JW: [beginning of Part 2] 00:00 You can’t imagine what was going on out at that place. It was the most screwed up operation I’ve ever seen. They decided that they had to guard the airplanes. And they decided, “Well, if we’ve got a guard, we’ve got to have rifles.” If you’ve got guards around this place, you’ve got to have rifles. And if you’ve got rifles, you’ve got to have ammunition. And if you’ve got rifles and ammunition, you’ve got to have somebody that knows how to shoot the damn thing. They pulled a fast check, and there was only one guy in that whole officers’ outfit that had ever fired a gun. (laughs) So we offered our services, old country boys, and they said, “No, we can’t afford it. It would be too dangerous.” So they said, “We want to go line you all up outside.” They acquired the rifles and the ammunition and everything, they lined us all up outside and said, “You’re going to march around the fence and protect the airplanes.” Some of us were going to guard the flight line. This guy was a second lieutenant, and he was covering gun safety. We had to learn gun safety. He didn’t know how to shoot the thing. Anyway, they gave us our lecture on gun safety, and this lieutenant was showing you how. In other words, when you got released from guard duty you saluted the guy that you were replacing. You’d pull your gun down to present arms. (chuckles) Anyway, the guy down on the flight line, the first guy closest down to the hangar—from the hangar the lines of airplanes were about 50 feet apart, and there was just a whole line; there must have been 150 of those things—this guy went through all the exercise of showing this fellow how to take the gun and come and present arms and then open the breech and close the breech. He didn’t know that the magazine was full of shells. And when he closed the breech and snapped it, he had the gun down here, and the bullet went through one whole line of Stearmans. (laughter) Oh, Lord! One guy shot a hole in the roof of the building. It was dangerous. I didn’t want to get out. (laughter)
I2: 03:40 Taking your life in your own hands on the air base.
JW: “I’d be willing to fight the enemy, but I sure as hell don’t want to get killed by you guys.” (laughter)
I2: The plane was a training plane.
JW: A Stearman was the first trainer that they had in the military, and it was a two-wing biplane.
I: Okay. What were you flying when you retired?
JW: I was flying a jet.
I: That’s what I thought.
JW: F-84. I had flown in Turkey. One of the hottest airplanes that I ever flew was an F-104. It stills holds a climbing record. It would take you to 35,000 feet.
I: Did you ever fly it?
JW: Oh yeah. I checked out in it and flew it. It was a whale of an airplane.
I: You saw a lot of changes.
JW: The airplane was way ahead of its time. Actually, the whole center of the fuselage of that airplane, when the pilot ejected, the whole center of that airplane or the fuselage came out with the seat. They had all kinds of trouble with that thing. It killed a whole bunch of pilots. The thing was all messed up. So they finally had so much trouble with it they gave it to the Germans. The Germans flew it for about a year, and the Germans couldn’t solve the problem, so they gave it back to us, and we in turn then gave it to the Turks. And about the time they gave it to the Turks, I went to Turkey. The airplane was in the Turkish Air Force when I checked out and flew it. I didn’t fly a USAF 104; I flew a Turkish 104. Same airplane. It was a fabulous thing, way ahead of its time.
I: 06:22 Okay. Did you attend any specialty schools?
JW: I wish I had that piece of paper that I had. Yes, I did. Before I went to Turkey, I checked out and flew an F-5. We did fighter tactics and were taught fighter tactics on the F-5, which was an experimental type thing when we first started it. What you did is you just had head-to-head combat, best guy wins.
I2: Kind of like TOP GUN school today?
JW: Yeah. I went through that program. I was an industrial aeronautical engineer when I got out of school, and when I came home from World War II I went through the engineering school at Wright-Patterson. Right after I completed that was when I got out. After World War II I got out of the service and went back in the civilian business. Command Staff School. War College. It sounds like I went to school all my life. I went two years of junior college and four years at Baylor before I ever went to fly, so I had six years of college.
I: What were some of your bombing missions in Korea? When you went down, your target was a railroad.
JW: Yes.
I: Did you have any other targets prior to that other than railroads?
JW: On this particular day, the early morning mission had discovered that the Chinese were attempting to move trains. Usually they only moved them at night, but they were moving their trains with equipment and supplies, trying to get it down to the front line because they were hard up for equipment and supplies. And they picked that up right away in the early morning, and we had a max effort mission and we launched a whole bunch of airplanes. They were up and down the line everywhere. Hitting a train was pretty easy. In the first place, it was big.
I: Did you ever have as a target factories or bridges? What were your targets prior to this time?
JW: We were doing napalming, air ground support. We were supporting ground forces, and that’s where they put armor plating on the belly of the 84s, and that really slowed down that operation but upped our safety factor a great deal.
I2: 10:41 What we’re looking for is to tell the kids— Mostly school kids will be looking at the video and other citizens. Could you describe just a typical day in the camp? You got up in the morning. What did you do?
I: Did they have a routine?
JW: We established our own routine, pretty much. After I had gotten into camp, we realized that if you didn’t establish some kind of a routine on a time basis that some of these guys would never get up. And so we just set our own, pretty much.
I: And you got to go take a shower and you got to shave every morning and you were fed bacon and eggs.
JW: I did not shave for two years.
I: (chuckles) I know.
JW: I had a cute mustache. I’m thinking seriously about growing another one.
I: (laughs) What did you have for breakfast?
JW: Early on we had millet and kaoliang.
I: Tell us what millet and kaoliang is.
JW: Millet and kaoliang are basically pretty much the same thing. Millet is a wheat derivative; kaoliang is more or less a cane, maize-like. It has no flavor to it. You just put it in water and boil it until it gets real sticky like glue, and then you eat it, and then you hope it goes right on through the body.
I: It was refined too, wasn’t it? Hadn’t it been through the mill and been polished and cleaned, no weevils?
JW: Nothing. Believe it or not, some of the food actually had maggots in it.
I: I believe it.
JW: Some of the stuff that they gave, of course they’d consider a delicacy, and I’m sure they do, like little shrimp that you get and just lay them out on a wooden board and let the sun boil them and make them rot, and they get dry and smell. Once they lose their smell and they dry, they think it’s great.
I2: 13:27 It’s a delicacy.
JW: (laughs) We had coffee. What we did, by this time we were getting quite a bit of rice.
I: There are two more questions after this one that we want you to do. Then we’ll quit.
JW: Where was I?
I2: Coffee.
I: We were having coffee.
JW: It’s a substitute for coffee. You’d take black rice, which is unwashed rice, pour it in a cast iron wash pot, build a real hot fire, put water in it and let it get good and hot, and what it does is it will seal itself on the side of the wash pot. And you just sit there and let it cook until it gets good and black, and then you break it up and put it in your cup and you’ve got— It’s unsweetened, of course.
I: Better than nothing, huh?
JW: But it’s better than nothing. You bet. They did on special occasions— Along toward the end of our tour there, they started bringing in pigs, little old rotten pigs that wouldn’t weigh 25 pounds, for about 150 of us. Our medical people discovered that the pigs had trichinosis, but that didn’t phase us at all. We just took it and cooked it and cooked it, and instead of having pig we had soup.
I: While you were in the military altogether, but especially while you were a POW, what was the value of your religious foundation to you at that time?
JW: I guess I was an average American youngster. My mother and father were churchgoing and very religious. In the early stages of my growing up, my mother was a Christian, my daddy was a Baptist. I joined the Methodist Church, primarily because all my friends were Methodists. And they all went to the Methodist Church, so I went to the Methodist Church. I don’t know when it influenced me a great deal. I guess it was after I got old enough and mature enough to really think about it. By this time I had gone to college. You might say that I had gone through the full treatment of religion, and based on the pressure that my mother used to apply and my daddy I became, especially after I had some pretty close calls flying around—I won’t say I became really religious, but there were times when I thought the good Lord was sitting in the seat beside me.
I: 18:05 God became more real to you.
JW: Yes. I don’t know. For me to try to explain how it happened, I can’t say because it was something that was very slow and it moved in. And when it moved in, it had happened before I realized it.
I: And that had to have been support for you while you were in Korea.
JW: Of course when you get yourself into some tight spots, there were several times that I was in tight spots, and there were several times that I had very religious feelings that there was somebody looking after me, and for some reason or other, he was kind of taking care of me. I think a lot of people feel that way. You get the feeling, I think, after you go through something like flying an airplane through a range of fire that’s shooting straight up and you know that every flash that comes up there’s a bullet behind it or in front of it, you get the feeling that there’s got to be somebody else. I very truthfully have felt that way many, many times. For instance, I think the day that I was shot down when I felt like I wasn’t too sure whether I was going to get out of the airplane or not—I was still fighting to get out, but I wasn’t too sure I was going to make it—and I reached down and I hit that trigger on that ejection seat and it worked, it told me something that I already knew, but it just reminded me to think of it a little more often. That’s the way I felt. I still do.
I: Fantastic. If you could talk to all of the schoolchildren, what message would you give to them?
JW: I don’t know. One of the things that we have lost in the youngsters that are growing up is they’ve lost patriotism. It’s just not there anymore. Maybe it’s because Mama and Daddy don’t mention it or the kids are not involved in things that require patriotism or a display of patriotism. And right now we’re in a situation, and it’s a very serious situation in this country. I think that we’re going to have a lot of problem getting youngsters to display and be patriotic enough to do the things that they may have to do in order to solve our problem. It’s not there. It’s not the kids’ fault, I don’t think. It’s the fact that it has never been pushed.
I: Do you think perhaps that not just the children, maybe all of us—but especially our children—have a false sense of security? They’ve never been threatened.
JW: They haven’t. Let’s face it. Ninety-five percent of the people that we have at our highest level of government have never, ever been in a war. And it’s extremely difficult to explain to people that have never been there and they never, ever want to get there, and consequently, it’s a forgotten item. It would be kind of interesting to see how this country reacts to the situation that we’re in right now.
I: 23:49 To what has happened today.
JW: Believe me. You bet.
I: Do you think that young people should join the military? And if you think they should, why do you think so? The military is so different now than what it was when you went in.
JW: One of the things that— What were we talking about?
I: Would you recommend to a young person that they go into the military? And if so, why?
JW: Even you take back during the Korean situation. It was a forgotten war. The first thing that I noticed, we had a bunch of youngsters, really young kids, Army, in which no one had ever tried to explain to them why they were sent to Korea. Nobody made any effort to. Consequently, they didn’t know why they were over there, and as a result, these kids laid down and died because they had nothing to really live for, whereas people that were at my age, I had a wife, I had two kids, and I wasn’t by myself. There were a bunch of other guys of that age. We survived a heck of a lot better than the youngsters because once you give up—let’s put it this way—you’ve committed the unpardonable sin. You don’t want to live, so you just die. And that’s what happened to a lot of the youngsters in Korea. I don’t know about Vietnam. I hadn’t been there, but I heard a lot of talk about it. It pretty much is the same thing.
I: It sounds like it.
JW: It’s kind of sad. Youngsters have to feel like they believe in what they’re doing. And if they don’t, they won’t do it. Again, I repeat myself by saying that it’s not their fault; it’s because they have not been into a situation where they have to survive, and I mean really, really survive. It’s too easy what they’re doing now. Maybe I’m too old too. (laughs)
I: They don’t know what it means to do without.
JW: Yes.
I: Most of them don’t know what it means to do without and to have to get out and work for what they have to have.
JW: 27:59 We are doing now what I said a long time ago. Our kids are trying to keep up with the Joneses’ kids. In other words, we’re in competition—not with anything that’s extremely valuable except pride. And if you lose that, you’re gone.
I: Thank you, Jim. We appreciate you.
JW: You’re welcome. I’m interested to see how this one’s going to come out.
I: We appreciate you and we appreciate Jim Kaiser. We appreciate all you guys.
I2: You and your generation gave us a great country. I just hope the current generation doesn’t lose it.
JW: You can’t blame the youngsters because they were raised that way. And that’s the bad part.
