When you get married, you wonder how long it’ll be before your first fight. Everything was speeded up in our case so we only had to wait six days. By then the squadron was on its way to California. I had to fly, and Olive was driving cross-country with Marge Duval, the wife of another lieutenant. They went in the Duvals’ convertible, and I’d hired a high school teacher to follow them with my car. It was a slightly used Lincoln that I’d bought from my commanding officer at the base, figuring that cars would soon be impossible to come by. Before we said good-bye, I gave Olive careful instructions: “There are three things I want you to remember. Don’t speed. Don’t pick anybody up. And don’t lose sight of my car. If it gets smashed up or lost we can’t replace it. I’ll see you in California.” We are both pretty independent, but I knew a lot more about the world than she did, and I thought I could save us trouble by telling her exactly what to do. I had no idea what I was getting into. Right off the bat she and Marge found it hard to keep the two cars together, going through towns with stoplights. By the time they reached Texas on the third day, they’d completely lost track of the high school teacher and my car. Then they pulled up at a gas station and the man running it asked, “Would you mind giving my son a ride to the next town? He has to catch a train and he’s going to be AWOL unless he can get there.” So they let the boy climb in back. Finally they started to speed, because the road was long and flat and they were worried the high school teacher had gotten ahead of them.
Meanwhile my squadron had flown only as far as Midland, Texas, where we had to stop because the weather ahead was bad. I looked on a map at the route the girls would take, and thought, “Olive might come by here today!” So I got an old crate and a Sunday paper and sat down beside the highway, near a railroad crossing. Within an hour, along they came—two beautiful girls in a blue convertible with the top down. I threw the papers up in the air and yelled, and they stopped—quite a distance down the road, because they’d been going so fast. That was number one. As they backed up, a lonesome-looking private sat up in the backseat, where he’d been asleep. That was number two. I was awfully mad. I asked Olive what he was doing there and ordered the poor guy out of the car.
Suddenly it dawned on me that my own car was nowhere in sight. I started hollering, “Where’s my car? Where’s my car?” Olive became so flustered that she couldn’t say where she’d seen it last. Probably she was thinking about divorce. In the midst of all this, a train rumbled by, and by the oddest coincidence it was the train carrying our squadron’s enlisted men and ground equipment. They recognized us and started yelling and hanging out the windows. If I hadn’t been in such a fury it would have been funny. As it was, we went to a hotel and I called the state police; the schoolteacher had reported in to them and of course the car was fine. We drank champagne that night and I finally stopped being sore.
Our base in California turned out to be an unlit, unpaved airfield at San Bernardino, about fifty miles from Los Angeles. We spent Christmas there in tents. It was terribly bleak; not many of the men had their wives nearby. Luckily Olive had gotten a room at the Mission Inn, quite a nice hotel where I’d stayed with my parents long before. On Christmas Eve she and I got some bourbon and about ten gallons of milk, and we went to the tents and served milk punch to the whole squadron.
At first the squadron sat on that field with no idea what to do, but on the fourth day after Christmas we got our orders. Our mission was to fly up and down the coast looking for Japanese submarines. The flight plan never varied. We would go straight over Los Angeles, out to sea about ten miles, then parallel to the coast at four thousand feet for maximum underwater visibility. When we got as far north as Salinas we went inland, refueled, and came back the same way. We were flying clumsy airplanes called O-47s. The O-47 carried a pilot, an observer, and a gunner. It looked like a pregnant animal with the observer down in the belly peering out of small windows. It had one .30 caliber machine gun, which we weren’t supposed to use if we spotted a submarine because it would just scare the Japanese away. Instead we were supposed to orbit the thing and radio March Field, just east of Los Angeles, where they had loaded bombers ready to attack. Our airplanes were ludicrous for the job. You needed to be able to go slowly and spot, but to do that in such heavy, high-speed machines was very difficult.
In my time off I had a lot of fun. Right after New Year’s I rented a little stucco cottage in town for Olive to share with John Gwynne’s wife. It was a two-bedroom cottage with cheap rugs and motel furniture, and we shared a bath and kitchenette—pretty primitive living. The squadron would drop in for parties on the patio, and we’d serve booze, ginger ale, and sandwiches. One night I had all thirteen officers there and things were really hooting when the police came and told us to quiet down. We started our excuses by saying, “Well, we’re going off to war.…” The cops took off their hats and guns and joined the party.
Near our place was a resort in the San Bernardino Mountains called the Arrowhead Springs Hotel, and on days off Olive and I would drive there. I remember seeing movie people, like Lana Turner. We were ordered not to go more than thirty miles from our post, but once, when Gwynne and I had a twenty-four-hour leave, the four of us went to Los Angeles. I guess they hadn’t seen many aviators there. John’s wife Cornee was good looking and so was Olive, so someone took our picture and it appeared on page two of the Los Angeles Times. Luckily nobody picked up the fact that we were off limits by twenty miles.
In the first two months of the war, it looked like the Japanese were overrunning the entire Pacific. They attacked and conquered Hong Kong and captured much of the Philippines, until Bataan and Corregidor were all that was left. Far to the east, they took over Wake Island and set up a base. It wasn’t hard to imagine that California would be next. But I don’t think our squadron sighted a single submarine. Los Angeles had an air raid scare in which all the lights in town went out and machine guns fired into the sky at nothing. But gradually it became obvious that the Japanese were overextended and they weren’t coming. Sub patrol began to seem meaningless and our morale began to sink.
I had to go out of my way to avoid confrontations with Major Nelson, our commander. Our first run-in had been back in Anniston, where I was the squadron safety officer, and he thought I took my responsibility too seriously. It made no difference to him that the airplanes we were flying were hard to maneuver and that the runway on our field was dangerously short with a mountain at one end. Whenever I’d make a suggestion to improve our procedures, Nelson would make fun of me. He thought I was a spoiled rich boy; I thought he was about the poorest leader I’d ever met. After we’d been in California a few weeks they started to pluck men out of our unit to replace crews that had been shot down in New Guinea. The way Nelson let us know about this was by getting the squadron together one morning, calling off three names, and saying, “Let that be a lesson to the rest of you guys. Straighten up or you’re next!” I thought, “This is no way to send men off to fight.” It would have been great if the Army had kept us together, given us decent airplanes, and made us a bomb squadron. We had working relationships with each other and we all knew our jobs. But it was obvious they were just going to pick us to pieces, and our commander was complying instead of trying to get the best deal for his men.
I decided to use every tool at my disposal to transfer out of there before Nelson got me. Ever since then, when I think trouble is coming my way, I’ve always taken evasive action. Even if it means making a mistake, I never lie dead in the water. I sent wires to everyone I knew in positions of command, saying I wanted to fly bombers. I went to our group commander and tried to convince him that the military could use my experience elsewhere, but he didn’t rise to the bait. Meanwhile three more crews got selected. Every time Nelson lined us up I’d think, “It’s going to be Watson.” Finally I was desperate; I called my father. I told him, “I’m not shirking. I want you to help me get into bombardment, and I want to join a squadron that’s just being formed so I can go through trainin
g and know the people I’m flying with.”
Dad was quiet for a moment and said, “Tom, I’m reluctant to do this. I’m concerned I might get you into a position worse than the one you’re in now. But I’ll tell you what—I’ll have Mr. Nichol go see General Marshall.”
I said, “Oh, that’ll be high enough.” George Marshall was nothing less than the army chief of staff; Fred Nichol was the executive we’d sung about in IBM school, Dad’s trusty number-two man. Just like they taught us in Endicott, Dad was aiming high—calling at the top.
I never thought Nichol would get anywhere, but about a week later I was called to the adjutant’s tent and handed a telex ordering me to the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I had no idea what that was. I said, “Gee, I don’t know whether I want to do this or not.…” A colonel from another unit, who happened to be standing nearby, said, “Hell, let me have that telex. I’ll see if I can go!” That’s how I knew I really had something. As it turned out, the Leavenworth school was one of the most coveted assignments in the Army. The top brass had all been there, and generals chose their aides directly from the graduating class.
Within two days Olive and I were in the car headed for Kansas, with our dog and three or four ginger ale boxes that contained everything we owned. We’d now been married two months and she was pregnant. Somehow we’d gotten gasoline tickets for the trip, and we took advantage of the drive to do a bit of honeymooning. On the first night we stopped at the Grand Canyon and saw the lovely scene of snow coming down through dim moonlight. When we got to Leavenworth we moved into a big old house downtown. The house had been divided up into apartments with beaverboard partitions. It was so primitive that I could talk to Olive while she was taking a bath and I was in the kitchen cooking dinner, but to us it was fun.
I was the only lieutenant in a class of about one hundred. The rest were majors and captains and lieutenant colonels, and people like Marshall and Eisenhower came to lecture us. Thanks to Dad’s help, I’d gotten myself in way over my head. My classmates were mostly career army officers already familiar with battle tactics. The Command and General Staff School built on that. We studied things like how you place your machine guns if you’ve got a valley to defend. None of this had anything to do with flying, but the Army was putting Air Force officers through the school because there was nowhere else to train them.
We had thirteen papers to do, and if you failed three, they threw you out. The grading system was called USA: Unsatisfactory, Satisfactory, and A. By some miracle my first paper was an A, but the second one was a U. That scared me, and I told Olive, “This is serious. Two more of these and I’m out. I’m really going to have to work at this.” So I moved out of our apartment and into the room I’d been assigned on the base, and I started studying like hell. I saw older men, senior artillery and cavalry officers, packing their bags, crying because they’d flunked out and their careers were ruined. I got a second U right away, but somehow I pulled through without a third.
Olive put up with living alone without a murmur. This girl I’d married for her beauty and kindness saw with great clarity how desperately I needed to avoid another failure. She also seemed to have a sixth sense about my relationship with Dad. I learned about that one night when my merry friend Nick Lunken—the one who had played that amazing joke on me at IBM school—came to visit. He’d just failed his army physical, I’d just earned another S on a paper, and we were both in the mood for fun. We went to a candlelight dance and Nick said to me, “These are metal chairs we’re sitting on. Let’s sneak under the table and put candles under a couple of people!” I thought that was a terrific idea, so we did it. I had just about made it back to my place when the people we’d picked screamed and jumped out of their chairs. Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. It was the aide of the assistant commandant of the base. He said sarcastically, “I thought you’d like to know that Colonel Shallenberger is amused by your antics.”
Olive witnessed this and gave me a pretty strong talking- to later on. “You’ve got to watch this business,” she said. “When you graduate your father’s going to be here, and you don’t want to be the class clown.” She caught me completely off guard. Two months earlier I’d been giving her hell for being irresponsible with my car, but when it came to Dad’s expectations, she had a better idea than I did about what constituted the straight path. From that night on, she helped keep me on it.
Dad did come to my graduation. He was proud of my accomplishment, although it seemed to me he was a little subdued. While he was in town, he got a fellow from the Kansas City Art Institute to paint my portrait—IBM had some connection there. The painting wasn’t so hot, and once I figured out why Dad had had it done, looking at it made me uneasy. He knew that by graduating I’d just moved closer to the war, and he was preparing himself in case I got killed.
Finally I felt in a position to do something that counted. My war was going to involve flying airplanes, the one thing I knew I was good at. The Air Force was bursting with activity, expanding from three hundred fifty thousand men to more than two million. The Battle of Britain had made it obvious that no one was going to win the war without mastering the air; from now on airplanes were going to be as important to victory as battleships or tanks. I was thrilled to be part of this, and even though in the end I didn’t get promoted as far as some people, or come back with as many medals, my successes were my own. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t worried about being overshadowed by Dad.
At the time I left Leavenworth one of the big jobs facing the Air Force was transporting heavy bombers to England. The U.S. Eighth Air Force, which was based there, was getting ready to start daylight raids against the Nazis, and American factories were churning out new planes, such as B-17s, by the thousands. These airplanes couldn’t hold enough fuel to make it directly across the Atlantic to their bases in England. They had to skirt the ocean, flying up the Atlantic seaboard to Newfoundland, across with stops in Greenland and Iceland, and finally down through Scotland. The airplanes’ jumping-off place was New England, part of the territory of the First Air Force, and that was where I was assigned.
My first job was a minor one. In those days most army pilots didn’t know how to fly on instruments, and there were numerous crashes. A pilot would enter a cloud bank, lose his sense of direction, and fly right into the ground. I was supposed to help remedy this by promoting the use of Link trainers. These were crude flight simulators, and if a man spent enough time in one he could learn to fly blind. All the air bases had them and the trainers would have helped a great deal, except that most pilots didn’t know about them. I was supposed to change that. It was basically a sales job, and I worked hard at it because it was my first chance in the Army to shine. I flew to bases from Presque Isle, Maine, to Philadelphia, preaching Link trainers. I badgered commanders for statistics on trainer usage and showed them how theirs compared with the records of other bases. I got senior officers to write letters recommending the things. I went totally overboard—but usage of the trainers went up by a factor of six and I think I saved some lives.
This modest success caught the attention of Major General Follett Bradley, the head of the First Air Force. In June 1942, he asked if I would become his aide-de-camp. His offer took me by surprise and posed a real dilemma. If I said no, it might hurt my chances in the Air Force; but if I said yes, I might be getting into a personal service job that I didn’t want and didn’t know how to handle. There was also Olive to think about, because the wives of generals’ aides always end up working as aides to the generals’ wives. But we decided that the job was a step forward, and I took it. It was the best thing that could have happened.
I have worked for two great managers in my life. My father was one and the other was Follett Bradley. Bradley was one of the pioneers of the Air Corps, having been, among other things, the first to make a radio transmission from an airplane to the ground. He joined right after World War I, when the Air Corps was known as a place
for daredevils, ne’er-do-wells, and drunks. But Bradley was a skillful flier and a natural leader. Like Billy Mitchell and Jimmy Doolittle he understood that the Air Corps was going to become really important. He was about fifteen years younger than Dad, nearly bald with only a fringe of white hair, and he had a round face with deep-set penetrating eyes. He smoked from a long cigarette holder and wore pince-nez which he kept in his left breast pocket, attached by a black ribbon around his neck. A fine-looking man, fun to talk to, and a great builder of morale. He took a couple of rides with me in his twin-engine B-23 to make sure I was competent, and immediately made me his pilot. After that he’d frequently ride down in the plane’s nose, chatting with some other officer while I sat proudly at the controls, gaining confidence by the minute. I wanted to be as much help to him as I could.
Bradley was busy making inspections around New England, trying to get the bombers overseas faster. There were problems with overcrowding and delays at airports along the transport route. At the first field we came to, in northern Massachusetts, he and a couple of other men toured the base while I stood waiting near the plane. Before they came back I said to myself, “This is a great waste of time.” I needed to assure myself that I was something more than an aerial chauffeur.
Father, Son & Co. Page 11
