DON AND BETTY HART

Don Hart flew P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs with the 78^th Fighter Group for three hundred and forty hours of combat during World War II.  The Thunderbolt carried armor-piercing bullets that were fired in half second bursts.  Hart flew four/lost four of those P-47s, planes that were known to out-dive any other airplane.  The Mustang burned only half as much gas as did the Thunderbolt, that is only fifty gallons per hour, so the Mustangs could fly past Berlin from England bases, and get back safely.  They both carried two five hundred pound bombs on their wings. 

The man who flew those war planes was born in Walla Walla in 1923, where he recently joined the Walla Walla High School class of 1941 for their sixtieth class reunion.  That class has had a reunion every ten years, thanks to the efforts of one of their classmates who has organized it every single time.  After high school Don went to work for Boeing and was working as a riveter on B-17s when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.  The building  he worked in was camouflaged over one night, as was the entire plant.  It was made to look like a village from overhead.  Anti-aircraft guns were installed and air raid shelters very quickly built, the expectation being that Japan would bomb all military equipment manufacturing plants. 

Not many women had worked at Boeing until the war started.  First young women started coming to work, riveting alongside the men.  When grandmas started punching the time clock, Don Hart decided it was time to go.  He enlisted in the Army Air Corps on December 14, 1942 at the Walla Walla Air Base.  He passed the physical and then took a three hour test that asked one hundred and fifty questions.    

"I took one look at it, figured I would have to answer fifty questions an hour, and started in," Don said.  He recalled a couple of questions, one having to do with gear ratios, and one asking the nickname of the P-38.  He answered those and enough other questions correctly to pass the test and was in the Army Air Corps.

First stop was Pre-Flight School at the Santa Ana Air Base which is now John Wayne Airport in Orange County.  He spent nine weeks in classes that included plane identification and learning codes.         Next came Primary School at Blythe, California on the Mojave Desert.  He had always wanted to fly, getting that desire from his father who flew in World War I,  and Primary was his first opportunity.  His flight instructors were mainly "spray pilots" who taught them in two-seater PT 22 Ryans.  He soloed after ten hours.  His next move was to Lemore, California, which is now a Navy base.  There he took classes and moved to PT-13s, which were low-wing single seat planes, to complete his Basic Training. 

Then he was ready for Advanced Training which he took at Luke Field in Phoenix, Arizona.  Luke Field was named for a World War I pilot who was known as a "balloon buster," or a flyer who shot down helium and hot air balloons used by the Germans.  Don flew a P-40 Flying Tiger for ten hours at Luke Field but spent most of his time in the air in AT-6s, logging about one hundred eighty to two hundred air hours by the end of his Advanced Training.  Yet another train trip took him to Abilene, Texas where he attended an Overseas Training School and first flew a  P-47 Thunderbolt for about one hundred and fifty hours.  After completing Overseas Training he was transported to New Jersey and shipped out on the Queen Elizabeth along with about seventeen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other military personnel including six hundred nurses. 

"Competition was keen," Don smiled, "But they were all nice girls."

After landing in Clyde, Scotland, the airmen mounted a train and rode through blacked-out England to join the 78^th Fighter Group, 82^nd Fighter Squadron at Duxford.  "We lived a good life at Duxford," Don admitted.  "We paid a Batman, as they called them, a pound a month to clean our quarters, make our beds, and shine our shoes."  Duxford had been a Royal Air Force base during World War I.

Life was not entirely easy for Hart while he was stationed there.  He flew seventy-six missions, over three hundred hours, then put in an extension for another fifty hours, only forty of which he flew before the war ended.  One of his more harrowing missions has been published in a book written by Hart's room mate at Duxford, Lt. Col. R. A. Dick Hewitt.  The book, titled Target of Opportunity, gives a detailed account of Hewitt's life and times with the 78^th Fighter Group, 82^nd Fighter Squadron, 8^th Air Force.  He uses Hart's experience of having to bail out over the North Sea to show how Britain's Air Sea Rescue teams operated.

Hart had skip-bombed a flak encampment and in the process sustained some damage to his plane.  As he was flying back to base over the North Sea his prop ran away, his engine froze, and then quit dead.  He quickly decided to ride it down to one thousand feet and bail out.  When he got free of his plane he barely had time to pull his D-Ring to open his chute before he hit the water, almost playing it too close.  Don inflated his Mae West and attempted to inflate his dingy which had been slung beneath his butt.  It was then he remembered he had played hooky from class the day they were taught how to inflate the little life raft in front of him.  As he bounced around in frigid waters, with strength brought by desperation, he sheered off the cotter pin holding closed the valve on the CO2 bottle.  The dingy partially inflated, and with his last ounce of strength he pulled himself into it and was at last on top of the water instead of in it.  

He had been flying with his flight leader Major Conner who saw him go down.  Conner called ASR (Air Sea Rescue) to give them a fix on Hart's position.  A Royal Air Force Wellington flew over in just fifteen minutes to drop rations and a mummy bag to help him stay warm and alive until a launch could reach his position, but he was so cold and tired he could not work his way into the mummy bag. That very mummy bag is now on display at the 8^th Air Force Museum in Savannah, Georgia. 

The launch showed up in about an hour, before he was overtaken by hypothermia.  Major Conner stayed with him, flying in circles, marking his position until the ASR arrived.  At that point, Conner's gas supply was low and he flew back to Duxford.  Three days after he was pulled out of the water, Don Hart was assigned another mission and was once again in the air.

About a month after the war ended, Hart headed home.  He flew this time, on a B-17.  They landed first on the Azores off Spain where they were weathered in for seven days, then flew to Newfoundland, then on to Bradley Air Field at Hartford, Connecticut.  He was taken by train to Chicago where he was placed in charge of a troop train attached to a passenger train headed for Seattle.  It took four days to travel from Boston to Fort Lewis, his final destination.  When the train arrived at that Washington military base, all the other personnel had to march off to quarters while Hart boarded a recon car that was there to meet him since he carried all the records of the cross-country trip.

Don joined the Reserves and, having an efficiency point of 4.0 and having been in rank two years, he was promoted to Major.  He had thought he would be going to Japan, but, as he said, "They dropped the big bomb." 

Instead he went to San Angelo, Texas where he served as a tower officer for some time until he finally asked the big question:  "How do you get out of Texas?"

The answer was to sign up for overseas duty.  He did that and was sent to Germany as the House Procurement Officer in Straubing.  His job was to clear civilian housing so the occupation forces could bring their wives and children to Germany to live with them. 

"We took any house with a bathroom," Hart explained.  The defeated Germans were given four days to get out of their houses after Don and his interpreter, whose father was a high ranking officer in the Nazi forces in Africa, explained to them what was going to happen.  "I was the most hated man in Straubing," Don stated.

While in the Army Air Force Don sent home over three thousand dollars he made playing poker.  His mother saved his money and when he came home he was able to start farming which he did for forty-five years.  He married Betty and raised two boys and a girl, all of whom have served in the military in a variety of capacities while also earning advanced degrees in law, education, and business.

Betty Hart was in school at Eastern Washington State College during most of the war.  She recalls giving her food stamps to the dining hall in the dorm where she lived so they could get food to feed the students, most of whom were women.  She worked in a drug store while attending classes and during summer vacations.  They rarely got any cigarettes or candy, since sugar was at a premium.  When they did get a small shipment it was held under the counter for special customers.  Betty related how she and the other girls would buy leg coloring, something like pancake makeup, to put on their legs so it looked like they were wearing silk or nylon hose.  She said it dried easily and didn't rub off.  Those who really wanted people to believe they were wearing hose drew a seam up the back of their legs with an eyebrow pencil.  Those who had hosiery took extremely good care of them and if they got a runner, they would have it repaired.  Repair ladies, who were usually very busy, would set up shop, that is a chair and a table, in places like Woolworth's or Newberry's.  The repair ladies would reweave the run with a gadget made of wire.

Don and Betty discussed the rubber shortage and rubber drives where people were encouraged to give up their tires. 

Betty said, "The government needed the rubber and rationed gas to protect the tire supply.  We were not told until after the war that access to the rubber plantations had been cut off by the war, making it a larger problem than gas." 

Don added, "I kind of think it was not so much that the government needed old rubber as it was that they were trying to keep people from driving and using gas." 

Whatever the reason, at least we saved enough gas and rubber to keep Don Hart flying for nearly three hundred and fifty hours which was enough for us to win the war.