Oral History Interview with Eugene Roos

It is Thursday, October 25, 2007. I am Leanne Diakov, and I am interviewing Eugene Roos at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Louisville, Kentucky about his naval service during World War II.

Diakov:Mr. Roos, I’ll ask you to just start by telling us a little bit about your self before the war—where you were born, a little bit about your family, where you grew up.

Roos:People call me Gene. Born in Rockford, Illinois on October 18, 1922, and my family there lived there until 1928, when my dad was transferred to a sewing machine needle factory—manager of a sewing machine needle factory in Orange, Massachusetts. As most of you who know anything about history, understand that 1928 was the year before 1929, 1:00and as a result of that catastrophy, my dad’s duties out there ended up closing up that plant, and we moved back to Rockford at that time in about 1931, I believe it was, not exactly sure. I have two sisters, an older sister, Mary Louise, and a younger sister, Carol Charlotte. Mary Louise was born in 1919, and she died very young in 1967, at the age of 48…48. My younger sister did better than that—she lived until December of 1998. My father lived to be 75. He was born in 1891; died in 1966. My mother died very young also, at the age 52, and all cancer victims so far in the family. Dad remarried four years later to a lady named Edna Peterson, who still survives in a nursing home in Rockford, Illinois. Of course, the early years in the 30’s 2:00were depression years. My father was very lucky up until 1941. He maintained employment. In 1941, the company he worked for was sold to folks who eventually shut the place down, and so he was adrift in 1941; how they managed to pay my tuition to the University of Illinois that year, I don’t know, but they got it done. He went about six or eight months unemployed, and he finally made another connection with a company in Rockford that was relatively young—Rockford Screw Products Company, it was called, and he was the office manager there.

Diakov:How would you describe—you’ve mentioned this was kind of during the depression in the years afterwards—how would you describe…I guess, your childhood status—were you middle class, or working class?

Roos:Middle class I would say. The fact that you kept your employment 3:00was something to be very grateful about, because the employment at one point was as high as 20% in this country. And companies were folding left and right, and Rockford, Illinois in those days was a heavily furniture manufacturing company. In those days, we exported jobs but they went to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Now we export them to Mexico, and who knows where. So Rockford evolved out of that from a furniture…centered on furniture…to a heavily machinery, machine tool center, Rockford was. Of course that was hammered after the war, and for a number of years later, by foreign competition 4:00also. But it would be middle class; we were certainly more fortunate that many, many people even though many of those folks kept their jobs, kept them at much reduced compensation levels, and pretty much nervous all the time about what the next day would bring. So, in childhood we were always aware of that. But we also were—our family would make sure that we understood how fortunate we were that dad was still employed. Our next-door neighbor, for instance, was a contractor, a carpenter contractor, and when the banks closed in 1933, one of the early things that FDR did was close the banks to try to slow or prevent bank runs. He had just made a deposit from one of his customers, I think it was $1500, as I recall, which would have been lots of money to cover his payroll the next time, and 5:00the day after he made that deposit, they closed his bank. And it turned that family very bitter, and was a close by lesson of what can happen to people suddenly in that period of time. We’ve had nothing to approach it since; we’ve had periods of difficult economic times in the country but for people to compare anything we’ve gone through in the last 40 years or 50 years with the Great Depression is unrealistic, not so.

Diakov:What kind of education did you have growing up?

Roos:Yes, I went to the University of Illinois in September of 1941, at a time when dad was just recently unemployed. I think he borrowed against his insurance; you know wherever they could scrape together—anyway they sent me to the University of Illinois in 1941. I got through that year, but I didn’t like it. I was not happy there. As a matter of fact, I just—in retrospect, I describe myself 6:00as…not prepared, immature at the time. I got through it, but I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the campus, and probably used that as an excuse for not applying myself. The second year, some friends of mine in Rockford had gone to Miami University, in Ohio, Oxford, Ohio. So I went one semester in Oxford—to Miami in Oxford, Ohio—and while I was there, I enlisted in the navy. And finished that first semester, and didn’t know when they were going to call me up, so I didn’t go back the second semester.

Diakov:Why didn’t...what made you decide to enlist in the navy?

Roos:Family history, probably. I have an uncle who was a Naval Academy graduate, and was a naval aviator, and I think that was the trigger on the thing. He was—nowadays, they call it a role model, I guess. Then you just admired them 7:00 [laughter].

Diakov:Well can you remember the day you enlisted?

Roos:It took me three times. I had—the first two times, I was a shade on the wrong side of blood pressure, and pulse, and so I was advised to go home and in a month, try again—a month after I did some strenuous exercising, running, that sort of thing….

Diakov:And did you?

Roos:Yes, got in…on the third effort. In the meantime, I wasn’t sure I was going to get in there—I wanted to…pardon me…this was in 1942. In 1941, after Pearl Harbor, and I was at the University of Illnois 8:00at that time, in fact I was at a rush party that Sunday when the news came over. And another friend of mine, I can’t recall his name, we went over to St. Louis and tried to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. And never heard back from them. I guess at the time, when things settled a little bit, and they decided that it didn’t make sense for the Royal Canadian Air Force to be drawing Americans who were in the war now themselves, so I never heard back from them.

Diakov:What was…interested you in the Royal Canadian Air Force versus… I mean, the Army Air Corp, or….

Roos:I guess, it was just near, a next-door country, neighbors…you know, you almost felt like they were Americans, or like they were United States citizens, almost, you know. In those days, there wasn’t any contention that I recall at all; there’s some now, of course, but it was…a rush probably, that was not very well considered. But, as I’ve been so fortunate 9:00in my whole life, I was fortunate they did not call me.

Diakov:Thinking back to this rush party, where you heard the news about Pearl Harbor, can you describe that? Do you remember…how they announced it?

Roos:Oh yeah.

Diakov:And the mood?

Roos:Yeah, well it was about lunchtime, because it’s about five or six hours difference in the time, and I don’t think we finished. I think people scattered back to their—it was a rush party, so a lot of people were there like I was, as a guest—went back to their dormatories, or wherever, and got a radio wherever they could, and they sat by that radio and listened to every minute for the rest of the day. And it was a consuming thing, it was such a jolting thing, and of course, it concentrated the country’s attention, on what had happened out there, and what a threat it was, and the determination 10:00just took over. There was no doubt in our minds in the end we’d…do the job. But, the young men that I was involved in—I was in a men’s dormatory, and men’s fraternity house—those fellows all knew they were…of an age group that obviously was going to get involved someway if they were healthy at all. Of course, I don’t remember any of them dragging a foot….

Diakov:Was there a big rush to run out and enlist?

Roos:I don’t recall that—I don’t think there was, although I shouldn’t answer that in a positive way at all, because I’m not really not sure. I made that effort to go to St. Louis, and I don’t know if many people tried to do that sort of thing to get into some other service, where they could move more rapidly. 11:00The country was so ill-prepared, that they didn’t have the facilities or equipment or anything else to handle a rush of people who wanted to be pilots, for instance. They didn’t have the facilities, airfields, or any equipment, the airplanes, the instructors, or anything yet. So there wasn’t any reason for the Air Force to rush out and try to enlist a whole bunch of people that they couldn’t properly handle anyway. Some of that, I think was even in my case where I didn’t get enlisted in October of ‘42 and they didn’t call me until May of ’43, so there’s, what, seven or eight months gap until they were prepared to take people who had enlisted about the time I did. So it took them that long to get organized, and in retrospect, I think maybe they 12:00wanted to accommodate these folks that wanted to enlist. And I don’t know for sure if it’s true or not, but in retrospect years later, I thought they maybe stretched out the training period longer than they would necessarily would have to do, as far as the training itself is concerned. But to absorb these people, we were…I was eighteen months from my cadet training before I finished the flight training and commissioned, got my wings. And I don’t think the Air Force, the Army Air Corp at that time; I don’t think their training was anywhere near that long. Of course, we were headed for the Pacific, that was pretty obvious to start with. They were headed to Europe, where the concentration was…the pace of the war was much bigger than it was in the Pacific. So, I don’t know about that and other things that are interesting in retrospect, I guess, that are places I was stationed were scattered all over the navy. 13:00I was at Monmouth, Illinois my first assignment, not too close to the oceans, for the navy [laughter], and then Laramie, Wyoming, [laughter] and St. Mary’s, California, Livermore, California.

Diakov:[Laughs] They didn’t want you to get too close to the water on your first….

Roos:Well, I think was it really was, Leanne, was that each congressman got something. And mainly they tried to protect, they tried to keep their schools going, their colleges going. So a lot of those bases were attached to a school of some sort—Monmouth College, University of Wyoming, St. Mary’s College, and my strong suspicion is that each congressman demanded that something be done for his district. And if it took the navy in Wyoming, okay, I don’t care [laughter].

Diakov:Well, so it took you three tries to enlist, and on the third time, I guess you had….

Roos:I had flat feet too, but they were congenital, if that’s the right word for it…it wasn’t—they didn’t hurt me at all, and I remember having, trying to stand on the edges 14:00of my feet because they did look for that, but it wasn’t…the guy looked at them once, and he said, “Relax!” and I eased a little bit and he let them go…I got in.

Diakov:Squeaked by…[laughter]. So where did you enlist? Did you have to go to…?

Roos:It was in Columbus, Ohio, because I was attending Oxford.

Diakov:Oh, okay.

Roos:Miami University in Oxford, Ohio at the time, I went to Columbus, Ohio to do that.

Diakov:And after you enlisted, and I guess signed your name, signed your contract or something, did they just send you back to school?

Roos:They didn’t care what you did. They just said, whatever you were doing, go back and do it. I’m sure some people were just working, some, most a lot of them were in school, 15:00and I think most of them did what I did—they finished the semester. We could have been called anytime; we didn’t know when they were going to call us. They just said it probably won’t be until next year, which would have been 1943, two or three months hence. I think that was as close as they would come to speculating on when the callup might be, and it wasn’t clear to me. So I stopped school, and went back home to Rockford.

Diakov:What was your family’s reaction to your decision to enlist?

Roos:When I called my parents about it, I was ecstatic. I think mother’s comment was, “Well, I’m not sure it’s so good,” something to that effect.

Diakov:Mothers! [Laughter].

Roos:It was her brother who was the naval aviator…half-brother.

Diakov:And your father?

Roos:No comment.

Diakov:No comment. So you went back home….

Roos:I got work in a gas station, I don’t remember. Odd jobs, just killing the time and earning a few bucks, dating some girls, including the one I married [laughs].

Diakov:Time well spent [laughs]. So then, when and how did you get called up? 16:00Roos:Just got a letter, I think there was about two-weeks notice, or so, and I think the date was May 12—I think that’s right. It was just a form navy letter—report to so and so on such and such a date, and I remember climbing on a train out of Rockford, and I don’t know whether—it certainly wasn’t a train directly to Monmouth, Illinois, so it probably went to Chicago, and frankly I’m not sure when we got to Monmouth in the end on a train or on a bus. I’m not sure.

Diakov:Well, what do you remember about showing up for training, and your first training?

Roos:Exciting. Speculation, that sort of thing—wondering what kind of people you’d meet, and what kind of quarters, and, just a young man’s concern about, 17:00or anticipation about doing something that was kind of a dream. Or course, I’d never thought about that before--if the war had never come along I never would have, never would have expected to be a naval…involved with the navy at all. So, it was something new, I…because it was a path to do something worthwhile.

Diakov:Did you know at this point that you were going to work on getting a pilot’s…become a pilot?

Roos:Yes, we enlisted as pilots. The navy called that program the V-5 Program. There was another V-7 Program, for people who aspired to be in the surface navy. And maybe there was some others too, I’m not sure, but those two I remember, and mine was a V-5 Program, and we were headed to be pilots. We didn’t know…we didn’t make a selection of the kind of airplane that we would be most interested in, until advanced training, almost well after a year after that.

Diakov:What kind of accomodations did they give you in Monmouth? 18:00Roos:At Monmouth, it was a college campus, and we lived in the dormatories. Of course, the student population just disappeared suddenly from almost all colleges, I guess, and that was the effort to keep those colleges, keep their heads and noses above water. And so the navy used lots of those, so it was ground school, studying and physical education, heavy emphasis on that, and some drilling, that sort of thing—close order drilling, it was called—a matter of building discipline, and for responsiveness, respect for authority and that sort of thing.

Diakov:And what did you think?

Roos:Pardon me?

Diakov:And what did you think? 19:00Roos:Oh, I liked it. I should add, I guess, that in high school I was in the ROTC.

Diakov:Okay.

Roos:So I had some initial interest in the military, but never thought of it as a career. And I got to be a company commander in high school ROTC. And enjoyed it, and so I had a little leg up on some of the, a lot of the fellows who hadn’t had ROTC school. I knew what left and right, and…[laughs].

Diakov:Knew about authority, and….

Roos:[Laughter] Yeah, as a matter of fact, when I graduated in that high school ROTC program, the company I commanded gave me a going away present, which still hangs in our den. It’s a sabre and a scabard, chrome-plated, hangs on the wall in our den [laughs].

Diakov:You left an impression.

Roos:And I think I got to be a company commander at Monmouth due to they had, they were organized in those kinds of units. 20:00Diakov:And then from, so Monmouth was physical training, and ground training.

Roos:Ground training, ground school, yeah.

Diakov:And, this was just for naval, just the V-5?

Roos:Yes, just the V-5, just navy people there.

Diakov:And then from Monmouth, how long were you there?

Roos:I should mention one thing. I only remember one instructor at Monmouth, and he was an attorney, probably 50 years old, I’m guessing 45 to 50 years old, who really wanted to be active, if he could have been—but he was too old. He taught himself, or he was taught, I guess, the fundamentals of dead reckoning navigation. He taught a navigation dead reckoning, which means without instruments—dead reackoning training at Monmouth, and he was just an outstanding guy. His name was Corme (?); I can’t remember his first name. I am assuming he went back to his law practice after the war, but he devoted a good deal of his time, 21:00whether he was ever paid for it, I don’t know. I don’t know if they were, I just don’t know. I would think they must have been paid something. But he was an outstanding instructor.

Diakov:And did you use some of his advice in training?

Roos:Well, he just taught this navigation course, and did an excellent job of it. I don’t think anybody flunked it, because he made it so you could understand it.

Diakov:Well, how long were you at….

Roos:Three months at Monmouth, give or take. Approximately three months.

Diakov:And then, where did they send you?

Roos:Then they sent us to the great naval station in Laramie, Wyoming. It was attached to the University of Wyoming in Laramie. And that was where we got our first flight time, along with ground school, and physical training and the rest of it, but the initial training in the single, small single-engine airplanes.

Diakov:Was this your first time in an airplane?

Roos:No, I had, during that interim between the enlistement and callup, I took several flying lessons, private flying lessons in Rockford, Illinois—maybe six hours or so, something like that.

Diakov:What was your first impression, the first time you got up in a plane?

Roos:Exhiliration [laughs].

Diakov:You knew this was something for you.

Roos:Yeah.

Diakov:That’s good. 22:00So in Laramie, you got a little more….

Roos:Some more ground school, and physical education, of course, which was heavily emphasized, all the way through. We were pretty sure that the Japanese were small, but didn’t mean that they were weaklings, and the emphasis, or a lot of it, of course, was that the airplane is made to stay in the air, but they don’t always do that, and maybe you might have to someday face them on the ground, whatever. But we, the airplanes that we flew in Laramie were in those days, the Cub and the Aranca were the two main small airplanes, and there was another one called a Luscombe, 23:00which in our opinion, at least, was a much better airplane. The Cub and the Aranca were fabric-covered, even the fuselages were, but the Luscombe was aluminum fuselage, and we thought it was a better airplane. That part of that’s egoist—every better wants to think their’s is the best, I guess—whatever they do is the best. Anyway, Laramie was a little special in its challenges because the airport was 7200 feet above sea level. So these small airplanes didn’t have abilities to climb much more than ten or twelve thousand feet above sea level, so we were flying at near its—you know within three or four thousand feet—is all you were ever off the ground. Most of the other fields are much lower—Standiford Field is about five or six hundred feet, something like that, as a comparison. So we were there also for about three months, and Laramie is kind of isolated. 24:00Cheyenne was, I don’t remember, 80, 90 miles maybe, Denver, 150, something like that. We didn’t in some of the other stations there were population centers closer, so we didn’t do much…I don’t remember much socializing or chasing around at Laramie, Wyoming.

Diakov:When you had free time….

Roos:Didn’t have much free time to start with, and there wasn’t much exciting to do. I don’t even know whether it was a dry county or not [laughs]. I don’t remember that.

Diakov:A very straight-laced three months [laughs].

Roos:Yes, the university continued to operate, but the V-5 program probably kept its head above water.

Diakov:And when you left Laramie, 25:00where were you, as far as your pilot’s training?

Roos:We had settled there in this small airplane, maybe had 25 hours total, I’m not…give or take. I look for my logbook, and its probably buried in an old sea pack, I’ve got. I got that out of there, but, I didn’t find it. So, which was a…everytime you fly you made an entry in this logbook, for as long as you fly—that’s the way it’s supposed to be done.

Diakov:And where did you go after Laramie?

Roos:A small college in California, called St. Mary’s, not too far from the San Francisco area. I think it might have been, it might have been an all-male school, I’m not positive about that. Picturesque area, that was all ground school again, and physical education. We were getting more advanced navigation instruction there, and some other 26:00ground school subjects, but there was no flying done there. And we were there about—that was another three months. Most of those segments were three months each, so…but it was in the California area, and Hollywood in those days were patriots. Those folks were patriots, and it wasn’t too difficult for the staff I think to get people to come up there to entertain us, male and female. And I can’t name any of them, but they were available which lightened the days a little bit. We did have a little free time, and I think we usually into Oakland, from there. They provided buses and transporation 27:00to and from a specific location in Oakland, back to the base at St. Mary’s. So that was pretty much routine.

Diakov:Do you remember at this time, I guess it’s probably late ’43, do you remember getting any reports about what was going on on the warfront?

Roos:Oh yeah.

Diakov:Did that cause you any anxieties, or… Roos:Well, the attitude was that we’re going to win this thing, and it was no surprise that there were ups and downs. The Guatanacanal Campaign, I guess, focused our attention as much as any others did. It was the first really major one that was a hell hole. And…it just was, there was a determination that…shrug off, if that’s not too casual a term to say, individual difficulties, in the war itself, but it was a stage we were going to have to go through, and we were going to finish it and win it. 28:00Diakov:And during this course of training, we you able to communicate with your family back home in Illinois?

Roos:Yeah, of course, telephones weren’t used much in those days, but the mail was; we had what we called “e-mails”—is that right? That doesn’t sound right—that’s not emails for heaven’s sake—there was a special name for mailing materials that were the paper companies developed which were very very light, and weighed almost nothing. What in the heck did they call those? Yes, I got good mail from my folks—didn’t hear much from my sisters, but [laughs] heard from my parents, my mother particularly, but dad wrote too. So 29:00I don’t know, I can’t remember specifically. I suppose we talked on the phone once or twice, I don’t know. But it was never thought to be a thing that you would just go pick up a phone like you do now, you know.

Diakov:Were you able to get home for any holidays?

Roos:Let’s see, I think I got home for Christmas of ’43, for a few days. But other than that, I don’t remember coming home. And I don’t think my folks—my folks never visited me, even in Monmouth, Illinois. Transportation, you know, was difficult, with the rationing and all in those days. You just didn’t do much driving. And it just didn’t lend itself to that, and most of the guys, there were very few of them whose mothers visited down there. That was always kind of an eyebrow-raising situation, when a mother came down to visit her 30:00son in the navy [laughs].

Diakov:You boys out becoming men [laughing].

Roos:Yeah, got to be macho from age six [laughing].

Diakov:Well, so we’re at St. Mary’s California, and that was mostly ground….

Roos:All ground, yeah.

Diakov:At what point did they decide…well, I guess, where did you go after that?

Roos:That was to Livermore, also in California, also in the San Francisco area. You hear it now as the Livermore National Laboratory facilities are there. It was what was called, the navy called that “primary training.” And this was ground school—you had ground school all through the whole program—and then various levels of flight training, and this went from the smaller Luscombe, Cub-type, Aranca-type airplane to what…an airplane that was called an N3N, the navy’s designation was N3N. I think the army used them also, under a different designation. They were a single-engine, biplane, much heavier than the Luscombe was; two-place, front and rear, and learned much more about flying with a lot of work on aerobatics, and how to get out of emergency situations—stalls, and spins, and that sort of thing. 31:00And lots of landings.

Diakov:What was that like, the first time you had to….

Roos:Thrilling, yeah. They were necessary maneuvers to learn, because if it happened accidentally, or due to poor pilot capabilities, you had to have some idea how to correct them, and you can’t do that without having been through it, or if you did it first with instructors. So you had good backup, you know. They didn’t throw you into that situation without a number of them being done with…by an instructor and then with the instructor to give you some idea of the attitudes that an airplane must be in in combat, and a lot of it is how to get out of difficult situations, and land relatively safely at least, you know. I don’t remember how many hours we took there, 32:00probably, I would guess at least 50 hours probably of training at Livermore. I think that was maybe four months; I’m not exactly sure of that. One of the highlights there, the things that you remember, is Robert Taylor—you remember Robert Taylor, do you remember that name?

Diakov:Yes.

Roos:He was the hearthrob of the 40’s and he was an instructor at Livermore.

Diakov:Oh my.

Roos:Yeah, I never had him as an instructor but I met him, and of course, he was subject to a lot of questions about subjects that you can guess [laughing]. His stock answer was “Well, everybody knew about Errol Flynn’s but not mine.” [Laughing]. I don’t think he was married to Barbara Stanwick by that time; I’m not sure. Anyway, that was a…by far the highlight of the training up to that point, because the flying was much more…intense and the experiences were more intense. These were open cockpit airplanes, too, besides, 33:00so you were…you knew you were moving. You had a much more, much closer relationship with the flying experience in an open airplane.

Diakov:What’s the weather like up there, in an open cockpit?

Roos:Well, in California, there was no—we didn’t fly that high, there, because it was sea level, just about, so we seldom were above 5,000 feet. Weather changes three degrees per thousand feet of elevation, as a rule of thumb, so if you’re 5,000 feet, it might be 15 degrees cooler, and if it’s 80 on the ground, it’s still not too bad. In Wyoming, 3,000 feet above the ground, that puts at 10,000 feet, but those were closed airplanes too, and in Wyoming we were there in the fall. By the time we got to Livermore, it was late in the year, 34:00late in the year, yeah.

Diakov:And by this time, did you know, were you going to fly solo, in a plane?

Roos:Well, we soloed in Wyoming, in Laramie, but those are those small single-engine airplanes. At each other level, you had to…you solo-qualified also, just because you soloed in a Luscombe didn’t mean you could solo immediately without instructions in a Stearman, and a 3N. So yes, we probably flew another six or eight or ten hours before they would let you solo those. They were more difficult airplane to land. The landing gear was relatively narrow, compared with the size of the airplane, and were subject to wind gusts, 35:00that didn’t have to be very strong before it could affect you, particularly on landings, where you were slowing down, and you got a gust of wind that would get your tail wagging. I got caught in one of those one time, it’s called “ground drooping.” The airplane doesn’t turn over, it just turns around quickly, and is greatly to be avoided if you value your reputation as a flyer [laughing].

Diakov:You have to answer for that in the Mess Hall [laughing].

Roos:Well, I was brought before—they called it some kind of a board—I’m not sure what it was, brought before a board review, for that incident, and I thought I’d sunk a battleship [laughing]. But they didn’t wash me out, fortunately, thank goodness—given another chance. Also at Laramie, another horrible mistake—they never found out about this one—because 36:00it was so. They had the main airbase, and then they had a bunch of outlying, small airports for practicing landing, that sort of thing, mainly for landing practices. At one of those outlying fields one day, I landed downwind. Other airplanes were landing like they should; fortunately, nothing ever happened there. It could have been a bad situation, but I was solo, so nobody else knew about that. And on my check ride, at that same outlying airport, I guess I landed the smoothest landing I ever had in my whole naval career—pilots call it “greasing it.” And I had one of those landings on the check ride, so the instructor was very impressed [laughs].

Diakov:You left a good impression [laughing].

Roos:Yeah. 37:00Diakov:Well, after St. Mary’s, in this more complicated flight training you had there, then where did they decide to send you? And did they send you all as the same group, or at that point did they come and divide you up?

Roos:No, at that point, there were two advanced bases. One was in Corpus Christi, where I went. The other one was in Florida, good heavens….Pensacola. And those were the two advanced training bases. So these people who had started out at Monmouth, and they’d split up and some went from Monmouth to other bases—I went to St. Mary’s but there were a whole bunch of other ones—and then it started concentrating back to the advanced training, where all of them came back eventually to either Pensacola or Corpus Christi. I went to Corpus Christi—no choice.

Diakov:When you got to Corpus Christi, you were with men you who you had started out with at Monmouth?

Roos:Yes, 38:00and Corpus was where you, where you had a chance to choose what kind of plane you wanted to fly, in the long run. And I chose Voda Engine. I think I was a competent pilot, but I was not, I didn’t feel that I was sufficiently competent to do a good job flying a single engine airplane off an aircraft carrier, so I worked on myself and decided I would try to find an airplane that had as many engines out that side, and have other people aboard to be a part of the crew, you know. Anyway, and maybe in the back of my mind, the uncle that I mentioned to you that was a naval aviator, he flew 39:00patrol bombers, also, and when he was in the navy and flying those things, they were called PBYs, Catalinas. They were twin-engine airplanes that some of them were strictly sea planes, and some were…had adaptations, including wheels on them so they could land either in the water, or on land. But they were a lumbering airplane, cruised at about 110 knots. And he was in the…they called them Black Cat Squadrons, because the Catalina, and then almost all of their flights in the South Pacific were at night. Because they were so slow, they would be [ ] and their mission was low level anti-shipping, and maybe that was in the back of my mind a little bit too. In our long-term transition, we did fly those PBYs in further transitions to other airplanes. 40:00That may have been back in my mind a little bit too. But then my closest friends, also were leaning towards multi-engine airplanes, so it wasn’t any traumatic sitting down, cogitating for hours on what to do; it just kind of flowed naturally.

Diakov:Yeah. But when you made that decision… Roos:Pardon me, I should say that the idea of flying airplanes off an aircraft carrier did not appeal to me.

Diakov:Okay, that was going to be my next question. When you made that decision, you know you were narrowing down… Roos:They could have upset those decisions, but I think the split was sufficient that I don’t know anybody that wanted to fly multi-engines that were forced to fly other airplanes, I don’t know. And then they had more, they had a range of single-engine airplanes, they weren’t all fighters. 41:00There were dive-bombers, and there were torpedo bombers, and the reconissance planes that flew off of battleships, for instance. In a multi-engine, my recollection is, that the navy only used four-engine patrol bombers. The marines, who were part of the navy in those days, maybe they still are, but I don’t think so, but in those days marines were part of the [ ] …so the marines took the same training course, they were part of the same training course, and at Corpus Christi, those that wanted to be in the marines, selected marines and the others didn’t. And marines had some different airplanes than the navy did.

Diakov:So what did they start, after you had chosen your airplane in Corpus Christi, then what did they start teaching you?

Roos:Well, we first start there, even there, it single-engine planes also, but again, heavier airplanes that we called Vaultee Vibrators, 42:00we called them. I can’t remember the navy designation, other than that. It became such a common term [laughs] to identify that airplane. It was a two-place airplane, but considerably heavier, and I don’t know how many hours we did—I really don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 hours in that. And after we finished then, that was when we made a decision to go either stay with a single-engine type airplane, or the patrol bomber, multi-engine type planes. And so the guys that chose single-engines, they went on to even a heavier, closer to operational-type airplane, succeeding the multi, and we went in to twin-engine Beech airplanes. They were the—the navy’s designation was SVN—and they were manufactured by the Beech Aircraft Corporation. 43:00And they were a very excellent transitional training plane, and survived many years after the war, as a small corporate airplane, for instance, that sort of thing. And so we had a number of additional hours of that, and that was when our night flying started, at Corpus, and celestial navigation started at that point, still other ground training studies, that sort of thing. Tried to learn a little bit about the mechanics of the airplane, started learning a little about radio navigation. Radar was just…just coming in to use, the early versions of radar. I think we 44:00got to Corpus and we were there about five months, I think May or June up until we finished in November. So that was the longest stretch—it covered training in that Vaultee, and the more advanced training in the SVN twin-engine Beechcraft. They had that Beech for training purposes, they had it equipped with gun turrets, and…let’s see, I’m trying to remember if they had a bomb bay or not. They were never used in combat, but it was a training thing, to get you used to the environment with that sort of equipment on it. I know they had a twin 50-caliber nose 45:00[ ] nose turret—it wasn’t all that big an airplane…I don’t know what….

Diakov:How many crew would you carry on?

Roos:In those, just two usually, just you and an instructor. Yeah. Sometimes an observer would come along with maybe another cadet might fly along, but nothing, no assigned—you didn’t need it in that airplane.

Diakov:So when you were doing your night flying, and doing celestial navigation, that was just you, right? You had to operate the plane and navigate.

Roos:I’m glad you’re asking these questions; I’m continuing to modify the thing. The navy accrued their patrol bombers differently than the air corp did. We had three commissioned officers, even in operational aircraft. One was the plane captain, who was by far the most experienced, and there were two other officers, and they traded assignments as navigators and co-pilots, 46:00and you’d just switch. And so the training and navigation was, of course, the first pilot had already been through that, somewhere down the line, you weren’t worried about him, but you were trying to get some exposure for these two cadets that they’d know a little bit about navigation. And then there were more cross country advanced training at Corpus, there were many more cross country trips, where you would fly to this place and fly to that place, and back here, and try to find Corpus [laughs].

Diakov:Good luck [laughing].

Roos:Try to get back home. Texas was one of my favorite places, though. This was in 1944 [ ], and Texas sky, once in awhile in Kentucky you’ll get what I call a Texas sky, where’s it’s just as blue as you can imagine, 47:00with perfectly white clouds. And to fly among those clouds solo, in the Vaultee, for instance, open cockpit was an experience that I’ve never forgotten. So when I see—we had one the other day here—we have them down in that place in Tennessee occasionally, a Texas sky [laughs].

Diakov:Brings back good memories.

Roos:Yes.

Diakov:Well, what did you…do you remember any of your free time in Corpus Christi?

Roos:Yes…I spent a fair amount of time…we had a fair amount of time off, a couple of days a week, usually, and Corpus was a big enough town that there was a varity of things to do, some of which attracted young men, some may not have, I don’t know. Texas was a dry state, or at least the county that Corpus is in. I think the whole state was dry. So the bus stations 48:00had racks and racks of lockers. So if you didn’t finish the bottle, you stored it in the locker and came back the next week…whatever. But usually you weren’t sure you’d be back next week, so you didn’t leave much [laughing]. Corpus was very busy, because Corpus Christi air base was a big operation, and then there were all kinds of other ones in Texas, of course, all over the state of Texas. Texas had beaucoup airbases, because of the weather primarly, I think, and flat areas, easy to build airports and could build them where it didn’t infringe on other people. People were very great about it. King Ranch, you’ve probably heard of the King Ranch in Texas, has had hundreds of thousands of acres, I guess—a huge place—anyway, they made…part of their holdings came fairly close to Corpus, 49:00and they made available, they had outlying shacks, cabins, maybe where the cowboys slept at night, I don’t know, but we loved those places. They’d send us out there for a couple of days for an R and R sort of situation where they were just out isolated, and I’ve never forgotten the King Ranch either—some of those things that stick with you a little bit. No facilites, just a roof over your head…cowboys! [laughing].

Diakov:Then, did you get assigned to, I don’t know…your crew or your co-pilot at Corpus Christi?

Roos:No, we had no assigned crews—we’re still cadets.

Diakov:Okay.

Roos:If you successfully finished your training at Corpus, that’s when you got your wings and were commissioned, 50:00and so we were, those of us that finished—by that time, most people finished. The wash-outs came much earlier in the program. And so, November 1 of ’44 finished the training, and we commissioned and got our wings at that point. And they sewed fabric-type things on the jackets of our uniforms, you know, and these you could wear on your shirts, or whatever you wanted to do. And they had some other ones that you could send to your girlfriend or your mother, or whatever, that they could wear as kind of a pin, you know.

Diakov:Did you send one to your mom?

Roos:Yeah, I don’t know what happened to it [laughs]. They came both in this double-studded style, and a safety pin kind of….

Diakov:Did you send one to your girlfriend, you now wife? 51:00Roos:Ummm, I must have.

Diakov:Does she still wear hers?

Roos:No [laughing]. Well, I think at that point the navy had for decades, maybe centuries, had a tradition that when a seaman first crossed the equator, they devised, what they called a “short snorter” bill. Now there were so many people doing it, and some of those rules kind of were eased to a great extent. This is my short snorter bill, but I did not ever cross the equator. My guess is that we did this when we finished at Corpus Christi, I don’t know. All of your friends….trying to think.

Diakov:Short snorter—it’s kind of like a yearbook, or something…finds this.

Roos:Some of the signatures I can read in there, but not too many. There are a couple of close friends in there—one of them 52:00turned out to be our best man at our wedding, and the other was the groomsman. The finished about the same time I did. Valuable souveniers here…how [ ] in the auction after we’re gone [laughs].

Diakov:I’m sure your family will hold on to that.

Roos:I don’t know if I’ve talked to them about that…I just happened to [ ] that yesterday.

Diakov:Did, in the course of this training—this is over a year, you’ve been training….

Roos:Yeah, it was eighteen months; we were called up in May of ’43 and finished in November of ’44.

Diakov:And your part of the navy at this point. Had you done any time on the water?

Roos:No. Swam in the swimming pool [laughs]. A little aside on that one—at Monmouth, one of our instructors, 53:00physical education instructor, was an officer, and his name was Art Taskvan, he was a running back, or full back at the University of Wisconsin, and one of the things we had was swimming exercises. One of his favorites was when you get too tired of swimming we’re going to do push-ups on the bottom [laughing]. Art Taskvan, he was a great football player, and I ended up graduating from the University of Wisconscin after the war—we haven’t come to that yet.

Diakov:So, other than the swimming courses at Monmouth and stuff, you hadn’t had any, like water training….

Roos:Oh yeah, a lot swimming, and treading water. A lot of the guys didn’t know how to swim when they enlisted in the navy. I was fortunate enough that the schools we had in Rockford, even at junior high school level, had swimming pools, so, and again we were fortunate enough our parents were able occasionally 54:00to go to a lake, up in Wisconsin, so I knew how to swim pretty well, to start with. But some of them just didn’t know how to keep their head above water, and they had grading—levels of accomplishment that you had to meet as you went along.

Diakov:And did they teach you anything about emergency landings over water, or what if your plane went down over water?

Roos:Mainly how to use your clothing, for instance, as floats—your shirt, you could tie it in certain ways and inflate it and it would keep you, it would help keep you afloat, or your pants or trousers, 55:00other things like that. Treading water, of course, was how to act if there’s another person in the water with you, who might be desperate, how to make sure you don’t go down with them, and all that sort of emergency-sort of water training. As far as, as far as emergency landings of airplanes in the water, there wasn’t much need, because they were going to land-based bombers that we flew anyway. They were not going to be seaplanes.

Diakov:So after Corpus Christi, and you got your wings, and I guess now you’re commissioned?

Roos:An ensign, yes.

Diakov:And where did you go?

Roos:Then we went to Jacksonville, Florida—that was for—they called that…Corpus 56:00was called advanced training; Jacksonville was operation training, and there we flew those PBYs, the kind that my uncle flew in the Black Hat Squadron. It was another transition to larger and larger airplanes, but we did…all the ones that we flew there were seaplane. We landed and took off from the St. John’s River, in Jacksonville. I don’t think we ever made an open ocean landing—I think that the felt that it one of those situations where the first time you do it….

Diakov:They make it as easy on you as they can?

Roos:Well, yeah, and…it was risky enough that they didn’t think…that the first time you do it might as well be the emergency—when you had to do it. 57:00Taught you techniques and how to land relative to the waves, how high they were, and wind velocities, and that sort of thing, to make it as easy an emergency landing as you could. But in the airplanes we ended up in…were land-based bombers, so that was just a matter of hoping that you landed softly enough that you could get out of the airplane someway. Not the idea that the airplane would float—it wouldn’t float.

Diakov:And how long were you in Jacksonville?

Roos:Well, up to and beyond when we got married [laughs].

Diakov:How did that happen [laughs]?

Roos:Well, finished the training down in Corpus, and we had a little leave then. I went back to Rockford, and Joyce did some hard negotiating and convinced me that we ought to get married 58:00 [laughing].

Diakov:She had to convince you [laughing]?

Roos:She won’t hear this, will she?

Diakov:Well, Joyce, I’m giving you a copy of this [laughing].

Roos:I think we were both ready at that time, just a matter of setting a date. Joyce was at Rockford College in her senior year, and she had a break—Christmas break—in school, so we planned the wedding around that, which turned out to be the 23rd of December. And we were together until she had to go back to school, and she went back to Rockford after our honeymoon and finished that semester, and then came back down to Jacksonville with me, and she dropped out that final semester, and finished that later. Then after Jacksonville, we went to another great seaport—Hutchinson, Kansas.

Diakov:Was she able to go with you?

Roos:Yes, for the rest of the way. And there the next transition was to a B-24, 59:004-engine, heavy bomber, and the missions were still going to low-level, not strategic bombing, but…what’s the other word…tactical—anti-shipping, anti-submarine support for landing forces, probably if the war had gone on, probably what we would been in a support situation with the troops landing in Japan, that would be my guess. Because we never were trained with a [ ] high level stratetic bombings, unless they did that after the war, someway. But it was never part of our training—it was all going to be low level training. So, Hutchinson, Kansas was again just more advanced work, more ground, well, more learning about that airplane, which at the time was a B-25 Liberator, it was called—the Air Corp called it a Liberator, 60:00and the navy did too at that point. They designate that the…let’s see…the PB4Y-1 was a Liberator, the navy’s designation for the B-24, and then late in the war, the navy had that airplane modified. The B-24 had….a little background…had twin tales on it, and it was a very difficult airplane to fly if you lost an engine. I weighed about 135 pounds then, which is not far from what I weigh now, and one of the exercises was cutting two engines on one side of the airplane and trying to figure out how to get it down safely with two engines. And even with both feet on the pedal, I could not hold the airplane flying straight. 61:00With all the strength I could…when the navy modified that, they went to a single fin and rudder, which in square feet was much larger than the combined area of the two twin tales on the B-24, so it was much easier to handle in an emregency situation when you lost one or two engines on one side. And then they added, they added more armour to it, they added more armourment to it, they put bigger engines on it, and that was going to be the airplane that we eventually would go overseas with into combat. So B-25, Hutchinson, Kansas was transition into that—when we were flying really heavy airplanes, and a lot of night flying, and cross-country flights. They were from Hutchinson, Kansas, which was in the dry area, they flew to Minneapolis, and loaded up on booze at the naval airstation in Minneapolis, and flew it back to Hutchinson, Kansas [laughs].

Diakov:Well, and these were bombers, how did you….practice any bombing in Kansas? 62:00Roos:No, not that I recall. We did in Jacksonville. They—not live bombs—simulated at targets, and they would send you out—they were some targets here but they sent you this way—you had to get there in a multi-stop serve or situation, and conduct a search. They had like a raft they would put out in the ocean somewhere there, and you were to find it and drop these simulated bombs on it, and a lot of crews never did find that darn thing. They had methods of doing dead-reckoning, it was called, and that was flying by the seat of your pants, really, and you knew it was in this general area, but you didn’t know where it was. And that was an exercise called a square search, and you would fly in one direction for a number of minutes and then you would turn ninety degrees and fly this way for a number of minutes, and that way, and you’d keep decreasing the size 63:00of that square, with the assumption being that somewhere in that biggest square, you’d find, you’d eventually find it on a search flight. And our crew happened to find one, happened to find that, so the enlisted men on the crew, they thought they were the greatest things that ever walked the earth—I think it was mostly luck [laughing.] Diakov:They had lined up their bigger square just right!

Roos:Well, but we didn’t, we never dropped any live bombs in practice. Now maybe they did when I got out and the rest of the crew went on overseas, after the way. Maybe they did practice over there. I would think they would have to, but I don’t know that.

Diakov:It just seems that there would need to be some kind of practice, about how the plane reacts, you know, when you take off that four or five thousand pounds, and then you let it go.

Roos:Yeah, I think most of these airplanes, they didn’t drop…what did they call them when they dropped a whole string of bombs at once—lots 64:00of pictures of that in World War II from [ ] strategic bombing. Now the navy’s—I think released one at a time, because they were after a merchant ship, or they were after a submarine or something. Maybe they cut…dropped two or three in a [ ] situation, but we never did it in a live situation, where we actually dropped something like that. Now maybe that was scheduling. When the war was over—because the war was over very suddenly—and when we finished at San Diego, we were going to Kaneohe Bay in Honolulu, Oahu.

Diakov:Now is San Diego where you went after Kansas?

Roos:Yes, after Kansas…no, we went to Miami, back to Florida.

Diakov:Oh, let’s back up to there. What was going on in Miami?

Roos:Just more training. There’s where, in later years, I got to thinking that maybe the created that thing to accommodate a bunch of officers that they weren’t ready really to deplore, 65:00out somewhere in the Pacific. I’m not sure about that. But it didn’t seem to me that it was absolutely necessary to have both Jacksonville and Miami. They seemed kind of like duplicated to me a little bit. We had a good time there.

Diakov:What was your training like in Miami?

Roos:Pretty much nine to five. We lived on…found an apartment down on Miami Beach, lived about 200 yards from the ocean, maybe. Joyce was there, of course, and had gotten to know some people pretty well; social life was good. Didn’t feel threatened, so it was, in fact I called the whole time that Joyce and I were married a year’s honeymoon at Uncle Sam’s expense. That was closer to the truth than it was a war experience—that’s why I hesitated about this thing, because 66:00as far as my service was concerned….

Diakov:Well, but that’s important too, I mean…..

Roos:Yeah, yeah.

Diakov:….how the country was….

Roos:Yes, and I wasn’t the only one in that situation, of course, lots of other people were there too, but even the…the people that really were in the war, like Bob Sleamaker—have you talked to him?

Diakov:No, he hasn’t been [ ] to talk about his war experience.

Roos:He’s doing something on his own. I’ve… Diakov:And I think that’s understandable.

Roos:Because he was really…I think, Battle of the Bulge, I think, and even I think St. Mary’s ..what’s that…the little town that the guy got caught… Diakov:…in the church tower?

Roos:Yeah, I think he was there too. He told me that, because I’ve been urging him to…I said, 67:00“Have your kids seen any of your citations?”—you know he has a Silver Star, which is right next to the Medal of Honor, and not many people get that. I wanted to try to be sure that his children knew about some of these things, because he’s so hesitant to talk about it. He wears the ribbon, often, and I once asked him what it was, and that’s when he told me it was a Silver Star—I didn’t know. Bob and I had diametrically opposing viewpoints on lots of things—politics, for instance, but can’t help but….

Diakov:Admire him.

Roos:And he told me, not too long ago, he was working on some information for his kids and grandchildren, so I hope he does that. Keep after him, will you? Did you intend to? Or did he shut you off?

Diakov:I think Jim has opened the door for him, but I’m, you know, I can understand and respect his decision…I’ll 68:00pause this for just a second here. Okay, we’re picking this back up here—we’ve taken a moment to talk about some other friends of ours, who are veterans, and hope to encourage them to share their stories. Picking up your story again, you and Joyce are in Miami, on your honeymoon [laughs]… Roos:Well, Jacksonville was really the honeymoon, yeah the earlier one. Miami, well, yeah, thought of a year’s honeymoon, yes. You’re too quick for me Leanne.

Diakov:And did you fly in Miami?

Roos:Yeah, oh yeah. Just more advance stuff, but really kind of a nine to five sort of a schedule. Night flying, some of course, and navigation was getting a little more advanced. Learning more about celestial navigation, and I think we were only there 69:00three months, I guess, but it was a pretty easy three months, really.

Diakov:And what were you hearing about the war during this time?

Roos:Well, by that time, the tide was turning to some extent. As there had never been any doubt to start with that we’d end up winning this thing, but it was a matter of how quickly we could do it, how strong the Japanese were, and all kinds of other things—what the British were doing, and what….But we were always aware of progress and most of the news by that time was starting to be progress. There weren’t too many serious—we took losses, but not defeats.

Diakov:And from Miami, where did they send you, from Miami?

Roos:San Diego. We had a little leave after that, and went back to Rockford, for a few days, and then took a train from Rockford to San Diego—kind 70:00of a cattle car, sort of thing….

Diakov:You put Joyce on a cattle car?

Roos:At that age, you don’t worry too much about that kind of stuff [laughter]. So, if was about a five-day trip, I think, from Rockford to San Diego. And the uncle I referred to earlier, called him “Uncle Bob,” he was stationed in San Diego. He was the executive officer at a naval station there in the San Diego area. It was…oh my goodness, I’ll think of it, I guess. Anyway, he was executive officer there, having come back from extensive tours in the South Pacific, and they had bought a house in San Diego, and the house next-door was occupied by a woman who’s husband was overseas somewhere, and had an extra bedroom. And so they arranged with that lady for us to rent that room 71:00from that woman who lived right next door to them. Camp Carney was the name of the station. And, so we…San Diego was…of course, the war was getting pretty close to the end, at that time. We didn’t know about the bombs. I was still convinced that we were going to have to be over there where there was action. But, things were moving pretty rapidly in our direction. Even at the cost, of severe, very severe losses along the way, in that island-hopping campaign. But San Diego’s a great city—even then it was. Lots of things to do, it was a great—had been a naval station for many, many years. Was, and maybe still is, a favorite place for navy officers to retire, and San Diego Zoo was outstanding. There’s just lots of things to see and do in San Diego. And by that time, we had transitioned to this PB4Y-2, which the navy called a 72:00Privateer. It was a modified B-24 Liberator, so this was the airplane we were going to fly in combat. And so, it was a topping off of the training…we were getting used to that particular airplane, its characteristics, its flying characteristics, the equipment that we hadn’t seen before, the different flying characteristics also—its additional power—it had guns and had more armor and protection around the pilots’ cockpit, and was just a far superior airplane. I don’t think that the Air Corp ever used that model; I don’t think they did. There’ve always been service rivalries, even in war, for heaven’s sakes. Rivalries, you know—there were a lot of fistfights, for heavens’ sake, between marines and navy guys [laughter]. I shouldn’t, 73:00maybe I shouldn’t say a lot of them, but it wasn’t unknown, particularly if the bistro, if you were there late at night [laughter]. Again, San Diego was a good time for Joyce and I, with our relatives next-door, and my favorite relative, my Uncle Bob, the aviator, was there, and there our crews were assembled then. We were organized as a crew that would stay together. And our plane captain, his name, was John Strayker, was an Annapolis graduate, and had extensive tours of duty in the South Pacific, in other airplanes. He came back and he was getting updated in this Privateer, and the two of us, who alternated as co-pilots and navigators, 74:00the other fellow was Bill Haney, and he was married, about my age. John Strayker was older by maybe eight or nine years, I’m not sure. And our enlisted men crew, which there were people, enlisted people who knew more about the radios—they knew more about the mechanics of the airplanes—they would man the guns; they would man the armaments—the bomb-dropping duties, and generally had housekeeping kinds of things to do with the airplane itself, making sure it was ready for flight. The plane commander, or course the plane commander was ultimately responsible for deciding that the airplane was airworthy, for a particular flight, but you had to depend on—I don’t know, I think we had about seven or eight enlisted men, plus the three 75:00commissioned officers on these airplanes.

Diakov:And were those enlisted men, were they—they were assigned to your group—that was always the same.

Roos:Yes, it was a crew.

Diakov:Okay.

Roos:And the intent, of course, when this was done, the bombs had not yet been dropped, so the assumption was that this was going to be a crew that would stay together for some time, through whatever action, in which you might become involved. So, the… bonding—is the word used now, was very important, and there had to be a confidence among the crew that your buddy next door know what the heck he was doing, yeah. And you could depend on him. And that, of course, pyramided up to the plane captain, who carried a heavy load of responsibility in that respect—that he had to be—that there had to be confidence in him, in his ability and capability, and 76:00 character.

Diakov:Did you have a good captain?

Roos:Yes, very good, as you would expect out of a naval academy.

Diakov:[Laughs]. Annapolis will be glad to hear it. So how long where you in San Diego? You had mentioned that you were going there… Roos:I think we got there, in June, I think. I think we got there in June of ’45, and the bombs were dropped in August. We had just finished our training, and….

Diakov:So you were….

Roos:The first one was dropped on about the 11th of August, maybe the other one, a few days later—Nagasaki.

Diakov:And you were still at San Diego when that happened?

Roos:Yes.

Diakov:Do you remember—where, do you remember where you were when you heard about the bombing?

Roos:Yeah, I think we were next-door over at with my uncle’s wife, and the news came on the radio, and I remember saying to her, “My God, this is only the first one.” 77:00This is the smallest one, you know…what comes next? Very sobering, even as young as we were, and inexperienced and immature; it was a life-changing kind of a day. Things are different.

Diakov:So you immediately knew the implications of this type of bomb, on….

Roos:That could do such tremendous damage.

Diakov:Do you…the next day…. when you… Roos:We didn’t…there was no regret it was done, don’t misunderstand me. There still isn’t…on my part.

Diakov:Yeah, but there was just an understanding, of the implications.

Roos:Yes.

Diakov:And the next day when you went…on to base, or met with your crew, was there any talk about whether this was going to be?

Roos:I think actually by the time 78:00they had bombed, we had stopped our formal training—we had finished it. And we were waiting for orders to go to Honolulu, the next stage, you know. And I think we through with our formal training, in fact, I know we were, because I prevailed on my Uncle Bob to let me and a friend of mine use one of the small, two-place airplanes to have some fun with it. And he arranged that for me, and when I came back in, I dropped the thing from about 15 feet, I guess, and blew out a tire [laughter]. So I don’t know how he explained that to his superiors, his hot pilot nephew—blew a tire on his landing [laughs]. So, yes, we were through with formal training, and we had been, we were going to get some liberty, some leave at that point—which 79:00we got, and went back to Rockford, and things happened very rapidly. When the war was over, there just wasn’t many days when the set—they had assigned point levels to how much, how long you’d been, what kind of service you had—they assigned point levels for that, and the point level assigned to ensigns, like I was, had first been set at some higher level, but on this final leave they were expected to go overseas, but by the time they got back to San Diego, a couple of weeks later, they had lowered those points to a level where I qualified to get out, which I mentioned earlier. And even though I had signed the papers to sign over to the regular navy, I withdrew those things, amid some less than friendly remarks from the officers who were probably getting credit for keeping guys in. 80:00Diakov:Yeah, yeah.

Roos:And so we elected to get out then, with a chance to go back to school in January, the following January.

Diakov:So you never hooked back up with your crew?

Roos:No, not in any formal way. I did go back for a year later, I guess it was, for some reserve training at Glenview Naval Station near Chicago—that’s an additional story, I guess. But they stayed in, and I don’t…I really lost track of them there for awhile, and…I’m really not sure where they ended…I know they went to Kaneohe Bay in Honolulu, and how they replaced me, or with who, I don’t know, but the crew was intact at that point, and I was part of that crew, so when I withdrew…it, you know, left a donut-hole there.

Diakov:And they had to find….

Roos:And they had to do something. And what they did in Kaneohe, or beyond that, I don’t know. They probably went further, maybe 81:00went to Okinawa—I don’t know where they went—replaced other crews, probably, because we were still…still hadn’t signed the peace treaty thing, and there was still lots to do, in those areas. Some of those Jap forces, they stayed in the Phillipines I think for years, in the hills up there, some of them did. And just didn’t believe that Japan surrendered—they just wouldn’t believe it. They were taught to fight to the death, you know, and they assumed the country would. Anyway, strange things happened.

Diakov:So you and Joyce went back to San Diego, and you…not quit the service…but you….

Roos:Joyce stayed in Rockford at that point.

Diakov:Oh, she stayed in Rockford.

Roos:She went back to…she went back to school to finish that last semester.

Diakov:And then you came home from San Diego, and started school in January of ’46, that would be. Discharged 82:00on the first of November I think—commissioned on the first of November, and discharged on the first of November.

Diakov:An even year.

Roos:I was eighteen.

Diakov:Did you…where did you go to school when you came back?

Roos:Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin at Madison, which was a bigger campus, a better chance for Joyce to get employment, and fairly close to Rockford. I think it was the proximity to Wisconsin as far as the chance for Joyce to get something to do. Oxford, Ohio wouldn’t have been many opportunities for her to get work, in those days the town wasn’t…. what, five thousand people, maybe, I don’t know. Beautiful campus—loved it, but….My sister graduated from there, but… So there was no thought of returning to Oxford, Ohio.

Diakov:Yes. And when you went….

Roos:Didn’t like Illinois.

Diakov:When you went to Wisconsin, was that…did you have a GI Bill? Was that to help you get through college?

Roos:Yes, 83:00got—they were…the enlistments were exploding at that time with guys coming back from the service, and wanting to go back to school under the GI Bill, which enabled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them to go to college, who never would have without that chance. So that was another benefit of the war, that sometimes is overlooked that it was a tremendous benefit. I think I would have gotten there anyway, someway or another, because I had a taste of it before the war. But, what was your question [laughs]?

Diakov:Well, you used the GI Bill….

Roos:Pardon me, one of the fellows in our wedding, whose name is Blaine Hendrickson, he and his wife—he was from Madison, and he went back to school there, and they helped us. Well, first of all, the accomodations available at that time for out of state people, just to find a place to live, was difficult 84:00because they were filling up rapidly. We first stayed in barricks used by nurses during the war, because I think the Army Air Corp had some kind of facility in Madison, and they had barricks for the nurses, and we—when they were disbanded, those spaces were available. So we had—I don’t know—a ten by ten room, I guess with a double deck iron bedstead, and two little rooms with a bathroom in between them, I guess. But our friends… that lived in Madison, found us a one room bedroom in town, where we stayed in a room, one out of eleven rooms in that remodeled old, old house, with one bathroom.

Diakov:Oh my!

Roos:[Laughs] And an icebox…an icebox—not a refrigerator, an icebox. The ice was delivered on Saturdays, I guess, and on 85:00Saturdays we slept in, so we just left the door open. The guy would come in with a 50-pound chuck of ice and put it [laughs] in the icebox, and on his way. Anyway, great days. I got credit for, I guess I got credit for two semesters, I guess. I got the credits I had from Illinois, I think were equal to a full year, because I went…I started in January, went straight through three semesters a year, for two years. That’s six right? So it must have been two that I got credit for. Majored in accounting. Primarily, I guess, because my dad wasn’t a certified accountant, but he was an accountant, and it was part of his responsibility as office manager in his job in Rockford. That was the attraction, I guess. And I don’t regret majoring in it, because it’s a good major for anybody, including liberal arts peoples, 86:00I think. And went straight through and had a great time there. Bought our first automobile out there, and the only convertible we ever owned—39 Plymouth convertible with a rumble seat. You don’t even know what a rumble seat is, do you?

Diakov:I believe I do.

Roos:Do you?

Diakov:Pops up doesn’t it?

Roos:Yes, in this one…probably one of the first ones that had a power-operated roof top on it.

Diakov:Oh my.

Roos:Most of them, up until that point, were manual.

Diakov:Yeah, you had to get out and undo the latch….

Roos:Yeah, so you popped a button—so that was great to go to football games with somebody in the rumble seat [laughter]. So that just took two years. I’m jumping over something, probably.

Diakov:Well, I think you’ve covered your [ ] and your service, and afterwards, I always like to ask at the end, just kind of a refresher….

Roos:Are you aware?

Diakov:I’m aware of the time. But I do want you to 87:00tell me, when you reflect back on your service, and in that time during World War II, you know, how did that impact…what did that mean for the rest of your life? How did that change you or direct you?

Roos:If I had to, if somebody said, “What were the thirty best months of your life?” they’d be those thirty months.

Diakov:Was that the friendships, the adventure…the…?

Roos:Hard to put into words.

Diakov:Yeah. Did you ever fly?

Roos:Could have had lots of…very fortunate that there were lots of great thirty months, but significant thirty months, feeling that you were doing, headed for doing something worthwhile, and meeting and marrying Joyce.

Diakov:Did you ever fly again, to pilot 88:00a plane?

Roos:Yeah, a couple of years later, in 1948, I think it was, because I stayed in the reserves, and you had to…so often, you didn’t have to, I guess, but you had an opportunity to go back to Glenview Naval Airstation, from where I lived in Rockford, for some more flight training, back to the Beechcraft…twin-engine Beechcraft we flew. And I went back there, and it was ground school, and jets would just come in and there was some ground information about that sort of thing—nothing very intensive, but they did…you did fly. And they assigned you a crew—two of us. And this particular assignment was a…cross-country flight, and I thought, well, we’ll fly down across Joyce’s farmstead, where she grew up on a farm in central Illinois. And I don’t think—they only 89:00updated training that they gave us were, I don’t know, three or four landings…well, okay, go. And it had been two years since I’d flown, and we got down over that farm, and both engines quit.

Diakov:Oh my Lord.

Roos:And neither one of us had flown since or we were…uncertain about…. and we were down to 500 feet, I guess, when we finally—both of us—said, “My God, we forget to switch the gas tanks!” And the other thing—all the controls were full. There was a word for that, when the pitch and the power were full on, when the engines came on, they just…thought they were going to tear themselves out of the airplane. So anyway, we both reached for the levels that switched the gas tanks. There’s a procedure that you do—you take off on certain tanks, and when you’re up and flying, you switch to other tanks, 90:00and then you switch back to those other tanks—things that you do automatically, if you fly enough.

Diakov:Yeah.

Roos:And if you don’t fly enough, you’re not a safe aviator…pilot, and you shouldn’t do it, and after that experience, I decided if I couldn’t fly regularly, I’d better not fly at all, so that was the last of it.

Diakov:Fortunate.

Roos:Yes.

Diakov:Well, you had a good experience, and I’m glad you shared it with me, and with the Library of Congress and the Kentucky Historical Society and with your family, who will be glad to the copy.

Roos:Okay, well bless your heart for volunteering to do this sort of thing.

Diakov:Well, thank you for volunteering to serve in the service.

END OF INTERVIEW