R: That is right, we were somewhere in the middle there. We were all supposed to go
 to pilot training first, and the way you got navigators and bombardiers was if for
 some reason something went wrong during pilot training, then you were transferred
 to training as a bombardier or a navigator. Well, when my group came through, they
 were so short of navigators that we were all assigned directly to navigation school.
 I was in the group that was sent to Coral Gables, Florida to be trained by Pan
 American. It was not an army-run operation. This particular navigation school
 trained navigators for over-water navigation to work with the air transport command
 ferrying planes all over the world. Of course, Pan-Am then was the great airline that
 flew all over the world, so their navigators ran this school and trained us to be over-
 water navigators. Of course, being in Coral Gables [was fabulous].

P: Coral Gables made it very nice?

R: Yes. As a young man from Pittsburgh, I thought that this must be some marvelous
 foreign country.

P: Okay. From there, trace your military career.

R: When we graduated, after a short leave, I went to Fort Wayne, Indiana where they
 were manufacturing DC-3s, and as they came off the assembly line, then they would
 assign a crew to fly them somewhere. Well, I was assigned to a crew that was taking
 a plane to Australia. That was my first flight.

P: And that was certainly over water.

R: Oh, boy! But the difficult part was, once you got to Hawaii then you were doing just
 little island hopping, these little bitty pieces of coral in the middle of nowhere, under
 radio silence, because the Japanese were still [out there]. This was 1943 now, and
 I am telling you, I think the good Lord navigated more than I did because we made
 it to Australia. But, when we got there, all the navigators who were supposed to do
 this as their contribution and not get into any shooting war, were all transferred to
 New Guinea because there was such a shortage of navigators on the combat
 bombers. So I made one flight for the air transport command, and then wound up
 in New Guinea and flew fifty-seven combat missions, first on B-17s and then on B-
 24s in that part of the Pacific Ocean.

P: Where were you at the end of the war?

R: At the end of the war, we had moved three times. We started in Port Moresby
 [Papua, New Guinea], and then we moved to a temporary site somewhere, and I
 think we wound up in a place called Dobadura. We lived in tents the whole time
 and we would trade with the lumber plants the Aussies had. You had to produce
 everything, almost, you needed out there, and we would go and trade something for
 some lumber so we could at least build a floor up off the ground. Then [we] put in
 mosquito netting and all that sort of thing. It was very primitive.


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