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Show g (DID) IS MY 1JL CflD-PHlLOT Wf Cot. Robert L.Scott w.N.u.tLP WL At that instant the professor stood up and said he would wait five seconds sec-onds for me to begin the recitation correctly. I tried again and was ordered to sit down. The zero I received dropped me from the first section to the last. Furthermore, I found immediately that in this last section the subjects sub-jects for monographs were not selected se-lected by the cadet, but were assigned. as-signed. The new instrut-tor gave me the battle of Sandepu some insignificant in-significant engagement in an insignificant insig-nificant war. I looked for days in the library for data on the battle, and finally found about one paragraph para-graph devoted to it in the Encyclopaedia Encyclo-paedia Britannica. It was Sandepu, Haikoutai, or Yen Kai-Wan, fought during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. A person with my imagination and initiative, I reasoned, would simply waste his talents on such a small battle. I therefore decided to create cre-ate a fictitious battle. This extra work mattered not, for I had nothing noth-ing but time, having been placed in confinement for getting the zero in history. I worked out an elaborate plan for the battle and introduced the subject In a manner that I knew would attract attention to even a last-section monograph. I dedicated the work of art to the officer in charge of Field Artillery, Lieut. Pete Nuby a contraband nickname of a very tough officer. I illustrated the monograph with pictures of New York street cleaners and wrote under un-der them that they were Japanese soldiers waiting to go over the top at the River Ho in 1905. Lastly I tied the book in red ribbon at least six inches wide, completed with a TBe story thus far: In 1920 yonnr Rob-ert Rob-ert Scott cut 50 feet of canvas from the ide wan of a Holy Rollers' tent In Ma-eon, Ma-eon, Ga., and decides to nse It for the wing covering of a glider. He pulls off rom a roof and crashes 67 feet to the ground. He fell Into a Cherokee rose bush, which probably saved his life. He now goes In for building scale model planes and wins a Boy Scout avla. tibn merit badge. At an auction sale he buys his first plane for $75. He plans on going to West Point but meets with many difficulties. He goes to Ft. Mc-Pherson Mc-Pherson and enlists In the regular army as a private. Three months later he be gins bis training In the Fourth Corps Area, West Point prep school. CHAPTER n Scott put in six months ol study there, lor there were some eight hundred ol us soldiers trying in competition com-petition for about fourteen vacancies. vacan-cies. As luck would have it that year, these fourteen were cut to eight. Once again West Point teemed a long way off. I got down to business then; I would shut myself my-self in my room and almost memorize memo-rize the lessons, especially every old West Point examination as far back as 1920. The study bore fruit. . I kept at the top of the class and in March took the dreaded examination. examina-tion. One day, some weeks after the annual competition for entrance from the Regular Army, I was walking walk-ing guard duty. I was called from Post Number One, around the guard-house; I had just heard the familiar call, "Number One two prisoners," and had replied, "Turn 'em in." The General had sent for me. As I stood before him my keart felt as though It would beat out through my blouse. He smiled and spoke. "Son, you have won in the West Point competitive examination and t want to tell you you're starting lut on the same read I started out on long time ago. It's the greatest great-est school in the world but learn lome common sense too. I'm aend-tag aend-tag you on furlough until you report for duty at the Military Academy. Congratulations." The world was never so sweet. I gained two inches in the chest that flay. Thus, in July of 1928, I walked through the sally port with my suitcase suit-case and began the routine that is familiar to nearly everyone. I had beard of the strict discipline of West Point and the difficulty of studies for one handicapped by a Southern tog the explanation I gathered that someone who lived there in the town spoke English. This of course was pleasant news, for I was, after all, a lonely tourist in a very foreign land. They now sent a small boy to bring back this connecting link between us. I waited . and waited, while they all pointed and jabbered about me. Finally the steak came, and got cold while my mouth watered, wa-tered, but I felt I had to wait and ask the American if he would eat with me. At last there was a commotion com-motion at the entrance, and I turned anxiously to see my American friend. Through the door waddled a dark, dirty little man evidently a former fruit-vendor in New York. He saw me, stopped his Croatian talk, threw out his arms, and cried, "Son of a beetch! Son of a beetch!" To my discomfiture, that was the only English Eng-lish he seemed to know. But I halved my steak with him and patted pat-ted him on the back as he tried to talk, and in the end I guess his compatriots com-patriots really thought their friend spoke American anyway. I could hear them calling me Americanski. I continued on, keeping clear of the tourist routes, and finally, after a forty-five-day trip from Cherbourg, I rode into Constantinople. Here I came close to getting in a real jam. Back through my life I had concentrated concen-trated on scouting, archery, and flyinganything fly-inganything but girls. I could remember re-member crossing the street to keep from having to talk to them. But that real bashfulness was far behind me. Now I had about gone to the other extreme; I had found dates in Paris, Venice, and other cities, and bad had a fine time. Before reaching Turkey, I had been warned by the head of the American Express in Sofia that I should be very careful in Istanbul and should confine myself to the Americanized Turks in and around the Pera part of the city. They told me above all to stay clear of Ga-' lata the old Greek and Turkish section. sec-tion. As luck ruled, however, my first acquaintance was from Galata, and that night I headed for the city of the veiled women. Well, even with right ideas the men in that quarter had the wrong idea. I saw the danger just in time, and even then I had to jump through a window glass and all into an alley. I can hear the yells even these years afterwards as I ran through Galata back to Pera for my motorcycle. Stopping at the hotel ho-tel Just long enough to check out, I : .: V-7 .5 , . . -f 1 : . ) j ' "s r Y L- - v - accent. My year ol hard worn naa made me hate books again, but I resolved that after the work I had gone to I most certainly would not be kicked out or "found," as we say in Kaydet slang. I remember my father's ambition for me. He was of course proud of my appointment, appoint-ment, and used to wonder why I didn't rank about number one in my class. During my Plebe year, which was easy because I had just about learned the first year's work at the prep school, he used to write and tell me that while it wasn't too disgraceful to be number fifty in a class of over three hundred, he couldn't see why I didn't study a little more and get up into the first twenty. Well; as the first year went by and I got into the more difficult studies, I went lower and lower in a liass that dwindled finally to some two hundred and sixty. During the last year, when I was very far down, Daddy would write: General Henry. H. Arnold, chief of the United States Army Air Forces, to whom this story is dedicated. bow larger than the monograph. I doomed myself in the last paragraph para-graph by saying that I had dreamed I had observed the battle, but had been awakened by reveUle, which, as Napoleon declared at the battle of Maloyaroslavetz, is a hideous noise in the middle of the night. All of which went to prove, I contended, that history could be made in sleep, and it therefore did not require an "engineer" to be a historian. For the story of Sandepu, I imagined imag-ined that I went down to a Southern city to inspect the Army's Erst aircraft. air-craft. This was a free baUoon the latest invention of 1905. Becoming weary, I went to sleep in the basket of the balloon. But a storm must have torn the craft from its moorings, moor-ings, for when I looked down I was Koinr Mown to the East across the was off in more dust for Scutari and East in Asia to Ankara. So raising the veU of a Moslem female shortened my stay in Constantinople. Con-stantinople. Even in my return to the West from Ankara, I found a way to dodge the city on the HeUes-pont HeUes-pont by getting a Black Sea steamer steam-er and crossing North of Istanbul to land at Varna in Bulgaria. From here I crossed the Danube at Rust-chuk Rust-chuk and went to Bucharest. My spirits had risen a little after missing the Turkish knives in Galata, Ga-lata, but here I found a cablegram awaiting me. The Comptroller General Gen-eral had ruled that the Economy Act of June, 1932, affected all officers offi-cers on leave. He had decided that I, like many others, was on leave without pay. My orders were to report to the nearest American Embassy Em-bassy for duty; I remember that they were signed by McColl. I sent my champagne back and ordered beer, for the money for this trip had been borrowed against my three months' leave pay. Here I was, thousands of miles from home and Randolph Field, where my flying training would start. If I reported to some ground officer in Europe, I would probably never get to fly. Anyway, just to make sure, I hopped on my motorcycle that night and headed for Texas by way of Budapest - Linz Bingen-on-the-Uhjne and Paris. I sold the motorcycle motor-cycle in Cherbourg and boarded the Bremen for a quick trip home. I had used pay that I was expecting to get during leave, and I'd be paying pay-ing the bank for a long time. But I resolved right then and there that I would pay that money back from the Air Corps at Randolph Field and not from some desk in an Embassy. And so I came at last to the Air Corps Training Center at Randolph Field, Texas. It's hard to describe my feelings as I walked into the North gate of that field and down the nearly mile-long mile-long road to the Bachelor Officers Building, where I was to report. It seemed that aU my life I had waited wait-ed for this moment. Now at last the great day was at hand when I would begin my government flying training. There above me against the blue Texas sky I could see the roaring airplanes in their Army colors. col-ors. As my feet carried me into the field I could hear the rhythm of the steps seeming to say in cadence, 'This is it! This is what I've waited for all the days of my life!" In October, 1932, I was assigned to Lieut. Ted Landon for primary flying training. I imagine this assignment as-signment was about as momentous for him as it was for me for after aU I must have been quite a problem, prob-lem, with aU I thought I knew about flying and the eagerness with which I approached military aviation. (TO BE CONTINUED) "You just stay there, Son, just stay there." I still heard the planes flying over and try as I would, I could concentrate concen-trate on nothing but the Air Corps. In 1930 I wrote an essay on flying fly-ing and it almost got me kicked out You see, in Military History you have to write a monograph on the strategy employed in one o : the major battles of the world. I had always al-ways liked military history and had been in the first section of that sub-iect sub-iect (At the Academy each student stu-dent is in a section commensurate with his scholastic standing.) My presence in : group Pe- to choose my batue. 1 " grandfather killed at Bull Run and I therefore selected the first Battle of Manassas. There was, as usual, many a slip. Before I was able to write the story we were permitted to travel te the Recast to play Stanford in foot-baU foot-baU Coming back under the cha-erta cha-erta of defeat, I did not bother to my books, believing that even Point would not expect a stu-dent stu-dent to recite within one hour of hf return from California. But I reckoned without the rigidity of the Icademy. Our train arrived across me Hudson at Garrison at :55 and marched into History at 7:55. I know what war it was in. and there tore knew nothing concerning it. T tore Knew however, rsofasion-known as to the blackboard with an Going 10 , tood at atten- that the forces of an a j concentrated for battle . . . Atlantic. For days we drifted) over ocean and continents, until, coming close to the hilly ground, I used the first air-brakes ever known. They were composed of one mile of government gov-ernment red-tape and the anchor worn by the captain of the "goat team of 1904. (This was readily interpreted in-terpreted by the professors, for the traditional football game of the year is one played between the first thirty thir-ty men in the Second Class, caUed the "engineers," and the last thirty men known as the "goats." I was of course in the last thirty; I had been Goat Captain, and had worn the anchor sewn on my football jersey ) These improvised airbrakes worked, and the anchor caught on a biU which I identified from maps as the hill of Chan-tan Honan the theater the-ater of the Russo-Japanese War. From this vantage point, swinging in the balloon, I watched the two armies in battle. Merely rank face-tiousness, face-tiousness, I admit, but even then I was completely air-minded. I was reported for submitting a facetious monograph in military art and for casting reflections on the Engineering Department. In the summer of 1932. after being eraduated and commissioned a second sec-ond Lieutenant of Infantry, I went to Europe. In Cherbourg, France, I bought a motorcycle and set out to ride to Constantinople. The one-cyl-mder Soyer took me down through Paris then Southeast into Switzer-land Switzer-land and over the Simplon Pass to naly I sPt some time in Venice; tnen I went up through the dust into Jugoslavia. One day I had ridden some four hundred mUes into the town of Novo ,n.n Tired and dirty from the Sew'durt olthe roads I wen, |
