I ran up to the flight deck as quickly as I could and headed for the port catapult to find out what was going on. When I got to the forward end of the carrier’s flight deck, an A4D was just being launched, but it was on the starboard catapult. What had not registered with me was that VA-83 was also maintaining two Skyhawks loaded with forward firing aircraft rockets (FFARs), to be on call if the Marines on the ground in Lebanon encountered trouble from hostile forces and asked for close-air support. That was the ready plane that had been launched, not the nuclear-ready bird. I had been badly shaken for a moment.
Within a week after the landings, the fiery rhetoric of the Kremlin had subsided and the nuclear bombs were returned to the carrier’s magazines. VA-83 settled down to flying daily patrols along the borders of Lebanon to detect and dissuade unfriendly Arabs from entering the country. Several of our pilots asked how to identify an unfriendly Arab. The best answer that could be provided by the air intelligence officer was that “an unfriendly Arab shoots at you.” The Lebanon affair was good experience for the task group pilots. Each aircrew was flying three flights every two days, and these were interesting sorties with a real mission. Although few planes were fired at, one of our Skyhawks was hit in the wing by what appeared to be rounds from a muzzle-loading gun. This was the first occasion a Skyhawk was damaged by hostile fire, and it was a modest precursor of things to come. More than 280 A-4 Skyhawks were to be shot down by enemy fire during the Vietnam War. The A-4 was the principal light attack plane in the Navy from 1954 to 1970.
These operations, conducting border patrols around Lebanon and maintaining station over Beirut for on-call missions to support the Marines, continued for thirty days without a break. Then, on 15 September, the Essex was ordered to proceed to Athens and prepare to end her deployment with Sixth Fleet, depart the Mediterranean, and to return to Norfolk. At this point, the Essex was in the ninth month of what had been scheduled as a six-month tour of duty with the Sixth Fleet.
At about 1700 on the first day of liberty in Athens, a large contingent of uniformed sailors with Shore Patrol arm brassards arrived ashore with instructions to round up all Essex personnel and instruct them to return to the ship immediately. This sweep through the better bars and restaurants of Athens during the dining hour was successful in making sure that all but two or three of the ship’s and air wing’s people were back on board at 0600 the next morning when the Essex weighed anchor and steamed off toward the Suez Canal.
PACIFIC BOUND
There were no announcements from the ship’s captain as to the future plans of the ship, but the crew observed a wooden platform being erected on the centerline of the flight deck, sixty feet tall, with a walkway from the platform to the ship’s island structure, which was on the starboard side. One old-timer said that meant the ship was going through the Suez Canal. This was to allow a local pilot to con the ship using the carrier’s jack staff as the directional reference line. If so, it would be the first time in history that a U.S. aircraft carrier had made a transit of this waterway. The concern, of course, was that it made the warship vulnerable to being bottled up in the canal as had been many commercial ships in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. It was not until the carrier was entering the canal that the crew was informed that the Essex would go through Suez and then proceed through the Indian Ocean to the Taiwan Strait. Our mission was to reinforce the carrier force of the Pacific Fleet in facing down a Chinese Communist threat to invade Quemoy and Matsu, two islands belonging to the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan.
The transit of the Suez Canal proved uneventful for the Essex. The carrier was part of a thirty-ship convoy. The canal runs traffic north and south on alternate days. The carrier positioned photo planes, which were indistinguishable from the fighters onboard, on both port and starboard catapults, where they took pictures with their side-looking cameras all the way through the canal for intelligence purposes.
From Suez, the Essex proceeded at twenty-seven knots, her maximum sustained speed, on the most direct route to the Taiwan Straits. Because of the need to make the best progress, the carrier did not attempt to fly aircraft, which would have involved turning into the wind for protracted periods of time to launch and recover her air wing. After a six-day sprint, the Essex joined Task Force 77, the Seventh Fleet carrier task force, operating off the coast of mainland China within the claimed territorial waters of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) but not flying any military aircraft closer to the landmass than the three-mile territorial waters limit the United States recognized at that time.
VA-83’s pilots were immediately launched with the air wing’s fighters upon arrival in the Task Force 77 operating area to conduct “training” operations at an altitude and a proximity to the landmass to ensure they would be seen clearly on the Chinese early warning radars. The carrier aircraft formations were to proceed up to the three-mile limit. There was an obvious absence of any Chinese fighter reaction to the presence of the U.S. Navy’s aircraft.
A week before the Essex’s arrival, several Chinese fighters had ventured into the airspace protected by Task Force 77’s planes and were immediately shot down. There had been no Chinese Communist air activity offshore since that time. There were seven Essex-class carriers operating in the Taiwan Straits at this time with never fewer than four in the Task Force 77 carrier disposition actually operating their aircraft in the vicinity of the offshore islands.
After two weeks on station with Task Force 77 conducting the show-of-force operations, the Essex was sent to Subic Bay in the Philippines for upkeep maintenance and R&R for the crew. At this juncture, one of the Pacific Fleet carriers was detached to return to its homeport after only seven months’ deployment, a circumstance that annoyed the Essex’s crew, who had now been away from home ten months.
In talking to my counterpart commanders of A4D squadrons on the Pacific Fleet carriers, I learned that they were not flying their A4Ds at night from the carriers. Because of the unsuitability of the A4D models in the fleet at that time for night or all-weather flying, due to the plane’s inherent instability and its lack of suitable cockpit instrumentation, there had been a succession of accidents at night in which several experienced and senior squadron pilots were lost. In one A4D squadron both the CO and the operations officer were killed in accidents during the same night carrier recovery. The morale in the A4D squadrons deployed to the Seventh Fleet was so troubled that several distinguished aviators commanding Skyhawk squadrons prevailed upon the admirals commanding the deployed carrier divisions in TF 77 to limit the Skyhawks to daylight flights. Unfortunately, the captain of Essex did not consider that the Pacific Fleet directives restricting A4Ds at night applied to Air Task Group 1. VF-83 continued to fly their share of night operations.
At about this time the commanding officer of the F2H-2 Banshee night fighter squadron, a close friend and classmate, Cdr. Bill Allen, was killed when making a night approach for landing on the Valley Forge, as his plane flew into the water several miles in the wake of the ship. This was a blow to Air Task Group 2 and to me. Bill Allen was well liked, and he was considered to have a promising future in the Navy.