*The Text of this chapter is shared with permission by the author
Chapter 2: a three-crash lieutenant
“It was a lovely time to be alive.”
John, age 20
Because of serious health issues with two quadruple bypass heart surgeries, John was encouraged by his children to record his personal history on video cassette tapes.
It was 1943 and John was still less than an average student at the University of Georgia. With America entering World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, John wanted to avoid the draft because he wanted “some say” on how he would serve. He learned he could join the “enlisted reserve,” so that’s what he did. Soon afterward he went to Atlanta with his father on a business trip and John saw a sign in a store front window that said, “We want YOU and you can wear silver wings!” He went inside and told them he was already in the enlisted reserves. They said he would need to take the mental and physical exams, and the mental exam was starting in 15 minutes. The physical would be that afternoon. John asked his father if it would be okay for him to take the exams. John, Sr., gave his approval. Passing those exams, John knew he would be called up in some branch for aviation cadets. He said later that he had given little thought to the consequences of becoming a pilot. “I just happened to be in that office,” he said.
He got called up in April 1943. He jumped on the troop train to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and said later that Mimmy and Daddy recalled how happy he was because he was “going off to a great adventure.” They, however, were not happy. After all, he was their only son. That didn’t register with John at the time.
When the troops got to Keesler, they were lined up and marched into huts. Learning to drill in sand that was about six inches deep proved to be less fun and not a great adventure, said John, especially in May when it was hot and humid. In fact, “It was awful.” The men learned if they crawled under the huts and dug down in the sand, they could find coolness for some relief.
Basic training lasted for a month and then 4,000 to 5,000 cadets were sent one night to Knoxville, Tennessee. There were too many cadets for the trainers, John said, so the overflow was sent to classes to learn physics and science courses. “No one would study,” he said. While they were on guard duty, a woman who was “sort of like the Red Cross,” drove up and asked how she could help the boys. They wanted dates. Instead, she came back in a big black Cadillac, picked up five of them and took them to a golf course on the river. “She paid for everything,” he remembered.
The boys did end up dating some girls from the University of Tennessee. “It was a lovely time to be alive,” said John. “We were going off to war and none of us would get killed.” One night some of the Georgia boys decided they wanted to go to Athens, so after reveille they went AWOL and drove in a convertible to Athens. Then they drove all night to get back for morning reveille.
From Knoxville, he was sent to Nashville where everyone was given tests to classify each man as pilot, bombardier, or navigator. Of 300 being tested, only 20 didn’t want to be a pilot. The psychiatrist asked him if he were afraid of anything. “Yes, I’m afraid of being washed out of the program before I learn how to fly.” John was classified as a pilot.
From there, he went to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, for training. He spent a lot of time drilling, shining shoes, and killing time. Another troop train arrived in December, 1943, to take them to Avon Park, Florida. He remembers this because the Alabama winter rain caused them all to have muddy boots and they had to take them off before getting on the train. “We got on wearing our socks,” he said. As John is telling this story on the videotape, it is June 27, 1995. He shakes his head and says, “It’s amazing how well I remember things way back when.”
During the trip to Florida, John happened to see a water tower that said, “Frostproof, Florida.” This one small attention to signs turned out to be an important one for him later. At Avon Park, the troops went to ground school half the day and flew the other half, six days a week. “There was a lake we could swim in; it was great. And you can’t believe how wonderful it was to have all the milk and food we wanted. We hadn’t got much food at Maxwell. And girls waited on us. We got $21 a month. Hamburgers were 10 cents and cigarettes were 15 cents a pack.”
Their airplanes had open cockpits and they had to strap themselves in to keep from falling out if the plane flew upside down. “We had leather helmets, goggles and white silk scarves, and we put lard on our noses to prevent sunburning.” Because of the open cockpit with the instructor sitting in the front seat, John said the airplane never took off “straight.” It always taxied in an “S” curve.
John’s instructor never could understand why he wouldn’t step on the right rudder as hard as he needed to, but John said he was afraid he would break it. The instructor would yell, “Right rudder! Right rudder! I’m going to wash you out if you don’t push in that right rudder!” It took 10 takeoffs before he did it right. John admitted the instructor was patient with him. He also realized later that he was trying to memorize what to do, rather than just “doing it.” Later on, John did hit the wrong rudder and ran the plane off the runway into the motor pool. When he was asked what happened, he said, “I had a tail shimmy.” He didn’t, but the war was on, “so they overlooked it.”
The cadets learned to do stalls and spins and how to recover. Finally, solos came after eight or 10 hours of flying time. His instructor said, “Go up and shoot three landings and don’t kill yourself.” John said he was so excited that he would be in the air by himself. He was having so much fun, and then he started coming down for the landing and realized the instructor wasn’t with him. “I was scared to death, but somehow I got it landed.” On his second run, he was 400 feet above the ground instead on being on the ground where he was supposed to be, so he went around again. His instructor later demanded to know what he was doing by flying in “jumps” instead of smooth glides up and down. John didn’t say how he answered the instructor, but it must have worked because he got thrown in the lake as a reward for soloing.
It was spring, 1944, in Florida with nice, warm weather. “It was a wonderful life. We were being taught to fly airplanes to fight Germans and Japanese.” One day he decided to see how high his airplane would go. He kept climbing 50 feet a minute and when he reached 9,250 feet; the airplane started shaking. He was above the clouds and when he came down, he couldn’t see the airfield. Then he saw a water tower with the name “Frostproof,” first seen on his train ride to Florida. He followed the railroad tracks to Avon Park and made it back within his 30-minute allotted timeframe.
From here, the cadets were secretly taken to a new destination: Cochran Field in Macon, Georgia, to learn to fly the B-13 and B-15 bombers. “I thought I was really hot,” he says with embarrassment and covering his face with his hands as he begins this story. When told to take up the B-15, he joked to the instructor, “I could fly the crate it came in. I’ll try to bring it back in one piece.” He had been watching the “big boys”--instructors who were hotshots and would land with the tail wheel down first. Shooting his third landing, he pulled back on the stick and airplane went up in the air; it started shimmying and he crashed. The flight commander came out in another airplane to get him. Furious, he said John had made him look bad. “He screamed at me all the way back: ‘90 miles an hour! 90 miles an hour!’ I was close with 85-87 mph, so I didn’t see any big deal.” He was again threatened with being washed out of cadet training and this time the instructor did actually fail him.
But, as John tells it, “This is an example of my luck. In the fall of ’43 and spring of ’44, the Germans were shooting our butts off. Washington [D.C.] sent word out: ‘If they can breathe, do not wash out anybody!’” So John was sent to the major for a ride to see if he indeed should be washed out. “God, I was ground shy when I was trying to land,” he said, but because the guy ahead of him had been washed out, the major sent John back to the flight line and said, “The boy can fly, he just can’t land it. Teach him how to land it.”
During one such training exercise, John recounts a story that he later published in a full page advertisement in Mathematics Teacher magazine called, “Terror at 3000 Feet.” In that incident, the instructor was yelling, “Think! Think! Think!” John said he was thinking but it was, “I don’t know what to think! Lord, tell me what to think!”
His training required lots of physical movement with feet and hands, not like today, he explained. “We had no radios in that airplane. A different rudder was used on the ground than the one used in the air. It required real memorization and practice.” They reached the ground during that eventful flight, but John says he learned a lesson that he used when he trained pilots in later years. “This terrible experience made me teach my own flier students that they should tell me what they needed to do, rather than yelling at them without any helpful directions.”
This, by the way, was a flight in which he didn’t have his seatbelt fastened. If they had turned upside down, he said he would have fallen from the airplane.
This same instructor later told John when he was soloing, “If you have an accident, have a big one and kill yourself so I won’t have an investigation on me.” John was so excited he forgot to fasten his seatbelt again. “If I had flown upside down, I’d fallen out.” John shot his landings and had to redo some of his flight work, but he finally got through this basic training. His instructor was “mean as hell” but, John said, “He got me through it.”
Now he got to choose whether he wanted further training in single or twin engine airplanes. He chose twin engine mainly because he didn’t think they would give him a single engine. Later, “I was in an AT-10,” he says with a deep breath, “and I can’t believe this but I thought the pilot was dangerous, so I was going to help him and I put on the brakes. We rolled upside down on the runway. Gasoline was coming out of the gas cap. We turned off the switches but that didn’t matter because the engines were hot as firecrackers. The pilot was 5’6” and he got out.” John, who was now 5’10”, was trapped. They were about three-quarters of a mile from the flight line so it took about four minutes for anyone to get to them. “Had it caught on fire, I would have been burned to a crisp.” He was screaming for someone to get him out of there but they wanted to foam down everything first. “It stank, but I was glad for that nasty smell.” He didn’t know how they got him out of that airplane except that they had to break through the fuselage.
This was John’s third airplane accident. He was assigned another instructor. But here he interrupts his story to tell about a special highlight during that time period: Mimmy had come to a peach orchard near the field and brought jugs of buttermilk and a whole basket of tomato sandwiches for the men on the night flight practice! That had clearly left an indelible memory in John’s mind.
The cadets were now sent to interviews to determine if they would be named second lieutenants or warrant officers. “We didn’t like the interviewer,” said John. “The guy was asking what we thought about the role of leadership and I said I didn’t believe that people could be driven, that they should be led. He didn’t like that answer.” Then something clicked in the back of John’s mind while the guy was talking and John said, in reference to the interviewer’s comments, “I never thought about it that way. You’re totally right.” John admitted that was a straight con job and he was lying “from the word go.” It worked. He was named a second lieutenant.
A fellow cadet had stood down a tactical officer at an early time in their training and told him why he was wrong. John said, “That cadet couldn’t understand why he didn’t make second lieutenant.” Further, the cadet had turned on John and chewed him out for “buggering” three airplanes and still making second lieutenant. At this point in the story, John said that the fellow’s fussing at him was overshadowed by the fact that Mimmy, Daddy, and his sister were coming to his graduation.
From Cochran Field, John was sent to Sebring, Florida, for B-17 training. They had combat returnees as instructors and, “These guys never told one horror story about their wartime experiences,” he said. They didn’t tell that one crew in 20 came back alive. None even hinted that John and the others were going to die. “It was unbelievable the way they played the game. The war wasn’t found in the newspapers. You didn’t talk about dead soldiers until parents got a notice and a Gold Star was put in the window—a Gold Star was for the mother who had given her son for our country.” John and his crew figured they weren’t slackers, however, so that meant they wouldn’t get killed.
He looked at those B-17s and said, “You cannot imagine how big they looked. Now, today, a B-17 can fit under one wing of a DC-10. The B-17E and B-17F were two of four models. The B-17G had a nose turret hung on the front of it because other B-17s had no fire [gun] protection. John decided flying formations was fun but confesses he was just “adequate” in getting the B-17 off the ground and back down.
At this point in his storytelling, John interjects a particular incident that has remained humorous to him: his wisdom teeth being pulled. “We took our overseas physical and they pulled our teeth because they didn’t want us to get shot down with bad wisdom teeth. I guess that was the reason. Nobody knew.”
John returned to Avon Park Army Airfield in Florida and was assigned a flight crew. This was, in fact, the combat crew replacement center. They started flying practice combat missions with more instrument training which involved flying over the Everglades where a gunnery range had been set up. During one particular run, John could hear the .50 calibre guns being fired from within the airplane. It was his crew shooting at white Herons.
Another learning moment was when he realized he hadn’t used much sense by not giving his copilot more air time. Giving him control of the airplane, John said when they got to 3000 feet, he asked, “Where’s the field?” His copilot didn’t know. “We were over Central Florida, lost.” They decided to turn on all the search lights and thought that might help. It didn’t. “It was bad,” said John. Then someone finally saw the lights of Avon Park on the field and they headed home.
“It was August 1944 and I had wised up just enough to know I was going to have to know something to make a living.” He got a call from his father, asking if he’d like to go to West Point. Seems his uncle was having lunch in a Washington, D.C., restaurant and a Georgia congressman who had just been defeated asked if he knew anyone who wanted an appointment to the Military Academy. He had one opening left to give away. John’s uncle thought he might be a good candidate and told his father about the offer. John asked his father when it began and was told June 30, 1945. John figured two things: 1) If he went back to the University of Georgia, he would do nothing but drink beer and cut classes. 2) He could still fly a mission overseas and be back in time to go to West Point. He didn’t know anything about West Point, but he knew it was a big deal. He thought maybe West Point would make him “do something.”
He didn’t realize a situation had developed that would provide another of the many strokes of good fortune in his life. He was going to have to make a wrenching decision. John’s father called to let him know that he would have to take an exam for admission in March of 1945. John’s unit probably wouldn’t ship out until February. That meant he wouldn’t have time to fly his 25 missions and get back in time to take the exam. “For once in my life, I made the right decision,” he said. He resigned his commission immediately so a new pilot could be assigned his crew and this would give them practice runs together. Then he adds, almost softly, “But I got to fly in Korea and Vietnam and prove I wasn’t a coward.” He later learned his crew got in 14 missions, all “milk runs,” or easy flights with little or no danger, before the end of the war.
Chapter Two - John Saxon's Story read by Niki Hayes and Jenny Hatch #JohnSaxonsStory