Robert Burns

Robert Burns, 5th Air Force, Army Air Corps

Robert served in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific in 1943, and later served in the Korean War as well.

What branch were you in?

Well, I was in what used to be the Air Corps in World War II. I was in two wars [World War II and Korean War]. I always looked upon Korea as my real war ‘cause I got there early and when there was real war. I sort of got to the end of World War II. I spent a lot of time there, but I wasn’t overseas.

Where were you during World War II?

Well, I ended up in the South Pacific. When the war ended, I was on Okinawa. We were getting ready for the invasion of Japan. Actually I was on the Island of Ie Shima, which is a small island, a satellite island off the island of Okinawa.

Well, you wouldn’t know about Okinawa except it had a battle there … Although my wife and I went back there in the 1970s. We went to Asia. It used to be that when you flew from Hong Kong to here, you used to go up to Okinawa and then fly down to Ie Shima Island. Nowadays you can do it in one hop.

You were a pilot?

No, I was a radio gunner. I was going to be a pilot, but I ended up in the hospital, because I had asthma. So you couldn’t be a pilot, once they found out, you couldn’t be a pilot and have to rely on breathing devices. So they sent me to radio school and I became a radio operator gunner.

Was the radio gunner still on the plane?

Oh yeah. Very definitely. See, radio operators nowadays, you can get a cell phone and you can call around the world, in those days you couldn’t. In fact, even a voice radio, you can have a big voice radio, big as this room, but would only be good for only about thirty or forty miles. Good for planes that talk to each other or for landing instructions. But if you wanted any distance you had to send code, they called it CW, where you send Morse code. You could rely on say a thousand miles on a Morse code. But it took a long time doing it; I took about a year to be good at it.

Learning, you don’t learn the code, it’s a reflex, like dah dot comes over and your hand writes A and you can’t listen to code and know what’s coming on. You have to let your hand go and then read it afterward and find out what you wrote. It’s what they call a conditioned reflex and it broke my heart when war was over and didn’t need them anymore. So I spent three years of my life learning, getting good at this and it’s pretty worthless because then they came up with new equipment. Now you can use a cell phone. You have to live with the technology of the age and that was it.

What skills did you use in Korea? What did you do there?

I went to college and I took ROTC and got to be an officer and I made a platoon of tanks when I was in Korea, for a year, but that’s my real war in a way. But I kind of miss World War II. World War II was a good war. Everybody felt good about it. Korea was kind of a grim, working class war.

Well you know, it ended the way it should have been, but pretty much just the way it started. There hasn’t been any trouble since. I mean how can you do better than that?

Well it was fine, it was the Cold War. I always figured, there’s no more Russia so, we must have won the Cold War. It wasn’t dramatic like World War II, but same thing. But one thing about it, I always loved Asia. I loved the South Pacific. I went back; I flew all down through New Guinea and the Philippines, and everywhere like that. In fact my wife and I have been. She’s no longer with us, but we were over in Asia several times.

How long were you in Japan during the war?

Well, we were in Japan until the war ended. From the time the war ended, in September, I guess, or August, it’s kind of a hard one when the war did end, you know. Nobody seemed to know. But when it ended, and then it ended officially, and I was in Japan four months after that and then they sent me home.

So you spent a lot of time training in those war years.

Oh yeah, took a lot of time training.

Where did you train?

Well, I went to radio school at Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was about six or seven months and then they sent you from there to Yuma, Arizona, for gunnery school. But they kept training for radio operating, while you’re in gunnery school. Then you had four months after that. You’d join a crew in order to be in a B-24 for another four months. You had a good year before you got good enough at it. You can learn the code, go home tonight and learn the code, but when it’s coming at you at 22 words a minute, you can’t listen to it. You had to build up ability. It’s funny, I see people talking from something else and their hands are going and then they have to read to see what came over.

What’s the gunnery school? Is that separate from radio school?

Everybody except the pilot was also a gunner. You had a bombardier gunner, a navigator, engineer, radio operator, among other things. You had ten machine guns on the bomber and it took the whole crew to use them. The pilot and co-pilot didn’t. They stayed in their seats. Everybody else was a gunner and they all had to go to gunnery school because they didn’t want you to be shooting your own airplanes down, which happened, too.

Then when you were on the plane for those four months?

I was on the plane all the time once I started training. Well, when I got overseas… It’s hard for me to say what is a mission. In Europe, a mission to me is when you drop bombs. We flew an awful lot of just patrol. If we didn’t drop bombs, I wouldn’t say that’s a mission. That was a patrol area and we were patrolling around Okinawa. What you had there was the Army Air Corps made up of different air forces. You had the 20th Air Force that was the B-29s. They had their own war. Then I was in the 5th Air Force and we were part of MacArthur’s army. Then they had the 7th Air Force, which was in the Central Pacific. Then they had the 13th Air Force which was in the South Pacific in the flank.

We weren’t allowed to bomb Japan, because if everybody bombed Japan we’d have chaos. You know, one of the big problems in war is to keep from fighting your own people. So we weren’t allowed to bomb anything in Japan. Well we can patrol up there, just to keep the war within control. So I never flew, dropped any bombs on Japan, although we flew patrol up there almost every day.

There were Air Corps by regions?

No, the Army Air Corps was part of the Army. The Army Air Corps was broken down into different Air Forces. The 1st Air Force through the 20th Air Force, although there was a couple of them missing, and each Air Force had a certain place. Four Air Forces were kept in the United States, the 5th Air Force was in MacArthur’s Army, the 6th Air Force was in the Caribbean, the 8th Air Force in the…well that’s the way it was broken down. There wasn’t any Army Air Force per se. That didn’t come into being until around ’48 or something, when they created the Air Force. So we were really an Air Corps.

What kind of planes were you on?

B-24. That was the biggest plane they had until they got to the B-29s. It was 10 men and one of the reasons they had all of the men was they had to man all the guns. You could, theoretically, in peace time, train one man to do half of those jobs. If you had ten jobs, and you trained one man, it would take him ten times as long as you can train ten men simultaneously and we had plenty. You know, we had a draft on; they had more men than they could use. Nowadays, you have very full crews. It’s a different technology. In fact they don’t even put guns on planes anymore, not bombers. And yet it seemed like half the people in the Air Corps were gunners at one time. We were a real clique, you know. I have a big set of wings and bring them out every now and then. My grandkids look and they want to know what they are. They never saw those before. They don’t make them anymore. They haven’t made any since 1945.

Is there anything that you have, any memorabilia, anything special like those wings, you would like to include in your story?

I wasn’t much for the photography in those days. Cameras were, you know, kind of difficult. So I got some pictures, but no really great ones. I got one very interesting thing. I have a map, it was a cloth map, one map on each side. It was put out by the geodetic survey, whatever, that makes maps. It’s a map of sections of China. When we were going to attack Japan, the other planes would have gotten hit, and they would have gone over to China to escape. These are maps of China and I don’t think that the Chinese know we have these maps. I have one good one. I’d have to explain to people what it is, but they gave them to the crew members in case you got hit and had to go over there.

I am in favor of this (the interviews). I hate to see things forgotten…. Remember about 20 years ago they took a survey of New York City school kids and they wanted to know, “Who did the US fight in World War II?” Do you know what the overwhelming choice was? – Russia.

I think the schools are a little remiss on their history if they can’t even tell the war. When I was going to school I knew that we fought the Germans in World War I just from watching movies.

I love history and I hate to see things forgotten. I’d hate to see a cat die because the cat’s forgotten. It just bothers me. We should get things to go on forever.

This [interview] is sort of a way of keeping history alive.

Oh, yes, I’m very much in favor of it. Historians write something 100 years from now- they’re making it up. I’ve read one history book on World War II which was good. It was written by William Manchester who was a great writer. He died about a year ago. He was in the Marine Corps in World War II. He wrote a book called Goodbye, Darkness.

That’s a terrific book. But there’s more garbage written about war than anything else.

Well, first of all, you’ve got to sell the book so it’s got to be a good story so they are writing what they think it should be. It’s got a modern slant to it. In 1942, it was a different. When the War started, I was very much surprised that we got into war because everyone assumed that we were not getting into this war, especially after the Russians and the Germans started fighting each other because the people in this country didn’t look approvingly on the communist system in Russia. Russia and Germany were pretty much the same so when they wanted to fight each other everyone thought that was great.

So I was very much surprised when the war started. You knew about Japan. They were generally in favor of China but they didn’t care about Japan. I was very much surprised when the war came…everyone else was, too. It changed everything.

Were you still in High School?

Yeah.

Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?

I was home doing my homework. My mother came out. She said they’re bombing someplace. She had it all mixed up, she didn’t know what it was. So I turned the radio on. I knew where Pearl Harbor was because I used to make ship models, which was one of my hobbies at the time. I had to explain to people where Pearl Harbor was. Nobody else knew. People didn’t travel in those days. That was the end of the Depression. People didn’t have any money, so they didn’t go anywhere. If you went to California from Boston you were a celebrity. It was like going to the moon.

It changed everything. Like in Boston the ethnic people, the Irish, were very predominant. They had nothing to do with England. They hated England. They were rooting for Hitler, and so everything changed. I always said World War II was the greatest party that was ever thrown. Unless you were in the front line getting shot, it was a great time. Everybody had money. Everybody liked each other and it was very friendly and the whole thing changed. It hasn’t been the same way since, although it’s nice here.

I haven’t been home in 20 years. In fact, I’m going home this summer. I have a friend who said to come on out and started telling me about all the people I knew who had died and I thought I better go back while they still know me. I like Boston – it’s a great city. But I like Chicago better. People don’t realize what a great town this is.

So after you heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor, what did you do? Did you wait until you graduated?

You had to be 18 to join anything. I turned 18 in August and I said I wanted to be a pilot and got into the program. I would have been a great pilot. I flew airplanes and soloed. Then they kicked me out because I couldn’t breathe. Well,I can’t blame them.

How did your family feel about you signing up?

I don’t think my stepfather could care one way or the other. My mother was upset and wanted to know why I signed up. But you couldn’t beat the draft in WWII. They drafted everyone once you became of age. The only way you could stay out of the Army was if you were a farmer. In those days, it took a lot of people to run a farm.

So that was August of 1942?

Yes, but they had a backlog of enlisting, so they didn’t call me until January, 1943.

Where was your basic training?

You won’t believe it – Atlantic City. They had six guys in a hotel room. It was like a troop ship, but it only lasted for three weeks. They taught you how to march and step and how to wear the uniform. Then they sent me to Syracuse University because I was going to be a cadet. I was there for 3 or 4 months and then they sent me down to Texas for regular training, until they found out about my breathing problems and kicked me out.

I said I wanted to stay in flying so they put me as a radio operator which is the best job on the plane except for the pilot. He is the only one who knows what is going on. I was sent to Sioux Falls, SD which is a nice town. I would like to go back there. I spent six months there and then went to Arizona for gunnery training and then to Westover Field in Massachusetts. We trained there and also patrolled the coastline looking for U-boats. I never saw one, but we bothered them, and they could see us. It served a double purpose. We lost two of the twelve planes in our squadron, with twenty dead. Planes were dangerous then. The pilot was 20 years old and was flying a four engine airplane – a year and a half earlier than that he was in high school.

So when a message came through, you would tell the pilot?

You would keep a log. A lot of things were routine like the weather. Anything of interest to the pilot, you would give to him. I sat behind the copilot. The pilot sat on the left and the copilot on the right. There was a bulkhead with radio equipment between us and I could yell around it to pass on messages. I knew what was going on and I could contact other radio operators and monitor what was on the air.

What did you major in when you went to college between the wars?

Chemical engineering. In those days, you had twelve million people wanting to go to college. The colleges were designed to handle a very small fraction of that number. I went to the University of Massachusetts and had 1000 in the class. I had as much interest in CE and brain surgery, but I could get into the program. I would have loved to study radio or electronics. Unless you went to MIT, you couldn’t study electronics in 1946. A lot of people got into a line of work that they didn’t want to but had to do something. Before WWII, very few people went to college unless you wanted to a doctor or school teacher.

Did you become a chemical engineer?

I worked as an industrial engineer in the food industry. I was good at it and it kept my family eating but I didn’t like it. It was just a job, it was drudgery. Nowadays, kids can go anywhere and do anything.

Did you know your wife before the war?

No. I met her during the Korean War. Just as the Chinese ended the war, I was taking a course in the Army. I was home on leave and I met my wife. She had gone to a boarding school in Wellesley Hills and then she joined a convent but decided she didn’t like it. I met her through friends. In fact, I used to date her girlfriend.

How many kids did you have?

We had four. Unfortunately, my youngest daughter died about four years ago from cancer. We had three daughters and one son and they all live in the area. Some of the family go to Nantucket every year. I said when you go, I want to ride in the airplane with you and my friends will pick me up at the airport, probably in July.

When you traveled with your wife, did you think things had changed a lot?

So, during the war I was all over the Pacific, from New Guinea to Okinawa. After the war ended, I flew over Japan and Korea. In fact, when the Korean War started, I was the only one in the country who knew where Korea was. (Laughter)

I always had a good job and a good place to live. Park Ridge is a nice town. She loved it. She knew everyone in Chicago. She knew Bill Wrigley and the Mayor because of her job. She started with TWA as an account exec and met all these people and then she went to the State and was in charge of international tourism. Her name was Mary Patricia Shannon.

I see you in the Library and you have your little group who call you “the Commander”.

They call me that because I was a tank commander in the Korean War.