Chapter One
All things being equal I should be onboard
a carrier heading into the South Pacific. Well, they’re not always equal nor
fair either. Records got all bollixed up
in San Diego and instead of shipping out
with my mates I was sent to Jacksonville, Florida. And I wasn’t even assigned to
a Navy base. No, I’m stationed at the Jacksonville Municipal Airport, for crying
out loud.
Of course there was good reason for the
Navy to choose Jacksonville Municipal, it has long runways and that fit the
needs of our heavy bomber patrol outfit. I won’t even hazard a guess as to how
this diverse group of guys wound up in Squadron VB-4 Operational Training Unit
2. Most of our personnel were back from the war in the Pacific. Some had seen
action at Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Coral Sea. A couple of guys had
physically jumped from the deck of the sinking Aircraft Carrier Lexington. Most
enlisted personnel had been trained in carrier-based operations as aircrewmen or
line maintenance. They had worked on single engine aircraft like the TBF Avenger
torpedo bomber, Douglas Dauntless dive-bomber, and fighters such as the F4F
Wildcat, F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair.
Our squadron’s aircraft was made up of
four engine B-24 Liberators using the Navy designation PB4Y-1 and a single tail
version of the Liberator called the PB4Y-2 Privateer. Maintenance facilities
consisted of one main hangar, a wide concrete apron and dozens of individual
parking areas called boon-docks. Living quarters for enlisted personnel and
officers were regular barracks built among a sprawling pine forest.
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As an aviation machinist mate and
certified aircrewman my first duties with the squadron was working in a line
maintenance crew and doing routine engine repair. The first hurdle a new guy
had to jump was chasing back to the hangar for a couple of spare parts and a
skyhook. Of course the skyhook didn’t exist and pretty soon you’d figure it was
a ruse and you had become the butt of a joke.
At the time I joined the squadron the war
was still raging in Europe and the Pacific with German U-Boats prowling off our
Atlantic Coast. And while our squadron’s mission was to train crews in
long-range patrol activities, a secondary mission was to keep an eye out for
German submarines.
From the time I checked into the squadron
I wanted to put in some flight time. In
order to qualify for flight pay (flight
skins) an aircrewman needed to put in a minimum of four hours flight time per
month. Of course the frugal Navy used that time to train men for their specific
duties. As an aviation machinist mate my flight training was to prepare me for
the job of plane captain. The plane captain is charged with pre-flight
inspection of the aircraft along with in flight duties and once you got back to
base, a post flight inspection. There was a long checklist you had to follow,
but in general it consisted of going over maintenance reports, a visual
inspection of the plane, confirming the amount of fuel onboard and reporting the
results to the first pilot. It was most important to be consistent and go over
every item on the checklist in careful detail. Once I had gone through the
required training period and was thoroughly checked out in both the Liberator
and Privateer my name was placed in the instructor’s pool. I was never sure why,
because I was outranked by most aviation mechanics in the squadron.
While in the air the plane captain would
move around the craft checking gauges, temperatures and pressures. For
long-range flights careful attention had to be paid to fuel onboard – where it
was stored and when necessary transferred from one tank to another.
The easiest way to get on the
skipper’s shit list was to screw up on fuel transfer and starve an engine or
two. The transfer procedure was actually quite simple, if you went by the book.
If you didn’t it could be a problem. I chose to go by the book.
As the youngest instructor in
the outfit I was always walking on eggshells, because my students were not only
battle-hardened veterans they also outranked me.
However, most of the guys
were glad to be back in the states, and not being shot at. And to a man, they
wanted to soak up all the knowledge they could about the Liberator and
Privateer. We kept busy and they gave me little grief.
Sticking to regulations not
only worked out in theory as a matter of fact in the whole scheme of things our
squadron had a perfect safety record until one fog shrouded night PB4Y- I
Liberator number 34 was returning to base on three engines. The airport was all
but closed in due to low hanging clouds and fog. The pilot missed his first
approach to the runway so he pulled up and prepared to go around for another
try. However, during what should have been a routine procedure to get lined up
for another approach the pilot made one fatal error. He made a steep left turn
toward the dead engine and suddenly the plane slipped off to port and due to his
low altitude the pilot didn’t have time to recover. The plane plunged into the
swamp and all eight men onboard were killed.
Official news of the crash didn't come out
until early the next morning. The fog
was so thick that you couldn't see a dozen
yards in front of you. What little breeze there was came from the direction of a
local pulp mill that gave off a strong pungent odor that smelled like a
combination of rotten eggs and sulfur water.
The fog along with that smell hovered over
the area a good part of the day, certainly long enough to leave an indelible
impression on my olfactory senses. Until this day, anytime I get a whiff of
that pulp mill smell I am reminded of the loss of Number 34 and her crew.
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