We were in the middle of the Cold War with Russia. Strategic Air Command was all over the world, and they're the ones that kept us safe. They had one third of their B-47 fleet in the air at all times. And to keep them up there, you had to get them refueled, well I cruised on a propeller driven Casey 97. So, most of our refueling in Bermuda was done at night.... over the ocean. Once a month we got to come back to the states for over land navigation. Probably the funniest thing that I can remember before I went into the air force, General Curtis Lemay was head of SAC and he came into Cleveland to speak at his nephew's graduation at Case Western Reserve. And he flew in a Casey 97, he stepped off the aircraft smoking a cigar. Well, one of the rules around airplanes, you don't smoke. So, I asked one of the guys on his crew how he could do that, and the guy said the plane wouldn't dare blow up on him.
There were two to three thousand people on a boat, they called them troop ships and we had to move from island to island. When you got on those ships, you were always conscious of the fact that there were two, three or four destroyers following us. The Japanese just wanted to kill as many people as they could, they would just wait at the ports in their submarines, just waiting. One of our ships were headed to Iceland and a destroyer got them, killing five hundred people. The natives at the island of Saipan were told to watch out because we were going to be invading the island and killing as many people as possible. They were so scared. So, when they heard this stuff, they took their families to the highest point and committed suicide. There were times when we had to climb down rope ladders from the troop ships, because they could only go so far, onto navy ships to bring us to waist deep water. Well, when people climbed down on the rope ladders from the troop ships, a lot of them fell off and drowned because of the gear and water movement from the ships. That happened a lot.
