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MEMORIAL ARTICLE
Published Assembly Jan '51
George Michael Sliney No. 15845
Class of 1946 Killed July 7, 1950 in the Crash of a
Jet Bomber in Indiana, aged 25 years. |
FIRST LIEUTENANT GEORGE MICHAEL SLINEY, son of Brigadier
General and Mrs. George W. Sliney, was born at Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas, on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1924. He graduated
from West Point in the class of 1946. His brother, Major Edgar
M. Sliney, USAF, graduated from West Point in the class of 1941.
His father, General Sliney, graduated in the class of 1913. In
December 1946, George married Esther Watkins of Washington, D.
C.
As an Army son George was to
see much of the world; as an officer in the Air Force, he was
to fly over a vast portion of it in the pilot’s seat of
a B-29. George was a born observer. The opportunities for an
avid young mind were legion in his peregrinating life; in addition
to his keen interest, he could retain facts and impressions and
recall them at will. It followed naturally that he enjoyed friendly
contacts with people—plain people, or learned older ones,
or very young ones; from each he gained something to be added
to his repository of information.
To
every thing and person that fitted into the kaleidoscopic picture
which was his life he gave something of himself; through all
his adventures and travels he remained constant—lovable,
dignified, hard-working, dependable, unpredictable. He kept intact
his remarkable good humor and sense of right. And as he gave,
so he received. Life gave him robust health, a host of friends,
and developed in him the intrepid spirit of the Air Force.
George loved the great outdoors. He loved
the broad expanse of sea and the staggering heights of mountains;
he loved the silence of deserts and gentle velvet valley lands.
His outdoor interests embraced all the healthy pursuits of Army
sons. He learned to ride horseback when a very small boy in Hawaii,
going far into the hills of the Waianae Range along the lava
ridges of the Firebreak Trail. He swam in the waters of Waialua
and Waikiki. He learned to shoot at Fort Sill when he went out
in the cold dawn with his father to hunt wild duck and geese.
He learned about camping and campfire cooking on the desert in
California when his father often took Sons of the American Legion
out for weekend trips. He hiked the hills of Hollywood and in
the Wichitas of Oklahoma.
As an officer George often reminisced
about his happy childhood. “Our home was always filled with
music,” he wrote in one of his notebooks. “The piano,
the ukulele, the guitar. We all sang, and when my voice broke
I was embarrassed.” How strong that voice was when he sang
in the Cadet Choir at West Point! When he was at his first station
at Roswell, New Mexico, he wrote home of the wind in the trees
at dusk. “It always reminds me of places I have been. I
remember the wind in the trees when I sat in my favorite apple
tree in Groton, and looked way across the New England hills;
and the trees in our garden in Hawaii when I was a very happy
little boy and never wanted to grow up.” Later, when he
was at Shemya in the Shimitchi Islands there was no wind in the
trees on that barren air strip, but this pilot, flying high over
the Aleutians and the ocean of the Great Circle, only had to
reach into his storehouse of fact and fancy for other and more
appropriate dreams.
All through his boyhood George
received his education in many places; Washington, D.C., Hawaii,
California, Oklahoma, Massachusetts. He graduated from Lawrence
Academy at Groton, and after preparatory work at Millard’s
and Sullivan’s, he entered West Point and graduated in June
1946, with his Air Force wings.
George received his advanced
flying training at Enid, Oklahoma, and was assigned as a B-29
pilot at Roswell, New Mexico in the Strategic Air Command. During
this assignment he graduated from the Air Tactical School at
Tyndall Field, Florida. George then went to the Alaskan Command
and was assigned to the 375th Squadron of the V.L.R. Weather
Reconnaissance.
Twenty-seven months of
Arctic flying was rugged training, and eight of these months
were spent at Shemya in the Aleutians. Many flights were made
over the North Pole and many to Japan, and while George logged
his half-million miles of flying, often there were only great
ice floes beneath the lone silver ship.
One of his most interesting and rugged
experiences in the Arctic was a survival test in which he participated.
Five Air Officers were flown to Chandler Lake, a great frozen
stretch one hundred miles north of the timber line. Here they
lived on survival kit rations and equipment to test their effect
and usability for use by airplane crews in case of bailing out
in the Arctic.
George’s adventurous spirit
took him to the gold rush at Fishwheel, when, in a chartered
plane he took off and staked a claim of about thirty acres. Just
hunting down another dream, but what fun!
To George, difficulties were
never discouraging; they were something which had to be licked.
When he found the housing problem impossible in Fairbanks, he
bought an unfinished log house, moved in and worked on it until
he left. There were partitions with the bare two-by-fours showing;
these he finished with celotex. The water pump was in the dining
room. It was an ugly thing so he moved it down in the basement
and installed it there. When the cold weather came,”
he wrote home, “I found out why the pump was in the dining
room. The blooming thing froze.” All this when the temperature
was under forty below!
On returning to the States, George
was assigned to jet bombers with the 85th Bomber Squadron.
“I’m going to fly to California and show you what a
real plane looks like,” he wrote. “I’m really
happy about this,” he said.
On July 7 George flew off into the wild blue on his last flight,
in the plane he loved above all planes. When friends tell you
they loved your son, it is heart warming; when his commanding
officer tells you of traits and characteristics he too has observed
in your son, you know the peace of work well done. His commanding
officer, Colonel Karl T. Rauk, in whose organization George served
in Alaska, wrote:
“George was a reliable, efficient and thoroughly
capable officer on any assignment which he was given. His refreshing
spontaneous sense of humor was always an uplift for the morale
of his organization. His continuous enthusiasm was a constant
source of inspiration for anyone with whom he associated. I feel
that George lived his years to the fullest extent, giving the
utmost of his capabilities, and, in turn, receiving the best
from life.”
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