CHUCK MAULTSBY HAD no questions of conscience when it came to combat. He saw himself as a patriot willing to kill or be killed for his country. In 1943, he entered his senior year at Holy Trinity High School in Norfolk, Virginia. He had not flown for one full year and was eager to get back in the air and into the fight against Germany and Japan. Maultsby paid frequent visits to Norfolk Municipal Airport, which served as a transition school for Army Air Corps pilots assigned to operational units in Europe. He wanted to trade places with them in the worst way, but he was still a year away from his eighteenth birthday. The Army Air Corps did, however, have a preaviation cadet program open to high school students as long as they could pass a physical and mental aptitude test. Both examinations were of great concern to him.
Maultsby considered himself an average student at best, and he was a puny teenager. At 130 pounds and just over five feet tall, he fell short of the program’s standards by five pounds and a half inch of height. He ate six pounds of bananas on his way to Langley Hospital for his weigh-in. As he stepped onto the scale, he was relieved to see that his banana binge had worked. He now weighed 136 pounds. The examiner measured his height next. Maultsby closed his eyes and prayed. The examiner brought the horizontal bar down until it rested on his head. The man paused.
“Stand up straight,” he barked.1
The examiner then shoved his thumb into Chuck’s spine, the force nearly lifting him off his feet. For a split second, Maultsby measured five-foot-six. The aspiring pilot passed his exams and was ordered to report for duty at Fort George G. Meade in July 1944. He would be the first member of his family to enter the military since his uncle Patsy had served during World War I—an ominous reminder for his aunt Inez, who seldom talked about her brother’s wartime experiences. Maultsby managed to form a narrative from bits and pieces of conversation that suggested his uncle Patsy had been gassed in battle and then spent time in a German prisoner of war camp. Patsy made it back home but was never the same. He lived for just a short while longer—killed by a fall as he stepped out of a bathtub.
Chuck forced the image of his uncle Patsy to the back of his mind as he was shipped from Fort Meade to Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi, where he spent the next eight weeks undergoing basic training in the searing heat of the southern sun. He spent countless hours learning how to shoot a rifle, listening to lectures, and participating in psychomotor tests. Aptitude for these tests would determine whether cadets would move on to bombardier, navigator, or pilot training next. Maultsby scored high marks and qualified for all—but chose pilot training, as flying was his first and only love.
Designated an “on-the-line trainee,” he was transferred to Greenville Army Air Base in Mississippi, where he began training on Stearman PT-17 and North American AT-6 Texan biplanes. He spent a year at the training center and was eventually commissioned as a second lieutenant. He had recorded hundreds of hours in the cockpit and was eager to join the fight against the German Luftwaffe or the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service. Maultsby thought he was about to get his chance when the barracks lights flickered on in the middle of the night, and the pilots were ordered to gather their belongings and ship out. They went by train to Montgomery, Alabama, but were diverted along the journey to Tyndall Field in Panama City, Florida. As a fighter pilot, Chuck Maultsby was ready and able, but the military refused to send him into the fray. World War II was winding down, and aerial combat operations were almost over. With Hitler’s war machine decimated, the Allies were assured victory in Europe. The Empire of Japan would soon surrender as well, following the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War heroes were coming home in droves, while Maultsby and his fellow pilots performed menial duties on base, such as flight line maintenance and mess hall cleanup.
Discharged in November 1945, Chuck Maultsby was in no hurry to get out of uniform. He told his family that he planned to enroll at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. The challenge was coming up with the tuition. The Army Air Corps had given him some money, but he spent most of the small sum on new clothes. His aunt Inez had given all his clothes to the Salvation Army, not that they would fit him anymore anyway. Maultsby had undergone a major growth spurt while in the army and now stood five feet, seven inches. He had also gained ten pounds of muscle. He realized that if he wanted his basic financial needs met, he would have to go to the man who had turned his back on him time after time—his father.
By now, Chuck’s father, Isaac, was a successful businessman with a string of shoe-repair shops. Inez also confirmed that Isaac had just returned from a long vacation in Europe and was flush with cash.
The mere thought of asking his father for money sickened him, but he swallowed his pride. Isaac’s answer was predictable, made not for love of his son but as a way to grow his own small business. He told Chuck that he would not spare a cent for the young man’s education but would instead bankroll Chuck’s very own shoe-repair shop.
Resentment of his father’s failure to seek proper medical care for his mother and subsequent brutal treatment and abandonment of him and his siblings had sent Chuck down a different path. Emulating his father in any way, in business or otherwise, was not an option. He declined Isaac’s offer and walked out of his life.
Maultsby put a pin in his dream of college and took a job as a mail carrier, which gave him a little money to continue his pilot training back at Glenrock Airport, which had reopened after the war. Several months later, he became eligible for the GI Bill and applied for enrollment at the Northrop Aeronautical Institute in Hawthorne, California. A few weeks later, he received his acceptance letter in the mail and made his way to the West Coast. The schoolwork was difficult and the environment very businesslike. Maultsby shared an apartment in nearby Manhattan Beach with four other students—veterans like him and serious-minded men. When he wanted to blow off a little steam, he took a bus to Hollywood and played tourist. He once saw Clark Gable washing his car and Howard Hughes testing his Spruce Goose in Long Beach Harbor. Maultsby was not the type to be starstruck and only found himself at a loss for words once, when he stopped into a small Manhattan Beach diner called the White Stop Café. He took a seat at the counter and watched as a young waitress with brown hair tied up in a ponytail emerged from the kitchen with a pencil and paper in hand.
“She was the cutest thing God ever made,” Maultsby recalled. “She had large, beautiful soft hazel eyes and the longest lashes I’d ever seen.”2
The pretty waitress took his order and disappeared into the kitchen. Drawn to her immediately, he inquired of the café owner, “Who’s the little tootie that just waited on me?”
He later discovered that the “tootie” was the café owner’s daughter. Jeanne was still in high school but acted more mature than the bobbysoxers dressed in poodle skirts, with their socks rolled at the ankle. She usually wore slacks, a turtleneck, and just a hint of lipstick. Neither had a car so they courted by trolley, bus, or a borrowed car on occasion. They fell hard for each other and soon began to talk of marriage.
With the blessing of Jeanne’s parents, the couple wed in March 1949, after Chuck had successfully completed his education and training at Northrop. A month later, Jeanne announced she was pregnant. Chuck found work as a draftsman and took other odd jobs while he awaited approval of his application to join the US Air Force.
He was ordered to report for duty in March 1950, just a month after the birth of their first child, Charles Wayne Maultsby II. Jeanne tended to her newborn while Charles Sr. sweated out basic training at Perrin Air Force Base in Sherman, Texas. He ran, lifted weights, and drilled with other recruits, while also learning Morse code, aircraft recognition, flight planning, and meteorology. To keep their minds sharp, these future combat pilots had to commit trivial data to memory, like how many jelly beans it would take to fill the water tower on base or how many rivets there were in the port wing of an AT-6.
Mealtimes were Pygmalion-like exercises to improve posture. Pilots were ordered to sit on the first six inches of their chairs, ramrod straight, with their eyes focused directly ahead. They could not look down at their plates but instead had to raise their forks in a straight vertical line and lift them horizontally to their mouths. Seldom did a morsel of food remain on the fork long enough to eat. Nearly half of the cadets washed out of the program.
Chuck survived basic training and graduated to fighter school at Williams Air Force Base in Mesa, Arizona, where Jeanne and Chuckie, as the baby was called, joined him. The couple settled in nicely and made friends easily with other cadets on base, including a young hot shot and future Mercury Seven astronaut named Virgil “Gus” Grissom. Like Maultsby, Grissom had served in the Army Air Force during World War II but not seen combat.
General Henry Russell Spicer served as commanding officer at the base. Spicer, a living legend, had been flying for the US military since 1933. The Colorado Springs native was a rigid man with a mustache as thick as a hairbrush and a piercing gaze under a heavy brow. He had earned a reputation for quick decision-making while stationed in Hawaii as a second lieutenant in the 6th Pursuit Squadron in the late 1930s. When the United States entered World War II after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Spicer shipped out to England to lead the 66th Fighter Wing, tasked with escorting heavy bombers, such as the B-17 Flying Fortress, on raids over occupied Europe. Spicer led fourteen missions and downed three German aircraft before he was shot down over the English Channel in early March 1944. He managed to bail out of his P-51 Mustang but spent two days adrift in the bone-chilling waters off France before making it ashore at German-occupied Cherbourg. A group of German soldiers then spotted him as he lay on the beach, too injured to walk and suffering from frostbite to his hands and feet.
Spicer surrendered without struggle but refused to talk under heavy interrogation. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp at Barth, Germany, where he spent months recuperating. Spicer walked the perimeter of the camp routinely while rubbing his legs to regain the circulation he had lost to the frigid waters of the English Channel. Despite his frailty, Spicer, then a colonel, challenged his captors at every opportunity. Installed as senior officer at North No. 2 Compound at Stalag Luft 1, he grew increasingly angry about the Germans’ heavy-handed treatment of his men, many of whom spent weeks in the cooler for minor transgressions such as failing to salute a German soldier of lower rank.
Spicer had also grown frustrated with friendly relationships he observed between the prisoners and their captors. On November 1, 1944, he gathered his men in front of his barracks and addressed the group in a stern voice loud enough for the German guards to hear. He ran down a list of grievances and reminded the Allied POWs that they were still at war with Germany.
“They are still our enemies and are doing everything they can to win this war,” Spicer shouted. “Don’t let them fool you around this camp as they are dirty, lying sneaks and can’t be trusted.”3
He then told the men that if they all had to stay in the camp for fifteen years to see all the Germans killed, it would be worth it. Spicer’s passionate speech drew loud cheers among the camp’s 1,800 POWs but outraged his captors. Spicer was immediately hauled off and placed in solitary confinement awaiting court-martial by a German tribunal. The Germans sentenced him to death by firing squad following six months in isolation. The extended prison sentence turned out to be a lifesaver for the American airman. The day before he was scheduled to face the firing squad, Soviet troops liberated Stalag Luft 1.
General Spicer carried this strength and tenacity with him during his command at Williams Air Force Base. For Chuck Maultsby, Gus Grissom, and the other cadets, fighter pilot school was much different from basic flying school. There were no more cafeteria exercises or trivial facts to commit to memory. Instead, General Spicer and other flight instructors who had stared down the enemy in the skies during World War II schooled the young pilots on every facet of air war.
The cadets learned loops, rolls, and other aerobatic maneuvers to evade an enemy. They trained extensively in the F-80 Shooting Star, practicing start and emergency procedures and how to rise and lower gear flaps. The F-80 was a sophisticated fighter jet but easy for pilots to operate on takeoff. Cadets would simply “kick the tires and light the fire,” as the phrase went on the base. The real challenge came in the air as pilots tried to get accustomed to the thrust and speed of the Shooting Star. Chuck put in nearly sixty-five hours of flight time before graduating in May 1951. At the ceremony, General Spicer wished the cadets Godspeed and a safe return from Korea. He then pinned a pair of wings on Maultsby’s uniform while Jeanne had the honor of pinning a gold bar on her husband’s right shoulder.
Next was Fighter Gunnery School at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada. This would be the final stop to prepare the cadets for combat as 90 percent of all pilots graduating from the program would head overseas to the escalating conflict in Korea. Nellis was one of the largest and busiest air bases in the United States, with a takeoff or landing occurring every twenty seconds. Named after local fighter pilot William Harrell Nellis, who flew seventy combat missions during World War II before he was shot down and killed during the Battle of the Bulge, the air base had earned the nickname “Home of the Fighter Pilot” because it pitted the best against the best. These elite cadets tested themselves and one another each day for eight weeks from sunup to sundown. Maultsby and his fellow combat pilots learned the deadly arts of dive-bombing, skip-bombing, high-and low-angle strafing, tactical firing on convoys, and air-to-air combat at altitudes of 12,000 and 20,000 feet. The pilots chased after one another in the skies over the Nevada desert in a fiercely competitive environment.
“Anytime you were airborne, you were subject to being pursued by another aircraft,” Maultsby wrote years later. “If you didn’t see him [an aggressor] and he got your tail number, you owed him a beer when you landed.”4
He flew eighty sorties in less than thirty days. He spent more time in the air than he did on the ground. He and the other cadets were as combat ready as they could possibly be. The training was over. It was now time for the real thing.
Maultsby was ordered to Japan in August 1951. Jeanne and Chuckie, now eighteen months old, drove to Los Angeles International Airport to see him off. Chuck and Jeanne did not say good-bye—it sounded too final. Instead, they hugged tightly and kissed silently before he boarded the plane. Wife and child remained on the tarmac as the large aircraft taxied down the runway. Maultsby gazed out the window and watched as his entire world receded in his view. At that moment, he wondered if he would ever return home to them.
He was assigned to the 26th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Naha Air Base in Okinawa. The squadron was ordered to protect the island from the threat of Chinese combat aircraft. The base was small, and the men were housed in Quonset huts. During World War II, the Japanese had used the base to launch kamikaze attacks against American ships. One former kamikaze pilot, who never had the chance to complete his mission, now worked as a bartender at the officers’ club.
As Maultsby awaited his first combat mission, he kept his reflexes sharp through air-to-ground gunnery training at an auxiliary field nearby. As he returned from one practice mission, he began to experience engine trouble on final approach. He pushed the throttle full forward, but the F-80’s power was limited, and the jet’s engine refused to accelerate. As he reached the ground, the right wing dipped and scraped the runway, sending the fighter jet end over end, with the pilot trapped at the controls. The violent thrusts rattled him, and his head slammed against the console. The plane turned over several times before coming to a dead stop. Dazed, but still conscious, Maultsby worked desperately to free himself from the cockpit, fearing the plane might explode. He pulled himself out of the wreck and crawled to the top of a nearby ravine. Looking back, he was shocked to see that the nose, wings, and tail were completely destroyed. A crash vehicle was dispatched to the scene, and as the driver got out and surveyed the crash, he called to Maultsby, who was now standing a few yards away.
“Where’s the pilot?” the driver asked.
“I am the pilot.”
“No, I mean the pilot who was in that thing!”5
Inspecting the twisted wreckage, the emergency driver was flabbergasted that anyone could have walked away from the crash. Maultsby’s squadron mates could hardly believe it either. They looked at him as if he were a ghost. The story of his miraculous survival grew and was later immortalized at the crash site, which was renamed Maultsby’s Canyon.
He was growing more anxious to enter the fight in Korea as he realized that he was still one hundred combat missions away from reuniting with Jeanne and Chuckie back in the United States. Up to that point, the only enemy he had faced was Mother Nature. Soon after he survived the training crash, a massive typhoon hit Okinawa and nearly destroyed their small base. Hurricane-force winds ripped his Quonset hut from its foundation and blew it away. He and others waited out the typhoon in the concrete officers’ club. When the weather finally abated, he returned to his quarters to find nothing left.
Maultsby was soon dispatched to Korea and assigned to the 35th Squadron of the 8th Fighter-Bomber Group at K-13 near the city of Suwon. The base, attacked and lost to the North Koreans twice since 1950, had returned to American control. It was now used to stage patrols along the Yalu River and the deadly MiG Alley.
Maultsby entered the fray immediately. He undertook missions to destroy roads, canals, and enemy trains. He bombarded enemy troops with rockets and napalm. He was ordered into the air sixteen times and successfully completed each task in textbook fashion.
Maultsby was then briefed on his next mission—a major attack on a convoy of tanks, armored vehicles, troop transports, and supply trucks outside Kunu-ri, North Korea, just eighty kilometers from the Chinese border. The area was of critical importance to the enemy, and Chuck knew it would be heavily defended. On the day of the mission, he climbed into the cockpit of an F-80 Shooting Star and waited for his turn to lift off. The squadron took off in pairs, with a 1,000-pound bomb tucked beneath each wing.
As he taxied down the runway, Maultsby discovered that a circuit breaker had become dislodged, which meant that he would have to apply extra force on the stick during the bombing run and the return to base. Such a long flight would be torture on his arms, and he briefly considered turning back for repairs. But the mission could not wait, so he continued soaring into the sky and into formation with the other American bombers.
Despite intelligence estimates, the pilots truly had no idea what they were about to face in Kunu-ri. The enemy had set a trap for the squadron by bringing in dozens of heavy guns to launch a counterattack against the bombers.
Chuck Maultsby knew he was in trouble the moment he reached the target. Antiaircraft fire blanketed the skies.
“Great clouds of oily, black smoke erupted everywhere in the sky,” he recalled.6
Realizing there was no way to penetrate this deadly shield with glide bombing, the squadron leader ordered his men to begin dive-bombing maneuvers instead. Maultsby pushed his plane into a deep dive toward a line of railcars below. The next moment, the F-80 shook violently as a shell slammed into its side, then exploded just feet behind the cockpit, tearing off the left side of the plane. The windscreen shattered, sending jagged pieces into his face as hot, sharp metal shards from the exploded shell pounded the back of his seat. Flames poured into what remained of the cockpit, and the instrument panel melted before his eyes. Maultsby’s left arm was now on fire. Immediately, he stuck his arm out of the plane, allowing the wind to snuff the flames.
The shell explosion destroyed the control system, and he could no longer manage the large F-80. The only instrument still working was the bomb-release lever. He squeezed it hard with his right hand and released the heavy payload of bombs toward the target. As a result, the plane became much lighter and pitched up instantly. Maultsby felt his muscles tighten and contract with the pressure of the g-forces. His head fell between his knees. He strained to look up but could not lift his head. Stuck in this position with the F-80 now spiraling out of control, he grabbed hold of the ejection handles and with all his remaining strength pulled them back, activating an explosive charge. The pilot’s seat shot up like a rocket from the distressed F-80, narrowly missing the plane’s canopy, which would have severed both his legs. The thunder of the airstream pounded Maultsby’s eardrums as he kicked wildly, attempting to break free of his seat. The pilot chute opened, and he was now floating in the cold Korean air, surrounded by three squadrons of American jet fighters and streams of lightning shooting up from enemy antiaircraft guns on the ground. A volley of gunfire struck the chute, and he could hear bullets zip by his head. He closed his eyes and prayed. If death should come, let it come quickly.
As he fell, the snowy earth rose up quickly to meet him. The trajectory of the parachute was pushing him dead center onto his own target. Much to his surprise, he landed softly in the thick snow without harm. The pale color of his parachute made for the ideal camouflage against the glistening whiteness. Still, Chuck was in the center of the aerial target and had to find cover immediately, or a bomb dropped by his own squadron would kill him. He struggled out of his harness and spotted a hill several yards in the distance.
Get behind the hill and away from the firing, he thought to himself. Disappear from sight and run for it while the Chinese are focusing all their attention on the sky.7
He sprinted toward the hill and then felt the ground give away under his boots. Two 1,000-pound bombs exploded less than a football field away, transforming the landscape into Satan’s version of a Salvador Dali painting. It was all surreal. The ground vibrated and rippled. Trees erupted into torches. The sky bled.
Maultsby fell to the ground as if trapped by gravity. Each time he got up to run a few more steps, the force of another bomb knocked him back down into the snow. This macabre dance caught the attention of a group of Chinese soldiers, who started chasing after him with rifles ready. The enemy closed the distance easily and surrounded the downed pilot. He raised his shaking arms in surrender. Just as when Williams Air Force Base commander Henry Spicer reached shore in Cherbourg, France, during World War II, his protégé Chuck Maultsby was now helpless and in the hands of the enemy.
Jeanne Maultsby had not heard from her husband for at least two weeks and was sick with worry. Chuck had always been dutiful in his letter writing. He never withheld the danger of his job from her and, not wanting her to hear about the accident from some other source, like a newspaper reporter, had even mailed her photos of the F-80 crash he had walked away from during the training exercise in Japan. Jeanne grew more concerned when awoken by her toddler’s screams in the middle of the night. Little Chuckie was covered in sweat and calling for his father over and over again. She comforted him until he fell back to sleep. The outburst was totally out of character for the normally happy little boy. Jeanne saw his unusual behavior as a premonition that something terrible had happened to her husband.
The next day, her hunch was confirmed when a strange woman arrived on her doorstep and asked if she could come inside. She was holding a telegram. Jeanne showed her to the couch and both sat down. There was a moment of awkward silence as the stranger fumbled with the telegram. Finally she opened it and informed Jeanne that Chuck had been lost during a mission on January 5, 1951, and was now declared missing in action.
Maultsby, held in isolation for several weeks, was not sure whether he would ever see a friendly face again or even survive at all. He was taken up the Ch’ongch’on River to the coal city of Anju, North Korea, and interrogated along with another American pilot. The two prisoners were held together in what Maultsby later described as a small prison cave dug into the side of a hill.
“The cave was not quite high enough for a man to stand or lie with his feet outstretched,” he recalled. “We slept and lived in filthy straw, passed our body waste almost like animals and endured all the discomfort and sometimes the horror of living in a stinking hole in the ground infested with all manner of insect life and rodents.”8
In keeping with the fighting spirit of his former commander and mentor General Spicer, Maultsby too discovered ways to challenge his captors. He and his fellow American captive attempted to dig and claw their way out of their cave until their fingers bled. And then they dug some more. But the fortification of their crude prison cell was surprisingly strong, and fed only one bowl of rice and a few drops of water each day, they were growing weaker. But worse than the malnourishment were the physical beatings. While the prison guards pounded his broken body, Chuck Maultsby dug his own hole, deep within his mind, and locked himself away from the excruciating pain.
“You must have resilience, belief in yourself, in your country,” he later wrote. “If you believe, you can stand anything.”9
Weeks stretched into months and eventually years. Maultsby suffered a seemingly endless wave of beatings, followed by hour after hour in the interrogation room, and yet he refused to provide his captors with a morsel of information. He dug in deeper when they threatened him with death. Chuck Maultsby was a warrior, trained to kill and ready to give his life for his cause. He just hoped that his wife and only son would one day understand.
Maultsby had no knowledge that cease-fire talks had been ongoing since 1951 and had nearly fallen apart several times over the issue of POWs. The North Koreans and Chinese demanded that all prisoners of war be turned over to their respective countries, but representatives of the UN forces argued for allowing prisoners to choose where they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. Finally the two sides struck a deal in late July 1953. The armistice agreement called a cease-fire and established a new border between North and South Korea along the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The repatriation of prisoners, called Operation Big Switch, began a month later. Chuck Maultsby was one of 3,597 American POWs to be returned home.