High Jinks at Thunderbird

At the Arizona desert's edge, in a broad valley twelve miles northwest of Phoenix, there were high jinks one day last week. Sprung up from the cactus in less than five months under the watering of Hollywood money. Southwest Airways' new Thunderbird Field--acting as one of 48 kindergartens for Army Airmen--was graduating its first class. Hollywood starlets trailed inspecting officers down ranks of 102 grey-clad cadets, who had a hard time keeping eyes front.

Southwest's President Leland Hayward, cinema agent, TWA director and husband of twinkling Margaret Sullavan, gave each man a silver wrist tag. Stockholder Brian Aherne flew in in his Fairchild to see the fun. Stockholder Hoagie Carmichael thumped the piano in the canteen.

From now on, Thunderbird will turn out a class every five weeks. But the U.S. Army Air Corps loved this fuss & feathers. It was tophole publicity for the Army's flying-cadet training program.

When the Air Corps began its emergency expansion in May 1940, it was turning out 1,200 pilots a year. Quickly the figure was upped to 7,000. Before the Air Corps got a good start it was lifted again, this time to 12,000. That meant stepping up the schooling about ten to one. The job went to husky, squash-nosed Brigadier General Davenport Johnson, overseas pilot of World War I and a flying veteran of Black Jack Pershing's expedition after Villa in 1916. By the time Johnny Johnson had got on the job, the Air Corps had started revising its whole training scheme. It had given primary training (first ten weeks of its seven-and-a-half-month course) over to 28 civilian schools, detailed a few officers to each to supervise flying and teach cadets how to act like military men.

By 1941's beginning, Johnny Johnson could see daylight ahead. The civilian schools were doing a bang-up job. Training-plane production was going up & up. By next November the training rate will have hit 12,000 a year and the Army will have plenty of schools (seven fields for intermediate training, eleven for advanced) to finish off the work. But big as the training program was, it had been dwarfed by the huge shadow of war ahead. On April 3, Johnny Johnson got a new program--a production of 30,000 trained military pilots a year.

To hit this astronomical mark, Airman Johnson picked up 20 more civilian schools for the kindergarten work, contracted to furnish them planes, pay them $18-20 for each hour flown, $52.50 a month for cadets' board & room. Intermediate schools, run by the Army, are being stepped up from seven to 15, advanced schools from eleven to 21. The Air Corps needed more mechanics, stepped its training goal up from 45,000 a year to 100,000. It also had to enlarge its training for bombardiers, gunners, navigators and observers to fit the new pattern.

What Johnny Johnson wants to bring home to U.S. youth today is that it takes no supermen to fill these jobs. For flying officers the physical examination is tough, but it takes no crack athlete to pass it. The educational requirement, two years of college, can be met by passing a written examination, and last week the Air Corps eased up on its requirements. As if he hadn't troubles enough already, last week Johnny Johnson got another problem to chew. Announced by bald Assistant Secretary of War for Air Bob Lovett was a program for training 8,000 British airmen annually in U.S. schools.

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