Joel Varner was born in October 1923 in Senatobia, Mississippi. He attended high school and junior college there. He had a traditional, small town upbringing. His father was a pharmacist and owned a drugstore. They did fine during the Great Depression. It was hard. In high school, things were going in the direction of war and they kept up with it by radio. The faculty at the college kept them informed and warned them that eventually we would be in the war. One Sunday, he was in a car and just riding around with others and the news of Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] came over the radio. Nobody knew where it was or what it was. He knew he would be called into the service. He was not afraid of going in, but he was not anxious to go in. He had a funny feeling in his stomach about what the future held for him. He graduated high school in 1941. His second year of junior college, he transferred to Ole Miss [Annotator's Note: University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi]. He started off in pharmacist school, but eventually went into business school. He joined the ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] and also joined the Army Air Corps in November 1942. In February 1943, his unit was mobilized.

[Annotator's Note: Joel Varner went on active duty in the Army Air Corps in February 1943.] Varner joined the Army Air Corps because he did not want to be in the infantry. Flying fascinated him. He went by train to Miami Beach, Florida for basic training and then to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he attended Allegheny College. Varner was sent to the classification center in Nashville [Annotator's Note: Nashville, Tennessee]. From there he went to Maxwell Field, Alabama and began his aviation cadet program. In Jackson, Tennessee he learned to fly. Basic flight training was in Newport, Arkansas, followed by advanced training in Dothan, Alabama where he got his wings. Basic training was in a tandem, open cockpit plane. In advanced training, he flew the T-6 [Annotator's Note: North American AT-6 Texan advanced trainer aircraft]. It was delightful to fly. After graduation, he was transitioned into P-40s [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft]. They were obsolete at that time, but still considered a primary pursuit plane. He went to Venice, Florida where he transitioned into P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft]. He did a lot of navigation, low-level flying, formation flying, acrobatics, and air-to-ground firing of the machine guns. He was then sent overseas.

The war in Europe had ended, but the war in the Pacific continued. The Allies were supporting Chiang Kai-Shek [Annotator's Note: leader of the Republic of China from 1928 to 1975] in his fight against the Communists. Joel Varner was sent there [Annotator's Note: with the 530th Fighter Squadron, 311th Fighter Group] to be a replacement pilot in Karachi, India [Annotator's Note: now Karachi, Pakistan]. They continued to train in P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft] in glide-bombing. They stayed there a month or two and the war ended. This was in August 1945. He was then sent to China as a replacement pilot for ones who were getting out of the service and going home. He was in northwestern China in Xi’an. He then went to Shanghai. Everything was beginning to close down. He ferried some P-51s from India. He was flown back to Calcutta [Annotator's Note: now Kolkata, India] where he picked up P-51s and flew them to the Assam Valley. They followed a B-25 [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber] over the mountains and landed in Kunming [Annotator's Note: Kunming, China]. He went to Shanghai [Annotator's Note: Shanghai, China] in a flight of 25 aircraft. After he was airborne, he found he was not drawing fuel, so he turned around. The remainder ran into a severe thunderstorm, losing five airplanes and three pilots. The planes were turned over to the Nationalists [Annotator's Note: Nationalist Chinese troops] in Shanghai. He caught a troop ship out of Shanghai and went to San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California]. He then went by train to Camp Shelby [Annotator's Note: Hattiesburg, Mississippi] where he was processed out.

Joel Varner flew P-40s [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] in his initial training. He had been flying the T-6 [Annotator's Note: North American AT-6 Texan advanced trainer aircraft] with a radial engine. Transitioning to a P-40 meant he had a long nose in front of him. There is a lot of torque that pilots have to be careful of. He took off and could not handle it. It was a great experience. It has a lot of power and was fun to fly around. It was obsolete though. The transition to P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft] was like going into a Cadillac [Annotator's Note: American luxury automobile]. It was the greatest airplane and was very well designed. The wide landing gear made it easier to land than the P-40. It was much more responsive than the P-40. It cruised at about 300 miles per hour. It was easy to fly and had a good fuel capacity. It had six machine guns and could drop bombs. He flew one for six and a half hours and it was not uncommon to fly it for eight hours. Varner never came across any Japanese aircraft. In Shanghai [Annotator's Note: Shanghai, China], there was an accumulation of Japanese airplanes. It was over with [Annotator's Note: World War 2] when he got there in November 1945.

Shanghai [Annotator's Note: Shanghai, China] had been a big military base for the Japanese. Joel Varner went into the southern airport. The United States Navy would land their amphibious planes on the river and taxi up on the ramp for maintenance. In November [Annotator's Note: November 1945], there was some kind of commemorative day, and they put 75 P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft] in the air in formation. He was with the 530th Fighter Squadron, 315th Fighter Group [Annotator's Note: 530th Fighter Squadron, 311th Fighter Group]. They were not assigned any particular aircraft, so they did not name them. There was nothing to flying in the Himalayas [Annotator's Note: Himalaya Mountains]. They just followed the B-25s [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber]. They flew out of Chabua, India. He remembers seeing the Burma Road [Annotator's Note: a road linking Burma with southwest China built in 1937]. Kunming [Annotator's Note: Kunming, China] was an important base. Varner was not a day-in and day-out Hump pilot [Annotator's Note: name given by Allied pilots to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew to resupply the Chinese war effort]. He did not get a chance to make any friends with the locals. As long as the war was going on, the Chinese would protect everything. After the war was over, they had to provide their own security. Chiang Kai-Shek [Annotator's Note: leader of the Republic of China from 1928 to 1975] was fighting the Japanese and the Communists. The Communists would try to recover American pilots to get the rewards. The weather was good for him most of the time. They had no reason to fly in bad weather. He flew from Xi'an [Annotator's Note: Xi'an, China] to Shanghai and all the way to the east coast with no problem.

The Americans had captured some bases on the east coast of China and the Army Air Forces were out in the boondocks [Annotator's Note: countryside]. There were Japanese troops in between the two. Joel Varner had missions to keep an eye on them. They did not have much occasion to fly. They flew to get flying pay. There were some transport units, but no need for fighter planes. Varner flew as a copilot on a C-47 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft] to get his flying time. He flew into Nanking [Annotator's Note: now Nanjing, China] and offloaded some aviation fuel. Coming back, they ran into some weather. The pilot made three attempts before he could land. He had fun flying the P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft] around Shanghai [Annotator's Note: Shanghai, China]. The Japanese loved to fly kites and he loved to fly and cut the kite strings. Things were pretty loose in those days. Everybody was ready to go home.

Joel Varner had no desire to stay in the Army Air Forces. He wanted an education. He went right back to college. He got out of the service in July 1946 and was back in school in September. He enjoyed himself. He graduated in 1948 and went to work with his father in the drugstore. He married in 1950 and moved to Jackson [Annotator's Note: Jackson, Mississippi]. He went to work with a bank and retired from banking. He used the G.I. Bill. He does not remember a lot about it but it helped a lot. If Varner had not gone into the service, he does not think he would have finished college. When he came back, he was more mature and more ready for an education. The teaching of World War 2 is very important. It was too big of an event for people not to realize. There are a lot who do not know who Adolf Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] was. The museum [Annotator’s Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana] is important. Varner stayed in the Reserves. He transferred to the Army. They had light observation planes. He joined an artillery unit in September 1950. The war in Korea had started and his unit was mobilized and sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He changed the date of his marriage then. His unit supported the artillery school. He would fly the observers up to adjust the rounds being fired. That lasted a year and then they were sent to Germany. There was a fear that the Russians were going to push through Germany at the time. Germany was divided into zones and the Russians had mortars between them. Varner's mission was to patrol those borders. Germany was nice. His wife was able to go over, but had to go as a tourist. They traveled around Europe. It turned out to be delightful. He was based in Hammelburg which had been a POW camp [Annotator's Note: Oflag XIII-B prisoner of war camp]. When the Americans were moving through the area during the war, Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] found out his son-in-law [Annotator's Note: later US Army General John Knight Waters] was there, and he attempted to rescue him [Annotator's Note: Task Force Baum and the Hammelburg Raid on 27 March 1945]. He lost some of his men [Annotator's Note: only 35 of 300 men returned from the mission]. Varner feels that was one of the sad mistakes Patton made in his career. Varner stayed in the Reserves. He went to helicopter school. He really enjoyed it and it was good to him. Flying was fun. He retired in the 1970s. He did not go to Vietnam [Annotator's Note: Vietnam War, or Second Indochina War]. He thinks he would have gone AWOL [Annotator's Note: Absent Without Leave]. The Vietnam War is something we should never have gotten into. The War in Iraq either [Annotator's Note: Iraq War, 2003 to 2011].