The American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews The Museum of Flight Seattle, Washington
Charles H. Older (Part 1 of 2)
Interviewed by: Eugene A. Valencia
Interview Date: circa 1960s
2
Abstract: In this two-part oral history, fighter ace Charles H. Older is interviewed about his military service during World War II. In part one, he describes his experiences as a fighter pilot, including his time with the American Volunteer Group and with the United States Army Air Forces in the China-India-Burma Theater. Topics discussed include his service and training history, his missions in Burma and China, and his thoughts on various aircraft.
The interview is conducted by fellow fighter ace Eugene A. Valencia.
Biography:
Charles H. Older was born on September 29, 1917 in Hanford, California. He joined the United States Marine Corps as an Aviation Cadet and completed his flight training in 1940. Initially assigned to Marine Fighting Squadron 1 (VMF-1), Older opted to resign his commission in order to join the American Volunteer Group, then forming in Burma. He served with the AVG until the group disbanded in July 1942, after which he returned to the U.S. and joined the Army Air Forces. For his second combat tour, Older returned to China and served as group operations officer and deputy commander of the 23rd Fighter Group. After the end of World War II, Older joined the Air Force Reserve and went on to serve with the 452nd Bomb Wing during the Korean War. As a civilian, he pursued a law career and in 1967 became a superior court judge in Los Angles, California. In the early 1970s, he served as the presiding judge in the Charles Mason trial. Older passed away in 2006.
Biographical information courtesy of: Boyce, Ward J., ed., American fighter aces album. Mesa, Ariz: American Fighter Aces Association, 1996.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from the American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services 3
Index:
Personal background ...... 4
Marine Corps flight training ...... 5
Assignment with VMF-1 and joining the American Volunteer Group ...... 6
Training with the AVG ...... 7
Operational logistics ...... 8
Thoughts on aircraft capabilities ...... 8
AVG discipline and combat readiness ...... 10
Intelligence reports on Japanese aircraft ...... 10
Thoughts on pilots...... 11
Ferrying Curtiss P-40E Warkhawks from India to China ...... 12
Capabilities and tactics of Japanese forces ...... 12
Service with the U.S. Army Air Forces ...... 14
Experiences with various aircraft...... 15
Differences in aerial tactics ...... 16
4
Charles H. Older (Part 1 of 2)
[START OF INTERVIEW]
00:00:00
[Personal background]
EUGENE A. VALENCIA: Colonel Older, may I ask where you were born, sir?
CHARLES H. OLDER: Hanford, California.
EAV: Hanford. For goodness sake. Then you are a native.
CHO: Yes.
EAV: Did you live there through your first—
CHO: No, I moved away from Hanford when I was quite young and came to Los Angeles.
EAV: May I ask the size of your family at that time, sir?
CHO: Well, I have one brother and Mother and Father.
EAV: I see. Did you go to high school and grade school here, sir?
CHO: Yes, I went to Beverly Hills High School. Went to grade school in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills.
EAV: And college in this area?
CHO: Yes, undergraduate at UCLA and law school at USC.
EAV: May I ask what your hobbies were during this time, sir?
CHO: Oh, the usual sports. Astronomy. I used to make telescopes as an amateur. My brother and I did that. Swimming, hiking, camping.
EAV: Were you involved in any sports or college activities, student body work—this sort of thing?
CHO: I was student body president in high school. College, nothing particular that I can remember.
EAV: [unintelligible 00:01:35]—were you [sound of tape recorder being adjusted]—before you went into the military? 5
CHO: Just part-time jobs.
EAV: May I ask what they were?
CHO: Oh, I worked vacations. Department stores, things like that.
00:01:59
[Marine Corps flight training]
EAV: When did you decide to first go into the military?
CHO: Well, I was taking ROTC at UCLA and finished the four-year course there, but I didn’t start thinking about flying until about the last year of college. Then I applied for Aviation Cadet as a Marine cadet and took the elimination training at Long Beach, then went on to Pensacola.
EAV: Well, that was the time you could make a selection before you went in as a cadet.
CHO: Yes.
EAV: When I went through, you were—top ten, they said, that sort of thing. When was your first flight, sir?
CHO: My first ride in an airplane was about 1936, but my first flight where I got to handle the controls was in 1939.
EAV: Now, that was during your flight training at—
CHO: Yes.
EAV: …Los-Al?
CHO: At Long Beach.
EAV: Did you have any particular humorous incident during that time?
CHO: [pauses] I’ll be dead if I don’t recall. [laughs]
EAV: May I ask what the most interesting experience during your flight training might have been?
CHO: Well, I suppose your first solo flight is probably the thing that comes to mind immediately. Oh, we had—I had many interesting experiences at Pensacola. It was a great flight training school. I suppose the next greatest thrill after the first solo would be the first time I soloed in an F4B-4.
EAV: That must have been something. I—that was just a little bit before me, but… 6
CHO: That was more like flying than anything I’ve ever been in since.
EAV: At that time in the Marine training, you went—or specialized in fighter aircraft, fighter tactics, rather than seaplanes. Is this true at that time, sir?
00:04:15
CHO: Well, we didn’t specialize in Pensacola, except—well, it—yes, you are right. At that time, they cut out the seaplane work. I think it was my class, was the first class where they cut out the seaplanes, and you went to Squadron 5 fighters instead.
[Assignment with VMF-1 and joining the American Volunteer Group]
EAV: Did you—after graduation where did you go, Colonel?
CHO: Then I was assigned to VMF-1 at Quantico.
EAV: And how long were you there before you went with the AVGs?
CHO: Well, I started in VMF-1 in April of 1940, and I went with the AVG in—I left the Marine Corps in July 1941.
EAV: Well, with VMF-1, that gave you considerable fighter training.
CHO: Yes. We spent seven months on maneuvers with the fleet in the West Indies, Guantanamo, Virgin Islands, working off the carriers. And then we came back to Quantico, and about that time, the contact man for the AVG—or one of them—came around. Actually, he was a contact man for the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, which was the company with which we had our contracts when we went over with the AVG. We had a one-year written contract.
EAV: Yes, sir.
CHO: And CAMCO was the name of this company set up by William Pawley.
EAV: I was reading where the executive officer was—order was signed April 15th, ‘41, authorizing the induction. Did you go over on the Jagersfontein?
CHO: No, I went over on the Zaandam, which was later sunk off Brazil by the Germans.
EAV: I’ll be darned. Did you arrive with the first group, Chuck, at—bear with me in pronunciation—Kyedaw? K-Y-E-D-A-W? It indicated in the book it was the first assembly point 7
of the AVG, where General Chennault [Claire Lee Chennault] indicated that they had bad food, bugs, and rotten climate.
CHO: [laughs] Well, the first assembly place was at Toungoo, T-O-U-N-G-double-O, which is about 120 or 30 miles north of Rangoon.
EAV: I understand that there were ten resignations, he said, when he finally met with the AVGs for the first time. He had to accept ten resignations because of the climate, food, and bugs.
CHO: Well, there were some boys that got a little discouraged and decided to come home for one reason or another.
00:07:14
[Training with the AVG]
EAV: Chuck, we also read with great interest that the General said that he had his kindergarten, which consisted of a 6:00 a.m. class, for about 72 hours of ground school before flying started with the AVGs. Recall any incidents?
CHO: Yes, we had ground school every morning starting when it was still dark. And the reason for having it so early was because it gets so hot in Burma later on in the day that you can’t fly the airplanes. You can fry an egg off the wings. And so you had to do your flying either in the early morning or late afternoon. So we had our ground school even earlier so we could get that out of the way and get in the air.
EAV: Mostly tactics, this sort of thing?
CHO: Primarily tactics and intelligence, as little as they knew about disposition of the Japanese forces and the types of equipment they were flying. The performance characteristics of the Jap fighters, as far as they knew them, and of course, our own performance characteristics.
EAV: Yes, sir. It also indicated that a great deal of time was spent in transitioning some pilots who were torpedo and bomber pilots into fighters. This is why I asked the question earlier. You were certainly one of the few that he mentioned that he was fortunate to have on the team that had fighter training.
CHO: Well, there were some pilots who had had little or no fighter training, and it was a bit of a problem for them to get converted over in a hurry.
EAV: But I was going to ask—that was the next question from the book—with the field— fields and the average lengths of the fields and the P-40 with its narrow landing gear, it’s certainly a tribute to those pilots who had to transition to accomplish the transition in the time that they did. 8
CHO: Yes, they did a good job. We piled up a few of them on landings, but after the initial nervousness wore off they got along fine. [laughs]
[Operational logistics]
EAV: Chuck, what were the fields—mostly short-field type?
CHO: Oh, they varied quite a bit, Gene. Toungoo was an asphalt strip. It was actually a pretty good field. Places like Loiwing were just dirt. And you got up into China further, Kunming had a big runway that had been all handmade by the coolies—rock foundation and then packed with mud on top of that.
EAV: As indicated on the next question, of course, was the experience level—how were these squadron commanders and flight commanders selected, Chuck? Based on experience or age or…?
CHO: Experience and, oh—I really can’t answer the question since I didn’t make the selection, but I assume that the General took into account not only experience but leadership qualities and so on.
00:10:32
[Thoughts on aircraft capabilities]
EAV: I could find nowhere where this was made. I didn’t ask the General. And the questions are just things that I thought would be very interesting. One thing that I found in the book, Chuck—and I had the opportunity to work with both of them—was that the General indicated that the Oscar caused the AVG more trouble than the Zeke.
CHO: That’s because there were more Oscars.
EAV: Is that right?
CHO: We didn’t see too many Zekes until later on. And particularly the second time I went over to China in 1944, the Zekes, of course, far outnumbered the Oscars by then. They had other better fighters then, too. But initially, they were using, I think, probably more Oscars. At least we ran into more of them.
EAV: I understand they had a fine rate of climb and comparable to the—to what we had and could stay in a dive with the 40.
CHO: Well, I don’t know. I never tried to stay in a dive with one, but they had a very fast accelerated climb. They could turn on a dime. They were obviously lightweight because they 9
could practically make a flick turn. They probably had little or no armor plate, but they were formidable if you tried to dogfight with them in a P-40. So it had to be a pretty much of a hit- and-run. You could go a couple of turns with them, but you had to be ready to break off fast.
00:12:17
EAV: Yes, sir. I was quite interested in the tally that I had never had seen before concerning the RAF and Australian types, the variance in their tactics—or the difference in their tactics versus the AVG. And, in fact, the one squadron of Spitfires that were rushed into Australia from Europe who were fighting the Abbeville Boys, the Yellow Nose pilots, lost 17 out of 27 pilots on their first two raids. This was certainly an amazing tally.
CHO: Yes. I haven’t any idea why, except that I would guess there was a certain amount of overconfidence and perhaps a failure to realize that, while the Jap fighters could not compare in some respects in performance, that in other respects they were highly superior. That is, their overall top speed might not be quite as good and their protective armor and armament might not be quite as good, but they had certain characteristics that you couldn’t play with. Principally, their rate of turn and fast accelerated climb.
EAV: It was also indicated in the book that a great deal of respect was given to the Buffalo before Erik Shilling and an RAF pilot put on a mock dogfight. Were you there at that time?
CHO: Yes, I saw it. That occurred at Toungoo. And many of us were disappointed, particularly those of us who came out of either the Navy or Marine Corps, because just about the time that we were leaving the States, the Navy was getting the Brewster, which the British called the Buffalo.
EAV: Yes, sir.
CHO: And it appeared to us, just from the looks of it, that it might be a better fighter than the P-40. And we always had this in the back of our mind that here we were flying a second-rate fighter and the British were flying the first-rate American fighter, the Brewster. But as it turned out, this wasn’t true and the 40 was probably considerably better than the Brewster. In any event, Shilling was considerably better than the guy that was flying the Brewster that day. [laughs]
EAV: After that, there was also mentioned the fact that when the P-40s became scarce in parts—my Lord, I didn’t realize all the handicaps you all had to work under, patching up tires and other accessories—that when the Hurricane was offered that the group voted against accepting the Hurricane as a replacement aircraft. Do you recall that?
00:15:04 10
CHO: Well, I don’t recall at all that the Hurricane was ever even considered. I think I would have been horrified if I’d known about it because I would never trade a P-40, even the earliest model, for a Hurricane. Hurricane was a rugged airplane, but it wasn’t a P-40 by a long shot.
[AVG discipline and combat readiness]
EAV: Chuck, also—I’m getting back to the AVGs—General Chennault was criticized a number of times and actually ridiculed for the lack of discipline. But from what was in the book, it was apparent you had weekly meetings and carried out your own discipline without the necessity of a military—strict military, in the sense that we know it—strict military organization, where you imposed your own fines and majority rule type of thing. This—
CHO: Yes, we had an informal type of discipline. It was not formal in the military sense, but there was never any question about where the authority sprang from and who the leader was, so it really posed no problem as far as individual discipline. I don’t remember that we had any particular problems. I think maybe the General assessed a fine now and then on somebody for some particularly gross infraction. [laughs]
EAV: I was quite interested in the dispatch from the War Department to [unintelligible 00:16:25] that indicated that the AVGs would not be ready for combat until February of ‘42. When asked, the General came back and said, “We’ll be flying by the end of November ‘41.” This was certainly a lack of faith, and, of course, it showed the greatness of the AVGs in becoming a combat organization within that time.
00:16:54
CHO: Well, I guess you could keep training indefinitely for combat and never feel that you were fully ready, but in our case, Pearl Harbor accelerated everything and—
EAV: Yes, sir.
CHO: …while we may not have been ready on December 6th, on December 7 we were ready because we didn’t have any choice.
[Intelligence reports on Japanese aircraft]
EAV: The thing that I was amazed at was in one part of the book, where the General had given the War Department information in the fall of ‘40 on the Zero—detailed information on the Zero—and yet it failed to appear in the pilot intelligence reports until—as he said in the book, which is certainly true—until we saw the guns of the Zero. And also, the other interesting 11
point where he—they put parts—[poor?] intelligence on the Panay a few days before it was sunk. This was before the AVG was formed, but it certainly shows the brilliance of General Chennault. Amazing.
CHO: Yes, he had fairly complete documentation of the Japanese aircraft and their performance characteristics and also reports from Chinese Air Force pilots who had flown against them as to their reactions and what they found and so on. So I think he probably knew more than any other man alive at that time about what the Japs had in the way of aircraft and what they could do.
00:18:23
[Thoughts on pilots]
EAV: Chuck, were the RAF and Australian pilots well trained at that time?
CHO: Yes, I would say so. They—I think they were probably as well trained as we were.
EAV: Was it the lack of equipment that—
CHO: Yes. They were handicapped by these Hurricanes. I think the thing that hurt the most probably was that they didn’t have the knowledge that we had about the Japanese aircraft and I don’t think that they had practiced tactical formations. I don’t think they considered tactics and strategy in connection with—in relation to the aircraft they were going to be up against. And I think that hurt them more than anything. But as far as being good pilots, they were just as good as we were, if not better.
EAV: Were the Chinese pilots—did you have an opportunity to fly with any of the Chinese?
CHO: We escorted some Chinese bombers one time—they were Russian-built bombers—from Kunming to Hanoi, but apart from that escort mission, I never flew with them.
EAV: From what I gather from the book, they were considered very, very good pilots, those that were trained—
CHO: I don’t think the color of the skin or the nationality has anything to do with this. You get a good man in training, you’ll have a good pilot.
EAV: You know, getting back to the spirit of the AVGs, after the battles started to increase in frequency, Jack Newkirk’s message that the more hardships, work, and fighting the men have to do, the higher the morale goes, and squadron spirit here is really strong. That was certainly—
CHO: I think that’s true, up to a reasonable point.
12
[Ferrying Curtiss P-40E Warkhawks from India to China]
EAV: Did you get in on the ferrying of the 40Es to—from India over to China?
CHO: Yes, it was with six of us in February of 1942, flew over to the Gold Coast of Africa and picked up P-40Es and flew them back to China.
EAV: That must have been an interesting flight.
CHO: It was, extremely. We, of course, were flown over by various means to the Gold Coast. CNAC to Calcutta, and from Calcutta we were on a—BOAC, I guess it was, a Short flying— Sunderland flying boat—to Karachi and then Sharjah in Arabia and Basra. And we landed on the Sea of Galilee in Israel and then on the Nile at Cairo.
EAV: For goodness sake.
CHO: And from there, we went south on a C-47 to Khartoum and then across—Sudan, Al- Fashir, and [unintelligible 00:21:24] and Nigeria, finally the Gold Coast.
00:21:28
EAV: Gee, that was a long trip, but—
CHO: And we came back just—approximately the same route.
EAV: Any interesting experiences on that trip?
CHO: Just trying to keep from getting lost most of the time—[laughter]—with no radio aids and lousy maps.
[Capabilities and tactics of Japanese forces]
EAV: That was certainly an interesting flight, Chuck. Were you in—on the Battle of Salween Gorge? Salee? Salween?
CHO: Yes. Yes, I flew some missions down there.
EAV: That was certainly a—from all historian aspects, it certainly proved to be the one battle that the Japanese were thwarted in their offensive thrust, ground-wise.
CHO: You mean by the air—
EAV: By the air. By the flights you people— 13
CHO: Yes. Of course, the terrain there was definitely against the Japanese. Have these steep canyon gorges, steep walls, rugged canyons in the Salween, and it doesn’t take too much to stop somebody in a place like that because there’s no place they can go.
EAV: How were their ground firing—or what was their capability, ground firing-wise?
CHO: Well, they had pretty good ground fire. That always gave us a lot of trouble. You know, small automatic weapons and some light cannon. I don’t know what they were. 30-millimeter, I guess.
EAV: Strafing’s always quite interesting. Chuck, were the Jap pilots at that time—did you draw a constant? Were they—most of them at the same level of training or did they feed in people?
CHO: They seemed to vary quite a bit. Their best pilots were really good, and then they had some who seemed as if they just didn’t know what they were doing. Unfortunately, there weren’t too many of them. Most of the pilots were very good.
00:23:33
EAV: Did they use parachutes at that time?
CHO: Yes, yes.
EAV: Did they have any particular tactics they used against you?
CHO: Well, when they were escorting bombers, the fighters used to sit up fairly well behind the bombers and up high, and they would wait for us to attack first and then come screaming down.
EAV: The odds you people fought against, even with a good double-weave tactic, in and out. And it seems that you were exposed—or would be exposed many times to a great number like that. And I noticed that most of the battles that you fought you were always outnumbered.
CHO: We seemed to be.
EAV: Sure did. Tremendous.
CHO: Another tactic they used to have was the squirrel cage. Instead of just sitting up behind the bombers in formation, they’d get in a great big squirrel cage up behind, make it look like they were actually having a dogfight with some of our people to draw us in.
EAV: Just around like— 14
CHO: Well, they’d just be flying around in all directions, looked like they were dogfighting each other. They’d try to lure somebody in there.
EAV: Did it ever work?
CHO: No. [laughs]
[Service with the U.S. Army Air Forces]
EAV: Chuck, when did you leave China?
CHO: Well, the first tour, I left in—right around the 1st of July ‘42.
EAV: Then you came back and joined the Air Force?
CHO: Yes.
EAV: Could you trace a little bit of that history?
00:25:14
CHO: Well, I came back. I got married. And I flew with Consolidated down in San Diego for about four months and got tired of that and came back in the Air Force. By that time, all my Marine friends were spread all over the Pacific, and most of the boys I’d been flying with in the AVG were in the Air Force, so I went back in the Air Force. Then I had a 38 squadron around L.A. here for a while. Muroc. Incidentally, my group commander when I had that 38 squadron was Jack Chennault, the General’s oldest son.
EAV: Well, Chuck, I read—my co-partner in this venture is General Holloway and—on the television series. And I read of a very successful raid you had, and I couldn’t find the gap on you. Had an awful time. On the 17th of January ’44, were you and—
CHO: ‘45.
EAV: ‘45. Jack Chennault, Tex Hill, [unintelligible 00:26:16]—
CHO: No, no. This was—well, there were two January 17 missions that I can recall. One was January 17th, 1942, when four of us caught three Jap bombers down near [unintelligible 00:26:32], China, and shot them down. But I think the one you’re referring to—it probably is the January 17th, 1945, when we took 16 P-51s to Shanghai for the first time and—
EAV: Caught about 73 planes on the ground?
CHO: Seventy-four. 15
EAV: Seventy-four. I’ll be darned. You also picked off a couple of bombers coming in from, as I recall, from Formosa. It was escaping the attack by 29s.
CHO: Yes, I think Pappy Herbst [John C. “Pappy” Herbst] got one or two of them. I got three in the air that day and three on the ground. Pappy got—I don’t know—two or three in the air, also.
EAV: He was the one that picked off one of the fighters that finally took off from the field as I recall. One—
CHO: I believe so.
EAV: One did get off, and he came down and neutralized it. That was a—you catch them all on the ground, it’d sure be a lot more interesting.
CHO: Well, it was a—it was an extremely interesting mission because it was the first time Shanghai had been hit during the war. They had five major airfields in the Shanghai area. And they could throw 150 fighters in the air any day they wanted to. And we were coming in without any element of surprise, we thought. As it turned out, we did. But it looked like we were really walking into something with 16 airplanes. We had to leave four of those up for top cover, so we were alert, shall we say, that day.
[Experiences with various aircraft]
EAV: What did you—did you ever—did you have—this might be a silly question, but from the schedule that—it was apparent you were certainly moving. Did you have any time to relax in China with the AVGs?
00:28:12
CHO: Oh, yes.
EAV: What was the most [laughs]—I’m glad to hear that. Chuck, then you flew the P-40 and the P-38 and P-51 in combat.
CHO: I didn’t fly the 38 in combat. That was just here in the States. Just the 51 and the 40.
EAV: How many hours did you have when you went to the Flying Tigers? [pauses] Pretty hard.
CHO: Oh, I really don’t remember. I would guess around 1,000.
EAV: That was a lot of time in those days. Single-engine, mostly. 16
CHO: Yeah.
EAV: It sure was. You got all your victories—you got the majority of your victories in the P- 40.
CHO: Ten in the P-40 and eight in the 51.
EAV: What was your opinion of the 51 in combat at that time, Chuck?
CHO: That was the number one airplane, no question about it. Great airplane.
EAV: The P-40, at its time, used the way you did, was effective enough to get you ten aircraft. That’s—
CHO: The P-40 was a good airplane, but the 51 was just a hell of a lot better.
[Differences in aerial tactics]
EAV: Did—well, modification of tactics. Did you notice much of a change when you came back into the combat area over the tactics employed?
CHO: Yes, because when I was flying 51s on my second tour, we were mostly on the offensive, whereas in the AVG we were mostly on the defensive. In other words, we were defending airdromes rather than going out on offensive sweeps, except for a few occasions. And the tactics are naturally considerably different, particularly where you don’t have any warning net—or very little warning. You’re always sitting there waiting to scramble, and your principal tactic is to get the thing in the air before you get it shot down by somebody coming in—
EAV: Well, it was still modified, though. Take, as an example, your 17 January raid. When you’re up against—or expecting a potential of 150 fighters and you have 16 aircraft, while it’s offensive, you still have to employ—
CHO: Oh, yes, yes, yes. But what I mean is, instead of—
EAV: [unintelligible 00:30:43].
CHI: …instead of looking out, searching for the enemy, on the defensive missions, you don’t have to search for them. You know they’re going to be there. [laughs]
00:30:54
[END OF INTERVIEW]