American Valor Quarterly Issue 9 - Summer 2012 | Page 22

airplanes, one pilot outmaneuvered
another. That was assumed in WWII. But
the Japanese had their 10 years of combat
experience previously in Asia. Their air
commander sought the greatest aces that
they possessed and put them in one
squadron to embarrass the Americans,
and they did. With the fighter plane being
the most important part of the army, it
fell to the Allied fighter pilots to stem the
onrush of the Japanese in the Pacific. You
must have some hope in your efforts at
war or else it’s a rout. I’m happy to explain
some of what the soldiers did to turn
the war around.
From my humble beginnings, destiny
provided a trail that led to events
important to America that I was destined
to help influence. When I was 10, my dad
sold his hardware store for a big farm,
which was a monumental mistake. He
bought the farm in the prosperous ’20s.
When the stock market crashed, he had a
big loan and a farm that couldn’t produce
enough profit to pay the interest. We
children had to help him out with growing
the crops and paying the taxes while the
mid-‘30s Southwest was going through
the greatest drought of all time. Gray
clouds of dust up to 20 feet across would
roll across the prairies, whipping the plants
to death.

A couple of those vital elements include

stick around the water and starve to
death, so I found a highway not too far
away. Even though no one came for a
bit, I had to hitchhike either way.
Unfortunately the car I got in took me
back to Colorado and Kansas. At Hayes,
Kansas, I was so thirsty I had to get out.
In the middle of the night, I crept onto a
farm and woke up the owner, whom I
told I needed a drink. He gave me one. I
got a job working the harvest there and
made enough for a two-cent stamp to
write my very concerned mother.
Once the harvest was over, I was
homesick and drifted back down to
Oklahoma again. My longest stretch
without food had been three days. I
wasn’t making a very good hobo. My
father gave me 10 acres to put in a crop.
I had been told that you needed 60
college credits to qualify for the flying
cadets. That cost me a lot, about $90. So
I planted corn, and fortunately a
thunderstorm dumped three inches of
rain on my plot, something that was
practically unheard of in those days.

Morehead graduated from pilot training in April
of 1941. A “proud and brand new” second
lieutenant, he became a P-40 pilot at the
Hamilton Field Air Base.

After graduating high school, I left home.
I wanted to enter Oklahoma University,
but my father would not allow it. I was
just 17 and only had the shirt on my back
when I decided to get on a freight train
heading west. I went through Denver and
the Rockies like that. I got off the train
when it stopped at midnight and entered
an old shack with a leaky faucet. That is
the kind of place I would spend my
nights.
At a railway watering tank, California
lawmen, known as “bulls,” came down
the freight train and kicked off 86 hobos.
In the confusion, they missed me, but I
was ejected at the next stop. I couldn’t

After finishing my fourth semester at
UCLA, I applied for pilot training in the
Flying Cadets. I got into the Army Air
Corps because I needed a job very badly.
Some pilots tell the story of how they
long to fly—that wasn’t me. I went into
the service to get a job, and the best
outlook was flying cadet. I came into the
army recruiting office in Tacoma, Wash.,
on Aug. 2, 1940.
That afternoon six other Washington boys
and I took the oath to defend our country
against all comers. We were given railroad
tickets and boarded a train for Glendale,
Calif., where I entered the military service
of the United States of America. I
graduated from pilot training, a proud
and brand new second lieutenant, U.S.
Army Air Corps, April 1941, and became
a P-40 pilot at the Hamilton Air Force
Base.
On Sunday, Dec. 7 of that year, news of

AMERICAN VALOR QUARTERLY - Summer 2012 - 22
AVQ - Issue 9 Part 2.pmd

9

9/4/2012, 11:04 AM

Leon J. Delisle Collection

I grew up a hunter, forced both by choice
and necessity to develop a sharp, finetuned eye for the quarry. This began at a
very early age and continued until I was
grown, so the applied elements and
oddities of wing shooting became
natural. You might say that a number
America’s fighter pilots grew up like me,
handling guns and sharpening their wingshooting skills. They were pros—
something the Japanese with all their
veteran aces and all their smug prowess
had not counted on. Nearly all of
America’s fighter aces were hunters. They
learned many important characteristics
for being a fighter pilot.

knowing ballistics: the drop of a bullet,
leading a target. Japan didn’t have a
hunting cu \