Interview of Robert C. Newman
Transcript Number 345

May 6, 2003

Interviewer: Today is May 6, part of the World War II interview series. My name is Sherman Hayes, university librarian at UNCW. Today we're interviewing Robert C. Newman, Jr., who goes by Bob.

Interviewer: Welcome Bob, thanks for coming in.

Newman: Glad to do it.

Interviewer: We usually start out these interviews to get a sense of where were you at just before you joined the service? What was happening? What was your life like?

Newman: Well, I grew up on a farm in Virginia during the Depression. Some days, hot days in the summer, I would be fathering a mule behind the plow in the cornfield and see an airplane flying over and I thought there had to be something better than this.

Interviewer: And where was that in Virginia?

Newman: It was near Lynchburg, Campbell County, Virginia. World War II came along and gave me a chance to get a shot at pilot training.

Interviewer: Now you were in the high school then at that point. Did you graduate?

Newman: I had graduated from high school and had gone to Washington and worked in the FBI as a file clerk making $1440 a year.

Interviewer: So you were now out of school and you were a clerk in the FBI. That's fascinating. For how long did you do that then?

Newman: About six months and this other pimply faced kid from Iowa and I were the only men in our division so we thought that we needed to get into the service and we went down and took the aviation cadet exam.

Interviewer: What's the date and year that this was happening?

Newman: I guess that would have been in January of 1943.

Interviewer: So the war had been going on.

Newman: It had been going on for about a year and a half.

Interviewer: And you were watching I guess a lot of people you knew heading into the service.

Newman: Oh yeah, a lot of my high school classmates had already gone in.

Interviewer: So you were working for the FBI, but that might have been an exempt status, right?

Newman: Not at my level (laughter). An interesting side light on that, this fella and I lived in a boarding house with 40 women and we didn't realize we were in paradise, but we spent all weekends riding the buses and streetcars around Washington which you could do for a $1.25 a week just to get away from those girls. So you can see...

Interviewer: You were young (laughter). Now when you came back from the war, you would have been willing to come back to those 40 women (laughter).

Newman: My view had changed somewhat.

Interviewer: So you were in Washington, D.C. Is that where you signed in then, was in Washington, D.C. or was it in Virginia.

Newman: I took the test in Washington, D.C., but I went home for about a month and left from home in Virginia and went to Miami, Florida and went through basic training.

Interviewer: Well tell me a little bit about that. This is Army basic training?

Newman: Army basic training. It was really not bad at all. We lived in hotels on the beach.

Interviewer: You're kidding.

Newman: That's right and most of the people that went into the Air Corps at that time went through basic training down on the beach.

Interviewer: In Miami, Florida?

Newman: Miami Beach, Florida.

Interviewer: And they took over ...

Newman: Took over a bunch of hotels. We were living it up.

Interviewer: Did you have any off time at all though? I mean it would be pretty strenuous activity.

Newman: It was a pretty full day. But I actually got into the cadet program after basic training. The schools, the flying schools were sort of backlogged so they sent a bunch of people back to various universities and colleges throughout the country. I was lucky enough to go to the University of Vermont in July and August for a month.

Interviewer: As long as it's July and August.

Newman: It was great. We took courses at the university and I remember one course we took was first aid taught by a professor in the medical school there at the university. He got pretty detailed. In fact one day he came in and said we were going to go down to the cadaver lab and see some of the things we'd been talking about in anatomy. So we went down and he started pulling out these trays of cadavers. He reached on one and pulled the skin back and the ribs were there and he pulled the heart out.

Interviewer: Oh my gosh.

Newman: And then we went down to lunch the next class and guess what these had for lunch? Spareribs. So the whole squad just stood at 180 and left the mess hall, no appetite.

Interviewer: Now what city was that in?

Newman: Burlington, right on Lake Champlain, beautiful.

Interviewer: So far your locations have been very good.

Newman: Oh yeah. Went from there to preflight at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

Interviewer: That's still a base, isn't it.

Newman: Still a very important base.

Interviewer: Was that the major training center for much of the country at that point too?

Newman: The country was divided, if I remember correctly, in three geographical area and that was called the Southeast Flying Training. I believe there was a central one and a western one. Maxwell was the southeast.

Interviewer: You arrived there in about August then or September?

Newman: August.

Interviewer: Pretty hot territory.

Newman: Yeah, non-air conditioned barracks.

Interviewer: But from Virginia, you were probably pretty comfortable with that.

Newman: Oh yeah. That lasted about a couple of months and then we went to primary flying school which was the first phase.

Interviewer: So all of these moves so far you still haven't started the actual flight.

Newman: No, the training at Maxwell were around school classes and theory of flight. We had to take Morse code and become proficient. That almost washed me out. I just couldn't get Morse code. One day all of a sudden it just came to me.

Interviewer: Oh that's good. Now did you feel like it was really a thorough serious training here?

Newman: Well I did. I have to go back a little bit. Before World War II and even up the first year or so, to be a pilot you had to be a college graduate. The requirement for such large numbers, they gradually dropped that down to two years of college and then no college as long as you passed the screening test.

Interviewer: So it was pretty rigorous exercise, hours of day in the classroom. What would be a typical day in Alabama for you?

Newman: Classes from about 8:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon. Then two hours of rigid physical training including obstacle courses and all kinds of things. Then that ended at 5:00 and you'd have 30 minutes to get into class A uniform for a full dress parade every afternoon, retreat parade. It was a pretty long day.

Interviewer: Then they expected you to study that night too?

Newman: That's right and they had lights out at 10:00 and that was rigidly enforced.

Interviewer: And your instructors were pilots that were coming back?

Newman: No, these were not pilots yet. These were just academic instructors.

Interviewer: So next from Alabama, you go to?

Newman: Primary flying school in Camden, Arkansas. All of the primary flight schools were run by civilians under contract with one or two military officers who did the check rides.

Interviewer: Interesting, I didn't know that. That was throughout the whole country?

Newman: As far as I know, yes.

Interviewer: So you were really getting a private license kind of training.

Newman: Well it was much more extensive than a private license. If I remember correctly, we got about 75 or 80 flying hours in small single engine airplanes.

Interviewer: And the instructor would go up with you. What would be a comparable one today, a small Piper Cub or something like that?

Newman: Probably a Cessna 150 or something like that.

Interviewer: What was the plane that you actually flew?

Newman: It was a PT-19, Fairchild, low wing, open cockpit, tandem cockpit.

Interviewer: So the instructor is behind you then. Can you hear them in that thing at all?

Newman: We had a crude intercom system. They called it a _____, it was actually just a tube that struck us both through.

Interviewer: I mean it was loud, the engine's right in front of you.

Newman: Into your headset, he spoke into your headset.

Interviewer: And where did you stay then?

Newman: The government had built little dormitories. If I remember right, there were maybe 200 cadets on one of these stations.

Interviewer: Now you're getting right in the plane and flying every day?

Newman: That's right, again ground school half a day and flying half a day, flip-flop. One week you'd do in the afternoon and the next week in the morning.

Interviewer: Now tell me how you were feeling about this time. You'd seen that plane and thought it looked okay. Are you still excited about it?

Newman: Oh yeah, everybody had a white scarf and a helmet. We thought we were really hot stuff.

Interviewer: (Laughter) But I doubt if any of those 40 women were there in the middle of Arkansas (laughter).

Newman: No, no, not many. I went to a Methodist church one Sunday and this family invited me for lunch. It turned out they had a daughter that was about my age and we became sort of friends and dated several times. Her father was the town undertaker and he had the contract for all of the crash victims that occurred in the flying school. He used to look at me with a longing in his eyes (laughter).

Interviewer: But unfortunately there were crash victims?

Newman: Oh yes. I remember the saddest incident. One of our fellow cadets had his girlfriend come down and they got married and they had a military wedding. I was one of the people in the wedding. We had the lifted swords that they marched under. This was on Saturday and Monday morning he got killed in a flight. I'll never forget, his name was Philip Gross.

Interviewer: Then I wondered if you ever tracked those 200, how many of them made it through World War II. I mean pilots were not a ...

Newman: Well the washout rate in the school was fairly high. I would say maybe 25% washed out in that phase and then we go to the next phase in basic and there'd be about close to the same washout rate.

Interviewer: So by the time you're done...

Newman: Probably 50% would be what you started out with.

Interviewer: And those people, they got shunted into all other kinds of occupations in the Army?

Newman: Yeah, they were still enlisted, not officer status so generally they would go off to gunnery school or radio school, mechanics school, something like that.

Interviewer: Okay, the first one was primary and now we're in basic flight, is that what you called it?

Newman: Basic flight and this was a little larger airplane, BT-13 it was called.

Interviewer: Now you're still in Arkansas.

Newman: Still in Arkansas, at Walnut Ridge. The Walnut Ridge population was 400. This was the only place that nobody ever wanted to go off post cause there wasn't anything to do.

Interviewer: I wonder why they picked that. Do they just have a good airfield?

Newman: Well it was good level country. The weather was generally good and I suppose the Arkansas congressional delegation at that time had a lot of influence (laughter). Senator Fulbright was a key figure in those days.

Interviewer: You're right, I bet you're right. Everybody shares (laughter). So now same pattern, half a day, but a bigger plane.

Newman: That's right and near the end of that phase, your instructor made a recommendation whether you should go to advanced single engine or multi-engine. He was a hot fighter pilot type instructor. The instructors now are all military. This is all military, the whole school. The other two students, the instructor had three students, the other two wanted to be fighter pilots. I told him I wanted to go to bombers and he just couldn't understand that. He said okay, if you want to be a truck driver, I will recommend you.

An interesting side light, when I got overseas and became a lead crew, guess who showed up as a copilot, my basic instructor.

Interviewer: You're kidding. This same guy?

Newman: Same guy.

Interviewer: As a bomber copilot?

Newman: Yeah, the war, you know, the end was not too far down the road and they were closing down flight schools and just sending these instructors wherever they needed them.

Interviewer: He wasn't your copilot was he?

Newman: Not mine, but I did let him remember what he said. So I went to advanced twin engine and that was in Blytheville, Arkansas. Graduated from that.

Interviewer: Yeah, we've been going many weeks now. When did you finally graduate? What was that about?

Newman: June 27, 1944. Each of those flying schools were roughly two months.

Interviewer: So you're cranking through pretty fast, but this is complex stuff. This is all instrument training?

Newman: We had a very basic instrument training in basic and advanced. Of course that consisted of putting a hood over the cockpit so that the student couldn't see out.

Interviewer: Did you do night training too?

Newman: We had night training. We had to do blackout landings at night.

Interviewer: Now are you actually onto engine bombers at this stage?

Newman: No, this is a twin engine trainer that was 450 horsepower if I remember right. It was an all metal airplane made by Curtis Aircraft Company.

Interviewer: When you finally got the real thing, did you feel like it was a drastic shift or was it still good training?

Newman: Well I felt well qualified. Of course we just went into a much larger airplane, the B-17. Instead of two sets of instruments, you had four. That took a little adjustment, but not too difficult.

Interviewer: Now were you working with a copilot in the training or was it only with the instructor?

Newman: Only with the instructor in advanced except we did have solo flights where we swapped off being pilot and copilot.

Interviewer: Two students you mean?

Newman: Yes, two students. In fact I guess about a fourth of the training was that way, solo, two students.

Interviewer: So you're a very accomplished pilot by this point.

Newman: Well I wouldn't go that far (laughter). When we finished advanced, I guess we had about 150 hours of flying time total.

Interviewer: So now you're done and ready to go and be assigned.

Newman: Ready to go through B-17 transition. This again was just pilots only, no crews. I did that a Sebring Field, Florida.

Interviewer: Back to Florida.

Newman: Yeah, got about 100 hours in the B-17 and went to Rapid City, South Dakota and my crew was already formed. Everybody was there waiting for me.

Interviewer: Interesting, they were all new to the process?

Newman: They had been through their respective specialty training, the navigator, the bombardier.

Interviewer: Okay, let's talk about that. What would be a normal crew on a B-17.

Newman: 10.

Interviewer: Ten people.

Newman: Ten people, pilot, copilot, navigator, bombardier, radio operator, flight engineer who also served as a top turret gunner, left and right waste gunners, bald turret gunner, bald turret under the belly and the tail gunner.

Interviewer: And the gunners, what other duties did they have besides guns? Just maintaining those guns and keeping them ready to go or were there other internal jobs that they had?

Newman: Well their primary purpose of course on the mission was to be gunners. They were responsible for loading their guns before missions, cleaning them after, taking them out of the airplane and storing them.

Interviewer: And the only two people that could really fly the plane were pilot and copilot. Were the bombardiers or any of the others...

Newman: Technically only the pilot and copilot. I made it a practice to put each one of my crew members in the right seat doing crew training and make them ride through a landing with the idea if I were disabled, at least they might have a reasonable chance of getting the airplane on the ground.

Interviewer: And I bet that happened sometimes too.

Newman: Yeah, it did happen sometimes. I think there are several instances where non-pilots were able to at least make a semblance, a crash landing.

Interviewer: Alright, so how long were you there then in Florida for this kind of an orientation?

Newman: I think another two months. I got to Rapid City in September. I remember that because we had a blizzard on the 27th of September that paralyzed the base for about two days.

Interviewer: Then you went to Florida. It wasn't too bad there then.

Newman: No, we went from Florida to South Dakota.

Interviewer: Oh, you went to South Dakota to get your crew training. Did it melt then?

Newman: Yeah, it didn't stay on the ground very long, but it was a blizzard.

Interviewer: Rapid City, I have flown into Rapid City. That is a terrible, terrible area to fly in. Did you have troubles, isn't that in the middle of a valley where you come down...

Newman: No, it's pretty flat country.

Interviewer: Not too bad. Maybe it was another part of South Dakota. I mean there are some parts of South Dakota where it's pretty hilly territory.

Newman: Rushmore was the highest place around.

Interviewer: These crew men just came from everywhere and anywhere then?

Newman: That's right. All my gunners were 18 and 19 years old. Of course I was only 19 myself.

Interviewer: I was wondering about that.

Newman: My navigator was 19.

Interviewer: Had you just turned 20 at this point?

Newman: I had just turned 20 in August.

Interviewer: So you were the old man at 20?

Newman: Well the old man was the bombardier, he was 23. He was married and incidentally he passed away this year. My navigator was 19. I'll interject a sad note here. He and his wife were murdered in their home in California in January of last year by their grandson who was on drugs.

Interviewer: Oh no.

Newman: My wife and I had been out there about nine months before and visited them. It was a closed gated community and the grandson, I guess had a pass. He was looking for drug money.

Interviewer: Did they catch him?

Newman: Yeah, I don't know what happened.

Interviewer: Go through the war and then later something like that. That's just weird. Now were you the commanding officer? By pilot you were in essence...

Newman: I was designated as the plane commander.

Interviewer: And what rank were you at this point?

Newman: 2nd lieutenant.

Interviewer: Okay, the plane that you got to work with, did that become your plane at this point?

Newman: When we finished our crew training at Rapid City, we were sent to Lincoln, Nebraska and picked up a brand new airplane that had five flying hours on it.

Interviewer: Where was it made? Probably California?

Newman: It was Boeing, I'm not sure which factory. Actually probably a lot of people don't know this, but General Motors was making airplanes for Boeing. They built B-17's and Ford Motor Company was making B-24's for Consolidated Aircraft.

Interviewer: Is that right?

Newman: Yeah, I'm not sure where mine was made. But I remember the total cost, $357,000.

Interviewer: That was real money, that was expensive and they handed it to a 20 year old and said...

Newman: Go.

Interviewer: (Laughter) Golly.

Newman: By this time I think I had about 300 flying hours.

Interviewer: Which is quite a few hours.

Newman: Yeah, but today we don't let a guy get in a four engine airplane in the left seat until he's got a 1000 or 1500 hours.

Interviewer: Is that right? Gosh. Of course today's planes cost...

Newman: I was a C-130 wing commander before I retired and we wouldn't let a guy get in the left seat as a pilot unless he had 1000 hours at least.

Interviewer: So you took the plane from Nebraska...

Newman: To England, Burton Wood, England.

Interviewer: You took one jump?

Newman: No, we flew from Lincoln, Nebraska to New Hampshire and from there to Goose Bay, Labrador and from there to BW1 which was an airfield in Greenland.

Interviewer: Okay, so you're doing that northern kind of...and the Germans by this point had been pretty decimated in the north Atlantic so you weren't at risk?

Newman: Well I'll tell you a story about that. The flight from Greenland to Keflavik, Iceland was if I remember about a 6-1/2 to 7 hour flight. I had an outstanding navigator. Pete was just one of the best. I credit my survival to him. We were out of the clouds and he hadn't been able to get a couple of good celestial shots. They had briefed us that you could pick up a radio homing beacon in Iceland pretty far out.

So I guess about halfway through the flight, I just tuned it in and picked up a signal, pretty strong. Flipped it to the compass position and the compass pointed about 45 degrees to the right of our heading. I said, "Pete, I think I've got Iceland". He looked at the compass direction, he said, "No way, no way. I just got a good celestial shot. We're right on course. Keep this heading" which I did.

Another aircraft behind us, there were about 15 airplanes en route, fell into the trap and it was a German submarine transmitting on the same frequency. They recognized their error in time, but they landed in Iceland with just a few minutes fuel left.

Interviewer: What do you think the Germans were trying to do, get you so you would run out of fuel?

Newman: Yeah, just so we'd lose an airplane.

Interviewer: Oh my gosh, well you're there in the war all of a sudden.

Newman: We landed in Iceland, Keflavik and I think it was about the 24th of December, something like that. Of course in December, it never gets daylight in Iceland. We went to bed, I don't know whether it was 9:00 at night or 9:00 in the morning. I think we spent about 36 hours there.

Interviewer: So your final destination was a big air base in England?

Newman: Right which was a depot where they took airplanes that were brought into the theater and did certain modifications. So I gave up my brand new airplanes. We were assigned to our bomb group which we went by train. Got to our bomb group about 9:00 at night after riding a train all day. The in charge of quarters duty officer said, "I'm going to assign you a bunk wherever there's a vacancy and then we'll worry about the permanent barracks tomorrow".

I went into a Nissen hut and there were four or five guys sitting around, playing cards and a girl there. I was pretty tired, sat around visited for a few minutes and then finally I whispered to one of these guys "What time does she go home". They said she doesn't, she lived there. So what that was I found out later, they had a big party on base and the Saturday night before one of these guys had taken a fancy to this young girl and just moved in with her.

Interviewer: I wonder how long that lasted (laughter).

Newman: I don't know, but I went over to a dark corner, put on my pajamas and went to bed.

Interviewer: (Laughter) And the next day you got assigned somewhere else.

Newman: Our officer crew members got assigned to an old Nissen hut.

Interviewer: What's a Nissen hut?

Newman: It was a metal curved hut and it would accommodate eight people.

Interviewer: So you were with other officers then?

Newman: Yeah, other crew. We started flying a mission. I think our first mission was aboard the 3rd of January 1945. After five missions, I got selected as a lead crew.

Interviewer: Now tell me about some of these missions. What would be involved in a typical mission?

Newman: Well a typical mission would be a wakeup call somewhere around 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning. You'd go for breakfast and into the briefing room where the whole crew would be assembled in a large room and the briefing consisted of a big map on the wall with the route into the target and out of the target.

Interviewer: Now were just your pilots going to this briefing?

Newman: No, the whole crew went initially and then after the general briefing which included a weather briefing, always ended with a chaplain saying a prayer. Then the briefing broke up. The gunners went to their briefing, the radio to his, the navigator and the bombardier and then the pilots went to a little bit more specialized group.

Interviewer: Serious business though, no larking around here.

Newman: No, a lot of times you'd see a heavily defended target and that curtain draws back and you hear this, "Oh my God".

Interviewer: So they'd been there before...

Newman: If you hadn't been there before, you'd heard about it. I remember sort of humorous thing. Briefed one morning to go to Sweinefurt, Germany which was a big ball bearing factory and the intelligence officer said, "If you knock this thing out, it's so critical, the German Air Force will be crippled. They won't have any ball bearings to build airplanes". A couple of missions later, that same intelligence officer was debriefing my crew and our tail gunner said, "I never saw so damn many airplanes flying around without ball bearings in my life" (laughter).

Interviewer: (Laughter) What happened, huh? Cause they were coming up at this point still. There was heavy defense from the Luftwaffa at that time.

Newman: I'll have to tell you about the first jet airplane that my crew saw. I had a little Italian top turret gunner, flight engineer, Federici, Johnny Federici and he grew up in an Italian home where the family spoke Italian. When he got excited, he reverted to it. One day Federici started screeching on the phone in Italian. I finally got him calmed down and he said, "An airplane with no propeller" and we'd seen the first ME-262. Yeah, the FW-190's and the Messerschmitts were pretty active. Of course flak was our biggest problem.

Interviewer: And flak, tell the people who are listening what flak is.

Newman: Flak is antiaircraft guns, shells that were fired by I think it was 88mm and they had those guns loaded on flat cars in many instances. When German radar determined where the big bomb screen was going, they would move those flak cars around a lot.

Interviewer: Now with flak, did that shell go up and explode and spread out?

Newman: That's right.

Interviewer: So the flak was the metal pieces that were going to tear through your plane or your person, right?

Newman: Exactly.

Interviewer: It wasn't a bullet.

Newman: Metal fragments, that's right. In fact I knew a guy that got a piece of flak in the calf of his leg and you won't believe this but that piece of metal had the last four numbers of his serial number on it.

Interviewer: Oh my God.

Newman: He carried that around in his wallet. I guess he still has it if he's still alive.

Interviewer: So we're back to the mission, typical mission. So you've now been briefed, briefed...

Newman: Okay then you've got a takeoff time and a sequence of takeoff. Then the whole crew goes out to the airplane, the gunners load their guns. The ammunitions people had already loaded the bombs depending on what the mission was going to be. Then we gathered around the airplane, I give my little crew briefing and we get aboard, get in our seats and wait for the engine start time which you got in the briefing and that was based on what time you were going to taxi and take off.

Then when the takeoff starts, the airplanes taxi in a stream out to the end of the runway. I've seen times when the fog was so thick that we had to have a truck lead us out to the runway.

Interviewer: That didn't stop you?

Newman: Didn't stop us. The only difference is there was a one minute interval between takeoffs rather than 30 seconds. Then the takeoff began and each field had a low frequency radio beacon right in the middle of it and the idea was you take off, turn back, start circling that beacon and just spiral up to formation altitude which would be somewhere around 25,000 feet. Many times I have felt prop wash from low airplanes. In the clouds, you know, you couldn't see. It's an absolute miracle that there weren't more mid-air collisions because none of us knew how to correct for wind drift.

Interviewer: Now at that height, were you then using oxygen most all the time?

Newman: 10,000 feet automatically you put on oxygen masks, 10,000 feet.

Interviewer: Could you still communicate pretty well through those masks?

Newman: Oh yeah, you had a built in interphone system, electronic interphone system. The lead airplane was always the first off of course and each squadron or each group had a certain designated color flare to fire periodically so that the other airplanes could form on it.

Interviewer: And what was a normal flight contingent? How many planes would go over on most bombing runs?

Newman: Oh a thousand.

Interviewer: A thousand!?!

Newman: A thousand airplane raids...it would be an hour and a half after you got formed up before you ever left the coast. Getting in the bomb stream. I remember one time, the easiest flight mission I ever had from a flying standpoint, when I was the lead crew, our group was second in the bomb stream. The group that was supposed to be the entire first lead got fouled up and didn't make the rendezvous in time so we became the leader of the 8th Air Force. All I had to do was not worry about keeping in formation.

Interviewer: They were following you?

Newman: They were following me and it was a piece of cake.

Interviewer: But a thousand planes would not be uncommon.

Newman: That's right.

Interviewer: Coming from multiple bases then.

Newman: Oh on a clear day which was not very often, but from 10,000 feet over our base, I could count 11 other air bases. England was a floating...it was an aircraft carrier.

Interviewer: That's right, that's a way to look at it. It just wasn't moving anywhere.

Newman: Not only bombers, but fighters too.

Interviewer: Now were the fighters with you at that point because earlier in the war, there was an awful lot of controversy about the fact...the 8th Air Force took terrible losses because the fighters weren't there.

Newman: Well that's right and when they did get there, they didn't have the range to go all the way into some of the deep targets. Finally the P-51, P-47, but the P-51 used to have some radio equipment right behind the pilot's seat. They took that out and put a 50 gallon fuel tank right behind the pilot seat which gave them additional range. Most of the time, well every mission they could go all the way in.

Interviewer: Good, good, by the time you got there. But earlier in the war...

Newman: That's right, they went without. That's when the fighters really...the loss rate was just horrendous at the beginning of the war.

Interviewer: So now you're up in this massive formation and your job as a pilot is to stay in a certain order so that you don't run into somebody else.

Newman: That's right. You're flying formation within your own squadron and then the squadron is in a group and the group is in the _____.

Interviewer: So then what happens? How long until you start to get to a target? What's your flight time usually before? You've taken an hour and a half to form up, but that's the time over...

Newman: Let me think about that, the longest mission I ever had was 9-1/2 hours.

Interviewer: One way or both ways?

Newman: Total, round trip.

Interviewer: So four hours in.

Newman: I'd say after you left the coast, you'd be over the target within two hours or a little longer, something like that.

Interviewer: Okay and as a pilot, what was your job through this whole process? What were you doing?

Newman: Well my main job as a wing man was to stay in tight formation as close as you could. When I became lead, it was flying the airplane straight and level and at constant air speeds so the people behind me could stay in formation.

Interviewer: And the key to the formation was by being close together, then your guns were more effective?

Newman: More concentrated fire power.

Interviewer: So that the fighter pilots from the other side couldn't separate you out.

Newman: That's right and of course a straggler, anybody that became a straggler was prime meat for the German fighters.

Interviewer: Are you in '45 at this point?

Newman: My first mission was the 3rd of January '45.

Interviewer: See the impression that's left sometimes is even by that point, that there were hardly any fighters left, but that's not the case?

Newman: Well they were still there, but we had crippled their fuel production so drastically that I read later that the Germans were actually towing airplanes by truck out to the end of the runway just to save that much fuel. They were still there, but not nearly in the numbers that the early boys had.

Interviewer: Did you ever lose in your division to fighter pilots?

Newman: Oh yeah, yeah. We lost a number of airplanes to fighters.

Interviewer: And then the flak was still coming up even with the pounding you were giving them?

Newman: Flak was still coming up. To confuse the German radar, we dropped what we called chaf, simply strips of tin foil, real fine tin foil, about this long and maybe this wide. It came in bundles. The radio operator, at his left foot, there was a chute. His job was to shove this chaf out the shoot and the bundles would disintegrate in the air stream and that would blanket out the German radar.

Well one day my radio operator was bent over shoving the chaf off and a Messerschmitt 20mm cannon went right through the fuselage where he his head would have been had he been sitting straight up.

Interviewer: Did you ever see the plane?

Newman: I didn't, but the top turret gunner did.

Interviewer: Do you think that worked, that chaf stuff?

Newman: Well I'm sure it helped, but it wasn't completely effective.

Interviewer: But then if there's a thousand planes coming, they could almost just shoot up in the air (laughter).

Newman: You've seen contrails on a clean day?

Interviewer: You mean the stuff behind the plane?

Newman: Yeah, well of course you can image what kind of contrails all those airplanes would leave. The Germans could pinpoint where we were going just by the contrails on a clear day.

Interviewer: Now when you're heading over to let's say a target that's 3 hours over, were you getting flak even in between or was it mainly just at the bomb site?

Newman: The fighters would be the big threat inbound if German radar had enough warning to get them up. In fact, we used to send out diversions just to mislead, not even...airplanes that didn't even have a target tried to mislead the German air defense system.

Back to the flak, it was pretty effective. One mission to Munich, I think it was a railroad yard and incidentally I've been to Munich since, but I didn't tell the local people that I'd been there before (laughter). We had two engines shut out on the same side.

Interviewer: So you were only going on two engines?

Newman: Well we didn't get all the way back. Coming back over northern France, it was obvious we weren't going to make it. My navigator spotted a little air strip on the map and we thought it was still German held territory. I set up a pattern of landing and it turned out, it's pretty short. We ran off the end of the runway and there was a big ditch out there about 100 feet and as soon as we touched down, I shut down the other two engines and braked as much as I could. But we landed and ended up in that big ditch.

My first fear was the airplane was going to catch on fire. Everybody got out and it didn't burn. But we were...the American forces had just taken that territory and I got in touch with some ground troop there and he had gotten his company commander and we set up communication and finally got back to our home base in England and told them where we were. That night we spent the night in a schoolhouse in a little village.

Interviewer: Is that right?

Newman: And the next morning or the next day, the Air Corps sent a couple of...I think they were Canadian, they were single engine airplanes that carry four to five people. Took two of them in and landed on this little strip and picked our crew up and took us back.

Interviewer: And just left the plane there?

Newman: Left the plane there.

Interviewer: Wonder what ever happened to that plane?

Newman: I don't know whether they ever tried to salvage it or not.

Interviewer: Pretty bad shape?

Newman: Well I imagine the gear, I know it was bent.

Interviewer: So were you out of the flying business or did they just give you another plane?

Newman: No, we flew more missions. We just got another plane.

Interviewer: You were a truck driver, right? They got you another truck (laughter).

Newman: Got us another truck.

Interviewer: Now when you're over a target, you're still as the pilot just worrying about level and going straight, so is it the bombardier that takes over?

Newman: Okay, that's a good point I need to cover. When we get approaching the target, there's a designated, what they call an initial point, IP, where the bomb run begins. Once you get to the IP, the bombardier takes over and his bomb site can actually steer the airplane once he takes over. So he's got to control the airplane until bombs away.

Interviewer: And how long of a time period...I mean how long would you be over target and dropping bombs?

Newman: That initial point to the target can be anywhere from 1-1/2 to probably 4 minutes. At that time the airplane has got to be completely level, straight and level, constant air speed. That's the most vulnerable time because you can't take any evasive action. Then of course once bombs are away and he says that, I take the airplane and we make a pretty abrupt turn to get away from the target.

Interviewer: And the flak would go away pretty quickly or hard to know?

Newman: Well they'd follow you around. Some of the most heavily defended flak targets, we were told it could be up to 450 guns that could bear on you in the immediate target area.

Interviewer: Wow, it's kind of amazing that you got through at all.

Newman: Oh yeah, that's right. Lots of time, we had all kinds of holes in the airplane. The crew chief and his assistant would patch them up at night. That's another thing I have to say. In all my flying career, I've always had great respect and admiration for the maintenance people. We'd come home and our day is done. That maintenance crew had been up the same time we were pre-flighting and getting the airplane ready, but when we land, their day is starting again.

I know my ground crew chief, he and his assistants which were two, could change an engine overnight and have an airplane ready to fly the next day.

Interviewer: Did you like this B-17? Was this a great plane?

Newman: Oh, it was a great plane and obviously very forgiving or I wouldn't be here. It really was. It was just a big old forgiving airplane. The checklist was a metal placard on the throttle quadrant, had about seven or eight items on it. Today the B-52 checklist is about that thick for the thing each crew member has to do before the flight.

Interviewer: So how many missions did you fly then?

Newman: 25 and the war ended.

Interviewer: Was that pretty typical? That seems like a lot to me.

Newman: The typical missions or a typical crew, not a lead crew, was 35. A lead crew was 30. The war ended before I got my 30. But to show you how dumb I was, I had volunteered already to stay over there when my tour was finished and fly weather scout and mosquito bombers. The Mosquito was a British airplane all wood, plywood, and they were using those to fly weather scouts.

Interviewer: Just to check the weather you mean. Did your unit get pulled to go to the Pacific?

Newman: We came back as a group when the war ended. We flew airplanes back and my crew, well most all the crews, were designated to take 30 days leave and then go to the Pacific in B-29's. We were going to go through B-29 training. I was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota waiting to do that and the war ended in Japan in August.

Interviewer: You chose to continue in the service?

Newman: Well everybody was getting out in those days and going to the airlines. I was sent to Colorado Springs, Colorado. One day I got an assignment to fly some people to Mitchell Field, New York for a conference. There was a bunch of general and colonels. They told me they were going to be there three days and I should do whatever I wanted to do.

So I got the phonebook and started looking for airlines. I went around to all the domestics and they already hired all the people they wanted and I went to KLM, the Royal Dutch airline. When I came out of there, I was signed up as a copilot to go to Holland, fly for KLM.

Interviewer: Now you were out of the service at this point?

Newman: Not yet. The deal was I was to go back, get out of the service and send them a telegram which I did. I went to Montreal, Canada and got on a Dutch boat and went to Amsterdam, Holland and flew four engine C-54 which the Dutch airline had bought 12 of them from the Army Air Corps. The last airplane they flew was the Foker trimotor and they didn't have any four engine experienced pilots. So I was hired as a copilot at $800 a month. Man, that was big money.

Interviewer: And who was the pilot, was he an American too?

Newman: Yeah, he was an American and his pay was $1600. The guy I teamed up with had been flying a C-54's in air transport command across the Atlantic. He had lots of four engine time. Our first mission was to fly Dutch Marines to the East Indies. This is when Holland was about to lose the East Indies.

Interviewer: Let me just stop here and change the tape if you've got a second. Okay, we're back on tape #2 on May 6th with Sherman Hayes and Bob Newman, World War II project. I've got a couple of questions to fill in. There were several years there and we did it all in an hour, but what were if you look back on those 25 missions, what were the types of targets? What kinds of things did they say you were going to be bombing?

Newman: They called them strategic targets. Anything that would contribute to the war-making ability of the Germans. The main were fuel, cracking plants, railroad yards, submarine pins at Remerhaufen. That was an important target. All kinds of aircraft manufacturing sites, the ball bearing plant that I mentioned. Oil refineries were a big priority and that paid off because I mentioned the Germans were running out of fuel. They were into all kinds of synthetic fuel experiments as I read about after the war.

Interviewer: What about when they went after Dresden, you were part of that particular flight?

Newman: The fire raid.

Interviewer: Yeah, that was an interesting concept. You were mostly hitting industrial sites then.

Newman: The only exception to that was Berlin. I went to Berlin once and I remember very vividly that briefing. That's the only time we ever did mass bombing. During the briefing, I had all kinds of conscience qualms, but when those women and children started firing those 88's at us, I lost a lot of those qualms.

Interviewer: By that you mean it was more indiscriminate bombing. You'd take an area and just bomb it.

Newman: The RAF, the Brits, that's what they concentrated on, mass bombing which they did at night, blanket bombing. A lot of times we would be coming back from the mission and the RAF would be going out.

Interviewer: Just thousands of planes in the air. I mean in some sense many people feel like the air war was where we finally made such a decisive difference. It sounds to me like it did.

Newman: Well there's been all kinds of controversy about that, but everything I've read about the German top military leaders, they attribute largely the air war crippled their ability to fight. Nobody in their right mind would ever say that the air would completely win just like we just witnessed in Iraq.

Interviewer: No, it's the soldier.

Newman: But if you're going to occupy it always about the ground people that come in. But today the military forces are so integrated in joint operations, it's just unbelievable to me how smoothly this last thing went. Of course, the smart weapons, if we had had those kinds of things back in World War II, it would have been a completely different ballgame. I imagine that I would go so far as to say that we probably miss 15% or 20% of the targets, maybe more than that. I'm sure we plowed up lots of brussel sprout fields.

Interviewer: I wondered about that. After you got back, would the Intelligence people go over with you and say here's what....

Newman: Well we had our own cameras to strike photos and in fact I've got some here in my...

Interviewer: Well we can take a look at that. I've got some examples that were put in front of the camera here. So explain what these are.

Newman: That's what they call strike photos that were done usually by a photographic airplane that flew over the target or in some cases by cameras inside the bomber.

Interviewer: So you were taking these pictures too and then they had interpreters.

Newman: Photo interpreters who would...

Interviewer: Now would they talk to you later about it or it didn't matter, you just went on the next mission.

Newman: No, the only thing, the decision makers decided whether they had to go back to that target or not.

Interviewer: Were there times when somebody would say we're going to go to this site and you just about didn't want to go? I mean were some of these so bad that you just said I wish we weren't going there again? Any of them have that reputation?

Newman: Well (laughter), we had one guy who used to get sick after a briefing with a rough target, but that was really an exception. Take my own case, you know I was too young and dumb to really realize what a serious thing this was. Of course when you go through Nissen hut and see all those empty bunks, that kind of brings it home.

Interviewer: And you lost fellow planes, right?

Newman: Oh yeah, yeah.

Interviewer: And you knew the people in them.

Newman: Oh yeah. When I was flying lead, I lost two wing men in one mission.

Interviewer: Was it flak that got them?

Newman: Flak in this case.

Interviewer: And as far as you know, they died. Would they have a chance if they bailed out?

Newman: Well my gunners saw some bail-outs, but I don't know what ever happened to them, whether they were successful or ended up as POW's. I mentioned when I started flying lead, I got a radar operator. The radar we had was a very crude version of what they have today, but we did do radar bombing.

Interviewer: What would that mean?

Newman: You dropped your bombs based on what the radar man told you. You couldn't see the target. The bombs were dropped by radar. The most accurate bombing was visual.

Interviewer: But during a bombing run, you weren't worried about the target. You were worried about the plane, right?

Newman: The pilot is.

Interviewer: That's what I'm saying. Now what was it like when they finally said that Germany had surrendered? What were your feelings and what did people do?

Newman: We had a big celebration.

Interviewer: Did you? Good.

Newman: We had a big celebration. I remember we had one stripped down airplane on the base and I got designated to fly it to Presrick, Scotland and pick up a load of champagne. The champagne was flowing. You can get a lot of cases of champagne in a B-17 (laughter). The enlisted club and the officer's club got pretty rowdy that night.

Interviewer: That's great. Now what about when you were in England, did you have any time off at all?

Newman: Oh yeah. We had three day passes and my navigator and bombardier and I used to like to go to London and go to the little English theaters and saw some great plays.

Interviewer: At that point, it was just in desperate shape? Really bombed out terrible?

Newman: I just can't express how much admiration I had for the Brits. What they went through as a nation. I remember being in a subway in London late at night and see people sleeping all over the platforms, little kids, just unbelievable what they put up with. Not only with the blitz of the 40's, but the V-2's after.

Interviewer: Were they still coming down when you were there?

Newman: Oh yeah, yeah. In fact the V-1's were not nearly so dangerous as the V-2, but I remember at our base we could hear V-1's going close by on the way to London and the fighter guys used to take off in P-51's and fly formation with them and they were gyro stabilized. They'd get a stubby wing on the V-1 and tip it up, spill the gyro and crash before they hit the target.

Interviewer: Is that right? I had never heard that. They really would go up and maximize the same speed...

Newman: Just fly formation with them, get a wing under it. But the V-2's, that was a different story.

Interviewer: They were just what? Faster?

Newman: Of course it was ballistic, coming down I guess at supersonic speed.

Interviewer: When you were in London, did you ever have to do an air raid?

Newman: They were still going on, the V-2's were going on. There were no aircraft air raids, but the V-2 strikes were still going on.

Interviewer: Would they evacuate everybody or was that...

Newman: You didn't have time.

Interviewer: If just happened.

Newman: I never went through one, but I suppose you just heard this scream as it came down.

Interviewer: Was there still a lot of rubble in London?

Newman: Oh yeah, even from the blitz that they went through in 1940, they never had a chance to rebuild it.

Interviewer: Now everybody talks about, you know, there were so many American soldiers there, but people were still friendly and helpful and glad to see you in London?

Newman: Oh yeah, the population was extremely grateful. There were some cases, the British GI's resented the Americans. In fact, they said you're oversexed and over-wealth or something like that. I'll tell you about a little incident that happened to my navigator, bombardier and I. We were on a day off and we went into I think it was Cambridge. Went into a restaurant bar and the bar was downstairs and the restaurant was upstairs.

We went upstairs to have a meal and there was an elderly couple and we were the only ones in there. There were three Brit GI's that came in and they had obviously had several drinks. They sat at a table over here and they started making disparaging remarks about the Yanks. Finally without any word or anything one of them reached over and got my navigator by the collar, jerked him up and started swinging at him.

Interviewer: Oh my God.

Newman: Well that started it. The other two got involved and my bombardier and I got involved. I looked around and Pete, the navigator, had turned the table over and broken the leg off and was about to hit this one guy and I knew if he did, he'd kill him so I stopped Pete. Then I saw a knife flash and I got a little cut right here in my leg. About that time, the whistle and the bobbies came. These Brits told the bobbies that we started it.

The old couple had gone downstairs when the melee started and they came back up and told the cops what happened.

Interviewer: Oh, they were honest at least.

Newman: They were honest so they hauled those guys off (laughter). We didn't finish our meal. That was a rare incident, I'm sure. One of the funniest things I ever saw was in a bar downtown London one night when several Canadians who had had a fair amount to drink came into the bar and there were three Scotsmen in their kilts and the Canadians decided they wanted to see what they wore under their kilts and that was like a Western brawl from the movies. I mean we got out and watched from the outside the window. It was a brawl (laughter).

Interviewer: The MP's came shortly did they?

Newman: Well I think the British bobbies broke it up.

Interviewer: How many days would you fly and then get three days off? Was there a pattern or was there no rhyme or reason?

Newman: Well after I became lead crew, we didn't fly as often as a regular crew because we spent a lot of time in target studies and that kind of thing. I'd say that maybe every three or four missions, the crew might get a day off and go to London. Then we had what we called flak leave, rest leave which was a seven day break. There were several rest areas. The one we went to was I think the town was Brighton.

Interviewer: So you'd go for a whole week.

Newman: A whole week.

Interviewer: And a lot of other people were there too?

Newman: The one we went to was a commandeered resort hotel on a beach.

Interviewer: Kind of an R&R thing that you wanted to do, you'd been flying hard. Did you become a higher officer in this process too?

Newman: After I started flying lead, I got promoted to 1st lieutenant and then six weeks later I got promoted to captain.

Interviewer: Wow, and you were 21 by this point or not even?

Newman: I was not 21. In fact we came back to the States, a friend and I went to Fort Lee, Maryland to process for a leave. We went into Washington one night and went into a bar and they asked for my identification. He had to buy me a drink. I was not yet 21, yet I was a captain in uniform.

Interviewer: A captain in the Air Corps, that's amazing, just amazing. Now you were talking about the fact that you processed out and ended up flying for the Dutch. Was that dangerous duty going into their former territory?

Newman: Well when we landed after we finished our operation processing, we were put in a jeep and escorted to town with an armed vehicle so this made my mind up right there that this is not for me. After we got home, both Roy Benson and I decided that this wasn't for us.

Interviewer: So you only did that one mission you mean?

Newman: That one trip. We flew around continental Europe a little bit.

Interviewer: Was commercial air fare even starting up? It was so beat up, everything in Europe.

Newman: Yeah, the Dutch I guess they were the first ones probably to get back into the flying business, KLM. There's another interesting story going back a little bit, in New York when I hired on, I was told that after 90 days we'd be given an option to sign a contract and if we didn't want to sign a contract, they would pay our way home. Verbally, this is all verbal.

Well when Roy Benson and I decided we wanted to come home, we went into see the chief pilot and told him. We'd also figured out as soon as the Dutch got enough of their people trained, we'd probably have a job, but at Dutch wages. That was another thing that influenced our thinking. We told the guy that we thought we might...

Interviewer: You had the right within the 90 days, right?

Newman: He said they were sorry to see us leave and we said when did he think he could arrange transportation. He said "That's not our problem". Well you know that didn't shake us up too much. The first thing we did is move out of this heated hotel which was the only one in Amsterdam into a cold water flea bag. We went to see the American Embassy people and told them our dilemma and they sympathized with us, but they said there wasn't much they could do. We still weren't too concerned.

Interviewer: (Laughter) Now what year is this?

Newman: November of '45. Went down to Dutch shipping lines and we said we would hire on as crew members and work our way back. They would only take Dutch. We looked in as maybe coming back as passengers and they had waiting lists of people since 1940. Well we did begin to get pretty desperate.

Roy Benson had flown transports all of his military career and during the North African campaign he had been designated to fly Field Marshall Montgomery around North Africa. Well they got along so well Montgomery kept him for a year. Flew in a DC-3. They had corresponded still, kept in touch. Well one morning we got up and Benson said, "It's time to play the ace". So we went down to Canadian Army headquarters in Amsterdam and told the duty officer that he'd like to place a personal call to Field Marshall Montgomery.

The guy looked at him like yeah, I bet you would. Roy had a letter from Montgomery and he pulled it out and showed it to the guy and convinced him and he put the call through. Well Benson told him what our predicament was and Montgomery said just check again in 24 hours, he would see what he could work out. Well he had arranged for us to go down to the commissioner of the Allied War Shipping pool in Brussels, Belgium which we did. They put us on a liberty ship bound for Houston, Texas.

Interviewer: Oh my gosh, probably built here in Wilmington, right, a liberty ship?

Newman: I'm sure it was. Well about 10 days later, we got a diversion into Philadelphia and we went up the Delaware River into Philadelphia Christmas eve night and docked about 11:00 pm. I got off that boat and kissed the ground.

Interviewer: I bet you did (laughter).

Newman: I had seen somewhere in the Stars and Stripes newspaper that the American Army Air Corps was opening up regular commissions to people who had been in World War II. I decided that was what I was going to do. Roy Benson went to work for Continental Airlines and I got my regular commission and went back...

Interviewer: As a captain?

Newman: As a captain. I continued that served 30 years and retired in 1973 as a colonel.

Interviewer: After that war, did you end up going back to Europe in some other capacity because so many people went back to help out in post World War II.

Newman: No, I never went back. I never was assigned to Europe. I went to the Korean War, stationed in Japan flying missions out of Japan. Then I got involved in the Vietnam thing, again operating out of Japan.

Interviewer: Did you ever get married?

Newman: Yeah, after we came back from Holland while I was waiting to apply for this regular commission, I went to Lynchburg College which is a small Christian church endowed school and this young gal who was secretary to the dean was working her way through school and I walked in to register and she registered me and assigned me a room. I ended up asking her for a date and six weeks later we were engaged and in June we were married. The dean, he got mad at me.

Interviewer: Stealing his secretary (laughter)?

Newman: Yes, stealing his secretary.

Interviewer: Now did she follow you then through your career as you moved everywhere?

Newman: Except the Korean War, she couldn't come there.

Interviewer: And what was your home city then through this long 30 years? Did you have a home base that you considered your home?

Newman: In the area where I grew up outside of Lynchburg, we always went back there on leave and she was from Roanoke, Virginia.

Interviewer: Had family there?

Newman: We had three children. The youngest, my son, whose now is a physician and runs a family practice clinic from East Carolina Med School, he was born in Japan.

Interviewer: That's great. I just wanted to look for a second through some of these other pictures. Most of them are fine, but I think there were one or two of the actual plane flying. I think that's great if you want to hold that up. Now tell me a little bit about that.

Newman: That's in flight, in formation.

Interviewer: In front the full plane is B-17, you can see lots of others in the distance there.

Newman: Yeah, they're all B-17's.

Interviewer: And then this is the actual double engines that you're taking out of the cockpit, right.

Newman: I would guess so, yeah.

Interviewer: This is your crew here?

Newman: This is the ground crew, crew chief and his assistant. Our airplane was named the Winged Warrior.

Interviewer: This is?

Newman: That's in front of our Nissen hut, that's our navigator.

Interviewer: Here's some of the guys in your crew.

Newman: Me on the left, my radar operator and then my navigator and the bombardier.

Interviewer: Look at these uniform guys, these are handsome guys.

Newman: Oh yeah, we're hot shots down in London on pass I'm sure.

Interviewer: These are great. I think this is a good one too with the whole crew. I know I have to pan it a little bit. This is your whole crew here.

Newman: That's right, that's the one ____ from Rapid City with.

Interviewer: The big star. Did they stay with you pretty much, that whole crew or did that change quite a bit?

Newman: Everything stayed the same except we picked up the radar operator.

Interviewer: But they didn't move people in and out, in and out then?

Newman: Well when I was flying lead usually my copilot went to another crew because as a lead crew, we had a command pilot who's usually the group commander who flew as copilot.

Interviewer: Now I've got this guy in a funny hat, looks like a bobby. Is that what this is?

Newman: That's a British bobby.

Interviewer: And that's a picture of you.

Newman: That's in London.

Interviewer: He's smiling at least (laughter). Oh good, here's some great pictures here. Let me get those in. Here's one up in the air again of actual flight. And then this is a fascinating one here. You might explain what that is.

Newman: That looks like a strike photo.

Interviewer: Where the bombs are actually in the air, right?

Newman: This should be the bombs falling and some that have already hit the target.

Interviewer: Here's one somebody took while the plane is coming in and here's a real nice close-up of a maintenance guy working on a big engine.

Newman: Then again, I can't overemphasize how dedicated those maintenance people were. They were just fantastic.

Interviewer: Now here's the one you talked about called the Prince Hotel. Was that where you stayed?

Newman: That was our rest leave hotel.

Interviewer: Wow, that is quite the place.

Newman: It was a big beach resort hotel.

Interviewer: It says right on here, US Air Command, isn't that something? Those are great pictures. It really gives us a sense of the time and activity. Now this here...

Newman: That's after the war.

Interviewer: USO event?

Newman: Well I was a squadron commander and I think we were having a squadron party there.

Interviewer: Now by squadron commander, how many people ...

Newman: About 100. Actually that was a graduation from the University of Maryland. I guess I didn't mention the program that the Air Force started after the war. I was privileged to go to the University of Maryland for two years and managed to get a degree.

Interviewer: So you're a college guy now?

Newman: Yeah. There were 21 Air Force officers at the university at the same time. We all graduated in 1949.

Interviewer: And now you're saying that anybody that's a pilot at this level is required to be a college graduate anyway. So as you went through your career, that didn't hold you back. You had your degree.

Newman: That was the purpose of this program to get those of us that didn't have a degree the opportunity to do it.

Interviewer: You obviously were supportive of the military, but one of the last questions we usually ask is that as you talk to a grandchild or somebody of today's generation, what was your sense of accomplishment after World War II? Would you go back again or why did you do this and how did you feel at the end of the war after momentous several years in the service?

Newman: Well that's an interesting question. Of course as I mentioned a while ago, after my experience with KLM, I made up my mind that I wanted to go back into the service because I liked flying. I liked the idea of flying and enjoyed it the whole time except for a few moments of stark terror. Yeah, I'd do it all over again. In fact today my second career, I taught at high school ROTC at a high school up in Alamance County, North Carolina for 14 years.

I used to tell my students that those of you that want to go into the service, you have to remember that this is not like any other job. The only purpose of the military is to fight a war if it becomes necessary and that's something you always need to keep in the back of your mind and be sure that you would do that before you ever even think about joining the service.

Interviewer: That's a good point.

Newman: I think that for a young person coming out of high school who really doesn't know what he or she wants to do, the service is a good maturing place and it also allows you to pick up a trade, particularly in the Air Force, that's useful anywhere in civilian life. None of my grandchildren have selected to go into the military. They're all college graduates. I think I'd probably do the same thing over again.

Interviewer: And at the time you went in, it wasn't about a choice of career. The country had been attacked and was in the war and you did it as a patriotic...

Newman: Oh yeah, World War II was an all out effort. Vietnam was a completely different story.

Interviewer: And you flew in both of those conflicts.

Newman: Right and in Korea I was in the rescue business flying amphibians picking up pilots out of the water which was interesting and satisfying.

Interviewer: Yeah, you weren't bombing somebody, you were saving somebody. What about Vietnam? You must have been a colonel or higher?

Newman: I was a lieutenant colonel and then colonel, but I was flying transports supporting the troops.

Interviewer: Bringing in materials...where were most of your supply flights coming from then?

Newman: The States and usually the Philippines or Okinawa or Japan.

Interviewer: Well listen, I want to thank you very much for the interview. It was very interesting and we really appreciate it as part of our ongoing project.

Newman: You bet.