Page 30 - Volume 13 Number 6

A New Beginning – Part Three
When World War II came to America in December 1941, the Wichita division of the Boeing Aircraft Company was flooded with orders for thousands of biplanes to train tens of thousands of pilots for the air battles to come.
by Edward H. Phillips
“Get pilots to the front!” That was the cry of Lieutenant General Barton K. Yount, head of the United States Army Air Forces Training Command (AAFTC), as 1942 dawned. He had been hand­picked by General Henry H. Arnold for the job and Yount was doing everything within his power to accelerate flight training at the primary, basic and advanced levels. On Dec. 7, 1941, the surprise attack on America at its Pearl Harbor base in the Territory of Hawaii had united the nation in a determined effort to utterly destroy the Empire of Japan in the Pacific and reduce to rubble Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in Europe.
In the wake of Japan’s attack a cloak of security quickly descended upon America’s factories producing weapons of war. Although the bombing came as a shock to the nation, the U.S. military high command was not totally
caught by surprise. More than three months before the raid the Army Air Corps submitted a plan to the War Department conducting a massive air assault against Germany and Japan. The comprehensive document originally called for 2 million men and 88,000 aircraft.
Although production of war materiel in the United States had increased by 400 percent during 1939­1941, the nation’s ability to train military pilots was sorely lacking. According to the Air Corps, the lack of training bases needed to fight a war on two fronts was “wholly inadequate for the job ahead.” As early as 1940, however, the Air Corps established dedicated training bases at Randolph Field, which became the Gulf Coast Training Center supported by the Southeast and West Coast Training Centers located at Maxwell Field, Montgomery, Alabama, and Moffett Field in California, respectively.
28 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
A PT-17 assigned to Randolph Field in Texas was caught on film during a training flight. The rudder has been painted to match the fuselage color in compliance with an Army Air Corps order issued in 1942.
(Courtesy U.S. Air Force AETC History Office)
JUNE 2019