Interview with Charles Lamb, Korean War Veteran. CCSU Veterans History Project

today is May 11 2018 I am interviewing Charles lamb at normal Community College in Norwalk Connecticut the interviewer is Caleb Pittman working with Central Connecticut State University so for the record could you please state your full name and city and state in which you live my name is Charles Perry lamb jr. right and I live in Westport Connecticut and which word did you serve I'm sure in what which war did you serve well the Korean conflict what was your branch of service well I was a naval pilot and who was a pilot a navigator during the Korean conflict okay what was your highest rate well while I was still an active duty lieutenant junior grade but in the reserve I went eventually became a lieutenant in the Navy okay and in which general locations did you serve well I did my flight training at Pensacola Florida and Corpus Christi Texas and then even later on I was stationed in daughter's point of Hawaii and I did more training there and also was active as a gunnery officer in the squadron I just I don't think I did anything I don't know went to Japan and Korea okay so were you drafted or did you enlist I enlisted when I was in high school okay and where were you living at the time Talan called Sycamore Ohio do you recall the date well I was 1946 when I'm this I don't remember the yeah Oh sighs good that's good so why did you join her in high school well it's a little bit of a long story but whenever it's in high school during the war I've learned that hard work doesn't always get you to the top you know and in fact I worked with a group of people on the railroad who couldn't read or write because of thee they regret they were as young from the draft and I date and I lied a little bit about my age but at 16 I was already a foreman because these guys couldn't write read or write so I said to myself I don't think I want to do that kind of work in the future so I said to my dad how about college dad and he said you know you're aren't too smart at school and all you did was play basketball he says I don't know I could send you to barber school barber school that did not appeal to me so I started to search around and I heard about the naval aviation college program and another young man from the local town and I went to Detroit and when we got there there were about 20 guys already waiting to take the test and they were already in college and we were just two high school kids in any event we did three days of testing and I don't know what happened to those guys but we were the only two left and interesting enough we had to take one more test which was a psychological test and it was the only test that we actually took where somebody who was administering it was right into room and this was silly stuff like you know did you ever wet the bed and stuff like that and my friend Dale chucked the wrong check and his corpsman sitting said he said no don't check that that will knock you out it was interesting because that torment later on we both Dale and I went to Bowling Green State University which after we had been sworn in and the corpsman that we met that day was that Bowling Green State University which was kind of nice so any rate getting into that program no was sort of tough my English teacher and my math teacher learned that I was going to take the test the math teacher whose brother had been Navy pilot in World War two decided that I needed to own up on my map so she made me do every problem in the freshman algebra book it's the word problems and then do trigonometry and geometry in the meantime the English teacher there was a book on how to improve your vocabulary it's still worse and something around she made me go through that thing so by the time I got to Detroit I was really pretty well prepared and couldn't pass the test and that meant that we got two years of college I remember to go into flight training for up to two years and then two years in the fleet and then two more years of college was all paid for so it was turned out to be very nice arrangement and it became known as flying Midshipmen program and I've explained that in a minute you have to understand that World War two ended and this description here and a lot of pilots left in a sort of the shortage of pilots particularly commissioned officers and so Admiral Holloway devised this program which was the Naval Aviation College for them and to build a replacement for all these people that were leaving a service and so that's the program that we got into it as I said was a very good program because it gave us free college for two years and when we got out of the Navy we had two more years of free college that meant books tuition and $75 a month that wasn't ready yet so anybody what happened was this we started our flight training but we went to college two years then we all went to Pensacola I'd say we all went because there were four young men from Bowling Green that were in the same program and we all went to Pensacola together and we did our starter flight training first ground school and my dream and Pensacola was a great adventure for us because we had none of us ever been solved before and we didn't know about it apartheid and back at the bus and all that kind of stuff it was all sort of new to us and also we knew nothing about the let's say the way the Navy works the officers clubs and everything else and we were suddenly introduced to this program on the side except that we were limited we were not allowed to go out in public and drink or smoke or do anything like that and what was interesting was that the girls in Pensacola were very wise to all this and they knew the clubs where we could go and drink wine and beer privately and no officers were allowed in and so we managed to get through that period pretty well but after we finished the ground school so to speak naturally from the ground school included an amazing amount of different things for example night vision test navigation we rode the centrifuges to get the idea of gravity many many programs like that the interesting one was the so-called high altitude chamber so basically this nurse comes in and she said you're going to get in a chamber you guys and she said it's okay if you're passed gas because you're going up to 30,000 feet and then we're going to ask you know take your oxygen and we see what happens no oxygen 30,000 feet well the guy next to me was playing cards with somebody and they took off his mask all of a sudden he's picked up all the cards that's reported but then we finally got to the flight training and that's when that's the second time I was ever up in an airplane and gotten the airplane the instructors it okay taxi out well you know and takeoff that's right away yeah well how Eddie right and so you went through so until solo friends and then you started stuff like acrobatics formations line gunnery and then ultimate at night I'd find instrument rings then went started to prepare board to carry on and so it took us out to the carrier and we spent a day on secure watching a few people land and listen at the other and then we went back to Pensacola in the next week I said all right they're gonna fly out to the carrier and see the ocean they're near Pensacola and the carrier will be out there and so there are six of us had no instructor with us I was the lead pilot why but that's where it turned out they said just ice now 180 degrees for 15 minutes and you don't see the character well we did that we didn't see in here Terry here we're flying around out there over the ocean but we were pretty well trained so we went into square suits and after about five minutes respond to kill you now you have to understand we had been practicing landing on a carrier on earth what's it called field carrier practice we set your altimeter to zero he went up to a certain altitude come around at about a hundred and fifty feet dropped down to seventy feet and then turned in and landed on the ground so we had all set our outer meters to zero when we took off that morning and Pensacola was only about 215 feet above sea level but when we came around to go into the carry over the first time they got waved off because nobody told us that the carrier was 70 feet of the deck was 70 feet off the ground we're flying along at the wrong altitude right any rate we managed to come around and I heard on board on this second pass cost me a box of cigars but we did qualify that day and there's a picture of the carrier and she's still located down in New Orleans today but she's I don't what she called mothballed okay so any rate once we qualified on the carrier then we were sent to advanced training and that was in Corpus Christi and I went to a multi-engine down there brought flying what was known as PB for white ooze which were the Navy's version of the beach one for World War two and eventually qualified in that aircraft and then that's when I got the and I was doing Midshipmen at this gym and I was scheduled to get my commission in July and I was sent to San Diego well I was there it's going to be there about four months before July so they sent me to school and I went to mine warfare school and went to lead electronic school and then I was scheduled to go to underwater demolition and today I was to report for that duty the Korean War broke out and the next day I was on a ship on the way to one and I'm still a midshipman $78 a month but I was a qualified pilot and navigator you got to Guam nobody knew where the squadron was I couldn't find it talked to finally found an enlisted man and I said you know where VP 28 is he said no he says it's secret not supposed to tell anybody he said maybe you can find something out over two officers flow so went over the officer's club they ran into a midshipman that I had known back in Pensacola and I said what's going on he said well I'm here because I broke my arm and a blah blah he said look he said you just go to the officer's club and you sign it shut for your meals their drinks and sit around somebody will be in touch with you sooner or later though he was right after about two weeks I'm sitting there and Josh comes walking in and a crummy looking flight suit and he said I'm looking for midshipman lamb and he says come with me and your over operations and he said we're going to go to Okinawa and you're the Navigator and it's kind of interesting because I never paid for those chips like so and daddy rate we went to Okinawa and second day I was there they gave me a mission black navigator down to China coast and I guess we were mapping out to Chinese radar installations or something came back home that evening and the commanding officer said we got the duty until tomorrow morning and we're being deployed back to Hawaii and so you're a navigator going back to Hawaii and so we flew from Okinawa dr. von quads named Johnson I'd have been back to loggers wearing white and after I was there about two weeks I tonight commission showed up and I became an ensign in the Navy and Barbara's point was a good experience we've got a lot of training did lots of interesting stuff but it basically was squadron training getting ready for the next deployment and in about after about six months we were deployed to Naha Japan which was there was an Air Force Base there called Air Force Base and we were flying in support of the seventh fleet the trove squadrons and patrols in the Sea of Japan basically and we would constantly encounter Russian planes and it would be kind of a standoff you know it was kind of a we dare do you dare us kind of thing but we had more guns than they did so they generally do off after a while it was decided that the squadron could go back to Hawaii but all the incense who were unmarried would stay and be transferred to the Marine unit on a land base under in Korea and we started supporting this Marine unit and the program was called with anyway they code an operation fighter flying basically what the mission involved would be we would take off every night flying north across the 38th parallel and the bomb nine and we would search for trucks coming down from the north foot which was society Korean army and we would have with us a Marine fighter plane and when we would spot something were to drop the flares and a fighter plane attack and attempt to destroy the trucks typically we would have maybe three or four fighters over the entire region we would be there for maybe eight or nine hours frequently we would run into some sort of block because the enemy knew that we were doing this and they would set up flat traps and attempt to see if it could force us a way of shoot us down which of the case might be the guns they had were some sort of radar control and if you flew in a straight line they can track you so what we would do is about every thirty seconds or so we make a slight turn that was our strategy and you can see that any aircraft are cooling off behind you in it because it couldn't track you in the curtain [Music] anyhow that went on for quite a long time remember some famous people there Ted winds were flying that's quadrant at the time I never met him because I flew at night he's doing that Benny but he was there and there were some other famous folks around one of them was a it wasn't in class me that my but he was in the same program I was shortly afterwards and he was doing something against the Soviet MiG's that were loaned to the Koreans apparently and his name is Neil Armstrong who later as you know became the first man to land on the moon I didn't know Neil but later at his squadron at a midshipman flying midshipman's of reunion I met him but by that time we were both old so anybody look 40 missions in Korea came back to Hawaii and I met a very wonderful woman and we were there living in paradise [Music] it was a good six months until finally came time for my discharge and so came back to the to San Francisco and that square of discharge but I stayed in the Naval Reserve and when dr. college and continued I stay in the reserve until well I had a female eighty ten years old daughter but main thing was that kind of fun was when I went back to college where I met my current wife we were both older than the other kids because she had graduated from the art school as he was studying advocating and I had spent four years in the Navy and two years in college so we're and not only that being in the Reserve I was still flying on what to called weekend warriors so I was getting paid for that and I was getting a GI dental and so we could afford we didn't need at the college Commons I mean we could afford and they're old enough to go out and have martinis and states and and then eventually were married and then later on as I said I finally resigned from the Navy Reserve because I didn't want to go to Vietnam and that's into my career in the Navy okay um what can you tell me about what was the average day like while you were navigator defend most of the time the flu at night yeah so there wasn't any day you know the pilot would have it on autopilot and sometimes the radio operator and the Navigator would be the only two people of 12 or 13 that were awake but typically you know we had to maintain of course and running on autopilot is to shoot be a shooting star fixes and keep it on autopilot because it keeps the airplane study what does a pilot and later on when I dunno you just well I did both you know sometimes I was a pile of sometimes a navigator sometimes of flying and Pacific I flew the Pacific I think probably about five or six times from from between San Diego and Japan or Okinawa were there any casualties in your unit not from combat there were a couple of airplanes Christ for other reasons but you know we were fortunate we didn't lose any other place another sister squadron I do I don't know the circumcenter did you see any combat yourself partly did you see any combat well I got for the missions and I saw a lot of flock coming up at I mean he bet you know it didn't hit anything and I remember one night flying back into poo south and we were lining up on the runway to land and we saw tracer boats coming up now this is an area that was controlled by the Marines and everything the reasons and we reported it to the tower and anyhow we landed on the next day of the Marines bulldoze the whole area around where the gunfire is hainted for himself but we don't need combat base always they fly and the flak that was coming up occasionally were you awarded any medals or citations well I got two air medals and then I got I think I mentioned the national descent oh I know Korean service model too stars and these others were just for being there in defense medals occupation dollars United Nation did you sustain any injuries yep did you stay in touch with your family the best I could I did they lived in a little time in Ohio and then you had a switchboard operator and when I got back to Hawaii I called and I heard the switchboard woman say you know as Charles lamb is calling I said Myrtle get off the phone and get my mother on the phone with it I mean it was that kind of a town 500 people yeah but it worked out okay for me see you're able to keep in touch over they found well I wrote letters obviously and it wasn't a problem there there were a lot of little incidences I know when when I left to go to career the first time one of these two okay now they have a car and I was in San Diego and I knew what to do with the car so I left it with a said girlfriend and later on in a comment terms and since my dad was railroad engineer he got too passive they came out later and picked up the car and then since they were going home on the railroad with a foggy car and at that time I think Okinawa Korea under which and I get this notice from the state of California that the emissions wasn't correct according to the state of California but I never worried you know it was like I got my draft notice what is there also they went my commanding officer I said what I do with this draft it was and he said don't worry about it this is for did it he's got already flown so you know there was a lot of that kind of silly stuff happen but I was like words to him pretty well with my family okay so did you always have enough supplies while you were doing missions supplies yeah supplies food that's right well what happened when does we were assigned to the Marine unit because it was very cold flying at eight ten thousand feet at night they gave us special underwear and also jakka's warm doctors but because it was World War two issue and it was a shortage we had to give the jackets back every morning when we came back and they did back to us we're ready to fly again so uh but as far as food no I'll tell you since I was a gunnery officer we had a bunch of shotguns up he used for training first eat guns and so I decided to be good idea to go hunting in Korea because you know supposedly the peasants originated somewhere in Korea so we went off with a guide and some roads went hunting and we shot several pheasants and well I offered them to this Korea you know they really needed it they were not too they wouldn't take it because I wouldn't eat the birds so we took them back to the squadron mess where we made occasionally and here's an old staff sergeant in the Marine Corps to cook and I said here you can have these fans of Titian all right services you come back at six o'clock it says and we had a fetish for dinner well I don't know how sergeant and Marine Corps does is but three of us went in through the table it was on set of tablecloths and the pheasant under glass and the hose from there and how he managed to do that I don't know but we were sort of special anyhow because they couldn't do maintenance on an aircraft at this base and we would have to fly back to Japan for a couple days whatever well they did 50 our second hundred hours seven whatever and the chief and our flight crew would get me to go to the officer's club and we went to pick up many four or five cases of whiskey whatever it could go on and when we got back to the base in Korea we were talking to her because the chief was selling a whiskey to the enlisted people for 20 bucks a bottle or something like that I don't know but it was a sort of an exciting adventure in there was there anything that would you do to entertain yourself were there I mean besides stuff like that well in Korea didn't do anything but spent a lot of time also in Japan yeah and while I did two things first of all I traveled but I went to Roshan on I went to Hiroshima just to see what the city took like after the damage that was done by the bombs and but probably the most fun I had was a problem we were staying in a hotel near the base and one night we came back in was late and the dining rooms closed one of the guys said why don't you go down the street to the Italian restaurant this is in Japan and he said that take a bottle of red wine he said it'll be good deal so we went to a fellow oranges restaurant and as long story about him but he had been in the Italian Navy back when Italy invaded when world war ii started he was a naval officer and he couldn't they couldn't get back to italy because they closed the entrance to the mediterranean in both hands so they sailed to japan and the commanding officer of the ships was told by the japanese to surrender the ships to the japanese navy and he refused to do this he scuttled them all and these guys were literally left in Japan all during the war sort of semi prisoners but eventually he got himself together and started a respite the problem was pretty much the Japanese weren't really Hindi Italian food but when the Americans came that was pretty good and so we went there and we met him and I'm a beautiful woman I romanticized I guess what was I know three or four months I was there and that was and remember what we would do a Cajun I'm a dress and Japanese clothes and rolled and she and I would walk and talk to people and she would introduce me somehow I don't know because I didn't almost picked up a little Japanese I don't know but any rate to the beautiful girl and had great fun together that's what we did for entertainment and there's a famous movie now about a girl's opera and it turned out that we could go there all the time it was a lot of stuff going on you know operas movies whatnot so entertainment was and it's just everything was either oriented towards Japanese history or it was a movie that we had already seen you know Bing Crosby movies or something like that but there was there was a plenty of entertainment did you go on leave Leave yeah I took a few days before I came back to the States when I and I went to Tokyo and I remember going into a department store if you wanted to buy art or anything not that they didn't have art dollars but the art galleries were in the department stores and so I bought some souvenirs and bought some art prints and whatnot to take home to my parents and to my [Music] cousin's kids you know and that worked out pretty well but I guess I don't remember doing things like to leave at you as your imagine that I mean when we were transforming based a lot of time long and when I was waiting around in San Diego it didn't seem like there was any need for leave because I just going to school anyhow you know I wasn't wasn't that kind of thing and once we got in the water Hawaii again there was no it was just day to day job weekend talk so no I don't remember ever ever having to leave okay what did you think of the officers new fellow servicemen the officers and thinking when you in a service Japan well I was I was an officer when I was in Japan in Korea okay so what do you think of your fellow officers then oh well the senior officers were great that number one guy I flew with was Denman the Berlin Airlift until I call and whatnot into Berlin during to him and but some of the reserve officers were not so good to just they weren't as well trained as we were because they had been away from in a while you know and so as pilots some of them worked you're great but as administrative officers they were plotting okay did you keep a journal did I keep a journal yeah not during that period no okay so you said you were in Hawaii when your service ended harbors point what was your plasteel like my last day of divers went oh boy well I don't remember too well because uh I remember being transported over where the Navy had a seaplane base and we got on what was known as the Mars and they move us back to San Diego so they yeah it was really like a first kind of class flight that stewardess was on board well they were actually Navy women that had waves but it was a great airplane so we just rode back to San Francisco and I was discharged attachments this one okay how was your homecoming like I'm doing well it was a Hertz is that quiet you know I remember I had to take a training from the west coast and got into Chicago and had to change and so got on this car and it was a empty seat next to this young woman and we start talking and she said well where have you been I said of querido she said my father was in the big war and career just a police action right anyway we got to Toledo which was where she got weird well I guess first he got off and I got off but I didn't bother to get to know her any better because I lost interest at that yeah say yeah and so the train pulled into Tiffin Ohio which is a year Sycamore for either and my father another was everything and you know just a typical homecoming everybody came the following day that the house and I had some Mikimoto curls for my mother some little blue eyes jackets of some time but I jaded my cousin my girl cousins you know these are things you could pick up in Japan and around they were in the numbers riding on him like I had been there anything and so they were all very happy with all that stuff seemed like a pretty good arrangement and I had a few weeks to fool around and then I tried together we went back to college okay and that was supported through that go so when you graduate from college where did you get work Oh what's interesting because I was at Kent State University and I was taking enrolled in what they called the aerospace program but I've had so many of the courses already in the Navy they gave me credit for all of them and they asked me to become an intern at Chrysler they want him to set up an internship and so I went out there and got involved and in a program there Indianapolis and it turned out that totally I forgot narrative they hired me because they wanted to be deaf but I moved on eventually to company called Cleveland dramatic and we designed and built landing gear for aircraft and then later I don't know I forgotten what's your question really let was leading up to now where you went to work after oh well after that clean-o-matic was very interesting because I really was able to use a lot of my neighbor experience in terms of aircraft and I did work on them and actually on the b-52 and a number of other important difference seven over seven and I'm not so then the company gave me an attitude they picked another man and myself and said do two guys go to college get your master's degree and we'll make one of the chief engineer and the other chief something so we did three years a case at night and we got to about six three months before graduation and a new president came on board and he heard of chief engineer so neither one of us anymore and I was doing some work in the positive assurance at the time and so I said to my wife you know I'm gonna graduate but I don't like this job anymore where do you want to we want to do it she said I always wanted to live on the East Coast near New York near the water so we found one job advertised in the New York Times and I came up there and qualified and became director of quality assurance and manufactory for going out over which is in Stamford Connecticut and I worked with them until oh I guess sometime in the late eighties and then I door out of her was sold I broke it up and sold uh so I formed my own company the consulting from of lamin associates and I did that until it just one retired good and came here it's an NCC okay and I've been here since I guess 1997 or okay so did you join any veteran organizations oh well I mentioned that I've stayed in the reserve for a long time but now I didn't because frankly I was a little angry that the VFW because they didn't recognize a war until later but eventually it was recognized so I didn't join that was the only group in the West Fork that I knew about but anyway no I never did join until this little group started here to college yeah did you attend any reunions yeah well I just this was a squadron I was in and there's a whole bunch of stuff about reunions to test squadron I probably went to fibers four or five unions about precise quadrants and I wrote to reinforce stories editor in here and whatever and then it was a typical they called you to Midshipmen be another resistant group that was in was referred to as a flying Midshipmen and this is a new Armstrong at one of the reunions well as such as this is reinforcing ultimately there was a lot of stuff and we stayed I stayed in touch with all the guys that I went through Bowling Green with until then now all all but one of them that died and I still contact him we talk to church three times a year okay and with the guys in the squadron well we said we had I guess maybe three or four different they're mentioning this okay and yeah they'll only know of one of them that still you know it's still around at disappoint but there probably are others I just don't know where they are kind of heard from them we had one that went interesting one one of the guys was always getting into some kind of trouble and he was arrested in Japan and they put him in the marina three and I went down to the creek and I said I want to see him and they brought him out and I said he's my guy you know I need a moment flight crew well the Marines let him go he wasn't in my life but anyway it was a complainer but we put him on a disciplinary action where he had to report to the officer of the day every evening and so that we knew he wasn't getting in trouble again and I remember one night I had I had the duty and I had him standing at her and this some of the senior men like the chief got some little incident they had to report in and this one she comes in and he looks at you you're gonna make me stand here with that criminal service I said no you could go to today right so after I went to work and and and married my wife and I went to the grocery store and were gathered up everything getting ready to pay and the clerk says it's no charge agreement and she said the manager said not to charge you and this is a guy I got us pretty but now there were a lot of little incidents like I taught school of the Christmas attics and Indiana and then I was for a while and one of the other guys and the crew was taking your course and well did not at the same time and then Arctic drumming in through these guys okay but the other anymore so how did your military experience influence your thinking about war or the military in general well I I thought that the Korean action was legitimate you know and I guess I hope some other actions have been too but I don't think they they are and I'm ambiguous about what goes on in the Middle East I just don't understand test yeah but and also you know you get into all this stuff about who was hacking who went but everyone seems to me tries to put their best foot forward what are the Russians or whether Asiya Americans are who and then when I was flying in Korea you know Stalin was still in charge and he was trying to exert his influence on the Korean and then later now it's Putin trying to influence someplace else and we did the same thing we tried to influence what happened in China after World War two which sank I check and Taiwan know that so I think it's awesome I don't know it's just it's just an ongoing thing but I don't like the idea of combat I said that's bothers me I don't you know it seems like we can work things out okay yeah is there anything else you want to add that hasn't been covered yet no I think being in the Navy was great for me and as I mentioned I had several good mentors from high school that helped me get in and it was a very good education technically but also in terms of leadership and learning your way around how to deal with problems and the crises and not to panic and whatnot so it was a it was a great experience okay okay well I'd like to thank you for your service and also for taking the time being here today

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Id: BEbFGp6nJ5Y

Length: 54min 58sec (3298 seconds)

Published: Wed May 30 2018