22 February 2007

Skyraider: A story of the long war




Episode One: Recall

I heard this morning that the war is not lost, according to retired General Barry McCaffery, but it is sliding away from us. That was the sense of the note forwarded to me by a Dad who has two kids in the fight, one just coming back and the other just arrived. With the erstwhile Willing partners distancing themselves from Washington and pulling out of the fight, it looks inevitable.

The candidates in the nascent Presidential race are competing to present their pacifist platforms to the unhappy electorate, the Sunnis are getting heavier and better weapons, and I have seen all this before. I have to agree with the General's assessment that Ryan Crocker, the new reconstruction czar, and military pro-consul Dave Petreus do not have a winning hand.

I hope they can pull something off that does not look too much like defeat. This is not Vietnam, after all, which was a game-piece on a global chess-board. Some of the people we are fighting now are going to be coming at us somewhere else, just as soon as they can.

Uncle Ho never wanted that. He was content to light up a Salem menthol cigarette and see the occupiers gone.

My heart goes out to the 14,000 National Guard troops who are going back to Iraq next year, their time between deployments slashed to meet the demands of The Surge.

State commanders of the National Guard in Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio got the alert message last month. A brigade in Oklahoma that still has a battalion in Afghanistan wasn't supposed to be in the rotation for another three years, which serves to illustrate how badly stretched the force is.

There are some that argue that this war, asking so much from so few, is breaking the system. I am inclined to agree with them, five years into this. But it has happened before.

It was 1950, just five years after the Pacific War concluded. The Koreans supported by the Russians came south of the 38th Parallel, attacking the Koreans supported by the Americans, who had just completed the astonishing demobilization of eight million uniformed personnel.

I thank the serpent course of the Big Muddy for the chance to live the life I've had. The Mississippi River was the line of demarcation for the great recall of the reserves.

It was Dad's residence east of the Mississippi that kept him from being re-called to active duty in Korea, and flying his blue-painted AD-4J toward the Bridges at Toko-Ri.

That was the name novelist James Michener applied to his account of the real but fictionalized account of Navy pilots who must come to terms with their ambivalence towards the war, and the fear and adrenaline that went along with flying off a steel deck toward heavily defended targets.

They made a fine movie out of it, at the end of which the actor Frederick March turns to the camera and asks “Where do we get such men?”

Hell, I know where they got them. They came from dinner tables all over America, west of the Mississippi, where their new brides and newer children looked at them from their high chairs. Dad had been freed from the Navy at the end of the big War on the condition of his affiliation with the Reserve Program, and it was completely the luck of the draw that his unit was assigned to mobilize against the Russians in Europe, and not the Chinese and Koreans on the Pennisula.

Episode Two: Skyraiders

Dad's story was typical of those who were good enough to survive the Navy air training syllabus. He was selected to fly the famous Douglas SBD Dauntless Dive Bomber, the airplane that won the battle of Midway. Armed with the information from the Japanese codes the Spooks at Station Hypo at Pearl, the pilots were in just the right place at the right time.

They pulled the handle to deploy the fat perforated speed-brakes and pointed the nose straight down on the Japanese carriers where the flight-deck crews were hastily changing ordnance and fueling the planes.

Dad told me what it was like, putting the nose down like that, though he never made it to any of the great Pacific battles that we remember in sepia tones, and were actually bone-crushingly savage and murderous encounters. That is a good thing, at least from my perspective.

By early 1944, the Navy and Douglas recognized the need to replace the SBD. The follow-on aircraft would be a multi-mission platform that could dive, carry a torpedo and fly ground-support interdiction strikes. It also had to be fast and agile enough to twist and turn with Zeros and Messerschmitts in aerial combat.

The first prototype of the new aircraft flew in March of 1945, and the navy was so impressed that it ordered 548 production models a month later. BuAir designated the new aircraft the AD-1, for the first new-generation Douglas Attack Aircraft.

Like my Dad, it was delivered to the Fleet too late to be of use in the war, though no one knew just how abruptly the war would end. It was not a pretty airplane: it had a flat bottom and slab-sides on a massive fuselage.

With the war over unexpectedly, BuAir reduced the procurement program to by half, and came up with the name “Skyraider.”

The aircraft was gradually introduced to the Fleet as the magic Carpet returned soldiers and sailors from the Pacific to start their lives again. Dad's class at Pensacola was third-to-the last to be permitted to win their Wings of Gold. His are engraved with the date: April 2, 1946. They asked the class who wanted to go to the Fleet, and who wanted to go home.

Dad went to New York to finish school, and meet a pretty girl from Ohio, who worked for the Texas Company in the iconic Chrysler Building.

The Navy was awash with surplus equipment. There was so much that it could have equipped a major nation state from scratch. The Navy saw fit to use almost eighty major operational units as test dummies for the CROSSROADS atomic tests at Bikini Atoll.

All the while, the Douglas company was refining their design of the AD, since it was a remarkably flexible platform. Dad affiliated with the Reserves in New York, as was required, and he often says that the Skyraider could carry more tonnage than a B-17, and straight and level, it could outrun a P-51 Mustang fighter.

That was impressive, but there was a better anecdote that demonstrated to me just how powerful that brute really was. Dad said there was a guy at Grosse Isle Naval Air Station who managed to get his aircraft airborne with the wings still folded!

Naturally, he died. But that was part of the business.

Dad finished school, married and moved west to where the jobs were. He was at Ford's in 1948, and attracted away to feisty little American Motors the year that the Koreans came south.

Within three days of the start of the Korean War, Skyraiders were in action, striking targets north of beleaguered Seoul. The city fell, as the North Koreans swept down the peninsula toward the Republic's last stand at the perimeter around Pusan.

That is when the Reserves, already trained, made the critical difference as they flowed into the Fleet Seats and began to hammer back at the Communists. Former General Eisenhower was elected President, the first one I remember, and the AD became known as the premier attack aircraft in the world. It was useful in the age of jets, that had become ubiquitous as the rulers of the sky

Dad was tasked with the Red menace to the East, and he remained vigilant. I was old enough to recall the last discussion about the Skyraider at the dinner table. Mom gestured at us- three by then- and asked him precisely what he thought he was doing in that blue hot-rod on the weekends.

I don't know if he told her then, but she had a point. One of the regular training missions from Grosse Isle was to join up and run a simulated attack on the refinery downriver at Toledo. There was a burn-off stack at the facility for the volatile vapors that made a useful beacon of flame for the pilots.

Having made a successful run, Dad pulled off and cracked the canopy so that he could enjoy a cigarette before returning to the field. This was not an abnormal thing, half a century ago. The AD4-J had a cigar lighter on the instrument panel.

Dad enjoyed his smoke, and flipped the butt out the narrow opening in the canopy. The errant slipstream twirled it around a few times, and blew it right back through the opening, down Dad's kakhi flight suit, between his legs, and landed on the main wing spar far below.

I don't need to tell you what a lit cigarette and the fumes of high-octane aviation fuel can do. Dad would have been a fireball above Monroe, Michigan, boyhood home of George Armstrong Custer, if he did not take swift and dramatic action.

The AD was so big that he was able to lower the seat, un-strap and scootch forward out of the seat. Reaching up, he was able to maintain a hand on the control stick while he scuffed his flight boots along the wing spar, hoping to extinguish the butt before it blew him, and the Skyraider, to kingdom come.

As with all great flight stories, there are only two possible endings. In the first, the intrepid aviator gets lucky, nothing happens, and no mention is made of the incident after the sortie to the air intelligence officer or maintenance control. It eventually becomes a sea-story in some smoky bar somewhere.

The other alternative is that the aviator dies, and becomes a cautionary tale.

I'm pleased to say that Dad lived, and ended his affiliation with the Naval Aviation Reserve Program in 1956, the year of Suez. I didn't sign up until 1977, a belated way to beat the draft.

But that is another story.

Tomorrow: Episode Three: the War with the Air Force

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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