2  TAIL END CHARLIES

PASCO NAVAL AIR STATION, WASHINGTON

SEPTEMBER 1, 1943

Eric Erickson could feel the parachute thumping the back of his legs as he walked across the flight line. It was still a new feeling, and he liked it. This was the day he would make his first solo flight in the Stearman N2S biplane, the trainer the Navy cadets called the “Yellow Peril.”

Flying was the only thing the cadets liked about Pasco. The remote base was enclosed with a galvanized wire fence. There was nothing there but a few two-story barracks for the cadets and for the enlisted men who worked on the yellow-painted Stearmans. The town of Pasco had no bars, no entertainment, and, worst of all, no available women. The closest real town was Yakima, a two-hour bus ride away, but the cadets had learned that Yakima wasn’t much of an improvement over Pasco.

They were there to learn to fly, and that’s what most—but not all—did at Pasco. Washing out of the program meant an end to the cadet’s status as an officer candidate. Washouts went back to the fleet as seamen second class, the next-to-lowest enlisted rating in the Navy.

Back in Nebraska, Erickson had been an aspiring artist. He was the son of hardworking parents who traced their roots to Sweden. His father was a foreman for the Iowa Nebraska Light and Power Company, a veteran of World War I, and deeply suspicious of anyone who didn’t earn a living by physical labor. That one of his sons actually wanted to paint pictures for a living disturbed him.

The war changed everything. Erickson was studying art in a California academy when the wave of patriotic fervor swept America after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the summer of 1943 he was marching with his fellow cadets on the parade ground of the Navy’s Preflight School in northern California.

Erickson was a tall, skinny kid, six foot two and 160 pounds, lithe and agile enough to handle the strenuous physical training program. His previous college work gave him a leg up on the engineering and mathematics classes.

Then came flight training. The former art student seemed an unlikely candidate to be a Navy fighter pilot. On every training flight, he became violently airsick. Each time they went aloft, he’d have to lean out and vomit over the side of the little Aeronca training plane. Erickson’s classmates gave him a nickname: “Bucket.” His job after every flight was to wash down the barf-stained fuselage of the Aeronca.

The airsickness continued until the day his instructor cleared him for his first solo flight. It was as though his gut experienced an epiphany. From that day on, he was finished with the bucket.

By the time Erickson and his class got to the Yellow Perils at Pasco, flying had become great fun. There were close calls, but none were deadly. Engines sometimes failed. Once in a while someone “ground looped”—caught a wing tip on landing and went swirling to a stop in a cloud of dirt, sagebrush, and torn fabric. Naval aviation, they believed, was not inherently dangerous. Sure, there were risks, but if you were good—really good, like they were—nothing bad would happen.

Then one day one of Erickson’s buddies, a fellow Nebraskan named Paul Hyland, was practicing a solo acrobatic routine. He inadvertently put the Yellow Peril into an inverted spin—a rotating, disorienting maneuver—and was unable to recover. The Stearman plunged into a wooded field near Pasco, scattering pieces of the wood-and-fabric biplane over the field like yellow confetti. Hyland was killed instantly.

The accident stunned them all. They had been together since preflight training school. Hyland was a good-looking, well-liked kid who seemed blessed with above-average skills both on the ground and in the air. Of all the class, he seemed one of the least likely to be killed in a flying accident.

For the cadets, it was their first brush with a hard truth. Okay, naval aviation was dangerous. If they stayed with it, finished training, and went into combat, they could expect more such losses. Next time it might be them.

A few quietly dropped out and were not seen again. Others, like Erickson, wrestled with their misgivings, then stopped dwelling on it. If it happened, it happened. Anyway, Erickson rationalized, weren’t his parents the beneficiaries of his government $10,000 insurance policy? Hell, it was more than his father earned in a year.

Erickson and about half his class made it through Pasco and went on to Corpus Christi, Texas, for advanced training. They flew the “Vultee Vibrator,” the fixed-gear SNV, in which they learned instrument flying. Then they graduated to the big North American SNJ Texan trainer, learning formation flying, gunnery, and radio navigation. A few more cadets washed out, but by now most of the fainthearted had been eliminated.

Meanwhile, the war in the Pacific was tilting inexorably in favor of the United States. The new Essex-class carriers were joining the fleet, and the Japanese were on the defensive. To Erickson and his classmates, it was something to worry about: after all this training, the damned war would be over before they got there.

Almost to a man, each wanted to be a fighter pilot. Flying dive-bombers or torpedo planes took guts and skill, but the real glory was in the Corsair and Hellcat fighters. In newsreels, comic books, and recruiting posters, fighter pilots grinned down from cockpits covered with rows of swastika and rising-sun victory symbols. Absolutely nothing matched the pure testosterone-loaded glamour of being a World War II fighter pilot.

On a steamy May afternoon in 1944, Erickson and his classmates stood on the hot tarmac at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station and received their gold bars as newly commissioned ensigns and their naval aviators’ wings of gold. The big prize, though, was the orders: Erickson and four of his buddies—Maurie Dubinsky, Jack Ehrhard, Bill Ecker, and Joe Arvidson—received the top assignments in the class. They were going to be fighter pilots.

They were sleek and sexy and, at first sight, intimidating. They were lined up at the naval air station, each in blue livery and adorned with white lettering and broad bars with a star. The newly winged naval aviators stared in awe at the voluptuous objects. They were Chance Vought F4U Corsairs, and they were, arguably, the hottest fighters in the world.

It was what Erickson and his buddies had been training for all these months. They’d been through fighter combat school in the Grumman F6F Hellcat in Vero Beach, Florida. They’d been up to Lake Michigan to qualify in carrier landings aboard a vessel called the Wolverine, a makeshift carrier converted from a paddle-driven passenger ship.

Now they had orders to a combat squadron, the famous VF-10 Grim Reapers, which would soon be split into two units—a fighting squadron and a bomber-fighting squadron, each equipped with the new Corsair fighter. And here they were, standing on the ramp at the Atlantic City Naval Air Station, gazing at the row of long-snouted fighters.

The Corsair had several nicknames, some complimentary, some not. They called it “Hose Nose,” “U-bird” for its frontal shape, “Bent-Wing Bastard,” and sometimes “Hog.” The name that bothered the Tail End Charlies was “Ensign Eater.” The Corsair was harder to fly than more forgiving airplanes such as the Hellcat, and it had a reputation for turning on inexperienced pilots like a mean-tempered pit bull.

As fighters of the 1940s went, the Corsair was big. Powered by the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial engine, the Corsair mounted a 13-foot 4-inch three-bladed Hamilton Standard propeller. To accommodate the massive propeller, Vought came up with the Corsair’s unique inverted gull-wing design. The design permitted a shorter landing gear while allowing clearance for the long prop blades. The stubbier gear could retract straight aft into the wing, leaving no bulges and still allowing room for internal wing tanks.

The Corsair was fast—faster than almost any other fighter in the world. On its fifth test flight back in 1940, it became the first single-engine production fighter to exceed 400 mph in level flight. The Navy was sufficiently impressed that they placed an order for 584 Corsairs in June 1941.

But then came the problems. During the Corsair’s carrier suitability tests, the test pilots found that they couldn’t see the carrier deck or the landing signal officer over the 14-foot-long nose. Worse, when the Corsair was at landing speed, about to plunk down on the deck, the left wing would drop like a rock, resulting in a swerving, heart-stopping arrival and sometimes a collapsed landing gear. Even when the Corsair came down on both wheels, the oleo shock absorbers sometimes bounced the fighter back into the air. The tailhook would skim over the arresting wires, causing the fighter to crash into the cable barricade stretched across the forward deck.

This was not suitable behavior for a carrier-based fighter. There was a war on, and the Navy urgently needed fighters on the new Essex-class carriers. They opted for the reliable Grumman F6F Hellcat and banished the temperamental Corsair to shore duty with Marine and Navy squadrons in the Solomons.

In the hands of Marines such as Pappy Boyington and Ken Walsh and Navy aces such as Tommy Blackburn and Ike Kepford, the Corsair proved itself to be one of the most lethal aerial killing machines ever designed. And it was then that the big fighter earned another nickname, this one from the Japanese—“Whistling Death,” for the high-pitched howl from its wing-root air coolers.

Meanwhile, Vought and Navy engineers were working on the Corsair’s carrier landing problems. The nasty wing drop was fixed with a simple 6-inch stall strip mounted on the leading edge of the starboard wing. The dangerous bouncing tendency was cured by reengineering the oleo shock absorbers in the landing gear. The visibility over the long nose was much improved simply by raising the pilot’s seat 18 centimeters and giving him a Plexiglas bubble-type canopy.

The best fix came not from engineering but from technique. British Royal Air Force squadrons had been operating Corsairs from their own carriers since mid-1943. The Brits had learned to make a continuously turning approach to the carrier deck, not leveling the Corsair’s wings until they were almost over the ramp. The pilot had a clear view of the deck and the landing signal officer all the way to landing.

The fixes worked. After two years of being sidelined, the F4U was cleared for U.S. Navy carrier duty. And just in time.

From his new office on the Atlantic City naval air station, Lt. Cmdr. Wilmer Rawie could see the row of new Corsairs. They were arriving one or two at a time, and so were the pilots, many of them fresh out of flight training.

But not all. Rawie’s previous job had been superintendent of training in Green Cove Springs, Florida, where he’d been responsible for training Corsair pilots for the fleet. When he received orders to be skipper of the newly formed VF-10 Grim Reapers, Rawie cherry-picked the best instructors and students to take with him.

Will Rawie had come up from the ranks, serving a hitch as an enlisted man before going to the Naval Academy. After graduating in 1938, he’d put in two years as a surface officer before going to flight training. He saw a brief flurry of combat flying F4F Wildcat fighters from USS Enterprise at Wake, Marcus, and Midway, and he flew cover when Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders took off for their raid on Tokyo.

But then the war passed Rawie by. He was rotated back to the States to be an instructor, and there he stayed for two years. A lieutenant commander with no command experience, Rawie had reached a dead end.

His break came in late 1944. An air group was being formed under the command of Cmdr. John Hyland, an old squadronmate of Rawie’s from the Enterprise. Hyland tapped Rawie to lead the new fighting squadron. When their training was complete, they would deploy to the Pacific aboard one of the fast new Essex-class carriers, the USS Intrepid.

Through the autumn and into the gray winter of 1944, the new Corsair pilots drilled on gunnery, air-to-air tactics, night flying, and dive bombing. And they learned one of the grim statistics of the war: the Navy was losing nearly as many airplanes in accidents as they were in combat.

One day Erickson and a lieutenant named Al Blackman were practicing dive bombing on a target complex in the New Jersey marshes. They were flying a racetrack pattern, diving on the bull’s-eye target on the ground.

Erickson was behind Blackman when he saw something—an object, maybe a piece of the aircraft—come off Blackman’s airplane. The Corsair abruptly went into a flat spin. Erickson saw the canopy open, and he watched the tiny figure of Al Blackman trying to climb out.

He didn’t make it. The Corsair exploded into the ground, sending up a gush of oily black smoke.

Erickson was astonished. Blackman wasn’t a Tail End Charlie like Erickson. He was one of the guys who were supposed to know how to stay alive. Later, they learned what had happened. When Blackman’s Corsair pulled out of its dive, the starboard horizontal stabilizer separated from the tail. No one knew why, whether it was the result of previous damage or a flaw in construction, but Al Blackman had been doomed from the moment he entered the dive.

Erickson thought about it for a while. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone. Even me. Then he stopped thinking about it. If he let it bother him, he couldn’t do this job.

One final challenge remained: the Big One—carrier qualification. Without the ability to launch and land back aboard a carrier, none of a Navy fighter pilot’s other skills counted. Until now, the Tail End Charlies’ belief in their own invincibility had not been shaken. They were still bulletproof. Landing the Corsair on a carrier was going to be a piece of cake.

Then they saw the carrier.

The USS Core was a “Jeep carrier,” an escort carrier converted from a merchant ship hull. Jeep carriers were intended to escort convoys and support amphibious landings. Their designation was CVE, which, according to their sailors, stood for “combustible, vulnerable, and expendable.”

Most of the pilots didn’t mind the day landings. They didn’t even mind the fact that they were out in the tossing Atlantic on a butt-freezing winter day, with a low cloud deck that was spitting rain and sleet. Beneath the clouds the visibility was okay, and in the landing pattern they would try to concentrate on the LSO—the landing signal officer—and ignore the fact that the Core’s stern was heaving up and down like a yo-yo in the heavy seas.

From his platform on the aft port deck edge, the LSO coached the pilot with a pair of “paddles”—canvas-covered signal boards—signaling whether the plane was too high or low, fast or slow, angling his outstretched arms one way or another to align the plane with the deck. When the airplane was over the deck edge, the LSO gave the “cut”—a paddle across his throat. The pilot chopped the throttle, and the airplane dropped like a dump truck onto the deck.

Carrier qualification was tough on the airplanes. Several blew their tires after especially hard landings. One of the Tail End Charlies bounced back into the air, coming down nose low and gouging a hunk of wood from the deck with the big three-bladed propeller. With amazing efficiency, the deck crew hauled the wounded birds to the forward deck and soon had most of them flying again.

As soon as a pilot got his three landings, he’d climb out of the seat and another would take his place. When Erickson’s turn came, he strapped into the still-running Corsair, ran through his cockpit checks, then gave the deck officer the signal that he was ready. When the deck officer swung his flag forward, pointing down the deck, Erickson shoved the throttle forward and released the brakes. Hurtling off the bow, Erickson nudged the Corsair’s nose up, and the big fighter lifted into the gray sky.

He turned downwind, passed abeam the carrier, and started his turning approach. He spotted the LSO, who was giving him a “roger”—paddles level, no urgent signals to add power or slow down. Nearing the blunt, unforgiving ramp of the ship, he saw the cut signal and yanked the throttle to idle. The Corsair thudded into the wooden deck, and Erickson felt the hard tug of the shoulder straps as the tailhook snagged a wire. Less than a minute later, he was roaring back into the sky.

Each pilot needed three landings for day qualification, then had to make two at night. After Erickson’s third day landing, he thought it was almost becoming fun.

Then came nightfall, and the fun ended.

It looked like the carrier had sailed into an inkwell. The only lights the pilots could see were the line-up lights on the landing deck, which were visible only within a cone of 12 degrees. German submarines were reportedly lurking off the U.S. Atlantic coast, so neither the Core nor her escorts were showing any running lights. The destroyers ahead and behind the carrier were each marked with a tiny blue light.

Everyone was having trouble. The LSO was waving off one pilot after another. Some were taking as many as five passes to get their first landing. To the pilots watching from the darkened deck, awaiting their turn, it looked dangerous as hell out there.

It was. While they watched, one of the Corsairs turning into the groove—the short final approach to the deck—abruptly wobbled its wings. Before the LSO or anyone else could react, the fighter stalled and crashed into the fantail—the stern—of the carrier. There was a shuddering explosion, a brief orange flash, then nothing. The pilot, Lt. (jg) Larry Meade, was killed instantly.

Night operations were suspended—but not for long. Two hours before sunrise it was Erickson’s turn. After a botched first pass, he found his way through the murk and managed to land aboard. Then he repeated the process, completing his two required night landings. Following the director’s signals, he folded the fighter’s wings and taxied to the bow. Despite the freezing temperature, sweat steamed from beneath his helmet. Erickson knew he should have felt jubilant, but he wasn’t. He was just glad to be alive.

The next day the Tail End Charlies said goodbye and good riddance to the Core. They were finished with training. The next time they saw a carrier, it would be the real thing—the USS Intrepid in the Pacific.

They were headed for the war. But first a tradition had to be observed.

Partying was as much a part of squadron life as flying. Still, the historic Atlantic City bash would be discussed in hushed tones at reunions for the next half century. Most of the pilots had only blurred memories of the event, but one thing they agreed on later: it was probably a mistake to have invited everyone—especially the senior officers and their wives.

Of course, they should have known what to expect. The man responsible for planning the party was the squadron executive officer, Lt. Timmy Gile. Gile was an ace from the fighting in the Solomons, a bachelor, and a renowned hell-raiser.

The party started out fairly subdued, with the usual toasts and pronouncements. The officers were in their dress blues, their ladies wearing semiformal dresses. Then it gathered momentum. Gile had booked a sixteen-member female group called the Philadelphia Debutantes. They were followed by the second act, a voluptuous stripper who went by the name of Toni the Tease.

By eleven o’clock most of the pilots were soused, the senior officers’ wives scandalized, and Timmy Gile’s place in squadron history secured. Not only had he organized the party to end all squadron parties, but he disappeared with Toni the Tease.