Richard F. North, Murray, Utah: an interview by Joel C. Calderon, 29 March, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 377

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Richard F. North 2 ar h 2002 RICH: Yah right. So anyway after we appealed that to our quadron c mmand r, th disassembled our crew and I was assigned to another crew at that point in tim who w r on their way over seas. There were about three of us that were from Salt Lake City in that group and so one weekend we violated our pass restrictions. We had a restriction of fifty miles from the base, and came to Salt Lake for the weekend. When we got back we learned that during that weekend my name had come up on orders to go to radar school in Virginia and, of course, when they couldn't find me they had assigned another navigator to go to radar school. On Monday morning, as soon as we got back, I received an urgent request that I report immediately to the squadron commander's office, which I did. He said, "You're being charge with being AWOL (absent without leave, of course) from the base, but in as much as you've been a good representative of the Air Corps up till now we're not going to press those charges. We're simply going to send you overseas and we're going to assign you to another crew replacing the navigator that we had to send to radar school in your place. That's how I got assigned to a new crew, which was a wonderful group, and we had a great relationship. We then went from Boise down to Salinas, California, which was our point of heading overseas. From there we took a troop train to New York and flew overseas. We landed at Karachi, India. We were assigned to the 14th Air Corps, which was in the China-Burma-India theatre of operations. We landed at Karachi, but our fmal destination was an air base in a town called Tezpur, India up in the Assam Valley in northeastern India, right next to Burma. India was not divided at that time. 4