Baa Baa Black Sheep (2 page)

The pilots and ground crews were recruited secretly from the Army Air Corps, Navy, and Marine Corps. Two detachments of pilots and crews were already over in China doing business, I was told. I understood that I was to be in the third detachment to go overseas, but I had no idea that the third was also going to be the last.

A World War I flyer, a retired Army Air Corps captain, breezed around different flying bases here in the United States, recruiting people he counted on having the necessary qualifications. If a pilot or ground crewman signified his intention to go, from there on everything was handled through Washington, D.C.

When I first learned about this deal, I was an instructor at the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida. I was a regular first lieutenant in the Marine Corps with six years of flying experience, most of it in fighters.

The captain never approached me. I got in touch with him. He tried to tell me that any number of pilots had twenty years of combat experience under their belts. After thumbing back over aviation history in my mind I wondered where in hell these jokers were supposed to have gotten all this experience.

He added: “The Japs are flying antiquated junk over China. Many of your kills will be unarmed transports. I suppose you know that the Japanese are renowned for their inability to fly. And they all wear corrective glasses.”

“Captain, it’s quite a setup, but how do you know the pilots wear glasses?”

“Our technical staff determines this from the remains after a shoot-down. I haven’t mentioned this before because I thought you would be more interested in the flying end, but we have some of the most skilled technicians in the world in the Group. Furthermore, our aircraft will be the latest off the drawing boards. We already have aircraft factories going night and day right there in China. Best of all, there’s good money in it—six hundred seventy-five dollars per month. But the sky’s the limit, because they pay a bonus of five hundred for each Japanese aircraft you knock down.”

And there I sat, taking it all in, mentally calculating how wealthy I would be.

The captain could squeeze me in tentatively as a flight leader—because of all my experience, he said. And with all the ability I told him about he said I would soon be a squadron leader. Somehow, I had the feeling I had to lie in self-defense in order to get along with this Group he was talking about.

The captain tried to impress me with the high character of the men who were to be over me and under me. They were people who drank like gentlemen and paid their gambling debts. Bravery above and beyond the call of duty was dripping all over his suite in the San Carlos Hotel there in Pensacola.

Maybe the dear captain did have all these high ideals,
God rest his soul. Maybe he wanted them all for this dream group but had to settle for less. I don’t know.

But one thing for certain, I didn’t tell him that he was hiring an officer who had a fatal gap between his income and accounts payable. And because of this situation I had to account by mail to Marine Corps Headquarters each month how much money was being paid on each debt. Nor did I tell him that I was a whiz at a cocktail party.

All this spelled but one thing, I would be passed over for the rank of captain in the USMC, as surely as I was sitting there in the San Carlos. I had to convince the captain—and I did.

An unannounced resignation went through the Marine Corps four days later. This resignation was clipped to a lengthy agreement of reinstatement without loss of precedence, if I survived, or if the United States declared war. These papers were to be kept in Admiral Nimitz’s secret safe. In short order I was handed a passport with a horrible picture in it, labeled, “member of the clergy.”

All this was wrapped up one week after I first met our recruiting captain. The night I started to pack, I thought I’d better go into the bar, which happened to be adjacent to my quarters in B.O.Q. It seemed necessary to make a hero’s farewell to some of the student officers I had been guiding through flight school, helping them to get their coveted wings of gold.

Naturally I didn’t keep my big mouth shut. The captain’s Utopian air force was topped as each round of bourbon was being shaken for by a dice cup. I excused myself from this wonderful company only twice during the entire evening. The first time I had to go to my quarters and feed my dog, Fella, a rather large mixture of collie and shepherd. It was against regulations to have dogs or women in your quarters, but that was where I kept Fella when I slept. In the daytime the dog was out at Squadron II, where I instructed and checked students eight flights a day for one hour each, five days a week. He knew what airplane I took off in with each student, because he followed us out to the flight line. These airplanes were all the same color, yellow, and the only difference was the numbers on their sides. So I don’t know how the dog could recognize mine, but he did.

I was told that the dog always lay under my desk until our “Yellow Peril,” as these trainers were called, came back from a flight and was pulling up to the flight line. Then he would be all wags, standing below our cockpits, while the student and I climbed out. He never had to be cautioned about the propellers. After a few pats on the head the dog would follow us into the ready-room and to my desk. I would explain a number of things to the student and make entries of progress in his flight log.

Many people wondered why the dog and I were so inseparable. As I look back on this, I realize that I was down to my last friend.

During this last week my boss, who was one swell fellow, spoke to me as he walked by my desk, leaning down at the same time to pet Fella. The dog growled, which was unusual, and the hair stood up on the back of his neck.

Commander “Chink” Lee laughed and said: “Why don’t you teach your dog the proper respect for your commanding officer? That’s no way to get a good fitness report.”

“My dog’s a hell of a lot smarter than I’ll ever be. He probably already knows what you put in my fitness report.”

Chink flushed, then added: “You’d better not take that mutt to China, because if you do they’ll eat him.”

“No, I’m not going to, but I can tell you one thing for sure, he’s going to be the only one around here that I’m going to miss.”

When I excused myself from my drinking buddies the second time that farewell evening, I took care of my packing. All of my earthly possessions consisted of my uniforms and civilian clothes. There were about three thousand dollars’ worth of khaki, blues, whites, mess dress, full dress, and sword. This was not an excess of uniforms prior to World War II. They were required by regulation, but what little I had paid on them in the last five years hadn’t made a dent in their original cost. All of the uniforms went on the floor and the back seat of my sedan. Civilian clothes, except those I was wearing, went on top of the heap. This way I knew the dog and I wouldn’t be crowded in the front seat.

After packing I returned to the bar and was given the hero’s farewell, no doubt the first one since the Marines last fought in Nicaragua. Finally Fella and I were ready to start for the West Coast, but it wasn’t until after the Negro bartender
said: “Closin’ time, gentelmun, that’s all for tonight.”

My parents came down to San Francisco from their apple ranch near Okanogan, Washington, to say good-by and pick up my car. My mother tried to talk me out of going on such a wild-goose chase. She said: “There are other ways of paying off one’s indebtedness.”

My answer was: “Oh, don’t worry, Mom, I’ll get by okay. I haven’t got an enemy in the world.”

A feeling of remorse came when I saw Fella standing on the clothes and uniforms, looking out the rear window as my mother and father drove off for Okanogan. The dog seemed to be saying: “Why are you leaving me? What have I done wrong?”

Most of the pilots waiting to go overseas were two or three years younger than I was, and they had virtually no flying experience other than what they had received in flight school. Some I recognized as recent graduates from Pensacola. There was only one thing to believe, naturally; all of the vast experience was already in China.

Another thing, these pilots were taking their golf sticks, tennis rackets, and dress clothes. I guessed they were proper in doing this, because the captain had said: “You will be gentlemen in every sense of the word. Wherever you are stationed, you will have an interpreter who will act as a valet.”

Of course I didn’t know anything about the Orient, other than what little I had learned in school. And I didn’t believe that the United States would ever be at war. But I did stop to realize that anyone with twenty years of combat experience, which means something in most businesses, would have been buried for almost eighteen years. Come to think about it, the underwriters were making book on seven years for military pilots at this time. In addition, their actuarial figures didn’t have a damn thing to do with getting shot at in the bargain.

And again, I must have been dragging on an opium pipe when Dr. Margaret Chung, of San Francisco, gave each pilot a jade charm on a silver chain to wear about his neck, and said: “You are now one of my many sons. I pronounce you Fair-haired Bastard Number——”

Later the pilots referred to their charms, because they couldn’t remember the Chinese words, as “The Jade Balls.”

We stayed in the little-known hotel for a very good
reason, but conserving money didn’t happen to be it. How in hell the press never got the early scoop is beyond me! There must have been a minimum of ten bars in each square block in downtown San Francisco, and each of us was in every one of them during the two weeks, as had been the two detachments that preceded us. There was the captain, too, in uniform, with his prized “LaFayette Escadrille,” extra pair of wings, adorning the lower part of his blouse, which was the proper place to wear such an honor.

Nobody seemed to know who we were, where we were going, or anything else, and apparently didn’t give a damn.

Ex-captain Curtis Smith of the United States Marine Corps Reserve was in charge of our detachment. Our recruiting captain had placed him in command, for he himself was remaining in the United States. Smith was thirty-five years old and had held the highest rank previously.

Smith had plotted the entire trip in minute military fashion, although we were no longer military men. He had planned duties, watches, and even disciplinary measures. When Smith insisted on numerous occasions in gathering us together in platoon front and calling roll, he would address us in the most formal military manner. His bluest of blue eyes reflected like sapphires in the sunlight as he would go into his “Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli” act. The act was delivered in a strong, clear voice from Georgia. I thought at the time, and still do, “What a ham—what a ham.”

Jesus, how I dreaded Smith’s formations. I had counted on getting away from it all when I resigned, and hoped for something better instead of something worse. How happy I’d be when the trip was over, and I no longer had to listen to him.

Smith had been at Pensacola, where I instructed. After
years in the business world he had just completed a refresher course, and he took the AVG job more seriously than any new Annapolis graduate would have. Standing there, trying to fit Smith somewhere into the future picture, I found myself worrying for the first time.

Smith undoubtedly made me a little envious, too. He gave the impression of refinement, a department in which I was lacking, but I gave Smith credit for opening my eyes to the fact that a few, himself included, were not going for the remuneration alone. They were going to free the world for democracy, and were willing to give their lives if necessary. And, funny as it may seem, after a lengthy session in his cabin, one lonely blacked-out night at sea, he damn near had me convinced. Looking back, I think that he might have convinced me at that—if he hadn’t run out of whisky.

When we left San Francisco, I knew that I was trying to escape my own common-sense reasoning. If this was strictly a service deal, our mission to further democracy didn’t quite gel. And I knew it. Hell’s bells, I was twenty-eight years old. I knew that the people I was traveling with couldn’t possibly be as different as night and day from those waiting for us to join them. Everything should have been clear to me then, but it wasn’t. American citizens were getting so much a head on us. Just the same as cattle. The two ingredients necessary to accomplish this human sale were greedy pilots and a few idealists.

The taxicab stopped at Pier 40. When I arrived, some of my mates were carrying their belongings aboard ship. While Smith was paying the cabdriver, I took an inquisitive glance at the stern of this lady who would lug us halfway around the world. “
Bosch Fontein
, Batavia,” was in large letters on the stern. The name meant nothing to me, other than that it was Dutch. I don’t recall ever asking what it stood for.

My concern for Smith’s formations left me as I walked slowly along the pier from the stern to the bow. Perhaps this came from a habit I had acquired in aviation of always walking completely around an airplane before climbing aboard.

It was midmorning when I boarded the
Bosch Fontein
, home port Batavia, Java, wherever that was. Carl, a three-hundred-pound mess steward, explained to me later that the home port used to read “Amsterdam.” They had to change
the home port because the Germans had occupied their fatherland. The entire ship’s crew had families in occupied territory.

On many an evening I was with these Dutch crewmen sipping Bols Gin, which was their drink, listening to their tales of home and the rest of the world I hadn’t yet seen. They were gentle, friendly people. There wasn’t enough they could do for us. It was amazing, hearing these Dutch damn England with a far greater hatred than they had for the Germans who occupied their homeland, their loved ones practically in slavery. England was considered the basic cause for all this trouble.

The lunch, with a choice of numerous entrees, was enjoyed by all. We were informed that this Dutch motorboat had a bar but that it didn’t open until we passed the three-mile limit. The first meal was not just put on to make an impression, for the quality and quantity continued throughout the lengthy voyage.