4.
San Antonio was a military town in the 1920s and 1930s and Bennie Schriever had grown up in its aura. The Alamo is located there, and during the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt and the officers of his 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, better known as the Rough Riders, had hung out in the bar of the old Menger Hotel before departing for fame in Cuba. The tank had not yet replaced the horse in Schriever’s youth, although in a harbinger of what was to come a squadron of slow, lumbering First World War tanks was stationed at Fort Sam Houston. Bennie and Gerry would gather with crowds of other children to watch the tanks and the horses of the cavalry maneuver against each other on the expanse of the fort’s parade ground. The officers of the cavalry participated in the polo matches regularly staged there and at the municipal polo field next to Brackenridge Park Golf Course. In choosing Texas A&M, Schriever had also chosen to attend a military school. The college was all male then, and except for a few youths who were physically unqualified, every student wore an Army uniform, was enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and marched to and from the mess hall for breakfast and dinner. Bennie’s ROTC unit was B Battery of the Field Artillery, traditionally a San Antonio organization. After graduation, he was commissioned a Reserve second lieutenant in the artillery of the day, also still drawn by teams of horses. Howitzers and horses held no interest for Schriever. He would later joke that his legs were too long for the stirrups.
Above all, San Antonio was an Army fliers town. Schriever had grown up in a place where technology had literally flown past the horse. Kelly Field on the edge of the city was the Air Corps’ main center for advanced pilot training. As a boy, Schriever would sit on the fence out there and watch the First World War-era biplanes take off and land, their Liberty engines emitting so much thick black exhaust that they were called “coal burners.” Golf had also played its part in attracting him to flying because he had first caddied for and then played with and against the Air Corps officers who frequented the Brackenridge Park course. Schriever looked up to them as an elite. This was the romantic era of flying, of white silk scarves, leather helmets and goggles, and open cockpits, the First World War exploits of the German knight of the sky, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, and the American Ace of Aces, Edward V. “Eddie” Rickenbacker, fresh in memory. “The gals sure liked it. It was better than owning a convertible,” Bennie would laugh and say in his old age. His mother dated a pilot who was subsequently one of his instructors.
In late 1931, after he had reached the minimum age of twenty-one, he applied for Flying School, as it was then called, as a cadet and was chosen for the entering class of July 1932. The course was a year, with Primary and Basic training at recently completed Randolph Field, also adjacent to San Antonio, and then Advanced at Kelly. Even if he survived the 50 percent washout rate and won his wings and a Reserve commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he still could not have high expectations of turning the Air Corps into a career because he probably would not be able to convert his commission into a Regular, i.e., permanent, one. He could look forward with certainty only to a year of active service before he was tossed back to civilian life and unemployment. In the midst of the Depression, the Air Corps was being kept on a bare-cupboard budget by Congress. It had no funds to take in more than a few new Regular officers annually or to give its Reservists more than a year of flying experience. But at twenty-one, a man could always hope that he might beat the odds.
To pass the time and earn what he could before Flying School, he played a number of exhibition tournaments with other amateurs against pros in the area, worked behind the counter at the clubhouse shop at Brackenridge, and in June 1932, just before going to Randolph Field, won the San Antonio city championship for a second time. His opponent in the final round, Lieutenant Kenneth Rogers, was a pilot instructor there who was to serve as a brigadier general during the Second World War. “City Golf Champ Will Enter Flying Service July 1,” the San Antonio Evening Newsbragged in a headline. Schriever paid for the headline and the rest of his local media acclaim with some special hazing: the more senior cadets in an earlier class at Randolph ordered him to stand at attention in the mess hall and read his golf clippings to them while they ate.
He managed to solo successfully after his first half dozen hours of instruction in Primary, when most washouts occurred, despite a badly sprained ankle, which he taped securely in order to work the rudder pedals. Of the approximately 200 aspiring airmen who had entered Randolph on July 1, 1932, Bennie was among the ninety or so who went on to Advanced training at Kelly eight months later. That ever-present risk of an airman’s profession, death in a fatal crash, claimed two of his classmates, but his steady temperament made him a good if not a spirited pilot, which may be why he was assigned to bombers rather than pursuit aircraft, as fighters were then designated. He graduated on June 29, 1933, was awarded his wings and second lieutenant’s commission, and was sent for his year of active duty to the 9th Bombardment Squadron at March Field near Riverside, California.