The Twilight Warriors (4 page)

ALAMEDA NAVAL AIR STATION, CALIFORNIA
FEBRUARY 19
,
1945

I
t was late, nearly ten o’clock, but the party was going strong. You could hear them singing a hundred yards down the street from the officers’ club.

Getting plastered before deployment was a ritual in the wartime Navy, and the pilots of Bomber Fighting 10 were no exception. It was the night before their departure aboard the aircraft carrier USS
Intrepid
. The entire squadron had suited up in their dress blues and mustered in the club for their farewell bash.

The party began like most such occasions. Pronouncements were made, senior officers recognized, lost comrades toasted. The liquor flowed, and then came the singing. It was a form of therapy. For the new pilots, the booze, bravado, and macho lyrics masked their anxieties about what lay ahead. For the veterans, the singing and the camaraderie brought reassurance. Most knew in their secret hearts that they’d been lucky. They’d lived through this much of the war. There were no guarantees they’d make it through the next round.

Leaning against the bar and clutching his drink, Ensign Roy “Eric” Erickson bellowed out the verses of the song. Erickson was a gangly twenty-two-year-old from Lincoln, Nebraska. He was one of the new pilots in the squadron. They called themselves “
Tail End Charlies.” They flew at the tail end of formations, stood at the tail
end of chow lines, and now were catching the tail end of the war. They’d spent the past year and a half training to be fighter pilots. Their greatest fear, they liked to boast, was that the war would be over before they got there.

The Tail End Charlies were seeing a new side to the squadron skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Wilmer Rawie. Rawie liked to drink, and now that he’d had a few he was leading his boys in his favorite drinking song, “I Wanted Wings.”

Rawie had gotten a brief tour of combat duty in 1942, flying off the
Enterprise
in the early Pacific skirmishes. But then he was relegated to two tedious years as an instructor back in Florida. Finally, in the twilight of the war, he’d gotten a squadron command. Now Will Rawie was playing catch-up.

Watching from across the room was the CAG—air group commander—Cmdr. John Hyland. A dozen years older than most of his pilots, Hyland wore the bemused expression of a father chaperoning teenagers. The only one near his age was Rawie, who had begun his commissioned career after a stint as an enlisted man. Hyland had seen lots of these parties, and he had nothing against them. It was a tradition. Let the boys get shit-faced, herd them back to the ship, then get on with the war.

Though most of his pilots didn’t know it, Hyland was also playing catch-up. When the war began, he was on a patrol wing staff in the Philippines. Since then he had served in a succession of Washington staff jobs. Now Johnny Hyland, who had never flown fighters in combat, was another twilight warrior.