JOE's PISTOL, PART 2

Unless you stumbled across this blog completely by chance, you know about Joseph Jacob Foss.  He lived one of the most complete lives of anyone I have ever known: a natural outdoorsman, talented aviator, successful politician, unrepentant spokesman for Second Amendment rights, devoted family man, and always an intensely passionate patriot.

Variously, Joe was the top-scoring Marine Corps fighter ace (“Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children” refuse to acknowledge that unassailable fact 70 years later), Governor of South Dakota; commander and brigadier general of his state’s Air National Guard; first commissioner of the American Football League; and president of the National Rifle Association.  Among his lesser accomplishments, he helped convince the AFL and NFL to cooperate in the first Super Bowl.

I got to know Joe in the 1980s through our mutual friend Doug Champlin who owned a world-class fighter aircraft museum here in Mesa, Arizona.  Later I worked with Joe when I was secretary of the American Fighter Aces Association, and in various NRA events. 

Joe and Didi practically adopted me over the decades, in much the way of other military aviation families: Bud and Ellie Anderson; Marion and Edna Carl; Bob and Betty Dose’; Jig and Ginger Ramage; Alex and Kay Vraciu.  Sharing those relationships was an unexpected blessing, a byproduct of research and writing.

Because of a major frabup in the the Marine Corps bureaucracy, Joe’s age made him ineligible for a regular commission, never mind that he was the service’s top gun and recipient of the Medal of Honor.  Consequently, when he left the corps in 1946 he helped establish the postwar South Dakota Air National Guard.  (He trained and led a 16-plane aerobatic team; today the limit is four gofigger.)

There’s always been heavy cross-pollination between Airplane People and Gun People.  Doug Champlin was a prime example—he had a custom rifle shop in Oklahoma before he began collecting historic aircraft.  As a ranking fighter ace and devoted hunter, Joe was a prime example of the melding of those two pursuits.  It’s also how I came to own his pistol.

As an Air Force general officer Joe was entitled to take his sidearm with him when he retired.  He kept the M1911A1 and put it away for decades but in 2000, he offered to sell me the last sidearm he carried on active duty.  How I acquired “Joe’s Pistol” is detailed in the accompanying NRA article from 2012.

http://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2012/2/21/joe-foss-pistol/

When I brought Joe’s Pistol home I thoroughly cleaned it, took it to the police range to let some of the guys shoot it for bragging rights, then stashed it in my safe.  Fifteen years passed, hardly ever touching the Colt, as I had little intention of shooting so collectible a firearm again.

Then on Thursday, April 16, I realized that the next day was the 100th anniversary of Joe’s birth.  What better way to commemorate his centennial than to shoot Joe’s Pistol again?

Early this morning I met my shooting partner at my home range to shoot the historic .45 one last time.  My pal has known the Foss family nearly as long as I have, and besides, it’s more fun with a likeminded friend who shares the fusilogical pursuits. I decided to be cautious—we would only shoot a few five-round groups with factory ammunition, John M. Browning’s load, .45 caliber 230-grain hardball. 

Precision shooting with a “rack grade” G.I. pistol is an iffy proposition.  Joe’s Colt was wartime production, made in 1942 but nearly pristine.  The bore was extremely clean.  I don’t know how much Joe had shot it but obviously not much because the bluing was still apparent.

However, in 1911 (four years before Joe’s birth) the Army Ordnance Board decided to put nearly unusable sights on the big Colt.  The front is a mere nubbin--almost an afterthought--and the notch in the rear sight is pretty narrow.  On top of that, the trigger is, um, challenging.  I’d guess it lets off at seven or eight pounds, and though it breaks clean with no “creep,” that’s twice the figure of most 1911s today.

I plopped down in a sitting position and shot the first group at a home-made hollow bullseye at 10 yards.  Despite the heavy trigger, four rounds felt good.  Upon inspection, those four went into one inch extreme spread (that’s 0.55 inch net, deducting one bullet diameter.)  The flier opened the group to 2.25 inches (1.8 inches net.)  Not bad for 30 feet: most gunfights occur at 20 or less.  The only glitch: center of the group was 3.25 inches above my aim point.  As I learned, that’s not unusual.

Next I moved back to 20 or 25 yards, shooting at an old (old) U.S. Treasury 20-yard rapid fire bullseye.  Again firing five rounds from sitting, elbows braced on knees, I pressed off four good shots.  They printed exactly two inches extreme spread, or 1.55 inches deducting one diameter--extremely impressive accuracy.  The called flier went about four inches out toward seven o’clock.  Center of the four good shots was seven to eight inches high—consistent with the 10-yard results.  

My partner was more interested in practical than inherent accuracy, and shot two groups.  Firing one-handed at 10 yards, he put seven rounds into less than a pie plate, as fast as the heavy trigger permitted.  Standing back at 20-25, using both hands, he kept five high on the torso—all fight-stopping hits.

As of this evening, Joe’s Pistol is thoroughly cleaned, oiled, and comfy back in the safe.  It’s likely to remain there indefinitely, until the next custodian or an institution acquires it.  Meanwhile, somewhere far above the contrail level, I believe that my friend Joe enjoyed the small yet heartfelt tribute to the centennial of a proud American.

NAS PASCO

In southeastern Washington State is the city of Pasco, just north of the Columbia River.  Today it’s part of the Tri-Cities including Richland and Kennewick, but 70 years ago it was a remote railroad town with a prewar population of 4,000.  My father got to know Pasco pretty well during “War Two.”

John H. “Jack” Tillman was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1922 and learned to fly as a teenager.  He attended Oregon State College in 1940-41, studying engineering, before working as a draftsman for Douglas Aircraft in California.  After Pearl Harbor he entered Preflight at St. Mary’s, California, progressing to the Civilian Flight Training program in Idaho in late 1942.  He reported to NAS Pasco in May1943.

Recalling his time at Pasco, Dad said, “I went through CPT at Nampa, Idaho, with ten other Navy fellows and ten Army.  Our Navy and Marine Corps bunch was sent to Pasco, which was a pretty bleak place in southeastern Washington.  It had been a railroad town before the war, with some airmail flying, but that was about it.  There was no place to go and nothing to do.  Mainly it was windy and cold.

“The base was brand new; in fact, it wasn’t quite finished when we arrived.  There was a large concrete mat and hangars for A, B, and C Flights, plus Assembly and Repair.  But the gym and base exchange weren’t done, though you could get half a cantaloupe with a scoop of ice cream for a dime.

“The base commander was Captain B.B. Smith.  He was kind of a tyrant whose pride and joy was a Staggerwing Beechcraft.  The only other one he’d let fly it was a chief naval aviation pilot.  Sometimes when word got around that BB was due back we’d go down to the flight line to watch him land.  It could be pretty airy.

“Pasco was a primary base, mainly with N2S Stearmans.  They were a lot different from the way the purists think of them, with regulation yellow paint schemes.  Some were clear doped, some were silver and yellow, but they were all beat up.  There was at least one groundloop a day, every day.  Eventually ten N3Ns were ferried in from NAS Seattle to take up the slack.

 “The instructors were a mixture of military and civilians, probably with more civilians when I was there.  They tended to be older and more laid back.  But I noted that my two instructors took more time to critique each flight than the Navy pilots.“  Practically the first thing they impressed on us was that we were never, ever, to fly over the Hanford area northwest of base.  Naturally, that was the worst thing they could have done because practically every cadet who soloed made a beeline for Hanford, to see what he could see.  There was nothing obvious out there—just more sand and sagebrush.

“Rumor Control had two theories as to what was going on at Hanford.  Republicans said it was a secret factory making Roosevelt campaign buttons.  Others said, ‘No, they’re making the front ends of horses for shipment to D.C. and final assembly!’

“Right at the end of the war, after the A-bombs, we learned that Hanford was a nuclear research facility.  The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was produced there.

“The base had some enlisted men eligible for flight pay—cooks and whatnot.  A lot of them were terrified, because I think we lost three cadets while I was there.  One got into a spin, another got clobbered in a landing accident, and I think the other damaged his tail feathers while dropping rocks on improvised targets.  Another guy went berserk, flat hatting all over the country, chasing a phone company truck off the road.  Finally a bunch of instructors boxed him in and forced him to land.  He was gone forthwith; we never heard what happened.

“Anyway, one of our pastimes was dive-bombing with rocks.  We’d have some sailor in the back seat jump out at one of the auxiliary fields and pick u three or four good-sized rocks.  Then we’d fly out to the Columbia River, which still had some small islands before the dams were built.  Some of us cadets held bombing contests to see who could come closest to a spot on an island.  It was illegal as hell, but nobody seemed to mind as long as you brought your airplane back in one piece.

Jack completed training at Pasco in July 1943, proceeding to NAS Corpus Christi, Texas.  After the war he continued flying and restored two WW II aircraft, a Naval Aircraft Factory N3N-3, and in the early 1970s the world’s only flying Douglas Dauntless dive bomber, which was based at Pasco until space became available at Pendleton, Oregon.

Jack died in March 2014, age 92.

I was acquainted with a few other Pasco aviators via the American Fighter Aces Association.  In 1944 the NAS became an operational base, supporting carrier air groups preparing for deployment to the Pacific.  One of them was Air Group Nine which had completed a combat cruise aboard USS Essex (CV-9) in 1943-44.

Among the leading lights of Fighting Squadron Nine was Lieutenant Eugene Valencia, already an ace with seven victories.  In training his new four-plane division he spared no effort to gain as much experience as possible.  That included cadging bootleg fuel from the eminently bribable flight-line crews eager to exchange high-octane gas for booze.  It was of course illegal as hell but Gene was a flamboyant, press-on type of aviator who saw no reason to let regulations interfere with flying.  His charismatic personality won him admirers up and down the chain of command, and never moreso than when VF-9 completed its 1945 deployment aboard USS Lexington (CV-16) and Yorktown (CV-10).  In that time his division downed 43 Japanese planes with all three of his pilots achieving ace status. 

After the war the Navy sold the air station to the base to the city, which still operates it as the municipal airport.  A local historical group is raising funds to preserve the original building, and I hope you’ll visit the web site at “Save The Tower.”  http://savetheoldtower.com/ .

REMEMBERING ALEX

On January 29 I lost a cherished friend; one of my last lifelines to my parents’ generation.

Alex Vraciu (“Rhymes with cashew”) was a superb naval aviator and America’s top living ace.  With 19 confirmed victories he finished WW II as the Navy’s fourth-ranking fighter pilot, a position he’s bound to retain.  Aside from the fact that air combat is nearly extinct on Planet Earth, no future war is likely to last long enough for anyone to engage—let alone destroy—twenty enemy aircraft.

Al was an example of the condensed generations of aviation knowledge and experience.  He learned the trade from Lieutenant Commander Edward H. O’Hare, the Navy’s first WW II ace, who received a Medal of Honor for a five-kill mission off Rabaul, New Britain, in February 1942.  But “Butch” O’Hare had been tutored by the master—Lieutenant Commander John H. Thach, skipper of Fighting Squadron Three who devised the “beam defense” maneuver that became better known as the Thach Weave.

Therefore, between 1941 and 1943, when Al broke into combat flying with O’Hare from USS Independence (CVL-22), three generations of wartime aviators had cycled through fleet squadrons.

In June 1944 Al was already a 12-victory Hellcat pilot when he made history in The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.  He received one of the best vectors of the war, overtaking a formation of Japanese dive bombers bearing down on Task Force 58 off Saipan.  In a sizzling eight minutes Al splashed six “bandits” with merely 360 rounds of .50 caliber ammunition.  That’s 60 rounds per kill, merely 10 rounds per gun.  Better shooting just was not possible.

The next evening, escorting USS Lexington (CV-16) bombers in the “mission beyond darkness,” Alex saw the first Japanese carriers found by American aviators in twenty months.  He shot down a Zero for his final victory, then navigated back to his task group in the cloying darkness of a moonless night.  He barely got aboard Enterprise (CV-6), “Lex’s” team mate.

Accorded a celebrity’s welcome back home in East Chicago, Indiana, Alex noticed a raven-haired beauty in the crowd.  Never shy, he introduced himself and they were married before he left for another combat tour.

Again flying from Lexington, Alex logged one mission over the Philippines before his F6F was tagged by AA fire on November 14.  He bailed out, was scooped up by friendly Filipinos, and spent several weeks with a guerrilla band before reaching American forces.  His war was over.

But it didn’t end there.  Al remained in the Navy, and in 1957 he had his own squadron.  He led VF-51’s North American FJ-3 Furies in the annual gunnery competition and emerged on top—the Navy’s top gun three decades before the live-action cartoon movie of that name.

Al was well known to aviation buffs, and inevitably he was polite and tolerant to historians and well wishers.  But he was far more than the famous ace.  In the 40-plus years I was fortunate to know him and his family, I came to appreciate Al for his human qualities.  He was an American success story—the son of Romanian immigrants who paid his way through college, survived the Navy’s rigorous selection and training process, and emerged in 1945 as an inspiring example of his generation.  He married his darling Kay with whom he raised five children, and retired as a commander in 1957 to pursue a career in banking. 

I met Alex about 1971 during a job-hunting trip to California.

He was still working with Wells Fargo but, gentleman that he was, he took a long lunch to accommodate my schedule.  We hit it off, and in subsequent trips I enjoyed Vraciu hospitality in Danville.  The most memorable was in 1989 when we were settling down to watch Game Three of the cross-town World Series when the 6.9 earth quake struck the East Bay.  In about 30 seconds it killed or injured 3,800 people, inflicted some $5 billion damage—and sloshed a lot of water out of the Vracius’ swimming pool.

(I’d almost forgotten, but on an earlier trip Al, Kay and I attended an A’s game.  Oakland swept the ’89 series.)

Few would have recognized Al as a fighter ace.  He was far removed from the loud, egotistical stereotype, although

people familiar with the breed know that the tiger blood surges in some pilots when they start the engine with loaded guns on board.  Whether it’s compartmentalization or a change in brain chemistry, some personalities change when they strap in.

As mothers used to tell their daughters, “Watch out for the quiet ones.”

Yet Alex was not only a gentleman but a truly gentle man as well.  I recall an aces reunion in 1974 when Al met another member who had started a second family.  The former Flying Tiger’s son was no more than five at the time, but Alex spent part of an afternoon playing with the boy.  It’s been said that the measure of a person is how he treats those who cannot benefit him, and I learned more about Alex Vraciu that day.

Alex’s other trait was charm—the natural kind, not the manufactured or conscious variety.  The last two times I saw him were at Tailhook reunions, as he wanted to support that beleaguered organization, the intended victim of political agendas and political cowardice.  He was our guest as an annual gathering among some of the hardest of the hard core, including a carrier captain, veterans of Vietnam and Iraq combat, and their wives.  Without effort, Al became one of the guys rather than the biggest elephant in the room.  The ladies felt his old-world charm, and they comment on it even today.

Those of us who record history have known for decades that this time was coming.  We’re seeing the passing of the WW II generation—damn few of whom subscribe to Tom Brokaw’s hype.  Our mutual friend Joe Foss used to say, “We weren’t the greatest—we just did what we had to do.”

Al Vraciu was the last of scores of WW II naval aviators I knew well.  My last friend among Flying Leathernecks was Colonel Jim Swett, who departed the pattern in 2009.  Today that leaves one Army Air Force pilot among my close friends—one among hundreds.

Whatever your area of interest, folks, if you have any intention of helping record history, here’s three words of advice:

DO IT NOW.