Skipper Beauchamp foresaw the perils of his squadron’s upcoming cruise. In its four months of combat in Korea in late 1950, Carrier Air Group 5, while aboard USS Valley Forge, had lost fourteen aviators, more than 10 percent of CVG-5’s entire complement of pilots. True, VF-51 itself had suffered only one casualty. Beauchamp knew that his own squadron might not be so lucky.
The men of VF-51 were more excited than scared about the prospects of combat. They were, in Ernie Russell’s words, “in the company of fellow travelers at the peak of their potential, overflowing with energy and good spirits, and embarking on the adventure of their life.”
A bad omen for what was to come, typhoon Marge battered the Essex for two straight days, rolling the ship just ten degrees shy of its thirty-five-degree capsize point. In his journal for August 20, VF-51’s Bob Kaps wrote, “Same rolling, pitching motion. Becoming very disagreeable, says my stomach.” Several of the men got sick and hardly anyone got good rest. “I didn’t get much sleep,” Rick Rickelton noted in his diary, “Every time I would doze off I would get banged against the side of my bunk. I woke up so mad I almost broke my fist on the . . . bulkhead.”
On August 22, the Essex joined Task Force 77 about seventy miles off Wonsan. Looking out the large bay door of the hangar deck, Armstrong saw his first American carrier battle group. The carrier Bon Homme Richard; the battleship New Jersey; two cruisers, the Helena and Toledo; and some fifteen to twenty destroyers numbered among some two dozen warships that would swell in the following months to marshal as many as four carriers and three cruisers in simultaneous action.
The previous day, the pilots of Fighter Squadron 51 had gotten airborne, though bad weather on August 22 and 23 grounded them again.
Air Group 5’s first stretch of combat operations commenced on August 24, when CVG-5 launched seventy-six sorties against “targets of opportunity.” It was not Armstrong’s turn to fly that first day. Nor did he participate on the twenty-fifth in a massive air raid on the railyards at Rashin near the Soviet border—the first time navy fighters (both Panthers and Banshees) ever escorted air force bombers over hostile territory.
According to Armstrong, “The four-plane division was the mainstay of the operation.” A division consisted of two sections of two airplanes each. In flight, the sections stayed separated (as opposed to the World War II–era partner maneuver “Thach Weave”) by a quarter mile to a half mile.
Beauchamp divided his twenty-four pilots into six divisions scheduled to receive approximately the same number of hops. The Skipper led the first division with Bob Rostine as his section leader. Benny Sevilla led the second with Wiley Scott as section leader. Dick Wenzell and Tom Hayward led the third, Wam Mackey and Chet Cheshire the fourth, and Danny Marshall and Bill Bowers the fifth. The head of the sixth division was John Carpenter. An air force major, Carpenter came to VF-51 on an air force–navy exchange program. Carpenter’s section leader was John Moore. The junior officers flew as wingmen. At the start of the cruise, Armstrong usually flew as Carpenter’s wingman, in the division with John Moore. Later, Neil flew mostly with Wam Mackey. Like the other pilots, Armstrong also flew a number of photo escorts, which were not done in divisions.
Though Armstrong “was one of the boys,” as Hersh Gott declares, a special interest in education did set him apart somewhat. According to Beauchamp, “It was not unusual to find Neil in the ready room after dinner at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand illustrating a math problem, an aerodynamic principle, or so forth.” Early in the cruise, Armstrong taught an algebra class to some thirty interested enlisted men. So wrapped up in one lesson, Armstrong missed muster for a scheduled squadron briefing. It took a call over the ship’s PA system to get his attention. Neil burst through the rear door of the ready room and apologized for being late. As VF-51’s John Moore has told the story, Beauchamp accepted no excuses:
Beauchamp: “Neil, where were you?”
“Down below, sir.”
“What were you doing down below?”
“Sir,” said Armstrong, “I am teaching an algebra class to some of our crew and tonight I had a scheduled class meeting. Sorry, sir.”
The skipper demanded an explanation from his youngest ensign. Armstrong answered, “It’s no big deal, sir. Some of our guys asked me if I would do it and I said, sure. No big deal.”
The fact that CAG Marshall Beebe always asked for the squadron’s youngest aviator as his wingman did not go unnoticed. Ken Kramer relates, “I never discussed Neil with Beebe, but it is a fact that CAG chose to fly with Neil whenever he flew the F9F-2 Panthers. I think they had a very good relationship.” Armstrong concurs: “I flew with Commander Beebe some and thought he was quite a good air group commander, the first I’d known and certainly the first in any operational circumstances or any combat circumstances . . . . I was delighted when I had the chance to fly with him.”
Flying as Beebe’s wingman did not afford Armstrong any protection from danger; in fact, CAG’s aggressive approach to combat flying may have put Neil even more into harm’s way. Beebe “seemed to be completely fearless,” Hal Schwan says. “I was on missions with him where there would be a lot of antiaircraft fire—we would go in and make our run and he would call everybody to go up and orbit while he would go down to see if another strike was needed. I can remember looking down and thinking, ‘My God, that guy just doesn’t care!’ ”
Beebe had a well-deserved reputation for staying “feet dry”—overland—for too long, maximizing air time over enemy targets but leaving the planes with barely enough fuel to make it back to their carrier. Wam Mackey remembers: “We’d always have a hell of a time when we got to the ‘bingo’ point [the minimum fuel needed to return to the carrier safely]. We’d say, ‘CAG, help me out,’ and he’d say, ‘Okay, I’m just going to take one more look around.’ ” More than once, Beauchamp expressed his displeasure with Beebe for pressing everyone’s luck. Some of the pilots in Air Group 5 called Beebe “the greatest of the ‘follow me, boys!’ ”
On a couple of occasions Beebe managed to get authorization for his jets to fly up into MiG Alley in the uppermost regions of North Korea, though the requisite defensive maneuvering against MiGs would have used up too much fuel to afford safe return to their carrier. Balancing the risk against the unknown military gain, some of Beebe’s aviators wondered privately, What the hell was the man thinking?
Armstrong has never criticized Marshall Beebe for his aggressive flying, though he has said, “I do remember when I would have appreciated a couple of hundred more pounds of fuel in the landing pattern.”
Armstrong’s first action over North Korea came on Wednesday, August 29, when he escorted a photoreconnaissance plane above the 40th parallel over the port of Songjin, then flew a routine combat air patrol over the fleet. Three of the next four days (except for September 1, when the task force replenished its fuel and supplies), he flew armed reconnaissance over Wonsan, Pu-Chong, and again up to Songjin. A few VF-51 aircraft encountered small-arms ground fire on the twenty-ninth, but the squadron’s first taste of potent AA fire did not come until September 2. Beauchamp’s divisions’ main objective was disruption of the transport system that fed the North Korean and Chinese armies. “We did that by blowing up trains and bridges and tanks,” explains Armstrong, “and just being as contrary as we could.”
In its first ten days of action, Air Group 5 experienced a nasty rash of casualties. On August 23, LTJG Leo Franz in a Corsair from VF-53 disappeared in heavy overcast. In a “shocking incident” early on Sunday morning, an AD-3 (Attack Douglas) Skyraider piloted by LTJG Loren D. Smith of VC-35 was “seen to burn in midair and then crash into the water,” killing both Smith and his radioman, Philip K. Balch. Bob Kaps (nicknamed “Bottle”) reported: “Night heckler [typically a Corsair attack plane] exploded after catapult. Bomb & napalm load gave them no chance.” Covering the week ending Sunday, September 2, the ship’s combat action report noted, “Not a day had gone by but at least one plane had been hit by AA,” the casualties provoking “a more pronounced outlook on the point of survival.” Bottle Kaps wrote in his journal, “Have already decided I’m not the hero type.”
The next week almost ended Neil Armstrong’s life.
On Monday morning, September 3, 1951, following a briefing in the ready room, Armstrong suited up for what was to be his seventh combat mission since arriving in the Korean theater. Although years later Armstrong would take even greater care with the complicated suit so vital to an astronaut’s survival in the vacuum of space, donning a naval aviator’s two-part “poopy suit” drew comparisons to putting on a straitjacket. The inner lining, similar to a child’s snowsuit, was relatively comfortable compared to the tight rubber outer garment that resembled a frogman’s suit. According to one naval aviator, “If your face turns blue and you gasp for breath, you know the suit fits properly.” All of this trouble for an outfit that might keep a downed pilot alive in the cold ocean water for twenty minutes, yet that was considerably better than the ninety seconds without it. Carrier lore held that one successful ditching was all any pilot had the right to expect. This made the experience of Paul Gray, the thirty-five-year-old commander of VF-54, all the more remarkable. During the Essex cruise, Gray ditched an AD Skyraider into the sea five times and was rescued each time.
Having struggled into the rubber exposure suit, next came an outer shirt, a survival jacket, a holstered .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol, extra ammo, a life jacket, and gloves. As with his fellow aviators, Armstrong finished his raiment by tying a silk scarf around his neck. The scarf was not simply stylish; it was necessary to help stop water from getting into the immersion suit from around the neck if a ditching did occur.
The call to “Flight Quarters!” commenced a noisy, frenetic choreography on deck. The “plane captain” started the jet engines even before the pilots arrived to make their assisted climb into the cockpit, where the plane captain connected the shoulder and lap straps and arranged the parachute harness. Following a check of his oxygen mask and the status of his life raft and radio, the aviator was primed for the ship’s powerful H8 catapults. His cat shot that day would be Armstrong’s twenty-eighth in three months.
Armstrong’s mission was to fly an armed reconnaissance mission into a hot zone that U.S. naval intelligence called “Green Six.” Located west of Wonsan, Green Six was the code name for a narrow valley road that ran south from the village of Majon-ni, southwest of Wonsan to the interior border of South Korea.
The principal targets for September 3, 1951, were freight yards and a bridge. According to Rick Rickelton, who was flying wing for Mackey, “We really ran into a terrific concentration of AA; fairly heavy stuff. I think I could have walked on it.” Flak hit Lieutenant Frank Sistrunk’s AD Sky-raider from VF-54 while Sistrunk was bombing the bridge. His plane smoking badly, Sistrunk headed toward the safety of the east coast thirty air miles away. Halfway to the beach and at an altitude of about 2,000 feet, the Sky-raider nosed into a steep dive and crashed. Sistrunk became Air Group 5’s fourth casualty during the Essex cruise, following Franz, Smith, and Balch.
Armstrong, flying with John Carpenter, made a number of attacking runs that day. So many different versions of what happened next to Neil have been told over the years that it is difficult to sort out what really occurred.
The complete official version of Neil’s incident was reported, doubtlessly with input from Armstrong and other division pilots, by Marshall Beebe to the commanding officer of the Essex just days after the incident.
Ensign Neil ARMSTRONG of VF-51 saved his own life with a piece of exceptionally fast headwork. He’d been attacking a target in very hilly country. While he was in his run he was hit by AA. He lost elevator control but in a fraction of a second he rolled in all the back tab he could get. His aircraft, well loaded with ordnance, came so close to the ground that he sheared off two feet of starboard wing on a power pole. By babying the stick and the trim tabs he was able to fly to friendly territory and to safety. The stall characteristics of the plane were such that a landing speed of over 170 knots would be necessary without positive elevator control, which dictated the bailout. This was the first ejection seat bailout by an Air Group Five pilot. ARMSTRONG ejected himself, cleared the seat, opened his chute and landed near K-3 without further incident.
According to Beebe’s report, Neil’s emergency occurred “at approximately the same time” that Sistrunk was hit and killed.
Naval Aviation News, during wartime a “restricted” publication, capsuled Armstrong’s close call in its December 1951 issue under the title “One Stub Wing”:
The Panther jet Ens. Neil Armstrong was using to strafe trucks near Wonsan spun out of control and nosed downward, badly hit by AA. Armstrong struggled frantically with the controls. The plane leveled finally at about 20′, struck a pole and tore off three feet of its right wing. The pilot nursed the crippled fighter back to 14,000 feet and headed for friendly territory. Radio out, landing gear jammed and rockets hung, Armstrong bailed out.
Safely back aboard the Essex two days later, Armstrong reportedly commented, “Twenty feet from Mother Earth at that speed is awful doggone low!”
In the 1960s, NASA publicists and news media reporting Armstrong’s military background relied on “facts” presented in these two accounts. The superlative historian of military aviation Richard P. Hallion also cited them in his 1988 book The Naval Air War in Korea:
As an Essex Panther strafed a column of trucks near Wonsan, flak knocked the jet into a spinning dive. In its cockpit, the young fighter pilot instinctively regained control over the hurtling plane, recovering into level flight a mere twenty feet off the ground. The Panther immediately collided with a telephone pole, clipping three feet from its right wing. Again the pilot managed to regain control, and he staggered back up to 14,000 feet, reaching friendly territory before ejecting safely. Two days later, Ensign Neil Armstrong returned to VF-51.
According to Hallion, Armstrong displayed in this combat experience “the qualities of courage and skill that would lead to his selection as the commander of the first lunar landing mission in 1969.”
Regrettably, some of the salient facts about Armstrong’s flight of September 3, 1951, have been wrong from the start. Flying as Carpenter’s wingman, he was not strafing a column of trucks; he was making a bomb run. Also, antiaircraft fire did not hit him, even though AA saturated the valley that day. Nor did Neil get blasted into some sort of pole. Rather, at approximately 350 miles per hour, Armstrong sliced through a cable, presumably a North Korean–devised booby trap for low-flying attack aircraft. And it was not two feet (according to Beebe) or three feet (according to Naval Aviation News) of Neil’s right wing that got clipped off; closer to six feet was shorn. There was never any spinning out of control—that seems to have been an invention of Naval Aviation News, since Beebe had not mentioned it. Nor did Armstrong lose his radio or badly damage his landing gear. Other than those critical essentials, everything else written about Neil’s combat incident was basically true. Certainly, the part about Armstrong’s quick thinking was right on the mark.
Fortunately, Armstrong’s Panther jet cut into the cable at about 500 feet, flying at an angle where it could aerodynamically compensate the loss of half a dozen feet of wing. Instantaneously, he thought about the loss of the small fuel tank at the tip of his right wing (the “tip tank”), plus the serious damage to his starboard aileron, the moveable control surface attached to the trailing edge of the wing.
Armstrong radioed his division head, John Carpenter. As Neil recollects, “I was having to carry a lot of aileron already, to keep the airplane in balance, and if I got a little too slow where I didn’t have enough aileron, it was going to snap. I was going to lose control of the airplane.” Major Carpenter concurred. The only real option for Neil was to eject.
A bad choice for jumping out was . . . anywhere over North Korea. Only a few American pilots had made it back from overland ejections. Neil explains, “Navy guys like to come down in the water; it was a soft landing” over the sea, patrolled by intrepid navy rescue helicopters.
Carpenter stayed with Armstrong until he ejected as planned in the vicinity of an airfield near Pohang, designated K-3, located far down the coast of South Korea and operated by the U.S. Marines. The term “punching out” does not do justice to the “kick in the butt” of the Panther’s British-made Stanley Model 22G ejection seat, which was survivable at anything over 500 feet when not compromised by any sort of “sink rate.” Armstrong’s was Fighter Squadron 51’s first-ever ejection-seat bailout.
The jump was also Armstrong’s first. This fact contradicts VF-51’s John Moore’s The Wrong Stuff, which had Ernie Beauchamp assigning Neil the collateral squadron’s duty of “survival officer.” As such, Armstrong attended a briefing at the NAS El Centro’s parachute school, then strapped on a chute, found a pilot who would take him up, and bailed out. Beauchamp, in Moore’s words, “came out of the few hairs he had left and told Armstrong, ‘I can’t believe that you went ahead and jumped! You might get hurt, and we can’t afford to have anyone injured.’ ” Allegedly, Neil replied, “But, sir, you told me to go find out about it, so I did!”
Moore told a great story. Unfortunately, his tale was one of mistaken identity. It was not Armstrong but Herb Graham who took his parachute instruction a step beyond that required.
Rather than the parachute itself, it was the winds aloft along the Korean coast that saved Armstrong’s life. Neil “intended to come down in the water,” but misjudging the wind, he floated inland and landed in a rice paddy. Aside from a cracked tailbone, Neil was virtually unhurt.
No sooner had Armstrong picked himself off the ground when a jeep drove up from K-3. Inside the jeep—Neil could barely believe his eyes—was one of his roommates from flight school, Goodell Warren. “Goodie” was now a marine lieutenant operating out of Pohang airfield.
Warren told Armstrong that the explosions he was hearing out beyond the coastline came from North Koreans laying mines in the bay. If Neil’s parachute had stayed on course, he might very well have splashed down in the deadly minefield.
Late in the afternoon of September 4, Armstrong returned to the Essex aboard a “codfish”—for “carrier onboard delivery”—mail and personal transfer craft.
Ken Danneberg, VF-51’s intelligence officer, remembers, “Naturally we had to rough him up a bit.” As per ejection procedure, Armstrong had removed and dropped his helmet, which broke when it hit the ground. According to Danneberg, Neil “had that broken helmet in his hand and a smile on his face. We didn’t say ‘good to see you back, glad you’re alive.’ John Moore and I jumped right on him, ‘You know, Neil, you’re going to have to pay the government for that helmet.’ ” Kidding aside, everything that Armstrong had done “received a lot of favorable notice for his cool handling of the situation,” Herb Graham remembers.
In letters home, Armstrong virtually never mentioned combat, and certainly not what happened to him that day. All he did was make a note in his logbook for September 3, 1951: “Bailed out over Pohang.” Next to it he drew a little picture of an open parachute with a tiny figure of a man hanging from it. As for the airplane itself, Neil’s F9F-2 (Bureau of Aeronautics No. 125122) was the first Panther lost to Fighter Squadron 51. What happened to the crash remnants is unknown.
There was no celebration the night Armstrong returned to the Essex. Earlier that day, two of his squadron mates, James Ashford and Ross Bramwell, had been killed in action. Twenty-four-year-old Bramwell lost control of his aircraft after getting hit by enemy flak. Armstrong flew in the same division as the twenty-five-year-old Ashford and might have been in ops with him if not for his ejection the day before. During a reconnaissance mission in the region between Simp’yong and Yangdok, northwest of Wonsan, Ashford’s jet, heavily loaded with ordnance, failed to pull out while making a rocket run on a truck, then flew into the ground and exploded. As one of his VF-51 mates thought at the time, “What a price to pay for a goddamn truck!”
“It was just the dumbest goddamn thing,” fumed intelligence officer Ken Danneberg, “to take a ten-million-dollar airplane, and pilots in whom the government had invested a few million more, and send them down after incidental targets [to] get the living bejesus shot at them.”
According to Beebe’s combat action report, through September 4, 1951, “The Air Group had destroyed seven bridges, ninety railroad cars, twenty-five trucks, twenty-five oxcarts, two hundred and fifty troops, and damaged about twice as many of each, the price being the lives of five pilots, one air-crewman and ten aircraft.” In his journal that night, Bob Kaps wrote: “Another bad day. This war is really hitting home. . . . Two damn fine guys lost and for what?” Rick Rickelton noted in his diary: “The worst part of it is the heartsick people who are left behind.” On September 5, the entire task force took a day off from combat to replenish, giving them a chance to reflect.
“There was great concern among our senior officers and even some speculation whether the casualties might be sabotage,” Armstrong remembers, “because some of the accidents were unexplained. Leaders were doing what leaders do: trying to figure out how to make the situation better. And my sense is, it did get better. We certainly didn’t have the number of losses later that we had early. I don’t know if inexperience or circumstance or what might account for all the early losses.
“They never missed an opportunity to shoot at you,” Armstrong relates. “We saw all kinds of guns, all kinds of sizes, and some were radar-controlled and some were not. They had those long-barreled 85s that could reach up a long way. There was always a lot of concern about getting hit. I had a lot of bullet holes in the airplanes I flew, but usually got them back.
“If the target was particularly valuable,” Armstrong recalls, “then they really put a lot of guns around it. They didn’t have missiles in those days, fortunately. That would really have made life more complicated for us.”
Armstrong’s next flying came on September 10, a day when the Essex air group flew 101 sorties. Over the next nine days, Neil flew four combat air patrols, one photo escort (again to Songjin), and four armed reconnaissance missions. The recco on the tenth took him as far north as the Changjin (Chosin) Reservoir, where a British-owned power plant was a prime target, though the group would later learn of an agreement between London and Washington to keep the plant intact. Herb Graham has asserted, “ ‘Intelligence’ seemed to spend more time telling us about targets that were off limits than they did giving us good targets to hit. It did seem, at times, that we were risking our lives fighting a war with our hands tied.” When it came to target selection, Armstrong admits, “those were frustrations we lived with.”
The biggest disaster of the entire Essex cruise happened not in the air but on the carrier’s deck. At the end of a beautiful clear day on September 16, 1951, a F2H Banshee from VF-172 came in for an emergency landing. LTJG John K. Keller fought to bring his Banshee—left with limited aileron control and no flaps following a midair collision—home. At the head of his Panther division, Ernie Beauchamp had just entered the Essex landing pattern. The Skipper was turning crosswind for final approach when he heard Keller, “with a great deal of stress, maybe even panic in his voice,” calling for a “straight in.” Beauchamp put on power, picked up his wheels and flaps, and cleared the landing approach, as did the other three planes in his division, flown by Rostine, Kaps, and Gott.
A series of mistakes escalated into catastrophe. Still shaken by his plane’s jolting collision over the enemy target, Keller, the son of a University of Michigan professor, forgot to lower his tailhook for landing. Somehow in the urgency of the moment—perhaps due to the plane’s westward approach into the bright orange ball of the setting sun—the hook spotter and the LSO (William Chairs, a Naval Academy graduate) mistakenly thought Keller’s hook was down. The oversight brought the eight-ton Banshee slamming into the deck at nearly 130 knots. Bouncing high into the air, the plane jumped all of the heavy crash barriers, then tumbled headlong into an array of aircraft just moved from the aft flight deck to the starboard catapult area to make room for the returning aircraft. Some of those pilots and plane captains had yet to exit their planes.
The mushrooming explosion of parked planes—some fully fueled with almost a thousand gallons of high-octane gas—was tremendous. Hersh Gott, still aloft with Beauchamp’s division, was checking off in preparation for landing when somebody radioed, “Jesus Christ, look at it burn!” The Essex’s forward flight deck was a ball of fire. The only choice for Beauchamp’s division was to fly over and land on the Boxer, where they stayed overnight.
The consequences of the crash were obscene. Four men burned to death. Engulfed in the gaseous envelope of the flames, five others leaped into the ocean some seventy feet below, only to be gravely imperiled by burning aviation gasoline on the surface. A tractor shoved the offending Banshee overboard, with its dead young pilot still inside, and did the same to a few other burning airplanes. By the time the conflagration was extinguished several hours later, seven men had died. Sixteen were seriously injured. Eight jets in all had been turned to cinders. Fortunately, the Skyraiders, loaded as they were with fuel plus a 5,000-pound bomb load, were parked safely over to the other side.
As luck had it, Neil Armstrong was serving as the squadron duty officer that day. Rules prescribed that on the day he “had the duty,” the SDO would not fly—as Armstrong did not on September 16—and that he would stay at his position in the ready room. Consequently, when the Banshee crash occurred, Armstrong did not see any of the fire and took no part in the firefighting activities.
Under Armstrong’s direction, “I had just taxied a plane forward and was walking back down the flight deck,” Rick Rickelton recorded in his diary that night. “This F2H jumped the barriers. I ducked under it as it went by and it crashed into the planes parked behind me. It immediately exploded. I started making tracks but got burned on the hands and neck although not bad.” The Panther that Rickelton had taxied was one of those pushed over the side in an effort to slow down the fire.
Rickelton got off easy compared to senior VF-51 pilot John Moore, who volunteered to taxi one last Panther to spell the younger officers who had just sat down to dinner in the wardroom. The signalman waved frantically at Moore to park his jet on the very edge of the flight deck, starboard side, away from Keller’s incoming Banshee. The shriek of the ship’s crash whistle crescendoed as the Banshee bounced airborne and blasted into Moore, igniting his plane and knocking it onto the ship’s catwalk. “The heat was horrible,” Moore recalled. “I dived with all my might out of the cockpit and felt myself falling, still in this ball of fire.”
No more than ten feet away, the huge gray hull of the ship sped by him at twenty knots. Hardly believing he was still alive, Moore instinctively pulled the toggle of his life jacket, noticing that his hands were badly burned. As soon as his Mae West vest inflated, Moore realized his miscalculation. He needed to swim underwater, not stay on top of it. Wave after wave of burning fuel swept over him, frying his skin, especially around the neck and face. Finally, a rescue helicopter from the Essex lifted him back on deck. Another whirlybird dispatched from the nearby Boxer retrieved other men overboard. To get Moore to the sick bay located far aft, they had to navigate his wire stretcher through a maze of parked airplanes and tie-down cables, shoving Moore’s body underneath one plane at a time.
To treat Moore’s wicked burns, a doctor applied Vaseline-coated gauze bandages over his entire body, leaving only narrow slits across his eyes and lips. The next day he was flown to a hospital in Japan, where he stayed for several weeks. Amazingly, following a rehabilitation in San Diego until early 1953, he rejoined the Screaming Eagles aboard the Valley Forge, as a division leader during its third and final Korean cruise.
Moore’s burns were the most severe injuries suffered by a VF-51 aviator in the Banshee crash. According to CAG Beebe, “The flight deck personnel and squadron personnel nearest the crash made courageous efforts to aid the people injured by the initial explosion. Taking no heed of personal safety they disarmed and removed ordnance loads and moved aircraft out of the danger zone.” Wade A. Barfield, the VF-51 plane captain for the aircraft taxied by Rick Rickelton, died, as did another VF-51 plane captain, Charles L. Harrell. The squadron also lost Earl K. Niefer, a well-liked and experienced crew chief. Three other members of the VF-51 crew were badly burned but survived. In his journal for that day, a woeful Bob Kaps wrote: “Essex hard luck reached a climax.”
For the next three days, the men of the Essex mourned. With the loss of Armstrong’s plane, the deaths of Ashford and Bramwell, the serious injuries to Moore, and the fiery destruction of four additional Panthers in the Banshee disaster, a demoralized Fighter Squadron 51 counted only nine serviceable aircraft, down from sixteen, and twenty-one pilots, down from twenty-four.
It was a somber Essex crew that gathered at 1400 for a memorial service while en route to Yokosuka on Thursday, September 20, 1951. The service honored the memory of the thirteen men in CVG-5 killed since the cruise began. Armstrong considered himself lucky. He survived his September 3 flight by the skin of his teeth. Furthermore, had he not served as squadron duty officer the day the Banshee crashed, Armstrong, the most junior pilot in Fighter Squadron 51, would by rank likely have been on the deck taxiing one of the Panthers.
For Armstrong, it turned out that ill Fate was not the hunter. Rather, it was almost as if the young flier was being safeguarded so as to become the grand prize of some extraordinary Destiny.