I enlisted in the Navy as a cadet in December 1942, knowing I had to do something or be drafted. At that time you could still sign up as a cadet, and if you washed out you were back as a civilian, which most people didn’t realize. They put a stop to that right afterwards.
I went through primary training flying the old Stearman biplane at Norman, Oklahoma, and then I went to Corpus Christi, Texas. Corpus turned out more Naval pilots than Pensacola did. Most people think of Pensacola as being the big place, but Corpus Christi was huge, and they turned out a lot of pilots. At Corpus we flew the old Vultee Vibrator, and then the SNJ. Then just before we got our wings we had a little time in the old SBD dive-bomber. We thought we were pretty hot pilots when we got in that SBD! That was one of the better airplanes they had when the war started, but it really wasn’t worth a damn at that point.
We flew gunnery in the SNJ out over the gulf, and it got so you really felt at home in it. We used to fly instrument hops in the SNJ. The instructor would be in the back seat flying the instruments, and you’d be in the front. There was an outlying field there, right along the Gulf. They’d all land down there, park the airplanes, and sunbathe a little bit. We were coming in to land there one time and this instructor was flying it. He buzzed the field and pulled up, did a Chandell, dropped the gear, came down and was going to land, but he was going too damn fast. I could see that. He touched down about the middle of the runway, decided he wasn’t going to make it, poured the coal to it, and was heading right toward the Gulf. There were a bunch of bulrushes and stuff there, but what he didn’t know was that there was a big woven wire fence in the middle of all of them. The landing gear caught on that, and, boy, we just cartwheeled almost right into the Gulf, ending up upside down. It knocked him out, and since I kept my seatbelt loose I came down right on the back of my neck. I finally poked a hole in that little old canopy, got out of it, and got him out. If it would have caught fire we’d have been dead, because we were there quite a while before we got out.
There wasn’t a whole lot that separated instructors and students at that point. He really didn’t have but a few more hours in the SNJ than I did. Once you get your wings they may make you an instructor right away, which happened to him, I guess. Of course he was unhappy as hell.
We went right from the SNJ into the Corsair fighter, and I made my first carrier landing in a Corsair. You put in for your choice, but you never knew if you’d get fighters or not, which was what I wanted. This one friend of mine was dating a WAVE who worked in the personnel office, and he said, “Don’t worry about it. We can get you assigned to fighters,” and damned if they didn’t! I always wondered if she had anything to do with it or not. I’d like to find her again and thank her anyway. That was early 1945.
We practiced on land doing short takeoffs and landings before we did it on a carrier. We did all that at Cecil Field in Jacksonville. I was pretty confident that I would be able to do it once I got on a carrier. I was too damn dumb to know any different, thinking back on it. I guess when I landed the first Corsair on the carrier I probably had less than 200 hours total. On the Corsair you didn’t have much forward visibility; you had to kind of bank it around as you came in. That was the only trouble with the Corsair. I hated to wear goggles, but you needed to because you had to open the cockpit and stick your head out to see around that big nose. You were always looking at the LSO, the landing signal officer. He would stand out there on the deck with paddles in his hands and give you signals on what corrections to make as you came in.
I did my first carrier landing on a carrier that had been converted from a cruiser, out in the Gulf of Mexico. The only thing different from what we practiced on land was that they had a lot narrower deck. You felt like the wings were hanging over the side. But even that was big compared to some of those jeep carriers that Kaiser was turning out. They were really midgets.
Then we ended up flying the F8F Bearcat for a while, because it came out right at the end of the war. It was designed specifically to fight the Kamikazes because it climbed like crazy; it was just a little airplane, real small. It had a big R2800 engine, and it held the record for zero to 10,000 feet for a long time. You could take off and just point her up and she’d really go.
I got out to the Pacific in the late spring of 1945. I went out on a ship to Pearl Harbor, where we were supposed to have what they called an operational readiness inspection, to make sure you were up to par. But they were in a hurry to get everything out there, and we didn’t do much on that.
So I got assigned to the carrier Antietam, still flying the Corsair. That was one of the newer, big Essex-class carriers. We were flying mostly around Hawaii. They called it submarine patrol, but it was mostly just practice. They realized then that they had all the stuff they needed out there. Man, they had carriers massed because they thought we were going to have to invade Japan. That’s what I thought I was going to be doing, and that’s what everybody thought. Then I got assigned to the USS Randolf as a replacement pilot, still flying the Corsair. There were a lot of squadrons that were low on guys. You never knew where you were going to end up. We headed out from Hawaii, and I’m not sure where we went. We didn’t put in at any islands; we were out at sea all the time. And when they dropped that bomb, the first one didn’t scare the Japanese much, but then there was the second one, and the war ended.
I signed up to stay in one year after it was all over because I figured that even though the airlines were hiring like crazy, they wanted all those multi-engine bomber pilots, you know. I stayed in until the end of 1946, then got out and went to the University of Denver. I was in my senior year when the Korean war broke out, and they recalled the whole squadron. I was back on the Antietam again, still flying Corsairs. They sent us over to Korea.
I got out in 1954. I went back and finished my degree, and then in the spring of 1955 I went to work for the airlines. I stayed there until I reached the age of sixty in 1983, and you had to quit then.
I had my eightieth birthday last summer [2003], and my wife bought me an hour’s flying time in a Stearman like the one I’d trained in. A guy up north of Grand Junction has one with a bigger engine, and, man, it felt great to be out there again with your head in the breeze and the stick in there in a biwing airplane. It all came back to me; it was just like I was eighteen years old again.