Robert Davey couldn’t tear himself away from the allure of the Boca Raton Army Air Field. As a Pompano Beach resident, he now lives just 10 miles from his old World War II stomping ground: a 5,820-acre airstrip that warehoused bomber planes, training classrooms and barracks.
Sixty-five years earlier, Davey sat among eight of his fellow cadets, hands flat and visible atop the T-Building classroom’s sole U-shaped table, about to fiddle with a piece of equipment so vital and so secret Davey couldn’t breathe a whisper about it to anyone without risking a court-martial – radar.
“We were sneaky boogers back then.
Radar was very hush-hush,” says Davey, 82, now a secretary for Elks Lodge in Pompano Beach. He’s right: for six hours every day, six days a week for six weeks, Davey disassembled and reassembled tubes, rewired electronic boards, transmitted radio waves, swept for frequencies and analyzed signals. On Saturdays, cadets got orally tested for general parts knowledge, then forced to rewire a radar receiver gimmicked not to operate.
“You couldn’t pass that class with an IQ of 90,” Davey says. “Lots of fellas washed out. If you failed one test, you were allowed to retake it. If you failed twice, you were shipped to gunnery school right in the thick of battle.”
On Sundays, they rested. Davey remembers hopping a Greyhound bus several times to Miami Beach – the nearest entertaining town – and visiting the Five O’Clock Club. He boozed all night on whiskey and draft beer, flirted with women on the boardwalk, and stumbled back to base in time for the following day’s radar lesson.
IN HIS WORDS: “There were 16,000 men on the base, and we were the only radar school in the country. I came to Boca fresh from an electronics course at Chanute Field, Ill. and a radio code and repair course in Truex, Wis. I was in Boca for 10 weeks, but didn’t start radar classes until the last six. Before that, you had Kitchen Patrol. KP was the worst assignment you could have because you were there for a whole day.
At 18:00 for one hour, I rolled out of bed and took parachute training, and at midnight you got breakfast. You started out learning how to tumble on the ground by landing backwards and forwards. You dropped like a rock. Sometimes people put their hands out to break their fall but broke their wrists instead.
After I graduated, I became a radar navigator aboard C-47s and DC-3 bombers over the Philippines, New Guinea and Dutch East Indies. Half of our work was flying brass (top-ranking officials) to these places. It was kind of a taxi service, and we were a kind of carrier squadron. I truly appreciated this time in my life.”
