Interview by Daniel Jackson, October 15, 2016

I was surprised to hear that both your brothers also became pilots during the war?

Yes. They were bomber pilots. One was a B-17 pilot and one was a B-24 pilot.

What was it about your family that made you all so fascinated with flying?

Well, I don’t know about the other two, but I knew I didn’t want to be on the ground in the trenches.

Did you grow up in a military family?

Well, my grandfather was a Confederate soldier. And my uncle was a World War 1 soldier. I had a cousin who fought in the Spanish-American War. So we kind of had a history, but we weren’t a military family – not by a long shot. My grandfather used to tell us stories about when he was – he didn’t like Sherman and he didn’t like Yankees! He was captured in South Carolina and sent to prison in Baltimore. He wasn’t too happy about that. And I understand that Sherman’s people burned his house down. He had reason not to like him. But he would tell the older of us three – they actually had five children, and two died in infancy. I was the second son. And then they had two girls. They were Mary and Joan. My sister Mary – older sister – was a wonderful golfer of course. She was an amateur, but she played with the likes of Patty Burg, Louise Suggs, Meg Dietrichson. Not as a rule, but she played with them several times. She never went proam or anything like that. But Mary was I think either three or four-time amateur state champion, for golfer. She gave me a set of clubs that one of the companies had given her – I don’t remember which make or manufacture it was. But they gave her a set of clubs and she gave them to me. I put five golf balls and one golf club in the lake! Then I gave the clubs away. A golf swing is not natural. Baseball is. Minor league ball was fun. Americus, when I was little, was an affiliate of the Dodgers, I think.

It sounds like Americus was a pretty good place to grow up.

It was fantastic, yeah. We had my grandparents, on both my mother’s side and my father’s side. My father’s people were all Baptists. My mother’s people were all Catholics. And I think we might have had some bootleggers on each side. I don’t know! Not really, but we had a lot of drinkers, I know. But Americus was fun to grow up in: minor league ball, tennis. I’ll tell you a tennis story. We had a tennis team. Three of us played a lot of tennis together. One of them became number one on the team. And the other buddy and I became doubles. We won the district championship and then we went to Macon to play for the state championship. We thought we were pretty good. We played two boys from Atlanta. One was crippled and one was half blind. I think they beat us six-nothing.

You know a lot more about this than I do. Most of the action 14th Air Force was really down south.

I disagree. It pretty well covered the entire country.

Well I know we sat on our rear ends so much that I didn’t at times feel like a competent pilot. You have to fly to be competent. You know exactly what I’m talking about. The more you fly, the more confident you get in your own ability and the better you are.

When you say you guys sat around a lot, are you talking about when you were at…?

At Chengdu.

When you pushed forward to Xi’an, it seemed like you were quite a bit busier.

Well, yes we were. But at Chengdu we were really sitting on our rear ends most of the time. My squadron, and the group, as a matter of fact, got more combat time in Burma than it did in China. But the 23rd Fighter Group really were the group that claimed the mantle of the Flying Tigers.

Chennault called everybody in the 14th Air Force the Flying Tigers. The Chinese still call everyone the Flying Tigers…

We never called ourselves the Flying Tigers though, especially when we were over there. I don’t think I knew I was a Flying Tiger until ten years later – not quite that much.

So you just saw yourself as a line pilot in the 311th Fighter Group?

Yeah. The people here, they all think I was a Flying Tiger. I tell them I was not one of the original Flying Tigers. I don’t want to live off of that well-deserved fame. They were a special group of people.

True, but most of the AVG’s combat took place in Burma. You were the American the Chinese actually interacted with. So when they say Flying Tiger, you’re who they’re thinking about.

Yeah, that’s probably right to a degree, but the AVG – Chennault trained the Chinese pilots before he got the AVG down at Zhijiang, we called it. We went there, as a matter of fact, on the last trip I was on.

When people think of China, they think of rice paddies. At Xi’an you were in wheat country, correct?

Yeah, wheat or corn or whatever it was. They still used human fertilizer though. That I remember. China is a beautiful country. You get on the Yangzi and go through those gorges. What is astounding to me is how they have rebuilt that country. I don’t know if rebuilding is the word, but they have so much modern stuff now. Where there was an airbase now there are ten thirty-five-story buildings. We went to Xi’an ten years ago and I don’t think it looked to me like that city had changed near as much as some of the other places.

My first mission – I don’t know if I told you about that mission – but my first mission we flew up over the Gobi Desert into Mongolia. Who in God’s green earth knew we were flying a combat mission into Mongolia, for crying out loud, during World War Two? Trains. We caught a train almost immediately. They let me have first crack at it since this was my first mission. I got too close to it. Hell, if they had a BB gun they could have shot me down! I got a lot of ragging about that. I didn’t know what I was doing.

Were most of your missions out of Xi’an against railways?

Yeah. They were. That’s about ninety percent of what we did – maybe more – looking for trains and troops and stuff like that. I recall once or twice they had static lines – trench warfare up there in the hills. And we had a spotter. I think his name was Sullivan, I’m not sure. He came back looking for us one time. We were scared to death he was going to kill us! We bombed pretty close to him!

Was he OSS?

I think he was, yes. He was a captain.

So you also flew close air support?

Close air support, I guess. We dropped napalm. We were dropping napalm in the trenches. And that’s an awful way to die. You would see people come out in flames. But we dropped bombs. We dropped napalm in the trenches. I think I went up there twice. I’m not sure about that. I know I went up there once because of what happened on that one mission. Somebody said he was at the base looking for us.

The anti-aircraft fire taking down your planes, were those point defenses or were they mobile on the train?

Well, they had some on the trains, but most of it was small arms, I think, machineguns. It wasn’t what I would call anti-aircraft fire, it wasn’t anti-aircraft in that it wasn’t heavy stuff. Not a lot of what you think of in Europe, where you could walk on the stuff. You know, not many people know about the B-17s and the B-24s, the way those boys went out, just got slaughtered. Until the Mustang came along. They lost more people than the Navy and the Marines combined! And you think about that’s just one air force, just the Eighth Air Force. It looks to me like you’d have to hold a gun on them to get them back in the airplanes. They did an amazing job. Fantastic.

The 311th Fighter Group lost one P-51 for every one hundred ground attack sorties, while the 25th Fighter Squadron, which kept its P-40s, lost one for every three hundred ground attack sorties.

Isn’t that something. The P-40 was a sturdy airplane. I don’t know what happened to my airplane. I don’t know what they hit. The engine instruments didn’t look that bad – as far as the temperature and stuff like that. But all I know is I had some smoke in the cockpit. But it was more like an electrical smoke. And I did get a loud bang, but I still wonder what they hit.

It seems like it happened pretty fast.

It did.

You were probably out of the cockpit in a couple minutes at the most?

Something like that. My wingman didn’t even know I was hit. So they must have hit the radio. But I accused him of being deaf because he should have been able to hear me!

Was their discussion in the squadron on how to mitigate the weaknesses of the airplane?

Not really. Not for what we were doing. The losses you talk about – I don’t think I ever realized the losses were that bad. We knew to come across the target instead of parallel to it and stay low – as you passed over the target stay low before you pulled off. That gave them less chance to hit you. And things like that. Tactics maybe. But not so much with the airplane. In fact the airplane was the airplane. We thought we had the best airplane in the world. Everybody loved the Mustang. That’s what everybody wanted to fly. As a matter of fact, I did not like the P-40. The P-40 I thought was stiffer than the Mustang and had that narrow landing gear and great big nose up there. The first time I flew one I think I went ten miles before I thought to get the wheels up!

I always heard that the P-51 was a real pilot’s airplane.

It was. Everything was seeable, reachable – it really was just a fantastic airplane. They took me up at PDK a few months ago. They’ve got a seat in the back of the thing. In fact I may have a picture somewhere. It wasn’t like flying it. They didn’t have a stick in the back. But you can’t see, sitting in the back where the tank was. You can’t see out. You don’t have the horizon. It was worse than flying instruments! And the Mustang was not a great instrument flying aircraft.

I told you about our instrument landing systems, you have to come in, pick up the rail line from the Yellow River bend and you picked up the railroad back to Xi’an. And we would get to the second bridge from Xi’an, east of it, and we’d do a timed turn – about a minute I guess. The first plane would go, lead would go, the other three would go around again, so we had a minute between each plane. But then you’d slow down to about two hundred miles an hour or a hundred and eighty, somewhere like that. You’d come to the next bridge and drop five or ten degrees of flaps, slow down to about a hundred and fifty, and turn right along the wall of the town. You had to count eleven guard posts. Eventually we got smart and painted a big white circle around it. There you’d turn thirty-five degrees, drop your flaps, drop your gear, and land. That’s instrument landing! We didn’t have to do that much, but that was the procedure.

Up there I would assume more low-visibility than low-ceilings?

Yeah. That’s exactly what it was.

Did you have a lot of anxiety about being caught out by the weather and not being able to make it back?

Yeah. Well, we had some of that. I went up in a sandstorm one day. I was leading a flight. Again, we were going up over the Gobi Desert – this is maybe ten or fifteen missions later. They told us the weather was good all the way – clear. I was leading the flight. Curtiss got sick. But we ran into a sandstorm. So I told them, I said, “we’ll go back and we’ll drop the bombs in the river.” Well Al Calendar, that rascal, heard me. He was a hundred miles away, probably. “The hell you will! Those bombs are too precious! Too hard to get! Land with them!” So we landed with the bombs. Of course they weren’t armed, so it was alright. He was a bird. He was a great fellow. Al had three DFCs. He may have had five. He had fourteen Air Medals. He was credited with something like four and a half air victories. And I think they eventually gave him the other half, I’m not sure.

What kind of leader was he?

He came in later. He came in originally as operations officer. He was at Pinellas Air Base in St. Petersburg, when I was learning to fly a Mustang. Well they had a P-40 squadron there too. And he was the CO of that P-40 squadron. But I told him what a lousy job he did teaching us to fly! He said, “Well, that’s all I had to work with!” He always had a quick comeback. Great fellow. I named him “The Generalissimo.” But he’s a nice fellow.

Did you get briefed on evasion procedures?

Well one thing I remember – this was just a normal conversation – they told us, “don’t stand up when you get ready to bail out.” So that’s the first thing I did, was stand up. We knew – I don’t know if it came from having been out there or just sitting around talking, or if it was official instructions, but we knew pretty much wherever we were out there, which way to go if you got hit to have the best chance of getting help. And that’s kind of exactly what I did. I knew pretty much where I was was controlled by the Communists. But again in China, over here you’d have an area controlled by the Communists, by the Nationalists, by the Japanese, by bandits – whomever. It was a very very fractured country. And you really didn’t know what you were going to get. That last thing, I don’t know if you remember the last place I was. That was like an oasis in the middle of hell. Well, hell, it wasn’t that bad, the whole thing. I was just very lucky. But to see this compound out there, in the middle of nowhere, have a fellow come out of the gate, talk to you in Oxford English, see all this beautiful corn, watermelons – it was amazing.

Was he a communist?

No, I don’t think he was. I didn’t meet him. But I was talking to the fellow that worked for him. I don’t remember his name either. He’s one name I should remember. He talked kind of British. But if people spoke English, that’s what they were exposed to. He spoke very, very good English. He was a smart man, no question about that. But to find that place out there in the middle of Communist China. He may have been Communist. If he wasn’t, they left him alone, evidently. Because the whole area – not the whole area, most of it – was, the place I was before that was controlled by the Communists, I know because they gave me a big banquet that damn near killed me!

Where did you learn about the hand signal for the Eight Route Army?

Damn if I know, Dan. I don’t remember. They may have told us that in the briefing. That that’s the signal for the Eight Route Communist Army. Because I knew that that particular area was controlled by the Communists.

Did you have any preconceptions about the Communists that was changed in your face-to-face interaction with them?

Well, I of course am very much opposed to communism. But if communism would work in any place, it should have worked in China. They had such a mass of people you know, five hundred million people. Now they’ve got a billion and a half or whatever it is. It’s hard to control five hundred million people. I’m afraid that’s where our country is headed. We’re so damn divided and so damn diverse. You can’t get people to do what you would like to see done. I’m scared of Trump, to tell you the truth. Not Trump maybe particularly, but the result of him. I’m scared of her the other way: socialism. One’s going this way, one’s going that way. We need somebody to go this way [middle]. We don’t want to go this way, we don’t want to go that way, we want to go that way [middle]. And so what do you do about it? Then you get some jackass that thinks he knows the answer! Then the first thing you know, he’s a dictator. And life gets worse.

You’ve met Mao Zedong. At the time, it must not have seemed particularly significant. When it did register that “Wow, I met that guy”?

Well, to say that I met him is maybe an overkill. We were there. We were introduced to him. But did I meet him? I don’t know [if I’d say that]. We did not know that much about him. That’s a hard question to answer because I don’t really remember. I think that when I got home and Chiang Kai-shek – they were having the war over there. We knew that Mao Zedong was opposed to Chiang Kai-shek and we were on Chiang Kai-shek’s side. Well everybody now thinks that Chiang Kai-shek was the devil, but at least he was on our side. That’s one of our problems where we are now. Sometimes you have to deal with the devil. You may not want to, but you have to take the best of the worst. I think we’re all human. And we want to be left alone as much as we can. But at the same time we want the protection that the government affords. We want our families to be safe, and so forth. I think regardless of the culture, I don’t care whether you’re Hispanic, or even Muslim, whatever – and I say even Muslim, to me that’s an evil religion, that son of a bitch was crazy, if you’ll pardon my French – but it’s complicated.

How well did you know Tom Hill?

I didn’t know Tom that well. We had two rooms; Elmer [Youngblood] and I live in one room and Tom and a couple other fellows in the other. There’s a door and Tom lives here and Al and I live there. And we saw him. But to say I called him a friend – I knew him. They were all friends. But I knew him casually. He was not in an intimate way a close friend. His brother came to see me later at one of our reunions. That was a little uncomfortable. I know they cut his head off, according to what the fellow told me. I still to this day don’t know whether he was alive or whether he was dead. But I have a strong suspicion that he was dead.

It sounds like from your report if he wasn’t dead, he was near death.

Yeah. Again, I would not consider him a close personal friend. But he was a friend. I knew him, in other words. Everyone in the squadron was a friend. He hadn’t been there that long, as I recall, I don’t think. He was relatively new, I think, looking back on it, but I’d have to look at the record. But as far as I knew, he was a nice young man. Probably nicer than Elmer and I were.

Most of the coworkers, acquaintances, and friends that I’ve lost throughout my time – there have been some that I was close with – but most of them have been people that I knew, but it was an acquaintance.

Yeah. That was more like Tom. Yes. Even though we lived right there together.

I’ve always been curious how that affects people. For me it was a weird thing emotionally, because I wasn’t distraught, because I didn’t know the guy that well. It was just strange. I’m curious if it was a similar thing for you: upsetting that he’s dead, but also strange because you didn’t know him that well.

Uh… yeah. Well even with the people that I knew real well – I don’t know how to describe it. It’s kind like maybe you expected it. Like Bruce Jepson. Bruce – we lived together. I don’t know how long. It was not like losing a brother or a sister or a child or a parent or even a very close friend. But Bruce was a friend.

How long did you know Bruce?

Jep – we lived together a year, something like that.

He went down in April of 1945, so a month after you got to China.

Alright. I didn’t go down until what, July? Hell, if I had known the war was going to end, I wouldn’t have done that! They should have told us that they had that bomb they were fixing to use, “Just hold off.” Look at the lives they could have saved.

He’s still listed as missing in action.

Jep is?

Yeah. They never recovered his body.

Well I know where he is. You know that.

Well I’ve got the coordinates. Who knows what happened to him though.

Yeah, but I know where he is.

Where is he?

You don’t know that story?

No.

We had a reunion in D.C. And before that I had a call from a fellow with the government. And he was with the Chinese embassy. Our embassy in Washington – I’m sorry, in Beijing. He was the military attaché. A Chinaman came to him and said he knew where the body of an American was buried, back up in the middle of nowhere close to where – I wish I had written this all down. But anyway, this fellow from the embassy organized a party to go back up there. And they found an old man who had been a child when Jep went down, had seen the airplane crash, burn, the pilot trying to get out. And he told them, he said the Japanese had come and buried the body. And then the Chinese went and reburied it. And after that, as I understand, it was right either at the corner of a building or right under the corner of a building that had been built. I don’t know if it was this high or if it was twenty stories. They recovered the remains that were there and sent them to the Philippines. They discovered they were oriental bones, not occidental. They were Chinese. What had happened, the Chinese had come and got the body, thought he was Chinese, and Jepson is now buried in the Chinese National Heroes Cemetery. The way this fellow told me, the Chinese would not admit that they had made a mistake and wanted to save face. As far as I know, Jepson’s body is still over there in that cemetery. In the Chinese cemetery. And I’ve never heard any different. I’ve had – not in the last couple of years – calls and correspondence from some of his relatives wanting to know about it. I’ve kind of forgotten some of the details now myself. But as far as I know Jepson is still over there in that cemetery.

How did he go down?

That’s a damn good question.

Were you on the mission with him?

No. Elmer Youngblood was. Elmer and Jepson and I roomed together in a tent at Xi’an. And then later, Elmer and I roomed together in a building.

Looking at the other folks that went down: Sam Chambliss?

Sam, yeah.

Taken prisoner.

Sam was a nut. He went over there and wanted to win battles and this that and the other.

Myitkyina was the 311th group’s claim to fame. As the story goes with that operation, there’s a fellow Jim, might be dead now, it’s been quite a while, Jim – what the hell was his last name? Anyway, he was with the OSS out there at Myitkyina when they were having the battle. He operated mostly by himself. He was a Ranger, Army Ranger, operated by himself and he had several other fellows out there with him at some point. Well, yeah but sometimes we drop a bomb and miss by fifty yards – dumb bomb and dumb pilots too. Guesswork. I hit a bridge one day. Went right through it. But anyway, Jim was operating at Myitkyina and had two or three other fellows with him. One of the fellows, every morning, his toothbrush would be in a different place than where he had put it. And he thought the other fellows were trying to play a trick on him. So he decided he’d stay up and see what was happening. Well, he found that a monkey was using his toothbrush to scratch his ass with it. So I understand they ended up with a dead monkey. Before that, one of the new fellows had shot an elephant. And the herd ran off into the bushes. That night they came back and destroyed their camp. Don’t make an elephant mad. They’ve got a long memory.

What did you do after the war?

I sold envelopes. A very complicated business! If you wanted a hundred thousand, I couldn’t sell to you. If you wanted a million I could sell them to you. We also sold through distributors too. And then I had some of the big corporate accounts. I sold to people like AT&T or Southern Bell, and then Southern Company, Georgia Power, Alabama Power, Mississippi Power, Gulf Power, Gulf Oil, National Data. I did the billing for Atlantic Ridgefield. GE Credit – big companies. They used at least fifty million of those that I just mentioned. I had fun. I bribed them! I took them fishing. I would take them to lunch and entertain them and take them fishing and first thing you know, they want you to have the business. A good salesman looks after his customers as much as he does his business. Without that customer, your companies not going to make it.

It seems like a lot of people don’t remember World War II in China because they can’t separate the result of the civil war from our effort in World War II. Is that something you struggled with? Or did you just move on after the war?

Not in that exact way, I guess.

I guess I’m asking, did you ever go back to try and process what happened over there and make sense of it mentally?

No, not in so many words. Of course, you remember it. You’re a nineteen, twenty-year-old, twenty-one-year-old kid. It’s like you in the Air Force Academy. You’ll remember all that the rest of your life. You remember eating square meals and saying “Yes sir” and “No sir” whether you wanted to or not! But China was the forgotten theater because the main enemy was Hitler, as far as we were concerned, even after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. China was the forgotten theater because in the CBI, the British wanted to regain their colony. The French were the same way. They wanted to go back and get into Indochina. We had not a whole lot to gain, as far as I could see, by being there. Had it not been for the Flying Tigers, we might not have been there at all. But the Flying Tigers got a lot of attention. The main battle was Europe. And I don’t think we ever talked that much about it or resented it in any way. That was what Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill decided we would do, so that’s what was done.

There wasn’t anything romantic about it. One of the things that I always regretted: that I didn’t see more of China while I had the opportunity. We were a bunch of spoiled brats and thought that we were better than they were and they were underlings and this that and the other thing. The poverty was unbelievable. I don’t see how people live like that. But it made us look down on them, I think. We never really got to associate with the upper echelon of the Chinese people. I don’t know that we would have wanted to anyway.

It seems like corruption was especially prevalent around American bases.

Yeah, but walking out, the Chinese were just terrific to me with what they did. But people living in caves, no water, nowhere to take a bath, you know, that kind of stuff. I don’t see how they survived.

Did you see your perception of the character of Chinese people change during your walk out?

Yes. Because I thought a whole lot more of them. I had a much better opinion of them. Bear in mind, where I went down, once you got away from where I was shot down, the Japanese were afraid to go there too. So I would come to a village, hell, the whole village would come out just to take a look at you – just to see an American. I wasn’t in any real danger until we crossed the lines again going back the other way. I thought I had a very uneventful trip, to tell you the truth. But yes, my opinion of the Chinese changed after that, because I remember the first day, the first night, the next morning, whenever it was, coming to an old couple’s home. They lived in a cave. They fed me and let me sleep in their bed. I wish they hadn’t, because I got full of lice! And they were so open and welcoming. In fact, I liked the Chinese people much more after that. I felt much better of them.

What did it mean to you to go back later in life?

Well, that was nice, but we went back kind of in a different way – as tourists. In fact, I was invited to go back because I was considered to be a Flying Tiger. Every place we would come into they had a sign up: “Welcome American Heroes.” We weren’t heroes. We were just… but I saw them in a different light. Today, China seems … it’s amazing what the Communists have done. It seems much more prosperous. In the process, the people have lost their freedom. But in the same process they seem to eat better and live better. And of course I think China has eased up on a lot of their restrictions with free enterprise and so forth. Which to me shows that they’ve got some moxie. They’re smart enough to realize this doesn’t work like we thought it would.

When you went back, did you end up meeting anyone that helped rescue you?

Not me, but they had a couple of Chinese men that had helped some pilots out. They weren’t anybody that I knew. They didn’t give the pilots’ names. It could have been staged – I don’t know. I don’t think it was. They seemed genuine.

It seems like so many hundreds of aircrew were rescued – 584 from 14th Air Force and CATF – that it wouldn’t be hard to find some people that helped.

Five hundred and eighty-four? So my experience is not unique in any manner.

It means your experience was representative. You were face-to-face with the Chinese people you were there to support.

I think even then you kind of felt – not looking down on them is not quite the word – but you felt a little superior or what not. I don’t know. That’s probably the wrong way to put that. But to me they were terrific.

Did you have any preconceptions before you even got to China?

There was a movie… it had a Chinese detective. What was his name? Well that’s kind of the way I looked on China.

I’m assuming growing up in Georgia you didn’t have any interaction with Chinese in your life?

Nope. Other than the movies, I doubt if I knew what a Chinaman looked like.

That was your first experience outside of the United States – was going to war?

Oh yeah, first time I had been out of the country, yeah. Probably the first time I had been out of Georgia.

When you went to pilot training?

When I went in the Army. I had been to D.C. and Charleston, South Carolina, Florida and whatnot. I wouldn’t say we were poor, but we were a long way from being rich. My daddy was a railroad man. He always had a job and we had a wonderful life growing up. They were wonderful parents. They fed us, housed us, clothed us, educated us. And that’s hard to do with seven children. They had nine, originally. But we had a wonderful family. The fact is, after the war, when we were all grown and married, having children, this that and the other, we always stayed close. All of us had a little bit of the bubbly, we would get together and harmonize. I had one brother had the best bass voice I’ve ever heard. His timing was impeccable. My other brother, John, he – John was a pilot. John just died a couple months ago. So I’m the last of the Mohicans now. But John had a great tenor, or alto – whatever you call it. And we’d harmonize. And I had a problem with them. I may have told you this at some point, I don’t know, but they couldn’t sing drunk and they couldn’t sing sober. I had to catch them right in between! And then, after a good bit of this [alcohol], the children would beg us to stop! We had a good time. I had a great family. But as far as the Chinese go – what in the hell was that detective’s name? But he was always smarter than everybody else. He was very underplayed. Low key. But he always had the answer. That’s kind of the way I looked at the Chinese. Who else but the Chinese would put five thousand people out there making a runway by hand? From kids this tall to people as old as I am, pounding rocks. The little ones would pound little rocks. The big ones pounded the big rocks. And then hook them up to a roller and pave. It was unreal. There were a couple times where they would be working on the runway and you’d land. It was like rain, just spraying in front of your windshield. They really are to me just an amazing people. That you can have a billion and a half people – how do you feed them? I think that’s one of the problems with China is population – food, how do…? Another thing; we worry about atom bombs and so forth, I think we’re going to have to at some point wonder how we’re going to feed the world. We really are still raping the oceans and whatnot – the seas. How much fish can the oceans produce?

Did you go to China knowing that beyond the Nationalist government there were warlords and communists?

We didn’t know that over here until we got there. And Mao Zedong, we didn’t know that much about him until we got there – we didn’t know that much then, really. We knew he was at Yan’an. That wasn’t too far from Xi’an. And we knew that for the most part we were operating over Communist territory. And then of course the whole group was moved to Shanghai. And what they were doing there was trying to protect stuff that we had been trying to destroy. They were trying to prevent the Chinese Communists and the Russians from taking over the Chinese coast. They’ve squabbled over Manchuria for centuries, the Chinese and the Japanese and the Russians. You know, it’s a screwed up world, is what it amounts to. They squabble in Europe and they squabble in Asia. We took this place from the Indians.

Yeah, I don’t think we understood how complicated the political situation was until we got over there.

We didn’t. Absolutely not. We thought we were doing the right thing. We thought we were helping the Chinese against brutal Japanese aggression. And you had Meiling Song – Madame Chiang – lobbying with Roosevelt and whatnot. Having gone to Wesleyan College there in Macon we knew a little bit about her, not a whole lot. But I think we were doing it out of the goodness of the American heart, to tell you the truth. I think we’re still a great country at heart. I think we’re the greatest country in the world. I think we still have that. I think we have good people. I don’t care what stage of civilization – whether you go way back in history or five hundred years from now – people are going to be people. Humans are humans. You’ll have good and bad. I think our intentions over the history of our country have been for the best – not always right. We’ve made errors. But we have freedom. Which you are above others and probably the great majority with what you are doing. Freedom is a very precious commodity, or asset, whatever you want to call it. I think we are at the stage of overdoing some of it, but we go so far this way – we go over to Hillary or we go over to Trump. What better analogy can you use? Why in the hell we ended up with that kind of choice… what happened? How did it happen? You’ve got to hold your nose to vote for either one of them. And I’m afraid we are so divided that we could lose our freedom as a result of it. Because you’ll get some idiot, like Mussolini, or Perone, Castro. Look what happens. Same way with Russia.

It’s interesting in China at the political level with the bickering between Stilwell and Chennault and Chiang…

Yeah, it’s a wonder we won!

But while that was going on, you had a person-to-person contact with the Chinese on the ground. You as a young American fighter pilot were the American the average Chinese person saw.

Yeah. And I was at their mercy. They could have killed me without batting an eye.

Did you feel vulnerable with them? Did you feel exposed?

Not really. You’re a pilot. You have a lot of confidence in yourself. You get up there. You’ve got control of you. That was the situation. I had control, but I knew I’d survive. Maybe that’s a normal, human feeling I guess, but we think of it happening to the other guy, not you.

What about when it happened to you? Did you have a feeling of dependency or vulnerability?

Well, I wasn’t really scared. I guess maybe I was wondering what was going to happen, but I don’t think I was ever terrified, or anything like that. I didn’t think I was going to die. But when they told me about Hill, I knew I didn’t want to be captured. I don’t know. Life is funny. None of us… I’m ninety-two years old, I know I’m going to die. I don’t know when it’s going to be. It may be tomorrow, it may be ten more years – I don’t know. At some point you’re going to die. One way or the other, that’s our destiny. We can’t do a damn thing about it. I think that’s kind of the way – as a fighter pilot or whatever – tomorrow’s another day. You deal with it. That doesn’t mean you don’t worry. We did worry sometimes. I had enough sense to know if I flew over this place they had more ack ack down there than they did somewhere else. I knew to fly crossways instead of lengthwise. But I knew I’d get out. I don’t know why. I knew some way I’d survive.

Did you have an awareness of being an ambassador of sorts – that you would be the only American many of these people would see?

Well yes, to a degree. I tried not to be offensive to them. You could tell when the whole village would come out to greet you, or you’d wake up in the morning and the windows – there were no windows, just a hole, you know – you’d have ten people in each window looking at you. And you wanted to behave. In other words, I knew I was an American. I knew they were Chinese. I knew they were different. I didn’t know that much about their culture, but I tried to be careful not to offend them. I did have enough sense for that, even though I was twenty years old – twenty-one, whatever. How old was I? 1945… I was twenty-one. They were marvelous people. The little boy – the young student they gave me to look after me – he couldn’t have been but thirteen or fourteen, but hell, I wasn’t five or six years older than he was. But he would get me rice and honey. I found out pretty quickly I shouldn’t eat their food because it tore me up. I had been told to live on rice and honey, so this young fellow they assigned to me, I don’t know where he got it, but every night he’d have rice and honey and boiled water. That was a hard lesson for them to learn; they would give me – they gave me the first couple of times – boiling water. I wanted cold boiled water. I think the word for that was leng kai shui or something like that. I did cuss a bit when that first happened, because you blister your lips, but I should have had enough sense to feel the cup was hot.

You must have been, to a degree, in survival mode, right?

Yeah, I guess. Yeah, to a degree – yes. I’m at their mercy. Whether I survive or not is more up to them than it is to me.

I don’t even mean that so much as you just bailed out of an airplane and now you’re in a strange place and unable to communicate with people except through a pointie-talkie, right?

That’s right. We had the book – pointie-talkie. Where did I get that? I don’t know if it was in my pocket or where it was. But anyway, I did have a pointie-talkie. But the problem there was that nobody could read!

Was it useful at all? Did they find somebody that could read? It seems like people already knew what to do with you when you hit the ground.

Yes. I guess it was the first day. Late that night, or maybe it was the next morning, I forgot, but a fairly well-educated man – he’s the one that told me about Tom Hill. He could speak some English. Pretty good English. He spoke a hell of a lot better English than I did Chinese! But you couldn’t find anybody that could read the damn Chinese. And even today you show somebody a Chinese book and I don’t know how they ever learn how to read and write! But you’ll get a different interpretation. If you ask this person to read it, they’ll tell you generalities, but they won’t tell you this word means “the” or “that.” The Chinese are not dumb people; they had a civilization before we did!

Trying to think of the war from the big picture…

Well see, you’re well read on it.

I may understand it from the academic perspective, but you lived it.

I lived it, but bear in mind, I was a second lieutenant. I did what I was told to do. I wasn’t in with Stilwell or…

But you were a flight leader, out there leading two or four people. How many…

Probably about half of them [missions] were leads, I guess.

Did you have a certain number of missions you had to fly as wingman before you became a flight leader?

Well I was never what I’d call a “flight leader,” I just led a lot of missions for some reason.

I know there was an administrative job: this guy is in charge of A Flight. I mean in the air you led flights.

Yes, I led four planes. We’d go out in four-plane flights. I probably, maybe half the missions were leads.

Was that just something where they said, “You’ve had enough experience, you’re in charge of this flight”?

I guess so. I think the first flight I led was with Al [Calendar]. It might have been the second or third, I don’t know, but I knew he was checking me out. He wouldn’t admit that either, but he was. That’s when I hit that bridge and the bomb went right through.

That was when he was evaluating you?

Yeah, but I learned a lot from him immediately. He flew formation like we should always have flown it. Once we got out there, he was way out here. Usually we’d go out pretty close. He’s out here where if something got on my tail, he could get it. If something got on his tail, I could get it. But again, that was from flying aerial combat. He was an ace. He flew Spitfires. He went over with the 1st Pursuit Group, Fighter Group. They were based in North Africa. They were flying P-40s. And the British loaned them Spitfires, because the P-40 was no match for the Me-109. Chennault learned how to use the P-40. You came up on the Japanese from behind or you approached them head-on. Or go down through.

Did Calendar talk about his experience a lot, or was most of what you learned from him by watching him?

Just watching him. I didn’t really get to know Al real well until we got back over to this side of the world. I knew him of course. And he knew me. He came in as operations officer and was made CO. And shortly after he was made CO, I got shot down. But I knew that mission I flew with him I knew he was checking me out. In fact, I accused him of being a little underhanded about it – sneaky, not underhanded. And he just laughed. He was a great fellow – and a great family too. She just died, last December I guess it was. She was a great gal.

How old was he during the war? As a squadron commander, he must have been in his late twenties.

Al was not that much older than I am. When he died, he probably was in his nineties – 89 or 90. And it’s been about five years since he died. He was about three years older than I am.

So he was a squadron commander at twenty-four or twenty-five?

Well I would say twenty-six or twenty-seven. I think he was in the graduating class of 1940, or something like that. He graduated from flying school before we got into the war. As did my brother Tim.

What’s interesting in looking at the people in your group that went down, there’s a lot of leadership. Gabe Disosway got shot down, the group commander.

Disosway? They went out and picked him up immediately! They made me wait.

What was the reaction at the line-pilot level when the group commander was shot down?

I don’t think I even knew it! And if I did, we didn’t give a shit.

Well I appreciate you sharing with me. What I was missing was the less-concrete pieces, like how your perceptions changed. That’s hard to pin down.

That’s still hard to pin down. I don’t know, maybe it’s racial – looking down on the Yellow race, like we looked down on the Blacks. You don’t intend to be racist. You don’t want to be racist, but to some degree, I think I still am. I think a lot of us are. We recognize the differences in race and culture, the habits, the wealth or the poorness or whatever. We have some wonderful Black people in this building. If all Blacks were like that I’d want to be Black. And we had some wonderful Blacks growing up. But they were servants. The Chinese situation, you know, the Yellow peril that was talked about, even back during the thirties. You’d get the pulp magazines and they would talk about the Yellow peril.

So you walked into China with a lot of cultural baggage?

Yeah, I think we all did. I don’t think it was just me. I think we thought for the most part that we are the superior race and I think we still do. We look at what’s going on in Asia now and with the Arabs… we weren’t quite as screwed up in World War II as we are now, I don’t think. And God knows when you get my age what it’s going to be like – if in fact you get to live to my age.

Well, I think it’s important to tease out the nature of the war in China – it was so different than Europe.

It was a different war, no question about that.