Excerpt and photos from Immigrants of War - Len Morgan's story. On a cold March day I caught a city bus in Detroit, rode through the tunnel and got off at the first stop, Windsor, Ontario. In a window across the street was a poster with a John Wayne-like pilot headed, “Adventure In The Skies!” Over the door was a sign: Royal Canadian Air Force Recruiting Station. I went in. A Sergeant in a blue uniform sat at a desk.
“I’m an American,” I said. “I want to enlist for pilot training.”
“Fill this out, lad,” he said, “and I’ll send you along to see the officer in charge.”
So it was true. A high school diploma and two letters of recommendation were required. If you hadn’t brought them, a nearby print shop could arrange convincing duplicates. Then came a physical during which I didn’t mention having worn glasses for astigmatism.
Finally, at No. 9 Elementary Flying Training School, St. Catharines, Ontario, we saw what we had come for – airplanes, only they weren’t called that. Aircraft was the official term, aeroplane would do and kite was the official slang. The school included a cluster of barracks, classrooms, a parade ground, one hangar and 25 or so yellow Fleet Finch biplanes.
I logged 65:50 at No. 9 EFTS and was sent on to No. 14 Service Flying Training School Aylmer for single engine instruction in the Harvard, known south of the border as the AT-6 and the Navy SNJ. It was a considerable move up with a 600-hp engine; retractable undercarriage (landing gear) and airscrew (propeller) adjustable between fine and coarse (low and high) pitch.
Our class was two-thirds Canadians, the rest British, Australians and Americans. Speech-wise, the Canucks and Yanks were indistinguishable.
We Aylmer students were divided into three flights. The Harvards assigned to each flight bore distinctive hubcaps. There was much rivalry between us for the least bent props, smashed wingtips and wheels up arrivals.
Infractions required contributions to the “Rumble Fund,” ranging from 25 cents for taxiing in with flaps down to $5 for a belly landing. My groundloop cost $2. Although my group had the best record, there was plenty in the fund to finance a memorable party at graduation.
Low flying was strictly prohibited and almost guaranteed being washed out. It was foolish to try; the large black numbers on fuselage and lower wings made for easy identification by local farmers.
There were dreaded check rides with the OC in the rear seat, including the Solo Check, Navigation Test, Instrument Test and Wings Test - the final flight review of student progress. I sweated out constant check rides in later years but none more than that one. It decided everything.
Successful students were winged after 100 hours of Harvard flying and recognized as “pilots,” at least on paper. On a bleak November day we marched into a hangar for the Wings Parade and individually stepped forward to salute an elderly officer of World War I fame who pinned on the coveted wings. Eighteen of us Americans received our RCAF wings that day (November 21, 1941).
Don Vogel came from Michigan, a tall, lanky, reticent redhead with a keen sense of humor. He had logged a few hours in Aeroncas and wanted to fly fighters. He would get his wish.
Charlie Woods was from Alabama. Handsome, irrepressible and maddeningly cheerful, he was a wheeler-dealer. He could talk you out of your socks. Girls found him irresistible. “I bring out their mother instinct,” he explained. The fact was, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Bill Baldwin was heavyset, good-natured and sported a mustache. He often spoke of his folks in Denver. He was vain but not insufferably so and played the role of Yank in the RAF with fair success. For that matter, we all imagined ourselves to be adventurers, even soldiers of fortune, the only difference being that Bill looked the part.
Several of us newly-fledged pilots waited in a bleak Nova Scotia camp while a convoy was assembled. I remember one afternoon someone rushing in saying, “It’s on the radio; the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor this morning.”
We weren’t sure where Pearl Harbor was but we knew it was American.
Six days later we sailed from Halifax aboard the Letitia, whose sister ship, the Athenia, had become the war’s first U-boat victim two months earlier. Someone dubbed our ship “Athenia Mk. II.” There were 4,000 souls on board; it normally carried 1,500.
Two weeks after walking off the Letitia, four of us walked onto the Viceroy of India in Glasgow, bound for the Middle East, wherever that was. It was back to hammocks below the water line – “right where the torpedo comes in,” as a sailor reminded us. We docked at Port Said, Egypt, 63 days after leaving Scotland and took up residence in a tent city.
Bill, Charlie, Don and I remained together throughout training and for a year overseas. For reasons never explained, hundreds of us fledglings without operational training were posted to Egypt, where there was no operational school. Frustrated, we languished in a desert tent city.
The 9th Air Force of the USAAF set up headquarters at Cairo in mid-1942. Most of us Americans transferred to the U.S. Army Air Forces in Cairo and wound up hauling troops and freight in Air Transport Command C-47s.
So much for Spitfires. You went where they sent you and did what they ordered without question. Bill, Charlie and I transferred to the Army but Don, fearing an assignment to transports, maneuvered a return to England and fighter training. We three became C-47 copilots on the trans-Africa network which was just being established under contract with PanAm.
Twenty months after sailing from Canada we were rotated back home. Charlie and I waited for Bill, who was due back from India. We had shipped out together; we would return together. A message came in: Bill had had an accident. No survivors. Charlie and I left that evening on the long trip home.
Charlie went to Dallas ferrying base. I drew the same lackluster duty at Memphis. Don’s sister wrote he had been shot down – no details. After six months – the minimum “rest period” for overseas returnees – Charlie was sent to the China-Burma-India Theater to fly the infamous Hump. I was sent to a C-46 school whose graduates also went to the “Rock Pile.”
I was kept in Nevada to instruct. Charlie was not so fortunate. He crashed in a C-109, a flying bomb created by converting a B-24 to tanker aviation gas. Its crews wore tennis shoes to avoid sparks, yet their ships exploded, on the ground and in flight for no apparent reason. Charlie crashed on takeoff in India. He ran from the wreckage hideously burned. Doctors gave him scant chance of living. They would come to know his indomitable spirit.
“I got scorched,” he joked when I first entered his room, and then explained in detail what had happened.
After four years in hospitals and literally scores of operations he emerged, a hairless apparition minus ears and eyelids, blind on one side, his nose constructed with flesh from his arm. What remained of his fingers were frozen into claws.
“I was lucky,” he said. He invested his mustering-out pay in rent property, mortgaged it to buy more and so began a success story perhaps unmatched in American business, all things considered. Charlie made it big and earned every million of it the hard way. Yet he often said he’d trade his amazing success for my airline job.
Upon returning to England, Don requalified in the Harvard, then checked out in the Allison-powered Mustang I. After completing operational training he was posted to 268 Squadron at Tangmere. Don transferred to the 357th Fighter Group, Eighth Air Force, also P-51 equipped, and was engaged in high-level bomber escort.
“I sometimes regretted that,” he said. “I never again felt the camaraderie we knew in the RAF.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
And Bill. After the war I went to see his parents in their small home. He would have done it for me. I slept in the room that was his as a boy attending East Denver High. A gold star hung in the window. He was their only son. Answering their many questions, I recalled our training days, the long voyages to Liverpool and Suez, our months in Africa, making them sound more fun than they were. I said Bill was happy and doing exactly what he wanted right to the end. That part was true.
