{"id":80,"date":"2012-09-15T20:07:37","date_gmt":"2012-09-15T20:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/?p=80"},"modified":"2012-12-10T03:15:22","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T03:15:22","slug":"join-the-marines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/join-the-marines\/","title":{"rendered":"Join the Marines"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first American beachhead landing of World War II came in the early fall of 1942 when U.S. Marines stormed ashore at Guadalcanal. It marked the start of America’s painful, inexorable struggle to push Tojo’s Imperial forces back to Tokyo.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Japanese\u2014taking dead aim at Australia\u2014had been constructing an airfield base on Guadalcanal, at the southern end of the Solomon Islands. Whoever held Guadalcanal held the key to the vital lifeline between the U.S. and Australia, last surviving Allied power in the South Pacific.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Marines established a shaky perimeter on the island, capturing what later became Henderson Field.<\/em><\/p>\n

Operating from bases on Bougainville and Rabaul and with heavy naval support, the Japanese furiously and, repeatedly counter-attacked for months on end, in a frenzied attempt to retake the entire island. They threw in heavy troop reinforcements, naval bombardments and waves of fighters and bombers coming down the slot of the Solomons. Exhausted Marine ground troops held on and expanded their perimeter under appalling conditions. And a grim, outnumbered band of weary Marine Corps flyers in their Grummans blasted incoming bombers and out\u00adfought Mitsubishi Zeros overhead.<\/em><\/p>\n

Suffering insurmountable losses, the Japanese military in February of 1943 finally abandoned their efforts to recapture Guadalcanal. Within the Corps, the names of Marine flyers like Robert Galer, John L. Smith, Joe Foss and Oregon’s Marion Carl became the stuff of legends.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The valor of the flyers in the skies over Guadalcanal, the honor and tradition of the Corps, and my brash and youthful eagerness at that time to get into the thick of the fight, led me during advance flight training to try for a transfer into the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n

What I didn’t realize was that only the top ten percent of each flight class received, that choice\u2014to stay in the Navy or join the Marines. I had my work cut out for me.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The fierce intensity of advanced flight training at Corpus Christi hit hard. It was total immersion, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.<\/p>\n

Could I handle this?<\/p>\n

On the ground, we studied aerodynamics, meteorology, VFR and instrument navigation, radio flight procedure, oxygen procedure, leadership principles, military flight rules and regulations, flight manuals. The pressure was relentless. I studied harder than ever before in my life. 3 kept telling myself that failure was out of the question. We spent time in the water, learning emergency water landing procedures and survival techniques. We learned how to send and receive Morse code, fast. We continued never-ending drills on instant plane and ship\u00a0recognition\u2014split second flashes on a screen. And we each learned how to fire, field strip and clean the Colt .45 automatic that was to become an integral part of our flight gear in the South Pacific.<\/p>\n

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In the air, we flew the Vultee SNV Valiant, a cantilevered, metal, low-wing monoplane with an enclosed cockpit, two-way radio for ground communications, hydraulic flaps and a Pratt & Whitney 450-hp radial engine. It was quite a jump from the biwing Stearman that I flew during primary training at Livermore.<\/p>\n

The Vultee was a noisy, smelly, aerobatic transition trainer that introduced us to the instruments and feel of more complex and more powerful aircraft.<\/p>\n

One intimidating problem with the Vultee: It had a tendency to shake violently as it approached its stall speed of 75 mph. And the canopy rattled and shuddered on the second or third turn of a spin, as if the plane was about to blow apart. In the Army, it gained a reputation as a “Cadet Killer.” In the Navy, it was nicknamed the Vultee “Vibrator.”<\/p>\n

The Vultee SNV was an unforgiving aircraft to fly. You had to pay attention in the cockpit, every second, or you could run into serious trouble. Perhaps that was a valuable lesson. It forced us to sharpen our flight skills.<\/p>\n

After several hours in the air, getting familiar with the quirky SNV, concentrating on takeoffs and landings, I passed my key check ride. And I moved on to formation training, including basic three-plane sections, crossovers, peel-offs from six-plane echelons, formation takeoffs and other essentials that came with close formation work. We worked on precision formation drills, hour after hour, until they became second nature.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

At the start of advanced instrument training, most of us considered the Link Trainer an instrument of torture. The subject was blind flying. Mounted on a stand, the Link Trainer looked somewhat like a mini-plane amusement park ride. You climbed in the black metal box and strapped<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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yourself into a simulated cockpit. The instructor would then close the solid hood over your head. Suddenly, you were surrounded in a flat black and zinc chromatic green world. Arrayed around you, was every instrument, gage, switch, lever, handle, knob and button inside an SNV. And every instrument and flight control behaved exactly as those in the plane’s cockpit.<\/p>\n

The instructors hammered into us this adage: “When you’re flying blind, you can’t trust your senses. Trust your instruments.”<\/p>\n

The untold hours I spent in one of those black boxes helped jumpstart my confidence level in dealing with climbing and diving turns, stalls, spins and emergency procedures\u2014while flying blind. And in a second phase, I finally became comfortable with flying beams and radio\u00a0ranges\u2014procedures for getting back to your base or carrier when the weather closed in.<\/p>\n

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By this time, I admit I began having fun in the fearsome link Trainer. It was like playing around in a virtual reality video game. Only I was playing for keeps.<\/p>\n

The final test, however, came in the air. I piled up 24 more hours flying blind in a hooded Vultee “Vibrator” with an instructor in the rear seat, keeping a close eye on every maneuver. Then came the final check ride.<\/p>\n

When I came in for my landing, I knew I had passed the test. He gave me two thumbs up.<\/p>\n

I think it might have been that same week that Eleanor Roosevelt had dinner with us in the cadet mess hall. She was on a two-day visit to Corpus Christi.<\/p>\n

FDR’s dynamic wife was probably the most active First Lady our country has ever known. Throughout the war, she had her own radio program and a syndicated newspaper column, My Day<\/em>. She seemed to be constantly visiting hospitals and military bases. And throughout her life, she always acted as a strong advocate for women, children and the poor.<\/p>\n

In her visit to Corpus Christi, she told us, “The important thing is that you never let down doing the best you are able to do.”<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Tragic news came in a letter from home. My mother reported that Eddie “Double Thumb” Daniels had perished at sea.<\/p>\n

Merchant marine officials informed Agnes that in a convoy bound for England, Eddie’s loaded freighter had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. The ship exploded and went under quickly in the waters of the North Atlantic. AH hands were lost.<\/p>\n

For<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Agnes, it was an unbearable shock and a horrible coincidence. Twice, she had married for love. Twice, she had lost a husband to the sea.<\/p>\n

My mother wrote that Agnes planned to leave Portland and return to her hometown in Minnesota, where her mother and two sisters still lived. In later years, my mother and Agnes continued to correspond. They remained life-long friends.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It was the first of April, the day of fools, when I took on torpedo bombers as my operational specialty in the final phase of advanced flight training at Corpus. I had requested fighters as my first choice, but at that time, there was a waiting list. I learned that I would have to wait about two months to get into the over-crowded fighter program, centered at the Kingsville NAS some 35 miles inland from the main base.<\/p>\n

I thought that one over and said, “To hell with it.1<\/sup>‘ By this time, I wanted to get going. Really get going. So I followed Bob Ballard, Al Hunt, Clyde Hollenbeck and several other Oregon Webfoots into torpedo bombers.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Located near the southern tip of Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, Corpus\u00a0Christi NAS was surrounded by several outlying fields for special training in torpedo bombers, fighters and dive bombers. Waldron Field, the newly opened center for torpedo squadron training, was named for the skipper of Midway’s star-crossed Torpedo 8.<\/p>\n

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Within 48 hours of requesting a torpedo bomber assignment, the Navy had me out at Waldron Field getting checked out in a North American SNJ.<\/p>\n

The SNJ was a hardcore, high performance, low-wing combat trainer, with a Pratt & Whitney 600 hp air-cooled engine, retractable wheels and a 42-foot wing span. In aerial performance, it was extremely agile, a quantum jump up from even the Vultee SNV.<\/p>\n

My checkout in an SNJ provided me with a solid introduction to the basic cockpit layout for most WWII single engine combat planes. Beneath my left arm were the accessory controls\u2014elevator, aileron and rudder trims as well as landing gear handle, tail wheel lock and flap actuators. Allof the electronic and radio goodies were in a console by my right arm. Fuel gauges were on the floor for a quick glance during flight. Straight ahead, of course, was the instrument panel, And as I straddled the stick with my legs stretched on either side, my<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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feet rested on giant rudder pedals at the forward end.<\/p>\n

It was a good plane. Consider this: We are about 50 years into the jet age and there are more than 500 of those old SNJ Warbirds still in action around the world. Some foreign governments use them as airforce trainers. In a few of Hollywood’s Grade B thrillers, I’ve also spotted SNJs painted with the red “meatball” rising sun insignia, serving as simulated Zekes, (U.S. forces used male names for Japanese fighters, female names for Japanese bombers. Zeke was the U.S. designation for the Mitsubishi Zero.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0At Waldron, we concentrated on Torpedo Squadron attack formations, which demanded close teamwork.<\/p>\n

We moved on to gunnery with practice at the machine gun range, on into basic dive bombing, glide bombing and low level bombing techniques, plus more navigation practice, using the Mark III plotting board.<\/p>\n

As we neared the end of training at Waldron, the pressure mounted. In the middle of a lengthy navigation hop, two of us blew off steam by flat-hatting across a section of the giant King Ranch\u2014a totally forbidden maneuver. We swooped down below tree top level and streaked across the grassy prairie lands. As we roared over a rocky rise and skimmed down over a herd of longhorn cattle, we may have started a small stampede.<\/p>\n

It was a stupid, dangerous, damned fool thing to do. Not only did we risk our lives, we risked getting tossed out of Corpus if they caught us. They didn’t catch us.<\/p>\n

About a week later, when the final lists were posted, I let out a whoop and\u00a0a holler when I saw my name on the list of pilots accepted for transfer to the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n

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***<\/p>\n

In the fifth month of my 21st<\/sup> year, I received Navy Department certification as a Naval Aviator and I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. As I stood in the hot Texas sun, while they pinned on my chest the Wings of Gold, I couldn’t help but reflect momentarily on that wintry day after Pearl Harbor, when I first told my mother that I was determined to go into Naval Aviation. Deep inside, I had never been certain during training whether or not I had the right stuff. But I doggedly kept at it.<\/p>\n

Sure, I was proud. Proud to be in the Corps\u2014proud to be a Marine Corps pilot.<\/p>\n

I knew, however, there were severe<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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tests to come.<\/p>\n

Along with my wings and certification papers, Commander Fritter presented me with orders to report in ten days to the Commanding Officer of the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville, Florida, to go immediately into carrier qualification training.<\/p>\n

I left Corpus Christi with 245 hours of flight time in the log books.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The intrigue and romance of New Orleans still captivates me, left over from my first visit that year as a guy from the West Coast who had never before breathed the moist, decadent air of the Mississippi delta country.<\/p>\n

“The Big Easy” was a stopover on a lurching train ride across the South to Atlanta and down to Jacksonville. I stayed in New Orleans three days and three nights. Joining me on that R&R holiday was a former Corpus roommate and avid jazz fan named Dick Brubaker, from Bakersfield, California. Dick had remained in the Navy and was a newly commissioned Ensign.<\/p>\n

We shared a room in some forgotten low-budget hostelry located on the St. Charles Streetcar line. But we spent most of our time rolling around the French Quarter, the Vieux Carre<\/em>, where wrought iron balconies held up tottering facades\u2014the beautiful and the decrepit. We reveled in the Quarter’s wartime, carnivalian atmosphere.<\/p>\n

The sounds of great jazz resonated up and down the streets. Before we were through, I think we hit every jazz joint in the Quarter. And most of the bars, too.<\/p>\n

At The Old Absinthe House Bar\u2014the same bar where Otto Larsen and Eddie “Double Thumb” Daniels grabbed a fistful of matchbooks for me when I was about twelve years old\u2014we downed bottles of Dixie Beer and gorged on freshly-shucked raw oysters from the Gulf-washed backwaters of southern Louisiana.<\/p>\n

Early one evening, coming out of an ancient bar with peeling yellow walls, we asked a dusky, almond-eyed beauty if she’d like to join us for dinner. She caught us by surprise when she smiled and said, “Yes.” A short time later, the three\u00a0of us were happily drinking Ramos Fizzes and digging into bowls of steaming jambalaya in a romantic little outdoor courtyard restaurant which she had recommended. It was next door to a gaudily painted tattoo shop\u2014an epitome of the Vieux Carre<\/em>\u2014the charming and the seedy, side by side.<\/p>\n

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At the end of an engaging dinner, Dick and I decided to invite our guest to<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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listen to some good jazz with us. But it never happened. With little more than a winsome smile and a hurried, “Goodbye,” she stood up and walked out on us. Literally.<\/p>\n

She disappeared down a path through the overgrown foliage at the back of the garden. And she never came back. We were bewildered, mystified. As I remember it now, we hung around for awhile, shrugged it off, paid the bill and wandered next door to view wild designs on the wall of the tattoo shop.<\/p>\n

I came close to taking a needle in my upper arm that night for a USMC globe-and-anchor tattoo, but I thought better of it. Instead, we rolled on to one more jazz and blues joint a couple of blocks up the street.<\/p>\n

Late on our last night in New Orleans, Dick returned to the hotel while I set out on a long walk in the moonlight, alone. I strolled deep into the Quarter, where the din of Bourbon Street soon gave way to residential charm-narrow passageways behind wrought iron and mysterious patios glimpsed though the profusion of hidden gardens. And always, the moist sweetness of perfumed air.<\/p>\n

That first visit to New Orleans was many years and thousands of miles ago. But even now, it makes me smile to look back on it.<\/p>\n

Inside the cavernous New Orleans train station, before boarding for Atlanta, I remember that we gulped strong New Orleans coffee and devoured deep-fried beignets<\/em> sprinkled with powdered sugar, The station was crowded and noisy. Across the far end of the station stretched a giant banner with the message, Loose Lips Sink Ships<\/em>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Walking the streets of a city’s old town district at night, alone, became a vicarious habit of mine in later years, especially during the sixties and seventies. After a dull business dinner, or a high-pressure business meeting, or sometimes just for the sheer intrigue of it, I would walk narrow cobblestone streets for an hour or so, enveloped in the atmosphere and architecture of the past. It was a head-clearing routine that I followed at various times in Geneva, Copenhagen, Athens, Paris, London, Tel Aviv, Barcelona and New York.<\/p>\n

Today, of course, strolling alone late at night in the old town district of any one of these cities would probably be risky business, indeed.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

“You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn’t any <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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woman and there isn’t any horse,\u00a0<\/em>nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane, and men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others. A man has only one virginity to lose in a combat plane, and if it is a lovely plane he loses it to, there his heart will ever be.”<\/em><\/p>\n

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ERNEST HEMINGWAY AUGUST 1944.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, when I first confronted a Grumman TBF Avenger, I thought it was a big, ugly, muscle-bound, unfriendly-looking monster. But in the months to come, I learned to love that plane.<\/p>\n

A tough, all-metal, mid-wing aircraft with a powerful Wright 1,900 hp radial engine, immense 13-foot Hamilton prop and deep, oval, tapering fuselage, the rugged TBF Avenger bore a strong family resemblance to Grumman’s smaller F4F Wildcat.<\/p>\n

Its 52-foot wingspan and 40-foot fuselage made the\u00a0Avenger one of the largest single-engine planes flown by the Allies during WWII. Yet its rearward-folding wings enabled it to be packed tightly together and fit deck elevators on even the small jeep carriers.<\/p>\n

It carried a three-man crew: the pilot in the single cockpit, a gunner in an electrically-driven ball turret to the rear of the greenhouse canopy, and a radioman with radar scope and controls in a compartment back of the internal bomb bay. That bomb bay packed one 2,000- pound torpedo or four 500-pound bombs or five 350-pound depth charges, controlled by the pilot.<\/p>\n

The pilot also controlled one fixed-forward .30 caliber machine gun, later upgraded to two wing-mounted .50 caliber guns or eight 5-inch rockets. The turret gunner manned one .50 caliber gun. And the radioman controlled one .30 caliber gun in the ventral gun position.<\/p>\n

After a study of the flight manual and a thorough checkout on the ground, I was cleared to take one of these babies aloft on a “fam” flight. As I shoved the throttle forward, picked up speed down the runway and roared into the air, I could feel the power of the 1,900-hp radial engine surging through the controls. This was flying!<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

At the outbreak of war, the International Olympic Committee had cancelled the 1940 Winter Olympic Games in Sapporo, Japan, and stopped all planning for the 1944 games, scheduled for Cortina d’ Ampezzo, Italy.<\/p>\n

This<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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move by the IOC shattered any Olympic dreams that 17-year-old Mary Bovee may have held, after winning her Pacific Northwest Junior Figure Skating Championship. Instead, she turned pro. She accepted a second offer to join the famed Ice Capades.<\/p>\n

Two days after graduating from Jefferson High School in the late spring of 1943, she said good-bye to her parents and boarded a night train in Portland, headed down the coast to California. She was bound\u00a0for L.A. and future stardom on ice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The show rehearsed in Los Angeles during part of the summer. Then, the cast with mountains of luggage, props and scenery were crammed on to a slow, five-day train enroute to New York City for the grand opening night performance in Madison Square Garden.<\/p>\n

It was a smash success.<\/p>\n

At the end of a sold-out, three-week date at The Garden, Ice Capades went on the road. By the time the show played Montreal, young Mary Bovee had been pulled from the line and given a featured skating solo on top of her contract role as understudy to Donna Atwood. (A former U.S. national champion, Atwood was the show’s featured star. Ice Capades owner John Harris ardently pursued her that year, too. Eventually, they married.)<\/p>\n

Such was the beginning of Mary Bovee’s 21-city, coast to coast Ice Capades tour in 1943. It was a whirlwind life of early morning rehearsals, nightly performances, two shows on Saturdays and Sundays, sell-out crowds, media interviews, photo sessions, catch up meals in late night restaurants, crowded hotels, rattling old trains, and a little daytime sight-seeing\u2014along with extra help in the war effort.<\/p>\n

In every city on the tour, the girls were booked for war bond drives, hospital visits with service men, blood bank donations, rolling bandages at local clubs for the Red Cross, knitting socks for overseas, and entertaining- the troops at USO centers.<\/p>\n

That was show business\u20141943.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In the swamps and palmetto trees somewhere east of Jacksonville, the Navy created a mock-up of a carrier flight deck on a landing strip, complete with cables and markings. My log book shows that during eight weeks of training in Florida, I made 35 two-a-day flights to that isolated strip and completed 150 simulated carrier landings and take-offs. Call that thorough training? Maybe so. At the time, I thought it was overkill. After<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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completing about a dozen landings, I thought most of us had a mastery of the technique. Coming into the landing circle, you lower the landing gear, you lower flaps and tail hook, and you approach the carrier flight deck from dead astern with nose up, tail down, fuel set for rich mixture, and power on just above stalling speed. Guided by the LSO, the landing signal officer, you line-up on the flight deck and when he gives you the Cut signal, you cut your throttle and drop to the deck in what can only be described as a controlled stall.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Al Hunt was a mischievous, fun-loving guy. His claim to fame at Jacksonville came when he put the wheels and flaps down on an SNJ and flew it up and down over the giant roller coaster at Jacksonville Beach.<\/p>\n

He wasn’t booted out of the Corps. But he did face a disciplinary hearing.<\/p>\n

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He ended up with a blemish on his record that cost him his promotion to Colonel in the reserves, many years later.<\/p>\n

Almost two years passed before I met up with AL again. He joined our torpedo squadron in the Pacific as a replacement pilot, shortly before the action at Iwo Jima.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Reports of bizarre happenings and mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle have been recorded for centuries. Sometimes called the Devil’s Triangle or the Twilight Zone or the Limbo of the Lost, it’s a triangular area of the Atlantic bordered by Bermuda, Southern Florida and Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n

We heard the weird stories. But we ignored them.<\/p>\n

My flight group took several long flights far into the Bermuda Triangle. These were over-water, navigational flights and anti-sub drills. The TBF Avenger had a range of 1,200 miles. Flying in a loose formation of six planes, we would head out into the Atlantic on three-hour and sometimes four-hour assignments. Several times we flew through heavy rain squalls without a problem.<\/p>\n

One year later, however, five Navy TBF Avengers on the same kind of over-water, navigational training flight, disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle without a trace. A PBM Mariner flying boat carrying thirteen crewmen and rescue equipment departed on a search for the missing TBFs. Ten minutes after take-off, the pilot checked in with the tower\u2014and was never heard from again.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On weekends in Jacksonville, pilots on<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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the make headed for the Roosevelt Hotel. It had a good bar. Good dance music. Good room prices. Good-looking women.<\/p>\n

My preference, however, became a resort town a few miles further south, where I had met the very friendly and beguiling Anne Entrekin. She had short, interesting- looking, curly blonde hair and a dark tan. She also had an old Chevy and a purse full of gas ration coupons.<\/p>\n

We had a few casual, easy-going weekends together that summer, before I took off for Chicago. Usually, we would go swimming in the surf, laze around in the dunes under the sun, eat at one of the fish houses, finish the day with Stingers at some local joint that had live music, and spend the night together in the Innlet at Ponte Vedra.<\/p>\n

It was a time of brief encounters.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On the choppy waters of Lake Michigan, north of Chicago, the Navy maintained a converted flat-top comparable to the fleet’s 10,000 ton, “jeep” carriers. At that time, in order to gain a U.S. carrier qualification rating, every Navy and Marine Corps pilot who finished carrier training had to make eight successful landings and take-offs on this short deck carrier, the USS Sable, as a part of his “final exam.”<\/p>\n

My time came on a gusty, windy day. In a six-plane\u00a0formation, three and three, we flew out to meet the carrier from our NAS base at Glenview, Illinois. We began our approach at 7,500 feet and spiraled lower into the traffic circle. Even with many weeks of training and practice, I approached the carrier with an outsized feeling of trepidation. My stomach was doing flip-flops.<\/p>\n

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I concentrated everything I had on altitude, attitude, propeller pitch, throttle setting, landing gear, flaps, tail hook and the rapidly approaching Landing Signal Officer on the right aft corner of the flight deck.<\/p>\n

I knew I was correctly lined up. The LSO held his paddles straight out from his shoulders to signify I was “in the groove” and the approach was satisfactory, In the final seconds, as my Avenger came in several feet above the flight deck, the LSO slashed his right paddle across his throat and dropped his left arm to his side. That meant Cut. I immediately chopped back my throttle and held the stick\u2014rock steady. A second later, my plane struck the flight deck. A three point landing. I felt the tail hook grab hold of the cable. My shoulder straps took the<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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strain of the forward momentum, and the TBF lurched to a rapid stop with the tail hook still attached.<\/p>\n

I had made my first carrier landing. And it was perfect. Deck crews hurriedly disengaged the hook and I was cleared for immediate take-off. I gunned the engine and pushed the throttle forward to gain lift-off speed.<\/p>\n

I went on to complete successfully all eight of my required carrier landings and take-offs. The intense training and practice we put in at Jacksonville paid-off.<\/p>\n

As each of the pilots in my flight felt their way into the groove that day, one after another, I think only one received a wave-off. He came in too high in relation to the deck. To pass the wave-off signal, the LSO simply waved both paddles over his head. That wave-off signal had the force of military law. Instructors had pounded that point home to us during training.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

One of our pilots, K.J. Wilson, went AWOL. He shacked up with a local girl in a Chicago hotel room for several days\u2014and nights. The MPs burst in on them. K.J. was manacled and sent off to the brig.<\/p>\n

He came close to a full court marshal The Navy\u2019s major investment in wartime pilots, a special need for torpedo plane pilots, and K.J.\u2019s strong desire to get overseas and serve\u2014all combined to save him.<\/p>\n

After Chicago, K.J. hurried home to Oklahoma on leave where he married Betty, a very pretty and very popular brunette.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Three of us spent a night on the town in Chicago before leaving Glenview NAS. We covered the loop and then some. My only memory of that uproarious night is one south side club where we must have spent hours drinking watered-down bourbon and listening to the great trombonist J.C. Higgenbottom and his band. Every table, every bar stool, every square foot of floor space was filled. His Chicago jazz turned everybody on.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

When I pulled out of Chicago on a train headed for Oregon, I carried written orders to report in thirty days to the Commanding Officer, Marine Air Wing, Pacific, headquartered in San Diego. From there, I anticipated shipping out as a replacement pilot for a squadron operating in the South Pacific.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

During my time on leave that summer, I spent some precious hours with my Grandfather, Jim Dewey. In his late<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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years, before his death, I found once more that intimacy which had made my childhood associations with him a pleasure and a deep memory. He was a tough, old bird. He taught me the value of hard work. His death a few months later from a heart attack was shattering.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

That Portland visit gave me a feeling for how civilians were coping. My Mother, a true survivor, continued with her job at the Oregon shipyards, along with my Aunt Phoebe. The two of them worked hard on the home front.<\/p>\n

They nurtured “victory” gardens. And they helped in the scrap drives and paper drives going on everywhere. Recycling was promoted on all sides.<\/p>\n

“Use it up\u2014Wear it out\u2014Make it do\u2014Or do without.” A popular slogan of the day.<\/em><\/p>\n

Most everybody seemed to support the strict rationing programs, too. All fats, rubber, heating fuels and gasoline were tightly rationed. People drove at the gas-saving “victory speed” of 35 miles per hour.<\/p>\n

Adults were allowed up to twenty-eight ounces of meat a week, ten ounces of sugar a week, one pound of butter a month, and one pound of coffee every five weeks. Coffee drinkers learned to re-brew their grounds. Canned goods were scarce. Shoes for civilians became even more scarce.<\/p>\n

A shortage of paper resulted in small “pocket-size” paperbacks, a publishers’ innovation that still flourishes.<\/p>\n

No new cars were manufactured. No alarm clocks. No new equipment of almost any kind. The industrial might of America became totally geared to war production.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Silk stockings disappeared. Women’s nylons, which were introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, disappeared along with them. I was told that some nylons were available on the black market at unbelievable prices, but most nylon went into the making of parachutes, rope and tents.<\/p>\n

I dated the lovely Virginia Valentine during my stay in Portland. One night, I saw for the first time how women were coping without their nylons. They painted their legs with foundation makeup and used an eyebrow pencil to\u00a0draw a “seam” up the back of the leg. I thought it was a hilarious gimmick. Virginia took it very seriously\u2014as a part of her dressy, on-the-town make-up.<\/p>\n

\n

***<\/p>\n

At the end of my leave, when I reported to the CO of the Marine Air Wing in San Diego, I learned<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

that I would not be shipping out to the South Pacific. Not yet. I was one of twenty-two pilots selected to form a new Marine Torpedo Squadron at the El Centro Naval Air Station in California’s Imperial Valley, south of the Salton Sea.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chapter Sixteen :\u00a0VMTB-242 I<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first American beachhead landing of World War II came in the early fall of 1942 when U.S. Marines stormed ashore at Guadalcanal. It marked the start of America’s painful, inexorable struggle to push Tojo’s Imperial forces back to Tokyo. The Japanese\u2014taking dead aim at Australia\u2014had been constructing an airfield base on Guadalcanal, at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-join-the-marines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":48,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1174,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/1174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/byronwmayo.com\/memoires\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}