Story 005 - Jean Cooper - 509th CG Ground Crew

I got your message a few days ago on Internet and started a reply, but by the time I was well into the first page I found that I was still on line which in Venezuela is quite expensive. The phone company is a monopoly and they charge whatever they like. I tried to save what I had written, but somehow lost it. I don't know if it was sent or not. I'm not too sharp on handling the Internet. 77 is not a good age to start learning to handle this instrument. Luckily I have a cybersmart grandson to help me out, but he is studying Systems Engineering at University of Los Andes in Merida, which is about as far as you can get from our home in Puerto Ordaz and still be in Venezuela.

Organization of the ground crews was a simple matter. There were usually six members on a crew in charge of first echelon maintenance. They did everything from wiping grease off the nacelles to changing engines when necessary. We pulled the 25hr,50hr and 100hr inspections. If anything was radically wrong with an engine we changed it for a new one from the second echelon shops.

To become a line mechanic, I was sent, after basic training in Miami Beach (rough duty), to a mechanic school in Amarillo, Texas. For a city boy from Michigan, the deserts of Texas were a radical change. It was hottern Hell in the summer and froze our #!@# off in winter. Not much, if any, snow but the wind started just north of Baffin Bay and swept down on us with nothing to break the force of it. We slept in barracks with no screens and the flies were something fierce in the summer. We had no sheets, only a wool blanket to cover up with so it was a choice of being eaten alive by the flies or sweating under the blanket. The school ran three shifts per day, so sometimes we were sleeping during the day and going to school at night. The teachers weren't too bright so a lot of the teaching was by film strips. Mostly we were so tired around 3 or 4 am that we could hardly stay awake. The army solution to that was to not have any chairs in the classrooms assuming that having to stand up all night would keep us awake and absorbing the information being doled out to us. Being smart ass G.I.s we soon learn to work in teams of three. Two on the outside holding up a sleeper in the middle. We were herded from classes at 0700 direct to PT for an hour or more, then to breakfast, after which we were given free time to try to sleep until it was time to repeat the cycle.

I don't know how, or if, records were kept of performance since I don't remember ever having written exams. Somehow a bunch of us were chosen at random to go to electrical specialist school at Chanute Field in southern Illinois. After Texas, that was near paradise. We had brick, two story barracks with generous latrines in each building. The drawback was that the permanent party members were mostly old army misfits who were largely rank happy. Their criteria was that a busy soldier was a happy soldier, so while we were not in classes they tried to keep us occupied policing the area.

Chanute Field was a short trainride from Battle Creek, Michigan where my folks lived, so I was able to go home for a weekend occasionally. The school awarded the best student in each class with a24 hr pass each week. Since I had had 2 1/2 years of college before I decided that the war couldn't be won without me, I didn't have much competition from the rest of the class who were a bunch of draftees with rarely a high school graduate among them. Thus, I had the pass every week, and when I didn't feel like going home, I could sell the pass to someone who was eager to go out and get drunk.

After electrical specialist school, I was given a long train ride out to Renton, Washington, just outside Seattle, where the B29's were being built. The instructors there were much better than we had had in Texas or Illinois. Again were back to drafty, wooden barracks which had a coal burning, pot bellied stove at each end to more or less heat the building. The guys near the stoves would be sweating while those in the middle would be freezing. Seattle's climate is not very cold, but there was a lot of wind which carried the heat away.

Once again, I was the star student in most of the classes. We EMs were mixed in with some 2nd lieuts who were learning to be flight engineers on the 29's and it embarrassed them when a PFC beat them on all the exams, both oral and written. On our days off we could take a bus into Seattle to see the sights which were impressive after the wastelands of Texas and the drabness of southern Illinois.

When I finished the B29 school, I was given short furlough, on which I married the girl who had been my first date at Central Michigan in the fall of 1940. She was practically my only date while I was there until March 1943 when I got itchy and enlisted in the army. We had a 7 day honeymoon, and she went back to finish at Central Mich and I went to Lincoln, Nebraska for assignment. Luckily, I was assigned to the 393rd bomb squadron at Fairmont around which was later formed the 509th Composite Group. While there I got a lot of practical experience in maintaining B17s and even was on flight status for several months as flight engineer. I had another furlough in time for my wife's graduation at Central Mich. and brought her back with me to Nebraska, where we lived in a rented room until she had to go back to Ann Arbor, Michigan where she had a teaching job

After a few months at Fairmont, our squadron was transferred to Wendover, UT where the 509th was taking shape. Again it was wooden barracks in the middle of a desert with extremes of hot and cold weather. I still remember working on a cold engine bare handed. There was no way to wear gloves when working between the cylinders of a rotary engine. Much to my chagrin, I was taken off flight status because I hadn't received the special training for flight engineers, who were all 2nd looeys, and I was still a PFC.

When the pilots were sifted out with many changes to get only the best (the same sifting was done among the EMs.) we went for a short training period in Cuba for over water experience. I was quite popular in Cuba since I had had two years of Spanish in High school and another two in college so I was helpful in directing the Cuban boys that were hired to do the scut work in the kitchens and latrines. When the crew went into Havana on an overnight pass, I was the only one who could speak enough to be understood and help my fellow crewmembers to get around. That time in Cuba is pretty much responsible for my being here in Venezuela for the last 47 years. More of that later.

We had another short respite from Wendover weather when we were sent to Inyokern, California where they had a special bombing range. I don't know why it was any different from our Utah desert. We were quartered at a navy base for the few weeks we were there, and it was a pleasant difference from the drabness of Wendover. I even got a chance to visit an aunt in Los Angeles whom I hadn't seen in some several years.

Came the summer and my wife came out to spend a few days with me. Just up the hill from Wendove was the Stateline Cafe and Casino where I uses to go on weekends for a delicious steak dinner and a shot at the crap tables where occasionally I won enough to pay for the dinner. While my wife was there I took her for her first look ever at a casino. She was appalled at all the money being thrown around. I bought her some chips and finally convinced her to try the roulette wheel. She put a dollar chip on a number and it came up, giving her $35. She quit right there and never placed another bet in her life.

That's when the order came for us to leave for Tinian, and that is when she got her only look at the Enola Gay as we flew over the hill on which she was standing.

After stops in Washington state, Honolulu, and Kwajalain for gas on the way, we arrived in Tinian. At first we slept in tents in the most mosquito infested area of the island. After a few day, Paul Tibbets kick some CB ass and got us into quonset huts. They were the best quarters we had had outside of Chanute Field, and there we slept, read, and played poker while awaiting the mission, about which we knew nothing. The word "atomic" was never mentioned until we heard Harry Truman announce on the radio that an Atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. We suddenly realized why there had been so much secrecy about our group and why many questionable characters had been transferred out. My father was visited by a couple of FBI types and was questioned quite thoroughly about me and whether we had any relatives in Europe. He thought I was in some kind of trouble, but it was routine questioning of all members of the 509th. We even had security types pulling latrine duty in Wendover to check up on the attitudes of the enlisted personnel.

Life on Tinian was quite pleasant what with movies in the open air theater where we took our raincoats even in dry weather. The object was to protect ourselves from the guys in back who opened their warm beer rations and sprayed all those nearby. We were limited to two cans per day unless you had a non drinking friend willing to exchange his ration for whatever you had that he wanted. Beer was ten cents a can and cigarettes five cents a pack. On the day Truman announced that the war had ended (Sept. 14, 1945, a date you probably don't remember) the beer ration was lifted and the quonset huts were awash in suds for several days. There wasn't much in the way of entertainment on Tinian. The movies and the gambling tent were about it. There was occasionally a USO show but non of the top liners ever hit Tinian. The girls didn't have to be good singers or dancers. Just being girls was enough.

After the war people were being repatriated according to a point system based on the time you were overseas. If we had been ruled by that system, we would have been there for several months after the war ended, but again Col. Tibbbets had the clout to get us back in days after the end of the war. We went to Roswell, NM for discharge, and for the first time our people didn't have to pull KP and latrine duty. Roswell was staffed by German and Italian POWs who seemed to have free run of the camp and were very lightly guarded. The major problem with them was to get them to go back home at the end of the war. Those who escaped did so to avoid being sent back home.

When I was discharged I went to Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, where my wife was then working as an executive secretary for the director of the orthodontics department of the dental school. She was making twice as much as she had made as a teacher and didn't have all the hassle she had had with gifted children (offspring of the college profs) and bureaucrats of the education system. I enrolled in the Business Administration school and worked my ass off getting back into the habit of studying after three years of mental atrophy in the Air Force. The director of the clinic where my wife worked gave frequent cocktail parties for his students, some of whom were Latin Americans. The men had to speak English, but most of their wives didn't, so my knowledge of Spanish got us invited to all of the parties.

After graduation, we moved to Toledo, Ohio where I was employed in the export department of Willys Overland, the original manufacturers of the Jeep. After a year working in the office handling correspondence with distributor in Latin America, I was appointed Regional Manager for the Caribbean and northern South America with residence in Havana from where I traveled most of the time visiting our distributors. At the end of three years I was hired as manager of a branch of our distributor in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela.

That was in 1955, and we have been here ever since. At one time I worked as industrial sales manage for a paint company, and after a time I realized there was more money in applying paint than in selling it, so I moved from Caracas to Puerto Ordaz, where most of the heavy industry is, and started a paint and sand blast contracting firm. The business is now in the hands of my two sons since I was forcibly retired by the loss of my left leg because of a cardiovascular problem, otherwise I am in good health despite my almost 80 years.

I am going to send you a picture of the Enola Gay's ground crew as soon as my son gets it enlarged from a 4 x 5 print to an 8 x 10 which should transmit with more detail. The pictures on the web pages are mostly lousy. It is almost impossible to distinguish any of the faces. It seems that Fred Olivi had quite a bit to do with assembling the info on the web page we downloaded. Practically, if not all, of the pictures are from his book, a copy of which I purchased from him.

I'm sorry to have made this so long, but I thought you might be interested in an enlisted man's view of the war. The officers' life was quite different from ours. They had all kind of advantages over us, from sheets on their beds to whiskey in the O clubs. They even had a swimming beach on Tinian which the EMs never heard of.

Time to close down now. I hope I haven't bored you too much with my personal life story. If I can be of any service to you in your quest for information about the 509th, I'd be happy to supply anything that I can.

Muchos saludos,

Jean S. Cooper

Society for the Historical Preservation of the Manhattan Project

Tinian Island

Jean Cooper

"In His Own Words"