Pilot’s Day: Taking Off in Peacetime and Landing in a War

Dec. 6, 1941.

Ah, to be 23 years old, newly married and in the U.S. Army Air Corps. You’re a kid from El Centro who grew up watching planes come in when bad weather forced them out of San Diego. You developed a passion for planes and flying them, and now that’s your job. And because we’re not at war, the Corps is more like a gentleman’s flying club than anything else.

Have golf clubs, will travel. What a life.

That’s how the world looked to young Bob Thacker when the calendar page turned from Dec. 5 to Dec. 6 in 1941. On Friday night the 5th, he’d been assigned to pick up a B-17 bomber in Seattle and return it to his base in Utah. On the 6th, his orders took him to the Bay Area, from where he kissed his new bride, Betty Jo, good-bye and prepared to fly the plane to Honolulu. While taxiing on the runway, he flashed his landing lights so Betty Jo would know which plane was his as he and 12 other B-17s took off.

A great life.

Somewhere over the Pacific that night, the calendar page flipped over to Dec. 7. As Thacker says today, “I didn’t know I was on my way to war.”

For those of us not there, it’s hard to imagine that America looked one way on the 6th and donned a new identity on the 7th.

For Thacker, it was a moment in a life now 83 years along that let him watch history from the cockpit, a moment in a life that could just as easily have ended that morning as it did for more than 2,000 other Americans.

It was the morning Thacker flew into Pearl Harbor just as the Japanese were attacking. It was the morning Thacker and his three-member crew were shot at, first by American anti-aircraft gunners who mistook them for invading Japanese bombers, then by Japanese fighter pilots.

“The first shots I took were from the Navy,” Thacker says. “Then I had three Japanese Zeros on my final approach and they shot out my right tire and put a few holes in my airplane. And they shot down the B-17 right behind me.”

We’re talking in the garage of the San Clemente home he and Betty Jo have lived in the past 30 years. Still a force with his pilot’s cockiness, crusty humor and Air Force precision of speech, Thacker animates the conversation with asides like, “Life has been a ball. I’ve had the most exciting life anyone could ask for.”

Take him back to Pearl, though, and he remembers it all. Like wondering why the tower at Hickam Field didn’t respond at first to the crew on the radio. Like being calm during the attack on his plane. Like remembering something as minute as landing downwind and being mindful of his airspeed.

Almost eerie, to my ears, is his depiction of how his crewmen, right up to the fateful moment, thought they were seeing Hawaiian island life at its most mundane.

What are those black streaks in the sky? someone in the crew asked as they neared Honolulu. Aw, probably volcanic action, someone replied.

What’s that black smoke? Aw, they’re probably burning sugar cane in the fields.

What are those ripples in the water? Aw, probably whales playing.

Minutes later, in the crucible of madness and fear on the ground, people were running every which way from their duty stations. Thacker remembers a row of planes “wiped out with that second wave of bombers” and everything from bodies to motorcycles flying out of the roofs of bombed-out hangars. “Everything was on fire,” he says. “And those strafers. Those goddamn strafers,” emphasizing the profanity to underscore the horrible memory. “A flight surgeon tried to run across the field. They got him.”

Ultimately, Thacker says, five of the 10 B-17s that reached Pearl Harbor (three had returned mid-flight to San Francisco) were shot down.

Thacker went on to a decorated career as a bomber pilot who flew 30 missions in both the Pacific and Europe. He tells his Dec. 7 war story without visceral anger, except that reserved for the Japanese military hierarchy of that era.

And he lobbies for more military preparedness, lamenting the nation’s woeful lack of it before Pearl Harbor--a shortage he says persists today.

Mostly, he tells the story with relish and reflection. And, of course, he knows that the movie “Pearl Harbor” is doing big business.

I ask if he’s going to see it. “I have to go see it, because of people like you,” he barks, with mock disdain. “We’re going to go Sunday, and I promise to keep my mouth shut in the theater.”

Thacker wasn’t traumatized by Dec. 7, 1941. He retired as an Air Force colonel in 1970, with service in three wars behind him and a story that’ll be fascinating till the day he dies.

“I matured very quickly,” he says. “I grew up in one day. No question.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.