To Bakedwell
Formate ! Are you sure that you got the spelling right ? Did you notice how like Fred Astaire I used to look ? Any way here goes....
The Seventh of December 1941 was a Sunday. It was a bright and sunny morning in Albany, Georgia and normally we would be enjoying a "lie in" and then a laze around but not this Sunday. It was rather special as we were joining forces with our classmates, the Americans, at the local Football Stadium to give a demonstration of our respective drills. The quick, crisp marching of the RAF contrasted strongly with the more informal and, to us, sloppier style of the Americans and we were warmly applauded by the large crowd gathered there
Drill finished we were standing at attention side by side with the Americans and the banners of each nation were fluttering in the breeze when the PA system broke into life. A highly emotional Announcer gave us the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbour and , consequently, we were all in the war together. It could not have been staged better if it was a movie.
The next few days were chaotic. To us, war hardened ,veterans it bordered on panic. We were all confined to the Camp itself and woe betide you if you forgot the password which was issued daily (By Tannoy at seven a.m. Believe it or not !) Sirens were always sounding at the oddest times and for no apparent reason. Gradually, however, things got back to normal, RAF uniforms miraculously appeared and we got down to finishing our training which had less than a month to go.
The third of January 1942, we filed into the Camp Theatre to receive ,from the Major General commanding the Southest Air Training Center, General Walter R. Weaver, the hard earned solid silver wings of the US Army Air Corps. We proudly wore them on the right breast of our tunics and the RAF Wings , which the US had thoughtfully preordered, on the left. Later, back in the UK we were forbidden to wear the US wings, an order which most of us ignored.
We celebrated our new status of fully qualified pilots with a gigantic party in the Airfield Reacreational Centre. "Dates" for the Ball in the evening were presented with the traditional sprays of Ocrhids and Gardenias in true movie style and we danced the night away to a terrific band to the tunes of "You are my Sunshine","Frenesi","The Hut Sut Song", Elmer's Tune", "Green Eyes", and "Jealousy". We finished, of course, with Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder.. but there were no upperclassmen to retaliate. We were to meet up with some of them later when they were based inthe cold fens of East Anglia with the "Mighty Eighth" of the newly named US Airforce, but they were very different people and so were we.
The night before the party we had celebrated with some drinks with our Instructors. When the beer ran low, my good and very kind Instructor, Lt. Millar, handed me the keys of his car and told me to go and get a few cases. But" I said " I can't drive a car". He couldn't believe it. I was nineteen years old, had two hundred hours flying experience and, like most of us, had never driven a car in my life.
Then it was a sad farewell to the rightly famed Southern Hospitality and back to face the harsh realities of wartime Britain.