3 – Too good to be true (part 2)
Across the continent in San Diego, the commander of Saratoga was similarly rebuffed when he tried to stop four dive-bomber pilots from resigning. One was Bob Neale. Tall and rugged, nervous and shy, Neale had three years of fleet duty behind him, and he expected to be discharged soon—not a happy prospect for a lad who’d joined the navy to escape the Great Depression, and who couldn’t imagine an economy in which jobs were plentiful. “And as far as knowing what I was getting into,” Neale said, “the country or the people [or] the living conditions, I didn’t have the faintest idea. It was an adventure, not motivated by patriotism or anything like that.... Looking back on it, actually, I don’t know why I went out there.” The navy owed him almost $1,500 in pay and accrued leave. Neale took his discharge and used the money to finance his wedding on June 19.
Also on Saratoga was Bob Layher, who’d tried to volunteer for British, Dutch, and Canadian air forces, so as to escape the boredom of peacetime service. Each time, the navy refused to let him go. Layher’s deliverance came in a telephone call from one of his shipmates, Henry Geselbracht, who told him in great excitement: “I’ve got a deal here!”
“What do you mean, a deal?”
“We can get out of the navy and go to China.”
“Sign me up,” Layher said.
But Irvine wanted experienced fighter pilots, as Layher recalled: “It cost us about three fifths of Scotch to get this nice guy [persuaded]. We wouldn’t give up on him until he said he’d sign us up, about eight o’clock in the morning, and before he sobered up he had us signed up.”
As a bonus, Irvine got a fighter pilot from Saratoga. This was James Howard, a gangling young man (in his wartime photographs, he bears a striking resemblance to the young Prince Charles) on temporary duty with the carrier. Like Tex Hill, Howard was born in Asia—in Canton, where his father had been a medical missionary—and wanted to see it again. “But the overriding reason,” Howard said, in words that echoed Hill’s, “was my yearning for adventure and action.” Having flown the navy’s new Grumman F4F Wildcat, he evidently impressed Irvine, who signed him on as a flight leader.
At Randolph Field in Texas, R.T. Smith and Paul Greene were sweating through the summer of 1941 as flight instructors. They were hostages to the great military expansion that President Roosevelt had ordered into effect: just out of flight school, they’d been kept at Randolph to teach new cadets, as the air force grew exponentially. R.T. especially had little hope of becoming a fighter pilot. A recent directive said that anyone taller than five-foot-ten couldn’t be assigned to fighters, and he stood well over six feet. He read about the recruiting drive in Time magazine, which reported that 100 Curtiss P-40s had been supplied to China, and that pilots were on the way. “For the past few months,” the magazine reported, “tall, bronzed American airmen have been quietly slipping away from east- and west-coast ports, making their way to Asia.” Actually, no pilots had left, but Smith and Greene were panicked that they might miss out on the great adventure. They asked around, got the recruiter’s address, and sent him a telegram: “We each have a thousand hours flying time and are ready to go.” Skip Adair met them a week later at the Gunter hotel in San Antonio, but turned them down when he learned that they’d never flown anything hotter than a North American BT-9 trainer. They returned next evening with a bottle of I.W. Harper. When Adair was mellow enough, they put the case to him again, and this time he signed them up.
A likelier prospect was Charlie Bond, whom the army had trained as a fighter pilot, then assigned to the Ferry Command. Movie-star handsome like Eddie Rector—like Smith and Greene, for that matter—the stocky young man would fly a Lockheed Hudson bomber from Long Beach to Montreal, turn it over to a Canadian pilot, and board a commercial airliner for the trip back to California. It was a boring routine for a man who’d set out to fly the hottest planes in the sky, so Bond was a ready listener when a friend called one night with the news that fighter pilots were needed in China. He asked around and got the number of a “Colonel Green” in Washington—probably Claire Chennault at China Defense Supplies.
“The next day I called Colonel Green’s office,” Bond recalled in a 1984 memoir, “giving name and duty station. In addition I told the secretary the names of two of my closest friends, who also were ferry pilots—George Burgard and James D. Cross. Within twenty-four hours a wire arrived at our headquarters, informing our commander that three of his pilots were resigning and were to be released immediately from active duty.”
At Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, so many flight instructors wanted to sign up that the base commander tore the list in half. John (Gil) Bright and John Donovan made the cut, along with Hank Gilbert, fresh out of flight school, and a forty-three-year-old enlisted pilot named Louis Hoffman. Dick Rossi—in the wrong half of the alphabet—should have stayed behind with the training command. But Rossi went to the recruiter and signed up anyhow. “When you’re young, you’re looking for adventure, more than anything else,” he explained. “Also I was put out because I’d been assigned as an instructor instead of to the fleet.” Rossi was twenty-six, a former merchant sailor.
A prize catch, or so he seemed, was Greg Boyington, twenty-eight and a first lieutenant in the U.S. Marines. He was hired on the spot as a flight leader. Broad-shouldered, thin-hipped, with the moody face of a Cherokee setting out on the Trail of Tears, Boyington was a heavy drinker, through nights that would end with the challenge: “I’ll wrestle anybody in the crowd!” He’d grown up believing his stepfather to be his natural parent, and he graduated from the University of Washington, married, and became a draftsman at Boeing Aircraft under the name of Hallenbeck. When he learned his birth name, he seized the chance to start anew as a bachelor and an aviation cadet. (Navy and marine pilots couldn’t marry for two years after earning their gold wings.) The lie had since caught up with him, and he was required to report each month on how he’d distributed his salary among those with a claim on it, including his ex-wife and three children.
Boyington described his recruiter as a retired captain and a veteran of the Lafayette Escadrille. This was Richard Aldworth. The pitch was delivered in the usual downtown hotel room. “The Japs are flying antiquated junk over China,” Aldworth assured him. “Many of your kills will be unarmed transports. I suppose you know that the Japanese are renowned for their inability to fly. And they all wear corrective glasses.”
“Captain,” said Boyington, “it’s quite a setup, but how do you know the pilots wear glasses?”
“Our technical staff determines this from the remains after a shoot-down.... Best of all, there’s good money in it—$675 per month. But the sky’s the limit,” Aldworth went on, “because they pay a bonus of $500 for each Japanese aircraft you knock down.”
Boyington just sat there, as he recalled, calculating how rich this project was going to make him. (In his 1958 autobiography, Boyington played the story for laughs, but his account was true in its essentials, as Claire Chennault would discover to his sorrow: some recruits were indeed told they’d be going against unarmed transports.)
Of all the recruits, the strangest case was that of a navy pilot who’d begun life with the name of John Perry. After dropping out of San Diego State, he joined the army as an aviation cadet, but was washed out for buzzing his girlfriend’s house. Perry then borrowed a friend’s name and academic record and started again as a navy cadet. In time he earned his wings as a flying-boat pilot, skippering a stately Consolidated PBY Catalina off the coast of California. Under the nom de guerre of Edwin Conant, he offered to go to China, and was accepted, though he’d never flown a fighter. For more than a year, in fact, he hadn’t landed on a hard-surface runway.
Altogether, 100 combat pilots signed up, though only 99 would actually sail for Asia. (Missing from the final roster was the name Chennault would have most liked to see: Ajax Baumler with his claim of four German and Italian planes shot down over Spain. Baumler was refused a passport on the inarguable if somewhat foolish ground that he’d violated his earlier passport by serving a foreign government.) Reflecting Commander Irvine’s early start, and perhaps the more enthusiastic support of Secretary Knox, 59 volunteers were navy men, and 7 more came from the marines. The army supplied 33, though CAMCO would later hire 10 army instructors for the flight school at Yunnan-yi.
