Above the Thunder (5 page)

In his book
Grasshopper Pilot,
Bill Cummings of the 3d Infantry Division related how he took off from one of these improvised aircraft carriers off the coast of Sicily on the morning of the Allied invasion of that island, 10 July 1943.
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It was his first-ever takeoff from an LST, but his L-4 hopped into the air just fine, and with that worry out of the way he headed toward the beach, weaving among the landing craft and nervously remembering how other Cubs had been shot down by their own side in the earlier invasion of North Africa. It was Lieutenant Cummings's first combat experience, he was ill from the effects of malaria and dysentery, and he was alone in the airplane and unsure what to
expect. When he reached the shore, he climbed up to fifteen hundred feet amid all the invasion activity and roamed across the beachhead and beyond it, radioing what he saw happening below to the commanders of the landing forces on their flagship at sea and replying to their questions. He thus became their eyes in the sky that morning and enabled them to direct reinforcements to locations where they were needed most.

When Cummings saw Allied troops on the beach being shelled by German defenses, he flew inland, spotted the enemy guns by their smoke and muzzle flashes, and called in naval gunfire that destroyed them. In another place, he saw naval shells landing too close to American Rangers advancing inland, and called a cease-fire there that allowed them to continue their advance. He kept the commanders apprised of the location of the front line as it moved forward from the beachhead and reported on the progress as it occurred. When he ran out of fuel that afternoon, he landed his Cub on a road near friendly troops and begged some truck gas, refueled his plane, and was back in the air in short order, continuing his mission. His efforts that day saved thousands of Allied lives and made a major contribution to the success of the invasion. At the end of the day he landed his L-4 near the beach, climbed out, and fell into an exhausted sleep on the ground for the night. The next day, he was called to the tent of his commander, Gen. L. K. Truscott Jr., and, to the cheers and applause of the staff officers, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by order of Gen. George S. Patton, while everyone toasted his health.

Cubs rarely flew at night, since they had no cockpit lights, nor were artillery airstrips in the war zones provided with landing lights, since they were situated so near the front lines that blackout conditions were the norm after the sun went down.
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Therefore enemy artillery felt safe to shell Allied positions at night, when there were no Cubs up to see where it was coming from and call in counter-battery fire. Lieutenant Cummings, however, discovered that he could fly his L-4 in Italy on moonlit nights and thereby gained tremendous popularity among infantrymen in the area, for when he was aloft and his engine could be heard overhead in the darkness, the Germans would not fire their guns, aware that he would be able to see the muzzle flashes. When his ground
crew heard him returning from one of these night flights, they put a few splashes of gasoline in empty C-ration cans on either side of the airstrip and ignited these little flares for a few moments to show him where to land. (Lieutenant Kerns and his fellow pilots made similar flares from soda-pop bottles, placing a single one on the approach end of the field and two at the other end.) Cummings wrote that soldiers often stopped by his airstrip to thank him profusely for making it possible for them to get some sleep at night, blissfully free from German shelling.
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After D-Day in Normandy, as the Allies pushed across France and into Germany, L-4s rode shotgun on Patton's hard-charging armored columns and ranged out ahead of them to locate German positions and artillery targets. In this campaign the Cubs gained the nickname “Maytag Messerschmitts,” and as a sideline some pilots mounted ba zooka rocket launchers on their L-4s and went hunting German tanks. (“All of us Grasshoppers enjoyed chasing enemy tanks around,” wrote Cummings.
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) Strictly speaking, this was against regulations, for before the war the Army Air Forces, after initially protesting the scheme to give the ground army its own airplanes, had agreed to go along with the scheme on the condition that the liaison aircraft not be armed—Air Corps brass insisted that they retain control of all armed aircraft. The Army dutifully complied, issuing orders forbidding liaison planes to mount weapons. Pilots were allowed to carry only a pistol in a shoulder holster, as an aid to survival in case they were forced down, but that was the extent of an L-4's official armament. This led one war correspondent to write, accurately, that when a passenger armed with a pistol climbed into a Cub, its firepower was doubled.

But at various places and times during the war, the rule against arming L-planes was broken by individual pilots eager to engage the enemy with something more than sidearms or whatever they could drop out the windows. For example, Lt. Don Vineyard and his friend Lt. Raymond Kerns welded a discarded machine gun from a bomber to the landing-gear struts of Vineyard's L-4 and shot up Japanese patrols and installations with it, and Kerns used it to destroy a Japanese fuel dump. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for the Japanese) their commander found out about the gun and made them take it off.

But when some Cub pilots mounted bazookas on their airplanes during the Allied drive across Europe into Germany, a few Army commanders (especially Patton) were willing to look the other way. The most famous of these was Maj. Charles Carpenter of the 4th Armored Division, a former high school history teacher, who mounted six bazookas on his L-4—three on each side—and named his Cub
Rosie the Rocketer
(a play on Rosie the Riveter, the fictional female factory worker who symbolized the six million American women working in U.S. factories building ships and airplanes during the war; Lieutenant Kerns's fiancée, Dorie Lane, was one of them). Major Carpenter was Gen. John Wood's personal pilot, and this fact, plus his having a little more rank than most Army pilots, meant that he was not often burdened with artillery-spotting duties and thus had more time to devote to his own private war. It was rumored that the death of his brother in combat gave him extra motivation to strike at the enemy.

Newspaper correspondents dubbed Carpenter “Bazooka Charlie” in their dispatches home, and the bolder ones begged rides with him on his aerial hunts, though he preferred to fly solo because the extra weight of a passenger cramped his style. Carpenter veered around buildings and trees to get shots at tanks and was finally credited with six panzer kills—two in a single day—and he also knocked out several other armored vehicles. From the air, he could spot enemy tanks in their camouflaged positions when the infantry on the ground could not. Even when he missed a tank with his rockets, he took solace in the fact that he'd at least revealed its location to the ground troops, who could then deal with it themselves.
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Generals Patton and Eisenhower, among the original proponents of liaison aircraft, were two of the many commanders who moved around the battlefields in liaison planes. Another one, Gen. Mark Clark, wrote after the war that the Cub “was often indispensable to the commander requiring firsthand knowledge of the battlefield.” Clark had his own L-4 equipped with pontoons during the Italian campaign, since the Italian Peninsula is surrounded by salt water, and he could thereby land anywhere on the coastline. “I don't know what I would have done without my little puddle-jumper,” he wrote. One day on takeoff a heavy
wave knocked the Cub's pontoons loose, and Clark's pilot, Maj. John T. Walker, seeing the pontoons dangling crazily beneath the plane, realized that it would be impossible to land that way. “Where would you prefer to crash, Sir?” he asked the general. “How about Sorrento?” replied Clark. “It's a pretty place.” In the surf at Sorrento, owing to Walker's skill and the slow landing speed of an L-4, both men waded away from the wreck unhurt.
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Allied commanders were not the only ones who came to appreciate the advantages of an aerial view from “puddle-jumper” aircraft. On the enemy side, Gen. Erwin Rommel was frequently aloft in Germany's version of a low-and-slow, unarmed liaison aircraft, the Fiesler Storch (Stork). One German solder in North Africa remembered how Rommel's troops would suddenly find him overhead, dropping orders scribbled on scraps of paper. He often directed his famous tank battles from the air.
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The German Storch was a larger and faster airplane than the American L-4 Cub, more complex and expensive to build, but it was less nimble and was never used to such good effect as the Cub. In what almost seems like a symbolic demonstration of the Cub's superiority, in one of the last (and surely the most unusual) aerial combats of World War II in Europe, Cub pilot Lt. Duane Francies and observer Lt. William S. Martin engaged a Storch in aerial combat, using their pistols. Banging away like Wild West cowboys at a range of about twenty feet (Francies noted the German pilot staring at them with “his eyes as big as eggs,”) they fired their Colt .45s out the Cub's windows as fast as they could pull the triggers, aiming at the German airplane's windshield. The Storch spiraled down to the ground and crashed in a meadow, and its lightly injured crew jumped out of the wreckage, only to be captured by Francies and Martin, who had quickly landed their Cub nearby. Later in the day, the two lieutenants posed proudly for cameras beside their trophy, the wrecked Storch, and one historian has noted that they are the only airmen ever known to have brought down an enemy aircraft with a pistol.
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In Europe, Cubs were so effective in directing artillery fire on the enemy that the German High Command offered several days of leave to any soldier who could manage to bring one down. German fighter pilots were awarded more points than they received for downing an Allied
fighter plane if they could shoot down a Cub, which they were seldom able to do, unless they could catch one by surprise, since wily Cub pilots made it very hard for faster airplanes to follow them in turns. I am aware of two confirmed instances (and several more are mentioned in wartime literature) in which a Cub pilot turned the tables on a pursuing enemy fighter pilot by luring him down into a ravine or canyon that only a tight-turning L-4 could get out of, causing the attacker to crash.
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In the Pacific, as the U.S. Army and Marines island-hopped toward Japan, wresting each island in turn from the Japanese in seaborne assaults, the artillery air sections attached to infantry divisions typ ically brought their aircraft ashore in the holds of the amphibious LSTs, rolling them out the bow doors of the ship onto the beach on their own wheels or strapped into the beds of two-and-a-half-ton trucks, in either case with their wings detached and stacked or strapped beside them. Once they reached a suitable location to fly from, mechanics would reattach the wings and the airplanes took to the air. Brand new L-4s straight from the factory would be delivered by cargo ship to the supply docks in their shipping crates and from there trucked to the airfields. After the airplanes were assembled, the big empty crates came in useful as sleeping quarters for a couple of men or as supply sheds.

Workers at the Piper factory in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, eventually built 5,703 L-4s for the Army, that were used in both the European and Pacific theaters. At the height of wartime production, an L-4 was rolling out the doors of the factory every twenty minutes. The L-4 was later joined overseas by the L-5, the Stinson Sentinel, a military version of the civilian two-seat Stinson 105 Voyager, a somewhat larger and heavier airplane than the Cub and with a more powerful (180 horsepower) engine (see the photo of Captain Baker on
page 11
). Being able to lift more, some L-5s were specially constructed as ambulance ships, with built-in stretcher bays. Seeing their usefulness to the ground army, both the Army Air Forces and the Marines acquired liaison aircraft of their own to use as aerial taxicabs and to evacuate wounded (the Marines also directed navy and artillery fire with them). My father told me, however, that Army Air Forces pilots, accustomed to flying larger and heavier airplanes, rarely acquired Fort Sill–style flying skills, so that he and his
fellow artillery pilots could always tell at a glance whether a liaison plane approaching their airstrip was being flown by another artillery pilot or by an AAF one, just by the way it was being handled—Air Forces pilots didn't have “the touch,” he said. They merely flew the airplanes, while Army liaison pilots wore them like extensions of their own bodies, and to an experienced eye the difference was readily apparent.

After the war my father, like many other Army pilots, went on to make a career of Army Aviation, serving, as Kerns did, through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. As our family moved from one Army post assignment to another during that time, my brothers and I grew up around these ex–World War II liaison pilots and heard some of the stories they told, although we kids, being kids, thought little of it at the time. We just assumed everyone's fathers had done such things. It wasn't until we grew up—and started flying airplanes ourselves—that we realized what amazing things liaison pilots had done with their light aircraft during the war.

Long after my father had retired from the Army to civilian life, I continued to hear of the World War II exploits of liaison pilots from him and his old friends, and I decided to collect and record these stories and perhaps turn them into a book (which, like so many good intentions, never came to pass, but former liaison pilot Bill Stratton has done a good job of collecting L-pilot stories in his two volumes of
Box Seat over Hell
and has formed an International Liaison Pilot Association online). I pumped Dad and his friends for more stories whenever I got the chance. Thus it was that one day in the late 1980s, as I sat in a restaurant with my father and his old flying buddy Floyd Erickson, it wasn't long before Erickson had me convulsed with a hilarious story of his trying to land a crippled L-4 in the Philippines during a combat offensive. He told us that just as he neared the ground, one of the airplane's wings struck a tree with such force that he was thrown out the door of the cockpit, and he ended up riding along outside on the wing struts for a while, as the pilotless airplane went through some wild gyrations before finally diving into the ground. The mental image he drew of a man clinging grimly to the wings of an out-of-control airplane as it careened around the sky, and then dove into the ground, nearly had me falling out of my chair. Fortunately, he
said, the crash did not injure him much—in fact, he hurt himself more in scrambling over rocks and brush trying to get away from the wreckage, for he feared the Japanese might beat the Americans to the scene.