Chapter 7: Thirty-eight thousand feet
My Uncle Erlon had worked at the fire station in Weston for years. When the second war came he debated whether to join the Merchant Marines. He did not want to get into the fighting. Then one day the phone rang and it was the commanding officer of the ship he had served on during the first war. The voice identified himself and said, “My ship is leaving Baltimore fully loaded in two weeks and I expect you to be aboard.”
He had some very scary experiences in that interval of time. He was torpedoed. Ten men were killed and the boat ran aground. He made one trip to Russia. They had to stay away from the shore. When thermite bombs landed on deck, Erlon ran around with a coal shovel, scooped them up, and threw them overboard before they exploded. They left England for Russia with a large group of Merchant Marine ships. They lost over fifty percent of them, sunk by Germans.
It was interesting to see the ships coming in from Europe loaded with the wounded, and then returning with more munitions. Their lives weren’t worth much, as the Germans tracked their courses and blew them up regularly.
I joined the Army in April of 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I joined at the Army Recruiting Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It was the medical hospital reserve unit.
I went for basic training at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, right through the winter. They taught me the ten commandments of the Army.
From there I was taken out of the hospital unit and transferred to the medical research unit in San Antonio, Texas. We were exploring the safe methods of teaching the use of new technologies to soldiers, especially those men who would be flying planes off of ships. I should explain what we were studying. At high altitude the air pressure drops, and the gases dissolved in a person’s blood can form bubbles — the same thing that happens to a diver who comes up too fast. We called this the bends. There was also what we called the chokes, which is an aeroembolism in the sternum area — gas collecting in the blood vessels of the chest. A pilot who went too high too fast could be in serious trouble. Our job was to understand the limits of what the body could tolerate and to teach the men to recognize the symptoms before they got into difficulty.
I met Dr. Richard Howard while I was in San Antonio. He had started out as an enlisted man, but he already had his PhD. Someone went to bat for him and got him a promotion to Second Lieutenant. We both got transferred to Orlando eventually. We have been friends ever since.
When I found out that my work in Florida was a permanent assignment, Kathleen and I decided to get married. We got married in Medford, Massachusetts, on November 6, 1943. My best man was my brother Guy. Kathleen’s sister Frances was the maid of honor. Barbara was a bridesmaid, along with Carol Stewart, a friend from Bates.
My primary work now was with high-altitude training at the Army Air Forces Tactical Center.[1] We had a specially built high-altitude chamber — a small room-sized tank with no leaks, designed to simulate thirty-eight thousand feet of altitude. This was the limit of our research unless we had special permission. Occasionally I got up to forty thousand feet, which is very uncomfortable.
We stayed in Orlando until January of 1946. At that time we were sent back to Massachusetts, and I was honorably discharged at Westover Field.
The Army Air Forces Tactical Center in Orlando, Florida, was established in 1942 as a training and research facility for air combat operations. Its Altitude Training Unit used low-pressure chambers to simulate high-altitude conditions, preparing flight crews to recognize and respond to the physiological hazards of unpressurized flight above 25,000 feet. ↩︎