There wasn’t a military tradition in our family. When I came home and told the folks I was going down to Randolph Field to train to be an aviator, it was almost beyond their comprehension.

My interest in flying really took over my life in 1936. At that time, I was a 21-year-old kid, working as a timekeeper on the graveyard shift at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica, California. Watching the large numbers of military airplanes rolling off the production line set me thinking. It appeared to me that with so many military airplanes being turned out, there...

Gosh, I’ve been busy. I was Officer of the Day the first day out, as you know, and they also made me commanding officer of the 1st Company of soldiers down below. I’ve 91 men, and for the first two days, they were all too seasick to move. By now, half of them are able to laugh at the other half, so things aren’t so bad.

My steward says this has been the roughest crossing he’s ever seen, and it really has been rough. Ever since we left Frisco, the boat has been pitching and banging around like a feather...

Hawaii was a wonderful place for a young bachelor, second lieutenant pilot. There were a bunch of nice guys in the 31st Squadron. It was a casual life in the military then. Every Wednesday was a half holiday, and work stopped at noon. About one Saturday each month, there was a big parade, review, and inspection in the morning. Otherwise, we had two-day weekends. And of course, the last day of every month was payday and a holiday. On payday, the eagle screamed, the troops were paid, and the rest of the day was off.

It is also well to...

I had always been a guy to play the field. I enjoyed the freedom of bachelorhood, as much as I enjoyed the freedom of flying like a bird. I had made it a habit not to see the same girl too often and to avoid establishing any kind of a pattern that might lead to a loss of my freedom, either on the ground or in the air.

And then I met Lee. Strangely, I found little interest in seeing any other girls and spent my time trying to insert myself into her life so that being together would seem...

After that night on the Pali, my world revolved around Lee. All my waking moments were either with her or planning how I could be with her. From that time on, other girls were friends or acquaintances, period! Things were a little different with her, though. She continued to date other guys although not quite as often as she once had, and I began to see less and less of that damn motorcycle when I came to pick her up. While my acceptance by Lee was lukewarm, I did manage to win over both Jean and Jane. I tried my...

Lee had an inherent dislike for the military services. She grew up in Long Beach, California, which was a Navy town, and the Army’s Fort MacArthur wasn’t very far away. Her only contact with either the Navy or the Army was to watch the soldiers and sailors on the streets of the town on Saturday nights. Then again, in her job at Liberty House, she came into contact with military wives, and she had become convinced that they were dowdy, snooty, bossy, and generally unpleasant. Lee was sure that military people were not as nice as ordinary people. And of...

The very southernmost tip of Hawaii, the Big Island, is called Ka Lae, meaning “South Cape” in Hawaiian. Hickam Field maintained a bombing range at South Cape, with a target so that we could drop our practice bombs, known as “Blue Whistlers,” and measure the accuracy of our bombing. There was a dirt runway for use in emergencies and where we could land to get people to the target and maintain the range. There was a detachment of about 30 men kept at South Cape, with an infirmary, a mess hall, and tents to live in. The 5th Bomb Group...

In the fall of 1940, Lee was scheduled to make a business trip back to the States to buy merchandise for her department at Liberty House. She had a busy program of meetings in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and planned to take a few days off to visit her folks in Long Beach. She had been in the Islands a long time and was looking forward to the break on the mainland.

I, of course, had an entirely different feeling about her trip. I even envisioned the awful possibility that she might decide not to come back. To protect...

After Lee’s return from the mainland, I was walking on air. Lee left her job at Liberty House so she could concentrate on getting ready for the new life that faced her. We selected “Franksgiving Day”—the 21st of November—as our wedding day. For those of you who might not remember, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in order to make the Christmas shopping season longer and boost the economy, had declared that Thanksgiving Day would be celebrated on the third Thursday of November rather than the fourth, and it became known as Franksgiving Day.

In the meantime, I had put...

Our wedding was a dream affair. Lee had decided to be married in the beautiful home of a friend of hers, Mary White, which was in Nuuanu Valley. Mary’s sister, Katharine, gave the bride away. The Reverend Henry Judd performed the ceremony. He was a very nice man. He was a friend of the Whites’, and it wasn’t important just what church he belonged to. If I ever found out, I don’t remember. He did a good job. After the ceremony, he told me that he had performed a lot of weddings, and he knew that this one was going...

As we drove away from the wedding in our can-free car, we drove up Nuuanu Valley, over the Kamehameha Pali that had so many happy memories for both of us and down the windward side of the Waianae Mountains toward Kaneohe Bay. We were a couple of happy kids. The world was our oyster. We had 30 days to loaf on the beach and swim and surf and get to know each other.

Lee was properly delighted with the little cottage, which she hadn’t seen before. I had stocked it with the basics, so we could eat for a day...

Our month in our little cottage on the windward side of Oahu was idyllic—endless days of sunning and strolling on the beach and reading aloud to each other in the evenings. We had eggs and bacon for breakfast and sandwich makings for lunch. In the evenings, we usually went out to one of the many little spots on the windward coast and listened to Hawaiian music, danced, and had quiet dinners.

But after a couple of weeks, we decided that we’d better touch base with the real world. We decided that we could have Lee’s former roommates (Jean and...

When our month-long honeymoon at Kahaluu was over, construction at Hickam Field was still underway, so there were no quarters ready to move into on the field. We found a nice little apartment in Kaimuki, up behind Diamond Head, where we lived until we could move on base. I carpooled with some other guys out to the base so that Lee could have the car three or four days a week, and we settled into married life. It was a cute little place. Lee had a chance to study up on her cooking, and we began to learn a little...

In March of 1941, quarters became available at Hickam Field, and we left our apartment in Kaimuki and moved on base. It was a nice little two-bedroom duplex, quite close to Pearl Harbor channel. When the huge Navy vessels went to and from Pearl Harbor, they seemed to tower over our house. The government provided a couple of dressers, dining room furniture, and Army cots. That was it. Lee immediately used her initiative in many ways. Between us, we owned a lot of books, so we got some boards and some bricks and improvised some bookshelves. She devised ahikiea...

Things on Hickam Field were pretty tense as 1941 wound its way through the summer. We completed the conversion from B-18s to B-17s, which made a tremendous improvement in our combat capability, but the world was at war, and it seemed like only a matter of time until we were involved. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten put into Pearl Harbor with a battle-damaged British aircraft carrier that the Japanese had beat up in the South China Sea. He spoke to a gathering of American officers and told us, “This is your war, just as much as it is ours. While you...

Did we know what was coming? At the lieutenant level, we had a pretty good idea. There were a lot of signs.

Early in 1941, Colonel Claire Chennault had come through Hickam on his way from Washington back out to China. He was recruiting Flying Tigers and painted a bright picture of all the money to be made and all the fun to be had flying shark-nosed P-40s out of Kunming. The pay was roughly ten times what a lieutenant made, including those who drew flying pay, and there was a $1,000 bonus paid for every confirmed Japanese plane shot...

Sunday morning, the 7th of December 1941, started out like any other beautiful day in Hawaii. Lee and I had gone to Honolulu the day before to do some Christmas shopping. We had already gotten our packages off to the States. In Hawaii, you had to shop and mail early because boat travel delayed the arrival of packages to the mainland. On Saturday, 6 December, we bought tree ornaments and presents for our Hawaiian friends. That night, we had gone to a small party at the club, and that fateful Sunday morning, we had decided to goof off.

I got...

That day was one I will always remember. To a young lieutenant whose exposure to violent death and mutilating wounds had been limited, it was unreal. The day had a sense of horror and unreality that are hard to convey.

The sky was full of Japanese airplanes. Formations of high-level horizontal bombers were laying down a pattern of bombs on our parked aircraft. Dive-bombers were making individual attacks. Several put bombs into the consolidated barracks and into the flight line hangars as I was running for the line. I saw one dive-bomber go straight into the big Hawaiian Air Depot...

It was about a week before bomb shelters were dug in the vacant areas throughout the quarters section and wives could come back to the base. There was a curfew after the hours of darkness all over the island. All windows were blacked-out so that no light could show at night. The general had put me on duty in Wing Operations, and Major Roger Ramey (later a major general) set us up on shifts, 24 hours on duty and 12 hours off. Lee was pretty well tied to the base and, of course, couldn’t leave the house after dark. Sentries...

After Lee left on her way back to the States, I did a lot of worrying. I was not at all sure that the Navy, with its destroyers, was capable of assuring that theLurline, with its precious load, would have a safe passage. I had several sleepless nights until I got a wire that Lee had arrived safely in San Francisco and that her mother and dad were there to meet her.

Our quarters were dismal and empty without her, but I didn’t stay there long. General Rudolph had orders to return to the States and gave me three...

Soon after we returned to Hawaii from Midway, the 11th Group was alerted for movement to the South Pacific. I had been promoted to captain, which I could tell Lee about, but there was no way I could let her know that we were headed south. She found out eventually, though, because we flew a lot of missions, and some were successful enough to make the news. We did most of our early flying and fighting out of Espiritu Santo, an island in the New Hebrides. As soon as the airstrip on Guadalcanal was secured and made long enough for...

Our first station down south was on one of the southern islands in the New Hebrides, called Efate, near the capital city of Vila. Our flying field consisted of one very narrow strip, covered with pierced steel planking and carved out of the jungle. The jungle was very close to the runway, and it was a scary place to land in a crosswind. Airplanes were parked by backing them with a tug into notches carved out of the jungle along the length of the strip. We were bombing targets on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, softening them up for the coming Marine...

Early in August, we began operations from Espiritu Santo, an island in the northern New Hebrides and closer to the action in the Solomons. Our base on Espiritu Santo was extremely primitive, just a runway chopped out of a copra plantation and covered with pierced steel planking (PCP). There was no taxiway structure. Our B-17s were parked in hardstands off of the runway. Later, the group operated out of a collection of Quonset huts, and each squadron established a tent camp in the coconut palms. To begin with, though, there were no structures of any kind. Flight and ground crews...

With the capture of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal and its improvement so that it could accommodate B-17s, the scope of the 11th Group operations was considerably broadened. Reconnaissance missions for Henderson made it possible to locate Japanese naval forces. Also, strike efforts could be launched from there against enemy naval units as well as against Japanese bases in the northern Solomons. It became standard practice to keep a sizable number of aircraft and crews forward on Henderson, rotating them back to Espiritu Santo for major maintenance or short periods of crew rest.

Living conditions on Guadalcanal were less than ideal....

Being a major and commander of a B-17 squadron was pretty tall cotton for a knuckle-headed kid who was just barely smart enough to find his way from his tent down to his airplane and back. I kind of enjoyed it except for those unpleasant periods when very unfriendly people were either trying to shoot you out of the sky or blow you up on the ground.

Eventually, the field on Espiritu Santo was completed. It was much more habitable than Efate and a much shorter run up to where most of our targets were. When the Marines had pretty...

In the spring of 1943, the 11th Group was returned to Hawaii to remain, reequip, and return to the Pacific war. All of us old B-17 guys were returned to the U.S.—“Uncle Sugar,” as we called it. I was flown back to Mather Field, next to Sacramento, California. I shipped ahead what baggage I had and began scrambling to find myself a flight to Long Beach.

When I arrived, Lee’s mother met me with a smile and told me, “I feel as though I know you already, Jim. Just like my own boys when they were away at school....

We arrived in Washington on a cold, blustery day in March. I found a building that was marked war and navy department building, and with my orders in my hand, I strode in the door to report for duty. I saw nothing but Navy uniforms around, and everybody looked at me kind of funny. When I showed them my orders, I was quickly told that this building was only a Navy Annex now and that I needed to go to the Pentagon building. I asked where that was, and I was told, “Across the river, in Virginia.” I went back...

We found a house. It was a nice little place. We had delightful neighbors across the street and were only a couple of blocks away from a bus line where I could ride to work and let the bus drivers worry about finding the Pentagon for me. I found a pleasant boss, an empty desk, and some nice guys to work with (some of whom I knew), and it seemed that my job had something to do with airplanes. I wasn’t quite sure about that, but I figured I could learn.

I quickly found out that I was a strange...

In 1943, Marietta, Georgia, was a quiet little southern country town, clustered around a town square. Today, Atlanta has spread out like an amoeba and engulfed Marietta completely. The airport, just out of town, was a small one, where a big hangar had been built as the first installment of the Lockheed factory that was coming. The B-29 Project was housed in a farmhouse in the back reaches of the field. Offices had been set up in the farmhouse, and this was the temporary home of the budding 58th Bomb Wing. Planning was under way there for four B-29 groups...

My tour at Smoky Hill Army Airfield was short but busy. The days were about 48 hours long. New assignees would walk in each day, and they would be greeted and put to work. Our job was to get combat ready in B-29s while they were still inventing the airplanes. We had one B-29 per squadron, most of the time. The majority of our training was done in B-17s and B-26s. During our months in Salina, I checked out all 15 of my pilots in B-29s, myself. It was a cold and snowy winter, and we lived in temporary barracks,...

In March of 1944, we began receiving the B-29s. These were the first we had seen with operational remote control gunnery systems and operational pressurization systems. We had to change all engines, across the board, to the new combat-ready engines. The Ground Echelon of our group had already left to travel to our destination by boat, and the combat crews changed the 240 engines in the 60 B-29s of our group. It was a relief to be finally on our way. And we finally learned where we were going: to the China-Burma-India Theater.

We flew from Salina to Goose Bay,...

It was a real relief when the people on top decided there were better ways to use my special talent, and they assigned me to the B-29 program. The B-29 was a big, new bomber they were inventing with a pressurized cabin, remote control turrets, and a lot of other goodies that, we were told, would make her the queen of the skies. They were right, of course, but there was still a lot of inventing to do.

The first B-29 unit was the 58th Wing, which consisted of four groups, each group with four squadrons. I found my place...

One incident that occurred during my year in India and China was a chapter of the war that Lee and I never forgot. In June 1944, we flew our first mission out of China against the Japanese home islands. We bombed the steel mill in Yawata, on the island of Kyushu. It was a tough mission, and we lost several airplanes and crews. It was the first time that Japan itself had been hit since the Doolittle Raid, and we tried to make the most of it.

The Japanese had a propaganda broadcast that they put on the air every...

Early in 1945, we got word that a base was ready for us on Tinian (one of the islands in the Marianas) and that we were to move from our bases in India and China to Tinian. This was good news for several reasons. It would put us closer to Japan where we would be able to carry much bigger bomb loads, and we would no longer be faced with the job of ferrying everything over the Hump before we could fly a mission. Also, we would be part of a bigger effort. General LeMay, who had been with us...

Paul Tibbets, a flying school classmate of mine, arrived on Tinian with his 509th Group and his atomic bombs. By the time Paul got there, the Japs were already beaten. Paul provided the force to make them admit it.

I was returning to Tinian on 14 August, from a mission bombing the Hikari Naval Arsenal, when we received the news over the radio that the Japanese had unconditionally surrendered. The war was over.

A few days later, I received a phone call in my tent that General Roger Ramey, the 58th Wing Commander, wanted to see me right away. I...