SWING SHIFT
On June 23, 1942, Captain Robert Tyre Jones Jr. reported for duty at Mitchel Field in Long Island, New York, to Brigadier General John K. Cannon, the commander of the Army Air Force’s Interceptor Command, which provided air defense for the northeast coast of the United States. Assigned to the Aircraft Warning Service, Jones spent 10 weeks in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, studying the strategy of saturation bombing and learning the finer points of aerial-photo interpretation. The service had been formed in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to watch for enemy planes entering American airspace.
Jones could easily have gotten out of serving in World War II because of his 4-F classification. He was 40 and a married father of two. But like so many others of his generation,
