Fighter Training at Kingsville, Texas

Enlistment | Dallas NAS | Corpus Christi NAS | USMCR | California

SNJ

Field of SNJ's

Guy's letter dated January 12, 1943:

"I'm at Kingsville now and have been here since Saturday. Everything out here is swell, but I can't say much for the fair City of Kingsville. It's okay, just a one-horse town with one picture show and nothing else. Of course, we don't have time to go to town much anyhow, so it doesn't matter.
I'm crazy about the fighter squadron. I haven't gotten far into it, as yet, but I've broken the surface and it looks wonderful.
... Tell Roy I'm flying SNJ's now. He can perhaps tell you a little about the plane. It's a nice baby with a 650 horsepower engine. We cruise at about 140 and has a top speed in acrobatics of about 250. And believe me, that's not coasting. They have hydraulic retractable landing gear and hydraulic flap control, variable pitch propeller, etc. Really a nice ship. We get to make a lot of gunnery runs with them later. Those 30mm machine guns have a pretty good lick, too. I'm anxious to do some strafing in it. And am I looking forward to my acrobatics in those babies. They say you can really wrap 'em up. I'll get about a hundred more hours in this squadron. That means I'll have about 250 flying hours when I get my commission. Probably about 100 more in transitional before I go to duty. I should really know those babies by then...
.... I had a wonderful time this afternoon. It was raining and they secured us from squadron about 2:30 PM and from 3:00 until 6:30 I had a jam session. There was a fellow here who has his sax (alto) and clarinet down here and he brought them down to my room and we had a fine session. He'd play sax and I'd play clarinet a while then we'd change around. I've been itching to play for a long time now and, gosh - I enjoyed it. The room was stacked full of kids in no time and it stayed that way until we quit. We really put on a show."

Then, in a January 23rd letter:

"Well, I've been pretty busy since I've been over here in fighter squadron. Sof far I've done mostly formation work and carrier landings. However, as soon as it gets daylight I have three hours of acrobatics and a two hour oxygen hop. We'll go to about 20,000' on the oxygen hop. They're a lot of fun. We put on our oxygen masks at about 12,000' and then climb on up. An on a clear day, you can see pretty far from that height.
When I said 'as soon as it's daylight' I mean just that. You see, I'm over here at squadron now and we always get here about 30 minutes before daylight. I'm pretty sleepy this morning. We were over here last night until about 12:00 for night flying. Twelve used to seem early to go to bed, but not anymore. Even 10:00 is late for me.
Mother has been wanting a picture of me in my uniform. Tell her when I'm in Abilene on leave I'm going to have her a nice big one made in my dress Marine uniform - color and all.."

Doc Marker remembers:

"I think we first started flying the SNJ in instrument flying where the student spent most of the time in the rear cockpit. Flying the SNJ was not a big step up from the SNV in controlling the craft but there were many more things to be aware of; retractable landing gear, stearable tailwheel, constant speed prop which brought manifold pressure into the picture and hydraulically actuated flaps. All the systems that were on a combat aircraft were on the SNJ.
Fighter training was conducted at Kingsville and mostly consisted of aerobatics and gunnery. All flights were in the SNJ. The SNJ was ,for me, a very comfortable and considerate aircraft. It would never surprise you. It would do exactly what you wanted if you put in the right control movements and pressures. All told, I probably had well over five or six hundred hours in the SNJ while in the service and not once did I have a problem with the aircraft."

Guy's letter to Mother dated February 25, 1943

"I do hope you can come down. Of course, graduations like this aren't what they would be in peace times, but I guess they're okay. They leave off the fluff and feathers now - only the meat left. I think they just say, 'Here it is!' Maybe a little more than that."

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