The location turned out to be in barren desert country west of the Algodones dunes, a few miles outside the grubby, sun-baked town of El Centro.<\/p>\n
There in the blazing heat of summer 1943, stocky, slab-jawed Maj. Bill Dean of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, skipper of newly commissioned VMTB-242, tackled the job of organizing and training what was to be the Marine Corp’s sixth and last torpedo bombing squadron destined for combat in the Pacific.<\/p>\n
He started out with five SNJ advanced trainers, three aging SBD Douglas dive bombers from the Solomons, a skeleton ground crew and one grizzled sergeant major named Russell L. Hopkins.<\/p>\n
By the luck of the draw, he landed four solid, experienced combat pilots as senior flight leaders: Barney McShane, Bud Main, Bill Ritchey and George “Sahib” Nasif.\u00a0 All four had recently returned from the ongoing Guadalcanal campaign.<\/p>\n
Next, Dean picked out 22 of us with advanced operational training as the squadron’s initial cadre of pilots.\u00a0 At the same time, he added 68 enlisted men and a few essential ground officers to head up engineering, ordnance, radio and radar, intelligence, support material, plus a medical unit.<\/p>\n
TBF Avengers began arriving early in August along with aircrews and additional pilots, including eleven junior pilots straight out of Pensacola and Corpus Christi.\u00a0 During the intensive air maneuvers that followed, it became apparent the eleven juniors could not perform at a level with the rest of us.\u00a0 They were transferred out to Goleta, a Marine Corps training base near Santa Barbara, for further seasoning.<\/p>\n
More aircrews and ground crews reported in, more transfers ensued, bringing the new squadron in at full operational strength: 40 pilots, seven ground officers and 303 enlisted men.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Bill Dean was a consummate careerist, dedicated to the Corps, and gifted with strong organizational abilities.\u00a0 His sense of humor was non-existent, however, and he had little rapport with his pilots.\u00a0 He was not a popular commanding officer.\u00a0 Whether or not he was a first-rate combat pilot is something I never determined.\u00a0 He led few of the squadron’s missions\u2014none of the sorties in which I was involved.<\/p>\n
\u00a0***<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jake Nevans and I were\u00a0among the first pilots to report in at El Centro.\u00a0 Jake was a ruddy, raw-boned six-footer from Colorado.\u00a0 In the heat of the night, we were issued our bedding and assigned to an empty, loosely framed BOQ building, inundated with dust and infested with black widow spiders.<\/p>\n
Personal memory is such a slippery customer.\u00a0 As I recall it now, sometime in the early morning hours, I think Jake did a backward somersault out of bed with a blood-curdling yell.\u00a0 He’d spotted a fat, black widow spider on his sweaty sheet, next to his leg.\u00a0 In the turmoil that followed, I upended a chair and discovered two more widows, nestled in the bottom of the chair’s seat.<\/p>\n
A thorough room inspection revealed a glut of the deadly widows in hiding.\u00a0 The two of us searched them out and exterminated them.\u00a0 Scores of them.\u00a0 With deadly aim, we squashed every last one of them.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Over the years, Jake and I have maintained a lasting friendship, half a world apart.\u00a0 At the end of the war, he headed for the Philippines, where he spent many years as a manager with an old-line British trading company.<\/p>\n
In the Philippines, Jake married Sally Saleeby, the vivacious daughter of an American scientist who played a major role in developing the Philippine hemp industry. \u00a0Sally and her family had been prisoners of war during the Japanese occupation.\u00a0 Eventually, Jake and Sally moved down under to Australia where they still operate their sprawling “Dunraven Ranch” in New South Wales.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
To my complete surprise, Ox Wilson, an ATO from Oregon, turned up in the second contingent of pilots to join the squadron.\u00a0 The last time we’d seen each other had been the end of spring term l941, when I left the University of Oregon, joined the boilermakers’ union and went to work at Willamette Iron & Steel.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I had no idea that Ox had entered Naval flight training and had made it into the Marine Corps.\u00a0 He went through Pensacola, not Corpus Christi.\u00a0 Our paths had not crossed anywhere along the line\u2014until that hot, suffocating afternoon when he came trudging into our dusty El Centro BOQ, lugging his newly-issued bedding.<\/p>\n
That night over a couple of beers at the El Centro Officers’ Club, Ox reported that another Oregon buddy, Vic Collin, was in training somewhere in the surrounding desert with the 104th<\/sup>Army Infantry Division, the “Timber Wolves.”\u00a0 He said that Vic was a second lieutenant getting ready to ship out to Europe.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n After a few days of familiarization flights, solo, out over the Sonoran Desert and Orocopia Mountains, all pilots assembled one morning for aircrew assignments.\u00a0 Capt.\u00a0Barney McShane conducted the draw.\u00a0 Barney was the squadron’s personable and very popular, Boston-Irish flight officer.\u00a0 He later became the squadron’s executive officer, number two in command under Bill Dean.<\/p>\n For me, it was a lucky day.\u00a0 I was assigned two bright, alert, well-trained teenagers who flew with me for almost two years\u2014throughout my tour in the Pacific.\u00a0 Following the war, we became long-distance, life-long friends.<\/p>\n Pfc. Ernest L. Linsmaier, an eager, young Marine from Ohio, brimming with enthusiasm, became my sharp-eyed, turret gunner.\u00a0 He sat coiled in the power turret during flight, manning a .50-caliber machine gun.<\/p>\n Pfc. Leon Wilmot, a rugged, young Marine from upstate New York, quiet and determined, became my radioman and radar operator.\u00a0 He occupied a bench seat in the belly tunnel facing a bulkhead of radio and radar gear.\u00a0 He also controlled one .30-caliber “stinger” gun in the aft position.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Grumman originally designed the versatile TBF as a torpedo bomber.\u00a0 VMTB-242 was officially designated a Marine Torpedo Bombing Squadron.\u00a0 But the Marine landing at Guadalcanal and the island hopping strategy that followed on the road to Tokyo shifted the emphasis for most Marine Avenger squadrons in the Pacific from torpedo attacks to low-level bombing, dive bombing, strafing and ground support missions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Out to build a first-rate striking force, our serious-minded skipper launched a relentless combat training syllabus that\u00a0included dive bombing, low-level skip bombing, both fixed and free gunnery, close air-ground support, navigation, night flying and anti-sub patrol, in addition to the latest torpedo tactics.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n The squadron operated seven days a week with officers and enlisted men alike divided into alternating port and starboard liberty sections.\u00a0 Half the squadron took liberty Thursday afternoons through Friday.\u00a0 The other half took liberty Saturday afternoons through Sunday.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n Navy and Marine Corps top brass had an odd name for dive-bombing without the perforated “Swiss cheese” dive brakes or flaps of an SBD.\u00a0 They called this technique “glide bombing.”\u00a0 But any Marine TBF pilot in the middle of a 65-degree dive on target, approaching redline speed, knew damned well it was anything but a “glide.”<\/p>\n Out on the Salton Sea, the Navy had constructed targets in a large U.S. gunnery range that stretched for miles.\u00a0 We practiced dive\u00a0bombing, or “glide bombing,” low level bombing and skip bombing on that Salton Sea range, hour after hour, day after day.<\/p>\n The TBF was a surprisingly accurate plane for dive bombing without a cockpit bomb sight.\u00a0 We would fly in echelon formation at about 7,000 feet with each plane peeling off into a steep dive at five-to-six-second intervals.\u00a0 We’d sight the target carefully alongside the nose during the dive.\u00a0 Then, when the target disappeared under the wing-root, we’d release the dummy bomb at 1,500-2,500 feet and pull out fast in a climbing, high-G turn.<\/p>\n By the end of the combat training syllabus, several of us could place a bomb within a 40-foot target area, consistently.\u00a0 That was considered exceptional accuracy.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n On simulated low-level attacks or on skip bombing runs, we would go into a shallow 35-degree dive at full throttle and follow that angle all the way to the release point.\u00a0 Or, we would level off and make a final run on the target at close to water level or ground level, depending upon the situation.\u00a0 We could achieve almost pin point accuracy with these low-level maneuvers.\u00a0 But we had to\u00a0recognize that in combat, such low-level tactics were more vulnerable to AA fire.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A nearby U.S. Army tank-testing unit cooperated with us for awhile on low-level skip bombing maneuvers in the desert.\u00a0 They would send a medium tank crashing through the brush and gullies in a series of fast, evasive moves.\u00a0 Each pilot would head down in a shallow dive, angle into a low-level run on the tank, and skip a hundred-pound water-filled bomb at the target.\u00a0 In a nearby radio truck, an operator reported to each pilot his hits and misses.<\/p>\n We were hitting the tank about six out of eight times when the Army called off the maneuvers.<\/p>\n Doe-eyed Jim Chambris, we called him “Bambi,” the mildest, most easy-natured pilot in the squadron, had come roaring in so low on one run that he hit the turret of the tank with his prop and broke off ten inches of a blade.\u00a0 An emergency landing followed.\u00a0 Fortunately, no crewman in the tank or in the plane was injured.\u00a0 But the Army called off further such maneuvers.\u00a0 Meanwhile, “Bambi” received credit for a direct hit.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n The tortuous training flights continued, hour after hour, day after day, as we sharpened our skills to meet what Bill Dean called, “The demanding standards of the Marine Corps.” In his engaging, Boston-Irish accent, Barney McShane put it differently.\u00a0 He told us, simply, “A well-practiced pilot flies better and lives longer.”<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n Col. C. L. Jolly of Marine Fleet Air, West Coast, lived up to his name when he issued a directive that made it possible for the pilots and aircrews of VMTB-242 to escape briefly the angry, hard-biting heat of El Centro\u2013and revel in the haunts of L.A. after dark.<\/span>He authorized Bill Dean to inaugurate TBF overnight liberty flights to Los Angeles.\u00a0 And he cajoled the Douglas Aircraft Company into allowing our planes to land at Mines Field, a privately owned facility near the Douglas plant in southwest L.A.<\/p>\n The Douglas people also graciously provided us with van transportation into the heart of Hollywood.<\/p>\n Holding to a schedule of alternating liberty sections, several TBFs were loaded to\u00a0capacity with hell-raising “liberty hounds” each Thursday and Saturday afternoon and flown to L.A.\u2014returning to the desert with hung-over cargo the next afternoon.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As I talk these words some sixty years later, I recall very little about those L.A. liberty flights.\u00a0 I do know that I was the pilot on two of the flights, maybe three.\u00a0 And I remember that even then, smog and haze could be a problem over L.A.\u00a0 I was flying CFR, contact flight rules.\u00a0 I had Linsmaier, Wilmot and two or three of our pilots crammed into the belly of my TBF.\u00a0 But when I let down over the San Gabriel Mountains into the sprawling L.A. basin, I couldn’t see the damned airport.\u00a0 I groped my way through a thick haze\u2014or was it smog?\u00a0 Quick decision: I flew out to the Pacific, circled back across Marina del Rey and there it was\u2014Mines Field\u2014right where it was supposed to be.\u00a0 No problem entering the landing circle.\u00a0 No problem landing.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Once they hit Hollywood, most aircrews headed for The Hollywood Canteen, located on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard.\u00a0 Movie stars such as Dorothy Lamour, Lana Turner, Heddy Lamarr, Dinah Shore, Betty Davis, and Betty Grable pitched in at the Canteen.\u00a0 They entertained, waited on tables, washed the dishes and danced with the soldiers, sailors and Marines passing through.<\/p>\n Even Marlene Dietrich did her part for the boys at the Canteen.\u00a0 By request, she always sang “Lili Marlene,” the haunting German war song that became so popular it was adopted by the troops on both sides.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, no commissioned officers were allowed in the Hollywood Canteen.\u00a0 So when VMTB-242 pilots landed in L.A., they would split in all directions.\u00a0 Three of the most popular hangouts were the main lobby bar at the Hollywood Hotel, the Zephyr Room at the Chapman Park Hotel and the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel.\u00a0 All three hangouts attracted women who seemed to\u00a0have a visceral feeling for flyers.\u00a0 All three hotels offered pilots a low, low rate for a double room, overnight.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n George Nasif’s family background was Syrian.\u00a0 His outlook was tough-minded American.\u00a0 He was an excellent pilot and a thorough Marine\u2014the only pilot in our squadron who served in the Marine Corps before the war as a\u00a0non-commissioned ground officer\u2014a first sergeant.\u00a0 He went on to earn his wings as a warrant officer.\u00a0 With the Marine Corps’ buildup following Pearl Harbor, he was commissioned a second lieutenant.<\/p>\n Somewhere along the line, he earned the nickname “Sahib,” an early East Indian or Arabian term of respect.\u00a0 A name he barely tolerated.<\/p>\n During one of those L.A. nights on the town, Nasif and I teamed up for a tour of assorted bars along Hollywood Boulevard.\u00a0 I remember only one of them: a swinging joint where the genial trombonist Jack Teagarden and his small jazz group were in total command.\u00a0 On a platform up back of the bar in his relaxed and bluesy style, Teagarden had the room mesmerized.\u00a0 Nasif and I had good “front row” bar seats.<\/p>\n We soon learned that our bartender was an ex-Marine. When we ordered “Scotch on the Rocks,” he looked around carefully, unlocked a cabinet under the back-bar, lifted out a treasured, impossible-to-find bottle of single malt Scotch whiskey\u2014and poured us a double.<\/p>\n “Semper fi, fellas,” he said with a wink.\u00a0 “This one’s on me.”\u00a0 He put the bottle away, locked the cabinet, and walked on down to the end of the bar where duty called.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n Poker, Gin Rummy and Chess were three popular pastimes at El Centro.\u00a0 I played all three. One night, in the middle of a low-stakes poker game, a few of us decided that Bugs Bunny had the makings of a gutsy and appropriate squadron insignia for VMTB-242.\u00a0 I forget who first came up with the idea.<\/p>\n Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, the legendary Warner Bros. cartoonists and anarchist-animators, had created Bugs Bunny in 1940.\u00a0 He was sort of a cartoon Cagney\u2014street-smart, crafty, pugnacious\u2014the blas\u00e9 hare who won every battle without ever mussing his aplomb.\u00a0 One raised eyebrow was all it took to illustrate his superiority to the carnage around him.<\/p>\n One of the pilots at the table that night, Frank Moses, bragged that he had connections at Warner Bros.\u00a0 That did it.\u00a0 Frank became our unofficial 242 delegate.\u00a0 During a liberty in L.A., Frank visited the studio.<\/p>\n We were surprised and properly impressed when he returned with a promise from “Looney Tunes” producer Leon Schlesinger that the studio\u00a0would have\u00a0Jones and Avery create a VMTB-242 Bugs Bunny insignia for us, compliments of Warner Bros.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The result was a full-color, original drawing of a cocky Bugs Bunny, carrot in hand, astride a live torpedo on its way to its target.<\/p>\n The pilots and crewmen took to the design, immediately.\u00a0 Our pompous skipper did not.\u00a0 He reluctantly agreed to go along, however, in the face of the squadron’s enthusiastic reaction.\u00a0 1st<\/sup> Lt. T. A. James, our hard-drinking procurement officer, placed an order for insignia patches and decals.<\/p>\n What happened next is murky.<\/p>\n According to the squadron intelligence officer’s official report, issued sometime later, the Bureau of the Navy sent a letter to Bill Dean in which the bureau refused to authorize the Bugs Bunny design as the VMTB-242 insignia “because it was not original enough.”<\/p>\n That differed from the word spread rampant around the squadron.<\/p>\n As we heard it, Dean still didn’t like the design and never bothered to send the insignia in to Washington for approval and registration.<\/p>\n Either way, it was never officially registered.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, all hands began sporting patches of the Bugs Bunny insignia on field jackets and flight gear.\u00a0 Ground crews applied decals to plane fuselages.\u00a0 And that’s the way things stood throughout the war.<\/p>\n Today, cartoonist connoisseurs consider Bugs Bunny one of the greatest animated characters ever created.\u00a0 And the outlawed VMTB-242 insignia remains a valuable collector’s item.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n We practiced free gunnery in three-plane formations.<\/p>\n A separate plane towing the target sleeve would weave from one side of the formation to the other, above and below.\u00a0 This gave each plane and gunner an angle of fire.\u00a0 And that’s when I discovered that my turret gunner, Ernie Linsmaier, was good\u2014very good.<\/p>\n The sleeve was a 12-foot marked banner at the end of a long 200-foot cable attached to the tow plane.<\/p>\n The drill got underway with the tow plane getting the long tow line and target sleeve into the air.\u00a0 Easier said than done.\u00a0 One of our senior pilots, I think it was Bud Main, twice failed to get the sleeve off the ground without dragging it beyond use.<\/p>\n Gutsy Jake Nevans was the next pilot scheduled and he laid it on the line.\u00a0 He told everybody within hearing distance that\u00a0he would get the job done, period.\u00a0 That challenge, on the heels of Bud Main’s earlier problems, prompted a few of us to hang around outside the ready room and watch the show.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jake revved the engine, set off down the runway, lifted the nose, pulled the wheels up\u2014too soon, too soon<\/em>\u2014and sure enough, the plane crashed back down, its belly screeching along the runway trailing sparks and\u00a0parts and a tattered banner and tow line.<\/p>\n Back in the ready room, the skipper ordered Jake to write a full report on the incident for the colonel who commanded the base.<\/p>\n In disgust, Jake told us that he wrote, “Like a damned fool, I pulled the wheels up too early and stalled out the aircraft.\u00a0 My actions were inexcusable.”\u00a0\u00a0 End of report.<\/p>\n That cryptic two-liner almost earned Jake a court martial.\u00a0 But Barney McShane interceded on Jake’s behalf and offered him a few extra pointers for his second try the following afternoon.<\/p>\n Jake was a man of indomitable spirit.\u00a0 He made it on his second try.<\/p>\n My turn for the dreaded tow-plane assignment came a week or two later in an SNJ.\u00a0 Or was it an SBD?\u00a0 I don’t remember.\u00a0 But with Barney’s tips and Jake’s mishap in mind, I know that I followed the startup checklist with more care than ever. “Check fuel\u2014mixture rich\u2014low blower\u2014set prop\u2014wings locked\u2014cowl tabs open\u2014check tabs\u2014tail wheel.”\u00a0 All O.K.\u00a0 Then I kept my feet on the brakes while I revved the engine up to a high rpm level, as in a carrier take-off.\u00a0 And I let ‘er go.\u00a0 Nearing the end of the runway, I eased back on the stick and nursed the plane into the air, carefully.\u00a0 I probably didn’t pull up the wheels until I reached a 1,000-foot altitude.\u00a0 And I felt the drag of that damned tow line all the way up to 7,000 feet.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n Mexicali is a sprawling capital city today, swollen with maguiladoras<\/em> or foreign-owned assembly plants, large hotels, industrial parks, banks, new government buildings, golf courses, giant warehouses, and more than 900,000 people.\u00a0 Far different from the Mexicali of sixty cockeyed years ago, when we knew it as the small, colonial capital of Baja California Norte, located in a dusty valley across the Mexican border, 12 miles south of El Centro.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At that time, Mexicali was a bordertown of unexpected contrasts.\u00a0 A\u00a0jumbled collection of sleazy bars, juke joints, cafes and whorehouses clustered in the blocks below the guarded crossing between Calexico and Mexicali.\u00a0 Yet, in a shady plaza less than a mile away, across from “the governor’s palace,” young locals still promenaded under the trees on Sunday afternoons, the women on the inner circle, the men on the outer circle, moving in opposite directions, slowly.<\/p>\n In that shady plaza during Mexico’s Independence Day celebration, September 16, 1943\u2014a day locked in my memory far too long\u2014I came face to face with the beguiling Elva Arce.\u00a0 Her dark, dark eyes, huge\u2014in a perfect oval face.\u00a0 Almost too perfect.\u00a0 Cream white Castilian skin.\u00a0 Her dark hair, long and lustrous.\u00a0 Who was she?\u00a0 A young Dolores Del Rio?\u00a0 I was\u00a0fascinated.<\/p>\n We were strangers in a crowd, viewing an outdoor exhibit of Mexican art.\u00a0 I don’t remember what I said to her as we stood close to each other in front of a wall hung with Mexican revolution-era paintings.\u00a0 But in response, she gave me a shy, wonderfully knowing smile.\u00a0 That was the beginning.<\/p>\n By late afternoon, we were strangers no more.\u00a0 We walked for awhile, wandering the plaza.\u00a0 We talked, while sitting at a table in an open-air cantina on the far corner.<\/p>\n To the intermittent sounds of mariachi<\/em> in the distance, I set out to learn more about this captivating creature from south of the border.\u00a0 I soon found out that she had a keen appreciation for her rich Mexican culture and an avid interest in Mexican art\u2014an interest she shared with her younger sister and an older brother.<\/p>\n In a soft, melodious voice, she told me of her first year away at college in Mexico City.\u00a0 She said that she was now at home in Mexicali helping in her father’s business until the end of the year, when she planned to return to the University of Mexico.<\/p>\n She told me that her father owned Mexican handicraft stores in both Mexico and the southwestern U.S.\u00a0 Her older brother managed the largest of these, located on historic Olivera Street in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n She revealed, also, that her mother, whom I later met, affectionately called her Elvita.\u00a0 I liked that.\u00a0 With her laughing permission, I began calling her Elvita.<\/p>\n That afternoon was the beginning of many endearing times we shared in late 1943.\u00a0 Few of my squadron mates knew about it.\u00a0 I would slip away from the base and\u00a0quietly head for Mexicali and Elvita whenever I could.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On our last, lingering evening together, she presented me with an enchanting photo of herself which I carried with me throughout my tour overseas.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/p>\n Sometime during that period, Ox Wilson made contact with Vic Collin in the desert.\u00a0 The three of us rendezvoused one weekend in the bar of the De Anza Hotel in Calexico.\u00a0 We were half-tight when we carefully and stiffly walked across the border into Mexico.\u00a0 I wanted them both to meet Elva Arce.\u00a0 It didn’t work out that way.\u00a0 We ended up raising hell that night in Mexicali and sleeping it off back across the border in Calexico.<\/p>\n