Memoir of Ralph E, Daniel – 371st BS 44-45

Interviewee:  Ralph E. Daniel, 371^st BS, 1944-45

Interviewer:     Kevin McCranie

Date:       July 24, 2001

McCranie: Could you start off by telling us where and when you were born, sir?

Daniel:     I was born in Zanesville, Ohio, March 30, 1923.

McCranie: Did you grow up there in Ohio?

Daniel:     No, later in my childhood I did. We left Zanesville when I was about a year old and moved to northern West Virginia, Fairmont, West Virginia, first and then after a short time there into Morgantown, West Virginia.

McCranie: What did your father do there?

Daniel:     He was with Western and Southern Life Insurance Company, and the reason we moved to West Virginia, he had received some promotions and became the manager of the operation in Morgantown.

McCranie: And your mother, what did she do for a living?

Daniel:     She was a loving mother.

McCranie: And a mother to how many sons and daughters?

Daniel:     I have one brother, Lawrence, who is nine years older than I am.

McCranie: Did you attend school in West Virginia, sir?

Daniel:     Yes, through grade school. The Depression came along while we lived there, and West Virginia was hit very, very badly. The area in which we lived was predominantly a coal

operation, and the economy suffered very, very tragically. It ended up that the company my dad was with closed the West Virginia operation completely and at that time (that was in 1933) in order for my dad to have employment, he came back to Zanesville, Ohio, and started working insurance there.

McCranie: Still with the same company?

Daniel:     Same company, yes.

McCranie: Could you tell me a little bit about your education?

Daniel:     Well, of course I went into grade school and junior high school and then high school in Zanesville and completed high school and graduated in 1942.

McCranie: At that point, the war had already started. Do you remember where you were when you heard about Pearl Harbor?

Daniel:    Ah, I don’t remember specifically, but I had started in the various theater companies in Zanesville when I was fourteen years of age. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was managing a theater there that was open Friday, Saturday, and Sundays, and I managed a theater for my last year in high school. I don’t remember specifically where I was on that Sunday morning, December 7, but I do recall the attention we all paid that when we heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

McCranie: Had you been keeping up with world events over the previous few years?

Daniel:     Well, to a degree. Nothing unusual at all.

McCranie: What type of theater company were you working with in Ohio?

Daniel:     It was movies. Shea Theater Corporation was the name of the company; it operated out of Buffalo, New York. And as I said, I started working there as an usher in one of the theaters when I was fourteen, then I came up through the usual involvement, became a doorman and eventually a manager in my senior year in high school.

McCranie: That gave you quite a bit of responsibility for a young man.

Daniel:     As much as anything else from the time element, because in addition to working there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I also served then … the other theaters in town, the managers would have a day off, and I would go over and fill in at their particular theater while they were on their day off. I did actually work six days a week, so it was pretty lengthy in time because usually I had to be there until closing. The last show wouldn’t be over and I wouldn’t be out before 11:00 or 11:30 at night.

McCranie: And you went to high school at the same time?

Daniel:     Yes, yes. The high school that I attended had a little bit of an unusual situation. It was a very large school and my first class started at 7:30 in the morning. So by about 12:30 or 1:00 I had fulfilled the obligation for the daily spending of hours at the school. Yes, there was quite a time element involvement.

McCranie: At the same time, you were making quite a bit of money, I bet.

Daniel:     Well, at that time, in 1942, you know, $25 a week was a lot of money, particularly for a kid in high school.

McCranie: Once you graduated from high school, how soon after that did you enter the service?

Daniel:     Well, prior to this time I had been pretty much interested in aviation of one kind or another, and the idea of being in the Army Air Corps was something that appealed to me very strongly. Then, of course, the war came along the end of ’41, I graduated from school in June of ’42, and about that same period of time the Army Air Corps had had standing regulations that a kid had to have two years of college to get into the aviation cadet program. But when the war came along, then they relaxed the standards quite a bit and competitive examinations were given and so forth, and the two-year college requirement was nullified. So I made application for aviation cadet training probably in about … oh, I would think probably July or August of ’42, and took the usual written examinations and physical and psychiatric and so on and so forth, and I enlisted … I was enlisted then in September of ’42.

McCranie: What was your family’s response to that enlistment?

Daniel:     Actually, nothing. I don’t recall any real reaction at all.

McCranie: Had your father served in the military?

Daniel:    Yeah, my dad was in World War I. He was an infantry captain, served in France and Belgium during World War I.

McCranie: Was your brother still living at home at this point?

He had married just a year or two before this, and he was on his own.

McCranie: Then after you enlisted and entered the service, where did the military send you?

Daniel:     Well, the first assignment, we went to Keesler Field, Mississippi. Of course, this was still pretty early in the war and there was a lot of confusion and a lot of… planning wasn’t as

good as it could have been. Consequently, we were potential aviation cadets we all felt, and we went to Keesler Field and there didn’t seem to be any real program designed toward getting into the flight program, and we went into just a normal basic training facility. During part of that time, we were at Keesler, then we were assigned over to Gulfport Field, which was at Gulfport, Mississippi. We were there for probably a couple of months, total.

McCranie: You did standard basic training at this point?

Daniel:     That was exactly it.

McCranie: What did you think about this? You signing up for aviation and getting stuck with this type of stuff.

Daniel:     Well, of course, we were all disturbed, and I certainly was. It was one of those things that they told us that this is what we were going to do, and of course, we were young enough and so forth, we said, “Oh, no, no, this isn’t for us. We’re to learn to fly airplanes. Where are the airplanes and when do we do this and when do we do that?” Of course, this had no effect at all. In fact, as I remember, one of the first things I heard … we had a drill instructor and he was a man of short stature but he’d evidently been in the military for many, many years because on his shirt sleeves you could see where stripes had been sewn on and torn off and sewn on and torn off. And he wore his campaign hat stuck down over his eyes. And as I remember very, very well, the first thing I heard out of his mouth was, “Youse guys are the grossest guys I’ve ever seed.” So that was the introduction to the military.

McCranie: Was he as tough as all that?

Daniel:     Yes, he certainly was.

McCranie: Fair but tough or fair but mean?

Daniel: I think that – fair but mean. There was no quarter with him at all, absolutely none. Uniforms were something that were catch as catch can situation. I remember there was a friend of mine, he was from Tennessee, and he had the biggest feet of any man I’ve ever seen, size 13. And I know it was at least a month and a half or two months before he got a pair of shoes, so he was wearing his civilian issue shoes that he’d brought with him during that period of time. Clothing was things that had been returned, almost unserviceable, but here again, were being re-issued again because supply and demand just had not caught up with the number of people that were coming into the military. But the Army in its intelligence, and it was intelligent, they recognized that many of us that had not had additional education offered to us were going to need it. Because of the requirements within the aviation program for more knowledge was just something that had to be recognized. So at that particular time the Army started a college training facility. Some of us were sent to Mississippi State, some of us went to University of Alabama. It so happens that’s where we went, and I was assigned to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. And while we were there, we went into a regular college program that was operated strictly by the university as far as the facilities, the rooms, the teachers, the instructors, the textbooks, and so on and so forth. We were there for probably pretty close to five months. Classroom activity was six day a week and the classes were involved in everything from most of the sciences, at least physics, most of the math programs, geography, public speaking, English composition, so on and so forth. And of course during that time we also were under military control because there was a military attachment there that we all served in, so we had the normal reveille parades and retreat parades and barracks inspections.

McCranie: Was it as strict as the basic training?

Daniel:     As far as you either did what was required and you did get satisfactory grades or you were eliminated, yes. Yes, it was.

McCranie:   Were a lot of potential pilots eliminated at this point?

Daniel:     I don’t have, really, any knowledge of how many were eliminated in the college programs. But I do know there were those that (we used the term) ‘washed out’, and there were a goodly number that were eliminated from the program, yes.

McCranie: How many hours a day did you stay in school with this?

Daniel:     Probably about six hours a day.

McCranie: Then studied the rest?

Daniel:     Yes, yes. Well, plus normal close-order drill, physical education, all of our calisthenics, our physical was handled by the athletic department at the University of Alabama. They taught swimming there; as a part of the program, you had to swim the length of the pool and different things of that kind.

McCranie: You said you were there about five months?

About five months, yes.

McCranie: You managed to have crammed a whole year of college into there with that.

Daniel:     That was the plan.

McCranie: After that, where did they send you?

Daniel:     After that we were sent to San Antonio, Texas. The area now is known as Lackland Air Force base. When we went there, it was called SAACC (San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center). Part of it was a classification center, and part of it was pre-flight section. We would initially go into the classification center, and there we received some very, very expensive physical examinations, a mental test, writing, examinations on just a great number of things, psycho-motor, which was very, very similar to a lot of machines that measured your eye-hand dexterity, your mind-hand dexterity, all of these various things. And then psychiatric examinations and so forth. This took about … the total of the whole cycle probably took between two and three weeks. The whole thing was very concentrated, and at the end of this time the candidates were either considered as aviation cadets or they were eliminated from cadet training at that time. And we probably lost about … oh, I would say probably pretty close to 20% of the candidates at that time. And those were then sent to gunnery school, A & E school — aircraft and engine mechanics school — something of that kind. Then the cadet-appointees were classified at this point for navigation cadets, bombardier cadets, or pilot cadets. Most of us wanted to be pilot cadets — pilot trainees. Of course, everyone wasn’t. And at that time we were appointed toward one of these three training facilities.

McCranie: And were you appointed as a pilot cadet?

Daniel:     Yes, yes. And then we went to pre-flight, and pre-flight was our first introduction, really, into the cadet program. And that consisted of a great deal more ground school, everything from naval vessel recognition, aircraft recognition, meteorology, navigation, mathematics, military customs and courtesies, the duties of the office of a commissioned officer, physical well-being, first aid, emergency first aid, aircraft nomenclature, study of the aircraft engine … just on and on and on. Everything that had to do with the aircraft involvement, plus a great deal of physical training, close-order drill, retreat parades every night, many, many inspections. This was the first, as I said, the first direction that we had toward the cadet program, where as underclassmen, when you were in the mess hall you sat on the first four inches of the chair, all meals were eaten as ‘square’ meals, and you were subject to whatever direction an upperclassman wanted to take against you, whether it was putting an individual into a brace (which is a truly exaggerated position of attention), whatever it might be.

McCranie: Did you have any problems with the upperclassmen?

Daniel:     Everyone did, yes. But it was one of those things that you looked forward to the time when you would be an upperclassman, too.

McCranie: It was payback time.

Daniel:     It was punitive, yes.

McCranie: And these upperclassmen, how long had they been there at the program?

Daniel:     Usually about five weeks, maybe five-and-a-half weeks, because the whole thing

took … the pre-flight took anyplace from ten-and-a-half to eleven-and-a-half weeks.

McCranie: Did you actually get to get into airplanes and fly …?

Daniel:     No, not in pre-flight. There was absolutely no aviation as such involved in preflight. This was strictly a pre-flight situation. And at the end of pre-flight, then the navigator cadets would go to a navigation school, the bombardier cadets would go to a bombardier school, and the pilot cadets would then go to a primary flight school.

McCranie: Where were you sent off to when this was over?

Daniel:  Fort Stockton, Texas. That’s way out on the west end of Texas, just east of Pecos. It’s real cowboy country; open range.

McCranie: Out in the middle of nowhere, it sounds like.

Daniel:     That’s exactly right. There were places like Peyote, which was a town close to us. There was a bombing base out there called Rattlesnake Army Air Corps base. So, you can appreciate from those terms what it was. Mesas, great mesas all over the place, and tumbleweed and that sort of thing. These almost without exception, by the way, were operated by civilian organizations. Because of the early time of the war and the fact that flying people were needed so badly, contracts were made by the Army Air Corps with civilian flying services to provide primary flight schools. The instructors were civilians. They rated a salute, they rated the term of `sir’ and so on and so forth, but they were civilians. All of our check pilots that did your check flying, our examinations and so forth, were all military. They all had earned their wings in the Army Air Corps and the commander of the base and the staff people, the cadre people, were all regular Army Air Corps. But the physical end of teaching the flying and so forth was civilians.

McCranie: Was there a lot of tension between the Army Air Corps military people on the base and the civilians or did you see …?

Daniel:     Not that I ever heard of. If there was, I knew nothing about that at all.

McCranie: Could you tell me a little bit about the first time you got to go into a plane and fly with it?

Daniel:     My first ride — well, that was always called a ‘dollar’ ride, like a dollar bill, because the instructor would put you in the airplane and he’d say, “Okay, we’re gonna go out and do this and do that …” And really, what it amounted to was flying around and so on and so forth. My instructor was a fellow by the name of Joe Hord, and he always had a little bit of a different sense of humor. The first time I went out with him, we took off and we flew out to someplace. Pretty soon he rolled the airplane over on its back upside down, and of course, being totally uninitiated, most of us would grab ahold of the side of the airplane — the inside of it. And the first thing he did was, “Put your hands on top of your head.” Consequently, then you’re hanging on the belt. Of course, it’s to teach you the fact that that belt is gonna hold you in. But that’s the first thing that he did.

McCranie: Had you ever been on an airplane flight before that?

Daniel:     Yes.

McCranie: When did that happen?

Daniel:     Oh, when I was a kid, back in the ’30s.

McCranie: Was that a passenger flight or something at a county fair or something like that?

Just a small, two-passenger airplane.

McCranie: Did you get airsick this time?

Daniel:   No. No, I never had any problem with airsickness at all.

McCranie: Could you tell me perhaps about your first time you went solo flying?

Daniel:     Yeah, I had a little less than … I had about seven hours and ten minutes dual when I went solo, and it was always a challenge because as long as you had not soloed, when you had your helmet and goggles on you had to keep your goggles down below your chin. In other words, they had to hang around your throat. But as soon as you soloed, then you could put your goggles up on the top of your helmet, as it should be. Anyway, when I soloed the first time, as I said, a little less than eight hours, it was one of those things that my instructor used the term that so many of the instructors would use, and that was the statement: “Okay, I’m not gonna fly with you anymore. If you get killed, I’m not gonna be with you; you’ll kill yourself. So go ahead and fly it.” And he’d climb out and that was it. But it was always just a cliche that many instructors used.

McCranie: Did your first solo flight go off okay or …?

Daniel:     Yes. No problem at all. I shot a couple-three landings and come back in and that was it. No difficulty.

McCranie: What type of plane were you flying at this time?

Daniel:     That was a Fairchild PT-19. Had a 200-horsepower Franklin engine in it, low wing, open cockpit.

McCranie: Do you remember any memorable incidents of your time there in Texas at your first flight school?

Daniel:     Nothing that was unusual. I was so totally involved in the classroom work that we had, because we still had a great number of hours of ground school to put in every day. And I was so totally involved in that and frankly, trying so hard, that it was more than an obsession. To have been washed out, to me, would have been … probably would have been … I’m using the term ‘disgraceful’ — I’m using that very generously. To be washed out would have been probably, to me, the most heartrending and disgraceful thing that could have happened to anyone. I was just that obsessed with it. When I had come in to the flight program and so forth, most of my good friends were a little older than I was and they had had several years of college that I hadn’t had. Consequently, I had to work, I think, probably harder, particularly on ground school, than a lot of them had to. So it was more than just an assignment, it was an obsession. I had to work very, very hard, and I did. I don’t think there was anything so unusual about that in primary, but that I did, nevertheless.

McCranie: Where did they send you after Ft. Stockton?

Daniel: Went to Goodfellow Field at San Angelo, Texas. This was a real, real departure from what we had had before, because now we were flying a much more challenging airplane; we were flying Vultee BT-13s, which was a military aircraft now. Had flaps, had controllable pitch propeller, had a 450 horsepower engine, had radio, had navigation equipment, had blind flying equipment, gyro equipment. It was a full military base. All the instructors were military. Military customs, courtesy, and the regimentation that a cadet program can have were followed very, very rigidly. There was no leeway on anything. By the way, in primary we had probably lost in washouts well over 20% of our class.

McCranie: Was this a shock, after spending those months there in the primary training with civilian instructors?

Daniel:     Absolutely. It was a real, real tough awakening. In fact, there were five of us. On the first day of flight program, we went down … we had marched down to the ready hangars, we went in, and the group commander was a fellow named Major Blue. I’ll never forget him. And they brought the instructors out; my instructor was a fellow named Lieutenant Bingham. Probably one of the prettiest men you’ve ever seen in your life. He was just a real, real pretty guy. There were five of us assigned to him, and when he walked out, of course we were all at attention, gave him a hand salute. In the military, when you started your salute, you never drop it until it’s been returned by the person you’re saluting. And he stood in front of us, walked around behind us, came back up, says, “Now.” Of course everyone dropped their hand salute and he says, “When I went through the cadet program, we got the cream of the crop. Now we’re getting the sour milk. Five students is too much for any instructor and I’ll see what we can do about eliminating as many as possible as soon as possible.” And he was gone. That was it. He was tough. He was really, really tough.

McCranie: How many of the five of you made it through?

Daniel:     Two.

McCranie: Two of the five?

Daniel:     Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I could outfly him, by the way. And I knew that.

McCranie: Outfly Bingham?

Daniel:     Yes. Yes.

McCranie: How did you figure that out?

Daniel:     By flying dual with him and when he would give me assignments to do, various things and so forth, he would demonstrate and I would end up, particularly in aerobatics, doing a better job than he did. I think it was probably because of the challenge.

McCranie: How did he respond to you doing a better job than him?

Daniel:     Ah, lots of profanity. Things of this kind. And he would do many, many things. Such things as when you’d be flying the airplane, perhaps you’d be under the hood, flying on instruments or something of that kind, maybe changing the fuel system from one tank to another. Because he could do that back in his cockpit, too. Changing prop pitch on you; changing the trim of the airplane; cranking flaps down. It was one of those things, you had to be alert to everything that was happening in the cockpit all the time to correct these deficiencies. He was tough.

McCranie: Did he get you to learn a lot there?

Daniel: Yes. In fact, one thing that was interesting, and my wife and I have talked about this several different times, he was married and when we had our little graduation ceremony in basic, he invited me to his home for lunch or dinner, whatever it was, I don’t remember now. But he gave me a ring, and the ring was engraved “Pilot Officer, United States Army Air Corps.” And I was not graduating from flight program, because then I had to go to advanced. But he gave me that ring as a gift. And he says, “You’ll make it. No problem.” But yes, he was tough. He was really tough.

McCranie: After leaving San Angelo, where did they send you?

Daniel:     Went to Victoria, Texas. That was Foster Field. I had requested single-engine fighter training and I had been recommended for fighter training, both in my primary instructors and in my basic instructors. So I was sent to a fighter school, which was Foster Field, Texas.

McCranie: What type of things did you learn there at that school?

Daniel: Well, we flew North American AT-6s, which was a much, much more advanced aircraft. It had 650 horsepower, retractable landing gear, and just a lot more performance and so forth. And there we went through much of the same type of training, but with much, much higher expectations and much higher requirements. That is, flying the aircraft in formation, cross-country, air-to-ground gunnery, air-to-air gunnery, aerobatics, of course, lots of aerobatics. Of course, we had a lot of the things in ground school — Link trainer, which was a synthetic instrument trainer. Of course, we did a lot of instrument flying in the air, too, under the hood. A lot of night flying, night navigation.

McCranie: Under the hood — that means you pulled the covers across the window so you couldn’t see?

Daniel:     Yeah, you have a cloth canopy that fits right down over you, around your shoulders and so on and so forth, so the only thing you can see is the instrument panel.

McCranie: I bet that was tough the first time you had to do that.

Daniel:     Well, we started doing that in basic. And we started it there. Learning to have faith in the gauges, particularly when your body facilities and so forth, the semi-circular canals in your ears and the seat of your pants and so on and so forth tells you that the airplane is in some particular configuration that the instruments tell you that it isn’t. Because one of the standard things that was done was what we called ‘unusual positions’ where you sit there and your instructor takes the airplane and then flies it through a great number of violent maneuvers and then gives it to you and yells for you to take it. Now, you may be inverted, you might be going straight down, you might be in a spiral, you know, who knows what it might be. But then you have to depend upon your gauges to recover the aircraft and start flying it as it should be flown. One of the things that, of course, was always advocated and talked about very, very strongly was the effect of vertigo, which is, of course, the false sensation of movement. And the fact that vertigo can creep into your system and you don’t recognize that it’s happening, but if you can’t get on the instruments and the gauges very, very quickly to recover the airplane, you can’t depend upon what your physical body is telling you. In fact, I had a … probably one of the most shocking experiences that anyone could have. We used to practice what we called ‘blitz landings’ — blitz landings and takeoffs, where we would go to an auxiliary field at night when there was no moon, and you would not use landing lights or flood lights. But we shot landings and takeoffs and so on and so forth. And the little locator lights along the runway, the little blue lights, they’d have a tin can over that with a slit on it. And there’d be just enough light coming through that slit that if you were lined up with the runway, then you could get a semblance of perception that there was light there. So all your landing and takeoffs were on instruments, and then when you got down to below 200 feet, then you just started feeling for the ground and when you felt your wheels rumble across, then you knew you were on the ground. Well anyway, this one time I had had a short in the aircraft wiring and my landing lights came on and I couldn’t get them to turn off. Circuit breakers didn’t work and so forth. So all I did was sit there with the control ship until everyone had finished, with my engine off because that was the generator wasn’t providing the electricity to have the lights on. Then after everyone had finished, it was very, very late in the morning, maybe 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, and the stage ship who was in control of that particular mission that night cleared me to take off and I took off. Well, of course as soon as I got airborne, then the landing lights were on, and that’s just like sitting in a glow of light. Because you know, in the air there’s nothing for the light to hit and bounce back, so you have no sense of vision at all. It’s just like sitting in a light bulb. But I had seen an airplane take off before me, and I could see the white light on its rudder, so I just followed it back to Foster Field. We were only about fifty miles away and I was flying along there and all of a sudden this white light on this other airplane peeled off to the right very, very quickly. I assumed that there must be another traffic in the area, so I did the same thing. Actually, that wasn’t what happened. The vertigo had set in on me and I didn’t recognize it. I had a false sensation of movement there. The first thing I noticed, though, was that red lights were diagonally going across the windshield, the wind screen of the airplane, and white lights. You know, what in heaven’s name is this? And I had sense enough to stick my head back in the cockpit and get on instruments while I was in a diving spiral. The needle and ball was clear over to the side, I was pretty close to going straight down, and I was diving and circling. And what I had seen as red lights, I think, were neon signs on the front of a beer joint. And the white lights, I think, were highway — automobiles. Very, very quickly … you know, this whole thing of training … the first thing went through my mind, this is what pilots are killed in. And I had enough of reaction, I went on instruments immediately and recovered. I must have been down maybe 100 feet or something like that off the ground. Then I stuck on the gauges and I was okay. But it was one of those things that … it could have happened very, very quickly and it almost did. Of course, I never told any of my instructors about it, either. But thank God, I had enough training behind me that I could utilize what I had been taught and so on and so forth and save the airplane and save myself, because I was probably only about 2,000 feet when I started this diving spiral. An AT-6 goes down very, very quickly.

McCranie: Were there many accidents by the different pilot cadets during your training period?

Daniel:     Yeah, unfortunately we had … we lost one of our cadets at Ft. Stockton on the second day of flying. We had I can’t remember how many because it was one of those things that was never discussed too much. It’s just that everything would be gone. When you got back from flying or whatever the situation was, the possessions were already packed up and gone. We lost the first one, I think, was about the second day in primary. We lost several in basic. We lost a very, very dear friend of mine who was across the hall from me in advanced … in fact, he’s buried right here at Dayton, Ohio. Yeah, we lost several.

McCranie: How long did you stay at Victoria, Texas?

Daniel:     Would have been there about two and a half or three months, and there I graduated, received my commission as a 2nd lieutenant, and got my silver wings on April 15, 1944.

McCranie: You’d been in school for a while with all this stuff.

Daniel:     Yes.

McCranie: Long period of training.

Daniel:     Long period of school, long period of having to perform. As I said, this was a very, very striking and obsessive point with me. We probably during the whole pre-flight, primary, basic, advanced, we probably lost … oh, two out of every three were probably washed out somewhere along in that.

McCranie: We keep the cream of the crop in there at the end.

Daniel:     Well, that’s what we felt.

McCranie: And where did the military send you next?

Daniel:     At this time, as I graduated as a fighter pilot, and at our graduation or about a week before that, we were told that a lot of us were going to have to be reassigned to other things, that fighter pilots were not being lost, that our casualty rate with fighter pilots wasn’t nearly what had been anticipated. Consequently, graduating cadets would be … probably a large part of us would be assigned to other things. Some went to ATC — Air Transport Command, some went to TCC — Troop Carrier Command, some went to instructors schools and so on and so forth. It was kind of a hodge-podge. Of course, that was a very disappointing thing because we all anticipated being fighter pilots. I went to Randolph Field; that was up at San Antonio.

McCranie: Did they give you any choice?

Daniel:     No, no. Absolutely none.

McCranie: What did you find at Randolph Field for you?

Daniel:     I was checked out in twin-engine airplanes. I checked out in two different military airplanes. I checked out in the AT-7, which was a Beechcraft twin-engine with two 450 horsepower Pratt-Whitney engines, and I checked out in a Douglass A-20, which was an attack aircraft, two-place — gunner and pilot. And then for about two months we set there and really didn’t do much of anything. We got a little flight time in and not much else.

McCranie: How did you find the twin-engine aircraft compared to your single engine ones you’d worked with before?

Daniel:     Well, I really got very, very little training in twin-engine. It was just one of those things that “Okay, come on, we’ll fly with you, and here’s how you start it, here’s the power

settings, and let’s go fly.” It was different, of course. I didn’t get the intense training in the twin-engine aircraft that I should have gotten. So it was no real challenge, there was nothing different about it as far as they all perform in the same fashion. It’s just learning the fact that you’ve got two engines and learning the power settings, that’s about it.

McCranie: After Randolph Field, where did the military send you?

Daniel:     Well, this was kind of an unusual situation. I had a very dear friend of mine, we had graduated, we’d gone through flight school together and we were both … when you take into consideration we were now just twenty-one years of age and … to say that we were a little bit concerned that maybe the war would end before we got into it was a true feeling. So we had set there for about two months and we reported over to base operations and asked what availability there was for transition into any type of combat-type assignments. And the only thing they had available at that time that we knew about was B-24 Liberator — four-engine bomber transition at Fort Worth, Texas. So I applied for it and I got it and I went to Fort Worth, Texas. As I said, I’d never even had twin-engine transition training, but I went into four-engine transition then at Fort Worth.

McCranie: Did you find that to be difficult?

Daniel:     Oh, God, yes. Unbelievable. It was very, very physically demanding, it was very tiring. There was no boosters on the controls, every bit of effort you put into it was what you got out of it. There was no assist at all in the control factor itself. The airplane was very, very heavy to fly …

Daniel:     … and was rated Military Occupational Specialty — MOS — as a B-24 pilot. We were there for about I guess maybe a couple months, and while we were there we would have about three or four pilots in the airplane at the same time with one instructor, and then we would trade off in different positions. One of us would serve as engineer, another one as copilot, another one as a radio operator, and so on and so forth. And of course we had to be responsible for using the radio equipment — CW — transmitting, you know, dit-dot-dit and so on and so forth. So then we received this type of training when we were at Fort Worth.

McCranie: And after Forth Worth, where were you sent then at that point?

Daniel:     Then we went to … then I went to Lemoore Field, California, which was at Hanford, California. That was more than anything else just a marshaling area, putting together great groups of people, that is, pilots, copilots, navigators, bombardiers, gunners, aerial engineers, radio operators and so on and so forth, and assigning people as a group to different OTUs — Overseas Training Units. I went to March Field at Riverside, California, and there was assigned a crew.

McCranie: Is this the crew that you would have during your combat experience?

Daniel:     Yes. Yes. And we trained as a crew there. Here again, a lot of ground school again. The pilots were responsible for being able to do the job of each individual. In other words, I learned how to use a bomb sight, I learned how to do celestial navigation. In addition to that, then we flew a great deal, formation flying. We had a lot of interception by training aircraft. We had camera guns; they had camera guns. We did a lot of practice bombing out in the Mojave Desert and so on and so forth.

McCranie: What are camera guns?

Daniel:     It was a regular gun, a regular .50 caliber machine gun, and it had a movie camera affixed to it so that you’re aiming and so on and so forth would register on the film.

McCranie: And what did you think of the crew that the military assigned to you for your plane?

Daniel:     Ah, we were all so relatively new to this sort of thing … none of our people had had any combat experience. The only thing that was disappointing was the fellow that was assigned to me as a copilot had never gone to copilot’s school. He had come out of the training command flying twin-engine aircraft and came directly to me. So he had never been to copilot’s school. He had never been in a four-engine airplane before. The first or second day when I had him, we were going to taxi out and I yelled across to him, “Okay, Rod …” his name was Rod Bolding … I said, “Okay, Rod, taxi out to the end of the runway.” He says, “Hell, I’ve never been in one of these things before.” And he hadn’t been. So from that standpoint, that was a disappointment.

McCranie: Did he remain your copilot?

Daniel:     Yes, yes. He turned out very well, too, by the way.

McCranie: And how many men are on the crew of a B-24?

Daniel:     Ten. Ten men. Pilot, copilot, navigator-bombardier, and six gunners. One gunner served as the aircraft engineer, one as the radio operator, one as the armer, one as the ordnance man, so on and so forth, and then each one had duplicate duties in addition to that.

McCranie: And how long were you in training preparing to go overseas?

Daniel: We would probably have been there about … I would think about three months.

McCranie: Then you got your orders to ….

Daniel:     And then we reported to Hamilton Field up near San Francisco and we were assigned an airplane then. Our own airplane, at that particular time. And we started flying the airplane; we flew it for probably about two weeks or some such period of time, during which we were required to run fuel consumption to be sure what the consumption of fuel was on the aircraft, testing out all the navigation and the electronic equipment, guns and so on and so forth, to make sure that everything was combat worthy because we anticipated, since we were on the West Coast, that we’d probably be going to the Pacific Theater. So just prior to our departure we were assigned over to Mather Field, California, at Sacramento. We were there for probably a couple of weeks and then we were cleared to go on to Honolulu or Oahu, and so we flew our airplane from Mather Field, California, to John Rogers Naval Air Station at Honolulu.

McCranie: That’s a long flight there.

Daniel:     Yeah, it was about 2,200 miles, and with the fuel that we had available and so on and so forth, it took us about ten hours, ten and a half hours, I think.

McCranie: Did your navigators perform …?

Daniel:     Beautifully. He did just a great job. We came in … we were to … every island you came into always had some security involvement. You had to do certain things in recognition in flying the airplanes so that the ground observers could see you and recognize … it might be a 360° turn to the right and a 90° to the left and then drop 500 feet or something of that kind for identification purposes. But we were to come in just above Diamondhead about two and a half miles, and I don’t think we missed it more than a quarter of a mile. He did a beautiful job.

McCranie: And then you remained in Hawaii how long?

Daniel:     Overnight.

McCranie: Then they sent you off again into the …?

Daniel:     Yeah. We went down to Canton Island. Our next flight was to Canton Island, which is in the Phoenix Island group, and that’s about 1,300 miles south. It was a much more difficult place to navigate into because the island itself was a circular atoll, with water on the inside of it. The whole atoll was probably no more than two and a half miles long, maybe half a mile wide. In fact, we always liked to kid about it — it was so small that the strip that we used to land on had a turn in it. So, when you landed, you had to land in a turn, when you took off, you had to take off in a turn, because the island atoll was so short and so circular. The thing that had been so interesting to me is the fact that when we flew down there, I wanted to look the area over, too, because that’s where Amelia Earhart was heading for. Howland and Baker island was part of the Phoenix Island group, and that was just to the west of Canton, within probably seventy-five miles. So it … sort of a memory situation, too.

McCranie: And how long did you stay at that island?

Daniel:     Just overnight. Then we left there and went to Tarawa. And that was a shorter flight. That was probably only maybe 900 miles. We landed at Tarawa, and we were supposed to refuel there and go on, but there was some fuel difficulties so we had to stay overnight there. Of course that gave us an opportunity, too, to kind of look the place over because the battle scenes were still very, very evident. Things hadn’t been cleaned up at all from the battle. There was the wreckage of everything from field pieces to alligators to halftracks to just on and on and on.

McCranie: Were those your first real sights of war right then?

Daniel:     Yes. Right.

McCranie: That kind of brought home the severity of it all.

Daniel:     Yeah, it sure did. It sure did. Because even in the training and so on and so forth, we really didn’t have much experience at all with people who had been in combat. Then we left Tarawa and went on over into an island by the name of Biak, which is just off the coast of New Guinea. And we landed there at Biak and that was our first real experience with any enemy involvement at all. We were to go on down into New Guinea but while we were there we landed there and that afternoon there was an air raid — the Japs came in and bombed. An ambulance airplane had been on final approach with a group of wounded on board and it was shot down and crashed and burned. So that was our first real experience.

McCranie: And when was this?

Daniel:     That would have been probably in December of ’44.

McCranie: And what did you do during the air raid?

I think we probably just watched.

McCranie: So you were already on the ground.

Daniel:     Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.

McCranie: And then after the air raid, your plane took off and …?

Daniel:     We went on down to Nadzab, New Guinea, which is in the Marcum Valley just about seventy-five or 100 miles west of Lae, New Guinea.

McCranie: Were you assigned to a squadron at this point?

Daniel:     No, this was a training facility down there in which we were to fly a couple or three missions into target areas that were no longer considered to be prime targets but had been at one time or another to give us experience in whatever might be seen. In other words, we carried a live bomb load, we carried a live ammunition load, we flew once or twice up to Rabaul in New Britain, which had been a very, very prime, powerful target before we got there. And we bombed … there was a couple air strips up there that through this type of thing were being kept neutralized. Vanakanui was one and Hanakiel was another. And we bombed up there. At times you might draw some anti-aircraft fire, but it would not be very extreme. We flew one or two missions on that and this was in the jungle area of New Guinea. Between the Australian military and our military people, a contract had been made where Australian individuals who had lived in New Guinea or had some experience there took us out into the jungle for about a half a day to show us places where we could get something to eat, what we could eat if we were shot down, how we could get water, and so on and so forth.

McCranie: What did you think of this little excursion here?

Daniel:     It was great! I thought it was good. I thought it was good. They were very decent Aussies and the things that you could eat … in fact, the one thing that stuck in my mind — anything that was red, you don’t eat — red color. It’s gonna be bad— it’s poisonous. Most anything that isn’t red, you’re okay. We also got some very extensive first aid in which we learned how to do a tracheotomy, as an example. We learned how … we practiced on each other of giving plasma intravenously. We were instructed on how to take care of stomach wounds, how to take care of intestinal wounds, the things you could use to perform a tracheotomy in case someone was hit in the upper throat and couldn’t breathe. How to give morphine. We carried supplies of morphine in our … the pilot carried forty surettes. We learned how to do many of these things. A compound fracture — what you do with it, what you don’t do with it.

McCranie: And you learned all this in New Guinea?

Daniel:     Yes.

McCranie: And how long were you there at this practice training field?

Daniel:     Probably about three weeks.

McCranie: It was an intensive three weeks.

Daniel:     Yes, yes, it was very busy. In the meantime, we had been assigned to the Thirteenth Air Force, 307th Bomb Group, 371st Bomb Squadron, and we joined the group at Morotai, which is about 900 miles south of the Philippines in the Moluccas island group.

McCranie: And what did you think of the jungle environment of these places?

Daniel:     The best thing that could be done is stay out of it. Bugs were unbelievable. Leeches were unbelievable. Snakes were unbelievable. Just on and on and on.

McCranie: Were many people … their health affected by this climate?

Daniel:     There was only one that I really knew of. I had a good friend of mine, his name was Pirko, and after one of our visits he came up with elephantiasis and he had to air-evac’d out. And that was because of a mite. A lot of people got dengue fever, different things of that kind. I ended up with a number of jungle ulcers. Had a big one on my belly, had some on my arms. It was standard that … we always used to kid about it, but what we called the ‘crud’ would get in your ears, too, because perspiration or showering and moisture would collect in your ears and then it would be in effect … so we had what we called … purple something or other — it was an ointment, and you tilt your head sideways and they pour the stuff in your ear and it dyes your ear blue or purple. So you could always tell if someone’d been overseas for a while because their ears were purple. And there was a lot of that. A lot of dengue fever, a lot of typhus. As I said, I had some … and I had malaria (my wife’s just reminding me) I had malaria, too. Although we used Atabrine and used it regularly, your skin turned … after you were on Atabrine a while, your skin was yellow, your eyes were yellow and so on and so forth. But nevertheless, I ended up with malaria and some tropical ulcers. It’s like a big patch that grows bigger and oh, they’ll get as big as maybe six inches in diameter and it’s a scaly-looking thing. And they seep. One nice part about it, you get back in this climate and they sort of cure themselves.

McCranie: That’s a good thing.

Daniel:     Yes, yes, yes.

McCranie: And could you describe to me the base where your squadron was stationed there in the Moluccas?

Daniel:     Yeah. Morotai was the name of the island. It was like a … shaped like a frying pan and the part of the frying pan which would be the handle was the part that we had. The part that would look like the pan itself, the circular part, was held by the Japanese. And there was a perimeter set up in the area between the handle and the roundness of the frying pan, and that was held by infantry troops and periodically there’d be some fighting going on, shooting and so on and so forth, to keep the Japanese back out of our area. The strip that we had was called Pitoe strip. It was a big strip about 8,000 feet long, so it did very, very well for us. Then along both sides of it were revetments where we parked our airplanes. And of course, a revetment, the coral and so forth, was about thirty-five or forty foot tall and the idea behind that, the Japanese did bomb us pretty regularly and attacked us quite often. So if one airplane got hit and blew up, there would be something between that airplane and the next one in line. It had been a plantation, a copra plantation, that had been operated by the Dutch long, long before the war. And then the Japanese came along and took Morotai and they had built a strip there. In turn then our people came along and took it back from the Japanese and enlarged the strip and that’s what we were using. It was a … there was a big island right across from us — Halmahera was the name of it. It was about 180 miles long. It was a very, very big island, and it had something over 50,000 Japanese troops on it. The upper part of the Halmahera was about a mile and a half across the bay from us. But our military people just did a magnificent job in taking Morotai because it made a staging place for missions that we would be taking against Indochina and the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines and so forth. And by bringing a lot of protection craft in there of different kinds and keeping the Japanese over in the Halmahera’s away from us, they segregated the area and isolated well over 50,000 Japanese troops. Our people brought in quite a large flotilla of PT boats and it was standard that nearly every night or late afternoon they’d be going out into the Halmahera area and shooting up everything along the coastline. Because the Japs continued to bring barges and different small crafts in there with the idea in mind they were going to come over and invade Morotai and take it back. But our people were able to keep that neutralized. They did just a great job.

McCranie: But you said the Japanese bombarded your airstrip when they could?

Daniel:     Yes, yes. The whole area. Yeah, we were hit seventy-one or seventy-two days straight.

McCranie: Did they often hit your planes?

Daniel:     Yes. Yes. We lost probably, oh, pretty close to half of the aircraft there, yes.

McCranie: Any ground casualties?

Daniel:     Yes. Yes. Yes. And of course, the reason was the fact that the people that worked on the aircraft and the people that did the maintenance work and so on and so forth almost without exception had to work at night because so often our airplanes would be out during the daytime. And then they’d come back in and they’d have to be serviced and those fellows, who did a magnificent job, just really, really a great job, many of them worked all night long getting the airplanes ready to fly again.

McCranie: And where did you sleep during this time?

Daniel:     We had a tent area down on the … here again, on the handle of what looked like a frying pan. We had our own mess facility down there and so forth.

McCranie: Did you keep trenches near your tent?

Daniel:     Yeah, oh, yeah. Had slit trenches behind … most everyone had a slit trench right behind

their tents. I had the best alarm clock in the world — behind my tent was a .90 mm anti-aircraft rifle and it was the signal piece that when opposition was expected coming in, they’d fire it three

times. I could be laying … you know, we had canvas cots, and I could be laying in that thing, and they’d fire that rotten thing behind me and I was out of it before anyone ever said, “It’s time to get up.” The shock of the sound of it was so strong.

McCranie:    The Japanese fly planes over your airfield or …?

Daniel:     Yes.

McCranie: And they shot artillery in there too?

Well, that was our artillery. No, I didn’t know of any Japanese artillery, no.

McCranie: Where were your planes flying from your squadron?

Daniel:     Where were we flying?

McCranie: Yes, sir. What type of targets were you hitting?

Daniel:     Ah, well, we covered … a lot of our work was strategic, in Borneo itself, but we did a lot of tactical work, too, from Ceram and Timor down near Java, up into the Philippines themselves, both as far up as Clark Field in Manila and Luzon. Then from Morotai through the Celebes into Borneo into French Indochina. We covered a very, very large area.

McCranie: Did you usually fly in squadron formations on these missions or …?

Daniel:     Ah, usually we did, yes. Although we also … I pulled a number of single or two-airplane tact missions, where we went out searching for naval vessels. Because there was so much … Japanese Navy bringing reinforcements up into the Philippines and into that area, and we would go out and find these ships and do something about them.

McCranie: On any of these missions, did you encounter Japanese ships?

Daniel:     Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

McCranie: Were these warships or freighters or what type of …?

Daniel:     Ah, of the ships that would be considered to be a warship, about the biggest we ever saw was what we called gunboats. These were oh, around 100 feet long, maybe 120 feet long. They’d have a 5-incher, usually, on the bow. Had a lot of .28 mm automatic firing cannon, things of that kind. And they’d be escorting freighters and things of that kind.

McCranie: Any notable missions as you were attacking these type of ships?

Daniel:     No, I don’t think … usually they were pretty much routine. I do have … I got a couple of combat strike photos that was taken from the airplane of ships that we sunk, but no, I don’t think there was anything that was unusual about it.

McCranie: Did you did skip bombing?

Daniel:     No. No, no. No, we were too big to do that. Our aircraft … we had 110 foot of wingspread, and by the time we got down low enough to do any skip bombing, we were making such a tremendous target that … and we weren’t fast enough to get in and get out.

McCranie: You did these high-level bombing or …?

Daniel:     Ah, we would usually … anything 3,500 feet — not high altitude, no. About 3,500, maybe 4,000, because if we tried to go in at 1,200 or 1,500, by the time we’d drop our bombs and they’d hit, the ship would made 180° turn and go in another direction.

McCranie: You also said you did some strategic bombing targets against Borneo.

Daniel:     Yeah, in Borneo. That was … the Borneo area, there was several areas there … Balikpapan and Tarakan and Brunei. Those were … all three of them were primarily oil, and the Japanese military machine depended strictly upon oil and they had the greatest facility they had for getting oil to keep their aircraft in the air and their ships moving was Borneo. And at Balikpapan, that was a very, very important target and a very tough target. There was an oil refineries there, tank farms that stretched about ten miles and a paraffin plant and just on and on and on. There was three big Japanese aerodromes, defenses, a great deal of anti-aircraft fire. It was a toughie, but it was very, very important one.

McCranie: And your whole squadron flew on missions …

Daniel:     Yeah, a squadron or a group facility where we might have three, maybe four squadrons flying in a box formation.

McCranie: And you encounter Japanese aircraft in these attacks?

Daniel:     Yes, yes.

McCranie: What did you think of the Japanese pilots?

Daniel:     Thank God they were no better! They had fine airplanes, they put up a lot of firepower, they had the facility to come up very, very quickly. Their response was very strong. They had a lot of a little bit different type weapons at times — in a number of places they did air-to-air bombing, which they’d throw phosphorous bombs from the underside of an airplane and they’d burst out in the middle of a formation.

McCranie: Did those ever hit any of the planes that you …?

Daniel: Yes. I never got hit with one of them. Yes, they got hit. McCranie: They take down a plane when they hit them or …?

Daniel:   Yeah, the phosphorous would bum right through the skin of an airplane. If it went into the nose area at all, nine times out of ten it would take the pilot and copilot out because it would hit and come through the windshield. And of course the biggest part of concentration of fire would be head-on approaches where the firepower could be brought in to the flight deck because, you know, if you knock the flight deck people out, the airplane’s going down.

McCranie: And they used phosphorous bombs and then their aerial gunnery and …?

Daniel:     Yeah. Well, most of the … a lot of the fighter aircraft had a .28 mm cannon on it which was bigger than the cannon that our fighters had, and 12.7 machine guns, which was the same as .50 caliber, and that’s what we had. So they had a lot of firepower, yes.

McCranie: But the pilots weren’t very skilled, you said?

Daniel:     No, no, I didn’t say that. I would say I’m just glad they were no better. As time went on, it was very evident they were running out of skilled people, but they still had some pretty good … some very effective pilots.

McCranie: Did your airplane ever receive damage on one of these …?

Yes, yes, more than once.

McCranie: Ever in jeopardy of not being able to make it back to your base?

Daniel:     Yeah. We flew one particular mission in particular over to Saigon, which of course, that’s Vietnam now. When we were hitting in there, that was French Indochina, and we got pretty well banged up there. We were very fortunate. It so happens that we had staged … we loaded a full bomb load and ammunition and fuel and so forth, and then I think there was six or seven of us flew from there up to Palawan, which is in the far southwest corner of the Philippines. That was about seven hours or seven and a half hours. Then we refueled there and then flew down to Saigon, which is in the South China Sea, and we hit Saigon. We got pretty well banged up down there and it was really very questionable whether we were gonna make it back. In fact, it was kind of an unusual thing; I had got on the intercom and there was a tremendous storm, it was nearly a typhoon, and the formation had gotten split up very badly. The end result was that our navigator had given the ETA and that was up and done and we were running out of fuel, and as I said, the airplane was in bad shape to begin with. But anyway, I had got on the intercom and I told everybody, I said … and it was night — it was way after midnight.

I said, “Well, I’m gonna start a 360° circle and then everyone start jumping” because you don’t crash land in the water, a B-24, at night. I told them … I had a crash bell which was a bell that rang through the airplane … kind of an unusual thing— God smiled, that’s the only thing you can say. I started to turn, and I just happened to look, and here was a shaft of light that came off to the right, off to the east. And that was Palawan. For some reason or other, this thing had come on — and this was far inside Japanese territory, you didn’t light anything up. And I headed toward it and that was where we wanted to go. So, we were just fortunate.

McCranie: Had you been hit by flak on this mission?

Daniel:     Yes, yes. Fighters and flak both.

McCranie: And had any of your people been hurt aboard the plane?

Daniel:     No. No. No, I only lost one man, but that was due to a … he went to pieces emotionally. I had no casualties.

McCranie: And how did you deal with that, when he went to pieces emotionally?

Daniel: Ah, many times I just wish I’d have been older — maybe I could have recognized what was happening. But I didn’t, and he just … I saw what was happening and he had said a lot of things to me that were contrary to what I knew him to be, and so I talked with the flight surgeon. He says, “Oh, my god.” So they had him on an ambulance airplane to Australia and that was it.

McCranie: What type of things did he say to you on that one there?

Daniel:     He came up to my tent and he said, “Lieutenant, I’ve got a bottle of beer. How about you and I drinking it?” Fine. We walked down to the beach at Morotai and we’re sitting there, and he says, “You know something? I can smell my mother burning in Hell.” I said, “Robbie, your mom’s not dead. What are you talking about?” That was just one of the things.

McCranie: He was one of your enlisted men or …?

Yeah, yeah. He was a crew member. A very, very capable individual, by the way. And he had also … he was gonna shoot the airplane up.

McCranie: While it was on the ground or …?

Daniel:     No, while we were in the air.

McCranie: Gee.

Daniel:     But you know, when you’re twenty-one, you’re twenty-two years of age, there just isn’t that much experience.

McCranie: Did your plane ever get credit for shooting down a Japanese fighter?

Daniel:     Yeah, yeah. We got three total, that were confirmed.

McCranie: How many missions did you fly?

Daniel:     Well, the crew … I think the crew flew about thirty-three to thirty-five. I flew forty-six.

McCranie: How did you end up flying so many more than your crew?

Daniel:     Well, it was normal that when you joined the unit, they’ll have you flying a couple of missions with an experienced crew —pilot. So, I flew a couple of missions with a senior crew without my crew. Then I was also made squadron lead pilot after about twenty missions, so I was doing some checking out of new crews when they came in.

McCranie: And what does squadron lead pilot do?

Daniel:     In other words, you lead the formation on squadron missions. You handle the navigating, the radio navigation, communications, assignment of target in case there’s … you always have a primary target, you have a secondary, and you have a tertiary. And if there’s anything wrong with the primary, you can’t see it or whatever the case is, you might call it off on that particular part of the mission and say, “Okay, we’ll go after the secondary.”

McCranie: So you ended up checking off a number of new crews?

Yeah, um-hum.

McCranie: Any hair-raising moments with other crews that …?

Daniel:     No. No. Nothing … just routine. Just what you’d expect.

McCranie: Did you find the crews were fairly well trained?

Daniel:     Ah, I don’t think that any of them were proficient until after they’d had some combat time. I know I wasn’t. I know I learned how to fly the airplane, I learned how to do the job after I got overseas; certainly not before that. The experience that you get from flying combat in a situation like we had teaches the job a lot more than you’re ever prepared to go. And we always used to have a standard saying, that if there’s gonna be losses, it’ll be the new people. And that wasn’t far from wrong, either.

McCranie: So, most of the planes you lost were the fairly inexperienced …?

Daniel:     Absolutely. Absolutely. We continued to lose crews in non-combat accidents, takeoff accidents, landing accidents. The B-24 aircraft was a very difficult airplane to fly; it was physically very demanding and it was very unforgiving. It was not stable at all in any of the three axis’s. So physically it was very exhausting, very tiring airplane to fly, and it wasn’t forgiving at all. One of the biggest problems we had was with fuel losses. All the fuel systems and the transfer of the fuel systems came through the fuselage from the wings and so forth. Consequently, it wasn’t unusual that you had fuel leaks going on all the time in the fuselage itself. If you did have, and if a hydraulic system kicked on or some of the electronic equipment kicked on or an electric motor kicked on or something of that kind that might make a spark, the airplane blew up. So that happened more often than it should have.

McCranie: Maintenance difficult out there in the islands?

Daniel:     Ah, actually I think it was probably the best that I’ve ever seen. Physically it was very difficult. Those fellows that did the maintenance, the ground crews, just did a magnificent job under terrible conditions. Materiel was always a problem because the Thirteenth Air Force was one of the smallest air forces in the Air Force contingent. And consequently, we drew supplies and so forth far after other organizations had got it. As an example, the Thirteenth was only two heavy bomb groups, the 307th and the 5th, two medium groups and two fighter groups. That’s it. So, we were very, very small.

McCranie: Did you ever fly with Navy planes?

Daniel:     No. In the air at the same time?

McCranie:       Yes, or …

Daniel:     Not in the airplane, but in the air at the same time, oh yes, yes.

McCranie: What did you think of the Navy pilots?

Good. They were good. They were trained in an entirely different facility and a different condition that we were, and we were entirely different than they were, of course. Generally speaking, with the exception of their large airplanes like PBYs and PBMs and things of that sort of thing, they were not well trained in navigation at all. And of course, it’s understandable because most of their aircraft had a radius of maybe two and a half hours or three hours, so they couldn’t be very, very far away from wherever they had started or where they wanted to go. So generally speaking, they didn’t have the long-range flying that we did, although their reconnaissance aircraft, the Catalinas and Mariners, now those … that was a different situation. No, they were good. In fact, we had quite an interesting experience … the war had ended and a fellow by the name of Colonel Cliff Rees was our group commander, and I was a senior pilot by that time. I talked with him, I said, “Look, I don’t want to fly an airplane back home. I don’t want to do it. Just let me sit on a ship, I’ll sit there and smoke cigarettes, flip them in the ocean, I’ll be contented. If it takes me two months to get home, I don’t care.” As it was though, I did end up flying an airplane home. There was three in this flight; I was flight leader of the three of us. We left Clark Field on Luzon and there was a very dear friend of mine, his name was Roy Mann, he was from Summerville, Ohio, over near Barnesville, eastern Ohio, and there was the three of us and we were set up on one hour radio contacts, conversation contacts, and he never reported in. I started calling him and we couldn’t raise him on voice or CW, either one. Make a long story short, God knows what happened to him but they never found the wreckage, never found anything. And he disappeared between Luzon and Guam, and we went on to Kwajalein, to Oahu, to the West Coast, and between Oahu and the West Coast, we had trouble. We lost one engine; it blew out through the top of the engine nacelle. We had a fire on board and we lost our navigation equipment, but we did get out a Mayday on a Gibson girl, which was an emergency radio. And the Navy sent out a Mariner from Treasure Island and he met us, escorted us in, and just did a real good job for us.

McCranie: Were you just carrying your crew back from there or were you …?

Daniel:     No, no, I had none of the enlisted men at all. We all came back on a point system and the four officers in the crew had more points than other officers in the other crews and our enlisted men were low in points. So they came back a month and a half later. The enlisted men I had on board the plane at that time were from another crew.

McCranie: Can you remember where you were when you heard about the end of the war with Japan?

Daniel:     Yeah, I sure can. I was in Borneo.

McCranie: Your unit had transferred bases at that time?

Daniel:     No, no. We were stationed at Morotai. I had flown a mission or something and when I came back, I was in debriefing and a guy named Mason Moore, he was intelligence officer, said, “Colonel Rees wants to see you at his tent.” I thought, “What the hell did I do now?” Didn’t think I did anything so bad. Anyway, so I went down and reported and he asked me, he says, “You flew fighters for a while.” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “You flown other twin-engine?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Have you ever flown B-25s?” “Nope, never have.” He says, “Well, Lieutenant General Morshead” who was the second in command of Australian forces “has requested that we supply him with an airplane

Daniel:     I checked out in the -25 the next day, reported to the general, and he said, “Yeah, okay, fine, we’ll go.” So, I flew him into Balikpapan. It so happens we landed at Sepinggan which was a Japanese airstrip and I was with him over there for about … couple weeks, I guess. Took him up to Tarakan, took him over to Brunei, and while I was at Balikpapan, it was announced that the Japanese had surrendered.

McCranie: Was the general a nice guy?

Daniel:     Yeah, he was a great individual. I had no real personal experience with him, but … he was a little bit of a comic fellow. I reported to him there at Morotai, went over and he said, “Hi. Yank. [Aussie accent] I flown three times with the Royal Australian Air Force.” He didn’t say “force,” he said “farce.” “We’ve crashed three times. I don’t want to do it again. Do you understand, Yank?” But he was a good guy, and I went back and reported back to Colonel Rees, told him, “Okay, fine, the general says everything is okay.” So, my radio operator, guy by the name of Bob Gaxiola, and my engineer … he was the third engineer I had, name of George Oliver …. And as I said, I checked out in a B-25 the next day and so then we flew the general over there. it was quite an experience.

McCranie: Why do you say that?

Daniel:     Ah, his ADC, which was a full colonel, had asked me after we got to Balikpapan, he said, “Was there anything that you’d like to do? You’re gonna be here for two days or whatever it is and then we’ll be going on up to Tarakan” or whatever it was. I said, “Yeah, I’ve always wanted to go on an infantry patrol.” “Fine.” And he set it up for me. I rode in a jeep with some other with some Australian troops, and we went out into an area where I think they were searching for snipers more than anything else. So anyway, I got to go along. There was a little bit of shooting, but nothing of any real affect.

McCranie: These Australian infantrymen think you were crazy to want to go out with them?

I imagine they did. I don’t really know. But I wanted to do it.

McCranie: You see any Japanese while you were out?

Daniel:     No, there was some shooting, but I didn’t see any.

McCranie: What else did you do for your few days you were there on … with the general?

Daniel:     Well, the big thing I wanted to do down there, I wanted to see the Japanese antiaircraft emplacements because they had shot at us so many different times. I wanted to see the big .100mm guns they had been using. So, I got to do that.

McCranie: Did they impress you?

Daniel:     Oh, lord, yes. They were all dual-purpose guns. In other words, they were two guns fastened together and they were fired by radar and so forth. Yeah, very impressive.

McCranie: They very accurate?

Daniel:     Yes, they were.

McCranie: Giving your planes a lot of headaches when they were flying the missions over that place?

Daniel:     Yeah. The biggest thing is, too, it can be so demoralizing because you can see all the explosions, you can see the fire coming out of the explosions, you know, and you know you’re walking right through that particular area where they’re going to be. We used to go down to … there was a place in the Celebes, Makassar, a pretty good size town, and down there we’d draw fire too. But many, many times the Japanese would come up with an airplane, and they’d fly alongside of us, out of machine gun range but fly along with us. And of course, what they’d be doing is calling back to their ground fire control people our speed and altitude and so forth so that the fuses could be cut properly on their anti-aircraft shells to get maximum effect. But there’s nothing you could do about, you know. They’re setting out there, they’re doing their job, too.

McCranie: Was there a lot of destruction on the ground from where the Australians had gone in?

Daniel:     Oh, heavens yes, yes. We had pulled all … when I said it was strategic over there, that was against the oil proposition. But we also pulled a lot of the tactical involvement of providing support on the invasion. Many times we would … during the period of oh, a week and a half or two weeks, whatever it was, maybe a little longer than that, we’d have a couple airplanes over there orbiting all the time. And they’d be loaded with, usually, anti-personnel bombs and some napalm and a lot of ammunition. Then the ground support people, if they got bogged down some place, they could call and we’d go in and give them a hand. So we, you know, got to see a lot of those things.

McCranie: And you were over there when you heard about the Japanese surrender?

Daniel:     Right. Right. I never saw or heard so much shooting in all my life.

McCranie: The Australians …

Right. Oh, God, all night long.

McCranie: They have a big party?

Daniel:     Well, I think they did. I know I didn’t want to go to have any involvement in it. There was too much shooting for that. Someone was gonna get hurt by friendly fire.

McCranie: Had you heard about the atomic bombs at that point?

Daniel:     No. No.

McCranie: What point did you hear about the atomic bombs?

Daniel:     Ah, it would probably have been a few weeks after that because I left the general and his staff in Borneo and flew back and when I got back to Morotai our unit was gone. And our units had already moved up to Clark Field in Luzon. I knew that we were going to move because we were slated to move up to Yonton strip in Okinawa to hit southern Japan. And evidently the move was already afoot, and of course we never moved up to Yonton but we were slated to move to Clark Field and that’s where I found the unit then. That’s where I rejoined it.

McCranie: So, they moved the entire base up …?

The unit, yes, the people.

McCranie: And at that point you went on peacetime footing with the planes or …? What were your missions there after the …?

Daniel:     Some of the airplanes did ambulance work, flew up into Okinawa to bring POWs back, flew over into the very western end of China to bring POWs back, that sort of thing.

McCranie: You do any of that?

Daniel:     No. No.

McCranie: What did you do during that period?

Daniel:     Well, here again, when I got back up there the unit had already been there several weeks. So I started doing some engineering flying and … which had nothing to do much other than having some observers looking for any areas that had been bypassed but that were still suspect and that was about it. I wasn’t there very long. Then the group was assigned some convoy facility for escorting truck caravans, truck convoys, from Ft. McKinley, which was down in the southeastern part of Manila, loaded with lumber trucks, bringing them up into Luzon and so forth. I made a couple of those trips.

McCranie: Just in case the Japanese attacked or …?

Daniel:     I don’t think it was necessarily that. I think it was just more than anything else that the plans had already been drawn to do these things and no one had initiative enough to cancel them out.

McCranie: And what is your opinion of dropping the atomic bombs there on the Japanese?

Daniel:     Oh, I think it was a godsend. I think it saved many hundreds of thousands of lives. But it’s known that the Japanese were working on an atomic weapon and Germany had been working on one for quite some time.

McCranie: And when did you fly back to the States again, did you say?

Daniel:     That would have been in … [to someone else: “When did I come home? September?] … October. October. October of ’45, the first of October.

McCranie: You weren’t there very long after the surrender then.

Daniel:     No, no. No, no. Not at all.

McCranie: You flew back to the West Coast and from where did … what did the military do to you then at that point?

Daniel:     Well, I went into the West Coast and reassignment was to Camp Atterbury in Indiana. I think I was given eight or ten days delay enroute to get there and so I got there in eight or ten days and was separated at that time.

McCranie: Did you remain in the service or were you discharged?

Daniel:     No, I was discharged, stayed Reserve, and that was it.

McCranie: Did they ever call you back up?

Daniel:     No.

McCranie: And did you have a girlfriend at this point or had you been married at this point?

Daniel:     No, I was not married. The young lady that I married, I had met her once prior, but she was only fourteen years of age when I met her. I was commissioned and flying at that time, so our age situation was not compatible at all. And then we were married in 1948.

McCranie: While you were overseas, how often did you receive mail?

Daniel:     Ah, pretty regularly. There usually was no real problem with mail at all. I would usually get mail every week, either from my mother or I knew a lot of girls in different places, and usually about every week.

McCranie: And did you get very many packages overseas?

Daniel:     No, my mother always got a kick out of this … she sent me a birthday cake and she had heard that you take a large box and you put about two or three inches of popcorn in the bottom of it, you put the cake in it, and then surround it with popcorn and put popcorn over the top. And that way when the cake is shipped, it will be intact, it won’t be bruised or broken and so forth. When I got the package, there was a label on it from the military post office, “received in damaged condition,” so on and so forth. So someone sure liked the cake and popcorn, I’m sure. No, I didn’t receive many packages.

McCranie: Did you appreciate the mail?

Daniel:     Oh, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

McCranie: And then did you write many letters while you were over there?

I usually wrote my mother at least once a week, and a few other letters, yes.

McCranie: And what did you do on your evenings off and your time off there in … how do you say that?

Daniel:     Morotai. There was a lot of boredom, there was no place to go, there was really nothing to do. Liquor or beer was a strong attraction — if it was available. Food was always a problem, not in quantity but in quality.

McCranie: What type of food were you fed for the most part over there?

Daniel:     Dehydrated materials. Dehydrated potatoes, dehydrated carrots, cabbage, Australian bully beef, things of that kind. Water was always a problem. We had no fresh water at all there on the island, and all our drinking water was what we called Lister water. It was a large canvas bag sort of like a big barracks bag and it had Lister tablets in it. And it was bitter — bitter taste. But the point is that it was pure, it didn’t make you ill, you didn’t get into dysentery or something of that kind.

McCranie: Were you limited on the amount of water you could have each day?

Daniel:     No. No. Not at all. We had an unusual thing happen, too. I smoked at that time. (I have not smoked for a number of years). But anyway, the unit had completely run out of tobacco. We had no tobacco at all. And of course, you know, you don’t miss anything nearly as much as when you don’t have it. But anyway, ran out of tobacco completely … we didn’t have any tobacco of any kind, and some fellows had been able to find some Japanese cigarettes and we’d smoked those, of course, and so on and so forth. And one day an issue came in. Every man in the unit got a one-pound bag of Bull Durham with a big packet of cigarette papers. And of course, a lot of guys had never rolled a cigarette before in their lives, but they learned how really quickly. The thing that was interesting — that was a donation by the American Legion Post of Durham, North Carolina.

McCranie: And they sent it off to you guys overseas.

Daniel:     Yes, yes. God bless them. Guys tried to chew it, you know, and put it in a pipe, roll it in cigarette papers and on and on and on.

McCranie: Had you ever rolled cigarettes before?

Daniel:     Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Everyone that lived through the Depression did.