Cheerio and Best Wishes

Ralph H. Schneck, Donald R. Schneck

Description

This is the true story of a young boy from Posey County, Indiana, who had a dream to fly. The outbreak of World War II enabled him to fulfill that dream. Cheerio and Best Wishes is told entirely through the letters he wrote to his family and friends. Detailed narrative and commentary provide explanation and background information. One hundred thirty-eight letters are presented in this book. It is highly unusual to find this many letters from one person, curated by his family and recently rediscovered by his son, along with carefully created photograph albums. The story starts in rural southern Indiana and follows the young volunteer as he goes westward to California and New Mexico to be trained to fly bombers. From the United States, he travels via South America and North Africa to England and deploys with the Eighth Air Force. The accounts of his journeys and experiences are detailed, ranging from entertaining to spine-tingling. Moments of high drama intermingle with the mundane nature of war. Together the letters and pictures in this book (the originals are now preserved for posterity in the Purdue University Flight Archives) offer a comprehensive and cohesive story of how US airmen were prepared and trained for war, and detail the daily experience of a bomber pilot flying missions over Germany. The letters of one young flyer reflect the experience of thousands of Americans who volunteered to go to war in the 1940s. His experiences were those of a generation.
Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: I Want to Be a Flier

Chapter 2: Class 42F: They Call Us Dodos

Chapter 3: Sure Enough It Was Henry Fonda

Chapter 4: Nothing To Do But Fly

Chapter 5: A New Navigator

Chapter 6: She Was Full-Blooded Portuguese

Chapter 7: V-Mail, Crackers, and Washing Socks

Chapter 8: The Big Show

Chapter 9: French Follies and the Broads

Chapter 10: Bombed to Pieces

Chapter 11: Friends and Family

Appendices

References and Resources

Index

Sujets

• Histoire
• Military
• History
• Aviation

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781612492582
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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______________________ ______________________
Letters from a World War II Hoosier Pilot
Ralph H. Schneck and Donald R. Schneck
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2013 by Donald R. Schneck. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schneck, Ralph H., 1919-
Cheerio and best wishes : letters from a World War II Hoosier pilot / Ralph H. Schneck and Donald R. Schneck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-640-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Schneck, Ralph H., 1919---Correspondence. 2. United States. Army Air Forces--Biography. 3. World War, 1939-1945--Aerial operations, American. 4. World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American. 5. Air pilots, Military--United States--Biography. 6. Posey County (Ind.)--Biography. I. Schneck, Donald R. II. Title.
D790.2.S36 2013
940.54’4973092--dc23
[B]
2012029106
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To the men who served in the 8th Air Force during World War II and especially to those who lost their lives while doing so, this book is dedicated.
God bless them all.
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CONTENTS
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Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1
I WANT TO BE A FLIER
Chapter 2
CLASS 42F: THEY CALL US DODOS
Chapter 3
SURE ENOUGH IT WAS HENRY FONDA
Chapter 4
NOTHING TO DO BUT FLY
Chapter 5
A NEW NAVIGATOR
Chapter 6
SHE WAS FULL-BLOODED PORTUGUESE
Chapter 7
V-MAIL, CRACKERS, AND WASHING SOCKS
Chapter 8
THE BIG SHOW
Chapter 9
FRENCH FOLLIES AND THE BROADS
Chapter 10
BOMBED TO PIECES
Chapter 11
FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Appendices
References and Resources
Index
PREFACE
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I n 2010, my ninety-year-old father, Ralph Schneck, was living at the Air Force Village in San Antonio, Texas, occupying the same house he and my mother, Norma, had moved into when he retired. It had been about ten years since she passed away, and the house had become too much for him. Ralph asked me to come down and help him select a new place in the high-rise apartment building that is part of the village. He also wanted me to take home most of the family heirlooms.
I arrived with a rental truck and spent the week looking at apartments and packing furniture, china, crystal, and some personal belongings. After two days of searching, he finally settled on the right apartment and selected a date for the big move. The village would provide the movers and a hotel-styled room for him to stay in while they moved everything and set it up.
The last two days were spent going through odds and ends and packing the truck. On the last day, as I was about to finish up, Ralph stepped out of the house and said, “Hey, don’t forget these two boxes.” I went back in to take a look. I had never seen the two boxes before, but I scooped them up and set them in the back of the truck. They were heavy-duty document boxes with separate lids. Scrolled on the side of each lid, in dark marker, was the word “genealogy.” I opened one box to find an old family Bible, a couple of photo albums, and a few framed photographs. Satisfied, I put the lid back on and didn’t give the two boxes another thought.
When I arrived back in Ohio and unpacked the truck, I set the boxes aside until I was finished. Because I was not interested in genealogy at the time, they held little interest, so I took them to the basement, found an empty shelf, and parked them.
Later in the year, my wife and I decided to take our own retirement to another level and move to West Lafayette, Indiana, my adopted hometown. Our real estate agent told us that we needed to de-clutter and get rid of some things, or at least move them out of sight. The easiest to hide were books and other items that we could pre-pack. I boxed some of these up and moved them to a storage unit not far away.
When I ran across the two genealogy boxes, I decided it would be best to repack them into standard moving boxes. With the first box repacked, I turned my attention to the second box and was totally surprised. Apparently, Ralph had repurposed a box without relabeling it, for it contained memorabilia from his military career. I carefully began unpacking the box. Some of the items I had seen before, but most were new to me. In the bottom, I found a couple of smaller boxes that contained bundles of letters, neatly tied with twine and separated by year. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were letters Ralph had written during World War II . . . one hundred and thirty-eight letters, along with numerous newspaper clippings, theater programs, and a few photographs, all bundled together. I started reading . . .
Even though I grew up in the US Air Force, my view of World War II bomber pilots was defined mostly by Hollywood and Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon comic strip: pilots wearing their leather flight jackets and a crusher 1 , with their headphones perched on top of their head, barking orders and making airplanes do things they were not designed for; pilots that flew all day, every day, and partied every night; pilots who never got tired and lived a happy-go-lucky life. I never gave much thought to the training they went through or how they got to the war front. I did not know what they did in their spare time or even if they had any. What unfolded as I read the letters was a completely different view. So different, that I thought it was important to tell the story.

S ome obstacles emerged while transcribing the letters. The first was that writing paper was sometimes hard for soldiers to find. As a result, some letters have only one paragraph, starting at the top of the first page and continuing to the very end of the last page. Little effort was made to set up paragraphs. This is especially true of the V-mail letters.
Another problem, perhaps more troublesome, was that almost all of the letters were written with a fountain pen. The single tap of the pen that may have formed a period or comma did not always leave any ink. Consequently, it appears there are a lot of run-on sentences.
Lastly, Ralph’s spelling and use of capital letters reflects his educational background at the time. It is obvious that he did not have a lot of experience writing essays. The reason is easy to understand. Ralph and his high school classmates, all eleven of them, would have written their essays in the evenings, by the light of a kerosene lantern—an arduous task that may have been of little value at the time.
As I transcribed the letters, I did some interpretation, placing some periods where they belonged and adding paragraph indentation where Ralph obviously intended for one to appear. These places were easy to spot—a little extra space between sentences or starting a new line when there was room on the previous line. These modifications were only implemented to make the letters easier to read. Ralph sometimes highlighted his writing by underlining certain words or sentences. During the editing process, I converted the underlines to italics in keeping with modern printing practices. Beyond that, they were transcribed exactly as they were written, complete with misspelled words, bad punctuation, and colloquial grammar.
Included in this book are almost all of the surviving letters. At first, Ralph tried to write to everyone on his list. To facilitate this, he would write the exact same letter over and over, adding a little personal notation every now and then. I did not include letters that were identical to other letters as there is no reason to show the same letter again. In other instances, I included only the unique text included in the duplicate letter.
In preparing the original manuscript I sometimes found it difficult to figure out where I was as jumping from one chapter to another and letter to letter presented problems. I eventually put together a detailed timeline, pulling dates from Ralph’s military records. This timeline is presented in Appendix C for the reader’s use.

A s I conducted my research, I discovered that I was asking questions that no one seemed to be able to answer. Answers that seem so obscure, yet so integral, to the war effort have long been forgotten; however, they did exist, and as I dug further and further, I became more resolute in preserving this knowledge for others. Still, I did not find all the answers for which I searched.
The end result is a personal story that is representative of the experiences of many of the sixteen million young men who went to war, as told through the letters written by one of them. It follows Ralph through all of his training, the arduous trek to the war front, and his return home. Through it all is the awe and amazement of youth accomplishing new things—a story that I thought was worth telling, and one that I hope you enjoy.

W hen Ralph returned from the war, he went back to see his parents. While he was there, he spent many hours putting together photo albums by the light of a kerosene lantern. Three albums, painstakingly detailed, chronicle his life to that point. After they were completed, Ralph put them away, and for many years they were only for his enjoyment. The albums were stored in the first cardboard box.
At one point in the 1990s Ralph produced a home video of his military career. The Flier included many of the pictures in the albums. For the most part, this was the f