The Army Aviation Cadets

 

Army Air Forces recruits arrive at the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Training Center in preparation for basic training. San Antonio was one of the three locations where Training Command processed and classified aircrew candidates for training.

When you can’t get enough college- trained officers to make into pilots, you take what you can get. In two world wars, the Army plucked teenage boys from high school, called them “cadets,” and tried to make them into officers and gentlemen while it taught them to fly.

The process was swift and often harsh. One World War I pilot who had been through it defined a flying cadet as “a person subject to military law who ranks just one grade lower than a German prisoner but who must remember that someday he is to be an officer and conduct himself accordingly.”

The Army Aviation Section entered that war with thousands of eager applicants and few planes with which to train them. It sent cadets to selected universities for preliminary training, then to flight schools in England and France. Many waited months to go overseas and had to build their own bases when they arrived. They entered combat with scant instruction; losses were staggering.

Between wars, pilot requirements dropped, and officers again filled most of the training slots. The Army let a few cadets enter, but the standards were so high that few qualified, and most who did washed out. Among the handful who made it through was a midwestern youngster named Charles A. Lindbergh.

By the early 1940s, however, the Army Air Corps faced another war and was again short of flyers. In June 1941, Congress created the grade of aviation cadet, and the Army launched a massive flight-training program. Within two years, its annual output would soar to more than 65,700 pilots, 16,000 bombardiers, and 15,900 navigators. In time, the cadet program would expand to train nonrated officers in such fields as communications, armament, weather, and radar.

To get that many applicants, the Army had to lower its age and education requirements. When I applied a few weeks after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I had just turned eighteen and was a high school senior.

Physical requirements remained high, but medical examiners tended to be lenient. When I was found to be underweight for my height, they weighed me again with my clothes on and had me slouch until I measured an acceptable five-ten. They so gave me three tries before I squeaked through the depth-perception test.

Passing the physical made us only “aviation cadet candidates.” We could await our official appointments either at home or in the Army as privates, unassigned. I thought a little Army experience would help later, so I enlisted. Three weeks after high school graduation, I was in a tent at Fort Dix, N. J., with seven other future cadets and some middle-aged draftees who still thought they had been inducted by mistake.

Source :
National Archives and Records Administration 342-C-K-662
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/1190cadets/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/airandspace/albums/72157715574200936