INTERVIEWER:   Mort, before we get into your actual experiences in World War II, why don’t you give the listeners a sense of where you grew up and kind of how you got to that point to either enlist or be drafted.  Where did it all start?

SALK:   Well it all started in the sovereign state of Rhode Island.  That’s where I was born and that’s where I spent the first happy 21 years of my life.  I was an on-the-job trainee at a jewelry factory when World War II started.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, I had already been in about a year and a half. The reason for that was because we agreed, that is my employer and I agreed, that I would volunteer for a year’s duty rather than wait to be drafted.

You see at that time there was an arrangement where you could put in a year’s obligated time and name the date of entry and departure from the military.  So I elected to do that in view of the fact that I had a blooming career in the jewelry business and we wanted to do one thing at a time to get the military obligation out of the way and come back and learn the jewelry manufacturing business.

INTERVIEWER:   So where were you born?

SALK:   I was born in Providence, Rhode Island.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh yes, I know Providence.  That was probably a pretty military area even at that time, wasn’t it?

SALK:   Yes it was with Newport naval station there at Newport, Rhode Island, the major place for the destroyer fleet on the Atlantic coast and the stock of the building of Quonset Naval Air Station, the biggest naval air station on the east coast, which was under construction at the time.

INTERVIEWER:   When did that start, in the late 30’s or was it in the 40’s?

SALK:   Very early 40’s with the anticipation in a war.  At any rate, after I was inducted, I was sent to Fort Devens, Massachusetts as a private at the rate of $21 a month (laughter) and all I could eat at the mess hall.  They issued uniforms.  Some of us were issued part World War II and part World War I uniforms left over and put in mothballs since World War I.

INTERVIEWER:   So what was the date here that you went in?

SALK:   I went in January 17, 1941 and arrived at Fort Devens, Massachusetts on that date.  Fort Devens had a regular Army complement left over from World War I and a bunch of draftees and volunteers arrived and we were inoculated, vaccinated and we were there for several days.  As luck would have it, I ran a very high fever and was very sick from the tetanus and typhoid and small pox and other shots.  I, along with a couple hundred other people, were put on a train.

We didn't know our destination.  We had only been at Fort Devens three days.  The train took us at night to an area, a dockside, the train terminated at a dock.  We didn't know what state or what universe.  By that time we didn't care.  Rumor started that we were going overseas.  It went through the train like wildfire.  None of us had ever seen a rifle or a bayonet or a piece of artillery, but we were going overseas.  That was the rumor at least.

When the train stopped on the dock and we could hear the sound of waves and initially all of us on the train were from the state of Rhode Island, we recognized salt air.  The rumor became almost real.  They then put us on a small boat and drove us on the waves to an island off the coast of Rhode Island called Jamestown Island, which lies just off Newport.  As we approached the island, we could see some lights and we heard a band playing the Star Spangled Banner and we knew we were at least not going overseas.

We arrived at this island, which had a few National Guard men, which had been inducted into national duty. They were weekend warriors, one weekend a month, and for that they received $1 a period of training.  We filled out their organization to what was called war strength.  They were a skeleton force called to active duty.  The National Guard was not at war strength.  We brought it up to war strength.  There were 155 men for a battery and I was one of those 155 men in D battery, much like our late President Truman was a D battery.  Man, I felt very proud of that.  He was vice-president at the time.

At any rate, there were three batteries on that island and that made up a battalion.  We had three battalions in our regiment.  One was at Newport, Fort Adams, one was at Jamestown Island where I was and one was on the other shore at Narragansett Bay with anything from three-inch guns to 12-inch disappearing cannon.  My battery owned two disappearing cannon 12-inch guns.

We trained on those guns, dry run, loading and incidentally the powder and the shells were left over from World War I and they were still covered with Cosmolene, an inch thick layer of gel on each one and the bags of black powder were left over from World War I.  So we used these things in dry run shooting the 12-inch guns.  As a no class, not even one stripe private, was on what was called the loading crew.  Some 35 men it took to run that weapon to get it ready to fire.  As such I had a baby carriage thing where we lifted the 1075 pound shell from its shelter under the parapet onto the carriage and the carriage was then shoved by me and a couple of other men to the breach of the cannon and some other people came along and loaded four bags of black powder and we put those in the breach and then the gun was ready to fire.

We did this day after day like a football squad would go through its…it looked like a football team.  You had to have the precision.

INTERVIEWER:   Was this your basic training then?  I didn't hear the basic training…

SALK:   Basic training was incorporated.  That was secondary to learning…

INTERVIEWER:   And it was James Island?

SALK:   Jamestown.

INTERVIEWER:   Jamestown Island, isn’t that interesting.

SALK:   And we also doubled in infantry.  You see there was no infantry that we knew about at least between the Narragansett Bay and Boston and the huge industrial complex that it was when we went.  So we were doubling as infantry in case we were invaded by Germans.  We had that responsibility.  So we were issued 30 odd rifles and sent to a firing range.  We also became qualified in the use of that.  They also issued us helmets left over from World War I. 

They issued us uniforms.  Some of us got these corset like jackets, tunics, with the buttons still blackened from camouflage and leggings, wrap around leggings and pates.

INTERVIEWER:   Now what’s a pate?

SALK:   It goes over your legs, leggings.

INTERVIEWER:   It was cold, January.

SALK:   It was bitter cold, bitter.  And it was on a high bluff or cliff overlooking the Atlantic.  Part of the responsibilities were standing guard duty so we patrolled with guns two hours on and two hours off for 24 hours about once a week.  In addition to that, there were little things like KP duty, kitchen police and some other things.  At any rate, it was comfortable to the extent that I was with 100%, our entire regiment was from Rhode Island.

I knew some of the men that had been through ROTC training and had become officers.  We had a relationship that was like no relationship because they recognized military discipline and protocol and I tried to play soldier as well as I knew how so I didn't recognize them either.  We were strangers so long as we were in uniform and it worked out just fine.

After a while, after 14 months or so, Pearl Harbor was bombed, less than 14 months, 11 months.  Recognizing that my year of volunteering was going to end up to be a lot longer, the duration of the war as a matter of fact plus six months.  So I volunteered for artillery officer school and I volunteered for the Air Force.  I much preferred the Air Force, but the name of the game was to do something that I thought I was more capable of doing, that I hadn’t used my talents.

INTERVIEWER:   Now had you been through college at this point or high school?

SALK:   High school.

INTERVIEWER:   High school graduate from Providence?

SALK:   From Providence. I took college courses, but it was the Depression.  I graduated in 1937 from high school and while I had taken college prep courses, my parents were in no way capable of sending me to college.  They were just putting my older brother through college and so …

INTERVIEWER:   So you were born about 1920?

SALK:   1919, June 1, 1919. 

INTERVIEWER:   So you were wearing those uniforms that they had been using just before you were born (laughter).

SALK:   And I was one of the fortunate ones.  The overcoat they issued to me was a size 44.  At that time, I was taking a 32, I weighed 127 pounds and it would wrap around me nearly twice, not quite twice.  They issued me one pair of World War II type pants and one pair of World War I trousers.  I was fortunate in another respect.  I got a World War II jacket.  I had to loan that to my friends when they went on leave because you weren’t allowed in town with a World War I jacket.  They had to have World War II so the public could see we were in uniform.  So we had to change clothes whenever one of us was lucky enough to get a leave to go to town.

INTERVIEWER:   I’m sorry to divert you back.  You’re back to a choice between the artillery or the Air Force, Army Air Corps.

SALK:   And so I went to night school at Newport where they had written examinations for entrance into aviation cadet training.  I used to take a night ferry from Jamestown Island to Newport, a long walk to a high school that had night classes for adults to brush up on math and a few other subjects.  I did that for several months and then a traveling team for aviation cadet examinations came out of Boston to Newport and they put us in the gymnasium.

There we took written exams and I looked for my name on the bulletin board for a long time and it never appeared on the list of approved candidates.  Then the word was sent back down.  A human error had been made.  The Boston team had picked up the wrong set of examinations.  They picked examinations for entrance to West Point and they were a lot more difficult than the entrance for an aviation cadet.  So we took exams over again, the proper ones after a few months.

I passed without a problem and was given a 20 day leave.  I went home to Providence, my hometown was 30 miles away from where I was stationed.  Orders came through sending me to Maxwell Field in Alabama for preflight training.  There we were issued cadet uniforms and lived as a cadet in much improved barracks, much improved meals.  Everything was very, very close discipline, extremely close and much physical training.

After completing some preflight, I was sent to Santa Ana Air Force Base in Orange County in California.

INTERVIEWER:   Wow, this is a lot of traveling.  Is this the first time that you had …

SALK:   First time out of the state of Rhode Island except for Massachusetts, yes.

INTERVIEWER:   And you went all the way down to Alabama.

SALK:   Alabama, yes.

INTERVIEWER:   And how did you get there, train?

SALK:   Train and sat next to another soldier in uniform.  We had a conversation and he was a professor at Princeton University, a psychology professor at Princeton, but he was a private, $21 a month private.  We talked and he wasn’t going into the flying end of the business.  He was going into the psychology end as a teacher.  The next time I saw him a few days later when I was in a classroom taking some examinations, he was handing out the tests.  That’s all he did, handed out the tests and someone else administered the exam and this is a Princeton University professor.  He assumed he climbed through that and got more important and more responsible position.

INTERVIEWER:   So now you’re in California.  Another train trip?

SALK:   Well I think I should insert this.  My younger brother had entered the aviation cadet program shortly before I did, two years younger.  He quit college and joined the Air Corps and was accepted in aviation and went to Maxwell Field.  I followed him there and we were able to see each other in the formation as we marched up and down the streets.  That was the only time we had any contact.  I couldn't visit him because he was upper class and I was lower class, but that’s the way it was.

At any rate, California, we were given train accommodations to California, but a cadet who was much wiser in the ways of the world than I decided that he and I would not take the train to California.  We would fly.  So we went into the base operations building where a couple of pilots were checking the weather and getting their clearance for a flight to Ohio.  We asked if we could fly with them.  It was frowned upon for aviation cadets to even be in that building, yet alone to seek flying.

He was advanced, he was more mature than I and said it was alright.  So we got on the plane.  About three days later, we landed in California after going from Alabama to Michigan to Texas to Wyoming and we zigzagged across the country vertically and finally wound up in California.  At our induction in California, we were caught in the spotlight.  California was blacked out completely.

The war was on.  Japanese submarines eventually fired near California, so it was blacked out except for these spotlights.  They caught us and escorted us into a landing at Douglas Aircraft factory in California.  We were treated very well, a chauffeured car and they took us into headquarters and saw to it that we were well fed.

Since we were beating the train full of cadets from Maxwell Field to California, we had time on our hands so we checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and the rest of that story probably would take longer than I have, but it was like spending time with Ernest Lubitch and visiting the movie lots and having lunch with Thomas Mitchell and John Payne.

INTERVIEWER:   And you really did all those things?

SALK:   Yes.

INTERVIEWER:   And it was cause you were in uniform and people were hungry to see cadets and so forth?

SALK:   Yes, yes, tangential to that, this cadet and I were looking for a movie house one day and we were in Hollywood and we didn't know where we were exactly so we asked a stranger if he could direct us to this movie house.  We were out standing just outside the Brown Derby.  The Brown Derby in those days was the crème of watering holes.  He turned out to be Ernest Lubitch and he was very gregarious and open.  He had a very thick accent.  I guess he liked to exercise his English.  He was headed for the Brown Derby and invited us in.  We had drinks and there was a big celebration.

INTERVIEWER:   And who was he?  Was he a movie maker?

SALK:   He was the number one producer.  He was Carole Lombard’s, she was a comedienne and an actress, he was a comedy specialist.  Ernest Lubitch was probably or the second biggest name in all Hollywood, actor or producer.  They were celebrating the very good reviews of a man who was there who was a movie actor.  There was a big celebration because the news had come out that morning and said he was very good.  He was very happy and so was everyone else who was connected with him.

So they had a party.  Ernest Lubitch left us in his keeping because he had an appointment.  He left us calling cards and extracted a promise from us to show up the next morning at Twentieth Century Fox.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s a great story.

SALK:   Incidentally or maybe it was something he thought about, they were in the midst or just starting to make a movie called The Bombardier.  I was headed for bomb training.  He thought that matched pretty well so we appeared at the gate as scheduled the next morning and told the people at the gate, showed them Ernest Lubitch’s card.  They were impressed, called his office and he had them show us to where he had his scriptwriter, Sydney Radamaker who had written many scripts of many movies, the top of his field.

So we talked about, I like to think true or not, that he was looking for just a few little things about the life of a cadet, what a cadet says, what he does, what he eats, what he looks like.  We were cadets and that was part of the movie, The Bombardier.  So I like to think we gave him “technical support”.

INTERVIEWER:   (Laughter) But your name wasn’t on the credits.

SALK:   He then took us to lunch where we sat with Thomas Mitchell, John Payne and I can’t remember the actress’ name.  She appeared mostly in pirate movies.  She’s still alive I think.  At any rate, we went on the set and watched Ann Rutledge who was top becoming star.  Then we met at the hotel where we had rooms, we met Walter Winchell.  He was at the pool with a group of people he was entertaining.  He heard about the cadets that were there and war was on and he wanted to…

From there it was things like Milton Berle’s home.  Milton Berle was at a low point in his career at that time.  He was between movies and television, but nonetheless, we spent time with him.  And I could go on.

INTERVIEWER:   So how long did this whole odyssey last?

SALK:   It lasted over a week.  Joel McCrae and his wife…I started to get a feeling that perhaps they were doing their civic duty, their war duty, and I didn't want that to happen.  So I turned down a lot of invitations because I rather have them buy bonds and maybe even put on a uniform or something rather than try to satisfy…that was fictitious and probably over dramatized in my head, that they were trying to make up for their war effort through us and I wouldn’t have that.  So I turned down a lot of invitations where I was afraid that might happen.

The fella who was celebrating his reviews that day had a big party at his house afterward and we went to that.  Everybody, after they left, one of them staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he wanted us to walk him up, within walking distance of the hotel.  He forgot his wallet so we wound up paying out of our $75 a month, we wound up paying for drinks at the hotel.  That’s an aside there.

INTERVIEWER:   Where is your training, what was the base you were heading to in California?

SALK:   Santa Ana.  It was a huge, huge base.  That’s where I saw my first World War II airplanes also.  They were flying over us.  We went out for a roll call at about 5:30 in the morning and these pairs of Cobra B-39’s, two or three of them each morning fly over there on patrol.  It was great to see a fighter plane.  They were on their last legs and they never did see combat as far as I can remember.

At any rate, we went through some classroom work.  Then we moved up to Victorville in June of 1942 and went through training there right on the edge of the Mojave Desert.  The temperature ranged in the daytime from 120-125 degrees and at night, I don’t know how cold it got, but it got very cold at night.  We had three months of that and I got my wings in September of 1942.

My good friend who had the only car, he had to park it outside the gate because cadets couldn't have cars on base.  He took me and another graduating cadet, another lieutenant, we were sent to Salt Lake City, Utah.  We drove there.  When we got to Salt Lake City, we reported to Hale Air Force Base just outside of Salt Lake and they didn't know what we were doing there.  They had no idea.  They didn't want us, or need us. 

It was a supply depot and the orders were wrong.  So we were able to respond to it very well.  We checked into the Salt Lake City hotel and had lamb stew and all the things that are good in Salt Lake City.

INTERVIEWER:   I was going to say, a little bit of a change from Hollywood hotel.

SALK:   Yes, but still a great place to be for a week until we got revised orders. Crawled back in his car and drove to Tucson, Arizona.  There we were assigned crews, assigned to a B-24.

INTERVIEWER:   Now is a B-24 a new bomber at that time?

SALK:   Relatively new, yes.  It was a four engine twin tail and carried a crew of 10.  Actually when we first started, we had nine on the crew, but later on they added a ball turret under the aircraft which the original models didn't have.  It was called a B-24D.  It had already been in action in England.  The British flew B-24’s before we entered the war.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh is that right, some of that lend lease that we sold them.  Now were you a bombardier, still training to be a bombardier?

SALK:   No, at that point I am a bombardier.  We’re all 2nd lieutenants except for the squadron commanders, squadron operations officer, a couple of notches of pay raises above ours.  Ninety percent of us were 2nd lieutenants, pilots, bombardiers, navigators and then we had sergeant gunners, radio operator, tail gunner so to make up a crew.

INTERVIEWER:   Now as a bombardier, were you also trained to fly the plane if somebody was hurt?

SALK:   Exactly.  That wasn’t true in the very beginning.  In the beginning, there was just the pilot and copilot that could fly the airplane.  So someone had an innovative idea and they selected me to be not quite the third pilot, but capable of landing and taking off in an emergency if those fellas were incapacitated.  So yes.  Through what we called in those days phase training, phase I, phase II, phase III, phase I was just organizing at Tucson.  Phase I was conducted at Wendover, Utah for one month. 

Wendover became popular later on and known because that’s where the crews who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki trained.  It was a very remote area on the salt flats west of Salt Lake City by about 100 miles and nothing out there.  It looks like a moonscape area.  We lived in tar paper shacks and hot bellied stoves.  We walked to a nearby hotel and just straddled the state line of Utah and Nevada.  So they had gambling in one end of it and a restaurant in the other.  When we got hungry enough, we’d walk to the hotel and have a steak and go back to our shacks.

INTERVIEWER:   Now did you have any sense at all where you were headed?  You were just moved here and moved there and no idea if you were going?  It was all secret, right?

SALK:   No idea.  The bomb sight which we used was, of course, about as secret as anything possibly could be.  I may get into that later, the bomb sight itself.  It was probably kept as close as the nuclear weapon field and the rest…

INTERVIEWER:   Well keep going.  That’s a good time to talk about that.  What is a bombsight?

SALK:   There were several different types of bombs produced by several different companies.  One was a Sperry bomb and it was awkward.  It wasn’t accurate.  A man named Norton invented a revolutionary piece of equipment, they had a bomb named after him.  It was a piece of machinery about this long and about that wide and it solved the bombing problem.  The bombing problem was very complex.  It had the height, size of the target, direction of the wind speed, there were a number of elements, the aerodynamics of the bomb itself, the speed at which it would drop.

This is all miniaturized for lack of a better word, into this, introduced into it, basic information.  Then it solves the problem for you. 

INTERVIEWER:   So when you say introduce information, you literally keyed in information?

SALK:   Not keyed in in the present sense of the computer, but we had to set it in with dials.

INTERVIEWER:   Speed, wind, things like that.

SALK:   Right, exactly.  Then the mechanical part of the bombardier was to…first of all, the training that goes into putting that information to solve and given there are a certain amount of tables of arithmetically derived tables that solves part of what you want to put into it.  Then to put, just place cross hairs on the given aiming point and to recognize things on the ground you’re aiming for. 

So it was at the pain of death that the secret of the bomb sight was kept.  The penalties were not quite death I don’t think, but the penalty for disclosure was very severe, jail, federal offense, treason, the whole thing because it was, I don’t know that any one, that a bomb sight was ever lost.  One of the instructions under combat was that if your airplane was in trouble, you had to leave it, bail out of it, was to put 45 revolver holes into the bomb sight to destroy it. 

INTERVIEWER:   So I think you’re in Utah.

SALK:   I’m in Utah.

INTERVIEWER:   Eating at a restaurant.

SALK:   Eating steak and so then…on those salt flats, they had concentric circles that bombardiers train on about 50-100-200 feet.  It had a little wooden house/shack resembling an outhouse in the center so if you hit the shack, it was called a shack, the shack was zero circular error.

INTERVIEWER:   That was the goal, you wanted to hit the shack.

SALK:   Absolutely.  We seldom did.   Then you measured the distance from however you hit these circles.  You had a black powder charge, 97 pounds of sand and 3 pounds of black powder so you could spot the bomb and take a picture of it.  Then you couldn't fudge it.  You showed it to the commanders who rated you.

INTERVIEWER:   Now who was running the pictures?  Was there a separate person who did photography?

SALK:   Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you have to run that too?

SALK:   No, no, I had enough with the bombing and I had a 50-caliber machine gun, a flexible 50-caliber.  Later on, I had a flexible 50-caliber and a not so, partially flexible 30-caliber.  At any rate, we went from Wendover to Pueblo, Colorado for the next phase.  Pueblo, Colorado was the first cement runway any of us had ever seen.  It had a big hump in the middle, sort of a big hump.  So you couldn't gain much air speed until you got over the hump and then you went downhill and you could take off more easily.

That was where we decided that I would be the third pilot in case of an emergency.  That is where I made my first takeoff.  It was almost a disaster.  I had watched the pilot and copilot do their thing for numerous takeoffs and I observed what they did.  When they asked me on this particular day, we were shooting landings, one landing after another, so I sat in the left seat.  We’re on the runway and I took all four throttles and I did what I thought they did.

I moved them forward, but what I didn't observe that they continued to move all four forward and I moved two forward and pulled two back.  So the airplane zigzagged down the runway (laughter).  When it got to about that hump, and I was doing probably 15-20 miles an hour or something, my good friend sitting in the right seat reached over, hit my hand and my knuckles hit the firewall and then we leapt like a scared rabbit off the runway.

Oh he yelled in my ear, “Pull back.”  So I did, I pulled the yolk so it hit me in the chest and that was too far back.  This is almost an Our Gang comedy, but that’s what happened.  Too much was happening to worry about it.  So it leveled off.  From then on for a while, we had me land and takeoff some nice level clouds, 8,000 or 10,000 feet high and we would simulate the landing gear and all that.  We landed on clouds until I got more used to what I was supposed to do.

INTERVIEWER:   But you really had no formal training like they did.  You were just trying to observe. 

SALK:   But I was excited, it was the first time.  It was my responsibility.  All these things so that’s what I did.  So after Pueblo, we saw to it that my pilot, a red-headed fella from Manhattan, got married because his neighbor in New York City had come out to visit him.  Now how she got there, none of us will ever know because you couldn't get transportation.  You couldn't get a taxi cab anywhere in the United States to say nothing of flying from New York to Colorado.  But she did.

I just talked to her last night.  He was reluctant to get married and she didn't say whether she wanted to or not, but it was pretty obvious she did.  So we talked to Arthur was his name, Karp his last name, and everyone knows that Karp is a mud fish and so at Pueblo one afternoon while we had nothing to do and the airplane was about from here to your desk across the street…all the airplanes by this time had a name.  Ours didn't have one.  So we decided after two or three martinis that we ought to name it the Mud Fish.  So we did.

It was Mud Fish I.  We went through I and then II and left our third one there in China.  Let’s see.  We were at Pueblo and they got married around Christmas time in 1942.  He passed away about two months and five days ago in Brunswick, Maine.  We kept in contact for the last 60 years or so.  I talked to his wife several times since he passed away, but called her last night just to keep up with her.

At any rate, we went from Pueblo to Salina, Kansas where we picked up brand new B-24’s, some ferry pilots.  Picked them up at Willow Run in Michigan, the Ford factory and they flew them down to…a whole group of them, 27 brand new B-24’s, they flew them to Salina.  They took our training planes, the ones we had all through Tucson, Wendover, Pueblo, they took them away.  I guess they used them for further training.

These aircraft were loaded with all sorts of accessories and spare parts.  You could almost build another airplane out of all the cargo that these had because I guess they felt it was easier to send it that way than send it around the Cape of Good Hope by ship or something.  The airplanes were going to combat.  We were then given two weeks leave.  We were checked out, we had gone through the training, we had all our equipment, brand new airplanes, D models still.

INTERVIEWER:   Were they in good shape?

SALK:   Oh yeah, fresh, like getting a new car out of the showroom, beautiful, paint was untouched.  No scratches or dents. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did you move your name over to that one?

SALK:   Yes, yes.  Two weeks leave time because we were going overseas.  We didn't know why.  They called a meeting and said we could go anywhere we wanted for two weeks and be back at a given time and a given date.  So a friend of mine and I, he lived on the east coast, decided we would try to get home.  We took a bus to Topeka and it was snowy and dark and cold and bitter, December or early January.  We got a seat on an airplane, but the airplane couldn't take off because the snow was on the wings.

Every couple of hours a group would wander out there with brooms and sweep the wings off.  Finally they swept off the snow that accumulated, we could get out there and get off the ground so we did and landed in New York.  I took a train from New York to Providence, but there were no seats available so I rode in the baggage car literally.

INTERVIEWER:   You might speak to the people about this time.  I mean this is war footing, military everywhere, activity tied to the war. 

SALK:   Traveling was almost impossible, to travel anywhere.  Everything was overcrowded, overbooked.  We’re getting a sense of that now with the terrorist activity and airplanes and waiting time, but it’s just really small by comparison.  As I said, I sat in the baggage car and got to Rhode Island.  The soot and everything from the railroad; I didn't look like much of a soldier when I arrived in Providence.

I was there for just a few days and had to get back.  When I got back to Salina, Kansas, just reversed that route, I went to the barracks where I had departed some 10 days, two weeks before.  There was no one there.  My heart stopped.  There were a couple of men, the area was empty.  There was no furniture, no beds, no nothing; bare, bare barracks where hundreds of men had been when I departed and that was where I was coming back to.

They thought the organization I belonged to was somewhere, they thought, a few streets over.  This friend and I walked there and they were having a meeting.  They were told we were leaving the next day going overseas. 

INTERVIEWER:   But you weren’t late.

SALK:   No, we weren’t late, but we almost missed it by that much.  Anyhow the next day we departed and went to West Palm Beach, Florida, the whole bunch of us to Tamarasin Field.  There we were told we were going to be there for a while so just report for reveille in the morning and you were on your own for the rest of the day.  So we did that for three and a half weeks.

We were given entrée to everything that West Palm had to offer because we were in uniform.  The Sun and Surf Club is the place I remember best.  You had to spell your name Rockefeller or Vanderbilt in order to get in there, but we did.

INTERVIEWER:   (Laughter) But Salk still got you in, right?

SALK:   Right.  So we played tennis and sunned and surfed to our hearts’ content.  We were given per diem too.  I don’t remember exactly, but I think we were given $7 a day and that was a lot of money.  We were making $75 a month.  I’m sorry, we were 2nd lieutenants, $125 a month and $75 flight pay.  Now $7 a day was a lot of money in addition.  So that’s what we did for three and a half weeks, get tan and stay in good physical shape.

Then one day they said we’re leaving tomorrow for Puerto Rico.  So we did leave and landed in Puerto Rico a few hours later.  We were told at first just going to refuel there.  When we got there, they checked us in the barracks and said we were going to be there for a while.  We were there for several days.

There were 27 aircraft crews.  The ground crews on the other hand had gone to California by train and they were going out by ship to wherever.  Back up a minute.  I’m ahead of myself a little bit.  The flying crews are in Puerto Rico.  We thought we were going to refuel and go on our way.  We didn't know where on our way was.  The war had just started, our troops had just landed in North Africa so that thing was just getting going. 

The war was on in Europe of course and we had a lot of airplanes.  So it was an easy deduction that we were going to go to North Africa or Italy or England.  We didn't know what the hold-up was because we were really hot to go.  It was no different than the mentality of our present day.  We just couldn't wait to get going. 

INTERVIEWER:   Well you had been training a long time now.

SALK:   Yes and we had reason, we wanted to go.  We wanted to participate.  We fooled around enough with this training.  We’re on edge now to test it in a sense.  About the third of fourth day after we landed in Puerto Rico, we were called into the base theater.  It was crowded.  We could all just barely fit in there.  After a pause of about five or ten minutes, some figures appeared in front of us and it turned out to be General Hap Arnold who is even today considered the daddy of the Air Force.

He explained and he addressed us.  He explained that he had just returned from China after the breakup of the Casablanca Conference where Chiang Kai-Shek said that he was going to have to drop out of the war.  They had no more resources and was being bombed very heavily without any protection and no help from the allies, that he would have to drop out of the war.  They tried to convince him, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, to stay in, but he wanted some material support.

So they sent Arnold back to China with Chiang Kai-Shek to find out what the situation was and what we could give him to keep him in the war.  Arnold had surveyed what the possibilities were, logistics and he then came back and our commanding officer was a Colonel Eugene Beebe.  Beebe had been Arnold’s administrative pilot in Washington.  In a reward, in a sense, Arnold had given him our group, a group of B-24’s to be commander of that.

As a further reward because he had confidence in him, he decided that this was a group that was going to go to China and keep China in the war.  So he flew a route back to and from China that he wanted us to follow where airplanes had seldom been seen and certain four engine bombers had never been seen anyplace.  So he told us we were going there and he gave us a few tips, like he was wearing mosquito boots and where not to drink water, named a few snakes that we ought not to have much to do with and gave us a general orientation for going to China.

We said China and we all looked at each other.  None of us had even imagined…with the exception of some of them, some had not ever even eaten Chinese food.  China, it can’t compare to anything, I can’t compare the current.  It was like going to the moon.  We just hadn’t heard of it.  You dig a hole straight down, you might get to China, but how do you fly there. 

INTERVIEWER:   And you’re over in the eastern part…

SALK:   Right and with we think we’re headed for North Africa or Europe.  So he gave a very nice orientation speech and the next day…

INTERVIEWER:   So this is the general that came down…

SALK:   General Arnold.

INTERVIEWER:   Wow, not your commander.

SALK:   No, him, in person.  That was a thrill I’ll never forget.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s something.

SALK:   Yeah for a little old 2nd lieutenant who’s looking at a four star general of the Air Corps.  So he was very engaging and very nice about it.  So that’s where we’re going.  Our Colonel Beebe, this fair-haired guy, was in charge.

INTERVIEWER:   Now this Colonel Beebe when you said the head of a unit, he was a pilot with a plane or was he on the ground?  So when you were head of a unit, you also flew with that unit?

SALK:   Oh yeah.  As a matter of fact, even a step further than that, as happenstance would have it, my airplane, the last three numbers, they all have serial numbers, the first two digits of the year was like 42-something, 5 or 6 or 7 digits.  Our last three digits on ours was 308, our bomb group number was 308.  I was the 425th squadron, 308th bomb group.  We had 373rd squadron, 374th squadron, 375th squadron and for reasons unknown, the 425th squadron. 

He was the group commander, all four squadrons were under him.  Because our aircraft had a 308 tail number, he decided he would sit in the left seat and he was driving to China.  So he did.

INTERVIEWER:   So you had Beebe as your …

SALK:   And Cobb had to move into the right seat. 

INTERVIEWER:   And then what happened to your other copilot?

SALK:   He watched.

INTERVIEWER:   He watched!  So he didn't have to lead.  So you were 4th pilot on that plane (laughter). 

SALK:   When we learned we were going to China, we tried to find out where China was by going to the base operations office where they normally kept maps of all flights.  We couldn't get any maps that took us all the way to China.  We did get some maps of some of the places that General Arnold mentioned that he had been to.  So we went to Belem in South America.  First we went to Georgetown, stayed there overnight and went to Belem and left from there and flew to Ascension Island, which is about halfway between South America and Africa.  It’s a lava island.

INTERVIEWER:   Now Belem, I don’t know where that is.

SALK:   Belem is in Brazil.  We landed in Ascension Island after spending one night in Georgetown and few nights in Belem.  Then we went to Natal, Brazil.  We actually departed over the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic out of Natal.  Ascension Island is just a dock, an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.  We burned out a set of brakes on our aircraft because there was no place to park.  The island was so small, it just couldn't accommodate a runway between some hills.

Then the parking area is up on top of one of the hills and trying to go up that steep grade and make a couple of turns, we burned off some brakes.  So we were there for about a week until some aircraft arrived from the States carrying a new set of brakes, which were installed.  But we spent the time to our advantage getting further suntans, which we had lost part of since leaving West Palm Beach and now we were south of the Equator so suntans came very fast.

Then after we left Ascension, we went to the Gold Coast of Africa and spent a few days of breaking coconuts and pineapples and swimming at Accra.  I think it’s now called Ghana.  From there we went to Nigeria for a few days.  Nigeria to Khartoum where the White and the Nile Rivers meet and spent a few days in Khartoum.  Then we went to a place called Salala that very few people have heard of.  It’s near the Egyptian Sudan.  That was an experience in that there was no airstrip.  We landed on the desert.

It was hard pan, but it raised clouds of dust so one airplane could land about every 10 minutes apart so the sand settled back down.  People native to that area brought 50-gallon oil drums and 50-gallon gasoline drums to our airplane and we had to hand crank gasoline into the gas tanks.  We were pretty much out and that’s the only way, they had no automatic way or mechanical way except by cranking by hand.  We did that and after quite a while to get 2700 gallons of gas into the airplane.

INTERVIEWER:   Each plane was 2700 gallons?

SALK:   Yeah.  Then we took off at intervals of about 10 or 15 minutes again because of the sand we kicked up.  We went from there to Aden.  Aden was a British oil port, Yemen, Yemen was not Yemen.  We spent a day or two there as guests of the British Air Force.

INTERVIEWER:   Now this was still the unit of 27 planes or is this even bigger now?

SALK:   No, we went in squadron groups, one squadron at a time about a day or two apart because none of these bases could accommodate us all at once.  We finally wound up in Karachi, India and spent a few days there and then to Agra which was just about in the center of India.

They have a huge depot, American depot, aircraft depot.  It’s the town outside which is the Taj Mahal.  We spent a couple of weeks at Agra getting our planes in good flying condition after a long trip from the States.  It was the first depot we ran into so they were equipped to help us.  From there we went to an airfield called Panaveswa, which is outside of Calcutta and spent about a month there and Calcutta.

We were told we were waiting for them to complete an airfield in China.  When General Arnold had been there, they arranged for the airfield, but the building of it was while we were on route to China.  They were building, actually refurbishing three airfields at three different locations.  One was at Kunming airfield and there was another one at a neighboring town about 30-40 miles away called Yang Kai and then another one, Chiang Kung.  But anyhow, so we had one squadron, headquarter squadron, which is 425th…

INTERVIEWER:   And how many planes would be in that?

SALK:   Seven airplanes, but it was headquarters because that’s where the commanding officer, Colonel Beebe and his staff, headquarter staff in addition to the operational squadron which is the 425th, so it’s 425th headquarters and 425th squadron.  They were attached to the 14th Air Force of course with General Chennault.  The occupied the same building.  There were two other squadrons, 373rd and 374th, went to Yang Kai and 375th went to Chiang Kung.  We were all in a radius of about 40 miles

We learned early that we were, we were at Panaveswa, that was the home of the 10th Air Force.  Tenth Air Force operated out of Panaveswa and they bombed places along the Burma coast and places like Rangoon.  So after a month or so, they told us we were now going to China.  We flew up out of Panaveswa to Assam province.  Assam province is the western slope of the Himalayas.  We refueled at an American airfield at Chabua. 

It was at that point that I didn't feel physically very well.  In fact, I felt very sick.  The airplane parked next to us and had a group, a flight surgeon as a passenger and he was out of his airplane.  After refueling, I told him I wasn’t feeling well.  He pulled my eyelids down and told me I had yellow jaundice.  He gave me an option of staying there and going to an American hospital on the base at Chabua or staying sick and going about a four hour flight to China.

I opted to go on the four hour flight to China, but I wished I hadn’t about halfway there because I was very sick.  I was lying down on the floor and trying not to live cause I couldn't stand living.  We landed in China some four hours later after flying.

INTERVIEWER:   But for you, there wasn’t much memory then.  That was really…

SALK:   No, over the hump first time, none.  I was carried out of the airplane on a stretcher.  I don’t remember anything after that very much for a while.  It must have been a day or two, I woke up in a hospital, a Chinese hospital, in Kunming, somewhere out in the hills. I don’t know where yet.  I couldn't go back, I didn't know where I was. 

Little English was spoken.  There were some American patients, I remember that, airmen and some Chinese nurses.  I didn't see Americans for a few days.  My crew were finally able to commandeer a jeep and some chocolate, solid chocolate bars used for cooking.  They brought some, they got the clue somewhere that that was good for me.  They came and visited, several of them.  I was there for about three weeks.  I couldn't stand the sight of food or the thought of food.  It was impossible.  That’s one of the things, you become completely debilitated with jaundice.

After about three weeks, I started to take nourishment and came back and went back to work.  We learned quickly that we were self-sufficient, that any bombs, gas, pencils, erasers, coffee, anything that came into China, we would bring in whereas the other American troops, some B-25’s and a lot of fighters, P-40’s and some cargo airplanes, C-47’s, the C-47’s would supply them because they couldn't carry enough of a payload to make a worthwhile trip over the hump.

We carried our own gasoline.  We left China with just a sufficient amount of gas to get to India.  Then we’d load up with bombs, gas, oil.

INTERVIEWER:   So you had to ferry back and forth your own supplies.

SALK:   Right.

INTERVIEWER:   Now were you part of the Flying Tigers?

SALK:   Yes, we were called the Flying Tigers.  There’s a line of discrimination, there’s been a debate going on for about 60 to 70 years. The Flying Tigers were the American volunteer group.  Those were the original Flying Tigers.  Then they were assimilated into the Air Corps and the 14th Air Force with Chennault who was the commander of the American volunteer group as well as the commander general now with an American uniform on.  He became a two star general in the Air Corps.  He left the Air Corps years before as a captain or a lieutenant.

So the 14th Air Force was known as the Flying Tigers.  We belonged to an organization called Flying Tiger Association, the 14th Air Force Flying Tiger Association.  So yes, in that respect, yes.  I was not an American volunteer.  That was before my time.  But a lot of them were still there.  They were assimilated.  Some went home.  Some opted to go back to the States and call it a day.  Some opted to stay.  I got to know a lot of the AVG guys.  Some of them were right there in China.  They became part of Chennault’s staff.

One of them, a fella named Vincent, became the commanding general of Qua-Lin.  It’s up near the coast.  It’s that place you see in the movies many times, but probably never noticed.  The entire landscape looks like a hundred inverted ice cream cones.  It’s all hills, then a space between them and then another one over the whole terrain.  Anyway he was made general at 29 years of age.  He was an ex-AVG.  Then the fella that wrote God is my Copilot, Scott, it became a book and then a movie, was there and several others.  One of them I used to have lunch with when I lived in Washington.  He passed away about a year and a half ago.  The only one that I know that is still alive is a retired general.

INTERVIEWER:   So you’re now in China and what’s your job there?

SALK:   My job is a bombardier.

INTERVIEWER:   So you flew mission after mission?

SALK:   We had to fly on average five to six supply missions to fly one bombing mission.

INTERVIEWER:   So let me get this straight.  You had to go back and forth five or six times, then you could fly one bombing mission?

SALK:   Right.

INTERVIEWER:   So how many bombing missions would you fly a month?

SALK:   During the monsoon season, we flew none.

INTERVIEWER:   None, and how long was that?

SALK:   You couldn't see anything.  We were all visual bombings before radar.  If you couldn't see the ground, you can’t bomb.  So during monsoon, which normally lasted a couple of months, we didn't bomb anything, but we did go over the hump.  So it wasn’t five missions, bomb, five missions, bomb.  Sometimes we stockpiled so we could fly four or five missions.

INTERVIEWER:   I see. 

SALK:   At one point we got a little desperate to drop bombs so there was a big supply of Russian built bombs that came along with the airfield at Kunming.  That was gratis.  So we didn't have the ballistic coefficients of the bombs, how they would fall, what they would hit when they fell.  But we managed and we used them up.  On the way to India, we would bomb Japanese encampments along the Mekong River.  These things would do all kings of things.  Some of them would tumble; some would fishtail.  Some of them would hit the target, but we got rid of them.

INTERVIEWER:   Now tell me about…one of the times you went over the hump and you weren’t sick.  What was that like?  That was supposed to be so high up in the air.

SALK:   There were three routes, southern, middle and northern routes.  Depending on the aggressiveness during different periods of time of the Japanese because Japanese had a few airfields on the hump.  For example, Michinau_____.  That was a fairly large city and airfield right in the middle of the Himalayas..  When they had their airplanes in there, they would attack us.  Most of the time they would attack the cargo planes.  We lost hundreds of cargo planes over the hump.

INTERVIEWER:   But you had no fighters with you?

SALK:   No, no.  Gas was precious.  To take care of ourselves we had ten 50-caliber guns.  That didn't mean they couldn't shoot us down, they did occasionally.  Our biggest problem was the weather and the height.  Now the southern route was lower elevation Himalayas, higher as you went north when you get up into Tibet.  So we lost a lot of airplanes over the hump due to weather. 

Example, I remember distinctly 50-caliber gun, you had the breach inside of the airplane and the muzzle obviously outside of the airplane and a gun sight outside the airplane.  I remember distinctly in my mind’s eye flying through a perfectly clear day, flying through a cloud for just a second and having that gun sight, not as big around as my finger, suddenly be about six inches because of the ice that accumulated – that fast.  If you didn't turn on the boots on the wings, there were rubber boots along the fleeting edge of the wing, it would ice up and you wouldn’t fly.  Some airplanes didn't have the icing boots on them.

 We accumulated bombs, gas, oil.  The only food that we brought in was coffee, bags of coffee, that’s all we were allowed to bring back from India.  The first mission we bombed was Hainan Island.

INTERVIEWER:   Clear over on the coast?

SALK:   Off the southeast coast.

INTERVIEWER:   That was quite a few hours to get …

SALK:   It wasn’t too bad.  I think it was about round trip six hours from Kunming.  There was an airfield on the south shore of Hainan Island.  The first mission we flew was a group mission and I don’t recall exactly how many airplanes went on it, about 15.  We crossed the coast around Nanning and we touched the southwest corner of the island and flew along a very beautiful beach, a white beach.  You could see people down there on the beach. 

About halfway across the shore by Hainan airfield, some of us bombed the airfield and some of us bombed oil storage facilities.  Not any one of us had ever seen combat before and we weren’t tutored too well on some aspects of combat flying because the gunners had not even test fired their guns which was a standard procedure.  They didn't even open the waist windows in case the fighters would come up.  You have to open them up and they’re about this big.

So we flew along, we were not attacked by any other airplanes fortunately.  Then we had the gall to circle to see, to ascertain the bomb damage.  Then we went back to China.

INTERVIEWER:   Well they must have been shooting at you at the time.

SALK:   No, there was no opposition.

INTERVIEWER:   No antiaircraft?

SALK:   No antiaircraft, nothing.  As I say it was by the grace of God because we were not prepared for anybody doing anything to us.  We were just on another training mission.  Anyhow, we were sightseeing.  So we bombed places like Kantung, Ting-Ho airfield, White Cloud airfield, from Hong Kong around the docks a couple of times.

INTERVIEWER:   Wow, all the way from Kunming.

SALK:   And we bombed Hankow, ______, ______.  The Hankow mission was the worst of the missions as far as combat losses. 

INTERVIEWER:   Tell us about that if you can.

SALK:   One day in August 24, 1943, three days before that, another squadron had gone to Hankow and lost two aircraft.  The leading aircraft was flown by the squadron commander Major Brady and he was a West Point graduate and he and his crew were shot down.  The operations officer for our group was also a West Point graduate, a classmate of Major Brady’s, his name was Horace Foster.  He was 24 years old.  He decided along with Colonel Beebe at the time, decided that we would go and get those people who had knocked down Brady.

So we were scheduled to fly 14 aircraft with fighter escort out of Hanyang____ which is about halfway to Hankow.  We took off and left Kunming, seven of us, and we flew over Yangkai____ where the other planes were supposed to come up and join us, seven more, a total of 14.  They didn't take off.  They said they had bad weather and that’s been a subject of controversy for a lot of years because I saw them on the ground through the clouds.  There were some clouds, but I could see them.  They weren’t taking off.

So my crew was not assigned to go on this mission, but as luck would have it, the squadron bombardier became sick during the night and Major Foster asked me if I wanted to go in his place with a crew.  He took over a crew.  He didn't have his own because he was a desk officer with wings.  I said that I would like to go so I did.

INTERVIEWER:   You weren’t flying on your Mudfish?

SALK:   No, we were flying Scherazade.

INTERVIEWER:   He’s holding up a book that’s called China, Up and Down by John T. Foster which repeats much of this story.  Here’s the front of that particular aircraft. 

SALK:   The crew of the Scherazade tried to be cultured, but they misspelled Scheherazade.  At any rate …

INTERVIEWER:   Did your fighters come along or not?

SALK:   Well yes and no.  We crossed Hiang-Yang___ which is an advanced fighter field closer to Japanese hill territory.  Anyhow when we crossed Yangkai_____, I better back up, of course they had to make a decision whether to go on to the target minus seven bombers or not.  They decided to go. Then we got to Hiang-Yang____ and we couldn't see any fighters.  So the second time a decision had to be made if we were to go on without fighters and they decided yes, we’d go.

So we did.  Halfway between Hiang-Yang____ and Hankow, and Hankow is a very big installation and there was a staging area for fighter planes out of Japanese through Hankow down into Formosa at that time.

INTERVIEWER:   The South Pacific.

SALK:   Right, the South Pacific, staging through.  So they had about 135 fighters.  So we proceeded down.  Halfway through, we did get some fighters to join us including four P-38’s which we had never seen before.  We had read about them, but we’d never seen them.

INTERVIEWER:   These are a new model?

SALK:   Yeah, they were beautiful, lightning aircraft. 

INTERVIEWER:   So how many fighters were probably with you?

SALK:   I think there were ten fighters.

INTERVIEWER:   Ten fighters and seven bombers.

SALK:   Including one of the fighters was an All-American football player, Tom _____ was in one of the P-38’s.  I don’t know if you know of him.

INTERVIEWER:   Yeah, he’s an announcer too.

SALK:   He was All American Michigan and he lost a B-25 he was the pilot of in the Amazon jungles on the way to China.  He lost his crew.  He was the only survivor.  I don’t know how he got from there to China, but he did in a P38 because there was no B-25 available to him.

Anyhow so now we get to…we had a B-25 squadron who was going to hit Uchang___ which is just across the river from Hankow and saw them pull off because they were much faster than we were and turn off and go into Uchang____.  Our target was a runway, an intersection of two runways in Hankow.  I led the mission.  I dropped the bombs.  There was one big cloud in the way, but I was able to interpolate between the end of the runway, ends of the runway.  I could see and went in between.  Just as we released the bomb, we were hit by what later Chinese intelligence told us was 40 to 60 fighters.

INTERVIEWER:   Forty to sixty!

SALK:   And we couldn't see them all at one time.

INTERVIEWER:   Were they waiting for you?  They had to be waiting for you.

SALK:   No, we saw them taking off.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh, did you?

SALK:   We saw the dust and commotion down there through my bomb site as I was making this bomb run.  These guys were getting airborne.  So just as we turned off the target and started to leave, we were hit by 40 to 60 of them.  At the very first pass, we were flying in B formations, two B’s, one behind the other, one on our left went down, started down.  He had an engine out and we could see three or four parachutes come out.

Then they slipped underneath us and fell back.  We slowed down our air speed as much as possible to see if we could try to get him to stay in formation, but he couldn't.  Within a few minutes, we lost two more.

INTERVIEWER:   Out of seven.

SALK:   Yes. 

INTERVIEWER:   And what was happening to your own fighter pilots?  They were up against how many too.

SALK:   You get right to the nub of the problem.  We didn't see them and we were firing and these people were making passes at us regularly.  What they did, if I can describe their tactics, they flew in elements of two.  There were two out of our firing range distance off each wing constantly.  They would fly ahead.  They’d look at us, we could feel them looking at us, then they’d peel off and fly straight on because our most vulnerable place was nose head on and they knew that.

So these two would come in and make a head-on pass and then they’d peel off and they’d be replaced by two more and they kept coming like that constantly.  I have a 50-caliber, at that time I had a 30-caliber down on the floor trying to stop them.  A 30-caliber is not very effective for an air fighter.  So we lost a total of three and this lasted 45 minutes.  It was constant. 

Just as we thought we might be rid of them, that they’d run out of ammunition and fuel, one last guy made a pass at us.  Nobody saw him and he killed my pilot and he knocked out, put holes in our fuel line.  The copilot was injured by the same projectile that hit the pilot.  The pilot was hit in the head with a 20mm, Horace Foster.  The copilot whose name was Don Kochek, got flack in the side of his face.  It looked like he had the measles, he had holes all over his face from the shrapnel.  It came through the windshield.

It knocked out hydraulics, put a hole in the oil well of one of the engines and hit the gas lines so gas spewed all over the bomb bay.  Anyhow I heard all this in the phone.  I came up on the flight deck.  I could see the condition of Foster and one of the other airmen came up.  We lifted him out of the seat and laid him down on the floor.  He was still alive.  I got in the left seat.  Incidentally Foster is a big man and he was heavy, but we managed to…there isn’t much room like in an automobile, you don’t have much room.

INTERVIEWER:   Was this his son then who wrote this story?

SALK:   No, this fella…

INTERVIEWER:   This is a Foster too so I just didn't know.

SALK:   We had three Fosters involved in this episode.  This Foster, he was a replacement.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s alright, keep going with the story.  So he was a contemporary who wrote this?

SALK:   Yes.

INTERVIEWER:   So you’re up front, you’ve moved him aside.

SALK:   And I got into the left seat because the gas fumes, we were all punchy.  We were all overwhelmed to varying degrees by the fumes of the gas.  So we’re getting almost unconscious.  The gas line that was hit was in the bomb bay and as I said it was like a fire hose, the pressure of the gas was spewing all over.  We were afraid to open the doors to get rid of the fumes because a spark would have made us a flying bomb.  So we couldn't open the bomb bay doors which would normally give you all the fresh air you could want.

We left them closed.  The copilot was okay because he had this hole in the windshield…

INTERVIEWER:   And he was still functioning.

SALK:   Yes and now all navigation aids, compasses are all shot out.  Everything is gone and now about a half hour passes.  We are starting to recover and recoup and getting a little fresh air through that hole.  Now we don’t know where we are in China.  We know we’re in China, but we don’t where for sure.

INTERVIEWER:   And the rest of the planes are gone?

SALK:   Yeah, the formation just broke up.  I glanced over and what we forgot during this excitement was that we had a third pilot aboard, a Chinese, who was being checked out in B-24’s to be a third pilot.  He was…we had a water cooler on the flight deck like a regular office water jug, and he was in an embryonic condition sitting by the water cooler.  So I managed to manhandle him into the left seat.  At least he had flown airplanes.  He was a pilot for the Chinese Air Force. 

So I got him into the left seat and I went back to the nose to try to help the navigator find out where we were.  We decided if we kept flying that we would cross a rail line someplace in that part of the world.  If we got that rail line, and we did eventually.  Then we had a choice of turning left or right.  On that rail line, it showed a very small airfield Hanyang where the fighters allegedly were supposed to have come from.  So that’s the airfield, but which way.

INTERVIEWER:   So you never did see these fighters that were with you?

SALK:   Yes, they were in and out of us on the way to Hanyang and Hong Kong.

INTERVIEWER:   But in the battle itself, never did see them?

SALK:   Therein lies another tale.

INTERVIEWER:   Well let’s keep going then.  You’re now…finally found the rail line.

SALK:   So we decided we’ll turn right, that’s sounds right.  There’s no sun.  It was overcast.  We couldn't tell where in the heck we were.  We did, after a while, see an airfield, a little bitty strip.  We didn't know if it was Japanese or American.  So we decided with cool heads to buzz it and see what kind of airplanes they had before we did anything silly like landing which could be fatal.

So we did buzz it.  There were some P-40’s sitting there.  We landed, we had an engine out.  Oh, the gas leak.  Back up to that. By the grace of God, and God had to be in on this, we took some just ordinary almost household friction tape and wound it around, aluminum soaking wet with gasoline, slimy, and wound it around and it held.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my gosh.  Otherwise you would have been completely out of gas.

SALK:   Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:   And how much did you have when you landed I wonder.  Did you ever check that?

SALK:   I don’t know.  I have no idea. I’ll tell you why in a minute.  That was a nicety.  We were past niceties.  We landed.  This was a fighter field where the fighters had taken off from, the ones that did show up.  The copilot and I decided that we were going to kill a couple of fighter pilots.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh geez, you were mad.

SALK:   Yes, more than mad because Horace had been lifted out of the airplane and taken to a hospital in town.  We knew that he didn't stand a chance of living.  He did die at about midnight that night, but he hadn’t died at this point.  He was in the hospital.  There was an American doctor in that hospital in this town of Hanyang.  We had _____, we wore one to sleep to bed at night, we were up 24 hours a day.  That’s the way we felt.  We were up to it and the proper frame of mind and all the motivation in the world to do just that.  I wanted to very badly.

We ran into some of the pilots and after we called them some dirty words, dirty names, they explained something that modified our feeling to an extent.  We didn't kill them, but were prepared to do it.  They said that…they were the ones that first told us there must have been 40, 50, 60 fighters and they became engaged.  I said they modified it because they were not supposed to become engaged.  Their job was to escort us, not to go fight, set any Olympic records by trying to get their ace killed.  They were supposed to escort us at all costs.

INTERVIEWER:   Yeah but they didn't have much choice, did they, if somebody attacks you?

SALK:   Well that’s the debate.  Their primary job, after all is said and done, all the arguments, etc., is that they’re not supposed to leave us.

INTERVIEWER:   But they did.

SALK:   But they did.  Now whether that resulted in more lost airplanes, I don’t know. 

INTERVIEWER:   Do you know later if they lost people out of their contingent?

SALK:   No, they didn't. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did they feel like they did get some zeroes?

SALK:   Yeah, I can’t tell you how many.  I know I got one and a half, that much I can testify to.  One guy made a mistake of turning a little too fast.  He was sitting like this and you could have hit him with a baseball bat.  So I did hit him.  Another one made a pass and I was shooting and the top turret gun was shooting, so we split him.

INTERVIEWER:   How did you get back then?

SALK:   We’re at Hanyang and they worked on our plane at night.  What they did to fix the oil well leak was to stuff some rags in it.  I don’t know what they did about the gas line.  From a practical matter, they told us that we had to get out of there before daylight because the Japanese would know by this time there was a B-24 sitting within a few miles of where the Japanese airfields are and they would come.  They could defend themselves fairly well, but they wanted to get our airplane out.

So they took some logs of trees and they put them under the main gear.  We started up that engine that had the oil leak that had been feathered, took 55 inches of ______ pressure, all the power it would take forward because it was a fighter dirt strip with trees at the end of the runway.  Not very long, I can’t tell you how long, but about 4,000 or 3,500 feet of dirt.

For all the power the airplane would take, all the engine power, it took whole gangs of guys had ropes, they pulled out these ______, we leapt forward.  We got off the ground and as soon as we got airborne, they cut off that engine with the oil problem, so we could start it up again for landing, for a safer landing.

INTERVIEWER:   So you flew at that point on how many, three engines?

SALK:   Yeah, they feathered the damaged one and we flew back that way.  One of these airplanes that survived the fight landed at the original recovery base which was Kua-Lin to spend the night, refuel and go back.  That was the flight plan.  Only one of us ever made it back, to take it back.  One of the seven made it back there.

INTERVIEWER:   The regular way, the planned way.

SALK:   Right.  Now they were met by a Captain Foster who was an intelligence officer who was at Kua-Lin waiting to debrief all seven crews.  So after he debriefed the one crew, he got on it to hitch a ride back to Kunming.  That airplane hit a mountain and killed everybody on it including that Foster.

INTERVIEWER:   Wow, interesting.

SALK:   And this Foster that wrote this book, he arrived in China about  two or three days before this mission and he was sent on this mission.  He had to sit in the right seat because the squadron commander wanted to go on this mission, Major Ellsworth.  They got shot up very badly.  This is his airplane, over here.

Now I did all this from memory which amazed Foster.  I don’t know how I did it either, how I described this to be honest because this is him up here.  I’m ahead of him and he said how the hell did you know that this happened.  I said I didn't see him, I don’t know.  I just told the artist that there was an airplane over on that side of the formation.

Anyhow he bailed out and he had trouble bailing out because the airplane was on fire.  The bomb bay was all aflame.  That’s the normal way to go, the accepted way to go through the sliding door, like you would open this door.  It slides up and down, step in the bomb bay, open the bomb bay doors and just drop out.  That was on fire so he couldn't.  So he had to go up a hatch about this big on top of the airplane.  He couldn't get out the first try because he had the parachute on and he couldn't get him and the parachute out that small opening.

So he started to let himself back into the airplane.  It was about to explode any minute, any second.  He described it in this book, but he told me in person, that he felt a hand on his heel and he heard the words, “Try again”.  He did and this fella on the flight deck, the top turret gunner, pushed him out and he slid along the fuselage and he just missed the tail.  He wasn’t hurt. 

A couple of other people in the crew from way back in the airplane bailed out.  The one that pushed him out went down with the airplane, Major Ellsworth went down with the airplane.  He sat in the seat and everybody got out, but he didn't.  The airplane exploded.

INTERVIEWER:   Do you think these Fosters were related or was that just a coincidence?

SALK:   Just a coincidence.  This is John T. Foster who is up in New Hampshire.  He and several survivors were saved by some Chinese.  It took up 10 days or two weeks or something.  If you read this book, this part that defies imagination.  This fella Foster went to China as a baby with his missionary parents and they’re both doctors and they lived in the village of American missionaries in Chang-Cia which is not far from Hanyang. 

When he got shot down, the guerillas, the Chinese, walked him out, they walked him through Chang-Cia where he’s met by the babysitter, the Chinese woman who took care of him for several years when he was a little boy.  He met her, reacquainted with her.  They took him back to the airfield and flew him back to Kunming and immediately evacuated back to the States because once you’ve been helped by the underground, they don’t want these people to be shot down again and tell the Japanese who helped them.  To save all that, they sent him back immediately.

I never did know him in China.  Now I arrived back in Kunming a couple of weeks before he does and I’m sent to India almost immediately.  It had nothing to do with this mission necessarily, but a routine being sent down to Bangala, India.  I assumed that these guys are all gone, they’re all dead.  I pick up my friendly publication from the 14th Air Force Flying Tiger Association.  There’s a note in there that says anyone that was on the Hankow mission this date and remembers anything about it, please call me with a telephone number.

Well it’s Foster.  So I pick up the phone and I called, “What are you doing alive”.  So he came down to Washington and spent a couple of weeks going through the archives, going through everything.  I talked him into writing the book.  I had this picture hanging on my wall, a picture of the cover of the book.  I had a photographer take pictures of the picture.

INTERVIEWER:   Can we have about five minutes about what Kunming was like because they’re very few people who were there at that time.  I mean there’s only several thousand American flyers that even ever went through there.  So this is a city in 1944?

SALK:   Got there in January of ’43.

INTERVIEWER:   And you were there for how long?

SALK:   I was there 15 months.  I flew 57 missions.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s over the hump and bombing?

SALK:   And bombing for which I received the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, Purple Heart.  I was on one mission where antiaircraft hit me in the arm and knocked me over.

INTERVIEWER:   What was Kunming like?

SALK:   Kunming, the best way I know to try to bring it home to you it’s like a city in the wild west might have been before the train tracks were laid to the west.  People didn't walk on sidewalks.  They walked in the street and they were shoulder to shoulder.  There were thousands of them.  There was little civilization.  These people were from western China and the Himalayas and they were mountain people.

They wore leather hats and they wore leather type clothes.  Their skin was hard like leather.  They were very primitive.  It was extremely unsanitary and extremely odiferous.  It was sickening to walk down the street.  If you had the courage to eat there, which I did once or twice, you paid a very high price for it. 

INTERVIEWER:   But were they friendly to you folks?

SALK:   Oh yes, they loved us.  They loved us.

INTERVIEWER:   And had people come from all over the region to get away from the Japanese?  Is that why there were so many?

SALK:   I don’t know.

INTERVIEWER:   But there were lots and lots of people. 

SALK:   They were bombed almost into oblivion.  It was like the pictures you see of Chiang-Hai. 

INTERVIEWER:   Really?  So the Japanese, did they not tackle your base too?

SALK:   Oh yes, we were bombed several times.  Fortunately we were building up our strength and our fighters were doing a very good job of handling them.  Before that, it was open season.  They had no defense whatsoever.  That’s amongst the reasons why Chiang Kai-Shek couldn't fight anymore.  He was getting whipped badly.  There were no opposition for the Japanese. 

INTERVIEWER:   So you spent most of your time flying it sounds like.  You didn't have too much break time.  You were in the plane flying, flying.

SALK:   Did a lot of flying, but the Americans like everywhere they go, they probably have official bowling alleys in Afghanistan now (laughter).  We had outdoor movies.  We had softball, a basketball team.  We played the local university basketball several times.  We played cards, we sang, we amused ourselves.  A lot of it was boring between flights.  There was very little reading material.  There was no outside entertainment except an occasional movie.  There was a bar set up in what was thought of as a day room or an officers’ club.

INTERVIEWER:   By this point, had you been promoted to a higher rank?

SALK:   First lieutenant.

INTERVIEWER:   Now we have about five minutes left.  When did you finally leave?  Was the war over?  Did you finally get a break from this?  You’ve been in now for four years or more.

SALK:   Well in China unlike some of the other theaters of war, had no limit on the number of missions.  In Europe for example, early in the war, you flew 25 missions and you rotated back to the States unless you asked to stay.  Our rotation was based on availability of crews.  If we had more crews than airplanes, then someone went home.  If we had more airplanes than crews, you stayed until more crews arrived.  So there was no end to it, it was open-ended.  Finally there came that day, in my case, where we had an extra crew.  Now at that time I could go home.

INTERVIEWER:   And you flew that last time back to India, that’s the only way to get home.

SALK:   Right.

INTERVIEWER:   And then you did that complete long flight.

SALK:   Back to Miami and then flew to New York.

INTERVIEWER:   By this time though, this was ’45 by now, right?

SALK:   It was April ’44.

INTERVIEWER:   And did they let you go finally?

SALK:   No, no, because Japan was still in the war.  VE Day had come and gone, but VJ Day had not arrived yet.  So they were training, reassigning people and I didn't know if I was going to be reassigned.  No our central redistribution center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, there was one in Miami and one in Atlantic City.  The west coast had their own. 

So they redistributed everybody that came home and they redistributed me to Midland, Texas.  I fought that, but I lost.  I said it before, rather than go to Midland, I’d just as soon go back to China and do it again.  I had read magazine articles that said that combat veterans could select a place of their choice and I believed it.  I wanted to go to intelligence school in Pennsylvania.  They said that’s nice to know, you’re going to Midland, Texas and train people.

INTERVIEWER:   I wondered if you were going to be a trainer then.  And how much longer did you stay in?

SALK:   Six years, all together six years.

INTERVIEWER:   Six years as an active pilot.

SALK:   Bombardier and then I went to school and I became triple rated.  I had two ratings in addition to bombardier.  I became a navigator, celestial and all other means, several other types of navigation, and a radar bombardier using not just visual means, but radar means of bombing because the later aircraft, the B-17, B-36, B-52, all used triple rated men. 

INTERVIEWER:   Last question for you.  You stayed in the military.

SALK:   27 years.

INTERVIEWER:   So if someone asked you about your service, is your answer that you were glad you went to serve, you’re proud to be of service?

SALK:   Very much so.  It had to do with my personal feeling and reflection of my roots.  You’re the first one I’ve said this to, because of my family.  My family came from Czarist Russia and being of my faith and background, to become an officer of the United States military, the thinking is so different in Russia and Europe, so I was very proud.  My parents were very proud of me.  I was very proud that they were proud.

INTERVIEWER:   Well thank you very much.