With the decommissioning of the squadron, the survivors of Torpedo Eight each received thirty days of home leave, after which they were ordered to join new units. For those readers interested in what happened to some of them, a brief account of their subsequent lives follows.
BERT EARNEST
After returning to the states aboard the Kitty Hawk, Bert Earnest went home to Richmond, Virginia, looking forward to renewing his relationship with Jerry Jenkins, the Smith College student whose name he had scrawled on the instrument panel of the Grumman Avenger he had flown at Midway. At Guadalcanal, he had named his second plane in her honor as well. When it was destroyed, he had “Jerry III” inscribed on the fuselage of his third aircraft. That one suffered the same fate as the first two.
The recipient of three Navy Crosses, the Purple Heart, and numerous other medals for his bravery at Midway and Guadalcanal, Bert became one of the most honored early heroes of the war. This didn’t seem to impress Jerry Jenkins, who waited for him to come home to announce that she had been engaged to someone else. He ruefully concluded that she probably wasn’t the right girl for him anyway. He also decided to forgo naming any of his combat aircraft in the future.
In January 1943, he was assigned to a composite squadron, VC-31, a Navy innovation made up of both Avenger torpedo planes and Wildcat fighters, and based in Seattle, Washington.
On temporary leave in San Diego, he met and fell in love with Millie McConnell, the beautiful daughter of Navy Captain Robert McConnell, who had commanded the carrier USS Langley at the start of the war. In 1944, Millie and Bert were married at St. Alban’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Bert’s new composite squadron was assigned to the aircraft carrier Manila Bay, and he left for the Pacific again in January 1944. During his second overseas tour, he flew more than a hundred missions supporting the invasions of Kwajalein, Eniwetok, and Majuro, as U.S. forces closed in on the Japanese home islands.
Returning to the States, Bert was recruited to make test flights of captured enemy aircraft, including a Messerschmitt 262, the first jet-powered fighter in the German Luftwaffe. On his first takeoff in the ME 262, an engine caught fire and the burning jet crashed into the dense copse of trees beyond the runway, stripping away both wings before finally coming to a stop. Incredibly, Bert stepped out of the remaining section of the fuselage uninjured. The two-dollar bill he had found on the runway at Midway was still in his wallet.
When the war ended, Bert became a Navy “hurricane hunter,” logging more than a thousand hours in a B-17 as it gauged the wind speed of the fiercest hurricanes that assaulted the Eastern seaboard. He went on to enjoy a successful thirty-year career in the Navy, commanding an attack squadron, an air group, and an amphibious command ship.
He and Millie raised two children, Kathryn and David.
After completing a stint at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Bert received a three-year posting in Paris on the staff of the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. In the late 1960s, he commanded the Naval Air Station at Oceana, Virginia.
Bert retired from active duty as a captain in 1972.
The shredded Grumman Avenger that Bert flew at Midway in what Admiral Chester Nimitz called “an epic of combat aviation” was shipped back to Pearl Harbor, where it was studied by aeronautical engineers to determine how it could have possibly survived all of the damage it received. The analysis comprised eight single-spaced pages, including each enemy projectile’s size, point of entry, vertical angle, and horizontal angle. Considerable attention was devoted to the fact that the engine and all three propeller blades had received numerous hits and yet the plane had continued to fly.
All told, the engineers counted at least seventy-three separate holes from machine gun bullets and cannon fire. They conceded that there were so many large holes in the aircraft, as well as so much shrapnel inside, that the number of actual hits was considerably higher. Every component in the plane, including the fuselage, wings, tail, cockpit, windshield, turret, engine cowling, wheels, elevators, stabilizers, and instruments, had been perforated by bullets or shells. After the inspection was completed, the “metal Lazarus” was put aboard another transport ship and shipped to San Diego, where it was stored in a Navy hangar. Later in 1942, a base maintenance officer ordered it sold for scrap.
Bert’s best dress white uniform from his first Pacific tour remains in the laundry of the USS Hornet at the bottom of the Pacific. His only keepsake from his time on Guadalcanal is a rusted cockpit chronometer that he keeps in his study. The captured Japanese ceremonial sword that he was awarded by General A. A. Vandegrift is now on permanent display at the Virginia Military Institute Museum in Lexington, Virginia.
At least two Grumman Avengers have been preserved for future generations. One is at the Pensacola Naval Aviation Museum in Florida, and another at the Admiral Chester Nimitz World War II Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas.
When the two exhibits were first opened to the public, both museum curators chose to honor Bert Earnest’s combat achievements in the Pacific by inscribing his name on the cockpits. He was the only pilot honored in this way. After George W. Bush was elected president of the United States, Bert’s name was removed from the aircraft at Pensacola, and replaced with the president’s name. Bert’s name remains on the Avenger at the Nimitz museum in Texas.
Millie Earnest passed away in 2007, and Bert lives in quiet retirement in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Whenever he drives his car, the ninety-year-old Bert carries the two-dollar bill he found on the runway at Midway on the night before his first combat mission.
SMILEY MORGAN
Smiley Morgan returned to Florida to discover that the news accounts of Admiral Nimitz personally awarding him the Navy Cross had preceded his arrival home. The story of his unescorted attack against the Japanese cruiser Tone appeared in every newspaper across southern Florida.
This new celebrity made no more difference to his girlfriend, Caroline, than Bert’s heroism had to Jerry Jenkins. Caroline gently informed him that she had fallen in love with another man while he was away.
After completing his convalescent leave, Smiley reported to Composite Air Squadron VC-35 in Seattle, Washington. Like Bert’s newly created unit, it was composed of both Wildcat fighters and Avenger torpedo planes.
Following a brief training period, the squadron was assigned to the escort carrier Chenango, and its pilots were ordered to fly their aircraft to San Diego, California, where they were to be deployed aboard the ship. Near El Centro Marine Air Base north of San Diego, the engine in Smiley’s Avenger caught fire. Trapped for almost a minute in the smoke-filled cockpit, he was the last one to bail out before the plane crashed and burned.
While on leave in San Diego, Smiley enjoyed a brief reunion with Bert Earnest, whose squadron was awaiting its own deployment to the Pacific aboard the Manila Bay. They were having drinks in the bar of the Del Coronado Hotel when a mutual friend, Charles De Bretteville, invited them to a cocktail party in the penthouse of the hotel his family owned.
There, Smiley met a famous married couple who would become his lifelong friends. They were the film star Gary Cooper and his wife, Veronica “Rocky” Shields Cooper. After the party, the Coopers asked Bert and Smiley to join them for dinner, and at the conclusion of the meal, Gary invited them to spend their next leave at the Coopers’ home in Los Angeles.
Once Bert met Millie McConnell, his leave time was taken up with preparations for their wedding. Unattached, Smiley was virtually adopted by the Coopers, and joined them for every leave he enjoyed during the rest of the war, often traveling to Sun Valley, where he fished and went trap shooting with Cooper, Ernest Hemingway, and Clark Gable.
Back in Los Angeles, Rocky took him under her wing and introduced him to the young actresses who came to their regular dinner parties, including Ingrid Bergman, Sonja Henie, and the teenaged Lauren Bacall, who could only talk to Smiley about Humphrey Bogart.
One night, Rocky asked Smiley to escort Mary Livingston
, the wife of comedian Jack Benny, to the premiere of the film, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which starred Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson. Smiley wore his dress blues, and sat directly behind Van Johnson. When Rocky introduced the two of them before the movie started, Smiley mentioned that he had served aboard the Hornet, and had enjoyed meeting the real Jimmy Doolittle, who was being portrayed in the film by Spencer Tracy.
At the end of the movie, which was a powerful and stirring account of Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo early in the war, the stars of the film were treated to a long, standing ovation, almost as if the actors themselves had flown the missions that helped turn the tide of the Pacific War. As the cheering continued, Van Johnson stood to acknowledge the audience’s ovation. When he turned to wave up at them, he noticed the Navy Cross on Smiley’s chest and was mor-tified.
“This is really embarrassing,” he said with an apologetic grin.
In October 1943, Smiley returned to the Pacific aboard the Chenango, flying close air support missions in the battles of Tarawa, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, and Okinawa. After being promoted to commanding officer of his squadron in March 1944, he had the fuselage of his plane painted with the name “Maria,” after Gary and Rocky’s only child. In the invasion of Guam, his plane was hit by enemy antiaircraft fire and he was forced to ditch in the Pacific. Picked up by the destroyer USS Kidd, he continued to fly combat missions at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Smiley returned to the States after fourteen months aboard the Chenango, having won the Distinguished Flying Cross and three more Air Medals. Shortly before the war ended, Smiley was introduced by his friend Chuck Spalding to another Navy officer who was in Los Angeles receiving treatment for a back problem he had exacerbated out in the Pacific. His name was Jack Kennedy. They hit it off and Kennedy invited Smiley to stay with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel whenever he was in town. The friendship led Smiley into less platonic encounters with Hollywood starlets.
When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Navy, and was assigned to a tactical development unit, COMFAIR West Coast. Afterward, he oversaw the training of reserve pilots at the Naval Air Station in Atlanta, Georgia.
In 1949, Smiley was on duty at the Naval Air Station in St. Louis when he met the young woman who would become his wife and soul mate. Nancy Corrigan was twenty. Smiley was thirty-two. They were married on September 24, 1949.
Smiley left the Navy with the rank of commander in 1954 to become an executive with the New England Mutual Insurance Company in St. Louis. He and Nancy had five children during a long and happy marriage. Eventually, they moved back to Florida.
In 1995, shortly before Nancy’s death from cancer, she and Smiley made a visit to Hawaii, where they spent a day vacationing with Bert and Millie Earnest. While there, they visited the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in which the names of Bert and Smiley’s friends from Torpedo Eight are forever engraved on the Punchbowl monument.
On the day before they were due to return to the States, Nancy asked Smiley if he would take her out to see the USS Arizona memorial. He had not planned on seeing it again. His memories of the doomed ship were deeply emotional. He could remember the smell of the sunken battleships as he had sailed slowly past on the day Torpedo Eight had arrived in Pearl Harbor aboard the Chaumont. That day had also been the precursor for the three long years he had spent flying combat missions in the Pacific.
Since it was their last afternoon in Hawaii, he agreed to escort Nancy out to the memorial in the National Park Service launch. At the entrance to the facility, he went to the ticket counter, just one more elderly, white-haired man shuffling up on bad knees. There, he was told by the young park service attendant that all of the tickets for the final launch of the day had already been sold. “I’m sorry,” she said, pointing to the large tour group waiting to board. When Smiley looked over, he saw that it was a large party of Japanese sightseers.
Without rancor, he escorted Nancy back to their hotel.
In 2002, driving from the wedding ceremony of his youngest son, Chris, to the reception, he suffered the first of several heart attacks. Smiley Morgan’s great heart finally gave out on April 3, 2007. He passed away at Tampa General Hospital, survived by his adoring children, Richard, Chris, Mimi, Markey, and Nancy.
THE TORPEDO EIGHT SURVIVORS
The author has tried to garner as much information as possible about all the officers and men of Torpedo Eight who came back with the squadron from Guadalcanal. Over sixty-five years, the trail has unfortunately run cold for many of them. What follows are brief accounts of the postwar lives of some of the squadron’s veterans.
FRANK BALSLEY
After returning to San Diego aboard the Kitty Hawk, the young turret gunner’s goal was to follow in the footsteps of Darrel Woodside, Red Doggett, and Bill Dye, and become an enlisted Navy pilot. He applied for flight training and was accepted into the program.
After winning his wings, Frank Balsley eventually logged more than ten thousand hours in the cockpits of nearly every aircraft in the Navy arsenal. Retiring from military service in 1965, he flew another fifteen thousand hours as a civilian, many of them for a private airline in Laos and Saigon during the Vietnam War.
The man whose closest friends growing up were Japanese-Americans remains a three-handicap golfer as he approaches the age of ninety. Today, he lives in San Jose, California.
JACK BARNUM
Barnum’s tour in the Pacific as a pilot with Torpedo Eight was enough to last him a lifetime. After he returned to the States, he turned in his wings.
WILEY BARTLETT
After contracting a severe case of malaria on Guadalcanal, Bartlett nearly died aboard the Kitty Hawk as it headed home across the Pacific. Following convalescent leave, he was assigned to a new composite air squadron.
Shortly after reporting to the carrier Manila Bay, he discovered that Bert Earnest was one of the pilots in the squadron. “You’re going to fly with me,” Bert told him, and Wiley did. Through dozens of missions at Kwajalein, Eniwetok, and Majuro, Wiley flew as Bert’s turret gunner, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses and seven Air Medals for bravery in action.
In 1944, Wiley became a bombardier on the Navy version of the B-24 bomber. Flying out of the Philippines, the squadron flew twelve-hour missions every two days to Japanese targets inside China.
He turned twenty years old as the war ended. Marrying his sweetheart, Rolande, who was then serving in the women’s naval volunteer service, he spent twenty years in the Navy, retiring to go to work for the Lockheed Corporation, after which he and Rolande bought and operated a commercial fishing boat in Monterey, California.
Wiley lives today in Repton, Alabama.
NEWTON DELCHAMPS
Shortly after returning to San Diego with the rest of Torpedo Eight, Del Delchamps passed the test to become an aviation ordnanceman second class, and received the promotion that Swede Larsen had denied him on Espiritu Santo.
One night on home leave in Alabama, he met a pretty young woman named Effie Bishop, whose date for the evening had unfortunately become drunk. Del and Effie danced and talked until three o’clock in the morning. He left to go back to the Navy with the understanding that she would wait for him.
During his next Pacific tour, he was assigned to Torpedo Squadron Six aboard the USS Enterprise. There, he was selected to be a member of the flight crew of the commander of the carrier’s air group, James “Bucky” Lee. When Commander Lee left the air group in October 1943, Del joined the crew of the carrier’s next group leader, the legendary Lieutenant Commander Edward “Butch” O’Hare, the first naval aviator in the war to win the Medal of Honor. At one point, Del confided to O’Hare that he would someday like to be a pilot himself, and O’Hare cut him orders to attend flight school.
Heading to the States, Del was shocked to pick up a newspaper and read that Butch O’Hare had been killed while flying a night mission from the Enterprise. Del counted him as the finest pilot he ever flew with in the Navy after Bill Dye.
> On New Year’s Eve 1943, Del and Effie were married in Gulfport, Mississippi. While completing flight training in Athens, Georgia, Del’s class was informed that due to the surplus number of trained pilots already in the fleet, 50 percent of them would not win their wings, regardless of performance. Del was one of the unlucky ones.
At Cecil Field near Jacksonville, Florida, he was allowed to take the exam to become chief aviation ordnanceman. He passed it, and spent the next twenty years in a succession of Navy assignments that took him to Florida, Puerto Rico, Jacksonville, Brunswick, Maine, Newfoundland, and on two long cruises to the Mediterranean.
He retired from the Navy as a master chief, aviation ordnanceman, and became an agent of the New York Life Insurance Company. At the age of eighty-six, Del lives with Effie in Fairhope, Alabama. They have two daughters, five grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
ROBERT “ANDY” DIVINE
Along with Smiley Morgan, Andy Divine was assigned to Composite Air Squadron 35 (VC-35) out of Seattle, Washington. When Smiley became the commanding officer of the composite squadron, Andy was appointed his executive officer.
When the war ended, Divine retired from the Navy and became a crop-dusting pilot near Fresno, California. He and his wife, Sarah, had two children, Dennis and Denise. In November 1986, they were returning to their home in Fresno when a trailer truck ran a stop sign and hit their pickup truck broadside. Sarah was killed instantly. Andy passed away from burns and internal injuries a few days later.
WILLARD HENRY DYE
Curly Bill Dye, the pilot with the most flying hours in Torpedo Eight and the lowest rank, was promoted to lieutenant in September 1943. His wartime assignments included service with Composite Air Squadrons 41 and 34. He retired from the Navy in 1946.
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