Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  Coming back now to Willy:

  Just forward of the island, the cat crew swarmed around him and took over. They went to work like a pro football team coming out of the huddle on a fourth down and inches to go. They lined Willy up carefully on the catapult, set the heavy towing bridle in place on the hooks on each side of the fuselage, looped it over the shuttle in the catapult track, and fastened the breaking link into the tail hook. Then they took a careful strain with the shuttle, cocking the cat as you do a slingshot. Meantime they raised the big blast deflector plate out of the deck just astern of the plane and checked a few odds and ends such as wing locks in place and control locks removed - which can make quite a difference right after you become airborne if not tended to properly beforehand.

  As each member of the crew finished his job, he shoved his fist out toward the crew chief with his thumb up and ducked out of the way. The chief turned toward Fly One, the launching officer, stuck his thumb up, and got clear.

  Fly One took a last look around, then looked up at Fly Control on the bridge and held up his thumb. In Fly Control, the Air Officer looked forward at the Captain, seated in his chair on the port wing of the bridge, and held his thumb up.

  (Note: A common expression for a clumsy operator is to say that he is “all thumbs.” There’s nothing clumsy about air operations on an attack carrier. But they’d have a hell of a time trying to run the show without using their thumbs. It would be as bad as trying to explain what a goatee is without stroking your chin.)

  The Captain nodded to the Air Officer, the Air Officer flipped a switch changing the signal light sticking out over the deck from red to green, the bull horns blared “LAUNCH AIRCRAFT” - and the America was ready to go.

  Down on deck the cat officer raised his right hand over his head holding one finger up and made circular motions. Willy ran his jets up to full power, made a quick check of the gages, throttled back and stuck his thumb up.

  The cat officer then held up two fingers. Willy braced his head back against a buffer, shoved his throttle up against the stop with his left hand, and when his RPM reached max, hit the afterburner button, saluted briskly with his right hand, and grabbed the stick again. Then he waited patiently for perhaps half a second, as the afterburner snarled up to a roar that drowned out even the jet engines.

  On deck the cat officer snapped his hand down, pointing forward. At the deck edge a sailor hit a button. Below in the catapult room a light flashed from amber to green. The Chief flipped a valve lever, and in the cylinder of the great engine high pressure steam hit the piston.

  On deck the bridle took a strain, snapped the hold-back link, and away went Willy and Joe down the catapult track. From a dead stop they were making one hundred fifty knots in little more than a second. As they roared over the bow ramp, a doohickey snatched off the tow bridle and whipped it under the deck and out of the way.

  Most people think a catapult shot must be an adventure, and in a way it is. But it’s a lot easier than a fly-off. When you fly one of those big jets off a carrier, you’ve got a lot of things to do exactly right. You’ve got to pour the coal on properly, you’ve got to hold her straight as you gather speed along the deck, you’ve got to ease her off at just the right point, and you’ve got to watch for an air bump at the bow. On a cat shot it’s just WHAM, and there you are. All you gotta do is flip up your wheels, milk up your flaps, and you’re on your way.

  As he cleared the bow Willy went into an easy turn, climbing like a homesick angel. By the time he completed one circle he was at ten thousand feet and flipped open his oxygen valve. It was a beautiful day, just as aerology had guessed it would be, CAVU (clear and unlimited, visibility unrestricted). The task group now looked like pieces on a chessboard. They had completed the launch and turned back to base course, leaving a neat pattern of curved creamy wakes behind them - much more visible than any of the ships.

  Willy squeezed his intercom button and said, “How ya doin’ back there, Blueberry?”

  “Okay, skipper,” came the reply. “Cameras are all programmed and ready. All I gotta do is turn ‘em on when you tell me we’re at point X-ray.’’

  “About ten minutes to go,” said Willy. “I’ll let you know.”

  At forty thousand feet on a clear day the horizon is over two hundred miles away. But you can’t tell much about what you’re seeing that far away, except for an occasional mountain peak sticking up. And even things that are right below you are seven and one-half miles away. Even the America looks no bigger than a shoe does at fifty feet. But of course, with pictures taken by modern cameras, photo interpretation experts can just about read the fine print in a loan contract. A reel of such pictures taken by U-2 flights told us more about Russian missiles than any cloak-and-dagger operation could have dug up in years. Taking such pictures on a clear day is just a milk run. The preprogrammed cameras do all the work and most of the thinking.

  Willy, like many other jet jockeys, often talked to himself at high altitudes. As he squared away on the outbound leg of this mission he observed to himself, “This is an easier way to make a living than being on relief.”

  After about an hour they picked up the Israeli coast. Willy jogged south a while and then headed home. He didn’t even have to worry much about navigating. There was a black box full of electronic sensors in the plane that had been synchronized with the ship’s inertial navigators while they were on the catapult. This box was marking the exact geographic location on every film the camera shot. And as far as finding the ship was concerned, Willy would pick up their radio beacon at about two hundred miles and just home in on it. It was indeed a milk run.

  But about halfway back to the ship, some little thing went wrong with Willy’s starboard engine. The big jet missed a beat, let out a small burp, and then exploded, tearing off the outer half of the right wing, scattering junk all over the sky, and filling the cockpit with flame and smoke.

  In the jet-jockey trade when things like this happen it is customary to consider that this terminates your contract with the government to fly that airplane. SOP is to get the hell out of there.

  Willy didn’t diddle around trying to call the ship and explain his troubles to them. He was however, supposed to serve notice on his rear seat man that he was about to leave. He grabbed his intercom mike and yelled, “Bail out! Bail out!”

  There was no answer from back aft, and the cockpit was getting hot. Willy yanked his oxygen connection, pulled his feet back off the rudder pedals, sat bolt upright, and hit the eject button. An explosive charge blew the plastic hood off the cockpit and blasted Willy, seat and all, into the wild blue yonder arse over tip.

  After three or four somersaults the seat flew apart, and there Willy was at forty thousand feet with no visible means of support except his parachute - which, of course, he didn’t dare open up there. The air is too thin to support life and you’d freeze. He had to freefall for almost a minute before he’d get down around fifteen thousand feet, where there’s air enough for a man to breathe. However, the Navy thoughtfully attaches a small oxygen flask to its jet jockeys’ G-suits to keep the boys happy while they’re coming down through the thin air. The big danger in high altitude bailouts is explosive decompression - and the G-suit takes care of that.

  So down Willy came, end over end. When one end was up, he could glimpse the big ball of flame and smoke where his plane had come apart, with many small trails of smoke coming down from it. When the other end was up, all he could see was an empty stretch of salt water below him. Fifty seconds doesn’t seem like a very long time, if you’re sitting by the fire at home. But when you are freefalling five miles or so over the middle of the Med - it’s apt to drag out a bit. Willy knew there was a barometric element in his chute that was supposed to pull it at fifteen thousand feet. He was beginning to suspect that maybe it was stuck, when suddenly his seat pack snapped open and out popped the pilot chute - dragging the big chute behind it.

  The big chute opened with a crack that shattered the eer
ie silence like a five-inch gun. Willy was jerked upright and began swinging in big gradually decreasing arcs, like a kid in a playground swing. When he recovered his wits enough to look around him he spotted another chute half a mile or so to the east with a figure swinging below it. “Radarman Blueberry, I presume,” he observed to himself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rescue

  At this time LCU 1124 was steering course two hundred and seventy at eight knots, two hundred miles west of Tel Aviv bound for Naples. Normal working hours routine was in effect. Webfoot had the watch on the wheel, and everyone else was basking in the sun on deck, caulking off or listening to Fatso and Scuttlebutt trying to outdo ouch other with yarns about the old days.

  Fatso, as was his custom at such times, was holding forth on the U.S. Navy’s role in World War II and the impact on it of one John Patrick Gioninni. This impact had been considerable as shown by the array of ribbons Fatso wore on his dress blues. Besides his Navy Cross and gold star he had a couple of Purple Hearts and theater ribbons for all oceans with more combat stars than there was room for. This morning the subject of his critique was naval strategy in the Med in early ‘42.

  “The Germans damn near run us out of the Med altogether,” he said. “I was in the Wasp then, and we saved Malta after the limeys gave up on it. The Germans had all of North Africa then, and there was Malta sitting halfway between Italy and Libya, smack in the middle of the Med, within easy range of German and Eyetalian air bases and the big wop naval base at Taranto. Malta was having a had time. The limeys had a couple of whole convoys sunk trying to get supplies to them from Gib. So they finally gave up trying and just wrote Malta off. The Maltese was living on nothing but figs. But they wouldn’t give up.

  “Mussolini kept sending bombing raids over every day. But they had a couple of squadrons of RAF Spitfires that shot the hell out of the dagoes every time they came over. Of course on every raid they’d lose one or two Spits, and finally they didn’t have many left, and it began to look like curtains for them. Spits didn’t have enough range to fly in from Gib, and every time a limey carrier stuck its nose in the Med the German subs put a torpedo in its belly. So the limeys said they thought it would be nice if we would take a deckload of Spits in on the Wasp. So they loaded us up with Spitfires in Gib, and we was supposed to make a highspeed run toward Malta and fly ‘em off as soon as they could make it there.”

  “Like the Hornet did on the Doolittle raid?” asked the Professor.

  “Yeah. The Doolittle raid was the day we left Gib. Our skipper then was old Black Jack Reeves, and he wasn’t about to let the Hornet get ahead of the Wasp. We snuck out of Gib after dark, ran for twelve hours at thirty-five knots, launched our Spits, and hauled ass back to Gib. Lord Haw Haw claimed on the Berlin radio that they had sunk us. You should of heard the whoop that went up on the Wasp when they put that dope out on the squawk boxes! Then we rubbed their nose in it by doing the same goddamned thing again nineteen days later. Altogether we delivered one hundred and twelve Spits, and Malta was a pain in the ass to the Germans until Patton got to Sicily.”

  “You kind of stuck your neck out on those runs, didn’t you?” asked the Professor.

  “Old Black Jack didn’t think so,” said Fatso. “Or at least if he did, you’d never know it. He was a character. He wasn’t afraid of anything except getting left out of a good fight. One of the toughest skippers I ever served with - but a good one. He was like Admiral Uncle Ernie King. He used to say, ‘Don’t expect a medal for doing a good job - that’s what you get paid for.’ But Gawd help you if you goofed off and loused up a job. He was a hard man to work for. But the Germans thought he was a hard man, too.”

  “There musta been a lot of characters in the Med in those days,” observed the Professor. “I was reading in one of Churchill’s books about the two four-star Admirals the British had in the Med then. One was in Alexandria and the other in Gib. They used to send each other insulting signals by radio that everybody intercepted and read.”

  “The one in Gib was Sir John Cunningham,” said Fatso. “I was a sideboy one time when he came aboard the Wasp.”

  “Well, anyway,” continued the Professor. “The one in Gib had married himself a young wife just before the war started and left her back in London. Nine months later she presents him with a son. So the Admiral in Alexandria sends his pal a radio saying ‘Congratulations. Who do you suspect?’ Not long after that the one in Alex took his fleet to sea and beat the hell out of the Eyetalian fleet. He was already a Knight of the Garter, so they made him n Knight of the Bath for winning the battle. So his pal in Gib sends him a radio: ‘Congratulations. Twice a knight - and at your age!’ “

  At this point there was a muffled CRUMP - like big gunfire a long way off.

  “What was that?” asked Jughaid.

  “Sounded like one of them sonic booms the flyboys make,” said Fatso.

  As all hands were scanning the sky Satchmo pointed astern and sang out, “I see something, Cap’n ... over there, and way up high.”

  There was a scramble for binoculars and soon Fatso yelled, “Yeah! I see it!”

  There was a high vapor trail ending in a puff of black smoke about half the size of the sun, with smoke streaks trailing down from it.

  “A plane must of blowed up! Right full rudder - ahead full speed,” yelled Fatso.

  As LCU 1124 swung to head back toward the puff in the sky a trail of black smoke streaked down from it and disappeared just beyond the horizon, sending up a great splash visible “over the hill.”

  “Head for that spot,” yelled Fatso to Webfoot. “She hit about a mile beyond the horizon so we’re only six or seven miles from it ... log the time,” he yelled to Scuttlebutt.

  “Aye aye Cap’n - steady on course zero seven five,” sang out Webfoot.

  “Time 1045 1/2,” reported Scuttlebutt. “We’re making twelve knots - about half an hour to get there.”

  A minute later Satchmo yelled “Parachute - parachute,” and pointed up in the sky about two points on the port bow.

  “Come left,” yelled Fatso to Webfoot. “Keep your glass on it, Satch, and coach Webfoot on.”

  Pretty soon Scuttlebutt spotted the other chute, a little lower and further away.

  “Okay, Scutt,” yelled Fatso. “Keep your glass on that second guy while we’re picking up the first one. Matter of fact, the way things look now we may not have to pick him up. He may land right smack on board!”

  This prediction was only a quarter of a mile off. It takes about fifteen minutes for a chute to come down fifteen thousand feet, and during this time LCU 1124 covered about three miles. Just a minute after the chute splashed down they eased up to the figure in the water, and eager hands dragged Ensign Willy Wigglesworth aboard over the bow ramp just as he finished inflating his rubber boat.

  “There’s another guy in the water about a mile ahead,” yelled Willy as he scrambled up on deck.

  “Okay. We got him in sight,” said Fatso. “All engines ahead full.”

  Five minutes later, radarman Blueberry was hauled aboard.

  “Didja get off a MAYDAY?” asked Willy.

  “Nossir,” said Blueberry. “It didn’t seem to me like there was time.”

  “I didn’t think so either,” said Willy. “You okay?”

  “I guess so,” said Blueberry. “But I got a hell of a boot in the ass when that seat ejector fired. Damn near broke my back.”

  “Yeah,” said Willy. “You shouldn’t be slouched over when you fire that thing. You gotta be sittin’ up straight.”

  “I found that out, sir,” said Blueberry, feeling his back.

  “Pretty damned good service you guys give shipwrecked aviators,” observed Willy to Fatso. “I was figuring on paddling around out here for a couple of days at least.”

  “We got a standing order on this bucket,” said Fatso. “To always pick up any aviators we see drifting around. Now - where’s your ship and we’ll take you back there?”

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p; “They’re about four hundred miles west of here. You better call them by radio and tell them we’re all right. Sometimes they worry if planes don’t get back on time.”

  “Can’t do it,” said Fatso. “Our transmitter is out.”

  “Too bad,” said Willy. “They’ll get nervous pretty soon and put out a search.”

  “Let’s go up to the charthouse,” said Fatso, “and we’ll lay out a course to intercept them.”

  In the charthouse Willy flattened out some of his water-soaked files and produced the launching position and predicted noon position of the America. “We were due overhead at 1218,” he said. “And they’ll go into their search routine right away when we don’t show up. They’ll be looking for us to the east, so I’d say you can plot them coming this way at twenty knots from their noon position.”

  “Okay,” said Fatso, making two pin pricks on the chart. “There they are - and here we are, more or less.” He stepped off the distance with his dividers. “Four hundred and fifty miles,” he announced. “I wanta be damn sure we don’t pass ‘em in the dark, so we’ll try to meet them about two hours after sunrise - that will be about 0745 tomorrow morning - about twenty hours from now. So we can just poop along at steerage way - maybe even run back east a little at night ... No strain, sir. We’ll have you back on board in time for lunch tomorrow.”

  Meantime, things were happening on the America. Down in CIC the radar had followed Willy on his outbound leg until he went off the screen behind the horizon at two hundred and fifty miles. A sailor behind the big plastic plotting board made a mark where he disappeared and posted the time, writing the numbers backward so they read right on the other side of the board. The CIC watch officer did a bit of figuring and told his plotter where and when Willy should come back on the screen. The plotter marked the spot and wrote “1142” alongside it in red.