First Man

by James R. Hansen

  As an Essex Panther strafed a column of trucks near Wonsan, flak knocked the jet into a spinning dive. In its cockpit, the young fighter pilot instinctively regained control over the hurtling plane, recovering into level flight a mere twenty feet off the ground. The Panther immediately collided with a telephone pole, clipping three feet from its right wing. Again the pilot managed to regain control, and he staggered back up to 14,000 feet, reaching friendly territory before ejecting safely. Two days later, Ensign Neil Armstrong returned to VF-51.

  According to Hallion, Armstrong displayed in this combat experience “the qualities of courage and skill that would lead to his selection as the commander of the first lunar landing mission in 1969.”

  Regrettably, some of the salient facts about Armstrong’s flight of September 3, 1951, have been wrong from the start. Flying as Carpenter’s wingman, he was not strafing a column of trucks; he was making a bomb run. Also, antiaircraft fire did not hit him, even though AA saturated the valley that day. Nor did Neil get blasted into some sort of pole. Rather, at approximately 350 miles per hour, Armstrong sliced through a cable, presumably a North Korean–devised booby trap for low-flying attack aircraft. And it was not two feet (according to Beebe) or three feet (according to Naval Aviation News) of Neil’s right wing that got clipped off; closer to six feet was shorn. There was never any spinning out of control—that seems to have been an invention of Naval Aviation News, since Beebe had not mentioned it. Nor did Armstrong lose his radio or badly damage his landing gear. Other than those critical essentials, everything else written about Neil’s combat incident was basically true. Certainly, the part about Armstrong’s quick thinking was right on the mark.

  Fortunately, Armstrong’s Panther jet cut into the cable at about 500 feet, flying at an angle where it could aerodynamically compensate the loss of half a dozen feet of wing. Instantaneously, he thought about the loss of the small fuel tank at the tip of his right wing (the “tip tank”), plus the serious damage to his starboard aileron, the moveable control surface attached to the trailing edge of the wing.

  Armstrong radioed his division head, John Carpenter. As Neil recollects, “I was having to carry a lot of aileron already, to keep the airplane in balance, and if I got a little too slow where I didn’t have enough aileron, it was going to snap. I was going to lose control of the airplane.” Major Carpenter concurred. The only real option for Neil was to eject.

  A bad choice for jumping out was…anywhere over North Korea. Only a few American pilots had made it back from overland ejections. Neil explains, “Navy guys like to come down in the water; it was a soft landing” over the sea, patrolled by intrepid navy rescue helicopters.

  Carpenter stayed with Armstrong until he ejected as planned in the vicinity of an airfield near Pohang, designated K-3, located far down the coast of South Korea and operated by the U.S. Marines. The term “punching out” does not do justice to the “kick in the butt” of the Panther’s British-made Stanley Model 22G ejection seat, which was survivable at anything over 500 feet when not compromised by any sort of “sink rate.” Armstrong’s was Fighter Squadron 51’s first-ever ejection-seat bailout.

  The jump was also Armstrong’s first. This fact contradicts VF-51’s John Moore’s The Wrong Stuff, which had Ernie Beauchamp assigning Neil the collateral squadron’s duty of “survival officer.” As such, Armstrong attended a briefing at the NAS El Centro’s parachute school, then strapped on a chute, found a pilot who would take him up, and bailed out. Beauchamp, in Moore’s words, “came out of the few hairs he had left and told Armstrong, ‘I can’t believe that you went ahead and jumped! You might get hurt, and we can’t afford to have anyone injured.’” Allegedly, Neil replied, “But, sir, you told me to go find out about it, so I did!”

  Moore told a great story. Unfortunately, his tale was one of mistaken identity. It was not Armstrong but Herb Graham who took his parachute instruction a step beyond that required.

  Rather than the parachute itself, it was the winds aloft along the Korean coast that saved Armstrong’s life. Neil “intended to come down in the water,” but misjudging the wind, he floated inland and landed in a rice paddy. Aside from a cracked tailbone, Neil was virtually unhurt.

  No sooner had Armstrong picked himself off the ground when a jeep drove up from K-3. Inside the jeep—Neil could barely believe his eyes—was one of his roommates from flight school, Goodell Warren. “Goodie” was now a marine lieutenant operating out of Pohang airfield.

  Warren told Armstrong that the explosions he was hearing out beyond the coastline came from North Koreans laying mines in the bay. If Neil’s parachute had stayed on course, he might very well have splashed down in the deadly minefield.

  Late in the afternoon of September 4, Armstrong returned to the Essex aboard a “codfish”—for “carrier onboard delivery”—mail and personal transfer craft.

  Ken Danneberg, VF-51’s intelligence officer, remembers, “Naturally we had to rough him up a bit.” As per ejection procedure, Armstrong had removed and dropped his helmet, which broke when it hit the ground. According to Danneberg, Neil “had that broken helmet in his hand and a smile on his face. We didn’t say ‘good to see you back, glad you’re alive.’ John Moore and I jumped right on him, ‘You know, Neil, you’re going to have to pay the government for that helmet.’” Kidding aside, everything that Armstrong had done “received a lot of favorable notice for his cool handling of the situation,” Herb Graham remembers.

  In letters home, Armstrong virtually never mentioned combat, and certainly not what happened to him that day. All he did was make a note in his logbook for September 3, 1951: “Bailed out over Pohang.” Next to it he drew a little picture of an open parachute with a tiny figure of a man hanging from it. As for the airplane itself, Neil’s F9F-2 (Bureau of Aeronautics No. 125122) was the first Panther lost to Fighter Squadron 51. What happened to the crash remnants is unknown.

  There was no celebration the night Armstrong returned to the Essex. Earlier that day, two of his squadron mates, James Ashford and Ross Bramwell, had been killed in action. Twenty-four-year-old Bramwell lost control of his aircraft after getting hit by enemy flak. Armstrong flew in the same division as the twenty-five-year-old Ashford and might have been in ops with him if not for his ejection the day before. During a reconnaissance mission in the region between Simp’yong and Yangdok, northwest of Wonsan, Ashford’s jet, heavily loaded with ordnance, failed to pull out while making a rocket run on a truck, then flew into the ground and exploded. As one of his VF-51 mates thought at the time, “What a price to pay for a goddamn truck!”

  “It was just the dumbest goddamn thing,” fumed intelligence officer Ken Danneberg, “to take a ten-million-dollar airplane, and pilots in whom the government had invested a few million more, and send them down after incidental targets [to] get the living bejesus shot at them.”

  According to Beebe’s combat action report, through September 4, 1951, “The Air Group had destroyed seven bridges, ninety railroad cars, twenty-five trucks, twenty-five oxcarts, two hundred and fifty troops, and damaged about twice as many of each, the price being the lives of five pilots, one aircrewman and ten aircraft.” In his journal that night, Bob Kaps wrote: “Another bad day. This war is really hitting home…. Two damn fine guys lost and for what?” Rick Rickelton noted in his diary: “The worst part of it is the heartsick people who are left behind.” On September 5, the entire task force took a day off from combat to replenish, giving them a chance to reflect.

  “There was great concern among our senior officers and even some speculation whether the casualties might be sabotage,” Armstrong remembers, “because some of the accidents were unexplained. Leaders were doing what leaders do: trying to figure out how to make the situation better. And my sense is, it did get better. We certainly didn’t have the number of losses later that we had early. I don’t know if inexperience or circumstance or what might account for all the early losses.

  “They never missed an opportunity to s
hoot at you,” Armstrong relates. “We saw all kinds of guns, all kinds of sizes, and some were radar-controlled and some were not. They had those long-barreled 85s that could reach up a long way. There was always a lot of concern about getting hit. I had a lot of bullet holes in the airplanes I flew, but usually got them back.

  “If the target was particularly valuable,” Armstrong recalls, “then they really put a lot of guns around it. They didn’t have missiles in those days, fortunately. That would really have made life more complicated for us.”

  Armstrong’s next flying came on September 10, a day when the Essex air group flew 101 sorties. Over the next nine days, Neil flew four combat air patrols, one photo escort (again to Songjin), and four armed reconnaissance missions. The recco on the tenth took him as far north as the Changjin (Chosin) Reservoir, where a British-owned power plant was a prime target, though the group would later learn of an agreement between London and Washington to keep the plant intact. Herb Graham has asserted, “‘Intelligence’ seemed to spend more time telling us about targets that were off limits than they did giving us good targets to hit. It did seem, at times, that we were risking our lives fighting a war with our hands tied.” When it came to target selection, Armstrong admits, “those were frustrations we lived with.”

  The biggest disaster of the entire Essex cruise happened not in the air but on the carrier’s deck. At the end of a beautiful clear day on September 16, 1951, a F2H Banshee from VF-172 came in for an emergency landing. LTJG John K. Keller fought to bring his Banshee—left with limited aileron control and no flaps following a midair collision—home. At the head of his Panther division, Ernie Beauchamp had just entered the Essex landing pattern. The Skipper was turning crosswind for final approach when he heard Keller, “with a great deal of stress, maybe even panic in his voice,” calling for a “straight in.” Beauchamp put on power, picked up his wheels and flaps, and cleared the landing approach, as did the other three planes in his division, flown by Rostine, Kaps, and Gott.

  A series of mistakes escalated into catastrophe. Still shaken by his plane’s jolting collision over the enemy target, Keller, the son of a University of Michigan professor, forgot to lower his tailhook for landing. Somehow in the urgency of the moment—perhaps due to the plane’s westward approach into the bright orange ball of the setting sun—the hook spotter and the LSO (William Chairs, a Naval Academy graduate) mistakenly thought Keller’s hook was down. The oversight brought the eight-ton Banshee slamming into the deck at nearly 130 knots. Bouncing high into the air, the plane jumped all of the heavy crash barriers, then tumbled headlong into an array of aircraft just moved from the aft flight deck to the starboard catapult area to make room for the returning aircraft. Some of those pilots and plane captains had yet to exit their planes.

  The mushrooming explosion of parked planes—some fully fueled with almost a thousand gallons of high-octane gas—was tremendous. Hersh Gott, still aloft with Beauchamp’s division, was checking off in preparation for landing when somebody radioed, “Jesus Christ, look at it burn!” The Essex’s forward flight deck was a ball of fire. The only choice for Beauchamp’s division was to fly over and land on the Boxer, where they stayed overnight.

  The consequences of the crash were obscene. Four men burned to death. Engulfed in the gaseous envelope of the flames, five others leaped into the ocean some seventy feet below, only to be gravely imperiled by burning aviation gasoline on the surface. A tractor shoved the offending Banshee overboard, with its dead young pilot still inside, and did the same to a few other burning airplanes. By the time the conflagration was extinguished several hours later, seven men had died. Sixteen were seriously injured. Eight jets in all had been turned to cinders. Fortunately, the Skyraiders, loaded as they were with fuel plus a 5,000-pound bomb load, were parked safely over to the other side.

  As luck had it, Neil Armstrong was serving as the squadron duty officer that day. Rules prescribed that on the day he “had the duty,” the SDO would not fly—as Armstrong did not on September 16—and that he would stay at his position in the ready room. Consequently, when the Banshee crash occurred, Armstrong did not see any of the fire and took no part in the firefighting activities.

  Under Armstrong’s direction, “I had just taxied a plane forward and was walking back down the flight deck,” Rick Rickelton recorded in his diary that night. “This F2H jumped the barriers. I ducked under it as it went by and it crashed into the planes parked behind me. It immediately exploded. I started making tracks but got burned on the hands and neck although not bad.” The Panther that Rickelton had taxied was one of those pushed over the side in an effort to slow down the fire.

  Rickelton got off easy compared to senior VF-51 pilot John Moore, who volunteered to taxi one last Panther to spell the younger officers who had just sat down to dinner in the wardroom. The signalman waved frantically at Moore to park his jet on the very edge of the flight deck, starboard side, away from Keller’s incoming Banshee. The shriek of the ship’s crash whistle crescendoed as the Banshee bounced airborne and blasted into Moore, igniting his plane and knocking it onto the ship’s catwalk. “The heat was horrible,” Moore recalled. “I dived with all my might out of the cockpit and felt myself falling, still in this ball of fire.”

  No more than ten feet away, the huge gray hull of the ship sped by him at twenty knots. Hardly believing he was still alive, Moore instinctively pulled the toggle of his life jacket, noticing that his hands were badly burned. As soon as his Mae West vest inflated, Moore realized his miscalculation. He needed to swim underwater, not stay on top of it. Wave after wave of burning fuel swept over him, frying his skin, especially around the neck and face. Finally, a rescue helicopter from the Essex lifted him back on deck. Another whirlybird dispatched from the nearby Boxer retrieved other men overboard. To get Moore to the sick bay located far aft, they had to navigate his wire stretcher through a maze of parked airplanes and tie-down cables, shoving Moore’s body underneath one plane at a time.

  To treat Moore’s wicked burns, a doctor applied Vaseline-coated gauze bandages over his entire body, leaving only narrow slits across his eyes and lips. The next day he was flown to a hospital in Japan, where he stayed for several weeks. Amazingly, following a rehabilitation in San Diego until early 1953, he rejoined the Screaming Eagles aboard the Valley Forge, as a division leader during its third and final Korean cruise.

  Moore’s burns were the most severe injuries suffered by a VF-51 aviator in the Banshee crash. According to CAG Beebe, “The flight deck personnel and squadron personnel nearest the crash made courageous efforts to aid the people injured by the initial explosion. Taking no heed of personal safety they disarmed and removed ordnance loads and moved aircraft out of the danger zone.” Wade A. Barfield, the VF-51 plane captain for the aircraft taxied by Rick Rickelton, died, as did another VF-51 plane captain, Charles L. Harrell. The squadron also lost Earl K. Niefer, a well-liked and experienced crew chief. Three other members of the VF-51 crew were badly burned but survived. In his journal for that day, a woeful Bob Kaps wrote: “Essex hard luck reached a climax.”

  For the next three days, the men of the Essex mourned. With the loss of Armstrong’s plane, the deaths of Ashford and Bramwell, the serious injuries to Moore, and the fiery destruction of four additional Panthers in the Banshee disaster, a demoralized Fighter Squadron 51 counted only nine serviceable aircraft, down from sixteen, and twenty-one pilots, down from twenty-four.

  It was a somber Essex crew that gathered at 1400 for a memorial service while en route to Yokosuka on Thursday, September 20, 1951. The service honored the memory of the thirteen men in CVG-5 killed since the cruise began. Armstrong considered himself lucky. He survived his September 3 flight by the skin of his teeth. Furthermore, had he not served as squadron duty officer the day the Banshee crashed, Armstrong, the most junior pilot in Fighter Squadron 51, would by rank likely have been on the deck taxiing one of the Panthers.

  For Armstrong, it turned out that ill Fate was not t
he hunter. Rather, it was almost as if the young flier was being safeguarded so as to become the grand prize of some extraordinary Destiny.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Ordeal of Eagles

  Arriving at Yokosuka in the early evening of September 21, 1951, Neil Armstrong experienced his first overseas “rest and relaxation.” For some of the men, R&R meant alcohol and women in the bars of Tokyo and Yokohama, but not for Armstrong or many of his fellow aviators in VF-51. The U.S. Navy had taken over a number of resort hotels on the east side of Japan, the most beautiful and luxurious of these “R&R camps” being the Fujiya Hotel, in the cool shadow of magnificent Mount Fuji (Fujiyama or Fujisan to the Japanese). Armstrong more than once enjoyed the wonderful food, drink, and service, all for very little charge. The resort even had a golf course caddied by elderly Japanese ladies who found “your ball” anywhere you hit it. A neophyte golfer, Neil discovered incentive enough to try the game, which he later came to love.

  Sightseeing in and around Tokyo, Armstrong took many pictures that he later developed into slides. He especially admired the famous Daihatsu, or Great Buddha, in the ancient capital city of Kamakura.

  Neil purchased two landscape paintings that hang to this day in his home. He designed the furnishings and garden in his Houston house to express the Japanese influence he found “unique and interesting.” Equally inspiring as Eastern aesthetic were the Japanese people, so thoroughly villainized by World War II propaganda. According to his mother, Neil remarked upon his return home from the navy in 1952, “Never sell them short, because they are highly alert and have brilliant minds.”

  The Essex stayed in port for ten days. Sailors alternated shore leave with three or four days of shipboard preparations, with most of the men of VF-51 making time to visit John Moore in the hospital in Yokohama.