Above the Thunder (15 page)

His face looking like a thunderstorm about to break, Marrs carefully went over our school records.

“Well, all of you have clean records up to this point,” he said. “If you had just one bad mark against you before this, I'd kick you out of this school!”

Still in my 201 file there is an order signed by Captain Marrs that confined me to quarters under the 104th Article of War for violation of local flying regulations, the only recorded punishment I got in nearly thirty years of Army service. It actually amounted to just overnight, for we shipped out to Fort Sill next day.

The first words we heard at Fort Sill were, “
GET THOSE WINGS OFF
!”

“But . . . sir, we have orders . . .”

“You have Army Air Force orders, but you do not wear wings with Field Artillery branch insignia until you have Army Ground Forces orders, and you won't get those until you have satisfactorily finished the course of instruction here at the Department of Air Training. Any questions? Take'em off.”

And so as humble wingless wonders, we started a new daily routine that began each morning at Post Field, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with mass takeoff of scores of little OD-painted planes with the old-style red-centered white star.
³
The big sod field would reverberate with the multiple mini-roars of Continental engines and Sensenich props.

At the same time, half of the student pilots would be in ground school classes, learning all about the simple systems of the Cub-type airplane; how to service and maintain it—the Army way, of course; how to patch or replace fabric; how to make field expedient repairs; how to uncrate, assemble, and rig a new plane; and how to tear it down and recrate it for shipment. We practiced refueling from five-gallon cans through a chamois fastened over a grounded funnel—which would be our normal method of refueling once we joined our units.

In case you've never seen a Piper L-4—the type I flew most of the time in training—maybe I should tell you that it was statistically not very impressive. It was a tandem two-place high-wing taildragger built of metal tubing and covered with linen fabric. It weighed about 680 pounds and was supposed to carry 370. The four-cylinder, sixty-five-horsepower, Continental O-170–3 engine (the “O” stood for “opposed”) was fueled from a twelve-gallon tank mounted just ahead of the instrument panel and would drive the seventy-two-inch Sensenich laminated birch propeller at 2,150 rpm for about one and a half hours of cruising at approximately seventy miles per hour. The main wing spars were of wood (spruce). The main gear had heel brakes, and the tail wheel was steerable with the rudder pedals. Its wingspan was 35 feet 2½ inches; overall length, 22 feet 3 inches; height, 6 feet 8 inches. Entry to the cabin was by means of a split door hinged at top and bottom on the right side. The seats were of canvas over tubing; the plywood floorboard was painted gray. There was 360-degree visibility, as well as overhead, through the windshield and extensive canopy. Both sections of the door could be left open in flight, as could a window on the left, which was hinged at the top and swung up to snap to a fitting under the wing. It had a plain, straight, removable stick with a simple black rubber grip, front and back, and the throttle was at the window ledge on the left. There was a magneto switch and a carburetor heat control on the panel and an elevator trim crank a foot or so below
the throttle. In front of the windshield was the filler cap for the gas tank, and through the cap extended a wire with a crook on its end. That wire was attached to a cork float in the tank and constituted the fuel gauge.

The L-4 had no wing flaps, no gyro instruments, no turn-and-bank indicator, and very little of anything that was not absolutely necessary. The redline airspeed was 120, and the plane would land at about forty miles per hour on its slick balloon tires. (See the appendix for more information on Piper Cubs.)

Besides the Piper L-4, the Department of Air Training of the Field Artillery School (DAT-FAS) also used the Taylorcraft L-2 airplane. The L-2 was a slightly faster plane than the L-4, because of its thinner wing. It was also just a little heavier, as I recall, and a little better looking, having a well-formed Plexiglas canopy, whereas the L-4 had just plain Plexiglas panels covering the frame above the level of the window ledge and back to a little aft of the trailing edge of the wings. Because of its added weight and thinner wing, the L-2 was less forgiving of clumsiness in the maximum-performance flying we had to do every day. Those first assigned to the L-2 on arrival at DAT-FAS flew nothing else while they were there, and the rest of us flew it not at all. Bud Kelly trained in the L-2, while Everett Kelley and I were in L-4s. The only serious accident in our class was when an L-2 stalled out and spun in, killing a member of our old Denton group, a Lieutenant Darling, and his instructor.

I almost got it myself once on a max performance approach. Sev eral of us were in the pattern at one of the stage fields, practicing solo. I was maybe two hundred feet up and trying to get the proper aspect of the barrier lined up for my final descent when the L-4 suddenly dropped out from under me. If it had been an L-2, I probably would have been done for, but I caught the dropping left wing, threw on the coal, pulled out over the pasture short of the field, then climbed over the barrier. At that point, I cut the power and landed safely. The next student in the pattern behind me was so shaken by having observed my close call that he went around.

On another day when the wind was pretty high and we students were shooting approaches solo over the barrier, a group of instructors stood near the barrier watching us, each waving his student around if
he thought the approach was getting into a dangerous condition. On one of my approaches, I got the plane coming down in a steep ap proach like a helicopter, perfectly lined up, feeling as steady as an L-4 ever feels. I was sure I had an excellent landing made, but every instructor on the ground began frantically waving me off. It wasn't like me, but I completely ignored them and came on in. I cleared the barrier, touched down gently, and stopped in about the length of the plane—actually short of the panel that marked the intended touchdown point. My own instructor turned and walked off, shaking his head, while the others laughed. I have no idea what he might have said that I couldn't hear. I do have an idea what would have happened if the wind had suddenly died or shifted direction.

Except when we carried an SCR-610 (one of the new FM radios) for ground contact when adjusting fire, we had no radio in the school ships. And so one day when a long string of us on a cross-country orientation flight went fluttering into Sheppard Field at Wichita Falls, we knew nothing of local conditions except what we could see. There was an instructor leading the flight, but most of us were solo students. We followed him in with no problem—except one student. He had gotten a bit behind on the way in and he didn't see the rest of us land, so he came in the wrong way, downwind. The tower had to cause a B-17 (a large American bomber) on short final to break off and go around. The high and mighty AAF people were outraged, of course.

At some point in the program, there was a cross-country buddy ride. Billy McPhail and I were together on one of these single-plane trips. Billy's hometown was Comanche, Oklahoma, which happened to be near the route we were expecting to fly, and we deviated just a little to fly over his mother's house. She came out into the back yard and waved at us, and Billy decided to drop a note to her. Looking around for something with which to weight the note, he found a ten-inch crescent wrench. He fastened the note to it, I lined up on the McPhail homestead, and Billy let fly. I'm so very, very glad to be able to report that the wrench missed Mrs. McPhail by about three feet before burying itself in the Oklahoma soil.

I got through Stage A in good shape. Staff Sergeant Wilkerson was my instructor, and it seems to me that most of our flying was west and south of the Fort Sill reservation. This country was formerly part of the reservation for the Kiowa and Comanche Indians, and it was fairly flat, laid out with straight north-south and east-west roads at one-mile intervals. Each of these 640-acre sections was divided into quarter sections by trails at half-mile intervals that made a cross in the exact center of the section, and it was on these crossroads that our ground patterns—S-turns and rectangular course, wind-drift 8, elementary 8, two-bank or parachute 8—all in the “Five-hundred-Foot Series”—were oriented.

The “Thousand-Foot Series” consisted of a sequence of turns: ninety-degree left turn with thirty-degree bank (90L/30), 90R/30, 180L/45, 90L/45, 360R/70, and 360L/70. Sounds easy, I suppose, but with a nit-picker sitting up there yelling about every (estimated) degree of bank, every (sensed) foot of altitude variation, and every (eyeballed) degree of heading error, it could really wring the sweat out of a student. There was no instrument to measure bank, you could lose fifty feet before the altimeter registered a change (the student, in the backseat, had to lean around the instructor to see it anyway), and the oscillating, lagging magnetic compass was useless during a turn.

We did stalls at two thousand feet—power on and power off, partial, complete, and full oscillation; spins from three thousand feet, once to right and once to left, two revolutions each. And we practiced chandelles and wingovers at any altitude above fifteen hundred feet. But all that was just review and refinement of what we'd been doing at Denton. It was in Stage B that we got into the more interesting part of the DAT-FAS program, in which we were expected to learn to maintain and service our planes in primitive front-line environments and routinely operate from unprepared fields and roads under conditions requiring maximum performance of the aircraft. Mike Strok, who was instrumental in establishing the course at DAT-FAS and was himself one of the very early graduates of it, says that the emphasis was on “learning by practicing
the extremes to which the pilot can push the aircraft and himself.” The training included landing on curved roads, and power-stall approaches over twenty-foot-high barriers for very short landings. It included tactics for evading enemy fighter attack, which involved turning toward the attacker, rapidly changing altitude and direction, flying “in the nap of the earth,” and landing as soon as possible. Attention was given to selection and aerial recon of landing areas, and, of course, to target identification and conduct of fire by aerial observation methods.

I don't recall having had much trouble or any really exciting incidents while at DAT-FAS until the day of my final Stage B check ride. As always, I dreaded and feared it, although I had never in my life failed any kind of major examination. To make my anxiety worse, my check pilot was one Captain Baker, the bogeyman of the entire DAT-FAS, as far as students were concerned.

We took off from the Rabbit Hill stage field and he told me to head off in a certain direction. Just as I reached five hundred feet, he yelled, “Enemy aircraft!” That was the signal for evasive action. I cut the throttle, rolled upside down, and pulled the nose toward the ground. I leveled off at about ten or twenty feet and proceeded to contour fly at full throttle back toward Rabbit Hill, still the nearest landing place I knew. Along the side of the field nearest me was a line of tall trees. As I approached them, I again cut the power and pulled up to clear them, thus killing off speed so I could make a three-point landing just beyond them. After that, according to the procedure, I would shut off the engine, leave the plane, and head for the nearest cover.

However, just as I touched down he shoved the throttle open and said, “Go on off.” I tried, but the plane would not pick up flying speed, and it wanted to turn to the right. It was quickly evident that the right tire was flat, having been punctured by a stub or something when we landed. Grumpily, Captain Baker told me to taxi up to the tiny shack that was the stage field office and get another plane. He got out and went into the building, growling, “Let me know when you're ready.”

I was nervous when we took off for the second time, but my flying seemed to satisfy him reasonably well as he put me through my paces. Finally, he looked down at a little place in the Wichita Wildlife Refuge
and asked whether I had ever been in there. I hadn't, so he said, “Let's land in there.” Well, I was clever, so I very conspicuously made my high drag and my low drag before I landed on the little weed-grown track. He told me to pull off and we'd have a smoke. We sat under the wing and got out our cigarettes.

After a while, Captain Baker said, “Well, I'm ready to go if you are.”

I got up and got the seat cushion and chocked the right front wheel with it, ready to prop the plane myself—since check pilots didn't assist during Stage B checks.

He very carefully ground out his cigarette butt and said, “Have you seen everything you want to see around here?”

I assured him that I had, and he got in. I propped the ship from behind the prop, put the cushion back in, and away we went. He told me to go back to Rabbit Hill.