Presentation Date: April 24, 2003
J. Paul McCann
* V12 Program July 1944/45, * Wings of Gold, Naval Aviator, (Friday) June 13, 1947, Flew Fighters & Multi-Engine, including the PBY Catalina, * Air group 15 NAS Alameda, 1947~49, * He tells about his treetop-level tour of Yosemite Valley & scaling Half Dome - in a Bearcat!, * Many other Rare Experiences in the F8F!
- Since age 11, dreamed/determined to be a military pilot.
- V12 Program July 1944/45.
- Wings of Gold, Naval Aviator, (Friday) June 13, 1947, Flew Fighters & Multi-Engine, including the PBY Catalina.
- Air group 15 NAS Alameda, 1947~49.
- Paul has 5 grown sons & 13 grandchildren!
- He tells about his treetop-level tour of Yosemite Valley & scaling Half Dome - in a Bearcat!
- Many other Rare Experiences in the F8F!
Flying Bearcats for the Navy
“I just knew that my old fanny was going to hit that desert and I was going to be deadsville...
As I recovered, scouts honor, I watched the sand that my bullets kicked up go over my wings.”
Even though Paul McCann was on active duty in the US Navy in July of 1944, he never saw action in World War II. Yet, given the chance to go home after the Japanese surrender, Paul decided to stick with the Navy. “The Navy had done a pretty good job going throughout the country selecting people they wanted to make into pilots further on down the road. And they ended up with a lot larger pool of people than they needed as the war progressed. As those things occurred, they kept lengthening the program. So instead of my getting three phases of flight training and about 180 hours of flight time before I joined my fleet squadron, I went through six phases and had about 420 hours.”
It was very thorough training, which started with the N2S Stearman. McCann was in one of the last classes at Corpus Christi to fly the open cockpit trainer. He soloed on March 28, 1946, at the age of 19. Next came basic instruments training in the SNJ. The war had ended, and it was after Thanksgiving, 1946 before he was sent to Pensacola, the start of multiple-qualified training. That meant multiple-engine flying in the SNB, as well as time in the PBY Catalina, which McCann says “climbs, glides and cruises at 90 knots.” Gunnery and tactics training in the SNJ came next, followed by carrier landings in the advanced trainer: “They rigged up a tailhook on the blooming thing with, literally, a clothesline rope to the cockpit, to lower it. I made six carrier landings on either the Wright or the Saipan , a small carrier built on a cruiser hull they had at Pensacola... We did six arrested landings in an SNJ, which was not really designed or stressed for carrier landings. It worked out pretty well, but I don’t think they did that for a very long period of time.”
Finally, on Friday, June 13, 1947 McCann earned his Navy Wings of Gold. Despite the irony of that date, Paul says his naval flying career turned out pretty well. Cecil Field, Jacksonville, Florida was his next stop, for about 80 to 90 hours flying time in the F6F Hellcat. There was another student pilot there by the name of “Shaky” Williams who, on a familiarization flight in an F4U Corsair, made an Immelman turn (a half loop with a half roll on top) in the bent-wing bird. Instead of just doing simple stalls and aerobatics to get the feel of the airplane, McCann says Shaky bought a handful of trouble: “He gets upside down and he’s got too much rudder and not enough speed and the plane goes into an inverted spin. They told Corsair pilots that, ‘you can’t get this thing out of an inverted spin.’ So he knew it was not going to be a good day in his life. “He caught that thing and pressed on the rudder so hard... he’s going around and it’s getting tighter and tighter... They’d taught him,’if you’re going to bail out of this thing, get out on the inside of the turn, otherwise the tail’s going to whop you on your way out.’
McCann says Williams was pressing so hard on the rudder in his inverted spin that his foot went all the way over the rudder pedal, catching behind his heel. Losing altitude, Shaky finally got the canopy open, released his shoulder straps and seat belt, and tried to free his foot. Finally, reaching down and pushing the pedal with his hand, Williams pulled his foot free and then let go of everything to bail out.
“Upside down, he makes his exit from the airplane... except one little problem. His belt got caught on the headrest. So he reaches back, undoes the belt, and as soon as he left the airplane and the tail didn’t hit him, he popped his chute and it blossomed. He hit right on his fanny in line with the rows of potato field... he scooted for about twenty or thirty feet and was not hurt.” Another memorable incident at Cecil Field involved an instructor checking out an overhauled F6F which wouldn’t release its landing gear. McCann says the pilot took a few circles of the field burning off fuel, and then commenced his wheels-up landing. “This guy makes a real long, Air Force type, straight in approach. This guy was so cool. He’s coming in on final and he cut the engine. The F6F has a three-bladed prop. Well, it stopped with two of the blades this way (at 10 and 2 o’clock) and one of them pointed down. This guy was so cool. On final, at about fifty feet altitude he’s clicking the starter switch, moving that prop around.” McCann says with the lower blades now at 8 and 4 o’clock, the pilot ‘slicked’ the Hellcat down onto the runway.
“And you can’t have it too nose high, or it flops and that bends the airframe... if it noses down, you ruin the prop. He slicked it on just right, like flying a glider. He got it down to less that 15 miles an hour and it fell off on one wing and came to a stop. All the pilots, after this guy does that landing and stands up in the cockpit, give him a round of applause. “All they needed to do was jack that Hellcat up, put a little paint on the bottom of it, and maybe that wingtip, and it’s ready to go again. But here they’ve got the guys with the big flat bed truck, the crane and everything. They put two big straps under it, get that sucker about ten feet up in the air and... you know what happens... they drop it. Just a total wreck, because it bends it so much that there’s no way you can repair a fuselage when it’s that much out of shape.”
Paul McCann was born in 1926 in Burlington, Iowa, and grew up in the midwest and southern states. Paul was a Boy Scout, and because his Scoutmaster quit, Paul was left three merit badges short of achieving his Eagle badge. In 1937, Paul’s older brother Charles joined the Marine Corps, and later, as a Master Sgt., Charles was assigned as the non-commissioned officer in charge of the honor guard on Adm. Ernest King’s private yacht, USS Dauntless . Paul’s other brother, David, became an Army Air Corps mechanic, stationed in San Angelo, Texas. Paul was sworn into the Navy Reserve in January, but did not see active duty until July.
In 1944 Charles’ position on the Admiral’s yacht proved fortuitous to the three brothers. They all got together in San Angelo, Texas, Charles arriving in Texas by plane and train, and Paul riding a Greyhound bus for 41 hours from Mobile, Alabama. For the better part of a week, the McCann’s had a good time in each other’s company. Then came the business of getting Charles back to Washington D.C. and Paul to Mobile. Paul explained how Charles had prepared by having a Staff Sgt. write a letter on the Admiral’s USS Dauntless stationery: “To whom it may concern... this will introduce Master Sgt. Charles W. McCann and his brother John Paul McCann, USNR(R)... So I’m an eighteen year old kid, dressed in civilian clothes, no tie, and with a ditty bag. We’ve got to get back from San Angelo, Texas to where we were going.”
Base Ops offered a hop on a UC-74 to Kelly Field, and from there they hitched a ride on a B-24 to Galveston, Texas. A B-17 then carried them to MacDill Field in Tampa . “Here I am as a civilian on a B-17 that had the Norden bomb sight up front. I am running all over that airplane. I was in the bottom turret, I was in the tail turret watching the sun come up over the Gulf of Mexico. I’m in hog heaven.” The McCann boys took a train next, to Jacksonville, stepped aboard a PBY Catalina and flew to Philadelphia. There they hopped a DC-3 to Washington D.C. After some sightseeing in the capital city, Charles lined up a ride for Paul in the back seat of an SNJ to Pensacola. From there it was a 35 mile hitchhike home to Mobile.
Post-war, the Naval Aviation training program slowed to a crawl. In Corpus Christi, the social lives of cadets actually picked up, though. “We were entertained in the homes of some of those guys who owned all those oil wells down there, with those debutante daughters. And that was easy pickin’s.” McCann and his fellow cadets escorted the daughters of the base captain and Admiral Sprague, chief of all Naval Aviation. Paul says the impression he made on the brass allowed him to get away with murder - - driving the Captain’s car, using a special pass to cross the officer’s golf course, things like that. The Captain even made sure that when Paul was transferred, McCann’s 78 rpm record collection was packed and delivered by airplane to Pensacola .
Alameda ‘48, ‘49In 1948 and 1949, Paul flew with Air Group 15, stationed at Alameda. He had a ride, Paul remembers with relish today, in an SNJ, to familiarize him with the Bay Area:
“A guy named Jim Riordan, only an Ensign, maybe a year and a half ahead of me... gave me the most fantastic approach and landing I ever experienced. He came in over (runway) 26 L at Alameda at exactly one thousand feet, and instead of going farther down to make room for a downwind leg and then a long base leg, this guy did three things simultaneously at a thousand feet. “He throttled down, dropped the wheels and flaps and set a rate of descent in the turn. And I watched the artificial horizon, I watched everything in that airplane. He didn’t move anything. And so help me when he got down, he landed on the tail wheel, the left wheel, reduced the rest of the power and put the other wheel on the ground. He never moved anything, from the time he started at one thousand feet it was just constant, all the way around like it was locked. It was amazing. Good technique. “Later he evidenced bad judgment.”
A couple weeks later, Paul says, the same pilot met a nice lady in Modesto, a high school teacher. According to McCann, Ensign Riordan flew a Bearcat in a solo 45-minute airshow right over the high school, from tree level up. The Shore Patrol was waiting for the pilot when he landed, and he was hauled to Treasure Island. Paul never saw him again.
Bearcat Squadron MatesMcCann told tales of other Navy pilots he flew with during his Alameda days - - John Ryan - - “John Ryan had lied about his age during the war and went through flight training in about eight months. He went to the Pacific and shot down six Japanese planes before he was nineteen. He was an exceptionally good pilot, and our Operations Officer. We’d go out on a gunnery hop and come back with maybe 3-12 percent hits in the sleeve. Ryan was constantly somewhere between 26 and 32 percent...
“He had six of us. It’s late in the afternoon, all the other planes have landed, so he called the tower and asked permission to do an explosive breakup. Well, we love doing airshow-type stuff. All of us wanted to be Blue Angels and we practiced like we were Blue Angels.” McCann says Ryan got permission for a low pass and explosive breakup from the tower. The Bearcats came in right on the deck, made the explosive breakup and spaced themselves to land. “We’d alternate, one guy on the right side, left side, until all six of us are plopping that thing down. That was fun, doing an explosive breakup. I’d like to do that again sometime.”
Rickabaugh - - The Executive Officer for another Bearcat squadron, Rickabaugh was at an Air Force base when a Lt.Col in a P-51 approached him on the ground. Apparently thinking Rickabaugh’s plane was an F6F Hellcat, the Air Force pilot challenged the Navy pilot to a race to 5000 feet. The loser had to buy dinner Friday night at the O’Club. “They got permission for a side by side racetrack takeoff. And the poor guy didn’t have a chance in that Mustang. Rickabaugh does what we called a ‘tow-target takeoff,’ where you get your tail in the air in a hurry and are rushing down the runway with that big 12 and a half foot prop chewing you through the air. Before you reach flying speed, you do two things. You move the stick foward and the oleos compress, and as they come back up, you horse back on it and drop the flaps... That big ol’ prop keeps you from sinking in and now you just takeoff like crazy. He puts it in the air in about 600 feet of run and by this time the guy in the Mustang is just barely getting his tail off the ground. Rickabaugh sucks his flaps and wheels up, makes the first pass on him just about the time his main wheels are breaking ground and goes, uh-uh-uh-uh-uh, gotcha once. When he pulls up, the Air Force guy sees Rickabaugh at about 2500 feet coming in again, and Rick ‘shoots him down’ a second time.”
McCann says Rickabaugh made yet another pass on the P-51 before the Navy pilot zoomed up to 5000 feet... and won that dinner. Jim Lloyd - - Flying Bearcats down to San Diego to have them hoisted aboard a carrier for three weeks of games at sea, McCann admits to coming up with ways to break the boredom. “Goosey” was such a game: “They’d teach you in training that if you wanted to move from a right wing position to the left wing, you’d move out and back and down and over and back up and back in again. Boooring! What we’d do is... drop down and fly underneath the other guy. You can see the prop arc, and if you move it underneath the guy’s fuselage there’s a vortex around the tip of the prop, and both airplanes would actually raise up about 20 feet. We called it Goosey...
You both had to hold still because it’s not cool if that prop gets ruined and you have a midair...” Another maneuver used in switching sides was to have one plane simply roll around the other. McCann says one time Lloyd was doing the rolling, when Lloyd probably failed to keep forward pressure on the stick at the top of the roll. The upper Bearcat started closing down, canopy-to-canopy on McCann’s plane. McCann says he kicked the rudder and slid to the side, leaving Lloyd to continue downward 200 feet, through the space McCann just left. When Lloyd joined up again, he showed his embarrassment with hand signals and McCann signalled back, “well shame on you.”
John Nicholas Longfield - - An Academy graduate, Longfield was paired with McCann over Fallon, Nevada, dropping bombs, shooting rockets and strafing targets. They came to a drill with another six or so planes taking turns strafing a target of oil drums arranged in a 200 foot circle and half-buried in the ground. McCann says the planes were making the passes in tightly bunched pairs ( a tactic to make a smaller target for antiaircraft) starting from 10,000 to12,000 feet: “I’m in the dive with Nick and we’re at about a fifty degree dive and it’s like you’re going straight down. We did it with power on... shooting those .50 calibers with little bursts - - brrrrp, brrrrp, brrrrp. So I have to divert my attention between my gunsight, when it’s on target, and Nick, because I’m flying right next to him... I’m not way out here somewhere, Air Force style. I mean, wings overlapping...
“When I’m looking ahead and my pipper’s on I’m going brrrrrrp. When I’m looking at Nick and I see the puff coming out from his guns I now he’s shooting. And if I’m on him, my bullets are going to go where his bullets are going. So I’m looking at him, then brrrrrrp, brrrrrrp, brrrrrrp. And I look and... Nick’s not there. I mean just like that, Nick is gone. McCann couldn’t see his element leader with his perpheral vision, and knew instinctively there was really only one place Nick could have gone. Up. By hauling back on the stick, he had done a snap pullout. “That went through this noggin of mine in a millionth of a second. And before I could put my head back I had that stick in my lap. Because I knew that Nick lost concentration, got target fixation, was doing a late pullout and he did it suddenly. And he told me later he didn’t think he would make it out.
“I just knew that my old fanny was going to hit that desert and I was going to be deadsville. When my vision came back - - I had been in such a panic - - when I pullled that stick back I didn’t save the Navy bullets. I didn’t leave this trigger finger out of the way. Everything was gripped. Brrrrrrrrrrppp! Those fifties spread out... As I recovered, scouts honor, I watched the sand that my bullets kicked up go over my wings.”
McCann finshed the mission, flew back to base, landed, and turned off the mag switch. He says the next thing he remembered was standing on the ground, leaning against the Bearcat and shaking like a leaf. His plane captain noticed Paul had not thrown off his shoulder straps and ‘jumped’ out of the plane as usual, and that the color had drained from the pilot’s face. With the help of another plane captain, Paul was lifted from the airplane. And to this day, he doesn’t remember anything between reaching up and turning the airplane off and standing on the ground, shaking. Don Howard - - When he flew from Alameda NAS, Howard admitted to having a hobby of flying under bridges. By his count he’d underflown 22 bridges before he was transferred. Back then in the Bay Area, there were only four bridges to be flown under - - the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate, the Carquinez and Benecia bridges. Howard searched for the rest of his spans up the Sacramento River and down San Joaquin River, structures with at least 13 feet of clearance for the Bearcat’s 12 feet seven inch prop. One of his targets was Bixby Bridge, on Highway One, south of Carmel.
“It’s built right up against the hills. There’s a hill that goes up 1800 feet and there’s only a couple of hundred feet on the inboard side of the bridge. That was a challenge for Don Howard. He’d been down there looking at it a time or two, and he’d drop his wheels and flaps and circle and say,’How can I do this sucker.’ “He finally worked up the courage... He went out to sea, came in. He figured 160 knots indicated would be about the optimum sped for him to do what he wanted to do, which was to get underneath the bridge and live to tell about it, without smashing into that mountain. He didn’t have a whole lot of room between that bridge and that hill. “As soon as he got under the bridge, he did a couple of things simultaneously. He put the stick in his lap and he added full power and he dropped the flaps. Zooom! A real fast turn. You drop the flaps and you turn faster. All of a sudden he’s upside down at about two or three hundred “But that great big ol’ R-2800 with that huge four-bladed prop pulls him out of it. And he sucks the flaps back up and comes home. But, whom can he tell...
YosemiteBy air, the time to the gleaming gem of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range is a straight shot of but a few minutes - - in a 500+ mile an hour airplane. And for McCann, Yosemite was that perfect destination, especially when aircraft had to be flight checked after an overhaul. The Bearcats, put back together without all their identification numbers, needed about ten hours of flight time. Paul says usually that time was with low power settings, circling NAS Alameda for three hours at a time. “Boring.”
After a circle or two, McCann says he would would split off on a tangent, hoping the Chief down below would lose sight of him, and Paul would pretend he was flying down to Monterey. Instead, he’d go fly a solo airshow for friends in Turlock. On the way, having practiced first in the clouds, he’d get down on the deck and fly inverted above rows of tree windbreaks in the San Joaquin Valley. “It keeps you sharp.”
Then there was Yosemiite Valley, from the air an s-shaped box canyon that winds right to the base of Half Dome. “From about 15,000 feet I would put maximum continuous power on that big old Pratt and Whitney R-2800 and dive in... The idea was to be right on the trees, because if there’s a little opening in the trees and you’re at two or three thousand feet, they’ve got a lot of time to look at you. But if you’re right on the trees it’s - - zooom, and you’re gone. “The Bearcat had a wingspan of about 35 and a half feet. So on one side, it’s not a real long wing, but I had to pull up to make room for my wing. And as I went past El Capitan I ‘d pull up and go into about an 80 degree bank. I’m doing about, 380 knots, over 400 miles an hour, and pulling four or five Gs.
“When you’re doing this in a narrow canyon, it’s kind of like walking through a doorway with one eye closed. You kind of have to look at this side of the door jam to to keep from bumping into the other side. So when I’m turning this way, I can’t see the other canyon wall - - I’ve gotta judge from the other one how close I am...
“I’m coming around in an 80 degree bank... and I’m heading right for the base of Yosemite Falls. Well, that’s not cool. So I’ve got to reverse it to about 80 degrees the other way and by the time I level out, I’m going across the putting green in front of the Ahwanee Hotel. Right across Mirror Lake, which then was a mirror. It’s now kind of a mud pie. Right to the base of Half Dome... and it has so much climbing rate... to 2500 feet above it. Kicked it over in a hammerhead stall, back down the face of it, back down on the trees, back out again... and then unwinding on the way home over the foothills, doing this upside down thing again. It gets your adrenaline flowing.
“I got away with it twice, but just like the preacher (who told his congregation he was giving a service at a nearby town one Sunday, when he was actually getting in a round of golf ) who got the hole-in-one, I couldn’t tell... Paul McCann retired form the Navy in early 1950, started work in the insurance business, and went to a regional convention at the Ahwanee Hotel. On the way by bus to the big trees at the southern entrance to Yosemite, McCann happened to sit near the driver. They were talking about airplanes, when the driver suddenly started talking about an event a year or so earlier when a blue plane came roaring through Yosemite.
“He was going like a bat our of hell,” the driver told McCann. “And he came right toward Half Dome and we thought he was going to kill himself. “ McCann replied, “You’re kidding? Who in his right mind would knowlingly fly into a box canyon? Isn’t that against the law?” Paul McCann says to this day,”the guy doesn’t know he was talking to the idiot that did it.”