J. Clair Whiteley

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
J. Clair Whiteley- Life in WWII
By J. Clair Whiteley
February 19, 2005
Box 8 Folder 34
Oral Interview conducted by Lea Whiteley
Transcript copied by Jessica Rhodes March 2006
Brigham Young University – Idaho
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Lea Whiteley: Where were you born?
Clair Whiteley: I was born here in Ogden up at the Old Dee Hospital in 1921, February
23.
LW: How old were you on December 7, 1941?
CW: I was 20. Yeah, ’ 21 to ’ 41 is 20 years.
LW: What do you remember about that day?
CW: On December 7th I was, at that time, in primary flight training down in Visalia
California and I had gone to church that Sunday morning. Got out of church, as I
remember, along about noon and one of the other cadets was running down the street
telling us all to get back to the base because Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Of
course, we all wondered what that meant. As the day went on the more serious we
realized the situation was. But I had, as I said, just got out of church. I remember it so
well because from that point on everything changed in our training routine.
LW: What did you think when you first heard about the attack? What was your initial
reaction?
CW: It was kind of a surprise because most of our attention, in those days, was focused
on Germany. That’s when Hitler was in his prime. And so it was a surprise that Japan
had, you know, done something we hadn’t expected. It was a bit frightening. Naturally,
all of the sudden, in your mind, you get thinking, well, gee whiz what about the Japanese
in our country? You know, are they affiliated in some way? What should we expect?
LW: Did you serve in the armed forces in the war?
CW: In that time I was in the flying cadets. We were being trained to become Air Force
pilots. In those days, they [ were] called the Air Corp. It was under the direction of the
Signal Corp, as a matter of fact. But, so they called us the Air Corp. We had three phases.
We’d go through primary, then basic, and then advanced flight training. And then we’d
receive our commission to Second Lieutenant and be rated as pilots and go on from there.
LW: You were in New Mexico?
CW: Not at that time. We were in [ California], like I said we were in Visalia when the
war started. But then we moved onto our basic training in Taft, [ California] and then
from there into our advanced training in Stockton, [ California]. That’s where I graduated
and finally got my commission.
LW: What was your rank?
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CW: Well, they let us know when we were cadets that we were one step below a yard
bird, whatever that was. We had really no rank. We weren’t even called privates. We
were cadets. And it wasn’t until we graduated that we really had any kind of rank and
then we became 2nd lieutenants.
LW: Did you meet and make any new friendships during the war?
CW: Oh, lots of them. Oh, yes and still correspond with some of them. Yes, very close
friendships, you bet.
LW: Did you meet any old friends from home that joined with you while you were in
your training?
CW: Yeah, I did as a matter of fact. We had, when I was instructing in B- 17s in Roswell,
that’s where I was assigned after the war was in progress and we had graduated and I was
assigned in Roswell at the Roswell Army Air Base. It was the Army Air Base at that time
because we were in the Army Air Corp. And we opened a new multi- engine flying school
out there and eventually got into where we were instructing in B- 17s. Well, during that
period when we were in B- 17s I had, oh, at least three that I remember of my close
friends from school come through and be qualified in B- 17s and I was able to give them
some help.
LW: How did the military train and prepare you for combat?
CW: I never did get into combats. Uh, all during the war I was assigned as a flight
instructor. And just had that all the way through, had that assignment all the way through.
And, uh, like I said, we started out in Lake Twins UC- 78s they called ‘ em. It was a rag
wing Cessna and went later into B- 17s and later into B- 29s. All instructing the whole
time. So, I never did get into combat. I trained a lot of people who did go into combat.
And after the war ended, uh, they, a lot of those people came back. Some of them had
been prisoners of war. Some of the same people that had gone through training had gone
over there, flown their missions, some became prisoners, some, uh, when they came back
the rule, at that time, was that before they could be discharged or sent back to inactive
status or whatever, they had to be re- qualified in the airplane and so we did that for a
while after the war was over in B- 17s. That wasn’t a very successful program because the
guys that came back from flying combat or had been prisoners, or whatever, only thing
they wanted out of that war was them. They didn’t care about, you know, they didn’t
plan on making the Air Force a career or anything.
LW: We’re going to change the focus just a bit. What was your image of Hitler,
Mussolini, and Hirohito during the war?
CW: Uh, that’s a good question. In, oh 19 what, ’ 39, ’ 40? When I was college we used to
get a lot of news reports and see a lot of news where Hitler was making his talks and so
on, and we discussed, you know among students, we discussed it, uh, and were sort of
ambivalent, I guess is the word for it, we didn’t, didn’t think too much about it at the
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time. But we were impressed at the way Hitler was able to get, what would you call it,
absolute loyalty out of the people, out of the Nazis, the, uh, the people that followed him.
He was a master at mass psychology and, uh, these people that followed him were
fiercely loyal to him and would do anything that he asked ‘ em to do. And I remember
listening to radio addresses, even, where he was speaking and someone would be
interpreting the talk and, you know, he was so impressive. We didn’t, because it was so
far away, we didn’t really give a lot of thought to the despicable things that were
happening over in Europe in that time. And I think a lot of us, even now, have some
pretty guilty feelings about the fact that, here this was going on and, and how little we
really did about it at the time to stop it from starting, if you know what I mean. But, uh,
and of course we later realized just how serious that situation was. Mussolini, my own
impression of Mussolini, they called him “ little dolce” he was a pompous, bellicose, he
looked like a, kind of a clown, you know, when you’d see him in the news and stuff and
you wondered why in the Dickens would pole even, you know, even follow him. But
apparently he had the same kind of traits as Hitler did, in his own country. Course, he
didn’t last as long as Hitler did. They finally got, but, uh, Hitler was, I don’t know what
you’d call him, anti- Christ or whatever, but he was a bad one. And I think we knew that.
We just didn’t realize how much damage he was really doing, you know.
LW: When did you first hear about the German concentration camps?
CW: Well, fairly early in the war. As a matter of fact, uh, oh you mean like Auschwitz
and, yeah. That was later on, that was later on. We didn’t realize until toward the end of
the war what was happening in those concentration camps. They, uh, they, it was a
horrible thing. But, it was pretty obvious, after we learned what was happening, what was
going on and it was such a, almost incomprehensible to think that anybody could be that
inhuman. And it was, so we were, at that time we just felt like we’d do anything in the
world to change that situation, get ready, and get him out of there and stuff, but, uh.
Thank goodness things began to happen that made that possible, but it was awful late.
What was it, 6 million Jews; I think in the meantime… yeah, it was bad.
LW: How did your life change as a result of World War II?
CW: Well, I started, I graduated from junior college in pre- med and had planned to go on
into medicine. But always, always had a hankering to fly airplanes. And this story may be
kind of interesting. In 1939, I guess it was, when Roosevelt was president, they
established, what they called, a civil pilot training program that, uh, got going in about
1940. What it was, this is a story that I was told back in those days that, I think, had some
merit to it. Robert H. Hinckley who was a, uh, resident of Ogden, quite a famous name
here, was on President Roosevelt’s staff and was a good friend of Art Mortenson, who
was the old manager of the old Ogden airport here. Art Mortenson was Mr. Aviation
around here for many years. Everybody knew him and loved him and he could fly
airplanes like you wouldn’t believe. In those days he was a just a typical barn stormer and
a great guy and a good friend of mine. Anyway, he and Hinckley were good friends and
apparently they were talkin’ about this sort of thing. The, uh, big multi- engine airplanes
were beginning to role off the production line and airplanes were coming and they were,
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you know, they were they didn’t have an awful lot of pilots to fly ‘ em and so Mortenson,
in their conversation, said might be a good idea for the government to maybe establish a
subsidized program where they could interest some of these young pilots in college, some
for these young kids in college to take flight training at a very low price and then
encourage them to go into the Air Corp. Well, this is what happened to me. When the
opportunity came along, and this is kind of an answer to your question how did it change
my life, when that opportunity came along I found out that the 35 dollars I could get a
private license and that meant all the flight training, all the books, the ground school,
everything. And we even got college credit for it! 35 bucks. Man, you couldn’t beat that.
So I applied for it. I was accepted into the program, but before, uh, I could be accepted I
had to be able to pass the Air Force physical to make sure that I’d be eligible, you know,
to apply to be an aviation cadet later on. So, I did. I didn’t have any problem with that.
Got my private pilots license in early 1941 through that program and course that was
what I wanted to do the rest of my life once I’d had a taste of it. And, uh, did exactly
what the program was designed to do. I applied for the Air Force training, was accepted
there, and then went into the Air Force, Air Corp. like I said in those days. Went into the
Air Corp. in, I think it was September, October of 1941 and then graduated in mid- 1942
from advanced flight school. That established a career for me. You know, so that’s how it
changed my life. It gave me a career.
LW: You said that you flew B- 17s. I don’t know much about airplanes. So, what exactly
are B- 17s?
CW: Well, the B- 17 was called the Flying Fortress. It was a four- engine bomber. The one
with the most famous bomber that and the B- 24 were the most famous bombers during
WWII. Carried out raids daily, London and out of England, over Germany and the areas
over there on bombing missions. There were thousands of them over there. And it was a
great old tough airplane. It’d come back with almost nothing left of it and still be able to
make a landing. But it was, it carried a good load of bombs, had a fairly good range, and
there were nine people in the crew, that was including the gunners, the bombardier,
navigators, all that sort of thing, you know. And so when we would train the crews we’d
have to train each of the members of the crew in their particular position and my job was
to train the pilots. I would have bombardier instructors and so on to train the other people,
the navigator, the instructors that would train the other people involved in the missions.
The airplane, incidentally, was built by Boeing.
LW: How did the war affect the community?
CW: The community? Well, you see when I was away from this community when the
war started and never got back here until after the war so I really didn’t get a feel of much
what was going on around here. All I knew about was that, uh, community where we
lived and most of our time was spent on a base during the war. So my community
involvement at that time was minimal, you know.
LW: Did you know any young men who did not return from the war?
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CW: Oh yeah, I did and was very close to a few that that happened. Some of my
classmates who were dear friends going into the service approximately the same time that
I did. Some a little later, some were drafted, some volunteered. But there were some that
were killed during the war and it was, uh, course you hated to lose a friend, you know.
And some had one situation where as, I was instructing on those smaller twins in Roswell
a pair of my students were killed in an accident during night formation flying. So, yeah I
did see and hear about quite a few of my friends who were affected that way.
LW: How did their families cope with that?
CW: Well, let me give you an example of how I expected that they would cope. This,
these two students that I was telling you about, we, to describe the situation just a little
bit, we, I was in the lead air plane with one student, I had five students, I was in the
airplane with one student. The other two planes had to have two people in the airplane
and one of the students was, uh, had been home on an emergency leave to bury his dad
who had died and so he flew and just, you know, he just filled the empty seat, so to
speak, in that third airplane. And, course he, because he had gotten so far behind during
his emergency leave he couldn’t catch up with the class so he had to be held over till, to
the next class, so that’s all he did was just act as a fill the empty seats. But it was that
airplane, that, we were on a down wind lake to initiate our landing and I signaled for an
echelon over to the right and the airplane who was flying on my left wing he would go
underneath the formation and come up on the right wing and form an echelon to the right.
Uh, the lead airplane would then make his left turn on the final approach and land, second
airplane the same way, then the third. Third airplane never came in. As it turned out,
whether he had misread his altimeter, or whether he had had mechanical functions, or
malfunctions, I don’t know. I always suspected the airplane kinda came apart from the
evidence that I saw, but, anyway, it wound up that he had crashed. And we were flying at
that time about 1,500 feet above ground and he would have had to, he would have had to
go down a long way in order for that to happen. And with the second eyes, the second
pair of eyes it would almost [ be] impossible for me to believe he would’ve made a
mistake I just feel sure in my own mind that there was some kind of a failure. I think the
airplane kinda came apart. But the investigations wasn’t, they weren’t able to come up
with anything like that. Anyhow, I went out that night and now it’s getting to be
midnight. And I went out along with the search crew to find him and we finally located
the airplane some distance from the airport and of course it was rubble. And we located
the two bodies. Could hardly recognize ‘ em. But I got thinking, here was this boy who
had just buried his dad, now he comes, now he’s killed and what’s the family feeling
like? I, I had an awful, I had a hard time with that— I really did. He hadn’t had a chance
really to get into combat and do any good. Fine young man, fine young man. We all
loved him; he was a good student as long as I had him. So it hurts, when you see
someone like that especially one that you’re training, you know, see that happen. Other
parents, my cousin, who was a dear friend and we were very close, Anita, a girl, married
a young man just before he shipped over seas. He was killed, and so I kinda saw what she
was going through. She had a baby and how badly that affected her. She later remarried
and a very successful marriage. But there’s a lot of trauma, a lot of trauma connected
with that. Especially with parents who are devoted to their families.
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LW: Did you have any other relatives who served in the military?
CW: Well, yeah, I had cousins who were somewhere close to the same age who were in
the military.
LW: Did you keep in touch [ with] them?
CW: Yes, oh yes and friends, kept in touch with them too, yeah.
LW: What are some of the most vivid memories you have of that time?
CW: Well, I, you know, there are a lot of them. One is kind of an interesting one. This
was in August in 1945, close to the end of the war. I was instructing in B- 29s at the time
and I had the students practicing instrument procedures southwest of Roswell and it was
late at night, dark night, and we were flying around in the area and all of a sudden there
was a terrifically bright flash of light that turned into kind of a fireball out to the west of
where we were flying. It didn’t look like it was too far away and I thought, we’ve had a
crash out there. There were some mountains, called the Sacramento Range, I think it was,
just west of us. And I thought, boy there’s an airplane down over there and so I call the
tower, told them that I saw the accident, or saw the fire and thought I’d run over there and
thought I’d go over and circle until they could get, you know, rescues teams out there or
whatever. The tower operator, he acknowledged the call and I turned the airplane in the
direction of the fire and by this time it was fading out a little bit, but I kept goin’ and it
wasn’t five minutes later, maybe a little more than that the tower operator called me back
and he said that he had checked with every, over all the airport bases around there and
there’s Alamogrodo, Albuquerque, there’s another one at El Paso, and he’d checked with
all of those, he had checked with their traffic control, there were no airplanes missing.
Said, so it couldn’t have been an airplane. He said, and there wasn’t anything missing
from Roswell, he’d checked with all of them. So, he said, suggest you just go ahead with
your mission. So we did, we went back and continued practicing. We, a lot of us saw that,
you know, while we were flying around that night. I don’t know, there must have been 20
airplanes in the air doing the same thing. So, we did, we landed, and for the next, uh, 4- 5
weeks we talked about, “ wonder what that was?” Never heard anything more about it
until one day about 6 weeks later the headlines were just screaming about the fact that the
Anola Gay had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and had a vivid description of
what had happened and also a little history about where the bomb came from and how it
was developed, and so on. At that time it had been, boy, a real deep dark secret. So this
was the first time anything had, really, much been said about it. It talked about the fact
that the first test of the atomic bomb was made at White Sands, over in Alamogordo,
right across the Sacramento Range from where we were flying. So, what we saw that
night was that atomic bomb goin’ off when it was tested. And if I had continued that
flight and flown through that cloud, only I know I probably wouldn’t be here now. But
that was, that [ is] probably one of the most vivid, vivid memories I have of World War II.
LW: What did you think when they dropped those bombs?
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CW: Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It ended the war. We were thankful for that. I think we all
had some pretty sad feelings about all the innocent people that suffered as a result of it,
there were a lot of ‘ em and we knew it. And the only rationalization that we could come
up with was because it did end the war it saved a lot of lives. It took a lot, but it also
probably saved many more than it took and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. President
Truman had to make a pretty tough decision when they decided to drop that. I don’t
disagree with it I think it had to be done. It had to, we had to hit them hard enough that
they wouldn’t hit back, if you know what I mean.
LW: What is your opinion, now, after all these years, what’s your opinion of the Japanese
and the Germans?
CW: Course, memories fade. I have, I don’t know. I really don’t know what to say. I have
a lot of respect for both of ‘ em. The, as a matter of fact, in a way I felt really sorry for a
lot of the Japanese during WWII that were, we put into camps here, you know, because
they were, just because they were Japanese. And thousands of ‘ em and, I don’t know
whether, how much good it did whether it was the right or the wrong thing, how many of
them were actually involved in sabotage, I don’t know. All I know is that families were
broken up, families were torn away from their businesses and put into prison camps and,
I think we were kind of mean to them, I really do. The Germans, those who were fiercely
loyal to Hitler, I think have faded away pretty much. Oh, there’s still some neo- Nazi
organizations around. I don’t know how serious they are, I would certainly be very, very
careful about dealing with them, you know, they would be killers, you know. But the
German people, generally, are, you know, great people. They, some of the engineering
they do are second to none in the world. I think once the wars were over and everybody
comes to a meeting of the minds then, it’s like you’re in a fight with a friend. You want
to beat the heck out [ of] him one day, but then once the fight’s over you become friends
again, you know.