On Saipan, we were under “Possum” Hansell, a headstrong general with whom I didn’t get along very well. He had been considered a great planner in the Pentagon, and he liked to tell you how to do things. I told General LeMay, “General, I think we’ve got an outfit that knows its job, but right now we’re being told not only what to do, but how to do it. And what we’re being told isn’t right.”

General LeMay reached in his pocket and took out a list and handed it to me and said, “Here is a list of one hundred cities. I want full coverage on them within seven days. You show me you can do your job, and you and I’ll get along fine.” We had them for him in five days, and I got along with him very well after that.

I attended General LeMay’s briefings to report on reconnaissance, normally meeting first in the morning with intelligence staff as to priorities so we’d already have planned what we were going to do the next day. We’d be taking off anywhere from midnight to three in the morning, so by noon we had radio reports from our airplanes using a very simple code to tell us whether we got target A, B, C, or D, or we didn’t get anything. After General LeMay received his weather reading, and we gave our reconnaissance report, we left while they went into what the bombers were going to do.

To be close to General LeMay on Guam, they put us on Harmond Field, which was a relatively short runway — maximum six thousand-foot runway, with a gradual three-hundred-foot climb out of this little valley. On our missions, we needed a longer field to take off from because we were heavily loaded. Although we carried no bombs, we did have guns and ammunition and three extra gasoline tanks that filled the front bomb bay to increase our range. So we used North Field (now called Anderson Air Force Base) at the north end of Guam, where there were two parallel ten-thousand foot runways with about two hundred to three hundred feet off the end of the runway down to the water. That’s where we staged in the afternoon, which means the crew would fly light — not be fully gassed. It was like a check flight, just a short flight over to North Field, every day, on every airplane. Then we would bus our crews back, put them to bed, get them up at about midnight, feed them, and bus them up to North Field; and they took off from there in their fully loaded and fueled airplanes.

Ours were the first B-29s in sight while driving up the island highway from the docks. Everybody always wanted to ride in them, and we were able to give many Navy people and others a hop on these little staging flights. My Uncle Clarence was a Navy officer, and when his ship came to Guam I took him, his skipper, and his executive officer on one of those flights up to North Field. It turned out to be a profitable flight for my unit.

When we first got down to Guam, we had obtained three walk-in ice-boxes from the Navy and the Seabees in trade for a few cases of booze. Of course, our justification was that we needed to have controlled, cool temperatures to store our film. That’s the only excuse we could legally use for getting them. [laughter] On the flight to North Field, my uncle asked, “How much freezer storage space do you have?” His ship had orders to return to Pearl, and they had a fifty percent emergency ration that they had to leave behind. They were going to turn it over to the Navy headquarters unlesss they could find someone else who had the cold storage space. We came back with sides of beef and hams and turkeys, and we wound up eating like kings for months. [laughter]

Before we left the states, the officers club at our base at Smoky Hill (Salina, Kansas) gave us a check for $1,300 — proceeds from the club’s slot machines. With this, we bought three hundred dollars worth of power tools and a thousand dollars worth of whiskey, and took them in our bomb bays with us to Saipan. We didn’t tap into them in Saipan, but when we went down to Guam we used the power tools to build a tent city in two weeks by setting up this little production line to build the foundations and the frames.