Semper Fi in the Sky: The Marine Air Battles of World War II

Semper Fi in the Sky: The Marine Air Battles of World War II

by Gerald Astor
Semper Fi in the Sky: The Marine Air Battles of World War II

Semper Fi in the Sky: The Marine Air Battles of World War II

by Gerald Astor

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Overview

Here, one of America’s most popular military historians re-creates, using their own moving and powerful voices, the true stories of the U.S. Marine pilots who flew the Allies to victory in World War II. These riveting accounts recreate conflicts ranging from the Marines’ gallant defense of Wake Island, where Captain Henry “Baron” Elrod destroyed two enemy planes before joining the fight on the ground, earning a posthumous Medal of Honor in the last-ditch attempt to stave off the Japanese, to the Battle of Midway and Guadalcanal.

Running the gamut from Second Lieutenant Alvin Jensen’s single-handed destruction of twenty-four grounded Japanese aircraft on Kahili to Lieutenant John W. Leaper’s sawing off a Kamikaze’s tail with his propeller over Okinawa, these thrilling oral histories of the Pacific war’s air battles bring them to life in all their terror and triumph.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307416605
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 12/18/2007
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 228,871
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Gerald Astor is a World War II veteran and award-winning journalist and historian whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, and Esquire. He is also the author of A Blood-Dimmed Tide: The Battle of the Bulge by the Men Who Fought It and Operation Iceberg: The Invasion and Conquest of Okinawa in World War II. He makes his home in Scarsdale, New York.

Read an Excerpt

ONE
 
TAKING WINGS
 
 
 
Even before the Wright brothers lifted off from the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, both the Army and Navy had begun to take an interest in the military possibilities of flying machines. By 1907 the Army had created an Aeronautical Division within the Signal Corps, and the Navy ordered its first aircraft to be delivered in 1911. That same year Alfred Austell Cunningham—an army veteran of the Spanish-American War, “a confirmed aeronautical enthusiast” (as he said after a 1903 balloon ride), and a commissioned Marine lieutenant at age twenty-seven—on his own while stationed in Philadelphia, leased a purported airplane for twenty-five dollars a month. He christened it Noisy Nan because of the racket created by the engine.
 
Unfortunately the contraption lacked the essential requirements of aerodynamics. Powered by an obstreperous four-cylinder motor, it lacked sufficient muscle to lift its wings, fuselage, and pilot off the ground. Only after as much as an hour of cranking would the engine sputter to life, enabling the plane to careen down the field without ever achieving flight. Cunningham created a bump at the end of the runway that jolted the machine as much as fifty feet into the air but Noisy Nan refused to continue on its own, content to settle back to earth. “I called her everything in God’s name to go up,” said Cunningham. “I pleaded with her. I caressed her. I prayed to her and I cursed that flighty Old Maid to lift up her skirts and hike, but she never would.”
 
When he abandoned Noisy Nan as a lost cause, Cunningham joined a local flying club and the members lobbied for a Marine airfield. Congress took notice, and the Marine Corps commandant of the day silenced the clamor by assigning Cunningham to flight school under the auspices of the Navy. On August 20, 1912, he soloed after two hours and forty minutes of instruction; Marine aviation had its first pilot. Cunningham continued to learn the art of flight for another year before he asked for ground duty “because my fiancee will not consent to marry me unless I give up flying.”
 
By 1915, however, the bride apparently relented, because Cunningham again received the designation of “naval aviator” and, with several others, notably Lieutenant Bernard L. Smith, sought to expand Marine horizons. Cunningham actually attempted the first catapult takeoff from a warship while it was under way. The catapult proved insufficient to the task, hurling Cunningham and his Curtiss flying boat into the water, an accident that broke his back. Another daredevil, Captain Francis T. Evans, confounded the experts when in 1917 he successfully looped a seaplane twice and then brought it out of a deliberate spin. Bernard Smith worked with Navy fliers to perfect a method to drop bombs from a plane and as an attaché in Paris spent three years visiting the World War I fronts to observe aerial warfare.
 
“With the Great War ravaging Europe and the airplane becoming another, albeit limited, weapon, the military establishment in the United States took notice. The Naval Appropriations Act of 1915 allowed naval aviation forty-eight officers and ninety-six enlisted men, with the Marine Corps, under a formula of four to one, authorized twelve officers and twenty-four enlisted men. The bill provided 50 percent extra pay to aviators for hazardous duty. Cunningham assumed command of an aviation company for a Marine Corps advance base force and interviewed all candidates for aviation service.
 
After the United States entered World War I, Cunningham sailed to Europe to study British and French aviation. He flew on photographic and bombing missions. Upon his return to the States he submitted a plan to the Secretary of the Navy for aircraft attacks upon submarines and their bases. In the last days of July 1918 the First Marine Aviation Force, with Squadrons Seven, Eight, and Nine, arrived in France and became part of the Navy’s Northern Bombing Group. Shortly after taking up station, the Aviation Force began unpacking crated boxes containing American-made De Havilland 4 bombers. Unfortunately the wood spars of the wings were warped, many control wires were too short, the engines required extensive overhauls, and bombsights and airspeed indicators had to be requisitioned. While waiting for functioning DH-4s, Marine pilots underwent some training with the French and British, and a few Americans flew missions in Royal Air Force (RAF) fighters, Sopwith Camels.
 
Among the airmen was Francis P. Mulcahy, a son of Irish immigrants, a native of Rochester, New York, and a classmate of football celebrity Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, from where he graduated in 1914. In 1917, before the United States entered the war, Mulcahy, already in the Army, had applied, unsuccessfully, for flight training. When he heard that commissions in the Marines were available, Mulcahy pleaded with Notre Dame’s Father Cavanaugh to aid him. On the strength of the priest’s recommendation, Mulcahy obtained his transfer as well as the opportunity to fly under civilian instructors working for the Signal Corps.
 
Shipped to France, Mulcahy earned a Distinguished Service Medal after he and two other pilots dropped food and bread to an isolated French regiment. The trio of DH-4s skimmed the battlefield at a hundred feet, making four trips under intense machine-gun, rifle, and artillery fire. Mulcahy said he never feared antiaircraft, mainly because of the limited range of such weapons.
 
On September 29, 1918, Mulcahy, with Gunnery Sergeant Thomas McCulloch in the rear seat of a DH-4, engaged in a shootout with enemy planes. Recalling the sudden attack by the German aircraft, Mulcahy said, “I was alone, maneuvering as best I could. They filled the damn thing with bullets. It was the nastiest kind of crackling sound. One went through McCulloch’s flying suit. This old plane had a wind-driven propellor, two of them, because they had two main tanks to suck the gas from the tank to the carburetor. One bullet must have just barely missed my head because it hit one of those things and put it out of commission. The engine stopped. I thought, Oh, oh, here I go in Germany, Holland or something with no engine. Then I thought, I’ll try the other tank. And whoop—she jumped. They must have been very much surprised when we didn’t go down.”
 
Even more discomfiting to the enemy, McCulloch actually shot down one of the Fokkers, becoming the first of the Marine contingent to register a victory. The official records claim only four enemy planes shot down by Marines, but the number may be slightly higher. Subsequently Lieutenant Ralph Talbot with Corporal Robert G. Robinson allegedly downed three enemy planes in duels on October 8 and 14, with Robinson seriously wounded in the stomach and leg. Both received the Medal of Honor. Not until October 14 did the Marines drop their first bombs, 2,218 pounds’ worth, by Squadron Nine on a railroad junction. By the time of the November 11 armistice, the Marines reported four pilots KIA and three wounded—but sixteen from the overseas air arm died of influenza.
 
The achievements of Marine aviation’s 282 officers and 2,180 enlisted men in France during World War I were minor, but the corps now held a franchise for air warfare. However, policy dictated that Marine fliers serve ground duty tours. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas C. Turner, a former machine-gun company commander who used his spare time to learn to fly with Army pilots and was a spit-and-polish disciplinarian, assumed command of the airmen. As officer in charge, he ruled as a benevolent despot, and his superiors, impressed by his demeanor and achievements, granted him a waiver for a hearing defect. During his term, flying was a high-risk duty; in 1922, of seventeen new officer pilots, nine died in crashes. The following year, out of eleven additions, four were killed.
 
Robert Sherrod, in his History of Marine Corps Aviation in WWII, recalled a conversation with a flier from that era who told of a candidate for aviation in 1924 being asked whether he wanted a three-, four-, or five-year tour. “What’s the casualty rate?” he asked. “Oh, about 25 percent a year.” The volunteer answered, “Put me down for five years and I’ll be 125 percent dead when I return to the line.”
 
Turner coped with ever-declining appropriations during the 1920s as the number of aviators fell to as few as 43 in 1921 and then rose in small increments to a mere 132 by 1930. Probably the only reason the figure climbed at all during the decade lay in the Marine presence in Santo Domingo, Haiti, and Nicaragua. A six-plane squadron, in 1919, joined a regiment of Marines stationed in Santo Domingo (leathernecks had been there since 1914) to strafe “bandits” or perhaps rebel groups, perform reconnaissance, and, with a specially modified De Havilland, evacuate wounded from deep in the interior of the country.
 
Revolution in the Carribean island nations of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) and Haiti and Central America’s Nicaragua intermittently brought in Marine Corps ground troops and some aviation units. The Fourth Air Squadron under Captain Harvey B. Mims, in 1919, with seven seaplanes and six Jenny airplanes, arrived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. For fifteen years the aviators would support efforts by local soldiers and a Marine brigade to suppress insurgencies. It was in Haiti that Lieutenant Lawson H. M. Sanderson, unhappy with the hit-or-miss techniques of aerial bombardment, manufactured a bomb rack using a burlap sack and a sight from a rifle barrel. He practiced on a range, diving at an angle of forty-five degrees, and reported, “The accuracy was astounding.” His squadron mates adopted the method, and glide-bombing, as it was called, became standard practice. Others would refine the techniques. Supposedly a keen student of a demonstration at an air race was the German aviator Ernst Udet. Upon his return home he designed the Stuka dive-bomber, a fearsome weapon during the early years of World War II.
 
When the Marines intervened in Nicaragua in 1927 they brought an aerial observation squadron led by Major Ross E. Rowell. He had learned to fly by paying for private lessons. Rowell’s initial requests for entry as a naval aviation pilot (NAP) had been denied; not until 1923, at age thirty-nine, did Rowell get his wings. As the situation in Nicaragua worsened, a second squadron arrived, with Rowell taking overall charge.
 

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