I spent three and a half more years in the navy, flying off carriers in the Pacific and later the Atlantic. I really enjoyed those years. I cannot think of a finer way for a young man to spend his early manhood, particularly as a bachelor. I made one major cruise around the world on a small jeep carrier and another to China and Japan on our air group’s big carrier.
The round-the-world cruise involved a secret mission to photograph from the air the beaches around the entire Persian Gulf. I volunteered for this mission. We spent about a week completing the task because we had only nine airplanes. The cover for the mission involved ferrying a shipload of trainer aircraft to Turkey. Interspersed with the trainers on the ship were nine photographic aircraft that were subsequently used for the photo mission. Someone had a lot of foresight, since this mission took place in 1948. He must have known that area would eventually become a hot spot.
We were not very well received in the Arab world at that time. Israel had just been granted its sovereignty and Americans were blamed for giving the Jews Arab land. That trip to the Persian Gulf was like a trip back in time to the days of the “Arabian Nights.” Slavery was still practiced in parts of that area. People were actually being sold. I spent some time ashore on Bahrain Island at the British airfield. It was a real education for an unsophisticated, young American. I was introduced to not only slavery but also child prostitution, totally veiled women, and thieves hanging by their thumbs or having their hands chopped off.
During our photographic missions, the aircrafts’ guns were loaded in case we had to protect ourselves. We were issued .38 caliber revolvers and an ammunition belt in the event we had to crash land or ditch the aircraft. We were taught an Arabic phrase that we were to use in case we were captured by some Bedouin Arabs. The phrase theoretically was an Arabic plea for mercy that they had to honor for 24 hours. They, in effect, had to give us a 24-hour-head start. The pilots quickly realized this was not much of a deal, since we would be wandering around on foot in the desert in a strange land and our pursuers would be on camels or horseback and very familiar with the territory. Well, it sounded good anyway.
Apparently at that time, there were many Bedouin tribesmen wandering the deserts who lived by their own laws and were generally very inhospitable. I also noticed from the air that the Persian Gulf had some of the biggest sharks that I have ever seen. They looked like miniature submarines from the air. I sure did not want to ditch in those waters. Neither land nor water seemed hospitable.
On my cruise to China and Japan in 1948, I was a participant in the navy’s evacuation of Americans from Tsingtao, China just before the communist Chinese takeover. Our carrier was part of a task group of two carriers, several cruisers, and numerous destroyers that were providing cover for a safe withdrawal of Americans from China. We spent a couple of months conducting exercises offshore to demonstrate our firepower. We did get to spend time ashore and again I was introduced to an unbelievably strange and cruel world. Many people were dying in that communist takeover. We could watch the battle through the big binoculars on the bridge of the carrier.
Three other pilots and I almost took a last ride in rickshaws one night without understanding what was happening. Unbeknownst to us, the Chinese pulling the rickshaws were taking us into communist territory in the city apparently to rob us and kill us. The U.S. Navy Shore Patrol rescued us in some very dark alleyways of Tsingtao. The shore patrol leader told us later that we were headed to our own execution. We were pretty young and innocent.
One incident that really made an impression on me was a search off Guam for five of our aircraft that apparently got lost and went down during a gunnery training flight. We were flying our aircraft off the NAS Orote Field at the time. The missing aircraft were never heard from after takeoff in the morning. The next day, we launched a massive aerial search with about fifty aircraft assigned to various search sectors all around the island.
I was outbound in my search sector, about 50 miles offshore, when my crewman in my TBM spotted orange smoke in the ocean behind the aircraft. I turned around and flew back a couple of miles and saw the smoke and some dyemarker. It turned out to be one of the downed pilots. I notified the control tower on Guam and they in turn notified a destroyer in the general area.
We tossed out our emergency life raft, but the downed pilot did not find it. I circled the pilot for an hour or so until the destroyer got there. We did not have rescue helicopters in those days. I was really amazed at the difficulty in keeping the pilot in sight. He was floating in a life jacket but it was startling to realize how small he was in that vast ocean. The sea was choppy with 3- or 4-foot waves and I would lose sight of the pilot every once in a while. I was terrified that I would lose sight of him and not find him again. I finally unbuckled my own life raft, made a pass over him, and tossed it out to him. He did not find it in that choppy sea, but finally the destroyer arrived and picked him up.
That episode really impressed me. I had flown many, many hours and thousands of miles over the oceans in a single engine airplane, never really worried too much about having to ditch because I always believed I would be found and rescued. I always thought I would be easy to find even though I might be in a life vest. It was, therefore, a tremendous shock to see just how small a person in a life jacket really is in that huge ocean. The Lord was with that downed pilot whom I found. We never found the others and had to give up the search due to a typhoon that came through the next day. That was another shock, to realize that the navy would give up on a search. I had naively assumed that they would never give up as long as there was a chance that the pilots were still alive.
During my 3 years in the fleet, I was a torpedo bomber pilot and finally a fighter pilot. I flew TBMs and the F8F Bearcats. The Bearcat was the most impressive aircraft that I have ever flown. It was a small airplane and an outstanding performer for its day. When I flew that airplane, I really felt that it was a part of me. I was wearing the airplane instead of sitting in it. The cockpit was very small. My shoulders rubbed both canopy rails but the small cockpit gave me a very secure feeling. The airplane was literally wrapped around me. That airplane responded like no other airplane I have ever flown. It was a fighter pilot’s dream.
I flew the P-51 Mustang when I first began flying for NACA/NASA. I was very disappointed with this plane after all the stories I had heard about it. To me, it was just a fast AT-6. The cockpits were very similar. It did not begin to compare to the Bearcat in my opinion. I hassled with a few P-51s while flying the Bearcat. I could wax them pretty easily. The only advantage they seemed to have was a speed advantage in a dive. They could pull away pretty fast. But when they finally had to pull up, we had them again.
I was released from active duty in the navy while on a cruise to Cuba and Haiti in the fall of 1949. The Secretary of Defense decided to get rid of all reservists on active duty to save money. Ironically, the Korean War started less than 8 months later and the navy then tried to get these same people to return to active duty. I was processed out of the navy at Jacksonville, Florida, and immediately set out by car for Seattle, Washington.
I chose to go to Seattle for several reasons. My wife Therese had been raised there and her family still lived there. Seattle also had a large university where I could finish college, and finally, it had a naval air station where I could continue to fly in the reserve. I had met my wife in San Diego after the round-the-world cruise. I had dated her for the next year, in between cruises and a transfer to the East Coast, and finally married her in June 1949. I drove from my station at Cecil Field, Florida, to Seattle, Washington, to get married and then back to Florida on my honeymoon, all in a 10-day period.
A week after we got back to Florida, the navy decided to evacuate our squadron aircraft because of an approaching hurricane. I had to leave my new bride in a strange apartment to weather out the hurricane by herself. She had never previously been exposed to any violent weather. She had never even been exposed to a real thunderstorm. When the hurricane hit
, she was terrorized by the wind, thunder, and lightning. She spent a day and a night in a closet. Meanwhile, we brave pilots were sitting in a bar in the officer’s club in Atlanta, Georgia, waiting out the storm. My wife never let me live that down.
I attended the University of Washington under the GI bill. I lived in the veterans’ housing on the campus and paid $40.00 a month for the rent out of my $120.00 GI monthly allotment. Before I graduated, my first three children were born. All of the veteran students were having children while attending school. The veterans’ housing area resembled a gigantic nursery school. Everyone was poor, but spirits were high. Scott Crossfield, who also lived in the same housing unit, managed to build an airplane among the baby cribs and diapers in his veteran’s housing unit. In Seattle, you hung the diapers inside.
I usually had a part-time job while attending school to make enough extra money to survive. Between that and the money I made flying in the reserve, we managed to exist and even pay the doctor and hospital bills for each new child. Kids were cheap in those days. The doctor charged $125.00 and the hospital charged $150.00. The part-time job and the weekend flying in the reserve did take its toll. I seldom finished my homework before two or three in the morning. Engineering is notorious for the amount of homework required. The University of Washington was on the quarter system when I attended, so we had quite a few long breaks throughout the school year. On each of these quarter breaks, I would try to schedule a ferry flight so that I could go on active duty and get paid for the week or two that I was not attending classes.
Ferry flights were a real godsend. I would draw full pay for each day that I was on the road. I always managed to make the trip last as long as the break period from school in order to get paid the most money. If necessary, I could manage to spend a week ferrying an airplane from Seattle down to San Francisco. On other trips, when I was in a hurry I could fly an airplane from Seattle to the East Coast and back in three days. That was pretty good time in those old propeller fighters.
During summer vacations, I had to work full time to replenish the bank account. I got involved in forest spraying and crop dusting through one of the members of my reserve squadron. My first experience was spraying forests in Oregon to combat the spruce budworm. The first year I flew a BT-13 trainer aircraft, with 1,000 pounds of DDT spray on board, over some rugged forest south of Hepner, Oregon. Forest spraying in those early days was fairly hazardous. The first year of forest spraying in Oregon, eight out of sixteen pilots were killed. The second and third years, the statistics improved somewhat. We only lost eleven out of thirty-five pilots the second year and eight out of thirty the third year.
In my second year, I flew a navy SBD dive bomber with 6,000 pounds of spray on board—very overloaded. Forest spraying was a very unforgiving job. We were flying overloaded single engine airplanes within 100 feet of the treetops, up and down the mountains and into the canyons. If the engine sputtered, that was it. Those big forests just swallowed an airplane. You could not even tell from the air where the airplane went through the trees in a crash. The airplane did not cut up the trees, the trees cut up the airplane. Forest spraying normally lasted only a month, so we had time to do a little crop dusting for another couple of months before the fall quarter started. My first experience as a crop duster was in Mexico. I dusted cotton below the border, south of Mexicali. I really enjoyed crop dusting. One could certainly get his fill of buzzing as a crop duster. I got pretty good at it, too. I could roll the wheels on the tops of the cotton plants and come home with cotton bolls caught on the brake lines. Crop dusting has to be one of the most dangerous kinds of work that I have ever done. The chemicals that we were using in those days were the major hazard since they were unbelievably dangerous. Some of the insecticides were derivatives of poisonous gases that the Germans had developed during World War II.
We breathed and literally ate the stuff and must have developed an immunity to the various poisons, because the insecticides often killed more than they were intended to. We quite often killed livestock when the spray or dust drifted onto pastureland. The unknowing Mexican laborers who helped us load the dust and spray into the airplanes got mighty sick after being exposed to clouds of that dust during a 16-hour work day. They seldom made it back to work the second day. If they survived the second day, they built up an immunity and then they could breathe it with the best of the duster pilots.
One insecticide, Systox, was so potent we had to carry little pills along when we sprayed it. If we started to feel dizzy or if we started losing our vision we had to swallow a couple of pills. That would keep us conscious until we got the airplane on the ground. Just imagine what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would think of that operation. I must admit, it was an awfully loose operation with few state or federal controls.
The other dangerous part of crop dusting was the danger of hitting something, like power lines, trees, telephone poles, irrigation plumbing, fences, buildings, or the ground. I had never had an accident before I began crop dusting. In two short summer seasons of crop dusting, I had two forced landings due to engine failure, one bad crash due to engine failure during takeoff over a big irrigation canal, two collisions with power lines in the early morning darkness, one collision with the ground due to a stall during pullout from a descent over a row of immense cotton woods, and numerous inadvertent touchdowns due to being sucked into the cotton when rolling the wheels across the tops of the plants. Thank God for the indestructible landing gear on those Stearmans.
Prior to dusting or spraying, we flew around a field a time or two as we mentally cataloged all of the potentially hazardous obstacles. We tried very hard to remember them as we worked our way across the field on each succeeding pass. Invariably, though, we would forget and then all of a sudden we would be on a collision course with something that could kill us. God did not intend for airplanes to be flown down among the trees, power lines, fences, buildings, and poles. Why, then, are pilots so damn dumb?
As I mentioned earlier, I did get pretty good at crop dusting. The guy I worked for used to drive out and watch me dust a field. He was really impressed by the maneuvering involved. I have watched other duster pilots work. It is impressive, particularly when they are working a small field with trees and power lines around the edges. Under those conditions, dusting becomes an aerial ballet.
I encountered some hilarious situations crop dusting. One morning, I dusted a Mexican farmer’s field about 70 miles below the border at Mexicali. When I finished at about nine in the morning, no one was there to pick me up and fly me back to Calexico where I was living while working as a duster pilot. The farmer invited me to his house and I was served an excellent breakfast. We sat around for an hour or so waiting for my ride to show up but no one came. The farmer suggested that we go into town and have a beer. It sounded good to me, so away we went.
The town was a small one. I do not even remember its name. We pulled up and parked in front of the biggest building in town, a large two story building that looked like a hotel. I found out, once we were inside, that it was the town whorehouse. It had a huge barroom and surprisingly, there were quite a few customers in the place even though it was only 10:30 A.M. We drank beer for about 3 hours, during which time the farmer was trying to convince me that I should sample the merchandise. I begged off by telling him I did not have any money with me. He countered by offering to loan me some money. I was spared at the last minute when someone ran in the bar and said an airplane had landed on the street just outside the building. It was my boss coming to pick me up. He griped about all the trouble he had finding me, but I was too loaded and too tired to care. I did thank him for saving me, however.
While dusting in Mexico near the border, I used to fly down from the border each morning just as soon as it was light enough to see. I usually flew low because I still enjoyed buzzing. In fact I would have to pull up to go over single-story houses. One morning, I pulled up over a house and I saw a pretty young lady taking a bath in
the irrigation ditch next to her house. She was naked. For the next few days, I made sure to sneak up on that house hoping to catch her bathing again. I did not catch her bathing, but on the fifth day I pulled up over the house and then shoved the nose of the airplane down to check the ditch and got a real surprise. I was looking down the twin barrels of a shotgun. The man behind the gun fired both barrels and I just about had a heart attack. I do not know if he was mad because I was an aerial peeping Tom or because I was waking him up so early with that daybreak buzz job. The airplane was riddled with buckshot holes, but he did not hit anything critical. I avoided that farmhouse for the rest of the dusting season.
They played some other unusual games down there below the border. Quite often the farmhands would wave and beckon us as we were flying over. They suckered me in a couple of times. I would respond to their waving and beckoning by giving them a buzz job. That is what they wanted, but just as I was about to pass over them, they would all heave a big rock at the airplane. A big rock like that could tear right through the airplane. Luckily they never hit a vital spot. When they pulled a stunt like that, I would come back around and pull straight up over them and dump a load of whatever insecticide I had onboard. The insecticide would make a large cloud on the ground when I pumped it down on them like that. The farmhands had to do a lot of running to get to clear air—a funny but dangerous game for everyone involved. Under the right circumstances, that insecticide could be just as deadly as the rocks.
Every once in a while on the way back to the border, I would take the main highway that ran southeast from Mexicali. When I said I would take the main highway back to the border, I meant it. I would fly a couple of feet above the road all the way, forcing all the oncoming traffic to pull off the road. I was eyeball to eyeball with a lot of cars and trucks before they realized I was not going to give way. Those that waited too long to pull over ended up in the ditch, because they had to turn hard to avoid the aircraft. One could get away with that kind of flying below the border in those days. No one enforced any flight rules or regulations. It was paradise for a pilot who liked to buzz.
At the Edge of Space Page 18
