Glide-bombing—like dive-bombing—was an art, requiring a pilot to dive at a near perfect angle. Too steep a dive and a plane could become inverted. A glide at the wrong angle could result in missing the target. And when pulling up, pilots had to be careful not to panic and pull back too hard on their sticks or their planes might stall.
The Avenger was a devastating weapon when used correctly. Training was crucial.
“A torpedo plane can’t go into a steep dive like a dive-bomber,” Bill Hazlehurst explained. “This was glide-bombing. We’d circle the target at one thousand feet, lose enough power to go down, glide in to two hundred feet, sight the target, release the bomb, and get out of there.” George Bush, Floyd Hall, and all the other torpedo pilots spent much of their time practicing glide-bombing runs. “We would bomb uninhabited spits of sand off the coast of Oregon,” Hazlehurst told me. “The skipper would be circling up above, observing our runs and scoring our hits.”
The intensive training caused intense friendships to be formed.
“Floyd was a great person to know,” Bill Hazlehurst said. “He had a great sense of humor and a big smile. In any squadron there are certain members who pal together. Joe White, Floyd Hall, and I were close friends. We became inseparable.”
Astoria had been a little fishing village until the navy moved in. “On weeknights, Floyd, Joe, and I would go to a nightclub in Astoria called Amato’s Palace of the Pacific,” Bill recalled. “It wasn’t much of a palace, but it was where we’d play poker, drink beer, and chase women.”
Snapshots of Floyd Hall confirm Bill’s memory that “he was a good-looking man with light brown hair and a fair complexion. . . . Floyd was a ladies’ man,” he said. Fellow pilot Leland Holdren agreed: “The girls liked Floyd. He was the one who got the date.” But Floyd yearned for more female action than backwater Astoria could offer. On their weekends off, Floyd, Joe, and Bill would grab some condoms and thumb a ride to Portland, about a two-hour drive away. In Portland, they would rent three hotel rooms and then head off for the chase. In their officer’s uniforms, the three cut attractive figures. “We were a rarity in Portland,” Bill said. “Not many navy personnel came through there. The gals would come running to us.”
For more than six months, Floyd Hall, the small-town-Missouri boy, partied in Oregon. “I remember Floyd was involved with many different girls,” Bill said. “It was a fun life. We had many hellacious weekends in Portland.” Handsome Floyd caught the eye of so many young women that soon he got picky. “He would only go out with blondes,” Bill remembered. “And for Floyd, there were plenty of those.”
Although he took full advantage of his time off, Floyd was always there on the flight line in the morning. Greeting him, ready to fly, were Glenn Frazier and Marve Mershon. Glenn and Marve were opposites in personality who worked seamlessly together.
Glenn was the machine-gunner who rode in the Avenger’s top turret. Once and always a Kansas farm boy, he was sturdy and quiet. “Glenn was a gentle person,” fellow crewman Charles Chadwell said. “A quiet red-haired guy doing his duty” is how parachute-rigger Mike Dake described Glenn six decades later.
Gunner Glenn was teamed with radioman Marve, who rode below him. Marve, the outgoing dark-haired city slicker from Los Angeles, enjoyed the spotlight. “Let me do the talking,” his buddy Robert Martin remembered Marve saying when they’d enter a store to cut a deal. “Marve was ahead of his time,” Mike Dake remembered. “He would streak his hair with different colors. We called him ‘Hollywood’ because he seemed to want attention.”
“Those two were as different as can be,” Dake continued. “Glenn Frazier was very conservative and Marve Mershon very liberal. But they got along and did their jobs.”
Radioman Jimmy Dye and gunner Grady York were also paired and flew in Ensign Bob King’s Avenger. Ralph Sengewalt trained with them. “Jimmy and Grady were extreme opposites,” Ralph remembered. “Grady was very quiet; he kept to himself. He would never, ever say a cuss word.” Fast-talking East Coaster Jimmy Dye was a different story. “Jimmy was an outgoing people person,” Ralph said. “He would start talking and never stop.”
Glenn, Grady, Marve, and Jimmy had all enlisted in the navy and gone through regular navy boot camps in Maryland, Florida, Idaho, and California. Their initial training was the same as that of sailors. “Navy boot camp was rough,” gunner Lyle Comstock recalled. “For twelve weeks I never left the base; I didn’t even have an ID card for ten weeks. We just drilled and trained. We tied knots, learned about ships and discipline and how to do things the navy way, with towels folded seams in.”
Discipline was tight, but there was none of the internal violence of the Japanese military. “Doing double time for too much noise was as violent as it got,” Vince Carnazza recalled.
In boot camp, “we were informed we had responsibilities and rights,” Vince explained. “We learned what the navy expected of us, what an infringement was, what the punishment could be. But we were also taught that we as individuals had rights and were informed clearly that we had recourse if we felt we weren’t treated properly.”
Another big difference between the two countries’ training systems was the attitude toward leadership. “We’d have a lecture and they’d set up a fictitious situation,” Vince said. “We learned how to interact with people who weren’t doing what they should be doing and how to efficiently get something done if you had to take over.” The Japanese military bred frightened followers with the idea that strength flowed from a terrorized organization ready to respond obediently to edicts from on high. Later, in the Pacific, Japanese troops often found themselves at a loss when their officers were killed, but American boys were able to step up into vacant leadership positions and continue the fight.
The navy administered batteries of tests to its recruits, searching for the best and brightest. “Most of the people who went into aviation were in the top ten percent of the grading system,” Vince recalled. Six decades after the war, Rowdy Dow from Massachusetts clearly remembered the difficulty of the test. Rowdy was a regular sailor and wanted to be a gunner. “I used to study the gunner’s book all the time,” he told me. “I can still feel it in my pocket.” Finally, the day for Rowdy’s test came. “They held a bolt up in the air and asked, ‘What is this?’ It was an obscure bolt from the inside of the plane’s interrupter, the thing that keeps the bullets from hitting the propeller. Everyone flunked that one and went back to study more.”
“I was in the top three percent of those tested,” Vince Carnazza told me. “They said I could have whatever I wanted. I was young and I had seen the movies and I wanted to avenge our losses. I volunteered to be an aerial gunner.” Vince, Rowdy, and the other gunners were all small enough to fit into the cramped spaces of torpedo bombers. “The turret is about a thirty-inch round ball, like a tennis ball,” said Rowdy. “A Plexiglas dome goes around the turret and there is a gun sticking out. The seat is small and your back is crushed against the wall. One hand is on the stick, which rotates the turret to where you want to shoot. Your other hand is on the gun trigger.” As gunner Robert Overbaugh explained it, “The whole turret swivels; it rotates on a round track. Your knees are up under your chin, and the turret goes around in a circle.”
While the pilot faced forward, the gunner faced backward, becoming the pilot’s “rearview” eyes. “Turret gunners,” said gunner L. E. Brinson, “are always looking where we’ve been instead of where we’re going.”
Gunners Glenn Frazier and Grady York trained for over a year and a half to master their discipline. After boot camp, they were sent to aviation ordnance school, where the learning was fast paced and intense. “We’d have a different subject every week,” Lyle Comstock recalled. “The first week was tools, wrenches and screwdrivers. We moved on to small arms, then to machine guns. We had to know the name of every part of that gun and then fieldstrip it. They would blindfold us and we would have to take a machine gun apart and put it back together in a minute.”
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sp; Rowdy remembered, “We stayed with those guns until we knew them like a toothbrush.”
After graduating from ordnance school, Grady and Glenn went on to gunnery school—Grady in Jacksonville, Florida, and Glenn in Purcell, Oklahoma. “There we started shooting skeet,” Lyle Comstock said. The turrets were mounted on the ground. “We learned how to shoot a gun, how to sight, how to increase accuracy.”
The next stop for Glenn and Grady was Fort Lauderdale, Florida, since “that’s where the airplanes were,” Comstock said. “One airplane would tow a target, a sleeve,” he explained. “Each gunner would dip his ammunition in different color paint. Later we could examine the sleeve and see who got a hit. Out of two hundred rounds of ammo, you’d be extremely lucky to get ten hits. With all the movement and speed, you’d have only three seconds to see the sleeve and shoot.”
Flying two hundred miles an hour and trying to hit targets in the Third Dimension took a lot of practice. Rowdy Dow had been an instructor at a ground shooting range when he volunteered to be an aviation gunner. He skipped gunnery school and had never fired from a plane when he reported to his flight squadron. “I told the captain I needed some training, but he just said, ‘Go up there, press the trigger, and shoot the target,’” Rowdy said. “So I went up and shot my own plane’s tail off. We had to make an emergency landing with ambulances waiting. It was a real calamity.
“The captain walked up to me and with a nice smile said, ‘You did right; you warned me. This is my fault.’
“That was beautiful for an officer to stoop down to an enlisted man,” Rowdy said.
These gunners who were training to shoot Japanese airplanes out of the sky were boys doing a man’s job. Grady York and Glenn Frazier were eighteen years old during much of their training. Fellow gunner Joe Bonn remembered, “Grady looked like he was sixteen years old.” Grady and Glenn were not alone. Ken Meredith told me, “We were just kids in those days.”
Grady manned a machine gun during the day, but during his time off he kept to himself and preferred to write letters and sketch airplanes. “Grady would very seldom go on liberty with us,” Ken Meredith remembered. “He was a self-contained person who was very bright.” Vince Carnazza recalled that “Grady was a good Christian boy. He would never, ever swear. ‘Skillyboo’ was the worst word I ever heard him use.” Ralph Sengewalt remembered, “Grady didn’t cuss and he didn’t want others to cuss. We kidded him about it, but we had a lot of respect for him.”
Grady’s letters home revealed a sensitive, artistic boy proud to be serving his country but also homesick. From boot camp he wrote a letter to “Dear Mama” and said, “Boy, I sure am lonesome. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been home.” Grady had been away from his mama for sixty days.
If Grady was not one to drink with the boys, he still paid a lot of attention to the girls. I found flirty notes from Misses Jean Sharp and Ruth Paterson among his letters. In Grady’s little black book, I found the names of only one male, three relatives, and twenty-four girls.
In a letter written on November 25, 1943, Grady admitted to his mother how dangerous it was to fly airplanes in World War II. “There’s been lots of excitement around here lately,” Grady wrote. “A boy got chopped to death by a propeller one morning and two planes ran together that night and killed two more. The next day a pilot went down in the swamps and killed himself. He was in the flight right next to me. I knew him—I guess it was just their time to go.”
But Grady believed his Lord would keep him safe. In a November 29, 1943, letter to his mother, he wrote, “Some boys the other night tried to get me to go into a bar with them. They said your Mother isn’t here. And I said to myself if you’re a Christian you are one anywhere and anytime. That sounded kinda funny. It seemed like if you didn’t see me it would be alright. But I know a lot better than that.” On December 28, he wrote, “All the boys or most of them went out Christmas Eve night and got drunk. I guess they think that’s the way they should celebrate the Lord’s birthday. My radioman stayed out all night in a whiskey joint and came right on and went up with us.”
The radioman Grady referred to in his letter was probably someone just like the irrepressible Jimmy Dye or streetwise Marve Mershon, neither of whom thought anything of carousing all night and flying all day. Radiomen in an Avenger operated from a cramped space under the gunner. The space was only slightly larger than the gunner’s turret. “The radioman’s compartment underneath the turret is compact, but not as cramped as the turret,” remembered Ralph Sengewalt. “When the bomb bay doors opened below, you could see the whole world.”
Radiomen had a .30-caliber gun they could shoot out the back of the plane, so they also went through gunnery practice. But their main focus was, not surprisingly, on becoming expert on the radios. “First we had to learn all the code,” radioman Bill Smith of Atlanta told me. “B is ‘da dit dit dit’ and C is ‘da dit da dit’ and so on. I’ll bet you didn’t know that trains whistle the Morse code at railroad crossings. They whistle the letter Q, for here comes the queen, or train. The queen is coming, da da dit da.
“We studied how to use our receivers, navigational aids, semaphore, our beacon,” Bill continued. “We were trained about something new called radar and the Doppler effect, how it operates by sending out a pulse and having it bounce back.”
“We spent twenty-two weeks at radio school,” radioman Joe Hudson of Shreveport said. “It takes a while to learn that code.”
The study was hard and serious, but the students weren’t. “Looking back now,” said Vince Carnazza, “we were so young, just high school kids. Jimmy was always coming up from behind me, grabbing my arms. We would wrestle like two teddy bears. We were just young guys testing each other in a playful manner.”
As their long period of training wound down, the realization that they would soon be off to war set in. Leaving home had been a jolt for these young boys, but now they would be leaving their homeland, and it sobered them. The young Flyboys’ thoughts of home intensified in the fall of 1944.
Before he shipped out, Warren Earl Vaughn summoned the love of his life to visit him one last time out at Mojave. “It must have been quite a chore for Warren Earl’s mother to make that trip all the way from Texas,” Archie Clapp told me. “The trains were full of troops, and that would have been a long, tiring drive over those two-lane highways.”
“Evi was so proud that Warren Earl was serving in the war,” Warren Earl’s cousin Madeline Riley said. “I remember her telling us how excited she was to see him fly. She said, ‘And here he handled that big plane all by himself.’”
On his last leave home in Jacksonville, Grady York decided to lavish his time and money on a pretty girl. “Grady insisted on taking me to the beauty shop,” his sister Pearl Diffenderfer remembered. This was a surprising and rare treat for his baby sister, something he didn’t have to do. “It was the City Beauty Shop,” she said. “It was the old-time way of putting perms in hair. They had these long rods on wires that hung down and they’d wrap your hair around them and turn on the electricity and perm it. It took a while, but Grady waited. I just knew he would never leave me.”
At about the same time, far up the East Coast, Jimmy Dye and his parents discussed his wish for his last night in Mount Ephraim, New Jersey. On an earlier home leave, Jimmy’s friend Les had introduced him to cheerleader Gloria Nields, who was a year younger than Jimmy. There was electricity between the two and they fell into sweet teenage puppy love. Fifty-eight years later, Gloria Nields told me of their youthful affair:
I only knew Jimmy a short time, but I was very infatuated. He was my childhood sweetheart.
The moment we met I was breathless. It was like I was coming up for air. There was chemistry. I was naive and he was too. I was seventeen. Jimmy was in a uniform, ready to defend his country. There was something about him. His personality and his beautiful blue eyes. They just held you. It was extremely romantic for me.
We both fell like a ton of bricks. I thought he
was the one for me and he felt the same. Our relationship was short but intense. We were in love.
I can remember a girlfriend of mine who saw us together said, “I’ve never seen you like this!” I was so taken with him.
Before his last night home, Jimmy’s mother phoned to ask if I could come over because Jimmy was leaving soon. We didn’t have a telephone, so she called the neighbors. I was never allowed to date anyone more than three times in a row, so I was surprised when my parents said yes.
Jimmy’s father picked me up in his car and took me to their house. Jimmy took my coat as I entered. He put it on a bed and then he kissed me. I will never forget. He was my first love.
We sat in the living room with his parents. They sat in chairs; we sat on the couch. At one point he lay down and put his head in my lap. I was timid, but I allowed it. He closed his eyes; I could feel that he felt good I was there. He was so affectionate. I touched his wavy hair.
All along, Jimmy’s parents kept watch. Fast-talking Jimmy was now old enough to fight and die for his country. But on the last date of his life, he was too young to be alone with a girl.
Across the country, Floyd Hall and his squadron buddies were finishing up their training in Los Alamitos, California, where they had been transferred from Astoria. After so many “hellacious weekends” in Portland, the three musketeers—Floyd, Joe White, and Bill Hazlehurst—had become inseparable. Then, about six weeks before they were about to ship out, Joe and Bill realized that Floyd wasn’t around in the evenings anymore. Where was Floyd? Joe and Bill wondered.
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