Edward Olsson
Army Air Corps

Interviewed By: Anna Birmingham
Adult Secretary: Ellen Folke

I graduated from the University of Missouri in Kansas City in June of 1941.  My wife and I were married in December of 1941, and I applied for a position in the Army Air Corps as a cadet in January of 1942.  Once I completed training, I was a Second Lieutenant and was later promoted to First Lieutenant.  I was assigned to a training command for the overseas crews, pilots, and navigators.  I was in training for about 10 weeks for each of the areas I would be learning and later teaching.  I think I learned more in those nine months than I had in all four years of college!  I learned about weather, navigation, about the airplanes themselves as well as how to fly them.  It was a very good experience for me.  I was discharged in October of 1945.

The first stage of training was called Preflight, and we learned about weather and identification of other aircraft.  The next stage was called Primary Flight School.  We went to Thunderbird Field in Phoenix, Arizona and learned to fly a very basic airplane called the Stearman PT-17.  We then went to Taft, California for Basic Flight Training, which is a little bit more complicated than Primary.  From there we went to Yuma, Arizona for Advanced Flying on two-engine airplanes.  One of the fears I had during flight training was that I wouldn’t be able to complete the training.  About 40-50% of the people in the program had to discontinue for one reason or another.  Even some really big, strong guys couldn’t always adjust to flying.

From there we went to Dodge City, Kansas where we changed from training planes to actual fighter planes.  We flew the B-26, which was called the Martin Marauder.  This plane was also called The Widowmaker because the wings weren’t large enough to allow the plane to handle very well.  My next assignment was to tow targets from an airplane for others to use as target practice.  It doesn’t sound very glamorous but all of us were happy to do whatever was necessary.  We helped train the people who flew the B-17s and B-24s because they were getting ready to go into combat in Europe.  We trained both the pilots and the gunners.  I think there was one bombing raid over Tokyo early in the war with B-25s that was made from an aircraft carrier.  But it wasn’t until the B-29, which was the fastest of the bombers at that time, that it was practical to fly in the Pacific.

When we were in Jackson, Mississippi we trained navigators on the new Loran navigation system.  We took long training runs out over the Gulf of Mexico, four hours out and four hours back.  They needed training runs that would approximate the flight to Japan, which was much longer than the flights from England to Europe.  The navigators needed to be able to tell us exactly where they were and how they would get back at all times.  After that I learned to fly the B-29 which was the big new airplane at that time.  It was going to be used to bomb Japan.

After we went on a solo flight and received approval to become a pilot for each particular aircraft, we got the instructor and the other members of our training group to sign what we called a Short Snorter.  I still have mine in my wallet – it’s a dollar bill, and some of these signatures are so old you can’t read them anymore.  It’s important to nobody else but me.

What was the best part of my training?  My wife and I were married in December of 1941, just after Pearl Harbor.  Because all of my assignments were in the United States, she was able to come and live with me during training.  She had worked for a savings and loan company, so wherever we lived she found a job at the local savings and loan company.  They always needed people because so many of their former employees had joined the service or taken other war-time jobs

I really enjoyed flying, and we did a lot of it so we became very proficient.  We really worked at it because our lives as well as the lives of our crews depended on our skill and our good judgment.  Some people are well suited to be fighter pilots; they love to do aerobatics in combat.  You can just tell who they are they're the ones that have no fear.  Others like to fly straight and level.  I guess I’m pretty conservative, I had fear.  I never did like aerobatics much even though I was well trained.  Luckily I was a little too tall to fit into those small fighter planes.

As pilots, we all felt that we had some close calls.  At the end of our time in the service we had the choice of going to work for the commercial airlines as pilots.  I felt that I had flown enough and wasn’t anxious to fly anymore because I felt that the law of averages could somehow catch up to me.  I wasn’t afraid, I still fly, but I didn’t want to do it for a living.  I did stay in the Reserves for awhile down at Fairfax Airport, but by the time our third child was born I felt that my family was more of a priority.  Some of those guys went on an airlift to Berlin.

An interesting thing about the Army Air Corps is that officer candidates were not allowed to do any KP (Kitchen Patrol).  What we did instead was Mess Management.  It was very much like KP.  We didn’t learn how to manage much of anything in the kitchen except a broom or a mop.

There were probably 12 to 15 pilots in our unit, plus crew.  And many of us were married and our wives lived with us too.  We all became very close.  One of the guys was 27 years old, and we all thought he was so old that we called him “Dad”.  We shared an apartment with another couple whom we didn’t know.  We worked together and we got along fine because we had to.  That was just the way it was. 

At one point when we were in California my wife was looking for a place to live.  She saw an ad put up on the bulletin board by a woman who needed someone to stay with her and help in her home.  She thought that was something she would like to do, so she went to find out about it.  Right when she arrived, another pilot’s wife had arrived for the same reason.  The woman ended up hiring both of them and I really think that woman did more for these two young wives than they did for her.  There were so many wonderful experiences like this in those tough times.  I used to go to the bus station to take a bus from Phoenix back to the air station for the weekend.  But I never did ride the bus even once, because someone always came along and asked us where we wanted to go.  Some of our relatives in California would not drive their cars for a while so they could save the gasoline to come and pick us up at the air base and take us home with them for the weekends.  These were the kinds of things the civilians did to support us.  Everyone had their little niche, and they performed to the best of their ability.

Of the sixteen of us who went to California for training, one of them remains my very good friend to this day.  We were usually assigned roommates by alphabet.  My last name is Olsson, and his last name is Miner.  We ended up in the same room for Preflight, Primary, Basic, Advanced, and Transition -- all five courses of our training.  He lives in St. Joseph, Missouri, and as a matter of fact, we are getting together for lunch next week.  Because our group is so small, we haven’t had organized reunions like some of the larger units do.  But we do keep in touch, mostly through Christmas cards and by email.

I was very fortunate because in the Air Corps we were not given the option of volunteering or not volunteering for duties.  We just did what they told us.  We didn’t question it, we just did it.  We didn’t have the option of volunteering to go on a dangerous mission.  Most of us were anxious to do whatever needed to be done, to get the war over, and to go back to civilian life. 

In Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, he tells stories of people where he lived growing up and all the different things they did during the war, how they stayed in touch, how they got together later, who died, and all of their different stories.  That book tells how many people were involved in some way.  For us it was a good time to be raising children and we were very lucky.  I have maintained friendships with people from the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, the Army, and the merchant marines.  I have friends who were in the Battle of the Bulge, on Iwo Jima, all these really newsworthy places.  Amazingly, for a long time we never even knew where they had been and some of them are still hesitant to talk about it.

The thing I want students of today to remember about my generation is that it was everybody doing his or her job.  We all had a common goal, and we knew what we had to do, and we made the best of it.  That’s just the way it was.

Permission Granted for Use By Edward Olsson © 2001
Transcribed By Ellen Folke