SOLE SURVIVORS
A Pilot and his Marine Corps Mitchell
When Pearl Harbor was attacked, I was home at the time. It was a Sunday, and we heard it on the radio like everybody else. I was living with my parents and working for American Airlines at LaGuardia Field. We were outfitting planes to go overseas, converting commercial airplanes for use by the military.
I had never been in an airplane except commercially, and I had never flown a light plane. I felt that an aerial line of duty was what I wanted, because I didn’t want to end up in a trench somewhere. It turned out pretty good for me, but my brother Robert was not as fortunate. An Army Air Corps B-24 top turret gunner and engineer, he survived two crashes but was over the Adriatic when his bomber No Time for Love was attacked by enemy fighters on March 24, 1944. He never returned and was listed as MIA. My brother Al also enlisted in the Army Air Corps to fly. He served as a navigator in a B-29 Superfortress and saw heavy action over Japan. On November 4, 1942, I enlisted to fly in the Navy because a good friend of mine was a Navy pilot, and he talked me into it. Patriotism was the driving force for my brothers and me to enlist.
FLIGHT TRAINING
I started the Naval Aviation Cadet Selection Board in January, 1943. It took me a long time to get through the program as it was pretty backed up with military trainees, and they didn’t have the capacity required to train so many people to fly. Some guys had to wait a year before being called to an active air station. My training coursework began at Olean College in Olean, New York and Union College in Schenectady, New York. At Olean we flew Piper Cubs. It was so cold we had to drain the oil out of the crankcase, heat it, and put it back in! At Schenectady, I flew an open cockpit Howard DGA, a damned good airplane! The DGA was a two-seat trainer, where the student flew in the forward seat. I didn’t have much time in those planes before we moved on to U.S. Navy PreFlight School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We never even flew at Chapel Hill; it was mostly ground school. The next move was to the U.S. Naval Air Station in Bunker Hill, Indiana for flight training. There we were taught navigation, radio communication, engine care and repair, physical fitness, and hand to hand fighting. Flight training was serious business. One time, a routine training flight ended in tragedy as two aviation cadets collided in mid-air in the cold night sky, spawning telegrams from the War Department to two separate families, each unbeknownst to the other, informing them of their loved ones’ demise. One day I was in an open-cockpit Stearman doing local flying and I got lost in the air. It was cold as hell. I landed on a farm, but I had to shoo the cows and horses away by flying over before I landed. I went up to the farmhouse, and a lady came to the door with a baby in her arms and said, “If you follow Route 31, it’ll take you to Bunker Hill.” My logbook shows that I started flight
I CHOSE THE MARINES AS THEY HAD THE PLANES I WANTED TO FLY, AND I WANTED TO FLY THE PBJ.
training on October 9 and completed it December 3, 1943. I flew a total of 28 dual hours, 59.5 solo hours, and 6.5 check hours for a total of 94 hours in a Navy N2S Stearman, a two-seat biplane. It had the nickname of Yellow Peril due to its color and tricky ground handling characteristics. After that, I moved on to the Naval Air Training Center in Pensacola, Florida. As we entered the Training Center on a bus, Cadets lined up on both sides of the street, chanting, “You’ll be sorry!” It was pretty rigorous training. I flew at an outlying airfield, Whiting Field, and began flight training in January, 1944 in a Vultee SNV Valiant, which due to its harmonics and rattling, was referred to as the “Vultee Vibrator.” In February I started flying the North American Aviation SNJ4, and on March I first flew in an SNB2 twin-engine. When I left Pensacola, I had logged 242.2 hours of flight time.