The First Hellcat Ace

We were in position to support the landings by the Marines on the sands of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945. Volumes and volumes have been written about the terror, chaos, and ruin that characterized this battle. And although we suspected it then, we did not know for sure how rough a time the Marines were having.

I was on combat air patrol over the fleet on the first morning of the battle. From high above I watched as landing craft emerged from their parent ships, then formed into moving circles, one following another as they waited for the signal to turn toward the beach. Once the signal came, the small landing craft swung out into neat lines parallel to the beach and started in—at a crawl, it seemed to me. Almost immediately Japanese artillery fire began to rain down among them. The smaller-caliber shells peppered the sea around the landing craft, while the large ones made huge geysers. I knew it was only a matter of time before the inevitable occurred.

When it did, it struck with a terrifying suddenness that stunned me, detached as I was by distance and altitude. One of the landing craft took a direct hit and exploded into fire and smoke and spray. When the wind cleared the scene, there was nothing but a dirty smudge on the water where a boat full of men had been. It made me sad for the Marines, but also selfishly thankful to be where I was.

The Navy had learned its lessons earlier in the war; too many Marines were killed when enemy positions weren’t hit hard enough prior to invasion day. This had been tragically illustrated at Tarawa. As a result, the Navy was placing special emphasis on ground-support missions for the Marines at Iwo Jima.

I was part of a strike mission later in the day on February 19. The strike included 16 F6Fs, 8 SB2Cs, and 8 TBMs. The airplanes in my division each carried six, five-inch, high velocity aerial rockets (HVARs) and a centerline drop tank loaded with napalm. This was the first time we carried napalm.

The task force lay about 75 miles west of Iwo Jima, so the island came into view only a few minutes after we launched. Iwo was just an ugly gray nothing of an island—only about five miles by two—marked by its one prominent feature, Mount Suribachi. This volcanic peak rose almost 600 feet and provided the Japanese with superb firing positions.

Charlie Crommelin was leading the strike and he checked in with an orbiting aircraft that was tasked with coordinating strikes for the Commander Air Support Control Unit (CASCU). Crommelin passed our position, our composition, and our ordnance loads, then anchored us in an orbit to await instructions.

While we orbited, we watched boats moving back and forth from the invasion fleet to the beach. Smoke and dust from the detonation of large-caliber shells obscured parts of the island. It was obvious that the Marines were having a difficult time.

After a few minutes we received our targeting assignments. Targets were referenced from a map overlaid with a grid. This grid defined numbered sectors, which in turn were subdivided into 25 much smaller lettered sectors. Thus, a target assignment for “an artillery position in sector 135A” defined a very precise position.

Our assigned target was a group of gun emplacements near the top of Mount Suribachi. Crommelin directed the bombers to drop one bomb each. The first two divisions of F6Fs were ordered to fire rockets; the second two divisions of F6Fs, to drop napalm. My division was one of those assigned to drop napalm.

From about 5,000 feet and a couple miles offshore, Crommelin pushed over into a shallow dive, and the rest of the strike airplanes followed him down. I looked over to make certain that Jay Finley and the rest of my division was in position, then went to full power to build up as much speed as possible. Not too far ahead of us, antiaircraft fire was already exploding.

As we neared Suribachi I could clearly make out the guns in cave-like emplacements. At about 2,000 feet I squeezed the trigger and watched my tracers arc down into one of the emplacements. When I got so close that I had no choice but to pull up or smash into the mountain, I released the napalm and yanked back on the stick. The G forces from the abrupt maneuver pushed me down into my seat and caused my face to sag. I felt particularly vulnerable exposing the belly of my airplane to the gunners below.

Luckily, I didn’t get hit. I craned my head around as I cleared the island, but I couldn’t see where my napalm had struck. As we rendezvoused back out over the water, the air coordinator reported good hits with the rockets and bombs, but said that only two of the eight napalm-filled centerline tanks had exploded. This frustrated me greatly; it was stupid to expose ourselves to enemy fire, only to deliver weapons that didn’t function.

The air coordinator sent us back to hit more targets in the same area. On three more runs we fired our rockets with good effect. The antiaircraft fire continued to lash up at us, but probably just as dangerous was the very real possibility of a midair collision with one of the other strike airplanes over the target.

Next, the air coordinator moved us to targets north of Suribachi, where we strafed troop concentrations. Finally, our ammunition nearly expended, we returned to the Randolph. Although the antiaircraft fire had been heavy, none of the airplanes from my division was hit.

The problem with napalm persisted throughout the campaign at Iwo Jima. It was estimated that only one out of three weapons dropped actually ignited. The Navy finally solved the problem by adding a second fuse to the tank. This fix was in place before the invasion of Okinawa. When put to the test on the battlefields there, it worked quite well.

On the afternoon of February 21, I was sitting in an airplane waiting to take off and was looking over at the Saratoga, about 2,000 yards off our port side, slightly aft of abeam. Suddenly I caught sight of airplanes—kamikazes—diving on her. One of them struck the aft part of the ship and another hit just behind the forward elevator. The second airplane apparently went through the flight deck and the bomb it was carrying must have exploded right under the forward elevator, because that 20- or 30-ton aircraft elevator went flying hundreds of feet into the sky, flipping like a champagne cork. But instead of champagne, the Saratoga was belching fire, smoke, and debris. And bodies. I was dumbstruck.

The Randolph came under attack at the same time and responded with her five-inch guns. It just so happened that we had received delivery of five brand-new F6F-5s from a jeep carrier; they were parked aft of the island next to the five-inch gun mounts. Unfortunately, the kamikazes attacked from such a direction that the guns had to fire right over the top of those beautiful new airplanes. The concussion from the blasts popped nearly every rivet on every one of those Hellcats, turning them into total wrecks. The deck crews simply pulled the clocks—prized for some odd reason as souvenirs—from the instrument panels, and pushed the aircraft overboard. It was a shame to lose the new airplanes, but at least the Randolph wasn’t hit.

The kamikaze was a new and puzzling phenomenon to me. By now the Japanese leaders realized they were not going to win the war. Their only chance of holding on to what remained of their empire—which in China, if not the Pacific, was still considerable—was to negotiate an armistice. The only way they could hope to press an armistice on us was by exacting hellish numbers of casualties, beyond what we as a nation were prepared to bear. The only way they felt that they could inflict these casualties was through the use of suicide bombers, more popularly known as kamikazes.

McWhorter was in the cockpit of his F6F aboard the USS Randolph near Iwo Jima on February 21, 1945, when he saw a kamikaze hit the USS Saratoga, pictured here. (U.S. Navy)

To deliver a bomb in the conventional way took a great deal of training and skill. Targeting and hitting a moving ship with a bomb was difficult for even the most experienced aircrews. But after several years of war without an adequate training scheme for replacement personnel, Japan had precious few skilled pilots left.

What it had was plenty of airmen and would-be airmen willing to sacrifice their lives by flying their airplanes directly into ships—a much easier task than bombing. From October 1944, during the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines, the Japanese had hurled suicide bombers at our ships in an organized, premeditated fashion. The threat had our higher-ups scrambling for solutions.

But it wasn’t just the physical threat of the kamikazes that was frightening. It was also the idea that the Japanese were recruiting and organizing whole units of men—ultimately, thousands of men—who would purposely sacrifice their lives against us. To even contemplate the idea required a complete shift in our way of thinking. Even though we were also deep in the business of war, the sacrifice of our lives was not a deliberate act ordered by the highest levels of our government. (Several years later my faith in humankind was restored somewhat when I learned that there were many in the Japanese military who also found the idea horrifying and repugnant.)

The kamikaze concept was desperate and ultimately ineffective. (U.S. Navy)

One of the many changes caused by the increased kamikaze threat hit close to home. The squadron ready rooms were consolidated and moved from directly underneath the flight deck into the big wardroom beneath the armored hangar deck. Where before the wardroom was a refreshing and clean refuge from the grunge of the daily grind, it quickly became cluttered with a big status board and piles of worn and sweaty flight equipment. It made for quite a mess, but we were much safer.

We stayed in support of the landings at Iwo Jima until February 22. During those three days, we pounded the Japanese positions on Mount Suribachi with bombs, rockets, machinegun fire, and napalm. The deck crews made the napalm—essentially jellied gasoline—right on the flight deck. As they filled our 150-gallon centerline drop tanks with gasoline, they simultaneously added a substance that turned it into a gel. After the tank was filled, they screwed an omnidirectional fuse into the fuel filler opening. The tanks were not originally intended to be accurate weapons and consequently tumbled through the air and hit the ground at all sorts of weird angles which necessitated the use of the omnidirectional fuse to ensure detonation.

To guarantee the best possible accuracy, we dropped the napalm tanks on Japanese positions from very low altitude—50 to 150 feet. When the tank hit, it ruptured and the fuse ignited, splashing an area about 50 feet by 100 feet with the fiery substance. Although we used napalm a great deal against enemy-held caves in an effort to kill the Japanese by suffocating them—burning up all the oxygen—we also directed it against whatever other targets we could find. The whooshing blast and fire and smoke it created made it a terrifying weapon that I’m sure had as much of a psychological effect as a physically destructive one.

When foul weather at Iwo Jima caused the cancellation of our planned support strikes on the afternoon of February 22, we left again for the Japanese home islands. As it had been during the strikes of February 16 and 17, the weather was awful. On February 24 we ran into a terrible storm. Huge waves crashed over the bow and ripped off about 100 feet of the catwalk around the forward part of the deck, damaged 7 planes on the flight deck, and wrecked the two 40-millimeter gun mounts on the bow.

The Randolph rolled and pitched worse than I had ever experienced. Plates and items on the wardroom table slid back and forth; when the carrier plowed into one of the huge waves, the impact jolted the whole ship. Nevertheless, we had it easy compared to the smaller ships. The destroyers pitched up so far that their entire bows came out of the water, and at other times their sterns were exposed enough for us to see the propellers. They rolled so far over that we could almost see their keels. The sailors aboard those ships had to be miserable. In fact, the seas were so rough that—even though our speed was reduced to 16 knots—a destroyer’s bow was crushed by the waves.

We were off the coast of Japan again on February 25. The weather was somewhat better, but still bad, with low clouds and poor visibility. We were launched that morning on fighter sweeps to hit Hyakurigahara, Hokoda, and Mawatari air bases. Jay Finley was my wingman and Norm Sandler and Stoney Carlson made up my second section.

The catapult officer was Lieutenant Commander Sam Humphries. We called him “Slinging Sam.” He did a commendable job getting our planes off that morning. The seas were very heavy, and it was unnerving to be sitting on the catapult, ready to go, only to see nothing but a huge wall of water directly ahead as the bow pitched down. Sam timed the catapult shots just right, launching us when the bow neared the top of its rise. It sure made for some anxious moments, though!

Some of our airplanes experienced an unanticipated problem as they climbed up through the freezing clouds. It was so cold that the engine oil circulating in the propeller domes, which controlled the pitch of the constant-speed propellers, congealed into a semisolid. The pilots of these planes, including Commander Charlie Crommelin, were left with fixed-pitch props—not a good thing in a combat situation.

As we neared Hyakurigahara airfield I led my four-ship division down through a scattered undercast and set up for a strafing run on several single-engine airplanes parked on the main ramp. I had not seen any Japanese planes in the air. As always, the antiaircraft fire was heavy and accurate, and I flinched reflexively when several bursts came particularly close to my airplane.

I lined up on the first of the enemy airplanes, and as the illuminated pipper of my gunsight settled onto the center of its fuselage, I squeezed the trigger. My rounds slammed home and I moved my aim onto the next airplane in line. Again, my bullets found their mark. Just before I reached the point where I had to pull up to avoid crashing into the ground, I sprayed a quick burst into the center of the rest of the airplanes.

A second or two later Stoney Carlson called out that Norm Sandler’s plane had disintegrated as it pulled out from the strafing run. I looked back but could not see where Norm had crashed. We made more strafing runs during which I tried to spot Norm’s airplane, but I could not find it. Finally, I corralled the rest of my flight and headed back. Along the way I kept hoping that somehow Stoney had made a mistake and that Norm hadn’t crashed, but rather that he had become separated from the rest of us and would show up back at the Randolph.

Somehow, we managed to find our way out to the carrier through the rapidly deteriorating weather. Lieutenant Fred Kidd was the air group LSO for this strike and he worked miracles getting us back aboard. The weather had turned really foul, and the stern was pitching up and down 20 feet or more. Fred managed to get us aboard without an excessive number of wave-offs by very competently judging the deck motion and giving cuts only when the deck was pitching down. This ensured that a descending airplane wouldn’t get damaged by rapidly meeting up with a rising flight deck. Only one F6F was damaged; it suffered two blown tires when it did not get down to the deck soon enough after the cut.

After I parked my airplane, Jay Finley and Stoney Carlson got aboard. I caught up with Stoney on the cold, rainy flight deck.

The expression on Stoney’s face telegraphed bad news. “I don’t know what happened for sure, Mac. I saw him as he started his pullout. I’m not sure if he got hit or what, but the tail of his plane came completely off.”

I imagined what it must have been like at the end for Norm—helpless, the ground rushing up. “Did he hit hard?” I asked.

Again, Stoney’s expression answered the question before he spoke. “It was bad, Mac. He’s gone.”

Although my division hadn’t encountered any Japanese in the air, some of our air group had more business than they wanted. Our skipper, Charlie Crommelin, whose airplane was one of those with a frozen-pitch propeller, shot down two planes! But he almost paid for it with his life. After he landed his bullet-riddled plane back aboard, more than 50 holes were counted in just one wing. The whole plane looked like a sieve.

The bad weather caused the cancellation of any more strikes, and the task force withdrew and headed south.

The loss of Norm Sandler hit me very hard. Not only was he the section leader in my division, he was my very close friend. I had known him since flight training at Pensacola in 1941, and we were together on the Essex—training together afterward at Astoria and San Diego. There, he and his wife, Jerry, and Louise and I had spent a lot of evenings and weekends together. On this cruise, Norm and I had shared a stateroom.

Back in our stateroom—mine alone now—I couldn’t help thinking of Jerry while I went through the unpleasant task of inventorying and packing Norm’s personal belongings. At that moment she was probably doing mundane things, with no idea that her husband was gone. I felt sorry for Louise, too. She would inevitably help to console Jerry, and would raise her own fears about my well-being. I hated the hurt that this would cause Louise and felt that, somehow, because of the nature of what I was doing, I was partly to blame.

It is very hard to lose a close friend like that. But in order to keep going your mind somehow blocks out the grief and nearly everything else about him, almost as if he had never existed. It sounds like a cruel thing to do, but it is necessary to survive in combat—to keep your mind in sharp focus—when so many of your close friends do not come back.