Although the attrition rate for washing out officer students in flight training was running as high as 25 percent, things went smoothly for me until President Truman’s decision to use the second nuclear bomb on Japan. The war ended, V-J Day was declared, and the demobilization of the U.S. military began. Citizen-soldiers’ reactions to the immediate and wholesale discharges were close to ecstasy, but chaos reigned for the career officers and petty officers left in place to run the Navy. Tanks, trucks, aircraft, and supplies were abandoned at overseas bases as the experienced operators and maintenance men went east in a mad but organized rush. President Truman had decreed that returning veterans go home as soon as possible; it was his highest priority. I later heard a lot about this. My father, a newly selected rear admiral, had been placed in charge of demobilization of the Navy.
I was in flight training at Corpus Christi, Texas, when the war ended. But the mean point of impact of the demobilization did not hit the continental United States (CONUS) commands until after I had received my wings in January 1946. That week, the entire syllabus for pilot carrier qualification training was cancelled. The course at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale (President George H. W. Bush’s training base two years earlier), where I had been assigned for torpedo plane training in the TBM Avenger, was reduced by 30 percent in flight training hours.
To compound this elimination of essential training in the more complex and demanding fleet aircraft, when I reached the fleet I was reassigned to a dive-bomber squadron of SB2C-5 Curtiss Helldivers instead of the TBM Avengers in which I had at least a truncated operational training. The SB2C was known to its pilots as the “Beast,” and not for any affectionate reason. The aircraft’s flight controls were sloppy, the mechs referred to it as a “flying hydraulic leak,” and the quality control of the aircraft as delivered from Canadian Car and Foundry, which had been given the production contract from Curtiss-Wright, was best described as awful. Yet it had destroyed more tonnage of Japanese shipping, warships and cargo vessels, than any other Allied aircraft.
Being ordered to an aircraft and mission in which I had not been trained was not atypical in the prevailing turmoil brought on by massive demobilization. And the disorder was further exacerbated by the resignation of many regular naval officers, tired of war and family separation and disillusioned by what they perceived to be a postwar navy that was going to be underfunded, undermanned, and overextended.
In July 1945, when I reported to Naval Air Station Oceana, at Virginia Beach, Virginia, the command of Bombing Squadron 3 (VB-3) had devolved upon a lieutenant, a former Reserve officer who had opted for a regular commission. Except for one or two lieutenants (junior grade), all of the other junior pilots were Reservists who were not interested in staying in the Navy or who had been turned down for a regular commission. Morale was at rock bottom and discipline was nonexistent. The week before I checked in, two young pilots had been killed in an accident involving an unauthorized cross-country flight in a squadron plane. The pilots were in civilian clothes at the time.
Because of my seniority, as third in the squadron, I was made squadron operations officer. It was a difficult position. Even the ensigns in the squadron had more flight hours than I did, and the lieutenants (junior grade) had flown SB2Cs off a carrier before the demobilization draw-down. It was something of a consolation to me that the executive officer, a lieutenant commander from the Naval Academy class of 1942, a year senior to me, had completed flight training only the month before. He had, however, been through operational training in Helldivers.
In August, a midair collision on a routine join-up and the failure of a pilot to pull out of his dive on a bombing run a week later took the lives of two more pilots. The VB-3 commanding officer was called over to fleet headquarters in Norfolk. He never returned to the squadron. In his place a more mature officer, Lt. Cdr. Heber Badger, a Naval Academy graduate from the class of 1941, reported. He had been through the carrier battles in the Pacific flying F6F Hellcats against the Japanese.
Within a week, before the new skipper could square away the squadron, disaster struck again. A carrier had become available to our air group on short notice for qualification landings. VB-3 was not ready. A landing signal officer (LSO) from another air group was borrowed to conduct field carrier landing practice ashore in preparation, but he was not really interested in us. His discharge date was coming up and he wanted out — badly.
On a blustery Monday morning in September 1946, VB-3 flew from our base at Naval Air Station Oceana to rendezvous with the carrier at sea off the Virginia capes. Those of us who had never before landed on a carrier had walked on board the day before and spent the night on the carrier. After the experienced pilots had made two successful landings each, the new boys would take their place in the cockpit. This transfer was accomplished with the plane on the flight deck, the engine turning over, thirty-five knots of wind buffeting the deck, and the air officer on the bullhorn — the flight deck announcing system — bellowing to the new pilots to speed up the exchange. It wasn’t that easy. The parachute had to be buckled on, the safety belt and harness attached, the microphone and earphones plugged in, the seat adjusted for height, the rudder pedals adjusted for length, the map case stowed, and the takeoff checklist gone over. All this with the 1,800-horsepower engine turning over at 1,200 rpm, the plane captain fiddling with the pilot’s harness, and the bullhorn urging him to hurry up. Under these conditions, the apprehension generated by the occasion of my first carrier takeoff and landing was almost more than I could bear.
Unfortunately, the brown-shirted plane captain was of little assistance. He had about as much experience on a carrier flight deck as I did. When he considered that I was properly buckled in, he leapt from the Helldiver’s wing to the flight deck and disappeared behind the island with his load of chocks and tie-down chains.
By now the yellow-shirted plane director was motioning frantically to get my attention to signal me forward to the fly one (the flight deck area forward of the island) officer. I taxied into the launch spot in the middle of the flight deck adjacent to the island. There the launching signal officer, with his left hand in a clenched fist to indicate I should hold the brakes, rapidly twirled a small yellow flag in his right hand as a signal for me to add full power.
I pushed the throttle forward and the rpm needle maxed at 2,800. I had full power. There wasn’t time to check the dashboard’s many other dials and gauges for such secondary essentials as cylinder head temperature or oil pressure. I nodded to the fly one officer, who dropped to his right knee and pointed his little flag at the carrier’s bow.
I released the brakes, and with the plane’s wing passing over the kneeling launch officer, the Beast lumbered down the flight deck. Everything felt good as the plane lifted off the deck fifty feet before reaching the bow. I was flying. I retracted the landing gear and wing flaps just as primary flight control called, “Scarface six, your signal is Charlie. You are cleared to land.” I punched the mike button on the throttle handle with my thumb to answer, “Roger Flapjack [USS Kearsarge], I have a Charlie.” There were six VB-3 SB2Cs in a racetrack pattern around the carrier, and I eased my plane in behind the one that was passing the island as I took off. He extended his upwind leg to several miles ahead of the carrier and swung into a left turn. I waited until he was abeam of me to port on a reverse course — to get a proper landing interval — before making a similar left turn to the downwind course, opening the canopy and lowering the landing gear in the process. As the bow of the carrier came abeam to port, about a quarter mile distant, I dropped my hook, lowered the landing flaps, and reduced power to about 1,800 rpm as I put the propeller into low pitch for maximum thrust. The plane was at about one hundred feet of altitude and ninety-five knots in a thirty-degree banked left turn when I visually picked up the LSO. He was giving me the fast signal by banging the signal paddle on his left leg. I eased off a little power, adjusted my turn to get a one-hundred-foot straightaway before the cut, and noticed the SB2C ahead of me was still on deck. The LSO was signaling for me to keep coming. At the last moment before I rolled out for the straightaway, the LSO signaled a wave off, simultaneously calling out on the radio, “Wave off, foul deck.” I jammed on full power, raised my landing gear, adjusted prop pitch, cranked the canopy closed, and eased up my flaps as the speed increased.