Making Airmen Out of Flyboys : Pilots Look Back Fondly on Santa Ana Army Air Base

They hated it.

It was purgatory with orange blossoms, tantalizing them with the promise of wings, humbling them with the threat of failure.

Learn today or ship out tomorrow. Think fast. Function immediately. Run everywhere.

Take one misstep and wash out in disgrace. Cut it and earn a chance to wash out someplace else.

But they smile about it now, and fondly. Today, the Santa Ana Army Air Base is their old friend, their protector. It is the place where they became not just men, but air men.

“This was a rough base,” said Norman French of Costa Mesa, a former B-17 bomber pilot who received his first training for the European air war at SAAAB. “Everybody had to double-time and everything was by the numbers. But the caliber of instruction we got was at least excellent and it served me well.”

It was, said Ted Conlin of Long Beach, who flew P-51 Mustang fighters in Europe, “looked upon by us as a necessary part of our education in order to get to fly airplanes. We had to go through this, and it was pure torture.”

But the memories of the relentless marching and inoculations and classroom hours wrestling with the complexities of physics and mathematics and machines that many of the recruits had never seen before are warm now, 50 years later. And this weekend, dozens of the old warriors gathered near the site of their old barracks to remember.

“We trained people as pilots who didn’t know how to drive an automobile,” said French. “There was a guy in my class who was a cadet and until he got in the Army, he’d never been eight blocks from where he was born. And the only time he’d ridden in a car was in the back of a taxicab, and here he was being taught to fly.”

The Santa Ana Army Air Base was officially activated Feb. 15, 1942, as a site for the most basic preflight training for pilots, navigators and bombardiers who would eventually serve in all theaters of World War II. Between its activation date and Oct. 31, 1944, more than 125,000 new airmen were trained there.

In its time, it was sprawling. On its original site now sits Orange Coast College, Southern California College, Costa Mesa High School, Costa Mesa Civic Center, the California Air National Guard Recruiting Office, the Air National Guard 222nd Combat Communications Squadron, the Orange County Fairgrounds and several blocks of commercial and residential areas. Some of the original 800 wooden buildings still stand, particularly on the fairgrounds property.

There were no airplanes on the base. Advanced training in the air would come later, at different bases throughout the country. The 60 days of work at Santa Ana were entirely ground-bound: math, Morse code, maps and charts, naval and aircraft recognition, organization and use of ground forces, military customs and courtesies, safeguarding military information, military hygiene, physical training and marching, marching, marching.

“One of the most popular postcards at the PX,” said French, “was a picture of a guy carrying a full pack saying, ‘You have to walk a hell of a long way before you learn how to fly.’ ”

Some of the cadets came to SAAAB from other Army bases, but many were raw recruits, fresh from civilian life, ignorant of military ways and rendered breathless by the pace of the training.

“You started out with two-plus-two and went through calculus in 60 days,” said Alvin (Bud) Anderson, an early cadet who went on to pilot P-61 Black Widow night fighters in Europe. “If you dropped your pencil, by the time you picked it up, you’d lost two years.”

In some ways, the base was like a small university--many of the more than 250 instructors were college professors or held advanced degrees. And SAAAB was the only air base in the country that trained not only pilots, but navigators and bombardiers in the same location. And not only officers were trained; selected enlisted men received instruction, and even a contingent of pilot candidates from the Republic of China.

“How well trained all the instructors were!” enthused Anderson. “Where did they get all these people and train them so fast? The whole thing was organized so well. I mean, it was down to a T.”

The routine was compulsively regimented and, said Anderson, “for the first 42 days you didn’t even get off the base.”

“From the sound of reveille in the morning to taps at night, you were scheduled,” said French. “They always had something for you to do, and I think there was some new item on that schedule every 15 minutes.”

Nearly everything seemed designed to wash cadets out, and about 30% of them did. As Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Right Stuff,” it could burst at any seam.

Bill Maloof, a cadet who eventually became a B-29 bomber engine, supercharger and propeller specialist, said he “couldn’t believe how many guys got sick when they were drawing blood. One guy, just as he walked out the door, he fainted. And they washed him out, just like that.”

French remembered that during a similar routine blood sample, the patient fainted, fell across a table and spilled a container of blood, which then flowed beneath a nearby door. On the other side of the door were cadets waiting for their own blood to be drawn.

“They saw that blood and all those guys fell, flop, flop, flop,” said French. “And they all washed out.”

Sunday parade on the huge base parade ground also saw its share of spontaneous washouts. The heat, together with thunderous Saturday night hangovers, could mean the early end of a flying career.

“The big thing here for all of us,” said Conlin, “was the Sunday parade. You had to be back and you had to be on your feet for Sunday parade and that meant standing out there in your squadron from 3:30 to 5 o’clock in the heat, and you stood at attention a lot of the time. If guys fainted, and some did, the other guys covered up for him, because that was a washout. If you fainted, they felt you weren’t qualified to fly.”

“They had ambulances waiting for the guys to keel over,” said Anderson, “so they could go over and put them on a stretcher and get their name and everything.”

Some men, hopelessly hung over or suffering from the heat, occasionally got surreptitiously dragged through the parade by the men on either side of them, who also risked washing out if they were caught. You were not supposed to help a man, even if he had fainted next to you, although, said French, “the two guys standing on either side were the lucky ones because they got to carry him off and they were out of the parade. If you tried to catch him, though, you got washed out.”

One man who watched all these comings and goings for three years was Charlie Kiser of Newport Beach, who worked in the base finance department, heading up 200 employees who handled officers’ pay. Already in the Army when SAAAB was built, and stationed at Camp Cook (now Vandenberg Air Force Base), Kiser said he ended up at Santa Ana as a kind of escape.

While at Cook, Kiser heard his division “was going with (Gen. George S.) Patton out by Desert Center for desert maneuvers. Being a native Californian and knowing that area, I transferred to the Air Corps and they assigned me to the finance department at Santa Ana.”

Kiser remembered a handful of famous names who passed through the gates of SAAAB during his time there. Joe DiMaggio, he said, served for a time as the base athletic director, and Gene Autry, Tom Harmon and George Gobel also passed through as cadets. French said that one day he heard what he called the most beautiful a capella rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” he had ever witnessed, and found that it had been sung by the young Tennessee Ernie Ford.

The young cadets are old now, all hovering around 70, that age that is the center point today for so many veterans of World War II. Most returned to civilian life--many were processed out of the service at their old home at SAAAB--but all have clear and specific memories of a tough, gritty, intense place that now exists only in shadows. Maloof even lives in a tract home in Costa Mesa that lies within the confines of the old base.

“If somebody had told me back in 1942 that I’d be living on the base,” he said, “I’d have told them they had rocks in their head.”

The former cadets love the base today as old fighting men love anything that helped keep them alive in war.

“Most of us had never been this far west,” said Conlin. “I can remember flying in and smelling the orange blossoms. Being a Middle Western boy, I thought this was God’s country. We made lasting friendships. Two of six of my close friends went through there with me and now we see each other on a yearly basis. Some I see every month.

“It wasn’t only tough; it was expert. When you went through, you hated it, but later when you had to rely on it to save your life, all those lessons came back to you.”