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

of them, into an auditorium for a talk on sex and VD. The men were young and wanted sex. The doctor said that when they got their wings and commissions they would have all kinds of opportunities for sex. He told them to be careful and always wear their condoms. The AAF didn’t want any of them to be sick. “I know a lot of you are saying, ‘That’s not going to happen to me,’ but my experience is that just about every man given the right circumstance is going to yield, and every one of you is vulnerable.” McGovern thought, There’s no way he’s talking about me, I just got married, there’s no way I’m gonna cheat on Eleanor. He had hardly had the thought when the doctor went on, “The most vulnerable guys are going to be you married fellas, because you’re used to sleeping with a woman and you’re going to miss it more than the single fellas.” Not me, McGovern thought.30 “Here I was a new bride,” Eleanor later said, “and George was a new bridegroom.” They didn’t see much of each other, but on occasion the wives could come to the lounge on the base. “The husbands were all carrying books,” she recalled. “They insisted that we help them cram for the tests. They’d ask us to test them on this, and test them on that. It was interesting to look around and see all the wives with books in their laps, asking their husbands questions for the test.”31 After Muskogee, McGovern went to Coffeyville, Kansas, where he again tramped the streets until he found a kind old lady to rent a room for Eleanor. He got to fly the Basic Trainer 13 - a BT-13. It had a radial engine and was a powerful plane that he liked very much. It had a stick, not a wheel. “When you opened that throttle and started down the runway,” he recalled, “that plane just fairly jumped.” It had far more power and much more speed than the previous planes he had flown: “It brought you definitely to a different level of flying. It required considerably more skill to handle.”
    Not every pilot had that skill. It was at Coffeyville that McGovern saw his first pilot killed. The officer had pulled up too fast on takeoff and stalled into a nose drop. “He just hit the runway - justbang. I was standing not too far from there. The fire engines were out in what seemed to me to be nothing flat.  But when they pulled him out of the plane his body was just like a lobster.”32 Cadet Charles Watry wrote that an accidental death led to a cadet saying, “That is the hard way out of the program.” One of his classmates was practicing S turns along a road. A twin-engine plane was doing the same thing. They had a midair collision. One of the propellers of the twin-engine craft cut off the tail of the classmate’s plane, which crashed, killing him. In total, the AAF lost 439 lives in the primary flight schools during the war. In basic school there were 1,175 fatalities, while in advanced training - flying bigger, faster airplanes, with more complicated training - there were 1,888 deaths.33 McGovern had the skill and the luck to survive and advance. He felt he was learning, gaining all the time, doing things he could not possibly have done three months earlier, including loops and spins and rolls. He had a lieutenant as instructor - no more civilian instructors. The military instructors were usually combat veterans, some of the best the AAF had. That is what McGovern thought of his lieutenant - one of the best.34 In the AAF, it was said, pilots often forget the names of those they flew with, but they never forget the names of their instructors. “Mine was really tough,” Ken Barmore said. He had been negative toward his first instructor, a civilian, but now he had a military flier. His name was Lieutenant Chilton.* “Boy, I would have followed that guy anyplace.” Once, in basic school, Barmore was doing solo acrobatics and went into a spin. “I couldn’t get out of the darn thing and I was getting panicked.” He thought he would have to