Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [28]
Frankly, I hated the air corps until one day when two other cadets and I walked down the street in Houston and a big white convertible Cadillac with two beautiful young women pulled up. We were only cadets, but we still wore wings—and they were looking for men with wings.
“You want to go to a plantation party?” they offered. We hopped in. At the party, food and drink were plentiful and free and dancing with the beautiful Texas girls was a bonus. After a few more get-togethers just like it I decided that maybe being in the air corps wasn’t that bad after all. Then I got elected captain of the cadets and was put in charge of a large drum-and-bugle corps. We performed at the stadium, in front of top brass and Washington officials, to honor those who died at Pearl Harbor.
Next I went to Officers Candidate and bombardier school in Midland, Texas. The curriculum was tough and included math and physics; we had to make sure the bombs went straight after we dropped them. The washout rate was high. By keeping my nose buried in my books, I survived.
However, fun was not out of the question. Before a practice night-bombing mission, my pilot, a sergeant, asked if I could drop my bombs quickly so he could keep a rendezvous with his girlfriend. “Where are you going to pick her up?” I asked. “I’m not meeting her on the ground,” he said. “I promised to fly over the local theater when the movie lets out at nine, and she promised to wave at us.”
We took off with several other AT-11 crews. The sergeant arrived first on the target, and I unloaded my bombs in such a hurry that later my scores were not up to par.
Then he did a wingover and hurried back to Midland. The sergeant buzzed Main Street, barely clearing the power lines. I looked down at the theater and saw people begin to pour out—and look up, puzzled, at our extremely low altitude. By the fourth pass, the sergeant yelled, “Do you see a girl waving a scarf?”
“Yes,” I hollered back. “She’s in the middle of the street with everybody else, wondering what the heck we’re doing!”
He made two more low passes, rocked the wings, revved the motors, and switched the landing lights on and off. His girlfriend continued to wave the scarf. Satisfied, the sergeant headed back to the Midland airfield. Before we arrived, frantic citizens and the police had already flooded the base with calls, all reporting an unidentified aircraft over the city.
Some were certain the enemy had invaded Midland.
They weren’t completely crazy. Only months before, at about 7 P.M. on February 23, 1942, while most people listened to President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat, a Japanese submarine surfaced twelve miles west of Santa Barbara, California, near the rich oil field on Ellwood Beach. According to one newspaper, “They lobbed sixteen shells into the tidewater field and [the residents] heard strange explosions…but [the Japs’] marksmanship was poor.” Tokyo claimed the raid was a “great military success,” though in reality the damage was no more than five hundred dollars. Nonetheless, this was the first attack on our mainland since the War of 1812—and the last before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
Back at the Midland airfield the commanding officer ordered all crews to report immediately to headquarters. “Okay,” he barked. “Who was the damn fool who scared the hell out of the good people of Midland?” Knowing the other crews weren’t aware of his revised flight plan, the sergeant kept his mouth shut. So did I. The CO was furious, but since no one else took credit for our asinine adventure, he assumed a crew from another base had caused the mischief.
Mission accomplished, we celebrated.
ON AUGUST 13, 1942, I graduated in the top fifteen of my