I remember, during my annual physical one year, asking the doctor if he was going to lecture me on stopping smoking.” Then Teillon told the doctor he flew carrier fighters: “He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t bother stopping.’ ” The billboard, featuring a pilot smoking, used steam to simulate the appearance of cigarette smoke.Įchoing the themes of mortality and fate illustrated in the first chapters of The Right Stuff, pilot Lance Teillon wrote online in 2011, “ obviously not beneficial, nevertheless a good number of us did smoke. Installed in 1941, the iconic Times Square Camel cigarette billboard was on display for 26 years. ![]() We can imagine the briefing and carrier ready rooms from Bassingbourn to Tarawa were almost constantly filled with a stifling wall of blue cigarette smoke, but many of these fliers didn’t snuff out their last cigarette and then take off-they continued smoking inside their aircraft. And he says, ‘You’re okay.’ And they let me in.” Sanders later became a B-17 navigator, flying combat missions over Germany. They took my three buddies, which, of course, disappointed me terrible.” The doctor told him, “ ‘Go out and smoke a cigarette,’ which I did, and it raised my blood pressure. “When I went in for the physical exam, my blood pressure was too low,” Calvin Sanders told an interviewer in 2003. Smoking, in fact, could even help a prospective flier get accepted into the service. America’s top World War I ace had been puffing on cigarettes since age five. And young men who dreamed of fighting in the skies looked up to Eddie Rickenbacker. In the early 1940s, even the president smoked, as did glamorous movie stars like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. As a result, tobacco consumption skyrocketed during the war. If young soldiers and sailors wanted more, cigarettes were just 50 cents a carton or a nickel a pack. In order to relieve boredom and improve the morale of fighting men, cigarettes came standard inside K-ration boxes along with candy and gum. tobacco suppliers reported rolling and selling 290 billion smokes in 1943. What we did know was that Chesterfields satisfied we’d walk a mile for a Camel and just like us, Lucky Strike Green had gone to war.”Īmerica supplied cigarettes to military men in stunning numbers during World War II. “Nearly everyone smoked in those days,” Army aviator Lieutenant James Alter wrote in his 2011 book, From Campus to Combat, “and considering the kind of work we were doing, no one would have been too worried about lung cancer even if we had known about it. When stationed in New Zealand in 1943, Gregory “Pappy” Boyington took no chance of being without a smoke: He had American cigarettes shipped to him. When Boyington straightened up, cracked his canopy, and flicked his half-smoked Camel into the ocean, it was a sure sign that things were about to happen. ![]() On the ground, he was a heavy drinker and, as he described in his autobiography, “an incessant smoker.” While on the job, hunting Japanese aircraft, one thing Boyington did not leave behind was his cigarettes.Īs McClurg related in Boyington’s 1958 book Baa Baa Black Sheep, “I always know when we’re going into combat.” Keenly observing his leader, he looked for a break in the chain. Adding a lit cigarette to that mix was perilous.īut Boyington wasn’t exactly a “by-the-book” type of guy. ![]() After all, a warplane was a flimsy aluminum shell wrapped around a conglomeration of stuff that naturally wanted to burn or explode-fuel, hydraulic fluid, oil, oxygen, weaponry. Pilots were not supposed to smoke cigarettes in their fighters. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington had his seat cranked all the way down and he was chain-smoking as usual. As a flight of Marine Corsairs cruised over the Pacific, Lieutenant Robert McClurg watched the canopy of his leader’s aircraft intently.
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