W E B Griffin - Men at War 1 - The Last Heroes

by The Last Heroes(Lit)

  They picked up their parachutes, then were driven out onto the flight line in a Ford panel truck. Dick and Ed jammed into the front seat with the sailor driver. The student pilots and the parachutes rode in the back.

  The cross-country flight (Pensacola-Valdosta-Montgomerymobile-Pensacola) they were about to make was the last training flight of the primary flight training program. Their students already knew how to fly, and when this flight was completed would be awarded naval aviator's wings and sent to advanced flight training. Ed Bitter and Dick Canidy would then start the whole process all over again, with four new officer students.

  Teaching fledglings how to fly was hard work and not very much fun. They both would have preferred other duty. But-for dify ferent personal reasons-both were aware that instructor pilot dut was better for them than an assignment to a fighter squadron or to an attack torpedo squadron aboard a carrier or to observation plane S catapulted from a battleship would have been.

  Ed Bitter believed that duty as an IP meant several things. First, that the Navy recognized he was a better pilot than most pilots. Second, that demonstrating the leadership characteristics IPS had to have to be successful would enhance his career (a tour as an IP was considered a prerequisite to command of a squadron). He also believed that the primary duty of a commanding officer was not so much to command, to issue orders, but to teach.

  The main things that instructors did was fly. Aviators assigned to regular squadrons were lucky if they got forty hours in the air in a month. That was two hours a day, five days a week. Instructor pilots often flew three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. In a two-year tour as an IP, Dick Canidy expected to acquire very likely more than three times the hours he would have had he been sent to an operational squadron. Aeronautical engineers with a lot of flight time were paid more money than those who had less, or who couldn't fly at all.

  X The world looked a lot different today than it had in 1938 when he'd graduated from MIT. The only worry he had had then was putting in his four years' service. The world had been at peace then, but now that world had changed. France had fallen. Japan was fighting China. Young men his age were flying Spitfires against Messerschmitts over England. Still he refused to think about what he would do if, in June 1942, the Navy would not discharge him.

  Advanced flight training was conducted in North American SNJ-2 Texans, singlewing, all-metal, closed-cockpit six-hundredhorsepower retractable-landing-gear aircraft that cruised at about two hundred knots. Primary training was conducted using opencockpit, fixed-landing-gear Steannan Kaydet biplanes. They weren't really Steannans, Boeing having some time before taken over that company, and while they were splendid basic training aircraft, stressed for acrobatics and sturdy enough to survive the inevitable hard landings, they were not really suitable for crosscountry flight. The planes they would fly today, officially N2Ss, had Continental Re70 engines producing a little over two hundred horsepower and a cruising speed of just over one hundred miles per hour.

  When he had been a student pilot, Ed Bitter had thought (as had just about every other student pilot passing through Pensacola) that it would have made a lot more sense to wait until the students were advanced and let them make their cross-country flights in the faster Texans. It was only after he had gone through the rest of the flight training program-including carrier qualification-and been made an instructor that he understood the Navy's reasoning.

  A six- or seven-hundred-mile dead-reckoning flight, in an opencockpit airplane making a hundred knots, while checking his position by looking for landmarks on the deck, was an experience the student pilot never forgot. It took him back to Eddie Rickenbacker and the Lafayette Escadrille, whose planes came with no more sophisticated navigation equipment and about the same performance as the Steannan. It was something they might need to remember when they were flying fighters capable of more than three hundred knots off the decks of aircraft carriers.

  Bitter and Canidy each watched their students perform the preflight check, and then watched them climb into the forward cockpits. They took a last look themselves, and then climbed into the aft cockpits and put on leather helmets. The plane captains and the ground handlers pulled the props through a rotation, the engines were started, and the chocks were pulled.

  Ed Bitter's ensign turned around and looked at him. Bitter nodded and pulled his goggles down over his eyes.

  "Pensacola Tower, Navy One-oh-one," Bitter's student called over his radio.

  "One-oh-one, Pensacola."

  "Pensacola, Navy One-oh-one, a flight of two N2S aircraft, destination Valdosta, Georgia, requests taxi and takeoff."

  Pensacola Tower gave them the time, the altimeter, and the barometer, then taxi clearance to the threshold of runway 28. When the student pilot reported them in position, the tower gave permission to take off at one-minute intervals.

  They climbed to five thousand feet, and took up a course that was almost due east. Canidy's student took up a position two hundred yards above Bitter's Stearman. Canidy's student would fly Bit- Paul tee's student's wing for half the trip, and then their positions would be reversed.

  Two aircraft were sent on each cross-country flight, alternating as leader, so there would always be one aircraft checking on the other. Now that he had come to understand the reasoning behind the flight program, Ed Bitter had concluded that, like many other oddon-the-surface facets of Navy policy, there was sound reasoning behind it.

  One part of the program was even an officially sanctioned "confuse your students" portion of the cross-country flight, designed to ensure that simply because they were about to be awarded the gold wings of a naval aviator, it would never enter their minds that they were anything but rank amateurs:

  13. DISORIENTATION.

  (a) Purpose: to give student pilots the experience of sufferin location disorientation, and the techniques of recovery therefrom.

  (b) Method: At some point during the Montgomerymobile leg of Flight #48, while flying over the area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola 239, instructor pilots will, without previous warning to the student, take over the controls of the aircraft, and attempt to disorient the student pilot by such maneuvers as aerobatics, stalls, and lowaltitude flight.

  The controls will then be returned to the student and he will be ordered to resume his original course and altitude.

  (c) Evaluation: Instructor pilots will grade the student on his ability to reorient himself, taking into consideration the time and degree of assurance with which he is able to do so.

  The area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola was a 25,000-acre property owned by the Carlson Publishing Company. It was in the pines, the management of Carlson Publishing Company being strongly convinced that it was just a matter of time before chemists came up with a means of using fastgrowing loblolly pine for newsprint. Carlson Publishing Company published eleven medium-sized newspapers throughout the South, and these consumed a good deal of paper, all of which had to be purchased from mills using New England and Canadian pulpwood.

  While they were waiting for the chemists to find a solution to this expensive and galling problem, the property was used by the chairman of the board of the Carlson Publishing Company primarily as a hunting preserve in the fall, and a vacation site in the spring and summer.

  The chairman of the board, on behalf of his company, had been more than happy to grant the U.S. Navy permission to conduct lowlevel aerial flights, to include landing privileges, on the area now marked on the map. He understood the necessity to train pilots as realistically as possible, he and the admiral and the others having been sent off to fight the Hun with less than twenty-five hours' total time in the air. Brandon Chambers had never forgotten that literally nauseating feeling of terror. He saw giving the Navy permission to use the land as his patriotic duty. And if some young pilot did dump his plane in the forests, the Navy would pay for the damages.

  Lieutenant Ed Bitter had heard the story
about the admiral who had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille getting permission from another Escadrille pilot to use the land long before it was told to him while he was receiving training to become an instructor pilot. He had heard it from Brandon Chambers himself. Ed Bitter's mother and Genevieve (Mrs. Brandon) Chambers were sisters.

  So far as he knew, no one at NAS Pensacola knew of his per sonal connect ion with The Plantation.

  Neither did anyone know that his father and his brother were respect ively chain nan of the board and preside nt of Bitter Commo dity Broker age, Inc., of Chicago.

  Edwin Howell Bitter was an officer of the Regular Naval Establishment. It was neither seemly nor wise for a Regular naval officer to let it be known that he had an outside income from a trust fund that was approximately four times his Navy pay.

  At 10:20, almost exactly two hours after they had taken off from Pensacola, they landed at Valdosta, Georgia, where the airport had a Navy fueling contract. They topped off the tanks, checked the weather again, and were airborne at 11:05. This time, Ed's student flew Dick's student's wing.

  They made Maxwell Field, the Army Air Corps base in Montgomery, Alabama, at ten minutes to one. The officers' mess there closed at one, and they just made it in time to eat. It was five minutes to three before they got off the ground again, with Ed's student again assuming the role of flight leader.

  An hour out of Montgomery, when they were just about halfway between Maxwell Field and Brookley Field, the Army Air Corps base in Mobile, Alabama, Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed Bitter clapped the speaking tube over his mouth and shouted to his student that he had it.

  The student pilot signified his understanding of and compliance with the order by holding both his hands above his head. Bitter pushed the stick forward, and the Stearinan, the wind screaming in the guy wires of the wing, dove for the ground.

  Behind him, Dick Canidy took the controls from his student and dove in pursuit. For fifteen minutes, sometimes right on the deck, sometimes climbing to eight or nine thousand, they engaged in a mock dogfight, always moving south, paralleling their original course, toward The Lodge on The Plantation.

  By prearrangement, once they spotted The Lodge, Dick Canidy would break off the dogfight and fly out of sight of Bitter's aircraft. He would swoop down the Alabama River with his wheels ten feet off the water. That always served to disorient student pilots. Bitter, meanwhile, would go down on the deck, fifty feet above the pine tree tops, and buzz The Lodge. He would then roll the Steannan, while flashing over The Lodge at no more than a hundred feet, straighten it out, and then shout over the speaking tube to his student: "You've got it. Take us to Mobile."

  Out of sight of them Canidy would do much the same thing to his student, and they would each complete the fifty-mile flight to Mobile alone. Over coffee in the snack bar at Mobile, the students would be told the reasons for this exercise; then they would make the final, fifty-mile leg home to Pensacola.

  Ed Bitter's student was usually the most disoriented. Not only were mock dogfights proscribed, but buzzing houses was NAS Pensacola's version of a mortal sin. Buzzing a three-story antebellum Mansion sitting alone in the middle of twentyfive thousand uninhabited acres (with apparent disregard not only for life and limb, but for what would happen to him when the occupants--obviously rich and important-complained to the Navy) usually upset the student pilot to the point where he could be sarcastically reminded that when one is lost, and all else fails, one might consider having a look at the compass.

  Everything went according to plan until it was time to buzz The Lodge.

  Ed almost had the Stearman on its back when the engine quit.

  In the time it took the sweep second hand on his aviator's chronometer to move two clicks, two seconds, his emotions shifted from near rapture to abject terror. It was one thing to have an engine quit in the middle of a roll when you had a couple of thousand feet under you to recover. You just fell through-and recovered.

  He had no more than one hundred feet of air beneath him.

  A body in motion tends to remain in motion. So there was sufficient momentum to just barely complete the roll. Now nearly disoriented himself, he looked hastily for someplace to put the Stearman on the deck. There was nothing in sight. He was, he realized, surprisingly calm, about to crash his airplane. There was nothing he could do but put it into the trees, and hope that the nose would not go into a tree trunk.

  And then the engine spluttered and caught. Sonofabitch wasfuel-starved.

  But there was full power again. He inched back on the stick and picked up a little altitude. He looked frantically around for The Plantation's airstrip, and saw it behind him. Fighting down the urge to make a steep banking turn toward it, he made a safer, slower, nearly level turn to line up with the runway. He had no idea of the wind. He was going in right now, no matter what it was.

  When he got the wheels on the ground, he heard himself expel the air in his lungs.

  Did I really hold my breathfrom the moment the god damned engine quit until now?

  He braked the Steannan, turned off the dirt runway, and stopped.

  "Get out of there, Mr. Ford," he said to his student. He waited until Ensign Ford clambered out of the forward cockpit and onto the wing. Then he climbed out of the aft cockpit onto the ground, walked fifteen yards from the aircraft, unaware of the chilling effect the wind was having on his sweat-soaked flight suit. Without warning, he was sick to his stomach.

  For a moment, he thought he was actually going to faint, but that passed, and he was then faced with shame and humiliation. Not only had he almost killed his student, but Mr. Ford was now standing there, looking at his IP's instantaneous change from near God to literally scared sick, nauseated, and nauseating human being.

  Ed became aware of the peculiar roar a Continental R670 engine makes when it is throttled back. He looked up and saw Dick Canidy's plane about to land.

  "What happened, sir?" Mr. Ford asked, having found his courage.

  "The engine stopped, Mr. Ford," Ed Bitter said. "I would have thought you would have noticed."

  He had put his student into his place with the sarcastic superiority expected of instructor pilots. Doing so shamed him.

  Canidy landed, taxied up beside him, and shut down his engine.

  "What happened9" he asked, and then he saw the sweat-soaked flight suit and repeated the question, this time with concern in his voice.

  "The engine quit " Bitter said. "Just as I started the roll."

  "Jesus!" Canidy said.

  "I thought I was going into the trees," Bitter confessed. "But when I got it right side up, it cut in again."

  "Fuel starvation," Canidy diagnosed confidently. He walked to Bitter's Stearman and climbed on the wing. The main fuel tank of the Stearman was located in the center of the upper wing, with the fuel line running down the wing strut to the engine.

  "Christ ' " Canidy called from the wing. "Fuel's pouring out of here. I'm surprised you didn't catch on fire." : Bitter forced himself to climb up on the wing. He saw for him self what had happened. The brass fitting attaching the fuel line to the fuel tank had either been improperly tightened or had vibrated loose since the last time someone had looked at it. In level flight, the suction of the manifold had been sufficient, aided by gravity, to provide fuel to the engine. And spillage had been instantly vaporized by the slipstream.

  Inverted, however, that hadn't worked. Not enough gas had reached the engine to keep it running. And now, as Dick Canidy said, the fuel was really pouring out of the fuel tank.

  "I don't suppose you have a wrench, do you?" Canidy asked. Bitter shook his head no.

  "I can't tighten it very much with my fingers," Canidy said. "It'll really soak the fuselage."

  "I'll walk up to The Lodge," Bitter said. "They're certain to have tools there."

  "That Gone With the Wind mansion?" Canidy asked.

  "Yeah," Bitter said. "And I'll call in and tell them what's happened."

  Canidy jumped off the wing an
d called to the two student pilots. "Either of you guys got a wrench?" he asked. "We've got a loose fuel line connector. Or a pair of pliers?"

  They shook their heads, and then remembered to reply militarily. "No, sir. Sorry, sir," they said, almost in unison.

  "Stay away from the airplanes," Canidy ordered. "And no smoking. Mr. Bitter and I are going to find a wrench and a telephone. I can't imagine it happening out here in the boondocks, but keep anybody who shows up away from the airplanes."

  "I think it would be better if you stayed here, Dick," Bitter said.

  Canidy looked at him a moment, then raised his eyebrows and smiled.

  ""Reserve officers,"' he began to quote, serving on active duty, will exercise all the-"'

  "Suit yourself," Bitter cut him off. "It's about a mile from here to The Lodge, if you insist on going's , "I wouldn't miss Tara for the world," Canidy said.

  What he had begun to quote was the navy regulation which stated that reserve officers on active duty had equal rank with regujar officers. He had graduated from MIT and been commissioned an ensign two days before Bitter had graduated from the Naval Academy. His automatic promotion to lieutenant, junior grade, after two years of satisfactory commissioned service had consequently come two days before Bitter's automatic promotion. Lieutenant (j.g.) Canidy outranked Lieutenant (j.g.) Bitter, and it was sometimes necessary to remind him of this, for Bitter had a tendency to give orders.