MIDWAY MOVIES

The movie of the season is Roland Emmerich’s revistation of the Battle of Midway, released last month.  Being more than somewhat familiar with that historic event, and a  sometime reviewer, I’m devoting this month’s blog to Hollywood’s treatment of the epic WW II naval battle.

Background: 

In June 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a major effort to capture Midway Atoll some 1,200 miles northwest of Oahu.  Occupying two sand spits was less important than destroying America’s remaining aircraft carriers and thereby—presumably—forcing a settlement with Washington.  Never mind that it was never-ever going to happen.

Short version: the operation turned to hash for the Japanese.  They lost all four aircraft carriers committed to the effort, plus a large cruiser, versus one U.S. flattop and a destroyer.  Midway was one of the significant battles of history, as it ended Japan’s strategic initiative and set the stage for America’s oceanic trek ending in Tokyo Bay three years later.

Hollywood’s first treatment of Midway remains the best in some ways.  Task Force debuted in 1949 with full Navy cooperation, tracing the development of carrier aviation from 1922 into the jet age.  The perspective is two fictional fliers: Walter Brennan (a thinly disguised Admiral Marc Mitscher) and Gary Cooper representing a tailhooking everyman.

Director Delmer Daves was a versatile writer-director whose credits included Pride of the Marines, (John Garfield and Eleanor Parker, 1947) Dark Passage, (Bogart and Bacall, 1947) and Spencer’s Mountain (Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara, 1963.)  The Midway portion of Task Force is relatively short and somewhat condensed to the point it’s hard to distinguish USS Enterprise from her sister Yorktown, sunk in the battle.  But the film was shot aboard real-live carriers with real-live airplanes: a Dauntless dive bomber and a Wildcat fighter.

Brennan delivers the movie’s best line.  While awaiting a contact report on the enemy fleet, he turns to Cooper and asks, “Do you know any satisfyin’ profanity?”

Coop of course did not, but events unfold in the film pretty much as in fact.  Largely lost on the audience is appearance of Wayne Morris, a genuine navy fighter ace, as a torpedo bomber pilot who barely survives the Midway massacre.

Lapse-dissolve, fade in three decades later…

If there’s a worse navy film than Midway 1976, I’ve not seen it.  Writer Donald Sanford’s previous credits included Submarine X-1 (1968) and The Thousand Plane Raid (1969) so presumably he knew something about World War II but it’s not evident on screen.  

Reputedly director Jack Smight flew with the Army in the Pacific but again, there’s no proof.  Mainly he worked on a variety of TV programs though he directed an early disaster movie, Airport 1975.

Midway ’76 remains a different type of disaster.

Despite the all-star cast with Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford and Robert Mitchum, the plot is convoluted, folded, spun and mutilated.  The carrier phase of the battle stretches into two days for no apparent reason. 

Film editing is appallingly bad, in no way retrieved by the Sensurround gimmick accompanying explosions and stuff.  Near the end Heston’s Dauntless morphs into a Helldiver (18 months early) into my late friend George Duncan’s F9F Panther (read: jet) that explodes on landing.  There’s also a 1960s Forrestal class aircraft carrier.  Ferpetesake.

Absolutely the worst performance is Hal Holbrook as code breaker Commander Joseph Rochefort.  Holbrook gained acclaim for his Mark Twain one-man shows but in Midway he plays Samuel Clemens playing a hayseed Rochefort lurching toward victory.

There’s also a pointless and unlikely Navy-Nisei romance that only detracts from the narrative flow.  

Short version: I counted something north of 70 factual and technical errors, the huge majority being avoidable.  Yes, in the 1970s computer graphics were unavailable but just a bit of judicious film selection would’ve gone a long-long way.

Now, as to this year’s release: OK, it is not terrible.  Certainly it is immensely better than Smight’s miserable product.

The Battle of Midway community—and there is such—was distraught at Woody Harrelson as Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz.  Part of the reaction was due to Harrelson’s fame as the not-so-bright Cheers bartender.  But while I was prepped to hate the portrayal, I came away admiring the performance. 

Patrick Wilson is excellent as intelligence officer Edwin Layton, and Brennan Brown  is immensely more credible than Twain-Holbrook as crypto genius Rochefort.

I knew four of the people portrayed in the movie: dive bomber squadron commander Dick Best, his daughter Barbara, his radioman-gunner Jim Murray, and Jimmy Doolittle.  Briton Ed Skrein captures Dick’s focused intensity without having known him (Dick died in 2001) although Emmerich owes Dick a posthumous apology for the hyena-gagging introduction when Best dives near vertically on the Enterprise, shuts down his engine, dips below the flight deck, pops up and lands without lowering his flaps.  Not only is that stunt impossible, it gives missions of viewers the impression that one of the most professional naval officers of his era was a hotdogging flyboy.

Dick’s back-seater was Chief Radioman Jim Murray who in the film is demoted to a tense, uncertain newbie rather than the veteran that he was.

Aaron Eckhart is too tall and too hairy to resemble “General Jimmy” but his selection is galaxies better than foul-mouthed Alec Baldwin’s miserable casting in the egregious Pearl Harbor.

Unlike Smight’s version, which tried covering all the bases, Emmerich almost exclusively limits himself to the Enterprise from Pearl Harbor onward.  Having written a lengthy Big E “biography” (see February 2012) and knowing dozens of her veterans, it’s a subject close to my heart.  But history is ill served in Wes Tooke’s script, which barely acknowledges that Enterprise’s sisters Yorktown and Hornet were engaged at Midway, with “Yorky” being sunk.

Emmerich is known for blockbusters dating from Independence Day (1996), often relying on computer-generated imagery.  Midway’s CGI ranges from mediocre to good, with ships better done than planes.  Some of the aircraft perform maneuvers that defy credibility as well as gravity, but that’s not unique.

The Japanese are fairly well portrayed, especially Etsushi Toyokawa as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.  

There are dozens of “gotchas” in the film, many noted by the consultants and obviously ignored.  One of my lesser gripes is based on some 500 hours in open-cockpit airplanes: nobody flies with his helmet's chin strap unfastened.  Yet Kommodore Emmerich’s fliers routinely do so. (Attempting added credibility, I’ll note that I’m probably the only Midway movie reviewer with flight time in a Dauntless.)

Those reservations aside, Midway ’19 helps correct the cinematic record begun so well in 1949 and miserably fumbled in ’76.  Internet comments about the “great” 1976 version merely remind us that some people have no business expressing their opinions but hey—it’s still a relatively free country.

Which is partly what Midway was all about.

REMEMBERING LEYTE GULF

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the greatest naval battle of World War II.  From October 23 to 26, 1944, the U.S. and Imperial Japanese navies clashed in Philippine waters.  The context was General Douglas MacArthur’s promised Return to the islands when he fled the unstoppable Japanese in early 1942.  Subsequently the Joint Chiefs in Washington decided to merge the Central Pacific and Southwest Pacific offensives in the Philippines rather than Formosa (now Taiwan) thus setting huge forces in motion.

Oddly enough, the Battle of Leyte Gulf had little to do with Leyte Gulf, but it was the dominant feature of the campaign.  The scale could only be imagined today: 236 American and about 80 Japanese warships plus U.S. torpedo boats and submarines while both fleets deployed significant support vessels such as tankers and provision ships.  The Americans brought about 1,500 tailhook aircraft aboard 34 fleet and escort carriers while the Japanese Navy had approximately 300 planes in four carriers and ashore.

The U.S. Third Fleet was led by Admiral William F. Halsey, the jut-jawed seadog who had been at war against Japan since December 7, 1941.  His carrier commander in Task Force 38 was Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, a pioneer aviator who relied heavily upon his excellent staff.  The amphibious force was led by Seventh Fleet’s Admiral Thomas Kinkaid.

Leyte Gulf has been told and retold dozens of times, and requires little expansion here.  The Imperial Navy deployed three units: two powerful surface forces transiting the islands from west to east, and a minimal carrier force well to the north, which was bound to draw attention of the aggressive “Bull” Halsey.

Leading four Japanese carriers was Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, who had clashed with Mitscher off the Marianas in June.  “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” all but destroyed Tokyo’s carefully hoarded supply of trained carrier aircrews, leaving Ozawa with a small crop of rookies.

Historians still argue whether Leyte Gulf was a carrier battle.  The previous five, dating from Coral Sea in May 1942, all involved mutual exchange of carrier air strikes.  They resulted in loss of three U.S. flattops (plus one to a submarine) and nine Japanese—totaling fewer than the fast carriers Mitscher owned in October 44.  While a few of Ozawa’s planes flew within range of TF-38, none accomplished anything significant.

The battle began with U.S. submarines stalking Japan’s surface forces west of the Philippines on the 23rd.  Events peaked the next day with continuous air strikes that sank one of the two biggest ships afloat but otherwise did little to deter Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, who continued toward his goal of attacking U.S. shipping in Leyte Gulf.  His passage through San Bernardino Strait was reported by U.S. night owls but was ignored by Halsey and Mitscher with disastrous results the next day.

Meanwhile, Japanese land-based aircraft USS Princeton on the 24th, the first American fast carrier lost since October 1942.

Hours later, Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s southern force was annihilated in the last major surface action of all time, a nocturnal slugfest in Battle of Surigao Strait.  Outnumbered about six to one, he lost his life and his command, only one destroyer surviving.  

Partly due to unnecessarily complex communications, Halsey assumed that his battleships, Task Force 34, were guarding the Leyte side of San Bernardino Strait.  With word of Ozawa’s flattops to the north, he took TF-38 to destroy Ozawa, leaving Kinkaid’s amphibious command vulnerable to surface ships.  The only American force in the way was “Taffy Three,” six small carriers with their escorting destroyers.  During the Battle Off Samar, the immensely outgunned “small boys” fought back with guns, torpedoes, and whatever aircraft could be launched.  Other escort-carrier planes added to the effort, forcing Kurita to disengage.  

Throughout the day the U.S. Navy lost two escort carriers (one to the first kamikaze mission) and three destroyers.  

Halsey’s aviators and “black shoe” surface warriors sank all four of Ozawa’s carriers, but by then his flattops were almost empty shells.  The execution continued into the 26th, raising the toll to 28 Japanese warships.  The Imperial Navy never recovered.

MacArthur’s forces largely secured the Philippines in April 1945, providing another advanced fleet base for the Pacific Fleet.  

Late that year the U.S. Navy owned 6,000 ships including 90 aircraft carriers of all types.  It was two-thirds more than 12 months before and over three times the figure in 1941.  That month more than 3,000,000 men and women wore navy uniforms.

Today the Navy has about 490 ships and submarines with 438,000 uniformed personnel.  Congress mandates eleven carriers but at this writing only two are deployed. The new USS Ford (CVN-78), an enduring boondoggle, was delivered incomplete and may not deploy for another four or five years.  Her primary aircraft, the F-35C stealth fighter, is perennially troubled, and in fact took over two years just to qualify in carrier landings.  The Lightning II remains in low-rate production until it meets required mileposts for operational capability.

There’s still a great deal of misty-eyed sentimentality about “the greatest generation,” though none of the hundreds of WW II vets I’ve known, met or interviewed bought into Tom Brokaw’s unsupportable assertion.  But one thing seems certain: the aircrews and sailors who fought Leyte Gulf represented the greatest assembly of naval talent and capability of the era.  

SEPTEMBER REMEMBER

On this anniversary of 9-11 I'm stepping aside in favor of Cdr. R.R. "Boom" Powell, former naval aviator, former airline captain and active historic aircraft pilot.  With our unindicted co-conspirator Cdr. Jack Woodul, we wrote a WW I epic called "Duel Over Douai," but this heartfelt contribution from Boom commends its attention to all...yesterday, today and tomorrow.

A flight to New York, late September, 2001:

I saw Ground Zero last evening. Marie told me to look for the hole. I said I did not think anything would be visible. Weather was poor, flight path not close. I was wrong.

After flying mostly above the clouds from Norfolk while the sun set and a gray and turbulent descent, visibility underneath was crystal clear with urban lights glowing off the cloud base. The Verazzano Bridge was a positive fix. To the west, the Statue of Liberty was lighted with her torch and crown shining gold even at a distance. Up New York Harbor the buildings of lower Manhattan rose like dark cliffs from the water. Emanating from the ground in their midst was a bright light, volcanic in intensity. The source of the light hidden by the dark sided buildings. Unearthly. Strange. An apocalyptic radiance of catastrophe. Its brightness made starker by the dark shadows of the standing structures. Ground Zero indeed. An opening to hell… except for the light’s color.

The light was pure, clear, white. White; all colors, but no color. White; the color of heaven, the color of snow, of summer cloud, the color of hope.

I stayed with my face against the airplane window until the vision was well past. There were glimpses of the arc lamps illuminating rescue and reclamation efforts – almost blinding in the night, but then the source was shielded again and only the fountain of light flooded up and out making the clouds as white as day. The rain had restarted when we got off at La Guardia and the wind was cold, biting, from the north. The summer of 2001 is gone. And there is a lighted hole in Manhattan and our country’s soul.

HISTORIC AUGUST

There are historic dates in every month, from January 1 (George Washington displayed the Grand Union Flag, 1776) to December 31 (Thomas Edison demonstrated his incandescent lamp, 1879).  But August (named for Augustus Caesar) has a wide variety of notable anniversaries, and besides, I’ve waited til the last minute for this month’s blog.

For starters, the eighth month originally was named Sextilis as the sixth month in ancient Rome. But following chronological realignment, it became August in 8 B.C. to honor Emperor Augustus Caesar (63 BC to 14 AD).

Three Roman cities were destroyed on August 24, 79 A.D. (the date is often debated) when Mount Vesuvius erupted in southern Italy.  The death toll at Pompei, Herculaneum and other places remains unknown but certainly ran into thousands.

(Skipping forward, in August 1883 catastrophic eruptions on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa spurred tidal waves 120 feet high, killing as many as 36,000 people. Scientists later calculated the five cubic miles of earth were blasted perhaps 50 miles into the mesosphere.)

“In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”  Remember that from grade school?  Me too. Actually, on August 3 the future Admiral of the Ocean Sea set sail from Spain with his three-ship “fleet” bound for a short cut to the Far East.  Three months later he fetched up somewhere in the Bahamas, and the rest, as they say, is politically incorrect history.

Ninety-one years later—August 5, 1583--Sir Humphrey Gilbert established the first British colony in North America.  On the Newfoundland coast he claimed St. John’s Harbor in the name of Queen Elizabeth. The noted explorer was not so fortunate on the return leg, sunk in a storm near the Azores.

For a week in Philadelphia during 1787 The Great Debate occurred in the Constitutional Convention.  The upshot was confirming a four-year term for president, ceding Congress the right to regulate foreign and interstate trade, and naming a committee to finalize a draft of the Constitution.  Some 232 years later, members of Congress who have sworn to Preserve and Protect that blessed document are trying hard to destroy it.  And there’s no penalty for Violation of Oath.

On August 21, 1863, during the American Civil War, Confederate leader William Quantrill led 450 mounted guerrillas in a predawn raid in Lawrence, Kansas.  The riders left about 150 residents dead, dozens wounded, and much of the town in ruin.  “Bloody Bill” had been denied a regular commission by the Confederate war cabinet, describing his attitude as barbaric.  He removed any doubt of that assessment. 

On August 19, 1934 German voters overwhelmingly granted additional powers to Chancellor Adolf Hitler, including the office of president.  Thus, one-man rule was codified, paving the sanguinary road to the Second World War.

On August 2, 1939 German expatriate Albert Einstein wrote President Franklin Roosevelt about the prospect for nuclear weapons, noting “A single bomb of this type carried by boat (The B-29 was barely in the drafting stage) and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

The rest, as they, say is radioactive history.

Actually, it’s short-term history because six years later almost to the day a B-29 Superfortress flew from Tinian in the Marianas to Hiroshima in Japan and dropped a 9,700-pound “gadget” that destroyed the city.  Optimists hoped that the 1945 shock and awe would force Tokyo’s doom-laden war cabinet to surrender but it took another A-bomb three days later, August 9, to obliterate most of Nagasaki.  Emperor Hirohito over-rode his war ministers on the 15th, effectively ending the world’s most destructive war.

(Other WW II August events included the first U.S. offensive of the war at Guadalcanal in 1942 and the Anglo-American conquest of Sicily in 1943.)

The true nature of Communism became evident on August 13,1961, with the first phase of the Berlin Wall.  Eventually the East German regime built more than 100 miles of wall around West Berlin, occupied by the Allies and the Soviets since 1945.  In 1987 President Ronald Reagan famously called, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  It lasted until 1990, yet today addled American liberals insist that a border fence to keep foreigners out is equivalent to a Communist barrier to keep people in.                                  

In 1964 the “Tonkin Gulf Incident” sent America spinning uncontrollably into a decade-long Crazy Asian War.  Thing is: the first incident on August 2 did occur with North Vietnamese PT boats engaging an American destroyer.  The next “incident” two nights later never occurred—a fact evident to then-Commander James B. Stockdale, an aviator and the only witness to both events.  Some military and political leaders in DC suspected that panic-stricken U.S. sailors misinterpreted radar data but it didn’t matter to the vile Lyndon B. Johnson.  Only 90 days from a tough presidential election, he used the incident as proving he was  Tough On Commanism (he was from Texas, after all), and ordered retaliatory air strikes. 

The rest, as they say, is grief-stricken history to the tune of 58,000 dead Americans, the loss of much of Indochina to Commanism, and political-cultural fault lines that remain today.

In 1969 the three-day Woodstock music and hedonistic revel began in a farm field near Bethel, New York.  Reportedly between 300,000 and 400,000 youngsters grooved to a couple of dozen rock and roll bands, representing the growing 1960s counter-culture movement.  Among the groups performing were Santana; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Jefferson Airplane; and my favorite, Creedence Clearwater Revival.  Despite the mixture of drugs and a boisterous good-times atmosphere, apparently only two deaths ensued.  The first (predictably) was an overdose but the second (surprisingly) involved a celebrant who fell asleep or passed out under a tractor, unknown to the driver.

The iconic American of the postwar era died in a Memphis hospital on August 16, 1977. Elvis Aaron Presley succumbed to heart failure at age forty-two.  The King was dead after a twenty-one-year reign.  And no other Music Monarch has come close to matching him.  

The half-century Cold War effectively ended (see 1961) on August 29, 1991 with a failed coup to preserve the tottering Soviet Communist Party.  Thus passed the Evil Empire. Yet some Russians—and others including Americans—still bemoan the passing of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.      

THE BROWNINGS OF JULY

I’m a huge admirer of John Moses Browning (1855-1926).  Gun guys will immediately know why—he invented a huge number and variety of firearms from single-shots to machine guns, and most of the automatic weapons used by the U.S. armed forces in World War II were of JBM origin.  They included the Browning Automatic Rifle, the fabled BAR, our standard squad automatic weapon.  The belt-fed weapons included the M1919 lightweight infantry weapon adapted as a secondary aircraft weapon, and the classic M1917 water-cooled. And of course the fabled M2 .50 caliber, still being used as the iconic “Ma Deuce.”  In an NRA article a few years ago I called it “The Gun That Won the War.”  I stand by that assessment.

However, Browning’s most enduring conception remains the M1911 .45 caliber pistol.  Aside from its century-and-counting service life, it’s my sentimental and operational favorite.  A Colt Government Model was the first firearm I purchased—my “Bicentennial Gun” in 1976.  I still have it, and it still shoots just fine.

But 75 years ago this month both the M1911 pistol and M1917 watercooled MG featured in three Medal of Honor actions on a Pacific island.  From before World War I to the present, about sixty Medals have been earned by 1911 shooters.

The Marianas campaign of mid-1944 was strategically important because with those islands in U.S. hands, Tokyo and most of the Japanese homeland fell within range of Boeing B-29 Superfortresses.  But first the main Marianas had to be occupied by U.S. Army and Marine Corps troops, beginning with Saipan.  (Object of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” of June 19-20.)

In the 27th Infantry Division was 29-year-old Captain Benjamin L. Solomon, medical officer of the 2nd Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment.  He was a rare talent: a USC dental school graduate who began his practice before being drafted in 1940.  A standout “rookie” soldier, he was described by other soldiers as “the best infantryman I ever saw.”  Others described him as “A nice Jewish dentist.”  Eventually he wore sergeant’s stripes leading a section of Browning heavy machine guns—knowledge that would serve him extremely well.

Apparently Salomon would have been happy to remain a plain GI, but his dental diploma commended him to the army medical hierarchy.  He was commissioned an officer and went ashore with the 105th Infantry on Saipan in early July.

On the morning of July 7 at least 3,000 Japanese swarmed though a 300-yard gap in the regiment’s perimeter.  Salomon had established an aid station only 50 yards behind the firing line, which quickly accumulated casualties.  Squatting over one patient, Salomon saw a Japanese emerge from the brush to begin bayoneting injured GIs.  Seizing a rifle, the medico shot the killer.  When six more enemy broke into the tent, Salomon shot one, bayonetted another, knifed one and grappled with the others until his friends slew them.

Recognizing the huge disparity of numbers, Salomon advised the wounded to withdraw to the regimental aid station father back.  Then he grabbed another rifle and exited the tent where he found a familiar weapon: an M1917 Browning with a dead crew.  The bespectacled doctor sat behind the gun, shouting for his friends to evacuate wounded while he covered their withdrawal.  He continued firing until he was killed.

A day or so later, members of the 105th cleared the battlefield.  Another medic noted dried blood trails and concluded that Salomon had moved the 100-pound Browning, tripod and ammunition three times despite fatal wounds.  Part of the reason: there were 98 Japanese corpses in the area, and apparently Salomon had killed most of them.  He moved each time to regain a field of fire around the heaped bodies.

Salomon was recommended for the Medal of Honor but the 27th Division commander, while sympathetic, was limited by regulations prohibiting medical personnel from bearing arms.  

Nonetheless, Ben Salomon’s fellow soldiers and admirers persisted for more than half a century.  They were denied by reviews in 1958 and 1972 until finally justice was done.  In 2002 President George W. Bush presented Salomon’s medal to the doctor’s alma mater: the University of California in Southern California School of Dentistry.  

On the same day as Salomon’s action, July 7, another soldier in the 105th Infantry also faced vastly greater numbers with a Browning design.  Private Thomas A. Baker, a 28-year-old New Yorker, already had distinguished himself on Saipan using a bazooka and small arms.  

On the 7th Baker was critically wounded in a close-range firefight but refused evacuation. He continued firing at the swarming Japanese until he ran out of ammunition, then was carried by a friend about 50 yards toward the rear until the good Samaritan was shot.  Recognizing the reality, Baker asked for a pistol to help cover his friends’ retreat.  He hefted a fully loaded M1911, resolving to make optimum use of the eight rounds.

As other soldiers withdrew, their last view of Baker was resting against a phone pole, facing the direction of the inevitable assault.  When the ground was reclaimed, his body was found with the pistol’s slide locked back—surrounded by eight enemy corpses.  Tom Baker had shot “a possible.”

The third Medal of Honor to a 105th man involved two iconic Browning designs, also on July 7. Another New Yorker, 44-year-old Lieutenant Colonel William J. O’Brien, led the First Battalion in resisting probably the largest Banzai attack of the Pacific War.  He organized his companies in a hard-pressed defense of their line but enemy numbers were too great.  With fighting down to arm-wrestling distance, O’Brien seized two M1911s and stalked up and down the line, shooting one with each hand.  He ignored repeated wounds and, with his pistols empty, he climbed into a jeep with an M2 .50 caliber machine gun.  As GIs withdrew, their last view of the colonel was standing behind the gun, shooting down Japanese pouring around him.  

Three men from the same unit using the same classic weapons against fearsomely lethal odds. All honor to them, their fellow soldiers—and to John M. Browning.

THE DRAGON'S JAW

Earlier this month a five-year campaign drew to a successful end.  It resonated over a period of more than half a century, dating from the spring of 1965. The result is Dragon’s Jaw: An Epic Story of Courage and tenacity in Vietnam.

My friend, colleague and unindicted co-conspirator Stephen Coonts is a former U.S. Navy attack pilot, Vietnam veteran, and immensely successful novelist.  Most of his books have earned their way onto the New York Times’best-seller list, starting with his smash 1986 debut Flight of The Intruder, later a successful movie.

Steve and I shared our first publisher, Naval Institute Press in Annapolis, and when I was asked to evaluate his original manuscript, I told the editor, “This book is so good that if you don’t publish it, I will.”  Things proceeded from there, and Steve has kindly included me in three of his anthologies including the fiction compilations Victoryand Combat. 

As they say, time passed.  Then one afternoon in April 2014 Steve phoned with a question: would I like to work with him on the full story of Thanh Hoa Bridge?

That was akin to asking J. Edgar Hoover if he would have liked to arrest Jimmy Hoffa.  (And if you don’t recognize either name, you’re encouraged to do some XX century googling.)  My response was not just Yes but Hell Yes!

Some background:

Thanh Hoa Bridge was the most notorious target in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War (1964-1973 or 1975, depending on one’s definition).  About 70 miles south of Hanoi, it was one of the two most important spans in North Vietnam, the other being the Long Bien Bridge crossing the Red River in Hanoi. Both were critical links supporting the North’s enduring campaign to funnel men and supplies from China and the port of Haiphong into South Vietnam, America’s erratic ally.  And both were extremely well defended.

Because of Than Hoa Bridge’s rocky anchors either side of the Song Ma, resembling giant jaws, the Vietnamese had long dubbed the area the Cầu Hàm Rồng.  And so it became famous—and infamous—as the Dragon’s Jaw, completed in 1964.

In that first conversation I told Steve that I had started a Thanh Hoa file about 25 years before, when managing editor of the Tailhook Association journal.  I’d heard various estimates of the number of U.S. aircraft shot down attacking the bridge, as high as 100+.  So, with a fading printout of American fixed-wing aircraft shot down in Southeast Asia, I was confronted with nearly 3,000 entries.   The task was somewhat simplified because President Lyndon Johnson, the frustrated Texas arm-twister, called off bombing North Vietnam in 1969 and it was not resumed until Richard Nixon ran out of patience three years later. But even then, I had to peruse about 1,700 combat losses, seeking Thanh Hoa targets.

So we had the bare-bones skeleton of our book. Steve and I easily reached an agreement—after all, one of his previous careers was the law—and away we went.  I would research the story, write a first draft, and then Steve would expand the text and sprinkle his literary pixie dust. His agent sold our proposal to Da Capo Press for manuscript delivery in the fall of 2018, working around Steve’s fiction obligations.  In that time I finished or began four projects of my own.  In a word, we were busy.

In all we consulted about 70 contributors representing the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, civilians, and Vietnamese. They included a well-connected American structural engineer who had worked in Vietnam; the Air Force colonel who led the first two Thanh Hoa missions in 1965; a future U.S. vice presidential candidate and other long-term POWs; the Navy pilot who probably flew more Dragon’s Jaw missions than anyone; the Phantom leader whose laser-guided bombs crippled the span in May 1972; and the naval aviator whose flight slew the Dragon that October.  Thanks to a couple of extraordinarily generous scholars, we obtained original material from North Vietnam, much of which had never been seen.

Early on, Steve and I realized that we had more than a gripping combat flying story.  The bridge became a microcosm of that entire “Crazy Asian War” in all its insanity, courage, pride, and grief.  It was as if the Dragon’s Jaw were an inanimate 20th century Grendel, the fearsome, lurking monster of the classic Icelandic Beowulf saga.  More than that, the overdesigned, overbuilt span represented what literature majors term a deus ex machina—a convention from ancient Greek sagas that brings players into the story. 

And we found something more.  Most of our contributors had waited half a century for someone to ask them to share their portion of the Thanh Hoa story.  It was as if Steve and I became their voices, which came spilling out of phones, tape recorders, and emails.  It wasn’t merely that Vietnam was their war—often the bridge was their enduring identity in that ill-conceived, misdirected, doomed endeavor. But at the same time they retain the fierce pride of accomplished warriors with shared skill in the profession of arms, and most of all—trust in one another.  Dragon’s Jawis their legacy, and Steve and I were privileged to record it.

We wanted the book to be about more than bombs falling and planes shot down.  We thought the context was crucial, so Steve immersed himself in the history of the war, trying to boil it down so that the contest didn’t overpower the story.  As Steve concludes, “We think we got enough of the political overview of the Vietnam War and peace efforts so that the intermittent campaign against the bridge makes some kind of sense. Believe me—it didn’t at the time.”

WHEN TO GROUND 'EM

The loss of an irreplaceable historic aircraft with its irreplaceable pilot this month has rekindled the long argument about how long such treasures should be flown.

Planes of Fame’s ultra-rare Northrop 9M flying wing crashed in a Southern California prison yard on April 22, destroying the last remaining example of four prototypes built during World War II.  It had sustained serious damage in 2006 but was fully rebuilt, returning to flight status four years later.

The fact is: airplanes will crash as long as airplanes are flown.  Pilots and passengers will lose their lives along the way. There’s no escaping that fact—it’s reliable as gravity.

The rate of attrition has slowed in recent decades, but it probably had to if the warbird community was to survive.  From the 1960s onward the Confederate Air Force (since rebranded Commemorative Air Force) drew loud, bitter criticism for a long string of accidents destroying airplanes as varied as two Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boats, a rare Douglas SBD Dauntless, an equally rare B-26 Marauder, plus P-51 Mustangs. The problem was largely solved by focusing on pilot qualifications rather than checkbook, and more rigorous maintenance.

But losses continue. Since last January the world log of warbird losses includes a Hawker Hunter jet in Hawaii; a double fatality P-51 Mustang, a nonfatal North American SNJ trainer on a California highway; a fatal Russian Yak fighter in Australia; a 1930s airliner in Switzerland with 20 dead; a multi-injury Douglas C-47 transport in Texas; a fatal De Havilland jet in Wisconsin; a nonfatal TBM Avenger in Arizona (the crew bailed out and the torpedo bomber disappeared); a dual fatality Yak crash in France; and another Yak badly damaged taxiing in New Zealand.

The question of whether irreplaceable treasures should continue flying is complex, heartfelt, and often noisy.  Absent a federal regulation prohibiting flying them, the decision naturally rests with the owners.  Anyone with the funds, time and talent can bring a worn piece of scrap iron back to fully operational status—a sight and sound to be enjoyed by thousands of enthusiasts.

There are nuances to the question of rebuilding an historic airplane, partly by definition. Sometimes vintage machines are largely or entirely reproductions (I’ll omit the “replica” argument) with an original data plate.  But for today let’s skip that concern and focus on “real” airplanes that are true restorations. 

Some purists advocate a law that would prevent issuing an airworthiness certificate to an aircraft that is the last one, two, or five (take a number) remaining.  Fine and dandy for the cause of History.

But what about the owner who may have invested hundreds of thousands of personal dollars in the project?  And let’s be honest: some rebuilds involve millions.

“Tough luck” is a damned poor excuse for a reply.

Since warbirds generally are World War II aircraft, almost any type you can name was purchased on an industrial scale: 18,000 Liberators, 12,000 Flying Fortresses, 15,000 each Mustangs and Thunderbolts, 12,000 Corsairs and Hellcats, 10,000 C-47/R4D Skytrains, etc.  But if the purchaser—the U.S. Government—scrapped that aerial fleet in wholesale lots, logically and ethically how can the same government prohibit private citizens (think about that word: citizens) from restoring, maintaining and flying the remaining examples?

Short answer: Idunno.

All I can say is this:

I was blessed to grow up restoring and flying historic airplanes, all of which were older than I.  In the 1970s Dad and I logged several glorious hours in what was then the world’s only flying example of a Douglas Dauntless.  (See my 2017 Naval History article called “The Plane That Won the War.”)  But we were acutely aware that the seals were thirty years old, and an in-flight failure could have cost us the aircraft.  Today I’m delighted that the bird is permanently nested in the National Museum of the Air Force in Ohio.

Warbirds are more than visual.  They are audio and sensory.  If you’ve ever heard twin Allisons packing the mail in a Lockheed airframe, or felt the throaty rumble of a Pratt & Whitney R2800 up close, you know what I mean.

And therein lies the glitch.  Would you rather see rare aircraft in the traffic pattern—call it the open range—or parked inside at a “petting zoo”?  

The answer is: it depends.  On many things, often with conflicting priorities and agendas.

But it’s a discussion we should begin in earnest.

HOSER

That zone five afterburner you heard earlier this month was Commander Joseph Frank Satrapa, USN (Ret) departing the pattern at age 78.  And if you don’t recognize the name, well, strap in tight, turn up the oxygen to 100 percent, and select Guns…

First, you should know that almost nobody called him “Joe.”  He was “Hoser” to at least two generations of naval aviators, and the reasons will soon be obvious.

Anyway: Hoser was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy from California and graduated in 1964.  It was a point of perverse pride that he finished 926th among 927.

Not that it mattered. Hoser was uninterested in academics and Military Courtesy.  He was massively, completely, interested in flying, particularly flying fighters.

He got his wish.

The thing is: for all his contempt for conventional naval bearing, Hoser was a natural-born, charismatic, by-gawd Leader. Nobody taught him that—he carried it with him like his gravelly Yosemite Sam voice.

Upon receiving his wings of gold, Hoser got what he most wanted: F-8 Crusaders.  In the mid 1960s the ‘sader was a cult machine: the navy’s first supersonic aircraft, record-setting speedster (John Glenn flew one coast to coast in barely three hours) and fearsome dogfighter.  It was a melding of man and machine.  Hoser became an acknowledged master of fighter tactics and gunnery, and showed early talent for imparting his skill to others.

Hoser lived and breathed aerial gunnery.  He cadged extra flights whenever possible, developing an uncanny skill at shooting holes in towed banners.  On his first F-8 gunnery flight he enthusiastically “hosed” all his 20mm ammunition at the target in one pass.  A callsign was born.

In 1967 Hoser deployed to war with a detachment of the VF-111 Sundowners (of honored memory) aboard USS Intrepid.  One of his squadronmates, Tony Nargi, downed a North Vietnamese MiG on the next cruise, and the fact that Hoser never scored had absolutely nothing to do with him. It’s just that the MiGs seldom came out to play.

Hoser had the eminently bribable parachute riggers modify his torso harness to accept his personal arsenal: a Colt .357 magnum with 42 rounds of hollow-point ammo, a Smith & Wesson five-shot revolver with 20 rounds of tracer and hardball; a throwing knife; and two hand grenades.  (He traded some marines a couple of flight jackets for the latter.)  Plus an extra battery for his survival radio.  As Hoser explained, "Just because you're on the ground doesn't mean the fight's over.  You just change tactics."

Then the roof collapsed.  Hoser was one of a handful of experienced aviators pulled out of their beloved Crusaders into other aircraft to spread the knowledge. To say that Hoser went reluctantly would understate the situation—he went with the proverbial doorknob in each hand and skid marks on the deck.

However, comma: he got the next best thing.  North American’s sleek, super-fast RA-5C Vigilante was Navy Air’s primo reconnaissance aircraft.  A “Viggie” looked like it was doing 400 knots sitting in the chocks. The other thing that Viggies shared with Crusaders was an appalling safety record: they seemed to vie with one another for the highest accident rate in carrier aviation.

Flying from USS America in 1972, Hoser became a recce force to be reckoned with. Partnered with Lt(jg) Bob Rinder, as his recon navigator, Hoser recalled, “Seems like the gomers usually shot two or three thousand feet behind us ‘cause we were going at the speed of heat. How fast is that?  Well, that’s classified…except it’s really cookin’!  I got hit five times over the beach in F-8s—one aircraft was a ‘strike’ that couldn’t be repaired.  Only got a single hit in an RA-5C down at Chul Lai.”

That October Hoser and Rinder diverted from a Hanoi recon mission to look at Thanh Hoa Bridge, the most notorious target in Southeast Asia.  After the film was developed, there was proof—the “Dragon’s Jaw” was down in the river. The A-7 Corsair IIs of Attack Squadron 82 had done the deed.

At war’s end Hoser was a dead-end lieutenant commander in a navy determined to “rightsize.”  He was on the way out when he happened to meet a well-connected Navy Reserve officer named John Lehman.  As in, future Secretary of the Navy John Lehman.  According to legend, Satrapa called one night and there was that distinctive voice in the Lehman telephone: “SecNav?  Hoser.  I wanna come back.”

And he did, in a deal that’s been compared to the NFL draft.  With a very few other essential but unpromotable talents (including legendary landing signal officer John “Bug” Roach), Hoser returned to the fold, back in fighters where he belonged.  He transitioned to F-4 Phantoms but hit his stride with the next-generation F-14 Tomcat.

Hoser’s wealth of skill and knowledge, coupled with his inspirational teaching style, produced results.  (“Never forget—you’re here to kill the enemy.”)  But it wasn’t just tactics and gunnery—Hoser was a master of deceit.  When he humiliated an adversary pilot (with film showing Hoser’s sight on the opponent’s cockpit) he was accused of cheating.  To which Hoser famously replied, “Credibility is down.  Kill ratio is up!”

While at NAS Oceana, Virginia, Hoser built a single-shot 20mm rifle originally with home-made ammunition that shot 350 yards or more.  But later his invention blew up, severing his right thumb and index finger.  Now, you cannot fly “fighterjets” without a starboard thumb because it controls buttons and switches on the stick.  Not to worry: Hoser convinced a surgeon to remove his starboard big toe and place it on Hoser’s hand.  The doc worked his wonders, and viola!  Hoser was back—as “Toeser.”

The Hoser Legend continued growing.  The stories are legion, and regardless of how outrageous, probably most are true.  Here’s a sampling:

Allegedly Hoser went fishing in California with hand grenades, aka “DuPont spinners.”  Caught in the act, reputedly Hoser shoved a grenade in the game warden’s hand, pulled the pin, and asked (non-rhetorically) “You gonna fish or what?” More accurately, he used direct-contact “bang sticks” on grouper, successfully.

Another F-8 legend, the late Commander John Nichols, recalled another Hoser shooting tale.  During a Fallon, Nevada, gunnery detachment they were billeted in BOQ rooms with adjoining head.  Pirate heard something in there pretty dang early and opened the door--and nearly gagged.  Hoser had been out bird hunting and used the sink to clean the products of his shotgun excursion.

Then there’s the story of how Hoser grabbed a five-foot water moccasin threatening a friend’s two children.

Upon retiring from the navy, Hoser sought the next best thing and found it in his native California.  Flying modified Grumman S-2 antisubmarine planes, he reveled in delivering retardant upon forest fires.  

Long before his final retirement, the living legend treated himself to his own tombstone.  “Here rests the fighter pilot Hoser.  I lived life as I wanted, simple, honest, brave

And

I never landed gear up!”

Joseph “Hoser” Satrapa—a born warrior.  His kind has been bred out of the system, never to return.

YOU WON'T RISE TO THE OCCASION

For about 27 years my internet tagline has been “You won’t rise to the occasion—you will default to your level of training.”  Recently some readers or colleagues have asked about the origin of the motto, which has been widely quoted, and sometimes misattributed.

Here’s the lowdown:

In 1992 my brother and I published The Sixth Battle from Bantam, a complex, multi-layered techno-thriller set in South Africa and the Indian Ocean.  At sea, it pitted a U.S. Navy carrier group against post-Soviet Russian forces deploying carriers and amphibious units.  The scenario quickly caught the attention of wargamers, and occasionally I still hear from those folks.

One of the major players in the novel is the fictional Fighter Squadron 181 flying F-14 Tomcats from the fictional Forrestal class carrier USS Langley.  In one scene VF-181’s leading light, Lieutenant Commander Ozzie Ostrewski (“the world’s greatest Polish fighter pilot”) ponders the informal squadron doctrine on the bulkhead:

VF-181 Lessons to Live By

1.    You can only do what you can do.

2.    You won’t rise to the occasion—you will default to your level of training.

3.    There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

4.    A little subtle keying helps on radio calls.

5.    At 90 degrees of bank the lift slides off the wings.

6.    Use the sun but remember everyone else is there.

7.    Be King Kong on radar and have King Kong eyes.

8.    When the BBs are flying it’s time for your last best move.

9.    Think big—think basics—and cheat like hell.
10.  When planning a fight, see Rule Number One.

Number Two became the most-cited of the “ten commandments” and caught on as soon as I began citing it online.  I remembered several of the quotes from visiting Topgun and “Strike U” spaces at NAS Miramar, California, and NAS Fallon, Nevada, but added a couple from elsewhere.  Number Nine was cited at a 1980s Tailhook banquet by the late Vice Admiral Jim Stockdale of honored memory.

Time passed. Eventually other operators began picking up the “rise to the occasion” mantra, applying it in other venues such as elite forces and a Midwest fire department.  The online search turned up a Special Forces (Green Beret) manual that attributes the quote to me in what I will call soldierly terms: “WTSHTF (you can look it up) you will not rise to the occasion…”  But I do appreciate the credit line just the same!

Some outlets requested permission to quote me and some did not.  I always granted a request when asked because I reckoned that I do not hold a copyright on the quote, but I merely asked proper attribution.

Since then, the quote has been claimed by or attributed to others, including retired military officers and civilian firearms and martial arts trainers.  The other day I ran a Google search and found some of those usurpers with as few as eight hits and as many as 140.  My count runs somewhere north of 7,700.

However, with my curiosity aroused, I sought additional leads.  Internet discussions often cite an ancient Greek poet named Archilochus, without many specifics.  Allegedly he wrote, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

I’d never heard of Archilochus, and little is known about him, other than reputedly he was KIA fighting the Thasians or Naxos in the VII century BC.  The similarity between Archiolochus’ alleged version and “mine” is obvious.  But since the link between the poet and the statement seems tenuous, we’re back to the XX century.

Yet there are other examples across time.  In the IV or V Century AD the Roman military writer Publius Flavius Vegetius said, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.”  The translation: “He who desires peace should prepare for war.”  

The U.S. Marine Corps version runs, “The more you sweat in peace the less you bleed in war.”

Vegetius’ oft-cited statement can be interpreted in a broader sense, essentially “Peace through strength.”  It has much to do with deterrence, certainly well understood by the ultimate Cold Warrior, General Curtis LeMay.  His Strategic Air Command emblazoned its nuclear-armed bombers with the motto, “Peace is our profession.”

The subject of training for conflict is of course broad and deep, spanning an immense ocean of material compiled over millennia.  There are many levels of training, and thus many default levels.  Though I would never claim that my quotation is definitive, it has gained considerable notice in three decades.  If it prompts practitioners and operators to discuss the subject, that’s as much as I can expect. 

Stay vigilant, stay informed, and stay well trained.