First Man

by James R. Hansen

  On October 1, 1951, the Essex headed to the northeast coast of Korea to rejoin Task Force 77. Armstrong flew ten times during this second combat period. October 5, 9, and 11 were routine air patrols, and three days were photo escort missions, the flight on October 24 locating concealed targets in the Wonsan region that were then eradicated in a devastating strike.

  To be fast, light, and versatile enough to protect the photo plane, the fighter escort was armed with only its 20-millimeter cannon. The photo plane itself flew straight, level, and unarmed (its Panther jet nose guns replaced with camera equipment) over the hottest spots in North Korea. “You’d get photos one day,” Hersh Gott says, “and they’d show a lot of damage and the next day they would be fixed” by large labor gangs working under the cover of night. At the completion of one mission, a photo pilot vented his frustration to VF-51’s Ernie Russell by jumping on the wing of Russell’s plane and saying, “Let’s go shoot something. Anything!”

  On October 22, 1951, Armstrong’s division found two trains for the ADs and Corsairs to destroy, and then itself went on to hit several supply points. On the twenty-sixth, his division hit bridges and busted rails in the region of Pukch’ong, over which he had flown photo escort twelve days earlier. On the thirtieth, Neil was part of an attack that flew quite far north, well above the 40th parallel, to the area between Tonch’on and Kapsan. It was during this flight that Armstrong may have gotten his first look at the Yalu River, beyond which lay China: “That wasn’t our normal territory. We were better off busting bridges down in the middle of the country rather than being exposed to the dangers of being up close along the border.” The day before, on the twenty-ninth, he flew about as far west as he ever got, during a fighter sweep in the area of Sinanju. North of Pyongyang at the mouth of the Ch’ongch’on River on the northwestern coast, here was MiG Alley. Bob Kaps reported “many anxious moments but no engagements” with MiGs.

  Fighter Squadron 51 suffered nary a casualty during this second tour. Overall, the entire air group lost only three pilots and the aircraft that carried them, a great improvement over the initial weeks of the first operational period. During the month of October, the squadron expended 49,299 20-millimeter rounds and dropped 631 general-purpose 100-pound bombs. This represents a slight slowdown of combat—partly through lost days of flying due to bad weather—compared to the twenty-one squadron pilots’ very first weeks in action when VF-51 fired 96,417 rounds, dropped 396 bombs, and shot off 626 rockets. Neil personally fired an estimated 7,000 rounds, dropped 48 bombs, and fired 30 rockets during the initial two-and-a-half-month combat period. During his twenty-six flights, of which nine were combat air patrols, he accumulated over forty-one and a half hours of air time.

  Following another refurbishing of the ship in Yokosuka lasting from October 31 to November 12, 1951, the Essex and its air group returned to action, again off Wonsan Bay. With the onset of winter, carrier activities in the Sea of Japan turned miserable. With temperatures topping out in the low forties Fahrenheit and lots of rain, there were several days in November when no flying could be done. On November 26, Bob Kaps noted in his journal, “Seas have reached the roll-em-out-of-their-sacks stage. Don’t know what keeps the planes from toppling over the side.”

  Armstrong flew only six times in November, two of them CAPs (November 19 and 29). His first combat flight during this third tour, which took place on the eighteenth, was a recco from Wonsan to Pukch’ong. During the mission, developing bad weather forced many aircraft to shift their targets from bridges to rail-cutting operations, which Neil pursued at Kilchu on the twenty-first and at Tonch’on on the twenty-seventh and again on the twenty-eighth. Both strikes involved busting up the coastal rail line that ran down from the Soviet border to Wonsan.

  For bombing such precision targets as narrow-gauge North Korean railways the Panthers’ symmetrical airframes provided a superior bombing platform to the props. Attacking in twenty-degree glides with dive brakes extended, the Panthers would release their bombs at 800 to 1,000 feet while flying at a speed of between 300 and 320 knots.

  During November and December 1951, Fighter Squadron 51 dropped 672 general-purpose bombs, most of them 250-pounders. It also dropped 16 fragmentation bombs. In all during this two-month period, the Screaming Eagles unloaded onto North Korean targets a total of 135,560 pounds of bombs, well over twice as much weight as the squadron had dropped in the previous two and a half months since first arriving in Korea. During the last two months of the year, strafing remained the most effective weapon for VF-51, with 43,087 rounds fired, an average of 2,051 rounds per pilot.

  “We would jettison armaments prior to returning,” Armstrong explains, “and we tried to jettison on targets of opportunity.” Wam Mackey declares, “I can’t remember ever having come back with any ordnance.”

  In December 1951, prior to leaving again for refurbishing in Yokosuka on the thirteenth, Armstrong took to the air eight times. Three of the flights were photo escorts—to the Kowan-Yonghung region, just north of Wonsan (on the third), over Wonsan harbor (on the tenth), and to Tonch’on via Songjin (on the eleventh). One was an armed recco (on the first) to Yangdok. The other four (December 2, 5, 6, and 9) were CAPs, but only three of them were uneventful.

  On December 2, at high altitude and over water, the engine in Armstrong’s Panther jet quit on him. Flameouts were a serious problem plaguing gas-turbine engines. Neil’s flameout was caused by a fuel control mechanism being stuck at a low-altitude setting due to salt corrosion. Advancing the throttle at the higher altitudes required by CAP missions had injected too much fuel into the mix, extinguishing the jet’s flame. Fortunately, the jet relit and Armstrong finished his flight without further trouble.

  During its third tour in the Sea of Japan, VF-51 had some close calls but suffered no fatalities. On December 14 the Essex arrived in Yokosuka, where it would spend Christmas 1951. In a shipboard Christmas Eve program, Armstrong, Gott, Kaps, Sevilla, Jones, Hayward, and a few of VF-51’s enlisted men, “had some makeshift choir robes and each singer had an electric candle or a flashlight made to look like a candle,” Neil remembers. “We sang Christmas carols, primarily,” then treated a number of Japanese orphans in the audience to candy and holiday fare.

  Most men waited until Christmas Day to open presents from loved ones. On the day after Christmas, the ship bound for yet another combat tour in Korea, Rick Rickelton wrote in his diary: “I had a very merry Christmas considering I couldn’t be home.” The Essex then ran into “some of the heaviest weather we have seen yet.” In the face of winds of nearly 85 knots for a full day, the carrier made almost no progress. Considering the dangers and near-arctic conditions to be faced back on station off the North Korean coast, Bob Kaps asked in his journal, “Who’s in a hurry?”

  Essex’s fourth tour proved to be by far the nastiest, most strenuous, and longest lasting of the entire cruise. For thirty-eight days from December 26, 1951, to February 1, 1952, the pilots of Air Group 5 flew a total of 2,070 sorties, an average of 86 per day (not counting the days when no flying was done due to replenishment or bad weather). Armstrong himself flew 23 missions during the period, with a total time in the air of over 35 hours. On only four days when the air group got into the air did Neil not fly.

  Twenty-three cat shots, twenty-three carrier landings, all in one month, all in combat conditions: this was the experience of the young aviator from Wapakoneta, tightly bound in the MK III Anti-Exposure Suit that had been newly issued to him while in Yokosuka over Christmas. Relying on half-frozen catapults and bone-cold aircraft carrying icy guns and frosty bomb loads, Armstrong and his mates performed an unenviable job, day after day, over a remote enemy land.

  On Friday evening, January 4, 1952, which ended the first week of the Essex’s fourth tour, the men of CVG-5 got happy news from CAG Beebe. At the end of January they were to leave for Yokosuka, spend two weeks in port, and then head back to “dear old Uncle Sam.” Kaps wrote in his journal: “HAPPY DAY! Hardly seems possible
but I’ll buy it.” Rickelton noted: “The word sounds pretty official and needless to say joy reigned in the bunkroom. I guess I won’t tell the folks till I’m positive. I figure 20 more flying days till home…. We should be home by the end of February. There’sgood news tonight!!”

  That was the last diary entry the twenty-three-year-old ensign from New Mexico made. Less than thirty-six hours later on an early-morning rail cut north of Wonsan, Rick Rickleton’s Panther was hit by flak. A real tiger of a fighter pilot, Rickelton always went in as low as he could, maybe a little too low if his aircraft was heavily loaded with ordnance, as the division’s planes were on that frigid January morn. When hit, the F9F nosedived right into the ground.

  Kap’s forlorn journal entry spoke for all of VF-51: “Rick shot down—plane exploded—no chance. Damn fine pilot and guy. Padre said mass for him, as he has done for them all. Hope the Lord can see through this mess, don’t think I can. There has to be a reason for prolonging this business but I just don’t see it.”

  With Rickelton gone, Wam Mackey’s division needed another wingman. The job fell to Armstrong. For the rest of the cruise Neil flew primarily in Rickelton’s spot with Mackey, Chet Cheshire, and Ken Kramer. Later in life, during a reunion of the Screaming Eagles, Armstrong would cheer and honor the brother and the nephews of Rick Rickelton by saying of Rick: “He was our fighter pilot.”

  Two days after Rickelton’s death, Wam Mackey remembers, “The admiral came down to the wardroom and said, ‘I’ve got some bad news: such and such a ship has had problems and is going to be delayed in relieving us, and we are going to have to come back one more time.”

  Sinking VF-51’s morale ever lower, according to Armstrong, was “our general feeling that most Americans were not aware, or at least as aware, of what was going on in Korea as they had been in World War II. There was a substantial difference in the level of information and in their interest.”

  Limits on information also frustrated the aviators, who “questioned everything,” Armstrong relates.

  “There’s just a lot more intensity to combat,” Armstrong explains, “and more consequence to making a bad move. These guys tend to be people who like challenges and like to meet them head-on.” As for the chance of dying, “It’s a reality that you live with, and I guess you think the odds are with you if you keep your head and don’t do anything foolish…. The naval aviators that I knew were determined to do a first-class job…. They were doing a job they thought was important.” Some of Neil’s mates looked at the situation more fatalistically. “For me, the adjustment to being a target was the roughest,” explains Herb Graham. “I reached a reasonable peace of mind when I considered myself dead and stopped worrying about it.”

  Historians have debated the ultimate value of the interdiction program, though the constant pressure applied by airpower played a role in forcing the Communists to the peace table. “It didn’t cut off the supplies,” Armstrong relates, “but I’m sure the harassment had an enormous effect.”

  From the beginning of the war, bridges were principal targets in the interdiction campaign. According to official Pentagon wartime statistics, navy planes destroyed 2,005 North Korean bridges out of a total of 2,832 that U.S. military forces destroyed in all.

  Over time the navy learned—at great cost—that the key to effective bridge strikes was coordinating the props and the jets into a single unified and well-timed assault. Marshall Beebe and the squadron commanders of Air Group 5 hatched the basic plan on the Essex in the latter months of 1951. Jets, with their higher and steeper “drop-down approach” to a target and their faster escape speed, had a significantly better chance of penetrating a bridge’s defenses. Yet the jets were not the best instruments for actually taking out a bridge. That took 2,000-pound bombs, which jets could not carry. The job of the jets was to quell the antiaircraft fire. Then came the Corsairs, which also bombed and strafed the AA positions, followed finally by the Skyraiders deploying the heavy ordnance. Typically, at least twenty-four aircraft would be involved in a major bridge strike: eight jets, eight Corsairs, and eight Skyraiders.

  “We [in the Panthers] wanted to hit them right before the ADs were ready to drop their bombs,” Hersh Gott explains, “so that it would keep their gunners down. When they saw us start our dives, they cleared out of those gun emplacements. I sure would have if I’d been a gunner down there.”

  The successful new tactic, adapted by Beauchamp from air strikes in World War II, was quickly adopted throughout Task Force 77, with one alteration. To prevent the dust created by the jets’ airbursts from concealing the props’ bomb targets, the air groups directed the jets to move their suppression points of aim farther from the bridges.

  Though Armstrong flew flak suppression on his fair share of bridge strikes, the only specific notation in his logbook came on January 8, 1952, two days after Rickelton’s death, when CVG-5 destroyed two bridges. Whether Neil flew as part of the attack on “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” cannot truly be answered, because the events depicted in James A. Michener’s 1953 novel by that title (made the following year into a Hollywood movie starring William Holden, Mickey Rooney, and Grace Kelly) were highly fictionalized.

  Armstrong recalls that Michener, just off a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, was a guest on the Essex during the last months of 1951. Himself a navy veteran of World War II, Michener was writing a series of articles on the naval air war for The Saturday Evening Post. “I think he went on two or three tours, at four or five weeks at a crack,” Neil recalls. “He would just sit around the wardroom in the evening or in the ready room in the daytime and listen to guys tell the actual stories. He didn’t ask questions much or anything; he just kind of absorbed it all.” It was here, while on Neil’s ship, that Michener began to think about writing a book that became The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

  “So most of the things that happened in the book…were actual events,” Armstrong recounts. “I thought The Bridges at Toko-Ri was an excellent representation of the kinds of flying that we were doing there. It was identical, same kind of aircraft and the same class carrier.”

  While living aboard the Essex, Michener interviewed Ernie Beauchamp two or three times. Marshall Beebe, to whom Michener dedicated his book, cameoed in the film’s opening scene as a pilot calling in a downed pilot report. The rescue helicopter pilot (played in the movie by Mickey Rooney) was at least partly based on one or more incidents involving VF-51’s colorful landing signal officer, “Dog” Fannon.

  Over the years, a number of people have compared Michener’s novel to the historical record. What most have found are recognizable elements of at least four actual missions in the Toko-Ri story.* Armstrong does not speculate on whether he flew on any of the four. All he has ever said is that “I flew into equally difficult places.”

  Perhaps for reasons of better storytelling, Michener did not accurately present the role of the jets in the coordinated strikes. In the book, Michener disregarded the jets’ technical lack of bomb capacity and had the jets bombing the bridges.

  Although the new tactics lessened air group casualties, there was no way to go after so many well-defended targets without losing some men and machines. On January 6, 1951, Rick Rickleton died. That same day Lieutenant Harold J. Zenner of VF-54 lost an eye when fragments of metal from an AA shell and small pieces of Plexiglas from his own canopy hit him in the face. On the ninth, Ensign Raymond G. “Gene” Kelly, also of VF-54, was fatally hit by AA fire following a bombing run on a bridge. On the eleventh, yet another pilot from VF-54, Joseph H. Gollner, crashed into the sea after what seemed to be a normal takeoff. On the nineteenth, a VF-172 Banshee flown by air force major Francis N. McCollon was hit by antiaircraft fire during a strafing run, then crashed and burned.

  But the death that hit Armstrong and the rest of the men of VF-51 by far the hardest, after Rick Rickleton’s, was that of another one of their own, LTJG Leonard R. Cheshire, on January 26, 1951.

  Like Rickelton, Cheshire
was from New Mexico—Albuquerque, to be exact. So impressed was division leader Wam Mackey with the two young men that he thought at the time, “If everybody from New Mexico was like those two boys, I’m going to move to New Mexico.” A tall, thin, angular man with dark brown hair, Cheshire had been married to Dorothy just before he left for Korea. After the war was over, Chet planned to return to the Land of Enchantment and become a teacher.

  In a cubicle in the junior officers’ bunkroom (an area the senior officers referred to as “Boys’ Town”), Armstrong and Cheshire slept right across the aisle from each other, on lower bunks. The two men—the squadron’s youngest member and the other the squadron’s oldest junior officer—became close friends. “In the combat environment,” Neil explains, “you welcome lighthearted conversation that takes your mind away from the realities of the war around you. But we also talked a great deal about the serious side of life: philosophy, theology, history, et cetera. Chet was a very thoughtful person, and I learned a great deal from listening to his perspectives on those issues.” Both Neil and Cheshire also spent time reading books. In the evenings, Cheshire often read out loud while the others, in the words of Hal Schwan, “would sit around and listen almost like a bunch of little kids.” In the first weeks of January 1952, Chet was well into a reading of The Caine Mutiny, a recent bestseller by novelist Herman Wouk.

  On Saturday, January 26, 1951, Mackey’s division was making its second run on a camouflaged train sitting in the Kowan area, just adjacent to Wonsan Bay, when Cheshire’s plane was hit by AA. According to Ken Kramer, Cheshire’s wingman, “We were in a racetrack pattern, which allowed us to keep each other in sight while we made individual dives on the target. Chet had just completed his dive and I was rolling into my dive behind him when he got hit.” At that instant, Cheshire radioed urgently to Mackey, “Wam, I’m hit, and I’m hit bad!”