Arriving at Yokosuka in the early evening of September 21, 1951, Neil Armstrong experienced his first overseas “rest and relaxation.” For some of the men, R&R meant alcohol and women in the bars of Tokyo and Yokohama, but not for Armstrong or many of his fellow aviators in VF-51. The U.S. Navy had taken over a number of resort hotels on the east side of Japan, the most beautiful and luxurious of these “R&R camps” being the Fujiya Hotel, in the cool shadow of magnificent Mount Fuji (Fujiyama or Fujisan to the Japanese). Armstrong more than once enjoyed the wonderful food, drink, and service, all for very little charge. The resort even had a golf course caddied by elderly Japanese ladies who found “your ball” anywhere you hit it. A neophyte golfer, Neil discovered incentive enough to try the game, which he later came to love.
Sightseeing in and around Tokyo, Armstrong took many pictures that he later developed into slides. He especially admired the famous Daihatsu, or Great Buddha, in the ancient capital city of Kamakura.
Neil purchased two landscape paintings that hang to this day in his home. He designed the furnishings and garden in his Houston house to express the Japanese influence he found “unique and interesting.” Equally inspiring as Eastern aesthetic were the Japanese people, so thoroughly villainized by World War II propaganda. According to his mother, Neil remarked upon his return home from the navy in 1952, “Never sell them short, because they are highly alert and have brilliant minds.”
The Essex stayed in port for ten days. Sailors alternated shore leave with three or four days of shipboard preparations, with most of the men of VF-51 making time to visit John Moore in the hospital in Yokohama.
On October 1, 1951, the Essex headed to the northeast coast of Korea to rejoin Task Force 77. Armstrong flew ten times during this second combat period. October 5, 9, and 11 were routine air patrols, and three days were photo escort missions, the flight on October 24 locating concealed targets in the Wonsan region that were then eradicated in a devastating strike.
To be fast, light, and versatile enough to protect the photo plane, the fighter escort was armed with only its 20-millimeter cannon. The photo plane itself flew straight, level, and unarmed (its Panther jet nose guns replaced with camera equipment) over the hottest spots in North Korea. “You’d get photos one day,” Hersh Gott says, “and they’d show a lot of damage and the next day they would be fixed” by large labor gangs working under the cover of night. At the completion of one mission, a photo pilot vented his frustration to VF-51’s Ernie Russell by jumping on the wing of Russell’s plane and saying, “Let’s go shoot something. Anything!”
On October 22, 1951, Armstrong’s division found two trains for the ADs and Corsairs to destroy, and then itself went on to hit several supply points. On the twenty-sixth, his division hit bridges and busted rails in the region of Pukch’ong, over which he had flown photo escort twelve days earlier. On the thirtieth, Neil was part of an attack that flew quite far north, well above the 40th parallel, to the area between Tonch’on and Kapsan. It was during this flight that Armstrong may have gotten his first look at the Yalu River, beyond which lay China: “That wasn’t our normal territory. We were better off busting bridges down in the middle of the country rather than being exposed to the dangers of being up close along the border.” The day before, on the twenty-ninth, he flew about as far west as he ever got, during a fighter sweep in the area of Sinanju. North of Pyongyang at the mouth of the Ch’ongch’on River on the northwestern coast, here was MiG Alley. Bob Kaps reported “many anxious moments but no engagements” with MiGs.
Fighter Squadron 51 suffered nary a casualty during this second tour. Overall, the entire air group lost only three pilots and the aircraft that carried them, a great improvement over the initial weeks of the first operational period. During the month of October, the squadron expended 49,299 20-millimeter rounds and dropped 631 general-purpose 100-pound bombs. This represents a slight slowdown of combat—partly through lost days of flying due to bad weather—compared to the twenty-one squadron pilots’ very first weeks in action when VF-51 fired 96,417 rounds, dropped 396 bombs, and shot off 626 rockets. Neil personally fired an estimated 7,000 rounds, dropped 48 bombs, and fired 30 rockets during the initial two-and-a-half-month combat period. During his twenty-six flights, of which nine were combat air patrols, he accumulated over forty-one and a half hours of air time.
Following another refurbishing of the ship in Yokosuka lasting from October 31 to November 12, 1951, the Essex and its air group returned to action, again off Wonsan Bay. With the onset of winter, carrier activities in the Sea of Japan turned miserable. With temperatures topping out in the low forties Fahrenheit and lots of rain, there were several days in November when no flying could be done. On November 26, Bob Kaps noted in his journal, “Seas have reached the roll-em-out-of-their-sacks stage. Don’t know what keeps the planes from toppling over the side.”
Armstrong flew only six times in November, two of them CAPs (November 19 and 29). His first combat flight during this third tour, which took place on the eighteenth, was a recco from Wonsan to Pukch’ong. During the mission, developing bad weather forced many aircraft to shift their targets from bridges to rail-cutting operations, which Neil pursued at Kilchu on the twenty-first and at Tonch’on on the twenty-seventh and again on the twenty-eighth. Both strikes involved busting up the coastal rail line that ran down from the Soviet border to Wonsan.
For bombing such precision targets as narrow-gauge North Korean railways the Panthers’ symmetrical airframes provided a superior bombing platform to the props. Attacking in twenty-degree glides with dive brakes extended, the Panthers would release their bombs at 800 to 1,000 feet while flying at a speed of between 300 and 320 knots.
During November and December 1951, Fighter Squadron 51 dropped 672 general-purpose bombs, most of them 250-pounders. It also dropped 16 fragmentation bombs. In all during this two-month period, the Screaming Eagles unloaded onto North Korean targets a total of 135,560 pounds of bombs, well over twice as much weight as the squadron had dropped in the previous two and a half months since first arriving in Korea. During the last two months of the year, strafing remained the most effective weapon for VF-51, with 43,087 rounds fired, an average of 2,051 rounds per pilot.
“We would jettison armaments prior to returning,” Armstrong explains, “and we tried to jettison on targets of opportunity.” Wam Mackey declares, “I can’t remember ever having come back with any ordnance.”
In December 1951, prior to leaving again for refurbishing in Yokosuka on the thirteenth, Armstrong took to the air eight times. Three of the flights were photo escorts—to the Kowan-Yonghung region, just north of Wonsan (on the third), over Wonsan harbor (on the tenth), and to Tonch’on via Songjin (on the eleventh). One was an armed recco (on the first) to Yangdok. The other four (December 2, 5, 6, and 9) were CAPs, but only three of them were uneventful.
On December 2, at high altitude and over water, the engine in Armstrong’s Panther jet quit on him. Flameouts were a serious problem plaguing gas-turbine engines. Neil’s flameout was caused by a fuel control mechanism being stuck at a low-altitude setting due to salt corrosion. Advancing the throttle at the higher altitudes required by CAP missions had injected too much fuel into the mix, extinguishing the jet’s flame. Fortunately, the jet relit and Armstrong finished his flight without further trouble.
During its third tour in the Sea of Japan, VF-51 had some close calls but suffered no fatalities. On December 14 the Essex arrived in Yokosuka, where it would spend Christmas 1951. In a shipboard Christmas Eve program, Armstrong, Gott, Kaps, Sevilla, Jones, Hayward, and a few of VF-51’s enlisted men, “had some makeshift choir robes and each singer had an electric candle or a flashlight made to look like a candle,” Neil remembers. “We sang Christmas carols, primarily,” then treated a number of Japanese orphans in the audience to candy and holiday fare.
Most men waited until Christmas Day to open presents from loved ones. On the day after Christmas, the ship bound for yet another combat tour in Korea, Rick Rickelton wrote in his diary: “I had a very merry Christmas considering I couldn’t be home.” The Essex then ran into “some of the heaviest weather we have seen yet.” In the face of winds of nearly 85 knots for a full day, the carrier made almost no progress. Considering the dangers and near-arctic conditions to be faced back on station off the North Korean coast, Bob Kaps asked in his journal, “Who’s in a hurry?”
Essex’s fourth tour proved to be by far the nastiest, most strenuous, and longest lasting of the entire cruise. For thirty-eight days from December 26, 1951, to February 1, 1952, the pilots of Air Group 5 flew a total of 2,070 sorties, an average of 86 per day (not counting the days when no flying was done due to replenishment or bad weather). Armstrong himself flew 23 missions during the period, with a total time in the air of over 35 hours. On only four days when the air group got into the air did Neil not fly.
Twenty-three cat shots, twenty-three carrier landings, all in one month, all in combat conditions: this was the experience of the young aviator from Wapakoneta, tightly bound in the MK III Anti-Exposure Suit that had been newly issued to him while in Yokosuka over Christmas. Relying on half-frozen catapults and bone-cold aircraft carrying icy guns and frosty bomb loads, Armstrong and his mates performed an unenviable job, day after day, over a remote enemy land.
On Friday evening, January 4, 1952, which ended the first week of the Essex’s fourth tour, the men of CVG-5 got happy news from CAG Beebe. At the end of January they were to leave for Yokosuka, spend two weeks in port, and then head back to “dear old Uncle Sam.” Kaps wrote in his journal: “HAPPY DAY! Hardly seems possible but I’ll buy it.” Rickelton noted: “The word sounds pretty official and needless to say joy reigned in the bunkroom. I guess I won’t tell the folks till I’m positive. I figure 20 more flying days till home. . . . We should be home by the end of February. There’s good news tonight!!”
That was the last diary entry the twenty-three-year-old ensign from New Mexico made. Less than thirty-six hours later on an early-morning rail cut north of Wonsan, Rick Rickelton’s Panther was hit by flak. A real tiger of a fighter pilot, Rickelton always went in as low as he could, maybe a little too low if his aircraft was heavily loaded with ordnance, as the division’s planes were on that frigid January morn. When hit, the F9F nosedived right into the ground.
Kap’s forlorn journal entry spoke for all of VF-51: “Rick shot down—plane exploded—no chance. Damn fine pilot and guy. Padre said mass for him, as he has done for them all. Hope the Lord can see through this mess, don’t think I can. There has to be a reason for prolonging this business but I just don’t see it.”
With Rickelton gone, Wam Mackey’s division needed another wingman. The job fell to Armstrong. For the rest of the cruise Neil flew primarily in Rickelton’s spot with Mackey, Chet Cheshire, and Ken Kramer. Later in life, during a reunion of the Screaming Eagles, Armstrong would cheer and honor the brother and the nephews of Rick Rickelton by saying of Rick: “He was our fighter pilot.”
Two days after Rickelton’s death, Wam Mackey remembers, “The admiral came down to the wardroom and said, ‘I’ve got some bad news: such and such a ship has had problems and is going to be delayed in relieving us, and we are going to have to come back one more time.”
Sinking VF-51’s morale ever lower, according to Armstrong, was “our general feeling that most Americans were not aware, or at least as aware, of what was going on in Korea as they had been in World War II. There was a substantial difference in the level of information and in their interest.”
Limits on information also frustrated the aviators, who “questioned everything,” Armstrong relates.
“There’s just a lot more intensity to combat,” Armstrong explains, “and more consequence to making a bad move. These guys tend to be people who like challenges and like to meet them head-on.” As for the chance of dying, “It’s a reality that you live with, and I guess you think the odds are with you if you keep your head and don’t do anything foolish. . . . The naval aviators that I knew were determined to do a first-class job. . . . They were doing a job they thought was important.” Some of Neil’s mates looked at the situation more fatalistically. “For me, the adjustment to being a target was the roughest,” explains Herb Graham. “I reached a reasonable peace of mind when I considered myself dead and stopped worrying about it.”
Historians have debated the ultimate value of the interdiction program, though the constant pressure applied by airpower played a role in forcing the Communists to the peace table. “It didn’t cut off the supplies,” Armstrong relates, “but I’m sure the harassment had an enormous effect.”
From the beginning of the war, bridges were principal targets in the interdiction campaign. According to official Pentagon wartime statistics, navy planes destroyed 2,005 North Korean bridges out of a total of 2,832 that U.S. military forces destroyed in all.
Over time the navy learned—at great cost—that the key to effective bridge strikes was coordinating the props and the jets into a single unified and well-timed assault. Marshall Beebe and the squadron commanders of Air Group 5 hatched the basic plan on the Essex in the latter months of 1951. Jets, with their higher and steeper “drop-down approach” to a target and their faster escape speed, had a significantly better chance of penetrating a bridge’s defenses. Yet the jets were not the best instruments for actually taking out a bridge. That took 2,000-pound bombs, which jets could not carry. The job of the jets was to quell the antiaircraft fire. Then came the Corsairs, which also bombed and strafed the AA positions, followed finally by the Skyraiders deploying the heavy ordnance. Typically, at least twenty-four aircraft would be involved in a major bridge strike: eight jets, eight Corsairs, and eight Skyraiders.
“We [in the Panthers] wanted to hit them right before the ADs were ready to drop their bombs,” Hersh Gott explains, “so that it would keep their gunners down. When they saw us start our dives, they cleared out of those gun emplacements. I sure would have if I’d been a gunner down there.”
The successful new tactic, adapted by Beauchamp from air strikes in World War II, was quickly adopted throughout Task Force 77, with one alteration. To prevent the dust created by the jets’ airbursts from concealing the props’ bomb targets, the air groups directed the jets to move their suppression points of aim farther from the bridges.
Though Armstrong flew flak suppression on his fair share of bridge strikes, the only specific notation in his logbook came on January 8, 1952, two days after Rickelton’s death, when CVG-5 destroyed two bridges. Whether Neil flew as part of the attack on “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” cannot truly be answered, because the events depicted in James A. Michener’s 1953 novel by that title (made the following year into a Hollywood movie starring William Holden, Mickey Rooney, and Grace Kelly) were highly fictionalized.
Armstrong recalls that Michener, just off a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, was a guest on the Essex during the last months of 1951. Himself a navy veteran of World War II, Michener was writing a series of articles on the naval air war for The Saturday Evening Post. “I think he went on two or three tours, at four or five weeks at a crack,” Neil recalls. “He would just sit around the wardroom in the evening or in the ready room in the daytime and listen to guys tell the actual stories. He didn’t ask questions much or anything; he just kind of absorbed it all.” It was here, while on Neil’s ship, that Michener began to think about writing a book that became The Bridges at Toko-Ri.
“So most of the things that happened in the book . . . were actual events,” Armstrong recounts. “I thought The Bridges at Toko-Ri was an excellent representation of the kinds of flying that we were doing there. It was identical, same kind of aircraft and the same class carrier.”
While living aboard the Essex, Michener interviewed Ernie Beauchamp two or three times. Marshall Beebe, to whom Michener dedicated his book, cameoed in the film’s opening scene as a pilot calling in a downed pilot report. The rescue helicopter pilot (played in the movie by Mickey Rooney) was at least partly based on one or more incidents involving VF-51’s colorful landing signal officer, “Dog” Fannon.
Over the years, a number of people have compared Michener’s novel to the historical record. What most have found are recognizable elements of at least four actual missions in the Toko-Ri story.4 Armstrong does not speculate on whether he flew on any of the four. All he has ever said is that “I flew into equally difficult places.”
Perhaps for reasons of better storytelling, Michener did not accurately present the role of the jets in the coordinated strikes. In the book, Michener disregarded the jets’ technical lack of bomb capacity and had the jets bombing the bridges.
Although the new tactics lessened air group casualties, there was no way to go after so many well-defended targets without losing some men and machines. On January 6, 1951, Rick Rickelton died. That same day Lieutenant Harold J. Zenner of VF-54 lost an eye when fragments of metal from an AA shell and small pieces of Plexiglas from his own canopy hit him in the face. On the ninth, Ensign Raymond G. “Gene” Kelly, also of VF-54, was fatally hit by AA fire following a bombing run on a bridge. On the eleventh, yet another pilot from VF-54, Joseph H. Gollner, crashed into the sea after what seemed to be a normal takeoff. On the nineteenth, a VF-172 Banshee flown by air force major Francis N. McCollon was hit by antiaircraft fire during a strafing run, then crashed and burned.
But the death that hit Armstrong and the rest of the men of VF-51 by far the hardest, after Rick Rickelton’s, was that of another one of their own, LTJG Leonard R. Cheshire, on January 26, 1951.
Like Rickelton, Cheshire was from New Mexico—Albuquerque, to be exact. So impressed was division leader Wam Mackey with the two young men that he thought at the time, “If everybody from New Mexico was like those two boys, I’m going to move to New Mexico.” A tall, thin, angular man with dark brown hair, Cheshire had been married to Dorothy just before he left for Korea. After the war was over, Chet planned to return to the Land of Enchantment and become a teacher.
In a cubicle in the junior officers’ bunkroom (an area the senior officers referred to as “Boys’ Town”), Armstrong and Cheshire slept right across the aisle from each other, on lower bunks. The two men—the squadron’s youngest member and the other the squadron’s oldest junior officer—became close friends. “In the combat environment,” Neil explains, “you welcome lighthearted conversation that takes your mind away from the realities of the war around you. But we also talked a great deal about the serious side of life: philosophy, theology, history, et cetera. Chet was a very thoughtful person, and I learned a great deal from listening to his perspectives on those issues.” Both Neil and Cheshire also spent time reading books. In the evenings, Cheshire often read out loud while the others, in the words of Hal Schwan, “would sit around and listen almost like a bunch of little kids.” In the first weeks of January 1951, Chet was well into a reading of The Caine Mutiny, a recent bestseller by novelist Herman Wouk.
On Saturday, January 26, 1951, Mackey’s division was making its second run on a camouflaged train sitting in the Kowan area, just adjacent to Wonsan Bay, when Cheshire’s plane was hit by AA. According to Ken Kramer, Cheshire’s wingman, “We were in a racetrack pattern, which allowed us to keep each other in sight while we made individual dives on the target. Chet had just completed his dive and I was rolling into my dive behind him when he got hit.” At that instant, Cheshire radioed urgently to Mackey, “Wam, I’m hit, and I’m hit bad!”
Mackey called Kramer to “get up there fast” because Kramer was closest. Already heading that way at 100 percent power, Kramer could see Cheshire’s plane in flames originating right behind the cockpit, where the plane’s 1,000-gallon tank of high-octane fuel was located. Gaining a little altitude, Cheshire blew off his canopy in what appeared to be preparations for ejection. But he did not eject. Instead, he turned toward Wonsan harbor and brought his plane down as though he was going in for a water landing. Kramer, who was nearest the flaming airplane, called Cheshire several times to eject, but Chet never answered. “By this time,” Kramer remembers, “I was flying right off his starboard side with a clear view of his cockpit and he never moved. I believe he was already dead at this point.”
As Armstrong tells it, “It was clear he was going to ditch, but for some unknown reason, just before ditching, at a very low altitude he ejected—too low for his parachute to open. He hit the water, but I could not see that clearly from my position. When we got in a good viewing position, I thought he was on the surface. By the time the rescue helicopter arrived, however, he was nowhere to be seen.”
It is Kramer’s view that Cheshire’s ejection seat went off, not because Chet was still alive to trigger it, but because the intense fire engulfing his cockpit set it off. Perhaps Cheshire had tried to eject back when he blew the canopy. Powered by a 75-millimeter shell, the cartridge fired the same type of ejection seat that had launched Armstrong to safety from his damaged Panther back in September 1951. This time it must have misfired, then ignited later when Chet’s plane was gliding in just above the water.
In his journal, Bob Kaps recorded the tragic news in words that mirrored what Armstrong and everyone else in VF-51 so deeply felt: “It happened again today. Chet this time. Hit and burning—bailed out too low in Wonsan Bay. Just don’t see the justice of it all. Chet, of all people. Poor Dorothy—what words could possibly explain. He had so much to live for. Heaven help this world of ours on judgment day.”
That evening over the ship’s PA system, Chaplain J. J. Buzek said a prayer, as he always did, for the men who lost their lives or had been reported as missing in action: “O God, we humbly beseech thee for the soul of the pilot, our shipmate, Leonard Cheshire, who died this day. Deliver him not into the hands of the enemy, but command that he may be received by the holy angels and conducted into paradise. God bless you all, men.” Since the ship had left Hawaii for Korea back in August 1951, Chaplain Buzek had said this prayer for Marshall Beebe’s men twenty-eight times.
James A. Michener wrote poignantly (but also incorrectly) about Cheshire’s death in an article entitled “The Forgotten Heroes of Korea,” which appeared on May 10, 1952, in The Saturday Evening Post. It is Armstrong’s belief that Michener used several stories derived from the life of Chet Cheshire in The Bridges at Toko-Ri as the basis for the novel’s doomed hero, Lieutenant Harry Brubaker, who was also a married, thoughtful, older man from a western state. It is little wonder that Michener’s book remains one of Neil’s favorites. And little wonder that Neil also eventually finished reading Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, to himself, though it took him many months before he had the heart to pick up reading where his good friend Leonard R. Cheshire had left off.
• • •
At 1330 hours on February 1, 1952, the Essex left Task Force 77 for Yokosuka, ending tour number four after thirty-seven grueling days out of port. Bob Kaps’s journal entry spoke for everyone: “Happy day. . . . Sure glad to have that one over.” Flying well over 2,000 sorties during that stretch (441 of them done by VF-51), Air Group 5 had fired nearly 400,000 rounds of ammunition, dropped almost 10,000 bombs, shot off approximately 750 rockets (the majority by the Banshees), and hit the enemy with just under 3,000 pounds of napalm. This resulted in 1,374 railroad track cuts, the destruction of 34 bridges and damage to 47 more, along with a multitude of damaged or destroyed war matériel and infrastructure. In accomplishing these attacks, CVG-5 lost five men, two of them from VF-51, and the services of more than a dozen aircraft.
Armstrong’s fifth and final tour of combat started on February 18, 1952. Mercifully, it lasted only two weeks. Neil was in the air every one of the days that flying was done, for a total of thirteen flights. The first, on February 20, involved gunnery training, and six were CAPs. The others were armed reccos. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Neil finished the work of the night hecklers in a morning attack that destroyed both locomotives and forty cars on a long train.
The weather stayed cold, overcast, with rough seas. On the twenty-first, the day Armstrong flew a recco to Yonghung, a Corsair pilot from VF-53, LTJG Francis G. Gergen, crashed while escorting a battle-damaged AD through a heavy snowstorm to a friendly field. It was the only death experienced by the entire air group during this final tour.
Armstrong says of the VF-51 aviators: “If they had that choice, on most days they’d say, ‘I ought to go fly, go face those guns again. I’d rather do that than stay here and read.’ Because they were that kind of people. They enjoyed the flying” and kept close track of how many missions they had flown, how many cat shots they had made, how many carrier landings achieved, and so forth, not wanting the other guys to get ahead of them. To the very last days of the cruise, as Hal Schwan explains, “It wasn’t a question of how difficult it was to fly so many missions; rather, it was more a question of trying to get out on more missions than you were scheduled.” The engineer in Armstrong regarded wartime survival primarily in terms of odds and probabilities.
Armstrong’s last flight in the Korean War came on March 5, 1952. On that day, the pilots of VF-51 transferred their flyable planes to the Valley Forge. The Panther jet that Neil flew was U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics No. 125123, a plane he had flown only twice before (photo escort to Songjin on September 17 and recco escort to Wonsan and Pu-Chong on November 18). He flew BuAer Nos. 125132 and 125100 ten times and nine times, respectively. Overall, he flew every one of VF-51’s F9Fs at least once, except the few that were lost early.
Armstrong flew a total of seventy-eight missions. Thirty of them were CAP, fifteen were photo escort, and one was for gunnery training. In the other thirty-two, he flew recco, fighter sweeps, rail cuts, and flak suppression. In all, Neil was in the air for over 121 hours. Over a third of that time came in the extraordinarily tough month of January 1952.
• • •
On March 11, 1952, after a few days in Japan, the Essex departed for Hawaii and from there stateside—or, as Bob Kaps called it, to “the land of dreams.” Finally on March 25 came the glorious sight of the California shoreline. “Seems years since we left this very dock,” Kaps wrote in his journal. “May the Lord will that none will have to go through it again.”
As did his fellow aviators, Armstrong arrived home with a chest full of war medals. Neil typically downplayed his own achievements, saying, “They handed out medals there like gold stars at Sunday school.” His first award, the Air Medal, came in recognition of his first twenty combat flights; his second, a Gold Star, in recognition of his next twenty. With his mates, Neil also received the Korean Service Medal and Engagement Star. As with most military honors and recognitions, Neil may have most appreciated his first, the Air Medal, which covered the series of flights that included his ejection over Pohang. This citation read:
For distinguishing himself by meritorious achievement in aerial flight as a pilot of a jet fighter in Fighter Squadron FIFTY ONE, attached to the U.S.S. ESSEX, in attacks on hostile North Korean and Chinese Communist forces. During the period from 21 August 1951 to 9 October 1951, in the face of grave hazards, Ensign Armstrong participated in twenty flights including strikes on transportation and lines of communication at HAMHUNG, MAJON-NI, PUKCHONG, and SONGJIN. He performed his assigned missions with skill and courage. His devotion to duty was at all times in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
The person who most influenced Armstrong on the Essex cruise was, undoubtedly, Ernie Beauchamp. Neil developed “enormous respect” for the Skipper. “I thought he was a superior leader,” Armstrong states. “I learned from our skipper that it’s not how you look; it’s how you perform.” If Beauchamp’s eyes had not gone bad, he most likely would have become an admiral. But after losing his wings in the late 1950s for failing to pass an annual eye exam, Beauchamp left the navy for McDonnell Aircraft Corporation.
In naval aviation, “Almost everything we did, we did as teams,” Neil emphasizes. “Eight eyes [per four-pilot team] are better than two in looking for trouble and looking for targets.” “We just seemed to click together very well,” explains Hal Schwan. “We had the closest and best operating organization imaginable. All of the people were top-notch people. That was really all you thought about.” And still do. Most of its members have kept in touch for the past fifty-plus years.
The Screaming Eagles was an amazing group of professionals. The early American astronauts are hardly more impressive. Eight members of VF-51 flew more than one hundred combat missions. One became a Blue Angel, the navy’s stellar flight-exhibition team. Two became captains. Another became the navy’s top admiral and chief of naval operations (CNO). Five became test pilots. Three were inducted into the Test Pilot Hall of Fame. The Golden Eagles, an elite association of naval aviation pioneers limited to 200 active members, at one time counted five men from VF-51 (Armstrong, Beauchamp, Hayward, Mackey, and Moore), perhaps the most ever from any one squadron. One can only imagine what sort of achievements might have been made by their other mates, forever young, who died over half a century ago in battle: Ashford, Bramwell, Rickelton, and Cheshire. From all of them, Armstrong learned a quiet, dignified pride.
Just under 34,000 Americans were killed in the Korean War, with over 23,500 of them dying in action. An additional 10,000 were wounded, and 7,000 became prisoners of war. The great majority of the casualties were U.S. Marines or soldiers in the U.S. Army. Compared to what the infantry went through in the ground war, the experiences of the men in the air—navy, marines, and air force—may seem comparatively inconsequential. Fewer than 500 navy personnel died in the war—492 to be exact. Twenty-seven of them fell during the Essex cruise.
At one point in Michener’s novel The Bridges at Toko-Ri, the admiral in command of Task Force 77 tells the doomed jet aviator, the fictional Harry Brubaker, “All through history free men have had to fight the wrong war in the wrong place. But that’s the one they’re stuck with.” Even more poignantly, Michener’s book concludes with the admiral looking out over the deck of his aircraft carrier, sadly pondering the young aviator’s death in combat and asking, “Where do we get such men?”