Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 10

  “A bottle of whiskey was passed around and everyone took a big gulp,” said another of Pringle’s survivors, who lost sixty-nine shipmates that day. “My hands shook as I drank and thought of my shipmates, sharks, fire, and the terror of the last few hours.”

  During the three-month Okinawa campaign, eighteen hundred Japanese planes—mostly Mitsubishi Zeros, stuffed like ticks full of fuel and explosives—made one-way trips toward the U.S. fleet, the greatest concentration of kamikaze attacks of the entire war. Though most were shot down, kamikazes damaged 198 ships and sank 17 of them. More than 3,000 men were killed in those attacks, including 832 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Franklin which was struck solidly by two bombs as men scrambled in panic across the Franklin’s decks. “The burial of the dead was terrible,” the Franklin’s flight surgeon said. “They were all over the ship.” And Admiral Halsey called the kamikazes “the only weapon I feared in the war.”

  But by early July the battle for Okinawa—a fight Winston Churchill called one of the most intense in military history—was over, and the island was under U.S. control. Though it was the bloodiest, deadliest battle since Guadalcanal three years earlier, American deaths paled in comparison to the one hundred thousand dead Japanese soldiers. Many preferred suicide to surrender, including Okinawa’s top officers, who ate a final meal and then immolated themselves.

  As the constant noise of war and its ever-present smoke subsided, the Cogswell was granted a reprieve from picket duty, and Shepard joined his shipmates on the north shore of Okinawa for some much-needed recreation. But instead of relaxing, the men walked gape-mouthed among the ghastly dregs of combat—mechanical wreckage and the twisted and rotting remains of dead Japanese soldiers were scattered everywhere. The men had to watch for booby traps—thin trip wires attached to grenades. “Much evidence of bloodshed and violence,” Shepard’s shipmate wrote secretly in his diary that night.

  Okinawa was the final full-scale battle of the war. But Japan refused to surrender, and on July 16 the USS Indianapolis secretly left San Francisco, carrying two atomic bombs. After delivering the bombs to the island of Tinian, the Indianapolis was sunk, on July 30, by a Japanese submarine. The death of 883 men was one of the war’s worst naval disasters.

  Meanwhile, the Cogswell spent a month bombarding the Japanese mainland before the ultimate day of bloodshed and violence, a day that convinced the Japanese of their defeat.

  That day was August 6, when the atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy fell from beneath the Enola Gay and landed on the city of Hiroshima; three days later, just a hundred miles from where the Cogswell was stationed, another bomb fell on Nagasaki (armed by its “weaponeer,” naval aviator Frederick L . Ashworth, a fellow graduate of the Naval Academy). The deafening, world-shaking explosion could be heard and felt aboard the Cogswell; “an awful bomb,” one sailor called it. More than a hundred thousand died in the two cities. A week later, at about 7:30 P.M. on August 15, Cogswell received new orders: cease firing. It was a day Navy men would not forget, a day to exhale. Aboard Cogswell there were muted displays of jubilation—not the rapturous cheering that spilled into the streets of San Francisco back home, just quiet waves of sad, sober relief.

  The war was over, “and much sooner than was expected,” Shepard wrote in a letter.

  On August 27 the Cogswell was chosen to be the first of the Navy’s flotilla to enter Tokyo Bay, to prepare for the following week’s surrender ceremonies. Behind her steamed hundreds and hundreds of battered ships with weary crews. It was a surreal procession into enemy waters, with Shepard riding on the deck as his ship took the lead. Citizens crowded along the shores, watching their captors flex their might. Most sailors felt not pride but fear—Is it really over? Is it safe to be cruising so close to the land and people we’ve bombed and slaughtered?

  At first, in keeping with wartime precautions against nighttime attack, the Cogswell kept its lights off. Then a characteristically feisty order came down from Admiral Halsey (who once had issued the famous order “Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs!”). Halsey ordered the Cogswell to “turn on your lights and let them know the U.S. Navy is here.” The cliché-prone Halsey crystallized the World War II experience for his men when he added, “There are no extraordinary men—just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.”

  Like most survivors, Shepard would speak little of his World War II experiences. “Some struggle,” Shepard once wrote to a friend, playing it cool when the war had ended. What colleagues from the Cogswell remember most about Shepard was an eager young man, smiling and optimistic, ticking off the days until he could transfer to flight training. But, in the end, Shepard knew in his heart that the Cogswell, and he, had been lucky. A total of thirty-four Navy ships were sunk off Okinawa, half of them by kamikaze hits. More than thirteen thousand Navy men, Marines, and Army soldiers were killed in the Okinawa campaign, including Ernie Pyle, who stuck his head up from a trench and caught a bullet, dying like the war grunts he’d lionized.

  But the Cogswell, after flinging itself into countless battles, had lost but a very few men and—like Shepard—emerged intact and relatively unscathed. Then in mid-September—two weeks after the surrender ceremonies and around the time of Shepard’s first anniversary at sea—the mail room received an official Navy letter for Shepard. It contained the orders he’d ached for: to report to Corpus Christi in a month for flight training.

  As Shepard hopped a transport ship back to Pearl Harbor, yet another typhoon ripped into the fleet he left behind. Once again thirty-foot waves and hurricane force winds knocked ships into each other and onto the shores of Okinawa, as if they were child’s toys; thirty-six men were killed.

  This time, the Guam weather station gave the storm a name: Typhoon Louise.

  4

  “UNSAFE FOR SOLO” in Zoom Town

  Many young warriors returned home from World War II wanting only to put distance between themselves and the horrific things they’d seen.

  What they most wanted now was stability, a steady job, and a small brick rancher in which to raise children with a college sweetheart. They put their memories and mementos of dark, heroic adventures—medals, letters, pictures—into a box and put the box away. War was over, and there wasn’t much to say about it.

  Shepard, like many of his fellow veterans, would speak little during the rest of his life about his year aboard the USS Cogswell. He never attended the ship’s reunions or swapped letters with his shipmates. Yet while he would never dwell on the effect World War II had on his life, the effect was surely profound. The war invigorated his appetite for thrills and adventure, and he learned in the Pacific that the best thrills could be found only in one place: the air.

  As he and Louise drove from southern California in September of 1945, across the Arizona deserts, and through the endless plains of east Texas on their way to Corpus Christi, luck was on Shepard’s side. His timing was accidentally perfect.

  Shepard’s assignment to learn how to fly Navy planes coincided with a historic shift in military policy. With its massive floating airfields, the Navy’s mighty domination over the Japanese in the Pacific had demonstrated the superiority of an incredible new style of warfare. In the aftermath of the war, a presidential commission and several congressional committees met to discuss how to incorporate the best of naval aviation into the Navy of tomorrow. And despite substantial postwar budget cuts, the Navy saw to it that enough money would be spent on the next generation of Navy pilots and the next generation of planes.

  In late 1945, the best and brightest of that next generation— the chosen ones—converged on the sweltering Gulf coast of the Lone Star State.

  Corpus Christi was a crusty little port and fishing town of thirty thousand. Kissed by the bath-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Corpus Christi Bay on its northern and eastern shores, the city’s western flanks bristled with both longhorn cattle ranches and oil fields full of oil pump derricks that looked like dinosaurs. Some big-city fol
k from up north in Houston might occasionally come to town on weekends or visit briefly on their way to the beaches of nearby Padre Island, but in the days before air-conditioning, there was no escape from Corpus Christi’s punishing heat, not even in the tepid waters. So the town had remained a backwater, a hurly-burly mix of dockworkers, cowboys, commercial fishermen, and Mexican immigrants. Then the U.S. Navy arrived and turned Corpus Christi into a city of testosterone, adrenaline, and airplane fuel.

  In 1940, when it had become clear that America was destined to join World War II, the Navy decided it needed another flight training facility to back up its air training base at Pensacola, Florida. With a $25 million bankroll from Congress, the Navy picked a waterfront expanse south of downtown Corpus Christi, mostly for its stark, unimpeded flatness and, except for the occasional hurricane, its lack of rain. It took only a year to create a twenty-thousand-acre network of six conjoined air bases that sprawled south of town, consuming vacation cottages and virgin beaches while attracting ten thousand jobs and millions of dollars, which changed the culture and landscape of the region virtually overnight.

  The first cadets arrived on March 12, 1941, and graduated with their aviators’ wings eight months later. At the graduation ceremony, as cadets stood at attention beneath the brutal Texas sun, they fainted one by one onto the sun-baked tarmac. “They were kind of falling all over the place,” one cadet said.

  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the training schedule at Corpus Christi surged, with six hundred new cadets arriving each month. For the next four years an average of three hundred cadets graduated monthly, taught by a rotating faculty of more than eight hundred veteran instructors. At the height of World War II, Corpus Christi overtook Pensacola as the Navy’s main training facility. Construction costs—for bridges, roads, railroads, and housing facilities—swelled to $100 million, a river of cash that poured into the coffers of Houston-based Brown and Root Construction, which was awarded the contract at the urging of a young congressman named Lyndon Johnson. By 1943 Corpus Christi Naval Air Station was the largest aviation training facility in the world.

  Among the thirty thousand wartime graduates of Corpus Christi was future president (and Shepard’s future friend and neighbor) George H. W. Bush, who received his pilot’s wings there in 1943 at age eighteen—the youngest aviator to ever complete its training program. Actor Tyrone Power, as a Marine Corps lieutenant, received aviation training there in 1943, as did actor Buddy Rogers, who had starred in the film Wings but found during primary training at Corpus Christi that he suffered from airsickness. Other notable alumni included baseball great Ted Williams, who served as Corpus Christi’s physical fitness instructor.

  As naval aviators began dominating the battles of the war in the Pacific, Corpus Christi developed a romantic cachet that lured the national media. Life and Collier’s came to town, and both produced long, glowing spreads about the birthplace of America’s finest flyers; Collier’s dubbed it “Zoom Town.”

  For many newly arrived cadets, the first lesson of Zoom Town was adapting to its simmering heat. The stagnant air smelled like boiled shrimp, and a fishy stink seemed to seep into your skin. First-timers stepping off the train said they felt as if they’d suddenly been submerged in an aquarium. Aviators often fainted during uniformed marches and exercise sessions. A steady wind off the Gulf of Mexico stirred up the dunes, causing a fine coating of sand to settle on every flat surface. An omnipresent humidity hung in the air, a sheen of moisture that clung to walls, clothes, and upper lips.

  Some cadets felt as though they’d arrived in a strange foreign land. The annoying cowboy music on every radio station, the tropical coastline, the lazy drawl or rapid-fire Spanish of the locals—all made the place feel more like a Caribbean pirate coast than America. Brief daily rains turned quickly to steam. Some days you’d need a raincoat and sunglasses at the same time. And beneath the incessant sun, cadets quickly developed the burned, peeling faces that would become the telltale symptom of their new career, the mark of an aviator.

  Some hated the place. Others looked up into a sky full of airplanes and thought, as one cadet proclaimed in 1943: “Man, I have arrived at heaven.”

  Corpus Christi’s 997 hangars were stuffed with biplanes, seaplanes, single-props, dual-props, tankers, cargo planes, and helicopters. The air swarmed with the smoke and thunder of every size and shape of airplane known to man. On particularly busy afternoons, three hundred planes might share the skies at the same time.

  Sometimes there were too many planes and not enough sky.

  When Alan and Louise arrived in November 1945, there were hardly any planes at all. Most of the Corpus Christi air fleet had been flown inland to Dallas, just ahead of a hurricane whose fifteen-foot waves hurled themselves over the sand dunes and across the airfields, flattening scores of buildings at the base and downtown. A family of four was drowned in their car, and meals had to be delivered by boat to flooded corners of the air base. As the waters receded, they left behind thousands of dead frogs, whose bodies soon began to rot, baked into putridity by the stifling heat.

  Alan and Louise moved into a two-story corner apartment at 3601 Ocean Drive, one of the nicer complexes in town, right on the Gulf halfway between downtown and the naval base. The proprietor, Goldy, was a widow who had lost her husband in the war. Tropical gardens encircling the complex had been ravaged by the hurricane, and a hardworking and dignified old Mexican gardener labored to repair the damage.

  By late November much of the hurricane damage had been repaired and the planes had returned from Dallas. The morning after their first Thanksgiving together, Alan awoke at dawn, kissed Louise goodbye, and drove off for his first day of training.

  For Shepard, Corpus Christi would become much more than just a stop along the way. He and every other Navy flyer who passed through—including future senator John McCain and future astronaut John Glenn—would remember how it all began here. They would recall the blustery competitiveness, the bragging and dirty jokes at the officers’ club, and the laughter at the expense of hapless pilots who dumped their plane into the Gulf. Those who had served in the war entertained those who hadn’t with stories of the Battle of Midway and the victory at Okinawa. Among the trainers, it was easy to distinguish the aces (pilots with five or more enemy kills)—they were the ones who, in the words of another famous pilot, “exuded confidence the way a lamp gives off light.”

  The complex of airfields and military barracks resembled many of the naval stations that would become Shepard’s future workplaces: flat, dusty, infested with rattlesnakes and mosquitoes, surrounded by scrub oak, mesquite, and sand dunes. But a magical power lurked beneath the daily grind of the Corpus Christi training regimen. If the Naval Academy had turned boys into officers, and the war turned young officers into men, Corpus Christi made men—at least those who didn’t flunk out—feel like Superman. Here, they were given the tools and secrets to defy gravity. They “tasted the proud intoxication of renunciation,” as one aviation writer put it, and it empowered them, engorged their sense of themselves. Corpus Christi was the launch pad that would propel Shepard toward everything he hoped to accomplish. And it began with an awful bang.

  Two weeks into his classroom training, Shepard heard the plaintive wail of the crash buzzer. Two fat seaplanes—one taking off, one landing—had slammed into each other about two hundred feet above the bay. Pieces of wreckage and body parts tumbled down into the water. Of twenty-seven men aboard the two planes, only five survived. Twenty-two dead aviators accounted for the worst accident to ever occur at Corpus. But Shepard would soon learn that losing classmates was a persistent peril.

  A few months before his arrival, Shepard learned, a small group of planes was flying in formation when one plane lost control and nicked another, and they all began bouncing into one another. “Finally,” a mechanic witnessing the crash from the ground said later, “about five or six planes were dropping down, just like rain.” With so many planes coming and going, guided by ba
rely competent young trainees, keeping track of the frenzy was a constant challenge. Planes often shared runways—the right half for takeoffs, the left for landings. One trainee who was conducting ground traffic failed to see a plane come up behind him, and the propeller cut him to pieces. In one twelve-month span, ninety-one men died in 5,532 crashes.

  On his way to class Shepard usually walked past some mangled hunk of wreckage from the latest tragedy, deposited prominently outside the hangars as a message from the brass: Don’t let this happen to you. And every few days the crash buzzer sounded, signifying another young aviator down. Louise, a few miles to the north, could hear those buzzers, and each time she fretted that it might be her husband.

  Shepard’s introduction to Navy flying occurred in the front seat of a single-engine, two-seat biplane called the Stearman N2S. Painted traffic-sign yellow (to warn everyone around that a trainee was inside), the Stearman earned the nickname “Yellow Peril.”

  Every Navy pilot would forever recall his first moments in the open cockpit of the Yellow Peril, which the Navy used for decades as its primary trainer. It was a dashingly primitive stick-and-rudder aircraft. Future generations of aircraft would be flown with a sophisticated steering wheel system, similar to a car’s. But the Stearman—just one generation removed from the Wright brothers’ first planes—was flown with rudder pedals and a simple stick jutting up between the pilot’s legs. The control stick tugged on cables linked to ailerons—wing-mounted panels that help an airplane bank left and right. The control stick was also linked to the elevators—horizontal panels on the tail that, in combination with a corresponding increase or decrease in power, controlled the ascent and descent of the plane. On the pilot’s left was the Stearman’s throttle control lever, and at his feet were the two rudder pedals, which steered the plane. The Yellow Perils flown by the Navy had identical controls in the front and back-seats—one for the instructor, one for the student. The instructor communicated with his student via a one-way rubber tube called a gosport, usually used by the trainer to tell his student how badly he was flying. The Yellow Peril was sturdy and reliable but slow (top speed 126 miles an hour), and it had a troublesome rudder and bad brakes, which made even simple maneuvers such as taxiing complicated and dangerous.