Bomber Boy

On November 21, 1940, more than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Charlie Fenton presented himself to the Royal Canadian Air Force in Montreal as a candidate for pilot training. The next day Arnold Whitridge, the master of Calhoun College at Yale, wrote a damning letter to the commanding officer at the recruiting center. Fenton, then twenty-one, was “an intelligent boy,” Whitridge acknowledged, and quite able to keep up with the academic work at Yale, but had “preferred to amuse himself” instead. He described Fenton as “extremely unstable” and concluded with a devastating sentence the Canadian authorities highlighted: “It is possible, of course, that he will make a good officer, but I should not myself like to see him in any position of responsibility.”

Whitridge had good reason to criticize Fenton, who was a classic case of misspent youth. As a second-semester freshman, he’d been dismissed from Yale in the spring of 1938 for entertaining a girl in his room. On this occasion, as Charlie told the story, the campus police caught him and the girl in flagrante delicto and commanded him to “pull out, and get out.”

Readmitted fifteen months later, he was nearly expelled a second time for violating the solemnity of Yale’s Tap Day. Each spring aspiring juniors assembled in the Branford College courtyard, where an exclusive ninety of them would be tapped for membership in Yale’s secret societies: fifteen for each of six such societies, of which the most famous was—and is—Skull and Bones. Fenton, who regarded the ceremonial trappings of Bones with scorn, wandered about the courtyard randomly tapping candidates on the shoulder. “Go to your room,” he muttered, following the ritual, “Skull and Bones.” As many as twenty young men were temporarily uplifted—and subsequently disappointed—in this way. Members of Skull and Bones, learning of Fenton’s treachery, protested furiously to the college administration, and he was under scrutiny from then on.

The Tap Day episode occurred in May 1940. Fenton returned to Yale in the fall, veering between New Haven and New York in a haze of alcohol and sex. Then he left precipitously, without formally withdrawing from college, to enlist in the rcaf. He had worn out his welcome at Yale, and he did not want to miss the war.

Despite the warning from Whitridge, the rcaf admitted Fenton and shipped him off for nine months to a year of pilot training. This was what he’d joined up for, and he was “very very happy.” For a few months he performed admirably. He passed his Initial Training School classes, and was sent to Elementary Flying School for more instruction and seventy hours in the air. He had “certainly picked the most harrowing way of saving democracy,” he wrote home—“one pitfall after another.” About one-third of the men flunked out; and, even if he passed, there would be another school to follow. For a time he was “frankly terrified,” but eventually he felt he’d “got the damned machine beaten” and started to enjoy flying. Before long, he told his parents in May 1941, he hoped to ship across the Atlantic as a fighter pilot.

Soon thereafter—and not at all uncharacteristically—Charlie Fenton screwed up. Letting his fierce disdain for entitlements prevail, he went up on a routine training flight and ostentatiously buzzed the pool at the officers’ club—or so he later maintained. The rcaf records state that he washed out “because of misconduct”: going awol for three days—the first of five such actions on his service record. That breach of discipline cost him his pilot’s wings and his commission. Next he was sent to Air Observer School to be trained as a navigator. He failed that course too, probably because of minimal mathematical skills. In the aftermath, Charlie again went absent without leave for two days in late October. He would not be confined by rules and regulations, and he paid the penalties. The rcaf shipped him to gunnery school: “a nightmare, as the average lifetime of a gunner in action is 2½ minutes.” Six months...