大象传媒

This story appears courtesy of and with thanks to Robert H Allison.

This extra distance that Wells had traveled, to disobey instructions, ran his fuel so low that by the time he got back to the ships he was practically on fumes. Since our carrier was not taking planes aboard at the time and one of the other formation of carriers was receiving planes, Wells got into their traffic circle and landed on one of those carriers. The landing was a little short and the tail wheel struck the curved portion of the after-end of the flight deck. This sprung the back of the plane rendering it temporarily unflyable. The Captain of that ship called Wells to the bridge wanting to know what the hell he was doing on his ship. Wells told him that he was nearly out of fuel and would not have been able to wait for the Petrof Bay's formation to start landing planes. The captain called to have the gas tank on Well's plane checked and the report was that there was only a cupful left.

Wells was off the hook on that score but he still had to get back to our ship and he didn't have a plane since his was damaged with a broken back, full of holes and grounded. You can believe it or not but he talked that captain into trading his plane for one of theirs and on the next flight flew the new one back to the Petrof Bay. For all his shenanigans, Wells was given three days in hack (restricted to his room). He was not to be lonely, he had eight roommates.

At some point in our daily operations, I began getting an uneasy feeling in the traffic circle when approaching for a landing, especially in the final turn into the stern of the carrier. This didn't happen once, but was getting to be a regular occurrence. The feeling I would get was that the plane was gradually rolling to the left and was about to roll right into the ocean. Not just one plane but any plane I happened to be flying. There seemed to be nothing I could do to stop the roll in that I had the stick as far to the right as it would go. By the grace of God I managed to get aboard each time. Not only was I concerned, but the landing signal officer was after me because I was not responding to his signals quickly enough. He was not able to offer me any constructive advice and I knew that I had to solve the situation or I was going to wind up in the water.
One day as I was experiencing this feeling, I decided to turn the plane loose and see what would happen. This moment came almost immediately. On the turn to the down wind leg at about 50 feet of altitude, I again had the stick full right and was at the limit of my control. I pulled my feet off the rudder pedals and took my hand off the stick. I was no longer flying the plane, it was on it own. To my surprise the left wing came up and the plane leveled out and was flying very nicely, straight and level. I may be thick headed but it didn't take me but an instant to recognize what I had been doing. Being intent on following the procedures for the approach and landing I was, without being aware it, applying pressure to left rudder pedal causing the plane to roll and applying right aileron to hold the left wing up. This was cross controlling the plane. If I had been flying a straight line in place of turning I would have been slipping the plane just as I had done in slips to a circle. I was never to make that mistake again. Landings were normal again.
The squadron suffered at least 110 incidents of damage to it's planes due to enemy antiaircraft fire. I am aware of only one time that my plane was hit by enemy gun fire. I became aware of that only after I landed and the plane captain pointed out a machine gun air scoop that had been split open. Was very minor and didn't interfere with the flight characteristics of the plane.

On one of our strafing missions on the islands of Miyako and Ishigaki Shima we were to bomb and strafe

the airfields to damage the runways so that enemy aircraft could not fly in from Formosa, land, refuel and take off for Kamikaze runs on Okinawa. These were two very small islands about half way between Formosa and Okinawa. We would start our runs from about 10,000 feet and pull out just above the tree tops. In the dive of one of my runs, my plane began shaking and thrashing around so violently that I could no longer hold the stick, even with both hands. I assumed that I had taken a hit from AA fire and the plane was out of control and that I had no choice but to jump. I took my hands off the stick, reached for the canopy release. In a matter of seconds I needed to be out of the plane before it hit the ground. When I released the controls, the plane came out of it's dive and began to lose airspeed. As it lost speed it became less the violent and I realized that I might again be able to get control. This did happen and at a lower speed I had normal control again. I circled the island until my flight had completed its runs, then rejoined them. To fly with them I had to increase my airspeed to match theirs but this caused the severe vibrations to return. The skipper assigned one of the TBMs to escort me back to the ship while they went ahead of us. The rest of my flight and landing were normal. As soon as the plane was on the deck we scrutinized the plane for the cause of the trouble. What we found was that one of the connecting rods that tied the control wire from the stick to the trim tab on the elevator had stripped its treads and the tab was free to flop on it's hinges. At low speeds there was little or no effect but at high speed as in a near vertical dive a small movement up and down would cause a great amount of movement in the forward end of the plane. It was this great amount of movement caused by a little flutter that I was experiencing.

A couple of years after the war had ended I read in the Des Moines newspaper that the Army had discovered the graves of nine Navy and Marine fliers who had been shot down and taken prisoner on these two islands. They were flown to Formosa and executed. I have no reason to doubt the story. Not only did I have trouble over these two islands but we lost three or four planes there. One crashed in the ocean and the pilot was killed. The other pilots were rescued by seaplanes or by a submarine. In fact, the skipper was shot down over these islands twice. The first time we circled over him while he was in the water waiting for the "Dumbo" to show up. I was sure that the wrong coordinates were given for this location so when the "Dumbo" didn't show I kept looking in the direction that I expected it to be. Sure enough I spotted a very tiny dot in the sky to the west. I was not able to raise the leader of our flight on the radio, so without notifying Dunagan, I took off and flew to the dot, discovered the dot to be the rescue plane and led it back. I've often wondered if we might have lost the skipper if I hadn't noticed the error in the coordinates. The second time the skipper was shot down over these islands he was picked up by a submarine and spent three weeks aboard before being returned to Okinawa and back to the carrier.

Continued.....
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