Flyboys

by James Bradley

  “Dick was shy,” Lassiter recalled, “and he didn’t dance much.”

  Rugged and handsome Dick Woellhof lettered in three sports—football, basketball, and track—for the Clay Center Tigers. In the yearbook, the legend under his photo says, “Many know him, many like him.” He had an after-school job pumping gas at a service station, but most of all he was devoted to his family.

  “Dick was a family boy,” his aunt Ruah Sterrett told me. “He loved his mother, his brother, and his sister. His mother would proudly tell me, ‘Dick cleaned house today. He did all the laundry.’”

  The little money energetic Dick earned came home to help feed the family. “He was raised by his mother, who had to work hard,” Dick’s friend John Anderson told me. “There wasn’t much income.”

  “Mom was gone six days a week doing hair,” Dick’s brother, Lawrence, recalled. “When my sister graduated from high school, we two brothers were alone. I learned how to cook green beans in a can.”

  The great plains where Dick grew up were canopied by a sweeping arc of sky, and while many looked down, to the earth, for their future, some looked up. In Dick’s last year of high school, he told his mother he wanted to enlist in the navy to fly. Laura Woellhof confided to her sister that she was beside herself about the decision to sign Dick’s papers. “It made it harder that there was no husband to help her,” Ruah Sterrett told me years later. “She had to make the decision herself. Many times she said, ‘Dick’s so young. I hate to see him go. But that’s all he wants to do. He’s too young’—I heard her say that many times.”

  Of course, seventeen-year-old boys don’t consider themselves “too young” for anything, not even war. At that age, boys feel indestructible, ready for any challenge. And Dick was big and strong, six feet tall and 169 pounds. Almost every night, he assured his mother that he was ready to fight. “It was the only thing on his mind,” Aunt Ruah recalled. “He wanted to go.”

  Laura Woellhof finally relented and signed her boy over to the United States Navy during the July Fourth weekend. Dick took the papers down to the recruiting office bright and early on Monday, July 6, 1942. Laura phoned Ruah to tell her of her decision. Laura was in her forties and had already lost a husband. The war was not going well for the Allies at that point. Laura was realistic and she knew that what Dick wanted to do was dangerous.

  But danger never crossed Dick’s mind. To him war was just a glorious adventure. Aunt Ruah recalled young Dick’s boyish delight when his mother relented: “Laura said when she signed the papers, Dick hugged her, smiled, and said, ‘Mother, you’ve made this the happiest day of my life!’”

  The reasons American youths signed on to become Flyboys were as varied as the boys themselves. Some wanted to be part of an elite flying fraternity. “I decided to go the navy way,” was how Carlton Schmidt of Corfu, New York, remembered his motivations as a nineteen-year-old. “Their standards were higher than the army, it was more difficult to get in, so I thought I would be with a good group of guys.”

  “I figured that the navy air corps was the toughest to get into,” Philip Begin of Massachusetts recalled. “Army air corps would have been next if I failed with the navy.”

  “I became infatuated with the navy growing up in Seattle,” Flyboy Bill Connell told me. “In the 1930s, Seattle hosted the navy’s Fleet Week, and the Pacific fleet would anchor in Puget Sound. We kids would get on the barges and visit the ships. When I graduated from high school in June of 1942, I saw an edition of Flying magazine that covered naval aviation. There was a picture of flying boats in Pensacola. I thought, Wouldn’t that be neat!”

  Some enlisted without giving it too much thought. “I enlisted on December eleventh,” Jesse Naul said. “I had never been in an airplane, but it looked like a good way to go to war.”

  “I was drunk,” Dwain Robertson told me of the day he enlisted. He and his brother were hitting the college bars in Spokane, Washington. “We walked by a big poster that said, ‘BE A NAVY FLYER!’ My brother said, ‘That’s for you! You can be an officer. It’s better than being in the infantry.’ I said, ‘I have never been in an airplane!’ ‘Let’s go speak to the recruiter,’ he said.”

  Leland Holdren also made up his mind over drinks. “My buddy and I were having a beer one day and we both said we got our draft notices,” Holdren remembered. “We both thought we should be pilots. The navy recruiting office was across the street and the army office was three blocks away. So we went into the navy and came back for another beer.”

  “My grandparents had a farm,” Chuck Galbreath of Chanute, Kansas, remembered. “A buck rake is a wooden machine twelve to fifteen feet wide. It’s horse drawn and scoops hay with its prongs. I used to sit out there watching those horses’ asses from behind, and a plane would fly overhead. I thought they had better working conditions and made more money. In my second year of engineering school, I saw a full-page ad in the Saturday Evening Post. It was an ensign with his hands on a navy plane’s propeller, saying, ‘You too can earn your Wings of Gold.’ That did it for me.”

  Other future Flyboys enlisted as sailors and later were trained to be airmen riding behind the pilot. Robert Akerblom of Brockton, Massachusetts, told me, “I volunteered for the navy. It’s war, I figured, you have to go. This way I could have my choice. Sailing the high seas, get on the bow of the ship—that would be cool.”

  Some enlisted to fly in order to avoid combat on the ground. “I went in thinking, I better enlist before they draft me,” recalled Al Lindstrom of San Francisco. “I enlisted in the navy for flight training. I didn’t want to be a grunt.”

  A. M. Smith from North Carolina was in the Marine Corps ROTC. “While [I was] training one summer,” he remembered, “some fighter aircraft came over and simulated strafing. I saw that and thought they had a better deal than me on the ground. So I joined up to fly.”

  Jacob Cohen of Indianapolis was only fifteen when the flying bug bit him. “I was in the Board of Trade building in Chicago, looking through a periscope. There were planes landing on old coal-converted carriers in Lake Michigan. When I saw those planes landing, then that’s all I wanted to do.”

  Ed Rafferty of Kansas City remembered as a seventeen-year-old in 1942, “I thought navy pilots were next to God.” He signed up.

  For many young men of the Depression era—Dick Woellhof and Grady York come to mind—“the military world where decent food, adequate clothing, and some pocket cash were universal represented a step up the economic ladder.” Harold Wegener of Higginsville, Missouri, became a Flyboy when a friend told him of the rewards. “I had a buddy who said, ‘Let’s join the navy. Let’s become pilots. You can make two hundred dollars a month!’ That was a fantastic amount of money. I thought, Two hundred bucks, that’s for me.”

  Others saw enlistment as a chance to get a grip on their lives. Marve Mershon from Los Angeles listed “To learn a trade” as his reason to enlist two months after graduation from L.A.’s Poly High School. Marve had been a Cub Scout and part-time packinghouse meat cutter and parking lot attendant. But the amusement center “the Pike”—a kind of permanent outdoor carnival—was just down the street from Marve’s home. Soon the fun-loving big-city boy was having too much fun for his young age.

  “Paul the landlord’s son was a wild kid,” Marve’s friend Dick Terry told me. “He might have had an adverse effect on Marve. I heard there was marijuana involved, which I cannot confirm. But I heard stories that Paul led Marve down that road.”

  Marve’s brother, Hoyt, was concerned. Marve had already had brushes with the law—his driver’s license had been suspended twice for a period of thirty days each time. Hoyt had enlisted in the army in September of 1940—long before war clouds gathered. He had learned to value military discipline and thought his younger brother could use a dose.

  Susan Mershon, Hoyt’s daughter, told me, “There’s a family story that my dad talked Marve into going into the navy.” Another daughter of Hoyt’s, Carol, said, “Yes, I was told by my gr
andmother that Hoyt talked Marve into going into the service.”

  Marve followed his brother’s advice and enlisted in the navy on July 28, 1943. He stood five feet nine inches tall, weighed 129 pounds, and wore glasses over his blue eyes. Hoyt would be proud when the navy straightened out Marve’s life. It never crossed Hoyt’s mind that his younger brother might not return home alive.

  Flying in airplanes was dangerous in the early 1940s. Engines could spit flames or stall in midair, and navigation was primitive. As a result, serving their country thousands of feet above the earth’s surface attracted the adventurous. Warren Earl Vaughn of Childress, Texas, was certainly always ready to try something new.

  “Warren Earl was a daredevil,” his best high school buddy, Harold Waters, told me. “He liked living life close to the edge. I imagined he would make a good fighter pilot, just the way he lived.”

  His name was never just Warren, as I learned when I spoke with his cousin Ethelyn Goodner. “How do you say his name?” I asked her. “Warren Earl,” she answered. “All of it.”

  Childress in the 1930s was a dusty West Texas town where mules hauled the farmers’ wheat and cotton. “In the 1930s we were poor,” Warren Earl’s cousin Ralph Sides said. “We didn’t travel around for even ten miles.”

  Warren Earl’s father had left his mother, Evi, when Warren Earl was a baby. Evi raised Warren Earl alone. Evi gave Warren Earl his orientation in life, passed on her religious beliefs, taught him right from wrong. There grew a special bond between Evi and her only son. “Evi worshiped him,” another relative, Billye Winder, told me. “And Warren Earl worshiped his mother.”

  Warren Earl was strikingly attractive, with olive skin, black hair, and high cheekbones. Cousin Madeline Riley explained that he was part Cherokee Indian. “The story is,” Riley said, “in the early 1800s, some white settlers found an orphaned Cherokee baby, raised him, and he married into our family. Warren Earl’s grandfather looked Indian, but of his ten children, only Evi inherited the Cherokee traits of dark skin and high cheekbones, and she passed those on to her son.” Ralph Sides remembered his cousin as “very tall, very dark, and very handsome.”

  The girls certainly noticed his looks. “He was not a virgin when he got out of high school,” his buddy Harold Waters remembered decades later. “He was quite the ladies’ man. A place was no problem. We would drive a mile out of town and be a mile from anybody. We’d do it in a car. Of course we used condoms. If you got a girl pregnant, then you were going to marry her. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

  I told Harold Waters that I was surprised that high schoolers were so sexually active back in the 1930s. He thought for a moment and then said, “Oh, we did it as often as they do now. Only back then we didn’t talk about it as much.”

  What Harold remembered most about Warren Earl was his fun-loving, daredevil nature. “We drove out into the country to a salt hole. No one knows how deep it is. It was cold, neither I nor anyone else would go in. I thought there were buggers in it or I might be swept away. But Warren Earl jumped right in.

  “Then on the way home,” Harold continued, “Warren Earl played chicken with a Greyhound bus. He scared the fire out of me when he nearly sideswiped that bus. He was always the one who took chances. It was just his personality, how he approached life.

  “Warren Earl was very friendly and outgoing,” he added. “He was very positive about everything. He was the kind of guy you liked to be around. He made things happen.”

  Warren Earl’s pranks were kid stuff and never hurt anyone. He could talk Harold and himself into a school play for free, avoiding the expensive ten-cent admission charge. Once he found where they stored the popcorn machine and popcorn that was sold at basketball games. Harold Waters remembered, “Warren Earl said, ‘I’ll fix the door so it won’t lock and we’ll have popcorn.’ We did this a few times. We’d stuff ourselves and then be on our way.”

  Harold and Warren Earl were such close buddies that once Harold found himself guilty by association. “One day Mr. McClure, our principal, called me to his office and said, ‘You’re going to get a paddling.’ ‘What for?’ I asked. ‘I caught Warren Earl smoking in the pass between the school and the basketball court, and I’m sure you were somewhere around him,’ Mr. McClure said. I hadn’t been with him that time, but they assumed that if he was somewhere, I was too. Warren Earl got a kick out of that.”

  Warren Earl earned his spending money with jobs at the Childress ice plant and the Helpy Selfy grocery. At home, he was a dutiful son who listened to his mother and helped around the house. But when Evi was gone, he was a typical American boy. “Evi went to the doctor in Amarillo by train,” Harold told me. “She had some wine in the cabinet; her doctor told her to drink a little every day. We drank too much, so Warren Earl used some food coloring to fill it back up.”

  There were other things Evi never learned. Harold Waters again: “When his mom would leave, she’d lock the car. She didn’t know it, but Warren Earl secretly made extra keys to the car and the garage. He would unhook the odometer and we’d drive around trying to impress the girls. When we’d bring it back he’d sprinkle dust on it to make it look like it hadn’t moved. There was plenty of dust around Childress.”

  The girl Warren Earl wanted to impress most was pretty Jo Evelyn Michie. Jo Evelyn’s younger sister Jerry remembers handsome Warren Earl picking her up for dates while they were both in high school. “They were going very steady,” Jerry Michie said. “They talked about marriage.”

  But marriage would have to wait until Warren Earl established himself. After he graduated from Childress High in 1941, he entered Southwest Texas State University and took a job repairing airplane parts at the U.S. naval air station in Corpus Christi. But with the war still raging, Warren Earl thought it was time to enlist as an airman for the United States Marines. Perhaps he felt as Wesley Todd from Milwaukee did: “It sounded like being a Marine pilot was one of the toughest things you could do. I wanted to be somebody, so I went for it.” Warren Earl signed up on September 1, 1943—nineteen days before his twenty-first birthday.

  “We were sad when he went into the service,” Billye Winder said, “but he wouldn’t let us be sad for long. Warren Earl was always pulling a joke, making us laugh.”

  “My last memory of Warren,” remembered Madeline Riley, “is of a fit young man, so very handsome in his Marine uniform, filled with excitement and mentally bracing himself for the dangerous missions ahead. Our whole family was very proud of him.” As she told me this, her voice trailed off. After a few moments she said wistfully, “I can tell you one thing for certain: Warren Earl Vaughn was as good-looking a man as I’ve ever seen.”

  After the war, many Japanese would claim they were beaten by American material superiority. It is true that the United States was able to toss more metal into the battle than Japan. But it is also true that America beat Japan when it came to having large numbers of educated boys who were handy with a monkey wrench—boys like Floyd, Dick, and Warren Earl who were determined to make the war come to the conclusion their mothers desired. These impossibly young boys who would win the war had little stubble on their chins but plenty of American steel in their hearts.

  That same year Warren Earl signed up, another handsome but even younger American boy was itching to fly. Jimmy Dye of Mount Ephraim, New Jersey, hadn’t even graduated yet, but he wanted to be the first in his high school class to fly. “Jimmy was a risk taker,” his chum Dave Kershaw explained to me many years later. “He would run around and tell everyone he was going to be the first at something. Typical kid bragging. But he would always follow through. Later he would come back and tell you that he did it.”

  Jimmy Dye’s high school portrait reveals a smiling version of James Dean—an open face, slicked-back blond hair, and a toothy smile. “Jimmy was a very nice dresser,” his neighbor Cass Cain recalls. “He always had nice clothes and was well put together. To tell you the truth, I had a real crush on Jimmy.”

  Mount
Ephraim was a town of fifteen hundred “near Camden and just seven miles from Philly.” Dave Kershaw remembered it as “a country town with streets of just dirt. There were no outside influences. And unlike Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, we didn’t even have a town drunk.

  “In the wintertime,” Dave told me, “we young boys would rush outside with ashes from the coal heaters when we’d see a car stuck in the mud in front of their house. We would put the ash under their tires so they’d get traction as we pushed them out. We’d rush to the stuck car because we got a tip when we got them out.

  “In those days,” he explained, “we went to Sunday school in the morning and then church in the afternoon and evening. Sunday was a day of worship, of doing God’s will. There was no drinking ever, but also no cards, no movies, no makeup on girls, no vices. We were taught there was good and evil; we sang hymns like ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ National Geographic magazine was the worst influence our parents had to worry about.”

  Mount Ephraim was small but offered big opportunities for a daring country boy who always wanted to be first. “There was this creek outside of town,” Dave told me. “You had to walk through the woods, cars couldn’t get there, and it was very isolated. The creek carried overflow sewage from another town. It had a green scum on it, and there was a sign that read, ‘CONDEMNED. NO SWIMMING. TYPHOID FEVER.’ We just tore the sign down. The water was filthy, about five feet deep. We’d go out there on Palm Sunday. The water was ice-cold, and there could have been dangerous debris under the surface. Jimmy would dare everyone to dive. Then he would go first. He was a risk taker, and you could depend upon him to try something first.”

  Another time, Jimmy was the first to ride his bike across a narrow wooden construction plank suspended over a deep ditch. “His bike toppled over,” Dave said, “and he landed headfirst. He was groggy and didn’t know where he was when we pulled him out.”