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1 Nearing the Brink of World Conflict By the summer of 1940, the world was poised for global war. But no one was certain exactly when and where it would break out. During the prior twelve months, Europe had become engulfed in war. In the Far East, Japan was becoming progressively more belligerent toward its neighbors. Its armies had already invaded the Asian mainland, and by 1940 Japan controlled most of eastern China. Meanwhile, the United States, in its own search for world order, juggled several neutrality acts along with the Ludlow Amendment, which required a national referendum before Congress could declare war except in case of invasion. That summer two isolationist groups, America First and the Ohio (Over the Hill in October) Movement, floated propaganda through print and radio that the nation should stay out of these conflicts. But the longer the United States remained uncommitted, the more one-sided the struggles on the other side of the oceans became. Although land and naval strength were important, several strategists predicted that air power would win the next Great War. In response, the army and navy accelerated the training of U.S. military pilots in anticipation of America’s military involvement somewhere in the world. At the same time, the number of warplanes coming off West Coast assembly lines vastly increased. Glenwood Stephenson It is easy to imagine a dusty Plymouth Road King coupe rolling up to the gate of the U.S. Army flight school at Maynor Field near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in July 1940. Peering inside, the MP on duty spotted the shiny gold bar on the collar of the driver’s khaki uniform and delivered a crisp salute. The gesture should not have taken 2nd Lt. Glenwood “Glen” Gordon Stephenson by surprise, but it did. It was his first salute as a commissioned officer since graduation from one of the finest colleges in the nation the pre- O P E R A T I O N P L U M 2 vious month. In his checkered earlier life, Stephenson had been continually penniless, a hobo who rode railroad freight cars, a “dogface” private in the army, and most recently that lowest of human forms, a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy. Salutes were something he was accustomed to giving, not receiving. Recovering, Stephenson returned the salute and showed his orders. Receiving permission to continue from the guard (and another salute), he put the Plymouth in gear, let out the clutch, and steered it through the gate to his new quarters. He was once again about to put himself on the trainee end of the military pecking order. But the young lieutenant was not dreading the experience—quite the contrary. Just prior to graduation, Stephenson learned that he had been accepted as a student in the U.S. Army Air Corps’s primary flight school. Now here in central Alabama, he was reporting for training duty once again. His aim was to become a pilot. This was one more step along a challenging , fateful path. In June he had completed the four-year course at the Military Academy at West Point, New York, and achieved the ultimate goal of every cadet, which is to earn a bachelor of science degree and be commissioned a second lieutenant, U.S. Army. Stephenson was born in 1914 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to middle-class parents, Gordon and Hazel; his father was a successful electrical engineer. As a youth Stephenson displayed a sense of adventure. Twice, when things did not go his way, he tried running away. He spent hours in the fields and valley near his home searching for mischief with other neighborhood boys. Other times the boy enjoyed riding the streetcar from one end of Milwaukee County to the other alone. A Boy Scout, he financed his streetcar trips by delivering newspapers. When Stephenson was in seventh grade, his comfortable life in Milwaukee came to an abrupt end. A doctor told his father that the dust at Cutler-Hammer, a manufacturer of electrical devices, and the dampness from nearby Lake Michigan were aggravating his asthma and he should move to the country. The family sold their city house in the spring of 1927. Gordon Stephenson closed on eighty acres of land near Arpin in central Wisconsin and became a farmer. The family’s new home was nothing like their comfortable Milwaukee residence. The house had no electricity or indoor plumbing, a shallow twenty-foot well provided water of dubious...

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