Chapter 9: ►

_Manhood and Maturity_

I served in the Navy four years, until I was twenty-four. I never achieved my goal of engaging the enemy plane-to-plane over the Pacific. After winning my wings I was waylaid as a flight instructor for eighteen months. I very nearly made it. When the war ended, I was in training in Hawaii with a carrier air group for the invasion of Japan.

My Navy tour laid the groundwork for the contribution I made to aviation and the nation years later in a different kind of war. In the Navy I became a professional, disciplined aviator.

Ironically, I almost flunked at the outset. It happened during my two months of “elimination” service in Seattle in May and June of 1942. Like many men who already knew how to fly when they entered the military services, I found my past experience in the air not a help but a hindrance. A civilian pilot is an individualist. In the military a pilot is part of a closely meshed precision team. The adjustment is difficult to make. Civilian pilots learn many “bad habits.” One day my instructor said: “Crossfield, I don’t think you’re going to make it.” I did make it. In fact I never got a “down-check” although there was one close call.

It was a glove that almost did me in. One of our final checks at Seattle was an emergency landing in a small tree-bordered field. My airplane was an old N3N or “Yellow Peril” biplane, built in about 1933. While flying near this field one day my instructor gave me the signal to simulate an engine failure. I throttled back all the way and aimed for the field, calculating my glide-path, intending to make a perfect approach and landing.

I miscalculated. We were quite low when I realized I had undershot the field and would have to open the throttle. My instructor reached this conclusion about the same instant. He moved his gloved left hand to the throttle. As I pushed forward a split second before him, his glove caught and jammed in the throttle bracket. He tried to pull the throttle back momentarily to disengage the glove. Unaware of this mishap, all the while I was pushing the throttle hard forward, wondering what was holding it.

The ground was rushing up fast. I had to land. There was a hole between the trees that looked large enough to squeeze through. We grazed over a barbed-wire fence and penetrated the hole. It was too small. The right wing brushed the top of a tree, making a fearful racket on the taut dope-covered fabric of the wing. The plane bounced on the grass strip and rolled out. My instructor crawled out of the front cockpit, lit a cigarette, and paced about the plane, inspecting the broken ribs in the wing and the torn fabric. I sat in the cockpit awaiting the inevitable. Soon, I knew, I would be headed for a ship as a seaman second class.

I wondered why my instructor was delaying. Then it dawned on me. He was worried that we had damaged the plane so badly that it would fall apart in the air.

“As long as we’re here,” he said, “I’ll just stay on the ground and watch while you make a few precision landings between the markers over there.” This was the next phase of my test, scheduled to be carried out at another field. It was true that it would save time to do these maneuvers at this field. But I had a hunch the real reason was that the instructor wanted me to take that plane up and test-fly it--alone.

Very well, I thought, I’ll do it. I got us into this fix. I gunned the engine and took off. The plane held together and I made the precision landings without further incident. The instructor climbed in and we flew back to main base. He gave me an “up-check,” but I believe I earned it by default--because he was ashamed to report the glove snafu and because I had tested the airplane for him. Thereafter, in the way some men respond to error, I was determined never to repeat that fiasco. In time and with exacting practice, landings became the strongest point of my flying.

We moved from Seattle to the Naval Air Training Center in Corpus Christi, Texas--the big league. What a sight! It was the Boeing plant all over again. The Navy was just gearing for the instruction of aviators on a mass scale. Thousands of people were pouring into Corpus Christi each week. Everywhere new outlying flying fields were being scratched out of the dry, ugly Texas soil. Hangars, maintenance shops, barracks and officers’ clubs, it seemed, were sprouting all across the great expanse of Texas. It was semi-organized confusion on a grand scale. For the next six months, along with the fifteen other members of my cadet class from Seattle, I lived, studied, and flew hard while this transformation was taking place. We paid it scant heed. Our minds were set on learning our profession and going on to war, to the Pacific, where Naval aviators were desperately needed.

The skies over Texas were black with airplanes flown by young inexperienced pilots, feeling their oats, frozen in the grip of that infantile phase all pilots must go through: flat-hatting, or buzzing the ground. I don’t know how or why all pilots get this disease. Maybe it’s simple showing-off, or some kind of deep-seated craving for the sensation of speed, or a reaction to the highly disciplined military formation flying. It is very dangerous. But a lot of fun.

We had several special flat-hatting tricks calculated to stretch any pilot’s nerves to the breaking point. First there was wind-milling. The surface of Texas is a forest of windmill-driven water pumps. We used to dive at these lazily turning windmills, scream across the ground, lift the wing as we passed over the tower, and kick the rudder. When the plane’s slipstream hit the blades of the windmill, they would turn at tremendous speed, gushing water in a torrent, and probably grinding up the pump gears.

Another trick was the rare sport of playing leapfrog with automobiles. We would spot a lone car driving on a long, straight Texas road. Then we would ghost down and land behind him. We would clip along, waving at the awestruck kids in the back seat, their noses pressed against the rear window. We’d gun the engine and hop over the moving car, taxiing on down the road at high speed. I saw one pilot do this to a moving van. When the plane’s slipstream hit the broad side of the van it knocked the truck into a ditch.

Then there was the railroading. What better sport than to fly down a railroad track at night, directly toward an oncoming train, and at the last second turn on the plane’s landing lights and pull up steeply, all the while enjoying the vision of the engineer grinding his brakes into steel filings, wondering what he was about to smash into.

Bridges, of course, held the greatest fascination to the youthful, inexperienced pilot. There was a bridge up near Smithville on the Colorado River that loomed as my greatest flat-hatting challenge. It was tricky because there was a little turn involved just before passing under the bridge. Flying below the river banks, the drafts and winds were confusing and I had to take care that the plane didn’t drift into one of the bridge foundations. I made several tries before I finally plunged under. As it turned out, there was plenty of room--fully twenty feet clearance between the bottom of the bridge and the water. My dream was to loop around that bridge, but for some reason I never did. No guts, I guess, or maybe I had a little sense, at that.

These were rare diversionary moments in a rigid schedule of work and study. Mostly we flew in formation under strict observation. We advanced steadily in our profession, on the ground and in the air, learning about engines and propellers, navigation, night flying, bombing, gunnery, and the niceties of being a Naval officer. I learned one special discipline. On the night before a special check-flight, I would mentally fly the complete trip from take-off to landing, going through every motion of the controls and relating the movement of the plane to the geography. At Edwards many years later I was still able to commit a complicated experimental airplane flight to memory the night before flight. This left my mind free to concentrate not so much on flying but on gathering the aeronautical data we sought.

In December, 1942, one year after Pearl Harbor, we graduated as ensigns and full-fledged pilots. I had just turned twenty-one. Of the twenty-five men who were commissioned that day twenty-three got orders to the fleet. Two drew orders to remain at Corpus Christi as flight instructors. I was one of the two. At the time it seemed the blackest day of my life. I partially offset my deep disappointment by thinking that I had been selected for the job because I was an outstanding pilot. But I am sure they just picked my name out of a hat. I came to this conclusion when I saw what poor pilots some of the instructors were.

For six weeks I attended a school to learn how to be an instructor in advanced bombing and gunnery, then I was assigned to Kingsville Naval Air Station--a desolate outlying field. There I soon learned that instructors are not the infallible monarchs I had considered them when I was a cadet. Instructors are men like all other men, full of imperfections, contradictions, and uncertainties. Most of us were very young--twenty-one or twenty-two. We lived in dirty BOQs, engaged in seemingly endless cycles of new students, parties, poker games, graduation, new students, parties, poker games, graduation, new students, and so on. The pace we kept would defy all aero-medical studies on pilot fatigue--especially my own. I slept hardly at all. I flew probably four and sometimes six flights a day, with occasional time off during brief periods of bad weather. I never missed an assigned flight.

The second stage of infantilism in an airplane comes when the pilot learns aerial acrobatics and can be sure of a captive audience. As instructors we had such an audience in our students. One sure way to get a rise was to make a series of barrel rolls around a tight formation of student airplanes. This was one of my specialties until one of the new instructors, a former student of mine, tried to imitate it. Evidently he had not first practiced the maneuver behind the student formation. He miscalculated and smashed into a student plane, killing himself, the student, and another student in the rear seat. After that, I was far more conservative in the air when students were around.

I don’t mean to overdramatize this incident. Death is the handmaiden of the pilot. Sometimes it comes by accident, sometimes by an act of God. Over the years I have tried to become calloused about death. This attitude began at Corpus. Twelve out of the sixteen members of my original class at Seattle were eventually killed in airplanes. Hundreds of students, many of whom I knew well, passed through Corpus to a quick death in the Pacific. Eleven men in my training squadron were killed at Corpus. Indeed, come to think of it, three-quarters of all the pilots I ever knew are now dead.

There was a camaraderie among the instructors, and a sharp sense of competition. Teaching bombing and gunnery week in and week out eventually turned us into pros. One reason was that we shot and bombed far more than anyone else, including pilots in combat. When a new class reported in, we instructors began with a “demonstration” of bombing and gunnery, each with a student in the back seat of the plane. For us this was a moment of high drama. Instructor was pitted against instructor. We laid huge money bets for high score. In our eagerness to win we very nearly drove our planes into the ground or into the target sleeves. It must have been quite an indoctrination for the students. Some of them resigned after the demonstration flight.

We felt pretty good about our gunnery records until “Bogie” Hoffmann, a senior Navy pilot, came up from DeLand, Florida. A mustang from the famed Fighting 2 off the Lexington, Hoffmann, with Captain John (“Jimmy”) Thach, had developed a new gunnery technique. It was astounding in its simplicity and it greatly improved our scores. Alongside Hoffmann we instructors, supposedly the pros, felt like amateurs. I made every effort to hitch a ride in the back seat of Hoffmann’s plane when he made a demonstration. I strove to imitate him. The results were gratifying. From that point on, I met few men in the Navy who could seriously challenge me in aerial gunnery, but I could never touch Hoffmann’s shooting.

Flying over Corpus shepherding my flocks amid the hundreds of planes milling about, both in daylight and at night, and with a near-crisis every ten minutes, I learned the value of stern discipline in the air. Too often in times of trouble I witnessed tragedies which could have been averted had the participants remained at least outwardly cool. Too many times I heard people shouting conflicting advice--and orders--into radio circuits. I saw then the advantage of my father’s detached, emotionless attitude. I deliberately emulated it, striving never to raise my voice but to take positive command in times of emergency and do what I thought was right. Some people--those who knew only this calculated glacial exterior--thought I was a cold fish. No matter. The technique paid off.

One day, for example, I was leading a group of my students on a “tail chase”--a sort of follow-the-leader of aerial acrobatics, including loops, rolls, Cuban Eights, chandelles--the works. Somehow one of the pilots fell out of place and the prop of his plane chewed into the tail of the plane in front of him. The first word I had of impending catastrophe was a blast on the radio:

“Jones. Land immediately. Your tail is chopped off.”

The first thought of inexperienced aviators who get into trouble is to get back to earth quickly. They get down low only to find out the plane is no good and it is too late to bail out. The proper course is to keep all possible altitude until someone can find out how badly the airplane is damaged. I broke in on the radio circuit, my voice deliberately held low:

“Jones. Remain at your present altitude until we check your airplane.”

Jones started to argue back.

“Shut up,” I said calmly.

I moved in and took a look at his plane. Quite a bit of the tail was missing.

“Head for base,” I ordered.

I flew alongside, coaching him through gentle maneuvers to feel out the plane. One of these showed that if he slowed to ordinary landing speed, the plane would not fly. If he had followed the first advice on the radio, he would have been killed.

“Okay,” I said. “You land that plane about ten or fifteen knots above normal speed.”

Just then someone else broke in and radioed the base tower:

“We’ve got a crash coming in! Emergency! Emergency!”

This yelling only served to rattle the pilot of the stricken plane. Holding back my rage, I spoke on the radio:

“Defer the emergency. We don’t need any special equipment. Jones, remember to land fast.”

The pilot landed the plane, saving his own life and a piece of expensive government equipment. Experiences like these drove home the lesson never to permit foolish, though well-meant, interference to supplant a pilot’s responsibility in the air. The lesson is documented by a long roll of dead pilots.

As the months rolled on the flying was hard, endless, and gratifying. Life in the BOQ at night was soft, endless, and boring. Night after night we gathered in one room or another and drank until the bottle was empty, hangar-flying and telling endless, untrue sea stories. I tried correspondence courses to pass the time, but the insidious magnetism of that fun-loving bunch of troops shot down that effort. It did not take keen observation to see this was not doing some of us any good. In a few it was reflected by poor flying which made me wonder about my own flying. Here I would not compromise in the slightest--this nonsense had to stop. I had to get off that circus wagon.

I was engaged to a twenty-two-year-old girl from Seattle named Alice Knoph, a beautiful blonde who worked as a long-distance telephone operator. I met Alice on a double date back in the days when I worked at the Boeing plant. She was a vivacious Nordic type with a talent for singing, and she quickly became the delight of my life. She was engaged to a friend of mine, a picture I was determined to change. On our first date I told Alice I would marry her some day. She laughed, but six months later she was wearing my ring. Very sensibly we decided not to marry until the war was over.

But one day in April, 1943, I called Alice on the telephone and asked her to come down to Corpus Christi and marry me. The call cost $56.00, but this and the money I sent her for train fare was the best investment I ever made. Her sudden answer to my call for help naturally dismayed her family. But in the end they became reconciled. Alice lost her luggage on the trip down. When we were married by a Justice of the Peace in Corpus Christi she wore one of my shirts as a blouse. A cab driver was best man.

Alice and I rented an apartment in Corpus. Inevitably it became a hang-out for my bachelor friends among the instructors. There were too many parties. In that wartime atmosphere it was not quite possible to avoid a party even if we wanted to, which was not always the case. But when Alice came, it was as though I gained a balance wheel. My entire outlook changed.

I was always profoundly conscientious about my students. Slipshod instruction in gunnery and bombing could cost a combat pilot his life. But now I took on a new, voluntary chore. I became a specialist at saving the pilots slated for wash-out--the imperfections of our factory. In a way it was faintly comparable to my job at Boeing, when I redesigned parts that would otherwise have been scrapped.

I’m not certain just how or why I was moved to do this work. It may have started one day when I learned that an entire flight of cadets was about to be washed out. I looked into it and discovered that their instructor was a former student of mine. Had some imperfection in my own teaching caused this chain reaction? In any case, to my regular flights I added hundreds of hours of overtime work with these bruised pieces of fruit. To me this work, an attempt to mold these wayward men and their machines into perfect fighting units, was the most trying, and in some ways the most rewarding, of all. I tackled the job with missionary-like zeal.

Most of the work amounted to patient tutoring, simply building confidence first, then teaching technique. Occasionally, however, it was a matter of using common sense. I remember one case. The cadet was an ex-theology student. He stopped at our apartment one morning after church.

“Mr. Crossfield,” he said. “What can I do? I don’t want to give up.”

He came in and sat down while Alice rustled up some coffee. This was a very sad case. The cadet had been before three different boards. Each board failed him. For some reason he simply could not make precision landings, which were crucial to flying on and off an aircraft carrier.

While we sat waiting I looked at him, trying with him to ferret out his lack. Then I noticed his legs. They were the shortest I had ever seen on a man. An idea flashed in my mind.

“Can your feet reach the rudder pedals?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said. But as I thought about it and mentally measured his legs in the cockpit, I knew he wasn’t being completely frank. He probably reached the pedals, but with difficulty.

“Tell you what you do,” I said. “I’ll get you another flight and tomorrow when you go up I want you to put a pad--_two_ pads--behind your back. This will bring you forward and closer to the rudder bars.”

Next day the student flew with two pads behind his back. From then on the precision landing was a cinch. It was that simple, after over two hundred hours of apparently indifferent instruction. The flying board reversed its decision and he went on to fight in the Pacific. I don’t know what happened to him.

The best way to learn anything thoroughly, I believe, is to teach the subject to others. This is no new thought: college professors and scientists have known it for centuries. With each new student you begin all over, retracing the same fundamental course, each time exposed to a fresh, inquiring, and often challenging mind, and sometimes superlative ability. During my eighteen months at Corpus I logged 1,400 hours of single-engine time. Thus in one sense I learned to fly a thousand times, repeating the same familiar steps over and over and over, but each time adding a little knowledge and polish.

I think that this single tour of duty, more than anything else, honed my flying to a point of near-perfection.