• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1003 0

waiting on the wings. If it was dark or twilight, deck crews with illuminated batons pointed the way to the port side, where catapult rings and rigs were attached to the heavier torpedo-bombers—fighters usually took off unassisted—while pilots ran through their checklists. Then, on signal, at intervals of a few seconds, one by one they gunned their engines and were hurled forward into the air. Men took off from relative calm and comfort, flew into the heat of combat, experienced thrills and fears such as few seamen knew, then bounced back onto a heaving deck, to be violently checked by an arrester hook. They pulled themselves stiffly out of their cockpits after anything up to seven hours sitting on an unfriendly dinghy pack, went below for debriefing—and probably a shot of bourbon. Aircrew were the despair of many regular navy officers. Most cared nothing for the honour and traditions of the service, nor for ship’s discipline. They reckoned that if they flew and fought, nothing else was anybody’s business.

The rest of the U.S. Navy might be dry, but few air groups were. On the carrier Makassar Strait, for instance, commanding officer Herbert Riley—one of just two regulars aboard, a former naval aide to Franklin Roosevelt—wrote: “There was medicinal liquor aboard all the carriers to be used under supervision of flight surgeons. Their supply was generous…Liquor had its uses, believe me.” After one of his air group’s first missions, he found flight surgeons “dispensing liquor in water glasses…the pilots were high as kites.”

Thereafter, Riley introduced rules. He ordered the vacant admiral’s cabin217 to be converted into an aircrew club, complete with Esquire pin-ups and cocktail tables. Inside, any aviator was eligible for two drinks a night, provided he was not scheduled to fly. Cmdr. Bill Widhelm, operations officer of Task Force 58, complained bitterly about discrimination between officers and men in the allocation of alcohol: “There are men out there218 on those ships that haven’t had a foot on shore for a year. I don’t see why we can’t do like the British, give those enlisted men a grog. Pilots get it. I had it. But those enlisted men never get it.”

Cmdr. Jim Lamade of Hancock sought discretion to fine aviators for misdemeanours, because traditional navy punishments held no meaning for them: “These young pilots…are not naval officers as we know a naval officer. They’re just flying because it’s their job…Discipline…means nothing to them. If you say, ‘We’ll ground this pilot,’ well…they don’t want to go to combat anyhow, so they’d just as soon be grounded…they will lay around the bunk room all day and read…But if you take some money away from them, they will feel that.”

Likewise Cmdr. Jim Mini of Essex: “The boys in a squadron219 these days don’t have the navy as a career. There’s a problem of leadership; you have to have the boys like you. You can’t lean on being a commander and saying, ‘You’ll do this or else.’ You have to present it to the boys in an attractive fashion…I can safely say that if [the tour] had been much longer, we would have had trouble, and the boys would have broken down more than they did.” A high proportion of aviators caused disciplinary problems, declared a navy report: “The very exacting nature220 of flight duties has combined with the youth and frequent irresponsibility of flying officers to create difficulties which a special board was created to police.” Fliers’ letters home displayed carelessness about security; they broke the rules by keeping diaries; and “drink is often an issue.”

Flying combat planes from carriers was one of the most thrilling, yet also most stressful, assignments of the war. Ted Winters remarked of some of their long, long sorties: “It isn’t a question of how much gasoline, it’s how long you can keep your fanny on that seat.” It was an inherently hazardous activity to operate a plane from a cramped and perpetually shifting ocean platform, even before the enemy became involved. “We learned to listen221 for the slightest change in the sound of the engine which might reveal