Through the Eyes of the Cape Fear--Voices

Interview with Vernon Woodard
Transcript Number 024

Hello, we're at Plantation Village in Wilmington, North Carolina. Today is February 12, 1999 and were interviewing Mr. Vernon "Woody" Woodard for the Veterans Heritage Project.

INTERVIEWER: Good afternoon, Mr. Woodard.

MR. WOODARD: Good afternoon, I'm glad to be here.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

MR. WOODARD: Well...

INTERVIEWER: Where you were born?

MR. WOODARD: Well, I was born in Jamestown, New York. That's way up in the western part of New York State. I moved to Washington, D.C. when I was sixteen years old. My mother went to work for the government and I graduated from high school in Washington, D.C. At that time, Eastern High School was a segregated all-white high school. It is now un-segregated and is 99% black because of the demographics of the neighboring area.
I went to law school right out of high school. At that time, you could do that without college. I graduated from law school in June of 1941. I passed the Bar and was working as a lawyer in the Department of the Army Ordnance Corps. The Ordnance Corps was the one that made all the powder, ammunition, and explosives. I was the most junior member on a team that was negotiating large cost plus fixed fee contracts for new plants to be constructed to make ordnance material.
I had a draft classification of 2B, which meant I was occupationally deferred, indefinitely. However, after Pearl Harbor, the Government made a determination that anyone who had any occupational deferment would not be able to continue in that deferment unless they had a certain minimum grade. My grade at that time was P4 and the minimum grade was P12. So, I then had to go in. I enlisted at Bolling Field in Washington, D.C. to become an aviation cadet in the Army Air Corp. I took the various tests and passed those. I was told they had a big full pipeline and it would be a while before I would be called.
In the meantime, the draft board got obstreperous. They were being pressured to fill their quotas and they couldn't fill their quotas if they had too many people hanging around waiting to be called to the Air Force Air Corps operations. After this went on for a month or so, the draft board said absolutely, "Either we get credit for meeting our quotas for these people, or we're going to draft them."
So, the Air Force enlisted us as privates in the enlisted reserves and put us on inactive duty. I was on inactive duty as a private from about March 24 or 25th of 1942 until Armistice Day of 1942, November 11th, when I was called to go to the classification center in Nashville, Tennessee. In the meantime, I continued to work as an attorney in the Department of Defense. I, incidentally, right after taking the Bar and before I knew the results; I married my wife and am still married to the same lady for almost fifty-eight years.
In Nashville, the Army had a classification center and they gave you a lot of basic training. This was the only place you got basic training. You did a lot of marching and a lot of other things, but in addition to that, you took a battery of educational type tests as well as manual dexterity tests. They determined from these what they felt you were qualified to be and the three classifications were pilot, navigator, or bombardier. You could take your choice or you could say it would be all three.
Well, I wanted to be an aviation cadet and I didn't want to be a private somewhere in the Army, so I said I took all three. I ended up being classified as all three, but you always had your first choice available to you, so I was going to be trained as a pilot. About a month and half after I was there, they had so many people in the pipeline, they decided to be real humane and gave us all Christmas leave. We went home, supposedly, to come back after New Years. I went home, enjoyed it, and just after Christmas, got a telegram to report back immediately.
It seemed that the normal classification center at Nashville filled the pre-flight school at Maxwell Field, Alabama. In Santa Ana, California there was both a classification center and a pre-flight school and there was also the same in San Antonio. Well, what happened was, the classification center at Santa Ana, California was quarantined because of an outbreak of spinal meningitis and they didn't have any cadets to move into pre-flight. Since Nashville had them backed up, they took a whole trainload of us and loaded us on old antique Pullman cars, three men to a section. Two men slept together in the lower berth and one man in the upper berth and you traded off because the upper berth was more desirable to have all by yourself. It took us five days to get to Santa Ana.
The train would go along and out in the west particularly, you may not know about this, but there was a whole chain of restaurants called Fred Harvey Restaurants at various places on the line, usually where there was a junction. They would let them know we were coming and we'd go in there. There were four or five hundred of us on this train and they'd feed us and then the train would go on. It was a special military train and didn't have any real schedule. We ran all the way to Santa Ana five days later. The first thing that greeted you when you went there and marched into where you were going to be based, was the other guys who had been there a little while who were saying, "You'll be sorry, you'll be sorry." Knowing that you had just come in, you were just new people coming on board.

I went through pre-flight there and did all the things that I had to do. Also, I had a lot of work done. I had three wisdom teeth that were coming through, but only one had broken the gum. They insisted on taking those out because of future problems. We were on a regular workweek, but Saturday afternoon you were given leave and you could go into Los Angeles. They had the streetcar there that run all the way from Laguna Beach up to Los Angeles or you could stay in the Newport Beach/Laguna Beach area. I went to Los Angeles part of the time and went to Laguna Beach or Newport Beach part of the time and just had a little bit of fun. The only problem was, there was a retreat parade every Sunday afternoon that you had to meet with the formation at three o'clock for a five o'clock retreat. If you weren't careful and had a little bit too much to drink on the weekend, you weren't in very good shape to go out to march in the center of the field and stand there for forty minutes or so until the retreat parade started. Then, you had to parade by the reviewing stand. I made it without any big problem.
The only other thing that I want to say about that is that my last name begins with W and the Army at that point in time, and I guess they still do, go by the alphabet. A's go first and I was always the last one to get paid, to get any piece of equipment, and to get in the mess hall. The only place it worked to my advantage was when the squadron got guard duty. They filled the ranks of the guards and then they had a half a dozen left over and they called a supernumerary. My duty was to be an available substitute if somebody got sick and I just spent the night in the guardhouse resting, bunked there, without having to actually go out with a gun and parade back and forth.
After completing pre-flight, I was sent just north of Phoenix to Thunderbird Field. Thunderbird Field was an old civilian airfield where they had just finished making a movie about training British pilots in the United States. They were then sending U.S. people there to start their primary training. I had never been on an airplane before, but when I got to primary and met my civilian instructor, he took us individually. He had about four cadets that he had to work with. He took us up and flew us around and he showed us the area, showed us how the airplane went into stalls, and how when it flopped into a spin, how to get out. He showed you how to pull the throttle back and simulate a forced landing and how to find a good place to land. The field was right on the edge of the desert. Nowadays, I've seen it and the desert starts fifty or sixty miles away now, but it was right close but you couldn't land out in the desert. You'd have to find some farmer's alfalfa field or something like that to land in. So, that's the kind of training they gave us. I was flying what was called a PT17 Stearman and it's a two-winged primary training plane made by Boeing.

I soloed with no big problem. The Army did everything by plan. They had the pipeline adjusted so that thirty to thirty five percent of those going to primary had to wash out because they didn't have room for them in the next stage at basic. So, every time they had an excuse to put somebody as they'd say, AIn the washing machine" that meant you had a series of checks. If you didn't do perfect on those series of checks, you're washed out.
Well, the two things the people had the most problem with were hitting and getting down to a good field. They'd let you come in until you were fifteen to fifty feet above the ground before they'd take you out of there to make sure you were going to get in.(1) Then the other thing was ground looping. The Stearman ground looped more than the other primary trainers. A ground loop is where the plane starts to spin on the ground and one wing dips and it will pivot on that wing and it tears up the end of the wing. Well, that puts you in the washing machine right away and it was pretty hard to get out. Well, I was able to avoid it pretty good, but the further along I got into primary the more I realized that it was a lot easier and safer for me when I hit the ground instead of just trying to keep it on an absolute straight line.(2) We didn't have narrow fields, it was a big rectangular field but it was probably five hundred or six hundred yards wide and you sometimes had four or five airplanes land at the same time. There was plenty of room for it. So, I found that if, when you hit the ground, you just started to work the rudder just a little bit, your airplane would go just a little bit like a snake and you had it under control. It didn't just all of a sudden whip this way or whip that way when you least expected it. Well, this went along and my instructor never questioned it.
Another thing that you had to do, these airplane gasoline engines, when you cut the power off on them, they had a tendency to load up. The mixture builds up and if you let it build up, when you get down close to ground and throw the throttle to it, it sometimes stalls. So, they said you had to clear your engine periodically as you came in on this forced landing. That worked fine because it didn't take the cadets very long to figure out that it they were under shooting a little bit, that gave you a little more power so you could get over the fence at the end of the field.
I came up to the final check which was the first time I'd seen a military person. It was a Lieutenant and he was going to give us our final checks. Well, I went up and I did everything that he told me to do. I did my slow rolls and my snap rolls, spin recovery-both right and left, and stalls with no problems at all. I came in to land and I did my little weave, got out of the airplane, and he dressed me down. He said, AYou did just a beautiful job, everything till the end. What in the hell were you trying to do with this stuff?" I said, AWell, I found that if I avoid ground loops, I've got more control by just letting it turn." He said, AWell, that's not the way we do it in the Army! That's not the way we do it in the Army! I can't fail you, you did everything else perfectly, so you go on but you cut that stuff out. You can't do that in the larger plane."
I went into town that night and called my wife back in Washington, D.C. and asked her to quit her job with the War Department and come join me. I was going to Pecos, Texas where Judge Roy Bean held court years ago. I went to Basic school there where I flew a BT13A that was built by Vultee. It was a low wing, two-seater with a canopy on top and it was kind of a beast to fly. It was very erratic and you couldn't depend from one to the other how it was going to react. You didn't just have one plane you flew, you took what was available.
I had an instructor who was about a year younger than I was. He had just finished flying school and had a little bit of instruction as to how to instruct cadets coming along. Well we got along fine and we flew everything until about 2/3 of the way through basic. We were up one day and he said I want you to do some power on stalls, right and left. So, you brought the plane up right and it came up. You kept the nose higher and higher until it stalled. Then, it just dropped off and you had to recover that before it went into a spin. You just recovered the stall and then you went on. Now, I did this for the right fine and I went to do the left and got up there and it went into a spin instantly. Well, we tried it three times altogether and it would spin. He chewed me out because I spinned it. He said, AI'm gonna show you how to do it!" So, he went up, does his climb and stall to the left. He did it three times and finally said, AThere's something wrong with this airplane." That left wing stalled out a lot quicker than the right wing. When it stalled out, it just gave the plane a whip and down it went.

I forgot to mention that when I was at Thunderbird and primary, we had a grounds school there that gave you a very good training and all the aeronautical subjects. It was not only navigation but how the airplane works, why it flies, and how the engine works mechanically. Then, they had classes on enemy aircraft identification so that you could just see silhouettes. It happened that I did pretty well there, in fact, they issued a news release that I sent home to my wife and mother saying that I had received the highest grade in ground school from anybody who had gone through there before. I was sitting next to a student officer there. Very often you had somebody who had already got a commission one way or another and wanted to become a flier. I was sitting next to a guy named John Kimbrough. John was an all-American football player from Texas A&M. He graduated from Texas A&M and, of course, had been given a commission because he had gone through ROTC there. I found out he was looking at my answers. I still got to be good friends with John.

At basic, the Army, believe it or not, started giving you a little bit of a choice. They asked us to fill out a sheet as to what in three orders of combat flying you would like to do. In my case, I wanted and chose heavy bombardment. I liked the idea of having more than one fan out there working. Some of the guys chose what they called twin engine miscellaneous. Those were the A20's, B25's, and C47 cargo planes.
I got my heavy bombardment and was sent from Pecos, Texas to Stockton, California, which is going from the worst place of the training area to one of the best. It was just lovely up there in Stockton. I went up there and started flying AT17's which were a Cessna twin-engine trainer. On this washing machine deal, like I said, 30-35% had to wash out in primary. When you got to basic, it was only another 20-25% and when you got to advanced it was less than 5%. They spent too much money in training you and they didn't want you washing out then. It gave you a little bit of leeway and made you a little more comfortable.
We went up to Stockton and we were not only flying with an instructor part of the time, but when you're flying solo, you got a buddy because there had to be two in the bird. You had to get twice as many hours to get the hours because one guy would fly the plane for an hour, then you'd land and switch over. So, you flew up and down the San Joaquin Valley. You were then introduced to formation flying, instrument flying, and night flying. To make it worse, night formation flying was where you couldn't tell the lights on the plane from a bright star or planet just above it. It makes it kind of rough when you're first trying to learn.
In Stockton, they also gave us a choice. They asked all those who wanted twin engine miscellaneous to designate whether they wanted C47's, A20's, B25's, heavy bombardment B17's or B24's? Well, my wife had hooked up with another girl there and they were sharing an apartment. B24's were much better planes and a much newer design than the B17's. B24's had fourteen cylinder Pratt & Whitney engines and the B17 had nine cylinder Wrights in them. The Pratt and Whitney engine was a far better and newer engine.
I figured, also, that Albuquerque, New Mexico was where there was going to be training for the B24's, and Hobbs, New Mexico was where they trained for 17's. So, low and behold, we were just before leaving Stockton, just before we got our wings and our commission. They had us all in an assembly room and informed us that we were assigned to heavy bombardment. We got our orders that they were going to send 26 men to Albuquerque for B24's and over 200 to Hobbs for B17's. There were 27 people who wanted B24's there were only 26 spaces. We were instructed to go into a little private room in back to settle who didn't get to go. We got back there and there was a tactical officer, we call them. They were not flying officers, but they were officers and had been through OCS, at least. He started out by asking for a volunteer. He was a kind of a diminutive little guy, but he knew what he was doing. He tore up some paper and he said to write your full name and serial number on it and fold it into fourths. He took his hat off and said put them in here. He said, AWhich one of you guys would like to draw out the one name?" So, one of the cadets came up and drew out a name and said, AOk, this is so and so and you're not going." Just to make sure that no one didn't try to pull a fast one, he made a roster up from what was left in the hat. He said, AIf one of you guys put somebody else's name in and didn't put your name in at all, you're not gonna go." That's what happened and he found that there was no name or name pulled out for this one guy. He thought he had outsmarted the system but he didn't get to go.
We got sent off to Albuquerque where we met the B24. It was a much earlier model that had been flown in North Africa. It didn't have the turrets in front and back but it was the same basic shape with a forward entrance. We started training and I was paired up with this fellow that our wives knew each other and our wives had been traveling together.
So, we flew down and learned to fly the plane cross-country, formation day flying, and formation night flying. When you were flying nighttime, you didn't get into town and we stayed at the BOQ. Shortly after I started flying at night, I went over to the officers club to get dinner and to have a drink. I'd been flying twice that day, both afternoon and evening. There, sitting at the bar, was big John Kimbrough. I said, AHey John, what ya doing here?" He said, AI'm not doing anything. Just sitting here and having a drink. What are you doing? You assigned down here?" I told him I was in the B24 transition school. I said, AWhere are you? You in transition?" He said, ANo, no. I'm over at the other side of the field."
There was a bombardier school at the other side of the field. He was flying the bombardier trainers for bombardiers, which is one of the most boring things you could do in flying. He'd have to take four or five of these bombardiers and the instructor up and then fly bombs runs. He just kept flying these bomb runs and he said it was boring. He was trying to get out of there.
I said, "Well, you got enough pull you ought to be able to get out of there. Try to get into transition school." He said, AI can't. I've tried that. I didn't take a two engine advanced course and he said they won't take anybody who didn't have two engine advanced." I said, AWell, you ought to be able to talk them into going out. It'll just put you back a little bit." He said, "No, I don't want to do that. I'm hoping I can get out of here someway." I saw him a number of times there.

Well, after a little over three months of learning how to fly a B24, I was certified with a military occupational specialist as a four-engine B24 pilot. I was sent up to Fresno, California, Hammer field where I picked up nine other people -- A co-pilot who had just graduated from advanced, a bombardier, a navigator, and six enlisted men. Now, I have a picture here taken a little bit later. My first engineer was a little guy who was technically all right. He was satisfactory with me, but he couldn't get along with the other five enlisted men. They came to me in a group and said, AYou have to get rid of him because we don't want to go overseas with him. We don't trust him and we don't like him because he's just overbearing." I asked, AYou're sure?" So, I went to the people in charge and said I wanted to get rid of this guy. So, they took him away. I didn't want to go away with dissension in the crew. So, he dropped out and I promoted the assistant engineer to chief engineer.
Now, this picture shows the ten-man crew including myself. I'm down here in the front row. There's one fellow over here who was just a sub on this particular mission. One of my gunners was sick that day and didn't go. This was right after a mission and we'd just got off the airplane. I think it was probably over Truk and it was fairly early in the tour. They were out taking pictures, so we had this picture taken. I value that.
Actually, my radio operator is alive and we're not sure about this one, but nobody else is alive. So, we then trained there as a crew. The pilots did a lot of flying and the gunners had to fly missions with a tow target plane pulling a target while the gunners are shooting their guns. The bombardiers dropped practice bombs and the navigator got some cross-country flights. We had to fly day and night.

I had two significant experiences there that stuck with me and will stick with all the other ones all our lives. We were on a cross-country flight and I went from Fresno to what was called Muroc Dry Lake Airfield. It's known as Edward's Air Force Base and it's the field that the shuttle lands on at the west coast. We were flying out of there on a daytime mission. We were to go down to Tucson and then we were going from Tucson, a ways east of Phoenix, and then come back. I looked at the map and thought it would be nice to go a little bit further north to see the Grand Canyon. I went to the Captain, who was the Squadron tactical officer, and told him that I'd like to change a flight plan. I told him what I wanted to do and he said, AOh, lets go to the Operation Office and file an amendment to the flight plan." So, we did.
We went over there and we hit the Grand Canyon over at the edge where the little Colorado comes in and starts going West and starts to get deep. Everybody wanted to get down a little closer, so we ended up flying below the rim all the rest of the way up the Canyon. They won't let you go over it at all now, but back then nobody was worried it and I took the B24 down. We were looking up at the rim on each side. Well, that was a nice little trip.
Then, just before we got finished with phase training, we were on night flying and everybody had to do it. The bombardier had to drop bombs at night. They were flying target planes past us on one side, so that the gunners on one side got their shots at it, and then they'd come back the other way on the other side. Everybody got trained. The navigator had to work to get us down to Tucson, again. It always seemed I had to go to Tucson. Well, it was about two o'clock in the morning when we got to Tucson. We were quite sure it was Tucson, but we were there early but we didn't know what caused us to get there that early. The navigator said we had better ground speed.
We circled Davis Monathon Field there and came back up and flew back up towards Muroc Base. The Navigator said we must have an awful headwind because we were just not making any progress. Well, we kept looking and looking and I finally saw the Salton Sea, which is a dry seabed there in southeastern California. You could see it in the moonlight. We were way south of our course and short of where we should have been. Just about that time, the engineer said, AHey, hey, Woody look! We're practically out of gas." I said, AWhat do you mean, we're practically out of gas? We're doing this at 20 thousand feet with oxygen, too. What do you mean?" He said, AThe gauges are way down." I said, AYou been watching them?" He said, AThey were full when we started. I saw them once they were coming down, but they weren't coming down that fast but they're down now. They're showing that you don't have much gas left." So, I said, AWell, we gotta do something here."
Back in those days, there were rotating beacons and they had them located every ten miles or so.(3) They had red lights on the back of them if there was no landing field , but they had a green light if they had a field of lights that you could land on. We were looking off and we could see the light line. We could see them from twenty thousand feet and we could probably see eight to ten of the lights. One of them was green, so we headed for that. We started coming down heading for that light and got up close enough that we could see the field and knew from the way we had been flying and the plane had been acting that the wind was coming from the west to north west. So, we knew which way to land.
I called on a normal channel that most civilian fields monitor but we didn't get a reply. I said, AThere is a B24 in the area that is low on gas and we are coming in for fuel." We landed but didn't know where we were until we taxied past the tower and the sign read Needles, California. We parked the airplane and I called the base back at Muroc. I told them what had happened, that we were down, and we just had to get some gas and we'd come back in the morning.
So, in the morning, they brought a gas truck out. I ordered 800 gallons of gasoline and he put that in the tank. I knew that would be more than enough to get us home and we probably could have gotten home on 300. They had chits there, regular purchase orders. The pilot filled out the purchase order, signed it, and gave it to the gas company because they would collect. He wrote in how many gallons and how much it was a gallon.
We got back and the next day, this tactical officer came to me and chewed me out a little bit. He asked why we ordered so much gas. I told him that I practically ran out of gas once and I wasn't going to run out of gas again. He said, AYeah, but you know 200 or 300 gallons would have done it." I told him I didn't know whether I had a leak or just what was going on. We couldn't see a leak when we were on the ground, but I didn't know what was going on. It turned out that they checked the plane and found that it had been in combat at one time and had self-sealing gas tanks. A self-sealing gas tank has a rubber like substance that will seal a hole if it gets a leak in it. That stuff was made to swell when it's exposed to gasoline and that's how it plugs the hole. It was swollen up and instead of the gas tank walls being maybe that thick, they were like this. Since they were confined on the outside, all the expansion went on the inside and didn't hold anywhere near as much as they were supposed to hold. They figured I was justified in landing that night. They said we were the only plane that didn't get back that night.
So, the next thing was graduation and I knew I was going overseas. My wife was then staying south of Pasadena where she had an apartment. When we got leave, I'd go in to see her. But towards the end when we didn't have much flying to do, sometimes, we just had to fly a night mission and would get through at ten o'clock. If you didn't have anything to do for the next day or so, you didn't sign out or anything. Nobody was worried about you. You just went down to the gate and somebody was always going through the gate, so you could get a ride to Los Angeles.
I can remember going in several times and hitching a ride all the way over to L.A. to get over to Pasadena. My knocking on the door made my wife's landlord mad and he would get up anywhere from 4:30 to 6:00 o'clock in the morning. One time, I had one more trip to come in and I didn't know when I was going to get in and I didn't want to have to spend all the time hitch hiking across Los Angeles. So, I asked my wife to go up to Hollywood and check into a hotel and I'd get there just as soon as I could. I couldn't tell when I would be coming because first of all, I didn't know how much I would have to fly that night and secondly, I didn't know how quick I could get a ride. Sometimes, you had to wait a 2 hour to an hour for somebody going in.
So, she was waiting for me in Hollywood and she said that several of the soldiers coming in kept looking at her. The room clerk came over and told them to knock it off because she was waiting for her husband. The next morning, I walked out and started back to Muroc. I kissed her goodbye on the street and stepped out and immediately got a ride going back to base. I didn't see her again until I got home a little over a year later.

From there, the pilot, the co-pilot, and the engineer got sent up to Hamilton field northeast of San Francisco, where we picked up a lot of equipment. The government had a system where anytime you signed out government property, you had to sign a memorandum of receipt. I signed a memorandum of receipt not only for my personal items, but I signed for a completely equipped B24. Then, I had to take that airplane up and they wanted a ten-hour fuel consumption test.
So, for ten hours, we flew up and down the San Joaquin valley at a hundred and sixty airspeed miles per hour. When we got through with that, we went back close to Hamilton. We called in and said we were finished and headed over halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento where there was a military airfield. It's still there but now its called Fairfield Suisan Airfield. We stayed there and then we picked up some more equipment and made sure everybody had what they needed.
Then two days later, we took off at night headed for the next stop to Hickam Field, Honolulu. This was the first real over water flight that we ever had. We started out for Hawaii, we made it, and we were right on time. The navigator was told to navigate for the center of the island chain and to try not to hit Oahu at the north end. There's a couple of big volcanoes down on the big island and you can see those before you see anything else. So, we got there and went to Hickam Field. They gave us the day off and we all wanted to go to Waikiki.
We got out there and swam awhile and then some of them said let's rent a surfboard and try surfboarding. I was game and we went out and tried it and tried it. I didn't do very good on getting the surfboard started, but I sure did wear the front of my bathing trunks out trying to get on that surfboard. They were just barely clinging to me and I had to send the co-pilot in to get another pair of trunks to switch so I could get back up on the beach.
We went on from Honolulu to our next stop, which was the very small island of Christmas Island. It's famous for the fact that this was the island that Eddie Rickenbacher was looking for and he spent a month in a life raft out in the sea. He never did find Christmas Island. They put a radio beacon on the island so it wasn't too hard to find with a radio compass.
Our next stop was Fiji. We then went to Guadalcanal and I had half the crew with me. Four of the enlisted men went over in a cargo passenger plane. We had to get some more training including some practice missions before we went on up to the main combat areas. I went out to Henderson Field, which is the old traditional field that the Japanese were using and we had captured.

Right alongside of that, they built a longer strip called Koli Field which was just carved out of the jungle and they didn't put any rock down. They just put steel mats with holes in the matting down. I got in an airplane with a check pilot. He said, AOk let's take off. All I want you to do is to take off, we'll go up and exit to pattern at a 45 degree left angle and when you get out far enough, go around the rest of the way and start back a downwind leg and bring it around and land it." I take off in the airplane and it gets about fifty feet off the ground and he pulls all the power on the left side down to zero. The way the 24 worked, with 12 inches of manifold pressure and full RPM, it was the same as a feathered engine meaning the prop wasn't turning at all with no resistance. Below 12 inches it was resisting and you used that when you were landing to help slow you down. Above 12 inches of mercury it was pulling some. So, he pulls these two engines on the right side off. I'm on fifty feet and, of course, when you lose the power, the engines want to go down. If you had your inside engines going, it's easier to bring an inside engine up, but when they're out there on the outside they want to bring you right over like that. I think I called him a couple of dirty names when he did that. I got it up to about 350 feet. He said that's good enough, fly it around at 350 feet instead of 500 feet. I flew it around and landed it with just these two engines still off. I came all the way in with just two engines on the right working. They had to do it that way because the hydraulic pumps ran off the number 2 engine. You had to keep the engine on that side going, otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to do anything. He was satisfied that I could fly and then we flew some practice missions.
I flew a mission up to Ribul, one up to Bougain, one up to another island, and then we got sent up to Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands where they were bombing Truk. In my group, there were sixteen crews coming together. Well, there were two groups up there -- the 5th group and the 307th group B and each of them had four squadrons with two complete crews assigned to each squadron.(4) I went to the 394th squadron but it used to be known as the 4th Recon Squadron. In WWI, it was the 4th Recon squadron and had been in Hawaii ever since. But, when they became heavy bombardment squadron, they redesignated it and it became the 394th. It flew with the 23rd, the 31st, and the 72nd.
A couple of days before I got there, there was another crewmember by the name of Bassett. He got to go before I did because his name started with a B and mine started with a W. So, we got a place for a tent and brought around some lumber. The enlisted men were in another section. We built our tent and started flying missions the next day. I went to Truk every other day, but we were losing a lot of airplanes. We were not losing them over Truk, but losing them coming back because there were so many of them going down that we were instructed to spread out.(5) We were to fly out at least fifty miles apart and each would cover 20-25 miles on either side. You would get down to 500 or 600 feet and start looking for life rafts or life jackets in the water and you'd fly back. To do this, of course, you came off the target and some of you went to the left, some to the right, and some went straight.
One day, the 394th didn't fly that day. There were just three squadrons flying, but Bassett flew with one of the other squadrons and I flew with the second one. I heard him report to his squadron commander that he was off the target and he was spreading out and was going to go search. Nobody ever heard another thing from him and he just disappeared. Well, he could have lost more than one engine, but more likely, he and his navigator didn't do a good job in the navigating and/or the radio compass didn't work too good. The radio compass wasn't effective way out and in fact, you had to be within an hour flight. But on these flights, you were out five to eight hours away from your base. It was more likely that he had just got beyond the range or his radio compass wouldn't point to his base. The pilot was out there over the water, there was nothing but water, he was flying off the ETA, and I didn't know what to do. He started circling in bigger circles until we ran out of gas.

At that point in time, the 13th Air Force was called the jungle Air Force and it was a very small operation. It was a private war we were fighting over there. When we were in Europe, the U.S. was putting 2000 to 2500 airplanes over Germany a day. The British were putting another 1500 to 2000 over at night. We were lucky with the two groups if we got 40 airplanes off the ground and over the target. So, when you lose two a week, the percentage goes way up.
When we were flying, the newer pilots were flying missions every other day and a search mission in-between. On a search mission, you had a larger area and you were assigned an area. You started out and you would fly two hundred miles and then you would cross over fifty miles and then you'd come back two hundred miles just looking. You were gone twelve hours normally, for the search missions and it was pretty tiring.
We bombed Truk and a couple of other islands out that way and then they started to move up and wanted us to bomb Yap, another small island. It was famous in the old days because there was a trans-Pacific cable station there. Yap is also the place where they showed pictures of natives with big round stone money about four or five feet tall and one foot thick.
When we started flying up towards Japan and had landed at Saipan, the Japanese, to oppose this landing, were using two or three aircraft carriers that they would start out from midnight to one o'clock in the morning. They would steam out as fast as they could toward Yap, so that they would be within 200 to 275 miles at dawn. They'd launch their airplanes, immediately turn around and go back, and get out of range with the carrier. The planes would come in and they would either be equipped for the bomb or strafing, or both.
Then, they would fly south and west to Yap where they would refuel the airplane and then fly back to the carrier, land, and be ready to do it again the next night.
We were going up there from the southeast, almost a thousand miles away, and we were bombing the airfield so they couldn't use it. Over there, you had these coral airfields and coral gets hard pretty quick. All you had to do was to take a bull dozer or road scraper and push some coral into a hole and fill it up a little higher than it needs to be filled up and run a roller over it, pack it down a little bit, and it's ready to go. By morning, they could have the runways ready to take off again.
The second time I went up to Yap, it was a pretty cloudy day. We were in and out of the clouds and had just got on our bomb run. When you get on your bomb run, you have to keep going and give the bombardier a chance to get the bombs on the target. While we were doing this, a couple of zeros came out of the clouds within easy range and just raked across our squadron. I had a gunner back at the waist window who got hit by a twenty millimeter shell that exploded. The ball turret, which has to be retracted to land, had an electric hydraulic system and also had an emergency hand pump. It had all of its hydraulic system and electric hydraulic system shot out. The nose wheel was shot out flat and I was hit in the knees and the thigh.
We flew back with the co-pilot flying the airplane and I sat there till we got all the way to landing and I let the engineer go up to my seat. I figured I couldn't use this leg at all and couldn't use the right rudder. I was in the hospital for a month and went back to duty. I talked the surgeon into letting me stay in this evacuation hospital. I was sick right after I got there, apparently the shock from the wound caused malaria to flare up. I had been taking quinine for the malaria, but it just flared up and I was really sick. I couldn't keep quinine on my stomach, so every time they'd give me quinine, I'd throw up everything I had in my stomach. Then, they gave me a shot in the hip for anti-gas gangrene, which I was allergic too. I got the hives that were about as big as a football on my hip. The doctor had me there longer than he wanted me and I kept talking to him. I said, AYou're gonna get in trouble if you send me back down there." He said, AI'm gonna get in worse trouble if I keep you here." He kept me there and the only thing that happened was a surprise inspection and the doctor came hurrying over and said, AFor God's sake, go out in the latrines and spend an hour until this is over." I did and they never saw me.
I went back to duty and we moved further up the New Guinea coast. This was island hopping with MacArthur. The mission I had gotten wounded on, was the last mission they were flying before they went on rest leave. Rest leave was for seven to nine days in Sydney. I went up and they were not sending anybody right then because they were in the process of moving and each group had two C47's to use for moving and for ferrying people around. I flew a couple of missions and then it came time for a rest leave with another crew and I was down in Sydney for the eight or nine days, which was fine. I came back and continued to fly. We had nothing but dehydrated food and canned food. The best thing we had was pineapple and they only had to go to Hawaii to get that.

INTERVIEWER: You were saying?

MR. WOODARD: I was starting to talk about the food we had in the South Pacific. As I said, we had just dehydrated food and canned food unless you had some way of getting some from the Navy. The Navy had big refrigerated boxes that they brought on the ships and then they had little refrigeration units they attached to the boxes to keep the food frozen. The one thing the Air Force had was booze and we were issued at the end of every mission, two ounces of liquor. This was good U.S. liquor and most of it was 100-proof bourbon with good names like I.W. Harper, Old Grand Dad, and so forth. If it was a particularly difficult mission, they might increase the issue. Of course, it was the medical sergeant in the flight surgeon's tent who did the pouring. He didn't really stop too easily and gave you plenty. To tell you the truth, most of us just couldn't take that much booze after a strenuous mission. We ended up begging an empty bottle from him and then we'd just keep pouring it in. It didn't make any difference the brand of bourbon, if it was bourbon, it went in the bottle.
Then, my little bombardier, a little Italian fellow from Teaneck, New Jersey, would take out a couple bottles and would usually go to the CB's. He was a real entrepreneur. The CB's were the construction people for the Navy and he talked to the mess sergeant. You'd be surprised how you might get five pounds of steak for one bottle. So, he'd bring that back, build a little barbecue pit, and have some steak. Then in addition to that, when you went on rest leave, you were issued four bottles of wine, one bottle of bourbon, and one bottle of gin. Well, I never smoked, but up in the islands, you got issued a carton of cigarettes every week, too. I mean I think of all these cigarette company ads and how they're blaming them for getting people hooked on cigarettes. I mean the government did an awful good job in WWII of getting people hooked on cigarettes. I would give my carton to my co-pilot the first week, the navigator, the second week, the bombardier the third week, and the engineer the next week. I went right down the crew and I kept doing that.

Then, when they took you down to Sydney with a C47, incidentally this booze down there had no stamps because you could buy bourbon from the PX for $2.70 a bottle. Well, they'd bring that back up to the islands and the officers, as soon as they got a chance, had an officer's club tent built and they served booze. They had the fruit juices, ginger ale, Seven-Up and so forth to mix with it and they'd charge us all a quarter a drink.
But believe it or not, from the quarter a drink from the officers, they had enough money to replenish the booze and go down to Rockhampton, Australia where there was a farmers' cooperative. They'd buy a C47 full of fresh eggs with that money. They'd come back up and every man, whether flying or ground personnel, got two eggs the first morning you got back and one egg the second morning. The profits went into getting some fresh food.
My little bombardier, being Italian, found a bakery on one of the islands. It was all enlisted men and there was a tech sergeant in charge. They baked bread for everybody on the island. They made pizza and spaghetti for their own food and they had dry spaghetti. They were using dehydrated onions, tomatoes, and spices. People would come back from Australia and brought back Genoa Italian sausage because it was so hard, dry, and so spiced, it wouldn't spoil in the tropics. We would chop that up and put it in to have some meat in the spaghetti.
Then, of course, they had the cans of Vienna sausage. That's what we mainly had to eat. When we went on a mission, I designated two of the enlisted men to go by the mess hall to pick up two boxes. There would usually be four big cans of juice, pineapple juice, but sometimes grapefruit or orange juice, two loaves of bread, and then there would usually be a 5 lb. tin of Spam. We kept a can of mustard.(6) After we came off the target, whoever wasn't flying would take their trench knife and slice up the Spam the bread, and put some mustard on and that was your lunch. You'd drink whatever juice we had there.
When you went on rest leave, you ate high on the hog. You ate at rest homes, which were like cruise ships today. You just didn't get served that much. You had to be off and go through a line to get it, but you could go through the line anytime day or night.
Talk about flying, when we were flying off the Admiralty Islands and off the next two islands up, our targets were on the south side of the equator within two degrees and the targets were on the North side of the equator within two degrees.(7) You had to cross the equator going up and coming back. Well, there is right around the equator what's called the equatorial front. This is like a regular weather front and some days it was just really bad. I've seen the day I've climbed over twenty five thousand feet and didn't break out of the top of it. Some days, you could just pick your way through and had a little bit of instrument flying for a few minutes, and then you'd come out. This was another reason people got lost. You'd fly through here, they might think they're coming out this way and they're actually coming out another way and it doesn't take you long to get disoriented. When those fronts were heavy, you really got buffeted around in the airplane and it wasn't just simple flying. You couldn't keep it on automatic pilot and you just had to sit there and hold her.

We were on the third island along New Guinea up in what they called the Bight of New Guinea where there was a little round island called Numfoor. We flew missions to the north from there and then we flew to Borneo. The Borneo oil fields and oil refinery flight was a 17 2 hour flight and we were really loaded down. They really had to experiment to see whether the plane would stand it or not. A B24 had twice the gasoline capacity and twice the bomb capacity of a B17. They just kept bombs in one bomb bay and then the back bomb bay had gas tanks and extra gas tanks.(8)
We took off around one or two in the morning with room, as often was the case, for the CB's or U.S. Corp of Engineers.(9) They would alternate; one would be building a runway on one island and the next place they landed with the troops, the other one would build. They started at sea level on each end and they rose up to 40 or 50 feet higher than the middle and then came down. This long flight where we had to be loaded up heavy, they authorized us to go twenty inches above the red line on the manifold pressure to get all the power we possibly could get out of the plane. We'd taxi down and taxi so close to the water on one side that we'd stick the tail out over the water. We held our brakes until we had full throttle holding it there, and then released the brakes and we would start lumbering down, then lumber up the hill, and then it would start down. You'd pick up speed coming down the hill. The only problem is that you've got a negative angle on your wing so you had less lift on the wing.
That first night that we went down there, I took off and was one of the last ones in my squadron. There was a good friend of ours that had gone all the way through training. His crew ran out of runway and ran right into the ocean where the plane exploded. They delayed take off maybe for fifteen or twenty minutes and said there was nobody there. They checked right quick, but there was nobody around. They were just all gone.(10) We took off and flew up to the equator for a long time. We flew down to the east coast of Borneo to a place called Balikpapan where we went in and bombed an oil refinery. It was kind of cloudy.
There was another group that was flying there and this group was very famous for their publicity and they were always getting articles in the paper. They got up there, took one look, and turned around and went back. They said, "The target was obscured, we couldn't see it." Our group went up and it was obscured, so we made a circle, came, and we dropped our bombs.
In the meantime, we were under interception. The Japanese planes were flying all around. We had never, up until this point, had any fighter cover. The fighters couldn't get out of where we were. The Japanese were having a great time of coming in and shooting us. Of course, the B24's had ten 50-caliber machine guns on each one, so we didn't just lie there helpless.
During this bomb run, we got hit with a 20-millimeter projectile. A Zero has two 7.7 millimeter machine guns firing through the propeller, and then it has two 20-millimeter on each side. The 20-millimeter was the one that had hit the back part of my plane in Yap. We apparently got hit by a 20-millimeter shell that hit right up by the co-pilot. He sat right there and it went down on an angle like that against the bomb bay.(11) The bomb bay doors were open and it went right out the open doors.
The way the Japanese had the 20-mm fused, they were fused to go off on second impact. They'd go through something and then the next thing it hit, it would blow. It cut a trough just in front of the co-pilot's knee down to the bomb bay which was about 2.5 inches wide and about 3 inches deep. It cut the power off for all our radio equipment and all of our directional equipment. When we got off the target and out of interception, I was flying a number 3 position that day. I called the squadron leader but I couldn't get out and couldn't hear him. I got the radio operator to get up in the window behind the co-pilot and we had one of the guns that had different colored lenses and it triggered so you could send Morse code. He sent Morse code to the squadron leader saying that all of our communications equipment was out, we couldn't hear and we couldn't transmit.
They understood that we had no communications. They sent a message back to the base saying they had no communications with us using our number. The base read that as meaning we'd gone somewhere or gone down with no communication. We were sitting out there and flying along with them. Then, they decided they were shot up too and they were going to go to an emergency field. I flew the plane all the way back to our base and landed.
When we came in, I wanted to get everybody out of my way and I had the engineer fire the flare meaning it's an emergency. When we landed, the fire trucks and ambulances were all gathered there and had cleared off the end of the runway. I opened the side window and said, "I'm sorry." They wanted to know what had happened and I told them afterwards when we got down. I wasn't sure if they'd seen us and I wanted to be sure that they knew we were coming in. I didn't want them to tell us to go around or you're going to hit somebody. I wanted the freedom to come in, so we came in.
That was the longest mission flown by a four engine bomber. Subsequent to that, they flew out of India down to the Singapore area or down below Singapore. Of course, when they started operating B29's, the B29's going to Japan flew longer.
After that, we moved up to Molotai in the Halamahara Islands. Molotai was a small island which had a little spit of land that looked like an appendix coming out where we had established a perimeter and they had an airfield there at the base of that. There were camps down the rest of the island and they just left the Japanese to sit there. They had established a perimeter and the Army troops were there protecting us so they wouldn't come down.(12) While we were there, the Japanese started bombing us. This is the first because they were coming off the rest of the Halamahara and they were less than 200 miles away. They came down and they could bomb every night.(13) We'd send up night fighters to try to shoot them down and we were sending up anti-aircraft fire.
We all had foxholes but a foxhole doesn't protect you much for the hardware coming out of the exploding anti-aircraft shell that's just falling down. There were hunks of steel just coming down. My bombardier got us some more lumber and we built covers out of 3/4 inch boards over the top of our bunks in the tent. Everybody's tent had holes in it where the steel would come down. Instead of going out in the foxholes, we just stayed in bed every night, until they finally got all those Japanese planes shot down.
Another time, I was at the airfield and the engineer had wanted me to test an airplane for him. I had been doing a lot of testing for him and I didn't mind flying instead of sitting around all day doing nothing. Furthermore, my little bombardier used that as an excuse to get more things because he promised them airplane rides. I was down there one night and I'd tested an airplane and landed it. I was getting out of the airplane when an air raid warning sounded and a Japanese airplane came in. The Japanese dropped a bomb that hit a plane over on the other side of me and I had a full bomb load go up within 70 yards of where I was. I was down behind this revetment, so it felt pretty hot for a while.
I used to fly a lot of engineering missions. Whenever you did work on the turbo charger, you had to take it up to twenty thousand feet and run it up there to make sure it worked, because it didn't work below that. My bombardier would see these guys like the bakery group. I took all those up and it took me three times to get them all. We took them up and gave them a ride and they got to see how it was riding in an airplane. They'd send a large container of spaghetti or a large container of something else that they'd made up and send it back with us. We'd get a little good food that way.

It was interesting flying from Molotai. There were two things that really stuck in my mind. First, we went up on one bombing mission to the center part of the Philippines. We were going up the center of the Philippines and bombing airfields. We tried to keep the Japanese from getting any airplanes in the air. On the morning that MacArthur landed in the Philippines, we went up to Leyte where he landed and it was less than 50 miles wide. The Japanese were landing on the east coast and the west coast. They were bringing in supplies and more men.
We came in and bombed the Japanese on one side and then they had instructed us to get out as soon as the bombs were dropped because we didn't want to get too close to the east side.(14) They were going be very leery of any airplanes coming over and they'd shoot at anybody. It was quite interesting to actually see the boats coming in and the smoke coming up from where there was firing going on. We were probably about ten to twelve thousand feet and we were probably thirty miles away, but you could plainly see it. It was small, but you could see what was going on.
The next couple of days, the Japanese Navy was mauled by the U.S. Navy. This was the battle of Lady Gulf and the Japanese took a pretty good beating. They were retreating down south of Leyte and crossed North of Mindanau and tried to get over towards Borneo where they had a big naval base. We were sent up to look for Japanese shipping and any warships they had. I was squadron leader for the 394th that day and there were only three squadrons that went, instead of four.
The fourth one didn't go because it didn't have enough airplanes to go. We flew all the way up the center part of the Philippines, almost all the way up to Luzan, and then we turned around and came back. When we were coming back approaching Mindanau, I was in the number three squadron, which is off on the left wing of the squadron leader and going in that direction. I was leading the first squadron going in.
We spotted three wakes in the water and they were ships going in a curve. If they'd stayed dead in the water, we wouldn't have seen them because we were far enough away. We thought that had to be Japanese shipping because no U.S. shipping was supposed to be there. We started a bomb run and we were thirty or forty miles away. It turned out to be a Japanese light cruiser and two destroyers. We were going along, everybody's following me, we're getting close, and I'm talking to my bombardier on the intercom. Pilots had what was called a PDI, a pilot direction indicator, which was connected to the bomb site. Every time the bombardier made a correction in deflection, I would have to move the plane a little bit. He wasn't making much change, but when he warned me on his bomb site, he had a couple of contact points, contact points that were driving toward each other and when they got to the sight together, the electrical charge released the bomb. The bomb sight tells you when you're to release them. He was watching these through a glass window and he would say, "They're getting close now."
I had to guess which way he was going to turn because at ten thousand feet, they could sit there and watch your bombs come out. They could be more than a quarter of a mile away by the time the bombs got down and missed them. All at once, he went to the right and I kicked the plane over and the other guys were kicking it over and the bombs dropped. Our squadron put some right up across the middle of the cruiser. The second had some near misses, but they were probably misses because they weren't close enough. The third squadron came along and put a couple more bombs on the ship.
In our group, there was one more squadron called snoopers. These were radar equipped planes and they used to go out at night, singularly. They were painted black and they were hard to see. They're whole idea was to keep the Japanese awake and not to let them rest. They would fly and make eight to ten bomb runs fifteen to thirty minutes apart. They'd fly over and drop a couple of bombs and fly out and around. They'd fly back again in a different direction, drop a couple of bombs, and just keep them up with an air raid all night long. They came up just before dark and they said the cruiser was bottom side up and going down because it had turned over. The water was full of little life rafts and life jackets. We got credit for that Japanese cruiser going down, for which the pilot, co-pilot and the bombardier were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for a job well done.

Shortly after that, since my crew was well ahead of me because I had been out for a month when I was in the hospital, most of them were getting grounded to go home. So, I didn't have a crew. The officials at the fifth bomb group headquarters came to me and said I was behind my crew and I wasn't eligible to go home. I had been qualified both as a squadron leader and as a group leader. They asked if I was willing to trade five more missions as a group leader for a second rest leave in Sydney. I thought about it for a little bit and thought I'd like to go to Sydney again.
The bombing raids were getting easier, so to speak, and the Japanese were not as aggressive as they were. They didn't have as much equipment and furthermore we then had P38 fighter covers.
We got that midway in our campaign in the Philippines. Charles Lindbergh had come out and taught the Air Force pilots how to fly and conserve gasoline. You would fly very low RPM and very high manifold pressure and it would use less gasoline for the amount of power produced. So, they were able to get out further. The Japanese were coming over and circling around to come down. They usually came down from two o'clock to ten o'clock and high. That was how they attacked, in that angle. You could see them circling around and coming up to get into position and all of a sudden, they were going crazy and then came the B38's chasing them and chased them right out of there.
I got sent down to Sydney and it was supposed to be seven to nine days. I still have the pass at home. I had to go in everyday and I was there for twenty seven days. They couldn't get me back because the airplane was in use moving to the Philippines. I get back and we'd moved from Molotai right up to Somor in the Philippines. I go up and report in and they ask, "Where in the hell have you been?" I said, "I've been in Sydney. You took me down in your airplane and you were supposed to come back to get me. Why didn't you come back to get me?"

To make the story even sweeter, in the meantime, they got enough replacement crews in that I was grounded. First, I was grounded and then grounded from combat. I didn't fly those extra five missions. I went down to another island, Biak, that I earlier bombed before we took it, and was there for about a month until they had two ships go out with people on them. The rest of my crew went on one of those ships, but I hadn't been there long enough to get on one. There wasn't room for me, but after a month, they came along with the passenger version of the B24 and flew me back and landed at Fairfield Suisan Field in California. It was the same place I'd taken off from coming over.
I got home and I got sent to take a little leave and then got sent to rest leave in Miami Beach. They sent them there from the east coast and I was there for three or four days getting reoriented to civilian life. I then got a call to come to see Lt. Mosby. I thought, "It can't be the "Mo" I knew in the 394th", but sure enough it was. He was down there and he and a guy from the 72nd squadron were in charge of reassigning pilots that had come back. After leave from coming home from overseas, we were reassigned. So, he said to me, "Woody where do you want to go? What do you want to do?" I asked, "What's available?" We talked about it and he said he'd look for a couple of days. He called me back and said he had the best assignment they'd had in a long time. He said, "If you want it, you can have it, but if you don't want it, we'll keep looking." I said, "What is it?" He said, "You go to Memphis, Tennessee at the station at the airport on the other side, is the 4th Ferry Command--the 8th Air Transport Command, ferrying the airplanes around." I figured with my wife with me, it would be better to go to Memphis.
When we left Miami Beach, they were barricading it. It was getting very close to V.E. Day and they were not going to let anybody off. They had taken over a number of hotels on Miami Beach and they were using them to billet the officers and enlisted men coming in.
When V.E. Day came, they were just going to lock everybody in, let them celebrate all they wanted to, but just weren't going to let them go out beyond that point. It took a day and half on the train to get up to Memphis. I got my wife settled in the Peabody Hotel and went out to the airport to report in and was told it was VE Day and that I couldn't leave the base. Later that afternoon, I called my wife and I told her to find a bus at the hotel. I told her that I couldn't get off base but I had a BOQ, she could come out and see me because there was going to be a big party that night. She made her way out and partied.
At midnight, they actually took a bunch of army buses to get the wives off the base. So, I ferried airplanes, meaning to fly to one place with a co-pilot and an engineer and picking up an airplane. Since V.E. Day had occurred, they were bringing crews home from Europe and they were flying them into to Florida. The idea was, that those that had enough missions in, were through with their overseas flying, but those that didn't, were going to be transferred to the Pacific. They gave them a leave and they were to report back to the west coast where they were to pick up planes and flew them out to the Pacific. So, the Ferry Command was ferrying these B24's across the states and out there. But, before we got too many of them out there, V.J. Day came along and they had all these airplanes and they wanted them taken to various storage places. These storage places were old airfields. I flew airplanes into Fayetteville, Arkansas; Garden City, Kansas; Liberal, Kansas; Riverside, California; and half a dozen other places. We were just moving airplanes and then we would go back and get another one. That's what a ferry pilot did and this got kind of tiring but I wanted to stay around a little longer.
My wife was pregnant with our first child by then and I got a chance to take a job in personnel where I could still maintain my flying status but didn't fly anywhere near as much. I took special trips. For example, one Thanksgiving I was there and I took a trip with a B25 up to Washington National airport with an engineer who was going to be assigned and leaving right away. This was Admiral Harriman's personal plane and he was Ambassador to Russia. Upon landing, the Captain come out and dressed me down and said I was supposed to land at Andrews Air Force Base and I shouldn't be at Washington National because it was a civilian airport. I told him that the ATC offices were there. I told him I had orders that said I was to land at Washington National. I showed him the orders that said I'm to fly into Washington and that the passenger that I was transporting was the engineer to Admiral Harriman's crew, who was waiting for him so they could leave. He then said, AOh, oh, well that's all right, that's all right."
I did want to say when we were ferrying to both Riverside, California and Oxnard, California for fields in bringing B24's in, the planes coming back from Europe were not certified for instrument flying. They had flying instruments but nobody had certified them. They wouldn't permit us to fly instruments on them. We had to fly them out to Palm Springs and there was an airfield and an air base there. We had to call in and if the pass from Palm Springs into Riverside was open, not fogged in, then you took the plane on in. If it wasn't, then you had to land at Palm Springs. I must have had eight or nine of those kinds of flights and I never got through first and always had to land at Palm Springs. You would be at Palm Springs for anywhere from one to five days, depending on how long the pass stayed fogged in. If it was fogged in, you just couldn't go. It was kind of rough duty to stay out there for five days. You could get a BOQ for a dollar a night and you didn't have to pay $50 to $100 a night for hotel rooms. I continued to ferry airplanes and do the personnel work until about three months after our first child was born. I delayed my actual separation with the birth. I haven't done any flying of an airplane since then. I've ridden in a lot of airplanes, but never piloted one after that. It was too expensive. I always thought I was lucky to get through all these things. So, that's the end of my story.

INTERVIEWER: Very good.

INTERVIEW OF MR. WOODY WOODARD IS CONCLUDED

Footnotes:

1 They would permit you to bring the airplane down to 10 to 50 feet above the ground where they could be sure you would be able to hit the landing area and then they would reapply the throttle and take the airplane back up to normal and safe altitude.
2 I would put the airplane into a series of small S-turns.
3 Back in those days there were rotating beacons along the air routes, which had been designated by the government for all civilian aircraft to follow and thereby maintain some order as to who flew where, particularly when flying on instruments in bad weather. These beacons were located every 10 miles-if there was a lighted landing field, the back of the beacon would show a green light and all other beacons which had no lighted landing field would show a red light. Thus, one could see in a series of eight to ten beacons one which showed a green light.
4 With two complete crews assigned to each squadron.
5 They were getting lost and crashing into the ocean when their fuel ran out.
6 We also received a can of mustard.
7 Our targets were within two degrees south of the Equator but thereafter they were always north of the equator. Within a degree or so of the Equator, there is located the Equatorial Weather Front. This is very like a regular weather front-some days very tame to fly through and other days very violent to fly through. This was another reason a crew got lost-it was very difficult to maintain a constant heading with the result one was not where one expected to be when the airplane finally broke into the clear beyond the front. If you had been buffeted around, you had to know the proper heading to fly to get back to home base. A small deviation is all it took to miss home base completely.
8 The back bomb bay had two extra 600-gallon gas tanks which could be jettisoned after all the gasoline had been pumped out and transferred to the regular wing tanks.
9 As was usually the case, the runways on each captured island would be built by either the Corps of Engineers or the Navy's CB's.
10 They carefully checked the accident or crash site but found no one that was still alive-everyone had been killed. We took off and flew north to the Equator and then flew parallel to the Equator for hours, finally flying down along the east coast of Borneo to a Japanese Oil refinery at Balikpapan.
11 Mr. Woodard demonstrates a 30 degree angle.
12 The Japanese occupied the rest of the island. Us troops established a perimeter and prevented the Japanese from attacking our positions.
13 This was the first time we came under attack from the Japanese, who bombed every night.
14 US troops were landing on the coast and the Japanese were trying to reinforce their troops on the west side and to land supplies for them.