Once They Were Eagles Page 19
“In 1946 my father and I bought an existing electrical contracting business. Now, though, I’m getting to the point where I can’t do some of the heavy lifting and crawling required, so I’m taking just the work I want. I’ve been doing the crop dusting for over 30 years, since 1951.
“The Black Sheep were a fine group of people. I thought we had a tremendous combat leader. I tried to emulate him when I had my own squadron. I didn’t like the way some of the other squadrons were handled; you couldn’t find the CO, or the CO would put the best people on his wing instead of having them lead divisions where they’d do the most good.
Rollie Rinabarger
Gelon Doswell
“It was a hell of an experience. Of course, I’d rather not have been hit. I’m sorry I wasn’t around with the guys longer; it damn near broke my heart when Doc sent me out of there.”
Contract Negotiator
Gelon Doswell
Gelon H. “Corpuscle” Doswell, still looking as though he could use some plasma, might benefit from some of Rinabarger’s invigorating mountain climate. Instead, he lives in a town where the altitude is only 22 feet: Ocean Springs, Mississippi, an almost 200-year-old Gulf Coast resort that has become an artists’ colony.
I interviewed Doswell in my hotel room in New Orleans during the Marine Corps Aviation Convention. He’d put on some weight, was still pasty-faced, and wore his hair in a Marine Corps brush cut.
“The Black Sheep were pretty much the same as other squadrons except that they seemed closer knit. It was a gung-ho situation, and everybody seemed to pull together very well. I got more enemy contact, and Dustin and I were convinced we were going to paint some Japanese flags on our airplanes, but it never happened.
“Afterward, I returned to the States by ship and was assigned as a Corsair test pilot after training at Patuxent. I applied for a regular commission that came through in Hawaii, and I was sent to multi-engine school and became a transport pilot.
“I was at the Bureau of Aeronautics for a couple of years, commanded a Night Fighter squadron, and had the usual tours: Armed Forces Staff College; Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic; Iwakuni, Japan. I commanded the Reserve Training Detachment at the Naval Air Station in New Orleans and was assigned to the International Secretary of the NATO Standing Group in Washington—and selected for colonel there.
“One interesting assignment was at Quantico, heading up a small task group working on the Marine Corps Fighter Study. At that time, it appeared the Defense Department was going to cram the F-111 down our throats. The thing had grown from about 40,000 pounds up to about 70,000 pounds, and during its first carrier trials, I think, it buckled the deck of one. Then we were testing all kinds of ideas, like a one-man helicopter.
Ed Olander
Harry Johnson
“In 1965 my back began to bother me. At Bethesda, they told me they could do surgery but couldn’t guarantee anything, so they wrote me up for a disability retirement, and I retired in 1966.
“I sent out resumes and interviewed with several companies. Colt Industries in Hartford wanted me to sell weapons to the Army, Navy, and Marines; for a retired regular officer, that’s illegal, of course. I told them that. So I messed around awhile and finally came to Ingalls Shipbuilding Division of Litton Industries. I’m in subcontracting management, negotiating and administering major subcontracts. Been here 14 years, like the work, and expect to stay till I’m 65.
“We like living in Ocean Springs, too—we like to fish.
“I’ve had many outstanding times: a joint exercise with the Thai Marines in Bangkok, where we called on the King and the Ambassador; meeting Lord Mountbatten in Paris with the NATO Standing Group. And there were close calls, like Christmas Day of 1943, when I had to limp into Torokina just as the plane quit on me.
“The Black Sheep experience was great. I consider it an honor to have been a part—a hell of a squadron. I know Greg had his problems, but he was a fine combat pilot and a good combat commander. A little rough for a peacetime Marine Corps—actually, his own worst enemy.”
Politician and Entrepreneur
Ed Olander
“Big Old Fat Old Ed” Olander has slimmed down considerably since his days with the Black Sheep. He was on vacation in Hawaii, and I interviewed him in my Honolulu apartment.
After being released from active duty, Ed went back to his home town of Northhampton, Massachusetts, and carved out a distinguished career. He started a building materials business, which he still owns. He served two terms as Northhampton’s mayor; he was a member of his Community Hospital board for 18 years, nine of them as president; and he is now on the board of directors of a national bank.
About four years younger than Boyington, Ed was the oldest of the pilots who served both tours.
“It turned out to be a good mix, having new pilots with the experienced ones. We didn’t have the opportunity, like the other squadrons, to become familiar with each other’s moves before we went into combat. I don’t think I was scared, the first flight, but I remember it because I was confused—didn’t know which was east or west, or what the islands were going to look like. If we’d had enemy contact that day, I don’t think I could have found my way home. Later, we were confident because we had good leadership in the air, and the right airplane. I’ve had a love affair with the Corsair for 40 years. Yet after 40 years, the missions are a blur; I recall some misses more than I recall any hits.
“After we broke up, I went to dull Green Island, then to El Toro and trained in field carrier landings for the invasion of Japan that never happened. When the war ended, I was released from active duty, just before Thanksgiving 1945.
“The Black Sheep were a very special squadron, and not only because we were at the right place at the right time and compiled a good combat record. I can recall no group I served with that had such esprit. Part of that may have been the good feeling generated by success and by combat; part was a confidence maybe instilled by Boyington. It was a good-times squadron. Everyone knows Greg’s affinity for drink, and we all seemed to have a little, and we had some parties. But I think by the luck of the draw we had some damn nice guys who would have had this kindred spirit any place they happened to congregate. I’ve said many times that I spent six months with a total of 50 people and felt closer to them than people I lived with for four years at Amherst College.
“I let the Black Sheep experience all lie fallow until you organized that first reunion; then it all came alive again as though there had been no interim period at all. It was a very special group. It occupies a very special niche in my life.”
Manufacturer and Boatman
Harry Johnson
Harry “Skinny” Johnson drove the nearly 400-mile round trip from his home in Birmingham to meet me in Nashville. Like Yankee Doodle Dandy, Harry was born on the fourth of July. At six feet, two inches, he was one of the taller Black Sheep, and he was still distinguished looking. He might have been a banker.
I asked why he had chosen the Marines after he received his commission.
“There was this Marine Captain with all the ribbons. He said, ‘If you want to have tea at three o’clock and lace on your drawers, you stay in the Navy. But if you want to be the sorriest son of a bitch in the world, get in the Marines.’
“I said, ‘Well, I’d like to get into fighters.’
“He looked at me and said, ‘We have a new fighter, the Corsair, and its big enough for a 300-pounder.’
“I said, ‘Thank you, Sir,’ and that’s how I got in, but the first time I flew a Corsair was in Espiritu Santo. I was real hepped up to get assigned to the Black Sheep. I thought Boyington knew what he was doing, and if I listened to him and the others who’d already had the first tour, I could learn a lot.
“I don’t recall ever being real scared until later, in Korea. That’s because I was older, and we had to work under the flares at night, 4,000,000-candlepower parachute flares. There, most of the roads are river beds, so you have to get down below the
mountains to see anything, then corkscrew yourself out.
“When I got back from Korea, I stayed on extended active duty as a Reserve for a couple of years, and on Organized Reserve until 1961. By then I was 40 years old, and they were trying to put us in ground school, so I was through with it. I had a wonderful time in the Marine Corps; I just wanted to get out and make some money, and that’s exactly what I did.
“I started to work on a commission basis, then decided to go into manufacturing. Now I have a small plant, the Harry C. Johnson Company, manufacturing electrical connectors. Every power company uses them. We thought about expanding like the Wall Street Journal says, but I decided to keep it small and dirty. I have anywhere from four to ten employees.
“When somebody talks about recession, I say, ‘We don’t have a problem.’ We have orders for all of next year. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a big outfit because I don’t want it to be, but I can do my boating and fishing. I have six boats. At the lake south of Birmingham, I have what they call a ‘deck boat’; there’s a stereo on it where I play my favorite, Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Did It My Way.’ Then I have a bass boat that’ll go 54 miles an hour; a pontoon boat; a small aluminum boat; and at the yacht club I’m a member of, a 47-foot Swannee with all the deals on it. It’s slick. And I own a 42-foot antique, all-mahogany boat that I’m having refinished now. It’s beautiful—18,000 pounds of good stuff.
“But I’ve never been in any group like the Black Sheep since then that would even approach it. It was fun. It was a feeling that we were the best and we’d take any job. I liked the singing; I just liked it. You don’t see the same loyalty now that we had—I don’t believe I knew a one who wouldn’t risk his life to save another.
“Getting married and having a family, and the Black Sheep experience were the high points in my life.
“I agree with football coach Bear Bryant; what he preached and what we had was pride. When you have pride, you have class. When the crunch comes, you’re in there in your formation; you want to be a winner.
“In the Black Sheep, we had pride; we had class; and we were winners.”
Professional Marine and Accountant
Bruce Matheson
After serving 30 years in the Marine Corps, Bruce Matheson has retired to a comfortable life in Kailua, Hawaii, on the other side of the island of Oahu from Waikiki. Daily runs on the beach have kept his weight about the same as in our Black Sheep days; he still has his hair, with a few flecks of gray. One of the original members of our choral society, he is still musically inclined: he has an organ in his home, and he sings with a choral group and in the chorus of both the Honolulu Opera Company and the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.
Named outstanding freshman in his University of Illinois ROTC unit, he joined the regular Marines the day after Pearl Harbor. He had no thought of aviation but was tested in boot camp in San Diego and selected to go to aviation electronics school in Florida. Commissioned in January, he arrived in Espiritu Santo in July 1943.
“When Boyington introduced himself with a bit about his Flying Tiger tour, I was impressed. He had seen combat and could tell us that the Japanese were not really ten feet tall. We felt we were there purely to fly. No such things as electronics officer, oxygen officer, parachute officer; when we weren’t flying, we had nothing else to do.
“I felt I knew what I was supposed to do; I had confidence in the people I flew with and thought the missions were certainly within our capability.
“My first aerial combat taught me about as much as I learned previously or subsequently: you can’t afford to get a fixation on anything. I was devoting so much attention to shooting at a plane that I became a target myself, and didn’t realize it till I heard something like hail on a tin roof. I went into a split S and lost the Zero. The action moved like a swarm of bees in the general direction of the bombers, but it didn’t seem so much an overall movement as split-second glimpses of happenings you had to evaluate in a fraction of a second.
“I got my last Zero on the mission when Boyington went down. I wish, for our sake, that we had not been split up. It would have been wonderful to continue with that group of people. However, by the time we came back from R and R in Australia, for all practical purposes the air war in the Solomons was finished.
“By the time the war was over, I was a Captain, with a wife. I found I enjoyed flying very, very much, and we could fly in first-line airplanes. We traveled a lot. I liked the people. My college had been interrupted, so when I was asked if I wanted a regular commission, I cast my lot with the Marine Corps.
“When the Korean War started, there were no Marines in China, Guam, Philippines; none even in Hawaii. Had it not been for the Korean War, there might not have been any Marines, period.”
Matheson had a distinguished career: service in Guam with John Glenn, a Marine pilot before he became an astronaut and then U.S. senator. After Korea, Mat was in Hawaii three years; commanded the Marine Air Reserve Training Detachment at Norfolk for two years; was head of Shore Development Branch of the Division of Aviation at headquarters for three years; trained to fly helicopters; spent one year in Japan and then three years as Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, Pacific Marine Corps Headquarters in Hawaii. In 1968 he went to Vietnam as commander of Marine Air Group 36, the largest Marine Air Group ever sent overseas; it consisted of 12 helicopter squadrons at two locations.
Bruce Matheson
Glenn Bowers
His final year of active duty was spent as Chief of Staff of the Development Center at Marine Corps Schools. After retiring with the rank of colonel, he took a position as head of general accounting services for a data processing firm; most recently, he has become an income tax specialist with H&R Block.
As Mat thumbed through my musty War Diary, I asked him what set the Black Sheep apart from other squadrons.
“One thing that seemed to set us apart and also draw us together was the fact that the squadron comprised a number of college students, all bringing their own lore from various parts of the country. Entertainment was pretty much what you could make of it. Many of us liked to sing barbershop harmony, and we each brought with us songs the others didn’t know. Our songfests became sort of impromptu gettogethers—it didn’t even make any difference if you couldn’t carry a tune; we still learned the words. And despite the TV show, very little hard liquor was available on combat tours; it wasn’t the drinking. The relationship among the pilots was extremely good; we felt we were part of a group we had confidence in, and I think that is possibly the reason for the success we achieved.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as motivated to go again and again without question and hang it out as much as the Black Sheep and some in the other Solomons’ squadrons. I think the shock of Pearl Harbor literally carried me to and through V-J Day, through years of effort to try not only to survive it but to right the wrong that was done there. There was no such impetus for Korea, and you might say there was negative impetus for Vietnam.
“The youngsters who came through flight training just prior to Vietnam were given much better training, both on the ground and in the air, with better equipment, more sophisticated equipment. Their basic education was much better than we had, so they were a lot more capable.
“I don’t think we get the draft-card burners in the military now, but we got them in Vietnam because we were at the head end of the ‘me’ generation. In Vietnam we began to have trouble with drugs, and found drugs in flight crews. The obvious difference was motivation. I had hundreds of young pilots and thousands of enlisted men. I had to do the best I could to convince them that what they were doing on a daily basis was right, that it was productive and in the country’s best interest. At the same time, we were being visited by correspondents from U.S. newspapers who would tend to ask all the wrong questions and draw all the wrong answers, and go back and paint a wrong picture.
“The highlight of my entire 30 years was those two tours with the Black Sheep. As I look back, never before or sinc
e have I been in a situation that was a literal life-and-death effort, where you would knowingly place yourself repeatedly and routinely in these remote air battles hundreds of miles from your base and really think nothing of it. I don’t believe it was a matter of stupidity; we had reliance on each other and the airplane. I never found anything subsequent to those two six-week tours that was nearly as challenging or completely demanding of me as a person. Other things were colorful and enjoyable, but in that crucible I made friendships and attachments and long relationships such as I’ve never again experienced.
“Never since that time have I been given the opportunity to achieve or attain or do anything as notable or noteworthy as I was able to do in those few short weeks with the Black Sheep Squadron.”
Wildlife Manager
Glenn Bowers
Glenn Bowers is one of those rare persons who had his sights fixed on his career goal early in life and managed to achieve that goal. He had completed three years as a zoology and biology major at Penn State when he enlisted in the Marine Corps. After his release from active duty, he returned to Penn State to obtain both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and then started to work for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Commencing as a wildlife biologist, he worked his way up to the Division of Research, then to Deputy Director, and for the past 18 years Executive Director of the commission.
At his home in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, Glenn talked forcefully and enthusiastically about the work he and his people in wildlife management are doing in the state. He runs an outfit with over 700 employees and an annual budget of $32 million. The state owns a million and a quarter acres of land used by some 1,300,000 hunters. His regular staff is augmented by 1,500 deputy game protectors who donate most of their time.