Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  The VFAX was part of the navy’s rather relaxed approach to the question of what plane to buy next. But other forces were at work, moving inexorably toward forcing unwanted and untimely choices on the navy. A few years earlier, David Packard, Clements’s predecessor as deputy defense secretary, had provided a few million dollars apiece to a couple of aircraft companies to do some experimental work in fighter design. A major purpose was to keep experienced design teams together and demonstrate, in actual flying prototypes, innovations in technology.

  Production of a new fighter was not contemplated. But suddenly, before anyone had had time to make a conscious decision, these technology demonstrators were being seen as prototypes for the lightweight fighter then coming into favor.

  The air force was in the midst of a major modernization program. If they had had their choice, the generals would have bought a fighter force made up entirely of various models of the F-15, just as most of the admirals favored an all–F-14 force. But, under pressure to hold down costs while increasing the number of planes available, they began looking seriously at the possibilities offered by a lightweight fighter. What they decided upon was, in the jargon of the time, a Hi-Lo mix of big, complex, highly capable, twin-engined F-15s and a larger number of smaller, lightweight fighters that would be cheaper than the F-15s, but also less capable.

  Suddenly it occurred to a lot of people in Washington that the thing to do would be for the navy to buy the same lightweight fighter as the air force. This would have the advantage of providing for a larger production run and a higher production rate, thus cutting the cost for each plane. To many in Congress, this seemed an ideal way to hold down the defense budget, not only taking advantage of production efficiencies but also eliminating the need for separate navy spending on research and development.

  For the moment, the navy moved doggedly ahead. In June 1974, Lee sent out his request for comments from the aircraft industry on the VFAX. The responses came back in July.

  In August, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees agreed that $30 million should be allocated for the VFAX. Acting on this favorable signal, Clements gave the navy the okay to ask industry for proposals for full-scale development of the VFAX. Lee was elated.

  Action by the armed services committees is not the final word, however, and the navy aircraft program was in far more serious trouble than anyone dreamed. Nothing happens until the appropriations committees actually vote to provide the money. In this case, the Senate Appropriations Committee agreed on $20 million for the VFAX. But the House Appropriations Committee, following the lead of its powerful defense subcommittee, balked.

  That subcommittee had become the center of opposition to Lee’s plan for a combined fighter and attack plane, and for years to come there would be opposition to the F/A-18 from that source. Reasons for the opposition ranged from simple politics—two of the key members had rival aircraft plants in their districts—to deeply held beliefs on the part of staff members about the type of planes needed in future wars.

  One of those who worked closely with the committee was a former navy pilot to whom the lightweight fighter was especially appealing. His name was Charles Meyers and he was then serving as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for research. “Chuck Meyers thought we ought to wear leather helmets and still have just a day fighter,” Lee recalls. Actually, Meyers’s argument was more sophisticated than that. He thought it was foolish to send multimillion-dollar, manned aircraft to attack heavily defended targets. Instead, he favored using missiles for that purpose. But he also foresaw large-scale dogfights where sheer numbers would count. By that reasoning, lightweight fighters in large numbers were what the services needed, and there was no place for a new attack plane.

  How much credit or blame he deserves is not entirely clear, but the admirals thought Meyers and his allies on Capitol Hill were largely responsible for one of the most difficult bits of congressional language they had ever had to deal with. It came about this way:

  When the House and Senate failed to agree, leaders of the committees involved met in conference. They quickly agreed on the Senate’s $20 million figure. But then they inserted the language that was to send a shock wave through the Pentagon and Crystal City. Because it was later to prove so important, it is worthwhile to look at the exact words contained in their report:

  The managers are in agreement on the appropriation of $20 million as proposed by the Senate instead of no funding as proposed by the House for the VFAX aircraft. The conferees support the need for a lower cost alternative fighter to complement the F-14A and replace F-4 and A-7 aircraft; however, the conferees direct that the development of this aircraft make maximum use of the air force lightweight fighter and Air Combat Fighter technology and hardware. The $20 million provided is to be placed in a new program element titled “Navy Air Combat Fighter” rather than VFAX. Adaptation of the selected air force air combat fighter to be capable of carrier operations is the prerequisite for use of the funds provided. Funds may be released to a contractor for the purpose of designing the modifications required for navy use. Future funding is to be contingent upon the capability of the navy to produce a derivative of the selected air force air combat fighter design.

  The requests for proposals to begin full-scale development of a fighter/attack plane were about to go out when word of the surprise action on the Hill reached the Pentagon. Although the law itself did not include the restrictions contained in the conference committee report, the navy prudently decided to limit its request to the industry to derivatives of the planes involved in the air force competition. The plain language of the congressional orders seemed to commit the navy to a cheap little “wraparound” fighter rather than the bigger, more expensive strike-fighter the Pentagon leadership and the House and Senate Armed Services Committees had agreed on.

  Lee’s elation suddenly turned to gloom. But for Houser and the others within the navy who were dubious of Lee’s VFAX, there was little to be pleased about, either. At worst, they could see the navy forced to use a totally unsuitable air force fighter. At best, they could foresee a long battle with Congress and the defense bureaucracy to turn the decision around.

  This was certainly not the first setback in the navy’s long and frequently difficult effort to take aircraft to sea. But problems in the past had most often been technical ones—such as learning how to fly in the first place, or learning how to take off from the deck of a ship and come back aboard in one piece.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wings Over the Ocean

  To the pilot and observer in a German observation plane flying safely above the muddy death in the trenches down below, the war might have been a million miles, rather than a few thousand feet, away. The first faint green touches of spring were visible where the ground had been plowed by high explosive shells, and it all looked almost peaceful.

  They were above the range of bullets from the ground, and their only worry was the possibility of engine failure. And even if that happened, the prevailing wind would carry them safely back to their own side of the lines.

  As their Albatross flew in lazy circles near the village of Epernay, the observer tapped the pilot’s shoulder and pointed to a French Morane-Saulnier single-seater. The pilot shrugged and continued calmly on his course. The Morane turned toward them, approaching from the rear. But there was nothing to worry about. The worst the Frenchman might do would be to pull alongside and try to shoot at them with his service pistol.

  One can imagine the surprise and panic that gripped the observer, peering back over his shoulder, as a stream of machine-gun bullets suddenly poured at them through the propeller of the French plane. The pilot died instantly. But the observer—flying, in those days, without a parachute—clung helplessly to the sides of his cockpit as the plane went into a spin and crashed.

  The date was 1 April 1915.

  On that day, the airplane ceased to serve merely as an aerial observation post for the forces on the ground and became a fighting mac
hine in its own right. The era of aerial combat had begun.

  Piloting the French plane on that historic day was Roland Garros, who was both a concert pianist and an exceptionally skilled flier before World War I began. He was also the inventor of the device that permitted him to fire his machine gun through the propeller.

  The problem he faced was that, without some means to protect the propeller, the pilot would, sooner or later—and probably sooner—shoot himself down by blowing away his own prop. Garros calculated, however, that fewer than seven percent of the rounds from a Hotchkiss gun, which was capable of 300 rounds a minute, would hit the prop. The others would fly between the blades. In a ten-second burst, he only had to worry about three or four bullets. Garros directed his mechanic to bolt a machine gun between the cockpit and the engine and then to protect the blades with a shield of armor plate shaped so that the few bullets that hit the shield would be deflected.

  Although his invention was dangerously defective, Garros and his secret weapon went on a rampage, destroying four more planes in the next two weeks. But on 19 April, on a bombing mission, he made a crash-landing after his engine failed, and his plane fell into German hands.

  Within five days, Anthony Fokker, a young Dutch airplane designer and builder employed by the Germans, had analyzed and rejected Garros’s design and worked out his own system for shooting through the propeller. Despite the armor plate on Garros’s prop, Fokker reasoned, the blades would soon be battered out of balance and the engine would tear itself from the plane. His solution was an interrupter gear that permitted the gun to fire only when a blade was not in the line of fire. Within the next few months, pilots flying planes fitted with the new device virtually drove the Allied pilots from the air over the front. They called it the “Fokker scourge.”

  The British and French scrambled to meet the challenge. They sent planes into combat with shields of the type developed by Garros, but Fokker was right. The impact of even a few bullets destroyed propellers and engines. They tried mounting a machine gun on the top of the wing so it could fire over the propeller. But with the weapon in that position, the pilot found it difficult to clear a blockage or change ammunition drums. Unfastening the seatbelt, holding the control stick between the knees, and standing up to work on the gun was not a formula for longevity. Another effort involved putting the engine in the rear, in a pusher arrangement, but that made for a clumsy flying machine.

  Without enemy observers lurking overhead, the German generals were able to move troops into position for surprise attacks, and they eagerly began planning an early victory. But a Fokker plane fell into Allied hands and the balance of power in the air was restored.

  Thus, by late 1915, barely a dozen years after Orville Wright’s first twelve-second, powered flight on 17 December 1903, all the elements of combat aviation were in place. Pilots had dropped small bombs from their cockpits as early as 1912. Planes had also proved their usefulness on reconnaissance missions. And, with the addition of forward-firing guns, fighter planes could attack or defend bombers and reconnaissance craft as well as attack targets on the ground.

  It was in the final three years of the four-year war that the great aerial battles that have become part of aviation legend took place. Infantrymen watched in fascination as the German flying circuses, complex formations numbering fifty to sixty planes, collided with equally large Allied formations. Arch Whitehouse, who flew many missions as an observer and gunner in the British Royal Flying Corps and who later became a prolific writer, claims to have coined the word “dogfight” to describe these mass engagements.

  Typically, a dogfight began with a large formation descending out of the sun to attack a group of enemy planes. If the attack was undetected, the air was quickly filled with the debris of shattered planes. The survivors twisted and turned their planes, trying to avoid being shot while catching an enemy in their sights. Mid-air collisions added to the destruction. When the wood and fabric planes were hit, they often lost wings or tails and burst into flames. Flying without parachutes, crew members of stricken machines had a deadly choice: stay with the plane and burn, or jump to escape the flames. One eyewitness reported observing a pilot standing on the wing of his burning plane, trying to slip the plane so the flames would stream off to the other side. When the observer glanced back, the pilot was gone and the plane was spinning violently toward the earth.

  By the end of the war, well over 100,000 planes had been built by the belligerents, and aviation had become an integral and important part of modern warfare.

  While the war in the air over Europe evolved rapidly from reconnaissance to full-scale aerial combat, the development of naval aviation was much more tentative. No one seemed to be quite sure how airplanes fitted in with the naval forces’ traditional role of controlling the seas, and there was little enthusiasm for this newfangled contraption.

  Fortunately, the United States Navy had been blessed with one far-seeing advocate of naval aviation. He was Capt. Washington Irving Chambers, a battleship skipper who was assigned to Washington in 1910 and, in addition to other duties, was given the responsibility of keeping track of developments in aviation. He was ordered “to gradually provide the navy with suitable equipment for aerial navigation and to instruct the navy personnel in its use.” Chambers became not only the most forceful advocate of taking planes to sea, but virtually the only one within the navy itself. At one point, even his cubbyhole office was taken from him and he was forced to work out of his home.

  Eventually, he felt, every cruiser should carry a scout plane that could be launched from the ship’s deck, land on the sea, and be hoisted aboard for another flight. But, since planes capable of landing on water had not yet been perfected, he pushed ahead with experiments that took land planes to sea.

  He set out to prove that a plane could take off successfully from a ship. The forward deck of the cruiser U.S.S. Birmingham was fitted with a wooden platform eighty-three feet long and twenty-four feet wide, sloping downward by five degrees. Since the navy had no aviators of its own, Chambers prevailed on Eugene Ely, a civilian aviation pioneer, to make the flight in a biplane built by Glenn Curtiss. It looked little different from the delicate craft in which Orville Wright had first flown seven years before.

  The plane was hoisted aboard in Baltimore and the ship proceeded down the Chesapeake Bay through rain squalls and gusty winds on 14 November 1910. At about three o’clock in the afternoon, there was a break in the weather. Ely took his seat on the flimsy outrigger, which seemed to be perched out on the end of nowhere, revved up his four-cylinder pusher engine, and signaled his mechanic to activate the release mechanism.

  Although the platform was eighty-three feet long, Ely had only a fifty-seven foot run before he went over the edge, thirty-seven feet from the surface of the bay. As the sailors watched, the plane dropped from sight. They could picture Ely, with the engine at his back, being driven to the bottom of the bay. The wheels hit the water. The tips of the propeller splintered on the whitecaps. And then the plane gained power and rose into the view of those watching anxiously from the deck of the ship. An “aircraft carrier” had launched its first aircraft successfully. Ely, disoriented and nearly blinded by the salt spray on his goggles, landed safely a few minutes later on a nearby beach.

  Less than two months later, the navy, under prodding from Chambers, set out to test the other half of the equation: Could a plane land on a ship, as well as take off? Again, the plane was a Curtiss, and Ely was the pilot. The ship chosen for the experiment was the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, then anchored in San Francisco Bay. A wooden platform 120 feet long and thirty-two feet wide was erected above the after gun turret at the stern of the ship. Twenty-two pairs of fifty-pound bags of sand were attached to lines stretched across the deck at intervals of three feet to act as arresting gear, and three hooks were attached to the plane to catch the lines.

  Curtiss and Ely recommended that the ship sail into the wind, but the captain felt this would be dangerous in the relati
vely narrow confines of the bay. Instead, the ship was at anchor and a five-knot wind was blowing down the bay. This meant that Ely would have a tail wind as he approached the ship, a violation of the most basic rule in the pilot’s book.

  Ely flew out toward the Golden Gate, then turned and headed toward the ship. As he came in over the stern, the tail wind kept him airborne, floating above the arresting lines that were set twelve inches above the deck. He passed over half the lines before one caught. As the weight of the bags dragged at the plane, it quickly stopped, fifty feet from the end of the platform. A short time later, Ely took off from the Pennsylvania and flew safely ashore.

  Chambers had demonstrated that planes could take off from ships and land again. The one additional thing he needed was a reliable catapult so that seaplanes could be launched from battleships and cruisers without covering the decks with wooden platforms. That missing ingredient was supplied on 12 October 1912 when Lt. Theodore G. (“Spuds”) Ellyson, the navy’s first aviator, and his plane were successfully launched at Annapolis, Maryland, by a catapult powered by compressed air.

  Probably to Chambers, and certainly to most ship captains, the cumbersome wooden platforms used in the demonstrations aboard the Birmingham and Pennsylvania were an undesirable inconvenience, and little thought was given to developing a true aircraft carrier capable of taking large numbers of planes to sea. Instead, the navy focused on perfecting the seaplane as a scout and gun-spotter for the ships. Such planes were first used in combat during the American intervention in Mexico in 1914.