Chapter 4: the world turns toward Korea
“It was a good life. I was a combat pilot fighting a good war.”
John, remembering 1951
John could buy a car in February of his senior year at West Point and not have to make a payment until August, when he got his first paycheck.1 He bought a 1949 Ford, four-door, gun metal metallic in color. “I was so proud of that car; I didn’t know what to do.” After graduation, the graduates had two months for real vacation time. He and a friend decided to sail to Europe. While on the boat they learned they could buy a motorcycle in Germany which, they decided, would allow them to cover more of Europe in less time.
After picking up their motorcycles, they headed out of Germany as fast as possible. “The war had only been over for four years and Germany was decimated,” John remembered. “The people were sullen and just trying to keep body and soul together.” They took off for Holland, then Luxembourg, and on to Paris. At that point they stored their motorcycles. They realized they had just been riding motorcycles and not sight-seeing.
While in Paris, John and his friend saw two girls wearing “saddle shoes” and didn’t know if they were Americans, but figured it was likely because of those shoes. John said, “I’ll take the one on the left and you take the one on the right.” It turned out the girls were from Oklahoma. They all ended up going to the French Riviera and Monte Carlo. John and his friend went on to Italy, where a young boy told them about the Isle of Capri. For $3.50 a day, they could get a room and three meals on the island. “We met a divorcee who hired a taxi for us to see the all the sights; then we went to a party that night. The girls from Oklahoma arrived and the four of them then went to Rome.
Summer vacation was over; it was time to get back to the states. The two West Pointers caught rides on C-54s when space was available, flying to Iceland and then to Montgomery, Alabama. (In John’s storytelling, he doesn’t mention what happened to the motorcycles.) From there he went to Georgia to pick up his new car which had been driven home by Mimmy and Daddy after his graduation. He was to report to San Antonio, Texas, home of Lackland Air Force Base. Driving through Houston, he stopped to see the new Shamrock Hotel because he had heard was a “sight to see.”
Arriving in San Antonio, John thought, “Here I am with a new car and spending money. We got $240 a month!” But the military didn’t know what to do with him because, “We didn’t even have an U.S. Air Force in 1939 and here we were in 1949 with pilot’s wings.” They didn’t need training, so it was decided to requalify them as pilots. John once again asked for multi-engine planes. During that time, he said they would fly half a day and then he played golf the other half. As a West Point graduate, he was given a choice of assignments and he asked to be a flight instructor. They sent him to Enid, Oklahoma, home of Vance Air Force Base. He headed north out of Texas in his new car.
Being a new instructor, he would learn what teaching was all about. For one thing, his new-found understanding about the richness of learning would be put to use as a teacher. John told about one of the worst cadets he had, but then said that student had taught him how to “fly instruments.” He explained: “The Air Force didn’t know how to fly by instruments then. I had four cadets at a time and this new bunch came in. This cadet was among them.” When they were flying, there was a screen that had a “little airplane” on it that did show where they were, he said. The cadet was doing a good job of flying and John asked him how he was managing it. The cadet said, “I’m watching that little airplane all of the time.” For others, including John, they had been watching the “little airplane” periodically. “That’s how I learned to fly instruments,” said John. “We invented this method for ourselves.” The young man turned out to be a solid student and a successful cadet.
In another case, John “swapped” three of his cadets for three of those working with fellow flight instructor and West Point graduate, Lt. Willum Harry Spillers. Lt. Spiller’s cadets were going to flunk, he told John, and he just didn’t want to see that happen. John was able to help those young cadets make it through their training successfully. At John’s funeral, Brig. Gen. Spillers told how John was always able to help the students who were “a little slower.”
By sheer chance, the two girls he and his friend had met in Paris were students at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. He knew they were members of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, so he went to visit them. They invited him to a “radio listening” party of the OU-Texas football game. (It was on the radio, since television wasn’t in general use yet.) When he arrived, a young woman named Mary Esther Selby opened the door. John tells his children, “If I hadn’t seen those saddle shoes in Paris and met those two girls from Oklahoma, you would have had a different momma.” He and Mary Esther married in August, 1950.
On an April Monday in 1951, John was told he would be leaving for Korea that Friday. He immediately went to see Mimmy in Georgia. When he got back, he picked up his golf clubs and boarded a B-25, which was flown to Camp Stoneman, the San Francisco Port of Embarkation’s primary troop staging center. One of its jobs was to “ensure that only physically fit troops were sent for overseas duty.” Everyone underwent complete medical examinations upon arrival at Camp Stoneman. That included a battery of inoculations to prevent diseases peculiar to Pacific destinations. “An array of 45 dentists’ chairs was kept busy on an 18-hour schedule that saw many examinations conducted and teeth filled.”2 The military was, evidently, still concerned about their personnel’s teeth.
After arriving in Japan, John was assigned to the 452nd Bomb Group flying B-26s. “MacArthur was going to Inchon [South Korea] and he said we’d be home by Christmas, but the Chinese came into North Korea,” he said. He came to realize the reason he was snatched so abruptly from his instructor’s duties was because he was a qualified B-25 pilot and that meant he could fly the B-26 without any training. He also learned this was partially the result of a protest march in Los Angeles by wives of men with the 452nd. There had been no replacements for the men in the unit and the angry wives had told the world about it. The Air Force had quickly found some replacement pilots, which included John.
There were 15 new arrivals and they went to ground school for a week. They went to the flight line after that and were given a “checkout.” He was told to come back for instrument flight training but John could do it better than the instructor, largely due to his work with the “worst cadet” ever, so they had him qualify for night flight. He was then told, “You’re a combat pilot.”3
In the beginning of the flights, pilots were told they couldn’t shoot back at anybody. He recalled how he told the base commander that he was really tired of being shot at and dodging fire over North Korea and not being able to fight back. Finally able to start firing at the enemy, the crew would fly at night for a couple of hours, getting to their destination about 1 a.m., and then drop 500-pound bombs. “Full adrenalin would be going during this time,” said John, “but when we crossed the ‘bomb line’ going home, we’d get real tired.” He said one time he went to sleep and couldn’t get his head clear and eyes focused. He told “the kid in the cockpit” to punch him hard on his right shoulder if he went to sleep. “About 4 a.m., we were on our final approach. My arm was black and blue the next day.”
A faded newspaper article in a family scrapbook reports that John was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross while in Korea, the highest award given by the U.S. Air Force.4 The citation reads: “For making several strafing attacks on an enemy convoy under hazardous mountain and weather conditions, Capt. John H. Saxon, Jr., of Fort Valley, Georgia, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.” The citation goes on to say that John, a pilot of a B-26 night attack bomber, was flying along the enemy’s main supply route between Pyong-yang and Wonsan on June 13 [1952] when he sighted 60 supply vehicles moving to the front under overcast sky. “Through cloud breaks, Capt. Saxon made numerous attacks, scoring direct hits on 36. Weather made it extremely hazardous to work at low altitudes,” according to the citation.
When his father was contacted by the media for comments on his son’s award, Harold Saxon said he didn’t know of the award’s significance until the citation came. The reporter wrote, “Young Saxon had written his parents that the medal was for ‘keeping the neatest bunk.’” This lack of John’s need for personal “honoring” would become a hallmark that separated him from many individuals who leaned heavily on their academic degrees and/or publications to support their views, rather than on the visible results of their deeds.
John flew 55 missions in the Korean War. “It was a good life; I was 29 years old, a combat pilot, and fighting a good war,” he said. The pilots lived in dependent-type housing that had cots set up in all the rooms, except for the kitchen. Somehow, he and Harry Spillers got one room to themselves. Because the heating didn’t work too well, they bought a pot-bellied stone for their room that, at least, cut the chill and kept them fairly comfortable. He was especially impressed with the Japanese workers and how honest and hardworking they were. “They were wonderful people,” John said. “They were everything we wanted to be.” He told of leaving a cartoon of Chesterfield cigarettes by accident at a little store and when he returned a week later, the owner gave him the carton. John gave him half the carton for being so honest.
The Japanese women worked as maids and the military personnel would pay them out of their own pockets. “They were everywhere and they took care of us.” In fact, because Japanese were hired to work all over the base, John said they were, in effect, “running the place.” Because he was married, John didn’t mess around, but there was a single captain who was going into town and being with a lot of Japanese women. “One day a mamasan came to the house and called out this captain. She said she would not work in a house where there was a butterfly boy,” John said. “If he would go with one girl, she would stay as a worker; otherwise, she was leaving. We knew they could not be replaced, so the captain had to stop being a ‘butterfly boy.’”
Words for the Korean workers were not as charitable. “We were accustomed to leaving everything out in the open, so we lost everything to the Korean workers when they showed up.” Half of them were fired after the first week. He specifically remembered how much he hated kimchee, a pickled cabbage, and its smell. “We told them they couldn’t eat it in our quarters or offices.”
After they finished their stint in Korea, the pilots could live for a year in Japan. John found a job in the intelligence office in Tokyo because he wanted Mary Esther to experience Japan. Harry, who was also going to Japan, wanted to know if they should contact the wives first about this decision and John said they’d let the wives know later. He said Mary Esther was not happy about this but “she had a great trip from Seattle to Yokohama as she met other traveling wives. She was afraid about doing things like this,” he said, “but she found out she could do it.” His ’49 Ford was sent with her on the boat.
The wives had full time help with the Japanese government paying the maids $30 per month. John worked six days a week and Mary Esther was now seven months pregnant with their first child, Johnny. In one of his regular letters that he sent to Mimmy and his father, John explained their plans for coming home to Oklahoma. A typed three-page letter dated Jan. 23, 1953, was full of general news and thoughts on his career plans.5 He also said he was sure they could find the items that his sister Anne had asked for, including a table cloth that would cost about $30. They had thought they might be having twins, but the x-ray confirmed a single pregnancy. John was concerned that twins would be “a lot to handle all at once.” He had trouble preventing Mary Esther from over-exerting herself, he said, but she was “taking it easier the past month.”
Because of her advanced pregnancy, they thought they should fly rather than take a boat back to the states. He didn’t like the idea of living out of a suitcase for two months, however, while they waited for their shipped goods to come from Japan. “Maybe we will find some way to ship additional luggage if we travel by air,” he said. Because he had bought two more suits and another sport coat plus two uniforms, he figured he was “well-fixed” in clothes for another five or six years.
John teased his parents that they might not know him when they saw him. “My head of hair is approaching Daddy’s every day. I have a bald spot on the back of my head and two real thin spots on each side. I still weigh the same 165-170 pounds, but I fear that I’m carrying it in different places now. Seems I have to let my trousers out around the waist every year. When I was at West Point, I wore a size 30 shorts; now I find size 36 fits well.
“If I didn’t have anything else more important to do, I think I would worry about approaching middle age,” he continued. “Being 30 years old doesn’t seem old at all. I remember when you were reading Life Begins at Forty. I thought that was a book designed to give old people a lift so they wouldn’t mind being old. It’s funny how your ideas change as you grow up.” He said he’s being assigned to the Drone Group at Eglin AFB near Walton Beach, Florida. It would only be four or five hours from Fort Valley, Georgia [where Mimmy lived on the farm]. Although they had him assigned as a four-engine pilot, John wrote, “I have ideas on how to change that when I get there. They have a lot of jets and I plan to get checked out in them.”
He then got specific about his career plans. He said he had his application ready for the Wright Patterson Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, where he wanted to do graduate work in aeronautical engineering beginning in September 1953. If he were accepted, he said he would take Mary Esther to Enid to have the baby and have her join him at Wright-Patterson when the baby was about six weeks old.
He told about his “aims” for his career on a short-term basis:
“1. I want to be something other than a buck pilot.
“2. I want to get this training in some technical field such as aero engineering so that part of my job will be flying and some desk work for I have found that too much of either is no good. I am expected to stay proficient in my flying but when you have a job that is all desk work… you just can’t find time to fly. Flying all the time gets you nowhere, for any fool can fly an airplane.” He said he has a fully qualified intelligence rating now but ‘you get nowhere in that field.’ He agreed that intelligence experience was very valuable in other fields, however.
“3. I want to get checked out in jets so I won’t be left out. All of our new ships are jets with the exception of the B-29’s and B-36’s and I’ll do anything to stay away from those monsters.”
He closed, “After I get my graduate work, get checked out in jets and get a couple of years more experience, I want to go to staff intelligence officers school and I will be qualified to get a job as air attaché in some European or South American country. I want to work in a tour in Europe somewhere along the line. That should take care of the next 10 or 11 years.” By then, he said he would be 40 and ready to figure where he wanted to go after that.
John was accepted for the 1953 graduate program in aeronautic engineering at Wright-Patterson. Mary Esther was in Enid and Johnny was born on June 14. John traveled back and forth to Oklahoma until his family could be moved to the base in mid-summer. He was on the path to becoming a test pilot in jets.
Chapter Four - John Saxon’s Story read by Niki Hayes and Jenny Hatch #JohnSaxonsStory