Stand BY-Y-Y to Start Engines

by Daniel V Gallery

  OTHER BOOKS BY ADMIRAL GALLERY

  Away Boarders

  Cap'n Fatso

  The Pueblo Incident

  The Brink

  U-505

  (Original Title: Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea)

  Stand By-y-y To Start Engines

  Eight Bells

  (Original title: Eight Bells and All's Well)

  Clear the Decks

  Now, Hear This!

  Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea

  We Captured a U-Boat

  By the author of Now, Hear This! and Clear the Decks STAND BY-Y-Y TO START ENGINES "STARTS OUT ON A RIB-SPLITTING NOTE, AND GETS FUNNIER WITH EACH CHAPTER." (Palm Beach Post Times)

  "Hilarious tall tales about our present-day Navy. ... A truly funny book which moves along at a fast pace, except that now and again the reader has to stop and laugh out loud.... A whale of a story." (Charleston, S.C. News and Courier)

  "Rousing, robust, hilarious...." (Bridgeton, N.Y. News)

  "If you enjoyed NOW, HEAR THIS! ... you will have a hard time putting down ... STAND BY-Y-Y TO START ENGINES." (Shipmate)

  "THIS NEW ONE REALLY TOPS THEM ALL." (The Virginia-Pilot)

  "A HILARIOUS STORY OF LIFE AT SEA..." (Henry, III, News-Republican)

  "... button-busting laughter... the third side-splitting book by Gallery, and his funniest." (Florida Times-Union)

  "It is worth reading, particularly for old salts. Even old salts who have never been to sea." (The Providence Journal) "... riotous adventures..." (St. Paul Pioneer Press)

  "...THE SALTIEST AND CERTAINLY THE FUNNIEST WRITER ON WARSHIP LIFE IS REAR ADM. DAN GALLERY..." (Chicago Tribune)

  STAND BY-Y-Y

  TO START ENGINES

  Daniel V. Gallery

  Rear Admiral Daniel Vincent Gallery, U.S.N. (Ret.)

  July 10, 1901 to January 16, 1977

  Buried at: Section 4 Site 61-3

  Arlington National Cemetery

  PAPERBACK LIBRARY, INC.

  NEW YORK

  PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

  First Printing: May, 1967

  Copyright © 1966 by Daniel V. Gallery

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-11645

  Portions of this book have appeared previously in:

  Argosy, Nation's Business, and The Saturday Evening Post

  This Paperback Library Edition is published by arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Paperback Library books are published by Paperback Library, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Paperback Library and associated distinctive design, is registered in the United States Patent Office. Paperback Library, Inc., 260 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  In Memory of

  Commander M. L. Horner, U.S.N.R.

  Table of Contents

  Hanky-panky Aloft 6

  Loose Nut 18

  Maniac At Large 24

  Night Fighter 33

  Rescue Mission 41

  Ensign Willy Wigglesworth 49

  Very Deep Stuff 63

  More Deep Stuff 78

  Willy Wigglesworth And The Press 88

  Much Ado About Nothing 103

  Wired For Sound 113

  Willy's Mission To Moscow 121

  FOREWORD

  It is unfair to struggling authors to lend books.

  If you like this one, after you have read it, lock it up in a safe place or burn it. Then tell your friends about it, and direct them to the nearest reputable book shop.

  D.V.G.

  Chapter One

  HANKY-PANKY ALOFT

  Lieutenant commander "Curly" Cue, cruising at 10,000 feet, sang softly to himself as he led the Navy's famous Blue Angels stunt team down the West Coast toward San Diego.

  We're intrepid birdmen who roam thru the sky,

  We fly 'em down low and we fly 'em up high,

  We spin 'em, we roll 'em, we fly upside down,

  We never drink likker except on the ground...

  Curly was, of course, an ace blowtorch jockey. The only thing he would rather do than fly was to play harmless practical jokes on all who came within his orbit. At least Curly thought they were harmless. Like the time he smeared a little glue in the foam rubber lining of a friend's helmet just before a four-hour flight. When they got back the doctors had to trepan the helmet and shave his pal's head. Or when he put a small box of bumblebees in the cockpit of a squadron mate's jet plane, the box being rigged so it would pop open when the plane was catapulted. Fliers get extra pay for hazardous duty, but all Curly's shipmates figured they were doing extra hazardous duty.

  The six Blue Angels were flying what was, for them, a loose formation, cruising between two layers of cloud. For many miles along the coast that day there was a high overcast and low undercast separated by about 6000 feet. Between layers, horizontal visibility was ten miles. But you were on instruments in there because the layers seemed to merge in the distance and there was no horizon whatever. You were flying in the center of what seemed to be a huge gray sphere that looked the same in all directions.

  Suddenly Curly's roving eye spotted a big Navy seaplane some miles ahead and several thousand feet lower, coming in the opposite direction. Curly had been hoping they would meet somebody coming the other way that morning. The prevailing weather suggested to his alert mind the possibility for an interesting psychological experiment.

  He squeezed the button on his stick and said into his microphone, "Wake up, you guys. There's work to be done."

  His five teammates all waggled their wings, showing they had shifted their brains out of neutral and were no longer asleep.

  "We are going to inverted flight for a while," announced Curly. "Rolling to the right. Acknowledge."

  Five matter-of-fact "rajahs" came back, indicating only mild surprise. When you flew behind Curly anything could happen, and usually did. And, of course, the Blue Angels are just as relaxed upside down in formation on instruments as they are any other way. As the last "rajah" came in, Curly and his boys rolled bottoms up and flew that way for the next few minutes.

  We take you now to the cockpit of the patrol plane. In the co-pilot's seat is Rear Admiral "Windy" Day, old-time Navy pilot who had been one of the best in his younger days and was still pretty good. The pilot's seat is empty at this moment, the pilot having just gone aft to the gents' can.

  The plane was on autopilot and the Admiral was scanning the instruments with a practiced eye, noting that all was well. Every now and then he scanned the sky around him, too, as all alert fliers do, especially older ones.

  He spotted the approaching jets when they were still mere specks, noted that he was headed right at them, but they would pass several thousand feet overhead. The jets were much smaller than his plane, so he didn't see them until nearly a minute after Curly had spotted him. The planes were closing at almost nine miles a minute.

  Soon Admiral Day began to have an uneasy feeling. There seemed to be something funny about the formation ahead. All of a sudden it hit him - they all looked as though they were flying upside down. By George, they were flying upside down... or else HE was!

  Day shot a glance at his gyro horizon and saw no sign that it had tumbled. Instinctively he looked out to check the horizon and, of course, there wasn't any. True, he should have realized he was not hanging in his seat belt, but when the vertical seems to have suddenly flipped 180°, you don't always think logically and clearly.

  In that empty gray sphere there was no way whatever to tell which way was up except by the gyro horizons of the various planes. Squadrons of jet fighters don't usually cruise around upside down on instruments, so the Gallup poll on "which way was
up" seemed to be 6 to 1 against him. Admiral Day suffered a brief attack of the screaming meemies and his own personal vertical tumbled.

  He slapped the autopilot switch to the "off" position, grabbed the yoke, and began trying to horse that big flying boat over on its back to match the vertical indicated by the jets. In just a few seconds the first pilot came scrambling back to the cockpit, hauling his pants up as he ran, took over the controls and resumed level flight.

  Meantime Curly's formation, now flying right side up, circled the patrol plane, waggling their wings in a friendly manner and doing a slow roll to salute their big boat compatriots before buzzing off to the south.

  As they disappeared, the pilot said to Admiral Day, "The Blue Angels, sir. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander Cue, is quite a practical joker."

  "Harrumph," said Admiral Day, and tacked on a string of pithy observations which cannot be repeated here.

  Of course the story was all over North Island minutes after the Blue Angels landed there. It didn't suffer any in the telling, and although the flying boat never got more than about 45° off the vertical, Curly and his boys had it doing snap rolls all over the sky. Immediately after the seaplane landed in San Francisco, the pilot, to protect his professional reputation, flashed word south through the fly-boys' underground that the Admiral was at the controls when this incident happened. That made it all the better. It became a permanent part of U.S. Navy folklore.

  Next day Curly and his boys flew back to their home base in Pensacola and things went back to normal on the West Coast for a while.

  A week later high over Pensacola four training planes droned back and forth doing some simple maneuvers. Three cadets were sweating out their final check in formation flying. The cadets were in a loose V, and the fourth plane, flown by an instructor, was tagging along not far behind.

  These lads had only about two months' flying behind them and were pretty green. For them, each flight was still an adventure. In the chase plane behind them the bored instructor told them by radio what to do and what a sloppy job they made of trying to do it.

  The cadets were having a Bad Time this morning. They always did when Lieutenant Percy Peabody was in the chase plane. Student pilots are bold, eager lads who accept the risks of learning to fly for a paltry 50 percent extra pay and the coveted gold wings they will get if they make the grade. But they all figured they ought to get a campaign ribbon too whenever they went out with Lieutenant Percy Peabody.

  Percy was a frustrated jet pilot who thought it was a sad waste of flying talent for him to be teaching kindergarten classes. He came to Pensacola for shore duty from a fighter squadron expecting to join the Blue Angels, and figuring this would be a big break for that famed elite group. But for one reason or another (mainly because he was Percy Peabody) he got thumbs down from that famous Navy team of precision stunt pilots. Instead, he wound up instructing cadets in primary flight school. This is a terrible comedown from performing amazing feats of airmanship and being wined and dined all over the country as the Blue Angels are. It rankled what Percy had where his heart should have been. As a result he hated cadets as a hen hates sharp-cornered eggs, and vented his spleen on them whenever he got a chance. He was at his nasty best this morning, arid his pupils were being brainwashed.

  "Come on there, No. 3," he sneered into the mike, "close up. You're twenty feet too far out. Whassa matter, sister? Ya scared? Get in there where, ya belong."

  "Roger. Wilco," replied No. 3 and eased in a little closer to the leader.

  "Aw right now," growled Percy when No. 3 was in position. "Lemme see you go into right echelon."

  The leader rogered, made a hand signal, and when his pals had acknowledged, wiggled his wings in the execute signal. Number 2 plane slowed down, pulled up a little, slid over to his right, and dropped into place on No. 3's starboard quarter, putting the three planes in a diagonal line to the right. It was a well-executed maneuver. Not even Lieutenant Peabody could find anything wrong with it.

  But the Lieutenant had to have something to squawk about, he set a booby trap. He squeezed his mike button and said, "Make a ninety-degree right turn."

  "Right turn?" asked the leader.

  "That's what I said," replied Percy.

  "Roger," said the leader, and banked gingerly into a shallow turn to the right.

  Turning right, against the echelon, No. 2 and 3 planes began to close in on the leader and had to throttle way back and slow down to avoid jamming up.

  "Straighten out! Straighten out!" snarled Peabody as No. 3 began to wobble on the verge of a stall. "What the hell's the idea of turning against the echelon? Any dumb cluck oughta know better than that."

  "But, sir, you told me to," said the leader.

  "So what?" demanded Peabody. "Don't alibi. If I told you to fly into a mountain, would you do it? When guys like you crack up, they find blood all over in the crash but no brains. Never turn against the echelon. If you wanna go right, put 'em in left echelon before you start the turn. Were you just born stupid or did you have to study to get that way?"

  And so it went for the next half hour, with Peabody hazing his pupils real good, and keeping them on the verge of what he called "nervous prostitution." By the time they landed the three angry, sweating cadets were almost ready to .forget about flying and put in for submarines.

  Going back that afternoon from Corry Field to the BOQ at Main Side, Percy spotted a car on the road ahead, driven by a sailor, with the Blue Angels insignia on it. A gleam came into the Lieutenant's eye as he throttled down to stay behind. He trailed the car for a while, checking its speed carefully and hoping the unsuspecting sailor would do something wrong. But he didn't. Finally Peabody gave her the gun, passed him, and shot a glance at the driver as he did so. Then he pulled over to the side of the road motioning to the sailor to stop.

  The Lieutenant walked back to the sailor's car and said, "Lemme see your driver's license, sailor."

  The sailor produced his license and said, "What did I do wrong, sir?"

  Peabody ignored the question. He inspected the driver's carefully, but could find nothing wrong with it. Then he said, "Kennedy, you're on the report for being out of uniform."

  "I... I don't understand, sir," said Kennedy.

  "Don't you know there's a station order out about wearing proper naval uniform whenever you're off station limits?"

  "I am in uniform, sir," said Kennedy, unzipping the coveralls he was wearing and showing a blue jumper beneath.

  "No, you're not," said Lieutenant Peabody "That coverall is uniform only in the hanger or on the flight line. You can't wear it off the station and a first-class petty officer oughta know that."

  "But, sir, I'm just driving back to the barracks at Main Side," said Kennedy. "I been doing this every day for months."

  "Then you've been out of uniform every day. You're on the report." Peabody scribbled the sailor's name and rate in a notebook, strode back to his car, and drove off.

  Kennedy was stunned. Everybody wore coveralls driving to and from Corry Field. That station order was meant to apply only to men on liberty.

  Of course "out of uniform" wasn't exactly a flogging offense. He probably wouldn't get anything worse than a warning out of it. But getting put on the report is always a pain in the neck. It means going through the rigmarole of appearing at mast with a lot of ne'er-do-wells who are always in trouble, and losing a whole day's work on your plane while doing it, to say nothing of losing maybe a week's liberty waiting to appear. And even a warning goes into your record as a black mark against you.

  Kennedy sat there fuming until the Lieutenant drove off and then burst out with a blast of comments on Lieutenant Peabody's ancestry couched in language that it takes years of sea duty to learn. His observations cast serious doubt on the morals of the Lieutenant's whole family and indicated that he had probably sat in church scratching himself while his parents were getting married.

  In the officers' club that night Lieutenant Curly Cue, and two of his
Blue Angel teammates, Jim and Joe, were seated at a table swapping lies about their flying adventures. Curly was explaining a stunt he claimed he had performed recently which Jim and Joe knew very well was impossible even for ... or at least almost impossible for anyone except maybe Curly. Palms were extended and twisted this way and that, and elbows were cocked uas they always are when a group of pilots get 'em out of the hanger after hours in a bar. Curly had his right arm twisted like a pretzel and his shoulder almost out of joint trying to show how he had done a Cuban Eight with aileron rolls mixed up in it