Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [50]
Robert L. Voight, from Nebraska, was an exemplary cadet who excelled in ground school, flying, physical training—the works. He and I were selected to go up and dogfight one day—and did we ever get it on. Both of us tried every trick we had been taught and some we improvised. When we came down, our flight suits were drenched with perspiration and we were exhausted. Voight said, “Bob, you are the best I have ever fought.”
“I was about to tell you that you are the best I ever fought,” I replied. Coming from a cadet for whom I had so much respect, it was a compliment I shall always remember.
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I finished advanced training and was ready to graduate, go home, and get married. Right? Wrong. Earlier I explained that the navy had not lost as many pilots as they had expected, so the cadet program had been lengthened. Well, when we finished advanced training, we were informed that the program had been lengthened again.
We were sent to the main station for what was hastily dubbed preoperational training. The good part about preoperational was that we checked out in the SBD dive-bomber, one of the most famous navy planes of World War II. It was SBD pilots who sank four Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway, the turning point of the war in the Pacific.
We didn’t do any dive-bombing. We just went up and flew around the countryside for a few weeks, and at long last, the order came to prepare for graduation. Man, was I prepared! I got to a telephone as soon as I could and called Dorothy Jo. I told her that there weren’t going to be any more delays. I was going to become Ensign Robert W. Barker and she was going to become Mrs. Bob Barker.
• • •
I have told you the story of our elopement; now my bride accompanied me when I reported for operational training at the naval air station in DeLand, Florida. At DeLand, I flew the FM-2 fighter, which I have already described as an improved version of the much acclaimed F4F Wildcat. We were commissioned officers now, proudly wearing our hard-earned wings of gold, and we concentrated on flying and more flying. There was no more physical training or ground school. We were full-fledged naval aviators, and our next stop would be the fleet. As fighter pilots, our principal responsibility would be to shoot down enemy airplanes, with some strafing of enemy ground targets and ships thrown in.
In operational training we did more of all the things we had learned along the way: lots of formation flying, night flying, and dogfighting. But operational training also included gunnery flights—firing live ammunition at a sleeve towed by one of the pilots in our flight—and field carrier landings. Naval aviators practice field carrier landings for hours and hours before they do the real thing.
Field carrier landings are just what the name implies: a carrier deck is chalked out on a field in the same way a football field is done in chalk. Pilots fly a pattern around the field carriers, exactly as they will around a real carrier, and they are brought in for a landing by a landing signal officer, just exactly as they will be on a carrier. By the time we were sent up to the Great Lakes Naval Air Station to do our twelve qualifying carrier landings on the Wolverine (a carrier kept at Lake Michigan for just that purpose), we were ready. Every pilot in my flight qualified, and I am proud to say that I was one of those who received a grade of superior.
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When I finished operational training at DeLand, I fully expected orders assigning me to a seagoing squadron, but as you will recall, I was among the cadets who had to survive the purge necessitated by a surplus of naval aviators. The purge was not a pleasant experience. But what was about to happen to me next would be very pleasant, the most pleasant experience of my two and a half years in the navy. I received orders assigning me to fighter affiliation at what is today Cape Kennedy in Florida. During World War II, it was Banana River Naval Air Station.
Upon reading my orders, Dorothy Jo asked, “What is fighter affiliation?”
I replied