|
I was a young USMC
second lieutenant in VMF 452 flying off the
Franklin
on
March 19, 1945
when she was hit by a Japanese dive bomber and blew up spectacularly
and at great cost in human life – and yet never sank.
Here are two excerpts from my recently published memoir, Old
Gods, New Nations: A Memoir of War, Peace, and
Nation
Building
. The first
describes my training as a naval aviator.
The second recounts what happened to me and some of my squadron
mates on that chilly gray day in March 1945 off the coast of
Japan
.
Excerpt from Chapter 2, “Training a Sea Hawk”
II
Training
a Sea Hawk
Young men went off to the gathering storm of the war, as
doubtless they always have, out of patriotism (or tribal loyalties),
compulsion, the opportunity to break a dissatisfying routine, a spirit
of adventure and mass psychology. Everyone is going. Why not me? And
if I don’t go voluntarily, they will make me go anyway.
In my own case, I was not to be outdone by my brother, who in
the first months of the war left a promising job as a junior chemist
working for the government to enlist as an officer candidate in the
Marine Corps, having completed the requisite college degree a year
earlier. It took the Marines, well skilled in the arts of killing,
just ninety days to turn him into a second lieutenant, teach him how
to haul and shoot field artillery guns and command an artillery unit
(which in those days still included knowing how to ride a horse), and
ship him off to the already bleeding islands of the Pacific, from
which he returned three long years later with bad malaria and a head
wound.
When my brother left home, I decided I must continue the
just-established family tradition and also become a Marine Corps
officer. But I wanted to fly. It was far more dashing than slogging
through mud. I had seen enough movies about World War I to know that
aviators in their Spads and Fokkers were much sexier than the
tired-looking, helmeted foot soldiers typified by Lew Ayres in “What
Price Glory”. Aviators even earned extra flight pay for doing what
one would think everyone would want to do anyway.
The way to become a Marine Corps flyer was to enlist in the
Navy Aviation Cadet training program. In July, 1942, which
symbolically seemed the appropriate month for such an historic
occasion, I went to the Navy recruiting office in downtown
Kansas City
and enlisted as a Naval Aviation Cadet. I had finished two years at
the junior college, and thanks to my YMCA training I was muscled and
fit. Given the fact that my brother had just gone off to war, my
parents wanted me to wait to see if in fact I would be drafted. I was
not to be held back. A week later, after passing some relatively easy
written tests and a tough physical examination (my brother, who had
been a virtuoso model airplane builder, paradoxically became a
military pilot only after World War II), I took the oath of service
and was ready to go off and learn how to be a hero. That, it turned
out, was going to take a while.
In the early months of the war, the Navy recruited a lot of
young men to train as pilots. But its training capacities were still
being built up. There weren’t enough trained Navy pilots to serve as
instructors, nor for that matter enough flight base facilities. In
addition, the Navy had decided to create a new network of pre-flight
schools for its cadets at a number of American universities to
eliminate flab and sharpen up practical math and physics for aerial
navigation and related flight tasks. I could not even be immediately
scheduled for an active duty call to one of these schools.
In the meantime, however, I could start flight training at
government expense as a civilian under an already existing program
subsidized by the Commerce Department, operated by aviation academies
in various parts of the
United States
. A small private flight school at the Kansas City Municipal Airport
across a bend of the Missouri river from the stockyards was eligible
for the CPT (civilian pilot training) program and there, in the bright
and beautiful days of the late summer of 1942 above the ripening corn
fields of the river bottom lands, I began a love affair with flying.
My first master was a young, relaxed flyer named Ray Baker who, like
many pilots in those romantic days, wore a leather jacket and a white
silk scarf.
Flying, particularly in the tiny airplanes I began with, is in
its sense of feel and tactile rewards sort of like making love with
the air, the winds, the clouds and the sky. One can always tell a fine
flying airplane and a good pilot (even flying as a passenger in a 747)
– the way the pilot gently holds off coming in for a landing,
pulling back, holding, feeling for, and finally touching the ground.
We frequently flew out of grass strips and farm fields. You can land
like silk on grass. Like a bird, in a light plane you must master the
air and the wind and soar in its updrafts and spiral like a hawk.
Pilots are poets of touch. It has nothing to do with the physical
appearance of coordination in walking or sports, although coordination
is the essence of good flying. One of the best wingmen who ever flew
with me, unshakable in any maneuver, could hardly climb a stairway
without stumbling, and spluttered when he talked. With the mastery of
touch comes the ability to be hard and firm when the moment demands
violent maneuver – pushing over into a bombing run, or steadily
pulling the controls back but not stalling out in an impossibly tight,
gravity-multiplying turn in a dogfight; and emergency landings if you
must thrust the plane down hard on a short runway or a pitching deck
in a rough sea.
I soloed in a tiny Porterfield monoplane, powered by a fifty
horsepower engine which barely got two people off the ground, cruised
at seventy miles an hour and landed at a speed of maybe forty miles
per hour. We learned how to fly perfect circles in which, having held
your altitude constant as you come around through the 360 degrees
point, you bump into your own prop-wash. We did lazy S-turns above a
road to learn how to compensate for the effects of the wind, that
giant tide moving around the earth, on your pattern over the ground.
We learned spins – pull up slowly and steadily into the stall, feel
the tremble, plunge and flutter down, spinning around and around, feel
the powerless stick, count your turns, reverse the rudder at
two-and-a-half turns, pop stick forward, come out into a dive and ease
up slowly into normal flight.
When I finished my training at
K.C.
Municipal
Airport
, the Navy said I would not be called up for active duty training
before the end of the year. But
there was a two-month, secondary civilian flight program I might be
interested in at the
University
of
Wyoming
at
Laramie
. This training would involve larger airplanes and acrobatics. It
would be my first time living away from home. In 1942
Laramie
, lying at the eastern end of the high western plain before the first
ranges of the
Rockies
begin to rise, was a cow town. Its business was livestock, ranch
connected businesses and in more recent years the state university.
Our flight school was located outside the city and used its own grass
strip fields. My two months there could hardly have been closer to
heaven.
We flew open cockpit
Waco
bi-planes, the instructor sitting forward and the student aft. Our
group of fifteen cadets had rooms assigned in a university dormitory.
The status of our group was quite mysterious to most other members of
the university community. We were neither students nor on active
military duty. We did nothing to dispel the mystery, and in fact tried
to increase it by designing makeshift uniforms of our own consisting
of khaki trousers and shirts, leather jackets, and white silk scarves.
The Wacos were direct descendents of the classic fighters of
World War I, although with much increased power. They were designed
for acrobatic training, which also derived its maneuvers from the
early days of flying. For two months above the plains and low ranges
of eastern Wyoming we learned and practiced chandelles, that graceful
climbing turn which owes its name to early French aviators, loops and
the Immelman turn, an old maneuver invented by the German flier, Max
Immelman, in the first World War, which is half-a-loop going up with a
half-roll at the top to come out headed in the opposite direction. We
would dive down and waggle our wings at the cowboys and sheepherders
and, if none were in sight, chase cows and sheep across the fields. At
our main practice field we gathered at the landing end and watched
each other whistling in for landings on the worn-down grass strip,
scarves flying in the wind, and say: “There goes Paul.
Not bad,” or, “Boy, Jim really screwed that one up.” On
weekend nights, wearing our self-designed flight outfits including
appropriate leather jackets and white scarves, we hung out in the
Laramie
bars with cowhands and occasional university students. Some of the
cowhands knew us from our flights over their ranches and said our
acrobatics were a welcome break in their routine. By late October,
even with our blanket-lined flying suits and leather helmets, it was
freezing and becoming far too cold to fly open cockpit airplanes. We
finished our course and prepared to head either back home or off to
active duty. By then, counting both primary and secondary training, we
had accumulated seventy-five hours or so of flight time and deemed
ourselves ready to become aces.
The Navy ordered me to active duty as an Aviation Cadet in
December, 1942, at the
University
of
Iowa
pre-flight school. This was one of four locations the Navy established
when the war began to start sorting out who was bright and tough
enough to become a Navy or Marine Corps pilot (the Marines being a
wholly owned subsidiary of the Navy, a fact all Marines periodically
try unsuccessfully to put out of their heads). To staff and run these
schools, a major part of whose curriculum consisted of extremely
demanding, incessant physical training, the Navy commissioned as
officers a truly menacing collection of ex-college athletic coaches
and athletes. The commanding officer of the physical training side of
the
Iowa
pre-flight school, for example, was US Marine Corps Col. Bernie
Bierman, a famous football coach at the
University
of
Minnesota
. Younger, more junior jocks presided in person over the three-hour
daily physical training sessions. These USN pre-flight schools were an
earthly paradise for ex-college coaches: for the first time in their
lives, they had a captive audience of generally smart young men under
military discipline who would do virtually anything to avoid flunking
out of the Navy flight program. Flunking out meant you said goodbye to
wings and officer status and started at the bottom as an enlisted man.
Doing anything was often required in the three-month immersion.
Midwestern farm and city boys, many of whom could barely swim,
floundered around slowly sinking in the huge university swimming pool,
while officer/instructors dangled rescue poles just out of reach.
Swimming was designed for survival, not style or speed. For years
after the war, I could identify strange men of more or less my age in
hotel swimming pools who had obviously been cadets at the Navy
pre-flight schools by the way they swam the head-out-of-the-water,
frog-kick breast stroke. Boxing and wrestling programs were designed
so that competitions, rather than eliminating losers, allowed the
winner of a couple of matches to stand aside: the more you lost the
more you had to fight, and after a while in the losing bracket a
room-mate was ready to kill his room-mate in desperation.
At
six a.m.
(0600 hours) a bosun’s whistle and a recorded voice came echoing
through the loudspeaker “Hit the decks, cadets, it’s ten below
zero”. We would muster outside in the ice and snow of the
disheartening
Iowa
mid-winter landscape and then file in for breakfast. After eating,
part of the cadet corps went off for military drill outside or for a
forced march hike, trailed by an ambulance. The other half went to
class: practical physics, math, navigation, meteorology, practice in
aircraft identification using photographs flashed for split seconds on
a wall screen, and Navy history and practices.
The Navy fed and clothed us well. We dressed in officer’s
clothing – usually Navy green, although on ceremonial occasions we
wore dress blues – without any emblem of rank. My favorite Navy
article of clothing was the marvelous Navy North Atlantic storm coat
(I still wear mine sixty years later). Since we were all burning
calories like miniature stoves, the Navy fed us like prize animals
being fattened for market (which in a way we were). We ate limitless
quantities of bacon or ham and eggs, pancakes, steaks, ice cream and
candy bars, which were provided free in containers in the dorms.
Cadets soon formed into small groups of friends. My best friend
at
Iowa
, Billy Anderson, was a short, ruddy, quiet-spoken boy from a small
town in
Illinois
, whose humor and steady philosophical approach to the indignities of
cadet life helped keep my rebellious side under control. I thought
some of the jock officers went way too far in their hazing. The chief
swimming coach, a handsome blond fellow with the beautiful smooth
musculature of a champion swimmer, was notorious. He liked to strut up
and down the side of the pool yelling threats of expulsion at
unfortunate cadets who thought they were drowning. “Now, now,”
Billy would say. “Keep
your mouth shut. Keep your
eye on those wings.”
On graduation in early spring, I was ordered for primary flight
training to the
Hutchinson
,
Kansas
, Naval Air Station.
Hutchinson
is a typical small farm town in the heart of the vast
Kansas
wheat plains. The Navy built an enormous circular asphalt landing
field there – so that you could take off and land into the wind
regardless of its direction – and set up a number of auxiliary grass
strips and farmer fields for small field landing practice. I was
elated at the prospect of starting flying again, although the first
truth I learned from my first instructor on the first day at
Hutchinson
was that whatever I thought I had learned about flying in civilian
pilot training in
Kansas City
and
Laramie
didn’t count as far as the Navy was concerned. There is only one way
to fly: that is the Navy way. The Navy was different in one major
respect: it demanded absolute precision in the small field procedures
required for aircraft carrier landings and takeoffs and for flying out
of invasion beach air strips.
Over the next six months, first at
Hutchinson
and later at the sprawling Naval Aviation complex at
Corpus Christi
,
Texas
, the Navy systematically turned us into military pilots. To the work
in small field procedures and formation training, the Navy added
navigation, gunnery and instrument flying. Primary cadets flew the
open cockpit Stearman biplane, a thing of beauty, responsive in
flight, lovely sweptback wings, a delicate tail and an alarming
tendency to ground loop. At Corpus for advanced training, cadets
graduated to the famous SNJ (the Army Air Force version was known as
the AT-6), a low-wing, two-seater monoplane with a six hundred
horsepower motor and retractable landing gear. They were a joy to fly
– handsome, maneuverable and durable for the gunner and bombing
training, formation flying and acrobatics that comprised the
curriculum. The SNJ in silhouette bore a vague resemblance to the
Japanese Zero fighter and for many years most of the Zeros depicted in
movies about World War II were none other than the good old SNJ.
The flying domain of NAS Corpus Christi with its huge main
field and numbers of auxiliaries spread out over thousands of acres of
scrub brush, most of it the property of the enormous King Ranch, and
waterfront land along the Gulf of Mexico. It was a fabulous location
for pilot training: there wasn’t a hill for hundreds of miles. An
occasional hurricane might roar in from the Gulf but typical flying
weather was a hot, sunny day with a mild wind blowing in from the sea
bearing white, fluffy cumulus clouds. It was a perfect playground for
young pilots to roll and dive and chase each other’s tails around
the cloud peaks and valleys in the sky.
Our instructors were Navy flight officers, in most cases only a
few years older than the cadets, who had been unfortunate or fortunate
enough, depending on one’s point of view, to be assigned to training
rather than combat duties. I thought they had terrible assignments but
managed not to say so. In spite of the fact that instructors weren’t
much older than us, we were enormously respectful. After all they were
commissioned pilots and our fate depended on them. And what tough jobs
they had, particularly in primary training, condemned to sit in the
front seat of the open cockpit Stearman biplanes while the planes,
cadets handling the dual controls, staggered over field-bordering
trees into and out of small fields or skidded perilously close to each
other in formation training.
A half-century plus later, one of my few surviving squadron
mates wrote me that the Navy was about to dispose of old flight
training records that it had, rather unbelievably, retained in storage
since World War II. Former cadets could write in and get their
records. A mid-course comment
July 25, 1943
, by Lt. (jg) U. E. Orvis, an instrument flying instructor at
Corpus Christi
, noted: “Cadet Staples has a quiet and even disposition. He has the
industrious and persevering spirit which makes him capable at all
times. He has been conscientious in handling all of his duties. He has
demonstrated above average officer like qualities.” The final
comment in the file dated
September 1, 1943
, from Ensign R. James, just before I graduated: “Cadet Staples
exercises sound judgment and is sensible and cool headed but is
somewhat cocky and opinionated. I believe he will make a good
officer.”
One day, Ensign James led a flight of six of us out to a tiny
auxiliary strip in the middle nowhere in the scrub brush to practice
landings. We parked our planes and sat under a wing to talk about
flying. I looked around at
these beautiful machines and my companions dressed in their khaki
flight coveralls and helmets and thought we were the finest fellows in
the world. We were absolutely, as Tolstoy as a youth said about his
aristocratic coterie, “Comme il faut” – “all correct, as it
should be.”
On weekends at Corpus, we cruised and drank in the bars and
picked up local girls and an occasional WAVE (the Navy’s female
component, in those days completely land-based). One night, after a
long drinking and nude swimming party on a beach outside Corpus, I
awakened on the sand, buck naked, with the sun boring into my eyes and
a naked girl next to me. After a minute, I placed her as a WAVE left
over from the night’s partying although I wasn’t sure of her name.
We wandered back down the beach, found our clothes, hitched a ride
into Corpus and never saw each other again.
Hard drinking on weekend leave became a routine for me and a
good many other cadets as well. A favorite partner was Don Boyd, a
husky, red-haired, bright-eyed and totally engaging cadet from Flint,
Michigan, who decided I was someone he liked to party with. I was a
willing recruit. Don’s other best friend, a tough
Chicago
boy named Joe Bohlen, had developed a morphine addiction while
undergoing hospitalization for a serious operation, and was rumored to
be an occasional drug user. Drugs were, of course, totally prohibited.
The Navy tolerated alcohol use as a common weakness, although never on
duty. Virtually everyone smoked tobacco. Marijuana was known but not
widely used. Joe Bohlen decided one day that I was so fond of talking
about my flying prowess I should be dubbed a “Hot Rock.” That
metamorphosed into “The Rock” and then to “Rocky,” which has
remained my nickname until today. One of my favorite ladies, my first
wife’s cousin, dryly commented years later that she knew a number of
men named
Eugene
. They all preferred their nicknames, she said.
Don and I, along with about ten percent of our entire class,
were notified a few weeks before graduation that our requests to be
commissioned as Marine Corps aviators, which meant in most cases
flying either from small aircraft carriers or ground bases in support
of Marine ground troops in invasions and land battles, had been
granted. Thus on
September 4, 1943
, I put on the Marine Corps working green officer’s uniform, with a
single gold bar on each shoulder, and took the oath of office. I was
twenty-one years old, beautifully trained and sure of myself in the
air. Although I was less confident and certain than I tried to appear
in my official and social life, I found that other young officers
usually accepted me as someone who knew what direction to go and was
therefore to be followed.
After a short detour in
Jacksonville
,
Florida
, flying torpedo planes, which I thought would get me into combat
sooner, I reported to a Marine Corps fighter training unit in
El Toro
,
California
and was almost immediately assigned to join a new squadron, VMF 452
(the VMF stands for Fleet Marine Fighter squadron) at the Marine Corps
Air Station in Mojave. Mojave was a road stop in the vast scrub bush
and sand desert that starts east of the coastal hills in
California
and extends far past
Las Vegas
. It was the kind of town that actually had a greasy spoon restaurant
called the Silver Dollar Café. The desert’s inhabitants were
snakes, lizards, birds, wild cats and an occasional prospector
pursuing his dream of finding gold in the middle of military bombing
and gunnery ranges, which was what much of the desert had been turned
into. The Marine Corps built a modern flying field and aircraft
hangers at Mojave, erected some simple wooden barracks for officers
and men, around and through which the wind howled day and night,
burning hot in the summer and cold in the winter, two small but well
stocked officer’s and non-commissioned officer’s clubs and the
requisite mess halls, ordnance and equipment buildings.
One could fly at Mojave day and night virtually every day of
the year, since it practically never rained. Huge open tracts of
desert and mountain were marked off for gunnery and bombing training.
An Army Air Corps field was located nearby at Muroc Dry Lake (now
known as the Edwards Air Force base, famous in later years as the
advanced flight test base where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier
and then as the west coast landing strip for the space shuttle). The
Army Air Corps trained B-24, heavy bomber pilots at Muroc.
Our squadron had been assigned the still relatively new Chance
Vought Corsair, a sleek, powerful, inverted gull wing fighter that
looked like an aerial torpedo with wings. It was the Marine Corps
fighter of choice for invasion support, increasingly replacing some of
the Navy Grumann Hellcat fighter squadrons aboard the big aircraft
carriers. The Corsair was a hustling, heavy but sensitive machine,
lovely to fly, and tricky to land (dozens of pilots were killed in the
early version before engineers figured out how to prevent premature
stalling and rolling on final landing approaches). It was faster than
the Japanese Zero, although less maneuverable, tougher and more
versatile.
So we flew, and flew and trained, and flew. I always sought the
early morning flights, rocketing off over the fragrant sage in the
still relatively cool air before closing the cockpit bubble and
climbing steadily into the fathomless blue sky. In addition to the
daily training routine, a few of us would sign up for extra flying
time in available aircraft and go off dog-fighting on our own over the
mountains. A formal aerial dogfight started when the two fighters
crossed courses on 180 degree opposing courses, one a thousand feet
higher than the other (the height advantage was either agreed to or
won by the toss of a coin). The goal was to get on your opponent’s
tail where a fighter plane is unprotected (like a dog’s rear) and
shoot him down (in these fights, of course, this act was recorded only
with a triumphal whoop on the radio and occasionally a camera). The
trick was to maneuver one’s plane with such a delicate touch in
impossibly tight turns and at high G (gravity) forces so as not to
stall out until finally sliding into the hawk’s position behind the
enemy. My favorite opponent was an impassioned youngster named Hanson,
who after the war became a philosophy professor at
Yale
University
. He died in the 1960s flying his personally owned World War II
fighter in a crash in a snowstorm.
The Corsair mounted
six fifty
-caliber machine guns and carried up to five hundred pounds of bombs
or rockets. We flew gunnery runs over the mountains in four-plane
formations thousands of feet above the white target sleeve pulled by a
utility plane, rolling over to dive down for the kill and leading the
target to compensate for the relative speeds and courses of target and
shooter. It was bird hunting on a grand scale. The Muroc heavy bomber
airfield, some fifty miles away, was an irresistible, off-limits
magnet for the more venturesome of us, who would come flat-hatting in
across the sagebrush to rocket down the camp streets ten feet above
the ground, waggling our wings at startled Army Air Corps troops and
fliers, or occasionally swoop down in mock gunnery runs on B-24
formations lumbering along in the desert sky. Most of the time we got
away scot-free but my wingman and I finally got a sulfurous dressing
down from the un-amused Mojave base commander and a ten-day
confinement to quarters.
|
|
