Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  Even after the war, the Corsair continued to inflict plenty of damage on pilots. The engine sometimes stalled at slow speeds, and if it did, the plane would flip to the right—often too quickly for a pilot to correct. Pilots called this “a bad stall characteristic”—a murky euphemism that meant the plane could spontaneously crash and burn.

  One day one of Shepard’s classmates came in too high and fast for a landing at Cecil Field, slowed down too abruptly, stalled, and flipped. He was killed in a fireball a half mile short of the runway. Another peer failed to adjust the mixture control (which sets how much air and fuel the engine uses) before taking off; as the Corsair became airborne, the engine quit and both plane and pilot were obliterated.

  A dark joke among Corsair pilots was that the schedule in a Corsair squadron was a grueling one: a flight at 6 A.M., a flight at 1 P.M., a funeral at 3 P.M. Some pilots called the Corsair “the bent-wing widowmaker.”

  Death continued to stalk Shepard in his career, beckoning him and wooing him like a demon chanteuse. It had pursued and taunted him throughout World War II. It had unnerved and mocked him at Corpus Christi, and it now taunted him at Cecil Field. More than three thousand Navy trainees lost their lives in the mid-1940s, and thousands more were injured. The Navy counted thirteen thousand major accidents in one year, half of them resulting in destroyed planes.

  Learning to recover from the loss of a fellow aviator was an unwritten part of the curriculum of naval flight training. The solution, usually, was to shun it—and then drink. Acknowledging death was a dangerous thing. It was like acknowledging fear, and fear was unacceptable. So, to fuel their resistance to the fear of death, they imbibed.

  Among the notorious imbibers during Shepard’s months of advanced training outside Jacksonville were two former Naval Academy classmates, Dick Hardy and Bill Botts, who rented a beachfront house at Ponte Vedra Beach. Alan and Louise lived nearby, and Alan carpooled the twenty-six miles to Cecil Field every day with Hardy and Botts; the threesome, according to Botts, “collected speeding tickets like popcorn.”

  On weekends, Alan and Louise sometimes attended the infamous Hardy and Botts beach parties together. But Louise was carrying their baby, and pregnancy didn’t agree with her; her fragile constitution often left her exhausted and bedridden. So Alan regularly walked alone to the boozy and bustling Ponte Vedra beach house, where cocktail shakers chattered and locals girls in bikinis giggled and danced. Actor Freddie Bartholomew (who had starred in a 1941 movie called Naval Academy) lived next door and often stopped by for a drink. Alan or Bill Botts usually rented a small biplane from the local municipal airport and took turns landing on the hard-packed beach, taking party guests up for show-offy spins, loops, and dives. Botts recalled that on one such ride, a cute redhead screamed, “This is the first time I’ve been off God’s green earth!”

  As Louise approached her due date she left Jacksonville and went to stay with her parents at Longwood. Friends recalled that Alan then began occasionally accompanying the other bachelors for nights on the town.

  Before long, though, a vice admiral who lived a few doors down the beach caught wind of the weekend parties and ordered them to cease. The owners of the beach house kicked Hardy and Botts out. “And the party was over,” Hardy recalled.

  After that Shepard and the others were assigned to their first squadrons. Training days were over. It was time to become aviators.

  In July 1947 Louise gave birth to their daughter, whom they named Laura, in Wilmington, near Longwood. A few months later, after recuperating at her parents’ house, she joined Alan in Norfolk, Virginia, where he had been assigned, back in April, to his first squadron.

  Fighter squadron VF-42 was awaiting the overhaul of its aircraft carrier, the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. The FDR had been commissioned weeks after the end of World War II, the first of a new class of behemoth postwar carriers. When Shepard first spotted her, she was as rusty as a forgotten pickup truck.

  Her deck, just shy of a thousand feet, was the Navy’s longest, and in 1946 it had been used to host the first-ever test launches and landings of a jet on an aircraft carrier. But when military funds dwindled after the war, the FDR’s manpower was cut back to a skeleton crew, which fell behind in maintaining the huge ship. The FDR became rusted and filthy until she was finally put into dry dock for a much-needed overhaul. During the overhaul, Shepard’s squadron operated out of Norfolk Naval Air Station, exercising their Corsairs out over the Atlantic.

  For a brief while longer, Alan and Louise and their baby daughter were a normal family. In the two years since the end of World War II, despite moving from California to Texas to Florida to Virginia, Alan and Louise had enjoyed evening meals together, shared the same bed, played golf on weekends, and acted, for the most part, like a typical postwar couple. But Alan and his Corsair were about to embark on two years of extreme flying far from home and family. And during those two years he would begin distancing himself from his pack of peers, establishing himself as one of the premier pilots in the U.S. Navy. New levels of skill and an even stronger confidence would begin to emerge.

  With its muscular engine and enormous propeller (each of its four blades was as long and heavy as a man), the Corsair was among the few prop-driven aircraft of the day capable of approaching anywhere near the speed of sound. Reaching the cusp of Mach 1 required diving from thirty thousand feet at full power until the plane reached 350 knots—more than 400 miles an hour, or Mach .76. The speed of sound, or Mach 1, is roughly 660 miles an hour at sea level. At such speeds, the skin would ripple across Shepard’s face, breathing would become difficult, and the Corsair would groan, pop, and creak.

  At such superhuman speeds, a favorite aviator’s trick was to “crack the whip.” That meant pulling back sharply on the control stick, which would briefly shove Shepard into his seat at seven times the force of gravity, on the brink of blacking out. Then he’d jerk the control stick forward again, creating an air pocket behind the wings that would slam closed with a loud crack—like a thunderclap or the sonic booms left in jets’ wakes. “A rivet or two could pop, skins might wrinkle, but the old bird should still bring you home safely,” one Corsair pilot said of such high-speed dives.

  While performing those and other feats above the Atlantic Ocean east of Norfolk, Shepard learned to tame the Corsair, and his increasingly precise and confident flying soon caught the eye of the fighter squadron’s commander, James L. “Doc” Abbot.

  Abbot was an energetic, self-assured pilot from Mobile, Alabama, whose gentlemanly manner shielded a shrewd ability to manipulate the Navy’s rules and hierarchies and get what he wanted. Abbot spoke with a crisp drawl—a melding of his home-grown Alabama lilt and the clipped cadence of a Navy officer. That friendly drawl could disarm an opponent and defuse any situation. When Abbot had been chosen to lead VF-42, he visited the Norfolk offices in charge of assigning pilots to squadrons. He affably offered to help them out—then proceeded to handpick each of his pilots.

  As a 1939 Naval Academy graduate, Abbot chose to surround himself with other “ring-knockers,” most of them from the classes of ’44 and ’45. After a few weeks of flying together out of Norfolk—impressed with Shepard’s solid and skillful command of the Corsair—Abbot chose Shepard to be his wingman. Choosing a wingman is as intimate as it gets in naval aviation. A wingman is a pilot’s flying partner, his guardian angel. He flies slightly behind his partner, watching his “six o’clock”—his ass. Wingmen advise each other on speed, direction, altitude. If an enemy approaches, a wingman intercedes. If a pilot is in trouble, the wingman does everything he can to find a solution. But because the Corsair was difficult to fly perfectly level and straight, flying wing in a Corsair was no easy feat. It required finesse and a smooth hand on the controls. In choosing Shepard, Abbot was essentially saying: I trust you with my life.

  In the purest of partnerships, the trust is mutual. And so Shepard surely trusted his commander one day above Pensacola, Florida, when Abbot decided to have s
ome fun.

  A few months after Abbot had gathered his handpicked squadron of flyers, he took them down to the naval air station at Pensacola for some training exercises and mock carrier landings, in which they landed on a carrier outline painted on the runway. One day the commander of all four squadrons that constituted Shepard’s air group ordered all ninety planes of the group to take to the sky. Abbot took the lead of his squadron, which flew last behind the other three squadrons. As the ninety-plane gaggle banked left, Shepard held his Corsair steady, just behind Abbot’s right wing, and the rest of the squadron followed. The air group commander started calling Abbot on the radio, but Abbot ignored the calls, pulled away, and descended down onto nearby Mobile, Alabama, where he dropped even lower for an all-squadron flat-hat of Abbot’s parents’ house. Shepard and the others loved it, and the stunt endeared them to Abbot.

  Back at Pensacola, the air group commander asked Abbot what happened, and he innocently explained how his men had accidentally missed the turn.

  VF-42 finally loaded its planes, its men, and its equipment onto the massive FDR in early 1948 and left Norfolk for the island-speckled blue waters of the Caribbean. The FDR’s shakedown cruise was a chance for the planes and pilots to get acquainted with their floating runway, and for the FDR and her crew to accommodate the challenges and dangers of fuel-laden planes landing on her back.

  The FDR sailed first to Guantánamo Bay, where vast amounts of dark “anejo” rum were consumed, and where the eager pilots of VF-42 tried to figure out how to strap tanks of rum to their Corsairs and fly them back to the United States. One pilot was elected to buy a wooden cask of rum from one of the locals. But back on the FDR they realized their what-if scenarios of toting rum on a Corsair were nuts. So they drank it.

  FDR then moseyed through the Caribbean so that Shepard and his squadron mates could attempt landings on her 968-foot deck. Most of the squadron were “nuggets”—recently qualified squadron pilots on their first assignment (also known as FNGs, or “fucking new guys”)—and that meant they had very little experience with carrier landings. So as they nursed their rum hangovers and cruised past Jamaica, Haiti, and the Grenadines, they practiced landing on FDR’s armored deck, again and again and again.

  Shepard continued to impress Abbot and his peers during the FDR’s warm-up cruise—especially after getting Abbot’s permission to try landing at night.

  Landing on a carrier at night is one of the most difficult and dangerous maneuvers in all of aviation—especially in the Corsair. Even in calm seas, carrier landings at night are a ludicrous test of a pilot’s mettle. (At the time, no other nation even attempted night carrier landings.) One air group commander—Abbot’s boss—had been killed while attempting a night launch; he was catapulted off the deck and right into the sea. Of the three dozen pilots under Abbot’s command, most, like Shepard, were on their first carrier cruise. Those who were on their second cruise were offered the chance to “qualify” for night landings. At the time, qualifying for night landings was a rare distinction held by pilots in specialized squadrons.

  But Shepard insisted that Abbot give him a chance to qualify as well. “He just talked his way into it,” Shepard’s squadron mate Dick Hardy recalled.

  Most cockpits sit directly above or just ahead of a plane’s wings; on the Corsair, the cockpit sat behind the wings. To see around his Corsair’s absurdly long nose, a pilot had to approach the faintly lit outline of the FDR while banking steeply to the left, get the ship lined up in his sights, then turn sharply in toward the ship’s tail while descending slowly and, at the last second, straightening out and lowering the plane’s nose. Eyes bounce from the instrument panel to the string of lightbulbs sewn into the LSO’s suit to the fast-approaching runway lights and back to the instrument panel. A precise speed must be maintained— slow enough to land but a few knots faster than the point where the Corsair could stall. Like threading a needle, all the while the pilot had to keep both hands perfectly steady. With a margin of error of just a few feet, the slightest twitch—a sneeze, a cough— meant he’d be dead, along with the LSO and possibly scores of shipmates. Finally, with the deck almost invisible beneath him, he had to pick up the LSO’s lighted paddles, wait for the cut signal, then chop off the throttle and drop down onto the deck. Because the Corsair bounced hard on landings, the LSO had to bring the plane in precariously close to the rear edge of the ship, to make sure its tailhook snagged one of the arresting cables.

  One dark, calm night in the Caribbean, Shepard earned the rare distinction of being the first “nugget” in the Navy to perform carrier landings at night in the Corsair—another psychological half step ahead of his peers.

  Flying at night—“in the confidence of the stars,” French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once called it—would become one of the great challenges and great loves of Shepard’s career. And night carrier landings would become his specialty; for the rest of his life he would call those landings the most treacherous feats of his career.

  After a few months on the Caribbean, the FDR returned briefly to Norfolk and then, in early 1948, set out for a nine-month cruise to the Mediterranean. Shepard kissed Louise and baby Laura goodbye and walked up the FDR’s gangplank. On the top deck he turned to wave to his family but couldn’t find them among the crowd of wives, children, and friends milling below. Louise had decided not to drag out the goodbye scene. Why hang around with the other wives to watch the ship slowly, painfully disappear? Instead, she turned around and marched the baby home—the beginning of another long-term separation. Shepard’s one attempt at easing the pain of many months apart was a ritual that would continue through the rest of their lives. Whenever he was able, he would call Louise at 5 P.M. (her time) to say, “Hello, I love you, I miss you.”

  But for him, the separation also offered the chance to be a full-time flyer.

  That is, until the Atlantic Ocean snatched away his airplane.

  The FDR was nearly halfway to Europe when the icy Atlantic began tossing her around like an empty beer can on a river. Her engines wailed and whined. Her sailors barfed. Waterlogged airplanes bucked and bounced, straining against their wheel chocks and tie-downs. Shepard hunkered down below, wondering if his Corsair would survive the sea lashing, wondering which was worse: the relentless storm above or the South Pacific typhoons he’d survived in World War II.

  The rusty FDR had been overhauled in order to be displayed as a new symbol of American military might and to lend backup support to the ongoing delivery of food and supplies to Soviet-blockaded West Germany—the Berlin airlift operation, which was then under way. At a time when communism was still rooting around for new homes in the war-shaken countries of Europe, FDR’s role was to be part ambassador, part patrolman. To impress and intimidate its audience, the FDR brought along some of the Navy’s best fighter pilots. Yet as they neared the Azores in the eastern Atlantic, nine hundred miles off Portugal’s coast, Shepard and his colleagues had more on their minds than flying. Amid a monotony of gray—the sky, the sea, the ship, and their mood—not becoming shark bait was what mattered most.

  Enormous swells lifted and dropped the FDR, all forty-five thousand tons of her. Her skipper pointed the massive ship straight into the oncoming slopes of water. She’d slowly climb a wave, twenty . . . thirty . . . forty feet up, then disappear in an explosion of sea and foam before hurtling down the backside.

  Most of the FDR’s airplanes were tied down at the front of the ship, in “recovery” mode; with the planes up front, the rear deck was open to “recover” landing airplanes. The ship’s officers considered moving the planes to the rear—called “respotting” the deck—away from the crashing seas. But waves were now regularly hulking up and over the ship’s bow, deluging the deck. Any man walking up there would get swept overboard as easily as an ant gets flicked off a picnic blanket. Respotting was impossibly dangerous. All Shepard could do was ride it out below in the pilots’ ready room, hoping that his squadron’s planes were lashed tight enough
to withstand the pummeling waves.

  But the biggest wave was yet to come. When it did, the men in the FDR’s control tower gasped as it rose higher and higher, became a building of water, and then slammed down onto the plane-filled front of the deck. The front quarter of the ship was submerged, and when the water receded, the men in the tower gasped again.

  The planes of Shepard’s squadron had been parked in rows, five in the front row and rows of six behind that. When the wave hit, the first five planes were torn from their moorings and swept away without a trace. A few planes in the second row survived, but most were mangled beyond repair, so badly damaged that the crew tossed them overboard. Of the eleven planes in the first two rows, only one plane survived. It belonged to Shepard’s squadron commander, Doc Abbot, but it would never manage to fly right again.

  Shepard was sickened when he heard the news. His plane, his beloved Corsair, had been in that first row, and it was now flying to the bottom of the Atlantic.

  While waiting for replacement planes to be delivered, Shepard became intimately reacquainted with the simplistic color schemes of man at sea: the flat, drab, and persistent gray paint of his domestic environs, the muddled blue-gray-green of the ocean, the alternating white and blue of the sky, the unobstructed views of celestial light shows and the moon. His four thousand shipmates—a population greater than the entire Naval Academy student body, or Shepard’s entire hometown—were squeezed into a compact steel city three football fields long. Days and nights rumbled with the phlegmy churning of the ship’s boilers, the air sweetened by the stench of the Navy’s black fuel oil fumes.