The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
and so he helps me out of the airplane, I left my chute in there, you know, all that. We get into the
squad car and he says, "Don't worry about a thing, son, we'll have that airplane ready and you can
catch the squadron in 24 hours." So I got out of there and went to back to the base, got myself all
squared away. They did, they had that plane fixed in two days. Now, I'm by myself, Bill. I haven't
navigated across the country at all, and I was by myself. There was nobody to follow, and the skipper
was gone, the squadron was gone. I got maps out and all that kind of stuff, to figure out how the hell I
was gonna go, you know. So, at any rate, I got all my stuff out and headed out and navigated and
caught the squadron in Dallas, Texas at the Eagle Mountain base. I guess it was in those days, that
was 1941, right after Pearl Harbor. Sure enough, they were there, I had caught up with them. They'd
been fogged in. You know, Dallas has a lot of fog, so I was fogged in there, they were fogged in, and
so we were all happy. The skipper said, "Hi Bruce," you know, "How are you, Lieutenant?" I said,
"I'm fine, sir. I made it." And he says, "What's that cut on your head?" I said, "Well, I just banged
the instrument panel". He said, "Okay". They took care of us in Texas. Those Texans, you know,
are wonderful people. They had us up to a penthouse there and they're pattin us on the back, giving
us a great time. We were there for a couple of days and when the fog lifted, we headed to North
Island. Now, understand, there were no Marine fighters on the West Coast. There was a few Army
units there defending the West Coast. There was 111 and 121, and the other sister squadron that was
down in Newbern with us in F4F's. We were there just a few days and then they took us out to Camp
Kearney, which is now Miramar, and which is 2200 feet of dirt strip. They had a tower and all that,
and we had tents. Well, we went out there and quartered there and every morning we're up at 4:00
o'clock. They had six or eight of us turn up our airplanes. We had cartridge-starters on those, and
you'd put a cartridge in and start your engine so they'd warm up the plane so we'd be able to take off.
We would warm up the plane for a pre-down take-off, if anything happened, and they had a couple of
alerts. See, we didn't have radar as it wasn't perfected at that time, and so we would sit in the
airplanes waiting to take off. I had a girl friend, a lady friend, that was going to USC with me and she
was really a pretty little gal. I got tangled up with her a little bit, and we got married. We weren't
supposed to, but we did. Let's see that was January. In January we were doing maneuvers and stuff,
and while we were doing all those things, we were defending the West Coast, really. They had some
other planes down the coast but not many. They pulled me and about six other guys out of the
squadron and put us in 111, and we were shipping out for overseas. We left in February, I don't know
what the dates were, but I've got them in my book. We didn't know where to as they were sealed
orders. So we had all of our planes boxed up and put on board the USS GARFIELD, and we headed
out and we went to Samoa, American Samoa. And so we went there to Samoa, and they assembled
the airplanes. The only way they could get the airplanes from off the ship was the wings were taken
off and they put 'em on the back bed of a trailer truck and they would haul 'em out to the air base.
Now the air base hadn't been finished. You see, there were no seabees at that time, so they had civilian
construction outfits working on it. Then they had the seabees, they had just formed the seabees. They
came in and they started making the runway. So we were operating off of a dirt strip right out in the
ocean about 22-2300 feet out of coral and everything and living in tents.
MR. COX: You were at what location at that time?
COL. PORTER: American Samoa. I want to be sure you understand that there is an American
Samoa and there is British Samoa. Now Pango Pango was American Samoa, and British Samoa was
run by the, well, actually, it was a German mandate. There were a lot of German off springs, you
know. But it was run by New Zealand and they were building an airfield over there in Western
Samoa, Apia, that's the capitol there. At any rate, we went through all kinds of training there. It was
7