was coming home-I had enough points to come home-she wrote back and said, "I won't be there for you. I've already found someone else." So, the moral to this is being gone twenty-two months is too long. I thought we had a good marriage, but that war just busted that up, so I had to start over when I got here. Were there any women working on the bases in the U.S.? I was stationed just for a month at Kelly Field in San Antonio, and they had a LOT of women doing work there. As a matter of fact, my mother was in the engineering department there. This is her-she had a job where she was the gal that pulled all of the blueprints and everything for their craftsmen to do their work. They worked on fifty different kinds of planes there, and she could go to the files and find the right prints. When you returned home, how did the people at home treat you, or what was the reaction of people? You know we dribbled in. There would be a troop train with maybe 1,000 guys on it and they'd get off, and there wouldn't be nobody there-no bands. Family would meet you or something like that. There wasn't all this hoopla like when a battleship comes in. We came home in dribbles. This is a picture of my first wife here, and this is my mother and sister here, and this is me when I came back home to San Antonio. There was this "Glad you're back," and all that kind of thing, but no big deal. I have one last question. How did the people on the base treat you? Were there any pranks, or was it like serious all of the time between the officers and everybody else? It was all business. There weren't any pranks. We lived so close together that any mischief was generally taken as bad. I actually would say that we were a military atmosphere. Now the men didn't jump up and stand at attention and salute and all of that, but they called you "Sir"; you called them "Sergeant," or "Private So and So." It was a military atmosphere.
Interview with Frederick T. Phillips, a captain in the US Air Force during WWII. He answers questions about his time in the military and life after the war.
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