‘‘Admiral Derr mentioned it last night. I didn’t say anything to him, of course, but I wondered if it might not be a good idea to apply for that duty. It’s obviously important, and you could pick up a lot of hours.’’

‘‘Eddie, if there’s any job worse than sitting in a Kaydet teaching dummies to fly, it’s in a Catalina, flying endless circles over the ocean.’’

‘‘It’s something to think about,’’ Bitter said.

‘‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance the weather is going to keep us on the deck?’’ Canidy asked. ‘‘I could use another day in Washington.’’

‘‘Not a chance. I checked before I went to bed. Cloudless skies for the foreseeable future.’’

‘‘Shit,’’ Canidy said.

Officers might swear, Bitter thought, but they should abstain from vulgarity.

When they were dressed, they left the BOQ and walked across the base to the officers’ mess, where they had breakfast. Then they returned to the BOQ, picked up their luggage, and went to Base Operations.

The glory of their selection to buzz the Naval Academy graduation was over. As soon as they could hitch a ride, which might take all day, they had to go back to Pensacola, where they could count on spending many long hours in the backseat of a Kaydet, the slowest airplane in the Navy.

TWO

Pensacola Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida 0615 Hours 8 June 1941

Bitter and Canidy, in Bitter’s month-old 1940 dark green Buick Roadmaster convertible, drove across the pleasant, almost luxurious tropical base to the Mediterranean-style officers’ club. There they had breakfast.

They had been back a day and a half, doing hardly anything but waiting to see the deputy commander so he could vicariously experience their triumph in buzzing Annapolis. But today it was back to work, and with a vengeance, Canidy thought: a long cross-country training flight.

Canidy ate an enormous breakfast, and then, in the men’s room, read the Pensacola Journal cover to cover, while he got rid of as much liquid and bulk as he could. There were no toilets in Kaydets; and despite the many hours he had in them, he had not yet mastered the relief tube.

Finally, they drove to the airfield, where two ensigns, already in gray flight suits, were waiting for them at Student Operations. The students followed them into the locker room, and reported on the flight plan they had laid out as Bitter and Canidy changed into their flight suits. The two instructor pilots carefully folded their green uniforms and put them into canvas flight bags. While the odds against something going wrong on their cross-country training flight were remote, if they did have to spend the night someplace they would need uniforms. Naval officers could not go into public wearing gray cotton overalls.

They picked up their parachutes, then were driven out onto the flight line in a Ford panel truck. Dick and Ed jammed into the front seat with the sailor driver. The student pilots and the parachutes rode in the back.

The cross-country flight (Pensacola-Valdosta-Montgomery- Mobile-Pensacola) they were about to make was the last training flight of the primary flight training program. Their students already knew how to fly, and when this flight was completed would be awarded naval aviator’s wings and sent to advanced flight training. Ed Bitter and Dick Canidy would t

hen start the whole process all over again, with four new officer students.

Teaching fledglings how to fly was hard work and not very much fun. They both would have preferred other duty. But—for different personal reasons—both were aware that instructor pilot duty was better for them than an assignment to a fighter squadron or to an attack torpedo squadron aboard a carrier or to observation planes catapulted from a battleship would have been.

Ed Bitter believed that duty as an IP meant several things. First, that the Navy recognized he was a better pilot than most pilots. Second, that demonstrating the leadership characteristics IPs had to have to be successful would enhance his career (a tour as an IP was considered a prerequisite to command of a squadron). He also believed that the primary duty of a commanding officer was not so much to command, to issue orders, but to teach.

The main things that instructors did was fly. Aviators assigned to regular squadrons were lucky if they got forty hours in the air in a month. That was two hours a day, five days a week. Instructor pilots often flew three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. In a two-year tour as an IP, Dick Canidy expected to acquire very likely more than three times the hours he would have had he been sent to an operational squadron. Aeronautical engineers with a lot of flight time were paid more money than those who had less, or who couldn’t fly at all.

The world looked a lot different today than it had in 1938 when he’d graduated from MIT. The only worry he had had then was putting in his four years’ service. The world had been at peace then, but now that world had changed. France had fallen. Japan was fighting China. Young men his age were flying Spitfires against Messerschmitts over England. Still he refused to think about what he would do if, in June 1942, the Navy would not discharge him.

Advanced flight training was conducted in North American SNJ-2 Texans, single-wing, all-metal, closed-cockpit six-hundred-horsepower retractable-landing-gear aircraft that cruised at about two hundred knots. Primary training was conducted using open-cockpit, fixed-landing-gear Stearman Kaydet biplanes. They weren’t really Stearmans, Boeing having some time before taken over that company, and while they were splendid basic training aircraft, stressed for acrobatics and sturdy enough to survive the inevitable hard landings, they were not really suitable for cross-country flight. The planes they would fly today, officially N2Ss, had Continental R670 engines producing a little over two hundred horsepower and a cruising speed of just over one hundred miles per hour.

When he had been a student pilot, Ed Bitter had thought (as had just about every other student pilot passing through Pensacola) that it would have made a lot more sense to wait until the students were advanced and let them make their cross-country flights in the faster Texans. It was only after he had gone through the rest of the flight training program— including carrier qualification—and been made an instructor that he understood the Navy’s reasoning.

A six- or seven-hundred-mile dead-reckoning flight, in an open-cockpit airplane making a hundred knots, while checking his position by looking for landmarks on the deck, was an experience the student pilot never forgot. It took him back to Eddie Rickenbacker and the Lafayette Escadrille, whose planes came with no more sophisticated navigation equipment and about the same performance as the Stearman. It was something they might need to remember when they were flying fighters capable of more than three hundred knots off the decks of aircraft carriers.

Bitter and Canidy each watched their students perform the preflight check, and then watched them climb into the forward cockpits. They took a last look themselves, and then climbed into the aft cockpits and put on leather helmets. The plane captains and the ground handlers pulled the props through a rotation, the engines were started, and the chocks were pulled.

Ed Bitter’s ensign turned around and looked at him. Bitter nodded and pulled his goggles down over his eyes.

‘‘Pensacola Tower, Navy One-oh-one,’’ Bitter’s student called over his radio.

‘‘One-oh-one, Pensacola.’’

"Pensacola, Navy One-oh-one, a flight of two N2S aircraft, destination Valdosta, Georgia, requests taxi and takeoff. ’’

Tags: W.E.B. Griffin Men at War Thriller
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