Baa Baa Black Sheep (19 page)

The executive officer and I talked further, then he said: “You are not ready for duty yet, however, there is nothing more we can do for you here. You apparently don’t think much of our treatment or you would stay around longer than just to win a stake and shove off on shore leave.”

I wasn’t able to talk the hospital out of passing me for a flight physical before I left Auckland, but I counted on a friend of mine back at Espiritu, to give me an okay when I got there.

Part of my time had been occupied with a divorcee in New Zealand, a truly fine woman who mended my clothes and helped make my stay worth while. She took in roomers to support herself and her young daughter. I had tried to give her money on more than several occasions because I realized she must have been fairly hard pressed, but she was such a proud thing and would have no part of it.

In my efforts to find an appropriate gift for her before I left Auckland I asked the advice of one of her friends. “What on earth does Carrie need the most?”

And this woman friend said: “Don’t say I told you, but money.”

“I have tried that,” I said. Then thought of a way to get her to accept such a gift, one of the few things I did that seemed to work out for the benefit of humanity, so I invited Carrie to see me off on the plane. Before I boarded the DC-3 to Noumea, with but one gas stop at Norfolk Island, a tiny dot on the map on the way, Carrie said: “Please come back and see us again.”

“I doubt if it will ever be possible, but here, take this,” I said, and handed Carrie my roll, which contained several hundred pound notes.

“I can’t accept this. You know better than that.”

“I can’t use this crazy money where I’m going. If you don’t take it, I’m afraid I’ll have to throw the worthless stuff away as I’m flying back to the islands.”

The last time I saw Carrie was at the Auckland airport as I crawled on top of a number of crates in a DC-3, as there were no seats and no room to sit down anywhere. My last
impression was that she was so occupied holding onto the notes with one hand and defending her clothes against the slipstream with the other that she had forgotten me forever. But she hadn’t forgotten. After the war I received letters from both Carrie and from her daughter, who was grown up by then. Carrie had placed the money in postal savings and had put her daughter through school with it, and was happily remarried. The daughter wrote that she, also, had married a fine young man.

But in my true lame-brain style I had forgotten a few U.S. dollars rolled in the center of the pounds that I had every intention of keeping. My discovery of this slight error didn’t occur to me until I reached Noumea, which had become real civilized. The Army mess was the only place to eat, but I didn’t even have a quarter, which was the price of lunch, nor did I see anyone I knew to borrow a quarter from.

I thought I was stuck in another way in Noumea, for I found I had to pass a flight physical in order to get out of there. Beads of sweat came out of my forehead, and I was forced to bite my tongue, as part of this examination was to stand on one foot for a certain period of time with my eyes closed.

The flight surgeon had me walking back and forth while he was shaking his head, he was not satisfied with my leg. I tried to force myself to walk without a limp until I thought my leg would fold if the doctor didn’t say pretty soon that I had passed. I was finally able to con the poor doc into letting me by in spite of his better judgment, and I was off to Espiritu, ferrying a Corsair as I went.

But if I thought beads of sweat had been on my face during the physical examination, these were nothing by comparison to the drops that flowed when I strained and prayed for my leg not to give out on take-off, and again upon landing.

When back on the old Fighter Strip at Espiritu I was assigned to first one squadron then another, but no flying went with the work. There were about six squadrons that I went through. The pilots of each had long since been shipped back to the United States, and I was made commanding officer of each squadron briefly, so I could wrestle the paper work in order to get the ground crews and records ready to follow the pilots.

I dreaded this work because I was CO in name only, and paper wrestling bored me to distraction anyhow. Among the papers I soon discovered a lot of disciplinary action that had to be taken care of, some of it involving courts-martial. But I’ll bet few Marines thanked their lucky stars a major who hated to go through channels, or didn’t think they had done anything he wouldn’t do himself, was the one to sort this paper out. The net result was that there were no courts-martial, and only a few who received a fatherly talking-to.

Neither criticizing nor trying to build myself up, I might have accidentally saved the Marine Corps some precious time and trouble at that, for anything I seemed to do properly was accomplished more by accident than by anything I would accept credit for as done right.

In any event this work kept me physically occupied until August 1943, but I was going mentally crazier by the day. Try as I would, I could not beg or steal my way into an active squadron or get flying of any kind. Sometimes I believed I was so hard up I would have even jumped at a chance to fly dive bombers.

The fighter squadrons up north were being used up faster than expected, and replacement squadrons that were coming in on flattops were long overdue, so this gave me a brain child. I made an after-dinner call on the group commander, who was Colonel Sanderson.

“Sandy” happened to have been an all-around great in previous years, all man, and a superb pilot. He had been called upon many a time when the services were small and they entered military pilots in the air races about the United States. I recall many a tale of his exciting past in the flying game, but two in particular.

One time while flying fighters at the Cleveland Air Races, Sandy and Oscar Brice had collided when they were doing a squirrel-cage, and both of them had to hit the silk. Oscar’s chute opened and came down quite normally, but Sandy’s chute had caught on the tail surfaces of his falling plane. He had thrilled the spectators, and cheated old Dame Death, by pulling himself hand over hand up the strings until he reached the tail and succeeded in jerking his chute free just in the nick of time.

Another time, during camera-gun practice above San Diego, his opposition and he came together, which resulted
in Sandy being sealed in the cockpit when the upper wing was shoved back and down on top of him. But, fortunately again for Sandy, he had been able to tear off a portion of the wing and get out before his plane struck the earth.

Douglas SBD “Dauntless”

I came up with an idea that would supply a temporary fighter squadron and fill the gap until the flattops arrived. Why Sandy didn’t think I was full of hop or something I don’t know, or why a person like myself had been able to talk him into this idea. But I do realize that Sandy was one of the truly great aviators in command, and no doubt he had placed himself in my position, for he knew he could have done it.

The idea was to get replacement pilots from the pilots’ pool, some Corsairs used for training, and borrow a number
for control purposes from some squadron not in action at the time. Lady Luck was smiling on me that night, because Sandy agreed. I hadn’t approached any of the pool pilots yet, and not every pilot in the pool happened to be a fighter pilot. But I knew that most pilots wanted to be fighter pilots, if they were dumb enough.

I’ll never forget two SBD pilots who wanted to go with me so badly but didn’t seem to catch on very fast. About all one could say for them was that they were in the same sky with the squadron, but, regardless of that, these two were all guts.

And I’ll never forget the look on Bob McClurg’s face when I informed him that we had no extra time to get ready. I said as diplomatically as possible: “Bob, my boy, I’m afraid you better wait for the next trip. I am only thinking of your life, you understand?”

“You do what you have to do, Skipper. But I want you to know I’d a lot rather be dead than not go with you.”

“What the hell can I do with an ape like you? Come on, Bob, you’re going.”

I certainly hadn’t the slightest notion that this was the right thing to do, but the relief on McClurg’s smiling face was worth a million dollars.

The other SBD pilot was not as fortunate with his Corsair training as McClurg, although he was trying just as hard—maybe too hard. We were always sweating Shorty out when he came around to make any landing. But on this particular landing the lad bounced and started to swerve—poured full throttle—all two thousand horses at once. The wind-up was most amazing.

It was standard procedure to inform any pilot on cockpit checkout to retard the r.p.m. setting prior to coming in for a landing. For if a burst of power became necessary to control a landing, or to make a go-around, he would be able to hold the torque produced by the extra-large, three-bladed paddle on his plane. But it was evident this boy had forgotten, or was trying too hard, for when he hit the throttle the Corsair executed a ninety-degree off the narrow runway.

The prop torque had Shorty up on one wing tip before he got off the edge of the narrow runway. The last glimpse of the plane before it disappeared from sight the propeller was doing a good job of corkscrewing the plane and Shorty in an
inverted attitude through the coconut trees. We were able to raise the heavy plane up enough to free our little SBD friend from the overturned position he ended up in. Shorty was conscious, but one of Chief Sitting Bull’s Indians couldn’t have done a more thorough job of scalping.

I certainly had to hand it to Doc Evans, who washed the dirt and coral out of this bloody mess, afterward talcuming the skull with sulfa powder, and doing a real neat job of hemstitching the scalp back in its proper place. Anyway, I had been relieved of the unpleasant task of telling Shorty, the lucky fellow, that he wouldn’t be going with us.

Three pilots from 222 who had gone out with me on the
Lurline
were in the pilot pool because they hadn’t been able to complete the three combat tours that were mandatory. They were John Bergert, Bou Bourgoise, and Stan Bailey. The rest had never been in an active squadron, let alone seen a Japanese aircraft.

If I am giving the impression these boys couldn’t fly, please forgive me, because I could see in this brief time that some were naturals. Boys like Mullin, McGee, Casey, Fisher, and Bolt, not to mention others, were born pilots in my estimation.

For three short weeks we had trained by day if the weather permitted, and talked flying combat most of the nights. I wanted all the training we could get, yet on the other hand I wanted to get going before somebody changed his mind or the relief squadrons arrived and we wouldn’t get to go, period.

We had a hell of a struggle getting the bare necessities, let alone any of the regular items a squadron comes already equipped with, which all seemed as far away as luxuries at the time. I was able to see, not only feel, that some of the boys were getting dissatisfied before the three weeks were up, because I had promised many things that were slow in coming.

But we got the honey of all honeys for a flight surgeon, and Jim Ream stayed with the squadron to the bitter end. Lord only knows what we could have done without this fine Southern gentleman. Jim was young and full of enthusiasm, and fitted into our way of thinking so perfectly we were willing to stop the war on several occasions to teach the doc how to fly. We wanted him to fly combat with us.

We were also very fortunate in getting, as our intelligence officer, Frank Walton, who was a member of the police department in Los Angeles, and whom Bragdon soon nicknamed “Flat.” He was a meticulous person who kept track of everything whether it was his duty or not, and thank heaven he did. The bulk of us seemed content to be scatterbrains, although actually I should speak only for myself.

In addition to Franks obvious fine qualities was his Olympic backstroke championship in the days of Johnny Weissmuller. His name is not as well known as Johnny’s, but Frank had about as many records to his credit. Frank didn’t care to drink—he kept track of things for those of us who did—and, being a believer in physical fitness, he swam our asses off around the lagoon to keep us in shape, and as I couldn’t take a chance on wrestling for a while it was wonderful exercise for my bum leg.

In but a short time the boys in the squadron called me “Grandpappy,” and I loved this because it came as a word of respect like the Old Man or Skipper. I was content with my nickname, for I was thirty and the rest of the pilots were from nineteen to twenty-two. Not only was there a great difference between our ages; it was considered much the same as two generations in the fighter-pilot game. So Grandpappy was a natural.

I wasn’t to learn until some months later the real basis for acquiring my name, which was finally shortened to just Pappy. Come to find out these boys had dragged it back from legend around flight school, long after I had sailed for China. They talked about a check pilot with a long white beard, so long that he stepped on it as he got into his cockpit to give a student a check ride in order to determine whether to continue training or send him back to college. They said they would talk prior to being checked and wish that the man with the long white beard from the North Pole could be with them, although they were not certain that he ever existed.