Oral History Interview with James O. Stiles

It is Thursday, October 11, 2007. This is Leanne Diakov. I am interviewing James Ogden Stiles at his home in Louisville, Kentucky in regard to his service during World War II. Mr. Stiles served in World War II in the 5th Air Force, 22nd Bomb Group, 408 Squadron in the Pacific Campaign.

Diakov:So Mr. Stiles, if you could just, let’s just start with you telling me a little bit about yourself, before the war. Just start with when you were born, and where you were born, if you would.

Stiles:Okay, right now, you want me to do that. All right, I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, of course you got that, in 1924, 1:00at Baptist Hospital at the time, and lived in the west end of Louisville, down by, near the Shawnee Park area, which was a real nice section of Louisville at that time, close to the park, and had a good family there, and we had a good childhood. Went to the Stephen Foster Grade School down there at 40th and Garland, and made all of my life-long friends, of course, starting at that school. And people…who later on, when we went to high school, all of us graduated from Louisville Male High School in 1942, and all of us were very enthusiastic to enlist and we all did, in December in 1942…actually graduated from the class of ’42.

Diakov:What did your—if I could just interrupt—what did your parents do, and how many siblings did you have?

Stiles:I had two brothers, and we had a nice family, 2:00lived in a nice area. My dad worked at the Federal Reserve Bank, the branch of St. Louis called the St. Louis Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank; it is located at—the building is still there at the corner of Fifth and Market Street—and a restaurant is there, an Italian restaurant. We had a good family, my mother was home with us, and took care of us very well, and we had…it was so nice—all the people that lived there, all the people were young fellows my age, and my brothers had children their age—we had great times, and the park facilities we had there. It was really a free life, to be able to go anywhere, you could walk anywhere you could go; it was about five blocks away down to Shawnee Park. We all played baseball there, football, 3:00basketball, all those things, and it made it a real nice way to grow up. And then, after Foster School, we went to Shawnee Junior High School, through the ninth grade, and in Louisville at that time, all the schools were segregated by sex and race, in the high schools. The high school that I chose, and my brothers was Louisville Male High School, at Brook and Breckinridge, and then friends of mine went to Manual, Dupont Manual School, which is just at Brook and Oak Street, just a couple of blocks away, and then, there were only boys in the high schools. The three high schools in Louisville—Male, Manual, and St. X High School, which was at Second and Broadway, so all of us went to school on streetcars at the time—we didn’t have buses; we had streetcars, trolley cars, and went to those. And the girls all went to—they 4:00had girls’ high school—one of them was at Shawnee High School, which was through the 12th grade, and then Sue went to Atherton High School, which was in the Highlands. She grew up in the Crescent Hill area. And then there was another girls’ school, Halleck Hall, which was out near the University of Louisville. And then the Catholic schools were all girls, and from looking back on it, Sue and I agree whole-heartedly, and all the friends that are my age—thought that high school segregated by sex and by color, were 5:00good, although today, I don’t think any of us would object to having it mixed with colored students. But at that time, having males separate from the females during the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelveth year, made us a lot more studious, and more attentive to our studies. So we always were [ ] with that.

Diakov:Now you mentioned your wife, Sue. Did you know her when you were growing up?

Stiles:No, I didn’t. She grew up in Crescent Hills, and I didn’t know her. I grew up in the west end, and Louisville was like a lot of cities still are—you…there are neighborhood sections, like there’s Crescent Hills, we had Parkland, Shawnee, Highlands, St. Matthews—those 6:00were sections and people that grew up in those sections went to schools generally that were in their neighborhood, except for the boys’ schools at that time—we all had to go downtown to the boys’ schools.

Diakov:You mentioned you had two brothers—are they older brothers?

Stiles:No, they are younger.

Diakov:Both are younger.

Stiles:Yes, my brother Jack is two years younger than I, and then Joey, who now lives in Louisville, is four and a half years younger than I. Joe just retired—he was an orthopedic surgeon—and he is a graduate of the University of Louisville Medical School, and practiced his orthopedic specialty in Owensboro, Kentucky. And my brother Jack—well, we all were in the service. I was in what they called the Air Force, or Air Corp, and the B-24s—I enlisted that and took the test in December of ’42, right after we graduated from high school, and then Jack, he always loved to fly, and so he enlisted 7:00in the Air Force, in the Cadet Corp right near the end of the war, but then the war ended, so they dismissed that specialty from the government, or from the Army, and then they kept in the Air…in what’s called the Air Force, as a police, as a military policeman, and they sent him to Enewetak out in the Pacific, where they had the atom bomb test after the war…they had at Enewetak a nuclear explosion test, so he was there. He came back, and he wanted to pilot in a commercial plane, but there were so many pilots in the United States, that they all had plenty of air force men, so 8:00he then decided to go to the University of Louisville, and he got a degree at U of L, as I had done, well, right before him…well, yeah. Then he decided he wanted to still fly, so he enlisted in the Navy, and became a Navy carrier fighter plane pilot, just in time for Korea, so he served in the Korean war on the Carrier Oriskany, and he flew missions off of that. And then Joe, he was going to med school, and he knew he was going to have to be drafted, so he asked the doctor, the professor who was head of the med school that he felt he wanted to be in the service, so Dr. Murray, I think was his name, told Joe to go ahead and he was proud of him, wanting to serve his service, and he promised him that they’d let him in med school when he came back, because he’d already qualified—he’d been admissioned. So that’s what Joe did. 9:00He was in the field artillery and flew in a little reconnaissance plane, a little light plane and they would fly all over the lands, and see where the enemy—Japanese or Koreans—were placing all their artillery, and he flew reconnaissance on that. So, my mother, I know she had a big…we’ve often talked about that—must have been hard on our mom and dad, to have all three of us in service, over a period of ten years, at least one of us was always in. But we all got back, which was…we all, we were really, really blessed with that.

Diakov:And you were, being the oldest, I assume you were the first to enlist?

Stiles:Right.

Diakov:And you said you enlisted in ’42?

Stiles:Forty-two, yes. We graduated in ’42, but I wasn’t eighteen; I graduated at seventeen from Male, and enlisted in December, after I turned eighteen which was at the end of September, and….

Diakov:What led you to enlist; 10:00what spurred your decision?

Stiles:Oh, I think that generation that I grew up in, I think every one of us were Boy Scouts. We were in Boy Scout troops in various churches around here—I was in a Scout Troop that was at West Broadway Baptist Church, and then there was a nice troop at the Methodist Church, West Broadway Methodist. And then, I think every church there had a good [ ] had friends in all the churches around that were in the Boy Scouts, and it was…we had a real love of the country. I think it was something that we had really been nurtured in at school. We had…we said the Pledge of Allegiance every day—had 11:00one of the school members, or class member would read a chapter or some verses in the Bible every morning. This was in the public schools, and we had all [ ] of every faith; we had, oh I mentioned like the Baptists, the Methodists, the Evangelists, and the Jewish. We had several good Jewish friends that had gone to the Jewish churches in the Louisville area. They all had—it was interesting—they all had businesses. They had groceries, one of them, I remember now, I can…I really have had a good memory of that time, it apparently was a good time—apparently that’s why I remember so much of it—I remember we had one Jewish family, the Canter Family, they lived right across the street from the Foster School, and they had a grocery store. And Ruth Canter, she was there, and they were all just good students, and we all got along, had no problems. 12:00And at Christmas, when we would have Christmas celebration, the Jewish families, they would have some recollection of their worships at that time of year, and it was a very, very happy place to be because there was nobody that against anybody, if they were Catholic, or Jewish, or whatever, we all got along well, which was really a good memory. And I think the fact that all the boys that I guess of all families were really patriotic and wanted to enlist, and then our brothers were the same way. They all enlisted. They didn’t—none 13:00of them were drafted; they enlisted and wanted to…in the Air Force, we all had to…it was sort of like an exciting thing to do, you know, you had a lot of advertising for the Air Force or Air Corp, they called it, and the Navy, and we all either chose the Air Corp or the Navy. And so, we all….

Diakov:How did that process happen, when you decided to enlist? Where did you go to enlist, and how did you decide which branch?

Stiles:Well, we all, all of my friends—that life-long group that grew up with me from kindergarten—Max Archer, a good friend of mine, we enlisted together, and Roger Madison, 14:00and we’d all before we ever remember [ ]. Then the assembly we had at Male, the Monday after the Pearl Harbor, and we listened to President Roosevelt give his speech, and everybody was just enthusiastic about…most of us had not quite turned eighteen. Some of us had, but I didn’t turn eighteen, as I just told you, until September. But we all, for the most part, had chosen either the Navy or the Air Corp, and then we had an ROTC unit at our high school. And most all of the [ ] were in the ROTC, which I, for some reason had not elected to be in the ROTC in high school.

Diakov:Had you applied? Was it an application process?

Stiles:Yes, you had to just apply for it—everybody could get in the ROTC, but I always liked to play the sports, and it was…I played basketball and football during the…we 15:00had a gym period, and they were marching, and so I liked the athletics part of it better [laughs]. But it didn’t…the fact that [ ] of those that were in the ROTC ended up in the infantry, or field artilleries, and…all did pretty well. A lot of them that I know now, that are now doctors—Jack [ ], is a doctor here now, and we all graduated together. He was a doctor, and I think he was a captain in the infantry, and many others… I could go through my high school book in there, and pick them all out. And…that we were all just that way. I know some of them were killed, but most of us, for the most part, got sent back. One fellow I was in the Air Corp with, by the name of Ray Ford, his name was Raymond Delbert Ford, got out. We always called him “Del” 16:00but they call him now [ ], but he’s dead, he got shot down over Europe, P-47, and I remember going to school with him…it was—I can’t tell you how we got to there—but this is my childhood, pretty well-covered, I think. I know that we went to church down there at the Methodist Church, West Broadway, and my extended family, my grandfather and grandmother, they lived in Ireland, on Ransdall Avenue. We came through the flood 1937, and we lived on Elliott Avenue, which is between 39th and 40th just north of 40th and Broadway, and where the Baptist Church was at 40th and Broadway, and we lived one block north of that on Elliott. And 17:00it was a little dip there, and the water went up our…within three inches of our roof, during the ’37 flood, so we had to be evacuated, and my mom and dad and two brothers went to my grandfathers on Ransdall. They had room to handle them, and then I had an uncle, mom’s brother, who lived on Rosewood Avenue, that he invited me to come up there and live with him, because he had room to do that. So I at least spent time away from the family during the flood, and we all got back together, oh, in about a month and a half, six weeks when they got the west-end cleaned up, and all the mud and stuff, and so it was after I got back [ ], or graduated after ’37 there to get back to the west end. When I was in the service, 18:00they moved up to the east end.

Diakov:How did…just out of curiosity…how did you clean your house, after it’s within three inches of the roof?

Stiles:Well, I was twelve years old, and we had a basement, and my dad…. We had two houses—we owned the one on Elliott, and owned the one next to it. It was a small house that dad rented, and it was filled with mud and some oil residue, and…so dad at twelve years old he assigned me the job of cleaning the basement with a hose. Water got to running in, so I had a hose, and I cleaned it out, and [ ] there were fish in there and everything down in the [ ] garage in the basement. And so that was my job, to clean that up. My two younger brothers, they couldn’t do too much of that, but my dad and I did that, and then we hired local…carpenters, 19:00and plumbers and such to help repair those things. Because all that floors, hardwood floors we had to replace all those, and I remember the man that was the specialist—he was a very good carpenter, his name was Steerstuder, and he was a German decent and was a great carpenter and he did our floor. I remember that, and other people around the neighborhood—it took about…I’d say about two months to get all those things cleaned up, and then the…of course the city…the fire people, they came down and used the fire hydrants to hose down the streets, and the walks, and all of that, so people were out of their homes, if they got in water like we did, they were out of their homes for a good six weeks, probably. 20:00But they got it cleaned up—the streets, and the walks, and all of that. The city was…met the problems very well. They had people there…and interesting thing is, there was another emergency type of thing that we have now, like Katrina, where everybody is helpless because they don’t know how to do anything themselves. My dad, he could do some carpentry work, we painted the house—both houses—and he had me help him paint, and we mixed our own paint with the linseed oil and lead. So, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if we had had [ ] I’d have been a super genius [Diakov laughs] if I hadn’t used a [ ] when I was twelve years old, but I did all right. The lead doesn’t seem to have affected me very much, and all my friends were the same way; we all have done those things, painted with lead paint, that we did; we mixed it ourselves. My best friend, Max Archer, 21:00he died here just about a year and a half ago. He was a…he stayed in…he’s a different story…I could make a long story out of Max. And we all did those kinds of chores while we were young. And that was before we enlisted and had to take our exams, for the Air Force, so we were lucky we could paint with lead paint, and pass the Air Corp exam [laughter]. And anyway, is that enough about my childhood here?

Diakov:Yeah, that’s great. Think back…think back to the day of your enlistment.

Stiles:Okay, I can pick it up now.

Diakov:If you can recall that day, tell me what happened.

Stiles:I can. Okay. Well, my 22:00dad had the same work at the Federal Reserve Bank, and Max and I, we decided, and Roger, we all decided on about the last part of, right after Thanksgiving, that we were finally…we all decided that we were going to try to get in the Air Corp, so we went down the road. They had a picture of this building that’s down on the corner around Preston and Broadway where WAVE used to be, it’s a…it was part of a Baptist church before that, but then WAVE bought that corner and the Army Air Corp enlistment station, or office, was right there in that building, so we went down there, 23:00I guess Friday, before we actually signed up—that must have been about the first of December. We took our physical exams there, and then the mental exams. At that time, they had the exam was for college graduates who were going in and they decided just to…to take the same exam. We took the exam as graduates of Male High School, or Manual, if you met the grades there. We were all, again we had the…oh, the academic requirements we had there, and Max and Roger, we were all—had cum laude—we were B average or better, and they had a cum laude attachment. They had A’s for 95-100, and B was 88-94, so I was a B average, and we all were—all of us did well at those exams, and got in, and that was…. We came home, and the government had decided they were going to quit getting enlistments for the Air Force, or Air Corp. And we were worried about when they were going to close that thing up, 24:00and so dad…we were really, we were down actually, me and Roger, we were all unhappy that it looked like we weren’t going to be able to enlist on that first of December, because there was a notice in the paper that it was closed.

Diakov:And this was on the day that you had gone down and taken the exam?

Stiles:We had gone down on a Friday; they closed it over the weekend. So my dad, who was with the Federal Reserve Bank, he said, “Boys, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve been with the Federal Reserve Bank for (I think at that time for about) twenty years,” he said, “they have put out things that we never hear about for three days at the bank, and then they’d be in the paper today, but we wouldn’t hear from this for days.” [ ] their money just like they said, and I think you’ll probably get in. 25:00So, we did, we felt better and so Monday, we went down, and just like everything was as it was meant to be, and they said, “Yeah, you can sign up.” So they [ ] exams, and said, “You passed the mental exam, you got the physicals; all three of you are in good shape, and we can still enlist you.” And we said, “Have you heard anything?” “Oh,” he said, “we haven’t gotten any kind of report to close the business down, so we can swear you in right now.” So they did. They swore us in, and we were officially in. I think this was about December the 8th, I think it was, of ’42. And we were happy 26:00young guys there. We all got in. Dad was right—that the government wheel moves slowly, and so we did that. And then we had to sit and wait around to be called, because they didn’t have enough airports, or air force fields to train everybody, because they were building planes like mad, every type of plane; they were putting out hundreds of planes everyday. So we had to—I think we weren’t called officially to a place where we could go—was to…we went up I think in January…that we were called up and we did either in January or first part of February of ’43. Max and I were sent to Columbus, Ohio, to a 27:00reporting place, and then we got an assignment to go to basic school. So we were called cadets then; we were privates, we were cadets. So we got to Columbus—they had a troop train, ready for a lot of people that were coming in, most of the people that went to our basic center were from Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky, and we got on the train, and [ ] this you, wouldn’t believe it was to Miami Beach. What are we doing in Miami Beach? So it turned out the Air Force didn’t have barracks around, they had taken every hotel and restaurant and theater on the beach, Miami Beach. So we were assigned to different groups, and different flights, and 28:00I…Max was sent to a different hotel than I, and I was sent to Princess Anne Hotel in Miami Beach, right about a block from the beach. [ ] Miami Beach. And it was right there, and my goodness we got hotels for basic training. So we did for drilling, we took regular private training at a golf course, out on Lincoln Road, covered a pretty big area there, and so we took all of the training there and the regimental type training, and they’d taken us to movies, and introductory to the service movies, and the meals were served as buffets, or not buffets—they had somebody there to serve us, and all the restaurants and 29:00cafeterias that were scattered around Miami Beach. And it was interesting. Sue and I went to the Army’s little game with U of L this last January, for U of L, and we took a bus over to the beach, and it’s now the liveliest spot on Miami Beach—South Beach, and we walked from one end to the other from the south end and the hotel that I stayed in, the Princess Anne, had been torn down on the corner, and it was the parking lot, but the building next to it was just the spitting image of the Princess Anne, and it’s still there. So [ ] when it was there next door to me, in 1943. [Laughs]. So they kept pretty good shape of it, and it’s still a pretty wild place, but it [ ] for our phys ed, we’d run on the beach. [ ] ocean air, and the thing that was really memorable—I can see it now—we were seeing smokes, ships burning out off of the coast, and they were ships being sunk by German subMarines 30:00off the coast, and it happened, I don’t know how many—probably, I don’t know the vision would be, maybe 10, 12, 20 miles what the vision would be, and it would be ships coming from England or going to England that were under attack by German subMarines. And they told us—they’d told us that we’d see that—everyday there would be ships burning out there to the coast, and you wondered, gee whiz, this is sort of close, to have the ships being sunk out there. And the Coast Guard was running most of that. They had, of course the sailors on the ships, the Coast Guard, and they were having an aerial search with blimps, looking for subMarines that they maybe could get, but we never saw any action like this. Just say the blimps out there, but 31:00not anything that they did—couldn’t see that well. But we were all down there about 2 or 3 months, and then they still didn’t have a place to send us, in the Air Force or Navy navigation training, or pilot training, or bombardier.

Diakov:Just to clarify—so the whole time that you were in Miami Beach, it was just a basic….

Stiles:Just basic training—just like if you were a basic private at Ft. Knox.

Diakov:So you never flew—there was nothing to teach you how to fly in an airplane, nothing like that.

Stiles:Nothing there, there was just basic training.

Diakov:For the Air…for the Air Corp.

Stiles:But it was…they could have shipped us right into the infantry, for the same type of thing, but they still needed those planes, and they wanted us to get ready.

Diakov:So did they teach you anything like for the infantry? Did they teach you how to operate a gun, 32:00and how to…?

Stiles:No, nothing like that. We didn’t even fire—I don’t remember…. I remember going into gas mask training, where they would send you through a tent filled with poison gas, and you’d keep that on. They had a place where you could get that type of training, and I really, I really don’t remember having any rifle training. But I do remember the gas training. But with [ ] they took every air force cadet trainer, or Navy, they sent us all, and we were all in officer training courses, they sent us all to school in universities and colleges around the United States. And they sent 33:00a friend of a good friend—he was in the class of ’42, Jim Richards, he lives here and Sue and his wife are good friends. He was sent to Duke. He went there for a semester, to have a place to train him, and I was sent to Kutztown Teachers College, at Kutztown, and it’s now Kutztown University at Kutztown, and has an enrollment, I think, of twelve, thirteen thousand, and when I went up there, it had just about…oh, eleven hundred, twelve hundred, maybe. And when we got there, time we got there, we were sent there in about April, first of April that year, I guess that was the [ ], all the girls were there. Poor things, they had all these soldiers sent on to them. So we got up there, and it was a real nice experience. Right in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, 34:00and not far from Lancaster, and the people there were just so grateful, and we had about two hundred of us cadets up there, and they had, they had just great care for us there, and took good care of us, and had good food. They furnished all the meals, and they were—at the military that time, they had us all taken to church on Sunday morning, and we would all be brought out to line up in our squadron. Kutztown is a little hill that goes down to the churches there—Kutztown’s up on the hill—go down and there was a Lutheran Church, and oh, a Presbyterian Church, and another denomination was—some of my friends, who were…they 35:00didn’t have Methodist or Baptist Church there, but they would march us down there, and we would break regiments, or formation, and we’d pick a church or not go. But some friends of mine, we always went into the Lutheran Church, and there were two older women there, went there, unmarried I guess, they both named, oh…I had it there….Krauss, Krauss, two Ms. Krauss’. And they had a house which was an old house like you’d find in a college town across the street from the school, or the church up the hill. See right up the hill was right across from Kutztown, but we had to walk up the hill, and they invited my cousin and I—my cousin was home, I met him and he was sent up there, too. 36:00He was a lawyer—John Case Howes—he was an attorney here in Louisville for some years; he was about four years older than me. But we went, for some reason, we got thrown, I guess by alphabet, to the same place. I didn’t know he was there, and he didn’t know I was there.

Diakov:Until you got there?

Stiles:Yes, until we got there. And they invited the two of us out to Sunday dinner; every [ ] if we’d be in church, they invited us to come in for Sunday dinner, which they did for several weeks. I was there; I think it was about ten weeks that we were there at Kutztown. This was about a semester’s work.

Diakov:What did they teach you at Kutztown? This was different from….

Stiles:Oh, map-making, geography, English, and social studies. This fellow, Professor 37:00James Flynn, I think it was…good teacher…he’d been a professor there for years and we would go out for map-making to a cemetery that they [ ] wife was buried there and we would use the terrain there to map the cemetery—a good way, you know, to measure the height and the elevations, and so forth. But I remember him and I’d been back to Kutztown. I was just driving up to New York, and I would always use that as a stop spot just to go see that [ ]. But it, that university is really a nice place today. It was a good experience for all of us, after we were fresh out of high school, and not having 38:00the room to send us to basic training, the government sent us to places that would be good for our future—to colleges all over the county.

Diakov:Now what was your typical day like there? Did you stay in dorms?

Stiles:Yes, in dorms. There were two of us to a dorm room. Yes, it was just…there were dorms there; I guess all the schools didn’t have any male students going there for the most part, so they could use the schools the rooms for all those that didn’t have a barrack style.

Diakov:And did you have an officer who oversaw your daily routine?

Stiles:Oh, yeah, we had…and then we had our own, like our own officer for our group, or for our squadron. We called ourselves squadrons. We would 39:00get one—we had one that was really, he was probably a couple of years older than us. He was from the University of Michigan, I think he was. But he was very precise, and I remember we called him [ ], got to call him “Walkie Talkie Walker.” [Laughter]. And he would be out, and get up for reveille in the morning and get ready for the day; I remember Walkie Talkie Walker would always say, “It is precisely….” And he had a watch that he would always be out, and we’d hear this “it is precisely eight-thirty,” or whatever it was, and [ ] had that kind of a [ ] for the day, [ ] and I we just made up that kind of a name, for a fellow that was very precise. I don’t know what ever happened to him. We all got separated. 40:00But we were there, about ten weeks, and I had an aunt that lived in New York City, and she corresponded with my mother—who was my mother’s aunt—Aunt Bertha Curry, no Guttermain, they…her parents were of German descent. And she invited me and my cousin, John K. Stiles and this other high school friend of mine, Gerald Ford, to go up and visit her in New York. But we got a weekend off, during the last weekends we would be in Kutztown, and it was just about 60 miles to New York City. So we took the train. The train picked us up at Kutztown Station, and we got into New York, into the main train station there, and she met us at the 41:00Penn Station, or something like that, I think it was. I don’t know, but anyway she had a nice apartment overlooking all the rivers near Fifth Avenue. At the time the French liner Normandy—the Normandy—had been sabotaged and burned and turned over, and in her room—she’s probably on about the tenth floor—we could look out her window and see the Normandy over on its side, and it had been sabotaged, and laid there for probably the rest of the war. But never did say it was sabotaged, or whether it was an accident, or what, but it was there, all spread out. There were pictures in the papers about it [ ]. And then while we were there, we went to, she took us on a tour of New York—Rockefeller Center, and a couple of restaurants, she took us to for lunch. We were there for…we 42:00got up there early Saturday, and got back Sunday night. The USO always was very good to soldiers and sailors, and they had…our meeting place up in Pine Square. You could go in there if you were visiting and they had hotel rooms they could get for you, plays, or movies, so we went over there—the three of us went over there and we got a hotel that is still there, but it’s not by the same name anymore, but it overlooks Central Park. It was just a small room, and three of us were in there so it was tight in that little room, but it was good. And then we went to another booth there, that came out tickets to plays, or movies, and such…so we went to that, and the two 43:00plays that had just opened in New York. Two weeks before Oklahoma had just opened, so my mother said, “Oh, you ought to see Oklahoma; it’s supposed to be good.” So that’s the first thing we asked for. It was good, it was real nice. So we went to see Oklahoma, but the other…the next choice we had was Arsenic and Old Lace, and it was just a new one too. So we took that one and it was really good. I still remember it; in fact, you can still see it on the movies sometime, Cary Grant’s in it. But the two women that are in that movie were in the play in New York when we saw it. But it’s an old movie—it’s been there a long time, so that was really nice—we enjoyed that. And then at night we went to a theatre where Cab Calloway was the featured artist, and Helen O’Connell was a vocalist that was with, I think, Glenn Miller or one of them. She was…O’Connell 44:00was really good, and Cab Calloway was good; everybody was good. And in that movie, that was part of it…they had things like that, in those days, everywhere. They would have entertainment, vaudeville entertainment, in between double features really. So this was on Times Square, so we did that, had a good time, got on the train, went back to Kutztown, and the next week we got on a train to be sent to San Antonio, Texas for pre-flight school. Of course, while we were at Kutztown, too, we’d have a lot of regimental training, the schools, and other military things to learn, and so we got our train, and believe it or not, they routed us through Canada to get down to San Antonio, Texas [laughing]. We went up into Canada, across Canada, down to Chicago, 45:00and we had a lay-over there of about two hours, and my dad’s best friend from his boyhood lived in Chicago, at the YMCA. He was a bachelor, and stayed there. He had lost his job here during the Depression, and he used to live down on 34th and River Park Drive, which…where we lived down near that area. We were at 40th and near River Park Drive. And called him—he knew I was coming—he had talked to my dad, and he met me at the station, so I spent about an hour and half with him in the YMCA and he was happy to see me, because he was pretty lonesome. I always felt sorry for him—he was all alone there, and had lost his friends in Louisville because there were no jobs, because of the Depression. He worked in a fabric factory; 46:00I think they made wool fabrics for suits, and such. Louisville was a big center for fabric for all kinds of fabrics, and suits, they had hand-made suits. So, saw him, and went then—we went on through Kansas, on the train, and I remember the route that…there was a publisher of the paper there in Kansas…oh, what is that name…White was his name, he was a publisher of a paper in one of the towns in Kansas, and they stopped every train, and the Red Cross was out there in Kansas for this meeting. They always had such as some coffee, or milk or donuts, or something for us, and then proceed on down to San Antonio, and got us there. 47:00And that’s where we started to get into some hard, more thorough training.

Diakov:How long did that train ride take? You were talking about a couple of layovers… Stiles:It was about three days, I guess.

Diakov:Three days…with just an hour stop here….

Stiles:Yes, you had to stop for another things coming…always pulling off on the side. In fact, it was like that going down to Florida, we had to pull off on the sides there for… to take all the materials going—it was a busy country, I’ll tell you.

Diakov:And what time of year was that, when you got to [ ].

Stiles:That was about May, I guess of ’43; it was warm. Going down to Florida was nice, we went down there in March—it was really nice. And I have had people that I tell this to, or that I’ve told a few about this guy that enlisted—they think I was the luckiest guy in the world, to get to go all these places like this…[laughter] Miami Beach, 48:00and Kutztown, and different places, through Kansas. Professor, or Editor White, and I think he had Pulitzer prizes for that, I could look it up, but I remember he was something. But then, at San Antonio, we were there for about eight weeks there; we took radio training and Morse code because that was the communication in those days. Communications between people on a plane, or from plane to plane, had to be on something other—there was not much way to correspond with people. You know, you couldn’t do with a telephone or cell phone, or nothing like that, to communicate with anybody. And we were there for eight weeks, and we used to go into San Antonio, but we 49:00couldn’t get off the post for four weeks, and the last four weeks we were there, we could have Thursday off. Oh there were several camps, Army and air corp, around San Antonio, and every Army or air corp had an afternoon into San Antonio, and ours was on Thursday. We could get in on Thursday, and we went to town. We went in, and had a cadet place to meet, and the Gangston Hotel…something like that…it’s still there. I went down there to a U of L basketball, NCAA tournament a couple of years ago, and that hotel was still there but it was being operated by Hilton. And this cadet center was 50:00still there; it was a restaurant in the hotel now. And, so we had a good time there. We had some of those vaudeville shows to go to at the Aztec Hotel—Aztec Theatre. And Louis Prima, I don’t know if you know who Louis Prima is—he was there one afternoon, and we all got to see that. He was there for the week, and I guess every different regiment that got in there, got to go if they wanted to. And they we had…who was the other one…I’ll remember, but anyway, I always remember Louis Prima, so that’s what we did. And after that, we were sent out to airfields, and I was sent to…[ 51:00] Flying School at Pine Bluff, Arkansas. And so we were pre-flighting, taking our first training in PT-19’s which was our beginning, beginners primary training, and we flew and I flew solo there. I’d like to go back—I remember one thing I missed—about that flying. At Kutztown, we did have ten hours of flying at Redding, Pennsylvania. We drove a bus into Redding and had basic training, in like a Piper Cub. And we had that ten hours there, and then that was only flying we had up to going out to the primary school.

Diakov:Now did they teach you to fly a plane?

Stiles:Yes, you could, but then none of us really flew solo there, they would just show us how to handle 52:00it. They would let us handle it, but they wouldn’t let us land on it. I take that back, before we got out of there, we were landing solos. We did do a solo out of there, out of the primary school in the PT-19.

Diakov:Would was the first time you had been in a plane?

Stiles:Yes, well, that one in Redding was the first time I’d ever been in a plane. The thing that was sad, it turned out, is we didn’t own an automobile. During the depression we didn’t have an automobile, didn’t have a telephone, and so I’d never driven a car when I went into the service. When I went into the service, I’d never driven an automobile. My buddy Max Archer, he had—his father was a traveling salesman for a candy, Bunty Candy Company, and he—his dad would let Max have the car on weekends, so when we were in high school, Max and I always double-dated. And Roger’s dad had a business, and my dad…well, 53:00we just didn’t have a car. And so I finished primary, and flew solo there, and went to… Diakov:What did you think, the first time you got in a plane?

Stiles:Oh, it was something, it really was. It was exciting. And going out the teacher started doing skins, and flying upside down, and I’m hanging on that belt, you know. The first time he did that, I thought, “Oh, my gosh!” I checked that real quick to make sure, when he said, “We’re going to fly upside down.” And I reached down, and he got on the interphone—he could communicate person to person like that. He said, “That ought to teach you to make sure you check that thing….” Diakov:To make sure your belt is on [laughs].

Stiles:And I had [laughs], because I hadn’t made it tight, 54:00or had a little loose in it….but anyway, then, he was a good teacher, and so I was sent then to basic training, up in Kansas—Independence, Kansas. It was cold, it was winter, it was after—it was around oh, close to Christmas time, I guess. And this was the sad part of my career here, for awhile. I got up there, and I started flying; I had about fourteen hours or so, and then my instructor got ill, and he had to be off. So the teacher that had another group of guys took on four of mine and four of them went to somebody else, so he had four more than he should have. So, along about the…oh, I had about fourteen, 55:00fifteen, maybe twenty hours in that PT-14—it was a larger plane, bigger engine, and bigger heavier plane—looks like an AT-6. As far as horsepower, it’s four hundred instead of six hundred. But I was sent out to solo this day. And I come in, and came in too high, and dropped it in, and blame it on the fact that I had never driven a car before, you know, to know how far that ground is from you. When you’re in a car, you know, you know where this curb is, and all of that and everything around you, but you’ve never driven a car, and then come down in an airplane, but never been in a car…when it came down like that, I had a hard time judging my distance from the runway. So, I dropped it in from about six or eight feet, and boom, boom, boom—I bounced in—and I got in, and he said, “Cadet Stiles,” 56:00he said, “I’m going to save your life—I think you ought to be a navigator.” [Laughter]. So—see this is the part of the story you didn’t [ ] [laughter]. But, it was, he didn’t spend a whole lot of time with me; I would say he gave me that one shot at it, but anyway, I went then to…before I went to navigation school, I went to gunnery, aerial gunnery school in Harlingen, Texas. They had an aerial gunnery school there. We would fly…it was really interesting and exciting flying planes in motion, and you’d do some of it with a shotgun, driving like around a horse field, or a tractor field, and you would shoot clay targets from the shoot house, and you’d be on this moving train, 57:00and the movement with your shotgun, trying to get that was like flying in a plane, shooting at a plane, a foreign plane coming at you. It was kind of fun. Of course, at eighteen, you know, everything was fun, except I didn’t particularly like washing out, but they turned me into something more fun than ever. And which I did; I finished that. Then after gunnery school, they sent me to navigation school to Selman Field, in Monroe, Louisiana.

Diakov:Now what, where are we now…is it still near Christmas of ’42?

Stiles:Yes, it’s still probably…no, it’s after Christmas because I had about eight weeks, or eight or ten weeks at the gunnery school, so it must have been towards the summer again—probably May, probably May or 58:00April to be at Selman Field in Louisiana. And the weather was pretty good there. The only bad weather I had was in Kansas, it was snow on the ground there. The worst thing was snow, and they had snow everywhere—everything just looked white.

Diakov:Yeah, you could not….

Stiles:So, that was….

Diakov:So you spent a year enlisted, thinking you were going to be a pilot.

Stiles:Yeah, that’s right.

Diakov:And then at the end of the year, you’re going to be a navigator.

Stiles:Yeah.

Diakov:And so they sent you to more training.

Stiles:Right, which—my wife says…you were lucky.

Diakov:Yeah.

Stiles:She says you got delayed a year. But my friends, like Max Archer—he went to pilot’s training, and trained, and he got into a C-47 troop carrier group. And he started flying—he went to the Pacific, about…November 59:00of ’44, and I would have been going there, if I’d have been in the flying, I’ve been in the 44D, and which was what Max was. So he finished about some months ahead of me, so he went overseas…several months before I did. But then, I finished navigation school.

Diakov:And what did they teach you in navigation school in Louisiana?

Stiles:Oh, it was…see they couldn’t use the radio. Now you can get on a radio and get a wave to follow in, or lots of other things—radar, which we didn’t have that. So we had celestial, to start at night. Direct or DR, 60:00that was measuring the wind and air movement, and the weather…we had to get well-trained in weather conditions because when we were going across an ocean, or something like that, you had to depend on the wind direction, the drift meter, that you could read, and you could tell from the way the whitecaps are on the sea, which way it’s going, so you know the direction that it’s coming from, with a good compass—you had to have good equipment like that to detect air speeds, and direction, and all that. So that’s what we used, 61:00and if you were over land, just visual flying, by knowing what’s on a map—you’re going to have to have good maps. That’s what these maps that showed everything well that you have, so and going, like going from Clark’s Field—we were on Clark’s Field—on the Philippines, to go to China. It was just a regular...DR…[ ] and anyway and those other things I mentioned, with the airspeeds, and wind directions, and weather, and all that. I’ve skipped something here. Well, the thing that Selman 62:00Field, the final week of flying, I was doing very well there, and they have a navigational training plane—we had three positions in it, one to, you would use to DR, direct [ ]. Why can’t I think of that name? But anyway, celestial was the last chair, and then just visual, to fly. We decided we’d fly out in the morning, well like we flew up to, from down in Selman Field up to Chenault Field in Illinois, and coming back you would be in a different chair. Coming out I was DR, and coming back, I was a celestial. It was kind of cloudy, but there were broken clouds, 63:00and you had to know all of the stars, the celestial way, which was fun. And you’d have a sextant where you’d read the elevation of the star, and of course, you had books to tell you where they’d be at the precise time. That’s precisely in time as this, and you would read this, and find out a line of celestial [ ] through that, and where the three of them would cross, that would be where you would be, within about three miles. And so the fellow that was leading, the leading navigator, they asked him, and he asked us each where you were, on what you were doing—we were all separated from each other—so he had to be navigating on our own way. And each was different, so the lead navigator, he was off 64:00by 15 miles, and the next guy, he didn’t know where he was, and I had luckily, it was cloudy, and I had identified a couple of good stars, and one—the third one—was down on the southern horizon, called Nunki, it was [ ]; I just knew that’s one was Nunki, and I looked at my charts, so I used that, and got it. And I got back, and almost hit the target there. I was three miles off of the target and two minutes off of my time, so I got the top grade on it, and that got me a second lieutenant commission, but several of them who didn’t do as well, they were warrant officers, so I liked being a second lieutenant, rather than a warrant officer, although warrant officers, do very well too. 65:00I just like to, I guess at eighteen, I liked being a second lieutenant; or I guess I was nineteen by then, wasn’t I? In ’44, yeah in ’44 it was in about September ’44, and I had just turned twenty years old, when I got my wings. Then I got assigned to—we got two weeks off for leave, and then I was sent to… Diakov:What did you do during you two weeks, after you got your wings?

Stiles:Luckily, my buddy…no I take that back—I was going to say Max Archer came there—he’d already gone. I got back with him once before, but none of my buddies were there, but the girl I was going with from high school—she was there, so I went out with her.

Diakov:So you went home?

Stiles:Yes, I went home for two weeks. 66:00My parents and the family were all there, and my girlfriend, and she still [ ]; she lives over in the…and we broke up after I got back. And I started at U of L after I got back in 1946, January of ’46, and that’s where I met Sue, in political science class. At that time, the Gene Stater was in our class, mayor of Louisville, that later became our…he was in our class, and then a man who became a senator in Kentucky was in our class, and another fellow by the name of Paul A. Miller, he was an active politician in Louisville, so we had a great class, and the good thing about college at that time, most 67:00all of the male students were out of the service—we were all just coming back from service, and that’s what the main part of the class was in ’46. Sue has often said she was glad she got to school then, because instead of a lot of eighteen-year-old kids, she got to see some veterans who had a brain at the time [laughter]. So, we went and we…both graduated. I graduated in ’48, and she graduated in ’49. We married in ’48, and she was buried last year. I was in the fraternity Kappa Alpha [ ] and the guys that I went to service with from Louisville, they were Kappa Alphas. Roger Madison was a Kappa Alpha; Max Archer was not a KA, but he was active 68:00at U of L—he was going to of U of L. Sue was a Sigma Kappa, and so we had a lot of parties that way together, and they got married and had our family.

Diakov:During your two-week stint, after you got your weeks, after you were back here for two weeks, was that the first time you had been home?

Stiles:March Field, that’s where they had me in team training, and there were about four—all B-24 training stations.

Diakov:Where was March Field?

Stiles:March Field is at Riverside California. This is another one of those wonderful things that I had happen, as far as being where I was stationed. Riverside, California is about thirty miles from Los Angeles, and Hollywood. So on weekends, we could go into Hollywood and then to Los Angeles. We all were, made up our crew—a ten-man 69:00crew on our B-24’s. We had trained there—for, it was about ten to twelve weeks, I guess, and good group—most of us, about my age, except my pilot was from Ohio. He graduated from Ohio University at Athens, and his father and mother lived there, and they were in business there. He was about five years older than me. I have visited him several times in Miami; he moved after he…left Athens, and Mary his wife died—she was very nice, and my mother used to have her down to Louisville [ ], and she was just a real nice person, married while he was at March Field. She had married, or rented an apartment there, and she would have the crew—she would have the bombardier and the 70:00co-pilot, me and Cliff to dinner several nights. She was just a nice person, but…when we left we went to, or while were there, we had a good time. We went to—a navigator friend of mine, Ed Urbaniky, was from Chicago. We went up to Hollywood, or to LA or maybe up to San Francisco every weekend that we had free, and at Hollywood I remember seeing Frank Sinatra, on the first night when he was just a skinny guy out on Hollywood Boulevard. He was making a public appearance, and we happened to be there on the Friday afternoon and a Saturday, and heard all this noise, and looked down the street, and it was packed, wall-to-wall 71:00with girls, just screaming and yelling, and he was out there singing. We were a block away—that was as close as we got to him; we didn’t want to try to get in there. But it was memorable to see everybody [ ] that Frank Sinatra was in Hollywood. So then there were other places. We went…for some reason, I took to doing things that the other fellows didn’t do. I used to go to plays, or movies, or vaudeville shows, and got to see the show of, or the opera Mikado. It was really good, and what is that British Company that was…for years, they’re out of business now…they had all the Sullivan, 72:00Gilbert-Sullivan operas and I got to see the Los Angeles Auditorium with Mikado. But, you probably know the name of the British Company that used to have all of the Gilbert-Sullivan’s, but anyway, I got to do all of those things, which was [ ] and then it was around in February, I guess, that we got, we finished our training, and got our orders to go overseas. We flew up to Mather Field around Sacramento, and got our plane. We ferried a new plane over—all the pilots going over at that time were ferrying a new plane over, after we were ready to go. And so we left and 73:00flew on our first, this was to Oahu, and we landed at John Rogers Field, which is a Navy field near Nicholas Field there on Oahu, and we—must have been about a twelve-hour flight to go that distance, because a B-24, we would go about 160 miles an hour, and it was about 1200 miles, I guess it was. We were all dead-tired when we got there, but we had got to sleep overnight before we went off. We got open for that night and we could go into [ ]. They had a shuttle that would let us go into Honolulu for the night, and it was not damaged—not the town; the field was what was all ruined. But when we flew out the next morning, 74:00we were out of John Rogers Field, which was not part of the Pearl Harbor, so we didn’t actually see on taking off over the sunken ships—they were still all over, like the Arizona. I’ve been out there before to see the Arizona.

Diakov:So you did see those when you took off, or you didn’t?

Stiles:No, we just flew out of John Rogers and the take-off pattern was cutting away from Pearl Harbor. So, didn’t see that, and that’s why I always wanted to go back, which we did; Sue and I went there a couple of years ago. Anyway, the security there was good—the security, everything was so busy there, they were taking in all these incoming planes, but 75:00from there, we flew from Oahu, we flew to Canton Island, across the Pacific [ ], and then we landed at [ ]. It had just been taken by the Marines about four months before that—four or five months maybe—and we had terrible, terrible loss there. Thousands of Americans and Japanese were wiped out completely. They don’t keep any of them alive. And the Marines—I have some pictures—I probably have them somewhere, of that island, and it had been just [ ] for we went ashore, and 76:00they had big concrete bunkers—six feet thick walls that the Japanese did, and it had been pounded, pounded, pounded, but was still, elements of it still there. They had a lot of people there, a lot of soldiers, Japanese soldiers still alive, they thought they had wiped them out, but they had put bunkers all around the coast, in the sands, and then cutting down all of the palm trees, and they could cover them with big thick coconut tree trunks and it made such a thick roof, that they all survived. They thought they were all dead. I had a friend that was on his Army, fellow named of Alf Logan, and he was on that raid, and they finally got in there, and cleared 77:00it and turned it into an airfield. They made it easier for us to land on. The early parts of the war, the air corp, and MacArthur was…his plan was to [ ] get rid of [ ] or Canton, and let our own planes in there, and Navy carriers, Navy planes and Army air corps we could isolate them in other places. We could get rid of all their shipping and all their air corp, and there were some terrible battles there, aerial battles. But we finally took control there and we could go from their airports, stagger right on across. And so our flying from 78:00Canton [ ] New Guinea, they had taken it several months before.

Diakov:Tell me, what did you think, or some of the emotions you had when you were landing. I mean this is your first time overseas, and you’re landing in these strange environments.

Stiles:You know, I tell you…I would say we were all just business-like. I don’t think, I couldn’t notice that we were all excited, or anything, and we were…I did, when our first, the first leg, going from San Francisco to Oahu, I had the most interest in what I was doing as a navigator, because they were always, about every ten minutes coming back wanting to know where we were. I was the navigator, 79:00doing the direction, and they had flown with me in the United States, where we would take some long flights around and I’d be navigating, and they weren’t worried about that, it didn’t seem. But going across the ocean, the Pacific, for twelve hours or ten hours, whatever it was—there was one, particularly, they’d bring me back candy bars. The radio operator was busy guy, a fellow named Benton. He was from Benton, Arkansas, which is where Wal-Mart was started, and I always thought I wonder if he ended up with Wal-Mart but his name was Benton, from Benton, Arkansas, and that’s where Wal-Mart started. But he was good, redheaded, and then the engineer we had, a young fellow named Ed Dorfesmeyer, they were all older than me by about a year. 80:00Maybe if I was twenty, they probably twenty-one, twenty-two. And they had one interesting fellow. His name was Mortimer Dutchsnyder, and coming back, after the war was over, we all could take a plane back [ ] —navigate a plane back, but Mortimer said he didn’t want to fly back from Philippines to the states, and he said, “My name is Mortimer Dutchsnyder. Mortimer is French for ‘death in the sea.’ Mort-I-Mer; ‘mer’ is the sea, and ‘mort’ is death. My name is death in the sea, and I’m not going to fly anymore. He was the one [ ]—he would have a candy bar for me about every 15 minutes [laughter], to see where we were. But he was a big burley 81:00guy; he was from New Jersey. He was a real interesting guy; he was a gunner, a waist gunner. And he could practically pick that gun, I think. But he was an interesting guy. Everybody was—we all—he was the only one who was ever nervous. Benton, and Dorfesmeyer, we had a tail gunner named Duffy, he was a real Irishman…he was a good guy. All of them were good. One’s name was Smithy, Max Smithy, but as far as being…on this haul, I guess I was probably a little nervous, going on all my first strike with all these, but I stayed fairly calm. One thing that’s funny—when we were on one run from Canton toward [ ] Islands, Chuck 82:00Armstrong was our co-pilot, and he had it on automatic flying—I could tell the direction and they could just set and they could sit there and read. And Chuck was reading, had his…all the switches for the engines are on the side, and he had his legs crossed like this, and I was still taking track of the wind, and all the waves, and all that, and an engine went dead—an engine went out. Oh boy, that got everybody’s alert, so I raised Cliff, the pilot and he said, “Radio our position in, our engine’s gone out and we might lose another one.” So, I positioned us probably the best I could on where I thought we were, and [ ] it was, but we didn’t need actually, 83:00but I got ready to give it to Red Benton, the position, to radio into the nearest contact. We were already past the distance of return—we couldn’t turn back. We were closer to where we were going to—we couldn’t go back. And, so, he did, he put that in, and in about three or four minutes, the engine starts right back in, just as smooth. And Chuck had taken his knees down—while he was reading his book, he was resting while he read that book, and knocked out that switch—it was just a toggle, a toggle switch that you hit it there. And he of course, was embarassed [laughter]. The rest of the time we could always get in, but that was…and then when we got on in, our goal 84:00was to get to Biak, which is an island just north of New Guinea. And so we got there, and that was all the planes that we were, and they would service them, and then they would, we would stay there a few days, and they did a little training there—jungle survival—they’d teach us how to find the vegetation to use for water, and what we could use to cut up and make a shelter for, because it was always raining in the afternoons. They used the military, the Navy, and the air force had like a taxi system—Navy air transport services and the military transport. It was just like a shuttle, and we got us on AT or NAT, 85:00and to take us up to Clark Field in the Philippines, and landed at [ ] Island, [ ] and then up into Zamboanga, and we stayed in Mindanao, which is the southernmost Philippine Island, and then on into Clark Field, and then we came in there and got into a plane there, and worked it out, and found out how it was working and everything—how the instruments worked. And started at—there was still some Japanese up in northern Luzon—[ ] camp was still be operated by the Japanese, and….

Diakov:About what time of year is this? 86:00Stiles:This would be the first part of ’45.

Diakov:Okay Stiles:Yes, it would be ’45. April, May…I think the…as I recall, have you seen the movie, The Biggest Raid?

Diakov:No.

Stiles:Well, it’s one that Caliban’s Prison, that the Japanese had, and I think it was still…Japanese were still holding those prisoners up until probably before that time, but they—that’s when they were first bombed. But then, back when we were in New Guinea, they were flying missions out of there. We flew two out of there, just, to weed whack. It was up in part of New Guinea, and there was still some occupation there, 87:00but not too heavy. They had pretty well…the Australians and the Americans had pretty much cleaned it out, but they still had anti-aircraft and we dropped, I remember that first time we must have a bunch of these rocks. We could carry four two thousand pound bombs. This was a big bomb—that’s eight thousand pounds we could carry. So we each took—we had a squadron, six or eight of us, and we dropped four two thousand pound bombs on their camps, still there. And they eventually returned some light anti-aircraft fire, but not much, because we apparently pretty well knocked them out. And so that was that.

Diakov:And that was your first mission?

Stiles:Yes, that was the first one. 88:00Diakov:That was your first mission, and that was in New Guinea?

Stiles:Yes, that was the first bombing against…any resistance.

Diakov:What did you think, going out?

Stiles:Well, the…concussion ring that comes up—the navigator sits…is what is called the intelligence officer on the plane—we get the briefing before and after the mission, and of course, the weather briefing, we, navigators always got the weather briefing before we went on a mission. [ ]…in the air, I’d never seen a bomb like that, not even in a bombing range in California, when we got some little concussion rings from but we would hardly drop anything bigger than 500 pounds there, but these two-thousand pounders, I’d never dropped anything that big. 89:00You know you throw a big rock in a lake, a still lake—how the rings come out. Well, the concussion rings are the same thing. And concussion rings came out; I couldn’t…it was just unbelievable to see that concussion coming from those big bombs, swinging out like taking the whole ocean full of rings. The ocean was off the shore, but were just coming up from the ground. We dropped them on the ground, and those concussion rings come up from where your bomb hits, and the air is just concussioned until…it does like that. But I don’t know; I…Cliff and Chuck and all of us, we seemed like just…a group of fellows that we didn’t seem like we were real worried about anything. And I remember earlier, a fellow 90:00named, at the flying school with Cliff Bean—that was my pilot, Cliff Bean—by the name of Bartelle, and he just ended up in our same squadron. And he was the same way—they were just—you know they didn’t seem like they were frightened, and they all, they all took on the job. I can’t…I know that the people that are in the infantry or the regiment, had a lot more anxiety, you know, that were under constant fire, sometimes all day, or twenty-four hours, and so infantry, I always thought those fellows were the ones that had the tough experience. We had 91:00times when we had air battles, and I was fortunate enough there–I know this doesn’t sound right, but I didn’t get to, or have to…didn’t have to because of my age, into some of the severest fighting at all. I don’t have any friends of mine, who were my age that were in on any of the island invasions, like Corregidor, or New Guinea. Just two or three years ago, Sue and I took a QE2…Elizabeth—the Queen Elizabeth, the ship on a tour—and we went through the Pacific and one of the landings we made was at Lae, New Guinea, 92:00and the airstrip we flew from there was called Nadzab. It had been taken several months before by mostly Australians, and we went to the Memorial Museum, the Australian Memorial Cemetery, and there were three thousand Australians that were killed at that invasion at Nadzab, and got that place cleared for us. When you think about those fellows, you know they really knew how tough it was…caves, all over the area. I tell you, in my part, the toughest thing was seeing…we killing our own people, or our own people killing themselves. You know self-inflicted, or we were…[ 93:00] One of the first times was at March Field, where I was just taking the...we were getting our crew trained. And it was after we had been out on the bombing range for the day, and we came in about four and we were all going to dinner that night at March Field Restaurant—we had the officer’s place there, and we were going there. I was taking a shower, and I was looking out the window towards the landing strip, and I heard a plane—I knew it was a B-25 because it has a distinctive sound—ta,ta,ta,ta,ta….and it was just rattling. I just looked out that window when I was showering and BOOM, it just blew up. I don’t have any idea what caused it; there was something wrong with that plane, and it blew up on its approach to 94:00March Field. There were three of them, maybe four—gee, that’s why they say you live in favor, go down in flame, and this fellow was just flying in. You wouldn’t think that would happen if somebody wasn’t shooting at him. But that makes you think about those things. But you usually, you wanted to make sure that you preflight your plane, and that happened a couple times that I really have resentment for. Picking up after the war was over, and I’d have flights to China, and we had gone to Hong Kong for kamakize planes that were being assembled, and Canton, and Shanghai, and then most of…then the rest of the bombers were headed for Formosa, what it was called then, it’s now Taiwan. 95:00The planes there—they were assembling planes in these sea battles where the Japanese, where the Navy was after them, and we were, they were trying to get them out to [ ] to get them out to Formosa for raids on Okinawa. They would take them, send them over night—the Japanese would put them on wooden ships, and sail them, some of them, that they could get out to Formosa and the parts to the mainland. And [ ] northern Formosa was [ ] and we bombed there several times. But there were some of those things that the suicide kamikaze pilots would go out there, and that was where a good friend—I 96:00played golf with him up until two years ago, when he died—he was on a cruiser, off of Okinawa, and many ships, we sunk Navy ships, hundreds of ships and thousands of men killed in that, and destroyed the shore on the raids on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and all that. After the war was over, and when we dropped the atom bombs, and we went up to Okinawa, and two memorable things happened. One of them—there was a troop carrier outfit, and this general, and as I recall, his name was General Swing, and he always wanted to be the general, to be first man ashore at these important places. He wanted his troop carriers to be—as I remember his name, I may be doing his a disservice—but General Swing wanted to have his troops 97:00be the first into Toyko. So we were still at Clark Field in the Philippines, and he wanted us…we had strip that could handle B-24’s—seven or eight thousand feet, but he wanted us to come down so he wouldn’t have to truck his troop carriers up to Clark Field, he wanted us to have our planes come down to this little field, about 5,000 feet, near Manila. I’ve forgotten the name—I’ve got it somewhere, but anyway, our colonel said, “General,” …we were seventh in line to take off…we were going to carry twenty troop carriers and our five-man crew; we weren’t going to need any gunners, because the war was over…this was all peace time things. And our colonel told the general: “General, this strip is too short; it’s just—you’ve got too much load on this.” 98:00Because it’s the distance to fly, you had to have a lot of fuel on them, number one, and then we’re going to ferry twenty loaded troop carriers and five our crew, and he kept saying, “No, general, this is too short.” So he insisted that we do it, so we did. The first plane…we were, just, we had our engines going, and we were taxiing in our take-off spot—we were seventh in this line. The first one came up and he just [ ] and missed, and the next one, same thing, he got off and then sunk a little bit and then got off, and I think it was the third one came up, and couldn’t make it—crashed, blew up, immediately into flame and killed all of those twenty paratroopers and our five crewmen. The general called it off then, and said the mission’s cancelled; we’ll truck our men up to Clark Field tomorrow, 99:00so they overnight, they trucked them up to there. So I thought…seeing them, seeing them, how they ended up…[voice filled with emotion, pauses briefly]. Then after we got up to Okinawa, we were at Yontan Air Field, and the war was over, and people were flying for various…and one morning, they were taking off in a troop carrier outfit, I don’t know what they had on it—I know they had to have crew on it—but they were careless. They [ ] we’d had a little storm that night, and everybody went out and checked their planes, and were going to take off—in those days, your rudder and flaps, we chocked 100:00them with two 2 x 2’s or 2 x 4’s, you’d slice [ ] so they wouldn’t flap—the flaps wouldn’t flap and rudder wouldn’t turn, because they had these chocks on them. And we saw them taking off, and just went straight, and then BOOM, it crashed and it turned out—we found out that afternoon, everybody got briefed on that again, that they had not done their preflight. They didn’t take the chocks off, so it killed at least five of them on it, and that was crashed. And darn if it didn’t happen another day, about three days later.

Diakov:After the briefing?

Stiles:After the briefing, yes. Or maybe they didn’t see it; we saw it live…we happened to be out there, just looking up, as the runway was high above—our campus 101:00was down here and the runway was up here. We could see that thing going off and crashing, and it made a difference to see it—how serious we take it, I guess. And then the next thing that I did that I really remember, was at the end of the war, we were, we took our bomb bay and covered it with plywood floors, so we could carry people, like we had the troop carrier before. But these were to carry prisoners of war that we had released. So they had brought them down from Toyko from Okinawa, and so they used our plane for us to travel, to take our… these released POWs that had been captured on the Bataan Death March, and such, and had been working in the coal mines in Japan, and one of them… Diakov:So these 102:00were Americans?

Stiles:Yes, these were American, all American POWs, and they’d been working in coal mines. They had freed them, but there were skinny as skeletons, and we were going to fly them down to the Philippines, to Clark Field, and they could set them up and get them ready to come back…get them in ships to get them back to the States. And I was, I was in charge of feeding the prisoners. They had plenty of food, but they didn’t want us to feed it to them, so the flight surgeon preflighted all of us navigators, who were going to be in charge of feeding them, so every twenty minutes we were supposed to give them one these feedings. And I was introducing myself around to them, and one of them was named Bob Dietrich, and he was from Louisville, Kentucky. 103:00He had been captured from Corregidor, or Bataan, and skinny….gee, so skinny, and they were quiet, but I got his name, and some of the others, and I got his name written down and when I came back, and I never did try to look him up here for some reason. I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a Dietrich’s Restaurant over in Crescent Hill, and I know he was from Crescent Hill, and I started to ask the guy that had [ ] one night when we were there, and I guess I just didn’t do it. He’s probably dead now, I’m sure because he was just skinny and he had gone through those three years in those coal mines. So that was the last thing I did, and after that, we all got separated from…dismissed us from our crews, and we all were assigned a new crew to fly back, and so I was 104:00going to fly back to the States and we landed at [ ] Edwards Air Force Base was where the…rockets fly out of it. The [ ] had it when I was at River… Park, or city, and that was a [ ] mission out there. So that was the last we saw…took a train back from San Francisco to Atterbury, and got discharged at Atterbury, up at Indianapolis, south of Indianapolis, and when I came back, some friend was being met by parents at Atterbury, and he offered—they offered to drive me back to Louisville—he was going to Lexington, or somewhere, 105:00and I never saw him again after they let me out. And I remember up at the corner, my parents lived at Deerlane and Newburg Road, I guess it was, or not that…but anyway, Deerport Road, I got out…this little tavern, it’s still there. I called my dad and my parents and they just lived down the street and I got dad on the phone—before I could hardly put the phone down, he was out the door running up the street to get me, so I remember that. So that was the end of the story. I probably missed on some things.

Diakov:I’m going to pause here for just a minute…we’ve been going for about an hour and half, and we can pick up later. [Tape interruption].