Flyboys

by James Bradley

  When it was time to go on a strike, the airmen gave their full attention to the air combat intelligence officer. “The ACI would give you the knowledge you needed to do your job,” Rowdy Dow said. “The ACI is a smart guy who tells you what the target is, where it is, how to find it, what the target buildings are being used for, what kind of opposition to expect, and what to do if you have to bail out.”

  “When a group would come back from a strike,” said Ralph Sengewalt, “they’d have stories to tell and everybody listened intently. They all took an interest in what you saw, what had happened out there. After all, they were going out next.” And there was a ritual for returning pilots. “Immediately after a strike,” Ralph recalled, “we went down to sick bay and we got a two-ounce shot of whiskey to calm our nerves.” Hearts pumped wildly even after safe returns.

  The flight deck of an aircraft carrier was an incredibly dangerous place. There were whirling propellers ready to slice off arms, volatile jet fuel that could burst into flames, and bombs ready to explode. Movements on the flight deck had to be choreographed with balletlike precision. “Operations on an aircraft carrier is the most amazing display of teamwork I have seen in my life,” said pilot Porter Golden. “The work schedule on a carrier is four to five times more hectic than land based. Everyone has to perform exactly on schedule. And it continues twenty-four hours a day.”

  The slightest mistake invited catastrophe. A loose bolt could cause a plane to malfunction on takeoff and explode into a ball of flames. A pilot off by a few feet on landing would crumple his plane against the carrier and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Planes landing amid bombs and bullets made for potentially lethal situations. The possibility of disaster was ever present, and quick thinking was required to avert it. Crewman Sparky Frazer remembered watching in horror as a torpedo plane landed and a live bomb dropped out of its bomb bay onto the carrier deck. As Sparky stood frozen with fright, a deckhand named Buglione “slid forward like a slide into second base in a baseball game, flat on his stomach. When he got there he had the arming / disarming wrench off his belt and had it on the percussion cap in nothing flat. He buttoned the fuse off—never got up—lying flat on his stomach, took the thing and threw it backhand. It hit the flight deck once, splashed into the water—bam, it went off, all in less than ten seconds.” Sparky concluded, “If he hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be telling this.”

  Indeed, the tiniest mental mistake could cause mayhem. In March of 1945, a pilot took off from the USS Randolph but almost immediately declared an emergency because he was losing oil pressure. He was directed to land on the USS Yorktown, which was ready to receive aircraft. The pilot had turned his guns on and had an extra tank of gas, a “belly tank,” attached below his plane. In his excitement, he forgot to turn his guns off and jettison the belly tank before landing.

  The landing was successful, but when his tail hook caught the arresting wire, his plane stopped and the belly tank ripped off and kept going forward. The tank full of aviation fuel slid through the churning propeller. The fuel erupted in flame and the carrier deck was ablaze.

  Deckhands moved swiftly to control the fire but were machine-gunned in the attempt. “The pilot instinctively pulled back on the control stick upon landing, squeezing the gun trigger on the control. The machine gun sprayed the flight deck and ship’s superstructure with .50-caliber bullets.” A badly burned pilot and seven bullet-riddled sailors were rushed to the sick bay.

  George Bush remembered seeing a pilot’s leg slide down the landing deck and come to rest in front of him. The torpedo plane’s tail hook had failed to catch the arresting wire and the plane had hit a metal barrier. The severed leg was “quivering and separated from the body. The poor guy got cut in half. We young fellows were standing there stunned when this big chief petty officer came along, yelling to the crew, ‘All right, clean this mess up,’ and everybody snapped back.”

  Everything had to work just so. Archie Clapp told me how he watched a buddy die: “One guy ran out of fuel and went down just in front of the ship,” he said. “ He was trying to open the canopy but couldn’t get it open. We knew him for a year and we just watched him drown.”

  And, of course, life off the carrier was even more dangerous.

  “One time we had two hundred planes in the air from a few carriers and the visibility turned to zero,” recalled gunner Robert Akerblom. “You can’t see your hand and you don’t know what you’re going to hit and when. Jesus, guys died up there in collisions. That’s spooky—you can’t see your hand—that’s hazardous duty.”

  Navigation was a seat-of-the-pants proposition because the Flyboys had few of the communication and navigational aids we now take for granted. Flying over the trackless Pacific Ocean presented special challenges. Many pilots simply vanished when they got lost, ran out of fuel, or crashed due to antiaircraft damage. Many survivors had harrowing stories to tell.

  Pilot George Menard’s plane was fatally damaged by antiaircraft fire over Japan on February 17, 1945. He knew he couldn’t make it back to his carrier. His radio was out, but a fellow pilot, using hand signals, told him the American destroyer below would pick Menard up if he bailed out now.

  However, when Menard opened the canopy, it flew off into the air and an attached cable stretched across his chest, pinning him to his seat. Now Menard controlled his gyrating plane with his knees as he wondered how he was going to get out alive. He managed to get his knife out and started to scrape the cable. “One strand would break,” Menard remembered, “then another, and then, finally, all the strands started popping, and the whole cable broke loose. All this took a lifetime of five minutes.”

  Finally, he bailed out, but his Mae West life vest accidentally inflated in midair. Now he could not get his fingers under his chest straps to undo his parachute harness. When Menard hit the water, the wind caught his chute. He found himself skimming across the ocean like a missile, with his head battering through the waves. “I thought, well, if I time my breathing and get in sync with the troughs and the waves, I might last long enough for the tin can to pick me up,” he remembered. “I did that as long as I could, and then my timing, my breathing, got out of sync with the waves, and the last thing I remember was I was looking up at the surface of the water about four or five feet above me, and I had to take a breath. I took a breath, and it was just like a rheostat turning the lights out. It was the way I went out.”

  By the time crewmen on the USS Taussig were able to snag his chute and yank him aboard, Menard was technically dead. His face and fingertips were blue, and his breathing had stopped. He miraculously responded to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and lived to fly another day.

  On April 8, 1945, pilot Jay Finley of the USS Randolph was shot down over water near Okinawa. Dazed, he bailed out. When he regained consciousness, he found himself fifteen feet under water. “I am glad my head was up and feet down because if it had been the other way around I would have been going straight for the bottom.” Finley struggled to inflate his survival raft and fell asleep curled up in five inches of cold water. “The next morning when I opened my eyes and lifted the edge of the poncho, I looked straight out horizontally and saw water. I looked a little higher and saw water, and then I looked a little higher and saw more water. What a scare! I was in the bottom of a trough, and the waves were about twenty feet high. I had been going up and down on those waves and had not even felt them.”

  Finley spent five days huddled in his raft, cold water sloshing around while he was tossed by the waves. He was flipped over five times. “During these five days it was raining, cold, and there was no sunshine.” Finally, crewmen in a plane noticed the reflection of his signaling mirror and brought him back to the ship. After one hundred twenty hours of freezing torment, wondering whether he would live or die, he was asked if he still wanted to fly.

  Flyboy Jay Finley did not hesitate with his answer: “Sure, why not?”

  Pilot Howard Sankey remarked to me once, “I think many heroes are made be
cause they have to fight their way out of a hole.” Marine pilot Phil Vonville found himself in a deep hole after a strike over Japan.

  Phil’s nightmare began as he regained consciousness nine thousand feet over the Pacific with his plane headed straight down. “I always thought I was indestructible and that nothing could happen to me,” he told me. “Then in a blink of an eye a shell hit me.” The shell blew Phil’s right kneecap off, and a piece of shrapnel embedded in his right temple.

  “There was a chunk of metal sticking out of my head,” Phil told me. “Blood was oozing down my face, I had a hell of a headache, my leg hurt like crazy, there was blood everywhere, my airplane had a big hole in it, but all I could think was ‘sharks.’ That scared me more than anything.”

  In a desperate attempt to stay airborne, Vonville jettisoned his ammunition to lighten his plane. “My right foot was in a pool of my own blood,” he remembered. “I was going into shock from loss of blood. I took my belt off my coveralls, wrapped it around my thigh as a tourniquet. I put the end of the belt in my mouth and stuck a knife in the belt to hold it. All the while I’m flying an airplane.

  “I called the ship,” Phil said. “They said ‘Ditch.’ I’m thinking sharks. I said, ‘Negative!’”

  With his fuel gauge on empty, he rode the water for lift. “There’s a slight breeze just above the water because of the wave action,” he explained. That breeze was enough: His engine quit just as he coaxed his plane over the back of the USS Bennington (“They said I cleared it by only six feet”), where he made a belly landing and immediately lost consciousness.

  As if the rigors of flying and the fear of being eaten by sharks weren’t enough, there was always the terrifying thought of being shot down and falling into enemy hands.

  “Our skipper said fight them until they kill you,” pilot Jacob Cohen remembered. “You don’t want to see what they do if you’re captured.”

  “You have to figure that when you’re strafing people, they get pretty pissed,” said Howard Sankey. “We thought if we were captured we’d get shot. We didn’t think our chances were too great.”

  “I remember thinking I’d keep one round of my thirty-eight for myself if I went down,” said gunner Bob Stasdak. Added pilot Wesley Todd, “We used to kid about it. We’d talk in a falsetto voice about being shot down; maybe they cut your balls off.”

  I once asked dive-bomber Alfred Smith, “Did you have any close calls?” He answered, “Son, any day you fly is a close call.”

  “Four hours in the air is like working eight hours on the ground,” said George Heilsberg. “You don’t get a second chance; there are no mistakes. I went from a hundred and fifty-five pounds to a hundred and twenty-five. You’re under a lot of pressure.”

  “The scariest thing is the flak,” said gunner William Raker. “When they’re shooting ack ack and the flak is all around, that’s when you’re really scared. I saw planes near us just get blown up. That’s scary. You shook a little bit. When you crawled out of that plane, your knees were shaking.”

  Some Flyboys told me that because of their youth, they did not experience fear. “I was never scared,” said Joe Bonn. “I never thought anything would happen to me. When you’re young, everything’s an adventure.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” added Ralph Sengewalt, “but when you’re young, you’re not afraid of anything. You think you will come out OK, even though you know that everybody won’t. Even seeing flak—when you’re eighteen, it’s exciting versus scary.”

  But perhaps fear absent in the moment came out later in dreams. “You didn’t have emotions until afterward,” said Marine pilot David Andre. “After a close one, you’d be controlled. But I remember breaking out in a sweat at night after thinking about it.” Gunner William Hale said, “The actual fright wouldn’t happen until you were back. That night you’d get the shakes and you’d have interrupted sleep. You couldn’t get to sleep or you’d doze and wake up with thoughts of what you went through and apprehension about going through it all over again the next day. You kept it to yourself; you were aware the others were going through the same thing.”

  “Our flight leader,” remembered George Flashner, “would say to us in the ready room, ‘Anybody who’s not scared of going on this flight, raise your hand.’ Nobody raised their hand. He said, ‘Good. Anyone who raised their hand, I’d think they were nuts.’”

  But no matter how terrifying, no matter how dangerous their job, no matter how many buddies were lost, the Flyboys kept flying, even though if they ever said the word, they’d be relieved. Rowdy Dow, a teenager in 1945, later told me how the Flyboys flew through their fears:

  Once my plane was going down and I thought this was the end. We were trained that we had eighteen seconds to put our parachutes on and get out of that turret. I grabbed my parachute but was doing this under the terrific strain of centrifugal force.

  We didn’t crash. We made it back to the carrier. I was trying to talk, but nothing would come out. I lost my speech because of the terror I had experienced. The intelligence officer said, “Don’t worry. Go to sick bay, get a half a pint of brandy, and you’ll be fine.” He was right. I recovered.

  Any one of us could have said “I don’t want to fly” at any time. No one made us get in those planes. I’d look out the window thousands of feet up and see one of their shells come right up to the airplane, as big as a plate. That one shell could have put us up in heaven.

  Everybody was afraid. We knew this was a risky business. We weren’t afraid like a kid afraid of the dark. It was about going down where no one would find you, of not seeing your mom, your dad, and the girl you want to marry. That’s afraid.

  Your brain tells you not to get into the airplane; you’ll die a nasty death. But our brain also told us that we had to do something for our country.

  If we had given in to our fears, we wouldn’t have won that war. There were no replacements out there. Our country was depending on us, and we were all ready to die for our country. There was a job to do. We did it.

  Except for submarine duty, flying into battle off an aircraft carrier was the riskiest duty in WWII. Death was a common occupational hazard, and for the Flyboys, a lonely one. Marines fighting on land saw their buddies cut down, but for the Flyboys there was only a void—an empty chair in the ready room. “They didn’t come back,” said William Raker. “That was it.”

  And there was no time to grieve. On the carriers there was work to do and death had to be forgotten or at least shoved into the back of one’s mind. “There was so much death happening around us that you just had to deal with it,” said pilot Dwight Mayo. “Somebody would go down you knew like a brother,” Archie Clapp said. “But you couldn’t dwell on it. You’d get briefed on the next mission and you knew it could be your turn next.”

  “We knew they were gone,” said Ken Meredith of his lost buddies. “But the next day, we were off again. Then yesterday is history. You don’t deal with the day before. You just go on and hope you’ll make it through another day.”

  “After the first or second mission,” said Vince Carnazza, “you feel like you’re going to get killed, but you don’t know when. It ceases to be a big deal or something to worry about.” Marine pilot John Leboeuf shared a piece of ready-room gallows humor with me about airmen’s life insurance. “This one sounds kind of cold,” Leboeuf said, “but this is how we lived.”

  Ten thousand dollars

  Going home to the folks.

  Won’t they be excited?

  And won’t they be delighted?

  Ten thousand dollars going home to the folks.

  The Flyboys jokingly accepted death but were deadly serious about dealing it out to the enemy. “We hated them for what they did at Pearl Harbor,” said pilot Jack Cohen. “We wanted to get back at them any way we could.” “We thought the Japanese were horrible,” George Bush said. “We all knew the tales of torture from Bataan. We thought they did something terrible to the United States and we were going to teach them
a lesson. There was no question of who was right.”

  These feelings of intense hatred often led some airmen to cross the line in combat. “We’d strafe them floating in the water,” recalled gunner Joe Bonn. “They were the enemy. I had no compassion for them. That’s the way it was.”

  “Japanese pilots would bail out and our pilots would take great delight at shooting them in their parachutes,” Leland Holdren said. “There was nostalgia for WWI, the Red Baron thing, but we shot them.” Walter Stonebraker added, “We had no mercy. If we saw a Japanese plane go down, we’d shoot him in his chute. If we didn’t, he’d survive to fight another day. It was war.”

  And yet there was also a distance. Chester Bennett, a navy psychologist who evaluated hundreds of Flyboys in the Pacific, wrote to a friend, “You seldom find them expressing vindictive personal hatred for the enemy. It’s a contest of mechanical skill and grand strategy. And if anyone can jump the net and shake hands with the opponent after it’s all over, I think it may well be some of the fliers.” David Andre told me, “The air war out there was totally impersonal. We didn’t see the enemy, didn’t know what he looked like. You didn’t think of whether he was young, did he have a family, human characteristics—these things didn’t go through your mind.”

  It was a distance with a difference, the quality that made WWII modern and has characterized military conflict ever since. “One of the nice things about aerial combat is that it is impersonal,” explained Stonebraker. “It’s machine against machine. You see plants, ships, and you know people are going to be killed, but it’s impersonal. You are just doing your job.” Al Lindstrom explained, “I never saw the enemy. You don’t from the airplane.”

  “The enemy was whatever the target they sent me on,” added George Heilsberg. “It could have been German or Japanese. I had no hatred of the Japanese.” But there was no sympathy either. “You never see if they’re dead,” said Bonn. “You’re going a hundred and thirty miles an hour; you just spray. It’s just a revenge reaction. You can’t tell if you did anything.”