Training in World War II

Skip Schipper's account of what it was like to train in Iowa City during World War II...

"During WWII, I was a naval aviation cadet and went to pre-flight school at the University of Iowa in your fair city.  I was at the Navy Iowa Pre-Flight School during Oct, Nov and Dec 1942. There was no Navy flight training at Iowa City at that time.  The Primary training at Ottumwa was just starting so some of the cadets went there.  I did my first flight training at the Naval Air Station at Glenview, Ill.  during January, February and March 1943.  This was in open cockpit biplanes with temps as low as 10 above zero with ice and snow on the runways.  God was it cold."
 

"At the university we lived in the quadrangle dorms and spent lots of time doing athletics in the field house next door.  On Saturday mornings we went out into the country on progressively longer hikes until we were doing 15 miles in two and a half hours.  We walked on the level stretches and ran up the hills.  I learned to swim in the olympic-sized pool in the field house where the water temperature  was kept at about 55 degrees.  We always swam in the nude or sometimes fully clothed to duplicate a forced landing in the ocean."

"On a humorous note, as cadets we were not supposed to drink (most of us were under age also).  In order to get a drink, the routine was to go into the dining room at the Jefferson Hotel where beer was served in tea pots and poured into tea cups.  Saturday nights would find an unusually large group of cadets sipping "tea" in the hotel dining room. Whisky could be obtained in half pints from the bell hops and drunk in the back room of a local malt shop which would serve the "set-ups"."
 

- Skip Schipper, as told to Jay Honeck on December 10, 2003