Priceless Memories by Bob Barker & Digby Diehl

Author:Bob Barker & Digby Diehl [Barker, Bob & Diehl, Digby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 1599951355
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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About two months later, another officer, a commander, spoke to the Sixth Battalion on a subject that would deeply affect the lives of many cadets in the battalion. It was in this speech that the Great Purge reared its ugly head for the first time. It wasn’t mentioned as such, but the Great Purge is what it came to be called.

You talk with any cadet of my era, and they all know about the purge. Basically, when I originally signed up to become a naval aviator, you were given nine months of training as a cadet, and if successful, you got your wings. If you washed out, you went back to civilian life so you could join the Army Air Corps, the merchant marines, the U.S. marines, or whatever you wanted to do. While I was at William Jewell, the navy changed all that and gave us a chance to get out. Anybody who wanted to could get out immediately, but if you stayed in and you washed out later, you went to the Great Lakes and became a sailor. You didn’t have the opportunity to go choose something else. I’ll never forget it.

The commander encouraged us to stay in the cadet program, of course. He said, “You’re the cream of the crop. We haven’t had a better battalion come through here than you. You are not going to wash out. Don’t leave the navy now. You came into the navy because you wanted to fly for the navy. You will fly for the navy. You stay with it.”

All but one cadet in the battalion did stay, but later on, during the purge, probably 25 percent washed out, maybe more. The navy didn’t lose as many pilots in the Pacific as they thought they were going to lose, and now they had more pilots than they needed. I talked with instructors after the war who told me they had been forced to wash out a percentage of their cadets, even though the instructors thought the cadets were qualified to continue in the program.

So to get your wings after I got in the navy, you had to be able to fly and you had to do well in ground school, but it also helped to have lady luck on your shoulder. I was a good pilot; I worked hard and did well in ground school, but I was also lucky. I got my coveted wings of gold in spite of the purge, and though some cadets in my class had hairy crashes and some were killed, I was never in an accident or suffered injury.

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