In
southeastern Washington State is the city of Pasco, just north of the Columbia
River. Today it’s part of the Tri-Cities
including Richland and Kennewick, but 70 years ago it was a remote railroad
town with a prewar population of 4,000.
My father got to know Pasco pretty well during “War Two.”
John H.
“Jack” Tillman was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1922 and learned to fly as a
teenager. He attended Oregon State
College in 1940-41, studying engineering, before working as a draftsman for
Douglas Aircraft in California. After
Pearl Harbor he entered Preflight at St. Mary’s, California, progressing to the
Civilian Flight Training program in Idaho in late 1942. He reported to NAS Pasco in May1943.
Recalling
his time at Pasco, Dad said, “I went through CPT at Nampa, Idaho, with ten
other Navy fellows and ten Army. Our
Navy and Marine Corps bunch was sent to Pasco, which was a pretty bleak place
in southeastern Washington. It had been
a railroad town before the war, with some airmail flying, but that was about
it. There was no place to go and nothing
to do. Mainly it was windy and cold.
“The base
was brand new; in fact, it wasn’t quite finished when we arrived. There was a large concrete mat and hangars
for A, B, and C Flights, plus Assembly and Repair. But the gym and base exchange weren’t done,
though you could get half a cantaloupe with a scoop of ice cream for a dime.
“The base
commander was Captain B.B. Smith. He was
kind of a tyrant whose pride and joy was a Staggerwing Beechcraft. The only other one he’d let fly it was a
chief naval aviation pilot. Sometimes
when word got around that BB was due back we’d go down to the flight line to
watch him land. It could be pretty airy.
“Pasco was
a primary base, mainly with N2S Stearmans.
They were a lot different from the way the purists think of them, with
regulation yellow paint schemes. Some
were clear doped, some were silver and yellow, but they were all beat up. There was at least one groundloop a day,
every day. Eventually ten N3Ns were
ferried in from NAS Seattle to take up the slack.
“The instructors were a mixture of military
and civilians, probably with more civilians when I was there. They tended to be older and more laid back. But I noted that my two instructors took more
time to critique each flight than the Navy pilots.“ Practically the first thing they impressed on
us was that we were never, ever, to fly over the Hanford area northwest of
base. Naturally, that was the worst
thing they could have done because practically every cadet who soloed made a
beeline for Hanford, to see what he could see.
There was nothing obvious out there—just more sand and sagebrush.
“Rumor
Control had two theories as to what was going on at Hanford. Republicans said it was a secret factory
making Roosevelt campaign buttons.
Others said, ‘No, they’re making the front ends of horses for shipment
to D.C. and final assembly!’
“Right at
the end of the war, after the A-bombs, we learned that Hanford was a nuclear
research facility. The plutonium for the
Nagasaki bomb was produced there.
“The base
had some enlisted men eligible for flight pay—cooks and whatnot. A lot of them were terrified, because I think
we lost three cadets while I was there.
One got into a spin, another got clobbered in a landing accident, and I
think the other damaged his tail feathers while dropping rocks on improvised
targets. Another guy went berserk, flat
hatting all over the country, chasing a phone company truck off the road. Finally a bunch of instructors boxed him in
and forced him to land. He was gone
forthwith; we never heard what happened.
“Anyway,
one of our pastimes was dive-bombing with rocks. We’d have some sailor in the back seat jump
out at one of the auxiliary fields and pick u three or four good-sized
rocks. Then we’d fly out to the Columbia
River, which still had some small islands before the dams were built. Some of us cadets held bombing contests to
see who could come closest to a spot on an island. It was illegal as hell, but nobody seemed to
mind as long as you brought your airplane back in one piece.
Jack
completed training at Pasco in July 1943, proceeding to NAS Corpus Christi,
Texas. After the war he continued flying
and restored two WW II aircraft, a Naval Aircraft Factory N3N-3, and in the
early 1970s the world’s only flying Douglas Dauntless dive bomber, which was
based at Pasco until space became available at Pendleton, Oregon.
Jack died
in March 2014, age 92.
I was
acquainted with a few other Pasco aviators via the American Fighter Aces
Association. In 1944 the NAS became an
operational base, supporting carrier air groups preparing for deployment to the
Pacific. One of them was Air Group Nine
which had completed a combat cruise aboard USS Essex (CV-9) in 1943-44.
Among the
leading lights of Fighting Squadron Nine was Lieutenant Eugene Valencia,
already an ace with seven victories. In
training his new four-plane division he spared no effort to gain as much
experience as possible. That included cadging
bootleg fuel from the eminently bribable flight-line crews eager to exchange
high-octane gas for booze. It was of
course illegal as hell but Gene was a flamboyant, press-on type of aviator who
saw no reason to let regulations interfere with flying. His charismatic personality won him admirers
up and down the chain of command, and never moreso than when VF-9 completed its
1945 deployment aboard USS Lexington
(CV-16) and Yorktown (CV-10). In that time his division downed 43 Japanese
planes with all three of his pilots achieving ace status.
After the
war the Navy sold the air station to the base to the city, which still operates
it as the municipal airport. A local
historical group is raising funds to preserve the original building, and I hope
you’ll visit the web site at “Save The Tower.”
http://savetheoldtower.com/ .
