You Are Not Forgotten Page 10
Ryan proceeded through his checklist. He tested the wing flaps by pulling the small lever to his left and opened the cowl flaps slightly to let cool air into the engine. He checked the fuel indicator to ensure it read “reserve” and tapped the magneto on the instrument panel in front of him to make sure there was sufficient combustion and power. With the engine idling in the background, he turned a dial to release the brakes and taxied toward the runway.
The plane’s wide nose and large three-bladed propeller in front of him blocked his field of view. To make sure he didn’t run into anything, he made a series of S-turns, turning left and then right as he moved forward along the apron. After a few minutes, he came to a stop at the end of the runway and waited for instructions. When he got the signal, he pushed the throttle carefully forward. The plane quickly picked up speed and roared down the runway. Within moments the aircraft lifted off the ground, and Ryan was climbing high and fast over the North Carolina woodlands. It was his maiden voyage in the Marine Corps’s newest fighter plane, the F4U-1 Corsair.
Along with its telltale blue-gray paint, one of the most recognizable features of the Vought aircraft was its bent-wing shape, creating a gull-wing silhouette, which was an aerodynamic feature resulting from the most powerful piston-engine in a fighter plane and one of the biggest propellers in the world, at more than thirteen feet long. The Corsair was among the first fighter planes to exceed four hundred miles per hour and in many ways was a pilot’s dream. Its landing gear was capable of being enclosed completely within the wings, and it could climb exceptionally fast, up to over thirty thousand feet, and travel over a thousand miles on its nearly four hundred gallons of fuel. Designed to nose-dive ten thousand feet, it could also outmaneuver any American fighter plane that came before it. The fighter would come to earn its share of nicknames like Old Bent Wings and Hose Nose. To the Marines who fought there, it would endearingly be called the Sweetheart of Okinawa. It also had another distinguishing feature: a high-pitched whine that was caused by the air entering the engine inlets underneath the wings. A Navy evaluation of the plane described it as a “banshee scream.” The Japanese, it was said, were calling the Corsair by another nickname: Whistling Death.
But in early 1943 they had only been used in combat a few months and, to meet the ever-rising demands, were being rushed off the production line at Vought’s plant in Connecticut. As a result, the early models suffered from more than their share of mechanical problems and design flaws. Indeed, the Corsair’s very name, conjuring up images of a privateer, or pirate, was a fitting description of the traits required of the men who first flew it—gutsy, independent-minded, even fearless.
For starters, the pilot had limited visibility from the cockpit, which was situated low behind the nose and propeller. One Corsair pilot described the shape of the fuselage as similar to a baseball bat, with the cockpit barely visible poking out from where the bat is nearing its thickest point—not necessarily the most aerodynamic shape. A crew chief would often lie on the wing beside the pilot and use hand signals to help guide him along the runway. The canopy covering the cockpit above the pilot had so many crisscrossing bars that it came to be known derisively as the birdcage, and a mirror housed in a small bubble in the cockpit was the only means the pilot had to see the rear of his plane.
Pilots did enjoy one unusually clear view, though: through a hole in the floor. Next to the two small heel panels for the pilot’s feet there was a three-foot-deep gap, sometimes covered with Plexiglas, sometimes not. Much later the hole was covered over with steel to better protect the pilot, not to mention his flight chart, which was said to have been dropped through the slot by some very unhappy fliers. Shorter pilots were at a particular disadvantage because the cockpit was quite roomy and they had trouble reaching the pedals to control the plane. Some stashed a pillow or two behind them.
When it came to actually flying the plane, meanwhile, the operating instructions were riddled with special warnings. Some were carefully worded so as not to sound too alarming, such as when referring to the procedures for landing the plane. “This airplane is sometimes subject to noticeable momentary directional disturbance just after it makes contact with the ground,” pilots were informed. In other words, the aircraft often pulled to the left during landing, requiring pilots to engage the right rudder to keep the plane from flipping over. It became such a concern that United Aircraft, which owned Vought, asked one of its premier consultants to make an assessment. Before Ryan flew it for the first time, he and his fellow pilots received a personal tutorial from the consultant, Charles Lindbergh.
The world’s most famous aviator conferred with pilots, mechanics, and the Marine Corps brass before imparting some blunt advice about landing the Corsair.
“Forget everything you were taught about flying,” the first man to cross the Atlantic told them. “Just fly it in.”
He told them they should come in level and bring the main landing gear down first, rather than with the nose up and rear wheel down first, as was the traditional practice. But that also meant coming in at a higher speed than was normally considered safe. One pilot overseas warned only half jokingly at the time, “You might lose control of it when you’re landing. If you do get in real trouble, I would aim the damn thing between some of those neat, orderly rows of coconut trees, to shear off the wings and slow you down.”
Lindbergh’s guidance gave them confidence that they would eventually get the hang of their new planes. The famous flier even insisted on sleeping in the barracks with the pilots instead of the more comfortable accommodations his stature afforded him. His only request was that he be allowed to sleep on a top bunk.
The new Corsair pilots’ mettle was constantly tested that summer. The early-model Corsair, they learned, was prone to stalling at various speeds while flying level and making turns, and it usually occurred abruptly, with few of the traditional warning signs like buffeting or wing heaviness. The pilot manual also noted that the early batches like the one Ryan was flying did not have a stall warning light. The Corsair’s right wing so habitually stalled out that a temporary workaround was identified until Vought instituted changes in later models: a carved block of wood was taped to the end of it to improve stability.
There were other problems. When the Navy first ordered the plane in 1938, it wanted the pilot to be able to recover from eight spins. That requirement was eventually scaled back to two, and pilots were ordered never to try it at all. It was simply too dangerous. “NO INTENTIONAL SPINNING OF THE F4U-1 AIRPLANE IS PERMITTED,” Ryan’s manual stipulated in capital letters. If a pilot unintentionally went into a spin, it informed him, a recovery had to be made quickly—within one second or so—or the human forces required to do so will “become very high and the pilot cannot apply fully reversed controls which are necessary.”
The problems didn’t stop there. They were only compounded. The fuel tank made of reclaimed rubber and housed right in front of the cockpit leaked. A small spark could set the whole thing on fire. The leaks were especially problematic when the plane flew upside down and the highly flammable gas started seeping into the cockpit. The preferred remedy overseas was to place long strips of white tape around the edges of the gas tank where it met the windshield of the cockpit to prevent the pilot from being blinded. It also minimized the vapors that could ignite and blow the plane to pieces.
The early-model Corsairs had so many development problems, in fact, that at one time the plane was officially considered a “failure” by the Navy Department. Though it was designed to operate off the decks of aircraft carriers, it was not deemed safe enough to land on them until the end of 1944, after adjustments had been made. In the meantime, it was decided, the Marines could operate Corsairs from land bases.
After serving as communications officer for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing and then assistant operations officer, Ryan was assigned to Marine Fighter Squadron 321. Established in February 1943, the unit was stationed at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in Nor
th Carolina, where in 1941 a new air base was constructed in the densely wooded marshland between the New and the Neuse Rivers in the southeastern part of the state.
The new squadron, officially designated VMF-321, was part of the Marine Corps Reserve. But with the war expanding each day, the reserve distinction made little difference. The Allies were desperate to get reinforcements to the fight, particularly in the Pacific theater, and the squadron was to undergo “vigorous training” before going overseas in a few months.
Ryan had been assigned to help set up and train the new unit. Most of the squadron’s pilots were younger second lieutenants fresh from flight training and with little flight experience compared with Ryan’s 650 total flight hours. A number of them had been trained to fly the OS2U Kingfisher, a slow and lumbering seaplane that operated mostly in the Caribbean hunting German submarines. It could fly at a maximum speed of ninety miles per hour and bore little resemblance to the high-performance combat fighters they would be operating against the feared Japanese Zeros and battle-hardened anti-aircraft gunners. Other pilots assigned to the squadron, meanwhile, had flown the PBY Catalina, another flying boat designed for search-and-rescue operations at sea. When some of the fresh cadets reported for duty, they inquired where the seaplanes were. A colonel in charge responded: “There are no Kingfishers here. You are going to fly fighters.” When they protested that they had not been trained in fighters, his response was similarly simple and direct: “We’re gonna train you.”
Very few of them, including Ryan, had experience in fighter tactics. Indeed, even the squadron’s commander, Major Gordon H. Knott, was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who had previously flown Kingfishers. His knowledge of the Corsair and overall fighter operations was exceedingly slim.
It was not an uncommon set of circumstances for units headed to the Pacific theater in World War II. After Pearl Harbor, Allied leaders decided to give priority to the war against the Germans in Europe and North Africa. MacArthur and his Navy counterparts in the South and Southwest Pacific were in desperate need of reinforcements from the very start and chafed at the knowledge that better-prepared fighting units were heading to the European theater. Indeed, the first American fighter unit dispatched to defend Australia in February 1942, the Forty-Ninth Fighter Group, arrived with 102 pilots, 89 of whom had no experience at all in fighters. Their aircraft, a mix of Bell P-39 Airacobras and Curtiss P-40 Warhawks, were not considered modern fighter aircraft. In fact, the only truly modern American fighter plane in existence at the time, the P-38 Lightning, had been strictly reserved for operations in Europe until later in the war.
Despite their divergent experience and backgrounds, however, Ryan and the other pilots of VMF-321 quickly bonded over their shared experience of being at the birth of a new combat unit, flying a new, relatively untested aircraft, and their chance to put their collective imprint on the squadron’s character and future exploits. Ryan was particularly close with some of the other more experienced pilots, like Harold Jacobs of St. Cloud, Minnesota, the squadron’s operations officer, and Newton “Zombie” Blount of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Ryan and Zombie, a feisty boxing champ from the University of Mississippi, became fast friends, sharing their experiences growing up in the South and their time in the ring. Blount was always challenging officers and enlisted men alike to arm-wrestling contests, which he usually won. The squadron’s card shark proved to be Roger Brindos, a fearless pilot with dark, wavy hair and chiseled features from Duluth, Minnesota, whose outsized bravado made him seem indestructible. Brindos found in Ryan a willing, if novice, poker companion. Another one of the founding members of the squadron whom Ryan quickly bonded with was Robert Woodson Marshall, a young, baby-faced lieutenant from the small town of Amite, Louisiana, who in his quiet southern manner and gentle speech swapped stories with Ryan about their engineering studies back home—Ryan at Georgia Tech and Bob Marshall at Louisiana State University.
Before long, Ryan’s squadron mates took to calling him Mac, while some of the younger pilots gave him the nickname Pop, a reference to, at least in that setting, his advanced age. At twenty-six, Ryan was at least a few years older than most of the others. To some of the fresh lieutenants, at twenty-one or twenty-two, he was downright old—and more than a bit wiser.
But the thrill of flying still tickled him, just as it had when he was a teenager and Grace first took him out to the Charleston Army Airfield to watch the barnstormers do their stunt flying before crowds of gasping onlookers. He was hooked then and had jumped at every opportunity to fly since. He had almost lost count of how many times he had scrounged together the money to fly to school at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, often as the only passenger on the Delta Airlines flight that stopped in Columbia, South Carolina. Those trips had only fueled his dream to be a pilot. His diary entry for July 17, 1940, the summer he took his first flying lessons, said it all: “SOLOED!” When he was accepted as a Navy flight cadet, he almost couldn’t believe his luck. Nearly every day he got to climb into one of the two open cockpits of a Stearman Model 75 biplane, wait excitedly as the whir of the propeller stuttered to life, and experience the thrill as the spunky little seven-cylinder engine carried him up into the clouds. Sometimes, when he was flying solo without an instructor, he would unfasten his safety belt for a few brief moments, exhilarated by the feeling of being untethered thousands of feet above the earth as the wind gusts bracketed the sturdy little aircraft. If he thought he could get away with it, he sometimes took the training plane up to 11,800 feet, the highest altitude at which it could fly safely. In Jacksonville and later in Quantico he spent hours practicing splits, loops, cartwheels, snap rolls, touch-and-go landings, and what to do in a whole range of emergencies—from engine failure to the loss of oxygen. He also gained some modest experience in gunnery practice, firing dummy rounds at a target towed by another plane. One of his favorite maneuvers was peeling off en masse as part of a formation. “Sure do have fun stunting,” he recalled after one long afternoon of flying out over the Atlantic.
When he wasn’t in the cockpit, Ryan was often studying the finer points of navigation, sitting in his room in the bachelor officers’ quarters plotting a course by the stars; in his barracks in Jacksonville, he spent many nights looking out his window at the constellation of Scorpius in the southern sky. Like all pilots, he also did his share of “hangar flying,” sitting around the squadron or in the Officers’ Club swapping stories about being at the controls—like the one about how he got his first full taste of the dangers of flight when a fellow trainee out at the Charleston Army Airfield tried to land his plane on top of his, cracking up both aircraft. Or when, during that same summer he learned to fly, he had to ditch in a plowed field on Johns Island after his engine cut out.
Now Ryan familiarized himself with the Corsair. To his left was the engine control box, with several levers situated next to a small wheel to maneuver the ailerons—the control surfaces on the trailing edge of the outer wings—and to trim the rudder. Nearby was the lever to bring the landing gear up or down and the dive brake to increase drag. To his right, at about knee level, was the radio control box, just above a leather pouch to store flight charts or other personal belongings. In front of him were red warning lights and a series of gauges and indicators for fuel, air, hydraulic pressure, altitude, and airspeed, as well as the all-important artificial horizon. On the floor to his left were two charged CO2 bottles, one for extending the landing gear if the plane’s hydraulic power failed and the other to stabilize the air in the fuel tank to protect from an explosion when engaged in combat with an enemy plane.
He could see immediately that this plane was wholly different from others he had flown. It was made purely for destruction. This particular model, the F4U-1, carried six .50-caliber machine guns—three in each wing—and could fire 2,350 rounds more than three hundred yards. Directly in front of him, between his legs, was the control stick, with the weapons-release button for his thumb. Below the main instrument panel and to
his left was a pair of switches for the guns, covered by round gray safety caps. Up above, directly in Ryan’s field of vision, was the gun sight, housed underneath armored glass.
Ryan had precious little time to become proficient in the Corsair. While the squadron had its full complement of forty pilots by May, it only had a handful of Corsairs to train with as it waited in frustration for new planes to come off the production line. Much of the experience the squadron did get was not very promising. By midsummer, three pilots in the squadron were already dead from accidents. In May, Second Lieutenant Minard Baker flipped over while coming in for a landing, and just days after Ryan’s maiden flight, two accomplished fliers, Captain John Sanders and Major Joseph Leising, were killed in a midair collision of their Corsairs. The squadron’s pilots were also receiving gloomy reports about Marine aviators flying the Corsair in combat. Some were well on their way to becoming Japanese aces—a tongue-in-cheek reference to how they were personally responsible for destroying five Corsairs. Those were the lucky ones. Many others were killed in crashes, while the Japanese were claiming even more. Ryan’s squadron was in turmoil. Its members were wholly unprepared for combat, and they knew it. Their few months of training consisted mainly of formation flying and acrobatics in single-seat training aircraft.
As their departure date approached, Ryan and other officers worried that low morale was becoming a grave problem. They felt leader-less. Major Knott, the squadron’s skipper, may have had movie-star looks and been a magnet for girls, but he had also grown more and more unpopular. He had a reputation of not listening to advice. For instance, he insisted early on that pilots fly in formations of three rather than two, a basic tactic of fighter operations meant to ensure each flier had a fellow pilot keeping an eye on him for mutual protection. Those who raised the issue were brushed off. Soon enough, words like “arrogant” and “conceited” became some of the kinder descriptions whispered about him. Knott also privately held deep concerns about the spirit of the men, recounting how haphazardly they were thrown together and rushed toward combat. “It was one hell of a way to get ready to fight a war,” he wrote years later.