Between the school year while I was still at Greenbrier, I landed a summer job helping construct the foundation for a radar tower from which to spot German U-boats that prowled the Atlantic coast off the United States. Whenever I took a break to wipe sweat and arch my aching back, I gazed out to sea across the rollers marching in from the Gulf Stream. I scanned for periscopes or sharklike shapes lurking beneath the surface.
Once when Dad came home on leave from fighting in the South Pacific, he told me about new units called Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) and swimmers who referred to themselves as “Frogmen.” I read an account from the American Civil War about a man who must have been the first American Frogman. On the night of October 23, 1864, Navy Commander William Cushing led a daring commando raid to sink the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle, which dominated the Roanoke River. Raiders sent the ironclad to the bottom, although they blew up their own boat in the process. Two of Cushing’s men drowned and eleven were captured. Cushing swam ashore and hid out until he was able to steal a small skiff to complete his escape.
Why couldn’t commandos also be used against submarines? It was a far-out idea, I conceded that, but still, there had to be unconventional methods of dealing with conventional threats.
At Annapolis, my mind turned down other avenues while my classmates pondered conventional naval tactics of position and counter-position, beach assaults and mass fleet tactics. I read about Merrill’s Marauders, the Swamp Fox and Leathernecks of the Revolutionary War, Devil’s Brigade, the OSS, and, of course, the Alamo Scouts, Rangers, and UDTs. I imagined small bands of trained “special warriors” able to command earth’s elements—sea, land, air—as they infiltrated enemy positions, rescued POWs and hostages, blew up enemy command posts, sank enemy submarines, assassinated terrorists. … Any damned thing.
“Bone? Bone?”
Parr shook me. We were at our desks that evening studying when I found myself staring into space.
I looked at him. “What do you want, asshole?”
That was how best buddies talked to each other.
“So the Prodigal Son is dreaming of launching himself into the world to seek adventure, fame, and fortune? Bone, you know you’re sometimes more like Don Quixote than Admiral Farragut?”
“You’re saying I’m jousting windmills thinking they’re giants?”
“All that’s missing is the Lady Dulcinea and a fat man on a jackass.”
“That makes you either the fat man or the jackass.”
So now fresh ensigns were leaving Bancroft Hall to meet the challenges of the fleet. World War II and the Great Depression were over, the Cold War began after Winston Churchill dubbed the Soviet Union’s communist isolation an “iron curtain,” and America was on a roll. The economy was booming and folks were ready to kick up their heels and get back to the good times like in the Roarin’ Twenties.
President Harry Truman and his “Fair Deal” Program were in the White House after President Roosevelt died in office. In this year of 1949, the first Volkswagen Beetle arrived in the United States, the B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II made the first nonstop around-the-world airplane flight, NATO was formed in Europe, and the “Red Scare” unsettled the nation.
Albert the Monkey became the first primate shot into space, “Tokyo Rose” was convicted of broadcasting propaganda for Japan during the war, Hopalong Cassidy aired on NBC-TV as the first western, Los Angeles received its first recorded snowfall, the last American troops from World War II pulled out of Korea, and Grady the cow got stuck inside an Oklahoma silo.
Over below the bleachers at Memorial Stadium, a group of graduates minus their covers struck up “Navy Blue and Gold,” the Naval Academy’s alma mater.
Four years together by the bay where Severn joins the tide,
And by the service called away we scatter far and wide.
But still when two or three shall meet and old tales be retold,
From low to highest in the fleet, we’ll pledge the Blue and Gold.
The Hamiltons and Parrs waited for Warren and me in the bleachers, Mom wiping her eyes and Frank waving with both hands, one of which clutched my cover. Dad would have been proud of me, whether he was here or not. I could almost see the softening of the lines in his face that made all my academic efforts worthwhile.
As Parr and I worked our way through the wildly celebrating cadets to join our folks, the heavy thunder of an aircraft engine stopped us. Out over the bay, the Academy’s N3N open cockpit seaplane labored low over the water, its gray-blue fuselage and wings gleaming in the sun. The Academy used it in aviation familiarization for midshipmen inclined toward becoming pilots.
“I suppose you’re following your old man’s webbed feet into naval aviation?” Parr said. “You’re going to be a flyer, right?”
The seaplane dropped a wing and turned back toward the upper end of the bay. I watched it until it swept out of sight.
“Yeah,” I said. “Time to give up the windmills and go to work in the real world.”
CHAPTER TWO
AS REQUESTED ON MY “dream sheet,” I received orders on June 30, 1949, for preflight training at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Florida. Parr elected to go with the fleet. The next time I saw him he would be riding a destroyer off Korea in 1952.
By this time, the Cold War, the standoff between communism and what we in the West termed the “Free World,” was into its fourth year. The USSR called off its blockade of West Berlin in May 1949, after nearly a year—during which time the only access the U.S. had to the divided city was by air. America might be on a roll, but the rest of the world was jittery, as though countries were anticipating something dark and uncertain lurking in the future.
“It won’t be long until the Russkies have the Bomb,” the Admiral predicted. Dad had his sources. “We should have listened to George Patton and taken out the Soviets while we had the upper hand. We wouldn’t be in the crap we’re in now if we’d dropped Little Boy on Moscow.”
In August 1945, I was a first-year plebe at Annapolis, a tall, gawky kid with big ears and blue eyes exactly one week away from my eighteenth birthday when the world entered the nuclear age. A senior engineering instructor came into the classroom wearing dress whites, gold braid, and a constipated expression.
Warren Parr leaned across the aisle toward me. “Maybe Commander Murdock ought to loosen his tie and his belt,” he whispered.
Rumors had been circulating through Bancroft Hall since early that morning. It seemed Commander Murdock was about to confirm them; he was dressed for a formal announcement. The classroom fell dead silent as the commander unfolded the morning’s New York Times and, without preamble, read a statement issued by President Harry Truman:
Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam,” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.…
It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. … We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. … If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.
I called Mom as soon as I could; it took me about an hour to get through to Norfolk. All the lines were tied up by relatives of sailors, soldiers, Marines, and airmen telephoning around trying to pick up some news about their loved ones in the Pacific.
“Your dad is in London, last I heard,” Mom reported.
“He wasn’t flying?”
“I rang Buck at the Pentagon. He told me there were no reports of U.S. casualties. Don’t worry, darling. Your dad’s a tough old bird. You’ll
be just like him.”
Japan announced her surrender after one more bomb and my eighteenth birthday. Germany had capitulated on May 8. World War II was over. The Admiral and all the other “boys” would be coming home.
I later looked upon the construction of the atom bomb and its employment against Japan as a major influence in developing my viewpoint on limited war. Dropping “the Bomb” was necessary in order to save American lives that would be lost in an invasion of Japan, including possibly the life of my own father. Still, as the Cold War advanced into a bomb-rattling standoff between the “Iron Curtain” countries and the “Free World,” I began to consider the threat of nuclear war too awful to contemplate.
“There must be an alternative,” I insisted to Parr and some of our midshipmen buddies. “There has to be.”
Parr shrugged. “Like the super warriors you’re always talking about?”
“So the alternative is for nations to go around killing off each other to let God sort ’em out?”
Call me a softie, but I was profoundly touched by accounts of how children, women, and the elderly suffered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombs killed about 130,000 people, a toll almost incomprehensible in only two explosions. A piece I read about Toshika Saeki personalized that number, brought it down to where you could imagine something like that happening to your mother or your aunt, your girlfriend, sister, or wife if circumstances had been reversed and Japan and Germany got the Bomb first.
Toshiko Saeki lived on the outskirts of Hiroshima with her children while her husband, like husbands in the United States, was away fighting. She looked up and saw two enemy airplanes flying so high over the city that no anti-aircraft guns fired on them.
“There came a flash of light. I can’t describe what it was like. … I lay flat on the ground, trying to escape from the heat. I forgot all about my children for a moment. Then, there came a big sound, sliding wooden doors and windows were blown off into the air. I turned around to see what had happened to the house, and at one part of the ceiling, it was hanging in the air. At some parts, the ceiling was caved in, burying my sister’s child and my child as well.”
Thirteen of her family members were killed instantly.
“I couldn’t identify people by their faces. Trying to find my family, I had to take a look at their clothing. … I couldn’t find any of my family, so I went to the playground. There were four piles of bodies and I stood in front of them. … If I tried to find my beloved ones, I would have to remove the bodies one by one.”
Reaction in America to the devastation was mixed. Most accepted it as necessary, a human anomaly that ended the war, saved lives, and would never be used again. Others became frightened and uneasy about their personal fortunes and mankind’s ultimate fate.
“It looks as if humanity is moving inexorably toward Armageddon and into the limbo of forgotten things,” they said. “An oblivion of our own making … and this time destiny plays for keeps.”
Others were more optimistic. “This menace can turn into the most powerful deterrent to future wars of aggression.”
No one was even thinking of such consequences in October 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor, when President Franklin Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. Scientists had already discovered the secret of fission and the power it unleashed. Roosevelt appointed Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr. director of what became known as the Manhattan Project. Groves in turn selected a brilliant theoretical physicist from the University of California, Berkeley, to head the project’s secret weapons lab. J. Robert Oppenheimer was thirty-eight years old, emaciated at 125 pounds, and had a chronic cough.
Three years later, on July 16, 1945, he oversaw the world’s first test explosion of an atom bomb. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell was among 425 observers who waited for code-name “Trinity” to go off in the predawn of the Jornada del Muerto desert on the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico. The desert’s name, ironically, can be translated as “Journey of Death.”
Farrell waited with Oppenheimer in the control bunker during the countdown.
“Doctor Oppenheimer,” he recalled, “grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted ‘Now!’ and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growing roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief. The damned thing actually worked!”
“Trinity” exploded with the equivalent of twenty kilotons of TNT. It left a crater in the desert five feet deep and thirty feet wide. People felt the shock wave over a hundred miles away as the mushroom cloud, which soon became the symbol of mankind’s doom, rose to a height of seven and a half miles.
“The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” Farrell said. “It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.”
Oppenheimer’s reaction became gravely famous: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
Nazi Germany might well have dropped the first bomb on the Allies had the timeline been somewhat altered. In 1939, only months after the discovery of nuclear fission, Hitler approved a clandestine scientific effort to develop atomic weapons. The war might well have ended quite differently had not events turned against him before his program matured.
Russia likewise had entered the nuclear race. Only five months after Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, a Soviet nuclear physicist named Georgy Flyorov wrote a letter to Josef Stalin warning him that the U.S., Britain, and Canada were conducting scientific research on the atom, the results of which “will be so overriding [that] it won’t be necessary to determine who is to blame for the fact that this work has been neglected in our country.”
Stalin launched a Soviet program of his own to build a weapon, which proved initially unsuccessful. At the end of the war, allies began scrambling all over Austria and Germany to identify and exploit Germany’s nuclear research. The United States and Britain brought 1,500 scientists, technicians, and engineers to the West to continue their work. Stalin did the same sort of “requisitioning” for the Soviet Union.
Aided by his seizure of Nazi scientists and by a communist spy ring operating inside the Manhattan Project, and spurred on by desperation in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin quietly accelerated his research and development. Military nuclear reactors and research facilities sprouted up all over the USSR. United States intelligence warned that the Soviets were on the verge of a breakthrough that could upset the balance of Cold War power and threaten all mankind well into the future.
Dad said World War III would last less than thirty days.
By now I had begun the twenty-two-week primary training program for naval pilots at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, the successful completion of which led on to training in props, helicopters, or jets, the latter of which were just coming online in numbers.
NAS Pensacola was my first active duty station. It was just as I remembered it from when I was a kid bouncing around all over the Navy following Dad: white-painted World War II barracks, classroom buildings, hangars, and other construction, all seemingly presided over by lawned BOQ quarters and stately officers’ and senior enlisted family housing on North Avenue, some of which had been built shortly after the Civil War. Everything was clean and orderly and dress-right-dress squared. The sun reflected off the wings of trainer aircraft as advanced students made touch-and-gos or practiced carrier landings on the runways.
Everything was as bright as the Florida sun in the aspirations of young naval aviators at the start of our careers.
Ground school came first. Actual flying followed later. We future aviators filled our days in classroom studies of engineering, aerodynamics, air navigation, aviation physiology, basic instruments. … In little groups, like chicks trailing after a mother hen, we gathered around our instructor and the blue-gray stubby SNJ trainers on nearby Whiting Field and went over pre-flight and start-up procedures. We were even allowed to sit in the cockpit and buckle in. I lifted my head so I saw nothing but sky through the top of the canopy and pretended I was soaring at 10,000 feet, patrolling for bogies. Ace Hamilton, fighter pilot.
The United States had no active enemy at that moment, a condition of relative peace in a world pausing to catch its breath after the latest championship bout. Such a state wouldn’t last long if the Admiral was right—and he was always more right than wrong. War, not peace, was the natural condition of mankind.
I chafed to get on with it and move out into the fleet and test my wings on an aircraft carrier. Mom always said I had the patience of a hungry vulture: “Patience, hell! Let’s go kill something!”
For me it had to be jets.
Evenings, some of us got together after study time and caroused over to the O Club to sip a sud or two, smoke cigarettes, and trade scuttlebutt. Classmate Lieutenant (junior grade) “Rico” Rifkin and I hit the books until after dark on August 28, 1949, a date memorable in that it was the night before the world changed again, even more significantly than it did after Fat Man and Little Boy fell on Japan.
Rifkin knocked on my door. “Let’s go, Bone Head. I hear a beer calling your name.”
The night was exceptionally warm, the dog days of summer when the snowbirds up north stayed home and waited for the weather to cool before their annual migration to Florida to lie on the beaches, sip mint juleps, and complain about high taxes.
A first-phaser named Collins joined us. He was a wide-shouldered kid with black cropped hair and a temper to go with his crooked nose. We discovered the O Club full of second-phase students training to become helicopter pilots.
Night Fighter Page 2
