Jax

No such machine tool had ever been built before. It took 1 7 months to set up, cost $25,000,000, spread over 3,000 acres, now takes 10,000 men to run it. This Brobdingnagian tool is the' Navy's great new air station at Jacksonville, Fla.--"Jax" for short. Last week, as it spun into full speed, out came its first sample products--three young Ensigns in the U.S. Navy's air arm.

In six months this raw civilian material -- an ex-coxswain of the Harvard crew, a Yale-and Virginia-weaned son of a Manhattan broker, a Rollins College tennis player -- had been ground and polished into finished products. Their juts of individualism had been smoothed off, the working equipment of an aviator, the military mold and manners of an officer, fitted on.

Last December, as these three entered the gates of the air station, the machine tool was still abuilding. On the right were dozens of pearl-grey barracks with colonial facades, long mess halls and groundschool buildings; on the left, mammoth hangars skirting the vast bare landing field. Now, just six months later, the arid newness is gone. Grass grows beside the streets, palm and pine spot the once dusty table land. The 200 cadets who stream in each month from the odds & ends of civilian life see a brisk hustle of officers and trainees in their khaki service uniforms or bright whites. That first look shows them that they have come into a new way of living.

Skin Off, Skin On. Intense is the word for Jacksonville's training. The Navy makes it coldly clear from the start that no dime-novel fliers are wanted. New cadets are greeted with the warning: "Re member that you are Naval officers as well as Naval aviators." To show that these are no idle words, the Navy spends the first six weeks of its precious training time schooling the novice cadets in its traditions, odd jargon and technical functions. Before a cadet can pin on the silver bar of a Second Classman -- the happy sign that he is at last flying -- he must bone up for many a long, hot and sleepy hour on the rudiments of engines, aerodynamics, aerology, gunnery, navigation, the dit-dit-dahs of radio code.

By the time Jax turns a fledgling loose in a "yellow peril" (primary trainer), the Navy has fashioned him into the rough framework of a seagoing man. He says "Knock off the chatter" when he means shut up, "shove off" when he means leave, calls the floor "the deck," tells you to "bear a hand" instead of hurry up, describes things as "squared away" when they are in order. From 5 a.m. reveille to 9 p.m. taps, he takes orders and gets little thanks. He learns not to resent the peremptory nature of commands, comes to see that brusqueness and military efficiency go together.

As he begins to shed his thin civilian skin, the Jacksonville cadet finds his existence pretty comfortable. There are the six tennis courts, a swimming pool, a golf driving range, the Cadet club where tax-free Tom Collinses sell for 20-c-. Outside his hard-driven hours he has no responsibilities. With $75 a month to fritter away on weekends or payments on a car, he seems to have ample funds for his brief periods "ashore"--Saturday nights and Sundays.

Quarter-Deck. New as it is, Jacksonville is already acquiring a character of its own--a character that reflects the personalities of Commanding Officer Captain Charles P. Mason and the officers of his staff. At older Pensacola, one of the Navy's other air training stations, cadet life is stricter and discipline more sternly professional. At Jax, military formalities are reduced to a minimum, and habits are more casual, friendlier. The thermostat for this temperature is Lieut. Commander Roger Cutler, a tall, ruddy Bostonian, who left the textile business to take command of the Cadet Regiment. Known out of his earshot as Rodge, Cutler goes at his duties with the directness of a businessman, impatiently waves aside red tape as he tries to get his boys another swimming pool twice as big as the present one, or electric fans for their rooms or better chow for their mess or a fleet of boats to sail on the adjacent St. Johns River. Cutler's executive, tall, twangy Lieut. John Richard Yoho, a young Annapolis-and-Pensacola-trained officer of the regular Navy, who understands the circuitous ways of bureaucracy, tempers these impetuosities.

Casket Surplus. Jacksonville is now well on the road to producing a lion's share of the 17,000 aviators the Navy wants for its expanded fleet. To the delighted surprise of many an oldtimer, Jax has so far done its job, in the midst of the confusion of organization, with an astounding safety record: one training death in 60,000 flying hours. A great joke to cadets a few weeks ago was the scuttlebutt (rumor) that the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, basing its judgment on the law of averages, had stocked the station with a large surplus of caskets which were overstuffing a remote building.

Out of green material (some cadets had never seen the ocean); Jacksonville is turning out officer-aviators salty enough to handle posts with the fleet, sharp enough to fly the confusion of gadgets which form a modern warplane. By the time they are commissioned, Jacksonville's cadets find nothing paradoxical in the traditional Navy, have faith in big battlewagons as the backbone of a fleet. A separate air force? Heresy! They are Navy.

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