An Original Rosie: Elinor Otto Keeps Moving, Even After Almost 50 Years in Plane Production

STORY BY RANDY ROUGHTON // PHOTOS BY STAFF SGT. ANDREW LEE

8 February 2016

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Elinor Otto was one of the original Rosie the Riveters, the thousands of women who took on jobs for men deployed overseas during World War II. She worked on airplanes for almost 50 years until she was laid off in 2014 at the age of 95 from the Boeing Company plant in Long Beach, California, where she shares a house with her grandson.
(U.S. Air Force Video by Jimmy D. Shea)

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“Whether rain or shine, she’s part of the assembly line. She’s making history, working for victory…”
Long before he learned the role his grandmother played in history, Elinor Otto was John Alexander Perry’s role model. Whenever he had a decision to make, he asked himself one question: “What would grandma do?”
Aside from being the inspiration for her son and grandson, there have been two constants in Otto’s life. She simply cannot sit still for long, and she loves working on airplanes.

Elinor Otto was one of the original Rosie the Riveters, the thousands of women who took on jobs for men who went overseas during World War II. She worked on airplanes for almost 50 years until she was laid off in 2014 at the age of 95 from the Boeing Company plant in Long Beach, California.

“If she had an outlet you could plug into her, you would never sleep again,” Perry said. “There’s nothing about her that’s normal. She just goes and goes and goes and doesn’t stop. She is truly the Energizer Bunny.”
Otto was one of the original the Riveters, the thousands of women who took on jobs for men deployed overseas during World War II. She worked on airplanes for almost 50 years until she was laid off in 2014 at the age of 95 from the Boeing Company plant in Long Beach, California, where she shares a house with her grandson.
“Everything with me is an adventure,” said Otto, who’s now 96 years old. “That’s what life is – one big adventure.”
Perry then pointed to a photograph of his grandmother as a young woman and smiled wistfully.
“See, she was beautiful,” he said. “People wanted grandma to be an actress.”

Elinor Otto was one of the original Rosie the Riveters who replaced men who went overseas during World War II. She worked for Ryan Aeronautical Corporation in San Diego for 14 years until she was laid off. Almost a year later, Otto moved to Long Beach to work for Douglas Aircraft Company, which merged with McDonnell Aircraft and later with Boeing. She was laid off again in 2014 at the age of 95 from Boeing shortly before completing a total of 50 years working on aircraft.

Manual labor
But Otto had no interest in an acting career because she had a destiny – an important one for not only her life, but also for the then-fledgling Air Force and nation.
“I had to work on airplanes,” she said. “They used to ask me, ‘Why do you want to do a man’s job?’ I said, ‘Because you get a lot of exercise, you’re on your feet and move around.’ That’s what I like. I just don’t like jobs where you just sit still all the time.”
Co-workers and visitors would marvel at the sight of Otto at work, moving her hands and stomping her feet along with the vibrations of the riveting gun. But not everyone initially accepted women in jobs usually reserved for men.
“Of course, the men resented hearing that women were going to be working with them, at first,” Otto said. “But after we proved ourselves and proved to them that we were able to keep the schedules up and get the jobs done right, they started respecting us, and we all cooperated together.
“Some of the guys would say, ‘You’re working too hard. You’re making us look bad.’ But I would say, ‘Well, go to work then!’”
Eventually, the men saw that the women worked as hard and as effectively as they did. In fact, the women were often selected to handle the rivet guns because their work was more precise, Otto said.

Elinor Otto holds her rivet gun that she used for the majority of her career to put pieces of military aircraft together. She worked on airplanes for almost 50 years until she was laid off in 2014 at the age of 95 from the Boeing Company plant in Long Beach, California.

“They told us, ‘You women handle the rivet gun. Don’t let the men do it,’” she said. “They wouldn’t let the men do that because we were more careful. With the sets we had to make, it was so easy to make a ding on the skin, and they would have a hard time fixing it.
“Things were smaller then – smaller parts and rivets. Now we need guns that are so heavy. But I could do that, too. I would say, ‘I’m not as frill as I look,’ because I’d been doing it for a long time. I had to tell some of them that I’d been doing this work since before you were born. You had to fight your way sometimes with the men.”
During the war, Otto made 65 cents an hour, which didn’t go far, since she paid $20 a week to board her son while she worked. To motivate themselves before heading to work, Otto and her female co-workers would sometimes sing along with the song, “Rosie the Riveter” by the Four Vagabonds on a .78 rpm phonograph. She still knows the words today: “Whether rain or shine, she’s part of the assembly line. She’s making history, working for victory…”
After the war, Otto worked as a car hop and other equally unsatisfying jobs before she returned to factory work in 1951. She worked for Ryan Aeronautical Corporation in San Diego for 14 years until she was laid off. Almost a year later, Otto moved to Long Beach to work for Douglas Aircraft Company, which merged with McDonnell Aircraft and later with Boeing.
By the end of 2014, when the Air Force ended its relationship with the Long Beach plant, Otto had worked on every Boeing C-17 Globemaster III they had. Throughout her half century working on planes, whether on the C-17, KC-135 Stratotanker, or the Douglas DC-8, McDonnell Douglas D-9 and D-10, Otto’s fast-paced style never changed, mostly because it was the way she worked since childhood. But she admits there was also another reason.
“When I would sit down, they were about ready to call the paramedics,” she said. “They thought that maybe something was wrong with me.”

Rosie pride
Interest in the Rosies peaked a couple of decades later, with the renewed popularity in the “We Can Do It” poster during the women’s rights movement in the 1970s and ‘80s.
“We didn’t know we were doing anything important,” Otto said. “We thought we were just working people, working together for a purpose. We had no idea that this was ever going to happen, that we’d get all of this attention about it. Otherwise, I think I would have taken more pictures.”

Over the years, Elinor Otto has collected many Rosie the Riveter memorabilia items and they’re displayed throughout her house. Many of today’s Rosie the Riveter images come from the iconic “We Can Do It” painting from J. Howard Miller in 1942.

At the age of 12, Otto’s grandson learned about her role during World War II only after he was given a history project on the Rosie the Riveters in junior high school. His father Ronald Arthur Perry told him to write about his grandma.
“Everyone at that point wanted to meet her and talk to her,” John Perry said. “I kind of got swept to the side and grandma was famous.”
Perry and his father introduced Otto to the world through the “Keep the Spirit of ‘45 Alive” group and the Weider History Group, and soon all of the major networks and newspapers were calling. Otto decided on NBC for her first major interview.
“After I was on The Today Show, I walked out in New York City, and here comes everybody. ‘Oh, there’s a Rosie!’ Everybody wanted a picture on their cellphones,” she said. “I think it’s cute, all this stuff they do.”
The awards and recognition also kept coming her way. In 2014, Otto received the Lillian K. Keil Award for Women’s Contributions to the Military from the American Veterans Center for her contributions as a Rosie the Riveter during the war.
“There really are a lot of Rosies left,” Otto said. “Most of them are still healthy, but they didn’t work until they were 95. They weren’t that crazy. In my day, if I were to see an old lady like me working in there, I would have said, ‘What is that old bag doing over there?’ I am so grateful that anybody even cares.”

Elinor Otto reads a memory book that was presented to her by Boeing, recognizing the teams that worked on the C-17 Globemaster III. During her long career, Otto worked on every C-17 Boeing had.

The forced retirement, especially so close to reaching the 50-year milestone of working on airplanes, hurt Otto deeply. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she watched the last C-17 tip its wing goodbye before it left the Long Beach plant for a four-hour flight to Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina.
“The layoff hurt her,” Perry said. “For a long time, she was not grandma. She moped around the house trying to fill her day because she was so used to getting up and going to work. I shed some tears on that, too.”
Since her retirement, it hasn’t been easy for Otto to stay busy but she does the best she can. Her friends and co-workers remain special to her, especially after so many attended the graveside service for her 71-year-old son who died in 2013. So many of her Boeing friends showed up that Otto thought they were coming for another funeral.
Once a month, Otto meets with her former Boeing co-workers at a Long Beach restaurant by the marina in Shoreline Village. Carol Hill, who was in charge of product distribution at the plant, looks up to Otto for her longevity and never-stop attitude.

Throughout her career, Elinor Otto worked on airplanes for almost 50 years until she laid off in 2014. By the end of 2014, when the Air Force ended its relationship with the Boeing Long Beach plant, Otto had worked on every Boeing C-17 Globemaster III they had.

“She’s my idol,” Hill said, “to have worked that long and still have all of her faculties. This woman is remarkable. She was this little person working those big riveting guns, just standing on her stepstool.”
Otto may not be holding her handy riveting gun as she closes in on her 100^th birthday, but she shows no signs of giving up on the motto that got her so far as a Rosie and as a person.
“I just believe that people have to keep moving,” she said. “People are staying healthy longer, and they get bored and want to get out and do something. You don’t want to sit around and do nothing. You can fall apart that way. So just keep moving. That’s the secret to life.”

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2016/02/an-original-rosie/#sthash.JyAQZfGM.dpuf

D-Day Stories: Veteran Still Loves Sharing Memories of His Combat Missions During World War II.

D-DAY STORIES

Veteran still loves sharing memories of his combat missions during World War II.

STORY BY RANDY ROUGHTON / PHOTOS BY MASTER SGT. JEFFREY ALLEN

28 October 2014

“This is the one that’s going to get Hitler,” was the hopeful refrain of World War II bomber pilots like Fred Taylor, as they dropped their bombs during the D-Day invasion 12,000 feet above Normandy, France.

Fred Taylor, a 96-year-old former bomber pilot, flew two of his 31 combat missions on the June 6, 1944 invasion in the B-17 Flying Fortress called “Patchess.” Taylor now resides in Cazenovia, N.Y.. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen

These days, the 96-year-old Taylor can’t get around as well as he used to because of his health. He mostly listens to tapes, radio and TV and sits in his wife’s garden in their Cazenovia, N.Y., home. But he also loves to talk about yesterday.
Yesterday for Taylor means stories about how he went from wanting to travel and see the country to being a bomber pilot during the biggest seaborne invasion in military history. Taylor flew two of his 31 combat missions on the June 6, 1944 invasion in the B-17 Flying Fortress called “Patches,” a nickname inspired by the square patches that covered more than 400 bullet holes the plane’s exterior sustained from anti-aircraft fire.
“There were 434 or 414 bullet holes, depending on who was counting that day,” Taylor said.
Taylor may not see or hear well anymore, but his memory remains practically as clear as it was during his younger days.
“When he retired (in 1989), he loved to build our houses,” Taylor’s wife Wendy said. “He rebuilt our house here, and he rebuilt our camp in the Adirondacks. If you’re asking what he can do now, it’s taking it easy. But he does love to remember the past and talk about the war.”
Before Taylor joined the military, he left the University of Pennsylvania to hitchhike and ride freight trains in his quest to make it across the country. When he got to the West Coast, he worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps in Seattle for two months before his mother wrote a letter to get him out, so he could return their home in Watertown, N.Y.

After completing his initial training in the National Guard, Fred Taylor, transferred to the Air National Guard in 1942 and completed all three phases of pilot training before he joined the 379th Bombardment Group at Royal Air Force Station Kimbolton near Bedford, England. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen

A few months later, Taylor joined the National Guard and was assigned to the 7th Regiment and sent to Camp Stewart, Ga., for training. He transferred to the Air National Guard in 1942 and completed all three phases of pilot training before he joined the 379th Bombardment Group at Royal Air Force Station Kimbolton near Bedford, England.
Taylor’s B-17 and other aircraft were distinguished by a triangle K on the tail. All B-17s in the 1st Bombardment Division had large triangles on the top of the aircraft’s vertical stabilizer, and each group’s assigned code letter was painted inside the triangle. The 379th’s letter was the letter K.
The group attacked strategic targets such as industries, oil refineries, airfields and communications centers in Germany, Belgium, France, Norway, Poland and the Netherlands. By D-Day, Taylor had already flown a dozen missions.
A colonel called in the aircrews at 1 a.m. for briefings and informed them that the invasion day had finally arrived after a couple of weather-related postponements. They would invade the Cherbourg Peninsula that morning. Taylor’s first mission was at 7 a.m. Before takeoff, a ground crew of four men told him they wanted to go up with him.
“Get a parachute, and get in the airplane,” he told them.
“I thought, ‘Let them have an opportunity to see what goes on,’” Taylor said. “I wasn’t supposed to do it, of course, but I got away with it.”
So many Allied planes filled the skies above the peninsula on D-Day that Taylor remembers his two missions as among his easiest. Any German pilots who were able to get off the ground were destined for a bad day.
“You look down at the English Channel, and it looked like Times Square,” Taylor said. “It was unbelievable how many ships there were in that English Channel. There were thousands of ships – destroyers, battleships, aircraft carriers, transports and supply ships, and there were so many airplanes in the air that I felt sorry for the Germans. They got some fighter planes up, but it took one helluva brave pilot to go up against the American and British air forces because we had so many fighter planes in the air. He was bound to get shot down.”
Taylor flew his second mission at 4 that afternoon, but faced little opposition by then, as Allied soldiers had already secured the beaches.

World War II veteran bomber pilot, Fred Taylor, still has the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal he was awarded for missions flown during the D-Day invasion over Normandy, France. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen

“The American and British armies had already secured the Cherbourg Peninsula, and Germany was on her way out,” Taylor said.
When his tour ended, Taylor returned stateside to train for missions over Japan, but the war ended first. After the war, Patches, with her 400-plus bullet holes, was scrapped for her parts, and Taylor returned to New York to farm turkeys. He had up to 5,000 turkeys at one time on his 172 acres, with a feed bill that reached between $70,000 to $75,000 a year. He also kept the local post office busy with his mail-order gift business.
“I made a first-class post office out of the Cazenovia post office with the amount of postage I used,” he said.
He farmed turkeys for 13 years before working as a grocer brokerage salesman, selling forklift trucks and as a co-partner in a manufacturing sales company before he retired in 1989.
During his 31 missions in Europe, Taylor caught flak a couple of times, including once when his co-pilot got hit in the top of the two helmets he wore. Another time, Patches got knocked out of formation, and Taylor was flying as a co-pilot so he could break in a new pilot.
“‘We’re going to hit the deck!’” Taylor said the pilot yelled. “I said, ‘You damn fool! You want some kid with a .22 to shoot you down? We stay right here at 17,000 feet and follow those thousands of airplanes,” which were also on the same mission.
Today, Taylor still keeps the piece of flak that came through Patches’ dashboard and penetrated his flak vest on one of his missions. His eyes and ears may have betrayed him in his later years, but his mind remains sharp. He loves those occasions when he can tell visitors about Patches and his role in one of the most historic days in American and world history.

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2014/10/d-day-stories/#sthash.WSkblD8r.dpuf

U.S. Maintains Air Superiority For Six Decades

A few months after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower surveyed the Normandy beaches with his son. "You'd never get away with this if you didn't have air supremacy," then 2nd Lt. John Eisenhower told his father. "Without air supremacy," the elder Eisenhower replied, "I wouldn't be here." The United States won air superiority in Europe by 1944 and the Pacific by the fall, won it in Korea in 1950 and hasn't lost control of the skies since. No American service members on the ground have died from enemy air attacks since three were killed during the Korean War more than 60 years ago. Control of the air gives a military power the opportunity to exploit height, reach and speed, enabling informed decision-making, the ability to strike freely at a distance, and the ability to maneuver unconstrained by the limits of terrain or ocean, said Dr. Richard P. Hallion, former Air Force Historian and senior advisor for air and space issues with the Directorate for Security, Counterintelligence and Special Programs Oversight. "I go back to David versus Goliath," said Hallion, author of "Storm Over Iraq: Airpower in the Gulf War" and "Strike from the Sky: The History of Battlefield Attack." "There wasn't a manhood issue here demanding he engage in the close fight, where he could have lost. Instead, David hit him with an aerospace weapon - a rock at a distance. In the airpower era, that aerospace weapon is the airplane and missile of today." When the North Koreans invaded the South in June 1950, they did so with overwhelming military force, and initially, without encountering immediate air attacks, Hallion said. Retired Marine Corps Col. Warren Wiedhahn experienced combat in Korea as a private first class, both with and without close air support. During the initial days of the Korean War, "there was no close air support, the North Korean juggernaut moved very rapidly with their tanks, artillery and infantry. They annihilated everything in front of them until there was nothing left in Korea but the Pusan perimeter," Wiedhahn said. But by then, robust air power forces - Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps - assisted by British, Australian and South Korean airmen as well - were taking a heavy toll on North Korean attackers, Hallion said. "During that period of time, the close air support was building up," Wiedhahn said. "The ships were coming in. The Air Force was flying. Now, all of a sudden, we began to see aircraft." After participating in the Inchon Landing and helping to liberate Seoul, Wiedhahn also fought in the battle of the Chosin Reservoir a few months later. United Nations forces chased the North Korean army to the southern tip of South Korea until China sent more than 100,000 troops that surrounded about 30,000 U.N. troops. "When we were up in the Chosin Reservoir, and the Chinese decided to attack, we began to see air - mostly Navy and Marine Corps (Vought F4U) Corsairs off of the carriers. That's how I really began to appreciate close air support. It (Control of the air) is absolutely, positively vital. After a 17-day battle in sub-zero temperatures, the Marines managed to withdraw to the coast, where they were evacuated in December." "Indeed, air power saved the Marines from annihilation as they made their way from the reservoir down to the coast," Hallion said. Five years after Wiedhahn retired as a colonel in 1982, he talked with four of the Chinese he fought against in the Chosin Reservoir during a visit to Beijing as part of his Virginia-based Military Historical Tours organization. About 40 years later, the sights and sounds of American aircraft were still engrained in their memories. "One of the greatest things we feared was your airpower," the Chinese told Wiedhahn. They said, they always moved at night, and never moved when the weather was clear because of their fear of our planes. Air superiority and supremacy are two of the five conditions in the air warfare spectrum, along with air paralysis, air inferiority and air parity. There is actually a huge difference between air superiority and supremacy that can be especially costly in war, Hallion said. "Air superiority is the absolute minimal condition we should ever be prepared to fight with," he said. "Air superiority means that the enemy is still able to undertake air action against you, but you are able to confound and defeat it. What we should really seek is what we had in the latter stages of World War II and what we had in the (Persian) Gulf War, where we had air supremacy, indeed, we had air dominance. That's where you so thoroughly dominate your opponent that they are instantly confronted with air attack, and they are unable to do anything about it. "We had air supremacy, clearly, in the first Gulf War because in that war, the Iraqi air force was simply unable to intervene either against our coalition air forces or against coalition surface forces. At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, by the second or third week, the Iraqi air force was fleeing the country, and the air action there was primarily intercepting aircraft trying to flee to Iran. That's what happens when you have air supremacy, and in the best of all circumstances, air dominance. You can then devote 100 percent of your air effort to ensure that the people on the ground get the support they need to prosecute the ground war." Gen. Charles A. Horner, who commanded all U.S. and allied air assets during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, credited the airpower dominance to the intelligence, preparation and training before the invasion. "When did we get air superiority? We had it before the war began because we had the means to get it - the equipment, intelligence, training, and the courage of the aircrews," Horner said. "But do not get the idea that gaining control of the air was easy. It was not a macho, no-sweat operation. What turned into a turkey shoot in late January and February started out as a bitter struggle; those first few days were the hardest-fought, most-critical aspect of the entire war." Because the Air Force has had almost an unprecedented control of the skies for decades, it might be easy to forget how costly it was to achieve air superiority, especially during World War II. In the European and Mediterranean theaters alone, the U.S. lost 4,325 fighters and bombers before D-Day, with 17,000 killed and 21,000 wounded or POW in the fight for air superiority and didn't achieve theater-wide supremacy until the final days of the war. More Airmen were killed in aerial missions over Europe "than all the Marines who unfortunately died in the entire span of World War II," said retired Gen. David Deptula, who was the Air Force's senior intelligence community official when he was the Headquarters Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Deptula was also the main attack planner during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and a joint task commander for Operation Northern Watch in 1998-99. "If you take a look at how many aircraft we lost in the Vietnam War - 2,781 Air Force and Navy combined, that was against a fifth-rate power with only 206 fighter aircraft. Why did that happen? Because, we were late in achieving air superiority. "It took us some 30 years to apply the air superiority lesson, but we did it in the form of developing the F-15 (Eagle). But those F-15s first flew in 1972, and now some of them are more than 30 years old. In 1979, I flew F-15s at Kadena Air Base, Japan. In 2008, my son was flying the exact same tail numbers I did, but it was 29 years later, and that was five years ago. Today, we have a geriatric combat Air Force, and we badly need to recapitalize it in order to maintain the advantage of air supremacy in the future." Without control of the air, troops on the ground face many hardships and hazards, as the late Gen. Bruce K. Holloway, vice chief of staff during the Vietnam War, wrote in an article for Air University Press. For six decades, American troops haven't had to experience "what it's like to lose mobility except at night; to be cut off from supplies and reinforcements; to be constantly under the watchful eye of enemy reconnaissance aircraft; to be always vulnerable to strafing and bombing attacks; to see one's fighters and bombers burn on their handstands; and to be outnumbered, outgunned and outmaneuvered in the air," Holloway wrote in his article, "Air Superiority in Tactical Air Warfare." However, there are some who aren't convinced the Air Force's decades-long dominance of the air is a certainty, especially with recent cuts in weapons systems such as the F-22 Raptor, which Deptula calls "the most capable aircraft ever built specifically to achieve air superiority," and F-35 Lightning II. In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for capping the original 722 Raptors to 187. Three years later, across-the-board defense spending cuts have put the F-35 at risk. "There are newer threats out there, quite frankly, that could defeat the aircraft that we currently have," Deptula said. "That's why the Air Force works so hard to recapitalize those aircraft by building F-22s and F-35s that can operate, using modern technology, to achieve air dominance by networking capabilities with sensors that we never had in the past. "Our challenge in the future is we're not going to have time to do what we did in World War II - bring America's industrial might to bear over the time necessary to create the kinds of aircraft to maintain our superiority advantage. It falls on Airmen of today, to articulate the air superiority lessons of the past and to make the Airman's voice in the defense of our nation heard. Today's Airmen need to be unabashedly clear about the lessons of history in order to maintain our capabilities in the future." As vital as Eisenhower perceived air superiority to success on D-Day, some airpower experts wonder if the day will come when the U.S. won't have the control of the skies needed for a crucial confrontation with another military power. "I think the greatest danger we face as a nation today is to assume that air and space power is a God-given right to the United States of America, and we will always enjoy it," Hallion said. "We see that sometimes, unfortunately, in our sister services. They have labored so long with perfect freedom of maneuver because of the American airpower shield that we've put over their heads that I think many individuals fail to realize that it is perishable. Air dominance is like freedom itself - you have to constantly nurture it, care for it and invest in it to ensure that you will still have it."

Tinker Epitomized Native American Strength, Leadership

PAWHUSKA, Okla. (AFNS) – The nation’s highest-ranking Native American general didn’t have to be on the ill-fated mission in the Pacific that took his life in 1942. The question of why he was always intrigued Dr. James L. Crowder, a historian and author of “Osage General: Maj. Gen. Clarence L. Tinker.”

Maj. Gen. Clarence L. Tinker was a natural leader who personally led his airmen into combat missions during the early days of World War II. He perished, along with his crew, during the battle of Midway. (U.S. Air Force photo/Courtesy)

 
So he once asked the question while talking to members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma.
“We were having a meeting about Osages who served in the military, and I asked them, ‘Why would he do that?’” Crowder said. “All of the key documents from that time showed he didn’t have to be on that mission. They said an Osage leader is never at the back of his band of warriors.”
Tinker, a one-eighth Osage, grew up on the reservation in Pawhuska, Okla. George Edward Tinker, his father, started Osage County’s first newspaper, the Wah-Sha-She News. Even after Tinker became a general, he sometimes called home to talk to his father, just so he could hear his native language.
“So General Tinker was always proud of his Indian heritage,” Crowder said. “In 1906, when they turned the tribe lands into individual holdings after oil was discovered in the Osage Nation, the Osage became the richest tribe in American history. As an alumni member at 19 years of age, General Tinker became quite well-to-do and had a lot more money than many of the officers he served with. He was not one to show off his wealth, although he did like to show off. He was known for coming in the MacDill (Air Force Base, Fla.) officer’s club on a mule with full Indian headdress for the Army-Navy football game. He liked to be the center of attention, yet he was kind of a quiet person, too.”

Crowder describes the general as 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds, with extremely long sideburns he was always proud of.”(Gen. Henry H.) Hap Arnold told him several times, ‘Get those sideburns shaved,’” Crowder said. “He would, as long as Hap Arnold was around. But then he would just grow them back out.”
Early in his military career, Tinker served with the 25^th Infantry Division, originally in Spokane, Wash., and later moved with the division to Hawaii. In 1919, Tinker took an interest in flying, earned his pilot’s license and entered the Army Air Service in 1922. Five years later, he was named the commandant of the Air Service Advanced Flying School at Kelly Field in San Antonio, and later commanded several pursuit and bomber units. In 1940, he pinned on his first star, and, after Pearl Harbor, was named commander of the Army Air Corps’ Hawaiian Air Force, which became the 7^th Air Force in February 1942, with Tinker as its first commander. He was promoted to major general a month earlier, just six months before he disappeared over the Pacific. In its announcement of Tinker’s appointment as Hawaiian Air Force commander, Time magazine described Tinker as “a spit-and-polish, sky-ripping flight officer part Osage Indian, flyer since 1920.”
When Tinker assumed command of the Hawaiian Air Force, his father reassured friends in the corner drugstore in Pawhuska, “You can go home and sleep peacefully now. The Tinkers have got the situation well in hand,” he said, according to an article in The Milwaukee Journal on Feb. 14, 1942.

Before Dec. 7, 1941, Tinker warned that the Japanese were the biggest threat instead of Germany, and he thought the Air Force would be the major factor during World War II. He also believed that a long-range attack against Japan would be the key to war in the Pacific. During the spring of 1942, he considered the Japanese on Wake Island as a threat to Midway and Pearl Harbor. However, he didn’t think the B-17 Flying Fortress could make the 1,300-mile trip so he acquired four Consolidated LB-30 Liberators and prepared for an attack on Japanese forces on the island, Crowder said. Tinker, then commander of the ArmyAir Forces Hawaiian Department, died with eight crewmembers when their B-24 Liberator disappeared through a formation of clouds over the Pacific Ocean during a long-range mission on Wake Island that he chose to personally lead. He was the first American Army general officer killed in combat during World War II. Oklahoma City Air Depot, the base that had only recently opened, was renamed Tinker Air Force Base.
“His career stretched from the beginning of the Air Force as we know it into World War II,” Crowder said. “He came through that period in the 1930s when the Army Air Corps wasn’t really held in great respect and was very poorly funded. Yet he came through it, and I think he was a very natural pilot.

“The fact that he gave his life in such a dramatic way as commander of the 7^th Air Force leading his men, is also important in remembering General Tinker.

“But General Tinker’s favorite thing was working with young Airmen. He thought the key was the young men coming up in the military, and he always tried to give them positive experiences with officers. He was an encourager is a way anybody could remember him.”

Images and items of Tinker and his career can still be found throughout the base that was named for him more than seven decades since he disappeared over the Pacific. There’s a bust of Tinker in the Air Force Sustainment Center Headquarters, and a painting and a display of his awards and medals greet visitors to the Tinker Club.
But the first seeds of his leadership skills were planted in Tinker’s Osage childhood. His portrait hangs in the chiefs room of the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, and to this day, the Osage Nation honors him with a song and dance on the final day of their four-day In-lon-shka. The annual celebration emphasizes the culture and values that date back to the 1880s after they moved to their current reservation in Oklahoma. The Tinker family attends each year, with most of the men participating in the dancing.
“We have veteran dances that honor our soldiers,” said Chief John D. Red Eagle, principal chief of the Osage Nation. “My father was a World War II veteran, and we honor him during that time, as our other families honor their soldiers. We talk about when they were in the war because they were very proud to be a part of the military. That’s the way they felt about General Tinker because of his service to the United States as a soldier. It is a big honor to have a song in that dance.”

Flying the Cadillac: Reserve NCO Shows Off PT-17's Aerobatics for Air Show Passengers

Navy pilots called the PT-17 Stearman “The Yellow Peril.” Former President
George H.W. Bush considered it one of the most challenging planes he flew
during World War II. Army Air Corps and Navy pilots trained in the planes, and fewer than 3,000 remain today. But an Air Force Reserve technical sergeant chose to buy one of the blue and yellow two-seat biplanes because of their acrobatic versatility and their history.
Tech. Sgt. David Brown in his PT-17 was the first to fly over the U.S. Air Force Memorial during its dedication ceremony on Oct. 14, 2006. He discovered
the plane after first flying the Piper J-3 Cub, Piper L-4 Cub and 1929 Fleet Biplane in the Flying Circus Air Show in Bealeton, Va.
“All of those were kind of cramped on the inside,” Sergeant Brown said. “Then, I had a chance to fly the Stearman, and it was literally like jumping into a
Cadillac out of these other aircraft.
“The Navy called it ‘The Yellow Peril’ [because] cadets would sometimes wreck them when they would land a little crooked,” Sergeant Brown said. “A new pilot without a lot of experience will land in a crosswind, flip off the runway, and the next thing you know, you’re upside down in a ditch, and you don’t know what happened.
“But the fact that it is challenging makes it an airplane that’s respected in the aviation community.”
The medical materiel craftsman with the 459th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron at Joint Base Andrews, Md., paid $12.50 for his first ride in a PT-17 at the Flying Circus when he was in high school. He’s been with the Flying Circus himself since he first joined the show as a ground crew member in 1975 and now t akes passengers for about 10 minutes of loops, spins, rolls and hammerheads,
a maneuver in which he pulls the plane upward and stalls in mid-air before making a steep, spiraling descent.
“When we pull away, I get [passengers] on the microphone and talk to them about what we’re going to do,” Sergeant Brown said. “I find out if they have any flight experience and if they’re a thrill-seeker or not, so I’ll know what to expect.
“If I get somebody who’s a little apprehensive, I’ll take it easy on them. I always tell them, ‘You’re in control of the flight. This is your ride and I want you to enjoy it.’ I want them to come down and say, ‘This is the best thing I ever did. I want to come back and do it again.’”
Sergeant Brown earned his private pilot’s license in 1979 and first entered
active duty after he earned an ROTC commission, but was denied pilot training because his eyesight didn’t meet Air Force standards. Instead, he served
four years on a Titan II missile crew in the 373rd Strategic Missile Squadron
at Little Rock Air Force Base, Ark., and received his discharge in December
1986, just before the missile system was deactivated the following year.
Next, he tried to land a job with the commercial airlines, but opened Brown
Aviation after he earned his flight instructor’s certificate. He gives open cockpit rides and flight instruction, while working at his full-time job as an area maintenance engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation.
Sergeant Brown joined the Air Force Reserve as a staff sergeant in 1996, 10
years after leaving active duty as a first lieutenant.
He flies with the call sign, “Air Show,” but calls his plane, “No Bucks,
No Buck Rogers,” a reference to a line in the movie, “The Right Stuff.”
Sergeant Brown bought his first plane, a 1946 Aeronca Champ, while still on active duty and later bought a Jungster 1 biplane. In 2002, he bought his PT-17 for $75,000.
“I jokingly say the Air Force would never let me fly one, so I had to go buy
my own,” Sergeant Brown said. “My first official mission was when I flew
over the [Air Force] Memorial. I said to myself, ‘I had to wait a long time, and I had to buy my own Air Force airplane to do it, but I’ve got my first mission here.’”
Retired Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff at the time, wanted a PT-17 as the first airplane in the lineup, Sergeant Brown said.
Organizers discussed using Ross Perot Jr.’s Stearman, but due to the logistics
of flying it from Texas, they searched the Washington area and found
the sergeant through the Stearman Restorers Association.
Just flying into Andrews alone turned into an adventure. Sergeant Brown filed
his flight plan with Potomac Approach, but when he pressed the button to talk
to air traffic controllers, it broke and swung on a wire under the panel. He
peeled off his gloves, grabbed the wire and flew the plane with his elbow on
the stick while he held the two wires together to talk on the radio.
“Every time I would hear the guy, I’d put my elbow on the stick and put the wires together to talk to him,” Sergeant Brown said. “I did that all the way to Andrews with no co-pilot in the airplane. I said to myself, ‘Please don’t call me while I’m on the approach because I can’t land this airplane and hold the wires together at the same time.’
“When I landed on the runway, I switched the radio to ground control, and the guy in the tower at Andrews told me, ‘For the oldest airplane on the field, you sure have the clearest radio.’”
While he wasn’t able to fulfill his dream as an Air Force pilot, Sergeant Brown
is proud of the role he plays in introducing air show passengers to his historic airplane and his work as a reservist in an aeromedical squadron. He especially felt the importance of his job while on annual tour with his squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.
“That really hit home with me when we were working on a trailer with medical supplies that were going to Afghanistan to set up a field hospital,” he said. “I knew that [trailer] wasn’t going to be opened again until somebody needed it in a combat situation. When it got over there and they opened this thing up, they were going to be saving soldiers’ lives with this
equipment.
“I’m not flying [F-16 Fighting Falcons], but I’m in a flying unit, I still get to ride on the aircraft occasionally and I’m still associated with the best Air Force in the world.”

Glacier Girl: WWII P-38 Lightning Marks 20 Years since Recovery from Greenland Glacier

In 1981, with their equipment covered in ice and snow, two Atlanta men prepared to fly home in disappointment after a second expedition to retrieve a squadron of World War II airplanes buried in a Greenland icecap. But then Pat Epps and Richard Taylor heard Norman Vaughn whistling. The 76-year-old had participated in an equipment salvage operation by dogsled after the airplanes had to land on the icecap almost 40 years earlier. Taylor couldn’t believe Vaughn’s chipper mood while they were forced to leave the icecap no closer to finding the lost squadron than when they landed.
“I said, ‘Norman, don’t you understand? We failed at this thing,’” Taylor said.
“He stood at attention and said, ‘We didn’t fail. We went as far as man can go. We went into the teeth of the gale, and the only way we fail is if we quit.’
“I thought there was a lesson there. If you don’t quit, you never fail.”
Eleven years and five more expeditions later, Epps’ and Taylor’s Greenland Expedition Society crews raised four .50-caliber machine guns and a .20 mm cannon from a P-38 Lightning, a World War II American fighter aircraft, that had been under ice for 50 years. This summer marks the 20th anniversary of the raising of the plane that became known as Glacier Girl.
In July 1992, crew members raised the P-38 piece-by-piece through an icy tunnel from beneath 265 feet of ice. The late Roy Shoffner, who also supplied major financial backing for the 1992 expedition, restored the P-38 in Middlesboro, Ky., and on Oct. 26, 2002, Glacier Girl flew for the first time in 60 years. Rod Lewis, founder of Lewis Energy Group, bought the historic plane and gave the P-38 its new home at Lewis Energy in San Antonio. A California recovery team is still working to retrieve the five remaining P-38s, using a Russian-built Antonov AN-2, the short takeoff and landing PZL 104 Wilga 80 and a radar detection probe.
During World War II, the P-38 was invaluable in the Pacific, with a range that allowed it to fly long distances and return safely to base. The Japanese described the plane as two airplanes with one pilot, while the Germans called it “der gabelschwanzteufel,” or the fork-tailed devil. P-38s were involved in the April 18, 1943 mission that shot down and killed Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.
On July 15, 1942, the Army Air Forces 94th Fighter Force’s six fighters and two bombers were forced to land on the Greenland glacier. The planes were part of Operation Bolero, a massive buildup and movement of Allied aircraft from the United States to Europe. The squadron flew a day earlier from Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada to Sondre Storm on the western coast of Greenland. They were flying over Greenland’s ice-capped mountains and the Denmark Strait and were headed to Reykjavik, Iceland, and eventually to Scotland. But the weather turned foul quickly, with temperatures falling to below minus-10, and the planes had to land on Greenland’s frozen glacier.
An Army Air Force ski and dogsled team rescued the 25 crew members huddled inside the two B-17 Flying Fortresses three days later, but the eight planes remained for five decades, covered by ice and snow.
In August 1980, Epps and Taylor heard about the lost squadron in a bar at a remote land strip during a stop on the way home from buzzing around the Arctic in a single-engine plane. Other pilots thought the two were crazy, but Epps, an Air Force veteran and 1998 Gathering of Eagles honoree, and Taylor, a U.S. Army Airborne during the Korean War, are both self-ordained adventurers. They thought nothing of taking a one-engine plane in extreme climates, even going as far as rolling the North Pole.
When Epps and Taylor began discussing the idea of resurrecting the lost squadron, they had no idea it would take seven expeditions and 11 years, let alone more than $2 million to bring up just one plane.
“[The airplanes] would be sitting on top of the ice. All we had to do was brush the snow off of them and bring them up,” Epps said. “We were totally convinced we were going to fly them all off the icecap. I was stuck to the project like Br’er Rabbit got stuck to Tar Baby.”
Epps began negotiating with Russ Rajani and Roy Degan, who had salvage rights to the planes. The men first brought the story to Epps in 1978, but he wasn’t interested then.
“That’s not my kind of business,” he told them. “I’m not into war birds. I service business aircraft, sell them gas and sell them hangar space.”
But a wealthy visitor to Epps Air Service at Atlanta’s DeKalb-Peachtree Airport in the spring of 1981 galvanized his interest in the planes, more specifically the P-38s. A new Learjet 25 pulled on the ramp, and Epps made a point of telling its owner how much he admired his plane.
“Yes,” Charlie Gay told him, “but I’ve always wanted a P-38.”
“He unwittingly started our search for the lost squadron,” Epps said.
So in 1981, Epps and Taylor went with Rajani and Degan on the first Greenland expedition with a pair of rented magnetometers, which detect iron and steel beneath the surface. However, they were surprised to see no signs of the planes, and a second trip that year was marked by bad weather that covered their equipment with ice and snow, although the 1981 expedition provided Vaughn’s inspiration to keep trying.
Two more expeditions followed in 1986 and 1988, when GES hired Austin Kovacs of the Cold Regions Research Laboratory and Dr. Helgi Bjornesson, a geophysicist with the Science Institute at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. Bjornesson had developed his own ground penetrating radar and told Epps and Taylor the planes were 5,000 feet from where they’d thought and 80 meters beneath the surface. They’d moved more than a mile from where they landed in 1942.
“When Helgi said the planes were 80 meters deep, I said you mean 80 feet?” Taylor said. “He said, ‘I know the difference between feet and meters.’ He was right, and that was really disheartening. We found the planes, but they were unbelievably deep. But having found them gave us credibility, and we had the first tangible evidence they were there.”
In 1989, the GES team had a twin-engine airplane for the first time with Don Brooks’ Douglas DC-3 with skis. Bobbie Bailey of Our Way Inc., designed, fabricated and packaged the probes, casing, drill shaft and keyhole saws that enabled the crew to retrieve pieces of the B-17 about 250 feet deep. Brooks built a 4-foot device called a thermal meltdown generator that melts the ice by circulating hot water through copper tubing coiled around it. The device allowed the crew to bore a hole through the ice to the planes. But its lack of a guidance system led to the device that became known as the Gopher.
They reached the B-17 the following year when they joined forces with Angelo and Remo Pizzagalli’s construction crew from Burlington, Vt. Bailey designed and fabricated the Gopher that allowed them to reach the plane, but they found the B-17 too damaged to retrieve. Still, the 1990 expedition left Epps and Taylor encouraged.
“The 1990 expedition was the pinnacle of all the work that we did because at that point, when we went back, we knew the right radar to use, and we found the planes in an hour, where before, it had taken us five years,” Taylor said.
“In 1990, we got down to the B-17, and the top of it was crushed down 5 feet. We thought at the time it was disappointing. But from my perspective, we had solved the technical problems. We had met and solved the scientific challenges and gotten down to the plane.”
Financing was a major problem throughout the first six expeditions, which cost about $1.3 million, Epps said. So GES struck a deal for the 1992 expedition with Shoffner, who was an Air Force F-89 Scorpion pilot in Alaska during the late 1950s. He eventually paid 70 percent of the cost of the 1992 expedition, and they would split whatever they brought up from the ice.
Bailey designed a third Gopher, which helped the crew raise Glacier Girl during the four-month expedition. Crew members had to carve a cave-like room around the plane so they could dismantle it before bringing it to the surface. Bob Cardin was the expedition’s project manager and supervised the raising of the 21-foot, 7,000-pound fuselage section with Shoffner after Epps had left with parts of the P-38 for Oshkosh, Wis., to raise more funds. Cardin christened the plane Glacier Girl over a bottle of Regal the day they brought the plane to the surface. A helicopter flew the center section of the P-38 to Kulusuk, Greenland. It was taken by barge to Denmark, then to Malmo, Sweden, before a cargo ship took it to Savannah, Ga.
Cardin also served as the project manager for Glacier Girl’s restoration after GES sold their share of the plane to Shoffner. He once called the P-38 “maybe the finest restoration of any war bird ever done.”
“This was a total team effort,” said Cardin, now a flight operations director for Lewis Energy. “No one person could have done that. We went to Greenland to preserve a nice part of our heritage. If someone doesn’t preserve the war machines that were used to preserve our freedom, when all of our veterans are gone, there won’t be anyone there to tell the story.”

Painful Pictures

The photographs George Wise took in a Nazi concentration camp remained in a shoebox for 40 years. But the images from those pictures never left his mind.
Wise continued to see the starving people, smell the stench of death, and he still heard the screams. He even chose to work as a bricklayer so he would work hard enough to sleep heavily and avoid the nightmares.
Finally, a friend helped convince Wise to take the pictures out of his shoebox. He uses the photos, which he took at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany after American infantry forces liberated it on April 29, 1945, to educate people about the Holocaust.
Wise will bring his message to the base at the Holocaust Remembrance Luncheon Thursday in the Club for Holocaust Awareness Week. He will tell the same story that had a National Security Agency audience in tears, as American generals were when they first saw the Nazi death camps.
“General Eisenhower, Patton and Omar Bradley all cried just like we did,” the 77-year-old Wise said in a telephone interview from his home in Lakewood, Colo. We didn’t know there was a place like that in the world. I couldn’t imagine any human being could do this to another human being.”
“If the war had lasted another six months, there wouldn’t have been a Jew alive on the continent of Europe, and the world would’ve never known if they had won the war,” Wise said.
Many people still didn’t want to know when Wise returned home. They didn’t care about the Purple Heart or his two Bronze Stars, but they especially weren’t interested in the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe. So Wise put his pictures away and didn’t take them out again until his Jewish doctor asked him to talk to a reporter about what they saw at Dachau.
“They didn’t want to hear my story,” he said of family and friends. “That broke my heart. It made me feel so bad, I put the pictures in a shoebox.”
Wise, an Army combat medic in World War II, arrived at Normandy after the D-Day invasion. He thought he’d seen the worst war could offer. He was wrong. He saw the worst at Dachau.
Wise saw the piles of corpses and the wall where the Nazis executed about 9,000 prisoners just before the Americans arrived. Everywhere he looked, there were signs of cruelty, suffering and death.
“You can go there 56 years later and still eel death there,” Wise said. “You hear the cries of the people begging to touch you. American soldiers were the only ones to every smile at these people. You wanted to feed them, but you knew it would kill them immediately because they were starving.”
Wise used a camera he had taken from a German soldier and photographed everything he saw.
His one regret is he didn’t have a picture taken of him in the camp because of the doubters. Wise, who is not Jewish, has had to resist throwing punches at people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen.
“These are people who weren’t even born, and all they’re doing is taking what they read from hate literature and believing somebody’s bologna,” Wise said. “I call them liars when they say it didn’t happen. I say where are the kids? There’s a whole generation of Jewish kids that just aren’t there.”
The pictures say it all. Each one has a story, Wise said. But there’s also a central theme in what Wise tells his audience, which includes many children. He wants people to know, not only what the Nazis did to the Jews and other people they tried to exterminate, but the damage hate can do.
“I tell people they really never knew what the word hate means,” he said. “I wish we could take it out of the dictionary because it’s the worst word in there. You don’t have to love every person, but you don’t have to hate him. Just respect every person, regardless of race, creed and color.”
There have been many emotional moments because of the nature of Wise’s message, but his appearance at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has a special place in his heart. Jewish people lined up for blocks to give him a kiss and hug for his part in their people’s liberation.
“It took me 48 years to come home, and that was when I got my welcome home,” Wise said. “They cried, and I cried. It was wonderful.”
Since then, Wise not only has his pictures out of the shoebox – he also feels the need to share them in hopes no camera will have to capture those disturbing images ever again.