- Collection:
- Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
- Title:
- Oral history interview of Charles Walter Dryden, part one of two
- Creator:
- Brown, Myers
Dryden, Charles Walter, 1920-2008 - Date of Original:
- 2002-02-28
- Subject:
- Airplanes, Military--United States
Training planes
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
World War, 1939-1945--Participation, African American
T-6 (Training plane)
P-40 (Fighter plane)
PT-17 (Training plane)
Anderson, Charles Alfred, 1907-1996
Davis, Benjamin Oliver, 1912-2002
Rayford, Lee, 1918-1967
DeBow, Charles H., 1918-1986
Knox, George Levi II, 1916-1964
Peirson, Gwynne, 1922-
Lane, Earl R., 1920-1990
Brantley, Charles
Brown, Roscoe C., Jr., 1922-
Tuskegee Institute
United States. Army Air Forces. Fighter Squadron, 99th
Tuskegee Airmen
Stearman PT-17
Kaydet
P-40 Warhawk
P-40 Tiger
T-6 Texan
Boeing-Stearman Model 75 N2S (Aircraft) - Location:
- Italy, Foggia, 41.50281055, 15.4528996096277
Italy, Foggia, Ramitelli Airfield
Italy, Pantelleria Island, 36.8314576, 11.9450395
United States, Alabama, Macon County, Tuskegee, 32.42415, -85.69096
United States, Florida, Okaloosa County, Eglin Air Force Base, 30.45907, -86.55026
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, South Carolina, Colleton County, Walterboro, 32.90517, -80.66677 - Medium:
- video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv - Type:
- MovingImage
- Format:
- video/quicktime
- Description:
- In part one of this two-part interview, Charles Dryden describes his experiences as a Tuskegee Airman during World War II.
Charles Dryden was a Tuskegee Airman during World War II.
VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW CHARLES DRYDEN Atlanta History Center Interviewer: Myers Brown Transcriber: Frances Westbrook INT: Please state your name, date of birth and place of birth. Charles Dryden: Charles Walter Dryden, born September 16, 1920, in New York City. INT: Where were you and what do you remember about when you heard that the United States had been attacked at Pearl Harbor? CD: On that day, well, I have to back up just a little bit. I had begun flight training in Tuskegee, army flight school on August 19, 1941. The program consisted of three phases, the primary, the basic, and the advanced phase, each of which lasted about ten weeks, a total of about eight months. OK. On Pearl Harbor Day, a week before, my classmates and I had completed the primary phase. There were eleven of us, we were the second class that went through flight training. The first class began on August 19 [he may mean July 19], 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and similarly my class started on August 19, 1941, about three months before Pearl Harbor. So by that time my class had whittled down, had been whittled down from eleven starting to four who completed the primary phase. So the four of us had been given ten days of leave to go home and celebrate and show off and all that, with our uniforms and so forth. ….. While I was in New York, my girl friend and I went to visit her brother in a hospital in Staten Island, on a ferry of course, the boroughs of New York City are waterfront. On our way home after we had visited her brother, we were riding a … bus from the hospital to the ferry. And while riding the bus, I was standing, of course, in uniform, my girlfriend was sitting, and one of the ladies on the bus said, “Soldier, do you know that we're at war?” No, I didn't. “Well, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor today.” I didn't have any idea where Pearl Harbor was. And she said, “You better report to your station.” So, my girlfriend and I continued to her home in the Bronx and found her family huddled around a radio listening to the reports about the attack on Pearl Harbor. And her father said, “Charlie, do you think you're going to have to return back to Tuskegee right away?” And, I don't see why, because I'm at least six months away from graduation. And, sure enough, I left her there and I went a couple of blocks away to where my parents lived. And I found the same situation, they were huddled around the radio looking kind of worried, and my father asked me the same question. And I said, “Well, I don't think so, our training …..” But while we were there a telegram arrived from the commandant of ….Tuskegee, saying “Cadet Dryden report back to Tuskegee immediately.” So, I still had two days of leave left on my leave of absence, but next day of course I got on a train, returning to Tuskegee. So that's where I was on Pearl Harbor Day. I didn't feel very much connected with it because I was just a trainee. I knew eventually I'd go to war, but there was no immediate threat to me. INT: Now, how did you get into flying? CD: My dear, late departed mother used to tell me that when I was an infant, before I could talk, I used to take bits of paper and tear them into little bits, throw them in the air and try to say airplane, airplane, as described in my book. So it seems like when I first saw the light of day I had the urge to fly. Some people I guess want to be a fireman or a doctor or a cook or a musician. I wanted to fly. That was from my earliest infancy. INT: And what prompted you to volunteer for the Army? For the Army Air Corps? CD: Because it gave me an opportunity to fly. There had been no acceptance of applications from black Americans for Air Corps at the time. And when I read about the Air Corps beginning to accept applications, I rushed out to the recruiting office in downtown Manhattan, and got an application. I had done that before but it had been denied. But now the Army had agreed to accept their applications. As a result….Mrs. Roosevelt had visited Tuskegee in October of 1940 to check on a polio treatment center that she heard about at the VA hospital in Tuskegee. And while she was there, she saw airplanes flying around the campus area, and she asked, “Well, who's flying these airplanes?” And she was told, local people. “You mean, colored people?” “Why, sure.” And she said, “But I always heard colored people couldn't fly.” That was the result of a three year study…the students, officers and the faculties at the Army War College had conducted a study three years of the performance of black soldiers in World War I. It came to some very ridiculous, bizarre conclusions, the bottom line of which was that Negroes are a subspecies of the human family, without the ability, the capability, the psychological set-up and so forth of doing anything technical, highly technical, such as flying airplanes, or as ground support people, mechanics….radio people, to keep the airplanes flying. So that was the general attitude throughout the country, that blacks could not fly. And so she had that idea. Well, when she expressed that opinion, someone…told her that, “Well, Mrs. Roosevelt, we've been flying here for years.” And our backshafters…to explain that. In 1926 a black man by the name of Charles Alfred Anderson bought an airplane. He was 19 that year, and he couldn't find anybody in this country to teach him to fly. So, he solved his problem by teaching himself to fly. And we knew him, he was sort of our chief flight instructor when we were cadets. So, he explained to us that when he bought the airplane and could find nobody to teach him, he had a problem. Well, he found out that by turning on the motor of a propeller driven airplane, up until the time you turn on the motor to get the propeller to turning, it's just an inanimate object, just like this table or chair, there's no life or character at all. But when you turn on the motor, the propeller starts turning and the airplane starts to vibrate ever so slightly. The more power you feed to the engine, which is like stepping on the gas pedal of your car, the faster the propeller goes, and the more the airplane vibrates. If you give it full power, which is like floor-boarding your car, the propeller goes fiercely, fiercely around, and the airplane is just waiting to get off the ground, in fact, if you remove the ___ from under the wheel, the airplane will go down the runway and it'll take off. So, he said, “but I wasn't ready, the airplane was ready to go, but I wasn't.” He said it took him about six weeks of taxiing it back and forth, getting his confidence up, his feel of the airplane, and one day about six weeks after starting that, he said to himself, “Shoot, I can fly this thing.” And he gave it full power, he took off and he taught himself to fly, believe it or not. So, here's the man with whom Mrs. Roosevelt, when she's at Tuskegee, said, “I want to fly with you.” Now, she did, in spite of the objections of the Secret Service entourage that always accompanied the President or his family. And so, they flew, landed, and there's a picture of the two of them after landing, both of them big grin on their face, he because he'd just been thrilled by riding, flying the first lady of the land. And she because she was always a very liberal person, always promoting and supporting minority people, women, blacks, native Americans, and so forth. She was always against prejudice. So she had just had exploded the myth that colored people couldn't fly. And when she returned to the White House, more than likely, she pulled the President's coattails and probably said something like, “Franklin, now look here. I just flew with a black man, very well, very satisfied with it. And you are commander in chief of the armed forces, and by the stroke of a pen, you can direct the army to accept applications from black people.” And probably that was said, but I like to add my own little ….she probably also said, “And I'm your wife, and you'll do what I say.” But at any rate, when the applications were made available to us, and I'd read about it in the local newspaper, I rushed out to the recruiting station where I had been about twice before and had been denied. And I got the application and submitted it. I was less than twenty-one so my father had to sign approval. Six months later, I was called in for a physical exam and an oral questionnaire, if you will, by a board of three officers, passed them both, and then I received orders to report to Tuskegee on the 19th of August 1941. So that's how I got in. It's a roundabout answer but I had to give you the background. INT: Now what were you doing before you were accepted? Were you working, or had you been in school? CD: No, I was a college student, in engineering at City College of New York. I really wanted to be, I always wanted to be a pilot, so I figured well, if there're no black pilots in commercial ….or military, the next thing to do is to get into the design of airplanes. So I really wanted a degree in aeronautical engineering. But NYU was the only local university offering that degree, and its tuition was pretty high. My father, I, my family lived through the depression, this was back in the thirties, so it was all they could do to put the three of us through school. So instead of being able to go to NYU, I was able to get into City College where the tuition was practically free. But they did not have mechanical, I mean aeronautical, they had mechanical. So I was by, not by design I was in mechanical engineering. Wasn't doing too well at it, as a matter of fact, it turned out that was really not my cup of tea. And my grades reflected it. I'd been a good student up until then. Won math prize and all that in junior high school. But then when I got to college it was more the, I was advanced one year before my peers by going through a rapid advancement program, which wasn't a good idea eventually. It was a matter of pride, but at it turned out I was not mature in college. I was at least one year behind where I should have been. And the pace at City College was fierce. I mean, there were some brilliant students, one was a Jewish student, who really set a high pace. And I was just in by the skin of my teeth. So along came World War II and saved my face. I was able to say, I'm glad to fight for my country, before they kicked me out of college. And what happened was that, as a result of a tour of Europe by Colonel Charles Lindbergh in the late thirties, when he returned to the states, he reported to the military and to the Congress that he had observed that Germany was arming surreptitiously. They weren't supposed to arm after the Versailles Treaty of World War I, but Hitler and his gang were secretly arming the Hitler Youths and they were training a lot of aviators. And so when they decided to come out of the closet in open warfare, they just changed their civilian trained pilots into the Luftwaffe, and they had an instant fighting force, a very potent one. So Lindbergh reported that when he came back to the states and gave the alarm that we better start doing something because our armed forces had dwindled down to practically nothing between the wars. And so the Congress decided to begin a civilian pilot training program in the area of 1940 with units at a number of colleges around the country including five predominantly black colleges, Tuskegee, Howard University in Washington, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, West Virginia State, and another one, I've forgotten which one. But also at a number of the general colleges, the white colleges, including City College. So I volunteered for that and was accepted and got my private pilot's license through that program. So when the army decided to accept applications and train blacks, I sort of had a leg-up because I already had a private's license. So when I applied I was enlisted into the second class that went through flight training. We started with eleven and graduated three. And I think we were the smallest graduating class in the history of the Air Corps. The first class ahead of us started with thirteen and graduated five. And so it went. Every month there was a new class starting, and eight months later about one third of those who started completed, until by the time the program ended— you know it started on July 19, 1941 with the first class, and every month a class began, and the program closed down in June of 1946. The war was over, so it stopped training. By that time there were 994 black men who got their wings at Tuskegee, almost a thousand. And by the way, if I ever see you on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and you miss that question, I'm going to find you because you owe me a half million dollars….But that's how come I got into the military. INT: Now, tell us a little bit about the training at Tuskegee. Maybe go through a typical day. I know no two days were the same, but, try to give us an idea of what the training was like. CD: Well, in the primary phase, the first of three phases, was conducted at a field that still exists today. It's called Moton, M-O-T-O-N Field, about ten miles away from the Tuskegee University campus. It was named after the man who succeeded Booker T. Washington, who founded Tuskegee back in 1851, I think it was. So Moton Field is still in business. At that time Moton Field was just an open meadow. It didn't have any runways or anything. Even today it only has one. That's a sort of a footnote. Two or three years ago Congress passed legislature appropriating $29.1 million to bring Moton Field up to speed as a tourist attraction under the aegis of the Park Service. So that's where we started our training. And that's where Chief Anderson along with a couple of other black instructors were the instructors for the first class and my class. The number of instructors began to increase, eventually by the end of the war there were about thirty black men who were instructing in that program. And there were a couple of white instructors, too. But, now, so the typical day at the beginning of the program. The first class ahead of us, they had ground school, they had flying in the morning and ground school classes in aerodynamics and weather and Morse code and things like that in the afternoon. In the afternoon, the schedule flip-flopped, whereas we had been in ground school in the morning, we started, now wait a minute. We had flying in the afternoon, we had ground school in the morning. And then it would be the other way. And that went on until the program, with the primary phase, ended. At that point we were transferred from Moton Field and . . . we had been living in the barracks on the campus of Tuskegee. In fact, we cadets were in a converted enclosed bathhouse which covered the pool area and that's where the first three classes had bunk beds, double-deckers, all that sort of thing, while the main base was being built about eleven miles from campus. That base was built for the, well, about a million dollars, they built the base. Now that, today, you win that on a program, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” But in those days it was a lot of money and it took about a year for the base to be completed. So when we were transferred there, there were no barracks and we lived in “tent city,” we lived in these four men to a tent with a sort of a ____ and a little coal burner in the middle of the tent. Some nights like last night in Birmingham when the temperature's down to 22 it was freezing. But, anyway, that was all right. And as we were going to ground school on that new base that was being built, there were all kinds of construction machines that we had to dodge as they went lumbering by. And they were cutting deep furrows of mud, you know, all over the base. Eventually the barracks were built, the facilities on the flight line, the hangar and all those things, the tower and all were built. It became one of the most beautiful bases in the air force. It was really symmetrically designed and we were very proud of it. When the war ended, it was close down and the army allowed it to go to weeds. And, which is a tragedy because, I kinda think that because it had been believed at the outset, you know, we couldn't fly, we felt that we were being programmed to fail. They said, OK, ____ send us the best you have and we'll try to train ‘em. We don't think it's possible, but we'll try. So they started the program. Fast forward to the end of the war—the record we had was unmatched by any other outfit. We had a perfect record in terms of escorting bombers to target and back home. We never lost one, never. And no other outfit can meet, met that record. Which led eventually to President Truman desegregating the armed forces. But I'm getting way ahead of the story. The day, our days on base, the main base, where we did the basic phase of about ten weeks and when we finished that we did the advanced phase for about ten weeks. It was a very similar thing. You'd have ground school in one part of the day and fly in the other part of the day, with the other class, upperclassmen. And then the third class came along. So they did quite a bit of switching around, so each group was flying the aircraft in which it was then being trained, so that the others, our classes could go on and do their training and so forth. And eventually, uh, there were classes that were as many as 75 started. And about one third of each class finished. There was definitely a quota system operating. And so the ground schools consisted of the subjects I mentioned. As we went further on our training became more and more sophisticated. Navigation training was added, formation flying in the advanced phase, night flying, gunnery and all that sort of thing. So by the time the eight months program ended we were well rounded aviators, military aviators. And that was how it went. INT: What plane did you train on? CD: The first was a biplane called the PT-17. PT for Primary Trainer, PT-17. It was a biplane, two wings, open cockpit. Communications, there was none with the ground, but there was communication between the instructor in the front cockpit and the student in the back through a so-called, I've forgotten, some kind of tube. He would speak into a tube and there was a hollow tube that went to the back where you had it attached to your headset. So whatever instructions the instructor wanted to give you, he just hollered into the tube and you responded. As I said, there was no communication with the ground, no radio. When you finished primary, then you went into basic. And the basic, and the airplane in the primary had about 150 horsepower engine. When you moved to advanced, I mean to basic, you were in a BT, a roll-wing [?] mono plane, one wing with a sliding canopy, so you weren't out in the open air like you were in a primary plane. It was full canopy, with a heated cockpit. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't do well. But, advanced, added to the complexity was the fact that you had, you had a 400 horsepower engine which was more than twice the power of the primary airplane. You had a closed canopy. You still had fixed landing gear. You had a variable pitched propeller so that from the cockpit activating certain controls you changed the pitch of the propeller just like in a boat, well, not quite like in a boat, but anyway, for takeoffs and landings when you needed all the power, the pitch of the propeller was changed hydraulically so that it would get a deeper bite as each time the propeller went around on take off and landing. When you got up to cruise you changed the pitch of the propeller so that it didn't have to take such a big bite. Then when you finished there you, we advanced to the advanced phase and that was an AT-6, an Advanced Trainer-6 called popularly “The Texan” [?]. The Navy trained in the same time airplane. They called it the SNJ and they were all painted yellow, so they used to call it the “yellow peril.” And you went down to Pensacola, the sky was just full of the yellow perils. The airplane had a 600 horsepower engine and it had retractable landing gear which was a new feature. And it was in that phase that we learned night flying, instrument flying, we went to gunnery at a base in Florida, Eglin Field, where we learned our gunnery. Aerial gunnery, ground gunnery. And when you finished that one you, if you passed all your ground school subjects and all your aerial maneuvers, and we learned acrobatics and so forth, then you were licensed as a pilot and you had your wings pinned on . . . . So that in a nutshell was how the program went. INT: Now, when you had finished your training at Tuskegee, when were you assigned to your squadron, and what rank did you have when you left Tuskegee? CD: OK. When we graduated, we were commissioned as second lieutenants. We were assigned to squadrons immediately. I was happy that my two classmates and I were all assigned to the 99th Fighter Squadron, which was quite celebrated even at that—we hadn't done anything, we were just the first blacks in as military pilots. And there was whole lot of hype in the black press, I mean, the white press paid us practically no attention except for complaining that it was a waste of the nation's resources, and “they couldn't fly,” why waste this, you know training and all the rest of it. So we had a reputation to earn. But among the first classes that graduated, and the first class of graduates, flight graduates, three of them were assigned to the 99th Fighter Squadron to go overseas as a fighter outfit. And the other two men were assigned to the, the, uh, what's the name, the 332nd Fighter Group, which would ultimately have three squadrons, which turned out to eventually to be 301st, the 302nd, and the 30—no, I'm sorry, the 100th, the 301st and the 302nd Fighter Squadrons all together made up the 332nd Fighter Group, which overseas painted the tails of their airplanes, their P-51s, red and became known as the “red tails.” Those . . . Society of 99th Fighter Squadron which was the first one that went overseas were three of the first class, including then Captain Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who was a West Point graduate. And he and two of his classmates were assigned to the 99th. My class came along, and all three of our, I'm happy to say, were all assigned to 99. As the classes came out, the third class, four graduated, and, uh, let's see Raiford [?] was in the 99th, Knox [?] was in the 332nd, ____ was in the 332nd, and, oh, Roberts was in the 99. So of the, uh, you know, that's . . . anyway, by the time the first class graduated and got their wings was March of 1942. My class was April, and so forth. By September of 1942 we had enough graduates assigned to the 99th to make up a fighter squadron, 28 pilots. So we were ready to go overseas by October. We didn't have orders to go overseas until we had left Tuskegee on April 2, 1943, and went overseas. About five months later the 332nd went overseas and after they had been overseas about five months they picked up the 99th which by that time had a year's experience as veterans, and the 332nd became a four squadron fighter group, which is unusual. There were none other like that. But that, that was how, from training we were commissioned as second lieutenants and we were assigned to a fighting unit. INT: Now, a couple of questions. Number one, what became of the washouts? CD: That's a sad story for the washouts. Because, well, what happened to them in most cases, they became enlisted men and were trained as mechanics, or parachute riggers, or radio men or armorers [?], ordnance people handling the ammunition. Some became administrative clerks and so forth. And I say it's a sad story because, I have to use my imagination since I was not washed out, but I know, I imagine how I would have felt if I had left New York with a whole lot of hype in the neighborhood. You know, say, I would rather go and be a pilot. “I don't believe he can make it.” You know, “Who, him?”. . .'Cause I'd been building models all my life, and talkin' flying. And that's how, at that time, it was as unlikely, not implaus—it was not, uh, imaginable that a black person could be a pilot, much less a military pilot. It might have been as implausible as someone, a black person being president of the United States. So, uh, after having been accepted for training, of course, I'd been through the civilian pilot training, so I had, the neighborhood knew that I was a pilot, anyway, I'd been trained as a pilot, so they gave me the likelihood or the possibility of making it in the military. But they were, there were some dubious people in the neighborhood. OK, so go to Tuskegee, and coming back after completing your training as a licensed pilot with your wings and everything, then the doubts have disappeared. Next was, how would we do in combat, you know. One thing to fly an airplane, it's another to fly against an enemy who is determined to kill you, to shoot you down. And quite frankly, this is like a footnote almost, I had ____ myself of fear, something like the fear that President Roosevelt spoke about after Pearl Harbor when he had a fireside chat on the radio to his fellow Americans, and he said, because we were in shock. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Americans just went into a state of shock. We never believed that, number one, we could be attacked by nations across the Atlanta on one side and the Pacific. And we just thought the oceans were our country's buffer, not realizing that air power was in its infancy and would be able eventually to cross oceans, continents and so forth. So when that happened, Americans went into shock. President Roosevelt addressed the nation, trying to stiffen our backbone, saying Americans for America, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Well, I had a little feeling inside myself in terms of how will I react the first time I see an enemy aircraft with its guns blazing, firing at me with the intent to kill me. He didn't know me, I don't know him, but he's trying to shoot me down and kill me. Will I be inclined to run away from him, will I turn coward, and chicken and so forth? You don't know until you face it. You imagine, I'll be a ti-, as much a tiger as anybody else, but you don't know whether you're going to be a pussycat. It wasn't until the first time, and I happened to be leading a flight of six the first time we encountered the enemy in the air, and I saw the airplane with a big black swastika on it, and they were turning into us and their guns were firing. And there were six of us. None of us had shot down an enemy . . . we were brand new, babes in the wood. And every one of us had the motivation to decide to be the first black American to shoot down one of those SOB's. Ok? Whose philosophy was, you know, the Aryan supremacy, we're better than the whole world, and certainly than the black people. And every one of us had a brave desire to shoot, to be the first, because we knew we'd be historically heroes from then on. So we scattered. After them, not away from them. And my fears were laid to rest. I had no, I was a tiger and I knew I was a tiger. But those are some of the reactions as we were overseas. INT: Now, where was that first engagement? And when? CD: It was June 9th, 1943, over Pantelleria, it's an island off of Sicily. And, it's spelled P-A-N-T-E-L-L-E-R-I-A, pronounced Pantelleria. And when we used to refer to raids over the island, we'd call ‘em panty raids. [laughter] It's interesting about Pantelleria because it's the first time in military history that a ground target surrendered purely to air power. There were no ground troops, no amphibious invasion, nothing of that, they were just bombed, we bombed the hell out of them for about two weeks. Not just us, airplanes of all kinds, bombers, medium [?] bombers, high [?] bombers, fighter bombers. And eventually one day they waved a white flag, they surrendered, [speaks in Italian]. They had enough, and that's when air power . . ., well, before then, air power, the power of air power, the potential of air power, was ___ by the Germans, with their Blitzkrieg where they bombed Poland and France and Britain, people to their knees, and almost brought Britain to its knees, except for the very gallant and heroic RAF. But that's the first time, and of course our part in the bombing of Pantelleria was very much a part of it. My first mission was not in the air against aircraft, it was air-ground, because that's what the 99th was mostly involved in, hitting targets on the ground. And my very first mission was a dive bombing mission on Pantelleria. And as I rolled into the attack, aiming at my target, I was fascinated and almost mesmerized by shooting at this ground target. This is for real. And then I saw little red streaks going by my cockpit. These were tracers. I'm being shot at from the ground. I couldn't really believe that, from that [number of] bullets that we were flying into that, how could they possibly miss us? I expected any minute that one of them would hit my airplane and I'd go up in flames. But you didn't think about that until after you'd pull up off the target and you'd say, “Oh, my God, they could have shot me down.” INT: Yeah. What where you flying? What kind of . . . CD: B-40s. INT: B-40s. CD: Yeah, it's that kind right here. [picture] It was a good, it was a good aircraft attacker but it wasn't very good in the air against the German aircraft. From the time we entered combat in June of 1943 until the _______ in the beginning of 1944 in Italy, we only had one victory, one of our guys shot down a ____190 on a patrol mission. And we didn't have any other victories until several months later. But over _____, the Germans came down to our level. Before then they had been staying up pretty high so we didn't have a chance to engage them. But when we were attacking there, not their homeland, but they had bases in Sicily, then they had to come down to our level to protect their ground troops and so forth. And then the guys had an opportunity such that within a couple of days they shot down seventeen airplanes. So they turned the tide. And it was then that the military brass began to acknowledge, well, I guess they can shoot and fly and fight. And from that, and now, it wasn't until about three months after the 332nd had gone overseas that the air corps brass decided that they needed to expand the fighter[?] escort units, because our bombers were taking some horrendous losses, because they didn't have enough escorts to take them all the way to the target and all the way back home. So the 99th was, no, not the 99th, the 332nd, the three squadrons, 100, 301st, 302nd, were transferred from what they had been flying, B-39s, and coastal patrol, they were transferred into P-47s as escort fighters, which is a very good airplane high up, but down low it's not too good to defend itself. Great on air-ground. Well, the P-47s remained the escort aircraft about one month, and then it was decided, decided by the high brass that it, the P-47 did not have enough range to go all the way with the bomber [to the targets] and all the way home. So then the guys were transferred from the P-47 into the P-51 Mustang, which was the Cadillac of fighters at the time. But the Germans had . . . to the end of the war when they designed and put into action their jets, their twin jets, that the P-51s were excellent airplanes for all roles—air to air combat, air to ground attacks, escort and all that sort of thing. So it was when the guys got into the P-51 that they really began to shoot down airplanes. One guy shot down three airplanes in five minutes. One guy sank a destroyer with machinegun fire. And that's in the movie, if you've seen the HBO movie, “Tuskegee Airmen.” You see the actual ___ film from the airplane of [?] Pearson, on an actual mission. You see him flying at the destroyer and you see the destroyer going down from machinegun fire. INT: Wow. CD: One of our guys became an ace over the period of the war . . . He was in Birmingham yesterday. One of the guys was 103 [?], who on the mission to Berlin right near the end of, a week or two before the war in Germany ended, in May of 1945. That day eight German jets were shot down by American pilots, and three of the eight were Tuskegee Airmen. Now, two of those three have died. Earl [?] from Cleveland, and Charles [?] from St. Louis. But Dr. Roscoe Brown, who later became president of _____, he's still living, and he was in Birmingham yesterday. He shot down a German jet. INT: Wow. Now, where was your base that you were flying out of? CD: In Italy, Ramitelli is the name, R-A-M-I-T-E-L-L-I, Ramitelli, south of Rome, I think. I was back in the states, so I was not, I was back in the states as a combat tactics instructors along with seven other guys who had been sent back to the states. Before the 332nd left the states, they left from Selfidge Field, Michigan, on Christmas Eve of 1943 and went overseas. Before they left, eight of us had been sent back from the 99th to be combat tactics instructors, to teach the guys coming out of Tuskegee—every month, a new class graduated with brand new wings and no combat experience. So to pass on to them what we had learned in fighting the Germans for the five months we had been overseas, we were sent back for that purpose. Getting a little bit ahead of the story, the eight of us ended up, first as Selfidge Field, Michigan, where we tried to integrate the Officers Club, and we were told to stay out of the building, not to go in there. Well, the strategy that we guys adopted was this: that after the evening, the supper meal, we would go to the evening movie, and after the movie was over, about eight o'clock, we would go to the club in random groups of three, two, one, five, so it'd look spontaneous, and try to use the club. A lot of guys said, oh, yeah, they couldn't do that to us, and so forth. But when the deal [?] went dry and there were only three guys that were going into the club, I happened to be on leave that day. They tried to do it the first time on New Year's Day. The war was over so there was no such thing as holidays. And I was on leave with my new bride who was a nurse at Tuskegee, whom I met the night that we left Tuskegee and went overseas. Yeah, it was one of those, “Where have you been all my life?” We fell in love, and when I came back we got married. But at any rate, we were married when I came back on November 16th. OK, so we were having our first Christmas leave together, she was a nurse at Tuskegee, when the guys decided to do this. So on New Year's Eve she returned to duty at Tuskegee and I returned to duty the next day. Well, when I returned to duty, the guys told me what had happened. And so I said, well, I'm in it with you, you know. The morning of the first, the lieutenant colonel, Charles Gale [?], who was commander of the training unit, who was the guy who would be training white officers, he saw me in the flight line, in the operations building, in the locker room. And he said—I was a first lieutenant, and because I had been in the first class, I was sort of senior ranking among all the guys that were at Selfidge Field—so he said to me, he said, “Lieutenant Dryden, welcome back from your leave. How was it?” And I said, “I had a good time, how was yours?” He said, “OK until last night.” Well, the guys had told me what they had done. And I acted like I hadn't heard anything. I said, “What happened last night, Colonel?” And he told me about how the three guys had gone to the club and they encountered the base commander, Colonel Boyd [?] and the same lieutenant colonel, Gale, at the entrance to the club. And the base commander told them, this club is for whites only, and not to come in there, you have a club in the barracks, which is a bar and a billiard, a pool table. So they said, “Do you understand?” And they said, “Yes, we do.” “Now you have to leave the club.” So they [said], “Is that a direct order?” They said, “Yes,” so they left the club. Because you see, we all knew that if you disobey an order or a superior officer in peacetime, you're flirting with a long jail sentence. In wartime, it's treason for which you could shot to death by a firing squad. And they knew that, so when they were ordered out of the building, they left. And that wasn't the end of the story. The next night, another group was going to do that. And I said, I'm going to go with ‘em. Well, when we left the movie to go to the club, I looked around and there was one guy on my left and on my right, and that's it, just the three of us. So, my base commander, I mean my training squad commander, Colonel Gale, has discussed this with me that morning in the flight line, and he said, “You understand that, I want you to understand that as the senior ranking officer among the black officers on the this base, I expect for you to set the example. You understand?” I said, “Yes, sir, I do.” I was churning on the inside. All day, all that afternoon, I just couldn't, I was nervous about what we were about to do, but I was determined to join the bunch. So that night after the movie, the three of us . . . we went in the entrance and who do I run into? Colonel Gale. He turned the color of this sweater, he turned beet red. . . . He said, “I thought you said you understood.” I said, “Colonel, I understood what you said, but I don't agree with it.” Man! There's an . . . and there's an army regulation two ten dash ten paragraph 19-C that specified that any officer assigned to a base is not only privileged to use the Officers Club but obligated to support the club with his dues, his presence, and his _____. So, there's the Officers Club, we're officers, this is army regulation, so we're . . . “Goddammit, I'm telling you to get out of this club right now.” “Is that a direct order?” Said, “Yes, it is.” So we left. Well, every night the same thing happened for about five nights. So finally, out of frustration, the base commander closed the club for everybody, black and white alike. So we felt that we had won a victory. The whole thing is that, at . . . Major General, he looked like _ _ _ _ _, he had a big mustache, ah, what is it, it'll come to me, he caused the whole training unit to be transferred from Selfidge Field, Michigan, outside of Detroit, to Roosevelt Air Force Base fifty miles west of Charleston, in the deep South. We were transported there by a secret, by train, a sealed train, and we ended up there after an overnight trip from Selfidge, up through Canada, then down through the state of New York and _____ Valley, down to Washington, D.C., all the way down to South Carolina. And when the train came to a stop out in the boondocks, we didn't see any buildings or anything, we thought that meant we were being interned the way the Japanese Americans had been out in California. There were, about every hundred yards there was an armed guard with a carbine, and so forth. So we thought we were being interned. But we got off the train, found out that the training was supposed to be resumed at Walterboro army base. Well, on that base, there were German prisoners of war who could do things we couldn't do. At the base theater, they could sit anywhere they pleased. We had to sit in the segregated, colored section. At the base PX, they could go into the building to . . . we couldn't go in the building, it was off limits to us. We were not considered, we were the enemy. I'm getting way ahead of my story, maybe I better wait for you to ask some… INT: Fine, let's go ahead. CD: I was so outraged and so enraged and so programmed that even today as I relate this to you, I feel like Pavlov's dog, with the ringing of the bell and the dog, after awhile you don't feed him, you ring the bell and it starts the saliva. Well, when I think about [pause] contemplating how our country treated us and we had just been defeating, we had lost one of our pilots. Honoring and respecting the enemy more than we were respecting, I just lose, I lost it, I absolutely lost all discipline, self-control, and I decided, “These rednecks don't think we can fly, so I'm going to have to show them.” So on a Saturday, I [was leading] three guys flying P-39s across the base, buzzing, real low, the way we did in combat. The idea being that when you come back from a combat mission you probably, possibly are low on fuel, you may be out of ammunition, you might leak from dogfights, you're physically tired, so the idea is to get your flight on the ground as quickly as you can and not fly a square pattern. For them it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. So the thing is you come in very low, you peel off, and the idea is to, by the time the number one man is at the end of the runway, to turn out [?], the number four man is taxiing down. So it's one, two, three, four. So ostensibly, that's what I was training the guys to do. But inside I was just making a statement, if you will. And the next day, Sunday, I still was full of venom, and, and, and anger. So I decided to demonstrate attack on a water tower, ____ tower. See, the Germans loved to put machineguns around the perimeter of water towers because then if you tried to attack something in a town, you'd, as you'd come in, they'd ____ on you as you were coming in. So the thing to do is to knock out the _____ tower. _____ standing for, the German was ______, meaning anti-aircraft, ok. So I was demonstrating this using the water tower in the middle of Walterboro, South Carolina. It's still there, I went and visited there the other day, demonstrating how you come in low and if the tower's right here, you come in low and then you pull up in time to fire on it, and after you fire, you get back on the deck low, and you go, doing what the British describe as ______, in other words you don't fly straight level, you're changing altitude and so forth. So somebody on the ground getting a bead on you, you're constantly changing altitude, it's what they call _______. All right, well, both of those actions, on Saturday and Sunday were against regulations and I was grounded. And I was general court martialed. The first trial, I was, well, first of all, this is the content of this—you haven't read this book yet, you have [addressing two people in the interview]. I'm going, it'll take you thirty seconds to read it, but I won't, I think I'll take a look at it to see how short it is physically. I can recite the words for the purpose of the tape. The title of the chapter is “Dismissed” and it reads as follows: “The accused will rise and face the court. Does the accused to have anything to say before sentence is pronounced?” “No, sir.” “Having found First Lieutenant Charles Walter Dryden, a member of blah-blah-blah-blah guilty as charged, violating the 96th article of war”—which is like a catch-all. If they can't get you for anything else, they get you for that—this general court martial sentences Lieutenant Dryden to be dismissed from the United States Army Air Corps.” And that's the end of the chapter. Now, what did dismissal mean? It meant a dishonorable discharge, that's what it meant. You wouldn't be able to hold a federal job, and all that disgrace, all that sort of thing. Well, that was the sentence. The reason, that, well, there were two counts. One was buzzing the base on Saturday, and buzzing the town on Sunday. I was acquitted of buzzing the town because I came up with a big fat lie which the court somehow or other didn't recognize the truth of that lie, and they acquitted me. But on the charge of buzzing the town [means base] on Saturday there was no way I could be acquitted because the control tower operator, when he was on the witness stand, under oath, he was asked, “How low—excuse me—who was [unclear] flight when they crossed the base.” He said, “Sir, the tower is 75 feet above the ground, and I had to look down at ‘em as they went by.” So we, all four of us, were pretty low. And so I was convicted, I was sentenced to be dismissed from the service. Fortunately for me [blows nose], pardon me, there had been a legal technicality in the first trial. I had been forced to use my one peremptory challenge to get rid of a member of the court who had been heard to say before the trial, “Dryden is guilty as hell as we're going to throw the book at him.” Well, that's certainly not an unprejudiced opinion for someone going, who's going to hold you innocent until proven guilty. He had me judged already. And so . . . I tried to use a challenge for cause, meaning I would have to indicate why do you want to challenge this man off the court. And my reason was because he had been heard to express a pre-judged opinion. Well, the lawyer on the court, there's only one legal, lawyer on general court martial, everybody else was just a run of the mill officer, but the lawyer acts as a judge, and he rules on the validity of certain things, such as whether a cause given for a challenge is valid. They call him the trial judge advocate. The T.J. in my court decided that my reason for wanting to challenge this captain was hearsay and therefore could not be held valid. But, he had to go. I had to get that man off the court. Because he had made up his mind before he had heard the evidence. So I was forced to use the one, every defendant has one peremptory challenge, which you don't have to have—I just want you off the court. You don't have to say I don't like your looks, I don't like the way you sounds, I hate your guts, off the court. “I want you off the court, you've got to go.” Well, I was forced to use that one challenge to get rid of this captain. The higher reviewing authorities, noting that in the proceedings of the trial, felt that as a defendant my rights had been infringed, so they granted me a second trial. . . . [pause in tape] OK. I was granted a second trial, for the buzzing of the town, I'm sorry, of the base, and there's no way I could have been acquitted from that because of the sergeant's testimony, the tower operator's testimony. But I was granted a second general court martial trial. All the members of, you see, the members of the first trial all knew me. Two of my squadron mates who had come back as instructors were on that court, and there were five white officers. But they were officers assigned to the base, so they all knew me. The second trial, however, was total strangers, never seen me before, and so forth. And the trial was held in the city of Charleston somewhere. Well, hearing the second testimony and all, I was convicted a second time, but instead of being sentenced to be dismissed from the service with a dishonorable discharge, I was sentenced to be fined $110 a month for three months, confined to the base, that means I couldn't leave the base for three months, and suspended from promotion consideration for a year. As it turned out, it was seven years before I was promoted to captain, but I was just delighted still to be on active duty long enough to remain and retire as a lieutenant colonel after twenty-one years. And I've never really thought about it until very recently, but I really . . . I don't believe there was anybody else in the history of the armed forces of the United States who's had two general court martials, convicted of both of them and still was able to retire as a lieutenant colonel—I don't think so! But seriously, I've often wondered, if I had had a clean record, without those two general court martials, what my career would have been like. I'm sure I could have made, at least made colonel, because, a full colonel, because I could have been promoted to colonel after I had been promoted to lieutenant colonel in my last year of active duty, would have been my last year of active duty in 1961, except that in '61, in '61 the German, the Berlin Wall went up . . . it froze all the . . . no retirement, no, you know, end of enlistment, nobody goes anywhere. And so I was forced to stay for an additional year until the freeze thawed and people could leave. Well, by that time, my last assignment, what had been my last assignment, was as an ROTC instructor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And when the, when my retirement was frozen, by that time, my replacement had already been programmed to come from France to Howard and become the PAS, the professor of [?], and I would have been retired. But that was stopped. So now with this . . . reporting to duty, so we . . . about four months and then I was transferred to Air Defense Command Base in Fort Lee, Virginia. While I was at Fort Lee, I retired as a major, and when I reported to Fort Lee from headquarters, air force, I was promoted to lieutenant colonel. OK. So now when I can retire, there's no freeze on retirement, I was asked by my major command, which was Air University, based in Maxwell Field, Montgomery, Alabama, a letter was sent to me asking, do you still want to retire. And I said, you bet your life, because Vietnam was building up, and I had already been in World War II and Korea. So I said, yes, I think I want to retire. And they, would you consider the strong possibility that if you withdraw your request for retirement that you've probably made the full colonels list in about three years. And I said, thank you very much, bye. Oh, I might have survived a combat tour in Vietnam but then again I might have been shot down and spent seven years in Hotel…whatever. So, I retired, I had had twenty-one years, and I just consider myself very lucky to have received that rank with honor. I was retired with an honorable discharge. And as I say, I've never really thought about it but I've had two general court martials . . . Some people when they read my book, read Chapter 1 and say, “How could that be, you were dismissed.” Because now if you look at Chapter 2 there's a picture from a newspaper article which indicates that I've been dismissed from the service. And people look at that and . . . I have to explain as I did to you. INT: Now, how long were you on, or involved in combat actions in Italy? For about five months? Is that correct? CD: Well, up until the end of the war. INT: So, did you go back to Italy? CD: No, I didn't ever go back, I stayed in the states, as an instructor. The unit had come back. I was the first in October and the other three in November. It was October 8. Some of us got married as soon as we got back. I married my nurse, in fact, when my airplane coming back from combat landed in Miami, I called her at Tuskegee, and she said, “Where are you? You sound so close.” I said, in Miami. Oh, she's so excited. “Are you coming by to get me soon.” “No, what I'm going to do first is report to Mitchell Field in New York and get my orders, and then you come up to my parents home in the Bronx. And just wire me as to when you're arriving.” And so a day or so later here comes this telegram, “Meet me at Pennsylvania Station,” such and such a time. And I met her, and so forth. Well, the other three guys who got married, all of them decided to stay on with their brand-new brides. A couple of guys went back immediately with the fighter group, with Colonel Davis and Lieutenant Raiford and Lieutenant Connell [?]. Both of them were first lieutenants. And Colonel Davis, the commander, well, the former commander of the 99th and now the commander of the 332nd, at Selfidge Field, he spoke to each of us individually. When he spoke to me, he said, “Glad to see you, Dryden. How's the squadron doing? I've been reading you,” et cetera. He said, now, if you continue, if you volunteer, because our orders had been changed from being assigned to the 332nd to go right back overseas that we were assigned to an outfit, a training outfit to remain in the states and train these guys, each month another group coming through. He said, “now, your orders have been changed and the only way I can get you to go back with me is if you volunteer.” He made this promise, I understand from the other guys, the same promise he made to me. He said, “If you continue to perform the way you did when I was the commander overseas, there's a very good chance that within the year you'll be a squadron commander as a major.” We were first lieutenants at the time. I said, “Colonel Davis, what a dilemma.” He said . . . I had always admired this man long time before I went to Tuskegee. I had read this black man who was a graduate of West Point. And to me anybody who graduated from West Point of whatever color was almost one step below God. Anyway, if a black man did it, he was half a step from God. And so, I, he was my hero, from years before, when I was a kid. And for him to make an offer to me, and he wanted me to go back with him, it was, if my wife wasn't such a cute lady, and . . . I would have gone back overseas with him. I don't know what my fate would have been, but anyway, I chose to stay in the states, and the other guys who got married chose to stay in the states. A couple of guys who stayed in the states, after about six months in Walterboro, South Carolina, they decided to go back overseas, with the 99th. And, when the war ended in Europe, the guys who were overseas were coming back to the states to start a brand new composite outfit, partly bomber pilots, partly fighter pilots, and then go fight the Japanese. And before they could be deployed overseas, the Japanese surrendered. And when I make presentations, I add a little footnote that the history books will tell you the Japanese surrendered because of two A-bombs on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki. Oh, I like to think the Japanese surrendered when they heard the black pilots were coming. Always gets a reaction from the audience. But, that's what happened. Now, that outfit was named the 477th Bomber Group, medium bomber group. It was supposed to fly B-25s, the same airplane that Jimmy Doolittle flew off a carrier and bombed Tokyo within three months after Pearl Harbor, just to let the Japanese know, “We're going to bloody your nose. You may think you may have knocked us out, but you're going to get yours.” That kind of airplane. Well, oh, there were 450 of us who fought the Germans, and you might very well ask, what about the rest of the 992 who got their wings. Most of the rest of them were assigned to the 477th, see they were flying B-25s so you had to have a pilot and a co-pilot, you had to have a flight engineer, a navigator, radio man, and two gunners, one on each side. So it took a longer time to train them, and so the war ended before they got overseas. Well, in the course of their training, they were at Truman [?] Field, Indiana, outside of _____, Indiana. And they had to go through the same nonsense we did at Walterboro. They were told, they decided as we did at Selfidge Field, that they wanted to use the Officers Club. So they tried to use it. The base commander said, ordered them not to come back to that club. And he wrote, he issued an order, requiring each of the officers to read it and then sign it, saying, I've read it, understand, and I will comply with the order not to attempt to use the club. Well, these men were not about to accept that kind of discrimination without putting up a fight. So they decided to try to invade the club one night. The Officer of the Day, who's in charge of the base when the base commander's away at night, he ordered them not to come in, and some of them jostled their way past him and into the club. And so, they were required to sign this order, saying they would comply. A hundred and four of them refused to sign it. Now as I said earlier, if you, if you refuse a direct order in peacetime you're flirting with a long jail term. You do it in wartime, it's treason. You could be shot to death. These men knew that. So they put not only their career, but their lives are on the line. [Not only] during wartime, but in this country. That took all kinds of courage. And, and they were written, given serious letters of reprimand, which remained in their records all until 1995, when we had an annual convention here in Atlanta. And one man had, John ____, and he was court-martialed for what he did. He was accused of having jostled the officer as he was going into the club, which was like an assault on his person, so he was court-martialed. And that stayed on his record. And the other men, the other hundred and three men had these letters of reprimand on their record, for all these years, until 1995. We had the convention here in Atlanta. And, I'm very proud to say that a protégé of mine, who had been a student in ROTC when I was teaching there at the end of the fifties, the Honorable Rodney Coleman [?], who in '95 was Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for maintenance and installation or something. He used his good offices to have this whole thing expunged from the record of all of these men. It was such an emotional thing, there wasn't a dry eye in the place. Everybody was whoopin' and hollerin' and so forth. ________ was our national president at the time, and he's the guy who had been court-martialed, had left the service, became a law-, I mean he got a law degree but he could not pass the bar, he could not practice law for all of those fifty years. And his record was cleared up. So, I mention that because these were some Tuskegee Airmen who didn't get overseas during World War II, but they fought the battle right here in this country. And they, they need to be saluted, as they are nowadays. They are referred to as the Famous One Hundred and Four. I wasn't in that, I was in Walterboro, South Carolina. But that's part of the story. INT: Now, why, after you go through two court martials, you had . . . CD: My court martials . . . INT: Yeah. You had gone through those two court martials, you had suffered from all this, you were not allowed to use the Officers Club. What made you work to stay in the Army Air Corps after all that? CD: That's a good question. It related to the basic question we all face. Well, why did you want to fight for a country that treats you and your people the way it does? Well, and also, another question is, How do you account for having an unmatched record, that you did. You never lost a bomber. The significance of that, of course, is the fact that when you lost a B-17 or a B-24, which is what we escorted, you lost ten American lives. And I had it said to me, a number of times, most dramatically perhaps last year this time in El Paso, Texas, at Fort Dix, where I had a book signing, in the PX. While I was sitting at the desk, this guy came up, a white guy, and he had an Air Force cap on, he looked as old I did, and he asked me, “Where you in the outfit?” And I said, Yes, I was. The guy started crying, the tears were coming out of his eyes. And he related to me how, on a mission to Vienna, his airplane had been shot up, they were straggling, they couldn't keep up with the formation, and the pilot of the airplane was calling, “May Day, S.O.S., help, we need help.” And [?] the red tails, the Tuskegee Airmen, in the area, two of them came over, and sat in on each side of them and escorted them all the way home safely. And he went on to say, if it hadn't been for you guys, I wouldn't be sitting here. He said, “Because we'd have been shot down for sure. And as a result of having gotten us home safely, I've had children, and grandchildren, and if it hadn't been for you . . . my family owes you men our past, our present, and our future.” Well, I started to cry. I'm an emotional person anyway. But, anyway, it gives you pause to wonder, and I've been asked, and my buddies have been asked, in their experiences tracking audiences, “Why is it that you continued to persevere the way you did?” And I would say, a couple of reasons. One is, our commanding officer, West Point graduate, now a four star general, President Clinton pinned his fourth star on him in 1998, at the White House. He said, to the group, the 332nd, “If you lose a pilot don't come home.” Now, that was what your parents said to you when you were in school, was “You get anything less than an A, on any subject, you don't live here anymore. Just don't bother to come home with it.” That's what he told us, in effect. We don't know what he would have done if we'd lost one, because we never lost one. That's one thing. But more importantly is that we knew we dare not fail. If we failed, those who opposed us and that included from the very top of the Air Corps, General Henry “Hap” Arnold [ck] and all the ranking officers, people in Congress and so forth, who felt that we could not fly. And if we failed, they would, we would provide them with the quote unquote proof . . . “We asked you, you harassed us until we finally agreed to train some of your men. We asked you to send us the best you had. You sent us the best you had, and they failed, like we told you they would. So don't bother us anymore.” We could not have provided that. So many times when the ____ were on the ground, we were flying, trying to find a target. If we couldn't find our target because they were covered by cloud, we'd go find a target of opportunity. But we always produced something, so that they could not say, “Well, we told you they're cowards, you can't depend on,” and so forth. The previous question you asked me, though, why would you continue to defend a country that treated you that way. This is best answered by one of our guys who became maybe the most popular or famous, the first black four star general, Daniel “Jackie” James, who, when he was asked that question at one of the colleges he was speaking to, I understand he said, “Because America is my country. It's so simple. I was born here, I was raised and educated here. My parents paid their taxes, and I would pay my—this is my country like anybody else's.” Different from other cultural groups whose ancestors came, integrated here, voluntarily, my people got here against their will. So that makes us even more my, I have as much, almost as much a vested interest in this country as the native Americans who were here when the so-called explorers “found” this country. They didn't find anything. There were people here already. And so, I have as much a stake in America as anyone else, if not more. But then also, our thinking then, that America would someday change and live up to its promises in the Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to the Constitution, and so forth, that this is the land of the free and home of the brave, or something, where, with liberty and justice for all, and the ability to pursue happiness like anybody else, that someday this nation will live up to those words. And it so has. After our unmatched record, President Truman, with his no-nonsense attitude, said, “This is nonsense. Do away with desgre-,with segregation.” Well, that led to the civil rights movement, it led to court cases that did away with segregation in public transportation, in education, and so on and so forth. So that day is coming, it's still coming, it's not there yet. Your minority group, women, has yet to be freed from the nonsense of “you get paid less money than he is for the same for the same work.” That ain't right. So, those are the reasons why I, for one, persisted believing in America. It worries me a little bit, I must say, because I have a book up here, which would be entitled, “Thank God I'm not young, anymore.” I have eight-one years behind me, and on balance and by and large, mine has been an idyllic life. I have not had any real serious problems, physically or what have you. I encountered Jim Crow discrimination, but it was very low level as compared to Emmett Till, who was killed in Mississippi, because he whistled at a white woman. Or, the Scottsboro boys, and on and on and on. I never experienced it. Nor did my parents. There is a difference in my case and in theirs as citizens. When I was, my parents were not, did not, my ancestors did not come through the heart of slavery in this country. My parents did not go through that. They were raised in Jamaica, which had its own form of slavery until the British eliminated slavery in 1832. So, my forebears didn't go through the horrors of the Mississippis and the Georgias and the Louisianas and so forth. So there's a different perspective. But I can very much empathize with my colleagues who did come through, whose ancestors came through the slave trade and all that sort of thing. Nevertheless, all of us agree that this is our country, and we owe it our allegiance. It owes us respect, and it's coming little by little. More and more. Like I just came from Birmingham, where back in the sixties is where you had the bombing of Sixteenth Street Church, killing those four little girls. In fact, I had a book signing in Morrow, at Barnes and Noble last Saturday. There were a number of black authors, you know, Black History Month. And on my right was a man who wrote a book called “Bombingham,” and it was about Birmingham, which was known as “Bombingham.” And the experience I've just had for the last four days in Birmingham showed a complete turnaround. This is a state where, as you know, Governor Wallace stood in the doorway and said, “Segregation yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Segregation forever.” You don't find that anymore. Just retired is the chief Marshall, Phillip Marshall, who's a black man, whose father was a Tuskegee Airman. There are all kinds of signs of the change of attitude, of the people in Birmingham, in Alabama. Things happened in the last four days that I never thought I'd live to see. There was a time when for a black person to be seen embracing a white woman would have meant his death, automatically. And yet I, and in those days when there were some liberal women like Mrs. Roosevelt who might want to embrace you, you would shy it off, “no, no, don't do that, you might cost me my life.” And yet, there were so many hugs and kisses and so forth, yesterday, that it became, it made me realize that America's getting there, little by little. They're, well, I'll you what was one of the very heart warming and emotional things. Vonetta Flowers, who won the Gold Medal. She was in Birmingham, I saw her last night, I hugged her last night. And there were so many people saluting her and celebrating her, that I said to one of the guys, I said, “Why, this world has changed.” I'm glad I lived long enough to see it. But I said earlier I began to say, that I'm worried about America, because there are things happening here that worry me about the immaturity of our population. There are so many things that are happening now that I don't think should be happening. And this is a personal opinion. Right now there's a trial taking place involving Yates, the woman who's drowned five children. I used to think Susan Smith was bad enough . . . but this woman's drowned five. We had the case about three years ago in Conyers where this young man, because his girlfriend broke up with him, went on a shooting spree. I had the same girl, well, I haven't mentioned Jackie before, but I was going with Jackie, and the same day that I went to Pearl Harbor, to the hospital, that girlfriend. Well, she came to visit me at Tuskegee with her mother, spent a week and so forth, and I thought we were going to get married. But when she went back to New York, when I put her back on the train to send her back to New York, I never saw her again. Because, see, absence makes the heart grow fonder for somebody else. And so, that affair broke up. So I've been jilted, as you might say. But I've never had a thought to go out and hurt somebody because I've been disappointed. When I was raised by my parents, there were four, there were three principles whereby their raised my brother, who's six years younger than I, and my sister's eleven years younger than I. Number one, acknowledge and obey God; secondly, never disgrace this family; and thirdly, get a good education. Nowadays, [people] do things which absolutely appall me, as what they do in terms of disrespect for their own family, for adults everywhere. Shut off the camera for a minute. There are too many cases, there are too many adults who have abdicated their responsibility in raising a family, and that's where we're put on earth to do, raise kids. So, some people will say, “I don't know what to do about” a little child . . . What do you mean you don't know what to do with them. They come from this size and you go, and even when they're that size you don't know what to do with them? I advocate corporal punishment, but I don't mean like the Church of God, worship, take the children, hang ‘em up and beat ‘em. I don't mean that. I have, and I'm getting off the subject, but you're getting a chance to see inside of me a bit. I have a ______ theory of child-raising. And it is this. Until a child, of whatever culture and language, learns that language, you can, “Don't do this” until you're blue in the face. They don't know what the hell you're saying. You could growl at ‘em, you could grunt like Beavis and Butthead, and go grunting at each other . . . depending on what you're talking about. So, what you have to do, is like . . . you have to introduce to their brain the connection between the impetus of the stimulus of pain and the words that you're speaking, whether it be Russian, or Yiddish, or Spanish, or whatever it is. Not until you do that do they know what you're talkin' about. So, my granddaughter, Morgan, who's now fourteen, when her mother was divorced, when the granddaughter was less than one, hadn't learned how to talk yet—we had a cat. So Morgan used to observe the cat crawling over to the tray next to the refrigerator and eat out of the solid food part and drink the water and go about its business. So . . . she thought it was a good idea. So I saw her one day, because we had a swinging door from the dining room to the kitchen, and I happened to go in through the swinging door, and I saw her crawling over to the, and grab a handful of solid food and get ready to eat it. I said, “Morgan, don't do that.” Morgan heard my voice enough to turn around and look, see it, didn't know what I was saying. So she proceeded to . . . reach, and I said, “Morgan, don't do that.” She still didn't understand me. The third time she . . . I said, “Morgan [raises voice], don't do that.” And spanked her hand. At that instant, that child learned that much English, because the brain said to her, “We feel pain. We just heard the word . . . or whatever. We connected the sounds and the pain.” And says to Morgan, don't do that again, unless you like pain. Nobody likes pain. You may say, well, that's cruel. Maybe so, but that's the way Nature teaches us. When you see a flame of a fire, especially on a hot, a cold day, and it's warm, there's pretty yellow flames, and you must feel like you want to touch it. And you do. Do you ever do that again in life? Never! So, in a very cruel manner, Nature teaches you . . . certain stimulus that you don't do. You don't jump off a building. I mean, like a lemming, you don't go running off a cliff. You know what would happen to you. So, unfortunately in my view, there are not enough parents, or people who are raising children, who understand the basic principles of child-ra-, of programming, a human being. In our language, in the art form of cartoons, which is the best way, I think, one of the best media for training young children, pre-teenage, teenage, older ones. I understand a lot of history books use the cartoon form of teaching history and so forth. And it's a good way to get information across to youngsters. Well, about five years ago, excuse me, I saw the Simpsons. I think that was when it was introduced. And I read out it, and I watched them, and I saw how these youngsters disrespect their parents and older people, and so forth. And I was appalled because it would never have occurred to me when I was a youngster to talk back to or, you know, an adult. In fact, now I'm very normal, so there were times when my father ticked me off, and times when I hated his guts, but I learned early on that I would go to another room out of earshot, and I'd call him every name in the book. He never heard it. And that saved my bacon [?]. Okay. Well, it's a simple thing like that. You just behave yourself according to what you know the consequences will be if you don't. Okay. So here's the Simpsons, five years ago, which became and still it a very popular cartoon show, with the kids still being very disrespectful. That wasn't the end of the line. The next one was Beavis and Butthead. These two characters who like cavemen oftentimes communicated by grunts and growls and groans. I thought, are we going back to the caves? All right. Very popular show. The rest is South Park. About two years ago I learned about South Park, or maybe it was three years ago. I was reading the review of the upcoming offerings on TV for the fall season. It described that among the new offerings the most popular among kids was South Park. It described the characters, very profane and so forth. The most popular character was the most profane, Mr. ______ described as a, excrement. I couldn't believe what I was reading. So I decided to check it out. So I would not be going on hearsay. So I watched it, from about October, Mr. ____ didn't appear until about a week before Christmas. Sure enough, Mr. _____ was a turd. [interviews chuckle] He had on a Santa Claus cap [laughter] and he was taking a bath in[?] a cup of coffee with an infant on a baby's chair . . . Where are we going? Where are we going? Where's it going to end? We must be like Rome and Greece and Egypt and Britain and Germany and so forth, going down the drain, rapidly. In everything I see, I see this kind of sign of decadence, pure decadence. And I'm not a holier-than-thou, I've had more moments, I've had things that I'm going to have to answer for in a few years when I come before the Bar of Justice. But I tell you one thing. I am glad I am not in Susan Smith's shoes, or Andrea Yates' shoes, because He's going, He or She, whoever the divine power happens to be, is going to say, I gave you five beautiful children. What did you do with them? Where are they? What did you do with them? Of course, he knows what she did. I don't think the plea of insanity is going to work in that court up there, I don't think so. Although she may get off with that plea in man's court. I'm very disturbed about the direction we're going in. This next book of mine, which I told you the title, “Thank God I'm not young anymore,” will have, initially was going to have three parts, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good would cover my eighty years behind me that I've lived through and describe just the very good things I have experienced, many of them involving people I've never met, but with whom I shared the air of this planet, the environment, the social environment of this planet in my lifetime. And they've enriched my life, made it very worthwhile. The bad will cover things like I described in terms of our social environment, the abdication of responsibility by adults, the actual returning our civilization to the time of the dinosaurs and then beyond. The ugly is all the heinous acts that we have observed that are going on, and getting worse. One of the things that I'm going to harp on is, whatever became of, whatever became of the adage that, “there's no greater love than a mother's love for her child.” Whatever became of sportsmanship? and in that one I'm going to cover things like, about five years ago, Sandy Alamor, the shortstop of Cleveland, I think, spat in the face of an umpire. How disgusting! You know, when I was growing up in New York, if you spat on the street, you were, you got a ticket, you know. To spit in somebody's face. That's not bad, that's not the worst. Playing a basketball game, Dennis Rodman, going for the ball, fell into the crowd. And knocked over a photographer, whom he kicked . . . That's not the worst. Mike Tyson bit not one ear but two ears of Evander Holyfield. Whatever happened to sportsmanship? What happened to respect for other? When I was a youngster there were four classes of individuals whom you'd better respect. All priests and nuns, you couldn't miss them because they wore the typical habit. All senior citizens, you showed them respect. All women. If you were on a subway or bus and you were sitting down and a woman came and sat, stood over you, if she was older than eight years old you got up and gave her a seat. And certainly if it's a pregnant woman you got up. And if you didn't get up, everybody on that car would look at you as if to say, “Who raised you? Or, who failed to raise you? You know. And so, those were certain things which my peers and I all had to face. All of us . . . Tape II. . . . and those guys who said, well, they had this conquest, they were lying like hell. Because the . . . girls we liked were trained to respect their own selves and other people's person, and certain rules of conduct. And so, I don't understand this business of going about living in and having children out of wedlock, ‘cause it feels good—that's a hell of a rule by which you run society. That rule applied across the board, nobody would be safe. Somebody taken a liking to you, they're going to have you . . . or take your life from you, and so forth. This is why I say, I despair about the trend that I see. My label for the current pre-teen, pre-young adult and pre-teenager, generation, they have the X generation, the Y generation, the greatest generation and so forth. And I label this one the me-three generation: untrained, unkempt and uncouth. And that's what I see. Well, my wife is a woman who sees the glass half-full, and I see it half-empty. She's an optimist and I'm the pessimist. And listening to me expound as I have with you, she'll say, “That's so pessimistic. There's got to be a good side.” And in deference to her opinion, I'll say, “OK, I'll look at it and see if I can't come up with a fourth part of the book besides the good, bad, and ugly. And I must say that I've come up hope, because, for a number of reasons. In the course of signing my book, having book signings, I was at the University of Texas in El Paso a couple of years ago. And I was, during the program I was talking to some of the cadets, ROTC cadets. And that's probably the hope, that's part of . . . our hope, because these are such clean-cut, decent young people, who show their respect for elders, for authority, for each other, for themselves, and that was part of it. And then, that visit, I was taken to Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, North, New Mexico, to address the graduating class of non-commissioned officers, sergeants and so forth. And I tell you, they were so impressive. The way they carried themselves, the way they respected their commander. The way their commander respected them. It was a two-way street. The way women . . . wearing many stripes. The way some of the women were flying some of the F-117 Stealth Fighters. And I said, you know, there's hope for this country yet. More to the point personally is the fact that I had a stroke last March the tenth, almost the anniversary. And to realize I have been bemoaning the road rage that all of us experience out on the freeway, and thinking, there's no more civility in our ranks as citizens. But I've had that notion diminished quite a bit since I've become handicapped, wearing a cane. I've had so many people who, seeing me approach a door, they're coming toward me on the other side, who rush to open it for me. Or if they've come out through the door before they caught sight of me, they rush back out and say, “I'll hold it for you.” Youngsters, old people. That I'm convinced that, one man said . . . I believe, I'm beginning to believe this, there's some good in everybody. Which may become so buried with cynicism and so forth that it took a September 11 to . . . understand that we're in this boat together and we're going to hang together or we're going to separately. So, I've added this fourth thing to my book, the hope. And, I just hope that, that trend will surpass the trend, the downward trend, and that we'll become balanced and we'll start going back up to what we really as a nation deserve to have. Because we've got good principles. It's just we got a lot of bad people . . . INT: A couple of very quick questions. When did you come to Atlanta? CD: When did I come to Atlanta? INT: When did you move to Atlanta? Yeah. CD: It was in 1975. I had come back from Jamaica where I lived with my former wife. We were divorced in 1975 and was living with my sister who was in _____ up in New Jersey. And I lived with them for about a year and I had a job opportunity in Atlanta. I came down for an interview and I was accepted so I came down. And stayed on that job for about a month. I was fired. Only time I've been fired in my life. Because I had worked with a particular individual in New York, and he was a business major, an accountant, and I had learned to trust him, because he was very competent in his field, and he was very confidential. I learned something that I had confided to him and at a social event I met his wife, and I mentioned this, it was no secret, but it was just something that was confidential. His wife had never heard of it. And I said, that's the man I want. He keeps his mouth shut. He didn't even confide in his wife. Well, I wanted him to be my controller, to handle the funds in this operation. So I said, I was staffing, I said to my boss, I want X, Y, Z. “You can't have him.” Because he was pulling strings through the Citizens Trust Bank at the time. And he, I was told “you can't have him.” I said, “I gotta have him.” “You can't have him.” “I insist.” “You're fired.” And that very weekend, a friend of mine who worked at Lockheed was assigned to transfer from personnel, we know call it, whatever, to marketing. And his boss had told him in personnel, if you'll find your own replacement, I'll release you to marketing. And that's the weekend we met each other. He was at Tuskegee, I knew him formally. So that Monday morning after I'd been fired, he took me to Lockheed. His boss said, “OK, I'll take Mr. Dryden.” And Don went over to marketing, very happy. I worked for Lockheed for thirteen years, retired in 1989, so that's the story of how come I came to Atlanta. INT: And tell us briefly what you did during Korea? The Korean War. CD: What did I do there? INT: Yes. CD: I flew with an outfit called the Mosquitoes. I tell you when I first learned I was going to be assigned to the Mosquitoes, I thought we were going to be flying the ____ Mosquito, which is a heckuva airplane from World War II, but that's not it. What we were, we were air-, we were tactical air controllers, from the air, flying a trainer, a T-6 trainer, two-seats, one behind the other, no guns . . . . And our job, pardon me, was to seek out potential target, because the North Koreans were excellent at camouflage. And they would run a tank up in the side of one of their mud huts and cover it over with grass and you wouldn't even know it was there unless they had tank tracks leading up to it. And then not knowing that there was tanks and ammunition and so forth around, our troops, with extreme noise would bypass it, and they would catch them from the rear. So our job as tactical air controllers was to find such targets and direct our fighters to knock ‘em out. That's what we, like mosquitoes we're supposed to harass the enemy. Well, I flew fifty missions of that and then returned to Japan and then returned to the states. So, I had thirty missions in World War II as a fighter pilot and fifty as a reconnaissance pilot in World War, in Korea. So I survived both of the wars, and so, that's why I say I'm blessed. To have survived two wars, two general court-martials, and two wives [laughs]. INT: [speaks to unidentified second interviewer] ______, do you have any? Unidentified: I think . . . CD: I hope I haven't talked your ears off. INT: Oh, no. This has been great. There was one question I was going to ask you. Oh, going back to World War II, and knowing how the Germans viewed themselves and how they viewed not only other whites, but how they probably viewed blacks, did you, what did you think would happen, you may even know what could have happened, to Tuskegee Airmen that were shot down and captured by the Germans? CD: It's a good question. As far as I know, from . . . you see, thirty-two were taken prisoners of war. Sixty-six were killed in action. Of the thirty-two who were prisoners of war, I don't recall ever having talked to any of them who report that they were brutalized by the Germans. Uh, very few . . . but I don't recall ever having any of them say that they were discriminated against, in other words treated as less than officers, like white officers were. That their rank was respected, treated with deference as they're supposed to. I don't know about any enlist-, we didn't have any enlisted men who fell into the Germans' hand. I thought you were going to ask what is my opinion as to what would have happened if the Germans had won the war. But, I did have an encounter by telephone on a radio call-in show in Rochester, New York, in 1990 when I was on tour. Four cities in the north of New York—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, the state capitol. In fact, Buffalo, the mayor gave me a wristwatch with the state seal on it, which I wear very proudly. And I had a book signing not too long ago at which this woman came by for me to sign her book, and she was from Rochester, I mean from Buffalo. And she said, oh, you've got the state seal of my state, and so forth. While I was in Rochester, on this call-in show, over the telephone came this heavily German accented voice . . . who said, “I'm one of your former enemy.” And I didn't know what he was going to say next, I didn't know whether he was a neo-Nazi gonna spout a lot of this Aryan supremacy nonsense and so forth. But what he did say was, that, “My squadron mates and I [Luftwafters], squadron mates and I could never understand why it was that we were never able to shoot down bombers that you escorted.” We had to have been the best, and words to that effect. Now, I didn't have the presence of mind that I have now to ask for a copy of that tape, where an enemy is saying that “you are the best!” And it occurred to me since then. I'm trying through a friend of mind in Rochester see if that radio station still has that tape, because that would be proof positive that the enemy hailed us as the best that they encountered. So. That's one of the things I messed up on. This will be an interesting anecdote, I think. I see you are looking at your watch. I won't hold you much longer. INT: We're fine. I just don't want you to be . . . CD: Well, nature's going to call me to the men's room soon, so I'm going to have quit. But, again in Rochester, there was a young black woman in her late twenties, I think, who, after the question and answer period, she asked me, she said, “Colonel, I have a question. Maybe you could help me.” And I said, “Well, I'll try.” “Did the Tuskegee Airmen ever get over the syphilis?” Now, you know about the stories about the black men who had syphilis in the Tuskegee area in the late thirties. There were about 400 of them, who were deliberately not treated by the doctors at the Veterans Administration hospital. HBO made a film called “Mrs. Ever's [sp?] Boys” on that subject. HBO also made a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. Second coincidence: the lead, the male lead in each of those movies was Lawrence Fishburne. So this woman put two and two together and said, “The Tuskegee Airmen were the men that had the syphilis.” And I said, “Lord, please tell me how to teach this lady that that's a mistaken notion.” So I tried to explain to her as I explained to you. But what bothers me is, if one person could make that mis- understanding, hundreds of people probably think we're all syphilant. No, no, no, no, I don't think any of us ever had it. We would have been rushed out of the program. So, ah, there's been a lot of experiences that have come out of the writing of that book, and that [?] was a Tuskegee experience itself. In our . . . last year, the man who talked me into writing that book was a professor of history, who used to be at Spelman College. And back in 1998, no '89, when I retired from Lockheed, and I decided to do this, I had the choice of doing the book. He invited me to speak to a class of his students. And when I was through, he asked me, he said, “Well, Colonel Dryden, when are you going to write your memories?” “Oh, one of these days.” I was about seventy at the time. He said, “Well, let me tell you that tomorrow is not promised to anyone so you better get started.” OK. He went on and he gave me, he made me an offer that I couldn't resist. He said, “To go from my house to my office at Spelman I have to pass your house . . . My wife is on the staff, administrative staff at Spelman. My little boy Clarence [name?] goes to an elementary school right in the neighborhood. So, what will do is, we will come by your house and pick you up, take you to the campus, you can use my office with all the history record books, and do you know how to use a computer?” I said, “No.” He said, “That's no excuse, I'll teach you.” Which he did. And so, after about a week or two of transcribing from some handwritten chapters I had written, about three of them over a period of time, transcribing into the computer as you all know, it's fascinating how you can move a whole chapter from one part of the book to another, and so forth. Such that, he would take me to work at his office, eight o'clock in the morning. At five o'clock, he would pick up his family, go home, leave me at the office. About eleven o'clock, at midnight, I'd call my wife and say, “Come get me.” She'd come get me. Eight o'clock the next morning I'm right back there. And that's how it went. For a year and a half. I finally got it finished. I sent query letters with sample chapters to thirty some-odd publishers. I just knew that this was the great American, not novel, but anyway, nonfiction type of book. Not a nibble, except from the University of Alabama Press. The director seemed interested and he said, “When you finish your manuscript, for the whole book, send it to me and we'll see what happens.” Well, to make a long story short, he said, “The Review Committee read, reviewed and decided to publish it.” They sent it to two readers in turn who sent me their comments and suggested changes and amendments and so forth. The director said to me, “Now, Colonel Dryden, when you get their comments, remember, . . . their comments may be, it's your book. Don't let them change your voice . . . and so forth.” I followed the advice. Finally it was sent to a copy editor who put it into its final form, and there you see the result. It's in its fifth printing. It's, over ten thousand copies have been sold. It's, one copy had to be delivered to a lady where I get my clothes cleaning, ‘cause she said, “I want to buy me a new book.” “OK, I'll bring it to you.” Tape ends. - Metadata URL:
- http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/306
- Additional Rights Information:
- This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required.
- Extent:
- 1:00:47
- Original Collection:
- Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center - Contributing Institution:
- Atlanta History Center
- Rights:
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