Richard McCalley
Personal Interview: Richard McCalley
You served in the Army Air Corps, right?
Yes, the Army Air Corps. At the time there was no Air Force. I was called into service in February of 1943.
Were you actually drafted?
No, I enlisted. I had finished my freshman year at Notre Dame. The Air Corps was offering deferments. I enlisted in August of 1942. I finished another semester. In February of 1943, I was called to active duty. They cleaned out every college in the country. They called everyone and had no room in preflight training. After basic training, I was sent back to the college training detachment. I got sent to St. Louis, to what had been a night school. They converted the parking garage to dormitories. We had a really good time. Right across the street was a USO. On the street, there were three good movie theaters and several taverns. We were a mile away from St. Louis University, so we went to dances. About July, I went down to Texas for preflight school. I got classified as a pilot, then went through pilot training, which took until May of 1944, when I got my wings. So it took about nine months to get my wings. After that we got further training in the type of plane we would be flying, the P-47 fighter, in other parts of the country, mostly Texas. I didn’t go overseas until Easter Sunday of 1945. Going overseas on an aircraft carrier took two weeks to get to one of the islands of the Marshall Islands. We had brand new airplanes. We were waiting for Okinawa to be secured. The battle for Okinawa was going on, and that’s where we were going to be. We stayed on a little island – Ieshima – off the coast. The island is most famous because it’s where Ernie Pyle was killed. We got there in June of 1945. I had 12 missions over Japan and Korea before the war ended on August 15, 1945.
What type of missions did you participate in?
We had dive-bombing missions in Japan. We had escort missions, where we escorted bombers to their targets. We had search and rescue missions. We never found anyone. Some were captured by the Japanese and returned as prisoners of war. I was a fighter pilot who never saw combat. The Japanese Air Force was pretty much destroyed by the time we got over there.
The day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, we didn’t know it at the time, but nobody in the area flew. The next day we had a mission over Japan. The crew chief got up and announced it. My comment was “What in the hell is an atomic bomb?” Nobody knew. Shortly after they dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki, the war ended.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I was a freshman at Notre Dame. That day was a pretty sunshiny day. Three or four of us decided to go for a walk up to Michigan. We got tired and gave up and hitchhiked back to school. The guy who picked us up had a car radio, which was fairly rare at the time. He asked us, “Did you hear the news? Pearl Harbor has been bombed.” Where is Pearl Harbor? Nobody knew. We all learned pretty quickly. Back then Hawaii was a possession of the United States, not a state.
Tell me a little about your training.
Basic training is where you learn that left is different than right. That lasted four to five weeks. Then we went to the college training detachment in St. Louis. We took tests and they put you in groups at the college detachment to see when you would go to preflight school. In preflight school, you were classified into a type of training: pilot, navigator, or bombadeer. I got classified for pilot. We took physical and mental tests for classification.
I went to primary flight training, basic flight training, and advanced flight training. Each was roughly two months. Then we got our wings. Then we were given a commission. After we got our wings, we still had further flight training. After that, they classified us into a type of plane. I got classified to a fighter. I think because I was small in stature.
Tell me a little about the missions you participated in.
Most were rather long and dull missions. A couple were kind of exciting. We were going to bomb a city in Japan. We had a bomb under each wing, I think 1000 pound bombs. I pushed the button to drop my bombs. One dropped, the other didn’t. It flipped me. We had a manual release, so I pulled that. After the bomb dropped, we were supposed to make a left turn, go out over the water, and climb to altitude to rejoin our squadron. After I dropped my bomb, I made another left turn, but there was no water. So I flew low and fast. I finally saw my squadron and rejoined. What really ticked me off was that nobody asked where I had been or what happened to me.
Being over there in the theater, we were flying over water a lot of the time. It was very nerve-wracking. What if the engine quit or something else went wrong? Fortunately that never happened to me. Some guys had to bail out. We were sitting on a parachute and an inflatable boat. I never had to use it.
What about the daily living conditions?
We started in two-man tents. They had no floors. We had cots, mosquito netting, sleeping bags, and no lights. When it got dark, we went to bed. I can’t remember where we ate our meals. One mission we got back after dark. The mess sergeant kept the food warm for us. We never went hungry. After the war ended, we moved to a new area, the luxury quarters. They were four-man tents with wooden floors, screened in sides. We built a front porch so we could sit on it. Then we had a nicer mess hall too. We could shower every day. Old wing tanks that used to hook onto planes for extra gas were filled with water. Sometimes it wasn’t hot water, but we got showers.
When I enlisted, I was eighteen years old. I enlisted to finish school. At the time I enlisted, they weren’t drafting. I had to get my father to sight the papers. I had to argue a bit, but not very long. I said, “Dad, pretty soon they are going to draft. I don’t want to be a foot soldier.”
How did the war affect you?
I think I grew up. I experienced things in the army, people shooting people, that I never would have before. In Army life you meet all kinds of people. Some were friends for life, some you just think about and forget. I still correspond with some people. One in Tuscan, Arizona, who was my first tent mate. When he got out of the Army, he drifted around. He joined the National Guard. He continued flying retired from the Army. Most went to school and lived their lives.
I graduated from high school in 1941. I don’t think any of us thought much about the war in Europe or what the Japanese were doing to China, but we sure learned quickly.
What happened after the war ended?
The nice part about when the war ended was that there wasn’t much to do. We went home on a point system. This was based on the number of battles you had seen and the time you had been there. Most of our squadron hand not been there very long. They broke up our squadron and sent us to Okinawa and other outfits. I didn’t get home until a year after the war ended. I flew as a copilot on the troop carrier planes. We got to make trips all over the Pacific area delivering people and equipment. I got to visit places like Japan, Tokyo, Iwo Jima, Manilla, and other places in the Pacific and South Pacific that I would never have been able to get to. In those travels, I got to see what war did, all of the destruction and hardships that war causes. Manilla, particularly, you think of it as a glamorous place, but it was anything but. Buildings were devastated, there was nothing but filth. Yet the people seemed happy. I guess because the war was over and they were free from Japanese rule. Having fought against the Japanese, I said I would never drive a Japanese car. I ended up owning two. My Army experience was good for me, and I think everybody should have some exposure to the services. I had two kids who served. John was in the Coast Guard and Tom was in the Army Reserves.
Can you tell me more about the actual war?
We had, while waiting for Okinawa to be secured, landed on the island Enewietok, which was later a bomb testing site. Nothing was on the island. The widest spot was a mile wide. Every afternoon we played softball, had dinner, played more softball, then watched outdoor movies. It was too hot and light to go to bed. One of my good friends was a pitcher. He was a really good pitcher. I played catcher for him a lot. One of our missions was to dive bomb an anti-aircraft gun on an island. He had a Tail-end Charlie and had to bail out. He hit his head on the horizontal stabilizer of the plane. The Air Reserve picked him up and radioed him in dead. His name was Neil McGuiness.
One nice thing about the squadron was that everyone was in the same age group: about 21-24. Most had been through at least one year of college. We had sixteen airplanes in the squadron. Each plane had two pilots. The pilots rotated. We flew every other day, weather permitting. Out of thirty-two pilots, we lost our commanding officer, five total pilots, and seven others were shot down and either rescued or returned after the war. The war was not without its dangers or fatalities.
We got called to active duty in February of 1943. We had ten days to report from the time we got the notice at school until we had to report to Ft. Thomas in Kentucky, across from Cincinnati. We had to get down there on our own. Three of us went down together. My roommate and my buddy. When we got there, they gave us rolled up mattresses and said go lay down until we call you. That evening we got on a train to Biloxi, Mississippi. Three days later we got there. They resurrected what we called cattle cars. They were old-time cars with no air conditioning. We opened windows. They were old-fashioned steam locomotives. Cinders and smoke were blowing in the windows. We got to Biloxi, Mississippi in the middle of the night. They took us and sat us on the beach and gave us instructions, then took us into the camp, Keesler Field, an air field. We got where we were going to live and everything and they didn’t have any uniforms for us. For a whol week we marched in our civilian clothes. We marched on the beach, in the sand. I went through my shoes that week.
There was also KP duty, which was kitchen police duty. My first job on KP was scrubbing pots and pans all day long. We ate good food. The second time, I peeled shrimp all day long.