TRUCE
Then suddenly silence. A truce had been declared, and we flew our last mission on the afternoon of 27 July. I had suspected something was up, because my last mission had taken me to a target northwest of Hungnam, and although the city was devastated, none of us had ever seen as much flak coming up at us as we did that afternoon. My guess was that the people on the ground knew that the truce was imminent, so there were no constraints on their expenditure of ammunition. They probably didn’t care whether we were within reasonable range before they let go with barrages of heavy artillery and automatic-weapons fire. It was colorful, to say the least.
The next day, with no flight operations scheduled, seemed very strange. The carriers retired to the east about thirty miles to join up with a replenishment group to take on board black oil for ships’ propulsion, aviation gasoline for the aircraft, and food and general supplies to keep the people and machines going. That afternoon, we were told we could exercise on the flight deck, and so our squadron took up a couple of blankets and we sat around, relaxing in the sun and wondering when we would be going home.
Two of the carriers in Task Force 77 immediately departed from Point Oboe for Sasebo, where one, the Princeton, would then head for home. The second carrier would have a brief period of R&R and return to the line to relieve the Lake Champlain, which would in turn go to Sasebo to prepare for her homeward trip to CONUS. There was no mention of the Boxer going anywhere. There was much disappointment on board, but had we been reasonable, we would have understood that we had been one of the most recent arrivals, not getting to the western Pacific until April. So the chances were that we would not head home until fall.
THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI
The James Michener novella The Bridges at Toko-Ri is a fact-based but fictional account of a carrier air group attacking a key bridge in North Korea. It drew upon the operational experience of Air Group 5 while embarked in the USS Essex in their 1951–52 deployment to Korea. Michener had spent several weeks on board the Essex that winter. The story first appeared in Life magazine and was then published in book form. It immediately became a best seller. The book was then made into a movie, produced by Paramount and starring Grace Kelly, William Holden, Mickey Rooney, and Frederick March. The film was acclaimed by Admiral Burke, who was CNO when it premiered in Washington, D.C., in 1955, as a meticulously accurate depiction of the air war in Korea and, in his experience, the best Navy war film ever. Burke had been deputy commander in chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Japan in 1951 and 1952 and largely responsible for running the Navy’s war in Korea. Vice Adm. Turner Joy, the CinC, had been ill with cancer.
I had the memorable experience of flying in the movie version of The Bridges at Toko-Ri. In early 1954, my squadron, Fighter Squadron 52, flying Grumman F9F-2 Panthers, had just returned to the Naval Air Station Miramar outside of San Diego from a combat deployment during the Korean War. Commander, Naval Air Forces Pacific Fleet had been designated by the CNO to supervise the Navy’s participation in the production of the film. VF-52 was designated as the squadron to provide air services, virtually working full time for the producer. The secretary of the Navy had ruled that the Navy Department would cooperate to the fullest extent with Paramount.
The most prominent aviation cinematographer at the time, Paul Mantz, had been engaged by Paramount to do the aerial photography. Mantz had rigged a World War II B-25—the light bomber used by Gen. Jimmy Doolittle in the Tokyo raid of 1942—for this purpose. The guns and acrylic glass had been removed from the tail turret and replaced with a large camera mounting. During the filming of the air action, which included our Panthers joining up, dive-bombing, strafing, and even crashing, Paul Mantz himself was manning the camera rig. Standing waist high in the plane’s slipstream, he wore a leather jacket and cloth helmet with World War II — era aviator’s goggles as he manhandled his enormous cameras as if they were machine guns.
The maximum speed for the B-25 while filming was 175 knots, close to the minimum air speed for the Panthers in a clean landing (flaps-up) configuration, the condition required for the combat simulation. During most of the filming, the Panthers were flying just above the stalling airspeed with flaps up. With flaps down for landing, the stall speed was under 120 knots. However, all of the pilots were combat veterans with extensive flying time in the Panther under all conditions of flight, and performing the simulated combat maneuvers after having done the real thing was just pure fun. As the senior pilot in the squadron, I had the distinction of flying in the role of Lieutenant Brubaker, played in that film by William Holden, and it was a source of deep satisfaction to have my Korean experience, which had been similar to The Bridges in so many ways, memorialized in this fashion.
The kindest flourish to the episode was Paramount’s invitation to the eight pilots who flew in the film, together with our wives, to spend a weekend in Hollywood as their guests. A private railroad car picked us up in Del Mar, California, near the Miramar Naval Air Station, where VF-52 was based, and took us to Hollywood. We had a full day of visiting the sets where the movie was being filmed, meeting the stars, and watching the production. That night, with the major actors in attendance, we were treated to a formal dinner at an elegant nightclub. It was, in retrospect, a very generous gesture to the military, something that did not have to be done but was offered with the most genuine appreciation and thoughtfulness.
7
Tactical Nukes
It was 0415 on 14 January 1958. I was sitting in the pilots’ ready room on board the USS Essex. Because I was the commander of Attack Squadron 83, my assigned seat was in the front row and the message that blared from the intercom was loud and clear: “Pilots, man your aircraft for the 0500 launch.” The squadron duty officer, a sleepy lieutenant (j.g.), responded with “Roger” then said to me, “Skipper, since you are the only sortie on this launch, I guess that means you.”
I slipped on my bandolier with the holstered Police Special.38, Navy issue, grabbed my helmet and map case, and headed topside. As I walked out on the flight deck through the control station hatch, I could see my plane, a single A4D-2 Skyhawk, parked on the port catapult. It was strange to see it all alone. All of the other aircraft were pulled aft on the flight deck. The weather was nice: sixty degrees, five-tenths cloud coverage, a setting half moon, and about ten knots of breeze. The Essex had not yet turned into the wind.
The Skyhawk, side number 301, was surrounded by a small group of flight deck crewmen — a brown-shirted plane captain, a green-shirted troubleshooter, a red-shirted ordnanceman, and a yellow shirt in a starter jeep to provide the air to start the plane’s engine. Standing guard over the group was a Marine in combat fatigues cradling a Thompson submachine gun. As I came up to the plane for my preflight inspection, the red shirt approached with his clipboard. “Sir, please sign this receipt for custody of the weapon,” he said. The sheet read: “One (1) Mark 28 Mod 0 Thermonuclear Gravity Bomb.” I signed off without a word and went over to the centerline pylon where the weapon was suspended. The chief ordnanceman pointed out the umbilical connections that would allow the bomb to be armed from the portable console in the cockpit. It all looked familiar, just like pictures in the handbooks and lectures. As I ran my hand over the bomb to ensure the proper adjustment of the pylon braces and the attachment to the bomb rack, I could not help but reflect on its deceptively graceful appearance. It packed the equivalent explosive power of 350,000 tons of TNT into its twenty-inch-diameter streamlined form. As I climbed in the cockpit, the wind caught my large, flat map case like an airfoil, whipping it around, and the plane captain helped me put it into the cockpit. I said, “Thanks, I’m going to need that.”