the F-6F Hellcat and TBF/TBM Avenger) in which a young man with a couple of years of college and five hundred hours of flight training could expect to fly safely into combat, return to base, and go up to fight again. All kinds of young men flew into combat off carrier decks, from movie actors and Kansas farm boys to future U.S. Presidents. The string of victories that they achieved-Midway, Coral Sea, Leyte Gulf, and many others-testifies to the Navy's skill and wisdom in deploying and fighting naval aviation.
The key to this success was the vast array of training bases, which turned out naval aviators and crews by the tens of thousands. By comparison, as the war went more and more against them, the Japanese and Germans turned out air crews with ever fewer and fewer flying hours of training. American naval aviation leaders considered it a crime to let a young 'nugget'[16] into the fleet with less than five hundred hours of flight time. Instead of leaving combat veterans in the fight until they died, as the Axis nations did, American naval aviators (often against their wishes) were sent home after a combat tour to rest and train new pilots before returning to combat. In that way, the veterans got a chance to recharge their batteries while the rookies got the benefit of their experience.
This meant practically that late in the war (the Battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf in 1944, for example), American carrier air groups were being led by second- and third-tour commanders (O-5's). The Japanese units were lucky to have lieutenants (O-2's) with a few hundred flying hours. The results were predictable. In repeated one-sided victories, the Americans shot their opponents out of the air at a ratio of over ten to one.[17] So effective was the American juggernaut that the Japanese had to resort to Kamikaze suicide planes to try to stop the onslaught. But this too failed. Naval aviation had won the Great Pacific War, making the island assaults by Marine and Army units possible, as well as helping sweep the seas of enemy naval units. When surrender finally came, following the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombs were more an excuse than a reason.
How, you might ask, did the war impact on the culture of naval aviation in the U.S.? It gave it a tradition of success and confidence-success and confidence built on intense training. This tradition would hold, even in the dark days of Vietnam and the years following that horror.
Corrosion: The Vietnam Years
Even before the end of the Korean War, new carriers had been laid down, and a new generation of supersonic jets began to appear on their decks. Every month seemed to bring a new carrier aircraft, weapon, or innovation. This was a very good time for Naval aviation. Out of it came, for example, many of the astronauts who would take America into space and to the moon. There was a downside, however. The new jets were unreliable- their new engines being both underpowered and prone to fires and explosions. The practical consequence: Naval aviation, always a dangerous profession, became truly deadly. Naval aviators, always high-spirited and daring both in the air and their personal lives, began to take on a fatalistic attitude about their chances of reaching retirement age. The result was a 'live for today' mentality, which they took with them into the 1960's and Vietnam.
This fatalism grew exponentially with the start of the Vietnam conflict, when losses to naval aviators who flew missions over Southeast Asia were staggering (due to enemy ground fire, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and MiG interceptors), and the chances of surviving a twenty-year Navy flying career became almost nil. Desperate for combat-ready air crews, and unable to send veteran Naval aviators on more than two 'war' cruises because of personnel policies, the Navy suffered a severe pilot 'crunch' during the conflict. Worse than just a shortage of fliers were the corrosive effects of the conflict itself on the culture of the community as a whole. Atlantic Fleet air crews, whose carriers rarely rotated to Southeast Asia, became almost second-class citizens next to the combat-hardened veterans from the Pacific Fleet. Even worse was the effect on the morale and morals of the aviators who went to Vietnam and came home.
I doubt that Mister McNamara and his crew have a morale setting on their computers.
Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, 1965
Vietnam was a winless war for naval aviators. They lost their first comrades months prior to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, and were the last Americans 'feet dry' during the evacuation from Saigon in 1975. During the intervening dozen or so years, the Navy kept two or three aircraft carriers continually on 'Yankee Station' (the U.S. code name for the carrier operating area in the northern Tonkin Gulf) as part of the bombing campaigns against North Vietnamese forces. It was a new kind of war for the Airedales,[18] most of who had grown up in the 'Doomsday' mentality of the Cold War. Now they were saddled by absurd ROE ('rules of engagement'), guidance on targets, tactics, and weapons use. The brilliant but ultimately wrongheaded Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, and his crew of 'whiz kids' devised this absurd situation. In one of the greatest military blunders in a century full of military misfortune, they failed to listen to on-scene commanders about how the air war should be fought. Instead, they tried to 'micro-manage' the war from afar, and turned it into one of the worst military fiascos in America's history.
Denied the means to victory, the pilots on the carriers flew daily from Yankee Station, getting shot down, captured, and killed in numbers that still numb modern-day historians.[19] Their mission: not to take effective military action that could lead to victory, but to deliver to an enemy 'political messages' from leaders in Washington who did not understand that the enemy did not care to listen to those messages. To say that air crews suffered a great deal of job-related stress is an understatement.
A fighter pilot soon found he wanted to associate only with other fighter pilots. Who else could understand the nature of the little proposition (right stuff/death) they were all dealing with? And what other subject could compare with it? It was riveting!
The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe, 1979)
In any group that regularly undergoes stress, tragedy, and the insanity of a 'limited' war, the survivors bond in unique ways. Thus it was with Vietnam-era naval aviators. They had faced off with death, and won (never forget that fighter pilots are incredibly competitive). They were the possessors of 'the Right Stuff,' the keepers of the magic combination of courage, ego, and skills that allowed them to accomplish with fiendish precision actions that no machine could reliably repeat day after day. They were true warriors who-after the day's fighting was over-could imagine nothing better than to spend their off-duty time only with each other.
Soon, the entire naval aviation community had isolated itself, not only from American society in general, but even from the Navy that took them into battle. The result was a subculture that lived in the air wing spaces aboard ship and in the officers' clubs of the liberty ports (like Cubi Point in the Philippines) and home bases. Quite simply, naval aviators fresh from combat were permitted almost
A law of nature holds that alcohol fuels all wars. And the lads at Cubi never suffered a fuel crisis. They got knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk the first couple of days, then recuperated with golf, swimming, or deep breathing.
On Yankee Station (Commander John B. Nichols and Barrett Tillman, 1987)
The effects of the Vietnam-inspired debauchery remained an integral part of naval aviation culture for a
