Interview of Paul Pritchett
Transcript Number 103

DECEMBER 12, 2001

Good afternoon. I'm Paul Zarbock, staff member here at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Library. We're continuing our program, video taping World War II veterans. Our guest tonight is Mr. Paul O'Neil Pritchett. 


INTERVIEWER: Mr. Pritchett, when did you get into the military and why did you go into the military?

PRITCHETT: I got into the military on February 2, 1943. I tried very hard to enlist because I wanted to pick what I wanted to do and to be drafted, they put you where they wanted to put you. But I had bad teeth and so the service would not enlist me. They would make themselves liable for my health for the rest of my life so they wouldn't take me, but I finally was drafted on February 2, 1943, and was put exactly where I wanted to be, in the Air Corps.

I got good technical training. I was first sent to Mississippi, Biloxi, Mississippi, for basic training and I spent six weeks there in basic training. From that point, I was shipped to Amarillo, Texas, to go to aircraft school, engine school. I was there for about four or five months and I had all my teeth pulled on the bottom. They pulled them all. Now when I went to Amarillo, I was married, had been married for about four years. We had no children yet.

I had my wife come down to Amarillo to live with me so we'd be together as much as we could possibly be with me being in the service. She followed me until I was sent overseas.

INTERVIEWER: What was your rank at that time?

PRITCHETT: Of course in the beginning, I was a private, buck private we were called. For every time you went to schooling when you finished basic training, you got a grade and you went to PFC. Then for every school you went to, you were supposed to get another upgrade movement, but things were tough and I did not get moved up. When I went overseas, I went as a PFC.

INTERVIEWER: And what was your enormous salary? Do you remember?

PRITCHETT: Yes, I remember very well, $55 a month on which I had to take some of it out and give to my wife for her. Of course the Army gave her extra money along with that and she got $50 a month and I got $50 a month.

INTERVIEWER: Was she working at the time that you were living in Texas?

PRITCHETT: Yes she was. She went there and the only job that she found when she came in, as she rode the bus. Hardly anybody could ride the trains. The trains were being used to haul soldiers, sailors, servicemen wherever they were going and most of the time, there would be very few civilians on any train. Of course there was no air travel at that time. So she rode a bus into Amarillo, Texas, where I had been transferred to go to technical school and when she got there, she was looking to get her suitcase out of the baggage department and she was there. 

Nobody was helping her so she was going through those suitcases to find her own suitcase so she could get out of there and the manager of the bus station came up and said you look like a good strong person. How about I give you a job taking care of this baggage. So that was her first job. She got there and had a job 30 minutes after she hit Texas.

But she worked there one day and that was enough for her, with the baggage. Then there was this young lady who had a liquor store of all things. In Texas, the liquor stores were owned privately by people and not by the state and this woman came and saw my wife and asked her if she'd like a job and my wife asked doing what (laughter). She was a little bit leery. She told her it was operating one of her liquor stores and my wife said I can't tell you that now, "I'll have to talk to my husband before I tell you." So when I got home that night, she asked me what I thought about it. I said there was nothing wrong with that as long as you're not regularly getting drunk, you're just doing a job. So the first two days she was in Texas, she had two different jobs already. She kept that job the whole time we were there, for 4-1/2 months she was in that job.

Now I was lucky because I was given a pass to be able to leave the base every night because of my grades. I had exceptionally good grades and they would give me what they called a class A pass which allowed me to leave base overnight. So my wife and I had an apartment and when she'd go to work, I'd go to school.

INTERVIEWER: What was the training that you were taking?

PRITCHETT: Aircraft air frames and engine repair. I was working on aircraft similar to B-17's, B-29's. Of course the B-29 had not come out yet. But B-24's, B-17's were the type of aircraft that I was being trained to work on.

INTERVIEWER: U.S. Air Force heavy bombers?

PRITCHETT: Yes, I did, when I finished school in Amarillo, they sent me to Chanute Field, Illinois which was one of the highest of the technical schools and they sent me there to become an aircraft electrician. Now in a B29, there's some 10-15 miles of wiring on that aircraft and of course we had all sorts of drawings to show what each color of each wire was and each number. It wasn't all that hard to figure out. You just went by what it said, then you were alright. You could hook something up, could go out on the wing and hook something up coming out of the controls from the cockpit. 

Also had knew how to take care of the ignition. That was electrical as far as they were concerned. It had 18 cylinders on a B29 and two spark plugs to each cylinder and they have a jolt of about 5000 jolts in each one of them. It wouldn't hurt you, it would just scare you to death if it got you. We used to tease people. We did all kinds of crazy things. We had to entertain ourselves somehow so we did. We enjoyed ourselves.

INTERVIEWER: Did your wife come up to Chanute Field with you?

PRITCHETT: Yes she did. As a matter of fact, I secreted her on the train that was taking us to Chanute Field, got her on, I told her to get down to the station with her suitcase and when she saw my bunch of fellas getting on the train, for her to get, go ahead and buy the ticket and get on that train, get on there any way in the world. She got on there and that train, you had to have almost an invitation to get on there. You had to have orders to get on there, civilian or otherwise. 

They didn't let you on just because you had a ticket. So they were going to put her off the next station and I said no, I was very friendly with the guy who was in charge of the bunch of soldiers who were on that car. I said no way are you going to throw my wife off. He said well you just bring her right here and we'll put her in my room because the in charge always had a room on each one of those cars. So I brought her and we set her up in that room and we hauled her all the way up there. When the conductor tried to get in to see if she was in there to get her off of there, there were 28 of us on board that train and we told him, "You put her off the next stop, you're going to be put off between there and the next stop". And we never heard anymore from him. 

We got her all the way up to Chanute Field, Illinois, and I was there for 2-1/2 months. There was where I was learning the wiring to the B29 and B17. We had the, they take a couple of those out every day on the flight training that they had so if there was something that went wrong, a generator or what have you, we were there. We were on the aircraft to put the generators on line together to get them all lined up where they were doing the job right.

Of course we got to fly wherever we wanted to go. That was the beautiful part about being in the Air Corps, you were able to fly, enjoyed it.

INTERVIEWER: Did your wife get a job?

PRITCHETT: Oh yeah (laughter). She was just, she just began to show that she was pregnant and she went, the first thing she did, she went to, on the post, to the doctor's office because they were going to take care of her having the baby or whatever was going to happen, the Army was going to be in charge of it. And the doctor was helping her and waiting on her about her pregnancy, talked to her and he said, "By the way, why don't you come around to the Officers' Club and I think I can get you on as cashier around there because you can't do all these things that you want to do, but you can cashier. All you have to do is keep the money straight". So that's what she got.

They even went so far as to try to pull the orders and make me permanent party at Chanute Field so we could stay there. They were going to make me be an instructor and her to be the cashier at the Officers' Club. That would have been some good cushy duty, but they couldn't pull me off orders. I had to go and was scheduled to go from Chanute to Seattle, Washington to the B29 plant. So after we finished up on the weekend before Thanksgiving in Chanute Field.

INTERVIEWER: And what year was that?

PRITCHETT: '43, and she'd gotten a room with kitchen privileges. That's what you had to do. You could rent a room, but you had nowhere to cook a meal, you had nowhere to do anything and so she gotten this room with kitchen privileges so when the people that owned the house that we rented from, after they finished their dinner meal at night, then they...we could go in the kitchen and make our meal and then we had to clean up. 

So they had their cake and eating it too because they got paid for that and then we cleaned up the kitchen. Anyway we were there for 2-1/2 months I think it was and it was beautiful weather. It was Indian summer there. It had not turned very cold. We left Thanksgiving. Again they put her on the train and we didn't even bother about buying her a ticket. 

We put her on the train, put her in the car with us. Everybody, we called ourselves a certain class, class 38 was the number, and everybody took care of her wherever they saw her or wherever the train stopped at a train station, and there was a barrel of apples or something that somebody was giving away, everybody that got off would bring her back an apple or something and so she was taken care of like she was a sister to all those guys.

INTERVIEWER: How many guys were there?

PRITCHETT: There was 28 or 29.

INTERVIEWER: And you're now traveling by train from St. Louis.

PRITCHETT: From Chicago, just 100 miles south of Chicago.

INTERVIEWER: So you're traveling from Chicago to Seattle by train.

PRITCHETT: That's right.

INTERVIEWER: Well that's a couple nights on the train, isn't it?

PRITCHETT: Yes it was. Of course we had a Pullman. The troops always had, nearly always had a Pullman and of course she was in the in-charge's room. She and I both as a matter of fact. The woman that we had lived with at Chanute Field had made up a basket of food and there was enough chicken and good food in that thing to last for three days and we ate chicken until we didn't know what to do with it. But we had a great time and the guys all took care of her. And wherever we went, we had the same bunch of guys from the time I was inducted and went through basic training until I got out of the service at the end of the war, I had some of the same people with me the whole time. That was a beautiful experience.

INTERVIEWER: So you picked up a B29 in Seattle, got introduced to a B29.

PRITCHETT: No, no, we didn't pick it up. They were still in the ex-stage at that time, experimental and I think they were building on about the 19th or 20th when we first went to Seattle, but you see they had already had one B29 wing had already been made up and sent to Burma and Curtis LeMay, General Curtis LeMay was the commander of that wing. They were flying two missions over the Himalayans in order to get enough bombs and enough gasoline to make one mission over Japan and they were losing more aircraft trying to get over the Himalayans cracking up than they were losing to war.

They were having a terrible time with it. When they sent us overseas, we went over. LeMay's wing was 44th wing and we went over as the 73rd wing and we had a one star general in charge of us. We got there and they sent us to Saipan and they were building the air strip, the black engineers were building this air strip out of coral, crushed coral right on top of a little hill. It was I think a little over 6000 feet of runway and the B29 used up every foot of it to get off if it was loaded.

It was just like planes taking off of an aircraft carrier, they'd come off the end and of course step over there and the whole plane was airborne. It might be dropping, but it was airborne and it didn't have enough speed to fly. They picked it up on that drop about 300 feet and then they'd take on off. It would be gone for about 14-16 hours to fly from Saipan to Japan and back.

In the beginning, they were flying at 40,000 feet and the winds over the Pacific and over Japan would have crosswinds, winds go this way, that way. This one might be going 400 miles an hour and this one 300 miles an hour so it there was absolutely no way that you could depend on hitting the target cause that bomb, even though it weighed 500 lbs., was taken off course by the wind blowing.

So we were going, we were spreading bombs all over Tokyo true enough, but we weren't having very much effect really. About that time, they sent Curtis LeMay and the whole 44th wing, flew it all the way from Burma over to Guam and we all became one 20th Air Force at that point. When LeMay was the commander, he came in, we'd been flying the planes with extra fuel tanks and one bomb bay. Put an extra 1000 gallon fuel tank in one of the bomb bays and then of course we had another bomb bay that had 2500 pound bombs in it.

Well what was happening was the planes were running out of gas on their way home and they were using more gas than they could carry. They couldn't carry more and of course it was eating up the gasoline they had and they were having a hard time. We were losing planes at sea. We were losing planes on some of the islands where there was a crash landing. 

INTERVIEWER: Did you lose any aircraft by enemy action?

PRITCHETT: I believe yes we did, not many. My plane, the one that I was on, of course maintenance wise I was on, I didn't fly it, was coming back, came back to fly back in. They flew a mission over Tokyo and aircraft shell went up and went through. The whole aircraft went right up through it, knocked a hole out of the top of the aircraft about six feet. Went through it and broke every wire in that five miles of wire and cut them in two.

Well the only thing that was flying the airplane was the ignition and it's not hooked to anything else electrical. They had no controls, no electrical controls, no nothing. The only thing they had was a _____ running the engine and it kept that thing humming and we got back to Saipan, the only thing they could do, they had to land that plane with the automatic pilot. They had to turn it loose and let it try to guide itself. 

So what they did, they put the automatic pilot on and eased that sucker right down on the ground and two or three people could crawl through that hole at one time. It was amazing.

INTERVIEWER: Wasn't that aircraft pressurized? The cabin.

PRITCHETT: Yes it was and as soon as that hit through there, they turned around and turned tail and got from over Tokyo and got right down over the Pacific and flew ground level basically all the way back to Saipan. 

INTERVIEWER: Well how many crew members on a B29?

PRITCHETT: I think were 11. Let's see you had the bomber, pilot, copilot, flight engineer, navigator, radio man, top turret gunner, lower turret gunner, two, one on each side, had a station under each one of the windows and a tail gunner. Even the tail gunners were pressurized. Where it was inhabited, it was pressurized. It was a beautiful plane. It was amazing really. I mean you see that thing with the wings sticking out about two and a half times this room on one side. The wing was wider than the plane was long. It was an amazing aircraft for that matter. I was so very, very pleased being in that outfit. 

INTERVIEWER: And you were at Saipan when the Enola Gay took off from ...

PRITCHETT: Yes, I saw it take off.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know it was on a special mission?

PRITCHETT: No, no, nobody knew. The guys on board the plane didn't know. Absolutely nobody knew. It wasn't even announced until after the bomb had been dropped. Then it came over the island radio, got a dispatch from the War Department in Washington telling them that the first atomic bomb had just been dropped.

INTERVIEWER: Where were you when you heard that news?

PRITCHETT: I was sitting in the aircraft on a weight and balance stand in as much as they wouldn't let the planes fly and we had nothing to do except we took to the weight and balance hard stand.

INTERVIEWER: How do you spell that?

PRITCHETT: Weights and balances. You get the center of gravity on that airplane that way. You know exactly where it is and therefore you can load the plane if you know where the actual center is. If you know where to start from, you can load it a whole lot more, with a lot more sense. We were there with the plane sitting up on balances, just standing up with a weight spot. This thing was stuck up under the wing until that plane is totally balanced. And it gives you the center of gravity on that airplane. You put a dog in the plane and it will go to that spot and lie down because he knows there's nothing strange about that place. He's right in the center of gravity.

We were sitting there listening to the island radio. We had, of course, we had all of the so-called good music of those days. I think it was the finest music ever written.

INTERVIEWER: What did you call it, AFRS? Armed Forces Radio Service?

PRITCHETT: Yes, yes it was. They had a radio station on Saipan which of course was heard over Tinian as well. I never went to Tinian. It was only 3-1/2 miles away from Saipan. You could get on a boat, they had boats that they would let you check out, do a little fishing if you wanted to, but I never went over there. See when we got to Saipan, the war was still going on and they had run down the Japanese all back in the hills and it wasn't open battle anymore. It was a catch me if you can sort of situation.

They went over, the 2nd Marines and the 27th Army Division just went from Saipan crossed over onto Tinian and continued the same fight basically. You could see, we saw the Japanese women actually jumping off of a cliff with their children. The cliff was about close to 100 feet high and they'd take the child up there and take it by the hand and jump off, killed themselves.

Any time of the day or night, you could hear small arms fire all up in the hills. The 2nd Marine Division were sitting right very close to where we were. Those guys, 2nd Marines, they were actually crazy. You wouldn't believe the things they would do and I can't tell you in mixed company. It was terrible. But I guess they were pretty rawed up about it. You could see across the water, only 3 miles, you could see across the water. You could see, at night you could see the tracers marching up with their machine guns. It was almost as hard a fought battle on Tinian as it was on Saipan.

After Curtis LeMay came, he flew one mission with somebody else in charge and they flew at 45,000 feet and the same thing was happening because the crosswinds there...so when they got back, he said "The next call is my call". So he had a meeting the next day of all the flight crews and he said, "We're going to get rid of that bomb bay tank, gasoline tank and we're going to fill up both bomb bays with bombs, not one of them with gasoline. We're going in at 10,000 feet instead of 40,000 feet. The only concession I'm going to make, I'm going to take half of the oil out of the oil tanks just to save that weight. That's all I'm going to do".

He said, "You will fly these airplanes and you will bring them back". They went and both wings flew. They went and came back and out of all of those aircraft, they were in wings of course, one wing was over there and one wing was over here, but they were all in one great massive formation. When they got to Japan, they dropped all their bombs. They were using incendiaries then. 

Before those guys, flight crews took off, they came to all of their buddies on the airplane they were flying, the crew, the ground crew and the flight crew were all very big buddies. They came to us and said, "Here's my 45, I'll never need it again, it's yours". You know they gave everything away. Got back and they did not lose one plane. So from then on, all Curtis LeMay had to do was say let's go boys, and they went. Whenever he said go, they went.

INTERVIEWER: When was that first raid? Was that 1944?

PRITCHETT: Yes it was, it was in 1944. It was, I don't remember the date, but it had to be most likely in January of '44. 

INTERVIEWER: Now the plane, a B29 flying at 40,000 versus the same plane flying at 10,000, do you use more gasoline flying at 40,000 feet?

PRITCHETT: Yes, considerably more. You use considerably more gas because you've got more weight. The more weight you carry, the more it's going to take. Well you reach the point of basically no return because the weight that you're carrying is costing you miles. It just doesn't work. So actually no matter what he said we're going to do thus and such, they were ready to go. All they had to do was say "Let's go". He was, with that cigar sticking out of his mouth, he didn't look like a general ought to look, I'll tell you that (laughter). He looked like a GI, he really did. Those guys would do anything.

INTERVIEWER: You were still...what was your rank then?

PRITCHETT: Oh by that time, I'd made corporal. I was supposed to have been a staff sergeant already for several months. By that time, I made corporal.

INTERVIEWER: Well why weren't you promoted to staff sergeant?

PRITCHETT: Well that's a long story, but it's kind of a nice little story. The exo was a former National Guardsman that had been sucked into the Army and made permanent Army.

INTERVIEWER: Now exo is executive officer.

PRITCHETT: Exactly, and he found out that I had had some experience in building houses or structures if you will. So he put me on duty and gave me a crew of four guys. We were putting up Quonset huts for the flight crews that were coming in because they were the bridesmaids. They couldn't do anything. They were supposed to fly and do nothing else.

So we had to build them a place to sleep. Well my crew got to where we could put one out in the morning and another one up in the afternoon so we were putting up two Quonset huts a day. But at lunchtime, we'd take a break and we'd break for an hour and a half, two hours because on Saipan sometimes on top of the aircraft wings, it would be 115 to 120 degrees. Those planes had no paint on them except the emblems. They were very shiny and it was just like standing on top of a mirror so the sun was shining, it was coming down and you were getting it going back up so it was pretty uncomfortable.

We'd take an extra hour for lunch. Well we had already made each officer in the squadron, gave us a fifth of booze and we had gone down to the CB camp, we'd take two 6x6, that's the truck the Army uses which it gets the most use out of. We'd take that down to the CB camp to the supply area. The CB came out there and wanted to know what we wanted, we'd just hand him a fifth of booze and say get lost.

He'd get lost and we'd load up those two 6x6's with everything we could put on it. By the time we got through with every officer in camp, we had built us a mess hall and an EM club. We had the only EM club on the island in Saipan.

INTERVIEWER: That's enlisted men.

PRITCHETT: Yes. We had a ping pong table and that's where we gathered at lunchtime. We'd play ping pong for an hour and cool down and I was hot shot stuff at that time. The colonel or the major or whatever didn't bother me any. He was just another man and I was not one of these guys that was shy.

So he wanted to, he'd come in and he'd challenge me to ping pong and I'd just tear him up. If I could make him eat the balls and embarrass him a little bit, I did. Well the sad part about that was that kept me from getting my promotions. 

Every time I'd get on the promotion list once a month, once a month he'd mark me off and eventually I went to the line chief and I told the line chief, I says you go tell the major that if I'm not left on the next roster that comes up for promotions, that he's going to have a yard bird on his hands because I'll just absolutely forget everything I know about these airplanes and the only thing I'm going to be able to do is pick up trash around the bivouac.

Well he told him and the next time I got promoted and then two months down the road, as soon as I could get promoted again, I got another promotion and thank God the war got over before I had time to get the third one (laughter).

INTERVIEWER: Tell me what a yard bird is.

PRITCHETT: It's a GI that, he cares for nothing, he does nothing and he's a scroungy, like Beetle Bailey basically. That's a yard bird. I just told him I would not take the knowledge that I had of that B29 and work on it and do the same job the other guys were doing that had gotten their promotions, same as I was supposed to get, and they were getting their pay and I wasn't and I was not going to do it.

INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you the next thing. Where were you when you heard that the war was over in Japan?

PRITCHETT: On the day that the Enola Gay took off from Tinian, word had come through that all aircraft on both of those islands were grounded except the ones that had to be in the air for cover and so we had moved our plane to a weight and balance hard stand to find out where the center of gravity was so it could be better loaded.

We didn't know what was happening. We had no idea. We were sitting there listening to the island radio in there because the weights and balances are done by a crew, not the crew on the airplane that works on the airplane, that's all they do is check weights and balances.

So all we had to do, we were sitting in the positions, pilot, copilot, all of the positions, and listening to the island radio. Of course they had good music and we were sitting there listening to the music about half asleep when all of a sudden over the radio came a message and everybody in that plane heard that message, but nobody could believe it because we said "Did I hear what I thought I heard?" "Yeah, I think I heard it too". The message was, "The first atomic bomb has just been dropped" and that's where I was when the first atomic bomb exploded. I was sitting on a hard stand on Saipan.

INTERVIEWER: Where were you when the war, when peace was declared?

PRITCHETT: I was working on the airplane. First place, I believe, I think it was five days from the time the first bomb was dropped until the second one was dropped. Now we were working on the airplane and we were expecting it, that there was going to be another one. Didn't know for sure, but we were really expecting that there was going to be another and we had all sorts of messages were coming out of Japan from the emperor.

The emperor was saying one thing and his warlords were saying another. We said you know, squabble all you want to, but this is the second one and if it takes a third and fourth, we're going to drop them. We're going to drop them if we have to and he declared a surrender. The Japanese emperor declared a surrender right over the airways. It was a happy time.

INTERVIEWER: Let me ask a final question please. Look right into the camera and know that you're now talking to the people that will see this video tape years from now. Would you mind, tell them what did all of the war experiences teach you.

PRITCHETT: Actually not enough. I don't think any of us got the message or we wouldn't be doing it again. It was a necessary thing and I'm proud to have been a part of it. I would not volunteer to do it, didn't then and would not now because I'm against it. But in the context of what we had to do, it was something we had to do and so I was glad I did it. I wouldn't change it for anything, but I would not want to do it again.

INTERVIEWER: Does war ever solve anything?

PRITCHETT: No, never has and never will because you're not...a second wrong cannot make the first one right. It just can't work. There's no sense in what we're going through at this time and I'm talking about the Taliban and all of the terrorist stuff that we're going through. It's a sad situation, but it's going, it's not going to get any better until we learn how to live with people.