The American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews The Museum of Flight Seattle, Washington
Mayo A. “Mike” Hadden, Jr. (Part 3 of 4)
Interviewed by: Eugene A. Valencia and John Florea
Interview Date: June 30, 1965
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Abstract: In this four-part oral history, fighter ace Mayo A. “Mike” Hadden, Jr. discusses his military service with the United States Navy during World War II. In part three, he continues to describe his wartime experiences as a fighter pilot with Fighting Squadron 9 (VF-9). Topics discussed include his combat tour in the Pacific Theater aboard the USS Essex (CV-9), his aerial victories and notable combat missions, and stories about fellow pilots.
The interview is conducted by fellow VF-9 fighter ace Eugene A. Valencia and by John Florea, a former war correspondent for Life Magazine who spent time with VF-9 during the war. The interview takes place on board the USS Hornet (CV-12) during a change-in-command between Hadden, outgoing captain of the Hornet, and William M. Pardee, the incoming captain. Some sections of audio may be difficult to hear due to background noise from the ship.
Biography:
Mayo A. “Mike” Hadden, Jr. was born on August 14, 1916 in Holland, Michigan. He joined the United States Navy in 1941 and earned his Naval Aviator designation the following year. Assigned to Fighting Squadron 9 (VF-9), Hadden served aboard the USS Ranger (CV-4) during Operation Torch, flying missions over Morocco and supporting Allied forces during their invasion of French-controlled North Africa. He remained with VF-9 during their subsequent tours in the Pacific Theater and participated in missions in the South and Central Pacific. Hadden remained in the military after the war and went on to hold several command positions. During the 1960s, he commanded the USS Graffias (AF-29) and USS Hornet (CV-12), then served with the State Department, the Iceland Defense Force, and the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. He retired as a rear admiral in 1973 and passed away in 1986.
Biographical information courtesy of: Boyce, Ward J., ed., American fighter aces album. Mesa, Ariz: American Fighter Aces Association, 1996.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from the American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services 3
Index:
Personal background and courtship of Lori ...... 4
Signing up to become a Naval Aviator ...... 8
Experiences during training and postwar assignments ...... 11
Overview of World War II service ...... 12
Dogfight over Wake Island ...... 13
Other combat missions and stories from the USS Essex (CV-9) ...... 19
More aerial victories ...... 27
Squadron mates lost during carrier takeoffs ...... 34
Night fighter training and missions...... 36
Thoughts on training, instinct, and personal initiative ...... 39
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Mayo A. “Mike” Hadden, Jr. (Part 3 of 4)
[START OF INTERVIEW]
[Begin Side A]
00:00:00
[Personal background and courtship of Lori]
[faint audio]
JOHN FLOREA: …write your story. When I write your story, not that I’ll bring out any of these things—
EUGENE A. VALENCIA: We’re on.
JF: But in a given situation, you know, I can tell a pattern in the way you would possibly think. Like from the moment—I knew the moment you said that, you know, you were an independent thinker about politics. So these—all these background facets of your family, everything, your house. What I want to know—is he on now?
EAV: Yeah.
[overlapping voices/unintelligible 00:00:24]
JF: What are your hobbies now?
MAYO A. HADDEN, JR.: Oh, athletically, I guess you’d say—
EAV: This is going to go fast. This is—all right.
00:00:34
MAH: Golf, if I’ve got any hobby at all. Because it combines exercise with a competitive thing, where you’re fighting against yourself. And when I was a youngster, of course, I liked to build model airplanes. That was natural. And I was in the Boy Scout business from the time I was a Tenderfoot until I made Eagle, until I became a Sea Scout, and that sort of—college, of course—that kind of went by the boards when I got into more team-type athletics.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative]. So could I—[unintelligible 00:01:13]—would be golf. But you can play golf, huh?
MAH: That’s right.
00:01:19 5
JF: Cards? Bridge?
MAH: No, very seldom. Only on board ship, for want of something else to do. Sure, I’m very proud of the fact that I have been a three-handicapper and now I’ve skied to a five to a seven. But in my day, I used to play a pretty fair game.
JF: I thought I was doing good to get down under 15. [laughs]
EAV: I’ve just started.
JF: Tell me about your romance. I mean, tell me how you met Lori and what was Lori when you met her and what did she—
MAH: Oh, Lori was—her father was one-time plant superintendent, general manager and that sort of thing, of the Ohio Lamp Works, a subsidiary of General Electric. His health went bad— again, with diabetes. And they moved from Warren, Ohio. Lori had been born and grown up in Ontario, when her dad was building the [unintelligible 00:02:17] GE plant. Grew up in Europe until she was about nine years old. Her father was an American, but her [unintelligible 00:02:25], married a Canadian. So she was born in Canada, but of an American father, automatic American citizen, [unintelligible 00:02:33] Act of 1922. Came back from Europe when she was about six years old, went to various schools in Lynn, Massachusetts and Marblehead, Mass. and whatnot. Went to high school in Warren, Ohio, went to Hood College for two years, transferred to the University of Wisconsin. And when her dad’s health—
00:02:53
JF: What did she major in when she was going to college?
MAH: Damned if I know. [laughter] But then they moved to a little house down in Fort Lauderdale.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative]. You met her then?
MAH: And Lori worked with Marge Davis, who is Fletcher Knebel’s wife, in Washington, a Washington columnist. And Lori worked with her sometime directing publicity for about six hotels around the Lauderdale area and also worked in a realty office and that sort of thing.
JF: Is she business-minded? I mean, to that extent—career-minded, I mean?
MAH: I guess she was at that time, and then she made her career snagging me and bless her heart.
JF: [laughs] Had she been married prior to you?
MAH: Oh, no. No, uh-huh [negative]. 6
00:03:38
JF: So you were her first marriage?
MAH: Yeah. No, she was—we were both 25 when we met and married—and I guess maybe we were 24. I had never had any—oh, sure. Romances? Sure. I went with one girl in high school from Findlay, Ohio, where I had gone to high school when they had transferred down there. I went with another gal from Rochester, New York when I was a freshman or sophomore in college.
JF: Now, up to this point—I mean, up to the point of your marriage, did you have marriage on the mind and did Lori have marriage on the mind?
MAH: I don’t know what Lori had on her mind. All I had on my mind, of course, was girls. I liked them. I still like them. [laughter]
JF: That’s good. That’s a very healthy trait. So was it love-at-first sight type of thing or was it just—she finally grind you down? Yeah?
MAH: Well, it was an oddball thing. When Lori and I met on, as I told you, on New Year’s Day, and I broke a date the next night, and I went with the O’Neal tribe down at Miami Beach, see. This was the same [unintelligible 00:04:48]. I sent this Marine up to take my place, and he took Lori out with some fictitious excuse. I’ve forgotten what I’d used, but every place they went up and down the beach, the bartenders would always say, “Oh, yeah. Mike and the gang just left here.”
00:05:04
MAH: She’d thought I was off someplace; I had broken this date. So the next night, I went on out to Fort Lauderdale and called on Lori. She barely let me in the door. But most of my friends had already gotten their commissions. I had been held over at Pensacola until after football season, until after we played Jacksonville, which was our main game, see. We won 15 to 7. But anyway, we had to play this football game because the BOQs all had a big bet on it and so did the commandants of Pensacola and Jacksonville. So by the time I got to Miami, all my friends, all my classmates were commissioned.
Well, anyway, I had a brand new Ford convertible. So the last—I’m ashamed to say—about the last month that I was at—I met Lori New Year’s Day, broke a date the next night, had a date with Lori the next night, and from then on, although all cadets were in at 9:00, fellows like—oh, Bob MacLeod, three-time All-American at Dartmouth and this kind of stuff, second lieutenant in the Marines, bright, shiny wings on his chest. They would use my Ford convertible and put me in the trunk, smuggle me out the gate. I never did spend a night in that [unintelligible 00:06:21]. So from then on, I was in Fort Lauderdale chasing Lori around. And got commissioned the 13th of 7
February ‘42. I had just got my wings, and my commission was postdated back to 14 October ‘41, when the first man in our flight class from Pensacola had graduated. So Lori’s mother died soon after I met her. Her father had died in ‘40. Her mother died soon after I met her, and she was—her grandmother had come down to live with her in her little house there in Lauderdale.
00:06:54
MAH: I had known Lori’s mother. She died in—last of January. But she told us—we were quite madly in love, I guess—
JF: From an illness, she died?
MAH: Yeah. Rather sudden heart condition. But the funniest thing. The war had just started, remember, on December 7th, and cadets in whites were God’s little men. So Mother Grant told us, “If you kids are really serious about this, if anything happens to me, you go ahead and get married anyway.” I think she had a feeling. She wasn’t an invalid, but she was having a little trouble getting around.
So like I say, wings on the 13th of February, and Mother Grant had been dead, I guess, three weeks. So I drove up to Fort Lauderdale with these brand spanking new wings on my chest, and I told Lori the night before—she wandered up to Warren to settle her dad’s estate, which was still hanging, but also get some things squared away on her mother’s estate. And I said, “Well, you know, it’s funny. You’ve got to go to Warren. I’ve got—I plan on going back up to Holland, say good-bye to Mother and Dad before I was put in to Flying, Fighting 9. We ought to drive up together.” Well, she said, “I’ve got that Mercury convertible and Mother’s Oldsmobile. So we’ll put that on blocks, and we can drive my Mercury.” I said “Okay. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll—” I was just kidding. I said, “I’d sell my Ford.” Well, I drove on up the night of the 13th, and I went knocking on the door and nobody’s home. The place is all locked up, and the old lady that lived next door came out and said, “Well—”
00:08:43
MAH: I asked her. I said, “Do you know where Lori is?” “Oh, she’s down in Miami. She’s shopping.” “Oh, she is? What for?” “She’s taking a trip.” “Taking a trip? Oh, is she going up to Warren, Ohio? “No, she’s going to go to Michigan.” “She’s going to go to Michigan? I don’t know anything about this. You must be mistaken. I’m going to Michigan. Lori’s going to go to Warren.” So I waited with them. About an hour later, Lori showed up. She said, “You ready to go?” I said, “Well, I will be. Are you kidding?” “No,” she said. “Let’s go.” I said, “All right. Let’s go back down to Miami Beach, and we’ll sell my Ford.” So we did. I went down there and sold it to a dealer right there, right on Biscayne Boulevard. We got back up to her house, load the car, and we strike out, see. I had somebody else’s car, [unintelligible 00:09:25] or somebody’s. I 8
had to drop that off in Jacksonville. So we drove that up to Jacksonville, and we kept right on going. We drove all the way up, all the way to Holland.
Actually, we got as far as Louisville, and I said, “Well, now, do you really want to swing over to Warren? Why don’t you come on up to Holland with me, spend four or five days with Mother and Dad? It’ll get your mind off losing your mother and all this kind of stuff.” So we drive on up, pull up in front of Mother and Dad’s house. Well, this gal I had been going [unintelligible 00:09:49], I didn’t know this, had been spending the weekend with Mother and Dad. They’d been trying to get her out of the house, knowing I was coming, before I got home.
00:10:00
MAH: And I turn around to introduce Lori. It turns out that Mother and Lori had been corresponding, and Mother invited her up. And I didn’t know anything about this. So we spent about five or six days there with Mother and Dad, and suddenly Dad sits up one night, you know, and goes, “When you kids getting married?” I go, “You’re kidding.” “No. You’re going to get married.” I said, “Well, I’m not ready to get married yet. We’re fighting a war.” You know, all this bit, see. He’s on the telephone, and he calls up Doc [Graham?], a longtime friend of ours, and says, “Doc, are you busy?” “No.” He said, “How about manning your office? The kids are coming down for a blood test. They’re going to get married.” I still haven’t asked Lori to marry me to this day. They run me down, give me a blood test, and the next day, a friend of mine drives me up to Grand Haven, the county seat, and Bill Wiles was the clerk. “This is a $2.00 wedding license on the county. This is a present.”
JF: And you never proposed?
MAH: Yeah, not to this day. [laughter] Next thing I knew, I was in my—
JF: The only time he wasn’t competitive. [laughs]
MAH: Of course, I make a good story out of this, but it’s more or less basically true.
00:11:14
[Signing up to become a Naval Aviator]
JF: That’s very good. One little hole there we have to fill up. Right after you were working for that company that you were traveling around for, and obviously with a very good job, the war broke out. What made you decide on—
MAH: Not the war. The draft.
JF: The draft hit? 9
MAH: No. I wasn’t a draft dodger in that respect, but I had a feeling. Why were we going into all this? We were going to have a war. I knew that.
[recording stops and starts again 00:11:46]
JF: You were saying something about—I was about to ask you how got in the Navy. You said you weren’t a draft dodger or something like that.
MAH: No. That’s right. I knew there was a war coming. So I had been working the Tri-State Hospital Show in the auditorium—or the exposition hall of what is now the Chicago Hilton. At that time, it was the Stevens. And it was a three-day show. One of these things where you work from 11:00 in the morning until about 9:00 at night and then entertain dealers and hospital buyers and hospital administrators in the evening. And having worked the Chicago furniture market for three years and the New York furniture markets for three years and the San Francisco market for two years and covered every bloody convention of hospital or hotel-type, institutional-type, I knew all the entertainment spots.
00:12:37
MAH: So the last night of the show, we would get pretty well schnockered up. And the fellows that had the booth next to me was the Aarons Brothers, who owned Aarons Publishing Company. I believe they put out hospital management, hotel management, trade papers of that type. Magazines. And so they said, “Well, why don’t you—look, you’ve got a war coming on. Why don’t you become a Naval Aviator?” I said, “Naval Aviator—” Well, I entertained an idea at one time of becoming an Army Air Corps pilot. “Why don’t you come with the Marines?” They were both Marine reservists. “Well, what do we do?” “Well, I’ll find out about it.” So they call some guy named Fairfax who was up at Glenview. And Glenview, in those days, was just two hangars and a small field, see. It has been Curtis-Reynolds Airport back when Dad was in the oil business around the area, and I had it known then. The old National Air Show was held up there and that kind of stuff.
So they called up this guy about 3:00 in the morning. He said, “You can come out and have a drink with me. You’ve gotten me up now anyways.” So we drove all the way out to Kenilworth and had a drink with this guy, and he said, “Well, why don’t you come down in the morning? We’ll talk to the flight surgeon. Maybe we can get you flight training. How would you like to be an aviator?” I said, “Eh, good. It sounds good, you know.” The next morning, by God, half canned up, I was down at Navy Pier, took a flight physical, passed it, signed the papers, and about 9:00 in the morning, with my eyes still dilated, I start to realize what I’ve done. [laughter]
00:14:06 10
MAH: So I close up the show. I had everything all packed. I sent all the displays and whatnot back to Michigan. I close up my office at 656 Lakeshore Drive, where we had a permanent display. And I went back over to Holland, and I went in to see the boss. And I told him, “Well, [unintelligible 00:14:26]. I think that I have just enlisted as a Naval Aviator. Or a Marine Aviator, some kind of thing like that.” Of course, I knew, but I was trying to develop a mental block. So they gave me an inscribed watch and all the fare-thee-wells and fond fare-to-dos and whatnot. About four days later, darned if I didn’t get dispatch orders to report to NAS Glenview. So I drove over in my little automobile. I had bought a brand new car at that time.
RON: [in background] Captain, do we have time to get [unintelligible 00:15:01] later?
MAH: Can you make it later, Mr. Ron?
RON: Yes, sir.
MAH: Fine, dandy. 1455.
RON: About 1500 or—
MAH: Just prior to that. I’ve got mast at 1500. Make it just prior to 1500.
RON: Yes, sir.
00:15:12
MAH: Okay. Thank you. So anyway, I hung around town and said my goodbyes to everybody and went over to Glenview and reported in. And I thought, “Well, I might as well give this the old try.” And this is an opportunity to learn how to fly. I had been taking private lessons up in Grand Rapids. Some 30-hour club or something like that. So I got in the—I decided, well, [unintelligible 00:15:43]. Why—I had friends who were starting to be tapped by the draft.
JF: You said you had learned to fly with some—
MAH: No. I had been taking lessons, but—
JF: You hadn’t soloed or anything?
MAH: No, I hadn’t soloed. I didn’t know my left foot from my right ear. But rather than become a boondoggler in the gravel cruncher, like some of my bachelor friends were—now remember, I was an affluent young bachelor. I was a member of the “Bachelors” up in Grand Rapid, Michigan, because I [unintelligible 00:16:12]—chasing the girls around, and I thought, “Well, this bit with the leather helmet and the flying scarf blowing behind me, this sounds good. I’ll give this a whirl.” So I did.
11
[Experiences during training and postwar assignments]
JF: How many—did you have many problems going through—going to flight school?
00:16:37
MAH: Well, no. I never had any problems, except that, there again, where does competition start and where does it stop? I walked in the barracks one night, and there was a little room next to my room that had an office in it. And when everybody else was supposed to be on work details, it seemed many of these guys didn’t have anything to do, so I wondered what that was. Well, that was “The Flight Jacket.” That was the office for the “The Flight Jacket.” So this is the big annual—like cruise book, you know? Like a college annual or a high school thing. Well, I thought, “Well, gee, with my advertising experience, this is a natural. Besides, it looks like I’m getting out of work.” So I became the business manager for “The Flight Jacket.” Well, this meant that I got to make trips over to Jacksonville and a trip down to Corpus Christi to collect stuff. And then they weren’t started long enough to have their own “Flight Jackets” yet, their own annuals. So we gathered all this stuff together, and it gave me a little prestige, a little status.
And about three or four weeks later, I walked in the mess hall, and everybody was having weenies and sauerkraut. And down at that end, there’s a table, and they’ve got steak and mashed potatoes. What’s this? We were all in starched whites there and dirty khakis at the training table. I didn’t know it was in existence. So the next day, I was on the squad. That got me a khaki pass so I didn’t have to dress up at night, and I sat at the training table and started playing football for them. There were a lot of things you have to kind of get into to stay ahead of people.
EAV: Yes, sir.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
00:18:11
MAH: Oh dear.
JF: Turn it off a minute. Let him have his soup, and then we’ll pursue him again. Is there anything involved in the competitiveness that made that one-year jump?
MAH: No. I think, again, it’s been being at the right place at the right time.
JF: That’s the other point.
MAH: Now, how do you do this? I think that, in many cases, a man makes his own good fortune. Now, I don’t mean that you have to be a brown nose. I won’t—I never have been, I don’t think. Yet you look at the career pattern of some people, you could honestly say, “Well, maybe there’s—maybe it’s possible.” Because after being a fighter pilot in World War II, I went 12
back in this fighter-type instructor business. I was one of the first to get out on a point system. And when I had 89 days—I had 90 days terminal leave coming. I took 89 days of it. Lori and I had made a trip up and down the East Coast and whatnot.
00:19:38
MAH: My old company was interested in putting me back on the road, and here and now, I had a family and I was six years older. I wasn’t very interested in that type of thing. They wanted me to take a pay cut. So Lori said, “When are you getting back in?” I said, “How do you know?” Lori said, “Do you want to?” I said, “Sure I do.” And Hugh Winters called me and said he was starting an outfit out of fighter-type instructors that he wanted to call the Blue Angels. Would I come down to Jacksonville and work for him down there and help set this thing up? He says, “You’re a lieutenant commander now, you know.” I said, “No. I don’t know that.” “Yeah.” So I said, “All right. I’ll send a wire to Washington, and I’ll request a return back to duty.” And I [unintelligible 00:20:24].
So I sent a wire in. Next day, indeed, I got a wire back: “Report to Grosse Ile for further assignment.” So I went down there, and no orders on me. And I says—old George [unintelligible 00:20:39], the skipper of the station, old aviation four-striper, and having just been there, you see, with a fighter squadron, he said, “Well, if they give you some silly job while you’re waiting around, let me know and we’ll try to fix you up.” So I went back up to him, I told him, I said, “You know, there are 14 of us in operations all waiting for further assignment, all lieutenant commanders, and I’m the junior one.” He said, “What job’d they give you?” I said, “Officer in charge of snowplows.” [laughter] He said, “For heaven’s sake, just go back to Holland.” He said, “I’ll call you when your orders come in.” He says, “Take basket leave.” So I went back home for another 12 days.
00:21:17
MAH: And he called me and said, “I’ve got an SNJ coming up for you. You’ve got immediate orders, first available air transportation, to the port in which the USS Salamaua, CVE-96—may be as her air officer.” So I came out here, and I joined the Salamaua in Pearl Harbor in Honolulu in, I guess, December of ‘45.
[Overview of World War II service]
JF: These are points after—but I want to ask you a few questions. Just give me the answers, and then we’re going to go on to something else. How many battles did you list, you know, like, for instance, Tarawa? Mainly the campaigns that you’ve been in. 13
MAH: Okay. The invasion of Africa, number one. [unintelligible 00:22:01]. The first raid on Marcus Island, August 31, 1943. The raid on Tarawa—not the raid on Tarawa. You’re right. No, the raid on Wake Island, October 5, 1943. Then the November strikes on Rabaul.
JF: Yeah.
00:22:31
MAH: Then the invasion of Tarawa.
JF: Yeah.
MAH: Then the raid on Kwajalein. Then the occupation of Kwajalein. Then the raid on Truk. Then the raid on Saipan/Tinian. And then we came home.
JF: Then you came home? Well, how did you get back from Japan? You were in Japan for a year. This is after the war?
MAH: Yeah. You want me to continue just a minute on this career thing? I’ll make it hurried, but—
JF: No, because that doesn’t—what I want to know is prior to that. We’ll get to this later.
MAH: Okay.
JF: Because we’re running out of tape. I want to find out how many planes do you have to your credit.
00:23:15
MAH: Eight.
JF: Eight. Start with the first plane.
[Dogfight over Wake Island]
MAH: The first plane over Wake Island, high cover. Jack Kitchen was my wingman. Everybody else was supposed to show up as high cover and corral them, and nobody showed up. Everybody was down below with a big mass, and we’re up—either we were too high or they were too low. I never did find out.
JF: This is with Fighting Nine?
MAH: Yeah. And we get in just prior to the island. 14
EAV: Mike, there were just two of you?
MAH: Yeah.
JF: Would you conduct it from here on out? I want to know about the kills.
EAV: He was flying your close—?
MAH: Close wings, starboard side.
00:23:52
EAV: Were you the—
MAH: We’re looking down here, and we can see Casey Childers in the group and the bombers and whatnot, just see their exhaust flicking away, see, in the predawn stuff. It was just getting light where we are. It’s dark down here. And then the island would start to [unintelligible 00:24:05]. Remember those little floppy, flappy things that looked like they were coming right at you? And it’s getting light, and I’m looking back at Jack. I’m still trying to watch these guys and weave over them down there. We were about 22,000, 24,000. And over here, gee, doggone if it isn’t a P-47, two of them. That’s silly. What are they doing way out here? Well, it can’t be P-47s. It must be SBDs. Well, what are they doing way up here? With the round wingtips? [laughter] Holy smackers! It must be a Zero.
So we started to turn toward them, and they started to turn toward us. All of a sudden, that circle kept getting larger and larger, you know. That red meatball. So I thought, “Oh boy. If I’ve got him, I’ve got him now.” I was way out of range. So far out of range that I was shooting with what I thought was a proper lead on the lead aircraft. I just held that pickle down, and the second plane blew up. [laughter]
JF: The second plane?
EAV: And Jack was flying your wing at this time?
00:25:18
MAH: Yeah. He was wondering what’s going on, see. Shells coming all around him. [laughter] And all of a sudden, here’s a fire in the sky, and this lead plane, he just pulled right on up. It disappeared in the [unintelligible 00:25:31]. But I kind of watched him, and Jack and I are yakking. He’s kind of excited. And I made a big orbit watching this guy go down, and I had just completed a 360 and all hell broke loose. That goddamn [unintelligible 00:25:44], and he was sitting right flat on my ass. Boy, I can hear these 7.7s rattling on the back of this armor plate like popcorn, and there are holes, all of a sudden, coming in the airplane, see, and part of my 15
starboard aileron just literally disappears. The next thing I knew, all the instruments came back in my lap. Whammo.
Well, this plane—this guy had me boresighted. I turned around, and there he sat. I was trying to turn inside. And he just had me cold. I know he [unintelligible 00:26:15]. He just sat there, so I didn’t know whether to hunch up this way or whether to get down behind that three-thirty- second of an inch of aluminum and [laughing/unintelligible 00:26:25]. Big protection, you see. What do you do?
Well, this was—the plane just kept shaking. Boy, he was letting me have it. Then you remember—you might even remember that plane, Gene. He put one 20-millimeter exactly—we measured it—18 inches outboard of the cockpit on the port side of the wing, put one 18 inches outboard of the cockpit in the starboard wing, put one directly ahead of the cockpit that split on the firewall—and part of it made holes in my oil sump and I lost all my oil—and the other came back in. Luckily, it didn’t all land in my lap, but it sheared off enough so it blew out all the instruments, filled my legs full of shrapnel and brass and bits of glass and stuff. Put one right behind the cockpit and knocked out all my radios, knocked off about that much off the top of my rudder, knocked off about that much—
EAV: So about ten inches off the top of your rudder.
00:27:18
MAH: Yeah. Pieces just missing out of that damned airplane like anything, see. And I can’t talk to anybody. In the meantime, I’ve got that nose down. I was trying to get out of there. I didn’t care whether I pulled the wings off or not because I figured he had me. But I never did— somebody was saying, “If you start a turn and a Zero tries to follow you, if you get him committed, you can reverse and he has to continue on.” So I build up as fast as I can go until it got dark, going down towards that water, see. And I started to turn, and I whipped out the other way. And he kept right on going. In the meantime, goddamn Kitchen still’s flying on my wing. [laughter] All this time. Round, round—
JF: He isn’t doing anything?
EAV: [unintelligible 00:28:00]
MAH: I turn around, and here’s Kitchen hanging on there with a big grin on his face. See, I could reach out and hit him on the head, he was so close. For crying out loud. Good lord.
00:28:12
EAV: Mike, wasn’t that the first plane that VF-9 shot down?
MAH: Yeah, it was the first plane. 16
JF: Didn’t Kitchen see the guy behind you?
MAH: He thought this was the biggest show in the world, see.
JF: [unintelligible 00:28:22]
MAH: Sure. He was sitting there watching them.
EAV: He wasn’t going to lose Momma, though.
JF: “I’m your wingman. I’m going to stay with you, baby.” What happened after—
00:28:37
MAH: I had this chunk in this leg. Blood was just squirting all over the place. So we used to carry a little piece of white lanyard, and I cut that off and made a tourniquet on my leg and gave myself a morphine syrette, [unintelligible 00:28:49]. I start thinking all these damn things. And it’s funny how your mind reacts. Like the day I was in the water, what do you think of? Sharks? No, see. “Oh yeah, sharks. Swim, lie still” All right. This day, if I go high, my blood pressure is such that I’m going to bleed faster. If I go low, they can’t pick me up on radar or I can’t hear their ZB. They can’t—I can’t talk to anybody. So what do you do? You give yourself morphine. Does that make you go to sleep? Or would you rather have the pain and breathe oxygen and make your heart beat faster and pump more blood out? I mean, you start trying to rationalize all these things, see.
In the meantime, we’re lost. I’m trying to talk to Kitchen, and I finally realize: no radio. So I pulled out my chartboard and took off that—remember that wheel thing? And if you lifted that up, it was white underneath there. And I take blood, see, and I’d write with my finger and hold this up to Kitchen to read and wipe it off and write him another message.
JF: What were you writing on?
MAH: “Take me home. I’m hurt.”
EAV: This was done in blood?
00:30:03
MAH: Hm-hmm [affirmative]. And so old Jack says, “This way.” Then he starts to climb. Well, I didn’t know this. He was talking to the ship. He broke radio silence and asked them for a steer, and they gave him a heading. Well, first, they asked him to climb so they could pick him up. So he starts climbing. All the time, I’m trying to catch up with him and writing on here, “Don’t go any higher. I’m bleeding too fast.” [laughter] He keeps going up, and I can’t make him stop. To hell with him. So I finally get underneath him, and every place he goes, boy, I stay right 17
with him. Trying to hold this thing in the air. But bless his heart, he got a steer and started for the ship, and I just followed him.
JF: How high were you when you were—
MAH: I don’t have the slightest idea. I don’t think I got much over about 8,000 feet. [unintelligible 00:30:47].
EAV: It was clear weather that day, wasn’t it, Mike?
MAH: Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Good, clear day.
JF: You weren’t really right down on the deck. You were a couple thousand feet.
00:30:54
MAH: Yeah. Well, when we first pulled out, I was as close to the deck as I’d dare get.
JF: When you followed him back to the ship, were on the deck or what?
MAH: About on deck—I’d about 5,000, 6,000 feet. We got back to the ship, and Admiral Duncan [Donald B. Duncan], Captain Duncan then, had turned to—or Admiral Montgomery [Alfred E. Montgomery] had called Captain Duncan and told him to put that plane in the water. This is so the story goes. And they had recovered the whole group. Everybody came back from Wake. And they were going to let me orbit, see. They didn’t want me to pile up the deck. After they got everybody pushed forward, they lined up all the tractors and then they put the barrier up. And Admiral Montgomery said, “Put him in the water.” Captain Duncan, later Admiral Duncan, said, “No. That boy was in the water on the last flight.” See?
JF: Was that the one with the sharks?
MAH: Yeah. “And this time he’s hurt. Bring him on board. At least we’ll give him a shot.” So they gave me the old Charlie signal by blinker. I gave myself another shot of morphine.
JF: Were you hurting bad?
MAH: I thought I was.
JF: Numb?
MAH: I thought I was. It was stinging. Because I had glass all in me and then this big hole here, see, where I had this tourniquet on my leg.
00:32:07
JF: Where was that? On your calf? 18
MAH: The inside of my thigh.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
MAH: But anyway, I made one orbit, and when I came past the ship, they told me that another bit chunk of something fell off as I went past that time. It was fabric or metal or something. In fact, I think it was my port gun cover came loose that time, that ripped off. So I came around again, and there was one fellow [unintelligible 00:32:28], maybe Charlie [unintelligible 00:32:31], who is quite a controversial figure. Some people didn’t appreciate Charlie. Yeah.
EAV: You know Charlie.
JF: Yeah, I knew him. The landing signal officer.
MAH: Yeah. Well, Charlie was back on the platform. And I came around in this circle. I was holding about 800 feet, I remember, because I figured if the engine was going to cut on me, at least I want to be able to square away into the waves [unintelligible 00:32:46]. And I had one wheel down. The left wheel was down, and my right wheel was about a third down.
00:32:57
JF: Couldn’t get it down?
MAH: I had no hydraulics, so I had no flaps. And I had to pull that hook out manually with [unintelligible 00:33:04]. The electric switches were gone. I couldn’t talk to anybody. And the plane was sluggish. I mean, missing all this fabric, see. So I came in real high, and Charlie gave me a cut signal and a tremendous lean. Well, it’s instinct. What do you do? I put that wing over and hit that top rudder as she came in on a skid and landed on that left wheel. The hook caught, and before that plane could swing down, the right wheel came down and locked. And there she sat.
JF: Beautiful.
MAH: Pretty as a picture. And then there I sit, and I’m pushing on the brakes; no brakes, nothing. The pedals just go forward. And she started to roll backwards, you know, that cable take—and I thought, “Oh, of all the stupid things. Now that I finally got on board, now I’m going to go right back—” [overlapping voices/unintelligible 00:33:50]
JF: Slingshot you right back out. Like a slingshot back into the water?
00:33:57 19
MAH: [unintelligible 00:33:59]. But I didn’t even think of that because I was holding my leg and I was so glad to be down. Two guys ran out and chocked the airplane. And they lift me out of the cockpit.
JF: It didn’t sling you back?
MAH: No. It just dragged me back about 10 feet, but I was thinking, “Oh god, I’m going to go right out—”
JF: [laughs] Bow and arrow.
MAH: They put me in a stretcher, hauled me down to sick bay. In the meantime, the plane captain gets in the plane and gives it the gun to taxi forward. And he got right up even with the island, and the prop stopped just like that. There was no more oil in it.
JF: My god, how about that.
MAH: That’s as close as I want to come.
[Other combat missions and stories from the USS Essex (CV-9)]
EAV: Mike, when was the day that McWhorter [Hamilton McWhorter] shot down—I’d like to read this, what Mac said the other day. The fellow that got that one shot, remember? He came up. He said, “Well, there again, Gene, it’s a teamwork aspect. Mike Hadden was leading the division at that time, as you recall, and he chose to distract the tail-gunner while we made a very flat high side.” Do you remember that?
00:34:57
MAH: Yeah.
EAV: Mac sure does.
MAH: It was a Betty, and we caught him on the south of Tarawa. And when we caught him— we were in pretty good position, but the guy was going like mad and he was low on the water.
EAV: Right on the deck.
JF: Was this the raid or the—I mean, was this the invasion of Tarawa?
MAH: Hm-hmm [affirmative], yeah. This was the pre-strikes of the invasion. I think the day before. 20
JF: Was this the first day, second? Because it was D-plus—no, it was D-minus. We started on D-minus-four, I believe. There was four days before we made the—
MAH: I think this was D-minus-four days.
JF: This was the first day of the [united?] strike.
MAH: Well, then we started to make a pass, and this—we kept getting [unintelligible 00:35:34] flatter and flatter, so I waved Mac on ahead to hold up altitude. So we just started on the big easy pass, and we just kept shooting. And then called Mac, and he just came down. And all he did was just touch those guns, and the guy blew up.
00:35:47
EAV: About five shots, wasn’t it?
MAH: Yeah.
JF: Was it a Betty?
EAV: Yeah.
JF: What was he doing? Were you flying air patrol over the—
MAH: Yeah—
EAV: He was a snooper.
JF: Oh.
MAH: He was a snooper out—they sent us out—
JF: Out near the island or were you going snooping?
MAH: About 80 miles out.
EAV: Mike, after Wake, that was a hit-and-run type of affair, too.
00:36:08
MAH: Yeah.
EAV: We didn’t see many planes, as I recall.
MAH: No.
EAV: It was about—who was the boy we lost? 21
MAH: At Wake?
EAV: At Wake, yeah. An Irish name. I was going to say McMahon and McGuinness, but it wasn’t. Impacted right in the runway, strafing.
JF: How many planes—were there many enemy planes around Wake? Many shot down?
EAV: Mike got the only one.
MAH: I was going to say three or four, I think. I’m not so sure. I got the first one, I know. It was there—we just happened to run into their dawn patrol.
JF: What was the second plane? Do you remember the second plane?
MAH: That I got? At Rabaul. I didn’t get anything at Tarawa.
00:37:00
JF: That was at the raid on Tarawa, not the invasion?
MAH: Yeah.
EAV: So that was a day, wasn’t it?
MAH: I didn’t get any on the invasion of Tarawa, either.
JF: Well, there wasn’t anything around there very much. Except on the way up from Palikulo Bay on route, we were attacked a number of times.
MAH: Yeah. At Rabaul, I got a Kate. At least that’s what I think it was. I hope it wasn’t an SBD. [laughter]
JF: Strike that last remark.
00:37:28
MAH: Yeah, no. It was a Kate. We, uh—see, that was a funny one. Casey had the first combat air patrol, and they started him out on a vector. He had one division. I had another division. So they started me out after him, and I’ll never forget this guy, whoever it was, I—maybe I shouldn’t attribute it to Casey, but it was somebody in that division. I said, “Do you have him in sight?” He said, “Jesus Christ, there’s millions of them.” [laughter] And I looked up, and here was this long echelon just peeling over. These were their dive bombers.
JF: The Vals? 22
MAH: Yeah. Well, we couldn’t catch them. Then they, all of a sudden, said there was another raid coming over here from the side. So why get messed up with our own people up here with torpedo planes coming? So we went swooping on down, and sure enough, here came a beautiful fan just starting in. So we jumped them. Well, there was some low-flying scud around, remember, that day. You know, isolated little patches. They’d keep popping out, there’d be something. You didn’t know whether you were shooting at them or six other people were. There were airplanes all over that sky.
JF: Oh yeah. I shot pictures. I was on the search line. I never saw so damn many airplanes in my life.
EAV: From all directions.
[overlapping voices/unintelligible 000:38:37]
MAH: Everybody was shooting in every direction.
00:38:34
JF: So I saw, you know, some of those—our own planes flying by and shooting at anything that was flying by.
EAV: And the ships were shooting at them.
JF: Everybody was shooting at everybody.
MAH: That’s one of the prize stories, was this guy that we—he was a torpedo pilot. And one of the funniest things that ever happened. First, he was shot down—or rather, set on fire by a Jap, and then shot at by our own AA. He landed in the water. And first, he gets strafed by the Japanese. Then he gets strafed by us, by our own planes. And he’s in—he and his two crewmen were in and out of this raft like popcorn, you see. Because every time they’d get in it, somebody takes another pass at them, so over the side they go. So they’d been shot at by Japanese, by U.S., by ships, by aircraft. Finally, a destroyer comes up alongside of them. So they—nobody’s hurt yet, see. So they put the crewman up, and then they put the other crewman up. And this guy says, “Now me,” and he gets on the cargo net. And with that, some joker on the bridge leans over like this, and his iron hat comes down and hits this guy smack on the noggin, cuts his head, knocks the guy into the water. [laughter/unintelligible 00:39:40] They had to jump over the side and— [laughter/unintelligible 00:39:44].
JF: “Now me.” That what it should be called. “Now me.” [unintelligible 00:38:56]
00:40:00
JF: See, but those are wonderful touches. That’s what we’re looking for. 23
EAV: Mike, do you remember that night going out? All the night attacks?
MAH: Oh, geez.
JF: Mike, can you tell me any more stories like that one. I’d love to hear those.
MAH: I can’t tell you many more like that, but I can tell you a couple of jokes, a couple of pranksters—
EAV: Do you remember Brooks, before we leave Rabaul? Remember, he was going to save the ship? He started to dump the depth charges over the side?
MAH: Yeah.
JF: Oh yeah.
EAV: The Admiral thought he was torpedoed. [laughter] He thought he was saving the ship and dumping them off the number two ladder. [laughter/unintelligible 00:40:31] Leonard Brooks, I’ll never forget that.
MAH: Oh dear. But you know, the hilarious moments. I have one picture that shows a bunch of fellows in my stateroom who have just been presented with—perhaps, I think there are maybe five guys there—presented with about 12 Air Medals and a couple of DFCS. And a big, muscular friend of mine is sitting on my bunk, and he’s got three Air Medals pinned to his fly. [laughter]
EAV: We are fighting sons of—
MAH: And then, see, we roomed right next door—Charlie Moutenot and I roomed right next door to Bill Bonneau and Gene. They were—we were in 201, and they were in 203.
00:41:22
EAV: Now, wait a minute, Mike. The reason you were there was to watch the hatch to the liquor.
JF: You were in 201, 203, and that was, what? That was on the port side, wasn’t it?
MAH: Starboard side.
JF: Starboard side. Well, then I was on the other side because I used to walk around the showerhead to get to Gene’s room.
MAH: Well, these characters, you know, there were always having those goddamn midnight snacks. I could never figure out why our room smelled so damn bad until we found out they were 24
stashing all their empty sardine cans in our ventilator. They were blowing right in on my bunk. [laughter] So that’s when we got a hold—that’s when I got old [Carney Junkers?] to give us some Limburger cheese, and we put it on the backs of their fan blades. The more it smelled, the faster they made the fan blow, and the faster the fan went, the less they could see it. [laughter]
00:42:04
JF: Oh, that’s beautiful.
EAV: Mike, when did you get your next plane?
MAH: Was it you or was it Bill Bonneau who put the flash bulb over the wash base? I guess Bill did that to you, didn’t he?
EAV: Yeah.
MAH: Gene got up to shave, and he stumbled around the room, you know, and he’s—
EAV: This is dark, pre-dawn.
MAH: He turns on the light, and he was blind for two hours. The flash bulb went off in his eyes.
JF: Was there much involved in getting that Kate?
MAH: No.
JF: It was what? It was a seaplane, wasn’t it?
00:42:37
MAH: No. It was a torpedo plane. Fixed landing gear. I think it had fixed landing gear.
EAV: No. [unintelligible 00:42:43].
MAH: [unintelligible 00:42:42]. But it had that long, green—
EAV: Long, green [unintelligible 00:42:44].
MAH: No, it just a question of flying around, and all of a sudden, there was one in front of you. And you shoot and he catches on fire and you’re gone.
JF: Who was flying wing?
MAH: But again, Kitchen was flying wing with me that day.
JF: Was he your division—with you? Or is this every man for himself? 25
MAH: This was about the time everybody was—
JF: Everybody split up. Well, what do you do in a situation like that? Now, I looked up in the air, and I saw everybody firing—how do you stay out of each other’s way, is what I could never figure out.
00:43:19
MAH: I don’t know. Jack Kitchen—
EAV: I think I joined up on Mike because when, as Mike said, someone said, “Here they come. There must be a million of the bastards,” I just came up from the number two elevator. The ship started to turn. Jesus, I just gave it the gun to get the hell off the ship.
JF: Yeah.
EAV: But everybody, as you said, everyone was for themselves. But they had a—
JF: They were going this way, this way. When that long line peeled off, were you up on top there?
MAH: Yeah.
JF: I was on that afterdeck with some guy—Cookie. Some guy called Cookie was—
EAV: Yeah, he was—
00:43:49
JF: He was a photography officer or signal officer. And we were up on the searchlight platform, and I look up and I said, “What are those planes coming down?” You know, a whole string of them coming down, you know. And pretty soon, he said, “I don’t know. Some of our boys flying air cover.” And then you could see the little things leaving the bottom of the ship [laughing/unintelligible 00:44:05]. And then I says, “Well, boy, they don’t think we’re very friendly, you know.” And with that, they just bracketed the ship, the Vals.
EAV: We were lucky.
JF: And we were luckier than hell. That whole lot came down and made a pass at the Essex and not one of them hit.
EAV: Especially that close, we would have been put out of commission.
JF: One of them came close and could have—the ass end kind of lifted out of the water a little bit. 26
MAH: Well, I was surprised where we were initially. Now, when I look back and I saw the ships maneuvering, and I can—through my mind’s eye today, I can see this white wake and intertwining of the three carriers, [laughing/unintelligible 00:44:45]. How come they didn’t hit each other, I’ll never know. They could have wrapped up two of them if they had ran into each other.
JF: I don’t know. Because had they coordinated their attack—because no sooner than these guys get through, we looked up and on the starboard side came the Betties, a whole pisspot full of them. And I said—and I looked at Cook and I said, “Who are these?” You know? Because I want—you know, I want to shoot pictures of the enemy. I was shooting pictures all over the goddamn place, as far as that goes. And then I went forward. This thing lasted a couple of hours, if I remember right. I went forward, and there was this English officer. No one can remember his name.
00:45:22
EAV: Who was it, Mike?
JF: The Englishman who was assigned to us. He was always on Montgomery’s bridge.
MAH: Yeah. He had been at Kinley Field with us. He was before the [unintelligible 00:45:32]—not years before, but I mean, when we were in the Ranger. He had something to do there. Oh dear. I can see him.
JF: I can see the guy, too. I can’t remember his goddamn name. Well, it doesn’t make any difference. Tell us about yourself more than anything else.
00:45:51
MAH: Well, you know—
JF: What was your third or fourth plane?
MAH: [overlapping] Before that, on the way home from Rabaul, after that raid up there that morning, you know? That’s when I missed the most beautiful shot of all. Here we are. We’re flying wing—[unintelligible 00:46:01] SBDs. They’re humping it for home as fast as they can go, and I’ve forgotten who was with me. We were over here on the starboard side, and another section was right here on the left-hand side. And I looked up, and here was a plane coming to join up on us, right smack dead ahead. And he came, and so I moved over a little bit, so he had a little easier chance to—and he just kept coming, and I looked up. I watched him. And then he came and he then came and he got right up here, and there were the two reddest meatballs you’ve ever seen in your life. And I can just them hanging there. And I looked and I tried to turn around and he was gone. Boy, he—[unintelligible 00:46:40] 27
EAV: He was a happy boy.
MAH: But a beautiful shot.
JF: He said—
[overlapping voices/unintelligible 00:46:32]
MAH: But what a beautiful shot. And he could have hit me; I could have hit him. Neither one of us. Both of us stupid. Yeah, he should have known this was a big formation going. But he didn’t go more than 300 feet over my head. I kicked myself all the way back to the ship.
JF: You should have pulled out your pistol and shot him.
MAH: Pitiful. Just pitiful
00:47:02
[More aerial victories]
JF: What are the most planes you got? I mean, in any particular—
MAH: I got three at Saipan.
JF: In one strike or—
MAH: Yeah. On one flight.
EAV: Yeah. Your division was the only one to get any.
MAH: Yeah. We got—
EAV: How did you find them, Mike?
MAH: We got six of them.
EAV: Oh.
00:47:19
JF: What day of the strike was this? Was it the first day? Now, tell us the story from the beginning. Saipan—
MAH: Yeah. Well, we had taken off and—
JF: First day? 28
MAH: Yeah. And again, high cover with a group going in. And there were high cumulus clouds. We were kind of weaving in and out of the clouds. And all of a sudden, over here was a Zero—or a Val, going down in a long—like a screaming dive, but he was enough of a 45, 90- degree angle, so we just pushed over and cut over toward him. And I fired way out of range, but all of a sudden he started to smoke like mad and just kept right on [unintelligible 00:48:06]. Then we got on down—Pat Cohan [possibly meant “George Cohan”] went down to chase him. I called him. I said, “He’s gone. He’s dead.” And he was. He had tucked under and was coming back this way. And damn Pat broke off and followed him all the way down. And I didn’t see Pat again until we got back to the ship. He had ran off and left us. I was mad.
JF: You didn’t see him until you got back to the ship?
00:48:31
MAH: Yeah. He never did join up again. So I had Les DeCew as—
JF: Was he flying wing on you or was your division—
MAH: He was the flying second section. But then we came around down at the southern end of Tinian—or the northern end of Tinian. And there was a black, triangular field. Remember that field in there?
EAV: They had this [unintelligible 00:48:54] antiaircraft—
MAH: Right. Well, low on the water, making for that field, I caught a guy about, oh, six or seven miles off the beach. But this time, having made that one pass at this guy, we had lost all our altitude. We were down maybe about 6,000 feet, see, trying to climb back up. And here was a guy making for the field. So I got him before he got back, just by—that was a flat tail chase. I had no more business going down there to save my soul, but he was headed for the beach and I was determined he wasn’t going to make it. He didn’t even bother to turn around and look, I don’t think. [unintelligible 00:49:26] trying to outrun me, and he didn’t make it because I had the altitude advantage and speed advantage. Now, just before we were ready to go home, and we were trying to round everybody up, and I was going back up to Saipan, outboard of the island, and all of a sudden, pop! Out of the clouds, here comes a little Hap. So I managed to set him on fire.
JF: Was anybody flying alongside?
00:49:53
MAH: I don’t know who was with me then. Kitchen again, I think.
JF: Did he follow you all the way? [laughter] 29
MAH: Kitchen, bless his little heart. Old happy Jack. Yeah.
EAV: Just happy to be in your wing.
JF: Didn’t want to shoot anybody.
MAH: The most thrilling one, though—no, that’s right. That third one, the one that popped out, that was at Truk. But the most thrilling one was at Saipan. Flying around these clouds, and all of a sudden, in a tight turn, here came a Zero. And we were going absolutely head-on, and I mean absolutely head-on, and I often wondered how long I could have gone without going chicken. Because we were both shooting—I could see the winks on his leading edge, and the thing on mine was just jump, jump, jump. You know how it is: chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck. And it was just a question of who is going to give way first, and I was just ready to put that stick over when, all of a sudden, he blew up going to the right—going his left. And just this ball of fire went through, and he just—it looked like my wing was going to go. But he just went sailing— this great big—here was an airplane—first, it was a nose with a little thin wing and red lights on it. And then it was a wing like such with a fire starting. And by the time it got to me, it was just one ball of fire, just a ball of fire going past.
JF: I supposed that was recorded on your gun cameras?
00:51:23
MAH: Yeah. And this shot, I’m almost convinced—
JF: Did you see it?
MAH: I’ve seen this in The Fighting Lady, a head-on shot. Either in The Fighting Lady or The Fighting Lady’s Family. But a head-on shot with a plane blowing up and rolling to the right, and I swear that’s that shot.
EAV: You see, we had all-color film. And as soon as we’d land, they’d take the damn film out of our gun cameras and put in the refrigerator and chill—
JF: Didn’t they develop any of the film?
MAH: No. We didn’t have the capability.
EAV: We had color.
JF: Oh, that’s right. Did you ever see any of your—do you have any film of any of your—
MAH: I saw one of mine and Jack Kitchen’s, that first morning raid on Wake. We got that one back. 30
00:52:05
JF: You got a copy of it?
MAH: Yeah. And Jack had—he had—
JF: In your household effects?
MAH: No. I don’t have a copy of it.
JF: Oh.
MAH: No. This is all Navy stuff. We weren’t allowed to steal that stuff. I wish I could have stolen it, goddamn it.
JF: How can you—we can request it, for sure? How can we—does it have the name of the pilot?
MAH: It should have because we used to hold up our board in front of the gun camera.
EAV: Yeah.
MAH: It’d be Smilin’ Jack or myself.
JF: Yeah? Before you took off?
00:52:33
MAH: Yeah. You’d expose maybe two or three frames holding your sign up, see.
EAV: In some cases, the aircraft companies have better film libraries than the Navy.
JF: And evidently, the Grumman people would have a hell of a—
[overlapping voices/unintelligible 00:52:45]
MAH: But there’s one of Jack Kitchen’s. I never did see my own. But this one was clearly identified as Jack. It shows him standing in front of the plane looking in his own gun camera. And then the next—then there’s little blanks, see, and then it shows his shot. That airplane is no bigger than that. Talk about out of range. [laughter] I think we were both so goddamn so far out of range, we had no business getting that guy. We must have been, oh, heavens to Betsy, three miles from him when we started to shoot.
JF: Was he firing, too?
MAH: Yeah. He fired, too. But in the gun camera frame— 31
00:53:29
JF: Was this—
MAH: This is funny for me to say. I shouldn’t say this, but as I remember it now—you know, it had a crosshair on that thing.
JF: Yeah.
MAH: This little airplane flying across the top up here some place. [laughter] Jack should never have exposed that film.
JF: Well, he was firing, too. Is that how could you tell the difference of who got the plane?
MAH: That’s what I maintained, although Jack claims I shot him down. He’s just—I guess the guy caught fire, actually, before Jack started to shoot at him, or maybe he caught fire later. I don’t know. This little tiny airplane that’s so far away in his film. Those things were awfully small.
JF: How did you feel when you got your fifth plane? Now you know you’re an ace.
MAH: Well, see, actually, I only got one and one and three and three.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
00:54:22
MAH: And I didn’t even realize it.
EAV: Where’d you get the other three, Mike? Truk?
MAH: I got three at Truk. [unintelligible 00:54:31]. That day, that was a hairy one.
JF: Tell us about the day at Truk that you were [unintelligible 00:54:35].
MAH: Well, when we were first flying in, they were there, too. All of us in the airplanes all over the sky, but we were [unintelligible 00:54:40]. And I remember right over here, we had a fellow with a German name, [unintelligible 00:54:47] or something like that? [unintelligible 00:54:40]. And I remember the F6F blowing up over here, right parallel with me about.
EAV: [unintelligible 00:54:55]
MAH: Something like that. There was one of our F6s shot down [unintelligible 00:55:00].
EAV: Is that right?
00:55:06 32
MAH: I saw it happen. I don’t know who the other F6 was. It wasn’t from our squadron, but they shot him down.
EAV: The Japs were waiting for us that day.
JF: Oh, they were?
MAH: We went in, and they came in from high up in the clouds and started [unintelligible 00:55:19]. But then we got kind of split up, and I remember following two SBDs going in and two Zeros coming in on them. And I was one behind the Zeros, and these two SBDs caught an ammunition ship. And that was the greatest explosion I have ever seen in my life. This looked like a phosphorescent bomb going off, all different directions, you know, all these little tentacles going off. Oh, what an explosion that was.
And I got one of those Zeros on that and then—I don’t know who got the other one or where it went or anything else. And we swung around, and we were coming back, got one at the end of that airfield that was on the north side of the lagoon there. I got one there. I had got one before the two Zeros off the SBDs. That was my first one in. I was high. Then the one off the SBDs, then the one off the end of the airfield. Then I thought, “Geez, this is the better part of valor. I’m getting out of here fast.” I started to climb and looked back, and there was one lone F6F going back and forth, up and down this airstrip. Here’s old Chick Smith [Armistead B. “Chick” Smith] down there, going back and forth, daring somebody to come out and play with him. [laughter]
00:56:34
MAH: So I finally get Chick to come and join up on me, and we—now, at this time, quite a bit of time has elapsed through all this. Everybody’s gone. Nobody’s around. So I finally took that five lone fighters—were you in that group?
EAV: I think I was.
MAH: And we start back to the ship. No ships, no nothing. So I go out. I break radio silence, about a medium frequency. “This is Mike calling Scarlet Base,” or whatever I called—Opal Base, I think it was. “This is Mike calling Opal Base.” Nobody. Finally, they come up and it’s Golden Base who gives us a call. And all this time, we’re leaning out. Chick calls me, and he’s— ”I’m out. Tanks are empty.” Somebody else, “Tanks are empty.” Well, we get over and here’s the Bunker Hill. I’m sure it was the Bunker Hill. And two battleships, the Iowa and the North Carolina, I guess, or the Wisconsin or the North Carolina. And several destroyers. So I told this—“Did you want us to go in with you?” This is old Smith. “Is somebody going with you or do you want to go in by yourself?”
JF: This is Chick? 33
MAH: Yeah. He says, “If I can make it, I’ll get there.” I said, “Okay. Well, we’ll be ready. If you go in, we’re all going to hang together.” Because none of us—there’s no sense in scattering out across the ocean. And this is when we kind of popped out through this stuff, and here sat these battleships. So Chick went in. He went in alongside the North Carolina, I guess it was. One of them.
EAV: I wasn’t with you.
00:57:39
MAH: And they pulled him out and had him on board. And then Hal Vita went in. And then, all of a sudden, here on the horizon are two carriers, and Stan…Kenton? His first name was Stan. We lost him later. He spun in on takeoff following me off [unintelligible 00:58:24].
JF: Mike, I can’t recall.
MAH: He was my new wingman. But anyway, we came in and—both of us, there were—out of the five, there were three planes left. Two had gone in the water, but within our own task force. So I wave Stan over, and we both make this long, straight-in approach. He landed on the Intrepid, and I landed on the Essex. And the funny thing is, he thought he was on the Essex, too, see. And he gets taxied up, and here’s some guy who’s giving him signals with a great big beard. He said, “Who the hell is this? What ship am I on? Russian?” [laughter] They gassed him up, let him fly off that night, and come home again. The other guy followed me in on the Essex. They laugh—old Charlie [unintelligible 00:59:16] got hold of him on the squawk box or something. And he says, “You were a little long on that approach.” I go, “Well, Charlie, how long was it?” He says, “210 miles.” [laughter] Went straight in, and we never did change course.
EAV: So, Mike, as a matter of interest, did you ever read Baa Baa Black Sheep?
MAH: No, I never did, but I ran into Pappy—
JF: Boyington?
00:59:41
MAH: …a year ago at the Tailhookers.
EAV: He was on Truk en route from Rabaul to Japan when we attacked.
MAH: Is that right?
EAV: He was—well, he can give you a—in fact, there’s good account in his book. The first carrier attack in— 34
MAH: Old Pappy was loaded to the eyeballs there in Las Vegas. We were at a crap table together, and then we were playing 21 together. And he was telling me a lot of this stuff. He was schnockered. The first time I had seen him in—I don’t know where he is now. Is he still around?
[Squadron mates lost during carrier takeoffs]
JF: Mike, during any of the flights to—on a strike, now, or returning, did you ever think of Lori? Were there any personal thoughts that come skipping through your mind, or was it too nerve-racking?
MAH: I don’t know. I don’t think you look at it that way. I think that the saddest thing is when you take off on a predawn flight and you’re climbing up to altitude and you look back and there’s a fire on the water, either in front of or alongside of the carrier. Because you would wonder who it is.
01:00:56
MAH: And you make your—when you take off that way, you join up in order. And then when it gets light, you reshuffle. So all you know is that you have a wingman on your port, and you get two wingmen on your starboard. In other words, you’ve got a section or division, see. So you’re flying along, “Gee, I got four planes.” It wasn’t of yours. The last outfit winds up with three, if you’re flying a four-plane division, or if everybody gets off. But you’ve still got that fire on the water. Then, as it gets light, and maybe this guy is supposed to be a wingman in the next division, he’ll peel off and jockey back. This guy will peel off maybe and come up and take this position. And this guy might fly all the way back and get in his rightful place. And then maybe you’ve only get three. I lost two wingmen that way.
JF: On takeoff?
MAH: Both of them on takeoff. This was in the old—the Night Bat Team days. I don’t know how I got dabbed for it, but—
EAV: That was a—now, this was a—
JF: Now, that’s interesting. Now, that very—that’s a very gripping, dramatic thing. You wake up at dawn to find out who you lost and then the shuffling of the planes—
MAH: And you recognize the numbers.
JF: It’s like playing Russian roulette. The fire on the water means, what? Plane that flipped in on takeoff? A lot of gasoline? 35
EAV: Do you remember—
01:02:17
[End Side A]
[Begin Side B]
00:00:00
MAH: …radar on these TBMs, see—TBFs. And theoretically, the system was, we took one section of fighters—like one division, actually. Two sections. And two torpedo plane. And as Gene says, we went down to Maui, and the outfit was headed up by Butch O’Hare. This was—
EAV: Well, Mike, if I might interrupt. Could you go back a bit, retrogress? It’s just the need of this. Do you remember the afternoon in Kwajalein? Where all the ships—the airplanes were on. We could do nothing. The Betties were flying back and forth.
MAH: And all we could do is sit there and watch them going back and forth.
EAV: But this was desperation.
MAH: [faint/unintelligible 00:00:39]
00:00:39
JF: You did what?
EAV: They killed a lot of these guys.
JF: Oh, the—
MAH: [unintelligible 00:00:43]—I had just mentioned the squadron in the hangar. And a Coca-Cola truck rolls up, and a guy started filling the Coca-Cola machine there in that hangar. And he looked so goddamn familiar to me with his big lard butt, see, and the small shoulders. I said to [Junker?], who this guy was. I knew I knew him from some place. Suddenly, he turns around, and he says, “You the squadron commander here?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “How about giving me a job?” Push Rod Martin.
EAV: I’ll be darned.
JF: Who was Push Rod? A pilot?
EAV: Yeah. Always having trouble with the push rods. [unintelligible 00:01:17]— 36
MAH: He would miss have his flights. But why? Another push rod.
[Night fighter training and missions]
JF: What motivated you to get into the Bat Wing then?
00:01:30
MAH: Oh, I don’t know. It was—I think we had had our share of being scared at Tarawa. Remember, we had the Independence on our starboard quarter, and she caught that fish?
JF: Yeah.
MAH: At Kwajalein, we had the Lexington on our starboard quarter; she caught that fish. And we had no planes in the air. We had to just sit there. And I remember myself hiding under Tilly with the Betties running overhead and watching all the fireworks and then hide up against the island again.
EAV: Oh, John, you should well recall our run-out from Rabaul.
JF: Oh yeah.
EAV: We couldn’t do anything.
JF: I know that. We were sitting there—I was there when the Independence went up. That’s true—
MAH: So there was a question of, what is a solution? Well, Butch O’Hare got the idea, and he figured that if they could utilize fighter direction teams—we were day fighter direction teams— utilize them at night, but have some way of localizing so you could find a plane at night, maybe the fighters could then do some good. But we had no radar.
00:02:29
MAH: We knew that night fighter teams were being formed, VF-175 and VF-176. Two squadrons being formed in the States, but we hadn’t had any word on it yet, when were they coming out. So they took Air Group 3, Air Group 6, Air Group 8, and Air Group 9, all sent volunteers down to Maui at Pu’unene. And they gave us a couple of lectures. We lived in a couple of old barracks buildings down there. We flew every bloody night for about ten nights, and I mean every night. And there was no moon. It was blacker than the ace of spades. And we’d make a section takeoff. It was a TBF and an F6F on either side of it. And the TBF had flame dampeners on—[unintelligible 00:03:12]. She had to take off in formation. We’d never find the guy otherwise. And no lights. Takeoff and fly this three-plane section, and the fighter direction 37
officer would yank everybody around. And he was flying the bogey, and they were using an A- 20 or something like that as the target, see. And he’d vector this triangle. Well, you get it astern and below the target plane, and then he’d just close. It was just a plain tail chase. We’d close in.
Now, theoretically, the TBM was supposed to able to pick up this target about 4,000 yards. See, that’s only two miles. And theoretically, further, at 400 yards, it would fade off his target because he was too close. So he would really continue to close, and by the time he could pick it up—when he could pick it up, he would tell fighter-direction control. And then he would take over [unintelligible 00:04:06] tail chase. Just keep this thing centered in the scope until it faded off.
00:04:12
MAH: When it faded off, he would hit his light switch twice and send—[imitating Morse code] dit-dit, dit-dit: “I, I.” And that meant we were to drop down 30 feet, pour the coal, charge ahead, and try to pick this guy up by his exhaust fire and start shooting. Well, we never did any shooting, but we used to scare the pee out of each other. [laughter] You had to fly close enough so that even on the blackest night—he had plane dampeners, but we didn’t. So you had that ghostly blue exhaust.
JF: Yeah.
MAH: And that would reflect on the white star on his fuselage.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
MAH: So you had to stay in close enough so you could watch that white star. And you had to rely on his instruments. You never knew whether you were flying upside down, sideways. You couldn’t take time to watch your own instruments because you couldn’t take your eyes off his star.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
00:05:00
MAH: And you’d fly for an hour and a half that way.
JF: Jesus Christ.
EAV: To me, it’s—
MAH: And then when his lights would flicker, then it was all ahead and [unintelligible 00:05:09]. And then you’d have to go on your instruments. Well, they had the four of us. I wish I could think of those other two kids’ names. One of them was George— 38
EAV: Blair?
MAH: No. See, we had George Smith, George Young—George Young? Maybe that was it. I don’t know. George Blair. There were three Georges. Well, anyway, Push Rod Martin was leading my second section. These other two guys—Stan was one wingman and George was the other one. And we put up with this thing for ten days, and then they’d send us back to our current units. And the head of the fighters was Butch O’Hare, and the head of the torpedo planes was John Phillips. John was skipper of VT-6, I think, and Butch was the skipper of VF-6—or maybe it was VF-3 and VT-3. But they were in the same air group.
00:06:05
MAH: And so then we went back to our squadrons. The very next raid out, that’s when Butch O’Hare got into a plane at 2 p.m.—and Butch O’Hare [unintelligible 06:14]. And they tried this in actuality against the Japanese. And this is also in the old film Fighting Lady when they were vectored over and followed this bogey, and the fighter-direction officer had three blips— actually, he had four, initially. Three in formation and then the one. And after this melee, there were only two blips. And the torpedo plane and the JG came home. Butch O’Hare never did. The next night, they tried it again with two other fighters, and John Phillips, again, flying the TBF. And that night, John Phillips didn’t—but they know that John Phillips did shoot down a plane with his TBF. Because they watched the blip disappear ahead of him and he reported it: tally-ho and a splash. And then somebody shot him. And it must have been one of the F6s.
EAV: It was a desperation effort.
MAH: So that’s when we knocked it off. Now, a week later, when we got to Pearl, we took a fighter squadron on board. The squadron commander was Admiral [unintelligible 00:07:20].
JF: You never flew a mission on that—
EAV: [unintelligible 00:07:26]
MAH: I never did fly a mission on that thing. And we sat in the ready room for an entire cruise. We had the night watch. The four of us would sit there and we’d get in that round table poker game and play as long as anybody wanted to play. And guys would get up early in the morning and would play with us. But there we’d sit. In the daytime, we were allowed to go to bed.
0:07:49
MAH: But we didn’t fly in the daytime. We went for about eight or nine days. Then we get down there. We’re going to make a predawn strike on Kwajalein. And so I’m leading the division, and Stan was one wingman of mine. Now, he hasn’t flown, see, in about—all this time, 39
we’d been sitting in the ready room. [unintelligible 00:08:12] take off, no sweat. It was what we were trained to do now. Damned if he didn’t spin-in. The next morning, the next guy—the other guy spins in. Both of them.
JF: Any reason?
MAH: No. We never know in these operational losses. Spun off the bow on takeoff. I think it was from lack of flying.
JF: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
MAH: But a guy can’t sit in the ready room and then expect him right out—you know, for a period of time, without flying any combat air patrol or keeping your hand in. But we lost both of them. Too bad.
[Thoughts on training, instinct, and personal initiative]
JF: Was it more or less—it sounds like everything is, more or less, a complete surprise when you’re trained—and we’re talking about the competitive spirit and being at the right place at the right time and everything. So when you do run into a bogey or whatever, it’s all by instinct then, isn’t it?
00:09:13
MAH: Well, this is the result of training. Like the day that Charlie [unintelligible 00:09:16] brought me aboard with no brakes, no flaps, and this tremendous slant signal. It wasn’t mine to reason why that he’d want me to slant. Charlie gave me a slant, and I automatically put it over. When you drive today and you come to a stop sign, you don’t say to yourself, “Let’s see. This car has an automatic clutch. All I have to do is put on the brakes, so I’ll put on the brake now.” You see that red light—you see that crossing light, and without you even thinking about it, your foot’s on the brake and you’ve slowed and you’ve never given it a conscious thought.
JF: That’s right. So an instinct takes over.
MAH: It’s instinct, and it’s a subconscious trained reaction. Now, there are instances where you can get in a dogfight, if you will use that term. Sure, then it’s strategy. Then it’s tactics. Then it’s brain power. Now, you’ve got the human factor. But in a melee, it’s instinct.
JF: And then what—
MAH: A general melee or a general fracas, it’s just plain instinct. Turn, turn, look. Your head’s on a swivel. 40
00:10:16
JF: It’s like, for instance, you said a moment ago, which was very interesting, that when this guy was chopping you into ribbons, someplace you had heard or read or whatever, if you had made a port turn—
MAH: Get him to commit himself.
JF: Yeah. Get him to commit himself and then [unintelligible 00:10:32].
MAH: Go the other way and he wouldn’t be able to unlock, and he couldn’t.
JF: And this is what basically happened.
MAH: I don’t know where I picked it up from.
JF: I suppose having a retentive memory helps quite a bit, too, doesn’t it? In a case like that? [laughs] You don’t have a retentive memory, you’re kind of duck soup.
MAH: That’s why today it’s—I’ll be most honest. These kids that fly these jets today out here at sea, they fascinate me. These kids that fly these S2Fs—not a fast airplane, 160, 170 miles an hour. They fascinate me. I am not arithmetically agile enough to keep up with these kids today. They’re running dials and listening to Julie patterns and flying on sonar and playing on radars and figuring their gas in pounds. I still figure in gallons. Holy smackers, I can figure that. But they are. They’re veritable engineers. They are. They’re crackerjacks.
00:11:27
JF: And everything they do is by instinct, too, isn’t it?
MAH: Some of them get a lot more—
JF: To tie up everything, then, you’d have to say—you mean—you tie up whatever—the way you want to tie up. We talked about being at the right place at the right time and we talked about competitiveness and now instinct also enters into it.
MAH: Well, I—
JF: Just give us a general tie up of the whole thing.
MAH: Okay. Well, remember, at the beginning of the war, people said the Japanese were going to make lousy pilots because they all had myopia and this kind of stuff, which is bound to be [unintelligible 00:12:03]. We’ve also claimed for years that American boys would be easier to train because they have a natural mechanical ability. And this is easy to see because we’ve all worked on automobiles when we were kids—or someplace in our formative years. 41
00:12:20
MAH: We’ve all learned how to drive. When I say all, I mean 99%. And yet you take a country like Turkey, Indonesia, China, how many cars do they got per capita? The vast majority of their people have never seen an automobile, let alone ride in one, see. And very, very few have ever driven one. And yet, basically, those people turn out to be pretty damn good pilots, given a chance. We still have an edge, though, because we’re mechanically inclined. We also are competitively inclined to [unintelligible 00:12:54]. They go in for group gymnastics and this sort of thing. This is one thing. We go in more for the competitive type of sport: baseball, football, soccer. They go in for doing pushups and right arm, left arm, weightlifting. So there, you have a natural inclination. You’ve got a natural aptitude. I think you’ve got a higher intelligence. Again, because we’re inclined toward this. We’ve been exposed to them, through our press, through ours magazines. Kids now—
JF: Now, you’re saying higher intelligence because they’re more naturally adaptable and can accept—
MAH: Right, yeah.
JF: Why you talked about these young kids today.
00:13:48
MAH: But we also make our own good fortune, in many respects. Like I said earlier, and I think that being at the right place at the right time, sometimes we create that by getting there in the right place at the right time. I don’t know. To wrap up, I think the American tends to try to do the best job he can in any one endeavor, primarily because he isn’t told that he has to do it. You know what I mean? It’s not a totalitarian or regimen where he, like everybody, has to keep in step during this thing and this thing. [unintelligible 00:14:33]. But we tell him to do it. We don’t tell him how to do it.
JF: Well, that’s typically the Japanese. You’ve got to tell them exactly how to do it. And they’ll do it, and they’ll do it excellently.
MAH: Right.
JF: But no personal initiative.
MAH: But they will only go so far, and then they turn around and say, “Where do I do next?”
JF: Yeah.
MAH: Whereas the American will do something, even if he has to undo what he did, see. 42
JF: [laughs] Even if he’s a meathead, he’s doing something.
MAH: But at least he’s doing something.
JF: Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting analogy.
EAV: Mike, I know you’ve got a schedule here and mast.
MAH: Yeah. I’ve got to get out—
JF: Sociologically, you say we have an edge, though, in a number of departments then, right?
MAH: I think we do.
EAV: Mike, there’s a few things. I know we’re—
00:15:18
[End Side B]
[END OF INTERVIEW]