Read Online The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 by Stephen Ambrose - Free Book Online

Barmore began to fly. “My instructor wasn’t very good, actually.” Three of his five students washed out. “His idea was to go as high as the PT could go and get it upside down and then glide. You’d be hanging there with your feet up in your face. Boy I hated it. I knew right then and there I was never going to be a fighter pilot. I knew that.” He passed his twenty- and forty-hour check and went on to Shaw Field, Sumter, South Carolina, for basic flight school.24 Robert Hammer was a sergeant in the Army. He volunteered for the AAF and went to the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center. When he lined up for the first inspection, the St. Louis Cardinal baseball star Enos Slaughter was in front of him. Slaughter was asked why he had signed up for the AAF. “I thought I might get to stay in the States and play baseball,” he replied - and he got what he wanted. Hammer’s answer to the question was, “To get out of the States and do some fighting.” He too got what he wanted. He went through the training, then into the air - his first time ever - in a PT-19. He had eight hours in the air and didn’t like being a pilot. He fouled up his landing patterns and was washed out.
    The base commanding officer called Hammer in and asked if he would like to be a navigator. Hammer asked how long the training time would be. The CO told him a few months. He asked what else was available. Bombardier - which meant an additional few months. Anything else? Radio operator - only a six-week course.  Hammer picked radio operator. He was sent to radio school at Scott Field, Illinois, just east of St. Louis. There he learned the parts of a transmitter and receiver, made a receiver, and became proficient in Morse code.25 Nineteen-year-old Howard Goodner, like Hammer, didn’t make it to pilot training, so he also selected radio. He went to school in Illinois, where he learned electronics, mechanics, code, and the workings of a radio. He mastered the internal electronics of the radio, built generators, studied vacuum tubes and amplifiers, transformers and transmitters. He learned to disassemble a set, then reassemble it blindfolded. Morse code was hard for him, as it is for most people. “The sounds come through earphones,” he wrote his parents, “and they sound like a swarm of bees.”
    Goodner became so proficient that the Army Air Forces offered him a posting as a radio instructor. He was tempted, as it meant no one shooting at you and you got to stay in the States. “I would take the job,” he told his mother, “but you stay here too long.” So he declined, explaining, “I guess I just didn’t want it. I couldn’t take it and stay here while Tom [his brother] is across and all the others too. I guess if you were a boy you would look at it the same as I.” She didn’t.
    Like all radiomen, Goodner went to gunnery school, in his case to Panama City, Florida. There he shot skeet with a shotgun, then progressed to firing from moving platforms, first with small arms, then with automatic weapons and finally heavy machine guns. He learned how to operate the power-driven turrets, how to sight and swing them and their twin .50 calibers. The total number of men who graduated from gunnery schools was nearly 300,000, more than for any other AAF specialty except aircraft maintenance.
    Goodner completed gunnery school on January 12, 1944, finishing in the top 2 percent of his class. His superiors thought he should reapply for the air cadet program. He said no, because learning to be a pilot would take too long. He wanted to get into the war. “Don’t worry,” the squadron commander assured him, “you won’t miss the war.” Goodner again said no.26 George McGovern was in love, and terribly lonely. He and Eleanor had decided they would wait until the war was over before getting married. Through correspondence, the couple agreed to move the date forward to the day he got his wings. That resolution also faltered. When he was at Muskogee,