Oral history interview of Jack A. Crockford

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Jack A. Crockford
Creator:: Gardner, Robert D.
Crockford, Jack A., 1923-2011
Date of Original:: 2003-07-02
Subject:: Monsoons
Kohima, Battle of, Kohima, India, 1944
Curtiss CW-20 (Transport plane)
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Falkenburg, Jinx, 1919-2003
Day, Doris, 1924-
Tokyo Rose, 1916-2006
United States. Army. Air Corps. Air Force, 10th. Combat Cargo Group, 4th
Michigan State University
Flying Tigers (AVG), Inc.
China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association
United States. Armed Forces Radio and Television Service
United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944
Location:: Bay of Bengal, 13.5392, 87.6709
Burma, Irrawaddy River, 20.3142558, 94.9191074
Burma, Meiktila, 20.8814233, 95.8619463
Burma, Rangoon, 16.7967129, 96.1609916
China, Shenzhen River, 22.5582755, 114.1983394
Myanmar, 21.0, 96.0
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Mississippi, Keesler Army Airfield
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
hi-8
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Jack Crockford recalls his time in the Army Air Corps. He enlisted because it was 'the thing to do.' He thought he wanted to be a Marine sniper, but a friend talked him into joining the Army Air Corps. The mission of his unit was to support the British in the China-Burma-India Theater, dropping supplies to the troops in Burma. They flew daily, enduring small arms fire, but the real threat was the weather and flying conditions. There were no paved strips, and the planes were "under powered, overloaded and unarmed." They used ADF (automatic direction finder) navigation. He recalls a landing where the entire strip was surrounded. They also ferried Chinese troops and he tells of the poverty and living conditions of the people in Burma and India. He describes the debriefing process, where the unit's intelligence officer and flight surgeon would have a "bull session" with each pilot to determine the pilot's ability to continue flying. Crockford was grounded twice, and sent for R&R to a tea plantation in the mountains and a bazaar in India. He comments on the lack of secrecy, describing Tokyo Rose welcoming them to the region, including naming the commanding officer. He reports that his fellow officers were the best he'd ever known, and remembers that the engineers who kept the planes maintained were so good that in 400 missions, he experienced engine failures only three times. He remembers hearing that the atomic bomb had been dropped.
Jack Crockford served in the Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India Theatre during World War II.
INTERVIEWER: July 2nd, 2003 at the Atlanta History Museum. Mr. Crockford, can you tell me what war and branch of service you were in, what your rank was, and where or when you served. JACK CROCKFORD: Yes. I was in the, what was then, the Army Corps from, I think, 1942 until February of '46. I was a pilot, served with the 4th Combat Cargo Group in Burma, and our mission was to support the British 14th Army in their drive through Burma from Imphal to Rangoon. My rank, I separated with a Pilot 1st Lieutenant. INTERVIEWER: Were you drafted or did you enlist? JACK CROCKFORD: I enlisted. INTERVIEWER: Where were you living at the time? JACK CROCKFORD: I was in my freshman year in college at Michigan State and lived close by, 30 miles out from Michigan. INTERVIEWER: Why did you join? JACK CROCKFORD: Well, I guess you'd say it was the thing to do. At that time, everybody was subject to the draft and it just struck me that I'd be – I wanted to fly and I thought, well, I better enlist and hopefully make the choice and go through the program, which for me worked out. INTERVIEWER: So the reasons that you picked that potential branch of service? JACK CROCKFORD: We did have career planning in those days and I was a shot on the Michigan State rifle team and thought I wanted to be a Marine sniper. And on the way over to sign up, a friend of mine talked me into the Air Corps on the basis that, you know, why don't you do this and you'll get to learn a trade that will be worth something to you later on. And I was interested in flying. It seemed to me, that makes sense so I flipped over to that fast. INTERVIEWER: It was probably a good choice. JACK CROCKFORD: Yeah, it probably was. INTERVIEWER: Do you recall your first days in the service? JACK CROCKFORD: Very well. Of course the first was I had to take a train from Battle Creek to Chicago in our civilian clothes, and I don't think up until that time I'd ever been on a train. I have no idea what the protocol was. I couldn't find a seat for a long time and they put us up over night in a gymnasium and loaded us on another train the next day or two and went to Biloxi, Mississippi, to what we call boot camp. Basically the boot camps of, I guess, all the services had basically the same training. INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your boot camp, your training experience. Do you remember any of your [unintelligible]. JACK CROCKFORD: Yeah, I think – I remember the drill instructor was like all drill instructors. [unintelligible] and he was – underneath it all he was a good guy, but he was tough like they were supposed to be, and I was in Biloxi Field and it was an area I wasn't used to, and they worked us pretty hard. And I guess the goal was to weed out the ones that weren't willing to work apparently. INTERVIEWER: How did you get through there? JACK CROCKFORD: Pardon? INTERVIEWER: How did you get through it? JACK CROCKFORD: How did I get through? Just persistence, I guess, patience. I never had any real difficulty there, although the hours were terrible and it was a whole new way of life to all of us I think. All the activities are totally mandated by the Army. They told you when you could do this, when you could do that and that's totally foreign to my background, but it wasn't long until they had us thinking like they wanted us to. INTERVIEWER: Which war did you serve in? JACK CROCKFORD: Which war? INTERVIEWER: Yes, sir. JACK CROCKFORD: World War II. INTERVIEWER: Where exactly did you go? JACK CROCKFORD: Well, I went to the West Coast for flying school and after graduation was assigned to 4th Combat Cargo Group which was a brand new organization. In fact, there were only four groups of Combat Cargo. It was a new concept and I found out later it was designed particularly for the Burma Campaign, and we went to India and flew out of India into Burma supporting the British 14th Army primarily, and later on flew the Hump into China. INTERVIEWER: Do you remember arriving at your first duty station there and what it was like? JACK CROCKFORD: Yeah, I remember that. I had strep throat so I wasn't feeling real good, but we arrived at a place, Sylhet, India. We towed a glider all the way across India from Karachi, two day flight because you had to fly slowly. And we towed a glider to Sylhet and landed and we were based there. We moved into a little compound of bamboo [huts] and living was not that bad if you were used to that sort of thing, but it was pretty grim by today's standards, particularly when the monsoon set in, which it came to that later on. We got there in November '44, so the weather was pretty good until the monsoon set in the next spring. INTERVIEWER: What was your [unintelligible] assignment there? JACK CROCKFORD: Well, I was a pilot. At the time I started out as a co-pilot and then we graduated into splitting time and finally got crews of our own. We were flying – well, at the time we got there the Japanese had that siege up to Kohemia and Imphal, and that was kind of the turning point of the war in the Pacific actually. They had just broken the siege of Kohemia and had started south pushing the Japanese out of Burma. They had taken Burma in '42, I think, when the Flying Tigers were there. And once they got over the hills into Burma they didn't have any way of receiving supplies except by air and that was our job. Fourth Combat Cargo to the British and there were troop carrier group or two, I don't really know. I think the 3rd Combat Cargo operated pretty much in the eastern part of Burma. But we operated mostly down the Chinwind River to the Irrawaddy and on south to Rangoon, and it took – we started Imphal probably – well, in November and we got to Rangoon seemed to me like May the next year – yeah, the following year. Had to do a lot of flying in the meantime, it was a daily event actually. INTERVIEWER: Did you parachute the supplies in, or did you actually go from one station to another? JACK CROCKFORD: I'm sorry, I didn't – INTERVIEWER: When you delivered the supplies, did you parachute them in, or did you actually go from one station – JACK CROCKFORD: Mostly we landed on little narrow strips. They were all the same in Burma. I can't remember any surface strips, hard surface runways. They were all dirt strips, very narrow, and relatively short. They were all laid out the same. They were one strips and you landed this way and at the end would be a little parking bay. You'd turn off there and unload your cargo and if you had wounded or whatever to bring back out, you'd pick them up and take off this way, so it was really very challenging flying. I wouldn't take anything for the experience of it. We learned how to handle the airplane under those conditions. We weren't so great on instrument let downs because there were no facilities for that. You just found your way the best way you could and we always flew real low, 200 feet or so. The idea being to stay below – well, two things, one was you were pretty well hidden from Japanese fighters down there, and the other was if you were low enough we had the feeling that ground fire didn't have very long to shoot at you. And it must have worked because we didn't pick up a lot of holes, although we'd get small arms fire and you rarely knew when you got hit. We didn't really consider – we considered the real threat was the weather and the flying conditions. That was really the threat to us. You got to remember we didn't have any equipment really. The airplane, it was a state of the art and we all thought, you know, we got the latest thing and it's good stuff, and it was for its time, but it was – basically the airplane was under-powered and overloaded and unarmed, so – and the navigating system, really all we had was ADF, which is low frequency. I don't even think they're using it any more. And it was mixed blessing because there weren't many stations. And once the monsoon set in the flying conditions were very, very bad. I don't know, you know, the monsoon is about 200 inches of rain in six months and for the first time they decided to carry on the campaign through the monsoon. I think up until then they had always more or less called a truce and waited the weather out. That year they decided, well, we got them on the run we'll keep at them, so we flew through that. It was – I'll have to say it was a great experience. Just finding the strips was a problem. But by the time the monsoon set in we had flown so many missions that we pretty well knew Burma like the back of our hand and could follow rivers and generally knew where you were just by looking. Granted you couldn't see very far when the rain was pouring down, but at least we – somehow or other we found our way in and out. INTERVIEWER: Did you see any actual combat? JACK CROCKFORD: Well, I [LAUGHTER] – that's a good question. Yeah, we saw it, but we weren't involved with it because we had no guns, which is a terrible frustration to me I can tell you. You'd see people on the ground shooting at you and all you could do was just kind of hump up and pour on through it. Many of the strips – see the strips they move as an Army – as a 14th Army, so these strips, they'd build them as close as they could. Frequently we'd be going in strips that were surrounded and firing was pretty close. One in particular, a place called [Unintelligible] was one of the deciding battles of Burma I think, down in kind of middle Burma on Irrawaddy River, just off of it. And that strip was surrounded for I don't know how long. In fact, they closed it a while and even when it was opened they'd time our arrival. It would vary, but they would give us a time before which you didn't land there, and usually it was around 10 o'clock in the morning, and at that point they were supposed to have the strip cleared. And it was usually but you couldn't leave an airplane there over night. It was a near thing, but we flew through the whole thing and did some dropping there because we couldn't land. But as far as being involved in a battle where we were shooting back, no, we didn't do that because we couldn't. There were times I would have loved to. INTERVIEWER: Were there many casualties in your unit? JACK CROCKFORD: Not as many as we expected. I really don't know the numbers but the casualties were flying accidents. We lost one airplane and crew on their way over. We flew our own ships over and we were all green and had a lot to learn about flying and that was a major undertaking in those days. The route in particular – the leg in particular that I think everybody sweated out was the jump from South America to Sanchin [phonetic] Island. That's a long, long ways with basically no – well, the only thing, like I say, we had ADF. But Sanchin Island wasn't very big; it would be easy to miss it. INTERVIEWER: How many aircraft in a group at a time like that? JACK CROCKFORD: We had 100 airplanes; we had four squadrons and 25 airplanes each I think. I'm sure our group went together but there were other airplanes involved in the transferring. I remember for some reason or other there was a B-26 outfit that was always scheduled to take off ahead of us. We'd fly from one leg to the next, spend the night, and the next morning it seems like we were always sitting on the end of the runway when the last B-26 started. And then our outfit would go and there would be somebody behind us, I guess. So there were a lot of airplanes in the air, all of them – well, I'll say most of them going east toward the war, although that route was used by everybody, I guess, coming back if they were flying. But we never did – I was never aware of that. We never saw any of them. INTERVIEWER: What type of aircraft did you fly? JACK CROCKFORD: I flew C-46 British Commando. It was a great airplane but had a terrible reputation in the beginning. Once we learned to fly it I think we thought it was the best of the bunch. You better think that when you're flying one. INTERVIEWER: Were you wounded during the service? JACK CROCKFORD: No. INTERVIEWER: Do you have any memorable experiences you'd like to share? Anything in particular [unintelligible] that you haven't shared with us yet? JACK CROCKFORD: Many of them, but – some of them sound probably pretty glamorized by now. Yeah, we had – I think everybody had serious experiences. Well, the experience of just seeing the world was great, but I assume you're talking about battle related experiences and – INTERVIEWER: Whatever you'd like to share. JACK CROCKFORD: Yeah, we had a lot of them, or I did, to the point that you'd be, as one of the guys said, you're just sitting there waiting for impact and fortunately for me it never happened. But you got to remember we didn't have the equipment to make precision let downs and if you got 200 inches of rain in six months and you're flying through that stuff you got to be – it's great to be good I guess, but it's another to be lucky. I learned right off the bat that the airplanes we were losing seemed to be – some at least, if not most of them, you were losing them when they were trying to get on the ground after they had found the run way. Because in that kind of weather when you turn out to make a pattern you lose the field and you got to – and we had no way to find it. I learned how to fly what we call low visibility approaches, practiced them constantly. Every time I'd come in good weather and bad, I learned to trust it. It was simply you flew over the field, and if you saw the runway you instantly turned to the heading of the runway, the closest heading that you could get on, no matter the wind, anything. It didn't matter. If you saw the runway you turned and lined up with it. We had two compasses and we un-caged the one that was set on zero, and then you had a standard pattern you flew out to 45 degree turns, standard rate turn to the left and start letting down on the final, and you had to trust it because you didn't have any other options. When you're flying the Hump in Burma – or into China, the altitudes are so much – so high and the loads are so heavy that you got committed to land before you were ready because pulling her out, going around was not an option in many of those places, so you just had to learn to trust them. I had some real bad experiences. I had a load of Chinese troops from – I picked them up at Lashio, and at that time we were flying them back to China, and I had a load of Chinese troops and took off in weather out of Lashio just about dark and it was clear we were overloaded when I left, because I took the – took a few limbs off the top of a tree leaving, but there again, landing back there was not a real good option and we were already airborne so we went on to China. The weather got worse and worse, and you see, we didn't really have any way of knowing what we were getting into unless some pilot was coming out. Then you'd talk with him and he told you what it was. But anyway, we got over the Hump and Kunming was closed and we went to – they wanted to turn us around and go home. We didn't have enough fuel to get back, so we had to get down somehow. It's kind of grim to mention this, but I guess I will. The instructions were in a situation like that, you just locked the cabin door and went out through the belly and just left them sitting there. That's not good. So we decided we'd try it and finally saw the runway and made a pass for it and thought I had missed it, and opened the gear up to belly in on whatever we hit and I happened to see it off to my left and we got on it and got stopped barely. It was raining so hard we couldn't taxi. We didn't know where we were. The strip was new to me. I didn't know where I was and didn't know what runway I was on or anything for that matter. It was that bad and it was that close. And those kinds of things – I think those kinds of things happen to everybody. I missed an approach at another field over there that I'd never been to. The weather was bad and they had a 15 mile approach I remember, outbound from a station. I saw the field straight in, thought I had a great final set up, and the guy in the tower finally told me to go around, you're too high, and I was way too high to get on the ground. I started the normal go around and he called me -- he told me to fly downwind of whatever, I think it's 8300 feet. And I told him I had – and by then I was back in the weather, and I told him I had 78 or something like that, well below what he told me. I asked him if I'd make it. And he said “Negative, there are rocks out there.” And you know, you don't forget something like that. Somehow or other we stumbled around out there, and I did hit the field. We had a radio altimeter that went from 40 feet to 400. At one point in my turn, in the fog and the weather it went off the screen which meant I was less than 40 feet off the ground. And we got in, I'll never forget this, you've got a little operate check – an operations with a little wooden check sitting there and they have this sign over the door and it said Good Work; you made it again. [LAUGHTER] And I've never forgotten that. Oddly enough, I met – sometime probably in the 1950s or so I met a fellow who became a great friend up at Rome that they told me had flown C-46's in Burma, so of course we had to start hanger flying, and he started telling me about his crash. And he did the same thing I did only he hit the top of that hill that I missed by 40 feet and slid off the far side. It was – those things I think happen, and that's what basically got our people. The Japanese didn't. They worried us, but they didn't worry us as much as weather and the flying conditions. INTERVIEWER: Were you awarded any medals or citations? JACK CROCKFORD: Yeah, a DSC and one Oak Leaf Cluster, the Air Medal and three Oak Leaf Clusters. And then I think there were three; we called them battle stars or campaign ribbons. I can't recall the name of them, but two of them were the Burma Campaign and one was China. And other than that, no. INTERVIEWER: How did you stay in touch with your family? JACK CROCKFORD: By letter. Those little – you know, one of those little – what do they call them; v-mail? Had a very limited space, they're very light and that's the way you'd – and you know, sometimes mailed the – it would be a long time getting there and coming back. It was nothing like it is today, but that was the only way we had. INTERVIEWER: What was the food like? JACK CROCKFORD: The food? INTERVIEWER: Well, by today's standards it wasn't much. In fact, it wasn't much in those days, but it was all we had and I don't remember – well, I guess what I remember about it, as bad as it was the guys – the Englishmen that we were flying to in Burma were laying out there in the mud and the living conditions were so bad over there for them – you see they went in there and they were there for six to eight months just living in the mud and eating anything they could get, so ours was better than that. But it was not excellent. I remember one of the things that – you know, our country has a plentiful insect life and we saw some of that in the mess hall. One of the things my mother had the worst trouble with me, and I didn't realize it until later and she told me, when I came home mother baked bread and they baked our own bread in Burma and you just automatically learned to take a slice of bread, hold it up and look for dark spots, and then you'd break it and throw it away. And for several months I'd always pick mother's bread up, look at it, not even thinking what that looked like, but you just learned to do that. I remember one night I came in from flying real late, midnight maybe and they had some – they'd always feed us when we came in, something. This night it was corn beef hash and the cook, I guess he felt sorry for me, he'd just made some brownies and he wanted me to take a brownie, and I said, “Fine.” He said, “Why don't you take two.” And I finished my hash and I don't know why I broke that brownie, there was a cockroach about a ___ long cooked right in the middle of it. So the food – you know, I kind of laugh now. I hear these complaints about Army chow and if they only knew. But we lived on it and were reasonably healthy, I guess, when we came back. INTERVIEWER: Did you have anything special that you did for good luck? JACK CROCKFORD: For what? INTERVIEWER: Did you have anything special that you did for good luck or anything that you carried? JACK CROCKFORD: I don't think I had any serious superstitions. I had a pistol, an unauthorized pistol, actually, a 22 Colt Woodsman, my own that I had taken with me, smuggled it over. And I always flew with it because in our escape kits we were armed with a 45 pistol. And in our escape kit there was a box it may have been 20 – [END SIDE A] [BEGINNING SIDE B] JACK CROCKFORD: You got to remember that was a remote country. In fact, the Naga Hills it might show it as unexplored. That's how remote it was. If you bailed out over in there you had to live on what you could shoot or catch or whatever. And I didn't have any faith in eating lunch if I had to shoot it with a 45, so I always carried that 22 with me. And I guess that was probably my most serious relief – luck. INTERVIEWER: How did people entertain themselves? Did you have any entertainers there? JACK CROCKFORD: No, not where we were. I remember Jinks Falkenburg [phonetic] was over there but this is part of the rivalry in the combat cargo and the rest of the Air Corps. Nobody ever came where we were because we were living down very close to combat and off the beaten trail. No, I don't think we had an entertainer the whole time I was there, but we played – the guys basically played softball and we had our Officer's Club – Enlisted Men's Club. We also had badminton and ping pong tables. I was a great hunter and still am for that matter, and I spent as much time as I could, when I wasn't flying, on just hunting around there for jungle fowl, doves, ducks, stuff that the cooks would cook for us. And they were a real treat. INTERVIEWER: Did you get a chance to go on leave while you were in the service? JACK CROCKFORD: I got grounded twice. We flew so much that – I never realized how this worked until later. They didn't tell us a lot because they didn't want us to know a lot. After a mission or after a day's flying we would generally have a debriefing and you'd have to stop at this tent and our Flight Surgeon would be there and our Intelligence Officer would be there, at least the two of them, sometimes a CO. And you'd sit down and the way they softened the blow is the Flight Surgeon poured out two ounces of whiskey per mission for the day. If he thought you needed more he was very generous, I'll have to say, and the Intelligence Officer would keep us talking. It was, you know, it's the bull session. We're having a drink and having a bull session about the day's event. And from this, like I said, I didn't really understand the system at the time but the Flight Surgeon was looking you over to figure out when you'd had about enough and just been used up. And when that happened they'd ground you and send you somewhere to a rest camp. And I went on two of those while I was there. One of them up at the – it was a nice place except I had appendicitis out there. But up in the mountains, in the tea plantation country, very nice. And the other one was at a [Unintelligible] Bizarre which was a tent camp on the Bay of Bengal, out miles from anywhere. So it was just a way of getting away from the outfit and away from flying for a week or whatever they – and you'd come back and start flying again until you got worn out again. INTERVIEWER: What did you think of your fellow officers and the troops? JACK CROCKFORD: Oh, they were – you know, you consider them the best people you've ever known really. Unfortunately, they were from so many distant places. You kind of lose track of them except on an infrequent basis. They were among the closest friends a man ever had I think. I respected any pilot that was a good pilot, and I think you'd have to say that our people were among the best. I know that doesn't sound very polite but the kind of flying we were doing was so different from what the other part of the Air Corps was doing that I don't think they ever really appreciated that we were essentially bush flying them C-46 airplanes. That's a challenge. The other thing that I really respected were the other people, the engineering people and how they kept those airplanes flying through the situation we were flying in. And it's beyond me because mud and dust and yet we had very little engine problems. I had three engine failures in 400 plus missions, and that's an excellent record for the maintenance people. Somehow or other they kept it going. INTERVIEWER: Do you recall the day your service ended? JACK CROCKFORD: I remember when the so-called – what did they call it; the secret weapon? I'd been on the Hump and was coming back from Myitkyina from Kunming and listening to armed forces radio on our radio. Doris Day was singing Sentimental Journey, I remember that. Then they cut into that song to tell us that they used a super weapon and that the war would be over in a matter of days. We did not have a clue. When I got back we all gathered around and thought, well, this is just another rumor. Nobody knew what a super weapon was. They had no idea about that, which I think surprises people today that they just presume that sort of thing was common knowledge. Unfortunately, a lot of the secrecy wasn't so secret. As a matter of fact, the day we got – you asked me about – the day we arrived at our first base in Syhlet, Tokyo Rose came on the radio. On Tokyo Rose that evening, they had radios [unintelligible], and she welcomed our group by name and the name of our Commanding Officer to Burma and was so sorry that all these fine young men were going to be killed and leaving wives and sweethearts and that sort of thing. You know, this is something we didn't even know where we were going until – well, an hour out of Florida when we started overseas. An hour out we opened our orders to see where we were supposed to be going to. So we thought this is pretty secret, but it didn't appear to be to the Japanese. And that worried me a little, I'll have to say, that they knew more about our business than I did. INTERVIEWER: When you came back to the United States and got discharged, where did you get discharged from? JACK CROCKFORD: I'm sorry, one of my hearing aids went out. INTERVIEWER: When you came back after the war to be discharged, where were you discharged from? JACK CROCKFORD: We came by boat and we came into New York and took a train to Camp Atterbury and I was discharged from Atterbury. INTERVIEWER: What did you do in the days and the weeks afterwards? JACK CROCKFORD: Well, I was very fortunate. I got home between Christmas and New Year's, and it was a tremendous let down. And we lived on a farm, it was cold, snowing and I was going to take some time off for – because that would seem to be the thing to do, and after about a week of that – two weeks at the outside, I realized this wasn't going to work. And my mother was convinced it wasn't because she told me later I'd just stand at the window and gaze out at the countryside. So, I'd been a student at Michigan State and I decided just on a whim to go down there and see if I can go back to school. It was about a week or two into the quarter, long after the registration was over, and I went down there and – I knew – I had an advisor from pre-war and talked to him and he went out of his way to get me admitted back in college. So I didn't have that long a period of adjustment. I was right back in school, which is the best thing that ever happened to me because it could have gotten kind of boring out there, and I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had something specific to do. INTERVIEWER: Was your education supported by the GI Bill? JACK CROCKFORD: After the war, yeah. $65 a month I think it was. And I used that. That doesn't sound like much money and it wasn't even then, but I never had to borrow any money. I had jobs all the time I was in college and it was $65. It made a big difference to a lot of people I'm sure. INTERVIEWER: Did you make any close friendships while you were in the service? JACK CROCKFORD: Oh, yeah. Yeah, a guy I flew with – well, two people I flew with became really close, but then once the war was over and one of them drifted – well, he didn't drift; he lived in Iowa, the other lived in California, I lived in Michigan, going to school then moved to Georgia to work, so I wasn't able to really keep close contact. But yeah, we had – I had some good friends, really fine people. INTERVIEWER: Did you join a veterans' organization? Such as — JACK CROCKFORD: No, I joined the Hump Pilots finally, and I've been a Hump Pilot – belong to the Hump Pilot Association, but that's – and I'm a member of Burma Star, which is an English organization, but that just happened in the past few years because Americans weren't eligible up until – I never was in the VFW, or what's the other one? American Legion, for whatever reason. I'm not much on joining I guess. INTERVIEWER: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general? JACK CROCKFORD: Oh, yeah. I can't really say how it did, specifically about those two subjects. I've noticed this, guys my age, it clearly was a turning point in our life, I think, because unconsciously you tend to date things, you know, when you're sitting there visiting with a friend you say, that was before the war or that was after the war. And I think that, at least in my case, I still tend to think of things before and after. And I'll tell you what it really did for me was during my career after the war there were some unpleasant times, you know, in my work, not many but a few, and I can remember thinking the worst days I've ever had since in my career I could always think, well, you know, this is all pure profit just being here. And that made a tremendous difference to me. And I think that anybody that thinks about that has got to look back on a military career as a real plus in the way you look at things later. Wars, you know, they're terrible, but there's a time when you're just going to have them. The Army or the military, it's like a lot of other things. It's so easy to criticize the way they do things, you know, you could say the same thing about government. Look, when it's all said and done somehow it worked. You know, when we were involved in the campaign I couldn't wait to see what combat was truly like, and it didn't take long until I saw some. And I came away with – the overwhelming impression I got was this is utter, utter confusion, and you wondered how anybody made any sense out of it. I think that's the thing people tend to overlook today is if they hadn't been involved in something like that, the decisions, by the time they hear about them are pretty straight forward, but at the time they're happening they're not that simple. So, I didn't stay in for a number of reasons, but I don't think that was one of them, not that I had a bad impression of the military. INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered in this interview? JACK CROCKFORD: I probably said too much already, but this is a subject that could just go on and on. Right at the moment I don't think of anything. It was a great experience, unfortunately it was very expensive for a lot of people but one of those things that had to be done and so it was done. I can't think of anything more at the moment. INTERVIEWER: We really, really appreciate you taking your time for this. JACK CROCKFORD: Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to have somebody interested. [END INTERVIEW] [KS]
Metadata URL:: http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/146
Additional Rights Information:: This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required.
Extent:: 50:50
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
Holding Institution:: Atlanta History Center
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