On board the USS Oriskany (CV-34) en route to East Asia on my first official Navy deployment, we were operating about forty miles south of Barbers Point. We were flying practice bombing missions using a target on the island of Kahoolawe to hone our bombing and strafing skills. The Banshee was considered a fighter bomber. We could carry two five hundred-pound bombs and twenty-millimeter shells, which fired through four cannons configured in the nose. The war in Korea was winding down, but we needed to be ready, just in case it continued. I was on the bow catapult with two five hundred pounders suspended from the pylons under the wings.
With my Banshee cinched firmly to the catapult, I ran the engine to full power, booted feet firmly planted on the brakes. It was a typically bright blue day in this part of the world, and I was looking forward to the dive bombing. I checked my instruments and gave a sharp salute to the yellow-jerseyed flight deck officer, signaling I was ready to go. The hydraulic-powered sling shot fired, and I instantly knew that something was wrong.
I did not get that exhilarating boot in the behind that would send me a couple of hundred feet down the catapult track and heave me into the sky at over one hundred knots. I was experiencing what every carrier pilot dreads but only a few, fortunately, undergo: a cold catapult shot. It was impossible to stop the Banshee, but it wasn’t going to fly either because of insufficient speed off the end of the bow. The aircraft rolled down the deck and after a short toss, dribbled, wings level, into the sea.
This was a potential catastrophe, but two things worked in my favor. The straight-wing F2H plummeted, wings level, into the water. A swept-wing jet would tend to fall off on a wing, complicating impact. Also, the aircraft floated long enough for me to unbuckle my seat harness and to step out onto the wing and into the warm Hawaiian waters.
The crash alarm sounded on the ship. On the bridge, the skipper, the colorful Capt. Charles D. Griffin, who occasionally wore a railroad engineer’s hat and a silk ascot around his neck, swung the ship away from me in a manner that kept the huge screws at the stern safely distant. Within minutes, the ship’s helicopter was hovering overhead and sending a hoist cable down.
I worked myself into the horseshoe collar and was pulled slowly out of the water. I sensed the helicopter was straining, but happily the crew hoisted me up, hauled me inside the fuselage, and within minutes delivered me back to the flight deck, less one U.S. Navy jet fighter bomber.
I was no sooner checked by the flight surgeon and deemed fit for duty when the ship’s amplifier boomed, “Lieutenant Lawrence, report to the bridge immediately.” Wet flight suit and all I hustled up to the bridge, figuring I must have done something wrong and was about to get chewed out.
Captain Griffin was seated in his upraised chair, not unlike a Lazy Boy on a pedestal, at the far left corner of the glassed-in bridge overlooking the flight deck.
“Lieutenant Lawrence reporting as ordered, sir!” I said.
Griffin eyed me seriously, but there was the beginning of a smile on his lips. “Good job, Bill!” he proclaimed. “Good job!”
I sighed inwardly with relief, chatted a bit with the skipper, and then retreated to the ready room. Along the way, I ran into the helo pilot and thanked him profusely for saving me and for the professionalism of his crew.
He said, “You know, you could have made things easier for both of us had you abandoned your parachute.”
I turned red with embarrassment. One of the cardinal rules before pickup at sea is to get rid of the chute. Keeping it attached adds immensely to the helo’s burden, because of the drag it crates. In the hurry to save my skin, I forgot a basic procedure. Live and learn.
Through the wives’ pipeline of communications, Anne would certainly hear of my cold shot, so I explained it all in a letter, emphasizing that I was unhurt and how I was expeditiously plucked from the sea by the pros in the helicopter. She was happy I was OK, but like any wife, it was no small matter of concern to her. She neither complained about the distress nor expressed any misgivings about my continuing to fly.
Chapter Four
ALAN SHEPARD AND THE MANGY ANGELS
“This is Ghost Rider,” Alan began, “all aircraft go to max conserve.”
ALAN SHEPARD WORE THE F2H LIKE A GLOVE. Flying on his wing was a dream. He was smooth as satin at the controls and had an acute sense of what is now described as “situational awareness.” He was a newly minted lieutenant commander and reported to the squadron following a tour of duty that included matriculation at the Navy’s Test Pilot School and engineering test pilot assignments at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland.
One night at sea aboard the USS Oriskany, a “gaggle,” a large group of aircraft, was airborne awaiting clearance to land. One of the air group’s planes had a mechanical problem and had to “take the barrier,” that is, land and be snared to a stop by an upraised “fence,” not unlike a tennis net but taller and strong enough to halt a fast-moving jet.
Suddenly, there was chaos in the dark skies over the Pacific. This had never happened before to most of us, including the air traffic controllers on board the Oriskany. In effect, they lost positive control of the situation. We were directed to land on our sister ship, the USS Midway (CV-41), a short distance away.
Alan Shepard was not the most senior pilot in the air that night. Yet, it was he who had an innate sense of the present disarray and danger. Our planes were hardly more than separate patterns of lights crisscrossing in the sky. While some were paralyzed into inaction, Alan was mentally working out a solution. He calmly transmitted a cautionary message to the airplanes.
“This is Ghost Rider,” Alan began, “all aircraft go to max conserve.” This meant reducing power to save fuel, which is expended at a much greater rate in a jet than in a prop. He then calmly began sorting out the various flights from the different squadrons. He assigned them altitudes and headings, and like a Spanish shepherd (no pun intended), he gathered his sheep and got them funneled toward the backup carrier, the USS Midway.
Following an anxiety-saturated hour or so, all hands made it down safely, and there was no doubt that Alan Shepard was the man of the hour.
Alan and I took advantage of the opportunity to qualify as officers of the deck (OOD). As part of the air wing, we did not stand watches on the bridge because of the necessary time-consuming instruction required to do so. Still, it wouldn’t hurt our résumés to qualify as OOD. The price we had to pay was that we stood the watches on our own time. Squadron responsibilities prevailed. The watches were four hours long, so we traded sleep, the evening movie, acey-ducey games (Al was an expert acey-ducey player), and other leisure activities for learning how to operate the ship. We both got our qualifications, but it was drudgery.
One night, Al and I were both on the bridge, the carrier steaming along quietly. He looked at me for a long moment in the dim red lighting of the bridge, clearly exhausted, and said, “Why are we doing this? Why aren’t we down below sleeping like everybody else?”
Good question. But we both knew the answer. The experience would be career enhancing.
I was once asked if my athletic inclinations enhanced my ability to fly airplanes. Hand-to-eye coordination and motor skills are critical whether a flyer was a quarterback, a clarinet player, or an Elizabethan scholar. But the competitive mind-set of athletes does give you an edge. I used to get butterflies before a game identical to those that flutter in the stomach when you’re at full power awaiting a catapult shot on an aircraft carrier. When the action starts, though, the butterflies disappear, replaced by a “go get ’em” charge that makes you want to be as good as the next guy, if not better.
At the same time, you can take aggression too far. One day during aerial gunnery practice, I thought I was making good runs on the target banner being towed on a long length of cable by another plane. We dove in from a “perch” several thousand feet above the banner, which was white, with a bright orange ball in its middle. The trick was to keep the aircraft in trim and to track the banner thr
ough the gun sight in the dive, leading the target à la Sergeant York so that upon reaching a specified altitude and airspeed, you could depress the trigger on the control stick and, with reasonable certainty, expect the 20-millimeter cannon shells to burst through the strip of cloth.
After several runs, I was hitless, which is extremely embarrassing for a fighter pilot, one of whose priorities was shooting down enemy aircraft. This just wouldn’t do.
With renewed determination and a grimace on my face, I rolled in for another run. I established a nice lead through the sight, and as the banner tracked across my line of vision, I fired. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw the red of the bull’s-eye as I whizzed by the banner and felt a dull thud.
I pulled up as per procedure and, with sickening realization, noted what looked like a metal rod imbedded in the leading edge of the tip of my right wing. Fortunately, it didn’t affect the flying characteristics of the Banshee. I knew I’d be dressed down for this and dreaded the return to the ready room. I knew I was in line for a chewing out by Commander Carr.
The rod, it turns out, was part of the support apparatus for the banner. I scored a hit all right, but not with any bullets. To my surprise, Commander Carr actually praised me for my aggressiveness, but he made it absolutely clear that what I did was verboten, unsafe not only to me but to the tow plane as well.
I learned my lesson and eventually acquired the knack for air-to-air gunnery competence. I was able to hit the target without flying through it.
Alan Shepard may not have been able to become a Blue Angel, but this did not prevent him from forming his own personal acrobatic team. He worked his extraordinary magic with Lt. Wendell Smith, the flight schedules officer, and persuaded him to post Al and three others on the same flight as often as feasible. I was one of the three chosen by Al to be the slot man in what was to become his personal rendition of the Blue Angels. John Mitchell flew the left wing, Preston Luke the right. We would complete the assigned portion of the mission according to the schedule and then use the remaining time for acrobatics. We flew in stair-step port and starboard echelon formations but spent considerable time in the diamond. From my slot position in the diamond, slightly below and right behind Shepard, who led from its apex, I had an excellent perspective and could coach Mitchell and Luke to close in or loosen up and to polish the geometry of our maneuvers.
What a marvelous experience, flying with Alan Shepard. We executed loops, wingovers, and aileron rolls and got pretty good at it.
In the ready room one day Al sat us down and said, “We’ve got to have a name for our group.”
I’m not sure what we needed a name for, and I don’t know who came up with it, but the “Mangy Angels” became our appellation, and it stuck. “Mangy” was in deference to our sweat-soaked, infrequently laundered orange flight suits, which gained a kind of character with age. “Angels,” I think, assuaged Al’s disappointment at not becoming a genuine Blue Angel.
In Korea, the armistice had been signed before we reached the Sea of Japan. I admit I was disappointed, wanting to experience combat first hand. But that was self-serving, and I was pleased just to be this close to the action. In fact, we made periodic flights overland in Korea. At one point I was part of an exchange party that went ashore for several days to see how the grunts—our ground troops—were handling matters. Some of them, in turn, came aboard the Oriskany. I visited soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division in their trenches south of the Chorwon Valley.
From a raised platform, we gazed through binoculars at the North Korean soldiers moving about in their padded uniforms. It was bitterly cold in Korea, and while our soldiers manned their positions on the frozen tundra, I thought of our warm accommodations aboard ship. The only time we got the chills is when manning or debarking from our Banshees. We slept under clean sheets, while our Army counterparts made do with tents and layered clothing. Compared to them, we ate like kings. I thanked God for my life aboard ship, and the U.S. Navy, of course.
We wore cumbersome “poopy,” or exposure, suits in cold weather, a single-piece costume from neck to boots, like the one William Holden wore in the film The Bridges at Toko-Ri. If a pilot had to bail out over water, the suit would prevent him from instantly turning into a Popsicle. It was hoped that a rescue helo would reach him within a few minutes. I was blessed never to have to go through that experience. The rubber neck of the suit, by the way, was almost air tight. Turning your head frequently goes with the territory of being a wingman. There was a time or two that I nearly blacked out from diminishing blood flow to my brain caused by the taut fit of the suit around my neck.
We were at sea conducting a fleet exercise and briefing for a routine flight when Al told us, “The guys on the flight deck deserve a treat. They bust their tails for us all day and half the night. Today, we’re gonna salute ’em with a diamond break.”
A normal break occurs at the culmination of a flight. In right echelon, the formation parallels the ship’s course, passes by it on the starboard side, proceeds a set distance beyond it, and then, individually and in timed sequence, each pilot turns sharply 180 degrees back toward the flattop, completing the oval circuit by landing on deck.
The Blue Angels sometimes performed their break from the diamond formation, which is a bit more dramatic and difficult to do. Al wanted ours to serve as a tribute to the hardworking plane captains; flight deck directors; mechanics; chock bearers; ordnancemen; metalsmiths; electricians; safety officers; and fuel, crash, and salvage crews, who are the true creators of the bizarre ballet of motion called flight deck operations. They were important to us, and we loved them for it. In return, they held us in very high esteem.
Following our next mission, Al led us back to the ship, and when we were cleared in, I slipped into the slot forming the diamond. We descended to five hundred feet and rifled through the sky at three hundred knots. All eyes were on us as we whistled by the ship. A half-mile beyond it, John Mitchell, from his left wing position, broke, whipping his Banshee into a sixty-degree angle of bank turn toward the downwind leg. Fifteen seconds later, Al stood his Banshee on its wing and pulled. I was next, followed by Preston Luke. Our neatly spaced quartet completed the circuit, much to the delight of the audience topside, except for the commanding officer of the VF-193 fighter squadron. Infuriated, he ordered Shepard into his presence and let him have it. “You know that’s an improper procedure. I won’t have you hotdogging out there. You’re in hack for a week.”
“In hack” was a form of punishment for officers that restricted the miscreant to his stateroom except for meals. Good thing Al wasn’t claustrophobic. A stateroom on a Navy ship has a lofty sounding title, but in reality it’s an all-gray, cramped space that is usually shared by two or more people. Al had his own stateroom, so he was alone during his period of restriction. I felt sorry for our Mangy Angel leader and visited him whenever I could, sometimes sharing a meal with him.
Al had a vision of the Mangy Angels photographed against the background of majestic Mount Fujiyama, a revered Japanese landmark. Not flying straight and level across the mountain—that had been done before—but going straight up, paralleling the upward thrust of the mountain’s snow-capped peak.
“We’ll make the cover of Life magazine,” he declared. When the Oriskany went into port at Yokosuka, Japan, some of the air group’s aircraft deployed to Naval Air Station Atsugi, west of Tokyo, to keep our flying skills honed. This afforded Shepard the photo opportunity of his dreams.
Sharing our ready room was the F2HP photoreconnaissance detachment, about a fifth of the size of a normal squadron in terms of aircraft and personnel. Photo pilots made high-speed, low-altitude, straight, and level runs over “enemy terrain” to film possible gun emplacements and the like. The pictures were immediately processed upon arrival back at the ship for analysis by the intelligence officers.
Al cornered Lt. John Romano, a “photo” pilot. John flew the F2HP version of the Banshee, which was equipped with an aerial camera for filming
terrain where enemy installations might be deployed. In wartime the film would be developed on the ship and analyzed by intelligence personnel, and suspect areas would be targeted.
“The Mangy Angels have need of your services, John,” Shepard said. Al’s subtle, but nonetheless overpowering, personality gave Romano pause. “I want a photograph of the Mangy Angels by Fuji, and you’re just the guy to do it,” Shepard said. This request had the tone of a directive, even though Al had no purview over the photo detachment or its people.
Romano eyed Shepard suspiciously. “I don’t know, Al . . .”
“We’ll form into a diamond, go into an easy dive to gain airspeed, and then pull up into a loop,” Shepard explained. “You fly alongside us from a comfortable distance and turn on the camera as we start up into a loop. We’ll want the frame that captures us perfectly vertical with the mountain. Got that?”
We could tell Romano was reluctant to do this, but Al persisted. “Nothing to it,” Al said. “You’ll get a great picture.”
Romano suspected he’d be the subject of ribbing from his fellow pilots if he didn’t comply with Shepard’s request, so he said “OK,” without much enthusiasm.
Next day the Mangy Angels and John Romano, after completing our portion of the mission assigned on the flight schedule, flew to Mount Fujiyama. We did some steep turns and a couple of aileron rolls to get John acclimated. His photo mission seldom called for acrobatic flight, so wrestling his Banshee through high-g maneuvers was a departure from his routine. He flew well clear of our formation but turned and pulled and rolled over with us, as if connected by an invisible rod to our diamond. He then followed us through two practice loops and signaled he was ready for the live run. Mount Fujiyama waited patiently in the background.
Al positioned us for the ultimate loop, several miles abeam the slopes of the mountain. It was a bright cloudless day, the sky as blue as the waters of the Marianas Trench. In the loop, once we pulled up we would trade altitude for airspeed, all the while holding four and a half g’s on the Banshees. The waist and leg pockets of our pressure suits would inflate, preventing blood from draining south from our brains and exposing us to blackouts. Technically, a pressure suit is designed to maintain pressure over all or part of the body under conditions of low ambient pressure.
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