Raven 5: An Airman's Story

Edward D. Connor

Description

Edward Connor was barely out of high school when he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps before the beginning of World War II. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, he and thousands of other young men were quickly trained to conduct the air campaign in the Pacific. Stationed first in Australia and then in New Guinea, Connor describes his wartime experiences. He also describes his two decades of service in the U.S. Air Force as an electronic warfare officer — a "Raven." In his straightforward memoir, Connor recounts some of the most harrowing events experienced by a young man looking to serve his country and survive a terrible war.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Military
• History
• Aviation

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456622541
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

RAVEN 5: An Airman’s Story
 
 
Edward D. Connor

 
 
Copyright 2014 © Edward D. Connor
All Rights Reserved
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2254-1
 
Ebook conversion by eBookIt.com
 
Cover photo: Crew S25FO of “The Groundhog” RB-50 reconnaissance aircraft commanded by Capt. William Meader. Edward Connor, designated Raven 5, is fourth from right. Courtesy Bruce M. Bailey, Lt. Colonel, USAF (Ret.)
 
Interior photos, unless otherwise noted, are copyright © Edward D. Connor, Jr.
 
Back cover photo: Edward Connor’s “Raven Five” license plate, showing his award of the Silver Star
Part I: World War II
I began my career in the military in 1940 when I was 18 years old. I had graduated from Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., and gone back to Florida because I wanted to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville. I really didn’t have enough money for college, but my grandmother set up an appointment with the dean of men to discuss my options. He offered me a deal where I could work on campus while attending classes. I immediately realized it was going to be quite a grind. I would take a job most mornings as a busboy in a fraternity house, go to school in the afternoon, and study at night.
 
Attending university in Florida would be sort of a homecoming for me. I had spent the first four years of my life in the Key West area, until my mother died. Then my sister Eleanor and I went to live with our grandparents in Inverness, north of Tampa. My father was in the U.S. Navy and spent most of his time aboard ship; therefore he was unable to care for Eleanor and me. My grandfather was clerk of the Circuit Court in Citrus County, and my grandmother was the head of the County Education Department.
 
In 1937, when I had completed the ninth grade, we moved in with my Aunt Rosalie in Ocala, 25 miles farther north near Gainesville, because at that point my grandparents had become too old to take care of two teenagers. Aunt Rosalie was my father’s sister. We moved there for a year before moving to the D.C. area. My father had remarried, and Eleanor and I joined him and our new stepmother in their apartment in southeast Washington. My father by then had become a chief petty officer at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he instructed cadets on maneuvering small ships.
 
After I graduated, Dad informed me he had completed his job raising me – in other words, “Time to get out there on your own, kid” – so I headed back to Florida.
 
After I’d had my interview with the dean, I met up with Gene Quinn, a high school classmate of mine from Inverness. He and I visited the annual Gasparilla Pirate Festival in Tampa. Being young men, we were looking for a good time – but we were also looking for opportunities to begin our adult lives.
 
Gene and I had downed a few beers at the festival and were feeling pretty good. As we wandered through the various attractions, we passed a recruiting booth for the U.S. Army Air Corps. They needed transport pilots. I guess they needed them badly, because they offered us the opportunity on the spot to fly around Tampa in one of the aircraft we would be operating if we joined up.
 
Even back in ’40, the Army brass was well aware the United States could find itself in a war in the near future. By that time, the Japanese had invaded Manchuria, and the Brits were already knee-deep in a fight with Hitler. Anyone with half a brain could see what was coming.
 
So, talking over a few more beers, we decided to enlist. Gene did it because his family owned a dairy farm near Inverness, and he wanted no part of managing cows. As for me, I went into the Army Air Corps because I decided it was the way to gain an avocation as well as an education.
 
We didn’t sign up back at the booth, however. We signed up in Ocala, near my aunt’s house. The Army Air Corps sent us to Jacksonville for our physical exams. That’s when we hit our first hitch. Gene and I both failed our physicals, at least in terms of becoming pilots, because we were both colorblind. To this day, I have no idea why such a condition prevents you from being a pilot. I can say this because, as it turned out, I spent over 20 years in the Air Corps and U.S. Air Force certified as a crew member, and I never once experienced a problem because of my colorblindness.
 
There’s a bit of irony here. That eye exam for colorblindness the Army gave us had been developed in Japan, so we were disqualified from fighting the Japanese as pilots by a damned Japanese eye test.
‘We Don’t Know What the Hell to Do with You’
My first assignment was with the 3rd Bombardment Group, joining other trainees at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia. Hunter had been built in 1929. But when I arrived there in my beautiful 1936 Ford coupe, we found the place was barely open for business. For one thing, they had no planes. They also had no uniforms, no supplies – not even the personnel to train us. Their solution was to send us to a Coast Guard installation at Fort Screven, out on Tybee Island, east of Savannah.
 
We didn’t fare much better there. They gave us the same story: “We can’t supply you, we can’t train you, and we don’t know what the hell to do with you. So, we’re going to put you on KP for a couple months.” So, I did KP – Kitchen Police, for you civilians – in my street clothes. I also learned how to be a busboy. (I had been trained for this when I lived in Washington. I had worked in the U.S. Senate dining facility).
 
When we returned to Hunter I was again assigned to the 3rd Bombardment Group and the 13th Bomb Squadron. Gene was assigned to the 17th Bomb Group, which was also stationed at Hunter. He completed his training, and in November 1941 he was sent to Java, in what today is Indonesia but back then was part of the Dutch East Indies. It turned out, however, that when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, Gene’s squadron aircraft were sitting on the ground at Hickham Field. Japanese fighters strafed the planes and destroyed them all.
 
The Army transferred Gene and his then-planeless comrades to the infantry, which suddenly and desperately needed men to reinforce the U.S. forces in the Philippines. He fought at Bataan and was captured by the Japanese in April 1942. He survived the infamous Death March, in which thousands of American soldiers and many more Filipinos were forcibly driven and mistreated along an 80-mile trek to a prison camp.
 
Eventually, his captors transported him to Manila and put him aboard a cargo ship. He and his fellow prisoners were being sent to Japan to work in the coal mines. The ship transporting them was sunk by an American submarine. My old schoolmate Eugene Quinn was killed by the U.S. Navy. In his honor, the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Inverness is named for him.
What Seemed Like a Week
During my basic recruit training, I spent part of the time guarding the 13th Squadron’s aircraft at Hunter: twin-engine, Douglas A-20 Havoc bombers involved in antisubmarine patrols. I was assigned to the Commo (Communications) Section, where I trained as radio operator of a command station Jeep, from which we could communicate with pilots from our group.
 
My journey to the southwest Pacific began inauspiciously on January 19, 1942. We boarded a troop train in Savannah bound for San Francisco. The war had just begun, and the Army hadn’t yet developed the huge network of troop trains that would eventually transport millions of G.I.s – technically, “Government Issues,” the nickname for enlisted military personnel – as the United States conducted the European and Pacific wars simultaneously. So the train I rode for what seemed like a week was the standard passenger variety in the process of being converted to a troop carrier. In fact, things were so frantic at the time that the Army was literally building kitchen, toilet and sleeping facilities on the train as we traveled west.
 
Needless to say, it wasn’t a pleasant journey. When we got on board, we each were assigned a seat we were required to keep for the duration of our journey. We basically ate and slept in those seats. Officers, meanwhile, enjoyed the use of the sleeper cars.
 
That long train ride gave me plenty of time to think about where I was headed and what might happen to me. I hadn’t experienced combat, but before I left San Francisco I did encounter something that gave me a taste of what lay ahead. As soon as the war broke out, most of our airmen were required to carry firearms at all times. The weapons of choice were .45-caliber pistols.
 
When one of our mechanics was cleaning his pistol in the barracks, it accidentally discharged. The bullet struck an airman standing nearby. It hit him in the chest, near his heart, and continued out the back. The hole the bullet made going in was relatively small, but the hole out of his back was horrible. As we tried to get him onto a bunk, he was bleeding profusely. He died almost instantly. I’ll never forget it – the first casualty of the 13th Squadron occurred in San Francisco, as we were waiting transport overseas.
 
Generally, when the Army shipped our troops to a theater of operations, the men were never told where they were going. It made sense. Too many people knowing where troops were being sent increased the possibility of an innocent remark tipping off a person who might pass this information, unwittingly or not, to an enemy spy.
 
I enjoyed a small advantage in this subject area. When I was in high school, I was an amateur radio operator and had learned Morse code, a dot-and-dash system for sending messages via telegraph or radio, or using signal lights flashed between ships at sea. With this know