Chapter 10: ►

_No Penalty for Being Late_

The last fourteen months of my active Navy service amounted to a determined but futile endeavor to get to war. This crazy-quilt travelogue took me from Corpus Christi to Jacksonville, Florida, back across the country to San Diego, to Seattle, to Klamath Falls, to Seattle, to Pasco, to Arlington, to Seattle, to Hawaii, to Philadelphia, to Norfolk, and back again to Seattle. Along the way, intense operational training improved and broadened my flying considerably.

The rat race began in September, 1944, when at last I was sprung from my duties as instructor in gunnery and bombing at Corpus and issued orders to the fleet. I was told to report to the Naval Air Training Center in Jacksonville, Florida, for a brief operational transition course. Alice and I packed our worldly belongings in our 1940 Mercury and set out. When I reached the new base and checked in, I was again forced to acknowledge that the Navy was not run for my express benefit. I had drawn an assignment to dive bombers.

To a fighter pilot, being a fighter pilot is very important. Fighters are the _avant garde_, the lancers, the agile fencing foils of the fleet, the spearhead of offense and defense in any pitched air-and-sea battle. The forte of the fighter pilot is individuality, perhaps erroneously, but nevertheless romantically, inspired by two wars. I had connived to be assigned to fighters when I was a cadet at Corpus Christi. With mixed feelings of adherence to duty and instructions, I decided to try again to bend the course of events more to my inclinations. If I didn’t try, I thought as a salve to my feelings, what a waste of two years of intensive training!

“Can’t I get fighter orders?” I asked the officer at the desk.

“We don’t have any fighter-plane orders,” he said.

“Well, in that case, consider me on leave.” I had about twenty-two days coming, as I had foregone leave since I was commissioned. My thought was to postpone my reporting date until some fighter orders came in. Alice and I rented a cottage on Jacksonville Beach. Each day for three weeks I drove eighty miles to the Naval Base to see whether any fighter orders had arrived.

During this time--it was October 20, 1944, to be precise, and I don’t know why I remember the specific date because I remember few others--a hurricane struck the beach where we were living. This incredible unleashing of nature’s power was without doubt the most impressive thing I have ever seen in my life. The pounding sea ripped up the concrete seawall and stove in cottages. It swept over automobiles, including ours. I tried to save it, and others besides, feverishly working on the drowned-out engines while the wind-driven rain pelted me like BB shot. It was useless. I pushed the Mercury against a fence which I hoped would prevent the car from drifting out to sea. Then Alice and I caught the last Coast Guard rescue truck, which took us to a brick schoolhouse in an emergency housing area for the displaced people. Before that storm hit us I never quite realized the awesome force the earth has cached in its storehouses. When this model of perfection goes awry it is a sight to behold. Against this force man’s efforts seem feeble indeed.

Against the U. S. Navy this man’s efforts were feeble, too. I was assigned to dive bombers, along with eleven other instructors from Corpus. Our instructor was a Marine and a wonderful aviator. He greeted us thus: “Boys, bombing is my business. If any of you want to put a little money on the bombing competition, I’ll be glad to match it.” Without telling him we had been bombing instructors too, we all laid bets. Dive bombing turned out to be far easier than the glide bombing we were doing in Texas every day for eighteen months. We won in a walk. The result was really to our benefit. In the strange way that a competent pilot shows his respect for other competent pilots, our instructor worked us night and day with no quarter, and gave us, rather than a transition, a post-graduate course in the finer points of dive-bombing tactics.

As a result of my desire to be a fighter pilot, I found my rear-seat man an annoyance through no fault of his own. To this day I find it hard to justify a flight crew of more than one in almost any airplane. The additional crew encumbers the pilot and compromises the performance of the airplane with added weight and duplication. Most of the new rear-seat men remembered all the horror stories they heard in training school about target fixation on a dive. So whether the pilot liked it or not, the men insisted on calling out the altitudes during the dive. The only cure for this was for the pilot to recover at such high G that the rear-seat man blacked out. Sooner or later he’d get the point. But my man stumped me. He never gave up. Once I dived almost into the ground and pulled out viciously. On the way down the rear-seat man called the altitudes: “10,000 ... 5,000 ... 2,000 ... 1,500 ... 1,200 ... 1,000 ... 800....” And from there on I was blacked out. Coming to in the climb, I could almost hear him shaking off the blackout, foggily picking up where he left off, calling altitude as we _climbed_. I gave up.

A few weeks later came the last straw. Sometimes on our flights we carried aloft a three-pound bag of powdered gilt-paint pigment. If the usual floating targets were engaged by other flights, we tossed the bag of paint out of the cockpit. When it splashed into the ocean, it spread out and made a good substitute target. I handed my rear-seat man the paint bag and told him to drop it if and when I so instructed.

It was an unforgettable take-off. By regulation we kept the greenhouse canopy open, and the cockpit was always very windy. About midway down the runway my rear-seat man got curious and opened the bag. Then he dropped it. The bag burst. The rushing wind caught the powdered paint and swirled it through the cockpit--a regular blizzard of gold. I was almost blinded. The gold flecks coated everything, including our faces and hands, sticking to the oil film that usually covered us on those flights. I cleared my eyes somehow and landed. The cockpit, the instruments, everything--and both of us--were beautifully gold-plated El Dorados. Weeks went by before I got all the flecks out of my hair. Incidents like this strengthened my desire for the lonesome fighter cockpit.

Fate intervened favorably. After a couple of months, I was ordered to report to San Diego for fleet orders--without my rear-seat man. I packed the car again and we set off cross-country. Alice was about two months pregnant.

We were leaving Shreveport the next morning when suddenly I recalled all the stories I had heard at Corpus about the bigness of the State of Texas. “I’m going to cross Texas the long way in one day,” I said to Alice. It was 986 miles to El Paso. We made it, but the cost was high. A little further along, in New Mexico, Alice had a miscarriage.

My orders required me to report in “on or before” a certain day that January of 1945. Time was short. If I took Alice to a hospital I would have to leave her there alone in New Mexico, an unthinkable desertion. But I knew the long drive remaining would be dangerous for her. Trying to make the best of an impossible situation, we decided to push on as rapidly as possible to leave Alice in the care of my sister, Elena Ruth, who lived near Los Angeles.

I drove on swiftly, without sleep, completing the cross-country drive from Jacksonville to Los Angeles in eighty-eight hours. When we reached my sister’s house, Alice was very ill. She almost died. It was a sobering lesson for a young man. I made up my mind then that no matter what challenge loomed in my life I would never tackle it at the risk of involving her or anyone else. I would go it alone--all the way. From that time on, Alice, with my encouragement, drew a protective cocoon around her life. She never inquired about what new Mount Everest I might be scaling, and in fact until she read this book she had little idea of the flying at Edwards. I’ve pointedly ignored it, both with her and the children. I’ve lived in two different worlds: in hers with our family, and in the world of my other love, aviation. This separation is a boon. It removes the insidious and encumbering influence of expressed day-to-day concern so common in the lives of pilots. And to some degree--to a great degree, I hope--it has spared her the anguish of waiting for the telephone call so many of her friends have received when their men bought the farm.

When I was certain Alice was in good hands, I raced on to San Diego, reporting in twenty minutes before the deadline.

Good news was waiting for me at the end of that mad journey. When I got there, the last man to report, some of the other pilots had been assigned to dive bombers, torpedo planes, and so on. But at the very last minute a request came through for a few fighter pilots for Air Group 37, based in the Seattle area, of all places. I snatched up the orders and hurried north to Seattle, then to Klamath Falls, Oregon. As soon as she was well, Alice joined me.

We had time to visit with her family and to spend a few days on the farm in Boistfort Valley. I found my father and mother--like most farmers during the war--short-handed but more prosperous. My father’s research and diligence were bringing handsome returns. He was laying plans to build a modern barn with an automatic milking line, and to buy new power tools and tractors.

He was reconciled to my chosen profession by then, but he openly urged me to do more. “A pilot,” he said, “is nothing more than a glorified chauffeur. Use your skill and talent in flying as a tool to help accomplish something lasting and significant for mankind.”

From Air Group 37 at Klamath Falls I was re-assigned to Air Group 51 at Seattle. We recommissioned that famed squadron and moved to Pasco, Washington. Air Group 51 prepared for war. We flew morning, noon, and night. Our skipper, Commander William Lamb, an Annapolis graduate, was one of the ablest men I have ever met. He rated others strictly by performance. Although I was a senior lieutenant, with many more flying hours than most of the pilots, I flew last man Charlie until I proved to him in the air that I knew what I was about. After that he assigned me to command a division. All Naval officers must assume a collateral duty, and as I had been with every squadron, I was assigned as an Engineering Officer. When we changed a wing, or conducted a major overhaul of an airplane, it was my job to take the plane into the air for the first test hop, to make sure it had been put back together properly. This was not flight-test work in its purest sense, but as close as I could come. I took keen satisfaction in squeezing longer life from some of those tired old birds and tried to keep them in near-perfect mechanical order, just as I did my automobile.

One man I especially admired in that outfit was a boot ensign named Smith. He was a natural hunter like Sergeant York, or Gabreski, or Chuck Yeager. No matter how hard I tried--and I went full-bore--he could always top my score in aerial gunnery. He was eventually transferred to another outfit, but of all the men I knew in the Navy this Ensign Smith stands out in my memory like a sore thumb--or an unscaled Mount Everest. I don’t know what ever happened to him.

We were scheduled to ship out on the aircraft carrier Cabot, but she broke a shaft, so our Group sailed to Hawaii, planeless, on an LSV that burned out a bearing and so proceeded at a top speed of six knots. It was one of the longest voyages of the war, I’m sure. The ship was crowded with aviators and soldiers. I remember it as one long Acey-Deucy tournament, which in the end I lucked out and won (the pot was $28.00). In Hawaii we were assigned to the aircraft carrier Langley and given brand-new, 400-mile-an-hour F6F airplanes.

And that was as close as I came to the war. In Hawaii we moved down to the island of Maui and for several months trained with the Second Marine Division, preparing for the invasion of Japan. The training was quite realistic, with live ammo and bombs. We were assigned a specific landing point on the coast of Japan, and on Maui we practiced our invasion role on terrain similar to it. Then the scientists unlocked the power of the atom and ended the war. We boarded the Langley, lashed down our planes, and steamed to Philadelphia via the Panama Canal. We based in Philadelphia for a few weeks at Mustin Field. From there we moved to Norfolk for decommissioning. Alice had been waiting on the farm ever since I shipped off to Hawaii.

For a while I considered remaining in the Navy after the war. It had many appeals for me. I met some of the finest men in my life in the Navy. It was a good life if you approached it from the right point of view in the right frame of mind. It was an opportunity to do my country a service in my chosen endeavor. The Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, where new Navy planes are flight-tested, had just opened up, and I thought of applying for a test pilot’s job there. In fact I talked to Commander Lamb about it at length. He gave me little encouragement to buck the Academy men and those with technical training with my “trade school” background. I decided then to return to college for a sound engineering education. I was well grounded in aviation, but too many people, such as Commander Lamb, clearly held an advantage over me. If I had known then that the Navy would send many of its officers to college after the war to obtain engineering degrees, I might have stayed on and thus avoided the tight financial squeeze that soon followed.

A lunatic episode, the maddest race of all, climaxed my Navy career. I’m not certain how it began. I think that the separating officer at Norfolk resented reservists who were deserting the Navy. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll separate you in Seattle, the point closest to your home, and fast, too. You’re due at the separation center there not ‘on or about’ but ‘on or before’ five days from now. You’ll have no transportation priority.”

“But how do you expect me to get to Seattle in five days with no priority?” I asked. It was November 1, 1945, and the entire transportation system of the nation was staggering under the load of returning servicemen. Without a priority commercial airlines were out of the question. All military airplanes were jammed. Trains were packing people in like sardines and running days behind schedule.

“That’s your problem,” the officer said. He handed me my orders.

This return trip to Seattle suddenly and curiously emerged as a great game. I don’t know why. I guess it was because the officer implied that I could never make it. _All right, I thought, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. And I’m not about to report in late for the first time in my Naval career and spoil a perfect record._ I packed a few clean clothes in a suitcase, sealed and shipped my foot-lockers (which arrived months later), and set off.

From beginning to end the trip was insane. I left Norfolk on a train, standing in the aisle. We chugged north for a thousand years and then south for another thousand, then east, I think it was, and finally arrived in Washington, D. C., which is about a hundred miles from Norfolk--fourteen minutes by fighter plane. I made up my mind right then that I would get back on a train only as a last resort, after trying a mule. Incidentally, I still feel that way about trains. I checked in at Military Operations in Washington and by great luck got a hop almost immediately to Olathe, Kansas. I waited patiently there for a ride farther west, or north, or northwest, but the few planes that came through were jammed with priority passengers. The time was ticking by rapidly.

When I heard that I might have better luck in Chicago, I wormed my way on board a military plane going there. In Chicago I felt richer: I was now far ahead of the train. I could have boarded a train in Chicago that day and made it to Seattle with ease. But the thought of that prolonged trip was enough to make me gamble. Heavier air traffic was moving across the South so I jumped on another military airplane and wound up in Fort Worth, Texas. This move put me _behind_ the train schedule. I had to make it by air, or else....

In Fort Worth I waited. Without a priority it seemed hopeless. But luck is where you find it. I discovered very late that night that the Naval officer dispatching people on the airplanes was an old student of mine from Corpus Christi days. As a favor to a buddy, he stamped my orders with the lowest possible priority. Still it _was_ a priority and it moved me ahead of about a hundred people in the line. Hurrying now, for I was far behind the train schedule, I scrambled aboard a plane heading for Oakland, California, with an intermediate stop in Phoenix, Arizona. If I didn’t get bumped in Phoenix, I knew I had it made.

I got bumped in Phoenix. I then had less than twenty-four hours to make it to Seattle.

I paced the floor of the waiting room. The clock ticked on. Then a minor miracle happened. Completely unexpected, an airplane came through Phoenix headed for San Francisco. It was an old R4-D, converted to a hospital plane, manned by a flight crew and a staff of male and female nurses, flying back and forth between the East and West coasts, hauling the wounded to hospitals in the East and caring for them along the way. They were returning for more. I have never seen people so dead tired. I don’t think any of them had slept in a bed for a month. Yet they immediately turned their thoughts to my comfort. They gave me a sleeping bag, some hot coffee, and a ride to San Francisco. This little touch of humanity made me feel like a new man. Moreover, this hop to the Coast made up much lost time and put me ahead of the train again.

In San Francisco I boarded an Air Force plane bound for Seattle. As fate would have it, just then some luckless pilot drove an airplane into a mountain nearby. The plane I was on was diverted from its destination to help in the search for survivors. They dropped me off at the end of the world--Medford, Oregon. I might have made it to Seattle by train yet--a ten-hour trip--but having come that close, I refused to give up, although I was getting pretty tired at this point and was badly in need of a bath and clean clothes.

The next morning I met an Air Force colonel who had flown down to Medford in a B-17 bringing a ground rescue crew. At that moment he was debating with himself whether to return in heavy weather to his base at McChord Field, Tacoma, about thirty miles south of Seattle. I got into the debate, urging that the weather wasn’t so bad and that he return to McChord with me as his passenger. At about three in the afternoon we took off into a raging snowstorm. I sat shivering in the plexiglass nose turret.

When we got to Tacoma about dusk the snowstorm was still in full fury. I think the Colonel would have sought another field then--probably _any_ pilot would have--except for the expression on my face which plainly said: “It doesn’t look so bad to me.” Coming from a Naval aviator, it was a challenge to this Air Force type, perhaps. He lowered the gear and we threaded our way up the river through the storm groping--and I do mean groping--for McChord Field. It was dark and snowing hard when we landed. The runway lights were on, the tower was manned, but otherwise there was not a soul to be seen. No jeep came out to the plane; hell, the weather was too lousy.

My clock was running out. Without so much as a “thank you” to the Colonel, I plowed through the deep snow to a road where I hitched a ride in a truck that happened along. The truck dropped me at the base gate. I then moved out onto the main highway and thumbed a ride--I believe it took two rides--to Seattle. I arrived at the Processing Center at eleven o’clock that night, one hour before my deadline, November 6, 1945.

I have recounted these last days and hours of my active Naval service in some detail for special reasons. For one thing, the recollection of that trip has always astonished and amused me, especially the way those Florence Nightingales just happened along in Phoenix in the hospital plane and took pity on a forlorn traveler engaged in a restless, disjointed journey, a crazy race against time. That was the dénouement of the trip; that hop really let me win. And to those people, whose names I cannot recall, I shall be forever grateful. Another thing: I think this screwball tale tells a lot about the workings of the feeble clot of gray matter which I call my mind.

I should close this account by adding the significant fact that there would have been no penalty whatsoever if I had arrived late. Even a couple or three days late.