Flying the Corsair from a World War II aircraft carrier

From Norman Hanson’s Carrier Pilot:

The [Corsair] fighter had originally been ordered by the US Navy for carrier use to replace the Grumman F4F, the Wildcat (Martlet to the Royal Navy); but it had proved to be such a handful in Fleet trials—particularly in deck-landing—that the new Grumman F6F—the Hellcat—had been adopted instead. The F4U—the Corsair—could now go to the shore-based squadrons of the US Marine Air Corps; and to the Royal Navy, if they wanted it. The Royal Navy accepted it willingly. The only alternatives in sight were the Seafire and Sea Hurricane—RAF production models fitted with arrestor hooks—and these just weren’t carrier material.

What was it like to fly a Corsair? It is no easy matter to describe it to someone who has never handled a fast aircraft; who has never known the thrill of three-dimensional high speed. Once tasted, that thrill remains with a pilot for the rest of his life. He climbs up on the high wing of the Corsair and lowers himself into the cockpit. The seat is a concave bowl of steel, designed to fit a packed parachute on which he sits. Between his backside and the parachute itself is a one-man dinghy, carefully stowed into a canvas case and attached to the parachute harness by a webbing lanyard. He straps himself, first, into the parachute harness, then into the safety harness. Now he dons his helmet and goggles and connects the R/ T lead and oxygen pipe. He’s ready to start up. In front and to either side are ranged the controls, levers, switches, dials—in all, about 110 of them. He goes through his check-off list … Magneto switches off. Control locks off; and check, too, that rudder, elevators and ailerons are all turning ‘the right way’ in response to movement of the controls. (They have been known to have been reversed, with dire consequences.) The wing-lock lever is in neutral and the manual lock engaged. Tail wheel unlocked. … The propeller control is in fully fine pitch. The angle of attack of the blades on the air is adjustable hydraulically; fully fine pitch, offering least resistance to the air, gives maximum horsepower and is always used for take-off. Once in flight, the coarser the angle, the lower the speed, the less wear and tear on the engine and the more economical its petrol consumption. (Consumption, as a matter of interest, is about 60 gallons per hour at cruising speed and no less than 100 at operational speeds.) Mixture control to full rich, to give the engine plenty of petrol to get her started. Elevator and aileron trimming tabs in neutral. Six degrees of right rudder trim. At maximum horsepower the engine torque is enormous and will try to tear the aircraft round to port. The pilot’s own strength on the rudder pedal would be insufficient to resist that force and the trimming tabs help him to overcome it. Cooling gills, round the front of the big radial engine, oil coolers and intercoolers open. Petrol cock turned on to main tank. This large container, holding 350 gallons, is surrounded by self-sealing material and is positioned immediately in front of the cockpit, behind the engine. All this sounds quite a handful. In fact, it took only a few seconds. Now the pilot confirms to the fitter, standing to one side below him, that the magneto switches are off. The fitter grasps the propeller blade nearest to him and rotates it once or twice ‘the wrong way’, blowing out; tough going, this, against the compression of 18 cylinders. Now he moves back and looks towards the pilot who turns on the master electrical switch, rendering all systems ‘live’. He gives the priming switch two or three short but decisive squirts, injecting a shot of neat petrol into the cylinders. Again he looks to his fitter, who signals to him that no one is standing within range of the great propeller. The pilot turns the magneto switches to ‘on’ and presses the starter switch, firing the Koffman starter which ignites a slowly expanding gas to hit the pistons under enormous pressure. The starter has a deep-throated tiger’s cough. It jerks the propeller into life, back-fires once, then settles into the comforting roar which signifies a good, clean, fire-free start. He moves the mixture control to auto-rich and advances the throttle to give 500 revs per minute on the rpm indicator. He leaves it there until the oil pressure gauge awakens and climbs to normal. Whilst waiting, he has another look around. Hydraulic pressure is normal. Oil temperature is rising to normal. The blind-flying ‘artificial horizon’ is dancing around slightly, showing that it, too, is awake and healthy. He switches on the radio and the crackling and unintelligible natter from miles away tells him that the set is functioning satisfactorily. At last the oil temperature and pressure gauges show normal. He opens up the throttle steadily to 1,000 revs and, keeping an eye on the rev counter, turns off one of the magneto switches. The revs drop by 50. He switches back to ‘Both’. A pause; then he turns off the other. Now the drop is only 30. Both are acceptable, for anything up to a loss of 100 is safe. Everything is OK for him to move. He throttles back and crosses and re-crosses his hands before his face. The fitter and rigger nip below the wing and behind the lethal propeller to pull away the wheel-chocks. The fitter gives a ‘thumbs-up’ sign. The pilot advances the throttle a little and taxies out to the downwind end of the airfield runway.

Today there would be at least a month of transition training before a pilot moved into a different aircaft. Back then?

After the Sabang operation, Joe Clifton from Saratoga and I exchanged aircraft for a local flight. It was my first experience of the Grumman Hellcat and, despite my fanaticism for the Corsair, I was certainly enamoured of it. Its cockpit was similarly roomy and efficiently laid out. Its performance, too, was much the same but in landing particularly I found it a lot safer and easier to handle largely, I think, because of its superior visibility and better stall characteristics.

Imagine an F-15 pilot just jumping into an F-18 for a $100 hamburger ($10,000 hamburger?) run!

Hanson does not describe anyone having qualms about killing enemies, even when an individual, such as a flak gunner, was targeted by strafing. War, it seems, came naturally to this group of young men.

We were searching out ahead, weaving all the time like bastards, when tracer flew past us, fired from astern. There in my mirror was an Oscar—it looked as though it was sitting on my elevators—with guns flashing along its wings. I had time neither to shout nor to break before it dived beneath us, only to reappear in a split second, pulling up in front of us, the length of two cricket-pitches away. We all heaved back on our sticks and gave it the works; no need for gunsights. The silly bastard was half-stalled, sitting there like a broken-down old whore. Its port aileron took off and sailed over our heads. What looked like a section of flap fell away to our right. Someone must have hit the engine. The aircraft fell, smoking, down on the port side and Matt Barbour must have nearly flown through it. God knows how he missed it. I yelled and did an aerobatic turn to port where another fighter—a Tojo?—was boring in. No—it was another Oscar. We gave it a long burst, tearing chunks out of the back end of the fuselage and tail section, and it sheered off to starboard. Jesus! Business was brisk and we were tearing around like frustrated virgins!

It must have been about 1630 as we crossed the town, flying at about 8,000 feet. Glory be! There was a parade ground! What was more, it was pretty full with all the licentious soldiery drawn up in serried ranks. One of the Corsair’s drawbacks as far as the enemy was concerned was that the exhaust roar from its 18 cylinders was all behind it. There was virtually no noise from the engine apparent until the aircraft was almost overhead. It was said that the Japanese called it the ‘whispering death’ for this reason. So when I decided to attack this juicy target, they broke formation only when it was too late for most of them to find cover. There were three possible angles from which to attack, only one of which was dangerous. After an afternoon of sheer frustration, monumental stupidity born of weariness and a touch of ‘twitch’ chose for me the route which in normal and more carefree times would clearly have indicated—‘ A sticky death this way’. In my eagerness to get in amongst it without losing the invaluable element of surprise, I gave the boys no warning at all. I banged the stick over to the right and down, leaving them to follow as best they could. It was providential that I did so, for had I led them down in an orderly formation, at least two of them would have bought it. As it was, they had scarcely made their move to follow me down when they realised that I had made a hash of things, giving them time to alter their own approach to something much safer and more airmanlike. Certainly I wrought a bit of death and destruction, there was no doubt about that. With that enhanced, falcon-like vision which fiercely pumped adrenalin produces at moments of high excitement, I could see soldiers fairly bouncing away from the sledgehammer impact of the .5 shells. It needed only a touch on the rudder-bar to cover square yards of the parade ground and there was a fair number of bodies lying motionless as I levelled out and pulled away. And then I saw it. Rising sharply from the back of the military area was a sheer cliff-like eminence which I had completely missed in my haste to get to ground level. Now, as I approached it at 300 knots, it looked like the North Wall of the Eiger. Taking my life in my hands I pulled on the stick for all I was worth. I can only remember thick streamers springing from my wingtips before I blacked out good and true. The black-out hit me like pentothal—there was no greying-out, no fuzziness. I went out like a light. When I recovered I was out at sea, climbing gently at about 150 knots, safe and sound. The others had formed up on me again and were gazing at me with uncomprehending eyes. Well they might. They had all been enthralled by the spectacle of their senior and most stupid bastard of an officer busily trying to kill himself.

Hanson crashes into the ocean during a landing mishap and is rescued by a destroyer. This turns out to have been common:

John Winton, in his book The Forgotten Fleet, now regarded as a classic history of the operations of the British Pacific Fleet, counts the casualties suffered by the Fleet Air Arm in the two operations [against an oil refinery in Indonesia]. Forty-one aircraft were lost from the four carriers: 16 in actual combat, 11 in ditchings near the Fleet and 14 from deck-landing crashes. As Winton says, this works out at roughly one aircraft for every ten sorties flown; and he adds his own significant commentary: ‘a casualty rate which would have made even Bomber Command flinch’. Against these losses, it was estimated that we had destroyed 68 enemy aircraft—38 on the ground and 30 in the air, not taking into account several ‘probables’. Palembang, whilst not completely destroyed, was effectively put out of the war for a long time to come.

Why don’t fighter pilots do a lot of damage by pressing the wrong buttons? It turns out that they do…

Coming in to land for the second time, I was clueless enough to forget to flick off the gun switches. Having taxied up to the forward round-down, switched off the engine and unharnessed myself, I heaved myself up to get out of the cockpit, pulling on the joystick with my right hand for a bit of assistance. My six guns roared out with a fine, uninhibited two-second burst. A destroyer keeping station on us two cables ahead promptly turned up the taps and proceeded to belt off at high speed in the general direction of Australia. I didn’t blame her for one moment. A seemingly endless succession of chunks of armour-piercing steel, half an inch in diameter and about two inches long, scudding smartly above one’s head is sufficient encouragement to push off for any destination—even Australia. I walked down the flight-deck wearing as nonchalant an expression as I could muster. But I couldn’t fool Captain Lambe. As I passed close beneath the flying bridge, trying to avoid attention, I heard ‘Hans!’ in unusually soft tones. I looked up. His face bore the suspicion of a grin and his right index finger beckoned me. He listened to my feeble excuse without interruption. Then: ‘I’m sure it’s easily done, Hans—probably too easily on a day like this has been. But you know, you really shouldn’t frighten people like that.

It seemed to Hanson that the war would last forever, but of course it did not:

The enemy had a seemingly endless supply of flak ammunition and the more aircraft we flew over his islands, the better his practice became. We drove ourselves to attack him through all the hours of daylight and he never failed to greet us with his withering fire of deceptively slow-climbing balls of red and green as the flak rose to bracket us.

[on the way home to England in 1945] The Port Said of those days abounded in touts of every description, probably exceeded only by those of Cairo. Hawkers roamed the streets with anything from hair-combs to ‘feelthy pictures’ and small boys of unbelievable precocity touted for the girls, usually ‘My sister! You come see my sister! Pink inside, just like white girl!’ The story was told of a ship’s Captain who, landing at one of the quays and striding purposefully for the administrative offices, was waylaid in such a manner by a scruffy little urchin. ‘Run away, little boy!’ said the Captain, testily. ‘It’s the harbour-master I want!’ ‘OK, Captain!’ was the unabashed retort. ‘OK! Come, please! Can arrange!’

What awaited us when we reached port [in England]? I don’t suppose many of us gave it a thought. So far as we knew, Illustrious would undergo a pretty thorough refit. We would probably find ourselves in some less exacting jobs for a spell—and then? Back to the Pacific without a doubt, for the subjugation of Japan itself promised to be another Thirty Years’ War. (The destruction of Hiroshima, however, to astound the world within a few short weeks, would resolve all our problems. It would also pose a bagful of new ones.)

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