News Letter 1941 Jul-Dec - Air Force Historical Studies Office

units sent to Biloxi and wichita Falls. But it's
still hitting on all six cylinders and handling
amazing quantities of food in a fashion which dumfounds
military men. The organization is so flexible
that it can and does vary its service by as
much as 4,000 to 5,000 men in the course of a
single day, without batting an eyelash. (This is
something in a school such as this, where classes
numbering thousands are continually entering and
being graduated.)
Food is handled in wholesale quantities with big
business efficiency, the whole thing being controlled
by an elaborate but effie ient set of books,
records and running inventories, which stir up a
whale of a row if a cook bakes himself a private
pie or a KP sni tches an apple. The Gove rnment pays
47~ cents a day for each soldier's food and the
mess authoritiesdealwith colossal !lums, sometimes
spending as much as $5,000 a day more than their
income and making up for it during the week by
quantity discounts.
Holiday Dinner Already Planned
They plan their schedules weeks in advance and
the resulting meals stir the imagination. Next
Thanksgiving's dinner menu is already coming down
the line and Chanute Field privates may look forward
to a feast. The mess group now has listed
for that occasion shrimp cocktail, oyster stew.
roast turkey, roast chicken, roast ham, cranberry
sauce, giblet gravy, potatoes, peas, and corn, lettuce
and tomato salad, cake, ice cream. lemonade,
coffee, tea, after-dinner mints, assorted nuts,
candy, oranges, apples, ban~nas, grapes, cigars
and cigarettes. The powers-that-be say they hope
they can afford to add a few "extra fixin's" between
now and then.
Major Noyes worked for two years building his
organization and the flexible system of controls,
which is too complicated for description here. He
planned the physical setup of the three big new
mess halls and fought until he obtained them from
a reluctant quartermaster department. Each is
organized in sections, with food flowing from delivery
wagons to store rooms, through the great
kitchens with their batteries of electric stoves
into the long preheated service stands, where the
soldiers are served on aluminum trays. They circle
back to waiting, condiment-equipped tables, surrounding
huge coffee urns, and then pass out by
way of the electric dishwashing machines.
Noyes planned it all out himself and solved innumerable
problems in the process. He flew a
bomber to Langley Field, Va., to snatch worthless
alumim.un from a salvage heap and made the big serving
pans from which his cafeteria lines are fed.
For weeks he slept in the mess hall, checking cooking
routines and soldier food preferences. Securing
data from the Surgeon General, he went in for
balanced diets and learned tomeasure vitamins with
NA VIGA TOR TRAINING
BROADENED
A recent increase in the annual training rate of
aerial navigators to 5,250 has opened up a large
number of vacancies in new navigator-training
classes now being formed. The first class under
the new program was organized on October 4--others
will follow at three-week intervals.
Navigators receiving training are classed as
aviation cadets, and must meet the same general
requirements for appointment as do cadets taking
flying training. Physical requirements, however,
are slightly less rigid in that visual acuity of
20/40 in each eye correctible to 20/20 in both
eyes
is acceptable.
Other requirements provide that applicants must
be unmarried, citizens of the United States, between
the ages of 20 to 26 inciusive, and of good
character, sound physique and excellent health.
While undergoing training, navigator cadets receive
$75 per month and a one dollar per day ration allowance,
the same as pilot cadets.
The navigator training course lasts 30 weeks, 15
being spent at a navigation school, 10 at a reconnaissance
school and five at a gunnery school. Air
Corps navigation schools are located atKelly Field,
Texas; Mather Field, Cali fornia and Albany, Georgia.
There is also acivilian school operated under contract
by pan-American Airways at Miami, Florida.
Upon the successful completion of the 30-week
course cadets are commissioned second lieutenants
in the Air Corps Reserve and receive flight pay.
They are rated as "Aircraft Observers."
In accepting applications, graduates of accredi t-
ed colleges and universities who have received a
degree in engineering are taken first. Next come
graduates of accredited colleges who have had, as
a minimum, courses in plane geometry, college algebra
and trigonoM~.ry. Preference is given to
those whose mathe;liltical work has also included
analytical geometry and spherical trigonometry. A
third priority is given to those applicants who
have not graduated, but who. have completed two
years of accredited college work, and who have had
the mathematics courses outlined above.
a practiced hand. Part of his reward was contained
in the recent widely publicized letter which a
local soldier wrote President Roosevelt saying:
"The system we have here for mess can't be beat in
any other Army camp. It's a system that everybody
likes. The food is better than I ate at home."
Major Noyes can't quite say that, though. He
encountered his only major defeat when he tried to
show Mrs. Noyes just how rolls should be baked.
The major proved totally unable to reduce the proportions
required for an 18,OOO-man recipe down to
five-person family size, and the resulting odor of
mixed spices drove them out of the house. Since
that episode he lets his own ki tchen severely alone.
24 N. Y. Daily New.