Chapter 9 Hallaleujah! Cadet School

I was first sent to an Army Air Corps base for recruits near Waco, TX. It was under construction at the time and after a few days, in March of 1942, we were sent to Kelly Field in San Antonio, TX for basic training. This lasted about six weeks. We did close order drill, took a lot of tests, did hours and hours of physical training and learned the usual Army routines. Weekends were for marching or parading.

We were billeted in tents while the base was under construction. They put us in alphabetical order and I became longtime friends with several men in my tent who had the same first letter in their last names. In addition to the tents, the base consisted of about 40 or 50 buildings that had recently been constructed to house classrooms, supplies, administration offices, residences for instructors, maintenance personnel, commissioned officers and noncoms and the Army Air Force Navigation School which had been transferred to Kelly from Barksdale Field.

Kelly was the training center for advanced aviation training of bomber pilots and crews. The demand for bomber crews had been escalating since Pearl Harbor and Kelly was a beehive of incoming cadets who would be trained to be navigators, bomber pilots or bombadiers as well as construction crews building almost as fast as new recruits arrived. But we weren’t ready for bomber school yet and as soon as we were through with basic training (April ’42) we were transferred out of Kelly. (A few months later, in July of ’42 it was renamed the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center.)

Next we were sent to Chickasha, Oklahoma for primary flight training at the Wilson and Bonfils Flying School. Cadets had begun training to become U.S. Army Air Corps pilots there in October of 1941. More than eight thousand recruits trained to be aviators there during the four years that the school trained pilots for the Army. (Ironically, by 1944 Chickasha had also become home to a Prisoner of War camp for German soldiers.) My dreams of flying were beginning to come true.