Oral history interview of Hugh Leith Gordon, Jr.

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Hugh Leith Gordon, Jr.
Creator:: Gardner, Robert D.
Gordon, Hugh L., 1922-
Date of Original:: 2004-02-19
Subject:: BT-13 (Training plane)
Radar
P-40 (Fighter plane)
Antiaircraft guns
Mitsubishi G4M (Bomber)
Mitsubishi A6M (Fighter plane)
Aichi E13A (Seaplane)
Black Widow (Night fighter plane)
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Walker, Unknown, Captain
McQueen, Jim
Smith, Carroll Cecil, 1917-1994
MacArthur, Douglas, 1880-1964
Wainwright, Jonathan Mayhew, 1883-1953
Kerstetter, George N.
Sorbo, Albert Richard, 1919-2001
Sellers, William Bain, 1918-1985
United States. War Department. Citizens' Military Training Camps
United States. Army Air Forces. Night Fighter Squadron, 418th
Saks & Company (New York, N.Y.)
Georgia Institute of Technology
Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Company. Georgia Division
Vultee Vibrator (BT-13 trainer)
Curtiss P-40 Warhawk
Aichi E13A (reconnaissance seaplane)
Northrop P-61 (Night fighter plane)
Saks Fifth Avenue
Location:: Indonesia, Owi, -1.24233435, 136.207497077032
Indonesia, Papua, Abepura, -2.5964, 140.6324
Philippines, Clark Field
Philippines, Leyte Island, 10.95, 124.85
United States, Arizona, Glendale, Thunderbird Field
United States, California, Hammer Field
United States, California, Santa Ana Army Air Base
United States, Florida, Bay County, Tyndall Air Force Base, 30.08535, -85.60731
United States, Florida, Miami-Dade County, Miami, 25.77427, -80.19366
United States, Florida, Palm Beach County, Boca Raton, 26.35869, -80.0831
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Maryland, Anne Arundel County, Fort Meade, 39.10815, -76.74323
United States, Tennessee, Davidson County, Nashville, 36.16589, -86.78444
United States, Texas, Pecos Army Air Field
United States, Virginia, City of Norfolk, 36.89126, -76.26188
United States, Virginia, City of Richmond, 37.55376, -77.46026
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
vhs
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Hugh Gordon recalls his career as an Army Air Corps pilot in the Pacific during World War II. Before the war, he was working as a civilian clerk for the Navy and was receiving civilian military training. He describes his uniform of leggings, puttees and camp hat. He participated in rifle training and marching. He describes how unprepared the U.S. was for war and remembers marching with wooden rifles because there was a shortage of weapons. He describes his intense desire to fly with the Army Air Corps and the irony of being called up on Armistice Day. After basic training, they were put on a troop train without knowledge of their destination. He arrived in California to see the guards at the base wearing gas masks to protect themselves from the dust of the Santa Ana winds. He describes his flight training, including his first solo, and how he felt on washing out. He was then sent for special training as a radar operator and describes that process, including the stri
Hugh Gordon was an Army Air Corps pilot in the Pacific during World War II.
HUGH L. GORDON VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW Atlanta History Center March 4, 2004 Interviewer: Bob Gardner Transcriber: Stephanie McKinnell Reviewed by Mr. Gordon. Tape 1 Side A Robert Gardner: This is an interview with Mr. Hugh L. Gordon, 3523 Clubland Drive, Atlanta [Marietta], Georgia, born August 30, 1922. Date is February 19th, 2004. Interviewer is Robert Gardner. Mr. Gordon, can you tell me what war and branch of service that you served in, what your rank was? Hugh Gordon: I was in World War II. I signed up as an aviation cadet shortly after Pearl Harbor. I think I was 19 at the time. From the very outset, I knew I wanted to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps. I lived in Norfolk, Virginia, which is a big Navy town, and I was familiar with the Navy. In fact, I was working at the naval operating base as a clerk when the war began, and that's when I signed up. That was my passion, to get into the war and be a pilot and be in combat, and I had ups and down as we get into this thing, and I'll tell you my emotions as I went through those experiences. RG: Recall your first days in service? HG: Yes, I signed up in early '42. And they called me to duty November 11, that's Armistice Day ironically, and they sent us to Richmond, Virginia. At that point in time, we were in the service. And then we were sent to Nashville, Tennessee, which was a classification camp, and we were given physicals and tested and so forth to see what we were capable of doing. RG: Can you tell me about your boot camp or training experiences? HG: Well, it was very interesting because at that time, the United States was just not ready for war. I'll give you an illustration of that. In 1939, it was junior year in high school, and that summer I signed up for a Citizens Military Training Camp, CMTC, at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was my first time away from home, and it was to learn to be a soldier. Wore the leggings and I think they called them puttees, a campaign hat, a big brown campaign hat, and we went on the rifle range and machine gun and pistol range and learned to take weapons apart and that sort of thing. But the interesting thing about it, to illustrate the un-preparedness of our country for war, is when it came to marching, they didn't have enough rifles to go around, so we carried wooden rifles. And you'll remember the various movies of the time, they would have various military exercises. They would have a truck with a big sign on the side that says “tank.” Then I went back again when I graduated from high school. I went again to the CMTC, and that would be in summer 1940. So when the war came in December, I was sort of oriented to the military and didn't want to go in the Navy, lived in a Navy town as I mentioned. Nothing wrong with the Navy, but the glamour of the Air Force appealed to me. And I truly wanted to be a pilot, and I truly wanted to get in combat. So we started training for a month or so in Nashville, which was a camp that was put up in a hurry somewhere outside of the town. And this was typical of every place we went as aviation cadets, they had thrown up these buildings and cleared off land, the streets weren't paved, it was mud, and everywhere you went it showed, you know, that we were not ready. But we were learning to be soldiers and served KP duty and marched and went to class. Then we got on a troop train. We got our orders to go to a preflight. They wouldn't tell us where it was. So there were several hundred or so on the troop train, and we went south from Nashville, and we thought well, we're going to Biloxi, Mississippi, or something. And then we went west and I thought well we're going to San Antonio. Nope. And we ended up in Santa Ana, California, which is just outside of LA. I'll never forget when we got off the train, we had duffle bags, and it was all we had, a duffle bag. As we approached the camp, the cadets on guard duty were wearing what looked like gas masks to keep the dust out because they were having Santa Ana wind storms at that time, and wind was blowing the dust and sand horizontally. That was our introduction to Santa Ana. We were there for, I don't know, another six or eight weeks. Again, determining what we were qualified to be. And I qualified to be a pilot and fly. So from there, we went by train to Phoenix, Arizona and Thunderbird Field, which was an interesting place I've got a few letters here that I had picked out from letters I had written to my mother and father, must have been 70 or 80 of them. And in one of those letters, I told them about our anxiety of where we were going to go. Were we going to go to Cal Aero which was a primary training camp? I mentioned in the letter several of them. Or were we going to go to Thunderbird Field in Phoenix. And I mentioned in the letter that a magazine called Coronet called Thunderbird Field Hollywood's version of what pilot training should be. I thought that was interesting. I certainly wouldn't have remembered that if I hadn't seen my own handwriting on it. Thunderbird was an air field outside of Phoenix. They had taken a mile square area, all dirt, and that was the air field, with a wind T in the middle of it. Then we stayed in what looked like a huge motel, one story motel with grass in the middle. And while we were there, they had just put in huge swimming pools, which we never went in because they had an epidemic of measles, and we were restricted in some of the things we could do. There we were introduced to our instructor. The instructors at Thunderbird were private civilians, not military. Lindstrom was my instructor. And I'll never forget my first flight in an airplane, in a P-17 Stearman, a biplane. I think they were all painted yellow. It had a 250 HP Continental radial engine that I could show you in a little bit, is now a good time to do this, let's take a look at this. You see the engine there, and that is what we wore. We had a leather helmet with metal gossports coming out by our ears. And attached to those gosssports were rubber tubes for communication. And then we had another tube with a little funnel, and we talked to each other like that ( muffled sound) you know. At Thunderbird, in the Stearman, I sat in the back cockpit. It was an open cockpit, of course the goggles we put on because we're right out in the wind. And the instructor was before me. It was interesting because on the ground, the airplane was slanted like this, and when I had to taxi, I could hardly see over. So when you taxied, your airplane went one way and then this way so you could see what was ahead of you. You sort of zig-zagged across the field because you didn't have clear vision in front of you. And when I got to basic training, it was the other way around, the student trainee was in the front seat and the instructor was in the back seat. That plane was all enclosed. I'll get to that in a few minutes. So we had about eight hours in which time you were expected to be able to solo. We started flying and I remember the letters I wrote home about this. You would think that it would be very easy to fly straight and level without dipping the nose down or up, without varying from side to side. But that's the first thing you were taught, just to do that. And then as time went on, we learned to do acrobatics, and I'll tell you that in a minute. But as I say, we were expected to solo in about 8 hours. But they never told you when it would be. So there was this huge one mile square field, dirt, with the wind T's in the middle, where you had planes lining up, others in the traffic pattern, and still many others still taxiing on the field.. As you can imagine, the area was swarming with planes.. Everything, we did was in a big rush to get us trained. Whatever we were doing. So one day after we had landed, we were over at the far edge of the field and the instructor, Lindstrom, un-strapped himself and got out of the airplane and said “I think I'm going to…” and I read this in one of my letters.. He said, “I think I'm going to stay over here for a little while, why don't you just take it up for a little bit, and don't forget to come back and pick me up here.” After that my first flight was uneventful, and then we went into acrobatics and doing slow rolls, snap rolls, loops, and then a maneuver where you fly like you're going to make a loop and then you level up and you go in the opposite direction. There were other things that we did; spin's always the first thing you do when you're learning to fly. You learn to get out of a spin, and the PT-17 was a wonderful training plane; it was great for acrobatics, but difficult to land. The landing gear was rather narrow. And when you came in, if you let a wing dip and touch the ground, you would do a spin right there ‘cause that would grab the plane and spin you right around. That happened quite often. I wrote home, and I said I can fly, I can fly. It was tremendously exciting. We went into town on the weekends, and like other guys, I had a little girlfriend there. And when I went overseas she wrote me letters. Then we got to the point in our training where we had been approved, we were graduating, we were going to be sent to basic training. So that's another period of anxiety, where we are going. We knew the basic training sites, so we got together and just talked about that and speculated with great anticipation. Well then, I was sent to Pecos, Texas, to an Army Air Force base there, Army Air Corps base. My instructor, this was a military base, and all instructors were military officers, Captain Walker was my instructor. The BT-6, I think it was, was called the Vultee Vibrator. It had an enclosed canopy, bigger plane, much bigger plane, with more sophisticated cockpit. I wrote in one of the letters, just the instruments in the cockpit alone cost $10,000. This was the impressionistic kid away from home learning something everyday. I was not very worldly, away from home twice, those two summers in CMTC. I was learning something all the time. But we were so excited and into what we were doing. In the Army routine, I frequently roomed or bunked with other cadets in the alphabet “G”. Goldstein for example, twice it was, two different individuals I roomed with named Goldstein. And I'll never forget, one was ahead of me a little bit in flying. He had come in a little earlier, and he had just made his first night flight. So I came in that night, and he was sitting on the edge of the bunk with his head in his hands, and he was in great emotional trouble, I knew that. And what had happened is that he had set his altimeter wrong, the elevation I think was something like 500 feet. And 500 feet was also the height over the ground, that you'd make your landing pattern. You'd come in at a 45, your downwind, you turn to your approach. Well, what happened, this is a night flight, this is the first time he'd been up there. This sounds incredible, but this could and did happen, When he made that turn towards the strip, his wing bounced off of a the desert ground, and of course frightened him immensely, and he very fortunately got out of it and hit the throttle and pulled up and got to the proper elevation and came back and landed. But because of that, he was washed out, and that was what was hurting him when I came. So Goldie went with a large number of cadets that were washed out and just waiting around for orders from Santa Ana as to where they were to go. And there were several choices. Most of them went to gunnery school which meant they did not get their commission, and then others were fortunate enough to be trained as either a bombardier or a navigator in which case they would get a commission. And as I say in my letters, shortly after that I washed out. In a flight, after about seven hours or so, my instructor told me that I was being washed out. He didn't like the way I was handling the turns. He felt that I was holding, that if I was turning right, I was holding the right rudder too long, and that was dangerous because that could put you in a spin and that would be very dangerous depending on your altitude. And so probably it was the best thing, I had no way of knowing whether I would make a good pilot. I had done real well in primary at Thunderbird. In fact I came back one day, as I wrote in my letter, that my instructor came in and said we had a good flight, you did good today. And that made me feel real good because in primary flight training all the instructors were tough. For example, when I was learning to fly straight and level, this was one of the first flights, he let me know who was in control. And he was not happy with the fact that I was not holding this plane on the line that he wanted me to, so the next thing I know, here I am holding the stick here, and he had taken the stick and he was slapping me on the leg, and of course the plane was going back and forth every time he did that, and he'd [muffled instructions]. And I'm not exaggerating, I was so excited that I didn't even understand what he was saying, and he was yelling at me and everything. But fortunately, I knew he was in control and I'd listen to him, and I'd try real, real hard to do what he wanted to do, and fortunately I made it through primary. But when we got to basic training, it was more cut and dried, and they were eliminating the cadets by the dozens. And it probably had something to do with what they needed in the war, but it also was clearly the right thing to do if they felt you might kill yourself, ruin a plane, or kill somebody else. That was a tremendous blow. I mentioned earlier that this was my dream to be a pilot. Going back to the CMTC camps, when I was real young, and in the military, and I knew I wanted to be in the military for the war, get ready for it, and all this anticipation, all this fun and everything. And this came to be as I look back at my letters that I sent home, this was a defining moment for me in a way, in life experiences. I learned to deal with this kind of adversity. My bubble had been burst. And I was truly devastated, but in my letters to my parents, I was trying to tell them that I could deal with it and don't worry about me. They would know that I'd lost my goal, and I was very concerned about how they would deal with it. So I had several days just to deal with that and to see whether or not we would be referred to gunnery training or what. Finally they came in and said we've got this new thing that's radar, we can't tell you much about it, but you could get your commission. It turned out to be night fighters. At this time they were just beginning to develop night fighter training.. So I was sent to Tyndall Field for gunnery training to support my training as a radar observer-night fighter. They didn't know what to call us. Then I went to Boca Raton for radar night interception training. There were two people in a night fighter, the pilot of course in the front and the Radar Observer, RO, as we were called, in the back. And we were separated so we really couldn't see the pilot. We had to communicate by intercom. I had a whole bank of radar screens, and we learned to do night interception in which the RO would pick up the bogies and direct the pilot on the interception. We dealt with air speed faster, slower, left port, starboard right, up down, so forth and so on. Later when we got into combat, we would be directed to incoming bogies by ground control interception, it was called GCI. We got to know those people. They were part of really the night fighters. They were a separate location but when we went on leave we would see those guys, and we got to know them real well. So we were trained for that. When we were in Boca Raton, I remember our classes were enclosed in the wire fence with barbed wire on top. We could not take our notes outside of that area and this was all super confidential at that time. And so I went through that, and I got my commission as a flight officer. They don't have that classification any longer. They gave me $150 to purchase our officer uniforms. Well, I went to Saks Fifth Avenue in Miami Beach and bought this hat and my pinks and my khakis and all of my officer uniform. Then we were sent back to Fresno, California, Hammer Field, where we would team up with a pilot for combat training. And I teamed up with a man, Jim McQueen, who I had known in Nashville. We bunked next to each other. He'd completed pilot training, and we just coincidently met again at Hammer Field. For training there we flew up and down the San Joaquin Valley to San Francisco. My wife likes to tell this story so to speak. Have Hugh tell you the story about when they flew under the Golden Gate Bridge. And of course we did, and that was against the rules, but I don't think we thought much about that in those wild times. Then we flew overseas where we were to be assigned to a Night Fighter Squadron. In that flight across the Pacific, we landed in Hawaii and saw some of the buildings with machine gun holes in the steps and everything, remnants of Pearl Harbor… and ended up in Port Moresby, British New Guinea, which is the closest place in New Guinea to Australia. And eventually we were assigned to the 418th Night Fighter Squadron. It was the rainy season, and to get from our tent to the latrine and the mess hall, we had to walk on a plank. And if you stepped off the plank, you were going to have mud inside of your shoes, or you might even leave your shoe in the mud. We had to dig a trench around our tent with a little wall so the water would not flow right through the tent but flow around the tent. I noticed in my letters home there certain things appeared in nearly every letter. Always a little weather report. It was the tropics and rainy season, We couldn't do what we were there to do. And the other thing that was mentioned most often was food. My wife asked, what were you starving or something? I wrote in one letter that I am not starving, it's just that we have the same food all the time and and Spam, of course, was notorious, but there were other things that we had. They were all canned and everything. Then in my letter I wrote what I'd like them to send me if they could. And I said if this is taking some of your food points, don't use up your food points to buy stuff for me.. And there were times when we were not flying that we played poker. Our tent was set up for that with cards and poker chips ready all the time. I had 51 combat missions. The night fighters were not like the day fighters. They flew in formation with frequent flights. It was not unusual for day fighters to have 100 or more missions and shoot down a lot of planes. Our CO, Major Carroll Smith was the ace night fighter of the Pacific, and he had 7 kills, or victories. I hate the word kills but that's what we used at the time. We had two, and I can tell you about those in just a minute. We moved up with MacArthur as he moved up from Hollandia to a little island called Biak off the northern coast of New Guinea. .That was Dutch New Guinea and this picture is the place where we had stayed. That's where we joined the 418th. And when I got there, one of the pilots was being sent back for, I don't know, he was mentally distressed and just not able to go through combat anymore. That was my first experience with that. Then we went from there to an island in the Dutch East Indies called Morotai. It was very close to the Equator. As soon as the strip was cleared we went in and set up our squadron just off the far end of the runway; it was in a banana grove actually. And we had a parachute made of silk hung inside of the tent, and in the top center of the tent there was a ventilation opening with a flap over it.. And we had a monkey or two that would come in, believe it or not, and slide down that parachute, and if he could talk I think he would be saying “wheeeee”. However, he was annoying at times when he jumped up and down on the mosquito nets which rested on a tee bar and enclosed our beds. We were subject to air raids virtually every night because the Japanese, Japs we used to call them, and Nipponese, Nips, they would come behind the Halmahera Islands, which is a string of islands that protected them from the radar. Then they passed over a relatively short span of water, and would be right on top of us dropping bombs before we could even know it. I remember one night I was down at the flight line with our flight surgeon who had duty down there. We were in a JEEP, an open, no top JEEP, just perched along the runway, where he was on duty to cover any accidents or anything where he would help. And I was there like a busman's holiday. Let's go down to the flight line and see what's going on. They had P-70's, excuse me P-40's coming in, and one of them got off the runway and got stuck in the mud and flipped upside down with gas all around. And we jumped, got in the JEEP and went over there. The pilot was trapped upside down in there, and somebody in the group said don't light a cigarette. The pilot almost went mad; it was just an unfortunate comment that put terror in his mind. And he got out alright safe and sound. Fortunately. Then we next moved to the Philippines shortly after MacArthur had first returned to the Philippines on the island of Leyte. Most of the islands were bypassed. The Japanese, several hundred thousand, I think, throughout all those islands, and MacArthur just bypassed all of them, cut off their supplies, and they were virtually helpless but you didn't want to go down and get caught in those areas. If we went down in the jungle, we were told to ask for Colonel Johnson, ask the Filipino guerillas, friendly guerillas if we ran into those, and they would take us to some place where we could get out. Next was our move from Morotai to Mindoro in the Philippines, and a little place called San Jose. I didn't see a city there, but it's on the map as San Jose, tip of the island, and that's a pretty good sized island. And that's where a strip was secured for us to fly out of there to protect against the planes coming down from the Manila area to attack either our bases or the naval ships that would come up the water ways. That's another part of the story With each move our flight crews, pilots and ROs would fly up all of our planes as soon as the strip was secured. Preceding that, our ground crew with all of our tents and supplies and everything that's needed to set up a camp went up by ship, an LST, along with the invasion convoy. We had more flight crews than our p-61s could carry, so some of our flight crews were on this particular ship. A little perspective of the overall strategic plan which we later leaned. At this time, General MacArthur was making his way north aboard a large convoy, I don't know how many ships, I think it was about 70 ships, but it included aircraft carriers and a lot of destroyers and other war ships and troop ships. They would ultimately make their way from the southern Philippines through the Sulu Sea out into the South China Sea parallel to and way out from Manila, invade main island Luzon at the Lingayen Gulf, which was above Manila, and come down and capture Manila and free General Wainwright, Corregidor, and all that. The 418th NFS was to provide night cover for this convoy, every night on their trek up through the Sulu Sea out into the South China Sea from our new base on Mindoro. Now back to the ship that was taking our ground crew up to Mindoro with the convoy. Not far from shore on the morning of the invasion, LST 738 carrying the 418th ground echelon fell victim to a member of one of the Japanese auger squadrons, a kamikaze. The kamikaze hit the ship dead center and exploded, and everybody jumped overboard and swam to shore as best they could. Some of them were picked up by smallboats. But the sea was covered with oil, there was fire, and we were very, very fortunate we didn't lose a single person, the life of a single person. I could very well have been aboard that ship, but I was back in Morotai s recovering from infectious hepatitis, yellow jaundice, and had not been released to fly yet. So I may otherwise have been on that ship. Some of the guys were wounded and got the Purple Heart. There is a long list of them. And at the top of the list was 2nd Lt. Mortimer Goldstein. I'll tell you an interesting story, I think, about Mort. He was a good friend of mine, and like me, he was an RO, and we were in training together. After the war, Mort decided to be regular army, Army Air Force at that time. So he stayed and served in the finance branch of the Army Air Force. At some point, he knew, or felt that he would probably get little consideration for promotions with the name of Goldstein, and so he changed his name. And he attributes that in part to his ability to become a Brigadier General. Mort, as I say, is good friend, and we've met at a number of biannual World War II Night Fighter Reunions. And when he writes me a letter, its Mortimer Gordon, Brigadier General, retired. He changed his name to Gordon. Isn't that something.? I said I hoped I helped you to become a general. He said that was his strategy, and it worked. It's unfortunate that discrimination existed like that, but that's just one of the things experienced at that time. Back in Morotai, I was being treated by doctors from the Mayo Clinic, and they put me on sourballs and a pure sugar diet and glucose and absolutely no fat, and I lost a lot of weight and was yellow as can be, eyeballs and all. But I told them I really wanted to go on combat and join my group, and they finally said, “Fine, we're going to release you”. So I joined my squadron right after the first of the year. I had been in the hospital Christmas, and I say in the hospital, it was a tent with the sides rolled up and tied. Right outside the tent was a foxhole, and when the sirens went off, I don't care how sick you were, you'd roll out and try to get in that foxhole. But anyway, I joined the squadron the first week in January, 1945 and started back flying immediately at our most active combat time…and this was the luckiest thing in my Army career and the highlight of my career. Our squadron had been covering the convoy every night from dusk to dawn. As the fleet got up about the same latitude as Manila, and tne night before they were to land at Lingayen Gulf, Jim and I were providing night cover. We got up to the convoy about 3 o'clock a.m. and, let me see if I can find a combat report, want to hold that just a minute… I'm looking now at my combat narrative that I wrote and had typed somewhere in the squadron, and this is dated January 8, 1945. We were required to turn in a combat report. I won't read all of it, but it goes like this: Takeoff was at 0345. We arrived at the patrol area east of the convoy at so and so. We vectored southeast as directed by ground control, GCI, interception, to a bogey, and so I got the bogey on screen and directed the pilot, Jim McQueen. And the bogey was down just about on the water, I mean really, really close. We had big flaps in the wings to slow the plane down, that was unique to night fighters because we had to be behind the enemy on our interceptions and not in front of them so we don't become the chasee instead of the chaser. And then we dropped the flaps down and dropped the wheels down because we were fast overcoming this plane It turned out to be a Jake, I identified it here as a float plane with an open cockpit, and it was an observation plane. This plane was obviously scouting this convoy for bombers that were to come in shortly. When we got a visual on this plane, we immediately slid out in front of the plane, and they started, the guy in the cockpit with a gun on a swivel, started shooting at us. Jim,that SOB is shooting at us. He said, we're gone, and he hit the throttle and we got out of there. We made a little elevation and then about 5:30 a.m. we took a vector towards another bogey heading towards the convoy from the east. And fighter control kept giving us these vectors and it's all in here, made a hard turn port. And I kind of picked up the bogey at 8000 feet and 20 degrees above us. And it looked like there were two elements of two planes, each flying formation. A few seconds later, we got a visual on them. They were planes called the Betty, a Japanese plane called the Betty, and the Betty is equivalent to a B-26, which is our medium bomber class. And we closed in and Jim called fighter control to find if there were any friendly formations in the area. We had to make sure. And at 2000 feet the pilot obtained a visual as fighter control told us to break off, we were entering the Ak Ak range. And as you can imagine, that was a critical moment there. If seventy ships or more cut lose on them, they'd get us. Jim didn't hesitate. I think he said, “We got ‘em” and fired two long bursts. In a diving port move, we observed a plane crash in the water below us. Then Jim made a deflection shot and got the second plane. Then the other two by that time were turned around and headed home, towards Manila. And I said, “Let's go get them, Jim, we've got two”. And he said we're out of ammo. And oh, that was a huge problem as I will explain. When we got back, the armament officer said you've got plenty of ammunition, but there were some switches that weren't turned on or something, and I've talked to my pilot friends at these reunions and asked them how could this happen. But it did happen, and had we had use of the ammunition, I think we could have gotten at least three and possible four. I don't think they could have gotten away from us, and that would have been a lot more than the Distinguished Flying Cross we got for shooting down the two. Incidentally, destroyer GCI units named Burlesque Base and Famous Base confirmed our victories. So that was the highlight of my career in the Army Air Corps. And we came back to our base, and we were very, you know, pleased as were the ground crews that came over to do their thing.. Now you know, I've thought about this quite a bit,; how much protection did we provide? I think it's quite apparent that if those planes had not been stopped, if they had dropped a bomb… TAPE 1 SIDE B ….on an aircraft carrier or any ship, a supply troop ship, it could have been disastrous. And also that was a period of time of the kamikaze mentality…. if you're not going to come home, put your plane into a ship. I've already mentioned we'd lost a ship to a kamikaze coming into Mindoro. And looking back on it, it apparently was a closer call than we realized at the time. Now there were some other combat actions we experienced when the invasion convoy was coming up north which we covered every night At dusk, the fighter planes from the carriers would hurry to land before they had to turn the lights on and that sort of thing. On one mission, when we reached the convoy area during the dusk period, there were planes all over the place. That's the one time in which we had several night fighters flying in the air at the same time. And we were flying in and out of clouds, and it was something like you'd see in the movies really. One of the thrills of flying is to fly through a cloud and all of the sudden, bingo, there's a whole world right below you. It's a wonderful sensation. But looking back on it, we had one of those sensations. We came through this cloud and there right in front of us was a Zero, goodness gracious right in front of us, but before Jim could hit the trigger, the plane exploded into a ball of fire just like you see in the movies, and we went right through that ball of fire. You've seen it many times in the movies. Fortunately there was no damage to us. But what had happened, another one of our other night fighters was already trailing this guy, and got the Zero just seconds before we fired. The Zero was lightly armored and was virtually a flying gas tank. And when we got back, it was our friend Al Sorbo and George Kersetter, his RO. They got two planes that night, and that was one of them. That was an extraordinary experience and one of the highlights of our combat experiences.. RG: Do you recall the day your service ended? HG: Well, the war ended in August when we were flying missions out of Okinawa. We got home and retired in October of '45 as I recall. RG: What did you do in the days and weeks afterwards? HG: When the war was over? RG: Yes sir. HG: Well, we were just waiting around to see what was going to happen. Some of us, I was one given the opportunity to be a part of the Japan occupational army and be promoted from 1st Lt to Captain and be in charge of the radar observer group, but I turned that down. Other friends stayed and served in Japan. I came home, came home on a troop ship all the way from Manila. And I remember as we pulled into San Francisco, we went to the rear of the ship and threw all our dirty clothes away, clothes hat we would not be needing any more. RG: Did you work or back to school? HG: Yes, I went back to college and eventually went to Virginia Tech and got a degree in industrial engineering and came to Georgia Tech for a master's degree and went to work for Lockheed. And I worked for Lockheed for 38 years in Marietta, Lockheed Aircraft Company, and we were building planes. I was the head of personnel, human resources, and retired as that in 1988. RG: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general? HG: Good question. Yes, it made me appreciate the importance of our military and defending our nation. And I think about the current times and what's going on over there in Iraq, I can identify with that. Times have changed so much. In World War II, the military was treated with great respect wherever you went, sort of a patriotic thing. I nust say we did lose about 28 people in our squadron, which was a good percentage of the number of people in our squadron, so we did face death, and we often faced danger. One of the most hazardous times if I can deal with that for a minute, was coming back from our mission from Okinawa to Kyushu which was about a six hour mission. It was an intruder mission, unusual for the night fighters, although it became a very important part of our function. We carried a thousand pound bomb under one wing and a big gas tank under the other and flew up and circled around a designated airport. One of them was near Nagasaki, Kyushu; I don't know whether I'm pronouncing that right or not. But we would fly around and if they turned on the lights to have some logistical movement at night, then bingo, we'd drop the bomb on them. And we weren't going to fly back with that bomb, so you know what we did with it, we dropped it anyway. And then we would go down on the deck and see if we could find some shipping, and I remember one night, we found a ship as I picked it up on the radar. It was a pretty good sized ship, and Jim cut loose and probably sank it, he hit it, but we didn't stay to see if it was sunk. We had four 20 mm cannons underneath and four 50's up on a fixed turret on the top, and believe me we had the firepower to sink that ship. I am getting to that hazardous part. We were always flying over water, and I can show you this, these are silk maps that we had that showed the wind currents and the water currents. So if we went down and were sitting on top of a raft that could be inflated, we would use these waterproof maps to know where we might go with the current and the winds. And we also had other maps that we carried that, here it looks like a mess but they're silk. We were coming back from Kyushu one night and Jim says there's somebody following us. So we did evasive action and this plane behind us was following us very closely and getting ready to shoot us down, they were certainly in range for that. This lasted quite a while. We did evasive action, and we got way off course which is what I'm going to tell you. And it turns out Jim broke radio silence and asked who it was, and it was one of our own guys. I think it was a new captain that we had, Bill Sellers and his RO, and they thought we were a Nip plane coming down to Okinawa, and they wanted to make sure we were friendly. By the time that was all over, we had sort of lost our direction, and we kept going for about another hour, and I couldn't find on the radar screen even on long range, exactly where we were. So we had to make a decision. We were out over the Pacific, and we don't know whether to go south, east, or west. And we had a limited amount of fuel, it was a long mission, and we'd dropped our wing tank a long time before that, so we didn't have time to circle around and investigate where we were. So that was one of those delicate moments that we had overseas, that could have been disastrous. Let me think about this just a second. This is a shot obviously of our plane, not our plane in particular, but the P-61 and you'll see its twin tail with a center section, the pilot up front and the RO in the back, some of the armament is apparent right there, can you see it alright? My experience in combat is that we had a very narrow picture of the war. I've learned more about our part of the war as we look at films on the war on television. When something comes on, I say to my wife, hey, this is where I was. I have gotten a perspective of the war, after it was over, that I cherish. We have had biannual reunions of World War II night fighters in which we found out how close we were, all comrades in arms, .. I think my blood now is made of red, white, and blue so to speak At least I revisit that feeling as I observe the current controversy we have in Iraq and around the world. But ours was an extraordinary experience that I'll never forget, and I'll try to pass this on. This tape will be available for my children and grandchildren, who are very interested in the war. It's a part of their education to know what it's like to, in time of emergency, serve your country. RG: Thank you so much for your time, it's been my pleasure to do this interview with you. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this for us. HG: Sir, you're welcome.
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Extent:: 1:01:12
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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