World War II Remembered

Our Floating Runway

199 Our Floating Runway • Benjamin Sanderson U.S. Navy Ihad always dreamed of one day piloting an airplane. I grew up hearing heroic stories of my uncle Corry, a decorated WW I Navy flyer, who, after being thrown from his biplane in a crash, was killed trying to rescue his co-pilot from the burning wreckage. While still in high school, during the first days of WW II, I saved enough money for 20 hours of flight training and took my first lessons at a municipal airport near Buffalo, New York. I sat behind an instructor in a Piper Cub two-seater. I managed to take additional flying lessons while I was at Hobart College. Because I had acquired enough credits to graduate halfway through my senior year (December 1942), the U.S. government decided my chemical engineering skills were essential to the war effort and I found myself involved in the manufacture of powerful explosives. After a brief and unsatisfying stint starting up a new plant for Holston Ordnance, I requested a change to a 1A rating from the draft board and enlisted in Navy flight school. 200 World War II Remembered In February 1944 I reported for duty in New York City and was promptly put on a train with six other inductees. We had no idea where we were going. One of us was given an envelope, to open on the train, containing our orders and our destination: Philadelphia. We completed several months of aeronautical studies in Philly and flight prep in Chapel Hill, as well as physical conditioning meant to whip our bodies into shape; we were then designated as AFT (Approved for Flight Training). This was followed by six months of primary training at Bunker Hill, Indiana, to prepare us for actual flight training in a Stearman biplane. Among our training group was a rather well-known recruit: baseball star Ted Williams, who later became a Marine pilot. I began the long journey toward becoming a fighter pilot in a most forgiving aircraft, the Stearman biplane. After learning basic maneuvers , I gradually progressed to more complex maneuvers in increasingly powerful and less forgiving aircraft such as the F6F Hellcat and the F8F Bearcat. Along the way, up to one-third of the aviation cadets washed out of the program or were sent back for additional training. After making the cut at each step, I opted to become a fighter pilot and trained at various airfields across the country, eventually earning my wings and my commission in 1944. A Dangerous Endeavor Learning to pilot a Navy fighter plane off an aircraft carrier is a dangerous endeavor—almost as dangerous as the combat missions themselves . Things could, and sometimes did, go wrong in a hurry. Part of the challenge was to keep from killing yourself long enough to acquire the very skills necessary to keep from getting killed. Even experienced pilots lost their lives on routine training missions. One week before I joined my squadron, the skipper and the exec (both expert flyers) were killed instantly in a midair collision while practicing gunnery runs over the end of Long Island. As most people appreciate, taking off from an aircraft carrier is not at all like taking off from a runway. You are flung off the deck by twin steam-driven catapults designed to launch multiple aircraft in quick succession. I once had the misfortune to be assigned a bunk directly under one of these catapults, which announced every launch with a tremendous roar. Our Floating Runway: Benjamin Sanderson 201 Navigation was one of the essential flying skills you had to master in the days before GPS. A typical carrier mission required flying over a featureless ocean searching for enemy aircraft, while at the same time charting compass heading, time, and wind drift on a small pullout navigation table in the cockpit. Most importantly, you had to keep track of a floating runway that was sailing away from your starting location at 15-20 knots the whole time you were aloft. Wind drift had to be estimated by looking at ocean whitecaps and waves. So it was with some relief that you came back into visual contact with the carrier when returning from a mission, knowing that you had done your navigation calculation correctly. That relief was followed, however, by a white-knuckle landing on a runway heaving in the ocean swells. Carrier landings necessitated dragging...