Mexican Federals defeated rebels in Tamaulipas.
The Berliner gyrocopter No. 5 gave its first successful demonstration. U.S. Army Lt. Harold R. Harris flew it for one minutes and 20 seconds at the College Park Airport, near the University of Maryland, in front of the press and members of the U.S. Navy.
Harris has been mentioned here before due to his career as a test pilot. He lived until 1988, dying at age 92.
The Beverly Hills Speedway hosted its final race, which was attended by 85,000 automobile racing fans. Harlan Fengler broke the world's record for a 250 mile race, averaging 116.6 mph.
Fengler would go on to be the Chief Steward of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from 1958 until 1974. He passed away in 1981 at age 78.
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In the Apple TV series Masters of the Air, one of the characters is Maj. Gale "Buck" Cleven, who reports himself as being from Casper twice in the first episode.
Who was he, and was he really from Casper?
Clevens was born in Lemmon, South Dakota, on December 27, 1918, just after the end of World War One. His family moved to Casper when he was still a child, although I'm not certain when, as they moved first to Lusk, in 1920. He likely was a 1937 graduate from Natrona County High School, the only high school in Casper at the time (Natrona County had a second one in Midwest). Following graduating from high school, he attended the University of Wyoming while also working on drilling crews as a roughneck.
He did, in fact, move at some point to Casper, where he was employed as a roughneck on drilling crews. He used the money he earned to attend the University of Wyoming and was enrolled by the fall of 1937, presumably right after high school. His name appears in the social pages of The Branding Iron as having had a date attend the men's residence hall October dance. He was a guest of a different young lady at the 1939 Tri Delts Halloween sorority dance. The same year he was apparently in a fraternity, as he's noted as having attended the Phi Delta Theta dance with, yes, another young lady. In February 1939 he went to a fraternity dance with Nova Carter, whom I believe I'm related to by marriage. A year later, February 1940, he took a different gal to the same dance.
He left UW in 1941 to join the Army, intent on being a pilot. The October 21, 1943, edition of the UW Student Newspaper, The Branding Iron, notes him (inaccurately) as being stationed in North Africa and having received the Distinguished Service Cross, which he in fact did receive for piloting his badly stricken plane from Schweinfurt to North Africa, the flight path taken on that raid. This even is depicted in Masters of the Air. The Branding Iron noted that he had attended UW for three years. In June, 1944, the student newspaper reported him a POW. He's noted again for a second decoration in the March 2, 1944, edition, which also notes that he was a Prisoner of War.
As depicted in Masters of the Air, his B-17 was in fact shot down over Germany. He ended up becoming a POW, as reported in the UW paper, at Stalag Luft III for 18 months, after which he escaped and made it to Allied lines. He was put back in the cockpit after the war flying troops back to the United States.
Following the war, he was back at the University of Wyoming. He graduated from UW with a bachelor's in 1946. He apparently reentered the Air Force after that, or was recalled into service, and served in the Korean War, leaving the Air Force around that time.
He was on the Winter Quarter 1954 UW Honor Roll and obtained a Masters Degree, probably in geology, from UW in 1956. Somewhere in here, he obtained a MBA degree from Harvard and an interplanetary physics doctorate from George Washington University.
He married immediately after the war in 1945 to Marjorie Ruth Spencer, who was originally from Lander Wyoming. They had known each other since childhood. She tragically passed away in 1953 while visiting her parents, while due to join Gale at Morton Air Force Base in California. Polio was the cause of her death, and unusually her headstone, in Texas, bears her maiden name. Reportedly, her death threw Cleven into a deep depression. He married again in 1955, to Esther Lee Athey.
His post-war career is hard to follow. He flew again during the Korean War, as noted, which would explain the gap between his bachelors and master’s degrees, and probably his doctorate. He's noted as having served again during the Vietnam War, and also has having held a post at the Pentagon. He was in charge of EDP information at Hughes Aircraft. Given all of that, it's hard to know if an intended career in geology ever materialized, or if his World War Two service ended up essentially dominating the remainder of his career in the form of military service. The interplanetary physics degree would and employment by Hughes would suggest the latter. His highest held rank in the Air Force was Colonel.
Following retirement, he lived in Dickenson, North Dakota, and then later at the Sugarland Retirement Center in Sheridan. He died at age 86 in 2006, and is buried at the Santa Fe National Cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his marker noting service in three wars.
Paul Newman, having enlisted days before his 18th birthday, was called up for service in the Navy.
Newman wanted to be a pilot, but was taken out of flight school when it was discovered he was color blind. He went on to be a torpedo bomber crewman.
Sarah Sundin noted Newman's enlistment, but also noted the A36:
Today in World War II History—June 6, 1943: North American A-36 Apache flies first combat mission in a US Twelfth Air Force mission to Pantelleria. Future actor Paul Newman enlists in the US Navy, age 18.
We don't think much of the A-36, the dive bomber version of the P-51. The odd aircraft only came into existence in the first place as the 1942 appropriations for new fighter aircraft had run out and converting the assembly line to dive bombers kept the P-51 line open. Only 500 were built, with most used by the U.S. Army Air Force, but some used by the RAF.
Lt. Gen. Frank Maxwell Andrews, for whom Andrews Air Force Base is named, died in the crash of the B-24 Hot Stuff in Iceland, when it went down in bad weather.
He had been on an inspection tour in the United Kingdom.
Only the plane's tail gunner, SSgt George A. Eisel, survived the crash. Eisel had survived a previous B-24 crash in North Africa. He'd live until 1964 when he died at age 64. Married prior to the war, he and his wife never had any children.
Hot Stuff was the first B-24D to complete 25 missions, well before, it might be noted, the B-17 Memphis Belle did the same. Hardly anyone recalls Hot Stuff, as the Army went on to emphasize the Memphis Belle following the crash of Hot Stuff and the death of all but one of its crew. Of note, Hot Suff, predictably, had a much more salacious example of nose art than Memphis Belle, and it's interesting to speculate how the Army would have handled that had the plane been popularized. At any rate, the story that Memphis Belle was the first US bomber to complete 25 missions is a complete myth.
Andrews was the CO of the ETO at the time of this death. A West Point Graduate from the class of 1906, he had been in the cavalry branch from 1906 to 1917, when he was assigned to aviation over the objection of his commander. A prior objection had prevented his reassignment in 1914.
Inventor Lawrence Sperry, inventor of the autopilot and artificial horizon, demonstrated that air-to-air refueling was a theoretical possibility by intentionally touching a Sperry Messenger to a deHavilland flown by Lt. Clyde Finter. He did it eight times.
Both plans maintained a speed of 65 mph during the demonstration.
Sperry would go down over the English Channel that December, losing his life at age 30. He was flying a Sperry Messenger at the time. His company lives on.
Today in World War II History—September 10, 1942: US forms WAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron) under Nancy Harkness Love for already-licensed pilots, a precursor to the WASP program.
From Sarah Sundin's blog.
The WAFS were civilians by regulation, not military pilots, and operated under ninety day contracts. They had to be licensed pilots with 200 hours of experience when they hired on, and while they wore uniforms, they had to buy them, although that was required of Army officers as well. Unlike officers, however, they had to pay for their own room and board as well. There were only forty at the height of the program.
While they were required to have 200 hours of flight time, in reality the average for those signing on was 1,400 and a commercial pilots license. This made the WAFS not only quite experienced as pilots, in context, but unusual for female pilots.
Betty H. Gillies was the first member, in that she was the first to report for training. She was an experienced pilot of fourteen years and married to the vice president of Grumman.
Legendary fighter pilot Robert "Robin" Olds, Jr., son of an Army Air Corps officer of the same name, was born this day in Hawaii.
He became a triple ace, scoring kills in World War Two, Korea and Vietnam, and retired as a Brigadier General in 1973. His father had been a Major General.
Olds was a larger than life character in every way. He was married for many years to starlet Ella Raines, although their marriage eventually ended in divorce and he remarried (he still came in at half the total number of marriages than his father). His penchant for drinking likely kept him from rising higher in the Air Force than he did. He served on the Steamboat Springs Planning Commission in retirement.
He died in 2007 at age 84.
On this day in 1921, Bessie Coleman received a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, making her the first black person to be a "licensed" pilot. As her grandparents were Cherokee, she was also the first licensed Native American pilot.
The event is a real milestone, but it's somewhat deceiving. The US didn't require pilots licenses at the time and the global requirement was far from universal. Pilots licenses would be introduced in the US in 1927. This is significant here as Coleman's international pilots license was a real license, but one that was not recognized everywhere and, moreover, she was not the first black or female black pilots as is sometimes suggested.
She was a pioneering aviator however and earned her living as a barnstormer after taking up flying. In that career she was also an advocate for African Americans. She tragically died in 1930 at an airshow when her aircraft had catastrophic failure.
Czechoslovakia and Romania signed a treaty aimed at Hungary, which they feared may seek to redraw its borders at their expensive.
On this day in 1920 a young Amelia Earhart rode in an airplane piloted by Frank Hawks at the California State Fair in Los Angeles. She was 23 years old and her father paid the $10.00 charge for the ten minute flight.
On this day in 1940, a photo was taken of some new construction benefiting aircraft at a Naval Air Station in Rhode Island.
On the same day, famous aviator August Eddie Schneider was killed in an aviation accident.
Schneider was a well known daring aviator and had won multiple aviation speed records. He'd also flown for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. On this day he was training a student when his plane was struck by a Navy aircraft, taking it down and killing him.
And of course the war raged on:
On this day in the war, Winston Churchill addressed the Italian people and urged them to rebel against Mussolini and take Italy out of the war. The overall poor performance of Italian troops in combat was already effectively achieving that result.
Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yeager died yesterday at age 97.
Yeager entered the United States Army Air Force in 1941 as a private. He was an aircraft mechanic at first but volunteered for flight training and was promoted to Flight Officer, a rank more or less equivalent to warrant officer. He flew P51s during World War Two and was stationed in the ETO. He became a test pilot following World War Two and famously broke the sound barrier in that role flying the X1 "Glamourous Glennis", which was named after his wife.
Yeager had a long Air Force career which was likely somewhat arrested, as famous as he was, by the fact that he was not a college graduate, having entered the Air Force at a time in which it was still possible to become a pilot without a college degree. The movie The Right Stuff, in which Yeager was played by Sam Shepard (and in which Yeager had a cameo role as a bar tender), based on the book by Tom Wolfe, asserted that he was ineligible to become an astronaut for that reason. Whether or not that is true, he certainly was a justifiably famous character and in some ways his passing on December 7 was oddly symbolic.
