Wintermeyer, Charles A. oral history

              Interview with Colonel Charles A. Wintermeyer
[b. 8/10/17]
Recorded on 10/21/06
[Interview starts at 001 on counter]
Michael Stephen Wintermeyer: [Supposed to say: This is October 21, 2006]. I am Michael Wintermeyer and I am interviewing Mr. Charles Wintermeyer Sr. at 10440 High Grove. Mr. Wintermeyer is my grandfather. He is 89-years-old and was born on August 10th, 1917. Mr. Wintermeyer served in World War II. He was in Army Air Corps and held the following rank: Major. 
MSW: Were you drafted or did you enlist?
Charles A. Wintermeyer: I volunteered.
MSW: Where were you living at the time?
CAW: Weymouth, Massachusetts. That’s where I went through grade school and high school.
MSW: Why did you join?
CAW: Because I wanted to fly. I liked airplanes.
MSW: So you picked the Air Force, then?
[012]
CAW: That’s, that’s right. At that time there was no Air Force. The Air Force didn’t exist; you had to join either the Army or the Navy. So I joined the Army Air Corps.
MSW: Do you recall those first days in service?
CAW: In service, yeah. In fact, I very well remember those days. I rolled into camp with another fellow from Cambridge, whose name was Buckley, and we rolled into the Scott Airfield on Saturday, late Saturday afternoon. And I already had a pilot’s license. I already had a Master’s degree. I’d been a schoolteacher - 8th grade school teacher for two years. So I thought I was a pretty hot ticket and they were lucky to get me. Well, I reported in with Mr. Buckley to the cadet barracks and in about two minutes the upperclassmen, to whom we reported, made us both feel like we were the lowest level of dirt on the face of the earth. They told us that we could not open our mouths, we couldn’t ask where we were going to sleep, we couldn’t ask when we’d be getting anything to eat. We were just told, “Keep your mouth shut. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, and answer with only three things – yes sir, no sir, or no excuse sir. We don’t want to hear any other words and we don’t want to hear anything unless we ask a question. You accept that?” And I say “yes.” They said, “You say answer what?” And I said “yes, sir!” They said, “That’s better.” I distinctly remember that. 
MSW: So you were in World War II?
CAW: Right. Yes, I was.
MSW: And where exactly did you go?
[037]
CAW: Well, we started out; we left San Francisco by onboard a Dutch steamer. We ran all alone; we were not in a convoy. An on this Dutch steamer there were about, oh, I forgot how many, 100 of us, but most of us were replacements. We were young lieutenants, navigators, pilots, engineers, radio operators, all kinds of people. And we, it took us four or five days and we landed in Honolulu, Hawaii. And then those of us who flew with the group I was in, twelve of us out of the same class of cadets, we reported to the Hawaiian Air Force, which was known then as the 7th Air Force. We brought our stuff in, gave them your papers and…got your uniform and all that sort of stuff. Then they decided where the service needed you, and wherever they needed you, that’s where you were sent. They couldn’t care less what you wanted, you were sent where the military needed you as a replacement. So I was sent to Bellows Field, which was a private field on the windward side of Oahu. And when I reported there I was assigned as the Assistant Base Operations Officer at Bellows Field. It was a P40 fighter field, and when I reported in, the major that I reported to, he told me “2nd Lieutenant’s are about as useful as fleas on vet.” He says, “The only good you guy’s is any good is signing for property. So sign for all of these airplanes and go run that control tower right.” So I did and that was how I started; that was my first job.
MSW: Thanks. Did you see any combat?
[054]
CAW: Yes, much later on.
MSW: So were there many casualties in your unit?
CAW: Oh, yes. The First Admiral, the first I wasn’t in his particular outfit. The whole point of outfits, Michael, is to run an air base, and there were several squadrons or wings or groups, and they all used the same airfield. We were at Scott Airfield, like that e-mail I sent you, and this Navy Commander who brought in his airfield, he put me in charge of the control tower. That’s where they needed somebody; they needed an officer to run the control tower, and so I was running the control tower and there were bombers that got off and fighters they got off, and the Navy went to another field and the Army Air Corps began coming in. And on the first mission of the Army Air Corps, they sent off 86 B29s to leave Tinian and go up to Japan, which was 1,400 miles away. It was a wide, wide Pacific Ocean. And up to 36 B29’s did not come back. All we could, we hear their radios, we could hear some of them talking, and they were going into the water; they were lost, running out of fuel, and the airplane wouldn’t fly, it was too heavy and they were going into the water, and we had a few submarines out there trying to pick up the men. But very few of the men got picked up. They just hit the field. They probably drowned. But that was nine out of thirty-six. That was twenty-five percent a loss, a twenty-five percent loss ruined the morale of the whole squadron, the whole the whole outfit, so they had to improve so they didn’t lose as many. They wanted to get the number of losses down to ten percent because the people go off and fly, and go in combat, and they know they’ve only get one chance in four of coming back, you know they get very nervous and morale goes to a downward plunge. And you’ve got to have good morale to have a good combat outfit. But gradually the losses became fewer and fewer and fewer, per mission.
MSW: Do you have any more very memorable experiences?
[084]
CAW: Yeah, of course! But the most important, well two. The most important will be the second one. On another raid, there was another island close to ours, and on this raid there were I forgot how many, a couple a hundred I guess, B29s going to Japan. And they came back at night. Now they had already flown 1,400 miles up to Japan, dropped their bombs, and now they’re flying 1,400 miles back to their island base and it’s night, it’s dark. And there are these two islands, and all the lights are out. You can’t see anything – there are no lights. No cities, no nothing. And the airplanes coming back were crying out, you know people on board the airplane, the airplane commander or the co-pilot was screaming out “I’ve got wounded on board,” or “I’m running out of fuel,” or “I’ve only got two engines,” or “my plane is damaged,” or “my night hydraulic system is gone.” And they were firing the pistols, signals which indicated they had wounded on board, and as they come close on this other field on the other island, which was only a few miles difference, like the narrowest channel of water. There was pure confusion because theses fellows were flying’ in at night, dark, and all they could see on the ground was darker smudges. And they were calling in the dark. There were two towers, one each island, and they were called, their code-names are always together. Remember this, the code-names for the two towers were on different islands. One was Lotus, the flower lotus, and the other was Bluegrass. So they were calling for Bluegrass Tower and Lotus Tower. And in on our island I was in the control tower with a lieutenant colonel, who was the deputy commander of operations of those 350 bombers, and with him was a brigadier general, who was commander of the entire three wings. And the general said to the colonel, and he says, “Listen, we can’t do this. This is confusion. We’ve got to straighten this thing out. We’ve got to straighten this out first. Men are drowning, they’re they’re wounded, they’re dying, they need help, and they don’t know where to land.” So the three of us were standing together, so the lieutenant colonel just turned and grabbed me by the shoulder and he pushed me toward the general and he said, what’d he say, something about the, oh I was a captain then; I’d been promoted to captain. And he says, “Captain Wintermeyer will take care of their planes, General.” So the General looked at me with a very stern look and he said, “Well?” So I said “Yes, sir!” I said “I’ll straighten this out right away. Give me an airplane tomorrow morning when it’s daylight; I’ll fly over to the other island, I’ll talk to the people running that tower and I’ll straighten this out.” So he pulled strings with the Colonel, he said, “Give him an airplane, get him over to Saipan,…and let him straighten this out.” Well I went over the next day and I straightened it out. It was a simple matter as my telling the other control tower chief, who as another captain, “You will use such-and-such a frequency, say orange frequency or blue frequency, and I will use green frequency and yellow frequency on my island.” We set them and the planes coming back, they would call and they would call with these specifically aimed at a specific tower, so that tower could specifically answer them, and know that they would not be calling in the blind, in the dark. 
MSW: That’s a great story.
[128]
CAW: That solved our problem. Now, a more important thing was later on. Oh, say a month later. Another bomb group came over, the same B29s, and I’m still running the tower, in fact I was running the tower all these three fields on Tinian, a Navy field with Navy fighters and Navy patrol planes, which was the home of the Navy’s what they call Staff Wing 1. The full Wing 1, which was the so-called Eyes of the Fleet. And there was an Army fighter field and there was a field where I spent most of my time on, the bomber base on the northern end of the island, which at that time was the largest airfield, civil or military, in the world. It had four parallels, 18 and 8,000 foot runways, which had been built by the Navy Seabees and they were working 24 hours a day 7 days a week bringing in fresh coral and planting out the north end of the island into these runways. And I spent most of the time there because that’s that was our bombing base for bombing Japan and in the early summer of 1945 that the 509th Composite Bomb Group came over from the United States and my people, I had about a couple-hundred people, I had lieutenants, sergeants reporting to me, running these control towers. I was still a captain, and we were assigned to this outfit, so we slept with them, and ate with them and everything, and one of their airplanes one night early in the morning took off. And although we didn’t know it, inside that airplane was the first atomic bomb. The airplane went up and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima or Hiroshima, as they called it then. And shortly after they radioed back and they safely announced that the first atomic bomb had been dropped and they came back and landed. Several days later, President, President Harry Truman told the Japanese they’d have to surrender because we had this terrible weapon and if somebody wouldn’t surrender they were going to fight, fight until every last Japanese man, woman and child was going to fight until he was killed. He was going to fight for the Emperor, because they thought the Emperor was God. And by fighting for him they would immediately go to their version of heaven. And they were going to fight; they were not about to surrender. So several days went by and we got short-wave radio broadcasts from the states. And these broadcasts were to come from, amongst others, priests, rabbis, ministers, and all kinds of Americans who were from California or New York or Florida, wherever they were. They would say “oh, what a terrible thing,” “isn’t this terrible,” “America has to use the atomic bomb?” So we, over there on Tinian, were watching the bomb. We were wild! We were wild. We thought that, “why don’t those buggers come over here and fight those Japanese, sneaking into our camp that night, cutting our throats, disemboweling our sentries. And we’ve got to go up there. We know that they don’t care about dying, and so these poor people back in the states are belly-aching about it, why don’t they come over here and fight if they think that we enjoy what we’re doing?” So anyway, the Japanese wouldn’t surrender, so Truman apparently gave the order and another B29 went off. But this time it bombed Nagasaki, which was the second atomic bomb. Charlie Sweeney was flying that. He was later the Air Adjutant, the Adjutant General or the Commanding General of the Air National Guard in Massachusetts. And he dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki, and again, he waited for the Japanese to surrender. And then the Japanese still wouldn’t surrender, so we started to fly another one. Coincidentally, when these planes took off, nobody knew, nobody on the airfield knew that inside the bomb bay, instead of the usual 500-pound ball, was this one single huge atomic bomb. We called him “Fatboy” later on when we say how big it was, and anyway, the second bomb was dropped and this apparently convinced the Emperor of Japan that there was no hope. That anyone who had the atomic bomb could blast and blow every city in the area with the atomic bomb. At that time we, the United States, were the only ones who had it. And probably they, the Japanese, agreed to unconditional surrender. Well it was still touch and go because we know how civilly the Japanese would fight and how they hated to lose, so at the surrender ceremony, which they held on the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, up in Tokyo harbor, all of the Japanese high-level officers and the Allied high-level officers of the various commands, the Navy, the Army, the whatnot, were all gathered on board this battleship for the formal signing of the unconditional surrender. The General McArthur with the commander general would be there. And while they were signing this onboard the battleship, to make the point clear the Allies had flying over the battleship, over Tokyo harbor, squadron after squadron of bombers flew in formation over the harbor in the sky directly above that battleship, and this was pointed out to the Japanese, which was a reminder to them that we’ve got these bombers and we’ve got ‘em by the dozens, we have ‘em by the hundreds, and if you don’t sign this surrender, we will bomb Japan into pieces, the entire country. And so they signed what became unconditional surrender and that’s how we won the war. Because we had figured the high generals, you know they, the American and Allied generals had figured out, that if we didn’t ever bomb the Japanese, we would have to invade, storm the beaches, like we had all across the Pacific at all these islands, Saipan, all of the islands, and casualties were fierce. We figured, everybody in the Allies figured that if we had to storm the beaches of Japan, we would lose one million Americans. One million American soldiers and Marines would be killed or maimed in attacking the Japanese shores, so we had the choice, our generals did, we captains didn’t have much in it to say, but the generals decided we would rather drop the bomb and kill the Japs rather than order one million American and British, Allied Australian soldiers, sailors and Marines to get killed. It was that simple. And so, later on, when public realized the benefit later on, and we all agreed with ‘em, and the guys who flew these airplanes, that dropped the atom bombs, never once expressed a bit of regret, because it was either hit that hard a million Americans who could be killed or wounded or maimed versus dropping these two bombs on the Japanese cities. But we knew so we were wild. ‘Cause when you’re in a situation like that, you know, fly and people get injured, there’s no such thing as fairness in war. It’s either kill or be killed, like you know when I was shooting the Japs, I knew he was trying’ to kill me. And that’s it; I remember it even now, the feeling that that the people back in the states just didn’t understand. War was something they read about in the newspaper. It wasn’t out there getting a leg blown off or getting blinded or getting an arm blown off, or someone sneaking up on you with their knife and cutting your throat, things like that. They had no idea of what war was like.
[252]
MSW: So only the people back at home expressed any concern about dropping the atom bomb?
CAW: Oh, yeah. They had tried to be part Japanese, you see, from the states. They thought it was terrible that we that we Americans should have to kill so many Japanese. And our reaction, the military’s reaction, army on the island of Tinian; our attitude was “why don’t you buggers come over here then and you fight the Japanese and see what you would do?” 
MSW: Were you awarded any medals or citations after the war?
CAW: Oh, yeah. I was awarded the Air Medal, the Federal Defensive Against Japan, the Mandated Islands Campaign, and things like that.
MSW: Now on to your life during the Army, how did you stay in touch with your family?
[269]
CAW: Oh, we would write letters. When you’re a soldier or sailor, you could write letters. They had what they called ‘V-mail’ which was a very lightweight piece of paper and a particular lightweight envelope. And we would put our APO; the APO for Saipan was 344 and for Tinian it was APO 243 Pacific Theatre. And we would put, instead of stamps, we would just write up in the right-hand corner where the stamp usually goes, we would write “free” because we didn’t have to pay for stamps. We could write the letter, seal it and write “free” across the top and a military postal system would fly it back to the states. Of course, it would have to be censored by some officer in the in the group, the squadron. He would have to censor the mail to make sure the people, especially the young enlisted troops didn’t say anything in there that would give away any secret information like how many bombers we had on a particular airfield, or how long the runway was, or any other secret information like that. But that’s how he censored and we would get letters from home. 
MSW: How long would it take for the mail to get home and for you to get a response?
CAW: Oh, about ten days each way. Ten days to get back to the states and it would generally only take ten days from when it was flown out of San Francisco or San Diego out to Hawaii and then to various islands, until finally we at the Marianas Islands, which was way out, closer to Asia than the United States.
MSW: What was the food like?
[299]
CAW: Well the food was very often K-rations, which you ate out of the can, mutton or butter, or all kinds of stuff, they mixed it up into some kind of a can of soup. If you could take a can of soup today, vegetable soup let’s say, and you could put it out in the sun all day, the water, the liquid content all dry up and evaporate, take the rest of it, freeze it and put it into a big can that would be opened with a knife. We had that. And we also had C-rations, which also were opened with a knife and we had you know we ate out of a mess kit, which was an aluminum dish, and an aluminum cup, an aluminum knife and a fork of aluminum. That was our mess kit. And we always kept it strapped on your belt or with your pack on your shoulder. 
MSW: Did you have plenty of supplies?
CAW: At first no, but then gradually as the war went along and the Japanese were driven back, then the ships would come in with more and more supplies. We did get more and more supplies. But we never get, never did get anything like you know like fresh ice cream or fresh milk or, we always got powdered milk, powdered eggs, stuff like that. Vegetables, fresh vegetables and things like that, we’d get butter from Australia in a tin and we’d get beef from Australia when it came, and things like that. You know, ‘cause the United States was so far away.
MSW: Did you feel any pressure or stress?
CAW: Oh, of course, yeah, always. You were always under stress. For example one time, I think up in that same bloody control tower, and on the field, it was getting dark one night, early on, and there were the we had the Seabees, the Navy Seabees had built a real tower on top of Mount Wako, which was the highest level on the island, 600 or 800 feet or so. There was salt in the air there and this steel tower went up I guess maybe 150 feet or something like that, except at the top you couldn’t see it, and there was airplanes that would be coming in low enough that they couldn’t see it and they might hit it, so this is about four o’clock in the afternoon or something, and it’s getting starting to get dark, the sun had almost setted, so they took Colonel Lewis, he turned to me and he says “Captain, see that tower up there? I want red lights, a bunch a lights, strung on it from the bottom to the top every 50 feet in altitude.” You know what I said to him? “Yes sir.” So I went and found my sergeant, who was a technical sergeant from New Jersey. Anyway, I told him to get red lights up on the tower. His jaw dropped and he said to me “yes sir.” So I went back down from the tower, and about a half hour later the colonel and I go up in the tower to, Colonel Lewis I think his name was, “Captain Wintermeyer, have you looked up on the hill?” It’s just getting real dark. And all of a sudden the three or four red lights on the tower shining so that you could see them and airplanes could see them and they wouldn’t hit the tower and crash. So he didn’t ask me how they got up here, and he said, “Good job, Captain.” And I never asked the Sergeant how he got them up here, but I really wanted to. Anyway, I suppose what he did was he went and found whoever was in command of the Seabees that had built the tower; I suppose he told them to construct the lights on that tower. Well he never told me how, and I never asked him, but at that time officers were given a quart of whiskey a week. And enlisted men were not allowed to have whiskey, [I didn’t drink whiskey] so I took the quart I had and I went over to his tent when he wasn’t there, and I hid it underneath his bed, he had a wrapped up shirt or a jacket or maybe his pillow. I took it underneath there, and I never said a word about it and neither did he, because it was against the law, a young an enlisted man to have whiskey. But I’m sure he took that jug of whiskey and shared with the Seabees who put up the red lights for him. But he was a real sharp, real sharp kid; boy he was a great kid, a really great kid. I had another great kid out there the Navy issued, we get bombed by Japanese betties again, two engine bombers and they’d go right down the runway and they’d drop the bombs along the runway trying to hit the airplanes, our airplanes, that were patrolling, Navy Patrol Wing One, the “Eyes of the Fleet,” and they’d try to hit those airplanes and or the runway. And you know I the first time they did I was up in the tower, and while they’re coming down, this is in daylight, they’re coming down and the ground was rocking and booming and all that, and all the troops on the ground were stepping on each other to get in the cage or whatnot as the bombs would be going off, and I’m up in the tower where they where nobody no one can hear me, and I ordered that whoever happened to be in the tower when the Japanese bombers come in it was chaos here. And my senior, my oldest non-commissioned officer, was a fellow about, oh he was in his early 30s, but he was a ranking man, at that time he was scared and he couldn’t do it, when the bombers hit the ground he was scared, he would shake and hold his head, and shake, but he didn’t cry, but he was obviously scared to death. We all were scared to death, but he couldn’t he couldn’t control it because I got on him, I got him and I screamed at him, I yelled at him, I blasted him, I tried everything I knew and I told him, I said “You are the ranking non-commissioned officer. These young troops look up to you to give them an example.” I said, “You can’t break down. You’ve got to get out there and do it.” I said, “If I can stay up in the tower, you can stay up in the tower. I’m the officer in command and my life is worth just as much as yours.” And he said, “I can’t,” he says “I’ve got a wife and three little kids and I keep worrying about them.” So I finally went to the Navy Flight crewman and I said, “I tell you you’ve got to get rid of get him off the island.” I said “I don’t care how you do it, get him off the island. I can’t have him ruining the morale of the rest of my troops.” So we got him flown off. I never knew what happened to him. He was court-martialed; you have things like that happen. Not bad, it’s not a fun thing.
[430]
MSW: What did you do when you were on leave?
CAW: Leave? We couldn’t go on leave. There was no leave. We couldn’t on leave. There was no place to go if we did have a leave. So there was no leave. You’re in a combat theater; you’re fighting day and night, so there’s no thing as leave. It was wartime. You’re in a combat zone. You don’t get leave. You don’t take off. You’re stuck right there.
MSW: So then how did people alleviate their stress?
CAW: They didn’t. They smoked cigarettes; the policy of the military was they gave out free cartons of cigarettes to all everybody who wanted ‘em, and people smoked cigarettes. Tobacco, as you know, is a great stress reliever, and they would give these to the officers and they would feel relief with them. That helped. But other than that, there was very there was no other relief from stress. That was it, period. 
MSW: Where did you travel when you were in the service?
[450]
CAW: Oh, later on, after the war I came back, I after being in Brookline for four years I became a teacher. But at the same time, in the evenings and summers I liked airplanes so I flew at the Air National Guard.  At Logan Airport, later the headquarters of the State Police, and now who owns the Boston University along the Charles River. Well, I went in to join the Air Guard and I was told we have no openings for majors, they’re long gone, people signed up right after the war and so this was maybe a year after the war was over. But the adjutant at this outfit had been a couple years ahead of me in college and he and I played together on the varsity baseball team. So he said to me, “I’ll vouch for you to the commander if we can get you in as a captain, will you come in as a captain?” I said “Hell, yes! I don’t care what my rank is, I just want to belong to the outfit and fly.” So they took me in as a Captain and a year later, I was promoted back to Major and I was part of the Chief of Operations office. And then, after another couple of years, we were called to active duty. So I started active duty in the Air National Guard, just like the troops are being called now to go over to Iraq. And so I got the call, so the superintendent of school said the officer, “Well, we can’t afford to lose Mr. Wintermeyer. He came back and he’s doing a great job, I’ve made him chairman of the committee organizing an entire kindergarten through junior high school math curriculum, we can’t afford to lose him.” So I was sent to see the state McKenna and I told ‘em, I said, “You don’t understand, neither you nor the Governor of Massachusetts can keep me back. I am being ordered by the President of the United States to go back to my active duty. If I don’t go, military police will come and get me and I’ll go to Federal prison. You don’t have any choice in the matter. Neither do I.” So he, you know he said, “OK, well I didn’t know that.” So I was called to active duty and then after while I liked to fly, I like the military, and what I was doing, I thought was very important. Much more important, although teaching is very important, this was much more important. Whether the army was within NATO, which at that time was for central Europe and Russia. The only strong arm that NATO really had. The only atomic bombers that NATO had were based in England. They wouldn’t dare base them in France or Germany, they were based in England, and I was assigned to them. So I soon realized that this was the only atomic capability they both had, and later I found out the top generals on both sides said, “You can take your thousands of men at any time and roll through Germany, crush the Allies, roll through Germany, roll through Europe, take the whole place over. We can’t stop you. We’ve got a few thousand, a quarter of a million troops we can’t stop you, you’ve got thousands upon thousands and you’d go right through.” What do American generals say to the Russian generals? “If you do, within a matter of hours, our atomic force will flatten every city in Russia, and if you don’t believe it, try it.” And so the Russians got their spies around and they watched and they were convinced that we could do exactly that. We had these airplanes in England, and that’s where I was stationed, getting them organized and trained, and practicing on their missions. So that to me was still more important than teaching so I stayed and I would get to Oakland Air Force Base, Florida where they had an Operation Suitability Testing to test the aircraft and new radar off the assembly line and send them to the squadron and see how they work out, whether the squadron would rattle them or not or whether they were defective or missing spare parts, that sort of stuff. Then from there, I was shipped up to Cambridge Research Center up at MIT on a joint task force with these generals evaluate help them evaluate the entire air defense system of the United States and Canada. I was up there for three years I guess … Korea. So I went over to Korea and then I was over there for fifteen months as a general and then I flew back to the states in the Strategic Air Command as a bomber up in Maine. And I was up there for two and a half-years. And while I was up there, there were only I think five of us, there were 4,000 military people on the base, and only these five knew the complete war plan, and I was one of them. And they said “Well you have to live on the base.” So I lived on the base in the BOQ [bachelor officer quarters] and my family couldn’t move up there for a year. So the 52 weeks, I spent 50 of the weeks on Friday afternoons, I would check in with my boss so then I would take the weekend off. Most of the time he’d say yes, so if we ever worked late, like four or five o’clock on Friday afternoon, I’d get in my car and I’d drive for five solid hours from Bangor, Maine down to Walden where we lived, just to see the kids and my wife and be out of the airfield late Friday night, and then I’d have to leave Sunday night to get back to my office Monday morning by seven o’clock. And that was a rough go, and hell, sometimes it snowed, it was piled so high on the highway, that it was higher than the car, you couldn’t even see past the snow banks. I remember one time going around a rotary up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I skidded and slid, and I bounced right off that snow bank that was lining the side of the road. It must’ve been eight feet high, and I bounced right back on the highway and I just kept right on going. But that was a rough go. But I, I had to see her, I wanted to see your Dad, and in addition to that, later on when my family was up here, the Division Commander, who later would be a Inspector General to the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, he called all the officers and all the senior non-coms [non-commission officer] involved and he gave a talk and he said “We’re going to run this base like a civilian base. We got 1900 families on the base, we are going to have a city council, and the City Council is going to be made up of the Fighter Squadron Commander, Bomb Squadron Commander, the Campus Squadron Commander, the Hospital Commander, and the Mayor is going to be Major Charles Wintermeyer.” And I was the mayor and your dad was the Commander of the Bomb Squadron and he said, “Hey Chuck, who elected you?” And I said, “This is the first I heard about it.” So anyway, they got extra duty, the General, the Commanding General made me the mayor. So I spent Friday mornings for about an hour meeting with these commanders and we decided what was what and if somebody had a complaint, just any complaints about living in this community. One time I stopped these teenage kids who were making too much noise and keeping everyone up at night.
MSW: Mr. Wintermeyer. Sorry to interrupt, but it is almost done with this side. 
[772]
END SIDE ONE. 
MSW: I am Michael Wintermeyer, I am interviewing Mr. Charles Wintermeyer Sr. This is the second side of the tape. Start.
CAW: After the bomb wing I was up there for three and a half years then my named bounced out of the Pentagon Computers, and then I was sent to Germany, to headquarters here, United States Air Forces, Europe, and I was put in charge of all electronic projects of an area covering from Iceland to Greenland, all through Europe, all through the Middle East, and down to New Delhi. We had squadrons at Athens, Ramstein, Germany, and New Delhi, India. I was down inspecting places and I was the boss of things and I hoped I could engineer the officers and squadrons, who I’m sure did a responsible job. But anyway, after three years there, when I got shipped back to the states, I became fifty years old. I said to my boss, Brigadier General Cordell, “General, I’m fifty years old, I have a family to support, so I’m going to apply for retirement and go back to my old job, teaching school or become a superintendent of schools or become a college professor.” He said, “And I’ll disapprove it, the air force captain won’t let you go.” So I began the retirement state, he disapproved it, the two-star generals disapproved it, but down in the Pentagon, they approved it. So I retired and I came home with a home rented and a job waiting for me. I retired at Griffiss Air Force Base out in western New York, in the snowbelt. We came home; we had a house all set and a job all set. We picked this place, Bourne Mass., your father’s mother and I. One of the key requirements, it had to have a good school system. So to make sure of this, I took my job as a teacher in that school system, so I would really know that it was a good school system. As it turned out, it was because your father, Steve, went to Yale, and Chas went to the Air Force Academy. And they deserve a great deal of credit for that. But it was a good school system. And I know, because I taught in it. They did not want to let me go because I had skills that the Air Force needed, and they didn’t want to let me go. But under the law if you had over twenty-five years or something, and if you were a commissioned officer, I think the law said that they had to let you go, so I applied for retirement, and it was approved, and I’ve been retired ever since. 
[810]
MSW: What did you think of your fellow officers and soldiers?
CAW: I admired most of them for three good reasons. Number one, many was a time when we all were scared, and don’t let anybody kid you that people who have been in combat don’t get scared. They get scared, they all do. Anybody who tells you he never got scared, he’s just kidding you. The whole purpose of the military is: scared though you may be, you still carry out your orders. You obey, you obey, you obey. Carry out your orders no matter what. It’s just like baseball, or soccer, or swimming, or whatever sport you’re on; if the weather gets bad, or you get cold, or whatever, you still do it. You are trained to instinctively do what you are supposed to do. If you are scared, or upset, or whatever, the most important thing was that you do what you are supposed to do. If you didn’t, you let down the other fellows in your unit. There was no way, in most camps; they would let down the other fellows in their unit. You just didn’t do it, you were part of the unit, and the unit was part of you, and you just didn’t let the rest of the guys down. I think guys would get killed, rather than let down their teammates, the people in their unit, their aircrew, or their special team, or whatever, their infantry squad, their submarine, ship, or whatever. You just don’t do it, you get to be really close buddies, and you don’t get the other guy down. It’s a feeling of brotherhood or whatever you want to call it. It’s a very, very powerful feeling. One of the things, Michael, the Air Force officer’s oath, “I won’t lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate anyone in my group who does.” Well we take that very seriously, of course there are a few who don’t follow it, but not many. And that means an officer’s rule is his bond. For example, I’m eighty-nine, and I have never written a bad check in my life. An Air Force officer just doesn’t do that. And there are an awful lot of people in civilian life who don’t have a code to live by. So they think it’s perfectly all right to get by with lying, or stealing, or things like that. That’s not tolerated in the Officer Corps. That surprised my wife, Nancy, a little. Because we’d would roll in at night, after traveling all day, and we might roll in a big, plush hotel in Rome. I remember one time, the Hotel Berninni, a great big, plush hotel, after traveling all day, and we were tired, beat. She said, “Oh! They won’t let us in here, they won’t like us.” I said, “We’ll be alright.” So I went up to the desk and I showed my ID card and I said, “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Wintermeyer, United States Air Force.” And they said, “Yes, Sir. What can we do for you Colonel? We’ll take care of you right away. What would you need? What would you want?” If you’re an Air Force officer, wherever you went you were treated with considerable respect, and dignity, and so on. Even in Germany, who fought us in the war, I would go to meetings with the Luftwaffe and the Spanish Imperial Air Force in Tehran. ___+ In Tehran I’d go down to the Royal Iranian Air Force ___+ I’d go out with the Hellenic Air Force in Greece and the Royal Air Force in Great Britain, and you’re treated with great respect. I had to laugh at a meeting with the Luftwaffe. I was going into an elevator. One of the German officers called out my name, I was a Lieutenant Colonel, I was a big shot, “Leutnant [Lieutenant] Ober Wintermeyer!” And all the other German officers in the elevator who didn’t know me, clicked their heels and stood at attention as I walked into the elevator. But if you are a senior officer in most of those countries, the military is a very, very powerful force. Even in England, and Wiesbaden, if you were in the army, or were drafted, or in the navy, or went overseas or something; say you got a medal, or were a major, or whatever; that goes with you all your life. It will be with you, even if it's years and years and years. Since you’re in the military, people refer to you as Major John Smith or whatever your name might be. Because these countries over there appreciate what the military has meant to them. For example one time later on, I was called by my boss, who was called by the NATO commander, a four-star army general in Paris, who controlled all the North American [meant Atlantic] Treaty Organization, which was the only support against the Russians in the Cold War. He told my boss, “I want a senior Air Force officer to go down to Turkey and brief the Turkish Imperial General Staff.” And so my boss ___+. I reported to him and I said, “Yes, sir!” He said, “Chuck, I want you to go down to the capital of, Turkey and brief the Turkish Imperial General Staff.” I said, “Yes, sir!” and away I went. I met this Navy Captain in Istanbul. I said to the Navy Captain, who out-ranked me, “How do you want to split up this briefing?” He said, “Oh no, colonel, you’re the whole team, I’m just going there as an observer for vice-admiral so-and-so.” So anyway, we had the briefing, and I know my business, and I briefed the Turkish General Staff. And they sit there in these big, plush, leather chairs, and they have gold buttons on the arms of the chairs. They can push a button and if I am speaking in English, what I am saying is translated into Turkish or whatever language they want; French, whatever. And so again, I apparently did a good job because I was written up by the four-star general, commander of NATO, and my boss thought that was a really big deal. I learned down there that (it’s a democracy) the Turkish Parliament decided that they were going to go more secular. It’s a Muslim country, and we’re going to have the women wear veils and walk six feet behind the men, and they can’t drive cars, and all that sort of stuff. So they passed a law and in a week or two, that went on. The Turkish General Staff went to the Parliament and in effect said, “Cut out this baloney or we’ll throw you guys in parliament out on your ear and we’ll put in a different government!” So that straitened that out real quick. But the military underneath the surface runs these countries. The United States, Michael, is the only country that I know where the military is subject to a civilian boss. We are subject to the president, who is a civilian. He, by our constitution, is our Commander-in-Chief. It’s too bad because in all the wars, many of them brought on by presidents, many of the wars are really ill advised adventures, and the military has to pay the price. And Vietnam is a prime example. We never should have went to war in Korea. We never should have went to war in Vietnam. We never should have went to war in the Spanish War. The President and Congress get in to these countries, and that’s that. Then they call up on the military to bail them out. And so far the military has, but that’s an awful price to pay. That’s why there are so many cemeteries in overseas countries filled with American soldiers, sailors, and marines. You go through Europe, England, France, Germany. You look at some of these cemeteries, and they just shouldn’t be there. But that’s the way it is. 
[936]
MSW: Did you develop any close friendships while in the service and did they last?
CAW: Sure, yeah, First Lieutenant Allen Wesley down in the Pacific Northern Islands. We were on this airship out away from the main island. It was on a coral reef. There was an airfield out there; it was the only place that we had dry enough land to build an airfield. It was not all that long. There were four of us down on that airfield. He was the boss of it; his name was Allen Wesley from Kentucky. He had been at Pearl Harbor when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He and I became great buddies. But here is an interesting story: The army was commanded by an Army task force. The reason that island was there was that the destroyers coming west to the Marianas Islands would run out of fuel, they needed to have a place to refuel. Destroyers don’t have the range that battleships and cruisers do. That was why the task force was there. Anyway, there was an Army engineer – Captain Armstrong or something like that. He was Army engineers, and we were Army Air Corps. So the two of them had a bet that you couldn’t hit an empty eggshell with a 30-caliber bullet because the shockwave would push the lightweight eggshell out of the way. So all the Army officers, the engineers, pooled their money and bet on the engineer. We poor Air Force guys all bet on our buddy, Lieutenant Allen Wesley. Well, lo and behold, it became to me to settle it once and for all. Allen sat down and took his rifle, he shot and nothing happened. He tried again because the empty egg was still there. He tried again; the eggshell broke into a million pieces. So we all won our bet. Later on we talked to him and he told us he knew it would work because A) he was a crack shot and B) he had already tried it and knew he could do it. So we had the last laugh over the Army engineer officers. Later on, after the war, he came to visit me and we went out. He was a real nice guy. There was a Navy Lieutenant, Russ Forbush; he had been a star pitcher in high school. He and I would go flying sometimes in this Navy privateer. I remember one time I was flying with him out over Tinian. We took off and we were flying just north of Saipan. We were 3- or 4000 feet high over the Saipan Mountains going out on patrol and we passed through a rainstorm. The three of us are on the flight deck in the cockpit looking down at the control tower. The water started streaming in the copilot’s window. He was the copilot. I was in the jump seat right behind him. I said, “You Navy guys have it as bad as we have it in the Army.” And he laughed, and we laughed. And later on we came down from a higher altitude. He said, “believe it or not, I am a salesman of women’s underwear.” The aircraft commander was baker in civilian life. He was a baker back in Tennessee. So you ran into all sorts of people. I had a lieutenant report to me in Tinian, who was a graduate of Princeton. He was a nice guy, a smart guy. I think he worked for the New York Times. He was a real sharp guy but as a lieutenant, he was hopeless. I had to chew him out. He came to me one time and he said, “I had no place to sleep.” So I said, “Sleep like everybody else does. Go down to the beach where the Navy is unloading the ships and get one of those canvas fold-up-cots and take it back to wherever you’re going to sleep.” I’ve been sleeping in what used to be a Japanese officer’s bed. It was a couple of 2X4s with a ropes crisscrossed between the 2X4s. That’s what I used to sleep in. I had to go down and get it myself. He expected someone to set it up for him like back in the states. I had another lieutenant, a hell of a nice guy, his name was Joe Stacy. He was Southern fellow. We would be eating at the mess table out of our mess kits and I spilt something, a C-ration or whatever we were eating onto his lap. Instead of getting embarrassed, he just looked around the table and smiled and said, “Everything I eat looks good on me.” He began to laugh; he moved on and began to talk about something else. He was a real, real good officer. 
[1032]
MSW: How did your service and experience affect your life and your job?
CAW: It changed my life completely. If I hadn’t stayed in the military, I’d have wound up as either a superintendent of schools or a college professor. Even after we mobilized in 1950, I had a permanent job. I had tenure. I had a lifetime job. Brookline at that time was the wealthiest community in the United States. The teachers were paid very well indeed. But I went the military route primarily because I realized the importance of it. You see, so many people in America, like Congress, [don’t understand the importance of the military]. Congress makes me sick at times. There are only 5% of people in Congress who ever served in the military. They don’t have a clue of what goes of on in the military. They don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s too bad because it costs so many lives all along. For example, Henry Kissinger was a good Secretary of State because he was a realist; he knew what was going on. People overseas, even our allies, don’t like Americans for this reason: Americans go overseas, and they are very arrogant. I bumped into a fellow one time in a fur shop, better educated than I, well educated, well to do. He came from Switzerland. I met him in a shop down in Athens one Saturday night. We were both picking up the coats for our wives. We got talking and he said, “I can recognize you. You are an American military man.” I said, “How can you tell? I am wearing a loud sports coat and a civilian cap.” And he says, “It’s the way you walk, the way you talk, your haircut. The military stands out all over you.” Well, we get talking and he said, “We in Europe appreciate very much you Americans coming over here in 1917 or whenever it was, and also in World War II. You saved us from the Kaiser in World War I and you saved us from communism in World War II. But, that doesn’t give you the right for you Americans to tell us how to run our country. You can’t go around telling everybody you have to have a democracy. Maybe we don’t want a democracy. For example, he said, “We were a wealthy and well-to-do country, and we’ve never had a war. We don’t send our young troops out to get killed. Everybody has to serve in the military: financiers, scientists, bankers, lawyers, everybody. We don’t send them to war to get killed. We’re smart enough to stay out of war. Then you people come over, and while we appreciate your saving us, we think you have no right what-so-ever to tell us how to run our country.” And I said, “Other countries over here are saying the same thing, even in England back in the early ’50s, which was then probably our best ally. Even in England, people said repeatedly on the sides of buildings, on the sides of brick walls: ‘Yanks go home, Yanks go home, Yanks go home.’” And they’d write on the radio or the television, which was just starting then, “Bloody Yanks (bloody was a cuss word back then) are overweight, overpaid, overspent, and over here! Why don’t they go home?” In other words, a lot of those people even though we’re allies, they don’t want us over there because we all too often are very arrogant. We think, “Oh, Americans are better, or smarter, and all that stuff than they are,” and that’s not so. This fellow told me, “We’ve been around. We have had a civilized country for hundreds of years. You’re only 200 years old. What makes you think you know more about government than us? We don’t have any problems with uninsured people, fights over gays, 50% divorce rates, 1/3 school dropouts. We don’t have depression. We don’t have any of those problems, yet you think you can come over here and tell us how we should run our country.” You have to stop and think. There is a lot of truth in what they say. You wouldn’t know that if you didn’t travel over to these places, and didn’t get to know the people. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it is. 
[1120]
MSW: You have a good point there. 
CAW: We had no right to tell other places. He put it this way, “Suppose where you live, Massachusetts, suppose another country came in and they were different people, let’s say Chinese or Russian or something like that, and they spoke a different language, and they had conquered Connecticut. You were Massachusetts and they started to tell you how you should run your country. What would you imagine people would do?” I’d say, “We’d say, get that heck out of here! We’ll run our own country the way we want to.” And he said, “Exactly. That’s the way feel in Europe.” We Americans keep telling everybody what to do and we really can’t. You learn those things the hard way. And these congressmen, and too often the White House just don’t understand that. They just don’t have a clue. The only war that we’ve been in that was anyway organized was Desert Storm, which your father went in to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. That war was organized by the military. President Bush, the current president’s father, wanted to go to war against Saddam Hussein because he had invaded Kuwait and was threatening Saudi Arabia. So the Army told him, the Central Commander told him, “You’ll go to war, but you’ve got to give us time to get ready.” So they said OK. So General Stormin’ Norman said, “I want thousands of tanks. I want thousands of airplanes. I want millions of gallons of gasoline, and I want months to train all of these people in the desert.” They said, “OK, go get it done.” So he spent month after month getting the ships and the planes. He brought in the tanks, the guns, the planes, and thousands of bombs over to Saudi Arabia. He had the troops practice and practice and practice. And after eight or nine months he was ready. So he told the national security advisor, who was Colin Powell at the time, you tell the President that I am now ready to go to war. So Colin Powell flew back to the states and told President Bush Sr. the military says it is now ready to go to war. And the military said, “Pick a day, any day within the next couple of weeks will be a go.” So President Bush Sr. picked some date, say ten days in the future and said, “This is the date.” So they told that to General Schwartzkopf. When that day arrived, we started the war. We went through Iraq like water through a sieve. Captured Saddam Hussein. Captured Baghdad. The whole works and the total cost was what? Less than 100 Americans were lost, killed, wounded, or missing. Less than 100, and in all the other wars we’ve had, the deaths and the prisoners and everything else ran into the thousands upon thousands, because the civilians in the Congress and the White House didn’t know what they were doing. 
[1180]
MSW: Is there anything you would like to add about your thing in the Army and the Air Force in World War II?
CAW: Yes, there is. It I had a choice, as I look back now, I am very proud of having served in the military. I met some very, very nice people. But if it weren’t for my desires to fly airplanes and what-not, if another war came, knowing what I know now, and if I didn’t have to go, and I was twenty or twenty-one or something like that, I’m not sure I’d go. I wouldn’t volunteer and charge out to go, like I did before. It’s just not worth it. I happened to luck out. I was lucky; I wound up as a full colonel. I have a nice pension. I have my healthcare paid for and all that sort of stuff, so I was lucky. But there are a lot of guys in cemeteries and hospitals with one arm, or one eye, or one leg; their lives are ruined. So, I think that war should be stopped. There shouldn’t be wars. Maybe women should run these countries. They wouldn’t want their sons to go off to war. I think wars are wrong, and yet there seems to be no way to stop them. 
MSW: Thank you so very much.
CAW: You’re so very welcome.
[1209]
MSW: Thank you for taking this out of your busy schedule. I appreciate your sharing so many interesting stories. Thank you Mr. Wintermeyer.
[1212] End of interview