Above the Thunder (45 page)

Hal Davis, the daring pilot who used to fly rings around the rest of us, is alive and well in Virginia, and it has been a pleasure catching up with him by phone. Hal and I and our friends were not the first, but we were within a few months of being the first pilots organic to field artillery combat units, and we were the simple beginning of an Army Aviation branch that today is extremely complex and highly technical, that now carries and uses its guns and rockets with deadly effect, that flies the infantry to remote and isolated battle areas and flies them back again, alive or dead. It picks up the artillery's heavy cannon, rockets, trucks,
ammunition, fuel, and rations, and sets them down beyond the beach, across the river, or far away among the pathless mountains and jungles, where they could never go under their own power. Today's Army pilots still watch above the thunder of the battlefield—and they can even see in the dark.

But it's an expensive proposition. Back in the sixties I officially op posed abandonment of light airplanes in favor of the light observation helicopter, and I had serious reservations about the viability of airmobile forces against even a modestly equipped enemy like the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars. Although air mobility certainly showed its worth in that affair, I think the high rate of helicopter losses at least partially justified my fears. And, aside from the personnel casualties associated with aircraft losses, the cost of helicopters is extremely high. The price of one Vietnam War light observation helicopter would have paid for the ten L-4s of a World War II division artillery and probably for the flight training of their crews as well. In its expensive complexity, Army Aviation is right in line with the overall current U.S. military trend. As Henry David Thoreau said, we need to simplify, simplify, simplify.

Although I loved the Army—especially in my earlier days with it—there are a few things about it that distress me now. One of the most trivial is the nose-to-nose, top-of-the-lungs, git-down-and-give-me-ten style of handling soldiers. I've found it to be true that when a man is treated like a man—with respect—he generally responds like a man, and he feels much better about being a soldier. He must be toughened, true, and he must learn to respond instantly to orders, but I believe this can be accomplished by treating him as an intelligent human being, not a dumb animal, and I think he will be more dependable when he has to think and take responsibility for his own decisions. Only twice in my entire Army experience did I ever feel myself maltreated, and each time the offender was a smart-aleck brigadier general.

I get angry when I hear anyone belittle the Army uniform, or those who wear or have worn it. It's a uniform that has been honored by the service and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men, some famous, most unknown, but all of them as deserving of honor as any of those who disparage it. My wife's brother, Fay Lane, was in Army uniform when
he died in a hail of machine-gun bullets on a little hill on Okinawa. My brother Gerald was wearing it when he and Bryant Hicks, another 82d Airborne trooper, using a captured gun, held out alone for two days and nights in the face of a German panzer attack that swept away everything around them. They destroyed one tank, surrounded their foxhole with the equivalent of a platoon of dead and wounded enemy, and held their position until a counterattack uncovered them. Gerald was wearing it when a German artillery shell burst hurled him against a tree, broke his legs, knocked him into a coma for six days, and left him lying in the snowy darkness of the Ardennes until his hands and feet were frozen. My brother Bob was wearing that uniform when he drove a half-track recon vehicle with a cavalry reconnaissance squadron that led or screened Patton's famous Third Army in its great drive out of the Normandy hedgerows and on across Europe until the victory. They fought numerous small actions, many of them desperate, as they “either rescued or had to be rescued.”

In a presidential campaign during the First Gulf War, one of the candidates publicly observed that the men manning our ships in the Persian Gulf are “the finest sailors our Navy has ever had.” What did he mean by “finest?” If he implied that they were the tallest, handsomest, healthiest, best educated, best dressed, best equipped, best trained, best fed, best entertained, and best paid, then he may have had a point. But if he was saying that they were the most worthy, most courageous, most devoted to duty, most truly patriotic and willing to sacrifice all for home and country, then his statement is an affront to the memory of thousands of faithful American sailors whose bones are strewn in the briny deep from the North Sea grave of the
Bonhomme Richard
to Pearl Harbor and Savo Island, wherever the oceans roll. And I have heard other politicians make similar statements regarding today's soldiers, with equal affront to the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who, like John Durant and his men whose bones lie in the alien sands of Maffin Bay, have been sacrificed to preserve our nation's sovereignty and liberty—and, sometimes, for its greater power and glory.

Those men will never grow old.

Some years ago I stood alone in the summer sun in a little cemetery at Columbus Grove, Ohio, and watched as a soft breeze ruffled a decorative shrub growing beside a red granite tombstone. The marker reminded me that Carl Bunn had been dead for more than forty-one years, and it was hard to believe. In my memory, I could see him walking across the Schofield street from the mess hall to the barracks, the pockets of his khakis bulging with oranges.

American soldiers who made the supreme sacrifice during World War II lie in thousands of cemeteries throughout the world, like this one in the Philippines where many of the dead of the 33d Division were buried. This is Cemetery #1 at Santa Barbara on Luzon (Photograph from Sanford Winston,
The Golden Cross
).

Someone yells, “Hey, Bunn, let me have an orange!”

And Carl's young voice comes back, clear and fresh, “To hell with you, bud! Didn't the government issue you an orange this morning?”

TOM BAKER

The story of the J-3 Piper Cub began in 1926 with C. Gilbert and Gordon Taylor, brothers and partners in the very small Taylor Brothers Aircraft Company of Rochester, New York. Onetime barnstormers, the Taylor brothers had designed, and were attempting to market, a two-seat monoplane they named the Chummy, when Gordon was killed in a crash.

Gilbert Taylor then moved the operation to Bradford, Pennsylvania, where community leaders, anxious to promote new local industries, provided $50,000 to capitalize the new Taylor Aircraft Company. One of the stockholders was a Pennsylvania oilman named William T. Piper, who was interested in aviation but believed that the Chummy was too expensive and inefficient a design. Piper offered to sponsor the development of a small plane to sell for half the Chummy's $3,985 price tag. The resulting aircraft, designated the E-2, was completed in late 1930 and fitted with a twenty-horsepower, two-cylinder Brownbach “Tiger Kitten” engine. The airplane was named the “Cub” to go along with the Kitten engine. The diminutive motor proved too weak to fly the airplane and was soon abandoned, but the name “Cub” stuck.

In 1931, with no suitable engine available for the Taylor Cub, the company was forced to declare bankruptcy. Piper bought up the assets, retaining C. G. Taylor as chief engineer. Continental Motors Corporation provided a solution to the engine problem that same year when it came out with the thirty-seven-horsepower A-40 aircraft engine, and the Taylor E-2 Cub was placed on the market with it. Piper sold twenty-two Cubs that year, with sales growing tenfold by 1935.

A three-view diagram of the Piper Cub airplane.

In 1936, William Piper hired a young aeronautical engineer named Walter Jamouneau, who redesigned the airplane (hence the J in J-3), among other changes, rounding off its square wings and tail. The irascible C. G. Taylor had been quarreling with William Piper over various matters anyway, and to him the unwelcome redesign of his Cub by Jamouneau was the last straw. Taylor quit the company to establish the competing Taylorcraft Aviation Company in Alliance, Ohio.

When the Piper plant at Bradford burned down in 1937, W. T. Piper moved his manufacturing equipment and more than two hundred em ployees to a roomy, abandoned silk mill in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and resumed production under the name Piper Aircraft Corporation. By the end of that year, the company had built 687 Piper Cubs.

In 1938 Piper introduced the improved J-3 Cub, powered by forty-horsepower Continental, Lycoming or Franklin engines, which sold for $1,300. Engine horsepower was soon raised to fifty, and by 1940 it reached sixty-five (which it would retain throughout World War II, with the Continental engine). Piper also standardized a color scheme; just as Henry Ford's Model Ts were all black, so William Piper's Cubs were all bright yellow with black trim. When Piper began producing Cubs for the Army during World War II (see the introduction), the Cub was designated the L-4 (L for liaison) and received extra Plexiglas panels at the rear of the cockpit for better visibility, along with an olive-drab color scheme. Minor modifications resulted in such designations as L-4A (the original model), L-4B (no radio), L-4H (improved brakes and tail wheel), and L-4H (adjustable-pitch propeller).

Immediately before the U.S. entry into World War II, sales of the Cub were spurred by the government's Civilian Pilot Training Program, organized to develop a pool of pilots for the U.S. military. Seventy-five percent of all pilots in this program were trained in Cubs, many going
on to more advanced training in the military. In 1940, 3,016 Cubs were built, and peak wartime production saw a new L-4 emerge from the fact ory every twenty minutes. Between 1941 and 1945, the Army procur ed nearly six thousand Cubs, and they were flown in all theaters of the war. These L-4s (also known as the Army O-59 and Navy NE-1) ren dered invaluable service training pilots, directing artillery fire, evacuating wounded, carrying and dropping supplies, and doing courier service, aerial photography, and frontline liaison.

Production of the J-3 Cub ended in 1947, by which time a total of 14,125 civilian and 5,703 military Piper Cubs had been built. The J-3 was succeeded by the PA-18 Super Cub, basically the same airplane with a bigger engine (up to 150 horsepower) and wing flaps, which was produced up into the 1980s. In Army use, it became the L-21 and saw service in the Korean War.

Today the J-3 is finding ever-increasing popularity among antique airplane buffs. It has been estimated that perhaps forty of the original Army L-4s are still flying in the United States and Europe, along with hundreds of J-3s. Still an excellent trainer and an enjoyable sport plane, the Cub remains simple, economical, slow, and safe to fly, and the demand for J-3 Cubs remains high today, with corresponding prices. The Piper Aircraft Company is still in business, but no longer makes the Cub.

P
IPER
J-3/A
RMY
L-4 S
PECIFICATIONS