- Collection:
- Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
- Title:
- Oral history interview of Clar W. Cukor
- Creator:
- Palmer, Janet
Cukor, Clar W., 1925- - Date of Original:
- 2003-09-03
- Subject:
- Thunderbolt (Fighter plane)
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
United States. Army Air Forces
University of Chicago
Davidson College. College Training Detachment
United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944
Republic P-47 Thunderbolt (fighter) - Location:
- United States, Alabama, Houston County, Dothan, 31.22323, -85.39049
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Georgia, Lowndes County, Moody A F B, 30.97849, -83.21646
United States, Illinois, Cook County, Chicago, 41.85003, -87.65005
United States, North Carolina, Guilford County, Greensboro, 36.07264, -79.79198
United States, Texas, Bexar County, San Antonio, 29.42412, -98.49363 - Medium:
- video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv - Type:
- Moving Image
- Format:
- video/quicktime
- Description:
- In this interview, Clar Cukor recounts his time in the U.S. Air Force at the end of WWII. He had been a college student when he enlisted, partly "on a lark" and because everyone was being patriotic. While he was in basic training to become an aviation cadet, the Air Force realized it had too many pilots and closed pilot training. The Army wanted the trainees, but the Air Force didn't want to let the Army have them, so they were first sent to a college training detachment, and then sent for line training. Their commanding officer met the train and asked if anyone could type, and Clar raised his hand; he immediately became Cadet Colonel. He goes on to describe the relationship between the cadets and the CO, and the ensuing (high jinx) on the part of the cadets. After the war, he went back to school.
Clarence "Clar" Cukor was an aviation cadet in the USAAF during World War II.
CLARENCE CUKOR VETERANS HISTORY PROJECT ATLANTA HISTORY CENTER Interview Date: September 3, 2003 Interviewer: Janet Palmer Transcribed by: Stephanie McKinnell JANET PALMER: Today is September 3, 2003. My name is Janet Palmer, and my interview is with Clarence Cukor at the Atlanta History Center for the Veterans History Project. Mr. Cukor, will you please state your name and spell it. CLARENCE CUKOR: My name is Clare Cukor, given name is Clarence. First name is, I use Clare because I was raised on the southwest side of Chicago, and Clarences do not last long there. So Clare became protective coloring 60, 70 years ago. JP: And what was your date and place of birth. CC: September 28, Detroit, Michigan. 1925. JP: During which war did you serve? CC: World War II. JP: And what was the branch of service that you were in, and what was your unit number? CC: Aviation cadet. I was inducted as an aviation cadet, and I was discharged as an aviation cadet. Which alone is kind of unique. JP: Tell me a little bit about your background and what you were doing prior to going into the service. CC: Prior to going into the service, I was attending the University of Chicago. I had done my first year and I had just turned 18. Obviously I wasn't going to take the chance on going into the infantry, so I volunteered for the air force. And in my group, we were mostly 18 year olds. There were a few older members of the group, and we'll hear more about them as we talk later. JP: How did you feel about going into the service? CC: Well, of course, you know, it was all, big lark. The feelings were running high because of Pearl Harbor. Naturally we were all very big _. JP: When was that, when did you join? CC: September, October of '43. JP: And after you joined, where did you go for basic training? CC: Basic training, we went to Greensboro, North Carolina. What was rather interesting, towards the end of basic training, a clerk at Maxwell Field in Alabama literally looked behind his desk and found a list of 250,000 pilots the air force forgot they had. So they literally shut down pilot training at that point. Now all of us were destined to be pilots, but now with pilot training closed, the high command saw this big mass of raw material and they wanted to get their hands on it. The air force wasn't about to let that happen. We could pass air force physicals so they decided that they were going to hide us and keep us from the hands of the high command is literally what it amounted to. They, first thing they invented was so called college training detachment. So they packed us up and sent us to Davidson, North Carolina, for, two do the first year of college. Which of course for me was a snap. Most of the other 18 year olds had not been to college, so this was useful for them. This occupied us for about six months. Now it wasn't a total waste of time. We had a history professor who lived in the Piedmont, and his forebears for five or six generations lived in the Piedmont, so he took it upon himself as his basic mission in life to teach us Civil War history from the southern point of view. And it was well done. The man was superb. An interesting, and again, Davidson is a church related school, and their top student in their, in the civilian end of things, also happened to be the white lightening running and would make run up into Tennessee every couple of weeks to take care of our libation needs. After college training detachment, they sent us off to Moody Air Force Base for so called on the line training. Moody Air Force Base is in Valdosta, Georgia. The man that was running Moody Air Force Base was the colonel that had been running Hickham Field when the Japanese hit at Pearl Harbor. He had been demoted to his permanent rank of colonel, and of course he was now running Moody Air Force Base. My introduction to him was cute. A train arrived in Valdosta. I literally had one foot off the train. The colonel was standing out in front and simply said, can anybody type. At that time I hadn't learned the lessons about volunteering quite yet. So I could type. He walked over, pinned cadet colonel bars on your shoulder, said, they're yours, and he walked off. Literally. I now had a trainload of fellow aviation cadets. We had to find a place for them to stay, had to find the supply room, and on and on and on. Which we did. He regarded us as a labor pool. Moody Air Force Base had a contingent of German POWs. And the German POWs ran all the KP at the base. That is until we arrived. When we arrived, the German POWs were allowed to luxuriate. And we were given the opportunity to learn mess management, which is the air force way of handling KP. Since I was the cadet colonel, it was my duty to assign various of my friends to jobs. So we learned very early in the game how to make the game work for us. Now sick call in the air corps is typically around 8 o'clock in the morning. I ran my sick call at 7 in the morning. For some strange reason, all the people that were on sick call always wound up with the dirtiest jobs, which meant that they never got done. Now, the colonel didn't have much of a regard for cadets. He regarded us as raw material and that's all. We wanted to change his mind, so one day we ran a little competition. We had the top mechanic on the air field, an old line master sergeant, disassemble a P-47 radial engine. One of my crew did the same, except he didn't _ it, the master sergeant. After that, things eased up a little bit at the field. The young man who did this had been working at LaGuardia air field, and he was one of the top mechanics at LaGuardia prior to his induction in the service. We had some other interesting people in our group. One young man had come out of the merchant marine. This young man had made the run to Mermansk something like ten or eleven times, and he never got to Mermansk. Every ship he was on was torpedoed. The last one was torpedoed in the north Atlantic in the middle of winter. This young man was saved by a flotilla of ships that came by 30 days after the sinking. He survived 30 days in a little rubber raft in the north Atlantic. To this day, he doesn't know how he survived. He didn't have any frost bite. It was just an amazing occurrence. He was our front man. Every time we got ourselves into trouble, we'd push him up front. And of course it was very difficult for retribution to rain very heavy upon us in the face of all these ribbons that he wore. The field was run by, as I said, the colonel who had been in charge of Hickham Field. He was not very highly regarded by us. This man had a Nash as a staff car. His staff car was equipped with cameras. His avowed mission in life was to make every WAC on base. We learned about this because I had one of my boys who was very interested in photography. So I got him assigned to the photo lab. Naturally when the colonel got his set of pictures, we got a set. Finally after a year in the service, we did manage to get some leave. JP: What did you do when you were on leave? CC: Well, I went back to Chicago, obviously, which was home for me. Chicago at that time was marvelous. Because if you wore a uniform, there was no way you could spend money in Chicago. Didn't matter what. If you got into a cab, the fare was picked up. We went to eat in the finest restaurants in Chicago, you went to the Blackhawk, the bill was paid. It was a lovely place, a lovely town to have a leave. Eventually they decided they were going to transfer us from Moody to Dothan, Alabama. Now our colonel of our field had a pet cannon which he fired off every night when they took the flag down. He knew that we were going to do something as a parting gesture as we left Moody, so he put armed guards on the cannon. We staged a fight, managed to pull the guards off the cannon, and then very gently lowered it into the bottom of the swimming pool. That was our parting gesture to him. Eventually we found our way to Dothan, Alabama. JP: When was that, when did you go to Dothan? CC: Dothan would have been probably late '44. And Dothan, as far as I'm concerned, and to this day I consider a hell hole. My first view of Dothan was every single yard in the city of Dothan had a sign that said dogs and soldiers please keep off the grass. This was during World War II, and this is my memory of Dothan. The air field at Dothan was a fighter rebuilding center. So it was a very active field. It was interesting because it had six or seven messes. It was so big that it had three or four civilian messes. It had an officer's mess; it had a cadet mess. And of course it had a, several enlisted men's messes. The messes were run by an old master sergeant who was beyond the age of retirement, but he had come back to serve during the Second World War. His claim to fame was he was Hap Arnold's crew chief in World War I. Needless to say, the messes at Dothan, Alabama, were well run and well supplied. Now the CO at Dothan was a West Point _, and he had been careful to make sure that the Dothan, Alabama, air field had a 15,000 seat stadium, concrete stadium was built just so they could hold maneuvers every Saturday. They would shut down the entire field and everybody there was supposed to show up and participate in this showpiece. And of course there's not much going in Dothan, Alabama in 1944, so all the citizenry would come and view the goings on. Our group was kind of interesting. One of the members of our group was an old line master sergeant from the infantry. And he taught us how to march. We could put on a show if we felt like it. Weapons were tough, but we'd put on a good show. While we were there, our mental attitude was pretty bad. We had repeatedly tried to get out of the air force, but the air force wasn't having any of that. They kept us, and made damn sure that we couldn't get away. And so, now cadets normally wear an officer's uniform except wherever the uniform has officer's insignia on it. The air force uniform would have a propeller and wings on it. The shoulder patch would be a typical air force shoulder patch. Down on the forearm, we would repeat this propeller and wings thing. This was typical cadet uniform. We commissioned this patch, had it made, and essentially it says ‘thou shall not fly'. We of course, made a point of replacing our propeller and wings with the ‘thou shall not fly' patch. Well, we were just about ready to introduce it to the world, we hadn't done it officially yet, and I had sent out a crew to clean out a barracks. One of the crew came back to me and said, “Clare, you've got to come and see this. This is unbelievable, you've got to come see it.” Well this barracks had been closed since World War I. they were full of hats. And it had the old World War I hat. You know the kind of hat that sits flat on your head and has a peak and has a lanyard, the whole thing was full of hats. _ I assembled all the troops, ran them down, and issued new hats. Now typically, in the cadet uniform, you'd have an officer's hat and you'd have a gold propeller and wings like this in the front of the hat. So we took all the propeller and wings off, put them on these World War I hats. Almost at the same time, this was within minutes of this happening, one of my other friends came rushing back and said, now this was, this young man was in the message center. He was an interesting young man because in civilian life he worked for the mob in Chicago. And he lived in a house that was across the street from the Hawthorne racetrack. Typically he would sit up in the attic where he could see the Hawthorne racetrack, and he would run race results with Morse code, and he was a master with Morse code. He could send and receive something like 50, 60 words a minute, some horrendous number. That 30 second advantage that they got because of his activities were a big deal in Chicago gambling circles. Needless to say, when we got in the service, getting him assigned to the message center was child's play. This meant that I got the colonel's orders before he did. And of course, he comes running into me this day and says “look, the inspector general is coming down tonight. They're going to pull a surprise inspection on us in the morning.” OK. So at 4 o'clock in the morning, they pulled the surprise inspection. My group falls out in class A uniforms, World War I hats flat on our heads, propeller and wings, and of course, the ‘thou shall not fly' label on the forearm. The inspector general was just bursting with laughter, you could tell. He managed to control himself, but he was beside himself. Anyway, they finally assigned us back to our barracks and thought they'd give us a little bit of a review. One of the things he decided he was going to do is run a white glove inspection. Now for those of you that have never served in the service in the south in World War II, the barracks buildings were not very well made. The insides were never finished. The 2x4's were not even planed properly. They were just simply rough cut. So there was no way you could run a white glove inspection and pass it in this kind of construction. We didn't fall off the turnip truck that morning either. What we had done the night before was liberated some 50 gallon drums of lye, emptied out the barracks and sprayed all the barracks with lye and fire-hosed them down. So of course when the colonel ran his white glove inspection, we passed it. We were the only barracks in the south that could do it, but we passed it. This was an interesting time. From here, we were eventually transferred to San Antonio, yeah San Antonio airfield. And we did finally get some honest to gosh preflight training. We finally did get to see an airplane, we finally did get to fly one. We were just up to the point of soloing. JP: When was this that you went to San Antonio? CC: This would have been early in '45. Now we had gone through some of this training. By now it was close to, well it was late summer of '45. And the war was winding down. So the general assembled all of the cadets and he started out by saying, you know, we're going to discharge everybody according to the point system. We had men coming from overseas that had 150 and 200 points, that kind of thing. We had 20, 24 points. We'd been in the service 2 years. So he said, you have some options. Option number one: I hereby resign from the cadets and volunteer for the air corps for four years. Option number two is equally odious, three and four were no better. And so I said, general, that's, and I introduced myself and I said I'm not interested in any of these. He said, you will sign one of them. I said, I will? I said OK, I'll be happy to. I signed it, and over my name I put down ‘signed under duress'. Immediately all the cadets did the same thing. Well, the general went berserk; he just went crazy. They immediately ran us back to the barracks and put us under armed guards and so on. Along came another one of my friends. This young man was from Oklahoma. His grandfather had been in the great Oklahoma land rush, remember when they fired the gun and all the settlers ran out and claimed their land. Well, he was in that. And he was an attorney. In fact, he was the only attorney in the Oklahoma territory. So as he lived his life and as he functioned as an attorney, he got paid off in chickens and vegetables and occasionally a piece of land. To make a long story short, he wound up with pieces of land all over the state of Oklahoma. Eventually they found oil. Naturally he was sitting on lots of it. His grandson, who was in my group, every month, would get a check from Exxon for 10 to 12 thousand dollars for his share of the royalties coming from the land. So he had money. OK, here we are in the San Antonio barracks, we're confined to quarters. He and a couple of his friends sneak out that night, get past the guards. They go into town, and in the next two days, full page ads appear in major newspapers scattered around the country. He had the money; he had the resources to do this. Within a week we were all at discharge centers. That's the sum total of this story. JP: Where did you go after you were discharged? CC: Back to the University of Chicago to finish my education. JP: Did you use the GI Bill? CC: Yes, I did, yes I did. JP: How did you deal with this _ affected the rest of your life as far as being in the service? CC: Well, yes. Because prior to that, remember that when I went into the service, I was an 18 year old book worm. I had no idea in the world what the world was like. And I was totally insulated from all that. Well, here I had two years of growing up. And I had some good teachers. It was a marvelous experience. The GI Bill was fantastic. It's the best thing this county ever did for its citizenry. And why we've never done that since is beyond me. That should be a right of passage for every single high schooler in the nation. JP: Are you a member of any type of veterans group? CC: No, I've not been active with the veterans. JP: Keep in touch with the _? CC: No, no, not really. I have been active with high schoolers since my retirement. We, well, basically, something like ten years ago, we took four high schools in Georgia and matched them up with four high schools in Scotland. We allowed the senior economics classes to set up operating export companies. And they export to each other. Now in ten years we've gone from four, to there's something like 250 schools involved worldwide. We ran out of schools in Scotland. We're growing, I mean we're now in Ireland and Wales. Last year we added Germany, South Africa, and Ghana to the mix. This year, we've added Japan, Norway, Russia and Siberia and Spain to the mix. So essentially this is my give back activity if you will. JP: Are there any experiences or anything about your time as a veteran that we didn't discuss that you'd like to. CC: No, I think this would be… I don't know if this little vignette makes any real sense to you, but there were a couple of hundred thousand of us who lived this life. It did accomplish one purpose, it did put a little age on us, gave us a little bit of outside experience if you will. JP: Do you remember when the war was over how you felt, how the group was, how they felt and so on? CC: Well obviously we were ecstatic about the whole thing. I think the, when we dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and so on, I think those were more interesting times for me anyway. JP: Thank you very much. CC: Appreciate it. - Metadata URL:
- http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/148
- 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:
- 31:55
- 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
- Rights:
-
