Above the Thunder (3 page)

In addition to directing artillery fire, as Kerns relates through his own experiences, L-4 pilots, flying anywhere from a few feet to a few hundred feet off the ground and communicating with ground troops by radio, even exploited their bird's-eye view of things to assist individual soldiers and infantry patrols in maneuvering in close combat with the enemy. On their own, in often-unauthorized private wars, high-spirited and aggressive Cub pilots and passengers often took on the enemy directly, shooting rifles and pistols at enemy troops and dropping hand grenades or other improvised bombs on them, reminiscent of the earliest days of wartime aviation in World War I.

Among the noncombat activities of liaison pilots was ferrying war correspondents and photographers around the war zones (correspondent Ernie Pyle and photographer Margaret Bourke-White were two of the most famous); USO entertainers such as Bob Hope and other movie stars who came out to entertain the troops were flown by L-4 into difficult locations where larger aircraft could not operate. Hope, who with other members of his troupe once rode L-4s over sixty miles of water to entertain soldiers on a remote Pacific island, quipped that an L-4 “was a Mustang (fighter plane) that wouldn't eat its cereal.”
⁵
With all these advantages light aircraft provided the Army, it is startling to note that just before World War II began, the U.S. Army had no light planes at all in its inventory, nor any plans to acquire any. Army leaders at that time
were simply ignorant of what light aviation could do for them. How, then, did the ground army gain its own close-support air arm, distinct from the Army Air Forces?

The chain of events began in 1940, after Hitler's armies had smashed into Poland, but before the attack on Pearl Harbor. A board was convened in Washington to consider how the existing American aviation industry could be converted to wartime production, should such become necessary. Attention was focused on the manufacturers of large aircraft, not light plan es. However, representatives of the light plane industry, including William T. Piper of Piper Aircraft, were also in attendance, hoping to persuade the brass and the bureaucrats that they could make a contribution to the war effort with their small, slow airplanes. In
Mr. Piper and His Cubs,
Devon Francis quotes an Army general on this board telling them: “Light aircraft are impractical for military use,” and the sentiment was then seconded by an admiral of the Navy. It was a disappointing experience for the makers of light civilian aircraft and an example of just how shortsighted and hidebound the military brass can be. William Piper grew so frustrated at their reluctance to hear him out that he finally remarked, only half in jest, “We'd like to explain our side of the picture to somebody, some sergeant or corporal, maybe.”
⁶
He was turned away.

Undaunted, the light plane manufacturers, Piper, Aeronca, and Taylor-craft, refused to accept the negative verdict of the military lead ership and made an end run around the Washington bureaucrats by offering the use of their aircraft—free of charge and complete with civilian pilots—directly to generals conducting war games in the United States, hoping thereby to demonstrate what small aircraft were capable of in tactical military situations. Since there was no law against it, several Army commanders in the field accepted the offer. One of them, then colonel Dwight Eisenhower (later supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe), was already a licensed pilot and welcomed the chance to try light airplanes in a military environment. Gen. George Patton also had a pilot's license and even owned a small airplane himself, and both he and Eisenhower soon became staunch advocates of the Army acquiring its own light planes.

At prewar military exercises at Camp Forrest, Tennessee; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Camp Polk, Louisiana; the civilian Piper Cubs, Aeroncas,
and Taylorcrafts ferried officers around the mock battlefields and to conferences, gave umpires bird's-eye views of the action, unsnarled traffi c jams—directed by Gen. Walter Krueger, Third Army commander, by bellowing orders out the windows of a Cub through a bullhorn (the general figures later in Kern's story)—delivered messages and supplies, landed and took off from practically anywhere a truck could go, and generally demonstrated their extreme usefulness to ground forces in these “liaison” roles, not to mention their potential for directing artillery fire. The Fort Bliss exercises in July 1941 were typical: ten civilian J-3 Piper Cubs, two Aeroncas, and two Taylorcrafts participated in the biggest war games ever undertaken by the Army in the desert, flying in 115-degree heat, landing and taking off from roads, dry lakebeds, and strips hastily scraped out by Army bulldozers, and sticking close to the troops wherever they went. Tony Piper, the factory owner's son, piloted one of the demonstration Cubs, and Henry Wann, a Piper employee who later became an Army pilot and a friend of my father's, flew another. Eisenhower borrowed a Cub every evening during the desert war games and took it aloft to relax and cool off a little.

In all these prewar training exercises, as the unofficial little civilian airplanes demonstrated what they could do, officers on the ground who had previously been unfamiliar with light aircraft learned what they were capable of and had some eye-opening experiences. One of these was crusty old cavalryman Gen. Innis P. Swift, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. Swift became another convert to the cause of the liaison planes and added his voice to those putting pressure on military authorities to adopt them. According to legend, one day Gen. Swift saw a Cub bouncing around in the grass during a difficult landing and remarked, “Why, it looks just like a grasshopper!” and from that point on, whenever he wanted a liaison plane, would bark, “Send me a grass-hopper!” However the name was acquired, it stuck, and thereafter all liaison aircraft, but particularly the Piper Cubs, were commonly referred to as grasshoppers, and many L-planes thereafter sported impromptu grasshopper logos on their cowlings or fuselages.

The praises of its high-echelon officers in the field finally persuaded the War Department to relent its initial position, and on 6 June 1942, it allocated small aircraft directly to Army and Navy units “organically,” military jargon for “under the command and control of those forces.” The name of the Piper Cub was even mentioned in the authorizing document.
⁷
Thus was Army Aviation born, growing over the years and wars into the powerful combat force it is today. Immediately after it acquired airplanes, the Army set about recruiting pilots to fly them from within its ranks, awarding them the distinctive L-wings to wear on their uniforms upon successful completion of their training.

Liaison pilot Capt. Donald A. Baker with an L-5 Stinson, Luzon Island, Philippines, 1945. Note the grasshopper logo painted on the cowling (Photograph courtesy of Tom Baker).

That is how my father, Donald A. Baker, who had never been near an airplane in his life before he entered the Army, came to be—like this author of this book—one of the most highly skilled flyers in the world: an Army artillery liaison pilot. His story is a fairly typical one and will serve to illustrate the experiences of many others who became L-pilots in World War II. Like my father, many of them had been ground-bound
civilians before the war, with no thought of becoming aviators. When the war began, my father was a warehouse clerk in a furniture store in Omaha, Nebraska, preoccupied with playing semipro softball in the city leagues, and had never even been up in an airplane, much less considered piloting one. If you'd told him in 1941 that he'd soon be on the other side of the world, flying airplanes over jungles filled with hostile Japanese, he'd have thought you were crazy. But thus does war suddenly change the fortunes of young men. Not many months after he entered the army, the shipping clerk who had seldom been out of Omaha found himself thousands of miles from home, sleeping in a jungle on one of the Philippine Islands with a .45 pistol close at hand in case marauding Japanese discovered him. Nearby, as he slept, two large, fierce, but friendly (Japanese-hating) Igorot tribesmen stood guard around his airplane all night with spears. He had been forced to land in Japanese-occupied territory when his plane ran out of fuel. Eventually he located friendly troops, begged some truck gas for his airplane, and got out of there safely.

When the Army put out a call to its troops for volunteers for flight training, many men like my father who had never thought about aviation were suddenly confronted with the opportunity to become airplane pilots. As a newly minted second lieutenant at the Army Artillery School at Fort Sill, my father noticed the call for volunteers on a bulletin board. On impulse, he signed up for the flight school—mainly to escape the monotony of running a motor pool, he said. His mother, who was deathly afraid of airplanes, having witnessed their formative and crash-prone years, was never told that her son had become an aviator, since it would have distressed her terribly—she just knew that airplanes always crashed and killed their pilots sooner or later. “My flying was one of the best-kept secrets of the war,” my father chuckled years later.

Lieutenant Kerns, however, had harbored an ambition to become a pilot since childhood, ever since seeing Lindbergh's
Spirit of St. Louis
pass over his family farm in the late 1920s. He had even taken civilian flying lessons in his spare time while he was a radio operator in the prewar Army in Hawaii. In fact, as a private, Kerns narrowly missed being in the air in a little Interstate Cadet trainer plane when the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor. He was just getting ready for his lesson that morning when the bombs began to fall. For him, the Army's call for volunteers for flight training was heaven-sent.

Soldiers who were accepted for flight training, like my father and Raymond Kerns, were first sent to one of several civilian flight schools around the country that came under contract with the War Department to give servicemen their primary flight training. My father went to Pittsburgh, Kansas, while Lt. Kerns attended one in Denton, Texas. These civilian schools trained their students in L-4 Cubs and L-3 Aeroncas, with civilian flight instructors operating under the supervision of Army Air Forces officers. After they successfully completed basic flight training and won their Air Forces wings, the fledgling aviators reported to Post Field at Fort Sill for their tactical Army aviation training, where the real fun began.

From what my father and his friends have told me and from what Kerns has written in this book, I doubt that there ever has been, or ever will be, again, such rigorous or unconventional flight training as pilots received in liaison aircraft at Fort Sill during World War II. Upon reporting to the school, the students were immediately ordered to remove their brand-new Army Air Forces wings from their uniforms and told they were going to have to earn them all over again, as Army L-wings. They were also informed, “We are now going to teach you to do things with an airplane that you have always been told that you should never do, and you are going to do them very well.” Some of the training maneuvers seemed wild and dangerous to ordinary pilots and, in fact, broke all civilian flight regulations, but they were designed to develop the extraordinary piloting skills necessary to operate airplanes from unusual locations and promote survival under combat conditions.

Teaching these skills at Fort Sill were handpicked flight instructors from all over the nation, many of them civilians, some of them former barnstormers—and in their dealings with their students they were tough, demanding, and unforgiving. Although they might be friendly enough when off duty, my father said that they would shout orders like maniacs from the backseat of a Cub during flight training, deliberately adding mental pressure to the physical (it was necessary to shout anyway over the roar of the engine), and occasionally banging him over the head
with rolled-up maps to emphasize a point if he made the slightest error. Anyone who failed to please these instructors would soon find a pink slip of paper on his bunk, ordering him to report to the commandant's office, and thereafter was seen no more in the school. Mediocrity was not tolerated, and students who did not demonstrate a strong aptitude for flying were soon washed out of the program. It was simply too dangerous to allow marginal pilots to fly to the very limits of what an airplane can do. The Army wanted only the very best liaison pilots, and that's what it got.

Some ninety classes were trained at Fort Sill between 1942 and the end of the war. Each class underwent sixteen weeks and two hundred hours of tough training, both on the ground in classrooms and in the air as pilots. In addition to their flying, they learned basic maintenance and repair of their airplanes. Near the end of the course, they were taught to direct artillery fire from the air by radio.

For the flight training, primitive practice airfields were scraped out all over the Fort Sill military reservation and became known to sweaty-palmed student pilots as Rattlesnake Field, Rabbit Hill, Geronimo Field, and Apache Field, to name a few, each one presenting unique flying challenges. Students landed and took off uphill and down, over and around obstacles, with the wind blowing in any direction. My father often spoke about the hair-raising, extremely short-field landings he was required to make and how he was taught to do them. After first “dragging” a prospective landing site, that is, flying slowly only a few feet above it to inspect it closely for any hidden dangers, the student then went around and landed using a slow, mushing, nose-high “power approach” instead of a glide, a technique designed to provide the absolute minimum of landing roll. To do this, a pilot holds his airplane in the air at critically low speeds by the precise application of engine power, “hanging on the prop,” so to speak, and whenever he needs to get a look ahead (since the airplane's nose is sticking up in front of him blocking his view), he kicks rudder a little to slew the airplane around sideways just enough to see forward. Flown this way, an airplane is actually semistalled, and its rate of descent is controlled by the throttle and “feel,” or seat-of-the-pants instinct. When he arrives at his chosen touchdown spot, being only
inches above it by that time (if all is going well), he chops the throttle and the airplane drops to the ground and rolls to a short stop, sometimes in hardly the length of a tennis court. This kind of a landing took a lot of practice, but after a pilot mastered it he could set a Cub down nearly anywhere. The Piper Cub, with its long, thick, high-lift wing, forgave such transgressions of ordinary flying safety, and obediently did as it was asked, while other planes, such as the Taylorcraft L-2, might whip over into a stall and kill a pilot who tried such things (which in fact occurred, so that the L-2 was eventually shelved as an Army trainer).