Joe McPhail

Joe McPhail was a Marine corps Pilot during WWII and the Korean war.

Interview 1 on LOC.gov

- Alice Braud Jones, with the Sam houston chapter DAR, Fort Virginia point chapter, UDC, Anne smith, and Hellen Stein in both chapters, interviewing Colonel Joe McPhail on 20 January 2014, Dickenson Texas.

- Joe McPhail served in the Untied States Marine Corps from 18 October 1941 to 10 October 1981.

- He was born in Grand Saline Texas, on highway 80 between Dallas and Freeport, pop of 1200, something like that pretty small town

- Fathers occupation was railroad commission, had to travel quite a bit, Joe ended up going to Corpus where he was working where he graduated from Highschool in 1939. The family moved to Corpus at the time

- He had a sister, she was about 11 years older than Joe, she was born in 1910, he also had a younger brother who was born in 1930, 20 year difference. Their mother didn't worjk outside the home, she worked inside the home

- Before entering the military, he just graduated from Junior college in Corpus in 1941, and that summer he enrolled into CPT Civilian Private trianing, government program, a neat thing for him because he got exposed to planes the first time and got to fly for about thirty for fourty hours that summer of 41, and he really knew then that he wanted to be an aviator, but the Navy that time, and the reason he chose the navy because at Corpus they had a Naval air station, and when he was going to junior college he saw all these guys in uniform in town and everything, and so he thought that would be all for him. But in 1941 in the Navy you had to be 20 years old and have sixty hours ofg college. He had the sixty hours of college, but he wasn't 20, so he had to wait until he was 20 and on 10 October 1941, eight days after that he was sworn into downtown Dallas. He joined in rather than being drafted, never had a draft number. He joined the Navy because he wanted to be a pilot, still having around 40 hours of flying experience from CPT flying Piper cubs, they were tail draggers, not a lot of peopole knowing about that

- 4:00 Early days in the military. He was first stationed at naval air station in Dallas. They called him to be there on 4 December 1941. Pearl Harbor was Sunday three days later, he got in just under the wire. He remembers about it, it happened about noon time, they heard about it, most people didn't know where pearl Harbor was. It was funny, they kind of had them patrolling the perimmeter of the air station, they wouldn't give them any bullets. THey were just walking the fence line while patrolling. They were patrolling but couldn't defend theself.

- His father wasn't in the military though, he passed away in 1940. He was only 53 years old. He had cancer and Joe thinks that he also had TB, they thoght it kind of was TB, but nowadays we didn't know about Cancer. His mother didn't resist when he enlisted, wasn't upset about it. It wasn't because he was the eldest brother his other brother was born in 1917. And his brother Gale? was born in 1930, sister was born in 1910, there were actually four children, three boys and one girl.

- Right after Pearl Harbor, he had only been there for a short [eriod of time. The base reacted, they were really concerned more on security they were afraid the Japanese, the ones that were here int he states were gonna rise up against them. They stayed busy at the base, they had two marine sergeants who kind of influenced Joe he thinks that were taking care of the aviation cadets. Incidently they called Dallas Naval Air Station E Base, Elimination Base, and they wanted to see if you could fly before they sent them to Corpus. The ymeant Elimination base, they wanted to see which ones could fly,a nd so were testing their capabilities, see if they could be a pilot. There weren't too many that had the CPT, so Joe had the rung up on the guys that never flew before, it was pretty easy for him. He wasn't flying a Piper in Dallas, there they flew N3Ns, built by the Naval Aircraft Factories, which didn't make too many planes, these were twin cockpit trainer planes, biwings tail draggers. They were pretty easy to fly for Joe, big wings, a stick instead of a wheel. But then when Joe went to Corpus they were flying Steermans, big strong airplane sure is. But then he flew a lot of different kinds of airplanes.

- 8:55 A flying day consisted of, they generally went to grad school for half a day, and then fly half a day. But they had a syllibus they would go through, start out elementary things, then do more compllicated things. Joe liked doing Acrobatics, was fun for Joe. He tells everybody that the war was fun for Joe. He really liked to fly. He attributed that to staritng out in that summer of 1941, June 1941.

- 9:50 After his training was finished, he got his wings in October 1942, then went to Opalaca Air Station in Miami, what they called Preoperationals training. They flew AT6s the Air Force calls, the Navy calls SNJs, but he had flown them in Kingsville in fighter training. And thats another thing he started out as a Seaman's second class in the Navy when he wwent to Dallas, then he went to Corpus and he was a Aviation Cadet then. And his pay at Dallas was 36 dollars a month, but then when he did fly, got his four hours, he got a 18 dollar raise, 54 dollars, 50% increase in salary. But then as Aviation cadet he would make 75 dollars, he had money he couldn't really buy or even spend on much aorund, no place to spend it. But yeah Corpus it was pretty interesting for Joe, started the steerments at Broadfield, then moved to Cabinets, then got to fly an OS2U, was a first line observation plane, they even had them on cruisers, would catapult them off and recover them with a kind of a sled like thing and then reel it in. He was doing water ladning. They had land planks too, fixed landing gear, but he thought it was pretty neat. One time he climbed to 9000ft and thought boy is this something. After that he went through instruments school. Then he had to decide I want to fly fighters, always wanted to fly fighters, but everyone wants tot fly fighters. He thiught that going into the Marine corps he would stand a better chance of getting into a fighter plane since they didn't have as many scout planes as the Navy did, and so he chose to go into the Marine Corps.

- 12:45 So was that just a paper transfer, yes it was basically just a paper transfer. There wasn't any formality or anything like that. From there he went to Miami opalak Naval Air Station, and there they did some field carrier landing practice they called some FCLP, like going aboard a carriers, was a different kind of landings. They did fly other, the N2, Joe got to fly what they were calling the F2A, which is a Brewster Buffalo, kind of a weird airplane, didn't ahve a hydraulic system, around six or seven ways to get the landing gear down, and one of them there were a pair of dykes to cut a cable as a last resort, if the crank doesn't work then you would use that. He did fly a Wildcat overseas, whole time he was overseas he flew them.

- 14:10 Those carrier landings, youree coming to land you're coming in on something thats not moving, meanwhile on a carrier that ship is moving the whole moving in different directions and have to be precise about it. He got to fly off a carrier during the Korean war in a Corsair

- 14:45 From Miami he went to San Diego California, waited to go overseas and got there December. He went to Samoa, American Samoa, deep in the Pacific, Pago Pago, a town there. He joined the Marine fighter squadron 441 who had Wildcats. Then their job was more training but then they ended up moving to different islands to keep the Japanese off of them. The job was keeping the Japanese from penetrating further. They had already gone into the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, in the Phillippines. They moved to a little island called Funafutti, no one has ever heard of it. At the moment of this interview he is reading a book called "Aviators", and its about Rickenbacher, Doolittle, and Lindberg, and Rickenbacher, they wanted him to go overseas as a kind of consultant and they shipped and got lost in the Atlantic, was int he raft for 26 days, well the little Island called Funafutti, they found him from OS2Us, found him in the rafts, they hada tough time, no food no water, they called a seagull and ate it, and used the insides for baits, they had some fishhooks. He finds it interesting to read about those guys. He thinks they were tough. Joe stayed overseas for 13 months didn't really do anything. They moved up to another island called Nanamia, and they were, Funafuti was about 700 miles below Tarawa, Nanamia was about 500 miles, no way for a Wildcat to fly there and back, but they were just there to keep the Japanese from getting it. it was the same reason to take Iwo Jima start flying the planes, they started flying the P-51s to escort the B29s to Japan. But nwo the Japanese had already that was home land for them and they had two airfields on Iwo, they had thousands of miles of trenches dug under the volcanic soil, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, so was Guadalcanal. A battle that nobody had heard about was Peleliu, they told the marines, the marine general said it would only take them two or three days, but took a month, and then they went some place else and the army came in and took over and heck they lost people too. Those tunnels and stuff, bloody nose ridge they talked about, they just couldn't get them out, burn them out mostly. The airfield was real close to the bloodynose ridge, the guys would come in, drop their bombs, go back, rearm, it wouldn't take them fifteen minutes. It was that close. It was tough at Peleliu.

- 19:27 How long was he in the Pacific? Joe was there for 13 months, then came back and instructed in a fighter training unit in El Toro California and then Jacksonville Florida, and then he went back overseas, volunteers, they came into the readyroom one day, they said they needed two Captains to go overseas, and it was Joe and his friend John Ralphus, and Joe said we were ready, and so John felt like Joe did and they didn't do anything that 13 months, but anything they went overseas and joined a new Fighter Squadron in the New Heberdees. in a place called Spridle Salas, that was in January 1945. And From there that squadron had been overseas for six months when they joined and so they were new, and we know they were going to Okinawa, the old guys got to fly airplanes on the way there, Joe and his friend had to go on an LST to get there, from Spridle Salas to Okinawa, took 38 days. Joe thinks in the interview thats a heck of a way for an aviator to get into war, a long ride it sure was. Had he had been an aviator they would have been there in a couple of days. It was a long long ways. Spridle Salas was about 500 miles east of Guadalcanal, took him a month and a half. And the invasion was 1 April 1945, which was Easter Sunday, the invasion of Okinawa, didn't have much opposition. They were down to a bunch of little islands. There were so many ships the most you had ever seen in your life, they couldn't get up to the beach, and so they had to sit down there for six days, and so they gott ashore on 7 April. Everything was prety primitive, they were still working on the runways, the airplanes haddn't shown up at all. And They were living in tents and eating out of mess kits, no bmess hall, they just had an outside, flies and everything were so bad

- 22:35 Did he have any indications at all of the atomic weapons that the united states was building at that time? No, it was a well kept secret, probably a good thing too since the Germans were working on it, trying to develop a bomb as well, and so they needed to keep a secret.

- 23:00 Where were you when they first dropped the bomb? He remembers that day, they all knew about it. They kind of stopped them from dropping any ordinance at that time, but they still kept flying some. He was on Peleliu, after Okinawa, he got to do a lot of flying up there. First flight on Okinawa was 12 April 1945, and he saw his first Japanese airplane, a Zero, he shot it down. But then the squadron did real well they had a lot of pilots and they shot down about 124 planes in that April, may and June area. And he shot down two, but had 140 combat missions. He had a lot of those missions in the first time he went overseas, not a lot, he had about 40 that time, then about 100 done a second time after Okinawa and Peleliu, and then 100 during the Korean war

- 24:40 He had heard that that the US had dropped the atomic bomb, he was on Peleliu. he was not able to see any residue, thousands of miles away. And his reaction was that he realised the enormity of it, they made him and others stop bombing and such that they had been doing up until that point, so he knew that something was going up. They heard that they dropped the atomic bomb, they were all happy that it happened, maybe this would end it. He was in peleliu when he heard the war was ending. The people reacted by celebrating some on the island. They claimed that on Okinawa that even some guys were injured celebrating firing guns, bullets going up they gotta go down. Alice Jones the interviewer had talked to one of the Navajo Code talkers doing an interview and he was on Iwo Jima, and he said when they heard the news, the Americans started jumping up and down, but the Japanese hadn't heard the news, and so they were still firing at that point. And so it took some time for the Japanese to stop firing, and some of them that did were so embarrassed that they just hid out for a long time. Joe says that in the Phillippines there was a Japanese guy in 1948 taht resisted for three years.

- 26:35 The war is over now...