Working at the Pentagon was ten times the education that IBM school had been. One of my duties was to investigate cases of cheating and stealing by Air Force personnel, and I learned a lot about human nature, including my own. For instance, I had no patience for the fact that if you didn’t prove a case from seventeen different directions, a fellow could squeeze out on some technicality. One time I had obtained a full confession and even so the case got overturned when the defense argued that I had been abrasive and threatening. I was glad I hadn’t tried to become a lawyer.
Oddly, I was much better at investigating sensitive matters, such as suspicious damage to Air Force planes or crashes in which high-ranking officers were hurt. I remember one tragic case involving an Air Force general named Uzal Ent. The fellow was a real hero who had led a daring raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Rumania. He was supposed to fly from Colorado Springs to San Antonio when his copilot got sick, and he asked the base commander for a replacement. They put in a new guy, and Ent didn’t brief him very thoroughly. When they were making their takeoff run, Ent began singing to himself, nodding his head in time to the song. The new copilot thought he was calling for the landing gear up, although normally the pilot would make a gesture and say in a loud voice, “Gear up!” When he saw Ent bob his head a second time, the copilot let the gear up. They were only going seventy knots, too slow to fly. The plane went down on its belly and one of the propellers on Ent’s side separated from its engine and walked up the fuselage. A propeller blade cut into Ent’s back and severed his spine so that he became a paraplegic. When I took the copilot’s testimony, I asked him, “If you knew the plane wasn’t going to fly, why did you put the gear up?”
He was stupid. He said, “I thought the general wanted me to!”
Work on matters like these brought me into contact with Hap Arnold, General Bradley’s boss. Arnold used me from time to time as his personal messenger. On one memorable occasion, he ordered me to get a bomber and offer Harry Truman a lift.
At that time Truman was a senator, in charge of the committee that supervised war procurement. He and his colleagues were playing hob with the Air Force because it wasn’t doing a very good job managing airplane factories. The committee would tour a bomber plant and find planes stalled on the production line because a single part was in short supply. The next thing you’d know, Truman would be blasting the Air Force in the newspapers.
General Arnold was not happy about this and he sent me to do something about it. He told me Truman was visiting his hometown of Independence, Missouri, so I got a B-25, a two-engine medium bomber that could be flown safely by one pilot, and headed out to the Midwest. I finally tracked down Truman at a church supper. From the doorway of the meeting room I could see a lot of tables arranged in a U shape, with the senator way down at the end. It might have been wiser to wait outside, but when the commanding general of the Air Force gave me an order, I obeyed. So I squeezed in behind all those people eating peas and chicken, got up to Truman, and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked around and said, “Yes, Major?”
“Sir, I know this is no time to talk, but I have a message from General Arnold and an airplane. I wonder if I could offer you a lift somewhere?”
“Yes, that would be nice. I’m going to Chicago tomorrow. Meet me at the Independence airport at ten.”
I met him there and he was very cordial, not aggressive by any means. He was wearing one of those white suits he liked so much, and a straw hat tipped down in front, and white shoes and socks—a neat, well-dressed little Midwesterner. Mrs. Truman and Margaret had come to see him off, and they couldn’t have been more affable. I took them through the B-25, then he told his family good-bye and I flew him to Chicago, which was thrilling for me—I felt proud to have a U.S. senator in my plane. When we landed at Midway Field I asked if I could have ten minutes of his time.
We went inside a fly-infested greasy-spoon restaurant with a soot-covered screen door and ordered coffee. Then he asked what my mission was. I said, “Sir, the Air Force is having trouble getting production to run perfectly, but it’s not helpful to have the Truman Committee always making remarks about us in public. The message I bring you is, could you kind of pay attention to the other services and get back to us later?” He didn’t fume or fuss. He said, “The dope I have is that your organization is the worst of any. But tell General Arnold I have his message. And thanks very much.” I carried that reply back to Washington.
The generals liked me because I got a lot done in a short time and wrote complete reports on what was accomplished. I came on pretty strong and pressed hard. Once in a while somebody who was full of pepper would say, “Now, look, for God’s sake, you’ve only been in this Air Force for four years, and I’ve been in it fifteen. So don’t think you can push me around!” At the Pentagon there were a lot of people I didn’t get along with at first—old officers who were only interested in building bureaucratic empires. But as I associated with more and more different types, I realized that to make it, you had to get along with almost everybody. If you dislike the people you work with, you’d better not show it. I learned that to be a good leader, I had to strike a delicate balance. It involved pressing to a point beyond where most people would press, but short of where I became known as a troublemaker. If a group had been through a particularly tough period of work, I knew enough to ease up and have them all over to our apartment with their wives for a drink. I also knew that if they hadn’t had much to do for a long time, they would welcome a period of intense activity.
Right after Bradley set up the air inspector’s office in early 1943 he was sent off on a top-secret mission to England. The U.S. Eighth Air Force had started daylight bombing in Europe. They flew B-17s packed in tight formations so that, theoretically, the planes could protect one another with their machine guns. But they were no match for the swarms of German fighters and the losses were horrendous. Bradley’s mission was to study the bombing results and determine if the daylight raids were worthwhile. He himself participated in raids over Germany and finally recommended that the daylight bombing proceed. But after he made his report he had a heart attack from having been at high altitudes for long periods without enough oxygen. He was only fifty-two but the Air Force retired him. He took a job with a war contractor called Sperry-Gyroscope and I saw him only sporadically after that.
I soon discovered that I worked a hell of a lot harder if I liked my boss. The new general who came in, Junius Jones, was the opposite of Bradley—a terrible fuddy-duddy. He immediately tried me out as his pilot and unfortunately liked the way I flew. He was a very odd ball, slow and ponderous without even a spark of humor. He constantly jingled the change in his pocket, which is why he had the nickname Jingle Willie. He was old and fumbly and would do the most unexpected things in an airplane. Flying with him was a nightmare. He’d sit in the pilot’s seat and say, “What do I do now, Watson?” I had to watch him all the time.
Once, on takeoff, he tried to yank a heavily loaded plane into the air before it was moving fast enough to fly. That could easily have killed us all, and I shoved the wheel forward to hold us on the ground. Approaching a landing he’d say, “Landing gear down, Watson.” And I’d point out, “We’re going a hundred and eighty miles an hour, General.” The wind would tear the sheet-metal fairings off the wheels if they came down when the plane was going that fast. Finally I’d call out one hundred forty, or whatever the safe speed was, and he’d say, “Gear down, Watson,” as if nothing had happened. I lost count of the number of scrapes I pulled him out of. Jones got to depend on me, but he got to dislike me too. As far as my military career was concerned, this was disastrous. For two full years I got stuck as a lieutenant colonel. Jones wouldn’t promote me, but he wouldn’t let me go.
With Bradley I never had any doubt that what I was doing was worthwhile. But under Jones I began to feel I should have pushed for a combat assignment when I came back from Russia. This bothered me all the time I was in Washington, and I finally decided to do
something about it in the middle of 1944, when I went with Jones to inspect the most famous airlift of the war. Japan had conquered Burma and most of the Chinese coast, essentially trapping Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese in the country’s interior. American pilots had to fly supplies for the Allies over the Himalayas, from the Assam Valley in India to Kunming in the interior of China. This was called “flying the Hump,” and the route was the most dangerous imaginable. The weather was violent—horrible storms and freakish winds that could flip an airplane upside down. The airplanes themselves were unreliable at high altitudes—the engines would ice up and stop or catch fire. So many planes crashed on one stretch of ground that it was called the “aluminum trail.” The planes that made it over often had to face Japanese fighters on the other side. But in spite of the dangers, the pilots would sometimes fly two round trips over the Hump in a day. If it hadn’t been for their heroic efforts, the war would have been over in this part of the world, and we would have lost.
The six air stations in the Assam Valley had gravel runways and were unbelievably primitive. Only one of them dated from before the war; the rest had been scratched out of the ground after the Hump airlift started in 1942, and we saw more that were still being built. The workers were civilians—whole families drafted from tea plantations—and they had almost no construction equipment. Women made the gravel for the runways by chipping large rocks with hammers, and you’d see them carrying it in baskets on their heads to the construction site. The runways were crude and bumpy but a welcome sight to pilots. Some of these air stations were undisciplined—with sloppy quarters and high disease rates—but they were succeeding in moving thousands of tons of supplies. To keep the planes in the air, the mechanics had to provide a level of maintenance that was practically impossible in such a rough place, and they worked around the clock to do it. I saw men changing engines in 110-degree heat in the open sun, and doing major overhauls in wind and rain.
When we got to the Assam Valley, the monsoon was just beginning, but that made no difference to flight operations. Planes took off and landed for sixteen hours each day under low skies and in heavy downpours. It wasn’t part of my official duties, but at the first opportunity I pushed myself onto a mission over the Hump. I’d heard so much about its terrors and difficulties that I felt I owed it to myself and the army to find out what the pilots were up against.
The pilot I went with was a young captain named Carpenter who was taking four tons of oil to Kunming; I flew as copilot. We wore oxygen masks, heavy boots, and parachutes. We had silk maps that showed how to walk out if we got shot down, and money belts so we could trade with the natives. The route we were assigned involved a four-hour trip, two of those hours behind Japanese lines. We took off in dark and rain before dawn and cleared the high ridges flying at twenty-one thousand feet on instruments, using oxygen masks on the way up. After daybreak we could see patches of ground below, but fortunately there were enough clouds to help us hide from Japanese fighters. For the third time I thrilled at the sight of China—even though this part was held by the Japanese. I could see little isolated valleys beneath us, with every inch of ground under the most intensive cultivation, and neat clusters of thatched huts.
We landed at Kunming on a runway where coolies were constantly at work refilling holes from the Japanese bombardment. We delivered our oil, and then Carpenter took me to a very primitive restaurant at the edge of the field. A Chinese guy ran it, and when he saw us coming he said, “Eggis, eggis.”
I asked Carpenter, “What the hell does that mean?”
“He means eggs.” It was all the restaurant had to serve. I ate eggs and eggs and eggs—eight of them. I guess fear had made me hungry.
On the way back to India, Carpenter let me fly. I made a textbook landing when we reached Assam, and it gave me a triumphant feeling to know that I’d been over the Hump. Undeniably it could be the worst flying route in the world, yet I thought I could handle it. That night I got carried away, and enthusiastically imagined myself commanding one of the air stations in the Assam Valley, participating in the contest among stations to see which could put the most tons over the Hump each month.
After a couple of days I went back to Kunming, sought out General Claire Chennault, the commander of the Fourteenth Air Force, and asked for combat duty. Chennault was famous in the world of aviation as the founder of the American Volunteer Group, or Flying Tigers. This was a squadron of American military pilots who slipped into China to fight on the Nationalist side long before the U.S. was in the war. At that time Chennault was retired from the U.S. Army and serving as air adviser to Chiang Kai-shek; Roosevelt knew all about his activities and looked the other way. The Flying Tigers flew obsolete fighters and were heavily outnumbered, but Chennault was such a brilliant tactician that they disrupted Japanese air operations all across China and Burma. After Pearl Harbor, the Flying Tigers were absorbed into the Air Force, and Chennault went back on active duty. The squadron gradually grew into an entire air force, and by the time I arrived had even launched an air raid on Japan itself, the first since Jimmy Doolittle’s daredevil bombing of Tokyo in 1942.
Chennault was ill on the day I met him. He only agreed to see me at the recommendation of Colonel Clayton Claassen, my closest friend from the Pentagon, who was now serving as chief of operations in Chennault’s command. I found the general lying in his hut with a nurse by his cot. I’ll never forget that face, which was scarred from a number of plane crashes and had no expression at all. He asked if I’d like to join him.
“I would very much, General Chennault.”
“We need people like you. I’m going to put in a request.” If that request had gone through, I might have stayed in the Air Force for life. But when old Jingle Willie got wind of it about a week later, he had other ideas. “I’ve had a request for you,” he told me, “but I’ve turned it down because you’re too important here.”
I suppose I could have pursued it further. But in the interim I’d pushed my way onto another combat flight as an observer, and it had scared me enough to last the whole war. It was a medical evacuation flight over a new route that followed a series of mountain passes into Burma. This paralleled the so-called Ledo Road, and it was expected to become a major airlift route, lower and less dangerous to fly than the Hump. It led to a jungle airfield that had just been captured by American and Chinese troops under General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. He was the senior American general in this part of the world, a tactician who was supposed to train and equip the Chinese and urge them onward in the fight against Japan. In 1942 the Japanese had crushed Stilwell’s army and chased him out of Burma, but now he was back on the attack. There was a major battle going on for the town of Myitkyina, around which several thousand Japanese were dug in. Stilwell had large numbers of wounded as well as men critically sick with dysentery and typhus. They all had to be taken out.
The pilot, a Lieutenant Taylor, told me he’d been convicted of selling black-market cigarettes and had been assigned to fly this route for another year as his punishment. We took off in weather that would have been considered unflyable in the States—a ceiling of three hundred feet with one-mile visibility. When he and his copilot took us up the first valley we were flying so low that, according to the elevations on the map, we were flying underground. The only reassuring thing was the uncanny way Taylor knew where we were. Every few minutes he’d tell me that a road or a hamlet was just ahead, and it would turn up exactly as he had said. But as we got into the narrowest part of the pass, we ran into solid fog. We were flying at less than a hundred feet, and I was sure the end had come. I curled up behind Taylor’s seat and braced for the crash. Taylor said, “What the hell? You want to live forever?” We cleared a final ridge in heavy rain and after that the clouds were at about four hundred feet and we stayed below them. I watched a very green, lush, flat valley rushing by, and noticed a number of wrecked DC-3s that had been shot down, which was far from reassuring. Finally we started to circle, and I s
aid, “How can you tell where the battle lines are?”
Taylor said, “Well, they keep changing. But the Japanese only have small arms to shoot at us with, so don’t worry.” At last we landed. We were so close to the lines that I could hear small arms fire, which made me awfully jumpy. Suddenly right behind me there was a tremendous whoom and I dove for cover only to see that nobody else did. I hadn’t noticed that I’d been standing right next to a camouflaged 75mm cannon.
The field hospital was run by a doctor named Gordon Seagrave, a friendly, kindly man who’d spent twenty years in Burma as a missionary doctor before the war. Now he was in the U.S. Army and had just written a successful book called Burma Surgeon. Seagrave’s hospital was cut into the side of a hill, with a crude grass roof the only protection. All around were wounded men covered with jungle mud and blood and bugs—a terrible sight and terrible smell—but somehow Seagrave kept the infection rate very low.
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