Aviation Graduation Quotes

They had graduated from cloth-and-wood flying machines in the dawn of human flight to steel and aluminum behemoths with thousands of horsepower and terrific firepower;

Some has been written about the reaction of our forces to the bombing of the “highway to death.” The criticism revolves around the lack of apparent remorse or guilt, and perhaps even bloodlust, at bombing the relatively easy targets. Everybody reacts to the stress of war and life and death decisions differently, and to narrow the image one would construct of an individual to his reaction immediately following the events of any battle is superficial and simplistic. Naval aviators are a strange mix of people—utterly homogeneous in certain respects, particularly to the casual observer, and radically different in their core and substance. Very few naval aviators show honest emotion easily; they’re not supposed to fracture the military bearing that has been instilled in them through years of training and detached experience under the stress of carrier aviation. Anger is the easiest emotion to display because it is the natural, instinctual outlet for stress and fear. But even expressions of anger might be as diverse in their reaction to a common event as physical violence or the mere raising of a voice. Most emotion comes out at the officers’ club, or on liberty in a foreign port, where the beer either softens or heightens aviators’ feelings to the edges of their flexibility, which often is not very far. Virtually all naval aviators are college graduates—some from state colleges, some from the Naval Academy, even a few Ivy Leaguers. This is their greatest obvious commonality—a college degree and mutual survival of the weeding-out process to get where they are in the navy. Many are religious, many are not, and the greatest of the values shared by the men is a trust in their comrades, a dedication to their country, and an absolute focus on their mission. It is exceedingly difficult most times for an outsider to register where a naval aviator is “coming from.” The uniform, the haircut, and the navy-speak contribute enormously to the building of a stereotype. So do the mannerisms of each individual; some express the control of emotion in reserved stoicism, others in an outburst of emotional release through inappropriate laughter or anger. Still others never express emotion at all. But the emotion is there, it has to be; despite years of training and desensitizing to hide the race of the heart and the sickening chill in the stomach, anyone who has landed on an aircraft carrier, never mind fought in a war, knows what fear and exhilarating intensity are.

There were three kinds of students going through Pre Flight in Pensacola. First, there were the OIs or Officers under Instruction. They were already commissioned Naval Academy or NROTC, and lived as junior officers. Next were the AOCs or Aviation Officer Candidates. They had college degrees and were commissioned as Ensigns upon graduation from Pre Flight. During Pre Flight training they were officially cadets and treated as such. Last and probably least were the NAVCADS. At the end of Pre Flight, they received a letter of completion and stayed cadets until they completed flight training. Only then were they commissioned. Each class was made up exclusively of one type of student. That is, even in Pre Flight NAVCADS and AOCs were not mixed together in a class. There is a book titled “The Second Luckiest Pilot in the World”, an anthology of flying stories. One chapter was about a NAVCAD going through flight training in the late forties. The author nailed it when he wrote that NAVCADS were in their own world. The officers didn’t associate with them because they weren’t officers. The enlisted guys didn’t associate with them because they were going to be officers. The result was a very tight knit group.

They served at nine hundred different shore stations across the United States not simply in clerical roles but as aviation machinists, control tower operators, statisticians, cryptographers, and weather forecasters. Predictably Congress was initially opposed to the idea of women serving in the navy, but thanks to the efforts of First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, a bill establishing a women’s reserve as a branch of the Naval Reserve was enacted in 1942. As indoctrination into navy life, Odette and other candidates took courses while stationed at Smith in naval history and organization, ships and aircraft, and law and communications. An hour and a half was spent each day either in military drill or in the gymnasium. Women who were not up to standards were quickly billeted out. Subsequent to graduation in February of 1943, Odette was sent to US Naval Training