1939-1941
1939
Roger Payne was the youngest child of Byrd and “A” Payne, pillars of the small community of Lone Mountain, Tennessee. Byrd ran Payne Brothers’ Store, a general merchandise concern that catered mostly to the subsistence farmers who scratched out a living from the rocky hills and “hollers” along the Clinch River.
Besides helping in the store, Roger’s mother, Sallie A.M. Jennings, called “A,” kept a large garden and tended an orchard of apples, peaches, and pears. These, along with the blackberries that grew wild on the hillside behind the barn, were turned into jellies and jams. A could usually be found over a hot stove, canning almost everything her large family ate. Nine of the ten children she had borne over a span of twenty-one years had survived to adulthood, and they all doted on their youngest brother, Roger.
All except Jim, perhaps. Jim was the always irascible brother closest in age to Roger. He loved Roger, but he hardly doted on him. In fact, when Roger was only two, Jim whacked him on the head with a hammer. Roger sported a distinguished looking silver patch of hair over his left temple for the rest of his life.
Roger was eighteen when he left home for the first time in the fall of 1939. His older sister, Anne, and her husband, Maury Kite, drove from Chattanooga to pick him up and take him back to live with them so he could attend the University of Chattanooga. The same mid-September week that Roger registered for his freshman classes, Germany invaded Poland.
Across the ocean and far away, WWII had begun, but Roger’s mind was on college.
In these earliest months of the war, Germany moved fast. That fall and throughout his freshman year, Roger would have seen posters and recruiters for the Army Air Corps all over campus. At that time two years of college was required for aspiring pilots – known as Air Cadets once they enlisted; so, college campuses were prime territory for recruiting. With the war in the background and pilot-recruiting literature all around him, there is no question in my mind that Roger’s interest in flying was piqued.
As 1939 drew to a close, the front page of the Claiborne County Progress, as well as every other newspaper in the country, was covered with accounts of the shocking destruction and heartbreaking losses from this war across the Atlantic, but the people of the United States had no intention, whatsoever, of sending their boys to fight in a war that was none of their business.
1940
In mid-January of 1940, however, a local tragedy knocked the war off the front page of the Progress – a tragedy that shook Roger and the entire Payne Family to the core. Just as Roger was beginning his second semester at Chattanooga, Cawood Rose, husband of Roger’s older sister Sallie, shot Schultz Robinson, a former friend and member of a prominent Claiborne County family. Schultz had a troubled past and every first-hand account described the shooting as self-defense, but the case never went to trial. The following month, Cawood was murdered by Schultz’s older brother, Hadad Robinson, who later spent years in prison for his act of revenge.
The widowed Sallie Rose and her two young children, Betsy, 5, and David, 2, came back home to live with her parents, Byrd and A Payne, in Lone Mountain.
Sadly, Cawood’s death was not the last trauma suffered by the Payne Family in 1940. On September 1, just two weeks before Roger would have returned to Chattanooga for his sophomore year of college, his father, Byrd, laid down on the sofa for his customary after-Sunday-dinner nap and suffered a massive, fatal heart attack.
Roger did not return to college. He stayed home to help his grieving mother, and to help tend Sallie’s children, Betsy and David, aka “Scut.” It was the start of the special bond Roger, Betsy, and David would share throughout their lives.
As the Paynes had been weathering all their personal storms of 1940, WWII raged unabated. Though the US citizenry was still dead set against getting involved in the war, many government and military leaders feared it was inevitable. Preparations were underway.
Only two weeks after Roger lost his father, the first US peacetime draft was signed into law by President Roosevelt. Every unmarried male from age 21-46 was eligible. Roger, however, was only nineteen. He took a job with Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph in Knoxville as a garage man. He shared a place with a roommate on West Fifth Avenue near downtown, very near to where his older sister Margaret, a private nurse, was living on Locust Street.
1941
As Roger began this first job of his adult life, the economy at home and around the country was improving. The whole country was suddenly working, eagerly throwing off the last vestiges of economic malaise left over from the Great Depression, but beneath that veneer of optimism and well-being, the war still lurked. Every branch of the service was beefing up with new draftees. Many of Roger’s closest friends and relatives enlisted or were drafted. This included Roger’s nephews, the “Ault Boys,” sons of his oldest sister Irene.
Irene was twenty-one when Roger was born, and she already had two sons, Kenneth and Frank who were older than their Uncle Roger. The next Ault boy, Lawrence, Jr. – alternately referred to as “Junior,” or “Runt”- was slightly younger. The 4 of them grew up as the closest of friends, and all would enter the service during the war. Kenneth was the first to enlist after the draft took effect. The middle brother, Frank, was completing college and planning to attend Officer Candidate School in Annapolis. The youngest, Larry aka. “Junior,” took a job in Long Beach, California, building airplanes for the McDonnell Aircraft Company.
One of the main areas of concern for the Army and Navy was the fact that their air combat capabilities were so obviously lagging behind both Germany and Great Britain. Everyone on this side of the Atlantic followed the Battle of Britain, and the brave exploits of young pilots captured the imagination of boys and men alike. Several young American pilots “crossed the pond” and enlisted in the RAF. William Dunn, a U.S. Army veteran flying for the RAF, was credited with destroying five German fighters. He became the first American Ace of World War II in Europe.
The United States Army Air Force (USAAF) was officially created on Roger’s twentieth birthday – June 20, 1941. It was to be a bigger and better version of the old Army Air Corps – still part of the Army, but with more autonomy in the command structure.
On Thursday, December 4, 1941, Roger took the train from Knoxville to Detroit, so he could start a new job on Monday, December 8, probably with one of the automobile manufacturing plants that were retooling to build planes and jeeps. He likely would have stayed with his sister, Anne and brother-in-law Maury who had moved from Chattanooga to Detroit. On Sunday, December 7, however the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. Roger returned to Knoxville as fast as he could and applied to be an Air Cadet in the new USAAF.
Roger’s aspiration was to be a pilot. He dreamed of dropping bombs on “Tokio.”
The Aftermath of Pearl Harbor
Long before the attack on Pearl Harbor the top brass in the Air Corps had begun to discuss and question the college requirement that had been in place for several years. Almost every young man who enlisted as an Air Cadet under this scheme had hoped to be a pilot, with those who “washed out” of flight school being redirected into technical schools to be trained as navigators and bombardiers. The Air Corps was not getting enough pilots, and too many of the navigators and bombardiers were below par.
General Carl Spaatz, chief of the air staff of the USAAF, had long felt the existing system placed “too much emphasis on formal education which may mean nothing and… no emphasis on native intelligence which may mean everything.” He espoused accepting high school graduates who passed carefully designed assessments. Word of this proposed change had been in the wind for most of 1941, creating a new crop of pilot hopefuls just waiting for the moment it became official. I have little doubt Roger was among them.
To that end, the Technical Training Command and Medical Division were given a large grant to develop a battery of tests to identify physical and mental aptitudes for each specific area of need – pilot, navigator and bombardier. Planes were being built, new airfields were being constructed, and many existing civilian facilities were being leased and adapted for military use.
The pace really picked up in early 1941, but after Pearl Harbor, a river of applicants for every branch of the military became a tsunami. The age for eligibility for the draft was lowered to 18, and the marriage exemption was dropped altogether.
By the time Roger tried to enlist in the USAAF, the decision to drop the college requirement for Air Cadets was a near certainty but had not yet become official. Applications were being taken, and tests were being administered, but final approvals were withheld. Unbeknownst to all these pilot applicants, orders had come down to the recruiting centers that those who had applied for Air Cadet were to be protected from the draft.
Now that the USAAF was assured they would have enough pilots, they did not have enough places to put them. Roger and thousands more like him were, essentially, in a holding pattern. Waiting to be called.
This is how, on a mild February day in Lone Mountain, young Roger Payne found himself sitting in Payne Brothers Store, gazing out upon the familiar world in which he had grown up, and writing a letter to his dear sister, Anne. It was full of news and all the latest family gossip – a long letter illustrating how attached Roger was to his family and friends. Many of them were both friends and relatives, and and it was obvious that he was very interested in their lives.
And Roger remained interested in each and every one of them throughout his life.
This letter was the first of Roger’s 167 “war letters” that finally found their way to his daughters over seventy-five years later. It provides a fitting introduction to his war years and to the loving man he was.
First letter: Waiting for the Call
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