James McNutt
Tricia McNutt
Mr. Thomas
U.S. History H, Period 5
1 May 2006
Transcript
I interviewed my grandfather, James McNutt. He was born in 1924 and lived here in Indianapolis his entire life. He joined the Army Air Corps when he graduated from Park High School. In the Air Corps, he was a navigator. I asked him questions about his experiences in the Corps and how it came to be. He reads a lot and watches The History Channel often, so I knew that he would be very knowledgeable on the subject.
April 26, 2006
Interviewer: Tricia McNutt
Interviewee: James McNutt
Q: How did the Army Air Corps begin?
A: The air branch of the Army started as part of the cavalry. But the old-timers in the Army thought that airplanes were silly, passing fads. The first real military use of the airplane comes from General John Percy down in Texas…Well, first of all you had to find somebody to fight, and they might be fifty miles over there or this way. So a couple of the old-timers decided to find somebody to fight was to fly an airplane and see where they are and then tell the cavalry down here and drop a note down to them. “Here, the bad guys are over here.” That was about nineteen twelve or thirteen. WWI really hadn’t started yet. When it did start in Europe in 1914, the first use of aircraft was through, again find the enemy first so you could find him. The first real military use of anything above the earth was in the Civil War. They used gas balloons tied on long ropes, and they would send an observer up in the air with his spy glasses and he could see over the top of the hill, yep, there’s the enemy. And they would write out a note and drop it down to the cavalry and the war began.
Q: Could they not be shot down in the balloon?
A: [Yes, they could.] It was the simplest type of balloon you could imagine, just like the state fair ones. You see them floating around out here… Pretty soon the Germans were using airplanes for about the same use as we were, but they got nasty first… So they started shooting at our guys. So, if you’re going to do that, we’ll do it too… Pretty soon it began to show its worth. You’d find the enemy, now how are we going to get him? They did all kinds of terrible things: chains into the enemy airplanes, using machine guns, handheld grenades, stuff like that. And it just got meaner and nastier as time went on. Well, finally when WWI was over, the few airmen that survived and stayed in the Army ended up in cavalry…There were a few left over that thought, ‘hey, this airplane has really good military use.’ Congress didn’t agree with them. They didn’t give them much money. They had a lot of left over ‘ginny,’ as they called it, from WWI… There were just a few pioneers left here in the Army that thought the airplane had a great case, military case. There were lots of fights between congress and hardcore military pioneers, really. And there’s always somebody that wants to make something better than what we have, so that started the real military use of aircraft.
Q: So WWII was the first time that they actually took aircraft seriously?
A: Yea, seriously. There were a few daring souls in WWI. There were the observation pilots. They’d go out and find the enemy, maybe take some pictures, and come back and give those to the ground soldiers… When it got to the largest part of the Army, they called it the Army Air Corps. It’s like the Cavalry Corps or the Artillery Corps.
Q: So, it’s just another section of the Army?
A: [Yes.] But the old time military people kind of looked down on it, a bunch of cowboys. Then all of a sudden, WWII started with the Pearl Harbor attack. That was just devastating. Our main outpost in the West was in Hawaii, and that was the headquarters of our Pacific Navy. When the Japanese looked farther ahead with the airplane than we did, they bombed Pearl Harbor. They sank all but about two of our Navy ships. So, that gave a hurry-up call to armed forces, and we started building ships like you wouldn’t believe it: aircrafts and Navy ships.
Q: Were you already in the Army at this time?
A: No, I was in high school. I graduated from high school in 1942. Pearl Harbor started and it was obvious we were in big trouble, and that we were going to have to mobilize all the young men of the country into the Army and the Navy and fly with the few old-time bombers that we had. When you have to do it, you can. We designed and built hundreds, if not thousands, of bombers. By that time, the War in Europe was going on, and we stayed out of that as long as we could.
Q: Until Pearl Harbor?
A: Until Pearl Harbor awakened everybody. It was obvious that guys like my age, that we were going to be in the military one way or the other.
Q: Do you mean you would be drafted?
A: Yeah, either drafted or volunteered. Well, I left Park [Tudor], when I graduated in ’42. I went to Purdue, and we had the ROTC up there.
Q: At Purdue?
A: [Yes.] So, I joined the Reserves, and I figured I’d be in a uniform in just a few weeks. It wasn’t a few weeks, it was more like a few months. In June of ’44, I finally got my orders. I wasn’t drafted, because I was in the Reserve. So, we put our uniforms on and off we went to be trained. It was almost comical, it was so haphazard… ‘What can you do to win the war for us?’ Well, we had aptitude tests like you wouldn’t believe it. I remember there was one big test. There must have been hundreds of us. You know, it was a huge aircraft hanger that had a great big radio to test us if we had an ear for radio. Well, I didn’t want anything to do with radio.
Q: What did you want to do?
A: Well, I wanted to be in the Air Corps. That’s why they tested us. They’d play these huge recordings of Morse code. Well, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with radio. So, if they played a ‘dit,’ I put down ‘dot.’ And if they played a ‘da,’ I put down ‘dit.’ I flunked that one good. And, as you can imagine, I was very soon in the high speed radio operators school of the Air Corps. Up in Madison, WI. We had a pretty darn good communication system developed for the Air Force, but I still didn’t want to be in radio. So, I applied for the Aviation Cadets. I wanted to be a pilot more than anything.
Q: Had you already been flying by this time?
A: I had already been a civilian pilot by this time. I was finally accepted after psychological tests, and physical tests, and all this silly stuff. It didn’t make a difference if you already knew how to fly. They were going to teach you how the Army flies. Well, I eventually ended up from there to what was called an Aviation Cadet, pre-cadet school. Which meant I spent about six months, a wonderful six months- I had a great time- at the University of Southern Illinois.
Q: And you had been in Wisconsin?
A: I had been in Wisconsin…They taught us all kinds of military stuff. Emphasis was heavy on math, physics, Army discipline, that sort of stuff. When we graduated from there we went to pre-Cadet school in order to get along. That was down in San Antonio. So, they gave us more aptitude tests. They thought with all of our talents that some were going to be pilots, some were going to be navigators, some were going to be bombardiers, all kinds of specialties… Did we need pilots? ‘Yep.’ We needed a lot of them. Okay, everybody’s going to be trained as a pilot… Do we need navigators? Half will be navigators. Well, I got caught in the middle. I wanted pilot training, but it turned out they had too many pilots but not enough navigators or bombardiers. Well, I chose navigation.
Q: What made you pick that over bombardier?
A: Well, the idea of dropping stuff from an airplane was kind of haphazard. Your chances of hitting what you wanted to hit were pretty slim. But how do we get there to know what we want to bomb? Nobody, except few Navy people, have any experience with long distance travel. How do you take a very expensive bomber with ten people aboard from the West Coast to Japan, or Italy, or someplace? The only thing between you and there was water. We had to develop the methods of getting there. ‘Cause, believe me, when you leave the shore and there’s nothing but thousands of miles of water out there, it’s all the same, whether it’s going Pacific or Atlantic or South. It was so crude, they had to use the same methods of navigation as Christopher Columbus did.
Q: Which was what?
A: By the stars. We had to identify all the stars in the galaxy.
Q: All the constellations?
A: [Yes.] Fortunately, guys back even in Columbus’ day were pretty smart, and even a hundred years before they were proficient, even the old Phoenicians and Greeks, back before the Medieval times navigated by the stars.
Q: And that’s what you guys did too?
A: Yes, so we had to learn an excellent way of finding out where you were. Of course, in the mean time mapmakers mapped out shorelines and, well, they were better maps than we had before. So that way, you could find the enemy, and you could drop a load of bombs on them.
Q: So you used the star constellations and maps?
A: [Yes.]
Q: So over water you used the constellations and over land you used the maps?
A: [Yes.] Or sometimes if there was a cloud cover below you and you couldn’t see the land, you could still go by the stars.
Q: So could you only fly at night, then, or travel at night?
A: No, it didn’t seem to make much difference night or day. Getting from point A to point B was pretty much the same. If you have a map, it shows the landmarks. There’s this mountain, and that river, and that town down there. Or Pegasus and all the stars up here. Well, there you go. You’ve got two things to work with. After navigation school, again, you have too many pilots, or too many navigators, or too many bombers, or too many this and not enough of that, or too much of the other. So, they formed the Air Transport Command, because they began to find out that they can use pair troopers to deliver troops or get what you needed from point A to point B, ‘cause there are points. What we called the ‘gooney bird,’ the C47 or the DC3, were the Douglas’.
Q: What were they?
A: They’re Douglas Airlines. We stripped all of the pretty stuff out of the inside and turned them into trucks, cargo trucks. You wanted to get a bunch of jeeps from here to there, but it takes time to drive them there, and there’s water in between. So, you loaded them all up in an airplane and could fly them over there, and put them where you want.
Q: So they just used airliners for that?
A: In the beginning, yes. But then they decided and found out that the airplane was pretty darn useful and not just another piece of machinery. It was like another ship or another truck. Well, I ended up in the air transport command. The war in Europe was really going big, just terrible. We were getting a lot of airplanes shot down, a lot of them shot up. So, they had to replace the old shot up ones. We would fly the new ones over to where they were needed and bring back the old shot-up cripples.
Q: So that was your job?
A: [Yes.]
Q: So you took the new planes over and then took the scraps back?
A: Yep. We didn’t get shot at all too much. I’d almost have to show you a map of the world, where all we went. It didn’t make all that difference whether it was Europe, or Asia, or the South Pacific, or South America.
Q: So what countries did you, personally, fly to?
A: Everywhere…We kind of chose our own routes to minimize the danger of getting shot down.
Q: Did they give you that option?
A: As a navigator, you’re in charge of which way you go.
Q: So you just figured that out as you went along?
A: Yep…
Q: So, I assume you were going over water because it was too dangerous to go over any land?
A: [Yes.] More times than not we didn’t have any guns. We needed the weight capability of the airplane to carry gasoline to get us home worse than we needed bullets…If I was wrong, we were all dead.