Irv Burg

Irv Burg Notes:
On Greatest Generation
Tom Brokaw may have been a little over-enthusiastic with that label. We were born in the midst of the depression. We were raised to be very responsible. We couldn’t even imagine saying ‘look what you made me do’. We did what we were asked and took responsibility, whether it was credit or blame.

We knew that you had to survive, so there was no shame in what your job was.

That is our gene pool. It was not surprising that on December 8th, 1941 when I went to the recruiting office to sign up that there was a long line of others so that I had to wait. I had two deferral opportunities, care for my mother and working on a government program, so I had to leave my draft card at home so they’d let me enlist.

We were sons of immigrants, either 1st or 2nd generation and had a love for the country that gave us freedom – even if there was some predjudice.

On Going to War
After graduation, I worked for two years prior to enlisting at a letter press printer in a job I had gotten with the help of IIT. I was working on photo separation techniques and in-camera masking technology that reduced the work of photo engravers. The company developed a large-scale camera that could reproduce large images. One of the images I worked on was actually used by my bomb group in India.

When I enlisted, I didn’t want to be in the mud and wasn’t interested in the Navy. The Army was developing the Army Air Corps. As an enlistee I had a choice and enlisted as an Aviation Cadet. I wanted to go to flight school, but the Seargeant wanted me to go to engineering because of my education. He said, “we need engineers and you’d do better for the cause”, so they sent me to engineering school and I became an engineer with the 7th Bomb Group of the 10th Air Force.

I got my commission in September of 1942 and they put us on a boat to India. I had never been west of the Mississippi. Through this experience my generation did develop a group identity and a bond. When you were in a combat unit, if somebody needed a flight jacket because they lost their’s, you’d give them your flight jacket, and they’d return it after their mission.

War Photography
The Army Air Corps never missed a target. Washington asked if we could take pictures of our bombing strikes. We were out of range for recon flights to record our damage, so we figured out how to take our own photos on bombing runs. They made me the Group Photo Officer. They promoted me from Second Lieutenant to Captain.

When we started losing planes in daytime flights, we shifted to night time missions, which caused a problem for photography. I casually asked the Colonel if there was a flash bomb. He said he could get some. We put them in the plane and I decided that if the fuse was set to detonate them 300 feet over the target 2 to 3 seconds after the bombs, we could get a photo of the damage we had done . We had the gunners sit on the flash bombs and when we told them, they would toss them out the window of the plane. My guess at 300 feet was accurate and when the flash bombs exploded, we got our pictures proving that we had hit our target.

Cold Beer
Each of us got a case of warm canned beer a month as a ration. Warm beer was better then no beer. One night I had enough beers to start thinking. I was the engineering officer. I had the right to redline planes, requiring a test flight before being put back into service. I thought that I could red line a plane each time we got a ration of beer. We had a 22,000 foot ceiling and it is pretty cold up there. So we did. Everybody thought that this Liutenant Burg was a genius and all the engineers started redlining planes. Turned out that one plane in every squadron needed to be tested every time we got a ration of beer.

On IIT
IIT was why I could figure out that the flash bomb needed to go off at 300 feet.

When I got to Armour, they indulged me. Baseball games conflicted with my classes, but there was a teacher who was willing to go out of his way to teach me when I could come in on Saturdays. They were willing to indulge me because they wanted a baseball team, but were not going to excuse you from a duty or responsibility. You either qualified to be a mechanical engineer or you didn’t.

A bigger thing was that they taught me to think. First you have to be able to understand the problem and what obstacles there are to doing that you want to do. They taught me the ability to understand what the problem is. My career was in marketing rather then engineering, but that degree showed I had the discipline to get something done.
On Scholarship

Without an education you are lost. Giving back is my job. It is part of my faith and culture. You are required to help those who need it and make it possible for them to support themselves.

Without an education in America you are lost – education makes it possible for you to understand what is going around you.
Where better to do it than at the school that taught it to me, a school with the ability to take any kind of person and make them better. Those students are our tomorrow.