Once They Were Eagles (26 page)

“As one of the experienced Black Sheep pilots, I was a division leader responsible for training the new men. With eight experienced combat pilots and a total of 28, we had more than enough to lead each four-plane division.

“After my first and only Black Sheep tour, I trained pilots for a while in Green Cove Springs, then went to Quantico for Junior Amphibious Warfare School, then to San Diego, Coronado, and El Toro. When the war ended, I was sent to Okinawa to join the Fifth Marines. We went into China; as Forward Air Controller, I was with the Division Commander on the first jeep into Peking.

“We didn't know what the Japanese were going to do. Our job was to repatriate them to Japan: disarm them, get them out of there. We had to make sure all the people who'd been locked up, the Embassy people and so forth, got out and back into operation.

“I was there a year and a half, then went to Tientsin and took over from John Begert as Air Officer for the Division. I got involved with OSS, flying agents into Manchuria, picking them up, and other sneaky things.

“When I got back to the States, I was at El Toro for several years, then at Electronic Officers School in Memphis, where I finally got my degree in electrical engineering. I went to Korea for a year or so and came back to serve on the Marine Corps Development Center for two or three years.

“I retired in 1961 when my eyes went bad; I had three boys growing up, and decided to try my luck on the outside. I went to work for General Precision.

“Kearfott provides guidance control and navigation systems for anything: airplanes, missiles, spaceships. We do planning, short- and long-range, for new products and business areas, deciding where we should invest our funds in developing new products and trying to forecast where the Defense Department is going and where we fit into that picture.

“In 1973, Mildred and I went to Japan. Our company, Singer, owns part of Mitsubishi Precision, and I went to do some work on strategic planning. The director of marketing, Suwo, was a retired major general of the Japanese Air Force. We got to talking one night, and it turned out that he'd been a squadron commander on Bougainville. We had long
talks that resumed when he came to the States later. He'd brought his logbook and I got mine out. Comparing flights and dates, we found we'd been shooting at each other! He got transferred back to Japan, and became head of training the Kamikaze pilots. He claimed to have shot down 27 or 28 American planes. He said they wondered where all the American planes were coming from.

“He was quite a man. He was a hunter, and so am I, so I took him to my place in Maryland. We had a great day of duck shooting; it was lousy weather, and the ducks were flying. I took him to dinner that night, and he said, ‘Hank-san, I'm sure glad I didn't shoot you down!'

Al “Shorty” Johnson drove from his office through the snow to talk to me at Bob McClurg's home in Syracuse, New York. Al owns a successful travel agency which, in addition to making him a comfortable living, has afforded him the opportunity to travel over most of the world. Al is still alert, energetic, and as quip-tongued as he was with the Black Sheep.

“The day after Pearl Harbor, I went across the street from where I worked to sign up for the Army Air Corps. I filled out quite a few piles of papers. I thought I was another Lindbergh: I already had a private pilot's license for a seaplane, so I kept asking about flying and trying to tell them about my seaplane experience, but they kept ignoring my remarks. Some little corporal with a big cigar kept handing me more papers. I thought, ‘I don't like this outfit,' and I rolled the papers in a ball and popped him right in the face and walked out.

“Up the street I saw a sign: ‘Navy.' I think it was 181 Broadway in New York City. I told them I had a seaplane license, and they said: ‘My God, just a minute,' and called a chief over: This gentleman has a seaplane license!' I thought they'd give me a plane that night!

“They gave me a physical, and a lieutenant said, ‘You have everything, except you need a tooth filled.'

“I said, ‘O.K., I'll get it filled.'

“He said, ‘How would you like to do it now?'

“I said, ‘Good,' and we took an elevator to the next floor. There was a dentist. The Lieutenant said, ‘Doc, I have a great prospect here.'

“Whambo, the next thing I know, I'm downstairs again, holding my jaw. ‘Raise your hand,' and that was it!

“Then they said: ‘We're going to let you finish your semester at New York University; then you'll have your two full years of college, and you can go in June. We're going to send you to preflight training.' The first preflight battalion was sent to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We were on Movietone News. But first, we got off the train at Greensboro, and there're these guys looking like my Uncle Mose, a forest ranger, with those funny hats.

“One of them was screaming and cussing bloody blue, and they seemed madder than hell about something. A guy from Syracuse and I were good buddies, still are. I asked, ‘Hey, what the hell is he so mad about?'

“He said, ‘I don't know who he's yelling at.'

“So we looked around behind us on the train. That set off the second stage, and the guy told us in no uncertain terms:
we
were the objects of his affection; he was a Marine drill instructor. I thought they'd been sent to drive the bus or pick up the luggage or something. He marched us to the buses, and when we got to Chapel Hill, there was a big open field with a desk at one end, guys signing up. It started to rain.

“They said to put down our gear, formed us into what they called platoons, and gave us close-order drill—and we still had civilian clothes on.

“Some guy said, ‘We've had it. There's only so many openings. We're gonna be the grunts, gravel crunchers, or jungle bunnies. We're gonna get a rifle and be on our way.'

“That set off the DIs again, but they finally signed us. Preflight was three months of nothing but physical activity, Navy regulations, and hikes, hikes, hikes. We got sent to New Orleans for Elimination Flight Training with two strikes on us because of all the publicity. They called us the ‘supermen.'

“I got to Espiritu Santo the end of September and saw my first Corsair. I didn't know how to get in it, since I'm so short; I thought you had to run and jump and climb up the side. Then one of the mechs
showed me how you push this thing and the flap drops, put your foot here, your hand here, and that's it. I asked him, ‘Where's the pilot's manual?' He thought that was funny.

“The first week, we had two killed out of our 15, mostly ferrying planes back and forth to Guadalcanal. One rainy night somebody came to our hut and said: ‘You guys are now in the Black Sheep.' We figured this is it; we'd heard all those wild stories. There's $10,000 going home to mama. If they needed us, then half the squadron must have been wiped out.

“We reported to the Dallas hut in the rain. Standing there in our ponchos, we saw this big red-headed guy that had this other guy by the belt—it was you handling Pappy. You'd caught him outside in the rain, and his hands were swinging back and forth. We said, ‘Uh-oh, that's the skipper. We're dead!'

“I'd come back from a hop and ask the mech, ‘What's that switch for?'

“He'd say, ‘Come on, Lieutenant, you're kidding me.'

“I'd say, ‘I'm not gonna touch it. Maybe it jettisons the engine.'

“We'd touch something, and they' d say, ‘Forget that, that's only in cold weather.' That's how we learned.

“I went back to the States and was released from active duty, but stayed in the Reserves. I had a job with Goodyear, traveling in 29 states, and got in my drill wherever I happened to be. But they stopped that and transferred me to the Volunteer Reserves, throwing me out of my home squadron. About four months later, they got called to Korea, so I guess they did me a favor.

“I joined Colonial Airlines, and they merged with Eastern Airlines; I was with them for 11 years. In 1962, I bought a rundown travel agency. I thought I'd bought a hobby, but after a hairy six months I got it back on its feet, and now it's doing well.

“It's been pleasant, but I wouldn't trade the Black Sheep experience for anything. It was an extension of what they say in the Marine Corps: ‘I always wanted to be a Marine' and ‘there's nothing as good as a Marine or even close to it.'

“We were a band of brothers. I've never seen another service that will get together and stick together, even if we don't know each other. Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

W. T. “Long Tom” Emrich is an internationalist. A commercial airline pilot (a Captain with TWA), he had better than a girl in every port: he had property in every port—or at least in Spain, Arizona, and Hawaii. He's been flitting from one to the other since he retired from TWA in 1981 and is now president of Global Enterprises, a firm that's developing an area in Colorado.

Tom talked to me in my apartment in Honolulu. He has lost most of the beautiful head of hair that was his pride and joy, but he is still erect and alert. Tom had wanted to be a pilot from his high school days. He'd spent two years at Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri, then joined the Navy V-5 program, graduating as Aviation Cadet.

After another year of training, he was shipped to the South Pacific in mid-1943.

“I considered myself lucky to be assigned to a squadron with experienced people in it. I'd never flown a Corsair before, and there, I got only 20 or 30 hours.

“Late one afternoon Fisher and I were sent on an alert; we'd never flown at night. Pretty soon it's getting darker and darker. He called me: ‘Do you know where the light switches are?'

“I said, ‘It beats me, Lieutenant.' We had to fish around, and you didn't have much room to maneuver, but we finally found all the lights.

“When we landed, Fisher said, ‘Well, I guess we checked out the airplane for night flying.'

“In the beginning, I didn't know enough to be scared—later on, I could get dry-mouthed. Sometimes, you could tell that the land-based pilots had limited experience. Like the Japanese Zeros doing slow rolls while they were escorting their bombers. It seemed pretty stupid to me, doing slow rolls when somebody was likely to be shooting them down. Maybe it was their way of impressing us with their ability to fly, like two Samurai prancing around waving their swords. But it didn't impress us.

“Afterward, I went to Green Island, back to Cherry Point, to Parris Island, and then to Congaree Field in Columbia, South Carolina. By that time, the war was about over. It was there I met a fellow who knew the Chief Pilot of TWA. We took an SNJ [training plane] and flew to Washington, D.C., for an interview, and I had a job.