The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

Pensacola Tower gave them the time, the altimeter, and the barometer, then taxi clearance to the threshold of runway 28. When the student pilot reported them in position, the tower gave permission to take off at one-minute intervals.

They climbed to five thousand feet, and took up a course that was almost due east. Canidy’s student took up a position two hundred yards above Bitter’s Stearman. Canidy’s student would fly Bitter’s student’s wing for half the trip, and then their positions would be reversed.

Two aircraft were sent on each cross-country flight, alternating as leader, so there would always be one aircraft checking on the other. Now that he had come to understand the reasoning behind the flight program, Ed Bitter had concluded that, like many other odd-on-the-surface facets of Navy policy, there was sound reasoning behind it.

One part of the program was even an officially sanctioned ‘‘confuse your students’’ portion of the cross-country flight, designed to ensure that simply because they were about to be awarded the gold wings of a naval aviator, it would never enter their minds that they were anything but rank amateurs:

13. DISORIENTATION.

Purpose: to give student pilots the experience of suffering location disorientation, and the techniques of recovery therefrom.

Method: At some point during the Montgomery- Mobile leg of Flight #48, while flying over the area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola 239, instructor pilots will, without previous warning to the student, take over the controls of the aircraft, and attempt to disorient the student pilot by such maneuvers as aerobatics, stalls, and low-altitude flight. The controls will then be returned to the student and he will be ordered to resume his original course and altitude.

Evaluation: Instructor pilots will grade the student on his ability to reorient himself, taking into consideration the time and degree of assurance with which he is able to do so.

The area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola 239 was a 25,000-acre property owned by the Carlson Publishing Company. It was in the pines, the management of Carlson Publishing Company being strongly convinced that it was just a matter of time before chemists came up with a means of using fast-growing loblolly pine for newsprint. Carlson Publishing Company published eleven medium-sized newspapers throughout the South, and these consumed a good deal of paper, all of which had to be purchased from mills using New England and Canadian pulpwood.

While they were waiting for the chemists to find a solution to this expensive and galling problem, the property was used by the chairman of the board of the Carlson Publishing Company primarily as a hunting preserve in the fall, and a vacation site in the spring and summer.

The chairman of the board, on behalf of his company, had been more than happy to grant the U.S. Navy permission to conduct low-level aerial flights, to include landing privileges, on the area now marked on the map. He understood the necessity to train pilots as realistically as possible, he and the admiral and the others having been sent off to fight the Hun with less than twenty-five hours’ total time in the air. Brandon Chambers had never forgotten that literally nauseating feeling of terror. He saw giving the Navy permission to use the land as his patriotic duty. And if some young pilot did dump his plane in the forests, the Navy would pay for the damages.

Lieutenant Ed Bitter had heard the story about the admiral who had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille getting permission from another Escadrille pilot to use the land long before it was told to him while he was receiving training to become an instructor pilot. He had heard it from Brandon Chambers himself. Ed Bitter’s mother and Genevieve (Mrs. Brandon) Chambers were sisters.

So far as he knew, no one at NAS Pensacola knew of his personal connection with The Plantation. Neither did anyone know that his father and his brother were respectively chairman of the board and presi

dent of Bitter Commodity Brokerage, Inc., of Chicago.

Edwin Howell Bitter was an officer of the Regular Naval Establishment. It was neither seemly nor wise for a Regular naval officer to let it be known that he had an outside income from a trust fund that was approximately four times his Navy pay.

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At 10:20, almost exactly two hours after they had taken off from Pensacola, they landed at Valdosta, Georgia, where the airport had a Navy fueling contract. They topped off the tanks, checked the weather again, and were airborne at 11:05. This time, Ed’s student flew Dick’s student’s wing.

They made Maxwell Field, the Army Air Corps base in Montgomery, Alabama, at ten minutes to one. The officers’ mess there closed at one, and they just made it in time to eat. It was five minutes to three before they got off the ground again, with Ed’s student again assuming the role of flight leader.

An hour out of Montgomery, when they were just about halfway between Maxwell Field and Brookley Field, the Army Air Corps base in Mobile, Alabama, Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed Bitter clapped the speaking tube over his mouth and shouted to his student that he had it.

The student pilot signified his understanding of and compliance with the order by holding both his hands above his head. Bitter pushed the stick forward, and the Stearman, the wind screaming in the guy wires of the wing, dove for the ground.

Behind him, Dick Canidy took the controls from his student and dove in pursuit. For fifteen minutes, sometimes right on the deck, sometimes climbing to eight or nine thousand, they engaged in a mock dogfight, always moving south, paralleling their original course, toward The Lodge on The Plantation.

By prearrangement, once they spotted The Lodge, Dick Canidy would break off the dogfight and fly out of sight of Bitter’s aircraft. He would swoop down the Alabama River with his wheels ten feet off the water. That always served to disorient student pilots. Bitter, meanwhile, would go down on the deck, fifty feet above the pine treetops, and buzz The Lodge. He would then roll the Stearman, while flashing over The Lodge at no more than a hundred feet, straighten it out, and then shout over the speaking tube to his student: ‘‘You’ve got it. Take us to Mobile.’’

Out of sight of them Canidy would do much the same thing to his student, and they would each complete the fifty-mile flight to Mobile alone. Over coffee in the snack bar at Mobile, the students would be told the reasons for this exercise; then they would make the final, fifty-mile leg home to Pensacola.

Ed Bitter’s student was usually the most disoriented. Not only were mock dogfights proscribed, but buzzing houses was NAS Pensacola’s version of a mortal sin. Buzzing a three-story antebellum mansion sitting alone in the middle of twenty-five thousand uninhabited acres (with apparent disregard not only for life and limb, but for what would happen to him when the occupants—obviously rich and important—complained to the Navy) usually upset the student pilot to the point where he could be sarcastically reminded that when one is lost, and all else fails, one might consider having a look at the compass.

Everything went according to plan until it was time to buzz The Lodge.

Ed almost had the Stearman on its back when the engine quit.

In the time it took the sweep second hand on his aviator’s chronometer to move two clicks, two seconds, his emotions shifted from near rapture to abject terror. It was one thing to have an engine quit in the middle of a roll when you had a couple of thousand feet under you to recover. You just fell through—and recovered.

He had no more than one hundred feet of air beneath him.

A body in motion tends to remain in motion. So there was sufficient momentum to just barely complete the roll. Now nearly disoriented himself, he looked hastily for someplace to put the Stearman on the deck. There was nothing in sight. He was, he realized, surprisingly calm, about to crash his airplane. There was nothing he could do but put it into the trees, and hope that the nose would not go into a tree trunk.

And then the engine spluttered and caught.