with smooth olive skin, curly black hair, and a face handsome yet innocent, with a glowing smile. Maybe it was his air of vulnerability that attracted the girls. His cousin Betty Huckleberry admitted, “I had a crush on him. I thought the world of Grady.” Sister Pearl said even the family cat “loved him and would follow him wherever he went.”

  Grady and Pearl’s father was a carpenter, and the family was poor. Entertainment was a tire hung from the backyard tree. Sometimes Dad would come home with a truckload of sawdust for the kids to jump in. “We ate a lot of beans and spaghetti,” Pearl remembered. “Steak once in a great while. Candy just wasn’t around. I was seven years old before I had bubble gum. I remember it clearly because it was the first time.”

  Perhaps it is not so surprising that a young boy in Grady’s circumstances would dream of soaring.

  A verse from the song “Home on the Range” sums up the innocence of the small-town America that produced many of the boys who went off to World War II:

  Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

  And the skies are not cloudy all day.

  Glenn Frazier literally had a home on the range. Glenn grew up in Athol, Kansas, just six miles from the cabin where Dr. Brewster Higley penned “Home on the Range,” which later became the Kansas state song. Glenn was a redheaded, freckled, innocent, open-faced farm boy who might never have left Kansas if he hadn’t felt the need to help his country. When he signed up at the age of seventeen years and six months, he wrote just one word on the form that asked his reason for enlisting. That word was “War.”

  Glenn grew up in a small-town America more connected to the nineteenth century than the twentieth. Radio was just uniting the country, and most homes still did not have telephones or indoor plumbing. “Athol was named after the wife of the railroad superintendent,” Glenn’s cousin Eugene Frazier told me. “The most population it ever had was four hundred. When the railroad left, it went down to two hundred.”

  “Glenn’s grandfather had been a pioneer,” Eugene said. “He had a big farm that he and Glenn’s dad worked. Glenn lived out in the country next to that farm.” Eugene recalled working with Glenn to harvest the wheat and rye that grew on their grandfather’s farm. “We brought our own lunch and got paid twenty-five cents a day. That was big money for eight and nine year olds.”

  Life in Athol was quiet. “We mashed a lot of pennies when the train would go by,” Eugene recalled. “We tried to figure out how to get rich by compressing sand into diamonds. Back then, even sand, anything, was valuable to us. That was when a penny would buy an adult hand of jelly beans.”

  If not for the war, Glenn probably would have been happy home on the range all his life—or at least in Kansas City, where his parents had moved while he was in high school. His favorite class was metal work, and on his enlistment form, he cited “hunting and fishing” as avocations. During high school he worked on a construction crew erecting prefabricated houses, a job that he probably would have stuck with if not for Pearl Harbor.

  One month after high school graduation, Glenn went in for his navy physical. There, navy doctors certified that this five-foot-one-inch, 110-pound specimen of American boyhood could fight for Uncle Sam.

  When George Bush told his father that he wanted to sign up for naval aviation and postpone plans to attend Yale, Prescott was supportive, but hesitantly so. Parents across the country were torn between patriotic urges and the knowledge that their boys were, well, just boys.

  Secretary of War Henry Stimson was the commencement speaker at George’s high school graduation ceremony. “Secretary Stimson,” George remembered, “told us the war would be a long one and even though America needed fighting men, we’d serve our country better by getting more education before getting into uniform. After the ceremony, in a crowded hallway outside the auditorium, my father had one last question about my future plans. Dad was an imposing presence, six feet four, with deep-set blue gray eyes and a resonant voice.

  “‘George,’ he said, ‘did the s
ecretary say anything to change your mind?’

  “‘No, sir,’ I replied. ‘I’m going in.’”

  His father nodded and shook his hand.

  Years later, I asked former President Bush why he hadn’t taken Secretary Stimson’s advice. He answered, “By then it was too late. I wanted to fight. It was just something I wanted to do.”

  George enlisted on his eighteenth birthday, June 12, 1942. “I was a scared, nervous kid,” he recalled. He was ordered to report for training in North Carolina two months later. Prescott Bush saw his son off at New York’s Penn Station. President Bush later told me, “My dad probably wanted me to stay home. I think I was the youngest guy on the train.” George’s dad never tried to dissuade his son. But as they said their good-byes on the train platform, his father’s feelings were obvious. George remembered, “It was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry.”

  Some boys didn’t have dads to consult. When he enlisted at the age of seventeen in July of 1942, Dick Woellhof of Clay Center, Kansas, could barely remember his father, who had been dead for nine years. He had died on July 26, 1932—Dick’s eighth birthday.

  Dick’s mother, Laura, worked six days a week to support her three children. Dick was the youngest, Lawrence a year older, and Lucille the oldest. After she was widowed, Laura Woellhof had studied cosmetology and opened a beauty parlor. The family home was the upstairs apartment.

  Jane Lassiter lived across the alley from the Woellhofs and remembered Clay Center as “a small town of three thousand churchgoing people. The town had two movie houses (the Rex and Star) and a postage-sized dance floor at the Gingham Apron Restaurant, where we would try some steps to the music of the time.