As I sat silently in my B-25—shrewdly named “Fickle Finger of Fate”—awaiting the signal from the Navy deckhand to start my engines, I thought long and hard about how I ended up here and about the unknown that lay ahead. Sitting on the pitching deck of the USS Hornet, with 11 other B-25s ahead of me and four more behind, I watched as the lead B-25, piloted by Col. Jimmy Doolittle, began its short run across the sea-soaked deck planking. For a brief moment, I recalled seeing the same pilot 10 years earlier at the controls of a red and white Gee Bee racer as it zoomed around the pylons at the Cleveland Air Races. That was when I knew I wanted to be a pilot.
Earning my wings
As a kid, I lived about 20 miles south of Cleveland. My friends and I spent our summers fishing and swimming. But when the air racers were in town, we would hike up there to the airfield, crawl under the fence, and go out and rub those airplanes. It was an amazing time in aviation, seeing the likes of Doolittle, Matty Laird, and Roscoe Turner. Doolittle was flying that Gee Bee only 20 to 30 feet off the ground around those pylons with Rosco Turner hot on his heels. Watching him fly an airplane that looked no more than a barrel with short stubby wings, I was in awe of his flying skills and from then on never stopped dreaming of flying. That dream was realized when I was commissioned October 4, 1940 and rated as pilot.
I was assigned to Lowry near Denver as part of the 37th Bombardment Squadron. We had Douglas B-18 Bolos, twin-engine bombers that we used to train new bombardiers. As we trained the first class of bombardiers,all these bombardiers. We would take them up and play on the Lowry bombing range day and night, getting these people qualified on the new Norden bombsight.
