Once They Were Eagles (24 page)

“You know, Frank, it sounds awfully smug, but if I had it to do over, I'd probably have done it the same way. I've had a good life, had friendships I wouldn't trade for anything. My wartime flying led into my life as a commercial pilot. I got letters of acceptance on the same day from Pan Am and to become a career officer in the Marines Corps. I chose Pam Am and have never regretted my choice.”

In order to see Hank McCartney, I drove the 100 miles from Orlando's airport to Vero Beach, a pleasant retirement community close to Florida's famous Indian River citrus industry. Vero Beach, population 16,000, has an additional claim to fame as home of the Los Angeles Dodgers' spring training camp.

Hank bought 80 acres of property at the right time, developed it over a number of years and through hard work into a profitable citrus grove, and sold out in 1979. He's a respected and active member of his community and so genteel that the information operator could find neither a “Hank” nor a “Henry” McCartney. Henry A. “Hank” McCartney had become “Allan” McCartney.

Hank owns an acre on the side of a mountain in North Carolina where he spends his summers. He is active in civic and church affairs in both states: member of his church's executive committee, chairman of the budget committee, member of the Rotary Club and the ambulance squad. And he still has time to do some woodworking.

Entering the service via the Navy V-5 program in July 1941 upon his graduation from college, Hank went overseas as a dive bomber pilot; flew a syllabus to qualify as a fighter pilot, and had two tours at Guadalcanal before joining the Black Sheep.

“Frankly, I can't recall the machinery by which I was selected. I do know there are immeasurable benefits derived from the mix of experienced with new pilots. When a kid comes on the air and says, ‘Hey, they're shooting at me,' you can say, ‘It's all right. It's perfectly legal for them to do that.' You can help a fellow over it.

“After the Black Sheep, I came back here to Vero Beach to join the Night Fighter Squadron. I was here for two and a half years. In May 1946 I went to Cherry Point, and later to China and Honolulu. I was in Washington for almost two years in the Division of Aviation, then in England as an exchange pilot with the RAF. That was a wonderful year, 1949 to 1950. From there to Cherry Point, then Quantico as an instructor in the Senior School, 1956—1959. Next, three years as naval attache in Jakarta, Indonesia, to the Air War College in Maxwell; to Japan; to Willow Grove commanding the Reserve detachment until my retirement in 1966 as a colonel. I had 26 years, with never what I considered to be a bad assignment. My progression was such that with each new job came new challenges. I had a good time all the way.

“In terms of personal satisfaction, the diplomatic tour in Jakarta during the transition just prior to the removal of Sukarno was interesting, fulfilling, and really challenging. I enjoyed the RAF—a remarkable group of people.

“The service today? The biggest trouble, as I see it, is that there isn't any leadership. I was glad to retire because I was getting to the point where I was going to have some confrontations. You know there's a point where if you're going to make General Officer, you got to go along a little bit, and I was getting a little too brittle. The command had been diluted. Staffs were nameless, faceless sorts of guys sitting way off somewhere trying to tell you what to do, but they never had to answer for anything.

“It's interesting that the Commandant of the Marine Corps now [1981], Bob Barrow, was my operations officer when I was Chief of Staff of Task Force 79. He was fantastic. He was a lieutenant colonel then. If they make up their minds to turn it around, he can do it.”

Marion J. “Rusty” March was one of the older pilots in the Black Sheep Squadron. A 1938 graduate of Stanford University in mechanical engineering, he had already started on a career when a friend talked him into becoming a Marine Corps flyer. He was an instructor at Corpus Christi, Texas, when the war commenced.

Now retired after 20 years of service with Santa Clara County as a mechanical engineer, he lives in San Jose, California. He drove up to meet me in San Francisco.

Rusty had joined us just before our second tour.

“I was scared from the first flight on. We'd go on these fighter sweeps, in planes not always in top condition. I was usually on the tail end, and I'd think, ‘Boyington really knows' because he'd get up there and you'd hear old Pappy say, ‘Tally ho!' and see that lead plane peel off, and you knew you were in good position. He always brought those fighter sweeps in so that they had altitude advantage, coming out of the sun at the Japanese.

“With some of the other leaders you'd get a mess—planes milling around and the Zeros making runs on us instead of us on them. Not with Boyington; he had a sense—not only experience but a certain aptitude. Personally, he may not have been the greatest guy in the world, but when he got up in the air, he had real aptitude. A lot of others did, too, but I have to exclude myself. I didn't really have that knack. I'd see a Zero and get buck fever.

“After the Black Sheep, I was Duty Officer at Air Command, Northern Solomons, on Bougainville. It was a lousy tour—just strafing palm trees around Rabaul. The crash that sent me home was the result of a night flight. I landed without having my wheels locked down. They had a level with a knob you had to push all the way through the quadrant so the handle would latch—if you didn't, the thing would hang. Normally, it would have been O.K. anyway, but this plane had a bomb rack on it for bombing missions, a long pipe bolted to the underside. I started to skid on my belly, and this damn pipe snagged in the Marsden matting, jammed back and up into the fuselage, and wiped out the lower end of the gas tank. It rolled up, and the thing flamed like a big blowtorch through the cockpit. The plane finally stopped, cockpit 90 degrees, nose pointing at a bunch of guys on the embankment watching who was frying in the flames.

“Without any knowledge of what I was doing, I flipped my safety harness and dove over the side. Chin broken, face torn up; my mustache and eyebrows burned off, burned all over my face; left wrist burned where the jacket and glove didn't meet. The funniest thing, my shoe was cooked so that the leather sole was cracked. I had a third degree burn on my left calf and up my leg. The meat wagon and fire truck found me there, trying to beat out the flames around me.

“I spent a couple of months at the Naval Hospital. They gave me a couple of skin grafts on my leg, one on my face, and shipped me home to the Naval Hospital at Seattle, where they finished the skin grafting and then sent me to Parris Island. I finished the war there and got out.”

Bob McClurg picked me up at the Syracuse airport and drove through a snowstorm to his magnificent estate in a wooded glen at Cedarville Ridge, New York. The pungent odor of pine needles from a brightly lighted tree in the corner of the sunken living room, and the sparkle and crackle of the log in the fireplace, emphasized that Christmas was not far away. The picture window looked over a snow-covered porch where birds were dinner guests in feeders. The living Christmas-card view continued down a slope and through the trees into a canyon, where a stream meandered through the property. Although he's a hunter and fisherman (the freezer in his garage is loaded with game: venison, pheasants, geese, ducks, grouse, trout), Bob assured me he never hunts the deer frequenting his own place.

The downstairs den walls are covered with souvenirs of his Black Sheep days, and some of his fishing expeditions.

McClurg is part owner of a highly successful agency that represents a dozen lines of plumbing and heating equipment. He is semi-retired now, concentrating on his golf, hunting, and fishing. Although graying, he still has plenty of hair; he is lean, alert, and energetic.

Already accepted by the Naval Air Corps in 1942, he left his mother to receive his college degree for him. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was the commencement speaker. She went up to him and said: “My son Bobby is a flyer too. Do you know him?” Rickenbacker answered that oh, yes, he knew him. Bob was shipped to Hawaii with only 21 hours in fighter planes, never having made a carrier landing in a fighter.

The colonel there asked him, “How the hell did you get here?”

“I told him, ‘By ship, sir,'” McClurg related.

“He said, ‘You dummy, how could you get here with a logbook like that? … You're worth nothing to nobody. You'll have to stay here and we'll train you.'

“Two days later, I was on a plane to the South Pacific. I had my first flight in a Corsair and demolished part of a palm tree when I took off. I managed to get it down all right, but every time they'd pick up pilots from the replacement pool, they'd reject me for guys with 120 to 160 hours in fighters.

“When I was transferred, Pappy looked in my logbook and took a couple of us out to fly. He said, ‘Mac, you fly like a bag of piss. You'll never get anywhere till somebody teaches you something.'

“I was grateful to him for that because I'd begun to feel like another bump on a log, and thought I'd never get home.

“The first air raid on Munda, when we were sleeping in a Quonset with mosquito nets around the four posts of each bunk, two of us got tangled up, smashed heads, and dragged the nets with us as we scrambled on all fours to the foxhole. We rolled into it, and somebody jumped on top of us.

“After the Black Sheep I went to Green Island, flew a few escort missions and strafing. I came home, did some instrument training, went to several schools, then back to the west coast to go overseas again. The colonel called me in: ‘You're going to stay in when the war's over, aren't you?'

“I said ‘no.' It turned out that you had to stay in a couple more years if you went overseas. But I had enough points, so I got out and went to work for a company that manufactures plumbing and bathroom fixtures.