Above the Thunder (4 page)

Student pilots had to fly for miles one foot above the ground. They took off and landed on one wheel, while turning, and around corners. Pilots began short, maximum-performance by first towing the airplane back to the very end of the strip, to gain every inch of takeoff room, then revving up the engine to full throttle while holding the wheels braked, then releasing brakes for the quickest possible acceleration, and horsing the airplane off the ground at the lowest possible flying speed.

During part of the training, collapsible barriers of lightweight poles were erected, and students had to make both landings and takeoffs over them without knocking them down. At higher altitudes, they practiced sudden turns and reversals of direction as defense against attacks by enemy fighter planes. My father said the instructors called these maneuvers “rapid descents,” and one such trick involved quickly rolling the airplane over almost onto its back while simultaneously turning in the opposite direction, a “split-S” stunt that faster airplanes attempting pursuit could not follow. The L-pilot then dove for the ground and when close to it would bleed off excess speed built up in the dive by fishtailing or skidding the airplane right and left with rudder to expose its fuselage to the relative wind, which quickly slowed it to landing speed. Once on the ground, the pilot was taught to exit the airplane with all possible speed and seek cover (and if he got the chance, he was also to drag his airplane to cover as well).

For many an L-pilot, all this push-to-the-limits training paid off handsomely on the battlefield. Lt. Joseph Gordon Furbee, for example, who flew with the Allied spearhead into Germany after the D-Day Normandy landings, was shot down by a German FW-190 fighter plane that
peppered his Cub with machine gun bullets and shattered its propeller. He landed, unhurt, on a street in a German town. After his mechanics drove a half-track truck to the crash site, patched up the Cub, and then used the truck to knock down any obstacles to his takeoff, he was faced with the task of flying his L-4 out of a small open field in the town. He managed to get the plane airborne from the muddy field, but then:

Less than a hundred yards ahead was a two-story building which I had no hope of clearing. . . . I banked to the left, the left wing barely cleared the ground as I made a 90-degree turn and leveled out for a climb up. I missed the building, only to find myself staring into a line of electric wires on poles along a railroad track. No way could I clear over them, so I eased the stick forward to glide under, skimming just above the railroad. Luck was with me—there were no boxcars on the track. The terrain fell away downward ahead, so I was not forced into climbing at once. My airspeed increased and soon I was free as a bird flying at any altitude desired.
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It was all in a day's work for an Army L-pilot.

The J-3/L-4 Cub was well suited to such hijinks because it was light, nimble, and exceptionally well designed aerodynamically. Piper had designed it to be the safest possible civilian trainer and sportsplane, suitable for pilots with even minimal skills, so its handling was inherently forgiving. A Cub just naturally wanted to fly, and it was difficult to stall one out even at the very slow speeds and crazy attitudes into which liaison pilots often forced them—it would never stall, in fact, without first shivering emphatically to warn its pilot that he'd better get the nose down a little. Because it had such benign flight characteristics, it was harder to make fatal mistakes with a Cub than with nearly any other airplane ever built. It was so stable, in fact, that it was difficult to force into a spin or to hold in the spin once begun, and a pilot could exit a spin just by letting go of the controls—the plane would soon right itself. It could turn on a dime, wheel in amazingly tight circles, and practically hover over a battlefield to observe the tactical situation and direct artillery fire. In the hands of a highly skilled pilot, a Piper Cub could
do astounding things. It remains one of the best aircraft ever designed, and it's a pity they aren't made anymore, but most sports plane pilots today demand more powerful, faster, quieter, and more comfortable airplanes. Its final version, the Super Cub, was produced up until 1981, and those still flying today are in demand as bush planes in Alaska and other rugged parts of the world.

It was these stellar flying characteristics that resulted in the L-4 being chosen by the Army over its competitors for use overseas (for simplicity's sake, and to standardize overseas shipments of planes and parts, the Army wanted to settle on just one aircraft), while the Taylorcraft L-2 and L-3 Aeronca remained mostly stateside in training roles.

While a Cub could fly off of wheels, skis, or pontoons, at one point during the war it was flown without the need for any landing gear at all. This was the “Brodie System” of landing and taking off from cables strung along the side of a ship or between poles on land. Landing on a cable fifty feet above the ground or on the deck of a ship looked like a circus stunt, but it proved to be a practical solution to some vexing tactical problems that had arisen during the war, situations where there was no space available for normal takeoffs or landings.

Navy lieutenant James H. Brodie, on assignment to the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, forerunner of the CIA), figured out a way to attach hooks to the top of liaison airplanes' wings, so pilots could fly these hooks into nylon loops connected to cables and thus both land and take off from the cables when they were installed on ships (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Lieutenant Kerns, who attended one of the early flight-training classes at Fort Sill, went to the Pacific with the 33d Division before this method was invented, so he never encountered it, but my father completed his flight training a little later, as the device was coming into use. After winning his L-wings at Fort Sill in 1944, Lieutenant Baker was sent to Hawaii, where he was trained to land and take off this way in an L-4, without the airplane's wheels ever touching the ground (or a ship's deck). This method had first been envisioned as a means to launch and retrieve liaison planes from ships in the mid-Atlantic, so that they could orbit around convoys to spot the German submarines that were
causing great losses to Allied shipping during the Battle of the Atlantic. But as the war went on, and the U-boat threat diminished, the idea was transferred to another seaborne task: providing air cover for amphibious assaults, with the invasion of Japan ultimately in mind.

The ships employed for this mission were modified LSTs (for “Landing Ship, Tank,” although many crew members swore it meant “Large, Slow Target”). The problem the Brodie device solved in this case was how to bring small aircraft in close to shore and launch them so that their pilots could direct (by radio) naval gunfire on enemy installations on shore, and later, after a beachhead was established, artillery fire. If they were launched from regular aircraft carriers far out to sea, the Cubs, with their single twelve-gallon gas tanks and relatively short range, didn't carry enough fuel to be able to fly to shore, spend the necessary time over the beachhead, and return. They needed to be launched (and retrieved) closer to the scene of the action.

As improbable as it seemed, the Brodie system, fit the bill admirably and proved quite successful the few times it had the chance to be used in combat before the war ended. The special LSTs were fitted with long booms projecting out over the water fore and aft, with a three-hundred-foot-long cable strung between them down the side of the ship. To land on the cable, an L-4 (or -5) was flown slowly and carefully toward it, using the same sort of nose-high power approach as used for short-field landings on land, until the hook projecting from the top of its wing snagged the cable, or more accurately the loop of nylon webbing hanging from a trolley on the cable. As the captured airplane then slid down the cable, it would be braked to a stop by the trolley, dangling in midair. From there, the plane was lowered to the deck by a crane. To take off, it was lifted up and hung back on one end of the cable with its engine running. The pilot then revved the engine to full power, the airplane was released to run down the cable, and when he neared the end of the cable, the pilot unhooked his airplane by pulling a lanyard hanging from the roof of his cockpit (which reminded my father of the overhead chains used to flush old-fashioned toilets) and flew away.

It took some finesse (and some nerve at first) to land and take off
from cables this way, but after a little practice L-pilots did it almost casually. In fact, remembered one Fort Sill instructor, some students practicing on a Brodie rig set up at Fort Sill got so good at it they became bored with ordinary straight approaches to the cable, and when they thought no one in authority was watching, they invented more interesting ways to snag it. One pilot would do a loop and hook the cable at the bottom of the loop. Another would shut off his engine a thousand feet above the cable and glide down onto it deadstick. Yet another thought it was fun to bounce his airplane off the ground and up into the cable. They all eventually got caught. “My punishment was to ground each of them for a week,” the instructor remembered, “but secretly I admired their skill.”
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My father, an athlete with quick reflexes, was a natural for this stunt. The only thing that made it a bit tricky at first, he said, was that there wasn't much separation between the top of the propeller arc and the hook above the wing, and the nose-high approaches pilots made to the loop narrowed it even more. Another complication arose when the flat-bottomed LSTs rocked in the sea, for then the booms supporting the cables could swing up and down vertically in an arc of as much as twenty or thirty feet. In that situation, the pilot had to gauge the rhythm of the swinging booms and conform to the motion, approaching the cable porpoise-style. During practice sessions on dry land, with the cable stretched between towers set in the ground, Dad saw one Cub hit the loop with its propeller instead of its hook, ending up dangling by its nose with the loop wound around the prop (the pilot, although unharmed in the “landing,” tried to jump to the ground rather than wait for assistance, and broke his leg in the fall). Another exciting moment could occur, he said, when you thought you'd snagged the loop, but actually hadn't, so when you chopped the throttle, expecting to hang from the cable, the airplane would just drop, requiring a very quick hand on the throttle to avoid dropping into the sea (or plopping onto the ground). Fortunately the plucky little Cubs could almost instantly get flying again, so such mishaps were rare. The most common accidents only resulted in broken propellers.

The Brodie system of landing liaison planes on cables strung down the sides of ships. Here an L-4 has landed by hooking the nylon loop hanging from a trolley on the cable, has been braked to a stop, and is hanging suspended from the cable. Next it will be lowered to the deck of the ship, an LST (Photograph courtesy of the Aviation Historical Society).

It would have been interesting to read the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle's account of being launched from a Brodie device, for the Cub that flew him to the island of Ie Shima took off that way, and he surely would have written about it, as he did everything else he saw or experienced in the war, but Pyle was killed by a sniper's bullet on that island shortly after he arrived there.
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For all its Rube Goldberg appearance, the Brodie device proved its worth in the assault on Okinawa, where Brodie-equipped LSTs brought their Cubs in close to shore and launched them to direct deadly accurate naval fire on Japanese shore defenses, and retrieved them to refuel and relaunch. A Brodie apparatus and its operating crew could also be transported in a C-47 cargo plane (the civilian DC-3) and set up on land, and thus be used in areas where regular landing fields had not
been built, or for some reason could not be. When camouflaged, the towers and booms could not be seen from above by an enemy the way a graded runway could. But the war ended before many LSTs could be equipped with the Brodie device, and it therefore never realized its full potential. Thus many liaison pilots on the war fronts, like Lieutenant Kerns, never even got to see it. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and its subsequent sur render made the assault on the Japanese home islands unnecessary (otherwise I might not be here to write this, since Dad told me that casualties among the liaison pilots were expected to be very high, and he may not have survived the invasion), and after the war the advent of helicopters made the Brodie system obsolete.

Before the invention of the Brodie device, another method to launch liaison aircraft at sea during an invasion was found, and this one also involved LSTs. In this case, the ships were converted into mini aircraft carriers by the addition of takeoff platforms about seventy-five yards long made of timbers and planks. On some of these ships, several Cubs could be carried on either side of the short runway, with their tails toward the runway and their rudders removed to gain extra clearance. Such pocket aircraft carriers showed what they could do during the invasions of Sicily, Anzio, and southern France. However, unlike with the Brodie system, the airplanes could not return to land on the flight decks, because they were too short for landings. On at least one occasion, during the invasion of France, a Cub could not find anywhere to land ashore and had to come back and ditch in the water beside its LST (the ship then tried to winch the airplane back aboard, but wrecked it in the attempt).