Jay Ottman

photo courtesy of Jay Ottman	photo by Thais Boise
In May 1944, when he was 19, Jay Ottman graduated from Air Corps Flight School in Victoria, Texas.	Ottman served in the Pacific and his brother in the European theater during World War II.

Memories of a plane and a girl

by Leslie Hunsaker
Veterans History Project

For a man who wasn’t a good swimmer, six-hour flights across the Pacific as a fighter pilot could be terrifying.

Jay Ottman, now 79, didn’t expect to be flying over water. He enlisted with the Army, he said, because “I could walk farther than I could swim if I went down.” He survived one runway crash — he walked away from that one — but he never did go down over water.

photo courtesy of Jay Ottman

November 1943, Primary Flight School. Hicks Field, Fort Worth, Texas

Ottman spent three years in the Army Air Corps flying a P-47 Thunderbolt— a plane he and other pilots referred to as “The Jug” or “the Mush Mobile” — during World War II.

Born in Lewistown, Mont., Ottman loved to ski. In 1943, when he was a 19-year-old student at the University of Montana, he was approached about putting his skiing talents to work with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy, but decided to pursue the Air Corps in hopes of becoming a fighter pilot. His first days in the Corps were spent in Kearns, Utah. He later attended flight schools in Texas before making his way to Louisiana and Nebraska. It was in Bruning, Neb., that he had his first experience with the P-47.

He remembers one instructor whom the students referred to as “Crazy Joe,” who was so tough that out of Ottman’s flight class of seven, only he and one other were left after the first month. Punishment could include a rack on the knees or a 20-minute plane ride with the pilot’s face in the prop wash.

After saying goodbye to his fiancee in Seattle, Ottman arrived by boat in Hawaii to find he would be ferrying 48 new planes to Okinawa. Once in the Pacific, he spent time on several islands, including Johnston Island, the Marshall Islands and Iwo Jima and Ie-shima, where his 507th Fighter Group spent much of the war. Airstrips were built on the island, and many of the pilots gave their planes nicknames.

Ottman called his “Peg O’ My Heart,” after his fiancée, Peg, whom he would later marry.

Ie-shima is best known, Ottman said, as the place where war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed.

A P-47 fighter plane on Ie-shima

It was on a trip to Iwo Jima that he traveled on a plane piloted by actor Tyrone Power; the plane was nicknamed the “Annabella” after the French actress Power had married. Later, Ottman remembers Power asking he could borrow some soap in the shower; the actor also joined Ottman and others for a few hands of poker.

One of the biggest problems the pilots faced was short runways. They had trained on 9,000-foot runways, but once they were in the Pacific, the island airstrips were closer to 4,500 feet. In the first two weeks, he said, more than 10 pilots were lost on takeoff. The casualty rate improved after pilots had more training.

Before the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in August of 1945, Ottman remembers that the camp on Ie-shima was quiet. Four planes got orders to fly north to Kyushu and then out to sea about 50 miles. They were told to take pictures if they saw something unusual, but not to investigate. When they returned to camp, the film was unloaded from their gun cameras and they never saw it again, he said.

photos by Thais Boise
Ottman named his plane for his fiancee, Peg, and then came home and married her.

After the war ended, Ottman and the other pilots lost their planes.

“The thing that made us mad was they took our P-47s away from us and then assigned us into make-believe jobs like supply officers,” he said. “I never knew what a statistical controller unit was, but that’s where I wound up for a year.”

Ottman was discharged in August 1946. He re-enrolled at the University of Montana and rejoined the Sigma Chi fraternity. He married Peg, and eventually entered the insurance business with his father.

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