Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (17 page)

Alan would leave her each morning at dawn and carpool to the base. But the academic schedule allowed him to be at home for dinner. In the hot and steamy evenings, they barbecued, went to parties, and lounged by the pool on the base, sipping drinks with other newlyweds. On weekends they played golf, a game to which Alan was becoming addicted. No months at sea, no enemy threats. Just the two of them starting a life. And one balmy south Texas night, in the second-floor bedroom of their Ocean Drive apartment, they conceived another life, the first child in a family that was to prove a
bedrock of Shepard’s life.

By early 1947, Shepard’s grades had improved enough that his instructors raised his rating from “average” to “above average.” He and Louise transferred to Pensacola, Florida, for the final months of advanced training, and this final test of naval flight training was the toughest of all.

It’s been said that finding an aircraft carrier at sea is like finding a pencil mark on a white wall. Before the Navy would give Shepard his wings, he had to find that pencil mark and land an airplane on it. Six times. With his father watching from the deck, filming the whole thing.

Before he learned to fly, Shepard was known mostly for his self-assured attitude and occasional displays of aggressive determination. He was one of a quarter of a million naval officers and, at that time, merely a lowly lieutenant j.g. (junior grade)—just one of the crowd. Earning those wings, however, was the first step toward being marked as exceptional.

A naval aviator’s “wings of gold” are a pair of wings attached to an anchor. They signify that the wearer has landed a plane on that speck of a carrier, which means, in many pilots’ minds, that they are “the best-trained men in the world.” One pilot said that after he successfully landed his first plane on an aircraft carrier, “it was difficult to walk without swaggering.”

The crazy notion of using ships as floating runways had emerged in the early 1920s. The first aircraft tenders were retrofitted with long tracks that would catapult seaplanes over the edge. The USS Langley was the first true carrier, a former coal carrier with steel planks welded into a skinny rectangle on top. By 1930, two more ships—the battle cruisers
Lexington
and
Saratoga—
had been converted to aircraft carriers, and Navy contractors began building planes with folding wings, so that more could fit atop. Carrier aviation evolved through the 1930s with the important addition of arr
esting gear—cab
les that snag and stop incoming planes—and hydraulic catapults that shoved airplanes into the air.

But probably the most critical innovation—the one that surely saved many pilots’ lives during World War II—was the spontaneous creation of the landing signal officer, or LSO. This was the brave and meticulous man, stationed at the rear of a carrier, who gave signals to incoming aviators with rectangular paddles in each hand. The first LSO was the USS Langley’s skipper, Kenneth Whiting, who got frustrated watching a pilot repeatedly miss his landing. He grabbed two white sailors’ caps, ran down to the rear edge of the Langley, and coached the pilot toward the deck with hand motions
to indicate when he was too high or low. That extra guidance proved so helpful that the LSO was immediately initiated into the emerging hierarchy of carrier aviation.

LSOs guided pilots to safe landings by advising them to add power (two paddles held together in front of the LSO’s body) or to drop lower (both arms raised overhead into a slight V), or to abort and “wave off” (both paddles waved frantically overhead). A basket of netting over the left rear of an aircraft carrier’s deck, a dozen feet below the LSO’s platform, provided a place for him to jump and escape a crash landing.

Carrier aviation had indeed come a long way by the time Shepard prepared for his six required carrier landings, and he was set to earn his wings at an ideal time to be a pilot in the U.S. Navy. Though President Truman had signed the National Security Act in 1947, creating a new U.S. Air Force, Navy pilots considered themselves—would always consider themselves—the nation’s best pilots. And throughout the late 1940s stories rippled through the insular naval aviation community of various records and firsts performed by ice-in-the-veins Navy pilots: an eleven-thousand-mile, nonstop trek f
rom Perth, Australia, to Columbus, Ohio; the first ejection seat, tested at six thousand feet above Lakehurst, New Jersey; an amazing 170-hour endurance flight. Some records lasted but a blink. The world speed
record of 641 miles an hour, set at Muroc, California, by Turner Caldwell, was bested five days later by a pilot who reached 651 miles an hour. Pilots were now even flying
jets
off and on aircraft carriers. It was a whole new world, Shepard’s world
—if
he could nail six landings.

On the second day at sea, aboard the USS
Saipan,
Alan and a handful of other trainees prepared to make their six landings. The wind blew steadily that day, making an already complicated maneuver more difficult. Even the takeoffs were rough, with the winds slapping the planes sideways as soon as they were airborne. And the wind played tricks with the trainees’ efforts to line up their landings. One pilot came in at a horrible angle and the LSO frantically waved his paddles, sending the pilot away from the ship and back around to the end of the line. Another pilot’s wobbly attempts and
subsequent wave-offs made the ship’s officers so nervous that the pilot was sent back to land on shore.

As Shepard approached for his first-ever carrier landing, Shepard’s father, Bart, pointed a 16 mm camera at the approaching dot of a plane, which grew larger as it neared the ship. Shepard had convinced the captain of the
Saipan
to allow Bart aboard for the two-day trip; in his uniform, Bart proudly walked around the deck, saluting all who came near.

Shepard had performed the prelanding pattern by flying ahead of the ship, banking into a U-turn, and then passing at a low altitude, U-turning again, and following the ship’s wake until he spotted the LSO’s paddles. His descent was slow and steady. His speed was just right—a few knots above the stall speed. Each time the wind nudged Shepard off track, the LSO tilted his paddles to get him straightened out. Finally, when it seemed as though he was going to fly right over the ship, Shepard saw the LSO’s paddles drop down and left—the signal to cut power. He pulled back on the th
rottle, let the nose drop a little, and then pulled it up again. His SNJ dropped to the
Saipan
’s deck, bounce
d hard, and then caught one of the arresting wires with its tail hook. Pilots call carrier landings “arrested landings” or “traps”—more like a controlled crash than a gentle runway touchdown. Shepard’s body was thrown forward into his shoulder straps, and he nearly head-butted the instrument panel—the violent conclusion to every safe carrier landing.

“Absolutely perfect,” Shepard yelled. “Right in the center.”

His next five landings were also nearly perfect.

The next day Bart pinned on Alan’s wings of gold, and the uniformed father saluted his uniformed son. Alan called it “one of the best moments” of his life.

5

A perfectly charming son of a bitch

After receiving his wings, Shepard, like other knighted Navy pilots, paused anxiously at a fork in the road. Both paths led to a career as a naval aviator, but only one offered the full flyboy package—speed, thrills, danger, and adventure.

On the day he received his wings, he had been handed a one-page form on which to list his preferences for a squadron assignment. Like many of his peers, Shepard wrote “CV”—the Navy’s alphabetical code for carrier aviation. Next to that he wrote “VFB” (a fighter-bomber squadron), then “VF” (a fighter squadron), and then “VTB” (a torpedo-bombing squadron). Each of his selections was a request to become a so-called single-engine pilot. Newly winged pilots were assigned to either single-engine or dual-engine aircraft. The latter meant big bombers or transport planes, oafish, lumbering air buses u
sed to transport troops or supplies. Due to their size and the need for a long runway, dual-engine planes were based on land. At the time, the best way to reach an aircraft carrier was to be selected for the smaller, speedier single-engine aircraft.

Single-engine flyers, furthermore, would be entrusted with the Navy’s fastest, most sophisticated planes. And if chosen for single engines, they’d be pointed down a path leading
to the next generation of aircraft—jets. In the late 1940s the Navy had begun slowly replacing its propeller planes and their piston-driven engines with jet-propelled aircraft. Only a handful of the Navy’s top pilots were flying jets at that time (the first U.S. jets were flown in 1942 and 1943). But the next best assignment—which placed an aviator in line for jets—was to serve as a single-engine pilot.

At the bottom of his request form, Shepard added an extra plea, an effort not only to be assigned to single-engine planes but to get the nastiest single-engine of all.

“I earnestly desire to fly fighter-bombers—Corsairs,” he wrote.

Shepard had been introduced to the powerful, ugly, and notoriously tricky F4U Corsair during the final year of World War II. He watched from the deck of the USS
Cogswell
as divisions of the menacing planes grumbled overhead, aggressively bound for some aerial enemy confrontation. He’d heard thrilling stories about the Corsair’s kamikaze-killing sprees. Still, there was an asterisk beside the Corsair’s success. It was an imperfect plane, and only the best pilots could fly it—which, of course, was all Shepard needed to hear.

The Navy made its assignments by reviewing a student’s grades and assessing which squadrons needed new blood. Shepard had to worry whether his late surge of improvement during Corpus Christi training had been enough. He knew the Navy wanted careful, “check-happy” pilots—those willing to check and recheck their planes before taking off, in pursuit of error-free flying. Navy airplanes were getting faster, more sophisticated, and more unforgiving by the day. It was not a time for Dilberts.

Shepard did not have to wait long for his answer. Five days after scribbling “CV” and “Corsairs” he received a letter ordering him to report the following week to Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida.

But surely the two letters he saw most clearly on the half-page letter were VF—the code for a fighter squadron. Not only
had he received his wish to be a carrier pilot, he had been chosen to fly the coolest, most dangerous plane in the Navy.

The single-engine F4U had a long snout and V-shaped “gull” wings, earning it various nicknames like “Hose Nose” and “U-Bird” or simply the “Hog.” A two-thousand-horsepower engine drove its enormous thirteen-foot propeller. It had terrible visibility; it was difficult to see over the long nose, and early versions had a birdcage over the pilot instead of a bubble canopy. Pilots had to zigzag while taxiing down runways, just to be able to see around the nose and in front of them. The Corsair’s fuel cells leaked and had to be taped up. On takeoff, pilots had to practically stan
d on the right rudder to keep it from turning or “torquing” to the left. The plane bounced hard on landings, which pilots often compared to “milking a mouse”—a delicate feat. As one famous Corsair pilot said, “The air, not the runway, was the Corsair’s element.” The manufacturer, Chance-Vought, was constantly modifying the plane to correct the problems and even hired the most famous pilot of all, Charles Lindbergh, to work out kinks and teach other pilots how to handle the temperamental plane. Late in World War II Lindbergh had traveled to Corsair operating bases in the South Pacific as a civilia
n technical adviser; that’s where he had nearly crossed paths with Shepard, on the corpse-covered island of Biak.

Despite its maddening and dangerous quirks, the Corsair was also an incredibly successful enemy-killer during the war. It could fly more than four hundred miles an hour and could turn on a dime. During World War II, heavily armed F4U Corsairs shot down more than two thousand Japanese aircraft, most of which had just a fraction of the Corsair’s power and maneuverability. In a fast dive, the front edge of the Corsair’s wings made a whistling sound, and the Japanese called the terrifying planes “whistling death.”

Among the many notable wartime Corsair pilots was an unflappably talented Marine named John Glenn, Shepard’s future colleague and friend. Glenn flew fifty-nine combat missions in World War II. Despite being hit by antiaircraft fire five times, he always managed to fly his damaged but sturdy Corsair back home. “Nothing gave me more pleasure than to be flying a Corsair,” Glenn said in his memoirs. “You reach a point of oneness with the plane, as if you are the brain and it is the body.”

Joining a Corsair squadron was a very sweet assignment for a twenty-three-year-old. Practically every Navy pilot of the day wanted to fly off aircraft carriers, although not all of them wanted to do so in the Corsair. Many of Shepard’s colleagues had a love-hate relationship with the temperamental Corsair. But Shepard absolutely loved the plane, calling his Hose Nose a “for real men only” kind of machine.

Even after the war, the Corsair continued to inflict plenty of damage on pilots. The engine sometimes stalled at slow speeds, and if it did, the plane would flip to the right—often too quickly for a pilot to correct. Pilots called this “a bad stall characteristic”—a murky euphemism that meant the plane could spontaneously crash and burn.

One day one of Shepard’s classmates came in too high and fast for a landing at Cecil Field, slowed down too abruptly, stalled, and flipped. He was killed in a fireball a half mile short of the runway. Another peer failed to adjust the mixture control (which sets how much air and fuel the engine uses) before taking off; as the Corsair became airborne, the engine quit and both plane and pilot were obliterated.

A dark joke among Corsair pilots was that the schedule in a Corsair squadron was a grueling one: a flight at 6 A.M., a flight at 1 P.M., a funeral at 3 P.M. Some pilots called the Corsair “the bent-wing widowmaker.”

Death continued to stalk Shepard in his career, beckoning him and wooing him like a demon chanteuse. It h
ad pursued and taunted him throughout World War II. It had unnerved and mocked him at Corpus Christi, and it now taunted him at Cecil Field. More than three thousand Navy trainees lost their lives in the mid-1940s, and thousands more were injured. The Navy counted thirteen thousand major accidents in one year, half of them resulting in destroyed planes.

Learning to recover from the loss of a fellow aviator was an unwritten part of the curriculum of naval flight training. The solution, usually, was to shun it—and then drink. Acknowledging death was a dangerous thing. It was like acknowledging fear, and fear was unacceptable. So, to fuel their resistance to the fear of death, they imbibed.

Among the notorious imbibers during Shepard’s months of advanced training outside Jacksonville were two former Naval Academy classmates, Dick Hardy and Bill Botts, who rented a beachfront house at Ponte Vedra Beach. Alan and Louise lived nearby, and Alan carpooled the twenty-six miles to Cecil Field every day with Hardy and Botts; the threesome, according to Botts, “collected speeding tickets like popcorn.”

On weekends, Alan and Louise sometimes attended the infamous Hardy and Botts beach parties together. But Louise was carrying their baby, and pregnancy didn’t agree with her; her fragile constitution often left her exhausted and bedridden. So Alan regularly walked alone to the boozy and bustling Ponte Vedra beach house, where cocktail shakers chattered and locals girls in bikinis giggled and danced. Actor Freddie Bartholomew (who had starred in a 1941 movie called
Naval Academy)
lived next door and often stopped by for a drink. Alan or Bill Botts usually rented a small biplane from
the local municipal airport and took turns landing on the hard-packed beach, taking party guests up for show-offy spins, loops, and dives. Botts recalled that on one such ride, a cute redhead screamed, “This is the first time I’ve been off God’s green earth!”

As Louise approached her due date she left
Jacksonville and went to stay with her parents at Longwood. Friends recalled that Alan then began occasionally accompanying the other bachelors for nights on the town.

Before long, though, a vice admiral who lived a few doors down the beach caught wind of the weekend parties and ordered them to cease. The owners of the beach house kicked Hardy and Botts out. “And the party was over,” Hardy recalled.

After that Shepard and the others were assigned to their first squadrons. Training days were over. It was time to become aviators.

In July 1947 Louise gave birth to their daughter, whom they named Laura, in Wilmington, near Longwood. A few months later, after recuperating at her parents’ house, she joined Alan in Norfolk, Virginia, where he had been assigned, back in April, to his first squadron.

Fighter squadron VF-42 was awaiting the overhaul of its aircraft carrier, the USS
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The
FDR
had been commissioned weeks after the end of World War II, the first of a new class of behemoth postwar carriers. When Shepard first spotted her, she was as rusty as a forgotten pickup truck.

Her deck, just shy of a thousand feet, was the Navy’s longest, and in 1946 it had been used to host the first-ever test launches and landings of a jet on an aircraft carrier. But when military funds dwindled after the war, the
FDR
’s manpower was cut back to a skeleton crew, which fell behind in maintaining the huge ship. The
FDR
became rusted and filthy until she was finally put into dry dock for a much-needed overhaul. During the overhaul, Shepard’s squadron operated out of Norfolk Naval Air Station, exercising their Corsairs out over the Atlantic.

For a brief while longer, Alan and Louise and their baby daughter were a normal family. In the two years since the end of World War II, despite moving from California t
o Texas to Florida to Virginia, Alan and Louise had enjoyed evening meals together, shared the same bed, played golf on weekends, and acted, for the most part, like a typical postwar couple. But Alan and his Corsair were about to embark on two years of extreme flying far from home and family. And during those two years he would begin distancing himself from his pack of peers, establishing himself as one of the premier pilots in the U.S. Navy. New levels of skill and an even stronger confidence would begin to emerge.