"Experiential" research aboard an Aircraft Carrier

As I mentioned in my last entry, I have dozens of stories about how Newt and I work together when writing a book.    Nearly all of it is what some people might consider drudgery, but historian types really enjoy, and that is digging through all the usual sources.    Newt loves reading biographies and autobiographies and there are quite a few out there related to the key players of the events leading up to December 7, 1941, so he usually tackles them.    I love to get the “grunt’s eye view,” what it was like for the ordinary sailor, pilot, a civilian caught in the middle of it all.

With our next book, Days of Infamy, I sought out a bit of a different type of research.     One of the great things about working with Newt is he can really open up doors when an historian needs a door opened.   We were talking one day as we were working on Pearl Harbor and I mentioned to Newt that I felt I had a real grasp of Civil War battles, from a lot of experience as a reenactor etc., but I did not yet quite have the feel of what it must have been like aboard a carrier, in the heat of action.    Yes, I had visited the fabled Yorktown at Patriot’s Point in Charleston Harbor and spent nearly a day crawling around every inch I could get access to, but it was not “alive,” at that moment, it is a museum, a wonderful museum that if you are within five hundred miles of Charleston you must immediately go and visit, but it is not alive.   A Civil War analogy.   Take a look at a cannon at any battlefield park.   You can learn a lot from studying it, even simulating loading it, but imagine actually firing it for real.   That is what I sought.

Well, later that day I received an email from an officer with our Navy, inviting me to spend a weekend aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71.   WOW!   Newt sure opened that door for this historian!       And I must absolutely add, up front, that my experience was paid for by myself and Newt as an expense while writing our books, visiting the carrier was part of a program the Navy has for civilian taxpayers, but there is a fee, which we gladly paid, and no special costs were run up.   Felt I should make that clear up front before I proceed!   I’m a tax payer too, and junkets really tick me off. . .so felt I should clear the deck on that before writing more.

Anyhow, there I was, a week later, strapped into a twin engine turbo-prop transport, ferrying supplies, and myself out to the T.R. at sea.    For this flying fanatic it was Christmas, Hanukkah, the Fourth of July, you name it, rolled into one glorious moment.   We lifted off from Norfolk.   And I was on my way for a “trap and cat,” weekend of research. . .an historian’s life is rarely dull.     In my imagination I tried to force myself into a bit of time travel thinking, to imagine that I was going out to CV-6 Enterprise, December 1941.    One of the first impressions I picked up was this.   As you come in to approach on final, there is one heck of a lot of turbulence that a pilot must battle through, because your landing field is tens of thousands of tons of steel, pushing through the seas at thirty knots, and the wind whipping around that huge bridge leaves a lot of roiling air to fly through.   Those last thirty seconds in to landing was wild. I was laughing, another passenger, a civilian contractor seemed a bit wide eyed, and then wham. . .the trap.   We snagged the wire .. .and wow, this amateur pilot was awed as we pulled a couple of G’s slamming to a stop.   I don’t think the other passenger felt the same way. . he looked a bit green.

The back hatch opens, someone guides me off the deck and into the bridge, that towering superstructure you see on all carriers.    A delightful but brief greeting from the captain, the XO and then hooked up with a chief petty officer as a guide. I was impressed by the greeting.   These sailors were great, polite, glad to have me aboard to look around, but they had a job to do, and the job was jockeying a new squadron of F-18 pilots through orientation, take offs and landings before the squadron deployed out to the Persian Gulf, and a very real war.   So there was no special stuff because I worked with Newt. . .and that really impressed me as well.

My guide led me to my bunk where I stowed my bag, they outfitted me in a white suit that I thought looked really cool (I didn’t quite know at the moment that someone dressed in white, walking around out on the deck of an aircraft carrier is wearing white to designate him as an idiot who does not know just how dangerous it really is, so keep an eye on him!)   And then my guide led me up on to the flight deck to watch ops.

Wow.   The historian here, trying to learn how a carrier operated in 1941, kicked my imagination into high gear. Rather than sleek F-18 Hornets, I imagined a deck loaded with Wildcats, Devastators (and God forever bless the men who flew those planes in 1941-42) and Dauntless dive bombers.     The ops are basically the same today as they were in 1941.    When our Navy was learning how to fly planes off of carrier decks in the 1920s and 30s, then as now, the noise was overwhelming.   Voice commands were useless. So uniforms became color coded to identify the job of each man (and now brave women as well) on a carrier deck.   Hand signals were everything.    For the next several hours I stood there, enthralled, awed, overwhelmed. . .I could try and write a hundred more words to describe the experience of being on an American carrier at sea, launching and recovering aircraft.   Not to sound sexist but I described it to friends as a “testosterone fueled ballet.”    There was something supremely elegant, almost ballet like, as the launch control personnel, (yellow shirts) motioned planes into position, and that final dramatic moment of their saluting the pilot, and then crouching low, pointing forward, and that F-18 thunders off the deck (and in 1941, a Dauntless, going in harms way, lumbered forward, lugging a half ton bomb into the air.)

We went aft to watch landings.    It is still the same. “Paddles” is still there, the guy you see in the WWII movies with what looks like ping pong paddles in his hands, guiding a wounded fighter back to safety.   Today it is far more high tech with television cameras, computers all over the place, but the eyeball of “Paddles” still reins supreme as he stands there, observing each plane coming in, and on that day, flight instructors nodding, or groaning as their students, getting ready for combat, jockeyed their Hornets back on to the deck.   When my guide took me there he pointed out some netting, off the side of the deck, with about a fifteen foot drop and informed me not to be “offended” if he pushed me over the side and down to the net.   (I smile as I write this, remembering how on the back of my white jacket there was a handle for my guide to hang on to, almost like a grab hold on a toddler’s jump suit.   It was there to protect my life.   In fact, at one point, he did pull me down on to the deck and we laid flat as a plane turned after landing, the hot blast of its engines thundering over us, the heat blowing aft like a blast furnace.)

As I watched, I tried to imagine what it must have been like in 1941-42. In some ways far more dangerous. Yes, getting sucked into a jet engine is a really crummy way to end your day, but imagine being on a deck with a hundred prop driven planes, each thundering with between 800-1400 horsepower of might, those props turning at 2,000 rpm, and only a few feet away from where you are crawling to help move a plane into place for launch.   I’ve mentioned that I own a WWII period plane and it is a baby compared to the power of a Dauntless dive bomber.    But even with just 65 hp of engine, when I prop start it. . .yes there is no starter on my plane, I actually do the old routine of prop starting. . .well when I grab that prop and pull it down, turning back and away, ready to dive to the ground if my buddy inside the plane has a little too much throttle on, it does make me nervous.    Imagining being on a pitching carrier deck with ninety to a hundred planes ready to go, is pretty damn scary.   Also, when on the T.R. we were doing practice ops off the coast of North Carolina.   Imagination taking hold, I was awed with what it must have been like off the coast of Hawaii, 1941, launching aircraft, anti aircraft gunners standing by ready to repel attack, and knowing that the enemy was coming.

Standing on the deck of the T.R. inspired many a moment of what Newt and I wrote about later.

Later that day, I fell into the hands of the Chief Engineering Officer for the T.R. and what a delight it was.   Commander Scruggs, my hat will always be off to you!       He led me on a tour when he had some time off from his work and I posed a question to him. . .imagine we are on the Enterprise, it is 1941, and we’ve taken a couple of hits. . .what do you do to save this ship?    Scruggs looked at me, and grinned when presented with the problem.    “Bombs or torpedoes, and where do we get hit?” he asked.   We debated that point for a few minutes and then we were off on a three hour tour (yeah I know, “a three hour tour,” but this wasn’t the “Minnow” of Gilligans Island, this was a thousand foot long carrier).    He ran me into exhaustion, going up and down a dozen decks,   running calculations, explaining how to counter flood, contain fires, clear smoke, rescue the wounded, and for good measure even threw in a real time emergency fire drill for some of his damage control crew.    I was exhausted, he was delighted to be able to share the deeper knowledge of his craft and I had a thousand impressions to store away as I tried to get to sleep.   They didn’t tell me earlier I was bunked directly underneath the launch catapults which were operating throughout the night.

The next day, just before leaving, the XO took a few minutes from his duties to bid me farewell.   With a bit of a smile he mentioned that whether my “cat,” being catapulted off their ship, was successful or not was dependent on their deck crew. . .average age, 19 1/2.   I replied, from the heart, that I was confident I would be home with my daughter that evening.   We shook hands, it was obvious how proud he was of his ship, a “guide” got me suited up and led me out to the thundering noise of the deck.   That was a moment that left a life long impression.   They were under full ops, Hornets roaring off the deck, catapulting from where I would be launched into the sky within a few minutes.

I glanced around at the deck crew.   19 ½ years old on average.   The same age as the college kids I teach.    The same age as the men who fought aboard the legendary Enterprise, Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet and Saratoga over sixty years ago, who held out against near overwhelming odds during the dark days of 1941-42. .. and yes, the same age as the Japanese deck crews as well.   Kids back then, but already old men as well.   I recalled breakfast that morning.   I tried to spend as much time as possible in enlisted quarters while on board, and had breakfast with some yellow and green shirts.   I talked with these “kids.” Why were they there?   What did they do?   And yet again, why were they there?    Their pride in their jobs touched deep into my heart.    And one young woman, when I questioned her about her job up there on the deck, and the risks involved said something profound.   “Sir, I don’t worry about getting hurt.   What I worry about is screwing up and a buddy, or someone like you gets hurt or killed.   I could never live with that.”   She put a lump in my throat.   She has the spirit of the Greatest Generation in her heart and she is a hero, as is every man and woman aboard CVN 71.

So they strapped me into the back of the transport along with a bunch of cargo, that rather wide eyed civilian contractor, and about a dozen personnel transferring off back to the mainland.     The crew chief explained the routine, emergency escape, made sure I was strapped in tight (that white idiot suit they had me in was a dead give away to keep a good eye on me!) He strapped in across from me, suddenly gave the hand signal we were about to “cat” my grin equaled his, and about five seconds later, I got the ultimate ride of my life. . .zero to 150 in less than two seconds!    Granted I was there to do historical research for a book Newt and I were working on, but those two seconds. . .better than any ride of my life!

So that’s the story of some “experiential research” that went into writing “Days of Infamy.”   When you read the book, you might pick up some subtle references to what I observed while aboard the gallant ship T.R. CVN 71.    What I observed today is really no different than how they did it in 1941.   And the crews?    Look into the eyes of a pilot, a yellow shirt, an engine room petty officer from CV-6 Enterprise, 1941 and in those eyes you will see a reflection of the 19 ½ year olds who at this very moment are doing the same tasks, somewhere in the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean, insuring that we remain safe.

It was research for a book, it was also an experience I wish every American could have.   I can not resist breaking a rule here.   I will try to avoid political comment with these blogs but this one I have to speak out on.    Three days before I visited the T.R., a former presidential candidate (you know who) made the sarcastic comment that if you are stupid and flunk out of college you might wind up in the military.   While having breakfast with the enlisted personnel aboard the T.R. I mentioned that.   There was an icy silence. ..and good God, true to their discipline and code of honor, none really voiced anger before this civilian visitor, (though I can well imagine, with my absolute approval, what those proud 19 year olds said in private!)   Their measured response was that their job was to defend such freedom of speech.      My hat is off to them and it is evident where my contempt lies.   This civilian, a college professor with a Ph.D. was humbled and honored to share breakfast with such 19 year old men and women.   God bless all of them.

So that is a bit of a glimpse into how Newt and I write a book.   We dedicated “Days of Infamy” to the memory of the gallant men who stood against nearly impossible odds in 1941, while back home, America prepared itself to go forth and save the world.   As I write this, I also think, and I know Newt would agree, a dedication goes out to the BRILLIANT and GALLANT young men and women of CVN-71 who defend us today.

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Comments

By Anonymous @ Tuesday, May 20, 2008 5:16 PM

I have read both books back to back in two weeks, something I have not done (reading a complete book) since grad school years ago. My 12 year old is now reading the first installment, Pearl. When will you and Newt release a 3rd book?

Thank you for re-igniting my interest in WWII and enjoying reading once again!!

Scott.

By Anonymous @ Tuesday, May 20, 2008 5:16 PM

By Anonymous @ Tuesday, April 29, 2008 4:40 AM

I loved reading pearl harbor. One thing is that when you and newt ended the book that we never get a view on just what american ships actrully was hit during the battle. Second does it explained in days just what assets halsey has left afloat.

By Anonymous @ Wednesday, April 16, 2008 8:13 PM

Dear Dr.Forstchen. Just finished an enjoyable read about your experience on the T.R. CVN-71. I happen to reading Edward P. Stafford's "The Big E The Story of the USS Enterprise". I happen to love history about our country and especially about our USN in WW II. So, I can hardly wait until “Day of Infamy” hits the printers. You two gents make quite a team and I’m looking forward to the next in your grand e series. God speed to both of you.

Best regadrs,
Patrick

By Anonymous @ Wednesday, April 16, 2008 1:35 PM

Thank you for providing your research and giving me that thrill that lasts in my memory.
There I was, aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, CVN-71 from the very first day out of the shipyards of Newport News, Virginia and on its maiden voyage to keep the sea lanes open across the world for free trade and protecting democracy around the world. That was also an experience I wish every American could have.

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