The Boy from Altheimer: From the Depression to the Boardroom

2. Becoming a Navy Fighter Pilot

Chapter Two Becoming a Navy Fighter Pilot Iwas sixteen in the summer of 1939 when I joined the Civilian Military Training Program at Camp Robinson, in North Little Rock. I volunteered for the basic course for thirty days. We were taught the elements of shooting the 1903 Springfield rifle, marching, and bivouacking and living in National Guard tents. Operated by the War Department under the authority of the National Defense Act, the camp’s objective was to: bring together young men of high type from all sections of the country on a common basis of equality and under the most favorable conditions of outdoor life; to stimulate and promote citizenship, patriotism and Americanism; and, through expert physical direction, athletic coaching, and military training, to benefit the young men individually, and to bring them to realize their obligations to their country.1 My first rifle was in a box of six, covered with cosmolene (a petroleum-based packing product used to inhibit corrosion) that had been packed in 1919 at the end of World War I. The guns had been stored for twenty years. I’ll never forget seeing that beautiful rifle covered in cosmolene. I became interested in the camp through my early fascination with World War I aviation and from reading magazines like the Lone Eagle as a child. I attended the camp again in the summer of 1940 and completed the Red Course (the four courses were Basic, Red, White, and Blue and young men 21 BOWENrevisedpages.qxd:Layout 1 2/6/08 4:00 PM Page 21 could attend only one camp each year) that provided training in Infantry, along with advanced instruction in the areas covered in the Basic course. While none of us received pay for our service, we were reimbursed five cents per mile for travel—which meant about six dollars for my round trip from Altheimer. In 1939 we wore World War I look-alike uniforms. They changed to khakis plus a sun helmet in 1940. The program ended when the draft began in 1940. On December 7, 1941, I was returning from a dance in Fayetteville with a carload of Henderson classmates when we learned of the Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The next day the U.S. declared war on Japan. Soon after, Japan’s ally, Germany, declared war on the United States. Students at Henderson, like others elsewhere, immediately began to leave school to join the armed forces. In late May 1942 my college roommate, Robert Stephens, and I decided to join the U.S. Navy V5 aviation program. I became interested in this program because of its War Training School, in which cadets learned to fly in light aircraft at the Arkadelphia municipal airport . I loved airplanes as a child, more so after Charles Lindbergh’s visit to Toney Field, just east of Pine Bluff. As a kid, I built model planes and regularly read two magazines—about World War I and air combat—that I had to hide under my bed because my mother did not approve of such a waste of time. Because I was barely nineteen, I needed my parents’ permission in order to enlist in the Navy. My mother knew how much I wanted to join, but nevertheless tearfully declined to sign the permission form because she already had two sons serving in the war effort. My brother John was in Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands with his National Guard unit, and Bob was serving with the Army Air Corps, learning to maintain aircraft after his poor eyesight barred him from the Army’s flight program. John had been involved in an incident at college in which fifty or so students entered the Fine Arts Building late one night and took an unpopular professor from his office and threw him into the fishpond in front of the building. The school president, Marvin Bankson, accepted voluntary withdrawals from John and two other students to resolve the matter, thereby ending the threat of expulsion for other students. Although Bankson later persuaded my brother to return to school, John’s unit was called into active duty. On January 6, 1941, I drove him to Pine Bluff to join a friend for a ride to Monticello. I never saw him again. In late summer 1942 the war heated up on several fronts. While German 22 / BECOMING A NAVY FIGHTER PILOT BOWENrevisedpages.qxd:Layout 1 2/6/08 4:00 PM Page 22 [3...