Video
Harold Cross Interview
Transcript
[Start of recorded material - 00:00:00]
Karen Abel:
Harold Cross: I am Harold Cross. I was born and raised in Vancouver. After basic training I was stationed at Ottawa RCAF base, which is now the Ottawa International Airport. It was in October 1941, I was the third person posted to 111 Squadron.
Karen Abel: Perfect. What did you do after Ottawa? Where did 111 Squadron go?
Harold Cross: When there were enough of us around, they chose six of us to go to Buffalo, NY to take a course on the Curtiss P-40 aircraft at the Curtiss factory. And they choose six of the engine mechanics to go to the Allison plant where they were making the Allison engines. When we got back to Ottawa, after the six-week course, the squadron was gone. They had dismantled the aircraft put them on flat cars and sent them out to Vancouver by train. We could never understand why they did that, why they didn’t fly them out, but they did. So we had to follow along. And when we got to Vancouver they were reassembling the aircraft in a part of the Boeing factory where they were building Cansos, big PBYs and the crew who had taken the aircraft apart were not all mechanics. It was an exercise in frustration sometimes trying to put them back together but we got them all flying and then moved to Pat Bay for our supposedly operational training.
Karen Abel: How long did it take you to get them back together?
Harold Cross: Let me see… at least a couple of months. And when they were all airborne, our destination when we left Pat Bay was Anchorage, Alaska. I was part of a six-man advance party. The squadron went by boat. The six of us took three days to get to Anchorage in an old Stranraer. That was a bit of an adventure (laughs). We landed in Price Rupert, and then the U.S. Navy hosted us at Sitka Island and the third day we flew into Anchorage. I went to Elmendorf Air Field. I think they call it Fort Richardson.
Karen Abel: Yes, it is still called Elmendorf Fort Richardson. What happened to the pilots? Did the pilots come behind you?
Harold Cross: I think they took three days also to fly up. I think they landed in Kelowna airport first and then Dees Lake and I don’t know if they flew direct from Dees Lake to Elmendorf, I really don’t know.
Karen Abel: How many were in the squadron at that time or how many made the initial voyage with the squadron. Any idea?
Harold Cross: No, I really don’t. I think there must have been about 60 of us. That sounds like a reasonable number (laughs).
Karen Abel: How were you greeted by the Americans when you arrived at Elmendorf?
Harold Cross: (Laughing) they knew we were coming; they had a truck waiting for us. We got off the Stranraer at the dock, got in a truck and when we got out of the truck at Elmendorf Air Field, the Sergeant in the guard house looked at us and said, “What the hell army are you? Salvation?” (Laughs). But Elmendorf Field at that time was still in lockdown from the bombing and invasion antics the Japanese were doing out in the islands. But they had no word about us being under lock down. So for three days we had the run of Anchorage and I must say that we were welcomed and treated very very well by the Americans. Most of them, even down at my level, had been made aware that there was a Canadian contingent coming. I think we already had No. 8 Bomber squadron already at Annette Island but we were the first fighter squadron there and the first large contingent. We joined X Wing and Commander McGregor was, I guess, our representative for all of the Canadian forces.
Karen Abel: What date did you arrive? Roughly…
Harold Cross: (00:08:50) It was in July, the beginning of July. The bombing of Dutch Harbor was in May. That was a diversion from the Midway exercise. It was the beginning of July. By the time all our aircraft got there, we lost a couple along the way, but we got them in shape. The only solid date that I can remember is my birthday (July 24th). I had my 21st birthday on Umnak. I don’t know how he did it, but there was a mail delivery on that day and there was a parcel there from my father.
Karen Abel: Wow. That’s great. Now when you landed in Anchorage, you were there for some training. What type of training happened there before you headed to Umnak?
Harold Cross: (00:09:40) It was mostly operational training for the pilots and familiarization of the territory really. And a briefing for the rest of us to warn us of what we were getting into weather wise. They made it sound like you’d never get off the ground. They weren’t far wrong (laughs). That has to be the worst weather in the world, when the cold Bering Sea currents and the warm Pacific currents meet, the resulting weather is instant, you don’t see it coming or feel it coming or hear it coming, it is just there and in some cases vicious. The wind, the wind was strong enough to lift a PBY off of the ground. Now a PBY would fly at 110 knots, eh, so if you had 120-knot wind, it is airborne (laughs), you had to keep them tied down. And it quite frequently got there.
We took off. I was in a DC-3 in an advance party and it was sometime around mid-July. The advance party took off in a DC-3 and seven P-40s behind us, we were supposed to lead them out to Umnak Airfield. We landed at NakNek and then at Cold Bay and at Cold Bay we were stranded. At that stage of the war, there was nothing at Cold Bay at all but an airstrip, a couple of petrol bowsers and a few tents. That was about it. So whatever time we were there we spent sleeping on the ground or in the aircraft or whatever. Then one day W/C McGregor decided that we were going to go on so we piled in to the DC-3 and took off and stooged around waiting for the seven to them to form up behind us. Nobody had yet got around to synchronizing the radio communication so those guys in those P-40s were all alone talking to each other; they could not communicate with our pilot. About ten minutes out of Cold Bay, we lost them. We flew into the cloud or fog or whatever it was, and we made it to Umnak and only one of the P-40s made it to Umnak and McGregor made it back as well. Now, the history books that have been written say he made it back to Cold Bay, but we heard he made it all the way back to Anchorage, so I don’t know.
But that was a bad day for him because five of them got lost and killed. They kept coming down until they could get under the cloud base but there wasn’t any under the cloud base, they ran into the mountains. One of them we never did find, he must have flown until he ran out of gas and he went down either in the Pacific or the Bering Sea. If he did either one of those, his life span was about three minutes. We never did find him. But we found all the others, four of them.
Karen Abel: Tell me about that.
Harold Cross: Well, three of them just flew into the side of the mountain. I don’t think, certainly none of us in the ground crew ever realized it, but I had wondered later if anyone had ever told them how high those mountains were, those islands were? One of them just scraped over the top and we found him slid down the other side. That was a grim day… that was really a grim day.
We climbed out of the DC-3 and the guy that met us was one of the biggest black men I have ever seen. He was a Sargent in the Service Police for the U.S. Air Force. He says, “Welcome to Umnak gentleman. There is your home. The mess tent opens at five.” And he walked away. The home that he pointed to was six, four man tents; each with four camp cots and four sleeping bags laying on the ground. His parting words were “Find a place and put them up and start digging.“ Because every tent that was already in use, all you could see of it was the roof. If you did not get them dug in before one of those storms came along, you’d be riding it somewhere.
Karen Abel: Where did you set up?
Harold Cross: Well, we found an open space about 50 yards away from the runway. Each picked a spot and built a tent.
Karen Abel: How many people per tent?
Harold Cross: Four
Karen Abel: Did officers have their own tent?
Harold Cross: Yes. There were only… I think there were only three officers with us at that stage. And they had their own tent, yes. When the whole group of us got there, I know one of the things that we did while we were in total hiatus; we only had one airplane there and we had the advance party to keep it running, but we put up tents for the rest of the squadron. The officers had three men to a tent and the men, four. It took us about three weeks to dig a hole big enough to put the tent down into.
Karen Abel: (00:19:30) How deep was the hole?
A friend, Brendan Coyle, enters the room and Harold stands to greet him…
Harold Cross: Brendan!
Brendan Coyle: It is the 100th Anniversary of Vimy Ridge today.
Karen Abel: It is the 100th Anniversary of Vimy Ridge!
Harold Cross: My father was there.
Brendan Coyle: Is that right?
Harold Cross: Yeah, one of the survivors. He was in the Canadian contingent of the Royal Engineers; a Sergeant. They were, I don’t know whether it was today when it started but during the battle of Vimy Ridge, they were building a bridge across a huge crater and one of the timbers fell and hit him. They sent him back to an aid post and the Doctor looked at him and said, “Well there is noting broken so go on back.” (Laughs) So there was never any record of it but… When I see some of the things that they show on television about what happened there, I don’t know how those guys survived really. The conditions that we had were bad, but we had absolutely nothing like what happened in the First Word War, on that front. Living conditions were just terrible; my father would never talk about it.
Brendan Coyle: My mom’s dad went over and just never came back.
Harold Cross: Anyways, where were we?
Karen Abel: I want you to back up a little bit and talk about your trip from Anchorage to NakNek, when you first made your way over to Umnak and talk about how two planes on the first leg went down and then replacements had to get in.
Harold Cross: (00:22:01) The undercarriage on the Kittyhawk was built so that a really hard landing would fold the wheels back into the wings. There were two struts from operating hydraulic unit to the oleo legs and those two struts were deliberately softer metal so that a hard landing, and we had a few of them, would buckle and the wheels would fold back up into the wings. The only thing we had to fix really was the air scoop and the propeller. Well, that runway at NakNek was one of the worst; it was terrible. One of them folded the undercarriage and the other one stood it up on its nose. So, that left us with two short of our seven of course, so we had to wait until two others came out.
From NakNek to Cold Bay was okay, was not too bad a day. But Cold Bay… I managed to sleep in the DC-3, try sleeping in a tail dragger, you either sleep with your head up or head down (laughs). But I managed to get back in the corner. There were no seats of course, it was just benches down the sides and cargo in the middle. I managed to take over one of the corners of the back of the bench so I sat up most of the time. You know, we get rain around here but we do not get rain like that. On a couple of days, the rain was just going sideways. And I could never understand why McGregor decided on that day, that we had been there long enough and we should go on. But he did and that is when we lost the five. It must have been a real shock for him when he got back to find out he was all alone.
Karen Abel: And you were part of the search party. Did you leave right away? At what point were you called back to go?
Harold Cross: (00:26:10) Oh no. It took us about a week to find them, you know, to send search planes out to find them. I forget how many of us there were. We had to go to those islands by boat and hike our way in. There is no place to land there. It really took about a month before we really found them, got in there and searched them and dragged the bodies out. That was a pretty bad time, for all of us; really bad for the pilots. You know when you think about it, here are these guys, all alone, sitting in that airplane; could not even talk to anybody but themselves. Our people in Anchorage could here them talking but nobody who was within eyesight could hear them. They could not talk to our pilot in the DC-3, he was US Army Air Corps. In the time of operational training, I don’t know why it never was done; to make sure everyone was on the same page, but until we got out to Umnak with a few of our own planes, nobody could communicate with anybody. And they should have been able to because they are all the same airplane, the same configuration and literally the same transceivers. They should have been able to calibrate them but nobody ever did until we got out there to Umnak.
Karen Abel: On your way to the Aleutians, did you know why you were being sent up there? How did you feel about that?
Harold Cross: (00:29:15) Well I knew why we were being sent out there. During the time I was in Buffalo, NY, I went to visit a cousin of my mother’s in Clifton, New Jersey, which is just across the river from New York. On the morning of December 7th, while we were having breakfast, came the news on the radio that Pearl Harbor was being bombed by the Japanese. My cousin, his young son, said, “Come on, let’s go.” And we got in his car and we went into New York. About noon on the day of December 7th, I was standing in Time Square of New York watching the news on the screen of the building. And when we got back to Ottawa, a week later, the squadron was gone. They took the airplanes apart, put them on flat cars and took them by rail. We never could figure that out why they moved them that way… (laughs). I left the Curtiss factory on Friday afternoon; and all three of the aircraft they were building: P-40s, that transport plane of theirs- the twin of the DC-3 and a reconnaissance aircraft for the U.S. Navy…. those three lines. Well, on the P-40 line, every second aircraft had either British or Canadian markings. And when I walked in on Monday morning, there wasn’t one, they painted them all over with American markings (laughs). It took them about three days to discover it was not going to work that way… it wasn’t going to work that fast so they went back to the half an half, lend lease.
When we got back to Ottawa, as I recall, we may have slept in the barracks one night then we were on the train to Vancouver the next day. Then we had to put those airplanes back together, which was, to say the least, an exercise in frustration. I guess they put everybody they could find at Rockcliffe tearing these airplanes apart; not necessarily all mechanics. If they could not unscrew it or unbolt it, they would take a sledgehammer and un-knock it. Well, the Kittyhawk was a very easy aircraft to maintain, but in those weeks, it wasn’t so easy. But we got them all back flying again. We went to Pat Bay and Victoria to do our operational training. The pilots then, had some real problems with the aircraft, they all trained on the Harvard and to operate the hydraulics on the Harvard you just push one switch, you select wheels down, flaps down and you pushed a switch and wheels and flaps came down. On the P-40, it wasn’t quite so simple. You selected wheels down, flaps down and then there was a trigger on the handle of the joystick and you had to hold that until the green lights came on. A lot of the pilots just flicked a switch and figured everything was going to go down. Well, there were more red flares flying around there than you could shake a stick at (laughs). After about two days of this, the guy who was controller stood outside the ready shack with a flare pistol in his hand waiting for it; you’d see them come in with their wheels half way down. It took them a little while to get used to this sort of thing. I think we ran out of hanger room one day. It was not a big deal to fix really; the aircraft was pretty good that way. The problem was getting it up on a dolly of some kind so you could wheel it into the hanger, get it up on stilts, let the undercarriage down and take out these two links from each undercarriage and put a new one in. It would take about a couple of hours, once you got it up, to fix it but it took them about two seconds to break it.
Karen Abel: (00:35:51) So then you made the trip north, and some of them made it without belly tanks. So how many did you leave behind because they did not have belly tanks, any recollection of that?
Harold Cross: On the trip out?
Karen Abel: Yes, to Anchorage.
Harold Cross: We didn’t have belly tanks until we got to Umnak. We didn’t use belly tanks from Elmendorf.
Karen Abel: There was a group that stayed behind; there were six of them that stayed behind to get belly tanks put on but you were already out there.
Harold Cross: Yeah, we were already out there.
Karen Abel: So you landed on Umnak, what were some of your first thoughts, as you stepped off the plane and looked around?
Harold Cross: (00:36:59) How the hell did I get into this? (Laughs) I don’t know… we were too busy really, by the time we got the tents up and found our mess kits to go to the mess tent...
Talk about first impressions, I guess I still have that first impression. The mess tent was a series of tents with the sides turned up so it was just a roof. And the serving area was a series of 45 gallon drums turned into stoves with fire in the bottom. And that was it. You took your mess kit down and as I recall, the food was not that bad but everything they put in there turned into stew. Then when you got to the end of the line, you had your choice, in the second half of your mess kit, to get coffee or dessert. Or you could have the dessert in with the meal and have coffee. Or you could turn this piece of the kit over and protect your meal from the rain because by the time you got to the mess tent it was raining like hell. And then you went and found yourself a place to sit and eat your meal. Now, if you can picture that, everything is scrambled together in one mess tin and you had a choice of course, you could sit down somewhere and eat and get wet or your could go back to the tent; of course by the time you got back to the tent everything was cold. And that is the way it was all the time I was on Umnak, they never did build anything but that long line of 45 gallon drums sitting under a tent.
Karen Abel: What did a typical day on Umnak look like?
Harold Cross: (00:40:18) Oh, for us, you got up and went to the mess tent for breakfast. Then went down and did our daily inspections on the aircraft. One of the things you had to do was drain the sump of each aircraft because the water that was inevitably in the gas would all sink to the bottom; the gas flows on top and you ran it until it ran gas. I will never forget, I walked down to the line one morning and there is a guy under a Harvard, he’s got the bucket between his legs and he’s smoking a pipe. I walked over to him and I said, “I would not want to be there when it blows.”
We had some crazy sergeant pilots in that squadron. They all hated those steel runways. They were terrible. But these guys… I think there were four sergeant pilots; they competed against each other as to who could get off the ground fastest. They would sit at the end of the runway, brakes locked, full power and let go of the brakes. As soon as the wheels stopped rattling, they put the wheels up. Some of them, literally, were propeller on the ground. I remember one day, one of them decided to take off and do a left turn take off. And he almost took a tent with him; I don’t know how his wingtip missed the tent (laughs). They told him when he got back that he better not do that again.
Karen Abel: Who were those crazy sergeant pilots?
Harold Cross: Oh I can’t remember the names. One of the sergeant pilots used to work for my father so I should be able to remember the name, but I can’t. He got drunk in the mess on night and he went out and hotwired a pick up truck; he was going to drive home. He drove it off of a bridge and totaled the truck. I think they took it out of his pay for the rest of the war. Those were the crazy things that happened.
Karen Abel: How did the Americans receive you on Umnak?
Harold Cross: (00:44:22) Very very well. On the day we got there, they had 11 aircraft sitting in a semicircle way down at the other end of the runway with big boxes beside them with new engines. They were waiting for a team to come from the factory to change the engines. At that stage of the war, the U.S. Air Corps did not train their own mechanics, they had people who could change the oil and do a daily inspection on the aircraft but they were not mechanics. Dean Nesbitt, our squadron leader, went to the commander of the air force contingent on Umnak and told him that he had a whole bunch of fully trained mechanics sitting around doing nothing because they had no airplanes and that we could change the engines on these airplanes. And we did.
It was a pretty much a primitive exercise because, of course, there were no hangers, we were siting out in the open. Fortunately it was July and August. Also, there was no equipment, there was no motorized cranes or lifts or anything like that. You hung a hand blown gantry up over the engine when you got it ready to remove and everybody would heave on the rope to get it out, and then the same thing for the new engine. We got ten of them flying. The eleventh engine had been sabotaged at the factory. There was a great human outcry about that. The oil pan was full of sand.
During our time in Pat Bay, we had one. The engine mechanics do the engine change and when they got it completed, one of the guys climbed in the cockpit and was going to test run the engine. We could never figure out why it even started but when he engaged the starter, the engine went to full speed and that lifted the nose and pieces of propeller were flying all over the place. Well that happened to this other engine that was up in Umnak too. When they really looked at the engine they found that the throttle had been put together backwards so when you hooked it all up, the throttle and the engine at idle, was actually at full speed. And actually, we could never figure out why it even started because usually you started it at idle, with the throttle at idle, and it should have gotten too much gas to flood it at full. But anyway, it did start and it tilted the thing up on it’s nose and we had to replace the propeller. And they found that this is what happened to the one out on Umnak too.
Brendan Coyle: Did you go to Amchitka with the Squadron?
Harold Cross: Yes
Brendan Coyle: How was that?
Harold Cross: (laughs) You got to try sometime, filling a 300 gallon tank from 45 gallon drums with a hand pump. It does not sound like much but, my God. That was during the time when they were ferrying our pilots out to Amchitka and our pilots were flying American aircraft on their patrols. And the commander at Amchitka, I guess they wondered what would happen if one of our pilots was shot down, a Canadian flying an American airplane… So he had Canadian roundels painted on the fuselage but all the other markings, the wing marking, the tail markings were American. It looked real strange. It did not last for very long but it was real strange.
Karen Abel: I am curious why 14 Squadron had shark nose painted on not 111? Do you remember seeing those?
Harold Cross: I don’t know. That was not done while I was there.
Karen Abel: Oh ok, because you left in…? When did you leave?
Harold Cross: When the bulk of the squadron went back to Anchorage. Then we went to Kodiak. I don’t remember any shark nose on our aircraft although I know there were some.
Karen Abel: Do you remember any names painted on the aircraft?
Harold Cross: I think S/L Boomer had his name painted on the aircraft but that is the only one I know of.
Karen Abel: My grandfather, we have two photos of a plane that he flew, and we have it written down, that his plane’s name was ‘Snookums’.
Harold Cross: (laughs) No, I don’t remember that at all.
Brendan Coyle: Did the aircraft come back shot up at all, from the Japanese?
Harold Cross: No.
Karen Abel: Do you remember anything about the four pilots who went on the offensive mission with the Americans; that would have been Boomer, Hal Gooding, and Jim Gohl…
Harold Cross: No, I do not remember any of that. That crew went from Amchitka, did they not?
Karen Abel: That happened when you were on Umnak, that four Canadian pilots were chosen, four 111 pilots… and they flew over to Adak.
Harold Cross: No… no, I do not remember who participated in that.
Karen Abel: Do you remember any Canadians going over? What the atmosphere was like? It was the only offensive 111 took part in.
Harold Cross: Yeah. No, actually I was so far down the scale that I did not even realize what was going on at that time. Wasn’t until I got back and met with a couple of the others that I realized that I had actually been there when that happened.
Karen Abel: That was September, I think they left on the 23rd of September, just weeks before you moved over to Kodiak.
Brendan Coyle: I have seen pictures of 111 on Amchitka.
Karen Abel: 111 started going over to Amchitka in April of 1943. They switched off; 14 Squadron would do one-month stints and then go over to Umnak, then 111 would do then next month.
Harold Cross: They were all using the same airplanes.
Karen Abel: Were you on the SS Columbia then, from Kodiak over to Umnak? How did you get from Kodiak to Umnak?
Harold Cross: I did not go back to Umnak?
Karen Abel: Oh, you just went straight to Amchitka?
Harold Cross: No, I came home.
Karen Abel: So, how did you get to Amchitka?
Harold Cross: On a DC-3. But I came home from Kodiak.
Karen Abel: So when were you on Amchitka?
Harold Cross: Oh, early on.
Karen Abel: 111 did not go over to Amchitka until April of 43. You could have been with 14 Squadron over there…?
That is a long time ago!
Harold Cross: It is a long time ago, my goodness.
Karen Abel: I can’t even remember last month!
Harold Cross: It is too long ago to remember to be quite honest with you.
Karen Abel: That is ok. Let’s talk about the gun turret control tower.
Harold Cross: (00:57:13) Oh yeah. (Laughs) Those damn steel runways. It happened long before we got there that a Liberator got caught in the wheels down, flaps down, runway right out there situation when the fog came and the runway disappeared. He groped his way down and put one wheel on the runway and the other wheel off the runway. Screwed the runway up fairly well and wrote off the Liberator. So they towed it down to one end of the runway, stripped all the engines and anything else on it that was valuable, cleaned out the gun turret on the top and made it into a control tower. That was the control tower when we were there. I don’t know what they did after we left but that was the control tower while we were there, a gun turret of a B-24!
Karen Abel: How was the clothing over there? There was some squadron diary entry that said there was a lack of RCAF clothing and that was in September they were still saying that. That Americans gave you clothing when you first got there.
Harold Cross: (00:59:10) When we arrived, during the time that we were still in Elmendorf Field, it was decided mutually that our uniforms were absolutely not suitable for anything. So they outfitted us all with American fatigue clothes. And that is what we wore almost all the time I was there. If you were lucky enough to get the truck going down for a shower once a week, you got fresh underwear, socks and shirts. And, it was all American issued. Actually, when we, as I recall, when we went out to Umnak, we left quite a bit of our stuff, everything you owned was in a kitbag, of course, and we left our uniforms and our great coats. All we wore were our caps; that was the only distinguishing thing we had.
Karen Abel: Did RCAF clothing ever show up?
Harold Cross: Not while I was there. The Americans supplied us with practically everything.
Karen Abel: What was life like on Kodiak?
Harold Cross: Kodiak, at least it was a solid concrete runway, but it was a short runway. While we were there, there were two liberators and one canso sitting off the end of the runway in the sea. And one P-40 also (laughs) there are pictures of it.
I still have a pass signed by the American commander of all the units in Kodiak permitting me to be in downtown Kodiak after 9pm. It was a pretty tightly controlled place.
Karen Abel: Do you remember a winter carnival?
Harold Cross: No, I don’t
Karen Abel: That was a squadron diary entry, that there was some kind of winter carnival. And my grandfather was one of the judges.
Harold Cross: Oh really? (laughs)
Karen Abel: Were you aware that the RCAF was the only fighter squadron there?
Harold Cross: Yes. We were the only ones there. The rest of it was reconnaissance and bombing units. Seemed to me that it was not a very good place for a bomber because of the short runways.
Karen Abel: What about Chiniak?
Harold Cross: I don’t remember much about that. I was not there very long.
Karen Abel: That was the other airfield that you had on Kodiak.
Harold Cross: I don’t remember the name of it.
Karen Abel: Marks Field or Miller Field is what they eventually called it.
Harold Cross: I remember being there for a few days but I don’t remember the name of it.
Karen Abel: (01:04:01) Tell me about the sweet potatoes.
Harold Cross: (laughs) At that stage of the war, the Americans weren’t that far into it. And one thing I really have to say about the Air Force, and I guess to this day, they are well organized and they were well organized. It took them until the Battle of Midway to really make a mark against the Japanese but they were well organized. The food supply ship arrived once every three weeks. And one week the food ship arrived, and somebody told me that it was 30,000 cases of foodstuff that they unloaded, and in this particular case, it turned out to be 30,000 cans of sweet potatoes. And of course there wasn’t another supply ship for three weeks. To this day, I cannot eat sweet potatoes. The cooks, you had to give them credit, they did a fantastic job. You figure, on a day when it is blowing 90 knots and raining almost sideways and these guys are working in these so called ‘tents’, I have to say that the food, the whole time we were there, was good the way it was cooked. The way you got it wasn’t all that good but…(laughs). But when they ran out of the residual stuff that they had left over from previous supply drops, for about a week, sweet potatoes fried for breakfast, boiled for lunch and then a meatloaf form for dinner, it got to be a bit…. That really soured me on sweet potatoes I must say.
Karen Abel: Now after the war did you keep in touch with anyone from the squadron?
Harold Cross: No, I didn’t. I used to meet a couple of the guys. That fellow, Bill Cripps, which I said we poured into a taxi after he drunk three torpedoes in Anchorage. I met with him a couple of times. I read his obituary in the Vancouver Sun about 15 years ago. But no, I did not keep in touch with him. One of the reasons that I have for thinking that I won’t be going to your commemorative ceremony is that I almost have a lifetime policy of not going back. I have read the agenda and a month from then I will be 96 years old. So I don’t think I’ll be going. Are you sure that I am the last survivor of 111?
Karen Abel: As far as we know. Brendan, do you know of any others?
Brendan Coyle: No. I knew a fellow, George Whitlock, he was a mechanic but he has probably passed away about 10 years ago.
Harold Cross: Whitlock, yeah, I remember him. Isn’t that funny.
Brendan Coyle: He was living in Calgary.
Harold Cross: Yeah, he was one of the guys I worked with when we were changing those engines.
Brendan Coyle: Do you think there was a real fear on the west coast of the Japanese attacking the coast?
Harold Cross: (01:09:47) Well I guess they did on a couple of places but anything serious, no. I am a bit of a military history buff, I have volumes and volumes of books and I have never been able to figure out why the Japanese thought that the diversion to the Aleutian Islands would pull that much of the US Navy away from Midway. And I have never been able to get any kind of the rationalization of occupying two islands out on the end of the Aleutians. Did they think they were going to walk up the Aleutian Islands and invade North America?? No way… (Laughs) that never has made any sense to me. Even to use it as a staging area, it is so far away, you know, all you have to do to look at a map. What the rational for the landings was, in all the books I have read, I have never been able to figure it out. The diversion, well… I guess if the American had not cracked the code and knew everything that was going on anyway, it might have had some effect but it had absolutely no effect on the outcome, absolutely none.
Brendan Coyle: I think that, among other reasons, there was a fear from the Japanese that the Americans would use the Aleutians to bomb Japan. At the time they had Paramushiro, which the Russians got a hold of.
Harold Cross: Yeah. Maybe. That would make some sense because they certainly couldn’t use it as a base to bomb anywhere in North America, not with the aircraft they had then, maybe now… but when you consider it took us 3 days to fly to Anchorage and today it is 3-4 hours from Vancouver to Anchorage
Brendan Coyle: I think the companies who were supplying equipment to the armed forces liked to whip people into a frenzy because I have seen a map and it shows an aircraft taking off and bombing Detroit from Kiska.
Karen Abel: Really? Harold Cross: Uh uh.
Brendan Coyle: It is in the book, actually.
Karen Abel: It is? In your book? That is far fetched…
Brendan Coyle: Yeah. Very far fetched.
Harold Cross: No Way. Not with the aircraft they had then.
Karen Abel: (01:13:31) What was flying like up there?
Harold Cross: Terrible. You literally never knew if you were going to get back. On the one occasion that I had to go on patrol with a PBY/Canso, we had been out for about 18 hours and we were coming back to land, wheels were down, flaps are down and runway was right out there and all of a sudden the runway disappeared. We were lucky, we groped our way down and put two wheels on the runway but when you think about it, you are almost running on fumes, there is nothing left in the tanks at all, you know there wasn’t any alternate anywhere that you could go to, so we groped our way down and landed about right in the middle of the runway, fortunately. But that’s the way it was if you were up there. God and his infinite wisdom only knew if you were going to get back down.
Karen Abel: Now, there were no other RCAF, after the five were lost, no others in your unit that were lost due to weather?
Harold Cross: No
Brendan Coyle: Actually McGregor lost an aircraft; he bailed out and got hit with the tail and ended up in a Vancouver in the hospital.
Karen Abel: That was W/C Morrow
Brendan Coyle: Was it Morrow? Oh Right right… Who’s aircraft was that?
Karen Abel: We didn’t lose a life but lost an aircraft.
Brendan Coyle: I thought it was McGregor.
Harold Cross: No, it wasn’t McGregor. We had one guy, at the time just before we left for Umnak, who was doing an air test and the propeller control on the P-40 was magnetic and there was a magnet about that big right at the front of the propeller mechanism and when you went to change the RPM, which meant you were changing the propeller pitch, the magnet released and the engineering in the propeller took over and controlled the pitch until it got to what you wanted. Then this sturdy great magnet snapped back in to freeze it to where you had set it. This guy claimed that the magnet released and the propeller went in to flat and he bailed out because the engine was going to shake itself loose. I don’t know if anything ever happened about it but there was an accusation around that he just bailed out because he just wanted to be a member of the caterpillar club. But I really don’t think anybody would do that. Fortunately he was a long way a way when he did it, he was out in the boondocks somewhere and there is a smashed airplane sitting around somewhere in Alaska.
Brendan Coyle: Yes, you were right, that was Morrow. I have a newspaper article on it. He was with 14, I think.
Karen Abel: No, he eventually, sometime on Kodiak, was the squadron commander. He has signed off on my grandfather’s log books.
Brendan Coyle: Oh. Yeah, he bailed then ended up in a Vancouver hospital.
Karen Abel: Yes, then went back to the squadron.
Brendan Coyle: It was no different for the Japanese, you see here the Japanese pilots and that, they were eating outside in the weather there.
Harold Cross: Oh yeah. I think they had it worse then we did.
Karen Abel: I am sure.
Brendan Coyle: Yeah. After a while it got kind of rough with the blockade of the island.
Harold Cross: (01:19:13) Oh yeah, I think they had it far worse then we did. At least we had a secure supply route. Our supply ship got there every three weeks and all the parts and equipment we needed got there when it was supposed to. I think it was pretty touchy for the ones on Attu and Kiska. I think that they must have suffered worse then we did.
Harold Cross: About those entries in your grandfather’s log book about flying in the back seat of a Harvard for those damn near air to ground targets… and thinking about how for the pilots in the P-40s doing the air ground firing what a dangerous business that was because when we put the guns in the wings of the P-40, they were aimed to converge about 250 yards out and they were tilted slightly up so that where they converged at 250 yards would be right about on the pilots eye level because they were down there in the wings. Which meant that to do ground strafing like they were you had to have the aircraft not only down but also down slightly more to focus on the target. Why they didn’t bounce of the water, I don’t know.
Karen Abel: Why don’t you re-tell me about the canisters in the back seat?
Harold Cross: (laughs) Oh yeah, about three feet long and three inches round, cardboard cases full of aluminum dust. And when they hit the water they formed a nice round target but to get them to hit the water, one of us went up in the Harvard and pitched them over the side. It was fun.
Karen Abel: You like to go up in the planes?
Harold Cross: Oh yeah. Fine. I still like flying. Not like my wife. She hated it. The first time we went to Ottawa she flew, and that was her first time flying. I am quite sure she thought she was the only one holding the airplane up. Her speed was a DC-3, no higher than 5000 ft.
Karen Abel: I’d say you were doing pretty darn well with your memory. That is along time ago Harold.
Harold Cross: The 75 Anniversary of the beginning of the events is also the 75th anniversary of my 21st birthday. Yeah, that goes back a long long way.
Karen Abel: Were you happy you were there and participated?
Harold Cross: When I look back on it, yeah. I guess it was all-necessary. It was a backwater of the war; sort of a sideshow.
Karen Abel: Still valuable.
Harold Cross: But they made in necessary.
Karen Abel: The Japanese?
Harold Cross: (01:24:50) The Japanese, yes. As I said before, I still cannot figure out why. I know all the reasons for the diversion activity, but why the invasion of the two islands? I never could figure that out. There was nothing there, there is still nothing there, 75 years later there is still nothing there. We were uncomfortable. We made our own comforts. But I am pretty sure for that matter, it was worse.
Mind you, I could never understand the Japanese psyche in their treatment of the civilians in the places they went and the treatment of prisoners of war but somebody said to me onetime, that their military was still functioning like samurai; you never gave up, you never surrendered. So to them, the people who did surrender were worthless. That was the only kind of rational I ever found in any of my books for their mental process in doing all of this stuff. Somebody told me that they expected, if they were captured, to be treated that same way.
Karen Abel: That would make sense.
Harold Cross: And a lot of the Japanese people who were taken prisoner of war could not understand how they were treated. So, when you think of their military, thinking in broad terms. I guess their military were pretty well running the country and their military were still back in old days of the samurai.
Karen Abel: That is why they did the bonsai charge, “If I die, you die” They are not going to surrender; they are just going to kill themselves instead.
Harold Cross: (01:28:40) Yeah, and when you read some of the stories, like the invasion of Iwo Jima and the invasion of Okinawa, when you read the stories of the guys who literally committed suicide, you wonder what they are thinking… I have a Japanese friend, a young man who moved into the apartment next door to us. We became very friendly and his daughters still call me Canadian grandfather and trying to equate his attitude and his outlook on life with what happened during World War Two is very difficult and very difficult for him. We never talked very much about it except that I told him that I was out there in the Aleutians with a bunch of his people at the far end. He is very modern, very well educated and works for one of the last family owned businesses in Japan. I think he is now the controller of the company. The company makes refrigeration equipment in large sizes and sells them all over the world. He has been all over the world for the company. Every time he comes to North American he makes sure that he stops here in Vancouver to come and see me. To equate, like I say, to try to equate his modern democratic attitude toward life and the attitude of that which created what happened during WWII is very difficult. They were different people.
Karen Abel: Totally different.
Harold Cross: Totally different
Karen Abel: And that is why we went to war, because those types of people needed to be stopped.
Harold Cross: Absolutely. But it is funny. When you read the history of the time. President Roosevelt knew the attack was coming. He almost knew the place and time and he did nothing. Because he also knew isolationist USA wouldn’t go to war unless somebody struck the first blow. The isolationist attitude in the United States in 1939 & 40 was pretty strong and they even resented the lend lease things that Roosevelt did. But on December 8th that changed. Wow- did it change. That is funny, it is like Coventry in England, Churchill knew the time, the place and the event that leveled Coventry and he did nothing about it, no warnings were issued because he did not want to let the Germans know that radar was what was supporting the RAF. Funny.
Karen Abel: What do you suppose would have happened if the Japanese landed on Kiska and the United States did nothing?
Harold Cross: (01:34:34) I think that the US Navy would have blockaded Kiska and Attu to the point where they would have starved to death, to the point where they could not stay there. And I don’t know why they didn’t because they had a long supply route, which from Japan was only by ship. I don’t know.
Karen Abel: Hindsight.
Harold Cross: I think part of it was from the political side of it not the military side, but from the political side, this was the first invasion in hundreds of years of the United States of America and they were not going to allow it to go on. It is really hard to say.
Karen Abel: 144,000 troops we sent up there.
Harold Cross: Yeah, to find nothing.
Karen Abel: We found nothing but still stood our ground. That is probably what it was about.
Harold Cross: Oh yes. Yeah, it is like the Japanese lost the war at Midway but it took us three years to convince them. But that is where they lost the war. So that invasion being part of that, I guess it was necessary, to convince them that they should not do that.
Karen Abel: You know at the onset, the RCAF made up one quarter of the air strength up there.
Harold Cross: Is that right? I never would have thought that. Although, we did have one 14 Squadron, they were stationed at Annette Island for a while and then went to Anchorage. 8 BR was all over the place. I don’t know who else was up there…
Karen Abel: 115. They eventually moved up to Annette Island.
Harold Cross: 115?
Karen Abel: Yes. It was the first joint effort of WWII between the Americans and Canadians and it was the first time the Royal Canadian Air Force had ever set up a base and ever take operational command by another unit.
Harold Cross: You know it is funny, not many people realize that in 1942/43 before the Americans really go going in England, the RCAF was the third largest Air Force in the world. The Royal Canadian Navy was the second largest in the number of ships; not in size of ships but second largest naval operation and they Canadians who went to Sicily… well the Canadian Army went over in 1939 and sat there until 1942. Just after Dunkirk, the Canadian Army was the largest armed force in Britain. Not many people realize for a country of only 30 million people, our contribution in both World Wars was pretty tremendous. And I wonder, when this ISIS outfit in Syria started, I really thought that we might have a situation that is so bad, that the whole world would be against it… but the world isn’t ready for that yet.
(01:41:31)
Description
Harold Cross, of the Royal Canadian Air Force, discusses his World War II experience in the Aleutian Islands.
Duration
1 hour, 41 minutes, 41 seconds
Credit
NPS/Karen Abel
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