by Bert Botta
In June 1957, with the ink still wet on my high school diploma, the U.S. Navy shipped me off to my first duty station, Barin Field, Alabama.
As part of an agreement I made with Uncle Sam as a reserve sailor, I committed to give two years of my life to the Navy for active duty immediately upon graduation from high school.
One year later, after serving my time at “Bloody Barin” as it was known throughout the Pensacola Training Command, I received orders to report to Antisubmarine Squadron VS39 in Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Barin Field got its nickname “Bloody” because of the frequent aircraft accidents among cadet pilot trainees over the years it served as an outlying field of the Pensacola Naval Air Station Pilot Training Command.
After arriving at Quonset Point, I spent a few months finding my niche in the squadron and preparing for my first deployment to the north Atlantic with VS39 aboard the U.S.S. Randolph, an aircraft carrier based out of Norfolk, Virginia.
One of the officers whose aircraft I was assigned to as part of his flight crew was a young Ltjg (lieutenant junior grade) named McGill. He was a couple of years older than me and was a NavCad (Navy Cadet) graduate. He had also put in a couple of years at Princeton before getting his wings. He busted any image I might have had about aloof Ivy League school kids.
McGill used to tell the enlisted men that he liked going on liberty (Navy term for R&R) with us better than the officers because he had more fun. But I suspect he said that to make us feel better. That’s the kind of guy he was.
When VS39 deployed to the Randolph, it was to qualify our pilots for carrier landings (carquals) in the north Atlantic. We flew S2-F’s, a Grumman built, propeller driven anti – submarine aircraft that were powered by 2 big, R2800 horsepower Pratt and Whitney radial engines. The aircraft were affectionately known as “stuufs.”
The stuuf’s were flown with 2 pilots and 2 enlisted crewmembers, a radar operator and a sonobuoy operator and were crammed with relatively sophisticated (for it’s day) onboard electronic submarine detection and tracking gear.
The Randolph had recently been converted from a CVA, an attack carrier with early generation jet aircraft onboard to a CVS, an anti-submarine designated carrier, with our full complement of prop planes aboard. The ship’s company personnel, who were not used to servicing propeller driven aircraft had spilled a 5 gallon bucket of oil on the flight deck during the night and had neglected to clean it up.
Once the early morning launch got underway in the black, north Atlantic predawn, McGill rode his aircraft up from the hangar deck to the flight deck on the starboard elevator. Once topside, he was signaled to taxi his aircraft forward to take a position on the starboard catapult
I was standing just aft and off to the port side of his aircraft and, in the pitch darkness I dimly saw him reach up to the overhead quadrant and gently rock the throttles forward on the two big R2800 radials to move his aircraft into position on the catapult.
As McGill’s aircraft started to move forward to line up with the catapult, the prop wash, blown aft from the force of the rotating props and in combination with the carrier completing it’s turn into the wind, forced me into a instant thirty degree lean against that gale force.
As he was taxiing forward, he rolled through the oil spill and as the deck rolled left McGill’s aircraft began a sickening, synchronized, slow motion skid toward the port side of the flight deck.
I stood there, frozen in anguished disbelief, while an impotent cry of “Mac..!!” was ripped out of my mouth and blown aft over the boat’s fantail (rear deck)
The aircraft, with McGill and a full crew – copilot and two enlisted electronic countermeasures experts, crammed into their seats amidst thousands of pounds of electronic gear – cart-wheeled lazily over the port side of the carrier deck. She took thirty feet of catwalk (the walkway surrounding most of the ship, immediately below the flight deck) with her, landing topside down.
As she completed her roll inverted, her phosphorescent underbelly gleamed in the pre-dawn darkness like the belly of an inverted sperm whale. The frantic churning of her props seemed to act in her fatal favor as she sliced her way through the water’s surface, seeking a frothy grave in the frigid, angry waters of the North Atlantic.
We lost all four aviators. The last time I saw McGill was in a body bag about six hours later as the “angel”, the recovery helicopter, deposited the crew members’ bodies on the flight deck.
One of the chopper crew members threw McGill’s “poopy suit” down on the carrier deck shortly after they landed. (A “poopy suit” is the rubber exposure suit that the Navy requires all flight crewmembers operating flights over cold water to wear)
His suit was ripped to shreds, except for a piece of his name, McGill, in large black letters on one of the larger pieces.
High Touch Memories
In some strange, inexplicable way McGill helped to heal the insecurity of this teenage, future aviator’s soul. He left an indelible impression on me of what real manhood and leadership was about – his love for life, his passion for flight, his vulnerability, his fun loving, open-hearted, strong yet respectful honoring of younger men.
I’ve never forgotten him.
Maybe that’s why, to this day, I still honor the holy ground that naval aviators walk on, even though I’ve apparently taken my place among them in the aviation brotherhood.
If one were to hold up to the light the advances in technology over the last fifty years and compare that to the brilliance of McGill’s soul, tech would come in a distant, dim second.