I can only imagine how hot it must have been in those cramped trainers at the height of summer in the high desert of California, learning to become bombardiers.
The American bomber offensive against Germany had begun a year earlier, in August of 1942. The British had been bombing German targets since 1940, but had soon shifted their attacks to less-accurate night bombing because their initial daylight attacks had produced appalling losses in aircraft and crews. Without fighter cover deep into Germany, the Americans would suffer the same appalling losses in that first year.
Yet throughout the souvenir booklet, the overall tone is upbeat, even jovial and light-hearted. Two cartoons were featured on the "Eleven Arrives..." page, discussing their first sight of the base: one was of the bus that brought them, with an officer gesturing for them to line up outside, with an overheated jackrabbit in the foreground and a lonesome cactus in the background. The text above emphasized that these trainees "were tired and hot". The adjacent cartoon is of a cadet with a small suitcase in one hand and the cord to his duffel bag in the other, asking, "Where's Da' Bombsight?"
Besides the cartoons, the text itself specifically defined their overall mood as the training continued: "They called us eager from the sidelines, and we were. Day after day, we became more and more determined to get through and earn those wings and bars.... We lost a few by the wayside, but to the end they were there trying."
Nineteen Forty-three was the year that Allied losses in the war were slowly beginning to turn into victories all over the map. But American losses were still heavy, especially during daylight aerial bombing. Hundreds of crewmen and dozens of bombers would be shot down during each mission.
One-hundred and forty-two student officers' smiling faces grace many of the later pages of the booklet. They came from all over the nation to this base in California: Garden City, New York; to Columbiana, Alabama; to Seattle, Washington; to Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and many other states, cities, and small towns in between.
Remarkably, beside each smiling photo was not only the name and hometown of the student officer, but there was also a brief, highly personalized description of each man. For instance, E.Z. Tucker, Jr. of Greensboro, North Carolina: "Z for Zodiac, meaning lady-killer. Doesn't care to be room orderly, but likes C. Q. duties, WACs and furloughs."
My dad's description reads: "Good at spinning endless, pointless yarns. He seems to be healthy but always complains of his aching back." My mom used to tell me that dad was like that. Even at parties, he'd go off on some verbal tangent that would soon bore anyone he was chatting up. And even I remember him saying as a generic complaint in the 50's: "Oh, my aching back."
These young men might soon be lying dead in the wreckage of their B-17, B-24, or B-25 bomber in North Africa or Europe, or be rounded up and hauled off to a P.O.W. camp after they'd parachuted out of their damaged plane, as happened to my father after a Ploesti raid. But here, in stark black and white, each man not only had a face, name and home town but also a distinct personality. Each was somebody, a unique individual.
There were, of course, no Asian-American or African-American faces in the class. (The Japanese internment camps were in full operation and segregation was fully prevalent in the Armed Forces of that time.) But there were many English and Italian and German names sprinkled throughout. (My father's was the only Hispanic name that I found.) A few of the men were obviously married, and many more were described in one way or another as skirt chasers -- straight or trying very hard to appear straight in that oblivious-to-homosexuality era. Two students were described as the first and second papas in the 43-11 class, married guys whose wives had given birth while they were in training.
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