by Miner, Ron
To most military guys, alcohol and cigarettes were as important as a rifle. If you didn’t enjoy either when you got in, you likely did before you got back out. Before enlisting, I visited a close friend in Olney, Ill., a city of albino squirrels. His father was an undertaker there and, over the course of the weekend, they showed me around, eventually heading downstairs and through the basement. There, spread out on white linens, was a body, the first up close view I’d ever had of a dead person. We made our way upstairs and sat down to talk a while. “What would you like to drink?” Innocently enough, I replied, “What would you suggest?”
“How about a Margarita?” I nodded, not even knowing what one was. It was good and went down a little too quickly, and I wasn’t prepared for the feeling it gave me. This first experience with drinking had been both unsettling and unpleasant, and I hadn’t tried it again until Dallas. I suppose the time away and the dangers faced affect the things you do to relax. At any rate, Navy guys liked their alcohol.
The month ended and it was on to Corpus Christi Naval Training Center in Texas. Here our work really intensified and ground school became heavily involved with celestial navigation. We peered at the stars through sextants and octants and even spent late night hours in sophisticated simulators high in the darkened interiors of domed buildings. The mathematics involved almost defeated us, especially Sims, but Ted, with his head start in aviation, was able to fill in the gaps where we needed it, and somehow we made it through.
The group continued flying the “Yellow Perils,” practicing a couple hours at a time, and returning to base, the whole swarm of us in our little N3Ns arrived together. Guidelines dictated we stagger ourselves right and left to land on the mat in a continuous stream. As I rounded out to try for the typical Navy tail wheel landing, I was alarmed to discover that the plane wanted to become airborne again. I couldn’t seem to whip it. After bouncing a couple of times with throttle completely closed, I was still skimming the hot pavement. The planes in front of me were somehow coming to a stop, but I was merrily sailing toward them. Growing desperate, I steered a course to zigzag around each one and ultimately got the beast slowed to a standstill. After taxiing to the line and shutting down, I was advised that the commander of operations wanted me in his hangar office, “Pronto!” Terrified, I appeared on the carpet giving my name, rank, and serial number, as prescribed.
“Just what in the Hell were you doing?” he blared. “Don’t you know how to make a wheel landing?”
“I thought all landings were wheel landings,” I stammered.
Apparently, during the two hours I was away from the field, the wind had picked up substantially, and the customary tail wheel type landing we were trying to master for carrier operations would not work. Easing back on the stick would only propel the lightweight aircraft back into the sky, and I needed to land on the front wheels, nose low, and allow the plane to slow to a crawl. This procedure had been omitted from our curriculum, until now. At length, the commander bought my explanation and assigned me to further training in “wheel landings.”
“Spot landings” were equally humbling. Picture, if you can, flying downwind above a circle marked on a grass field. At this point, you cut your engines and glide, power-off, without benefit of flaps (which you didn’t have on an N3N) or slipping (which involved crossed controls to come down rather sideways, increasing drag at will, which was not easy), yet still managing somehow to plunge the thing into the circle without crashing. I couldn’t seem to judge the maneuver well enough to hit the necessary two of three, and I thought I had washed out for sure. I was granted extra time and assigned to another instructor, Lt. Blackmore, an ex-airline pilot. He was infinitely patient and nursed me through the necessary skills to pass the test.
While the flight suits did the job in the N3Ns, for anything else we needed our local “uniform shop.” The process of getting fitted for uniforms was an elaborate one: dress blues, dress whites, working greens, working suntans, it all took time and was expensive. Along the way, I became acquainted with a girl named Henricia, who worked there. I was able to persuade her to go on a date, quite an accomplishment considering the flow of cadets through the shop. We spent time together over the next few weeks, dining at some intriguing restaurants or lolling around the stepped concrete breakwater along the city’s lovely waterfront. Corpus Christi was an interesting change for me and having her to spend time with and show me around town made it special. Ted had, by now, become involved with a lovely girl named Nancy. On one occasion Sims had a blind date, and the six of us all had dinner and hit a few nightclubs. It was a memorable evening. Ted and Nancy invited us all to Sunday brunch the next morning at a petite little hotel next to the high-rise Driscoll Hotel and we toasted with champagne, my inaugural acquaintance with that bubbly beverage.
According to rumor, Mrs. Driscoll, a multimillionaire, had once been insulted by the management of this smaller establishment and vowed to “Pee on their roof!” She acquired the property next door and built a multistory building with her penthouse on the top floor — and indeed one day stepped outside and proved she wasn’t bluffing. At least that was the legend. Ted and I enjoyed teasing the girls about exactly how they might go about accomplishing that. It was funny how the time away from training, with the stresses and apprehension about the future that it seemed to bring on, was becoming as important as the training itself.
There were numerous satellite bases scattered around the southern foot of Texas, and one or another would be selected for a certain phase of training, for example, so called “basic” training. Here we moved into heavier, low wing SNV trainers, a type of Vultee aircraft, and became familiar with the use of flaps and changeable pitch propellers — props with blades able to twist slightly along their length to allow the pilot to adjust the thrust produced by the engine. On my first solo practice flight in one of these new dream machines, I felt I was truly in Heaven. I was really enjoying myself out in one of the big grass fields shooting “touch and go” landings, but after a time, became concerned because the takeoffs were so dragged out, barely clearing the far fence. Eventually, I headed into the base and sought my instructor’s advice. “Did you shift the prop into low pitch before each takeoff?” With all the new gadgetry, and my concentration elsewhere, I had forgotten the prop and was in low RPM. My growing pains were teaching me the wisdom of a checklist. I also began keeping more notes and compiling some ledgers.
In many ways, Cabaniss Field was an enjoyable place. Originally, about 500 of us moved into the newly constructed barracks there, and other than a lack of hot water for a few days, I found the smaller size of the place appealing in the way that a small college might feel when compared to a large university.
There were two squadrons of a hundred planes each, meaning plenty of flying for everybody in those blue Texas skies, playing tag with cotton-like clouds for four or five hours a day. It was easy to forget you were strapped into a ton and a half of steel fabrication that was, according to the laws of physics, going just fast enough to stay up there.
Ted and I were talking as we headed back to the Field after a relaxing afternoon and a much needed liberty. We were still in shock at the loss of a shipmate, George, who had apparently let his airspeed drop too much and lost control of his plane. I had a flight in the morning and needed to pick up some cards for my folks’ anniversary afterward, so we agreed to head over to Ship’s Service first and then see what we could do about flowers.
Back at the barracks, about a half hour before taps, there was a blackout. “Not again!” came a voice out of the dark. “How am I supposed to study for this damn exam tomorrow!”
“I’m sure they spotted that sub again. You know, the one down in the West Indies, 2,000 miles away,” Russ, my other roomie, chimed in.
It was over in another fifteen minutes — we never really knew if these things were practice or the real deal. Then about five minutes after taps, the whistle blew again.
“Aaggghh!” I figured it was anothe
r blackout and hopped out of bed to turn out what few lights were still on. Suddenly, the fire truck that usually chases around with its sirens blaring when the blackout is called stopped — directly in front of Ship’s Service. A few of us poked our heads out to see what was up.
“Holy cow, there’s smoke up in the cupola!”
I rushed out along with several other cadets, all still in our shorts, and we pulled the hoses loose and snapped them onto the hydrant just as the enlisted men began swarming in from their barracks. It was a crazy scene, smoke filling the cafeteria and the general merchandise rooms with everything getting soaked down, including us. After an hour or so, things seemed under control, and I headed back to bed — I had a check to take in the morning. So much for my folks’ anniversary cards.
It was usually during the other form of “basic,” those abominable training drills on the ground that you realized how deathly hot Texas could be. “Cokes” were the preferred way of replenishing fluids, most of us downing three or four a day, about a nickel each, and they were at their refreshing best when those bits of ice would make their way up the neck of the bottle to the surface. Our cadet working uniforms were suntans, which had a tendency to quickly blotch around the arms. The sergeant called us in to hand out some additional equipment; “I have, here, official Navy issue rain gear for each of you.” Sims looked at me, and then we both looked at the sky. I suppose it might have been slightly threatening, although the Navy selected Corpus, in part due to the low incidence of cloudy days. “You will bring it along for today’s hike.” And so we did. This wartime garment was some sort of fabric painted with battleship gray flexible enamel. It was unquestionably close to waterproof, but every bit as effective as an evaporation barrier. A drop must have hit the sergeant in the nose somewhere along the way, and he barked out an order to don the rain gear. We continued to march along, singing and swinging as the gear rustled to our movements and the sun continued to beat down. When it finally ended and we removed the things, our suntans were chocolate browns and couldn’t have been wetter if he had marched us into the bay.
The next real step was into the first service type aircraft, the OS2U Vought Kingfisher (a nifty little thirty-foot seaplane that looked more like a fighter carrying a way too big twenty-nine-foot bomb. It was often used in a float version based on cruisers). What an exciting prospect! “Go out and climb aboard, I’ll join you in a bit,” the instructor said to Ted and me. I scrambled into the forward cockpit, Ted in the aft. We were looking over all the controls, levers, and unfamiliar gun and bomb arming switches, and underneath the seat, I discovered a mysterious, cone-shaped device connected to a hollow tube. My first thought was that it was some sort of Gosport communicator, like in the biplanes. Then I noticed the encrusted yellow stuff within it and it dawned on me that this was for those “longer” flights. Just then, I heard Ted, “Hey Howard, look!” I spun around to see him with the cone to his mouth. “A speaking tube!” Ted was inclined a bit to jump first and think later. It was a trait that was, one day, to do him in.
The Nordon bombsight was a fascinating optical device with crosshairs and a couple of control knobs. You preset the crosshairs and fixed on a target, and then steering was done by an “auto pilot” guided by the sight. However, our initial experience with it came not in an aircraft, but on moving stands in an empty hangar. These were set on rubber wheels, probably battery propelled, and stood some eight or more feet high, where the student sat on a platform to peer into his bombsight instrument. On the “deck” there was a map painted with various “targets” illustrated in a crude image. When activated, the stand would creep ahead and be guided by the knob adjustments on the bombsight. At the estimated release point, a switch was pushed to drop a miniature missile. It was fun. Ironically, this poorly done map of bombing targets was of the Corpus Christi area. It seemed to me that it might as well look pretty authentic, so I requested and got permission to redo it, perhaps leaving my own mark on the base for posterity.
It was the summer of ‘42. After a brief stay at Cuddihy Field, I had moved again to another part of the base. A few days later, a hurricane passed through the area, coming ashore at one of our favorite swimming beaches at Aransas Pass, about forty miles by car, fifteen by air. The seven-mile causeway to Mustang Island was knocked out and it flooded miles and miles of oil country. From above, it still looked wet down there.
We had been given a choice of carrier aircraft or flying boats. I chose the boats, as did Ted, both of us feeling that, if all went well, the larger twin-engine aircraft might be more in line with any ambitions we had about future airline careers. We began taking instruction in the PBY Catalina seaplanes right in Corpus Christi Bay, and it was a tremendous thrill. There were now two throttles instead of one, and six to eight people in the crew, generally including a couple of trainees to swap off with an instructor. We focused on three types of landings: power on, normal, and stall. Each was most appropriate to a certain water and wind condition. The power landing was used on smooth or glassy water with little or no wind. A certain power was set up with a “sink rate” of 175 feet per minute down, and the plane was flown until you heard the pat-pat-pat of the wavelets under the step of the hull. You would pull off the power and that was it. The normal landing was from a “power off” glide, where you came down and rounded out and put it on the water. You needed good depth perception and had to have enough wind to make the water choppy, perhaps six to fifteen knots. In rougher seas, a full stall landing was used. This was more like the tail-wheel landings we had learned from day one at Glenview. You would hold the plane off the surface with no power until it finally stalled just above it and came crashing down with a horrendous splash, sounding more like you had landed in a gravel pile than in water. Each style was fun and we practiced them all. Then we worked with plane-mounted bombsights, dropping lead weights with shotgun shells to mark the “hit.” We also began applying our celestial navigation on three-hour flights. Ted, Sims, and I were all sometimes on the same crew. Ted and I had been bunkmates since Glenview. He was a sidekick and good friend to me during our training together, but while I liked him a lot, I was more and more struggling with what seemed to be his growing tendency toward overconfidence and impulsiveness. I watched as he pulled several careless boners on flights with crews, and I started to fear flying with him.
Link trainers were like imitation airplanes and we had four large rooms each containing about twelve of them. Each cadet would sit alone in the things with a cover over his head, staring ahead at the mass of instruments that represented a particular aircraft’s cockpit dashboard. The device would allow us to do everything but go onto our backs — we could spin, stall, change airspeed, even bounce and buck along in very rough air — all while an instructor sat at a nearby desk talking back and forth with us. A remarkable gadget called a “crab” traced our exact path on a sheet of paper. Radio work required orienting yourself on a radio range and riding a beam into a selected airfield. Once we had fifteen hours or so on the links, we transferred to the real planes and did it all over again. It was a thrill to feel my way along the Rockport radio range while under a hood and totally blind, then nervously begin my timed let-down and announce, “I should be over the field...”
My instructor said, “Come on out of the hood,” and dipped a wing revealing the gorgeous sight of the airfield right below us. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
The low-pressure chamber was a chance for ten of us to find out what the air was like at high altitude. A doctor started with a simple little mental exam, and then took us up to 18,000 feet where atmospheric pressure is only half and no one could remain conscious over fifteen minutes or so. He gave us another exam after only five minutes, then took us all the way up to 28,000 feet. for a third exam. We all scored similarly on the first and third, but for some reason on the second at 18,000, my score was somewhat lower, maybe an indication that I was slightly more susceptible to the affects of altitude. Regardless, it was a fun way to s
pend an afternoon.
Curiously, as our training progressed, it became obvious that the training squadron was up to something, and slowly, a spanking new obstacle course materialized beside our barracks complex. Earth was mounded up, sections of sewer pipe were arranged, a wall was erected, and an enormous cargo net made of hemp rope was strung over a high cable like a tent. We watched with both interest and trepidation. As it was completed, they announced it would be christened the following day and our group would have the honor of the first run under the watchful eye of the admiral and his daughter in the reviewing stand. It was a wild day. We had no time to practice the obstacles individually or train and condition ourselves. They rather preferred to line us up and turn us loose. The several gazelles among us took off and set a furious pace while the rest of us scrambled along behind them. Some fell along the way. I nearly met my maker on the cargo net, but somehow we staggered on in, completely exhausted, and hating the admiral’s daughter.
Our several months of operational training in the PBYs neared completion. Soon it would be graduation day, and we would be given our Golden Wings. The camp was buzzing with anticipation and I had my four different colored Navy uniforms waiting and ready. Ted had opted to go Marine after graduation. He had discovered that the Marines offered a six-month training course in transport type R4Ds* flying instruments around the country, and he felt it would be invaluable for airline careers. I also think the snazzy dress blue uniform with the red stripe may have tipped him. But I was pretty damn proud of my Blue and Gold!
The two of us went out for a final weekend on the town. Flying was finished and we had made it. “Let’s do it up right,” he suggested, and we booked rooms at the more expensive Driscoll (remember Mrs. Driscoll) and headed to the lounge for champagne cocktails. He was in high form, smiling and chatting it up with everything in a skirt and, of course, persuaded one young lady over to the table where he turned on the full power of his charm. I watched in scientific wonder as she melted under his gaze, and it wasn’t long before they took off together “to see her car.”
