Of course, Ted’s wish to bag himself a Zero was predicated on the assumption that first he would get his wings and second he would be assigned combat duty. What if he were made an instructor? Finnegan asked. “Yeah, I thought of that,” Williams replied. That’s why, he announced, he’d decided that he wanted to be a Marine. “You don’t pick your spots there. Orders come from Washington in a sealed envelope. You don’t know—nobody knows what’s to become of you. But in the Navy, you have a selection—that is, if you can make it. And if I wound up an instructor, the wolves would say, ‘I knew it. In the bag. He’ll never leave the country.’ That’s why I want to make the Marines. I’ll have no say in the matter. They can send me to the Southwest Pacific, anywhere they wish. And whatever they do, I’ll have a clear conscience. Ted Williams, Marine lieutenant, flying a fighter. Boy, wouldn’t that be something?”26
After dinner, in the dark, Ted took Finnegan to the hangars of Saufley Field and showed him the various kinds of planes he had flown to date. There was the Piper Cub that he had started on at Amherst. It flew about seventy miles an hour and only weighed about 750 pounds, Ted said, stopping to lift one by the tail—with one hand. Then he pointed out an N2S trainer, which he had flown at Bunker Hill. It weighed a ton and could go one hundred miles an hour. Now he was flying an SNV, a low-winged plane with fixed landing gear that he said weighed two tons and went 120. “Rides much smoother than a lighter plane,” Ted said. “Difference between a light automobile and a heavy one.”
Then he told of another near miss he’d had—the same mistake he’d made at Bunker Hill. “You know, I almost killed myself the other day. Just about to take off when the instructor saw my wing flaps weren’t down. If I had taken off I wouldn’t have been able to gain altitude, and the Sox would have had a gold star on their flag. Wouldn’t the newspapermen have loved that!” He howled with laughter before turning serious. Ted concluded that he was “still in a D league as far as flying is concerned. In baseball, you can make a mistake on a pitch, and you’ve got two strikes left. In this game, one miscue can be fatal.”27*
At the end of their evening, around 9:15, Ted walked Finnegan to the bus stop. Waiting on the bench were a sailor and “three Negroes,” Finnegan reported. “How about a regular Pensacola cheer for Ted Williams?” the writer suggested.
“Who’s Ted Williams?” a black woman asked.
“Just a drop in the bucket,” said Williams, starting back to his barracks.28
On Christmas Day, Ted accepted an invitation to dine with an officer, Lieutenant Forrest Twogood, and his wife, along with their guests. Finnegan tagged along. During dinner, Ted held forth on a variety of topics, including his stormy relationship with the writers and the limited amount of time a major leaguer has to make his mark and his money.
“Dough’s all that counts,” Williams said.29 “Who’s going to care about me when I can’t swing a bat? It doesn’t lake them long to forget you.… A big leaguer’s got about 10 years to pile it up. If he doesn’t, nobody’s going to kick in to him when he’s through. I’m not reaching for the moon. But I’ve come down from $250 a day to $2.50 a day, and that’s a sharp drop. I’ve lost one year of baseball already and might lose three more. How do I know I’ll be any good when I go back?”
Finnegan then went to interview Ted’s commander at Saufley, a Marine named Major Graham J. Benson, of Lexington, Kentucky. Benson, remarking that he would be “very disappointed” if Ted were not commissioned in the Marine Corps, rated the ballplayer highly.
“Frankly, I like his work,” Benson said. “I had heard of his pop-off reputation in baseball, and was looking for some sign of temperament. But… his conduct has been exemplary. He’s had chances to pop too.” Once, said Benson, Ted had missed an exam on ground and air traffic procedures known as course rules. When Benson called him in and asked for an explanation, Ted didn’t offer any excuses. He said he’d just been absorbed in a navigation problem and forgotten about the test. He was assigned duty as a messenger for punishment and carried out the assignment without objection.30*
By the time Finnegan’s series started running, on January 9, 1944, Williams had moved on to another station within the Pensacola complex, Whiting Field, where he was learning to fly by instruments. Whiting was a new facility that had been constructed in haste several miles inland, amid the black, piney woods. The base’s red earth turned to mud during the winter rainy season. Ted and the other cadets would go up with instructors in whiny, vibrating SNVs fitted with a dark canvas curtain that would shut out all outside light as well as the view of the horizon, which a pilot uses as his anchor when flying by sight. The cadets practiced landings without being able to see the landing strip, and they flew in intricate patterns, recalibrating their instincts and learning to trust what the instruments told them about their altitude and attitude even if their body felt something different. All this was first simulated on the ground in what was called the Link Trainer, a machine that replicated the experience of flying at various speeds, altitudes, and angles. From the safety of the trainer, cadets would be informed by their instructors if they had passed or failed, a failure often being the equivalent of actually crashing and burning.
Another training device in the same building was more fun—a 1940s-vintage video game of sorts called the Simulated Aerial Combat Machine. A cadet would get into a faux cockpit at one end of what looked like a movie theater and look out at a screen showing films of attacking enemy planes. The idea was to fire off your guns at the planes and hit as many as you could. The whole exercise was accompanied by the dramatic theater-in-the-round sound of screaming planes and bursting bullets. When the lights came on, the cadets would rush to find out how many Japanese fighters they’d shot down.31
As the Finnegan series was unfolding back in Boston, a copy of the second installment, published on January 10—the one in which Ted was quoted as saying he “won’t be satisfied with this life until I get myself a Zero”—found its way to the bulletin board outside the Whiting mess hall. The clipping had probably been mailed to Pensacola by the parents of a cadet who’d excitedly written home about training with the great Williams. But the cadet who posted the article apparently did so with puckish intent, for as Ted walked in for chow that evening, he was serenaded by hundreds of his peers chanting, “Teddy wants a Zero! Teddy wants a Zero!”—louder and louder, until Williams abruptly stood up from his meal and stalked out of the hall in anger.
Now flying the SNJ-4 and SNJ-5 combat trainers, Williams further revealed his superb reflexes, coordination, and natural feel for the plane. He flew more smoothly than other cadets, most of whom would return from a training flight with their fuel tanks nearly empty. Such throttle jockeys were like drivers who stepped on the gas and braked more than they needed to. Ted, on the other hand, would have about a third of a tank left, conserving fuel by slowly and steadily making adjustments and corrections on the throttle with his hands, cutting the RPMs, and controlling the pitch of the prop.
Another aspect of flying in which Williams’s exceptional hand-eye coordination served him well was gunnery. A plane would tow a cloth sleeve around ten or twelve feet long and five feet wide approximately one hundred yards behind it. A group of four cadets, flying a thousand feet above, would then make dives toward the tow plane and try to shred the sleeve with as many bullets as they could. The proper technique was to lead the target slightly, as a skeet shooter does.
“Ted might have twenty to twenty-three hits, and the rest of us might have six to eight,” recalled Dick Francisco, a Marine fighter pilot who trained with Williams at Pensacola. “In gunnery he was way better than the average pilot. Sometimes the instructor would demonstrate, and Ted would get far more than the instructor as well.”32
Perhaps not surprisingly, the recollections of Ted’s instructors of his performance as a pilot were more exalted than his actual marks and fitness reports. During his first two months at Pensacola, he’d been rated below average on such skills as landings and fie
ld approaches. But in the final two months, from mid-February to late April of 1944, preceding his scheduled commissioning in May, Williams had stepped it up and earned an average mark of 3.53 on a scale of 0 to 4 in the key measurement of “officer-like qualities.”*
His 3.53 rating put him in the above-average range of 3.5 to 3.7, short of the “outstanding” range of 3.8 to 3.9. “Cadet Williams has shown a good attitude while in this squadron,” concluded Lieutenant A. B. Koontz in the “remarks” section of the evaluation. “He has been enthusiastic, industrious and cooperative. While in this squadron his progress has been satisfactory and he has performed all duties in an efficient manner. He possesses a good moral and military character and is above average officer material. I would like to have him in my squadron.”
Two key decisions faced by the cadets were whether to receive their commission in the Navy or Marine Corps and what kind of plane they wished to fly. None of the choices was guaranteed. Getting into the Marines was competitive and depended on the needs of the services at the time; only a fraction of a graduating class—perhaps 20 percent—would be designated for the Corps. Ted talked it over with one of his classmates, Raymond Sisk. “Ted said, ‘What do you think? Shall we go for the Marines?’ I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ ” Sisk recalled. “I was kind of fed up with the Navy at that point—a lot of chickenshit. I figured you’d be a man in the Marines.” But it was more about the Corps’ esprit for Ted. He basically bought into his pal Dick Francisco’s view that if you hadn’t served a hitch in the Marines, you still owed your country a military obligation.
Choosing a plane was thought to be a crapshoot. Cadets often assumed they would be denied their first choice, so they might try to game the system by saying a plane was their second or third choice when actually it was their first. But Ted played it straight. He wanted to be a fighter pilot and so chose fighter, scout, and torpedo, in that order. He got his first choice.
“We didn’t hear anything at first,” Sisk said. “Finally they posted the names. They accepted thirty of us as Marines. The ones they took were mainly college graduates. Ted was probably taken for his name, but he was also a good pilot.”
On May 2, 1944, Ted was commissioned and received his wings in a pomp-and-circumstance ceremony at Main Side attended by a full Navy band. Wearing a specially fitted gleaming new white officer’s uniform with starred epaulets, he officially accepted an appointment as a second lieutenant in the Volunteer Marine Corps Reserve. He had graduated forty-ninth in a class of 159 and was given a final mark of 3.186 when his entire five months at Pensacola were factored in. That put him at the high end of the “below average” range of 2.50 to 3.19, but he still finished in the top third of his class. The cadet who was ranked first only had a mark of 3.598, in the middle of the “above average” range. However, Naval and Marine Corps historians say that during World War II it was common for even the best pilots to receive mediocre grades and fitness reports. Said Hill Goodspeed, a historian at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, “You have some of the foremost fighter pilots to come out of World War II getting average grades, so average was not an uncommon score. I’d say the grading was tough.”33
The first enlisted man Williams encountered after the commissioning ceremony had to salute him. That was a glorious moment. Meanwhile, watching the ceremony in the audience with great pride had been Doris Soule, who’d been patiently waiting for her man for more than three years. She was there not only to witness a milestone in Ted’s life but also to collect on his promise that they would be married as soon as he became an officer and thus eligible to wed under Navy regulations. Two days after the commissioning, Ted and Doris were married. Soon the couple rented a house off the base, in Pensacola proper, and got themselves a German shepherd they named Slugger—naturally. Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey sent down an engraved silver service for the couple. Doris took a job in a local beauty salon.34
Ted’s idea of the perfect honeymoon was to take his new bride fishing in the Everglades.35 Williams chose the most remote area he could find and happily fished away, but Doris refused to leave their cabin because she was afraid of the snakes. Ted assured her there were no snakes, but Doris was (quite literally) unmoved. Finally he talked her into coming out to join him one day. As they headed down a path toward his favorite spot, Doris suddenly let out a scream. An enormous snake had just slithered across the path. Back to the cabin she went.
After commissioning, the next logical assignment for Williams, given his training to date and his skills as a pilot, would have been to go to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, for final operational, or combat, training before being sent off to the Pacific Fleet. But then he learned he’d received different orders: to become an instructor and remain at Pensacola. As the United States was increasingly in control of the Pacific theater and thus the war against Japan by mid-1944, and since there was a backlog of pilots developing in Pensacola and elsewhere, the assignment effectively meant that he would not see combat in World War II.
Though Ted would claim in his book that he had chosen to become an instructor “because it would mean extra flight training and I figured I would need all I could get if we were going into combat,” he actually had no choice in the matter, according to several people he served with as well as Naval officials.36 “The choice of instruction or combat was made by someone else,” said Goodspeed. And of course, Williams had explicitly told Huck Finnegan for his series in the American that he wanted to choose the Marine Corps, since they would make the instructor/combat decision for him, thereby ensuring that the “wolves” would know he had clean hands if he remained stateside.
“Everyone wanted to see combat,” agreed Dick Francisco. “We were young, patriotic, hated Japs, the usual gung-ho stuff. Marines a little more so. To this day a guy doesn’t join the Marines to be stationed in the US. He wants to fight.”
The Marine Corps could have calculated that keeping Williams in the United States as an instructor would bolster the morale of the cadets he taught while boosting Armed Services public relations at home. It would also avoid the horrific headlines that could have ensued had he been sent off to combat and killed in action. But other celebrities and prominent people were accorded no such deference. The actor Tyrone Power was a Marine aviator and saw action in Okinawa, while FDR’s son James Roosevelt was a Marine Raider, part of an elite unit that conducted amphibious light-infantry warfare during World War II, often behind enemy lines. Those who served with Ted at the time said that another factor in the instructor decision might have been that an overzealous Pensacola commander wanted to keep Ted in Florida so he could play in the base’s highly competitive baseball league—a banal but perhaps persuasive hypothesis.
When Ted began his stint as an instructor, he was assigned to Bronson Field, one of the outlying stations in the Pensacola complex, twelve miles west of the city, near the Alabama line. Bronson, which mostly trained fighter pilots, had been Ted’s last post, or final station, as it was called, before he was commissioned, and he had begun playing for the base’s ball team, known as the Bronson Bombers.
Besides Ted, the Bombers had three other major leaguers on their roster: Bob Kennedy, a third baseman for the White Sox; Nick Tremark, who had played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-1930s; and Ray Stoviak, who’d had a cup of coffee with the Phillies in 1938. The Bombers would play two or three games a week, usually drawing a few thousand fans each time. Mostly they would play against the other bases within the Pensacola complex, but they would also play against other service teams in the region, some from as far away as Texas.
At Bronson Field, Ted served under a lieutenant commander who did not try to conceal the fact that one of his top priorities was to field a winning ball team. The commander “made no bones about it,” recalled Ken Carroll, an instructor with Williams at the time and a former semipro ballplayer who was on the Bombers.37 “He wanted a team to beat the Main Station. I don’t know if he was unhappy being assigned to an outlying
field or what. It may have been a political thing with him.”
Williams’s roommate at Whiting Field, Karl Smith, who subsequently became Ted’s lifelong friend, was convinced it was baseball that kept Ted out of combat. “Every base was competitive with the other bases, and every base had a baseball team, so everybody wanted Ted as an instructor.… That’s the one thing that kept him out of combat in World War II.” Others recalled Williams’s commander rescheduling training sessions in order to make certain pilots available for games.
When it came to military baseball during World War II, the acknowledged powerhouse was the Naval Station Great Lakes teams organized by former Tigers catcher Mickey Cochrane, who had tried to woo Ted to the base, outside Chicago, in 1942. Cochrane’s teams won 166 games and lost twenty-six over the first three wartime seasons and featured, at various times, such major-league pitchers as Bob Feller, Virgil Trucks, Denny Galehouse, and Schoolboy Rowe, as well as position players such as Pinky Higgins, Billy Herman, Walker Cooper, Ken Keltner, Johnny Mize, and Gene Woodling.
Right behind Great Lakes in its baseball prowess was the Norfolk Naval Training Station, in Virginia. Norfolk was home to Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight champion who by then was a lieutenant commander in charge of physical training in the Navy. Tunney’s job was to recruit athletes, coaches, and phys ed teachers to oversee conditioning at Navy bases around the country. When the “athletic specialists,” as they were called, showed up for Tunney’s eight-week training course, the base commander, Captain Harry McClure, who favored baseball, had his pick of prime professional talent. McClure proclaimed that the ball games they were playing were “point-blank proof to our enemies that they cannot succeed in overhauling our way of life,” and his Norfolk roster included Williams’s Red Sox pals Charlie Wagner and Dom DiMaggio, the Yankees’ Phil Rizzuto, Walt Masterson of the Senators, and Eddie Robinson of the Indians.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 31