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Fred Gwynn's Chapter 2 |
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| We began to see that an ubiquitous death was an extra passenger in every carrier-plane, a presence that wasn't even related to the military enemy nations we were preparing to fight. Just before we left Quonset, Bob Wolfe and Bob Crader had been killed while stunting an unfamiliar SNJ, but now we found that we could kill ourselves just in trying to get aboard for a little supper. A college friend of mine, Max Eaton, had just been lost off the Ranger in making an emergency water landing, and I saw for the first time how it could happen. Before leaving Norfolk, I'd laughed at a rumor Bob Doyle had heard to the effect that I had been killed. It didn't seem funny now. Tom Durkin and I started writing a story of his experiences this month, and the next month he was at the bottom of the Atlantic. |
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Even when flying ashore to Quonset when we returned from shake-down, we ran into bad weather and a fighter-pilot spun into the ocean. You never get completely shaken down until all the carriers are in dry-dock and all the planes are in a museum. |
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| To balance the gruesome aspects of the Squadron's trip to South America was the exciting first encounter with foreign lands. Not that we ever even talked to the natives of Trinidad or learned anything about the island's history. Military men usually think of places they've been in terms of their military or alcoholic movement there. For Torpedo 16, Trinidad was an air-field with just one runway, so we did know we were in the tropics, where the wind is stable and prevailing. |
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Lexington with Trinidad in the background. |
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Trinidad was the lush Macqueripe Club and other Officers' clubs, so we knew that you could still get drunk in this war even if you were stationed at an outpost. But everyone was glad when we weighed anchor and headed north. Scuttlebutt about a week's leave in the States, before the trip to the Pacific, was rampant and cheering. |
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Two squadron pilots, Schopmeyer and Warren, who didn't care much for carrier work, were to be transferred, but most of us were pleased with our duty and anxious to hit home with our newly-gained Atlantic Theatre ribbons and our wild tales of flat-top flying. The shake-down cruise had taken a little less than a month, but we felt like ancient Nantucket whalers with two years and tens of thousands of miles behind them.
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One night we had "Philadelphia Story" for a movie, and we considered that, as carrier pilots, we would soon leave Hepburn and Philadelphia far behind, as monks leave the world. Another night we had a movie in which Admiral Charles Laughton quoted John Paul Jones's words from the deck of the Bon Homme Richard: "We have not yet begun to fight." Someone told me that this Lexington we rode had been named the Bon Homme Richard until the sinking of the old Lex. It still might bear that foreign name appropriately (I thought, stretching this information), for we, Torpedo 16, most certainly had not yet begun to fight.
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