Vanished Hero: The Life, War and Mysterious Disappearance of America’s WWII Strafing King

by Stout, Jay

  It was practiced in part because the service was short of the officers and staff needed to closely supervise the growing numbers of cadets. In its worst form it was little more than hazing. Taking examples from the military academy at West Point—but with less oversight—the barely-more-experienced upperclassmen harangued and harried their junior counterparts for offenses that ranged from genuine to groundless. Examples of gaffes that might earn demerits, or “gigs,” included sloppy grooming, an ill-kept room, a failure to salute, tardiness, and poor manners in the dining room, among many others. Abuses were common and it was an environment in which bullies sometimes thrived. Upperclassmen sometimes made up offenses simply to harass junior cadets they didn’t like. All the cadets had to endure this cycle during each of the three flight training phases.

  Righetti survived the hazing in fine fashion; it spoke not only to his fastidiousness and intelligence, but also to the fact that he didn’t make enemies. “I’m about as ‘gigless’ an underclassman that ever hit these parts,” he reported. “I’ve been commended by the captain on my ‘eagerness.’ I’ve had two gigs—one, a dusty windowsill and the other an oily cocking piece on my rifle. We’re allowed fifty in six weeks.”

  The hazing created a culture in which cadets in the junior classes were anxious to “give as good as they got” once they became upperclassmen. Righetti showed this same spirit when he wrote home on March 24: “I’m still doing as well as can be expected and am rather tickled at the prospect of being an upperclassman by the time you read this. Our upper class leaves Tuesday and our lower class arrives Wednesday. “Boy, here we’ll really work them over.”

  On the other hand, despite the abuses, the practice was not entirely harmful. First, as intended, it did encourage the junior cadets to behave. It also provided examples of both good and bad leadership that the young men drew from later in their careers. And it revealed their ability to perform under stress. Moreover, it taught the cadets how to exercise peer pressure to influence the behavior of their classmates. In short, the system was an imperfect but practical tool not only for maintaining order and discipline, but also for teaching leadership.

  The cadets looked forward to mail each day; letters kept them connected and grounded, and reminded them that, notwithstanding the abuse they endured from their instructors and upperclassmen, they were still loved by someone, somewhere. Righetti was no different and chided his family when they failed to write frequently. It was a theme that was repeated through his career. “Please drop me a line. I’d like to know what’s up and you’ve written one postcard in two weeks. I’ve even done better than that, and there are six of you.”

  It wasn’t much later that he received a letter from sister Elizabeth that upset him. That upset was likely magnified by the pressure he was already under as a flying cadet. “I’ve had a swell letter from Betty that sorta told me off,” he wrote. “She went over me pretty heavily for ever leaving home. In a way, she’s perfectly right, I guess. But she misses pretty badly where she insinuates that I deserted because the going was tough. I’d like to have you all understand that I’ve gone into this for only two reasons. First, I guess, is that I’d rather fly than eat.” Indeed, Righetti’s love of flying had always been evident to the family.

  The second reason he offered was the fact that there was opportunity—“big dough”—in the aviation industry. “I’ve always thought of our outfit [family] sticking together and I do plan on using whatever I can get to help out. I hope that you’ve known this all along, but from the way Betty talked, there was some question in your mind.” He closed the letter with an olive branch. “Please write me soon and remember that we Swiss are funny in that though we sometimes don’t show it, we are loyal to our families, and that it’s pretty hard to break the bond that holds us.”

  Meanwhile, Righetti continued to train, but under a new instructor. The change brought him back to top form. “I did manage to get a very good grade on my forty-hour check, so I’m practically a cinch to graduate [from the basic phase of training]. It’s figured here that once we get by that, we are as good as through. I was the second in the class to pass it, so out of two hundred men, that’s pretty good.”

  He also finished his night flying for the phase. “We had landings with the field flood-lighted, with wingtip landing lights and with flares. The first two are cinches, but it’s quite a trick to release a parachute flare at two thousand feet in a high wind, and with the ‘gun’ [engine] cut, get down under it and land before it goes out. It necessitates a pretty steep dive, but once you master it, it’s really the berries.”

  In the meantime, Righetti continued to enjoy the attentions of the local ladies. “These southern Belles continue to intrigue me, so you can’t blame me if I attempt to carry out my policy of reciprocity.” There was a coed who went to school in Austin and came home on the weekends: “She’s an only child, has a new Buick Coupe to go to school with, and I gather is from a moneyed family. She is very attractive, and on top of that, is smart. She’s 19, 5’6”, weighs 119 and wears a size 8 shoe. You can see from this that she is honest.”

  Then there was the niece of Thomas Gilcrease, the millionaire owner of the Gilcrease Oil Company. “Did I tell you about Betty Gilcrease? She’s my best local gal, and is she swell. She’s making me a pair of P.J.s out of parachute silk that I furnished.” He was also excited about another girl from a more modest background. “I had a swell date this weekend with a swell kid from down at San Benito, which is along the Rio Grande. She attends Our Lady of the Lake, the exclusive gal’s school in San Antonio, and is really a queen. Her dad’s a cowman and she’s just about the finest person I’ve encountered as yet. They’re not rich—she’s making her own way through school. She speaks Spanish as well as English.”

  At the same time Righetti grew indignant with rumors that he and Evelyn were to wed later that year. “I see no reason why I should abandon the independence of single blessedness in November or any other time in the near future. You can quote me on that, and I’ll see that a letter of explanation follows this to the proper sources [Evelyn] in order that we may quell this rumor.”

  Still, Righetti didn’t hold himself blameless. “It’s possible that I may have sometime in the past made statements that were perhaps misleading, but surely not a strong enough of one to marry me at any set time.” He did declare that he was fond of Evelyn but not at all happy with the talk of imminent marriage. “In short, if it means anything to her, she might find that it was a damn fool play to make so much noise.”

  Although his flying recovered, he collected more gigs as he progressed through the basic phase. “I got five at one crack for being late to Call to Quarters, Sunday nite. It was worth it though—I was at Betty’s [Gilcrease] for dinner. I was only ten minutes late and it won’t happen again.” A week later he bagged six additional gigs for more pedestrian offenses. “These gigs were two, for unshined shoes in my closet, two, for not getting my rifle in the rack in time, and two, for being in the shower when I should have been in mess formation.”

  Righetti finished the basic phase at the end of April 1940. “We are now officially through here at Randolph,” he wrote on May 3. He was pleased that he completed the phase with strong marks for his instrument flying, “especially so, in view of the fact that I started out kinda weak.” He explained that, “you get a canvas hood thrown over your head and must fly by the instruments and not by the seat of your pants which is nearly always wrong when you’re blind. Since it is the thing in modern and future air work, a great deal of stress is put on our learning it well.”

  His love life grew messier during this time. “I have a formal invitation to Our Lady of the Lake graduation dance, to be held on Saturday nite. I’d sure like to go—the gal who invited me is probably the sweetest gal in Texas, but Ev kind of cramps my style.” The reason that Evelyn was cramping his style was that she was in San Antonio with her mother to visit with him as well as family friends.

  “You can see the com
plications I have to deal with,” he continued. “I could pull the often abused but much used ‘confinement’ gag on Ev, but I’d feel like a skunk, so maybe I’ll just tell her the truth, and maybe I’ll just not go.” Ultimately he noted that the relationship was coming to a close. “I’m just a little afraid that the Righetti-Shepherd nuptials are rather definitely postponed.” Still, after her visit he did note, “It’s been pretty nice having her [here]—it would have been nice having anyone from home.”

  The advanced phase of flight training was split between nearby Kelly and Brooks Fields. Righetti was sent to Kelly where his class was put into tents; the infrastructure expansion on the base hadn’t caught up with the growing numbers of cadets. “There will be swell new barracks in September, but we’ll miss them.”

  “I have high hopes of getting in the new AT-6 at Kelly which is just off the line,” Righetti wrote. “A brand-new ship similar to the BC-1, but much more refined. It’s an ‘Alclad’ [aluminum clad] job, or in other words has an all-metal finish. It has retractable gear, a constant speed prop and cruises at 185—boy, oh boy!”

  In fact, although Righetti did fly the BC-1, he also was one of the very first of hundreds of thousands of students worldwide—over many decades—to train on the AT-6, which was an improved variant of the BC-1. Built by North American, the AT-6 was one of the most manufactured aircraft in history and was used by more than sixty different air forces. Ultimately, nearly sixteen thousand examples were produced. The South African Air Force was the last military user, retiring its aircraft in 1995.

  Nicknamed “Texan” by the Air Corps, the AT-6 was a rugged, single-engine, monoplane developed as an advanced trainer, but which also saw combat during Korea, Vietnam and a dozen or more small-scale clashes, civil wars and counterinsurgencies. It featured sophisticated characteristics similar to the fighters to which cadets such as Righetti would advance. These attributes included retractable landing gear, a constant-speed propeller, machine guns and a radial engine that produced six hundred horsepower.

  On May 16, 1940, just as Righetti was starting the advanced phase, President Roosevelt startled the nation with his call for annual aircraft production to be increased to fifty thousand. It was a ten-fold increase over the previous plan which called for five thousand aircraft per year. Putting Roosevelt’s new goal into context was the fact that the Air Corps aircraft inventory—of all types—at the time was only three thousand. In the event, the plan was not ambitious enough and was eventually overtaken by other plans which themselves were made obsolete by more updated plans.

  Arnold was certainly gratified to see aircraft production capacity expanded, but he knew that an air force was much more than massive numbers of flying machines. Rather, it was the right numbers of the right types of aircraft. It was the logistical capacity to support those aircraft with material and spare parts. It was mechanics to maintain them. It was airfields from which to operate. It was support personnel—cooks, clerks, doctors, meteorologists and many more—to keep everything running efficiently.

  And it was well-trained pilots and crews to operate the aircraft. “At a meeting in the White House, on May 14, 1940,” Arnold wrote, “the President agreed that I should get 106 million dollars for a training program, including building costs, gasoline, transportation, and training airplanes of the primary basic and advanced types. Once Congress had okayed this Executive Directive, we had in sight a setup which would permit the training of 6,300 cadets simultaneously. It enabled the Air Corps to start training pilots at the immediate rate of 7,000 a year, and promised me a 12,000-pilot production within a year.”5 In fact, the pilot production rate eventually grew to more than one hundred thousand per year. Righetti was part of the very beginning of the most massive pilot training program in history.

  As much as Righetti liked Randolph, and San Diego before it, he absolutely loved his time at Kelly. “This place is without a doubt the swellest place in Texas, and that’s a lot of territory,” he declared. “I soloed the BC-1 yesterday after an hour’s check, and checked out in a new AT-6 this morning. Boy, what ships! The BC-1 is a couple of years old, so is rather antiquated in this game. But all the AT-6s are less than three months ‘off the presses.’ They both have 600 horses but the AT-6, though bigger, is lighter and cleaner, so cruises 20 or 30 MPH faster.”

  Near the end of May 1940, Righetti mentioned the war in Europe and what it might mean to his future. His observation was remarkably perceptive: “Just in the event that the hair-pulling across the water makes you wonder about the future security of Army flyers,” he wrote, “here’s one slant. It’s entirely possible, and even probable, that if the mess lasts long enough, and gets dirty enough, the U.S. will be dragged in. But with the newest air force expansion program, before we can fight we have to have flyers, about ten times as many as we have. And before we can have flyers, we have to have instructors, and that’s where we who fly a little better than the average come in.”

  In other words, the best flyers from Righetti’s class—40-D—would serve as instructor seed corn for the massive air force Arnold was building. “I guess that unless this thing [America’s entry into the war] cuts loose too soon, we’ll spend the next few months teaching boys to handle airplanes. That has a lot in its favor, but it may become just a trifle boring in time. It’s darn safe though,” he continued, “pays a little extra in flight time, gives plenty of hours, and really is rendering a service to old Uncle Sammy. He’ll put us where we can do the most good.” Righetti additionally noted that, given the choice between fighting and teaching, he might prefer to stay in the States and perform the latter.

  His next declaration proved to be as wrong and ignorant as his previous observations on training had been prescient. “Even in the event that I become one of Uncle Sammy’s fighting boys, attack or light bombardment [his desired specialty] is almost as safe as a porch swing on a lawn in California. Anti-aircraft is the big threat for the boys off the ground,” he declared, “and attack ships fly so low that the dough boys can’t swing a gun on them before they’re gone. Refer to your war news telling of the German dive bombers for verification.” He was dead wrong. In Righetti’s defense, he was still a cadet working his way through flight training. Many men of much higher rank were—and would be—much more mistaken about much more important matters.

  To this point in his short career, Righetti had assumed that his physical size precluded a career as a pursuit, or fighter, pilot. He learned otherwise while he was in advanced training: “I passed my semiannual physical with a better mark than when I enlisted. Boy am I healthy! I managed to skip a meal and shrink on the measurer so that my dimensions are five feet, ten-and-one-half inches, and 167 pounds. This will allow me to get into pursuit, should I care to, with a half-inch waiver, which is the maximum allowable.”

  It was at this time that Righetti offered his personal thoughts on the notion of the United States going to war in Europe. “I’d hate to think that this country is dumb enough to fight anyone else’s battles for them again. At least, without a lot better excuse than last time.” His views were not uncommon, as many Americans were still very wary of getting involved in the fighting. However, with France crumbling under a concerted German onslaught, attitudes were changing.

  Indeed, Righetti’s own tone changed just a short time later on June 10, 1940—the eve of France’s total collapse. “The war progress continues to surprise us. But I don’t think we’ll be over there for a while yet. Although FDR did sound a little like he thought we might. None of us really worries too much about it, however.” On that day, Roosevelt had not outlined a plan for the United States to enter the war, but declared, “we will extend to the opponents of force [the Allies], the material resources of this nation; and, at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense.”6 Although he might not have considered it, Righetti was one of “those
resources,” and he was definitely in the “harness.”

  Notwithstanding the stress of flight training, the shadow of the war in Europe, and the girl-trouble he had created for himself, Righetti still found time to let his family know that he missed and appreciated them. He sent a note to Pop: “I do think of you all the time, especially so when the going gets a little tough. I don’t know who could be a better example of ‘stick-to-it-ivness’ than you are. And whenever I get a little griped at what might be termed Army highhandedness, I always remember your invaluable advice: ‘Anything worth having is worth working for.’ It’s surely been worth it though,” he continued, “The chances are better than even that I’ll get an instructor’s job, since I’m still comfortably among the top ten fellows here.”

  Righetti’s relationship with Evelyn continued its long-distance deterioration. “Ev called last nite and did a little raving, but cooled down okay, finally. If that dame isn’t darn careful, she’s going to make herself darn unpopular with a big Swiss pal, I know.” The bond they had presumably shared in San Luis Obispo would have been difficult to preserve in such circumstances even if Righetti had been fully committed to it. Without that commitment, it stood little chance of surviving.

  It seemed that his liaisons with one or more of his local ladies might also have reached low ebb during this time. “Texas has some swell and some awfully attractive people,” he wrote. “But they drawl, and so many people who drawl are easygoing, and easygoing people are too much like I am, to tie up with—figure that out!”

  It was apparent that the pressure of the actual flying instruction during the advanced phase was not as great as it had been during the previous two phases. In fact, the cadets were paired together for many of their instrument training flights; this freed instructors for other duties while giving the students additional confidence. “We have a plenty swell time with instrument instruction, hauling each other around,” Righetti wrote on June 10, 1940. “This A.M., my student Roberts [Fred] wrote a five-page letter while I flew him around. He’s pretty good, so I didn’t insist he stay under the hood the whole 1½ hours he had scheduled.”