McCutchan, Clay T. Maj Gen (ret). Interview by Daniel Jackson. 9 April 2020.

Could you explain your dad’s background prior to shipping overseas in World War II?

He was a sergeant pilot and flew in the gunnery school at Eglin. He was a tow-target pilot. He flew the T-6 and towed targets. In World War II, Eglin was primarily testing Army Air Force weapons and equipment and it was a gunnery school. They shared the ranges—just like we do today. If you were going to be a fighter pilot and were attending training in the southeast United States, you came to Eglin for your air-to-air and air-to-ground gunnery training. So anyway, dad went through pilot training in the southeast United States, cycled through Eglin—through gunnery school here—and then was plowed back. He was a sergeant pilot. Most of his class ended up going to North Africa, but he and his best friend, Phil Colman, were cycled back as T-6 pilots. They got here at Eglin in 1943 and were here most of the year. Dad had learned how to fly when he was fifteen or sixteen at Evansville, Indiana, his hometown. He was an avid sport pilot and light plane pilot and Phil Colman was avid too. And these two sergeant pilots decided instead of going and drinking beer at the end of the workday, they would go over to the test side of Eglin—over on the main side, because they were based at an auxiliary field. They were up at Field 4, which is now where the shotgun range is, where they shoot skeet and all that stuff. So anyway, they would go over to the fighter side and beg and plead and borrow fighters—they wanted to fly them. The test side had fighters and bombers—all kinds. So Phil Colman and dad did that on a regular basis and finally somebody over there said, “Who are these sergeant pilots?” And they said, “Well, they’re over here begging rides.” Well they were having trouble with a lot of the test pilots not wanting to do the maintenance FCF flights. They felt like they were too busy because they were doing real test flights. So the squadron over there said, “Well let’s hire these two sergeant pilots to do our FCF maintenance flights.” And so they did. They cut orders and transferred dad and Phil to the Eglin Fighter Test Group and checked them out in fighters. The first fighter dad flew was the P-39. And they did such a great job, these two sergeants doing all these FCF flights and ferry flights that these college-educated test pilots didn’t have time to do, that they really liked them. But then apparently the group commander said, “We can’t have sergeant pilots over here in the test group. We’re going to have to commission these two guys.” So they commissioned them as second lieutenants. And so now dad is a commissioned pilot and he’s being checked out in all the American fighters. He flew the P-38. He flew the P-39. He flew the P-47. He flew the P-51. He flew a Messerschmitt 109 and he also got to fly the Spitfire. I don’t think he flew the Zero. I think he flew the Messerschmitt. Because once they became officers, they didn’t look at them as sergeant pilots, FCF pilots, they began to throw them in the test process. In fact, dad flew a lot of tests of the P-39 cannon system. He was told, “Lieutenant, take this airplane, we’re going to load it full of cannon shells, and you’re going to take it out over Range 52 and shoot it as much as you can at this target.” And of course he said that he took off, went over there and fired two rounds and it jammed. So he turns around and comes back and lands and the armament guys work on the cannon. Then he takes off, maybe got five rounds out. He said he flew fifteen or sixteen sorties that day, trying to get the cannon to work. And at the end of the day it was working. But test work like that. He flew a high altitude collar ignition test for the P-47. His job, they said, “Lieutenant, take the P-47 up, orbit between Eglin and Crestview as high as you can go at full power until you run out of gas and come in and land.” So dad’s there orbiting between Crestview and Eglin and he thinks, “What kind of test is this?” And he thinks, “Gee, as high as this airplane will go and I’m at full power.” He says, “Oh, they’re testing this engine until it fails!” And that’s exactly what it was. They were testing the high altitude ignition collar because they were having trouble with it. And he had the airplane actually fail on him and he had the turbosupercharger go out on him and he had to land—it was all smoking and everything. So here Phil and he are doing this test flying and they got to go out to fly in the desert tests at March—the whole Eglin test group, they went out there for a month or so. And he met all these fantastic people. There was a guy—a colonel—working in one of the tenant organizations on Eglin who wrote survival manuals. “Hap” Arnold said, “We need survival manuals. We’ve got a worldwide air force now and we’ve got crews going down worldwide. And so we need to bring in doctors, and explorers, and scientists.” All these interesting National Geographic kind of people were all brought to Eglin and they went and sat down in this one building and put together survival manuals. My mother by that time was down here and she got hired as civil service, so she was typing the narratives. Dad got to go—on the social side he was invited by mom to go to the parties and socials—so he and mom got to meet all these scientists and world explorers. Later on, they moved that unit up to New York, but “Pappy” Herbst was one of the senior pilots in there. Dad met him and got to fly with him in the desert tests. Herbst later became, I guess, the ranking ace for the Fourteenth Air Force. That’s a story in itself. Herbst wanted to get into combat and they wouldn’t let him. And so he caught the Eglin base commander—I guess it was Grandison Gardner—on the beach at the Eglin beach club and buzzed him and didn’t realize it was him, but he buzzed him in a P-51. So he was going to be court-martialed and “Tex” Hill saved him. He said, “No, sir, instead of court-martialing him they’re putting together this new unit to go to China and its all full of outlaws and ne’er-do-wells. Why not turn him over to Chennault. Let Chennault work this guy out.” Herbst was a very interesting character. He was a service pilot. He was not an Army-trained pilot. He had gone up to Canada. He was too old. But he was a very experienced civilian pilot. He was a Hollywood lawyer—knew all the Hollywood stars. He went up to Canada and got check out in the Royal Canadian Air Force. And he ended up going to Europe and he actually got a kill. He shot down a Messerschmitt over there. Then he came back, got in the U.S. Army Air Force, and that’s when dad met him. Now, he went into a regular American unit in the Fourteenth. He was in one of the three squadrons [of the 23rd Fighter Group]. At the time, Chennault told him, “I’m going to give you all my troublemakers. This is the unit I put anybody in that I’m having trouble with, or they’re not doing their job.” He said, “I want you to see if you can turn them into a real fighter unit.” And boy he did. He was a very dynamic leader and within a few weeks they were out there kicking ass and really doing a great job. He was quite the leader. He set up a guerrilla squadron is what he did and “Tommy’s Dad” was the name of his airplane. During the desert tests he had taken dad to a Hollywood party where dad got to meet all these actors. Herbst was very political. Later on, he was one of the early jet pilots and he put together one of the first aerobatic teams and Robin Olds was on his wing when he was killed in a P-80. He had just gotten married the day before.

It seems like a lot of pilots from Eglin ended up in China. How did your dad end up over there?

What happened is “Tex” Hill was the Fighter Test Group commander. He got a message from Chennault and he said, “Come to China and bring all the experienced people you can.” So “Tex” did basically that. He looked at all the pilots that were there and then he looked at all the maintainers he could find and took them to China. And then a month or so after that some guy—a Colonel Weaver—stripped Eglin of all the experienced support people and maintenance people. Almost overnight, Eglin went from having all these experienced people there and then boom. A lot of them went to China and the rest of them went to Europe. Now dad’s group, they’ve left Eglin, they’re going to China, and he was on the [HMT] Rohna. There were a lot of CACW people on the Rohna and maintenance people. But dad was always a heavy reader and romantic, so when they stopped in Africa, he wanted to go see the French Foreign Legion Museum at Sidi Bel Abbes. They were waiting for the boat to take off. They were waiting in a port so they could get through the Suez Canal, so dad hitchhiked and went to Sidi Bel Abbes and got to see the French Foreign Legion Museum, which he always wanted to do. Well, he was late getting back and he missed the Rohna. Phil Colman was his roommate on the Rohna, cabinmate, and they had another guy that was their cabinmate—I believe he was a navigator. And the Rohna was sunk. In fact, dad watched it. He was on another boat and watched the Rohna get hit. It was sunk by a German twin-engine—I guess a Heinkel or Dornier or whatever—using a smart bomb, using a guided weapon. The Germans were flying out of Spanish islands, so it was illegal what they were doing, really. But anyway, so they sank the Rohna and the Rohna was the single greatest loss at sea in World War II to the United States. More people died in it than any other sinking. A lot of them were nurses and a lot of them were the maintenance people and support people for the CACW. Phil Colman ended up in the water. He said it was cold and rough and that’s why everybody was drowning. He finally got picked up and he ended up in Africa. Not at the Suez, he was about halfway there, but he had cheated and opened up the secret orders before he was supposed to and realized they were going to the Suez Canal. And so he went out to a supply depot and found a supply sergeant that gave him a German Kübelwagen. And so Phil jumped in this Kübelwagen and drove it to the Suez Canal and caught his boat and met dad there. Then they went on into India and stayed there for a while and got their airplanes. And then the Americans went on into China. I think they might’ve met their Chinese pilots in India, too. I’m not sure. That’s how that happened. These Chinese pilots they met were American-trained guys. They were at Luke, apparently. That was the difference, dad always said, between the CACW and the old Chinese Air Force. In fact, the CACW guys referred to the old Chinese Air Force as “the Royal Air Force,” because a lot of those guys—well, they were survivors by then, because a lot of them had been shot down—but they were all chosen based on their family connections and their wealth and their political connections, whereas in dad’s outfit, all these Chinese for the most part were chosen on ability. And they were American trained. So there was a distinct difference between the “Royal Air Force,” the old, classic Chinese Air Force, and the CACW. And dad flew with some of those “Royal Air Force” guys and he said you really had to watch them. You had to be very careful with them. And he said the younger Chinese, the CACW Chinese, tended to do it. They tended to take care of those older Chinese pilots. They treated them like their fathers and grandfathers and would cover for their mistakes. Now the biggest thing was language and culture. And Bill King was a lifesaver in dad’s squadron. He was born and raised in California went to visit family in 1937 and ended up in the Chinese Air Force. He flew in that big dogfight—there were two or three hundred Chinese and Russians and two or three hundred Japanese. It was over a coastal town. It was supposed to be the largest furball ever: several hundred airplanes in one big dogfight. The Japanese shot down the Russian flight leaders. Then they just chopped into the Chinese and it was a disaster. It was quite a fight. But Bill was a survivor. And of course he spoke fluent Chinese and he understood the culture. And dad said that he was essential in how smooth their squadron operated. That’s another lesson for the 6 SOS is cultural awareness, language. The guys in the CACW were not language qualified—pointie-talkie and off you go. Some of the Chinese pilots could speak English because they had gone to Luke, but the language and culture was a real issue.

How did working together with the Chinese work out operationally?

The more they did it, the better they got, particularly working with the younger Chinese. What dad encountered with the old Chinese Air Force veterans was they were either very good or weren’t very good at all. The new Chinese pilots in the CACW were all pretty good and even like the Americans. Dad said they were experiencing the same thing with the Japanese; when they encountered Japanese aviators, they were either very good or not very good at all and there wasn’t a big mass in the middle. The ones in the middle just weren’t there. So they were either very good or not very good at all. And he said the American advantage and the CACW advantage was you had this big lump sum of pretty good guys in the middle. And so he said that’s how they carried the day. Certainly they had some very exceptional pilots like Phil Colman and then they had American pilots that weren’t very good. But they had this mass in the middle of good guys, good, solid, brave guys trying to do the best they could with what they had to operate with. He said that was the big issue with them. Of course, the CACW was a pet project of Chennault. He wanted to build up an American-like Chinese Air Force. So that was the beginning of it. And it was fighters and bombers. It was a big war, but in China the air war wasn’t that big. A big mission would be like twelve B-25s escorted by twelve P-40s. Or maybe twelve B-24s escorted by half a dozen or a dozen P-40s or P-51s. It wasn’t the big meatgrinder that Europe was but it was at the end of the supply chain. The P-40: most of their work was close air support and interdiction. And dad said the P-40 was much better for the air-to-ground mission because the coolant system was up front. He said when they got the P-51—though it was a better overall airplane—they didn’t have much of an air-to-air mission. Most of their missions were against ground and anti-aircraft fire really took a heavy toll on the P-51s because of the radiator in the back and all those coolant lines running through the airplane. You’ll see that in reports even in Europe where P-47 outfits that were doing great work on the continent, strafing, bombing, all kinds of stuff, transitioned to the P-51 and they began to take a lot of casualties. The P-40 was really better for that. I think another thing that’s important to note that the success of the CACW and the Fourteenth Air Force was proven during the Ichi-go campaign. When the Japanese Army came up and was taking away the Fourteenth Air Force bases and pushing the Chinese Army back and what they did, basically an air force played a key role in stopping a ground army in that campaign. And I’ve seen that reference in several books. And the CACW played a key role—Americans flying alongside the Chinese. Dad even told me stories during that campaign where he was talking to a Chinese-American who was a ground FAC and this guy was calling them in and directing them where to drop their weapons. He said it was quite an accomplishment.

Was that during the battle for the airfield at Zhijiang?

I’m not sure. It was a big town. It was a battle over one of the big cities and dad said he was dropping ordnance in the city and talking to this ground FAC who was a Chinese-American, fluent in English, but he was Chinese culture.  

Did your dad’s stories from the war have a lot to do with the ignition of your life-long love of aviation?

Oh yeah, absolutely. But see my mom was a pilot, too. While dad was overseas, she learned how to fly through a civilian pilot training program at the local college. So she was a rated pilot by the time he got home, because she figured she’d have to learn how to fly if she was going to spend any time with him because dad’s hobby was flying. A lot of guys won’t do that. A lot of guys will go up and fly their Air Force airplane, come back and land, and go fish or hunt. But dad would come back, jump in a light plane, and go putz around. So it was both of them. And then of course I grew up hearing all the stories and I always thought that gosh, a lot of Americans flew with international air forces. Well that’s not true at all. It was really not that many. And then as I got older, I liked the idea of it—of U.S. Air Force types flying with international air forces—and kind of like you saw, I wanted to write a book about it, but I just didn’t have the patience to do it. But I collected a bunch of stuff and kept talking to dad about it. I never could get him to sit down and write down his experience. He did write down his Eglin experiences; he talks about what it was like to be at Eglin during World War II. But I did, at the 919th, we began to pick up FID and combat aviation advisory missions. The 1 SOW was tasked to do it, but they were maxed out. This was the 1980s. So they asked the 919th to help out. So we began to deploy to Honduras, Peru, Columbia, and Ecuador. I spent a lot of time in Panama doing the security mission down there for the canal. Working with the Columbian Air Force, the Honduran Air Force, the Peruvian Air Force—I really enjoyed that—meeting those guys and working with them. And so I wrote my Air War College paper on combat aviation advising and FID. It just happened that my civilian history job was next to the FID office at AFSOC and so Lieutenant Colonel Steve Witson, Major Scott Murphy, and Mr. Jerry Klingaman helped me with my Air War College paper. That’s when I kind of got hooked on it. I think it’s a very worthwhile mission, I really do. I think you get more bang for your buck through relationships and you learn the territory by deploying. As a FID or CAA guy, you become an area cultural and geographic expert resource for the Air Force. That was really key. And dad said in China relationships were really key between the Chinese and Americans. And that’s what I saw with the Hondurans, the Peruvians, and the Columbians—the relationship was very, very important—and lasting, it goes on and on and on.

When you were in South and Central America, did you find a lot of echoes between your dad’s experience and your own?

Yes I did. And the other thing was the language; we were not language qualified in the 919th. We were culturally aware, because we went to the Special Operations School and got a lot of briefings. Then after making so many trips down there, we became pretty smart about the cultures. The cultural awareness grew faster than the language. We did take some language qualified people. Yeah, I saw a lot of parallels. Like dad said, some of the Chinese were very good pilots, some of them were not very good at all. We encountered that. Some of them were political appointees and picked because of their family or how much money they had, that sort of thing. But some of them were just world class pilots—usually the ones who were trained in the States—that was my experience with the Hondurans, Peruvians, and Columbians. If they had the opportunity to go to pilot training in the United States, number one, their English was better; number two, they were thoroughly trained and you knew pretty much what to expect from them.

What were some of the fruits of your labor down in South and Central America?

What we would do is the State Department sold A-model C-130s to all those people down there, but they didn’t sell them any tools or equipment or even manuals. I don’t think they even sold them training. And so the people said, “Well we need to be trained.” And the 919th at the time was about the only A-model unit in the Air Force, still flying A-models. And we had two slicks and a number of gunships. And so they would come up, the Hondurans, the Peruvians, and the Columbians would come up, fly in our A-model ‘130, and we had a simulator at Duke. So we developed some long and lasting relationships with those people. They came to get their initial training and their sim time. They stayed at Duke and their families came up and visited and some of our families went down and visited them in their countries. I remember the day the 1 SOW needed to run a C-130 down to Honduras but didn’t have all the paperwork right. Our relationship ended up making it possible, but they had to give the Hondurans a simulator class in return. Dad told me in China it was the same way; there was a lot of give and take, a lot of politics. And Bill King helped dad and his Americans understand that. The classic case was dad led a mission: he had three Chinese wingmen and they briefed—it was a ground attack sortie on a town. And they were going to hit a Japanese supply depot. And so this four-ship goes in and dad says, “Now you guys drop where I drop.” “Yeah, yeah, we’ll do that.” So he goes in and drops his bomb right on the Japanese place and he comes up, he’s watching the Chinese, and they’re all dropping their bombs two blocks away. And he’s calling them, saying, “No, no, no! You’re dropping on the wrong target!” They all dropped on the same target. So when they got back, dad is talking to them and they’re kind of acting a little bit dumb during the brief and finally, after the briefing, Bill King with one of the Chinese came over to him and said, “Hey Mac, what you’ve got to understand is we knew you were going to hit the Japanese and destroy that building. And lieutenant so-and-so, his uncle has a big warehouse down the street and his competition was across the street, so we bombed it.” That actually happened. They wanted to take out the competition—and they did! That was the thing dad always told me; you really didn’t know who the Chinese were working for. Were they working for themselves, or their family, or the Nationalist Party, or the Communist Party? Sometimes you just couldn’t tell, whereas most Americans, you pretty much know who they’re working for. I saw that in Honduras, Peru, and Columbia. And I understand it, because there was a lot going on, particularly in Columbia. There were a lot of divided loyalties down there between the narcotics people and the insurrectos and family values and everything. So I actually saw that happen just like dad talked about.

Did your dad’s stories help you navigate those situations?

Yeah. Number one, try not to be the ugly American. Don’t be arrogant. Everybody’s got a story, regardless of their nationality. And everybody has a lot of pride. I’ll tell you, the Columbian Air Force, they were a very good group and very proud of where they had come from. They were an air force before the United States had an air force. They started their air force in the 1920s as a separate service while our air force was still tied to the Army. I think his experience helped me understand the culture and that you have to make allowances for people. He was pretty heartbroke by what he saw the Japanese do to the Chinese. But he said the Chinese were pretty mean to themselves, too. For example, one of their best Chinese crew chiefs would drain the old oil out of the P-40s and he was taking some home to keep his family warm and when the Nationalist Chinese Air Force guys found out, they tried him and they shot him. It was very brutal. There were a lot of things you could get killed for. He watched the Japanese really kill a lot of Chinese they didn’t have to, but he said he also watched the Nationalist Chinese be pretty brutal to their own people. And he said it was like the Wild West. You had to carry a gun all the time, everywhere you went. He said the Japanese were paying of the Chinese to snipe at the Americans. That’s why they didn’t wear the blood chits on their A2 leather jackets on the outside. They put them on the inside. There was a lot of espionage going on—a lot of spying going on. In fact, dad was the ops officer eventually, and if they had a big raid or a big mission, he would clean up and shave the night before so he could get up early and get going. And finally, the group commander, John Dunning, called him in one day and said, “Hey Mac, you’ve got to quit prepping for the mission the night before because the Chinese are watching you. Dunning had a Chinese guy acting like an agent—pretending he was—and looking for signs that would give away their position. John Dunning was a hero. He was quite the guy, So was Winnie Morse. In fact, dad said Dunning was the finest officer he ever served with.

My understanding is that Morse was at the Proving Ground prior to going out to China. Did your day know him there?

Yes. He’s the guy that “Tex” Hill recruited, along with “Pappy” Herbst, and took them and all these youngsters to China. Now “Tex” flew with the Americans, but he took a bunch of people over there to China for the CACW.

Well thank you, I really appreciate you doing this.