"First American Indian to fly for Navy"
Michel
William Connery SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
He lives in a cozy, quiet neighborhood in Arlington, but 87-year-old
Tom Oxendine has quite a story to tell.
Born in 1921, he was the oldest of eight children in an all-Indian
community in Robeson County, N.C. His father was an Indian
schoolteacher. Mr. Oxendine and his five brothers all went to college
and played varsity football. One sister became a professor of business
administration and the other an elementary schoolteacher.
Mr. Oxendine grew up as a Cherokee and enrolled in Cherokee Indian
Normal College, which is now the University of North Carolina at
Penbrook.
"It's unusual, but I never sat in a classroom with a black person or a
white person until I went in the Navy," Mr. Oxendine said.
In 1941, Horace Barnes, who had a flight school in Lumberton N.C.,
petitioned the government to do a study to train 10 American Indians
to fly, similar to the study being done with blacks in Tuskegee, Ala.
Nine men and one woman were selected. Mr. Oxendine is the only
surviving member.
When Mr. Oxendine entered the Navy, he received all kinds of publicity
as a Cherokee. Because there was so much confusion between the
Cherokees in Robeson County, the Eastern Band of Cherokees in western
North Carolina and the main body of Cherokees in Oklahoma, the Robeson
County tribe petitioned to change its name to Lumbee, the Indian name
for the local river.
"I went in as a Cherokee and came out as a Lumbee," Mr. Oxendine said.
When he entered the Navy, he could fly already. No one else had a
license, so he was sought quite often to explain maneuvers that others
did not quite understand.
Mr. Oxendine wants people to understand how he became the first Indian
to go through Navy flight training. The Navy restricted its officer
corps to Caucasians. Indians could attain any of the enlisted grades,
but not be officers. Blacks could only be stewards.
"That's just the way it was in those days," Mr. Oxendine said.
However, a couple of months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
Mr. Oxendine was allowed to enter flight training even though there
was no enlisted program for him. He got all types of publicity as
being the first American Indian to go through the naval aviation
flight program.
He sometimes would receive 100 letters a week from well-wishers and be
in wire photos and publications such as Look magazine. In February
1942, he went for initial training at the Naval Air Station, Atlanta,
and then to Jacksonville, Fla., for primary, advanced and operational
training.
Mr. Oxendine was assigned to observation aircraft as a junior aviator.
That was the O2SU Kingfisher, flying off a cruiser. His first duty
station was the USS Mobile, and he was involved in 33 major fleet
engagements, part of Task Force 3858, in all the island hopping, from
Wake Island through the Second Battle of the Philippines.
In November 1942, he was onboard the USS Mobile, which had three
pilots and two aircraft. His first target against the Japanese was
Wake Island.
"So I remember going in about 7,500 to 8,000 feet, through the
clouds." He could see the flashes from the anti-aircraft fire. "Then I
pulled up, looked across the sky and saw black puffs and flew across
the water," away from the island.
He had not slept well the night before.
"But I remember back in Philosophy 101 that a belief will never change
a fact," Mr. Oxendine said. "Now this served me very well, because I
went into Wake, and nothing happened. So I had worried and lost a lot
of sleep over something that did not occur anyway."
His mission was to fire on the islands at daybreak, together with a
thousand other planes. Then the ships would come in and bombard an
island until it was no longer a threat. If a plane got shot down,
submarines would go in and pick up any survivors.
Mr. Oxendine got a Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission in his
Kingfisher, in which a downed pilot was too close to shore for the
submarine to reach him. The rescue mission was at Yap Island in 1944.
He was told that a pilot was down, in a life jacket. Mr. Oxendine went
through anti-aircraft fire, then located him. The coordinator for the
flights was trying to minimize the fire from the beach. There were a
couple of explosions, and Mr. Oxendine was told, "Do not land! Do not
land!"
"But I had my sights on the pilot and did not want to lose him, so I
went ahead and landed," Mr. Oxendine said. "I picked him up and made S-
turns to avoid fire, and went back out" to the ship.
Journalist Raymond Clapper was in front of him in another plane when
Clapper died in the Marianas from a collision with another plane at
about 800 feet. Clapper's plane had broken formation to get a better
look at a bombed airfield.
During World War II, pilots received hazardous-duty pay. Initially,
some officers resented that pilots were getting so much money. "But
when you brought the plane back with many holes in it, you heard no
more of that," Mr. Oxendine said. "Of course, some pilots never came
back."
Mr. Oxendine was part of a 2003 exhibit, "Pioneers in Aviation," for
the centenary of the Wright brothers' flight. For four years, his
plaque was in the North Carolina Museum of History. It featured the
Wright brothers, with about 18 others - pilots and astronauts. The
poster showed Mr. Oxendine when he joined the Navy, with a N3N Primary
Trainer behind him.