Oral memoirs of Phil George: an interview conducted on February 4, 2020

Phil George was born in Austin, Texas on June 3, 1924. At the age of 18, George hitchhiked to San Antonio with a friend to sign up for the United States Army Air Corps, and was selected to join the pilot training program. He completed his aviation training in the United States before being deployed to the Pacific, where he spent most of his time at Chikyang, a remote airfield in western China the United States had taken over from the Japanese. Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August of 1945, George was sent on a mission to transport displaced members of the Chinese government from Chungking to Nanking in eastern China, which the Japanese had overtaken in 1937.