The Pacific revisited

I urged high school classmate Don Schaaf, world renowned expert on the battle of Pearl Harbor, to enroll and ride with me on the weekly trip to the North Platte campus. Don and I are both a tad hearing impaired so we sit on the front row in class. Our trips are loud as we review and prepare for the class. It has been an enlightening semester.

During the summers of 1967, 1968, and 1969 I was privileged to fly "my" KC-135 across the vast waters of the Pacific Ocean. My flights were in support of the Vietnam War but we operated near the locations of several major naval battles in World War II.

When flying large transport aircraft we pilots experience periods of intense activity , especially during take-off, air-refueling and approach to landing. The high activity periods are interspersed with hours of quiet watchful minding the autopilot and other reliable mechanical systems that make up the complex modern aircraft. During those periods of relaxed watchfulness, many times my mind wandered back to those times, 25 years prior, when America was fighting for continuing hegemony of those very islands, the people and waters over which I was flying at the moment.

I would remember stories told by hometown heroes like Wayne Boyer, nose gunner in the PB4Y, the Navy version of the B-24. Distant cousin June Bobinmeyer, a sailor, on the surface there below crewing a USS destroyer. A later acquaintance, Lee Petsch, cruised the depths in a submarine. On land, Marine Capt. Ray Stramel fought the battle to take the Japanese fortress on the island of Palau. Bob Ray, a Marine, and Artie Lebsack, Army artillery, fought and won the battle of Okinawa. Ken Martin, Les Hock and Orv Fritch, all Army Air Corps, maintained and crewed aircraft on New Guinea not much farther south. These were just the ones that I personally knew yet this part of Southwest Nebraska contributed many more sons who served to keep our country safe.

Being a graduate of the Air Force Academy where an airpower centric view of military history is stressed I was somewhat aware of the capabilities of the aircraft with which the warriors of that prior area fought each other. My aircraft cruised at 450 knots or about 517 statute miles per hour. B-24's and B-17's traveled at about one third that pace. Catalinas, our premier reconnaissance aircraft at that time, was slower and traveled in four hours what we did in one. An eight-hour flight, covering well over 3,000 miles, was easy for us, but would have been a marathon for the World War II aviator, Japanese or American Allies alike.

Another advantage of my jet-powered modern marvel was the ability to cruise at altitudes up to 50,000 feet. In the clear air of the Western Pacific, a bird's eye view from eight miles high allows a person to see 50 miles in all directions and large columns of smoke, such as those that came from the smokestacks of earlier large surface ships, could have been seen up to 100 miles distant.

Aircraft of the World War II era would not have been able to reach the rarified altitudes, much less fight at the speeds at which my unarmed tanker loafed along.

Many times I dreamed of sitting in my unarmed air-conditioned, pressurized, high altitude perch, where I could have single handedly changed the course of the Naval war below in a reconnaissance role alone. Walter Mitty style, I could have found the enemy fleets and dispatched our good guys on our carriers in time for them to launch and hit the enemy at max range and return unharmed and unreachable by Japanese airpower of the time.

Daydreams aside, my interest in the Pacific War was tweaked by my mental machinations over those vast waters. Time spent in Guam, relaxing on Terragi Beach where the Marines landed to take the island, and on Okinawa, flying model airplanes off the Japanese Yom Tan Air Field also increased my interest.

I have landed on and departed from runways at Wake Island, Midway, Hickam AFB, Hawaii, Anderson AFB, Guam, Kadena AFB, Okinawa, Clark AFB, the Philippines as well as new bases at Takhli and Utapao, Thailand plus CCK in Taiwan, called Formosa during World War II. All these locations were important to winning World War II and most were paid for dearly with American blood.

This course in the Political History of World War II and a chance to write a term paper on the Island Hopping Campaign to retake control of the vast Western Pacific has been a long time incubating.

I view as it a chance to pay personal homage to my heroes, those young men who stepped forth and helped American win World War II.

They truly were the greatest generation.

That's the way I saw it.