FORMER PILOT REMEMBERS REGIONAL TRAINING EFFORTS

This Fairchild PT-23, right, was used in pilot training at area air fields in the 1940s.

Cliff Rudesill, 19, was a flight instructor at Harris Field.

When the United States entered the war, Oliver Parks chose Cape Girardeau as a fifth site for pilot training. Located at the current airport, Cape Institute of Aeronautics was called Harris Field, named for Lawrence Harris, a Parks instructor who was killed in a crash in East St. Louis.

Some 2,500 pilots were trained at Harris Field between December 1942 and March 1944. Alden B. Woodbury, 1937 graduate of Parks Air College, chief pilot at the Tuscaloosa school and vice president at the Sikeston school, was chosen to oversee the construction and opening of the facility in Cape.

In his memoirs, Woodbury said, "The military had come out with a new set of austerity regulations. All buildings except hangars were to be of the military type, twenty feet wide, and as long as necessary. We pondered the best means of living up to the twenty-foot width and still have an efficient operation. It was decided that where expedient, the buildings could be built side by side, with corridors joining them in an 'H' shape. To my knowledge, this was the only facility built to these specifications."

At the Cape facility there were four hangars and 20 other buildings, such as administrative offices and barracks. The last surviving hangar was demolished just a few years ago because it was determined to be structurally unsafe.

There were auxiliary fields near Chaffee and Commerce.

Cape Girardeau resident Cliff Rudesill was a flight instructor at Harris Field. He graduated as an army primary flight instructor at Randolph Field in San Antonio and asked to be assigned to the Cape facility.

Rudesill was 19, the second youngest instructor in the Parks facilities, where the ages ranged from 19 to 50

"We did not know if these cadets would be fighter pilots or bomber pilots," Rudesill said. Naturally this was not part of the curriculum, but we gave them low level flight training, flying between trees, etc., so they would develop good, fast reaction abilities. We taught them aerobatics, which is flight maneuvers to be able to evade enemy aircraft."

He added that when the cadets came here, they knew nothing, but when they left here they were pilots soloing and trained in various aerobatics and cross-country skills. They went on to basic training in bigger, heavier aircraft.

The civilian flight instructors were required to join the Air Force Reserve. Toward the end of the war, they became a part of the Air Transport Command. Rudesill went to India and flew gasoline across the Himalayan Mountains to China.

In the 1970s, instructors from Parks Air College Flight schools formed a group called "Parks Warbirds," of which Rudesill is president.

"At 70, I am one of the youngest of the Parks Warbirds, so it is a declining membership," Rudesill said. "We formed for the purpose of reminiscing and we have made some good friends and memories of those events of the '40s."