On August 16, 1950, five days after Armstrong aced his carrier qualifications in the F8F, Naval Air Training Command Headquarters at NAS Pensacola informed the midshipman by letter that he had “successfully completed the full course of the prescribed syllabus of training for Naval Aviators” and was “hereby designated a Naval Aviator (Heavier-than-Air).”
Graduation took place a week later, on August 23; Neil’s mother and sister drove 825 miles to attend. Stephen, June explains, “was to testify in an [audit] case and [tried but] could not be excused. I remember both Mother and Father being very disappointed.”
After a short leave, Midshipman Neil Armstrong reported to ComAirPac, i.e., air command of the Pacific Fleet—“for duty involving flying.” Armstrong explained: “Typically you’re going to ask for an assignment that is similar to your recent training. In my case, it was fighters, so I was going to ask for a fighter squadron, and the choice would be East Coast or West Coast. There was a lot of talk about a war either in Indochina or Korea, but I don’t think that was related to my choice of the West Coast. I’d never been to the West Coast and thought it would be nice to see that part of the country, so I asked for West Coast and I was given the West Coast.”
Reaching California in early September 1950, Armstrong served ten weeks with Fleet Aircraft Service Squadron (FASRON) 7—based at NAS San Diego (NAS North Island as of 1955). Commander Luke H. Miller reported “Midshipman Armstrong has been attached to this command in a pool status awaiting assignment to an air group.”
From October 27 to November 4, 1950, Armstrong trained at the close-air support school run by the Marine Corps at its amphibious base on the south strand of Coronado Island down from NAS San Diego. “That was good fun while I was waiting for my fighter assignment,” Armstrong remembers. “A lovely flying experience.” Fifty miles north at marine Camp Pendleton, mock aerial combat drills set “offense” pilots (Neil continued to fly an F8F-2) to find and attack “enemy” ground targets and disrupt the “defense.”
On November 27, 1950, ComAirPac ordered Armstrong, along with Pre-Flight buddy and FASRON 7 mate Herb Graham, to “proceed immediately and report to the Commanding Officer of Fighter Squadron FIFTY ONE, for duty involving flying.” Fighter Squadron 51 was a veteran squadron just then returning stateside aboard the USS Valley Forge (CVA-45). It was the first of three cruises to the Far East that VF-51 would make during the Korean War.
Armstrong wanted to fly jets in VF-51 (until August 16, 1948, VF-5A), the first all-jet squadron in the United States Navy. William W. “Bill” Bowers of VF-51 recalls that “in the early jet days, most single-engine pilots wanted to fly jets. So those who got into it early, around 1949–50, considered themselves fortunate.” Some of them were also “a little more prideful than they should have been.” VF-51 member Ken “K. C.” Kramer concurs: “There was a great mystique about flying high-performance jets and we all played into that.”
As Herb Graham tells it: “When VF-51 was being formed in 1950, jets and jet-trained pilots were scarce and VF-51 was to be an all-jet squadron flying F9F-2s. Neil was in that assignment pool . . . and he was an excellent young pilot. It was a dream spot. Everyone wanted to fly jets and be a fighter pilot.”
VF-51’s commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander Ernest M. “Ernie” Beauchamp. A flight instructor at NAS Pensacola before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Beauchamp (pronounced “Bee-chum”) flew Grumman F-6F Hellcats in World War II with VF-8, a key player in the victory in the Philippines. Aboard USS Bunker Hill in mid-1944, Beauchamp’s squadron, under Commander William Collins, in six months’ time took down 156 Japanese aircraft, producing thirteen different aces, pilots who had destroyed five or more enemy aircraft in air-to-air engagement. Commander Collins himself had nine kills; Beauchamp had eight (four confirmed and four probable). But Ernie was more than an outstanding fighter pilot. He had a brilliant mind for fighter tactics. In the spring of 1945, Beauchamp took command of Fighter Squadron VF-1 (later VF-74), aboard the USS Midway, but the war in the Pacific ended before the squadron could deploy.
Beauchamp stayed in the navy after the war, retaining his squadron command before taking a staff post with the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air (DCNO-AIR) in the Navy Department in Washington. On June 25, 1950, the very day the Korean War started, Lieutenant Commander Beauchamp left his desk job to assume command of VF-51, which became as close to a handpicked squadron as the navy ever got.
Serving temporarily at NAS North Island as officer-in-charge of a brand-new jet transition unit (JTU) for flyers from reserve F4U squadrons that had been recalled to active duty, Lt. Commander Beauchamp not only saw the records but also observed the performance of a large number of pilots. “Only two or three pilots in the [then] currently deployed VF-51 would be available for a second tour,” Beauchamp explained in 2002 from his retirement home in Corona Del Mar, California. Beauchamp managed to secure the assignments of four of his veteran aviators. Lieutenant Richard M. Wenzell had finished first in his test pilot training class and at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River in Maryland and had performed most of the control and stability testing on the navy’s new Panther fighter jet. This was the very plane that VF-51 would be flying. The “dean of instruction” in Beauchamp’s JTU, Wenzell became VF-51’s operations officer. Pensacola flight instructor Lieutenant William A. Mackey had flown under Beauchamp in VF-1 and had recently completed the JTU at Whiting Field, along with Lieutenant Daniel V. Marshall and LCDR Bernard Sevilla, two other VF-1 veterans who Beauchamp in 1950 signed onto VF-51.
Still, Beauchamp was short on pilots. On the word of “Wam” Mackey, Beauchamp recruited four additional aviators from Whiting Field: JTU instructors LTJG Robert E. Rostine (who “made every plane he ever flew look good”) and LTJG John Moore; along with JTU graduates and class 5-49 members LTJG Thomas B. Hayward (future Chief of Naval Operations) and LTJG Ross K. Bramwell.
One day after arrangements had been finalized, none other than World War II double ace (fourteen kills) Marshall Beebe—the new commander (CAG) for Air Group 5—came storming into Beauchamp’s office. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t have all four of those guys! Some of those guys are going to VF-52.”
All four stayed in the 51st. “Skipper” (as the pilots called Beauchamp) told his chosen nine officers to wield “a fine mesh screen” for eleven additional “nuggets,” or new aviators who had not yet received an assignment.
Beauchamp, Mackey, and Wenzell, in Beauchamp’s words, “took every opportunity to fly with each of the nuggets on the recommended list.” Armstrong insists, though, that he never flew with Wenzell, Mackey, or Beauchamp prior to his assignment to the squadron; so “whatever Ernie found out about me, he must have learned from other sources.” Possibly the recommendation for both Armstrong and Herb Graham came from their commanding officer in FASRON 7, Luke H. Miller.
No one has ever claimed credit for identifying Armstrong as a person to bring into VF-51. Nor has Armstrong ever speculated about it.
Filling out the group with Armstrong and Graham were, in alphabetical order, ENS James J. Ashford, LTJG William W. Bowers, LTJG Leonard R. Cheshire, ENS Hershel L. Gott, ENS Herbert A. Graham, ENS Robert J. Kaps, ENS Kenneth E. Kramer, ENS Donald C. McNaught, ENS Glen H. Rickelton, LTJG George E. Russell, and LTJG Harold C. Schwan. Carrying on with VF-51 from the Valley Forge cruise were LTJG Francis N. Jones and LTJG Wiley A. Scott. Harley Thompson was pulled out of VF-51 to become a naval liaison officer with the air force in Japan, and squadron veteran Red Gardner was killed in an F9F training accident at NAS San Diego. The squadron was fortunate to retain experienced chiefs and first-class petty officers in maintenance, ordnance, and supply. New to the squadron were nonflying intelligence officer LTJG Kenneth I. Danneberg and ground maintenance officer ENS Howard “Howie” Zehetner.
The VF-51 nuggets still faced a competitive selection process. One potential disadvantage for Armstrong was that, at the time of his assignment to the squadron in late November 1950, he had not yet flown a jet.
VF-51’s Bill Bowers, a veteran of World War II, remembers that his first hop in a jet—at the one-month transition unit in Pensacola in a single-seat TO-1, the navy’s version of the F-80—was “terrific.” “Not just the higher speed,” Bowers notes, “it was the smooth, vibration-free flow of power from the new engines.” Some say the transition from props to jets was “like switching from a high-powered race car with a ‘four on the floor’ stick to a faster one with ‘automatic’ drive.” Others say the changeover was a little more problematic. Wam Mackey remembers from JTU training in Pensacola that the TO-1 was “a pretty complicated jet fighter” with “very short legs” on the fuel supply.
On Friday, January 5, 1951, Armstrong first took off in a Grumman F9F-2B. The “spectacular” first flight in the Panther lasted a little over an hour, and was another “one of those magic moments” in Neil’s career as a pilot. “That was very exciting to me, to be in the front lines of the new jet fighters.”
Though Neil was only a few months past his twentieth birthday, his fellow aviators held him in high regard. Herb Graham called Neil “quiet without being shy. He was confident without bragging. He listened intently.” Wam Mackey characterized Neil as “very serious and very dedicated. . . . He was a fine young pilot—a very solid aviator, very reliable.” But it was Beauchamp himself who most needed to be impressed, and he was. Until he read a book published in 1997 by VF-51 aviator John Moore, Beauchamp was not even aware that Neil reported into the squadron as a midshipman. “I must have known it at the time,” Beauchamp recalls, “but I always thought of him as a fully qualified designated naval aviator.” Neil’s mental approach to flying was very similar to his commanding officer’s. “Our skipper . . . was a great guy but very regulation,” Hal Schwan recalls. “He didn’t believe in any outward show—no flashy paint jobs on the airplane or anything like that. He told us we should get attention by how well we performed.”
Because the squadron possessed so few jets (only six planes for twenty-four pilots), flying was, in Armstrong’s words, “a bit scarce”—about three flights per week per aviator through the first two and half months of 1951. By mid-March, the winter fog had lifted and VF-51 had a full complement of aircraft allowing each pilot to fly between five and seven hops per week, periodically maintaining their instrument proficiency by flying “under the hood” in old twin-engine Beechcraft SNB trainers.
Armstrong always kept a pilot’s logbook, but he never kept a diary. One of his mates in VF-51, Ensign Glen H. “Rick” Rickelton, did. As the squadron trained, the specter of the enemy loomed. “I am anxious to go west and try some of this stuff for real,” Rickelton wrote on May 21, 1951.
“We felt that we would possibly be fighting swept-wing MiG-15s,” recounts Herb Graham. “They cruised above our top speed and could climb at a higher speed than we could dive. It was similar to the start of World War II when the navy F4F Wildcat fighters were faced with the much higher-performance Japanese Zero.” Having read the combat action report covering the Panther’s encounters with the “superior performance” MiG back in late 1950, Beauchamp felt “grave concern” that if MiGs were “manned by pilots as aggressive and well trained as ours that our own pilot and plane losses would have been great.”
According to Armstrong, “We didn’t know to what extent we would be offensive, in the sense that we would be dropping bombs or shooting guns, to what extent we might be defending the fleet against Chinese or Russian incoming aircraft, or to what extent it might be air-to-air or air-to-ground. I was very young, very green.”
Would Armstrong have enjoyed mixing it up with a MiG? “I probably would have enjoyed it,” he admits, “but I don’t know that I would have won against a MiG in an old Panther.” In retrospect, the Panther was an immature design that did not fly particularly well compared to the next wave of jets. “But we didn’t know that at the time,” Armstrong explains. “It didn’t have particularly good handling qualities. Pretty good lateral directional controls, but very stiff in pitch. Its performance both in absolute altitude, max speed, and climb rate were inferior to the MiG by a substantial amount.”
Contemplating the threat of facing the Russian MiG, and struggling to keep their focus through a grueling training schedule, unmarried pilots lived in the bachelor officers’ quarters at North Island. Rick Rickelton observed in his diary that Neil behaved as one of the guys. “Neil had a lot of fun,” Wam Mackey recollects of the squadron “beer musters” and officers’ dinners, “but he was serious about his work.”
If Armstrong’s age and youthful looks did not single him out, his hobbies did. Besides being an avid reader, he remained passionate about building models. Herb Graham, who shared a room with Neil in the BOQ, remembers seeing Neil carving a block of wood, “starting on the body of a pulse jet. He had made a model of the engine and needed a plane to use it. Neil was already flying the best of the navy fighters, but he wanted more.” Later, aboard the Essex, Armstrong built a small wooden boat and then out of a hat drew the name of one of the married guys who had children. Mackey won it and took it home for his boys. To his great regret—and to the greater regret of his boys by the time of Apollo 11—Mackey later gave it away to his local Fraternal Order of Police during a Christmas toy collection drive. Neil also built a model of the MiG-15, which he hung in VF-51’s ready room.
Training once again built toward the finality of carrier “quals” in the Panther, this time on the 27,100-ton carrier USS Essex (CV-9), recently modernized at a cost of $40 million. Neil had previously made a grand total of twelve carrier landings—six in the SNJ and six in the F8F. The older pilots, especially the ones who had fought in World War II, had many more carrier landings in prop planes, but they had no more experience in jet landings than Neil did. “The speeds tended to be higher on the jet,” Neil notes. “We were flying at slightly over a hundred knots typically in a pattern, which was maybe twenty knots faster than we’d been flying with the Bearcat.” The squadron flew night FCLP at Brown Field near the Mexican border.
“I happened to be a day fighter pilot,” Armstrong is glad to say. “We had night fighters on the ship I was on, and I thought they were crazy.” He qualified in the bright light of day on June 7, 1951, roughly two months before his twenty-first birthday and just two days after his preset “date of rank” for promotion to ensign. (In order to bring Neil “in proper lineal position with his contemporaries,” the navy subsequently revised the date from June 5 to June 1, 1951.)
On final approach, with his powers of concentration intent on the paddles of the landing signal officer, Armstrong reduced his speed to just above a stall, about 105 knots. In an instant, the ramp of the Essex flashed below him, the jet dropped abruptly, and its all-important tailhook blessedly snagged one of the arresting wires. With only 150 feet left before the airplane smacked rudely into the protective barriers, Armstrong’s F9F Panther jerked fiercely to a stop, having gone in a heartbeat from about 105 knots to teeth-rattling zero.
“Neil was a great precision pilot and did very well in this area,” recalls “K. C.” Kramer. “He had the skill and the nerve,” adds Herb Graham. Armstrong faced the LSO and his little green record book seven more times that day. “We got graded on every landing,” Kramer explains, “so there was some sense of competitiveness among the pilots.”
Following the exhilaration of his first carrier landing in a jet, Armstrong experienced the thrill of a “cat shot,” cannonading airborne by one of the navy’s powerful H8 hydraulic catapults. “The first few catapult launches took faith,” remembers Herb Graham. Armstrong concurs: “There was a degree of uncertainty. If, for one reason or another, you got a little bit of a weak shot, you could come perilously close to the water.” It was at this point, following a total of eight successful carrier landings by Neil that day, that Lieutenant Commander Beauchamp must have finalized his choice of Armstrong as one of VF-51’s officers beginning the cruise on the Essex. A month earlier, Beauchamp, in recognition of Neil’s abilities, had assigned him to serve as both the squadron’s assistant education officer and its assistant air intelligence officer. Based on Beauchamp’s input, Captain Austin W. Wheelock, commanding officer of the Essex, noted in Armstrong officer’s fitness report dated June 30, 1951: “Ensign ARMSTRONG is an intelligent, courteous, and military appearing officer. As a naval aviator, he is average to above average and is improving steadily. He is recommended for promotion when due.” Armstrong’s combined 215 hours in the SNJ, 102 hours in the F8F, 33 hours in the SNB, and 155 hours in the F9F made for a total of 505 hours in the air since Neil joined the navy.
On Monday, June 25, 1951, Fighter Squadron 51 received its orders. Three days later, at 1430 on June 28, the Essex upped anchor. As she approached the Hawaiian Islands on July 3, most of the carrier’s aircraft flew ahead to Oahu’s southwestern tip.
At NAS Barbers Point, the squadron’s aircraft were first equipped with heavy (four 250-pound general-purpose or four 260-pound fragmentation) bomb racks. Ken Kramer remembers: “We had expected that we would be fighting MiGs, and we had practiced our dogfighting tactics probably more than any other squadron before us.” If the navy’s Pentagon aircraft procurement unit “had only gone with the North American Fury [the progenitor of the Sabre jet] instead of the Panther,” Kramer has speculated, “we would have been the pilots fighting the MiGs” in the Sabre jet being built by North American Aviation for the air force. “Instead, we became a ground attack squadron,” “a big letdown for us” as naval aviators.
Yet, the navy’s decision to add the bomb racks was sound. The FJ-1 lacked carrier suitability; among other reasons, the plane kept losing its tail-hook in its landing gear. VF-51 became a fighter-bomber unit because, as CO Ernie Beauchamp put it, “it was the only game in town.” In the eastern half of Korea into which VF-51 would be flying, there were simply no MiGs to engage.
During the training in Hawaii (from July 4 through 31), it was unclear whether all of VF-51’s officers would make the cruise. On July 11, 1951, Rickelton wrote in his diary: “We are still wondering if they are going to have to kick us ensigns off the ship due to lack of room for planes.” Neil Armstrong, a brand-new ensign and the squadron’s youngest officer, felt equally vulnerable.
There was still a chance no one at all would be going. On June 23, 1951, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations had proposed a truce between North and South Korea. Treaty negotiations, started on July 10, at Kaesong near the 38th parallel, were still taking place on July 25, the day that Rickelton optimistically recorded in his diary: “I think the war is as good as over.” Starting on August 1, United Nations forces, in order to consolidate their front lines, resumed limited attacks, which the Communists called an act of aggression. By August 18, heavy fighting resumed. Five days later, the Communists broke off peace talks, charging the United States with violations of neutrality and with restarting the war. September 1951 would see some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. At the Battle of Bloody Ridge, the U.S. Army’s 15th Field Artillery Battalion set a record by firing 14,425 rounds in a twenty-four-hour period. On its heels came the monthlong Battle of Heartbreak Ridge, costing the United States 3,700 casualties to North Korea’s nearly 25,000-man loss.
By the time belligerency resumed on August 23, 1951, the Essex was fifteen days out of Pearl Harbor (having left on August 8, four days away from what had been a quick stop at the U.S. Naval base at Yokosuka [pronounced Yah-kooś-kah], Japan, and already on station some seventy miles off the northeast coast of Korea near the harbor at Wonsan). Joining Fighter Squadron 51 aboard the Essex were one squadron of F4U Corsairs (VF-53), one squadron of AD Skyraiders (VA-54), and one squadron of F2H-2 Banshee jets (VF-172). Also embarked were four VC detachments: VC-61 with F9F-2P photo planes; VC-3; VC-11; and VC-35 (“VC” designating a “composite squadron” trained in night attack and defense, air early warning, and antisubmarine warfare). The replacement at Pearl Harbor of the Banshee squadron for VF-52 (and its F9F-2s) was an unhappy surprise for the Panther pilots, who took no delight in the notion they might play second fiddle to the Banshees.
They need not have worried.