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when the bus stops for a twenty minute rest period, you stop and wait until the bus is ready to go on. Vinita, Oklahoma, is where there was a scheduled rest stop and I could hardly wait to get going again, Fairland was only in the next county just the second town away.

 

OPERATIONAL TRANSITION TRAINING

After this short two weeks leave I reported to the Army Air Field at Alliance, Nebraska, in June of 1944, for operational training in the Troop Carrier Command. Here is where I met the venerable DC-3, or the military designated C-47. Most of the airplanes we used at Alliance were genuine DC-3s. They were retired commercial airline planes which had been stripped of all the posh interiors and pressed into military service for training. Some of them had the loading door on the right side even. Most loaded from the left but through smaller doors than the C-47. One even had the remaining vestiges of a steam heating system from its former days of glory.

The DC-3s had a long history of service with the airlines even in 1944 when I first became intimately acquainted with them. Some of the airlines even used Wright Cyclone engines. These, I believe were nine cylinder engines. The C-47 used Pratt & Whitney R-1830 fourteen cylinder engines which developed twelve hundred horsepower. They had Hamilton Standard hydraulic constant speed propellers. For the first time we had airplanes which had regular seats and not aluminum bucket seats where the crew had to sit on their seat type parachutes. We still had chutes along with us in the airplane but we didn't wear them all the time.

Photo Courtesy McDonnell Douglas

Douglas C-47 Skytrain

 

Training here consisted of more intensive instrument training, more formation flying and more single engine emergency procedures. The UC-78s we used in advanced did not have full feathering props. We had to learn the airplane and its systems of course.

Here are a few of my thoughts about Nebraska. Having grown up in Oklahoma where one who had no Indian blood whatsoever was in the minority, I was offended to see how the American Indian was treated around Alliance. They rated socially a little lower than the Negro people in the South. Of course, at that time, I had little or no experience with southern traditions either. In Ottawa County Oklahoma we had no race problems. Whites and Indians lived together as they had since before statehood. There simply were no Negroes. I didn't know until much later that there was a county ordinance which prohibited Negroes from staying in the county after sundown.

Here at operational training we were formed into crews, which stayed together until we reached the replacement depot overseas. I was the pilot. The co-pilot was Lt. Harold G. Morris. He was from Elizabeth, New Jersey. Flight Officer Jack O'Donald was our navigator. Corporal Samuel Vitalie was the radio operator and Corporal Douglas L. Noble was the crew chief or flight engineer. We five flew together all

 

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