Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  The navy’s primary training aircraft was the Boeing-Stearman N2S, an open cockpit biplane covered with bright yellow fabric. It was known by its nickname, the “Yellow Peril.” It had two cockpits, fore and aft. The instructor sat in front and spoke to the student, to his rear, through a one-way communication line called a “gosport.” In the air, the instructor demonstrated basic maneuvers—stalls, recoveries, spins, glides, climbing, and diving. Then he let the cadet take control of the plane and shouted instructions through the gosport. Matt Portz recalled the instructor’s monologue as he took the control stick for the first time: “You’re climbing too slow. Get that nose down. Stop making flat turns. Do you want to spin us in? Your control work is jerky. How come you don’t have any confidence?”40 Since the device did not allow the cadet to speak back to the instructor, he could not ask questions or offer excuses.

  The Stearman was a forgiving machine, easy to fly—but it was also acrobatic enough to perform the basic maneuvers a pilot would need to handle a fighter, including loops, wingovers, snap rolls, Immelmanns, split-S’s, and the “falling leaf.” Cadets practiced precision turns by flying a figure-eight pattern around two pylons spaced in a field, maintaining an altitude of just 500 feet. This taught them how to bank sharply without losing altitude, a vital skill for any aviator. They learned to land in a strong crosswind. And so it went on, one flight after another. After ten or twenty flights, the cadet was permitted to solo for the first time. It was a milestone that none would ever forget.

  Russell Baker, an eighteen-year-old from Baltimore (and a future New York Times columnist), was told that flying an airplane was like driving a car. Baker had never driven a car, but he did not dare to admit it, fearing that the instructor would think less of him, or perhaps even expel him from the program. Later, after a bumpy flight in the Stearman, the instructor told him to ease up on the control stick. “Baker,” he said, “it’s just like handling a girl’s breast. You’ve got to be gentle.” Baker did not dare to admit that he had never touched a woman’s breast, either.41

  As the weeks passed, the ranks of the aviation cadets were steadily thinned. Some concluded that flying was not for them, and asked to be transferred to another officer training program. Others were killed in crashes. Many more were washed out by the instructors. Washouts left quickly and quietly, usually without saying good-bye to their fellow cadets. To do so would be awkward, recalled one: “It was too embarrassing for both of us.”42

  Survivors advanced into secondary flight training, where they flew in progressively more advanced training planes. The North American SNJ “Texan” and the Vultee SNV “Vibrator” were low-wing closed-canopy airplanes that looked and performed almost like service aircraft. Compared to the “Yellow Peril,” they were more demanding and dangerous. “Everything happened at higher speeds,” Bill Davis said, “and everything happened faster, with much less room for error.”43 In these intermediate trainers the cadets were introduced to basic bombing tactics, dogfighting, and gunnery. They shot at target sleeves towed by another aircraft. They acclimated to dogfighting in a device called the Simulated Aerial Combat Machine, which Samuel Hynes compared to “a booth at a fun fair.” It consisted of a mock-up of a cockpit facing a movie screen, on which was projected film footage of attacking enemy planes. As the cadet moved his control stick, the planes on the screen moved. When one swam into the crosshairs, the cadet pulled the trigger and was rewarded by a bell indicating a “hit.” To Hynes, it made “the business of shooting men out of the sky seem a harmless game of skill, something you might do in a pinball palace to pass the time, and win a Kewpie doll.”44

  The cadets were first introduced to instrument flying on the ground, in an early flight simulator called the Link Trainer. This involved climbing into the “Iron Maiden,” a stifling, claustrophobic cavity designed to resemble a cockpit. A lid was closed on the cadet from above. He used simulated controls and monitored simulated aircraft instruments. The instructor, talking through a gosport, told him to fly designated courses and altitudes. His performance was measured by a primitive computer that spat out pages of data. Natural pilots who had excelled in previous training flights were sometimes disoriented in the motionless Link, which provided no sense of “feel” in flight. But it was critical to master the art of flying by instruments alone, because every naval aviator would sooner or later fly at night, or in zero visibility weather. They learned to trust their instruments—airspeed, altimeter, compass, attitude indicator, needle and ball. They learned how to “fly the beam”—that is, to follow navigational beacons to a destination. Later, their skills were tested in flight by flying “under the hood.” A canvas curtain was drawn around the canopy of a training aircraft, so that the pilot could not see outside, and he was forced to fly the plane using his instruments alone. Many found this drill to be a holy terror. Smyth said that his first such flight was like “trying to balance a beach ball on the tip of a stick.”45

  After nearly a year of hard work, cadets were awarded their coveted gold wings. They stood in ranks on a quadrangle at Pensacola, while an admiral came down the line and pinned the wings to each man’s starched white blouse. They were commissioned as ensigns. Now they could properly call themselves naval aviators. It was an important milestone, but it was not the end of their training. In 1944, newly “winged” aviators would fly another three hundred to four hundred hours with an advanced carrier training group (ACTG) before being deployed to a frontline unit. Many were sent to Opa Locka Field, northwest of Miami, “an area of sand, scrub brush, and rattlesnakes under a blazing tropical sun.”46 They flew service-type planes—Hellcats, Helldivers, Corsairs—the same machines they would fly in combat. For the first time, they trained with veteran pilots recently back from the fleet. They practiced formation flying, gunnery, bombing, night flying, and overwater navigation. Dive bombing tactics were refined by dropping smoke bombs on a plywood bull’s-eye deep in the heart of the Everglades. They were told not to use the radio except in dire circumstances—“Stay off the air!”—and learned an elaborate hand signaling system so that they could communicate using visual cues from cockpit to cockpit.

  Most ACTG air group and squadron leaders were veterans of carrier operations in the Pacific. They knew the ordeals and challenges the rookies would face when deployed to the fleet. “We flew and flew and flew,” said Hamilton McWhorter, a famous Hellcat ace who returned to the United States to lead a fighter squadron in Air Group Twelve, a full composite carrier group in training. “If my students were catching on, then we flew some more. And after they caught on, we flew some more anyway—lots of formation tactics, and air-to-air and air-to-ground gunnery, some instruments and night work, and, of course, dogfighting and the usual tail chases on the way back to the airfield.”47

  Air Group Twelve was stationed for several weeks at Naval Air Station Astoria, on the Oregon coast. Most mornings, the planes took off in “zero-zero” conditions: solid fog. They climbed through an opaque white gloom, peering ahead for a glimpse of the faint blue exhaust flames on the plane ahead. At 4,000 feet they emerged suddenly into a bright sunlit sky, with a carpet of white, fleecy clouds beneath them. That sort of flying could put gray hair on a young man’s head, and it often did. But as McWhorter never tired of telling them, it was the kind of flying they would do in the Pacific war zones. There would be mornings when the carrier task force was wrapped in impenetrable murk. There would be days when the pilot would have to rely on his instruments or a homing beacon, because he could see nothing through his windshield. There would be late-afternoon flights when he would have to return at dusk, eyes peeled for a darkened flight deck, as his fuel needle bounced on empty. There would be flights when he was bone-weary, nodding off in the cockpit, and flights when he would have to find his way home in a shot-up airplane, perhaps while injured and bleeding. His training would give him the skills and instincts he needed to face those coming trials.

  The young pilots often broke regulations, sometimes with the taci
t approval of their leaders. “Flathatting”—flying very low to the ground—was prohibited by standing regulations, especially in populated civilian areas. But in wartime, especially, many aviators flouted the prohibition. Navy planes flying from NAS Corpus Christi flew low over the nearby King Ranch, driving herds of cattle, while the cowboys shook their fists. In Southern California, flathatting flyers flew ten or fifteen feet over beaches, or down the centerlines of highways, sometimes forcing motorists off the road. The rookies quickly adopted the after-hours habits of the more senior aviators, which meant heavy drinking and late nights at local bars and nightclubs. The dive-bomber pilot James W. Vernon did his advanced training at Naval Air Station Wildwood, near the southern end of the New Jersey shore. The experience was a blur of flying and partying in the nearby beach town, with the “phony exhilaration of booze, smoke-filled clubs, inane talk, sloppy dancing, clumsy caressing, tacky hotel rooms, empty late-night streets, roaring hangovers, and worries about VD. . . . It must have had something to do with hormones and peer group approval that made us squirm so pathetically in the sweaty grip of war.”48 He and his fellow pilots routinely slept only three or four hours before awakening to 0600 reveille. Breathing pure oxygen through their cockpit masks helped relieve the throbbing pain in their heads.

  Venereal diseases hit the advanced pilot training squadrons especially hard. Medical authorities distributed films exhorting servicemen to practice safe sex. Bill Davis especially liked one entitled: “Flies Breed Germs, Keep Yours Closed.” In it, a doctor informs a sailor that he has contracted venereal disease. “I must have gotten it in a public toilet,” said the sailor. “That’s a hell of a place to take a date,” replied the doctor.49

  In early 1945, as victory loomed, many young aviators in training squadrons were frantic to get into the war. They feared a sudden peace that would spoil their chances of flying in combat. The veterans told them that their zeal would fade after three or four weeks of continuous daily combat flying; the syndrome known as pilot fatigue was real and universal. Flying was a job; it was work. The cockpit was often an inhospitable place, too hot or too cold. A man forced to sit for hours grew cramped and uncomfortable. Flying required sustained concentration, and the mental strain took a toll. The persistent nearness of death ate away at their nerves. Even so, the most jaded pilot was occasionally reminded of why he had wanted to fly in the first place. For Samuel Hynes, one such moment came during a training flight at dusk, when the ground below fell into shadow: “The surface of the plane seemed to absorb and hold the light and color of the sunset; brightness surrounded me. It was as though the earth had died, and I alone was left alive. A sense of my own aliveness filled me. I would never die. I would go on flying forever.”50

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1945, the Third Fleet was back at sea again, northbound from Ulithi Atoll. Its mission was familiar—yet another round of carrier strikes on the archipelago of islands lying between Japan and the Philippines, this time in support of MacArthur’s planned invasion of Luzon on January 9. The objective was to isolate the beachhead at Lingayen Gulf by disrupting the flow of air reinforcements from Japan into the combat zone. Photoreconnaissance planes would take thousands of high- and oblique-angle photographs of Okinawa, to be used in planning the forthcoming invasion of that island, to begin in three months’ time.

  On January 3 and 4, dirty weather made for abysmal visibility over Formosa, so Admiral McCain cancelled about half of the planned strikes on the island. Returning pilots described it as some of the worst flying weather they had ever encountered. Lieutenant William A. Bell, an air intelligence officer on the Essex, noted “sinister grey clouds as thick as pudding from 700 feet altitude to 10,000 feet, rain squalls everywhere, and a slate-colored, wind-whipped sea.”51 Operational losses were heavy; Task Force 38 lost twenty-eight planes on January 7 alone. But the airmen kept at it, bombing and strafing airfields on Formosa, Luzon, and the Pescadores Islands.52

  Down in Lingayen Gulf, MacArthur’s bombardment and minesweeping groups were fighting off waves of kamikazes, and the SWPA chief repeatedly urged Halsey to suppress the threat. Aerial photos exposed the source of the deadly attacks: the Japanese had gone to extraordinary lengths to camouflage their planes on the ground, concealing them under foliage and brush, and parking them miles away from the airfields. January 7, 8, and 9 were long, busy days for the carrier force, with pilots making as many as four “hops” each day, and flying audacious treetop-altitude search-and-strafing runs over central and northern Luzon.

  Since taking command of the Third Fleet in August, Halsey had been hoping to lead a carrier raid into the South China Sea, west of the Philippines. He expected to find a wealth of high-value targets in harbors along the coasts of south China and Indochina (Vietnam). No Allied warships except submarines had dared enter those waters since December 1941, when the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse had been sunk by Japanese air attack off the coast of Malaya. In October and again in November 1944, Halsey had asked for permission to enter the South China Sea, but Nimitz and King had deemed it too risky. (Halsey was right when he said: “I am afraid that my superiors worried about my judgment in the presence of a juicy target.”53) Now Halsey renewed the request. He was especially keen to destroy two older Japanese battleships, the Ise and Hyuga, believed to be at anchor in Camranh Bay, Indochina. Nimitz finally assented.

  Late on January 9, the same day that MacArthur’s troops went ashore on Luzon, Task Force 38 passed through the Bashi Channel, south of Formosa. This route took the great fleet only 80 miles south of Koshun Airfield, a major Japanese base in southern Formosa. At the same time, a logistics fleet, comprising thirty fleet oilers with escorting CVEs, destroyers, and ammunition ships, passed through the Balintang Channel, the second of the two main navigable passages through the chain of islands between Luzon and Formosa. Neither force was detected by the enemy. As the sun rose on January 10, the main striking force of the U.S. Navy was in the heart of the South China Sea, an enclosed body of water surrounded on all sides by enemy air and naval bases. The fleet’s situation, Halsey later wrote, was “extremely ticklish,” because Japanese planes could attack from any direction, or several directions simultaneously. Task Force 38 was amply capable of defending itself, but Halsey also had to worry about the vulnerable logistics fleet train. On the other hand, from this position the U.S. carriers could launch powerful airstrikes in any direction, hitting targets that had been untouchable for nearly three years.

  After topping off fuel, the force began a high-speed overnight run toward the coast of Indochina. Halsey flashed a message to the aviators: “You know what to do. Give them hell. God bless you all. Halsey.”54 The next morning, more than a thousand carrier planes laid waste to targets between Camranh Bay and Saigon. They pulverized airfields, destroyed planes on the ground, knocked out bridges, derailed and overturned freight trains, bombed wharves, warehouses, and fuel dumps, and sank enemy ships at their moorings. A convoy of eleven unescorted Japanese merchantmen was caught in open water near Cap Saint-Jacques (Vung Tau), and all were sunk. No fighter planes rose to intercept the incoming strikes, and antiaircraft fire was negligible; it appears that the Japanese in the region were caught completely by surprise. Aerial photographs depicted a panorama of destruction along the coast—according to Lieutenant Bell’s diary: “Flaming, smoking vessels everywhere you look. Sunken vessels, too, their masts and stacks jutting from the calm water. Or lying on their sides in death.”55 The Ise and Hyuga had left for Singapore two weeks earlier, but the day’s score was good enough that Halsey did not mind. Local Free French agents later reported that the airstrikes sank forty-one ships of 127,000 tons, damaged twenty-eight ships of 70,000 tons, and turned the entire coast into “a shambles.”56

  This was the height of the northeast monsoon season, and the weather was turning ugly. The sky was hazy, the seas were rough, and a gale-force wind blew out of the north. After the ordeal of the typhoon three weeks earlier, Halsey and his subordinates were
inclined to be cautious. As the task force withdrew from Indochina, it slowed to 16 knots in order to prevent storm damage. The destroyers were low on fuel, and would have to top off before the next round of strikes against the China coast. But fueling was downright dangerous in those conditions. Coming alongside the fleet oilers, the destroyers pitched like seesaws. Their bows reared up high, exposing thirty or forty feet of their keels—and then they crashed down into the troughs of the oncoming seas, their propellers exposed to view, ejecting sheets of spray, green water sloshing over their decks and pouring in jets through their scuppers. Drenched crewmen hung on like rodeo bullriders. Watching the unnerving scene, Admiral Radford was thankful to be aboard a 27,500-ton fleet carrier. Lieutenant Bell, watching from the flight deck of the Essex, noted that the little ships rolled so far from side to side that “it seemed as if their masts, swaying like poplars in a gale, would dip into the turbulent water.”57