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.