<Begin Segment 21>

TI: And so now that you have both licenses, what happened next?

VW: Well, then, I could have gone on to other things, but the contractor, he liked the way I flew. And being the best, top pilot of the instruments and also of the commercial, he offered me a job to be an instructor, an instrument flight instructor. And so I thought about it and then I said, "Yes, I'll accept that job."

TI: Now, how does that work with the, being in the Army Air Corps? So you were, you could work for, you could work for the contractor as a, while you were with the army?

VW: Right. I was in Enlisted Reserve in the Air Corps, and I became a commercial instrument flight instructor. And that went on just fine, because I was training cadets, and after about three or four months, things started happening again. I got a notice from the, from the War Department, and it said, "By order of the President, you are transferred from the Air Corps to the Army as a private." So I went from being an instrument flight instructor, commercial, down to a private in the army, that's the lowest rank you could get. And it was just unbelievable. I was making nine dollars an hour at the time, but the money didn't, wasn't that... I went from nine dollars an hour down to thirteen cents an hour. That was the difference between the two. But that wasn't the big thing. The big thing was being transferred from the Air Corps to the, to the Army as a private.

TI: Because here you were a highly skilled pilot, training other people to be pilots.

VW: Yes.

TI: Really helping the war effort, and they were gonna change you to becoming just a, a private in the infantry.

VW: Yeah. They needed pilots, too, but they were so prejudiced. Coming from that Executive Order 9066, which I didn't know about at the time, but that's what transferred 120,000 people from the West Coast into internment camps, too.

TI: Now, how did they know that you were half Japanese? Because now your name was "Westdale." How did they know?

VW: Well, the FBI knows a lot of things that you and I don't know. [Laughs] And, well, it took them a while, though, because they didn't, they didn't connect that right away at all. When I joined the Air Corps, I joined as Virgil Westdale, and they thought I was an English guy. And my looks, I looked Caucasian, and they had no questions about that until somebody, somebody must have eventually notified them or something. Maybe... I don't know, maybe somebody, somebody indicated to them that I was part Japanese. And then they put, they went... now Mrs. Roosevelt didn't go along with her husband on this evacuating people from the West Coast and so on. And she tried to intervene, but he wouldn't listen to her. I found that out from reading Greg Robinson's By Order of the President.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.