Interviewer: Arlene Lane
Transcribed by: Steven Woldridge
Proofread by: Steven Woldridge, Ellen Bassett

ARLENE: This interview is taking place on March 5, 2005 at the Cook Memorial Public Library in Libertyville, Illinois. My name is Arlene Lane and I am interviewing Tom Kane, a veteran of World War II. Tom's daughter, Kate Brown, is also present. Tom learned about the Veteran's History Project through our library. This is Tom Kane's story.

ARLENE: Well Tom, let's start at the beginning of World War II. Can you tell me what you were doing then?

TOM: I was a student at Chicago Teachers College which was on the South Side of Chicago. And after Pearl Harbor, most of us all started enlisting. We enlisted in the early part of '42.

ARLENE: Okay.

TOM: A group of us was sworn in to the Army Air Corps. It wasn't the United States Air Force then; it was the Army Air Corps. We were sworn in over WGN, believe it or not. We thought we were pretty big shots. They called us downtown to WGN and we took the oath of office.

ARLENE: Wow, that's interesting.

TOM: It was kind of a big thing for us, you know? And then I was assigned, I got orders to report to Santa Ana, California, for preflight training. That's where you were inaugurated into the Armed Forces and told how to drill and also they would assign you as a pilot trainee, bombardier trainee, or navigator trainee. Those who didn't make it through those usually ended up as gunners on usually one of the heavy bombers.

ARLENE: So were you trained at Santa Ana?

TOM: Just categorized.

ARLENE: Oh, and how did they do that? Did you take tests?

TOM: Tests, all types of tests. They had us physically and mentally 20 hours a day so we didn't get much sleep hardly.

ARLENE: So it was grueling.

TOM: It was very grueling and most of the guys wanted to be pilots but it didn't work out. Everybody thinks he was going to be a fighter pilot you know and it was the height of all ambitions. In reality, most of them…most of us didn't make it through pilot training.

ARLENE: Did it require a lot of physical work too…physical exercise…endurance?

TOM: Quite a bit…quite a bit. It was…those were the days alright. And then I was assigned to New Mexico for flight training.

ARLENE: And where was that?

TOM: Roswell. Roswell, New Mexico.

ARLENE: Roswell.

TOM: That was where I took my flight training. And we graduated as Second Lieutenants on March 6th, 1943.

ARLENE: So how long did that training process take?

TOM: About seven months.

ARLENE: That's a long time.

TOM: It was considerable but then again we had to learn some navigation training as well as bombardiering. We had to learn pilotage and dead reckoning navigation in case the navigator was killed, we could navigate at least on pilotage. I'm not going to go into that…it's too complicated to go into what pilotage navigation is but it was just another form of navigating.

ARLENE: What kind of planes were you trained on?

TOM: Mostly it was a twin engine bomb trainer; one we could take up 10 bombs and two students on each trip and that's what I did for two years there in New Mexico. And about every six weeks we'd get two new students. At that time the Germans were killing our bombardiers like mad because they were coming head in to our bombers and the rate of collision was like 500mph. The Germans were excellent pilots and they knew how to hurt us. Now and then, one of my students would come back from overseas and tell me how it was. I met one in the officer's club and he was a Captain and I had been promoted to a First Lieutenant. As I was an instructor they promoted us pretty quickly but promotions were better overseas because there were casualties…tremendous casualties.

ARLENE: That's right they were involved in the actual combat.

TOM: New Mexico is a beautiful state.

ARLENE: I am curious about that…what it was like living in Roswell.

TOM: It was difficult. It was difficult to find quarters. Especially…I got married here on that air base.

ARLENE: Oh you did?

TOM: Right. (?) and I had a lot of trouble finding housing. Then they transferred us to Carlsbad, New Mexico which is a little bit south of Roswell. Yeah quite a bit more south, down, almost down to Mexico. The reason there were so many airbases in New Mexico is because there was no population to worry about in case your bombs fell astray, it didn't matter out there. There's nobody living out there. Roswell was the second largest city in New Mexico and I'd say there were only about 1,100 people there.

ARLENE: So it was beautiful but it was pretty remote out there?

TOM: Oh it was remote. Oh yeah you'd… I remember we (?) in a plane would have to land out there. It had engine trouble and the difficulty was getting back to civilization. There were no towns or anything. One man wandered around out there for a whole several weeks.

ARLENE: Really?

TOM: He crashed his plane and I didn't recognize him. He had to get surgery. The pilot was killed and he was sitting in back of the pilot. I knew him and his jawbone was missing. They didn't know how to do good surgery in those days. What do they call that kind of surgery? Restoring...

ARLENE: Plastic surgery?

TOM: Yeah, yeah. They didn't have that. Things weren't so nice all the time. I don't want to get you the impression that this is like an easy-go. It was not easy and planes were blowing up on the runway all the time. In fact when we checked into Las Vegas, to Gunnery School, my brother was with me and we were just going through the MP's and a B-24 exploded and killed all ten guys. That was not uncommon.

ARLENE: What was the cause? Do you think it was mechanical failure?

TOM: It was because we didn't give the pilots enough training. They had them like that.

ARLENE: You're right it was wartime so they had to get them through as quickly as they could.

TOM: They didn't have the training that you have to fly airlines today. Some of those pilots have two to three thousand hours before they let them fly. In our day, you just finished flight school and bango, they'd put you in a bomber.

ARLENE: Well how did you keep your spirits up there? Did you have (?) up there?

TOM: It was different but for the young men who were single because there were not enough women in town. There were several thousand on the base and Roswell is a small city. So it was difficult, they had dances at the officers club on Saturday nights. But there really wasn't much to do in that little town.

ARLENE: Was there a lot of bonding or camaraderie with the other flight instructors.

TOM: Oh quite a bit. Oh yeah we got together quite frequently. Yeah.

ARLENE: And what about your everyday life there? Was the food decent? Were the living conditions okay?

TOM: The food was decent. Except when we were going through training, we had to do our duty in mess hall. And everyone hated that because you had to get up at five in the morning and help serve breakfast to everybody. You had to do KP, a couple of times a week. And I really hated KP. The food wasn't that bad though, it was, you know, decent. I think we got a little tired of that jerked beef, creamed jerk beef.

ARLENE: Known by other names huh?

TOM: Yeah but other than that, you know, they did a pretty good job. It really gripes of course. It's in my nation to gripe.

ARLENE: Sure. Was there anything going on at the base that you couldn't talk about during the war? Was there anything kind of secretive going on?

TOM: Oh yeah…as bombardiers, we had to get the Nordon bombsight. It was a highly secret thing…during the war…was the Nordon bombsight. So we had to put it into a vault, a concrete vault, everyday after we'd fly a mission. The cadets and I would take the bombsight out of…in the nose and take it down into the vault and they'd sign and everybody…it was very hush hush. It was a secret weapon…the Nordon bombsight. It was the only synchronized bomb sight any of the nations used in that day. So we could bomb from 22,000 feet and come pretty close. [For more information on the Nordon bomsight, click here]

ARLENE: Wow.

TOM: Today, of course, it's vastly better than those days. But we thought it was pretty good.

ARLENE: Was it hard to do that? Did that take a lot of skill? Was it hard to operate the planes and to do that?

TOM: Well we trained our students to get into a kind of a steady thing, to do things in order, because we knew that overseas when the Germans are killing you, you panic. So we tried to instill in them, once you put them on the bomb run, for your target, never… don't even notice anything that is going on around you. Don't even notice if you are hit… don't notice anything, except your bomb run, which is usually 90 seconds. See we were connected up to the automatic pilot…the bombsight was.

ARLENE: There was an automatic pilot at that time?

TOM: So if I turned a knob on the bombsight, the plane would do this. I turned one of those knobs, it would turn the plane. So that was the hardest thing to teach them is not to crank so hard… to take it easy because the pilot would get scared that the bombardier would throw the plane into a spin.

ARLENE: I see.

TOM: So we tried to teach them early through ground school and then finally I was on the flight line.

ARLENE: Was there a chance that the plane might crash if it, you know, spun too much?

TOM: Usually the pilot would shut it right off if that happened. So he had command of the plane, the pilot, he could shut it off. Today you ride in comfort at automatic pilot at 33,000 feet.

ARLENE: A little bit different isn't it?

TOM: Yeah it is quite a bit different. But as I remember, the students were very good. They had a big orders and they didn't want to wash out because if they washed out they'd go into the infantry and that was bad. Nobody wanted to do that.

ARLENE: Tom are there any other stories that you'd like to recall about your service?

TOM: Yeah there were a couple of memorable experiences since I flew everyday almost during the war. We flew six days a week. I remember once we were…my pilot knew the other pilot in the plane close to us and we were fooling around getting closer and closer and he cut our rudders with his props so we went down 6,000 feet…in a matter of just a couple of minutes we lost 6,000 feet. My pilot had…we had bad rudders…damaged rudders but he came in and made a perfect landing. But of course he shouldn't have been fooling around in the first place because we had students in there; we weren't allowed to do that. The other experience I had was when we were blown over by a B17 and crashed like this into the ground. And they smashed the window in front of me with a sledgehammer. I remember seeing the crew chief jump on that…we were like this and the crew chief jumped up on the wing with a sledgehammer and I'm in the copilot seat and he smashed a big hole around me. And they dragged us through there because the gas was leaking out by then; we were just lucky it didn't explode. So I still remember those two incidents.

ARLENE: You're so lucky to have survived a crash and a near crash.

TOM: It was not unusual to have funny things happen like this. I remember sometimes a bomb would get hung up in the bomb bays and not go off; we'd have to go back on a little catwalk with a long piece of wooden…

ARLENE: While the plane was in the air?

TOM: Yeah, while the plane was lurching around and we had to knock that thing out, that bomb out, because we didn't like to land with it, you know, hanging there.

ARLENE: Well you must have been very skilled as a pilot to survive the whole thing.

TOM: The pilot and the bombardier instructor, which was me, we had control of the plane at all times and our number one regard was our students because we were responsible for our students. So we took good care to treat them good even though we chewed them out now and then.

ARLENE: I never asked you at the beginning how you actually became a flight instructor. Was it very selective?

TOM: It was, as I said there were only seven of us out of eighty-seven made instructors.

ARLENE: That's very selective.

TOM: And I think it was due to our grades and navigation because later on we were asked to teach some…a little navigation. And I had some college work in mathematics; I lectured on different mathematical backgrounds that helped in navigation. In fact the little instrument we used for navigation was really nothing more than advanced trigonometry, which we got in college and they converted it to a little instrument.

ARLENE: How interesting. I never realized that trigonometry…

TOM: Really, that was all that was made from that. We had a little, I think we called it the C-3, and you could manipulate there according to your drift…your wind…and come up with an exact, true heading on this little thing. I have never seen one of those since the war.

ARLENE: That's very interesting.

TOM: It was.

ARLENE: Are there any other stories or memories that you can recall?

TOM: I think I covered it pretty good. I don't want to tell you about… a lot of funny things happened while we were flying, I'll tell you. I got a new pilot one night and we flew at night and he forgot to switch gas tanks and all of a sudden all our engines went out and we were going down at night. I'll never forget that one. It wasn't funny. Later on we laughed at it but I didn't think it was so funny because the guy forgot to switch gas tanks. And I pointed at the tanks and he switched but by that time we had lost, you now, six or eight thousand feet.

ARLENE: Wow, what does that feel like as you're dropping?

TOM: It's bad, because there's no sound. You get so you love those engines, the sound of those engines, because that means you're living. If there's no sound you're going down.

ARLENE: How many pilots do you think you trained?

TOM: With, trained with? Remember we weren't turning out pilots, we were turning out bombardiers.

ARLENE: Oh the bombardiers, that's correct.

TOM: I flew with a lot of different pilots. Some are excellent and some barely made it. They did have some civilian pilots that they made captains automatically. And they were excellent, but they had been flying before the war so they knew what they were doing.

ARLENE: And you said that you, sometimes your students did come back and keep in touch with you?

TOM: They did…and the first thing they said was, "don't go over there, it's murderous;" because at that time the Germans were shooting so many planes down. A good example is that one raid in Schweinfurt and a good buddy of mine that I went through flight training was on that. I think they used 180 bombers and we lost 60 in that one raid. 60 went down, 60 bombers and that's 600 men. Ten in a bomber, so you lose 600 men, you're not going to complete your required number of missions if that keeps up.

ARLENE: No, what a loss.

TOM: You were supposed to fly 25 missions before they let you return home. But you can see if you're losing 30%...

ARLENE: That's quite a bit.

TOM: Then after three missions you're about done. But most of the guys who came back were pretty much (?) at us for teaching them how to do it and we got a lot of good feeling from those guys who came back.

ARLENE: Did those bombardiers mostly go across the Atlantic to Europe?

TOM: Most of them when I was graduating in 1943, most of them went to Europe. Right…there the casualties were the highest. Later after Germany was defeated, then we threw most of our bomber groups over to the Pacific and that ended up with Hiroshima… right.

ARLENE: Tom, did you receive any commendations for your service?

TOM: Oh after the… near the time when we were going home and the war was over, most of us instructors got a commendation from the president for training so many cadets here in the States, and I saved it. It made you feel pretty good because most of us that stayed in the States and did the flying realized that the guys who went overseas are the ones that deserve most credit because they gave their lives.

ARLENE: But it was due to your fine training that they survived and were able to come back.

TOM: Well I hope so. And I think we did a good job on the training them, all and all. There were some times when we felt that the experience we were giving them wasn't 100% realistic, but mostly it was.

ARLENE: Everyone did the best they could.

TOM: Yeah, eventually you have to fly. You see they spent a number of weeks on the ground, working on navigation problems and different things; but the real thing is when you get up and fly. You can't believe what the biggest obstacle was, when they went from ground school to the flight training with me. They couldn't find the target, because most of them had never been up, most of us never flew. We didn't know what it was like to look down from 12,000 feet and find the target.

ARLENE: Really?

TOM: And that's what amazed us, teaching our cadets to recognize when they saw. Can't you see these circles? That's the target. They couldn't see them, we would go right over then and come back again and go over them. And that's kind of funny isn't it that that is what took so much flying until you got that high and you could spot things.

ARLENE: That's, that's interesting. So the commendation was from President Roosevelt?

TOM: President Roosevelt, who most of us voted for.

ARLENE: Well that's very impressive. I'm wondering if there is anything else that you would like to add about your years in the service? Any other memories you might have?

TOM: I have an outstanding one of the people from North Platte…a little town out there in Kansas? No, Nebraska. That little town came out for every troop train that went through that little town and they had sandwiches, coffee and doughnuts. Even to trains that were there at midnight and those civilians deserve a lot of credit for helping us feel good…most of us were getting kind of homesick. We had never been away from home, only the rich could travel. This was the Depression. I'd say in our troop train, for every 100 guys, 98 would never have been more than 100 miles from home. Which is today, ridiculous because everybody flies everywhere today.

ARLENE: Yes, everyone is very mobile today.

TOM: Yeah so it was homesickness, it was a common ailment. We didn't admit it though, never admit it.

ARLENE: Did they hand the sandwiches and coffee to you right on the train?

TOM: Mmmhmm, right on the train.

ARLENE: Wow, that's very admirable isn't it; for such a small town to come out and do that.

TOM: It is... I think they deserve a commendation.

ARLENE: Well I agree with you. Well let's talk about the end of the war and when your service ended. Can you talk about that a little bit?

TOM: Yeah, I got discharged on October 25, 1945. Yeah…and I looked through different universities. I decided I would use the GI bill. And that was the best decision I ever made because I didn't waste anytime. I started back at Northwestern University on January of '46, so I didn't waste much time.

ARLENE: Good for you.

TOM: And I graduated in 1948 from Northwestern. But I figured, my buddy and I, that if we were going to get free education we might as well go to the best.

ARLENE: Well you did.

TOM: So we went to Northwestern.

ARLENE: What was your degree in?

TOM: Teaching administration, history and I was in the school of education, which is the oldest building in Northwestern, 1858 or something. It's gone now. But that was a scene of a lot of men, older with children and married, where education, the grades were never better than when the GI's went back to school because we didn't fool around; we were there to learn our business and get a job. So our grades surpassed any of the others.

ARLENE: That's wonderful

TOM: Mainly because we didn't fool around…you know…hazing and that stuff.

ARLENE: Well now I know why you are such a wonderful person to interview because you're a historian and a teacher, which is a great combination.

TOM: Thank you, thank you.

ARLENE: I hope you pass some of this information on to your students because I think it just makes the war come alive when you can talk about real experiences of real people and what they went through.

TOM: I can remember, during the crisis of Vietnam, which the nation was kind of divided on, they interviewed me; I was a history chairman at St. Viator High School. And they interviewed me about burning the flag… that some of them did. And I said well that would be unheard of in my time. You just… it would be unheard of because the flag is kind of a symbol in a lot of people's minds and if you trampled your symbols, they'll get angry and that's where a lot of the trouble started. You're fooling around with something that is pretty dangerous…which is upstairs here.

ARLENE: Especially a symbol that so many people have died for and I am sure you knew again some of your students too, who were lost to the war.

TOM: Oh they were.

ARLENE: Well, let's see; were you able to stay in touch with anyone from your time in the service?

TOM: I go to a bombardier reunion every year. It's shrinking but we're still alive and we've been to Branson, Hershey, Pennsylvania, the next one's in Washington D.C. And it's kind of fun…they even have a little Nordon bombsight.

ARLENE: They do?

TOM: I don't know how, where they found that thing but it's strange we stay usually in a resort. It's like a three of four day convention of bombardiers.

ARLENE: Well you should have a good time.

TOM: The people like to come in, we have a suite of rooms usually on the ground floor and they'll come in and through and look at those things. "What's that," they'll say. "Nothing, just a bombsight."

ARLENE: Well, Washington D.C…. you'll be able to see the new World War II Monument.

TOM: There's a new one, I can't wait…that's in September.

ARLENE: Yes, That's wonderful.

TOM: Yeah.

ARLENE: Well, is there anything else that you'd like to add that we haven't covered during this interview?

TOM: I think we covered just about everything I know. You are such a good interviewer.

ARLENE: Thank you, but you made my job easy for me.

TOM: Thank you.

KATE: Weren't you called back Dad? Didn't they call you back?

TOM: Oh yeah, I was called back in the Korean War…but just for 18 months. And it was again, in…due to my teaching that they wanted me to train other teachers. I was never in anything, it was nothing compared to World War II. But I had to spend 18 months and my wife wasn't happy about that. Mom wasn't very happy.

ARLENE: Where were you stationed?

TOM: You can't believe it, Fort Slocum, a little island in New York Harbor. Fort Slocum was where they trained people to go back to their different bases and help guys get an education while they were in-service (?). And it was kind of odd that every one of the services was there: Coast Guard, Navy, U.S. Air Force.

ARLENE: All on this little island?

TOM: On that little island. They also had a chaplain's school on that island. I didn't even know chaplains went to school. So it was kind of interesting for 18 months, especially being on an island, where we took a little ferry boat out everyday.

ARLENE: I didn't know that you were also a veteran of the Korean War.

TOM: Korean War, yeah, right.

ARLENE: So, I have to tell you that it has been such a pleasure interviewing you and I salute you for your fine service during two wars, World War II and the Korean War.

TOM: Thank you, thank you for having me.

ARLENE: And I know that we greatly appreciate your time and your important contribution to this project.

TOM: Thank you.

ARLENE: And again, it's been a great pleasure and honor interviewing you Tom.