Pilots in the Dorms: Arizona State Teachers College in Tempe During World War II

On February 15, 1943, the Army Air Corps College Training Program opened at Arizona State Teachers College in Tempe, one of the World War II home-front stories of Tempe, an American World War II Heritage City. Flying training began at Sky Harbor Airport in April 1943.

Tempe was not the area's only military school. The program also took aviation students from other Allied forces, including cadets at nearby Falcon Field in Mesa, opened in 1941 to train British Royal Air Force cadets and a few from other allied nations. From 1941 to 1943 troops did combat desert training at Papago Park, later a prisoner-of-war camp that service members were stationed there to run and guard.

The 315th College Training Detachment

The Air Corps set up detachments like Tempe's across the country to give future pilots, bombardiers and navigators the college courses they lacked, and to refresh those who had some college already. By August 1943 the Tempe post was commanded by Lt. John D. Hardie, who had replaced Maj. James D. McWilliams when McWilliams moved to the Coe College detachment in Cedar Rapids.

The pace was relentless — so fast, went a favorite preflight joke, that stooping for a dropped pencil could cost you a year of algebra.

The college kept teaching its civilian students, but the two groups did not mix. The aviation students lived in the campus dormitories, were organized in flights that marched to and from class in formation, and stood at attention on entering a classroom until told to sit.

A day in the detachment

Each day held one or more free periods. Student officers were chosen after the first month, from those who had proved efficient leaders and strong students.

Passes ran from 3 p.m. Saturday to 1 a.m. Sunday and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday — overnight, 3 p.m. Saturday to 4 p.m. Sunday, in the last month. More than five demerits ("gigs") in a week — for inspections, class conduct, appearance or attitude — could turn a pass into a duty tour.

Off duty there were movies or stage shows each week, a monthly dance in the Moeur Activity building, the post's orchestra and band, a printed biweekly newspaper, and a canteen selling personal articles, cigarettes, soda and ice cream cheaply. Civilians could watch retreat at 6 p.m. daily except Saturdays outside the Liberal Arts building, and a wing review at 5:30 p.m. on Sundays on the lawn behind the gymnasiums.

Two campuses in one

A history of the detachment printed after May 1944 recalls the friction. One September, with President Gammage's approval, military guards challenged anyone crossing ground marked as military — to the surprise of coeds walking home late with their dates. Then at New Year, Governor Osborn moved Arizona to Mountain Standard time, while the War Department kept military posts on War Time: civilian eleven o'clock classes collided with Army ten o'clock classes in the same room with the same professor, until on January 5 the Army gave way and ordered its posts onto state time.

One trainee's story

Richard J. Dominguez (1924–2018) served in World War II and Korea. In an interview held by the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project, he recalled being transferred into the Air Corps, sent to a base in Texas, and then assigned to Tempe in 1944 — one of the college detachments that prepared men for whatever they would become: flyer, bombardier, engineer or meteorologist. His group was all men, living in the dorms in small squadrons, the last class to arrive; the college itself, he remembered, was nearly all young women training to teach, and the trainees went to some of their dances.

The days were ordinary college classes, morning and afternoon, taught by the college's professors. Each man also got 10 hours of flying lessons in a Piper Cub out of Phoenix; Dominguez never soloed, but learned to take off and land, and kept the log his instructor filled in hour by hour. Then, with the war in Europe escalating and men needed there, the Army pulled the last classes out of the schools — his among them — and sent him back to the regular Army, to the Armored Infantry in Texas. He also served as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne, and was part of General MacArthur's bodyguard on the USS Missouri at the Japanese surrender.

A college retooled for war

The Arizona Republic reported in August 1943 that the U.S. Office of Education expected 100,000 schools to be without competent teachers that September. The college urged students to keep studying and go into teaching as patriotic service, and added war-emergency courses:

The draft, by the numbers

• By October 16, 1940, 183 male students — a quarter of them — had registered for the Selective Service; within five days, over 300 students and ten faculty aged 21 to 36 had.
• Nationwide, 18,633 men were inducted in 1940; the peak year, 1943, drafted over 3.3 million. From 1940 to 1946, over 10.1 million of 45 million registered men were drafted.

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Military Training and Impacts on Higher Education on the Home Front in Tempe, Arizona," National Park Service, written by Sarah Nestor Lane, an educator and consultant with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education under the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It quotes The Arizona Republic (October 1940 and August 25, 1943), Richard J. Dominguez's Veterans History Project interview, and "3052 AAFABU Air Crew CT at Arizona State, Tempe" from the Arizona Memory Project; all are rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson's questions and activities are left out, and its 1943 photographs, from the Arizona Memory Project, are not reproduced.