Aviation History May 2021 by HistoryNet

f-107 ultra sabre: best fighter the USAF never bought?

slow but deadly

the sbd dauntless dive bomber sank japan’s pacific war strategy pan am clippers: when luxurious flying boats conquered the world aerial minesweeping: ingenious solution to an undersea menace

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May 2021

DEPARTMENTS

5 MAILBAG 6 BRIEFING 10 AVIATORS

Famous for her role in the original “Star Trek” TV series pilot, actress and aviator Susan Oliver broke records flying solo from the U.S. to Europe. By Damond Benningfield

14 RESTORED

A North American T-28C Trojan trainer extends its landing gear and tailhook.

The only Douglas SBD-1 in existence is being restored by a dedicated team in San Diego after spending 52 years at the bottom of Lake Michigan. By Robert Bernier

features 26 Dauntless Forever

Judged “a decidedly prewar aeroplane of obsolescent design” by famed test pilot Eric Brown, the little Douglas SBD dive bomber nevertheless had an oversized impact on the Pacific War. By Stephan Wilkinson

36 Flying the World in Pan Am’s Clippers

44 A Red Devil’s Odyssey

36 Juan Trippe (left) and Charles Lindbergh stand before a Pan American Airways Fokker F-10.

The British developed an ingenious method to safely and quickly detonate hundreds of magnetic mines laid by Nazi Germany in European waters. By Carl O. Schuster

60 Earning My Gold Wings

A U.S. Navy helicopter pilot recounts the ups and downs of his flight training as America entered the turbulent 1960s. By Dan Manningham

ON THE COVER: Two restored Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bombers, converted from U.S. Army Air Forces A-24Bs and owned by the Commemorative Air Force (foreground) and Lone Star Flight Museum, are shown in their element against a Pacific background. Cover photo: Philip Makanna/©Ghosts.

16 EXTREMES

A Harvard student became one of the first Americans to complete combat pilot training in France after the U.S. entered World War I, but fate dealt very different hands to his three buddies. By Gary G. Yerkey

52 Aerial Minesweepers of World War II

Juan Trippe’s aviation empire grew from a single-engine Fokker to a fleet of luxurious flying boats that opened up the world to speedy international travel. By John Lowery

The quirky North American F-107A lost out to Republic’s F-105, but some still consider it one of the best fighters never to see production. By Robert Guttman

18 STYLE

Showcasing products of interest to aviation enthusiasts and pilots.

24 LETTER FROM AVIATION HISTORY 66 REVIEWS 70 FLIGHT TEST 72 AERO ARTIFACT

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PAUL BOWEN PHOTOGRAPHY; ROBERT BERNIER; UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS COLLECTION; NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

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ORDER BY MEMORIAL DAY TO BE INCLUDED IN OUR NEXT INSTALLATION.

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FORMS MUST BE RECEIVED ON OR BEFORE 05/31/21. FAX ORDERS TO 504-527-6088 OR MAIL TO: THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM, ROAD TO VICTORY BRICK PROGRAM, 945 MAGAZINE STREET, NEW ORLEANS, LA 70130. The National WWII Museum’s Road to Victory brick program honors the WWII generation, the American heroes who served during the war, and their families. The goal of our program is to celebrate the American spirit while forging a link between the present generation and the generation who fought to secure our nation’s freedom during World War II. Therefore, the Museum reserves the right to deny requests for inscriptions that might be considered offensive or inappropriate to those who sacrificed during the WWII era, or messages that do not align with the Museum’s mission, which is to tell the story of the American experience in the war that changed the world—why it was fought, how it was won, and what it means today—so that all generations will understand the price of freedom and be inspired by what they learn.

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

Aviation History

Online

You’ll find much more from Aviation History on the web’s leading history resource: historynet.com

Billy Mitchell’s Aerial Blitzkrieg Led by Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, the U.S. Army Air Service embarked on its first major campaign in September 1918—at the time, the largest air force ever committed to battle—at St. Mihiel, France, presaging the combined-arms assaults to follow. A zealous advocate of offensive air power, Mitchell spent the rest of his contentious career trying to bolster America’s air assets.

Clippers Circle the Globe

Two hours into its flight from New Zealand to Hawaii on December 8, 1941, Pan Am’s Pacific Clipper received word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Captain Robert Ford was directed to divert his flight path and return to the United States by any route that would avoid enemy interception. By the time the Boeing 314 landed in New York a month later, the flying boat had completed a 31,500-mile odyssey covering five continents and three oceans without accurate charts, navigational aids or weather forecasts.

Curtiss SB2C Helldiver: The Last Dive Bomber

For the most part American airmen enjoyed overwhelming superiority in the quality and quantity of their weaponry during World War II. But one notable exception was a dive bomber developed by Curtiss for the U.S. Navy, the SB2C Helldiver. It was nicknamed the “Beast” by its crews, many of whom preferred its predecessor, the Douglas SBD Dauntless. Still, the SB2C was produced in greater numbers than any other dive bomber in history.

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AVIATION H

MAY 2021 / VOL. 31, NO. 5

CARL VON WODTKE EDITOR LARRY PORGES SENIOR EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR STEPHAN WILKINSON CONTRIBUTING EDITOR ARTHUR H. SANFELICI EDITOR EMERITUS STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR GUY ACETO PHOTO EDITOR

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Aviation History (ISSN 1076-8858) is published bimonthly by HISTORYNET, LLC 901 North Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 Periodical postage paid at Tysons, Va., and additional mailing ofﬁces. POSTMASTER, send address changes to Aviation History, P.O. Box 422224, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2224 List Rental Inquiries: Belkys Reyes, Lake Group Media, Inc. 914-925-2406; belkys.reyes@lakegroupmedia.com Canada Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519, Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001 The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of HISTORYNET, LLC

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Billy Mitchell led the September 1918 St. Mihiel air offensive.

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Mailbag

TOMCAT PILOT

COURTESY OF LIEUTENANT DAVE THOMAS

Regarding the cover story about the F-14 Tomcat by Stephan Wilkinson [March], I understand that by pairing a renowned airframe with a provocative coverline you hoped to sell more magazines. The problem arises when Wilkinson, while being informative in several areas, does not come close to supporting the cover’s “never lived up to its Hollywood image” claim. His first attack on the Tomcat’s reputation is merely conjecture when he states, “Had the early Tomcats ever gone into serious combat, more of them might have been lost to compressor stalls than to enemy action.” > > Before leaving the replacement air group, F-14 pilots were well educated on the TF30 engine’s limitations and knew the workarounds so that the “sudden and scary” things that Wilkinson talks about did not happen in an air combat maneuver environment. His next attempt is nothing but hearsay: “Some Tomcat crews described their mount as ‘a nice aircraft powered by two pieces of junk.’” Nobody I knew in the Tomcat community ever said that. His seven-paragraph history of the AWG-9/AIM-54 Phoenix, while again informative, does nothing to support his argument. Neither does his nine paragraphs detailing the history of the Iranian F-14 sale. In fact, he shoots down (like a Libyan Flogger?) his own thesis by stating, “With excellent visibility,…20mm cannon, automatic maneuvering flaps and dogfight radar mode, it was well suited to the task” of establishing air superiority. Within the real world of global politics and projecting power, the F-14 absolutely was respected as a fleet defense weapon. Because its service life spanned the Cold War, it did

not have the shootdowns that other wartime aircraft had. If your readers would like to hear about what it was like to fly this capable airplane and why it was, in fact, very good at what it was designed for, you should have someone—like me [photo above]—who actually flew the aircraft and lived the mission write your next Tomcat article. Lieutenant Dave “Junior” Thomas U.S. Navy, 1984-1991 Thank you for your comments. The provocative coverline that evidently upset some members of the Tomcat community was written by yours truly, not Wilkinson. We stand by the facts presented in the story and, yes, we always hope to sell more magazines. –Ed.

BEST DIVE BOMBER

Your “Aviators” article about Richard Best [January] brought back a fond memory. I met Best late in his life. I held out my hand and said, “Mr. Best, all of us born since World War II owe you and your shipmates a debt we can never repay. You saved the world.” Without missing a beat he replied, “I always thought

our gunners and our maintenance people never got enough credit.” Despite playing a pivotal role in one of the most important naval battles in history, he deflected my compliment! Such self-effacing heroes are few and far between. Keep up the good work. “AH” is the best magazine of its kind by far! Gordon D. Bergslien Glendora, Calif.

T SQUARE 54 MEMORIES

In the late 1990s, my English degree, pilot and flight instructor certification and deep interest in aviation history piqued the interest of the new Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. Would, they asked, I volunteer to develop a standardized teaching curriculum for incoming docents? Oh, and also teach the initial classes? Understandably intimidated by the thought of making a fool of myself in front of the grizzled cadre of seasoned docent aviators, I was nevertheless irresistibly drawn to the project and the museum’s B-29 then undergoing restoration, T Square 54, a veteran of the first low-level incendiary raid on Tokyo of March 9-10, 1945 [“Restored,” January]. I explored every niche of the 99-foot-long fuselage. After checking myself out as airplane commander in the left seat, I found the central fire control gunner’s “barber chair” and gunsight operable. I then spent hours firing imaginary tracers at airliners arriving and departing nearby Sea-Tac Airport. I

thought this was the coolest thing possible. Boy, was I ever wrong. Around this time, I was invited to dinner at the Seattle home of an acquaintance, Dick Bush. When I mentioned what I had been up to at the museum with T Square 54, he and his wife, Shizui, exchanged significant glances. Dick then revealed that he had been a navigator-radar operator on Marianas-based Superfortresses during the war and participated in the nighttime incendiary strike on March 9. Then Shizui, a younger lady of Japanese ethnicity, spoke up. “Yeah,” she added without rancor, “and he burned down my family home that night.” She quickly added that fortunately when the attack happened they’d already left for the countryside after a warning-leaflet drop. After the war, Dick, then a widower, later frequently traveled to Japan on Washington State Apple Commission business. In what surely ranks among the most unusual of circumstances, they met, discovered their astonishing connection, fell in love and married. Within days we were all standing behind the control pedestal of T Square 54 gazing out the cockpit enclosure. I could only imagine the thoughts and visual imagery going through the Bushs’ minds but the expressions on their faces said it all. It was an out-of-body experience for all of us that I’ll certainly never forget. William S. “Bubba” Vaughn Diamond Point Airport, Wash.

SEND LETTERS TO:

Aviation History Editor, HISTORYNET 901 North Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL TO aviationhistory@historynet.com (Letters may be edited)

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briefing

Spirit of St. Louis 2 Takes Flight in High spirits The replica Spirit of St. Louis 2 makes a successful test flight on January 11 (above). Its builder and pilot, Robert Ragozzino (inset), plans to re-create Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing in it.

hen we last checked on Robert Ragozzino he had just completed a promising taxi test in his scratch-built replica of the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, inching him toward his goal of re-creating

Charles Lindbergh’s nonstop solo flight to Paris. Ragoz zino took another important step on January 11 when he made two successful test flights in his Spirit of St. Louis 2. The first flight, which departed from a former Strategic Air Command base

in Burns Flat, Okla., lasted less than an hour, while the second stretched to nearly two, marking an important milestone in the project’s up-and-down history. “It’s a big step forward,” Ragozzino said after completing the flights, “but I’ve

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OPPOSITE PHOTOS: SOS2/BRIAN LECKEY; TOP RIGHT: ISRAELI MOD; INSET: STOCKTREK IMAGES, INC./ALAMY; BELOW LEFT: EILEEN DARBY/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

got a whole list of things I want to change.” Wearing a leather flying helmet and ear plugs because the Jacobs radial engine is “quite the noisemaker,” Ragozzino said Spirit 2’s flight characteristics were so challenging he kept both hands on the stick. “It’s a beast to fly,” the 62-year-old Oklahoma native explained. “We need to tone down some of its attitude so it can be transitioned into an intercontinental transoceanic airplane.” He intends to make the aircraft more “user friendly” by replacing a too small vertical stabilizer, which forced the airplane out of trim, and by adjusting the flight control cables. Ragozzino has spent nearly 20 years working toward his goal of re-creating Lindbergh’s record-making flight, but his attempt has been postponed multiple times as he struggled to complete the airplane to his exacting standards. Both project manager and pilot, he’s designed Spirit 2 to mimic the 1927 original down to the tiniest detail, with only a few modifications to satisfy the FAA. Ragozzino remains confident despite the challenges and pressures involved. “It’s a tremendous responsibility,” he explains. “It’s a two and a half million dollar plane that has a $300,000 insurance policy with a $30,000 deductible. Since all airplanes crash, the threat of loss is intimidating.” For additional information and updates about the project, visit his website at spiritofstlouis2.com. John J. Geoghegan

guns for hire F-16As from private contractor Top Aces are loaded onto an An-124 for transport to the U.S. The DOD lease includes Israeli MiG-killer Netz 220 (right).

“MASS TRAVEL BY AIR— MADE POSSIBLE IN THE JET AGE—MAY PROVE TO BE MORE SIGNIFICANT TO WORLD DESTINY THAN THE ATOM BOMB.” –JUAN TRIPPE

Topgun Goes Commercial

he next air-to-air fighter training involving American pilots is likely to pit Topgun against “hired gun,” as a Canadian commercial operator, Top Aces Corporation, will be leasing General Dynamics F-16 fighters from its base in Mesa, Ariz., to the U.S. Department of Defense—the first private contractor to provide supersonic fourthgeneration aircraft for the purpose. In January Top Aces received four F-16As, flown in from Israel aboard a Ukrainian-registered Antonov An-124 cargo plane, the first of what may total 29 “aggressor” fighters acquired from the Israelis for a reported $100 million. The 40-year-old F-16As and F-16Bs include some combat veterans with shootdowns to their credit. One F-16A was the fourth in the eight-plane formation that bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak on June 7, 1981, and went on to share in the downing of a Syrian MiG-23 over Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 9, 1982. The Israelis have retired them for more up-to-date aircraft, including F-16C/D fighter-bombers, but Top Aces plans to upgrade its fighters with open-architecture avionics that allow them to be adapted to the latest radar, sensor and electronic warfare technology as the job requires. To provide worthy opposition for such current planes as F-22s and F-35s, Top Aces’ F-16s will be flown by retired American, Canadian and German pilots, 80 percent of whom trained at the U.S. Navy’s Topgun Fighter Weapons School. Jon Guttman

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BRIEFING

All-Woman Afghan Airline Flight

viation history was made on February 24 when a Boeing 737-500 of Kam Air, Afghanistan’s only private airline, left Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, flew 350 nautical miles and landed at Herat 90 minutes later. The two pilots and four-member flight crew reportedly performed their tasks with complete professionalism. What made the otherwise routine hop significant was that in a country in which opportunities for women are limited, all six members of the 737’s crew were female, starting with 32-year-old Ukrainian Captain Veronica Borysova and 22-year-old Afghan copilot Mohadese Mirzaee. Although their flight sets an inspiring precedent, neither the airline nor the crew were keen to publicize their achievement too much. That is because Afghanistan remains a nation violently divided. The airline was founded on August 31, 2003, by Zmarai Kamgar and by January 2018 it accounted for 90 percent of domestic air traffic. In that same month, however, the Islamist Taliban reminded the world of the unique dangers faced by the airline when it attacked the hotel that housed its

landmark achievement Afghanistan’s first all-female flight crew flanks travel writer Josh Cahill, who chronicled their historic Kam Air flight.

employees and killed nine of them—seven Ukrainians and two Venezuelans. Still, the successful flight is logged and its importance, Kam Air hopes, cannot be reversed.

MILESTONES

Hijacking History

Stolen wings On May 1, 1961, Antulio Ramirez Ortiz (left) hijacked a National Airlines Convair 440 (above) to Cuba.

criminal sanctions for aircraft hijackings that ranged from 20 years in prison to death. As for Ortiz, the Cuban government granted him asylum, but the hijacker later said the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis soured him on the Communist nation, claiming, “I could not stay in Cuba with a Soviet-supported government.” He tried to escape from the island several times over the next decade and, suspected of being an American spy, ended up in Cuban prisons for six years until he was finally permitted to leave the country in November 1974. Ortiz was immediately arrested by the FBI upon his arrival back in Miami. The concept of hijackings had seemed so farfetched in 1961 that there were no federal laws to cover air piracy, so Ortiz was instead charged with kidnapping, assault and transporting a stolen aircraft across state lines. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1976.

TOP: COURTESY OF JOSH CAHILL; ABOVE LEFT: AIR COLLECTION 216/ALAMY; INSET: AP PHOTO; OPPOSITE TOP (BOTH): MILITARY AVIATION MUSEUM; RIGHT: CAMBRIDGE ARCHITECTURAL

ixty years ago, on May 1, 1961, Antulio Ramirez Ortiz boarded National Airlines Flight 337 in Miami, Fla., for a scheduled trip to Key West. Ortiz, an American citizen born in Puerto Rico, produced a steak knife and a gun and ordered the pilot to fly the Convair CV-440 to Cuba instead. Ortiz told the captain (falsely) that he had been offered $100,000 by the Dominican Republic’s president to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and that he needed to get to Cuba to warn Castro of the conspiracy. The pilot complied with Ortiz’s demand and the Convair landed at a military base near Havana, though perplexed Cuban air traffic controllers at first threatened to have the plane shot down if it entered their airspace. Ortiz disembarked and the aircraft was allowed to return to the U.S. This marked both the first ever hijacking of an American airliner and the first time a hijacking had taken place in the skies over the United States. The incident touched off a tsunami of hijackings that lasted more than a decade—between 1961 and 1972, 159 commercial flights were hijacked in the U.S. The majority of these involved commandeering planes to Cuba, a concept that soon became a punchline in popular culture. President John F. Kennedy, who didn’t see the humor in the situation, started the first sky marshal program in 1961 and later signed into law

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Raised Dauntless to Fly Again

n March 1 a Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bomber recently acquired by the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach, Va., went on display in its unrestored state. At the end of the month the airplane was withdrawn to undergo a thorough rebuild and eventual restoration to airworthy condition. As has been the case with several other aircraft, including the oldest SBD-1 still in existence (see “Restored,” P. 14), the museum’s SBD-5 Bu.No. 36175 was recovered from Lake Michigan. When the Dauntless was originally accepted by the U.S. Navy on October 4, 1943, its intended successor, the Curtiss SB2C-1 Helldiver, was entering service and the SBD was swiftly relegated to the training role. On January 20, 1944, Lieutenant Charles L. Ford III was coming in for a landing aboard the training aircraft carrier Wolverine when the landing signals officer, judging his approach too slow, waved him off. As Ford banked away, however, he failed to add sufficient power and the plane went into the lake at a nearly vertical angle on its back. Ford was rescued, fortunate to get off with some deep cuts to his forehead.

up from the depths Lifted from Lake Michigan, the Military Aviation Museum’s Douglas SBD-5 was displayed in March prior to its restoration.

After more than 50 years in Lake Michigan, the SBD-5 was found and raised in 1994 from 177 feet of water by A and T Recovery. “Aircraft restorations are extensive, multi-year projects,” said Military Aviation Museum director Keegan Chetwynd, “but this exhibit provides the public a rare opportunity to see the ‘before’ state for themselves, alongside a number of our other WWII U.S. Navy aircraft that have been fully restored.”

TOP: COURTESY OF JOSH CAHILL; ABOVE LEFT: AIR COLLECTION 216/ALAMY; INSET: AP PHOTO; OPPOSITE TOP (BOTH): MILITARY AVIATION MUSEUM; RIGHT: CAMBRIDGE ARCHITECTURAL

Echoes of the Past in a Parking Garage

orm and function combine with art and local aviation history in the steel mesh fencing designed for the new Grove Bay public parking garage in Miami, Fla. Produced by Cambridge Architectural Mesh in Cambridge, Md., the fencing achieves several seemingly contradictory objectives at once: It blocks visibility of vehicles in accordance with building codes, provides ventilation, complies with Florida code regarding wind and hurricane resistance and

serves as a canvas to fulfill Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places mandate. The mesh panels are powder-coated to depict eight images of Pan American Airways Clipper flying boats, interspersed with aviation milestones and descriptors. The artwork reflects the era from 1930 to 1945 when the majestic Clippers regularly conveyed passengers to Latin America from Pan Am’s main base at Dinner Key in Coconut Grove, the art deco headquarters of which survives nearby as City Hall.

on the fence Images of historic Pan Am Clippers grace a parking lot’s steel mesh fence not far from the flying boats’ former main base at Miami’s Dinner Key.

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AvIATORS

Beyond “Vina”

HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS SUSAN OLIVER CONQUERED HER FEAR OF FLYING TO BECOME THE SECOND WOMAN TO PILOT A SINGLE-ENGINE AIRPLANE SOLO FROM NEW YORK TO EUROPE BY DAMOND BENNINGFIELD

Born in 1932 as Charlotte Gercke, Oliver was a wellestablished actress by the time of her Moscow flight attempt. She had starred in a 1957 film, The Green-Eyed Blond (although she was blueeyed), and had guest-starred in dozens of TV episodes. At the end of a trip to Europe in early 1959, she boarded a Pan American Boeing 707 for the return to the States. “Then somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic we suddenly went

WOman of many roles Top: Susan Oliver sits in her Aero Commander 200 during her New York-to-Moscow flight attempt. Above: Oliver played Vina in the original “Star Trek” TV series pilot.

bump in the night, as if the plane had hit an air pocket, and with a sharp lunge started falling, tumbling hard,” Oliver wrote in her 1983 autobiography, Odyssey: A Daring Transatlantic Journey. While the flight’s captain

TOP: ALAMY; INSET: CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES

hen Susan Oliver landed her Aero Commander 200 in Copenhagen on September 28, 1967, she was treated like Hollywood royalty. Photographers, reporters and local dignitaries swarmed around her, two Scandinavian Airlines flight attendants presented her a bouquet of flowers and a Los Angeles radio host called to interview her live on-air. Like a scene out of a spy novel, though, her arrival was accompanied by a foreboding note. A representative of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, told Oliver she had arrived too late to complete the planned final leg of her trip. Oliver, a popular television and movie actress, was trying to become the first woman to fly from New York to Moscow. She departed LaGuardia Airport on September 21 and completed the first legs of her trip in record times. She had received permission to visit the Soviet Union, but delays for training, aircraft modifications and weather pushed her beyond her assigned arrival time. Repeated trips to the Soviet embassy made no difference: The flight was over. M AY 2 0 2 1

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she wrote. “My log book began filling up with places like Coonamessett, Atlantic City, Victoria, B.C., Mexico City, and Niagara Falls.” In 1966 she placed second in the Reno Celebrity Air Race. She also survived the crash of a Piper Cub piloted by a friend. And in 1967 she decided to attempt the New York–Moscow crossing. Oliver chose the Aero Commander 200 because she had experience with it, piloting it for an Easter Seals publicity campaign in early 1967, and because she preferred the simplicity of a single-engine aircraft. A corporate sponsor added an extra fuel tank in the back seat and new avionics for the tricky overwater flights. She stashed a life raft and an oxygen bottle aboard, studied navigation and Russian, and consulted a clairvoyant (who promised success). Oliver trained for the flight with her boyfriend Mira Slovak, a pilot and hydroplane racer who had defected from Czechoslovakia in 1953 by hijacking the commercial DC-3 flight he was piloting. Shortly before her scheduled departure, though, he told her she wasn’t ready for such a challenge (she had recorded just 480 flight hours by the time she left New York), so they broke up. “She had the touch, she had the feelings for it, but she didn’t have any

experience, and the Atlantic needs a lot of experience,” Slovak said in a 2014 documentary about Oliver, The Green Girl. Oliver’s journey took her to Goose Bay, Canada; Narsarsuaq, Greenland; Keflavik, Iceland; and Prestwick, Scotland, before finishing in Copenhagen. In Goose Bay she stayed at an Air Force base, sleeping in the same room that had once hosted Charles Lindbergh. She faced a daunting landing and departure in Greenland, at the end of a long fjord and with a low ceiling that forced her to spiral up through the narrow chute until she was able to break through the clouds. And her wings began to ice up during the final stage of her flight to Scotland. When Oliver arrived in Copenhagen—only the second woman to complete a solo New York-to-Europe flight—she was still hopeful of reaching Moscow. She had checked with the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., before the trip, and was assured there would be no problem. Yet in her two visits to the embassy in Copenhagen she wasn’t even granted an audience.

“No-one in that sad, gray other country will even say why I’m not allowed to fly my pretty Bluebird into their private yard,” she wrote. Although Oliver’s trip was over, her aviation career was not. In 1970 she won the Powder Puff Derby copiloting a Piper Comanche. She also became the first woman to train to fly the Learjet, and even flew a few charters in it. Later, Oliver received her glider certification (and flew one in a 1973 episode of “The American Sportsman” TV series), was awarded an honorary doctorate of aeronautical science by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and earned her only Emmy nomination for playing one of Amelia Earhart’s instructors in a TV movie. Oliver passed her final FAA physical in 1976 and gave up flying soon after to concentrate on other endeavors, including a stab at directing. She died in 1990 at age 58 after losing a battle with cancer.

ABOVE LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; TOP RIGHT: NINETY-NINES.ORG; INSET: PHOTO BY WALT DISNEY TELEVISION VIA GETTY IMAGES

schmoozed with VIPs in the first-class cabin, the autopilot had disengaged and the copilot, who was distracted by other chores, didn’t notice. The aircraft rapidly spiraled from 35,000 to 6,000 feet before the captain made his way back to the cockpit and they recovered from the descent. Oliver returned to New York only to witness clean-up efforts near LaGuardia, where a Lockheed L-188 Electra had just crashed into the East River, killing 65 of 73 on board, and to hear that rocker Buddy Holly had died in an airplane crash that same day. She swore off aviation, passing up acting gigs that would have required her to fly. A hypnotist helped her overcome her fear, however, and after taking a flight in a private plane above Los Angeles in early 1964, Oliver plunked down $625 for flying lessons. She soloed in October of that year, shortly before completing perhaps her best-known acting role. In the original “Star Trek” TV series pilot she played Vina, an Earth girl who assumed many forms, including a dancing greenskinned Orion slave. After earning her private pilot’s license, Oliver worked on commercial and instrument ratings, receiving both in 1966. “Always, on film locations or publicity junkets, I’d head to the local airport,”

Life imitates art Clockwise from left: Oliver poses for a publicity shot for the 1969 film The Monitors, polishes a Piper Comanche during the 1970 Powder Puff Derby and radios from a glider on a 1973 episode of “The American Sportsman.”

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RESTORED

Ditched Dauntless

THE FLYING LEATHERNECK AVIATION MUSEUM IS RESTORING A RARE DIVE BOMBER RESCUED FROM LAKE MICHIGAN—THE ONLY DOUGLAS SBD-1 IN EXISTENCE BY ROBERT BERNIER

nondescript building on sprawling Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, Calif., houses a treasure trove of aviation history. Among the antique aircraft stored within the building is the last remaining example of an early-model Douglas SBD-1 Dauntless dive bomber, currently undergoing restoration by the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum. On a cold November day in 1942, a student naval aviator was returning to Illinois’ Naval Air Station Glenview from USS Wolverine, a training carrier operating on Lake Michigan. He never made it. A civilian reported seeing an airplane silently glide down for a “perfect landing” a few miles offshore of Chicago. The Navy searched, but neither the ditched Dauntless nor its pilot, Ensign Herbert McMinn, was found. After 52 years underwater, McMinn’s plane, a rare and sought-after SBD-1, was located and recovered in 1994. It passed through various museums before making its way to the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum in 2012 for restoration. During the 1920s and ’30s, the Marines perfected the use of dive bombing to support ground troops. In the days before precision guided weapons, diving the airplane directly at a target before releasing a bomb was the most accurate way to

deliver ordnance. The Navy also embraced dive bombing as the best tactic for hitting maneuvering ships at sea, and during the 1930s both services began acquiring purpose-built dive bombers. In June 1940 the Marines started taking delivery of SBD-1s, and Bu.No. 1612, the airplane McMinn flew, was the 17th Dauntless to come off the production line. Later that year the Navy began receiving the SBD-2, which was optimized for carrier operations and featured greater fuel capacity. Only 57 SBD-1s were built and many of those were destroyed on the ground during the Japanese

First of a breed Top: After 52 years in Lake Michigan, Herbert McMinn’s SBD-1 is recovered in 1994. Above: An SBD takes off from the training carrier Wolverine.

Pearl Harbor attack. The remaining dash-ones were reassigned to training duties as the Marines quickly reequipped with later, more capable models of the airplane. The Dauntless would become an icon during the pivotal Battle of Midway and the desperate fight for Guadalcanal. Nearly 6,000 SBDs of all marks were eventually manufactured. Retired Marine Steve “Smitty” Smith, curator

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OPPOSITE TOP: A AND T RECOVERY; OPPOSITE INSET: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; ALL PHOTOS THIS PAGE: ROBERT BERNIER

of the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum, has always had a passion for airplanes. “Especially anything with a prop on the front of it,” he’s quick to point out. With a Corsair, Wildcat and Avenger already on the property, Smith needed a Dauntless to complete the museum’s collection of significant Marine World War II aircraft. Problem was, most SBDs were scrapped after the war, and one flown by Marines was especially rare. Fortunately, Smith knew that curators at the nearby USS Midway Museum had obtained McMinn’s aircraft, and better yet, they were looking for an FJ-3 Fury jet fighter for their collection. The Flying Leathernecks had one of those, and after working through official channels and some old fashion horsetrading, a swap was made. With the Dauntless tucked into the museum’s restoration building, Smith coaxed Bob Cramsie, a seasoned aircraft mechanic, into leading the monumental effort that would be required to restore the oldest existing SBD. “Once I understood how rare this plane was, I was honored to be asked,” says Cramsie. Beginning work in early 2013, Cramsie knew he had a big job ahead of him. “When we got it, the plane was in pieces,” he notes. “Wings were detached and the vertical stabilizer was missing. There were punc-

tures in the belly and doors were missing.” Cramsie and his team of volunteers rebuilt the vertical stabilizer from scratch and set about repairing the badly damaged wings. He estimates they drove more than 5,000 rivets restoring the SBD’s wings alone. Although he has obtained some blueprints, when asked about the biggest challenge of the restoration process, Cramsie simply answers, “parts.” Holding up a small metal bracket, he explains: “Simple things like metal brackets have to be made up. Little things like that, they take time.” What helped make the Dauntless such an effective dive bomber were the perforated spilt dive brakes, an innovation that did double duty as landing flaps. The three-inch holes reduced buffeting and allowed for steeper, more accurate diving attacks. Commenting on the mechanisms that controlled and deployed the hydraulically powered dive brakes, Cramsie marvels: “They worked independently; you could raise the dive brakes, lower the flaps or do both. It’s really a Rube Goldberg motion on how it worked.” He’ll build new ones from scratch as the mangled and corroded originals sit nearby. Navy records indicate 38 SBDs crashed into Lake Michigan while serving as training aircraft. News of

handle with care Clockwise from above left: Lead restorer Bob Cramsie works on the SBD; engine and propeller are in place; the original perforated dive brakes will be replaced.

the Flying Leatherneck’s restoration effort has spread, and when not pounding rivets, Cramsie enjoys talking to visitors about the plane’s history. “Cool thing is, one of McMinn’s great-nephews came out to see the aircraft,” he says. “And one day, I heard a knock on the door; outside were siblings of another pilot who flew the plane—they had [his] logbooks.” Even though employed full time as an airworthiness engineer with Northrop Grumman, Cramsie has managed to devote more than 3,000 hours toward the SBD’s restoration, mainly working weekends. Although other volunteers have helped the restoration effort, the museum is currently shut down due to the pandemic, and Cramsie now works mostly alone. Why does he do it? Cramsie never served in the military, but his restoration

work is a way of honoring those who did…and didn’t make it back. And it’s personal. Like the McMinn family, Cramsie lost an uncle, whose A-20 Havoc went down over the English Channel during WWII. When completed the Dauntless will sport the colorful livery of Marine Bombing Squadron 1 (VMB-1): silver fuselage, yellow wings on top, and red, white and blue rudder. “My whole philosophy,” says Cramsie, “is put it back as close as I can do it, for parts and everything else, like when it rolled out of the factory in 1940.” Still an avid museum supporter at 99 years old, retired Marine Major Glenn Ferguson flew SBDs during WWII and remembers the plane’s reputation for ruggedness and something else: “If you could get it into the air,” he says, “it got you back home again.” Editor’s note: As we neared press time, the sad news came that the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum planned to permanently close due to funding shortfalls. According to Smith, the SBD-1 will return to the Midway Museum for the restoration’s completion. M ay 2 0 2 1

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EXTREMES

ODD THOUGH THE NORTH AMERICAN F-107A LOOKED, SOME STILL CONSIDER IT THE BEST FIGHTER THE U.S. AIR FORCE NEVER BOUGHT BY ROBERT GUTTMAN

orth American Aviation’s F-107A was the last fighter created by the makers of the iconic P-51 Mustang of World War II, the F-86 Sabre of the Korean War and the F-100 Super Sabre of the Vietnam War. It was designed to satisfy a U.S. Air Force requirement for a Mach 2 fighter-bomber capable of delivering a tactical nuclear weapon. Originally conceived as a development of the F-100, the aircraft was initially designated XF-100B and it bore a family resemblance to the “Hun” when viewed from above. The design diverged so much from the F-100, however, that the Air Force issued it a separate designation. Although the F-107A was never given a name, it has sometimes been referred to as the “Super Super Sabre” or the “Ultra Sabre.” First flown on September 10, 1956, the F-107 was considerably larger and heavier than the F-100, but it was powered by a Pratt & Whitney J75 turbojet delivering 24,500 pounds of thrust—50 percent more thrust than the Hun. The most distinctive visual difference between the two fighters was the deletion of the nose-mounted engine air intake of previous North American fighters in favor of a new variable-area inlet duct

cutting loose Top: The F-107A hit Mach 1.03 on its September 10, 1956, first flight. Above: An F-107A displays its unusual vertically opening canopy.

directly above and behind the cockpit. This was necessary to satisfy the Air Force’s nuclear-bomb-carrying requirement. The bomb was accommodated partly within a recess in the aircraft’s belly, taking up considerable space in the fuselage, which drove the decision to reroute the air intake above it. Due to the unusual location of the air intake, the pilot squeezed into the cockpit under a special vertically opening canopy rather than

via a conventional sliding or hinged canopy. In an emergency the ejection seat was designed to blast right through the canopy, though fortunately for all who flew it that particular feature never had to be used. Although smaller than its hefty rival, the Republic F-105 Thunderchief, the F-107 was no midget at 61 feet 10 inches long, with a 36-foot-7-inch wingspan and a maximum takeoff weight of 41,537 pounds. The F-107 demonstrated a top speed of 1,295 mph, a range of 2,428 miles and a service ceiling of 53,200 feet. North American had high hopes for the F-107’s future. There was even speculation

THIS PAGE & OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: COURTESY ERIK SIMONSEN; OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE/KEN LAROCK; RIGHT: NASA

Forgotten Ultra Sabre

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THIS PAGE & OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: COURTESY ERIK SIMONSEN; OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE/KEN LAROCK; RIGHT: NASA

that its production might be subcontracted out to rival Republic Aviation. Before it flew, however, the fate of the F-107 had already been sealed. The Air Force had ordered the F-105 into production six months earlier, in March 1956. To this day some still consider the F-107’s abandonment a mistake and declare that it was the best fighter the Air Force never bought. The F-107’s superior rate of climb and higher ceiling in comparison to the F-105 are often mentioned, as are its many highly advanced features, such as augmented longitudinal control surfaces, a one-piece movable vertical tail and roll control via spoilers rather than ailerons. Some also point to the high losses sustained by F-105s over Vietnam. There were a number of reasons, however, that could explain why the F-105 was chosen. The Thunderchief, which was also powered

by the J75 engine, had a fully internal bomb bay and could carry 40 percent more ordnance (14,000 pounds of bombs and munitions—4,000 pounds more than the F-107’s payload). Moreover, ceiling and rate of climb were less important in aircraft intended for lowlevel strike missions, as were the F-105 and F-107. While the production F-105 had issues remaining to be ironed out, so did the F-107. As for the losses later sustained by “Thuds” over Vietnam, it is debatable whether any other aircraft could have performed better under similar operational conditions. Perhaps the most important reason why the F-105 was chosen over the F-107 had more to do with the state of affairs at the two competing companies that developed them. At the time Republic Aviation was winding up production of its F-84 series of fighters and had nothing else in hand for the future.

In contrast, North American was engaged in a great deal of development work on several important new defense projects, including the A-5 Vigilante carrier-based nuclear bomber for the Navy, the XB-70 Valkyrie Mach 3 strategic bomber for Strategic Air Command and the XF-108 Rapier Mach 3 interceptor for Air Defense Command. In the late 1950s all three of those projects were expected to be at the cutting edge of the next generation of U.S. air power. Nobody at that time could have foreseen that, of the three, only the Vigilante would ever enter production and become operational. The XB-70 was cancelled during the mid-1960s when it became clear that ballistic missiles constituted a far more effective and less vulnerable nuclear deterrent than any manned bomber. As for the XF-108 Rapier, which was intended to replace the Convair F-106 Delta Dart as

required payload Left: The belly-mounted nuclear bomb pod drove the F-107’s design. Above: The second prototype is exhibited at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

the North American continent’s principal air defense against incoming Soviet supersonic bombers, that project was cancelled in 1959 while still in the mockup stage due to its high cost. Only three F-107As were ever completed, of which two survive. One is housed in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, while the other is at Arizona’s Pima Air & Space Museum. The third was damaged during an aborted takeoff on September 1, 1959. For tunately the test pilot, the famous Scott Crossfield, survived the mishap, but the aircraft was not repaired and was eventually destroyed during firefighting training a few years later.

high hopes The first F-107A arrives for testing at Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards AFB in November 1957.

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STYLE We imagine ourselves soaring through the skies in the cockpits of artist Ron Cole’s engaging aviation art.

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Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5a, by Ron Cole

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STYLE ART

Hot Coles

A fan of historic aviation since childhood, Ron Cole built his career in Los Angeles as an industrial designer and product development engineer with Disney, Pixar, Mattel, Boeing and JPL. He also worked as a model-maker on such films as Terminator 3, The Aviator, The Cat in the Hat and Madagascar. While employed as an artist and renderer for architects, he honed his proprietary technique—one that combines the best of acrylicon-canvas media and the versatility of digital painting. In 2006 he founded Cole’s Aircraft (and REC@War), based in Zanesville, Ohio. Cole also runs Gallery Luminaria. For more information, visit roncole.net.

Prints of Ron Cole’s art are offered for sale on his website from $75 to $600 in sizes up to 40 by 60 inches. This page: (above) RAF Spitfire Mk. I, No. 54 Squadron, Battle of Britain; (below) Nieuport 28, 94th Aero Squadron. Opposite: (top) Curtiss YP-37/P-40; (bottom) Albatros D.III Oeffag 253 in Austro-Hungarian service, circa 1918.

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ALL ARTWORK: ©RON COLE

STYLE

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STYLE ART

Pieces of History

In the Ron not too distant Artist Cole’s future, cars will fly and aircraft-themed Porsche to lead products,wants traditional the charge. Teaming limited-edition prints with Boeing, theline world’s and his unique of largest aerospace “relic” displays that company, the duo is combine actual pieces exploring premium of famousthe aircraft with urban air mobility his artwork are now market. available“Porsche throughand Boeing together bring his website. “People precision want moreengineering, than just a style innovation prettyand picture on the to accelerate urban air wall,” Cole says. “I offer mobility worldwide,” them that. I provide said Steve VP people withNordlund, real history and that General they canManager reach of Boeing out andNeXt. touch.”Along Each with Boeing’s Aurora limited-edition, signed Flight Sciences,relic the and numbered team is also developing art piece comes framed aand concept a fullyready for to hang. electric vertical takeoff Available at roncole.net. and landing vehicle.

Chance Vought F4U-1A Corsair relic display, $200 Boeing B-17F “Memphis Belle” relic display, $220

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STYLE STYLE

Clockwise from top: North American XB-70 Valkyrie honeycomb laminate titanium skin relic display, $220; Bell AH-1G Cobra attack helicopter limited-edition relic display, $130; Soviet II-2 Shturmovik Operation Barbarossa combat loss relic display, $140; Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird black exterior titanium relic display, 11 by 17 inches, $200.

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LETTER FROM AvIATION HISTORY

MOVIE MAGIC

I real mccoys F4U Corsairs painted in the markings of those piloted by Ensign Jesse Brown (no. 211) and Lt. (j.g.) Thomas Hudner (205) on December 4, 1950, fly near Wenatchee, Wash., during recent filming of the movie Devotion. An Aero L-39 Albatros camera ship operated by Helinet Aviation flies in the background.

n the ultimate battle scene of the 2019 Midway remake, Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless pilot Dick Best leads his squadron in an attack on the Japanese aircraft carriers during the epic June 1942 naval engagement. Viewers are along for the ride as the dive bombers plunge through a hail of anti-aircraft fire to deliver their payloads and sink four enemy carriers, changing the course of the Pacific War. It’s a perspective that could only be possible with the help of today’s photorealistic digital special effects, and it gives us an inkling of the bravery and steel nerves required of the U.S. Navy’s SBD crews. Unfortunately, the movie goes on to show Best (the subject of our January 2021 “Aviators” column, available at historynet.com) performing an impossible landing maneuver in which he dives at USS Enterprise with engine out, pulls up below the flight deck and then somehow manages to catch a wire and recover. It’s an unnecessary bit of drama that illustrates the temptations and pitfalls of relying on computer-generated imagery (CGI)—shortcomings that are on full display in such digitally overwrought Hollywood offerings as Pearl Harbor and Red Tails. SBD Dauntless expert Barrett Tillman, author of our Dick Best profile, judges the Midway remake “semi-OK,” which he notes “is several laps ahead of the 1976 atrocity.” He laments that “the new film’s depiction of Dick as an irresponsible flyboy who pulls off physically impossible stunts in his SBD gives millions of viewers the wrong impression of one of the most professional naval aviators of his generation.” There are plenty of examples in Hollywood history of movies that used real airplanes to good

effect in portraying historical events, starting with Howard Hughes’ 1930 extravaganza Hell’s Angels and culminating in the 1960s with The Blue Max and Battle of Britain. All those have been covered in these pages (in articles now posted on Historynet). Battle of Britain, in particular, earns kudos for its use of real Spitfires and (Spanish-built) Messer schmitts and Heinkels in scene after scene of carefully choreographed air combat. Now come reports of warbirds rending the air around Wenatchee, Wash., during filming of an upcoming big-budget movie based on Adam Makos’ bestseller Devotion. The book tells the poignant story of Korean War F4U-4 Corsair pilot Jesse Brown, the first African American naval aviator, and his squadron mate Thomas Hudner, who earned the Medal of Honor for his heroic attempt to save Brown after he had crash-landed on a snowy Korean mountainside. It’s a story we recounted in the May 2010 “Aviators” about Brown and March 2017 cover story, “Rescuing the Frozen Chosen” (both also posted on our website—use the search function to find them). Filmmaker J.D. Dillard has assembled an A-list cast that includes Jonathan Majors (Da 5 Bloods and “Lovecraft Country”) as Brown and Glen Powell (Hidden Figures and the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick, for which he earned his pilot’s license) as Hudner. But the stars of the show for most of us will likely be the real airplanes—a stable of 11 warbirds that includes at least four Corsairs and A-1 Skyraiders, F8F Bearcats and MiG-15s. Slated for release in early 2022, it promises to be an impressive production. When it comes time to portray Brown’s and Hudner’s Corsair crashlandings, however, we trust they will use CGI.

BY CARL VON WODTKE

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Subscribe Now! PENNSYLVANIA RESERVES AT THE FRONT H MAYNARD’S DEADLY CAP GUN H

A Scottish Hero? The Somers Mutiny Ted Williams at War Israel’s Close Call Riding a Torpedo Cedar Creek, 1864

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PHILIPPINES, DECEMBER 8, 1941

WHY DID MACARTHUR WAIT FOR THE ENEMY TO STRIKE FIRST?

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GHT STAY OVERNI BY WHERE MOS RAIDED —page 33

ROGUE U-BOAT!

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SUB S, A GERMAN194 DEFYING ORDER . COAST IN 5 PROWLED THE U.S

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CLE

JULY 4, 1864

PARTY CRASHER JOHN MOSBY AND HIS RANGERS RUIN INDEPENDENCE DAY AT POINT OF ROCKS, MD GETTYSBURG SURGEON’S LETTERS HOME LOUISIANA TROOPS IN THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN

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instrument of victory The Lone Star Flight Museum’s Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless flies near Galveston, Texas, in 2015. Built in 1942 as an A-24B, the museum’s dive bomber was returned to flight in 1997 after a 12,000-hour restoration.

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DAUNTLESS FOREVER THE “SLOW BUT DEADLY” DOUGLAS SBD DIVE BOMBER EMPLOYED 1930S TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS TO TURN THE TIDE IN THE PACIFIC WAR BY STEPHAN WILKINSON

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NAME THE MOST EFFECTIVE AMERICAN BOMBERS OF WORLD WAR II AND YOU’LL CERTAINLY COME UP WITH THE B-17, B-24 AND B-29, MAYBE THE TWIN-ENGINE B-25, BUT HOW MANY WILL THINK TO INCLUDE THE LITTLE DOUGLAS SBD DAUNTLESS ON THE LIST? claim to fame U.S. Navy SBD-3s patrol off Midway Atoll, where on June 4, 1942, Dauntlesses changed the course of the Pacific naval war in four dramatic minutes.

The Dauntless dive bomber flew almost entirely over the Pacific, and there it did more to win the war than any other bomber type, even including the Superfort’s two atom bomb missions. Yet of the 35 U.S. types that flew major combat in WWII, none was as old-fashioned and low-tech as the SBD. Show someone who isn’t an aviation fan photos of a Dauntless and a North American AT-6 trainer,

which first flew in 1935, and they won’t be able to tell the difference. The two airplanes are nearly identical in size, shape and detail. With a wingspan half an inch narrower than the AT-6’s, the SBD-5 had exactly twice the trainer’s horsepower and only moderately better performance—40 mph more cruise speed, a 1,300-foot higher ceiling, 500 feet per minute better rate of climb—but the extra grunt gave it the ability to typically carry a

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1,200-pound bombload, including a ship-killing half-tonner under the fuselage centerline. With those bombs, SBDs sank five of Japan’s eight fleet aircraft carriers and a sixth light carrier. The Dauntless played a major role in reducing Japan’s cadre of world-class navy pilots to a bunch of low-time novices left to fling their airplanes and bodies at American ships as kamikazes. The SBD started out as a Northrop, not a Douglas. Its designer, Ed Heinemann, worked for Jack Northrop, who had developed the sleek, precedential Alpha, Beta and Gamma mailplanes of the late 1920s and early ’30s. Northrop was already producing for the Air Corps the pre-SBD, Gamma-based A-17A dive bomber. Building on this substantial foundation, Heinemann initially came up with the ill-handling Northrop XBT-1 dive bomber of 1936. By the time Donald Douglas took over the Northrop company, Heinemann had fixed its failings and developed the much-improved XBT-2, the direct forerunner of the Dauntless. The XBT-2 got letterbox wing slots—not leading-edge slots but fixed flow-throughs well aft of the leading edge, mid-chord directly ahead of the ailerons. These slots kept the airflow attached and cured the XBT-1’s nasty stall characteristics. They also helped to create the outstanding lateralcontrol handling qualities that would make the SBD so effective at precisely altering its aim during a near-vertical dive, as well as its docile behavior during carrier landings. One of Heinemann’s most important accomplishments toward perfecting the Dauntless design was its beautifully balanced controls. When properly trimmed, an SBD’s solid and steady dive, responsive to minor adjustments in every direction, made it a remarkably stable and accurate weapons platform. Heinemann was one of the most effective warplane designers of the 1940s through the 1960s. In addition to the SBD, he was responsible for the Douglas A-20 and A-26 attack bombers, the AD-1 Skyraider, A3D Skywarrior (the “Whale,” to this day the heaviest aircraft ever produced for routine carrier use) and the A-4 Skyhawk. He also oversaw the creation of the F-16 Viper when he ultimately became vice president of engineering at General Dynamics in the early 1960s. Heinemann was busy enough with the SBD that he had nothing to do with the clumsy Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bomber, contemptuously nicknamed the “Torpecker.” Its main contribution to the war was to distract the Japanese during the Battle of Midway with its fruitless low-level attacks while SBDs dove on the carriers from above. During one Midway mission, 41 Devastators attacked the Japanese fleet. Thirty-five were shot down and not one scored a successful torpedo hit. (Admittedly, blame had to be shared with their terrible Mark 13 torpedoes, which rarely ran true or exploded on impact.) Meanwhile, SBDs fatally

damaged all four Japanese carriers participating in the June 4-5, 1942, battle. A problem with early fixed-gear dive bombers had been that centerline bombs tended to bobble around in the airstream and bounce off the landing gear immediately after release. (It might seem that dropping a bomb through the prop disc would be a greater problem, but that would have required a steeper dive than what was then being achieved.) The solution was bomb displacement gear, usually called a bomb crutch or yoke—a simple device that swung the released bomb through a 90-degree arc that put it well away from the fuselage before it was fully dropped. Heinemann fitted the fixed-gear Northrop XBT-1 with a bomb yoke and retained it for the Dauntless, which could actually dive steeply enough to put its bomb through the prop. Despite its antediluvian appearance and lowtech approach, the SBD was slow to achieve squadron service. The first two versions, the SBD-1 and -2, weren’t even war-worthy, since they had neither armor nor self-sealing fuel tanks. The combatready SBD-3, the “Speedy Three,” entered service at roughly the same time as the advanced Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

predecessors Ed Heinemann’s 1936 Northrop XBT-1 (top) handled poorly, but his Douglas XBT-2 (above) fixed many of its problems and led directly to the SBD.

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DOUGLAS SBD-6 DAUNTLESS FRONT COCKPIT 1. Magnetic compass 2. Reflector bomb/gunsight 3. Windshield hot air control 4. Tachometer 5. Manifold pressure gauge 6. Altimeter 7. Directional gyro 8. Artificial horizon 9. Position of .50-caliber guns (missing) 10. Oil/fuel pressure gauge 11. Airspeed indicator

12. Turn and bank indicator 13. Rate of climb indicator 14. Ignition switch 15. Cowl flap switch 16. Cylinder head temperature gauge 17. Oil temperature gauge 18. Oil pressure gauge 19. Fuel level gauge 20. Autopilot control switch 21. Starter meshing pull 22. Carburetor air control

23. Throttle 24. Bomb selector control 25. Landing gear position indicator 26. Arresting hook control 27. Rudder pedals 28. Control column and trigger switch 29. Voltmeter 30. Power system switches 31. Exterior lighting switches 32. Armament switches 33. Interior lighting controls

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he SBD started its war in the Pacific right on time—on the morning of December 7, 1941—but it was an inauspicious debut. Seven Dauntlesses were shot down or crashed and more were destroyed on the ground, totaling about two dozen lost. Three days later, however, an SBD from the carrier Enterprise sank the submarine I-70 north of Hawaii, scoring the first Japanese fleet sub of the war. Another early action in which an SBD played a part was Jimmy Doolittle’s April 1942 Tokyo Raid. In its S-for-scouting role, a Dauntless dis covered the Japanese picket ship that forced the early launch of Doolittle’s bombers. Though he knew the small boat had spotted him, the SBD pilot was unable to break radio silence and had to fly back to Doolittle’s task force and drop a weighted message on Enterprise’s flight deck. The SBD-4 gained a 24-volt electrical system, a wider-chord wing with more rounded tips and a Hamilton Standard hydromatic prop. But the SBD-5 became the go-to Dauntless, with 1,200 horsepower rather than the earlier 1,000. An equally important upgrade was a reflector bomb-

sight in place of the previous three-power telescope. The tube-with-an-eyepiece sight was prone to fogging as a Dauntless dove from 15,000 feet through increasingly warm, humid Pacific air, as was the windshield, which in the SBD-5 got a demisting heater. The SBD-6 gained a further 150 hp but was already being replaced by the unloved Curtiss SB2C Helldiver. (One carrier skipper, Captain Joseph “Jocko” Clark of USS Yorktown, refused to allow Helldivers aboard his ship. He demanded SBDs.) The SBD’s most recognizable feature was its perforated flaps, riddled with 318 precisely tapered and flanged, slightly ovalized three-inch holes. The modification had been suggested by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics when the early XBT-1 prototype revealed serious tail buffeting during dives. The outer horizontal stabilizer reportedly flapped through a two-foot arc, and Heinemann himself, riding as a backseat observer, admitted that it “scared the hell out of

hot seat Clockwise from above left: The rear-seater manned a .30-caliber twin machine gun; SBD-3s on the carrier Enterprise accompany Hornet and its B-25s during the April 1942 Doolittle Raid; an A-24 Banshee, the Army’s version of the SBD, uses its dive brakes.

training mission Aboard an escort carrier in 1943, two SBDs prepare for takeoff while Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers warm up behind them.

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pacific mainstay Above: A Dauntless lands aboard the escort carrier Santee. Below: Pilot George Glacken and gunner Leo Boulanger fly in an SBD-5 near New Guinea in April 1944.

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me.” The shakes were caused by turbulent vortices tumbling off the flaps, and the holes allowed a carefully calculated amount of air to feed straight aft while the flaps retained the ability to hold the airplane at a safe dive speed. There were two sets of Dauntless flaps: conventional split flaps that stretched below the wing trailing edge and under the fuselage, and dive flaps, which deployed upward above each wing’s trailing edge. All were perforated. For takeoff and landing, the lower flaps were set. They were also used for diving, but with the additional drag of the upper flaps. The dive flaps were powerful enough that the airplane couldn’t maintain level flight, even under full power, while they were deployed. It

was therefore critical that pilots begin retracting the slow-acting hydraulic flaps just before pullout from a dive. One feature the Dauntless lacked was folding wings, considered indispensable for parking on carriers. But Ed Heinemann wanted the strongest possible wings for an SBD’s typical 5G+ pullouts. No hinges for him. A novel solution to the parking problem was troughs just wide enough for SBD tailwheels, extending out laterally from a carrier’s deck so that a row of Dauntlesses could be parked with their main gear just at the deck’s edge. The SBD was surprisingly effective in air-toair combat. During the May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, Dauntlesses shot down more Japanese aircraft—35—than did the accompanying Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters. Throughout the Pacific campaign, SBDs claimed a total of 138 enemy airplanes while themselves falling fewer than 80 times (record-keeping was inexact) to Japanese fighters. One SBD pilot, Lieutenant Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa, attacked seven Zeros and shot down three of them in a single mission during the Coral Sea battle; the previous day he had participated in the sinking of the Japanese light carrier Shōhō. Cook Cleland, later famous as a Thompson Trophy racer, also was credited with several SBD victories. A Dauntless pilot controlled a pair of cowlmounted .50-caliber guns firing through the prop arc, and the SBD was maneuverable enough to

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make them an occasional threat. But the most effective guns were the rear-seater’s flexible twin .30s. (Early SBDs had just one tail gun, but it was quickly found to be impotent.) The most notorious Dauntless gunner was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had been a Marine intelligence officer. McCarthy was savvy enough to understand that a combat record, no matter how bogus, would someday play well with voters, so he cadged the occasional local ride in a Dauntless and later parlayed “Tailgunner Joe” into an effective campaign slogan. Never mentioned was the fact that he had once holed his own airplane’s vertical stabilizer with an unskilled burst. The gunner was also an SBD’s radio operator, and his seat swiveled so he could do double duty. He also had a set of rudimentary flight controls— airspeed indicator and altimeter, throttle and a control stick that could be unclipped from the left cockpit sidewall and dropped into a socket on the floor. He had no way to put the landing gear or tailhook down, but he could at least take a wounded pilot back to the ship and ditch near it.

he Army got its own version of the SBD, the A-24 Banshee, though it was largely unloved. Besotted with their heavy bombers and grand strategic bombing plans, Army Air Forces leaders had no use for dive bombing. They believed intentionally diving a bomber straight toward anti-aircraft defenses at danger-close range was simply a way to put aircrews in harm’s way. They couldn’t make the A-24 work as a level or glide bomber, so they used it as a trainer and utility aircraft. This despite the fact that the AAF was well aware of the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka’s success against ground targets, particularly armor, during the German army’s 1939-40 Blitzkrieg and the ill-advised Soviet campaign. If there was one airplane that seriously challenged the SBD for the title of

world’s best dive bomber, it was the Stuka. But the U.S. Army had few tanks itself at the beginning of WWII and little experience in countering them. During the two prewar decades during which the Navy had practiced and perfected dive bombing, the Army had studiously ignored the tactic. In fact, AAF leader Henry “Hap” Arnold tried to cancel the initial order for 16 A-24s, claiming the Army had already tested the dive-bombing concept and found it lacking, largely due to a dive bomber’s vulnerability to enemy fighters. Arnold was overruled by General George C. Marshall. Nonetheless, the AAF taught its A-24 pilots to bomb in a 30-degree “dive,” which was actually a steep glide. The maximum the Army would allow was 45 degrees, which was still glide bombing. Some benighted Army pilots had the brass to call the Banshee “a lousy dive bomber.” How useful might Army dive bombers have

loaded for bear Clockwise from above left: A Dauntless gunner checks his .30-calibers during a shakedown cruise on USS Independence in April 1943; crewmen load a 500-pound bomb onto an SBD aboard Enterprise on August 7, 1942, the first day of strikes against Guadalcanal and Tulagi; A-24s, underappreciated by the Army, ended up being used as trainers and utility aircraft.

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THE DAUNTLESS HAD THE LOWEST LOSS RATE OF ANY AMERICAN COMBAT AIRCRAFT OF THE WAR.

dodging weather On October 5, 1943, two Dauntlesses search for a break in the clouds to drop their bombs on the Japanese installations on Wake Island.

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been? One example: At the end of the 1943 Battle of Sicily, German and Italian troops fled across the narrow Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland aboard a shooting gallery of ships and boats. Army fighter bombers flew a total of 1,883 sorties and managed to sink just 13 of them. After the war, the surviving Banshees became part of the Air Force, which redesignated them F-24s. They remained in service until 1950, well after the last SBDs had been retired. The British Fleet Air Arm considered using SBDs and tested several of them. Their nicknames for them were “Clunk” and “Barge” rather than “Slow But Deadly.” One of the test pilots, Cap tain Eric “Winkle” Brown, the most experienced carrier pilot of all time, was underwhelmed by the little Douglas. “The Dauntless was underpowered, painfully slow, short of range, woefully vulnerable to fighters, and uncomfortable and fatiguing to fly for any length of time, being inherently noisy and drafty,” Brown later wrote. “It was a decidedly prewar aeroplane of obsolescent design and certainly overdue for replacement.” Damning with faint praise, he called the SBD-5’s performance “sedate.” The Dauntless left Brown baffled. Its performance deficits were so obvious that he deemed it “a very mediocre aeroplane.” Yet he knew its Pacific combat record and could only conclude that the SBD “was among that handful of aeroplanes that have achieved outstanding success against all odds.” (He had only to look to his own Royal Navy’s Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bomber, the infamous Stringbag, for another example of such an anomaly.) If the Dauntless had a secret ingredient, it

was that “most important, it was an accurate dive bomber.” Brown found it easy to make precise downline corrections in a dive with the “pleasantly light” ailerons. He also admitted that the Dauntless was hell for stout. “Extremely strong but also rather heavy,” which gave it “a loss rate in the Pacific…lower than that experienced by any other U.S. Navy shipboard aeroplane.” In fact, the Dauntless had the lowest loss rate of any Ameri can combat aircraft of the war.

he SBD began to be replaced in Novem ber 1943 by the brutish, short-coupled Helldiver—which, in fact, was supposed to have gone into service early enough in the war that the Dauntless would never have been needed. “Events that stick in my memory include every flight I ever made in the SB2C Helldiver,” recalled former Patuxent River test pilot Rear Adm. Paul Holmberg. “We had three to use in testing. Of the three, two had their wings come off.” The Helldiver’s handling qualities were so bad— much of which could be attributed to the unusually short fuselage—that pilots quickly took to calling it the Beast. The airplane had been intended to trump the SBD in speed, range and weight-carrying ability, yet when it went into service it provided minimal improvements over its predecessor. The SB2C’s moment of glory came in April 1945, when Helldivers and Grumman Avengers sank the supership Yamato, one of the two heaviest and biggest-gunned battleships ever built. It was the last great dive-bombing feat of any war. Meanwhile, the SBDs evicted from the fleet continued to fly into 1944 in the hands of the Marine Corps, in support of the island-hopping

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campaign. They became what Stukas had once been: flying artillery, giving close air support to both Marine and Army troops, particularly in the Philippines. Near-vertical dive bombing was often the only way to bring heavy ordnance to bear against troops in heavily jungled areas. Douglas developed .50-caliber machine gun pods for underwing mounting on SBDs, for dive strafing. The last SBDs to see action were those of the French navy, flying in 1947 in support of the Indo china War. The SBD-3 was originally intended for export to France, in 1940, but the French order for 174 aircraft was taken over by the U.S. Navy after the country’s fall. The French eventually got the airplane when some 40-plus A-24 Banshees were delivered to Algeria and Morocco in 1943, plus a further 112 SBD-5s and A-24s in 1944. Some of them operated over France after D-Day. The French removed their Dauntlesses from combat in late 1949, but they continued flying as trainers through 1953. In the U.S. a few civil SBDs operated as photo-mappers, mosquito sprayers and skywriters—one of the last painted in PepsiCola red, white and blue. An SBD even ended up at MGM Studios in Hollywood for use as a wind generator during filming. One of the world’s most concentrated SBD graveyards is the floor of Lake Michigan, where 38 Dauntlesses were lost in training crashes.

Only a few have been recovered (see “Briefing,” P. 9, and “Restored,” P. 14), largely because the Navy insists it still owns them. Many of those still on the bottom are particularly rare because they have substantial combat history. After having gone to war, they were superseded by the Helldiver and then sent back to the U.S. for training use. What was once intended to be a stopgap to await the arrival of a real dive bomber ended up flying through the end of WWII and becoming the most effective carrier-based dive bomber of all time, of all maritime nations. “The SBD’s contribution to winning the Pacific War was unexcelled by any other American or Allied aircraft,” wrote Aviation History contributor Barrett Tillman, the world’s leading Dauntless expert and historian. As Tillman points out, the Navy got more than its money’s worth. The last SBD-6s cost $29,000 in 1944 dollars (about $425,000 today), less government-supplied equipment such as the engine, instruments, radios and ordnance. Call it a Slow But Deadly bargain.

mission accomplished SBDs return to the carrier Lexington after the October 5 strike on Wake Island.

For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkin son recommends: The Dauntless Dive Bomber of World War Two, by Barrett Tillman; SBD Daunt less: Douglas’s US Navy and Marine Corps DiveBomber in World War II, by David Doyle; and Douglas SBD Dauntless, by Peter C. Smith. M AY 2 0 2 1

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pride of the fleet Pan American Airways’ California Clipper, delivered in January 1939 and one of 12 Boeing 314s built, flies over San Francisco Bay. The B-314 was the largest and most luxurious of Pan Am’s flying boats.

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FLYING THE WORLD IN PAN AM’S CLIPPERS THE BIG FLYING BOATS OF THE 1930S AND ’40S OFFERED PASSENGERS MORE TIMELY INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL WITHOUT SACRIFICING THE COMFORTS OF A CRUISE SHIP BY JOHN LOWERY

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IMAGINE BOARDING A LUXURIOUS WINGED OCEAN LINER IN MIDAFTERNOON, THEN RELAXING AS IT TAXIS SLOWLY INTO SAN FRANCISCO BAY. air entrepreneur Right: Pan Am founder Juan T. Trippe (center) poses with company officials and the first Sikorsky S-38 to fly scheduled mail from Miami’s Pan American Field in September 1928. Above: Pan Am’s Sikorsky S-42 Bermuda Clipper served on the Baltimore to Bermuda route in 1936-38. Later renamed and sent to the Pacific, it was sunk in Hong Kong Harbor by the Japanese on December 8, 1941.

Suddenly there’s a mighty roar from its four engines and the behemoth accelerates. You watch through portholes as the spray diminishes. Then, almost imperceptibly, there’s a feeling of release as the giant flying boat breaks the water’s surface tension and lifts smoothly into the air. Shortly, at cruise altitude, the seat belt sign goes out and you experience the ultimate in cruise ship luxury: drinks served in crystal and cuisine fit for royalty on china. Some enjoy a berth for the all-night journey to Hawaii or points west. The clientele on these Pan American Airways Clipper flights was so exclusive that during the first years of operation the airline provided passengers with a copy of both the crew and passenger manifest. Meanwhile, for the crew, the 15- to 20-hour overnight flight was an exercise in fatigue management. In the early to mid-1930s, the Pan American Clippers became an indispensable part of world

commerce. Travel time between Hawaii and the mainland was reduced from five days and four nights at sea to less than 20 hours in the air. The nearly month-long journey by ship to Manila was reduced to 60 flying hours.

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The genesis of what ultimately became Pan American Airways began in 1926 when 27-yearold Juan Terry Trippe and Yale classmates and fellow pilots John Hambleton and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney—along with Cornelius’ cousin, William H. Vanderbilt—formed Colonial Air Transport. Their financial motive was an airmail contract between New York and Boston since in those days landplanes could not carry enough passengers to make them profitable. Colonial completed its first airmail delivery from Boston to New York on July 1, 1926, using a single-engine, five-seat Fokker Universal. For prestige Trippe and his investors, all members of the board of directors, named Maj. Gen. John F. O’Ryan president. Trippe was appointed vice president and general manager. He soon purchased two Fokker F.VII trimotors for $37,500 apiece to expand the operation. Shortly thereafter, during a survey flight over the Florida Keys, Trippe, with board member John Hambleton, lost two engines on one of the Fokkers. Trippe viewed their subsequent singleengine landing as proof of the safety of multi engine aircraft, but the board thought he was taking unacceptable risks in trying to expand service. Consequently, they forced Trippe out of the company. Fellow board members Hambleton and Whit ney sold their shares and loyally followed Trippe to his next venture, the Aviation Corporation of the Americas. Trippe learned of a pending postal contract for flights from Key West to Havana, Cuba. But he faced two competitors: Florida Airways, formed by World War I aces Eddie Rick enbacker and Reed Chambers, and Pan Ameri can Airways Inc., a small operation founded by J.K. Montgomery and managed by Major Henry “Hap” Arnold. Trippe and his partners went to Cuba and talked President Gerardo Machado into an exclusive flying permit that barred all other airlines from operating into Cuban airports. With the competition emasculated, Trippe and company took over the two competing airlines, adopting the Pan American Airways name. On January 16, 1928, Pan American inaugurated F.VII passenger

service between Key West and Havana. In February 1929 Trippe formed a new airline, Pan American-Grace Airways, with J.P. Grace, who was influential on the west coast of South America through ties from his chemical company, W.R. Grace. Using Ford Tri-Motors on inland routes, Panagra, as it was known, achieved immediate success. Concurrently, WWI ace Ralph A. O’Neill established NYRBA, flying from New York to Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Financially backed by some of the founders of Pan American, it was equipped with 14 Consolidated Commodore flying boats. The Commodore’s significant range and payload capacity offered the promise of even greater profitability. Designed as a naval patrol plane, it was reconfigured to carry 22 passengers on short-haul routes, or, by limiting its passengers and cargo, its range could be extended to 1,000 miles. The flying boat quickly proved financially successful on the seven-day, 9,000-mile route. NYRBA posed serious competition for Pan American, and Trippe disliked competition. Using his significant political influence, he launched a

growing concern Clockwise from above left: Trippe (right) congratulates three Colonial Air Transport pilots following their first airmail delivery between Boston and New York in 1926; Pan Am’s base at Miami’s Dinner Key grew from a barge terminal into the world’s largest commercial marine base; the amphibious S-38 was Pan Am’s first successful flying boat.

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mail call Clockwise from top left: Charles Lindbergh (at right) and Pan Am vice president John Hambleton (to his right) stand with an S-38 and bags of mail they flew from Panama to Miami to inaugurate airmail service on February 13, 1929; passengers play cards in a Sikorsky S-40; with its maze of wing struts and braces, Lindbergh said piloting the S-40 “was like flying a forest through the air.”

campaign to shut down NYRBA’s mail routes. Pan Am began blocking NYRBA’s routes where they passed through areas it controlled, including Cuba. Trippe’s efforts succeeded, and on September 15, 1929, NYRBA was forced to sell its assets to him for $2 million, at a loss to investors of about $3 million. With the Commodores, Pan Am quickly gained control of South America’s east and west coastal routes and successfully established nonstop service between major metropolitan areas throughout South America.

uring the early days, Pan Am used several different airplanes on its Latin America routes. The Fokker F.VII and Ford TriMotor were productive on the inland routes, but there were few airports. Thus, with plenty of rivers, lakes and the ocean surface available, flying boats were the obvious answer. The Sikorsky S-38 amphibious sesquiplane, purchased in 1928, was the first flying boat widely used by Pan Am. Powered by twin 420-hp Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp engines, it had a crew of two and could carry eight passengers plus some mail. In February 1929 Charles Lindbergh and Hambleton (with Trippe along for the ride) inaugurated S-38 airmail service from Miami to the Panama Canal Zone. Sikorsky’s next aircraft, essentially a stretched monoplane version of the S-38, was the 15-passen-

ger S-41, which proved difficult to fly. One Pan Am chief pilot stated, “There’s nothing good you can say about the S-41.” It was followed by Pan Am’s first big four-engine flying boat, the 38-passenger S-40, the first of which was christened American Clipper. Only three were built and Lindbergh noted that with its maze of wing wires, braces and struts, “It was like flying a forest through the air.” The four-engine Sikorsky S-42 was introduced in the fall of 1934, with Pan Am purchasing all 10 that were built, giving each a Clipper name. The first, Brazilian Clipper, was used to inaugurate the Miami to Rio de Janeiro route. The advanced flying boat could carry up to 37 day passengers and the expanded crew included a full-time radio officer, flight mechanic and cabin attendant (purser). Later a design problem developed with the S-42 involving the fuel-jettison system, which was thought to have caused a fatal accident on January 11, 1938, after Pan Am service had expanded to the Pacific. Flown by highly experienced Captain Edwin Musick, the S-42 Samoan Clipper departed Pago Pago with a crew of six when shortly after takeoff they noticed an engine oil leak and turned back for a precautionary landing. Because the flying boat exceeded the allowable landing weight, Musick decided to dump fuel. Investigators speculated that while the dumping was in progress the flaps were extended and the electric flap motor ignited the fuel, causing the aircraft to explode. In 1934 Pan Am purchased 14 of Sikorsky’s 18-passenger twin-engine S-43 flying boats. First launched on June 1, 1935, the S-43 was equipped with 750-hp Pratt & Whitney R-1690 Hornet engines that gave it a top speed of 190 mph and a cruising speed of 166 mph. Its engines sat close together atop the 86-foot cantilever wing, which was mounted above the cabin on a short pylon. With no water rudder and close-set engines, the airplane was reportedly difficult to taxi. Yet Pan Am’s pilots liked its speed, and sometimes referred to it as the “Baby Clipper.” Pan Am’s long overwater flights caused serious crew fatigue problems. Civil Air Regulations limited domestic airline pilots to eight hours of flying per day and 85 hours per month. With its augmented flight crews, however, Pan Am could fly 24 hours a day. A “third officer” was on hand to periodically relieve the captain, first officer, flight engineer and radio officer. This relief pilot floated among the various crew positions and provided

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a necessary rest break during long over-ocean flights. The navigator, a notable exception, stood at his position without relief, often for 20 hours. Trippe wanted Pan Am to project an image as the “merchant marine of the air,” incorporating maritime custom and lore into all areas of its operation. The captain was assisted by a first officer; distances were in nautical miles, airspeed in knots; and the kitchen was dubbed the galley, the lavatory the head. The captain enjoyed the ultimate title, “Master of Ocean Flying Boats.” Pan Am emphasized professionalism with a touch of showmanship. Before flights the crew milled about the airplane dockside and at one bell formed up at attention. Then, in the best military tradition, they marched two at a time to board the aircraft. Once the engines were started and warmed, at two bells the passengers were escorted on board.

n October 9, 1935, the Glenn L. Martin Company delivered the first of three four-engine Martin M-130s, China Clipper, allowing Pan Am to establish transoceanic service. Originally powered by 830-hp Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp engines, in 1938 they were refitted with 950-hp Twin Wasps and hydromatic propellers that changed pitch automatically. With a potential range of 4,000 miles, the M-130 carried a crew of seven and up to 43 passengers, with sleeping accommodations available for 18. The M-130’s only design flaw reportedly was its single vertical fin and rudder, which caused the big flying boat to wallow in rough air, especially when the autopilot was engaged. This tended to cause air sickness among the passengers. With Lindbergh acting as a consultant, it seemed logical for Pan Am to start transatlantic service to Europe with the M-130. But to protect their own Imperial Airways, the British refused a requirement to refuel in Bermuda. As a result, Trippe turned his eye westward, forming the

Pacific Division to begin service throughout the Pacific and to China. Using the M-130 and S-42, initial airmail service began on November 22, 1935, from Pan Am’s Alameda Yacht Club base in San Francisco Bay. The airline flew cargo and airmail on proving runs for about a year, from San Francisco to China via Honolulu, Midway, Wake Island, Guam and Hong Kong. Later, with an airmail contract to the Philippines, a stop at Manila was added. Passen ger service to Manila began with a six-day journey on October 21, 1936. Despite their exceptional productivity, all three M-130s were lost in accidents. Hawaii Clipper disappeared without a trace on July 28, 1938, while en route from Guam to Manila. With the outbreak of World War II, the remaining two aircraft were acquired by the U.S. Naval Air Transport Service

size matters Top: A Pan Am twinengine Sikorsky S-43 “Baby Clipper” takes off from Dinner Key. Above: On May 3, 1936, a Pan Am crew participates in the christening ceremony for Hawaii Clipper, one of three big fourengine Martin M-130s built for the airline.

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a bigger boat Above: The Boeing 314 Anzac Clipper displays a camouflage paint scheme that the Pacific Clippers wore during World War II. Below: The M-130 China Clipper arrives over San Francisco. It was lost when it crashed during a night landing in Trinidad on January 18, 1945.

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but flown by Pan Am pilots. On January 21, 1943, Philippine Clipper was lost on a flight from Hawaii to San Francisco with Rear Adm. Robert H. Eng lish and his staff aboard. Upon reaching San Fran cisco the Clipper’s captain found the winds and visibility too bad to risk a landing and decided to hold over the ocean until the weather improved. But the winds blew him over land, and when he later descended over what he thought was the ocean, the M-130 struck a mountain northwest of San Francisco, killing all 19 aboard. On January 18, 1945, China Clipper was victim of a nocturnal glassy water landing attempt at Port of Spain, Trinidad. Investigators concluded that the copilot, who was flying the aircraft, misjudged its altitude over the calm, black water surface and failed to reduce his rate of descent. The flying boat broke in two on impacting the water and quickly sank. Seven of the 30 on board survived, including the copilot. The last and greatest of the American-made flying boat airliners was the Boeing 314. Designed to carry 74 passengers and a crew of 10, it was the world’s first widebody airplane. At a cost of $668,908 each, Pan Am contracted for six of the B-314s on July 21, 1936, with an option for six more. The first six aircraft mounted 1,500-hp Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone engines. The initial

test flight took place on June 7, 1938, with the first aircraft delivered in mid-February 1939. After four days of crew familiarization, the first 314 departed Seattle on February 19. With the British and French now agreeable to transatlan tic service, it was ferried to Baltimore, Pan Am’s Atlantic Division base. On March 3 Eleanor Roosevelt christened the airplane Yankee Clipper, and on the 26th it departed Baltimore via the Azores for the first survey flight to Europe. Rev enue airmail flights to Europe began on May 20, and on June 28 Dixie Clipper inaugurated the first regular transatlantic passenger service. By June 1939 the first six aircraft had been delivered. Sometime in the summer of 1939 Trippe picked up the option for the remaining six 314s. In March 1941 Pan Am took delivery of the first improved 314A, equipped with 1,600-hp Double Wasp engines. The original six were subsequently modified as 314As. The increased horsepower allowed the addition of three passenger seats, for a total of 74 day or 34 overnight passengers.

he December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor found three Pan Am Clippers dis persed throughout the Pacific. Captain Bob Ford was en route to Auckland, New Zealand, and flew the 314A Pacific Clipper back to the United States westbound via Australia, Java, Ceylon, Bahrain, the Belgian Congo and across the Atlantic to Brazil and on to New York City. Captain John H. Hamilton had departed Wake Island for Guam in the M-130 Philippine Clipper but was recalled and on the water at Wake when the Japanese struck. The Clipper subsequently departed with 70 people and 97 bullet holes, but they made it home successfully. Captain Harry L. Turner was on a scheduled flight from San Francisco to Hawaii in the 314A

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Anzac Clipper when he learned of the attack. His scheduled arrival time would have put the flight in the middle of the attack but it had departed 40 minutes late. Turner’s daughter was having her first piano recital in Oakland, and he delayed to hear her opening piece. Then he encountered heavy traffic going to Treasure Island, where Pan Am’s operation was based. These factors, along with a long preflight briefing about the tensions with Japan, combined to save the flight from certain disaster. By 1943, with the 12 Boeing 314s delivered, Pan Am based six at North Beach adjacent to LaGuardia Field for the Atlantic flights and three on the West Coast. The remaining three were sold to the British for use by their new national airline, BOAC. After the outbreak of hostilities, Pan Am’s Pacific Division became part of the Naval Air Transport Service. The only 314 accident was the direct result of the calm water “mirror effect” that had led to China Clipper’s loss. Just after sunset on February 22, 1943, Captain R.O.D. Sullivan was maneuvering to land Yankee Clipper on the Tagus River in Lisbon, Portugal. But the dark, glassy water caused him to lose depth perception. A wing tip apparently touched the surface and the big flying boat crashed. Twenty-four of the 39 passengers and crewmen aboard were killed. With the postwar Marshall Plan funding the construction of large international airports in Europe’s major cities and the growing availability of long-range, high-capacity landplanes, the flying boats’ days were numbered. At war’s end surplus DC-3 (C-47) and DC-4 (C-54) transports were available in great numbers from the military. And with certification of the four-engine Lockheed Constellation imminent, the B-314 was dated. Captain William M. Masland piloted Pan Am’s last scheduled flight in the great Boeing Clipper. It was late December 1945 in Lisbon, and everyone wanted badly to be in New York for Christmas. With winter weather that meant the long way

home, via Africa, South America and the West Indies. So, by flying three days and most of three nights and stopping only for fuel, they landed in New York at 2 a.m. on the 24th. “The night watchman met us, no one else,” remembered Masland. “No flags, no bands, no speeches, just the night watchman making his usual rounds. There never was a quieter end to a brave and glorious era.” Frequent contributor John Lowery is a fighter pilot veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Additional reading: Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats, by James Trautman, and The Pan Am Clipper: The History of America’s Flying Boats 1935–1945, by Roy Allen.

inside a leviathan A period cutaway (top) and photo of the flight deck (above) reveal interior details of the B-314. The cutaway shows the original 314 design, featuring a single tailfin, before a tri-tail was adopted for added inflight stability.

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A RED DEVIL’S ODYSSEY OF FOUR FRIENDS WHO WERE AMONG THE FIRST AMERICANS TO TRAIN AS COMBAT PILOTS IN FRANCE, ONLY ONE COMPLETED HIS TRAINING AND SURVIVED THE WAR BY GARY G. YERKEY

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victorious survivors After completing his flight training in France, bomber pilot Bruce C. Hopper joined the 96th Aero Squadron “Red Devils” for the final months of World War I. Here members of the 96th pose before one of their Breguet 14.B2 bombers on November 12, 1918—the day after the Armistice ended the war.

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flight School of hard knocks Top: A Breguet 14.B2, the 96th’s primary bomber, comes to grief at an American training field. Above: Hopper’s 1922 passport photo.

Hopper told a gathering of fellow Harvard University alumni that his “long record” of close calls had begun in World War I when, in his mid-20s, he served as a bomber pilot with the U.S. Army Air Service (USAS) in northeastern France. He said that in May 1918, for instance, he had somehow managed to survive the crash of his Sopwith Camel and was plucked from the wreckage by a doctor armed with a pair of pliers. He was briefly hospitalized but refused to be sent home and instead returned to the battlefield—“not from an eagerness for air combat but from a natural desire to stick with the gang.” Over the next several months, Hopper flew 29 bombing missions as a flight leader of the Army’s

96th Aero Squadron “Red Devils” and was later awarded a Pershing Citation and a Croix de Guerre for his service. Born on August 24, 1892, in Litchfield, Ill., Hopper spent his childhood in Billings, Mont., where his father was a rancher. In 1913 he enrolled at the University of Montana. But after two years, he and his friend and fellow sophomore Verne Robinson were bitten by a combination of “wanderlust and worthy purpose,” according to an article in the Great Falls Tribune. Soon the pair was making arrangements to join the American Red Cross in war-torn Europe. Hopper put his plans on hold, however, when he was offered a scholarship to attend Harvard University. After less than two years at Harvard—

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IN MAY 1968, 75-YEAR-OLD BRUCE C. HOPPER LOOKED BACK ON HIS LIFE WITH SATISFACTION… AND A MEASURE OF DISBELIEF. “MY POWER TO SURVIVE CONTINUES TO ASTONISH ME,” HE REMARKED.

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with the United States having entered World War I in support of France, Great Britain and Russia— he decided to leave his studies and head to Europe on his own. On April 28, 1917, little more than three weeks after the U.S. declared war on Germany, Hopper boarded the French liner SS La Touraine in New York, bound for Bordeaux, France. During the trip he befriended three students from the Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.—Jack Morris Wright, William Taylor and Jack Sawhill—who, like him, were traveling to France to volunteer for service in the war. Once in France, the four men, calling themselves the “Four Musketeers,” joined the motor transport branch of the French army and were assigned to haul military equipment and personnel with Motor Transport Unit 526 (Réserve Mallet) along the Soissons and Reims fronts. Hopper later said he was particularly fond of Wright, who was born in the U.S. but raised in France, noting they both shared a deep love for education. In an introduction to a collection of Wright’s letters home from Europe, published in 1918, Phillips Academy principal Alfred E. Stearns said that his student’s love of the French had led him to enter into their “great struggle.” “I am sure I can help them,” Wright had told Stearns, “and I owe them so much.”

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over there Clockwise from above left: Hopper’s close friend Jack Morris Wright, wearing a Royal Flying Corps uniform, wrote numerous evocative letters home that were published after his death; the ocean liner La Touraine carried Hopper and the other “Four Musketeers” to France; American soldiers arrive in Europe; aircrewmen of the 96th undergo gunnery training.

Once in France, Wright wrote to his mother saying he was driving a five-ton Pierce Arrow truck to and from the front and eating bread and cheese, “with guns flashing next to me…while sitting on a truck load of ten thousand pounds of dynamite.” On June 11, 1917, he said in a letter to his aunt that he had also seen airplanes “fall to their death” and had “heard the wounded cry.” Despite the risks, Wright decided to join the USAS, training as a pilot. “It is a dangerous service,” he wrote to his mother. “Many do not come back....You’ll no longer have a son in the truck service, but a son in aviation.” At about the same time, the other members

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The big Push Above: Captain James A. Summersett, commander of the 96th during the pivotal St. Mihiel and MeuseArgonne campaigns, stands with one of his Breguets. Right: Ground crewmen receive instructions on assembling and loading bombs. Below: Squadron personnel line up by their aircraft.

of the Four Musketeers—Hopper, Sawhill and Taylor—also signed up to become pilots. Initial flight training for them and others took place at a complex of French military airfields near Tours, later known as the 2nd Air Instruction Center. “We came to Tours together and learned to fly,” Hopper wrote in a letter to Wright’s mother, Sara Greene Wise, a well-known artist at the time. “Jack realized more than most of us the larger significance of flying....Flying was so tremendous in reality, so supernatural, so akin to some divine privilege....He told me he always felt as though invisible hands of a cosmic giant were supporting the frail wings of linen and wood, as on he rushed with the gripping power of the propeller.”

n early September 1917, after his first flight at Tours (with an instructor at the controls), Wright wrote to his mother saying that “you realize [you are] hanging in space by two thin wings and slowly progressing by the deafening motor and mad propeller…[and] that the space you are floating in is a breathing medium—a vast, colossal god in whose arms you are lying as a speck in the infinite.” The next day, Wright was allowed to take the controls. But he came down, he said, “with the con-

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viction that I could never make an aviator…I felt myself impossible to ever be able to hang correctly in space and tend to all the necessaries at once, when at the slightest mistake you were finished.” That night he slept restlessly, thinking that the next time he would climb into the airplane and “swing that machine around to the gale as I pleased, making myself at home and sure, or that I would, in attempting it, break my neck. I was bent on flying or nothing.” As the sun came up the following day, “I got in [the plane], we tested the motor, and off,” he wrote his mother. “The sun shone bright and I said to myself as though in a hammock, ‘Fine day today; the country will look pleasant. We’ll enjoy the trip. Ah! We’re up. I was getting bored with the earth!’ I waited for the signal. Finally, at two hundred meters after passing over another plane, my pilot tapped me on the back. I took the controls and calmly remembered what I was [supposed to do]....The weather was calm—no ‘bumps’— no ‘pockets.’ I was running the old boat as I had intended to—like a man. When the trip was over,

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practicing spirals near the airport, which he found frightening: “[Y]ou’re hung up in space some three thousand feet when you cut…the motor and start,” he wrote. “I pulled the plane over on a perpendicular and down [and pulled] back a little on the stick to make her spin lightly, and off she went, the clouds whirling by as in a cyclone—a war of the gods and the wind roaring at me like a continual fog-horn and pulling on me hard.” Wright continued: “Round like a top, down, down towards the earth, as in a falling merry-goround the plane led me like a bolt through space. I remember vaguely acknowledging that if the bus did smash, it was nevertheless a great experience,

Front Line November 11, 1918

LONDON

sallying forth Above: Breguets of the 96th set out on a bombing mission against a German target. Below: All was quiet on the Western Front at war’s end.

H O LLAND

BRUSSELS

BELGIUM MEU

GERMANY

LUXEM BO U R G

F R ANCE SE

BANTHÉVILLE SIVRY

D O M M A R YBARONCOURT

ARGONNE FOREST

PA R I S

CONFLANS

S T. M I H I E L AMANTY MEU SE

the results were accomplished. Between confident running of the plane or smash-up, I had gained the former—and, believe me, how I did enjoy it. Now I must go ahead, for I have much to learn and resist and conquer, inasmuch as I intend to make an aviator.” But along with his sense of excitement were persistent thoughts of his possible demise. “[D]eath is the general joke of the day; it makes us laugh....it is there—always present.” His roommate and fellow Musketeer Hopper later wrote that Wright’s “naive curiosity” had prompted him again and again to “stunt” with his airplane long before he was a master of the controls. Hopper said that at the advanced flight training school at the Issoudun aerodrome, about 150 miles south of Paris, a rivalry had sprung up between Wright and Jack Sawhill as to who would make the most rapid progress toward winning the much-coveted French brevet. “One day [Wright] circled the field countertraffic, that is he turned to the right on the takeoff when the two balls at the pilotage indicated compulsory turning to the left,” Hopper noted. “For that error he was taken off the flying list for two or three days, much to Jack Sawhill’s delight. Jack Sawhill, however, landed crosswind the next day, and was given a similar punishment. This friendly rivalry continued till Jack Sawhill fell in a Nieuport, and was taken to the hospital with a broken arm.” On January 16, 1918, Hopper said goodbye to Wright at Issoudun before heading back to Tours to become a flight instructor. “[I said] I should meet him in Paris, or at the front, or maybe behind the moon....[But] his rendezvous was not with me, but with Death.” Hopper wrote to Wright’s mother a few weeks later that on January 24 Wright had spiraled down from a height of 1,000 meters “with a cold motor” only to find that he was gliding short of the field. Wright tried to lengthen his landing angle but according to Hopper he flattened out at 50 meters altitude, the plane stalled and it “wing-slipped” to the ground. Wright was killed in the crash. Just two days before the accident, Wright had written to his mother saying that he had been

TOURS

ISSOUDUN

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AIr power Clockwise from top left: Bombs burst at a juncture of the MetzSablon railway on September 15, 1918, during the St. Mihiel Offensive; Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell (left), leader of the St. Mihiel air arm, meets with General John J. Pershing; the rail hub at Dommary-Baroncourt was the 96th’s first target of the war.

and [it] was the height of the game.” After landing, he immediately took to the sky for a second attempt. “My second, I felt was better, so that when I came out of it, it was as though I had held my breath under water a long time. I just burst loose and sang and shouted at the top of my voice.” Wright told his mother that, between attempts, he had seen the deadly crash of another student pilot he knew. “I don’t feel heart-broken for him,” he wrote, “so much as for the mother back home.” As for the fate of the other two Musketeers, Sawhill’s broken arm never fully healed and after a lengthy hospital stay he returned to the U.S. at war’s end. Bill Taylor completed his flight training and joined the 95th Aero Squadron, but was killed in action on September 17, 1918.

opper would spend the remainder of the war as a lead bomber pilot with the 96th Aero Squadron, flying the Breguet 14.B2 from the squadron’s base at Amanty Airdrome, near the front. Initially, in the spring of 1918, the squadron had to make do with 10 old Breguets that were in constant need of major repairs. “It was impossible to get spare parts,” Hopper wrote. “The squadron mechanics, when ordered to get the Breguets ready for duty 50

over the lines, were forced to utilize worn out farm machinery discarded by peasants in the vicinity of the airdrome.” On June 12, the 96th conducted its first bombing mission of the war when it attacked the railroad yards at Dommary-Baroncourt with a formation of six Breguets. The Americans dropped nearly a ton of bombs during the four-hour raid, leaving a trail of explosions across the yards and an adjacent warehouse. But on July 12 the squadron suffered a major loss when six Breguets were forced to land in enemy territory due to adverse weather and poor navigation. The pilots and observers of all six bombers were captured, including Major Harry M. Brown, the 96th’s commanding officer. Hopper wrote in a postwar report titled “Tactical History of American Day Bombardment Aviation” that after the debacle, which left the 96th effectively without aircraft, bombing operations ceased until early August, when 11 new Breguets were delivered to Amanty from Colombey-lesBelles. Twenty raids were conducted, Hopper said, and 21.1 tons of bombs dropped during two weeks in August. He said the raid on Conflans on August 20 was particularly successful: 40 German airplanes were destroyed on the ground and 50 workman and soldiers were killed. Hopper also participated in a number of successful bombing missions over the next few days, including those targeting the railroad yards at Longuyon and Audun-le-Roman on August 21 and Conflans on August 22, 23, 25 and 30 and September 3. At the same time, Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, commander of the First Army Air Service, was moving his headquarters to Lignyen-Barrois, a few miles from the front, in preparation for a major Allied assault on the German defenses—the St. Mihiel Offensive. From there, he would command the largest aggregation of air assets engaged in a single battle during the war, involving roughly 1,500 aircraft in support of 550,000 American and 110,000 French troops on the ground. According to Hopper, the day that the offensive began—Thursday, September 12—was “the worst flying day in many months.” A strong

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southwest wind made formation flying extremely dangerous, he wrote, and low, fast-moving clouds made it impossible to see more than a mile and a half ahead. The weather improved in the afternoon, however, and the 96th was able to conduct three missions—with disastrous results. Eight planes were wrecked or put out of commission, and three members of the 96th were killed. The results over the next few days were not much better. The squadron scored a perfect hit at the neck of the railroad yards at Conflans and successfully bombed enemy troops on the roads between Vittonville and Arnaville on the Moselle River. But according to Hopper the 96th lost no fewer than 16 fliers over the course of the four-day St. Mihiel operation along with 14 airplanes that were either destroyed in combat or forced down in hostile territory. During the final Allied assault of the war, however, from September 26 until the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the 96th recorded a series of major bombing successes as part of the MeuseArgonne Offensive. “For the first time since the squadron had been operating,” Hopper wrote, “the pursuit planes cooperated closely with the bombers. The protection afforded by the pursuit planes…[was] of immense value for precision bombing.” Hopper said that larger formations, comprising up to 20 airplanes, were also employed by the 96th over Meuse-Argonne. “The success of the big formation…did more to raise the spirits and courage of the squadron than any incident in its history,” he recalled. One of the first successes of the new-style for mation occurred on October 1 when Hopper led 13 planes on a bombing mission over Banthéville. On October 18 a flight of 14 aircraft led by Hop per reached its objective, Sivry, dropping 1,600 kilograms of bombs on the town center and nearby roads. “According to intelligence reports from French sources,” he noted, “250 men were killed, and 700 wounded on this raid.” Immediately following his discharge from the USAS in 1919, Hopper wrote a history of the 96th Aero Squadron, which he later said was “a pathetically small manuscript because there was just one log book as a record.” He then teamed up with an Army buddy, Cass Canfield (who later served as president and chairman of Harper & Brothers publishers), to travel the world. The pair floated down the Nile River in a felucca, camping at night on the riverbank. They traveled across China on foot and by raft and sampan for three months in 1920-21, ending up in Shanghai, where Hopper spent a year writing editorials and a column for the China Press and Shanghai Evening Star. Hopper also wandered through the Urals dressed as a peasant. With Junius B. Wood, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, he traveled

to Murmansk and inland to Luvozero by reindeer-drawn sled. In 1924 he returned to Harvard to complete work on his bachelor of science degree, followed by a master’s degree in 1925. He spent two years in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1929 as a fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs and completed work on his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1930, joining the faculty as an assistant professor of government. Among his students over the years were three Kennedy brothers: Joseph P., John F. and Edward M. In March 1942 Hopper established a branch of the Office of Strategic Services—precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency—in Sweden, where he observed and interpreted Soviet activities in the Baltic region for about a year. He later served as chief historian for the U.S. Eighth Air Force and U.S. Strategic Air Forces and subsequently worked at the Pentagon as special consultant and speechwriter for General Carl A. Spaatz. In 1946-47 Hopper served as a member of the site selection board for the U.S. Air Force Academy. He then returned to Harvard, where he spent the next 13 years, until his retirement in 1961, as an associate professor specializing in Soviet affairs. He died at age 80 in Cambridge, Mass., on July 6, 1973.

Overdue honor

Top: Decades after the war, General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz awards Hopper a belated Silver Star to add to his World War I Victory Medal. Above: A patch from today’s 96th Bomb Squadron, whose airmen fly B-52Hs from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, reflects their Red Devil heritage.

Gary G. Yerkey is a former foreign correspondent for several U.S. media outlets, including Time-LIFE and the Christian Science Monitor. He currently works as a journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. Further reading: Hostile Skies, by James J. Hudson; Destiny’s Wings, by Hugh T. Harrington; A Poet of the Air, by Jack Morris Wright; and Wings of Honor, by James J. Sloan Jr. M AY 2 0 2 1

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AERIAL MINESWEEPERS OF WORLD WAR II WHEN GERMANY DEPLOYED MAGNETIC MINES EARLY IN THE WAR, BRITAIN COUNTERED WITH AIRCRAFT THAT COULD EXPLODE THEM BY MIMICKING A SHIP’S MAGNETIC SIGNATURE BY CARL O. SCHUSTER

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Lord of the ring In a painting by Michael Turner, a specially modified Vickers Wellington uses its electrically charged, 48-foot-diameter ring to detonate a German magnetic mine during World War II.

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Fighting back Top: A Wellington DWI Mark II readies for de-mining duty in Egypt. Inset: The Royal Navy’s mine warfare section at HMS Vernon developed the strategy for countering German magnetic mines.

Within days, four ships totaling 14,575 gross registered tons were sunk and another 10,391 GRT of shipping was damaged. Although mines were suspected, minesweepers dispatched to the area did not find any, leading most Royal Navy officials to believe that the losses were due to U-boat torpedo attacks, even though survivors did not report seeing torpedo wakes. The mystery remained unsolved until a mine was successfully recovered on November 21, 1939. HMS Vernon, the Royal

Navy’s shore establishment technology research center in Portsmouth, initiated an effort to learn the mine’s triggering mechanism and recommend effective countermeasures. Steel warships generate a magnetic signature as they steam through sea-lanes, cutting across the Earth’s magnetic field. The German magneticinfluence mines were designed to capitalize on this, detonating when they detected that signature, even from considerable depths.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL TURNER; ABOVE: IWM CM5312; INSET: AWM P05468.001; OPPOSITE TOP: IWM MH31337; RIGHT: IWM CM5313

ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1939, TWO DAYS AFTER GERMANY INVADED POLAND, THE GERMAN SUBMARINES U-13, U-14 AND U-17 STARTED LAYING THREE FIELDS OF MAGNETICINFLUENCE MINES ON THE SEA FLOOR JUST OFF BRITAIN’S EAST COAST.

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had it by December 1939 and quickly identified the countermeasure requirements. The Wellington was a natural choice for the aerial platform. Already in mass production, it had good range and with many crews experienced in maritime operations it offered a fast, cost-effective platform, provided the potential aerodynamic challenges could be solved. With that viewed as the most critical problem, Vickers first installed a 48-foot-diameter balsa wood ring outside the airframe, attaching it beneath the fuselage and

secret’s out Above: An exploded view of a German magnetic mine. Below: This Wellington DWI was one of six that were assigned to No. 202 Group in Egypt to clear mines from the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean coast.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL TURNER; ABOVE: IWM CM5312; INSET: AWM P05468.001; OPPOSITE TOP: IWM MH31337; RIGHT: IWM CM5313

Britain worked to rapidly developed shipborne degaussing equipment and deperming operations to neutralize and remove ships’ magnetic signatures, respectively. The Royal Navy also introduced shipborne magnetic minesweeping equipment and tactics in record time, but full-scale implementation lay months away. Moreover, building and crewing the large numbers of minesweepers required to cover all British ports and coastal waterways would take months that Britain did not have. By year’s end, Germany had deployed 470 magnetic mines that claimed 79 ships of 162,697 GRT. With so much coastline and waters to protect, it was imperative that Brit ain develop a fast-moving magnetic countermeasure system. The solution was to build an aircraft that replicated a ship’s magnetic sig nature so that it could detonate mines from a safe distance as it flew over them. With that in mind, Royal Air Force Coastal Command asked the Vickers firm to modify its Wellington bomber for the aerial minesweeping role. It was a revolutionary idea. At the time, few naval leaders knew bottom magnetic-influence mines existed. Minesweeping therefore consisted of towing gear that cut the mooring cables of traditional contact mines so that they floated to the surface and could be destroyed. Royal Navy leaders at HMS Vernon’s mine warfare section had expected Germany to deploy magnetic mines. In fact, Britain had developed and deployed magnetic mines off the German coast in 1918 and off the Estonian coast in 1919 during its peripheral involvement in the Russian Civil War. HMS Vernon officials correctly believed that Soviet authorities had recovered some of those mines and turned them over to the Germans in the 1920s. The challenge was to determine the specific parameters of the German detonating system—the detonation threshold and timing. No countermeasure’s effectiveness could be assured without that knowledge. The British

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tions were faired over to streamline the fuselage. Also, because the magnetic coil rendered normal compasses useless, the Wellington was fitted with a gyrocompass. Testing in December 1939 against a disarmed German magnetic mine validated the concept. The prototype’s success led to three more Wellingtons being modified on the production line, bringing the inventory to four by January 1940. Vickers built another 11 from production lines at other plants. The 15 aircraft were designated as Mark Ia DWIs (Directional Wireless Installation) and assigned to General Reconnaissance Unit 1 (GRU 1) to hide their true mission. Operating out of RAF Manston, GRU 1 was responsible for keeping the Thames Estuary clear of magnetic mines.

Beachcombing Top: A clearance team recovers a German magnetic mine from the British shore. Above: A German magnetic mine raised in 1939. Below: The Germans and British approached aerial minesweeping in a similar fashion.

wings. The ring contained aluminum strip coils that emitted magnetic impulses when charged by an electrical current. Aluminum was used to save weight and costs since copper wire was heavier and in short supply. Early flight testing revealed the ring had surprisingly little impact on the airplane’s flight characteristics and handling. Vickers engineers then removed the bomb racks, bombsight, guns and all unnecessary equipment to reduce weight and free up space for a Ford V8 automobile engine driving a 35-kilowatt Mawdsley electric generator. The former gun posi-

ith the modified Wellingtons now operational, the next challenge was to establish the required altitude and transit speed for the “influence sweep” simulating a ship’s magnetic signature. The planes had to fly low enough to ensure they could detonate the mines laying on the seabed. Speed was also an issue. Flying too fast would not allow the mines’ sensors to reach the detonation threshold. Flying too slow or too low put the aircraft in danger from the mine detonation. Testing revealed that 35 and 60 feet were the minimum and maximum altitudes, respectively. The aircraft’s speed was not to exceed 130 mph while sweeping. Those narrow flight parameters made aerial minesweeping a tense and dangerous operation. GRU 1 achieved its first success on January 9, 1940, safely detonating a mine. The second success came five days later but the crew received a painful lesson when the mine detonated beneath their aircraft, almost bringing it down. They had

AERIAL MINESWEEPING TECHNIQUES Junkers Ju-52/3m MS

Vickers Wellington DWI

Airspeed was 125-135 mph

Airspeed was a constant 130 mph A third Ju-52 trailed 130 feet behind the forward pair to explode acoustic mines

The forward Ju-52s were 100-130 feet apart… …and 33-66 feet above the water

The Wellingtons flew 100-130 feet apart…

…and 35-60 feet above the water

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OPPOSITE FROM TOP: AWM P05468.013; IWM A30292; ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE KARP; ABOVE: IWM CM5201; INSET: IWM C4095

been flying below 35 feet, exploding the mine an estimated three-tenths of a second early. The Wellington was propelled upward about 40 feet by the blast, its hatches were blown off and the accelerometer recorded 10 Gs of force on the airframe. In a testament to the bomber’s robustness, no structural damage was inflicted beyond the loss of the hatches. In addition to sweeping British waters, three GRU 1 Wellingtons swept the waters ahead of HMS Hereward when it evacuated the Dutch royal family to Britain in May 1940. Fighter escorts protected the unarmed minesweepers on missions in dangerous waters, but neither RAF nor Luftwaffe records indicate any were ever attacked. Vickers’ designers introduced several improvements in early 1940. The resulting Mark II DWIs used a lighter and more powerful de Havilland Gipsy Six engine powering a 96-kilowatt generator, for a weight savings of more than 1,000 pounds. The greater generating power also enabled them to reduce the coil ring diameter. The Gipsy engines produced more heat, leading the designers to install an air duct to improve engine cooling and a smaller one to guide air into the coil to prevent overheating. The gyrocompass had proven unreliable and needed to be replaced. Vickers engineers discovered that mounting the normal compass in the tail isolated it from the coil’s magnetic influence. By

placing a compass indicator in the instrument panel they eliminated the need for the gyro, saving more weight and improving navigation. By August 1941, all Wellington DWIs had been brought up to Mark II standard. The Royal Air Force formed a second aerial minesweeping unit under GRU 1 in April 1940, equipping it with two Mark Ia DWIs and the first Mark II DWI. Operations along the British coast were largely successful as the Wellingtons were used primarily as a quick-response countermeasures force against suspected minefields or to clear ports critical to ongoing operations. Concerned about potential Italian mining of Egyptian ports and the Suez Canal, Britain deployed a Mark Ia to the Mediterranean on May 20 along with technicians and equipment to convert the five GRU 1 Wellingtons that followed to Mark II standards. Assigned to Middle East Command’s No. 202 Group, the six planes swept for mines in the Suez Canal, off the Egyptian and North African coast and in the approaches to Malta. Ironically, as the Allies advanced across North Africa in 1943, the aerial minesweepers’

Hazardous waters Top: A Wellington DWI performs a sweep over Tripoli harbor after the city fell to the Allies on January 23, 1943. Above: A German Junkers Ju-52/3m MS minesweeper erupts in flames after being targeted by an RAF Hawker Typhoon off Lorient, France.

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NAVAL MINE WARFARE IN THE ATLANTIC AND EUROPEAN THEATERS SANK MORE THAN ONE MILLION TONS OF ALLIED SHIPPING.

Sending a MEssage Armorers make final adjustments to mines before they are loaded into a Wellington bomber of No. 300 Polish Squadron at RAF Faldingworth. The message on the lefthand mine reads “From Polish Airmen” in both Polish and English.

primary focus shifted to countering Allied mines originally laid to close the Axis’ North African ports so that the harbors could be reopened.

lthough not as well known as the German magnetic mining effort, Britain’s mining of German waters also involved magnetic mines. The Kriegsmarine recovered one such mine off Jutland in late Sep tember 1939. While German losses to mines were not as serious as those suffered by Britain, the potential threat they posed to Germany’s naval training areas in the Baltic and North seas necessitated a quick solution. Like the RAF, the Luftwaffe chose an existing aerial platform as a testbed, the Junkers Ju-52/3m transport. The prototype used a 51-hp diesel engine driving a 35-kilowatt generator borrowed from a searchlight unit to power the coil, but otherwise the program was similar to Britain’s. A 14-meter (46-foot) balsa wood ring containing an aluminum coil was attached to the Ju-52’s wings via plywood struts. The first flight took place in mid-October 1939, followed two weeks later by a successful test off the port of Vlissingen during which the Ju-52 detonated several mines while flying at an altitude of 10 to 20 meters (33 to 66 feet). Production was slow due to the higher priority given to equipping units assigned to the 1940 western campaign. The first Ju-52/3m MS Minensuche (mine search) production aircraft was delivered in June 1940 and the first of six Minensuchstaffeln (mine search squadrons), Sonderkommando Mausi (special “mouse-catcher” unit), was formed that September. The Ju-52/3m MS aircraft were modified on the production line by installing a diesel- or gasoline-engine-driven 150-kilowatt generator in the cargo bay and connecting it to the aluminum coil. Since the British were deploying acoustic as

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well as magnetic mines, approximately half of the German Ju-52/3m MS aircraft were equipped with the KK-Gerät (Knallkörpergerät, or mine destruction device) to destroy acoustic mines. The KK-Gerät consisted of a container holding 30 10-kilogram explosive charges intended to neutralize acoustic mines by destroying their hydrophones. Early MS aircraft carried a single 15mm machine gun and two beam 7.92mm guns for self-protection. German aerial minesweeping tactics differed slightly from British practice. Flight speed was almost identical at 125-135 mph but altitude was determined by water depth. The German magnetic sweep aircraft flew 40 meters (130 feet) above the seabed, requiring an altitude of 10-20 meters for most flights. Also, the Germans employed two magnetic-coil equipped MS aircraft in line abreast with 30- to 40-meter separation, followed by a single KK-Gerät aircraft trailing about 40 meters behind them. Typically, the mines detonated about 5-10 meters behind the magnetic sweeps, making for some exciting moments for the KK-Gerät pilots. Additionally, Germany’s aerial minesweepers faced opposition in most of their operating areas and the Luftwaffe did not provide fighter escorts. As losses mounted, defensive armament was increased. By October 1943, the MS aircraft were toting a 20mm cannon in the dorsal position and 13mm machine guns in the beam positions, but losses continued. Sonderkommando Mausi was re-designated Min ens uch Gruppe 1 (Mine Searching Group 1) in October 1942 and became the administrative control unit for the MS squadrons. Like Britain, Germany used its aerial minesweepers as both a rapid-response force and for sea-lane clearance. As such, its MS squadrons deployed detachments to nearly every maritime theater, from the Baltic

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LEFT: IWM HU106355; ABOVE: BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-643-4755-30A FOTO OHMYER; ABOVE RIGHT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

and North Sea down to the Mediterranean. The northern French coast was the squadrons’ most critical and dangerous area of operations, with RAF and later American fighters attacking flights trying to keep the vital French coastal waters clear of Allied mines. They remained active despite losses and declining fuel resources until war’s end, and assisted Allied forces in Baltic and North Sea minesweeping in 1946. With Allied mining on the rise after 1942, the Kriegsmarine modified several of its allocated seaplanes for aerial minesweeping. Four threeengine Blohm und Voss Bv-138C flying boats had all their armament removed and a diesel engine powering a 53-kilowatt generator installed in the nose. They used the same magnetic ring as the Ju-52/3m, only it was mounted above the nose and attached by aluminum braces. They were designated Bv-138MS but their crews called them Mausi-Flugzeuge (mouse-catching aircraft). Blohm und Voss also modified two four-engine Ha-139 floatplanes for minesweeping by attaching the magnetic loop to the nose and wingtips. A lack of spare parts limited the planes’ utility and they were out of service by early 1943. Unarmed and flying individually, the seaplane minesweepers were used to clear mines in canals, rivers and estuaries from June 1942 to August 1944. Naval mine warfare played a key role in the Atlantic and European theaters, sinking more than one million tons of Allied shipping and damaging nearly double that figure. Five percent of British and German warship losses were due to mines. All the combatants employed mines extensively and their sophistication increased as the war progressed, raising the importance and complexity of mine countermeasure operations. The introduction and widespread deployment of bottom influence mines added a new threat dimension that had to be rapidly addressed. Aerial

minesweeping was the only solution that offered an immediate response. The planes were effective, comparatively cheap and could be quickly deployed to distant locations and sweep large areas of water. Although their operations are not well known, the aerial minesweepers of World War II played a key role in keeping waterways and ports open and should be viewed as the forerunner to today’s helicopter mine countermeasures units. Carl O. Schuster retired from the U.S. Navy as a captain in June 1999. He is an instructor in military history and international relations at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu. Further reading: The Wellington Bomber Story, by Martin W. Bowman; The Hidden Menace, by Maurice Griffiths; and Junkers Ju 52: Aircraft and Legend, by Heinz Nowarra.

“mouse catchers” Top: Three Ju-52/3m MS minesweepers patrol a stretch of sea. Above: A Blohm und Voss Bv-138MS is hoisted aboard a seaplane tender. The modified Bv-138s and similarly equipped Ju-52/3ms were the two main German aerial minesweepers.

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EARNING MY GOLD WINGS A U.S. NAVY HELICOPTER PILOT RECOUNTS THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HIS FLIGHT TRAINING AT THE DAWN OF THE SIXTIES BY DAN MANNINGHAM

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school is in session Author Dan Manningham’s U.S. Navy pilot training included extensive time at Florida’s Whiting Field in North American T-28 Trojans. This T-28C, restored by Mark Huffstutler’s Sierra Industries, is flying over southern Texas.

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Trojan horses T-28s await the day’s lessons along the flight line at Saufley Field near Pensacola, Fla., where the author trained in Beechcraft T-34 Mentors.

The phone rings and I’m the only one in the house, so I answer and the caller asks for me. He says he is calling from Navy Air recruiting and they have a class date for me to begin pilot training in Pensacola, Fla., on January 10. Am I interested? Yes, I am interested! Exhilarated, elated, euphoric, overjoyed because I have dreamed of flying as long as I can remember. And because I’m not necessarily a strong candidate—English major, lousy GPA, no athletic track record. But they have a class to fill, so I guess the first one to answer the phone gets the slot. Merry Christmas! I drive into Boston and propose to my girlfriend Fran. We marry seven days later and on January 10 I report to the preflight school at Naval Air Station Pensacola. (Fran and I celebrated our 62nd anniversary this year.) Preflight is four months of academics, physical training, swimming and military indoctrination. Our class has 22 guys from all over the country and we settle in for the training. Our first test is PT and I fail. I go back the next evening and pass, barely, but that obviates the need for any extra PT, which would reduce the time for studying. And

I’m going to need that time. We are given a course curriculum with books and a slide rule. Really? Do they expect English majors to know how to use a slide rule? The answer is a definite yes. Use every scale on the slide rule or fail the math course and be eliminated. I move into a room with C.J. and George, both engineering majors, and spend weeks mastering that tool with their help. Then there is swimming, which is another of my weak points. In eight weeks of half days in the pool we will swim above and below and around, including a mile swim with our clothes on, and experience the “Dilbert Dunker” survival trainer. PT includes all the normal activities plus parachute training and trampoline and an obstacle course. Academics focus on navigation, aerodynamics, engines and weather, which the Navy then calls aerology. The four-month preflight school concludes with three days in the Eglin swamps on a survival training exercise. We survive three days of pouring rain and eat a black snake. Memorable! After a whirlwind four months we graduate as “nuggets”—newly commissioned ensigns—and

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PAUL BOWEN PHOTOGRAPHY; ABOVE & RIGHT: SCOTT MCINTOSH; OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF DAN MANNINGHAM; OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: U.S. NAVY

IT’S CHRISTMAS EVE 1958 AT 4 P.M. I AM VISITING HOME OUTSIDE BOSTON AFTER WORKING IN NEW MEXICO FOR SEVERAL MONTHS FOLLOWING COLLEGE GRADUATION IN MAY.

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nearly half my preflight class washes out. Studying poetry is apparently an advantage. After two months and 43 hours in that little bird the next stop is North Whiting Field northeast of Pensacola, where we transition to the North American T-28 Trojan, a rugged beast with 1,500 hp and the performance of an early World War II fighter. The T-28 is actually a very nice airplane but I flunk my pre-solo check after enduring six hours with a screamer. No serious instruction, just verbal eruptions over any mistake. Getting a check ride “down” is serious because a repeat would mean elimination and transfer to navigator training with no chance of ever returning to pilot training. My new instructor, Lieutenant Martin, is a natural teacher. One of my brain locks is to forget to move the mixture control to “rich” for climbs and descents, but Martin has an ingenious solution. During a cookout at his home he takes my wife Fran aside and instructs her to whisper

plunging right in Left: One of the T-28s flown by the author at North Whiting Field. Above: A Navy trainee prepares to take a dive in the “Dilbert Dunker,” in which prospective pilots practiced ditching. Below: A student pilot climbs into a T-34B at Saufley Field for a training flight.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PAUL BOWEN PHOTOGRAPHY; ABOVE & RIGHT: SCOTT MCINTOSH; OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF DAN MANNINGHAM; OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: U.S. NAVY

are free to live off base. Following the ceremony, we are expected to give a silver dollar to the first enlisted guy who salutes us, and amazingly there is a chief petty officer standing at the exit to collect his booty. He has done this before. Next stop is Saufley Field, about 10 miles away, where we will start flying the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor. My first day at Saufley I follow a flatbed truck carrying a crumpled T-34 back from an accident site where two had died. Sobering! My instructor is a likeable guy named Ron Baker who is a “plowback,” meaning that following his graduation from flight training he was immediately sent back as an instructor. After 12 flights I am cleared to fly solo and continue with Baker as he trains me through an aerobatic curriculum for another 30 hours. We do multiple upsets and spins. Straight up and straight down, inverted flight, loops, Immelmanns, chandelles and countless landings. It is wonderful basic airmanship training that will stick with me for my entire career. Amazingly, I seem to do OK while

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Moving up The author completed multiengine training in Beechcraft SNB-5s (top) at North Whiting Field before moving on to helicopters such as the Bell HTL-6 Sioux (above), familiar to viewers of the TV show “M*A*S*H,” and the Sikorsky HO4S-3 Chickasaw (inset) at Florida’s Ellyson Field.

“mixture rich” in my ear every night as we lie in bed, which she does. I pass my next pre-solo check and we move on. Now more than 60 years later I still occasionally hear that whisper, “mixture rich.” At North Whiting the curriculum is precision and aerobatics—loops, Immelmanns, barrel rolls, Cuban eights and spins. The Navy loves spins, left and right, over and over. And every conceivable form of upset, including torque rolls. The T-28 has enough torque that a sudden application of takeoff power when in the landing configuration at approach speed will roll the airplane inverted with no control movement. All of it is truly great training in basic airmanship. This phase takes another two months and 42 flying hours and we then move to South Whiting Field. South Whiting training begins with a short course in basic instruments and the rest is formation and gunnery. The formation curriculum is challenging and the attrition rate is high. We begin with two-plane formation, break-ups and rendezvous, learning to follow and to lead. It is great fun but there is little forgiveness in this phase. Several

friends wash out at this point and I have a close call. On my fourth formation flight, immediately preceding the solo check ride, my instructor tells me that although the flight was OK he is going to do me a favor. He is giving me a down so that I will get two extra instructional rides before the check ride. A favor? Are you serious? With that down on my record one small error on the check ride and I am eliminated. I am so angry I can barely contain myself, but inflicting bodily harm on a fellow officer will only make this worse, much worse. And especially since on the very first “extra time” flight the new instructor says, “This is a shame, because it would have been a good check ride.” The actual check ride is with a little Marine major I have never seen before. My wingman for this check takes off before me and is supposed to begin a shallow right turn—15 degrees of bank or less—to accommodate my join-up but he immediately rolls into a 30-degree bank, which greatly complicates any attempt to catch him and join up. My angry response is to break ground and immediately turn so steeply that I have to watch the wingtip clearance with the runway as I initiate the turn and raise the gear. I am at 40 degrees of bank, 20 feet off the ground but I am determined to catch my lead. It is a risky maneuver because it is overly aggressive and I don’t know how that major in the back seat will respond. But I catch the lead, join up and the flight goes well. When we return I am apprehensive about how this will go down but

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OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF WEST FLORIDA; OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT: U.S. NAVY; OPPOSITE INSET & TOP RIGHT: COURTESY OF DAN MANNINGHAM; RIGHT INSET: GUY ACETO COLLECTION

the major is all Marine and loves the aggression. Semper Fi! We move on to four-plane formation and cross-country flights and then a short course in aerial gunnery. We fly out over the Gulf and shoot at a sleeve towed by another T-28. Wonderful fun. Next we will be assigned to a “pipeline”—specific training for fighters, multiengine, blimps (yes, still part of the Navy) or helicopters. When I meet with the detail officer he first makes it clear that he doesn’t care about my preference but then says the only pipelines currently open are multiengine or helicopters. Since I have heard that nuggets sent to ME squadrons spend a year or two on the navigator table, I ask for helicopters. Helicopters are relatively new everywhere in 1959 and maybe that will mean a good job market when I am discharged. I am assigned to helicopter training at Ellyson Field, which is within commuting distance, a good deal for me because Fran is pregnant and that will save at least one move. But in the Navy’s deep wisdom we are sent to multiengine training first in the Beechcraft SNB (C-45), back at North Whiting. The SNB course is a combination of multi engine and instrument training. It is a great curriculum because I can check off the multi box when I apply for a civilian license, and it is serious instrument training, although somewhat dated. The Navy does not use ILS (instrument landing system) radio navigation, so we do not train for that, but we do train for LFR (low frequency radio range) approaches, which were established in 1928 for airmail pilots. It is primitive but reasonably effective. We also train in MDF (manual direction finder) approaches, another anachronism that amounted to an ADF (automatic direction finder) but without the automation, so the signal antenna had to be tuned manually. These are challenging and archaic technologies but they’re excellent for developing our fundamental instrument flying skills while drilling the humid, turbulent spring skies of Florida. Cross-country training takes us to Minot, N.D., because that’s where the instructor’s family lives. En route we stop at NAS Olathe, Kan., but make a short hop into Kansas City for the evening. The instructor drinks too much so fellow trainee Vito Cutrone and I fly the airplane back to Olathe while Lieutenant Instructor is unconscious in the back and we have a “get out of jail free” card for any infractions on this trip. I leave North Whiting with 203 hours of total time. After that it is on to helicopter training at Ellyson Field. We start with ground training on helicopter weirdness, which is vast—the weirdness, that is. Our initial rotary trainer is the Bell HTL-6 Sioux, that bubble-canopy helicopter you can see on any episode of “M*A*S*H.” Training begins in the middle of a 10-acre grass field when the instructor

gives me control and tells me to hover but just stay within the 10 acres. And for the first hour or so that’s about all as I can do. But, like riding a bicycle, it suddenly clicks and we move on to other maneuvers. Midway through the helo training at morning muster we hear a long list of names called out, followed by the announcement that those named are hereby eliminated from flight training and that the rest of us will be graduated only as needed. The pressure is on. Advanced helo training is in the much larger Sikorsky HO4S (H-19) Chickasaw and repeats the curriculum from the smaller helo. During this time I meet a fellow student who has just failed his final check ride after 18 months and is eliminated, never to return. More pressure. My final check ride is a nail-biter because everything depends on it. The check pilot is another little Marine major named Pulaski, a quiet man. I start up, taxi and take off. Major Pulaski says, “Just fly up to the paper mill,” which is about 15 miles north. Then, “Fly around the mill.” Then, “OK, let’s go back.” Go back? Really? Have I performed so poorly that this is over? What about those multiple required maneuvers for any check ride? Is my avia tion career over? We return to Ellyson, shut down and Major P. says, “Congratulations! Have a nice career.” It’s over, in a good way. Two days later, on June 30, 1960, Fran pins on my gold Navy wings and I am free to: “Slip the surly bonds of Earth / And dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings; / Put out my hand and touch the face of God.” Dan Manningham served for five years in the U.S. Navy flying helicopters, followed by a 33-year career with United Airlines. He wrote about his experiences in Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 5 (HS-5) in the March 2020 issue’s “The Night Dippers,” available at historynet.com.

Golden hour The author receives congratulations after his wife Fran pinned on his “wings of gold.”

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REvIEWS

The Story in Art by John Fairley, Pen & Sword, 2020, $42.95.

The very thought of paintings conjures up expressions of great beauty. It seems counterintuitive, then, that scenes of aircraft with pilots pitted against one another in mortal combat could convey aesthetic pleasure. But because of the artist’s craft, the public has a means to view armed engagements from otherwise unobtainable perspectives. > > As sculptor Elisabeth

Frink eloquently puts it in the preface to this impactful book of aviation paintings, “The mind and eye of the artist is a very powerful lens.” Author and filmmaker John Fairley has compiled an impressive collection of images spanning the air warfare saga from biplanes to stealth fighters, though the main body of artwork is focused on the two world wars. Many of the paintings

are drawn from leading repositories of aviation art, with a clear propensity for works of British and Allied origin. The book begins with a sampling of Henri Farré’s classically impressionistic World War I air combat renderings, which incongruously set the sky’s elegance against the horrors of deathly skirmishes. The book’s 74 full-color selections reflect a wide variety of artistic styles and vantage points, including

from the ground looking up, as in Andrew Carrick Gow’s The First Zeppelin Seen From Piccadilly Circus, 8 September 1915, a chilling scene in which a dirigible hovers ominously above the city while residents in the streets crane their necks in nervous anticipation of what may come next. Reflective of the World War II section is Paul Nash’s familiar image of swirled contrails over the sparse flatlands of southern

England—his re-creation of a fierce clash during the Battle of Britain. However, lest anyone thinks this book celebrates air combat, it also includes reproductions of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Wilhelm Rudolph’s Dresden, each in its own frightful manner driving home the terror and devastation precipitated by aerial bombardment. Rather than attempting to deliver a comprehensive overview of war in the air, the book’s image-driven format offers history by vignette. The range of artwork and the perceptive nature of the accompanying text give readers much to ponder. Taken together, the paintings and descriptions present a compelling tableau of the first century of military operations in the third dimension. Philip Handleman

IWM ART LD 1550/COURTESY OF PEN & SWORD

battle of britain, 1941 Paul Nash’s painting depicts an aerial melee over England.

FIGHTING IN THE SKY

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HO CHI MINH TRAIL 1964-73

Steel Tiger, Barrel Roll, and the Secret Air Wars in Vietnam and Laos by Peter E. Davies, Osprey Publishing, 2020, $24. In important ways the story of the Vietnam War is encapsulated in the protracted battle to control the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the network of pathways and motor lanes that snaked mainly through the mountainous and dense jungle terrain of Laos. The North Vietnamese Army used the trail’s natural cover to infiltrate supplies and troops into South Vietnam, while U.S. forces and their South Vietnamese allies attempted to interdict the movement largely through the application of air power.

It was an epic struggle that stretched through the 1960s into the first half of the 1970s, manifesting heartache and heroism on both sides. Author Peter Davies provides a detailed technical history of this years-long tug of war, describing the multiple technologies employed in air operations such as Steel Tiger and Barrel Roll to stem the flow of traffic. Readers are introduced to such improvisations as airdropped acoustic sensors and cloud-seeding with silver iodide or lead iodide

crystals to induce rainfall to muddy the routes. The North Vietnamese fought back against the airstrikes and weaponry with bunkers, anti-aircraft artillery, surface-

to-air missiles, convoys of porters and teams to fill in bomb craters. The dizzying array of aircraft tasked to stamp out the trail’s traffic included various transports converted into gunships, culminating in the impressive AC-130A. However, in the end, by refusing to allow interdiction of supplies at the northern entry points, top U.S. civilian leaders unwittingly undercut the mission. As Davies astutely observes, America’s technological prowess devoted to suppressing the flow at the distribution chain’s southern endpoints was not enough to overcome the flawed decision-making or the doggedness of a committed foe. Philip Handleman

IWM ART LD 1550/COURTESY OF PEN & SWORD

SOUTH PACIFIC AIR WAR, VOLUME 4 F-102 DELTA DAGGER UNITS Buna & Milne Bay, September 1942

by Peter E. Davies, Osprey Publishing, 2020, $24.

by Michael Claringbould and Peter Ingman, Avonmore Books, 2021, $46.95.

The airplane’s evolution from pistons and props to rockets and turbojets was accompanied by a new variety of shapes, each with its particular strengths, weaknesses and overall fascinations. In 1946 German engineer Alexander Lippisch, designer of the stunning and terrifying Messerschmitt Me-163 rocket-powered interceptor, was working for Convair when he convinced the company to abandon its sweptwing fighter idea in favor of a tailless delta design. This led to the experimental XP-92 and the F-102, whose protracted development held up its adoption in the U.S. Air Force until 1956, but during which it benefited from such added innovations as the area rule to its fuselage and a variety of new weaponry. In F-102 Delta Dagger Units, Peter E. Davies is right at home in his 1950s milieu as he describes the Cold War interceptor’s career at American and European air bases, with firsthand pilot accounts on how its flight qualities compared with contemporaries such as the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. The “Deuce” spent most of its Air Force career intercepting and seeing off wayward Soviet bombers over the borders, but Davies also sheds light on its overlooked stint in Indochina, acting as a deterrent from Royal Thai air bases, and on the only one to fall victim to a MiG-21 over Vietnam. The 30 profiles depict a colorful array of Delta Daggers from the USAF, Air National Guard and two foreign users, Greece and Turkey, which came uncomfortably close to engaging each other during the Turkish invasion of Cypress in 1974. Jon Guttman

The fourth in Michael Claringbould and Peter Ingman’s detailed and profusely illustrated series about air combat in the South Pacific focuses on the first of Japan’s forays into the region in which aircraft carriers played no supporting role. In spite of their strategic setback in the Coral Sea and devastating defeat at Midway, the Japanese remained determined to secure bases in New Guinea with which to exert pressure on Australia. To do so their army set out to seize Buna and Milne Bay, supported by only two naval air groups, the 4th with its Mitsubishi G4M1 bombers and the Tainan with its Mitsubishi A6M2 fighters. Opposing them in the air were a variety of Allied units whose primary fighters were Bell P-39 and P-400 Airacobras of the U.S. Army Air Forces and Curtiss Kittyhawks of the Royal Australian Air Force, while bombers ranged from B-17s to B-25s, Lockheed Hudsons and, in its last, calamitous combat use by the USAAF, the Douglas A-24 Banshee. These and a supporting cast of floatplanes, transports and reconnaissance aircraft struggled for dominance in a grueling campaign. Although the Japanese took a disproportionate toll on the Allied aircraft, the authors maintain that both sides ultimately fought each other to a standstill until the Japanese discovery of a large Allied base at Milne Bay and the American landings at Tulagi and Guadalcanal changed the picture completely. What came of that will doubtless be covered in Volume 5. Jon Guttman

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REvIEWS AIRWARE MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR Xbox Game Studios, 2020, $59.99.

RAF BOMBER COMMAND STRIKING BACK Operations of a Halifax Crew

by Alan Measures, Whittles Publishing Ltd., 2021, $24.95. On July 14, 1941, Winston Churchill delivered a rousing speech that included the declaration that “from now on we shall bomb Germany on an ever-increasing scale…until the Nazi regime has either been exterminated by us or—better still— torn to pieces by the German people themselves.” On that same night Sergeant Len Starbuck flew the first of 26 operational sorties as a wireless operator/gunner with No. 102 Squadron, Royal Air Force. Author Alan Measures began this book as a memorial to Starbuck, his father’s cousin and best friend, who was killed while serving with RAF Bomber Command during World War II. As sometimes occurs when a writer begins researching a book, however, the subject expanded into something greater, more involved and more interesting. In addition to Starbuck, the author presents details of the lives of many of the airmen with whom the sergeant served, a surprisingly cosmopolitan assortment from a variety of countries around the world, 68

turboprops like the Daher TBM 930 and jets like the Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental. Buying the deluxe and premium deluxe trims add more aircraft and enhanced airports. The visuals across the board are beautiful and near photorealistic. The virtual cockpits look authentic and feature working switches and dials. Support for interface peripherals such as joysticks, throttles and TrackIR (head-mounted view control) is extensive, except for virtual reality (which may appear in the future). The interface for air traffic control is context-based and easier to use. FS is clearly a revolutionary upgrade to the franchise, one that cements it as the leader in consumer civilian flight sims. This greatness comes at a cost, as FS’s system requirements demand a cutting-edge platform to see it at its best. It requires 100 gigabytes of space just to install, and if installed on a traditional hard drive rather than a newer solid-state drive, load times will be longer. Automatic checks for updates when the game launches extend the load times further still. The early days after release saw many bug reports and defects, though the developers have been quick to provide updates. There is little formal historical material here, but FS makes it easy for a creative historian to set a flight plan to virtually tour famous landmarks by air. Bernard Dy including the United States. RAF Bomber Command Striking Back focuses on the period before the U.S. was officially involved in the war. It reveals a strange world in which the combatants battled each other, and frequently died, in the dark. At that time Bomber Command was still developing new tactics and technology. Initially equipped with the aging twin-engine Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, the squadron phased out those slow prewar bombers in favor of the larger, faster and more formidable four-engine Handley Page Halifax. Other new technology was soon introduced as well, including the innovative “Gee” electronic navigation system, enabling more accurate bombing at night or in low visibility. As the author shows, the RAF did not have everything its own way in the night skies over Europe. The Luftwaffe was also reorganizing, modernizing and increasing its nocturnal air defenses to better deal with the escalating British night bomber offensive. RAF losses were increasing and British bomber crews quickly came to realize that they had a less than 50 percent chance of surviving their tours of duty. RAF Bomber Command Striking Back presents a vivid dayto-day record of what it was like for the men who risked their lives night after night over enemy territory during the early phase of Britain’s bomber offensive. Robert Guttman

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Fans of the grandfather of all consumer-grade flight simulations last saw action from this storied franchise in 2006 when Flight Simulator X debuted. Assumptions that the series since went defunct could understandably be excused. Now back with a title that is both a renaming and homage, Flight Simulator (FS) takes off with a new engine built for the future. This new entry starts a complete reboot of the series. It features a new French developer, Asobo Studio, and a new design philosophy. Previous generations of the sim arose in an era before fast internet, gamification and constant geolocation were mature and prevalent. Each of those elements is now a key component in the foundation of FS. The most meaningful effect of this philosophical shift is a hefty boost in environmental fidelity. Improved aircraft graphics are expected in any iteration of a flight sim series, but it is the world outside the cockpit that really pushes FS into the next generation. Data culled from satellite imagery, Bing Maps and the weather firm Meteoblue fuel a rendering engine powered by artificial intelligence and Microsoft’s Azure web computing platform. This means users can fly anywhere in the world and the experience is more convincing than ever before, marked by more realistic landmarks, both natural and manmade. Other features requisite to the Flight Simulator lineage remain. A decent stable of 20 aircraft are flyable in the standard product, including props like the Cessna 172 Skyhawk,

Wings Over Iraq - A new historical novel

MARIE MARVINGT, FIANCÉE OF DANGER

by Eric B. Forsyth

First Female Bomber Pilot, World-Class Athlete and Inventor of the Air Ambulance

A gripping story of RAF bombers in Iraq during the period leading up to WWII. The country is wracked by rebellious Arab tribes, prompted by German intelligence posing as an archeological expedition. Newly qualified RAF pilot Allan Chadwick is posted to a squadron trying to maintain the flow of vital oil using obsolete Vickers Vimys. Set against the rise of fascism in Europe, Chadwick is soon exposed to the harsh realities of an undeclared war, as well as the pleasures awaiting a young man coming of age in a turbulent country.

by Rosalie Maggio, McFarland & Company, 2019, $39.95.

The author was an RAF pilot and is an award-winning sailor and retired engineer. His previous book, “An Inexplicable Attraction: My Fifty Years of Ocean Sailing,” was among Kirkus’s 100 Best Memoirs of 2018.

With so much attention being devoted to women’s achievements lately, it is astonishing that those brought to light in Marie Marvingt, Fiancée of Danger have been virtually forgotten. Nevertheless, her deeds stand with those of any woman in history. Indeed, in her day Marvingt was described as the “greatest woman since Joan of Arc.” For starters, Marvingt was the third woman to be granted a pilot’s license. Among the many aviation records she set was to be the first person to successfully cross the English Channel in a free balloon. She also invented the air ambulance and, during World War I, became the first woman to fly a bombing mission. To Marvingt, however, aviation was merely one more sport to master. By the time she began to take an interest in it she was already a world-class athlete. For example, when she was barred from competing in the Tour de France bicycle race in 1908 because of her sex, she rode the 2,789-mile course anyway. Of the 114 entrants, only 36 finished the race… AVHP-210500-008 Yacht Books .indd plus Marie Marvingt. In 1910 the French Academy of Sports awarded her a special gold medal for excellence in all sports. Rosalie Maggio’s page-turning survey of Marvingt’s careers reads like a work of fiction. World War I soldier, Red Cross nurse, French Resistance heroine, journalist and globetrotter—Marie Marvingt lived enough in one lifetime to have filled 10 lives. Robert Guttman

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Available worldwide wherever books are sold online, including www.YachtFiona.com Published by Yacht Fiona Books ISBN Paperback: 978-0-578-65299-3 ISBN eBook: 978-0-578-68800-8

THE LAST JAPANESE HOW MANY TIMES SOLDIER HAS THEFROM DESIGN WORLD OF THE WAR U.S.IIFLAG SURRENDERED CHANGED? IN THIS YEAR 27, 31, 36 or 40?

- 1945 - 1947 - 1950 - 1974 For more,search visitDAILY QUIZ For more, WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ at HistoryNet.com. MAGAZINES/QUIZ HistoryNet.com

ANSWER: 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE NATIONAL,27. ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943. ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE HELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE THE 50thFINALLY STATE. SURRENDERED. HELD OUT INHAWAII, THE PHILLIPINES,

3/11/21 10:24 AM

FLIGHT TEST

MACH 1 JET QUEST

MYSTERY SHIP

Can you identify this aerial surveyor and photo platform? See the answer below.

WHEN AERIAL SHIPS HAD NAMES Match the golden age transport with one of its individual names.

A. Sikorsky S-42 B. Focke-Wulf Fw-200 V1 C. Latécoère 300 D. Martin M-130 E. Short Empire C F. Dornier Do-26 V1 G. Martin M-156 H. Latécoère 522 I. Junkers G.38 J. Boeing 314A

Brazilian Clipper

1. Ville de St. Pierre 2. Canopus 3. Berwick 4. Seeadler 5. Philippine Clipper 6. General Feldmarschall von Hindenburg 7. Brazilian Clipper 8. Brandenburg 9. Croix-de-Sud 10. Russia Clipper

2. Which airplane was rushed into production as the world’s first Mach 1 fighter? A. YF-100A B. YF-102A C. Dassault Mystère D. MiG-19S 3. Which revised fighter using the area rule broke the sound barrier on December 30, 1954? A. XF-92 B. XF-102 C. YF-102A D. XF-104 4. Which was the first European-designed airplane to exceed Mach 1, in 1954? A. Nord 1402B Gerfaut B. Sud Vautour C. Fiat G.91 D. Dassault Super Mystère 5. Which airplane, after exceeding Mach 1 on April 4, 1957, became the first British Mach 2 design on November 25 of that year? A. Supermarine Scimitar B. English Electric Lightning C. Hawker Hunter D. Gloster Javelin

ANSWERS: MYSTERY SHIP: Abrams P-1 Explorer. Learn more about it at historynet.com/aviation-history WHEN AERIAL SHIPS HAD NAMES: A.7, B.8, C.9, D.5, E.2, F.4, G.10, H.1, I.6, J.3. MACH 1 JET QUEST: 1.C, 2.D, 3.C, 4.A, 5.B. 70

TOP: NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM; BOTTOM: PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES

1. What “penetration fighter” was accepted by the U.S. Air Force in 1949, only to be completely redesigned by 1954? A. North American XF-93 B. Lockheed XF-90 C. McDonnell XF-88 D. Republic XF-84H

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Jackpot! Hoard of 1881-S Morgan Silver Dollars Found & Secured Mintage accounts for only 1.94% of all Morgan Silver Dollars Struck!

In 1859, Nevada’s Comstock Lode was discovered, and soon its rich silver ore made its way across the nation, including to the respected San Francisco Mint—the U.S. Mint branch known by collectors as the source of some of the finest U.S. coins ever struck. That includes the 1881 Morgan Silver Dollar, which exhibits crisp details, blazing luster, and the iconic “S” mint mark of the San Francisco Mint. Now you have the chance to add these historic, 90% pure U.S. silver coins to your collection!

Here’s the breakdown: in 1881, just 4.25% of the total Morgan series was struck. Less than half of those coins came from San Francisco. In the end, the 1881-S Morgan Silver Dollar accounts for just 1.94% of the entire series—and that’s before the mass meltings that have left so few coins for collectors to secure. And we can expect that even fewer of the survivors are of collector grade...

Ye .7 a

Ye a

r!)

(MS63) condition by NGC/PCGS

 Sealed in protective holder  1881-S accounts for just 1.94% of all Morgans Struck

Actual size is 38.1 mm

Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS)! Grading service varies. The condition of these coins are as though they were struck yesterday, despite being minted 140 years ago to circulate in commerce! And yet they have survived with a quality level of eye appeal that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Don’t Miss This Opportunity—Order Now!

Look elsewhere and you’ll find 1881-S Morgans in the same MS63 graded condition selling for as much as $159. But you won’t pay that here. For this special offer, we’re offering these collector-grade, 1881-S Morgan Silver Dollars for just $99 per coin. That’s 140 years of American history for just 71 cents per year!

1881-S Date

The Morgan Silver Dollar was struck from 1878 to 1904, and again in 1921. In the 100 years since, most of these beautiful U.S. Silver Dollars have been worn out or melted down for their silver. It’s estimated that as little as 15% of all Morgans struck exist today in any condition. Even fewer come from this particular mintage.

 Historic Morgan Silver Dollars  Minted in San Francisco  1881 date  140 years old  26.73 grams of 90% fine silver  Hefty 38.1 mm diameter  Certified collector Mint State-63

The Morgan Silver Dollar is the most popular and iconic vintage U.S. coin. They were the Silver Dollars of the Wild West, going on countless untold adventures in dusty saddlebags across the nation. Finding a hoard of Morgans doesn’t happen often—and when it does, it’s a big deal. So when we came across a recent hoard of 549 Morgan Silver Dollars—all struck at the San Francisco Mint in 1881—it was like hitting the jackpot!

Morgans from the San Francisco Mint

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All Morgan Silver Dollars

The 1881-S Silver 1881-S Morgan Morgan Dollar accounts 1.94% of the entire series for just 1.94% of all Morgans struck. Don’t miss out. Call 1-888-324-9125 and use the special offer code below to secure yours today while our limited supply lasts!

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Coins are graded on a 70-point scale, with a 70 representing perfection. Through hard work and diligence, the collector who first assembled this hoard managed to find 1881-S Morgans graded as quality Mint State-63 (MS63) condition by the world’s two leading third-party grading services, Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) or

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GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. MHL203-01, Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2021 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

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AERO ARTIFACT

pan am time capsule

The 1930s and ’40s marked the heyday of Pan American Airways’ storied Clipper era (see story, P. 36), when the airline’s flying boats “proved their superiority over all competitors,” as Pan Am president Juan Trippe put it in 1939. Below are several relics from that golden age of air travel. Clockwise from top right: This 1936 Sikorsky advertisement promotes the S-43 flying boat, nicknamed the “Baby Clipper,” which flew Pan Am’s South American routes. The ad extols the S-43’s “high-wing construction which provides full vision from every one of its 15 seats.” Boeing’s 314 was the last-generation Clipper, capable of carrying 74 passengers. An inscribed propeller tip commemorates the B-314 California Clipper’s first flight, from San Francisco to Hong Kong, in February 1939. A wood-and-resin model depicts another 314, Yankee Clipper, which sadly crashed in Lisbon in 1943, killing 24 people. Pan Am operated nine 314s before converting to land-based aircraft after World War II. The fronts of these Pan Am playing cards feature a 314 flying over a namesake clipper ship. The cards may well have been used for canasta, a game developed in Uruguay in 1939 that quickly spread across South America in the 1940s. A flight pass at bottom left marks the March 3, 1939, first passenger flight of Yankee Clipper, christened by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt before its departure. In 1936 Pan Am built a hotel on Midway Island to accommodate its transpacific travelers. This breakfast menu features favorites such as “little pig sausages” as well as imported Santa Clara prunes from California. The hotel closed in 1941 at the onset of war. This leather pilot’s bag served Philippine Clipper, a Martin M-130 that barely survived the Japanese attack on Wake Island in 1941 only to fatally crash on January 21, 1943, in a storm in northern California.

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TOP RIGHT & BOTTOM LEFT: COURTESY OF JAMES TRAUTMAN; ALL OTHER IMAGES: UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS COLLECTION

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oaring over English skies in 1940, Royal Air Force pilots knew they were all that stood between the British people below and the impending Nazi invasion. Day after day, these brave men took their Hurricanes and Spitfires to the air, relying on nothing and no one but their instruments and each other, to engage the invaders, defend their countrymen, and change the course of history by handing Hitler his first defeat of World War II. “Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few,” said Winston Churchill. The Co-Pilot Men’s Watch is inspired by what was accomplished in the Battle of Britain. We studied classic aviator timepieces to match the vintage design and then gave it a 1940s price. Our watchmakers updated the movement for the 21st century, making it even more accurate than the originals. It features markings to calculate velocity, and a stylish sepia-toned dial carrying three classic complications: 24-hour at 3 o’clock and chronograph 60-minute at 9 o’clock. A vintage-style distressed brown leather strap recalls the battle-worn bomber jackets of the 1940s. Satisfaction is 100% Guaranteed. Take the Co-Pilot for a test flight and if it fails to impress, send it back within 30 days for a

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Military Discount for Heroes Like You

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