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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c h a p t e r s i x t e e n ........................................................... speculation among lieutenants 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 down. To us, it all sounded very lucrative and like something we should be getting in on. And it was a clear indication of America’s involvement in a coming Pacific war. Colonel Chennault picked up about a half-dozen recruits at Hickam who resigned their reserve commissions and followed him out to China. In those days, less than ten percent of the officers in the Army Air Corps were regulars. The rest were reservists on extended active duty. I had received a regular commission in 1939, and the Army wasn’t releasing any regulars. I don’t recall that any of my friends who flew with the Flying Tigers made a lot of money, but they picked up much valuable experience. Another indicator of things to come. I remember Captain Hugh McCaffery , commander of the 31st Squadron, getting us all together one day and predicting that America would soon get into the war that was already under way in Europe, and that when that happened, America would need an Air Corps hundreds of times larger than the one we now had. He said, ‘‘Every enlisted man in this squadron will make Master Sergeant during this war. They haven’t even enlisted all the Master Sergeants they are going to need.’’ This was exciting talk in an Air Corps where it took an enlisted man a minimum of six years to make corporal. He went on, ‘‘Every officer will make colonel before it’s over. I’m holding out for a star, myself.’’ This sounded like a pipe dream to lieutenants who hoped to make major before they retired. Captain Mac was conservative. He was a colonel when he was killed in an aircraft accident less than a year later. Had he lived to the end of the war, he would have been wearing several stars. Actually, most of the lieutenants who heard him and who lived through the war came out colonels. As for the enlisted men, many were selected to return to the States for pilot training or to attend Officer Candidate School, and many ended the war as field grade officers.* Captain Mac hadn’t foreseen that development, but he wasn’t far off in his prediction of what was in store for us. This was a pretty clear look at future events. In June of 1941, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten put into Pearl Harbor in command of a Royal Navy aircraft carrier that was knocked around in the Singapore area by Japanese dive bombers. While his ship was being repaired and refitted under Lend-Lease,† the Hawaiian Department held an Officers Call in the theater at Fort Shafter so Lord Louis could talk to us. He had a magnificent presence and was tall, handsome, articulate, selfpossessed , and every inch a proud fighting Englishman with royal blood. I got to know him better when I served under him later in the war, but to a lieutenant in Hawaii in 1941, he was pretty overwhelming. He told us about having a destroyer sunk under him during the evacuation of the British Army from Crete, and about some of his experiences as a commander of an aircraft carrier in Asiatic waters. He expressed the thanks of the British people for all America was doing under Lend-Lease while at the same time letting us know that we weren’t doing nearly enough. The gist of his presentation was that we had a lot more to thank the British people for than they had to thank us for—and he was right, of course. In August of 1941, Major Rosie O’Donnell, who went on to become a general and one of the outstanding air leaders of both World War II...

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