Rollo Fullmer, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, March 14, 2000: Saving the legacy tape no. 1

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ROLLO LLM w bout what tim y ar thi ? u th 1 11 111 nt ROL: About ten months. WIN: Ten months? Okay so we are into 1944 ar n t ROL: Yes. I think it was January when I was in ircl ill 1 rm b r ri ht. t Keesler Field they just kept training us and that type of thing out on bi ouac and 11th basic things that the air force does. Then a blanket order came through wh n I wa ut there about three months. This was the time of the Battle of the Bulge when o many of the ground forces were pushing into the air force, and the air force was overloaded I guess you might say. So this one order came through that people who had not been up to a level of air corps training at that time, and they previously had been in the ground forces, back to the ground forces they went. Thirty-eight thousand of us were pushed out. I have still got the orders in my memoirs. This was a big disappointment, of course. WIN: Disappointed there. ROL: I was classified as a pilot. They went through a rigorous testing of whether you would be a pilot, a bombardier, or a navigator, or out. I was classified as a pilot. WIN: Had you been flying at all? ROL: No, hadn't gone up to that level at all. In fact, we were waiting for a school, and the schools were filled. That is the reason for this delay, waiting to get into a school. The schools were just loaded. So I was shipped to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. This was a place where it was just a holding place, you might say, until they knew what they were going to do with you. Most of us got a chance to apply for officer candidate school if we wanted to because we were more or less that caliber of people. So I applied for Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, to engineering school because that is where I had been with the 34