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Fred Gwynn's Chapter 3 |
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| But a week later Torpedo 16 had another bad operational accident, a nerve-wracking and discouraging one. To familiarize the pilots with night navigation, flights were planned between the islands of Oahu and Hawaii, about 200 miles apart. The very first trip ended in disaster. The Skipper, Roc Curry, Newbold Landon, Roy Armstrong, Harry Minarik, Tom Bronn, and Dick Scheele took off at night from Hilo, Hawaii in a very bad overcast. |
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Isely, Curry and Landon were the only ones who ever got joined up. Minarik's crewmen, Wood and Cafferelli, navigated him to Pearl Harbor by radar, using the unfamiliar technique that Paul Dana had just begun to teach them. Bronn luckily saw a searchlight at the Hilo field and landed immediately. Scheele's generator failed, leaving him with no radar, radio, or lights. After recovering from two dangerous spins, he managed to climb to 14,000 feet (to avoid the high mountains of Mauno Loa and Mauno Kea) and bail out, along with his crewmen, McHenry and Milligan, and Bevo Stevens, the Personnel Officer, who had gone along for the ride and "to see the waterfalls" that line the beautiful volcanic coast of Hawaii. Nothing was ever heard again from poor Roy Armstrong, with his crewmen Sandford and VanDeventer, and an unidentified yeoman who had somehow been in the plane. After a search of several days, Scheele and the occupants of his plane were rescued, widely separated, on the lava slopes of Hawaii, Milligan having broken his leg in landing. Bevo Stevens, of course, had walked right into a ranch-house containing a congenial host, plenty of Scotch, and a whole roast pig on the fire. But the whole affair was bad business. In two weeks, Torpedo 16 had lost almost a million dollars in military equipment and personnel training.
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| In the middle of this situation, we were moved to Barber's Point Air Station on the southwestern tip of Oahu, and went on with our training soberly and somewhat desperately. Bert Parks, a VB-16 pilot, had a fatal crash one day while playing around and we tightened up even more. |
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| George Kiesel and Bob Brunt came to us as replacement pilots, and as the first specimens of the Navy's new "pre-flight" training program, we watched them carefully. |
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| But once more we recovered (knowing sadly, that the dead boys would not) and we hit the tennis-courts and the officers' bar even harder when off duty. When the Essex and the Yorktown raided Marcus Island in the first carrier attack in months, we knew that it was our turn next, and we cross-examined the returning warriors with all the anxiousness and reverence that boys could pay men who have been under fire. |
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One night we cornered all the liquor on the station and had a magnificent brawl in the biggest and roughest building we could find. It was the first time that the rank (squadron commanders) and the file (us) had made a real party together and it was significant. The next day we staggered aboard the Lex and went off to battle.
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