Sketches of a Black Cat - Full Color Collector's Edition: Story of a night flying WWII pilot and artist

by Miner, Ron

  So I was on my own again and decided to head upstairs and grab a nap in preparation for a late night.

  I was soundly sleeping when there was a knock at the door. I was surprised to find Nancy standing there. “I was looking for Ted,” she started. “Would you know where he is? He’s not in his room.” This was awkward. I assured her that I did not know his whereabouts, although he was in town.

  “Would you like to come in? We can call his room from here,” I suggested. She quickly sat down and explained that she had traveled from Dallas and expected him to meet her at the bus station. “I know he understood I was arriving today. He’s just so unreliable,” she lamented. “Did I do something? Is it me?”

  She had come all this way to help him celebrate his crowning achievement, and where was he? Over the past few months, I had gotten to know Nancy really well, and I felt tremendous compassion for her at this moment. I was miffed about my role as go-between, Father confessor, or whatever. Ted had really blown it here and it bothered me.

  I looked at her and there were tears in her eyes — and that did it. I had to do something, so I drew her to my shoulder to comfort her. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “ I think you are wonderful.”

  “Well, I wish Ted did, too,” she whispered.

  “I think he really does,” I reassured her. She walked a few steps away with a gesture of frustration, then turned abruptly and stared at me helplessly. “In fact, I know he does ... you’re very beautiful.” What was I saying?

  I may have been admiring her and she caught me and raised a brow, and I suddenly realized my off-hand remark may have surprised us both. I tried to clarify things. “I mean, look at you ... your hair, your figure, everything ...” Now I was fumbling around trying to hide my embarrassment and only making things worse.

  It was one of those moments that comes along, maybe once in a lifetime. You have bared your soul to someone and could very well never live it down, a “shake your head” memory that will always stick with you. Or she could bare hers as well. And that, to my astonishment, is what she did, slowly at first, until in a few moments, she stood before me, a stunning silhouette in the twilight of my room. I felt I needed to move toward her. We gently embraced. I was still amazed by the pace of the encounter but felt helpless to resist it. As the interlude continued, the tiny voices that always found me at times like this prattled in my ear, “What are you doing?”

  I negotiated. “Ted can be a jerk.”

  “He’s your buddy. How will you ever face him? Or her?” It was no use.

  “I can’t,” I whispered. “Not today. Perhaps, someday if you and Ted ... I’m sorry, you are special to me. Let me help you with your things.”

  She looked me in the eye and smiled, kind of proudly. There was no embarrassment, and we held each other warmly one last time before she went through the door. I never saw her again.

  The Navy Corps Band was playing loudly on the parade grounds, and Ted and I stood side by side at attention. It was Graduation Day. The admiral pinned the Golden Wings on our chests, our throats trembling with emotion. We faced each other smiling widely, saluted smartly, and then pulled Sims over and all bear hugged with a howl. A few days before, we had attended a mandatory lecture in the big auditorium. A fleet carrier pilot had returned from Pacific combat duty and he had much to say about the Navy action. We devoured his war stories eagerly. In his closing remarks, he brought us back to earth with a stunning analysis: “Only a third of you guys will return, you know. The Japs will get the other two-thirds.”

  I met Ted’s parents briefly less than a year after he had joined the Marines. Ironically, he had been switched from transport planes into SBD dive bombers. It was on his first solo flight around North Island in San Diego that he grabbed the wrong handle, the dive brakes popped on instead of the landing flaps, and he went straight in.

  I requested and received permission to bring the body back to Indianapolis for burial at Crown Hill Cemetery. It was a full military funeral. As I saluted the casket during taps, there in my dress blues, I recalled the Navy officer at the Wabash/Butler football game. It was at once a proud, sad, and very scary moment for me. I spent a few days with Ted’s family before returning to the Pacific for another three years. It was only a short time later that I received word that Sims, too, had bought the farm out there somewhere. Two of the three of us were now gone.

  * * *

  * R4D was the Navy’s version of a DC-3 like those used for passengers on commercial airlines throughout the U.S. The army designation was C-47.

  The First Tour

  I stepped off the launch into the darkness of the dock at Alameda Naval Air Station with some thirty other brand new officers. We were all reporting to our first duty assignment since recently receiving our wings and were a little uneasy as we took in the details of this strange, new environment. Towering above us was the superstructure of an aircraft carrier, enormous and waiting with ramp lowered. It was confounding; I had not trained for carrier duty. I was a seaplane pilot somehow misplaced and heading aboard the wrong ship. Mechanically, I moved along with the group. They were all complete strangers. There was no one I had trained with or felt I could ask or confide in.

  The group of us walked along for fifty paces or so and came to an intersection. To the left, the ramp ascended sharply into the ship, and to the right, it went ashore among a shadowy group of palm trees and buildings. Those palm trees kind of whispered to me, a lucky break as it turned out, and I wandered among them in the darkness and felt my way along. By midnight I had found my assigned quarters and was able to relax a little and review this particularly long day.

  It had, in fact, been an incredible eight months, and by October 1942, I was taking my final training run in a PBY. I had opted for the South Pacific instead of the Aleutians, I guess primarily because given the choice of simmering at the equator or getting frost bitten near the North Pole, I preferred to take my chances at a simmer. About a month later, I Iogged a couple more hours at Rodd Field in one of the N2S biplanes I had originally soloed in, and the next day, flew another two hours in the Vultee, presumably for familiarization. It wouldn’t be a stretch to admit it was satisfying and rewarding to see just how far things had come. I had accumulated about 200 hours of flying time by now and had earned a few weeks of leave, so I caught the train back to Indiana to see my family before shipping out.

  My mother was understandably torn between her happiness at seeing me home in one piece, and anxiety about my leaving again. “Why did you need to go in the Air Force?” She was not enthusiastic about flying or planes, but Dad seemed able to put her more at ease. In time, like many moms, she became ardently supportive and began compiling every news clip, photo, and letter she could into an elaborate scrapbook. Unfortunately, having two sons away (my brother, Mac, was entering the Army) took its toll on my parents. Dad barely lived to see the conflict end, and Mom died shortly after we both returned.

  But that first leave was memorable. I was persuaded to give a talk at Park School, the school I attended through high school and where my dad had taught for many years. It was different returning there in my Naval pilot’s uniform. I felt almost a celebrity status, even among the various “social” cliques that I might never have been a part of as a student. It was cool. I had stood at that podium many times over the years, but this time it came easy. At last, I felt I had something to say.

  Just before leaving Corpus Christi for home, I had stumbled across another good friend, Bill, and invited him to spend the week in Indianapolis. He and I seemed to have unlimited things in common. We had a great time together, double dating and taking in the town. When the leave ended, he went to Atlantic duty and I was assigned to the Pacific. Bill never returned.

  Our stay at Alameda NAS in San Francisco was brief. The first evening, I met several of the other junior officers as we signed in and we gathered the next morning for breakfast. We wandered into the officers’ mess, took our trays through the line, and
settled down at one end of an available table. As we dug in and talked a little, two officers from the far end of the table headed our way, grumbled a few words, and nodded at the sign by the table: “Senior Officers’ Table.” Oops! The next day before we were able to do anything else wrong we were all aboard a troop ship headed for “somewhere.” Our orders came neatly enclosed in a manila envelope informing us we were part of VP-54, “V” for heavier than air and “P” for patrol.

  The troop ship, a U.S. Army Troop Transport, was one of the many ways that huge numbers of soldiers, troops, and even Navy PBY crews were moved around to new training locations and eventually into action. It seemed that virtually every ship large and fast enough was being pressed into service. Some squadron members had hopped a United Fruit banana boat a few weeks before we shipped out and jig-jagged along to avoid detection from submarines. By now, even the Queen Mary, renamed the “Grey Ghost,” had been painted black and grey and fitted with anti-aircraft guns to serve as a huge transport capable of carrying 10,000, even 15,000 troops at a time. Both she and her sister, the Queen Elizabeth, traveled at high enough speeds on the water that they were relatively safe and able to outrun U-boats and subs.

  Our transport lacked the glamor of those vessels, but was surprisingly comfortable given the crowded nature of the place. There was even a dining room and the chow was reasonably good, although the sea was rough enough during our first night that many on board were sick. I couldn’t help noticing that none of our fliers were affected.

  Day by day the big ship chugged along, and despite some nerves and occasional seasickness, the friendships that were going to last throughout the war and into the years of peace afterward began forming. We talked by the hour, comparing notes and speculating about the future while anchoring our hats with chin straps against the wind. These graduates may have only had a couple of hundred hours apiece as pilots but we were united in a bond shared by men who fly.

  It was Hawaii. We dropped anchor at Pearl Harbor and were conveyed by ship’s boat to the recently sullied soils of that historic island, Oahu. There were occasional glimpses of the hulking battleships, their sunken wreckage a vivid reminder of what had occurred there less than a year before. It was an unforgettable feeling.

  Once ashore, we were treated to a bountiful breakfast, then whisked away in buses through winding, tropical forests to the top of Pali Lookout. The road rounded the curve and in past the sentries, approaching the promontory. My God, what a view! From the top of the sheer cliff, you could see out across the pineapple and papaya fields to the turquoise Pacific. There in the distance was our destination, the Air Station at Kaneohe Bay. And we assembled on that afternoon, a new group of friends.

  There was Jack and Pete, Del and Gewin, Art and Ray, and of course Willie and Bob, John, Mel, and Jim* and so many others. I developed a particularly close relationship with the first six of these guys. We became the “Big Seven.” VP-54 had arrived.

  Gunnery notes in notebook carried on all flights during WWII

  Early on, we fell into a routine of flying and additional instruction. One of our first sessions was gunnery training, so it was off for a couple of weeks to learn how to handle .45 caliber automatics, shotguns, and .30 and .50 caliber machine guns. I was not a natural, had no background in firearms, and in truth, was terrible at the skeet shooting challenges. Yet for some strange reason, I did well with automatic weapons, well enough to finish with the top grade in this class, a peculiar piece of irony. The second highest was Mel, and the two of us were promptly selected by our new executive officer, John Erhard, for his two pilot/navigators. He would never admit it, but we felt he was influenced by the gunnery stuff.

  We were now a crew and the flying began in earnest. At this point in the war, the majority of the pilots and crewmen were drawn from flight training facilities like we were, so most us had limited flying or combat experience. Our squadron had thirty or so PBY-5A, amphibious type Catalinas. We soon learned these would not be ordinary PBYs. Not only were they painted black, they were totally “blacked out” for night operation, hence the name “Black Cats,” shortened from our original moniker, “Black Sea Cats.” The engines were fitted with flame arrestors and the cockpit windows darkened, leaving “red light” as our main source of illumination. The red light was preferable for instruments and for reading navigation charts and the like because it didn’t affect our night vision afterward like traditional instrument lighting. Red goggles were also helpful in dealing with bright light.

  Our introduction to these aircraft was on the airstrip, bringing them and their hundred-foot wingspans in on the tricycle landing gear. At Corpus, our training was entirely in water. How much more fun it was to do both. PBYs had no flaps although the wing floats could be use, depending on the crosswind, to aid in slowing while landing. Its two overhead engines were used differentially to keep us moving in a straight line for takeoffs or turning in water (a wheel was sometimes lowered into the water as drag to sharpen the turns) and the wing’s elevated location afforded us great visibility for searches. We practiced bounce hops and bombing and torpedo work. One member of the squadron received a citation from CinCPac (Commander-in-Chief-Pacific). He so perfectly aimed the little lead missile that it hit the lens of the periscope of a submerged sub during a practice run. He first received a mock bill for $20,000.

  Christmas 1942 arrived. We had the day off and headed into Honolulu for some sightseeing. Several of us booked rooms at the old Moana Hotel, famous for its history and huge banyan tree on the patio at Waikiki Beach, and it became a favorite for future liberty weekends. The Navy Survival Museum was nearby, an entertaining place where one could learn skills such as weaving palm fronds and living off the jungle (but, of course, I hoped never to need these new insights).

  To get there, Jack Beuttler and I used our thumbs and quickly secured a ride from a gentleman in a Model-A Ford. Jack sat in front and I hopped in the rear rumble seat and the driver wasted no time in putting the little car through its paces. This was the same road that climbed the face of a steep mountain range and over the famous Pali. From the overlook, an almost sheer cliff dropped hundreds of feet to the lowlands stretching eastward to the Pacific waters. It was here that King Kamehameha once backed an invading army over the edge to annihilation. Another story goes that the strong onshore winds and updrafts thwarted a would-be suicide when the jumper merely floated to the rocks below unharmed.

  While the Model-A was surprisingly agile on the steep grade, to maintain its momentum the gentleman was now taking the horseshoe type turns full tilt causing me to pitch side-to-side and wonder whether at any moment the whole lot of us would suddenly be airborne as we headed over the unfenced edge of the cliffside. We accelerated over the crest and swung around the curve onto more level ground, where a military security guard was posted at the overlook near a retaining wall, casually staring off at the horizon. As I rose up in the rumble a few inches to take in this magnificent view, a sudden strong gust carried away my officers’ hat and it cartwheeled across the road coming to rest at the very feet of the lone figure on duty there. I banged wildly on the car body, Jack got the driver’s attention and we quickly squealed to a stop. Sheepishly, I climbed out and headed toward the Army enlisted man who was now eyeing me questioningly. He spotted my ensign’s bars and snapped to attention, holding a proper salute. Unlike the Army, in the Navy one does not salute uncovered, so I did not yet acknowledge his gesture and continued my approach, bent down to retrieve my hat and squared it to my head. Then without a word, I smartly returned his salute, did an about face, and marched back to my rumble seat in the Model-A. As we pulled away, the three of us could see the soldier with his hand still on his head, but now he was scratching it trying to decide what had just happened. Jack and I chuckled all the way to the streets of Honolulu.

  The next day, the two of us took a cab to Trader Vic’s. Jack, a Californian, seemed to find his way around by instinct and we palled around together exploring the city. For some
reason, they were having last call for drinks at 3:00 in the afternoon. Sounded good to us. “Bring us a couple of fog cutters, will you? Better bring a couple of standbys, too.” They were going down mighty easy, the hospitable waiter later managed another round, and we literally staggered back toward the Moana. It was dark and everything was blacked out. Desperate to eat our way out of some of the stupor, we managed to stumble across a darkened street near the hotel to a small cafe featuring tuna fish sandwiches. Unfortunately, it was hopeless. We awoke with terrible hangovers and were supposed to be back to the base for muster. Jack looked at me through blood shot eyes and said, “Hell with them. Hell with the God damn war!” Hours later, we crawled out of bed and into the sunshine, found our way to the Windward Transit, and made our way back to Kaneohe expecting to be “thrown in the hack.” To our amazement, we had not been missed.

  Hawaii was a contradiction. This land of almost indescribable beauty, its foaming breakers, lush tropics and mountains, and skies full of vivid sunsets and stars had become our final training ground:

  Day after day we would hear the beat of many motors, engines cough and roar as our loaded planes strain at the yoke, and crews readied themselves for another mission. We climb aboard, and outside, exhausts flash blue, the wing lights twinkle, and we taxi out, earphones squawk and then a pause — a roar, a shiver, the sudden pull of unleashed power. We climb and the earth recedes, the trees and hills grow small and insignificant, climbing into ever brightening morning skies and winding through as curious clouds watch us pass. We skirt the jagged coastline and see contrasting beaches and verdant mountains unfold mile after mile before us ... — it was hard to imagine what we were really doing here.