Presentation Date: November 21, 2002
Chief Petty Officer Tom H. Flowers USN (RET)
Assigned to VP-12, a PBY "Catalina" Squadron. Flew throughout Pacific, including operations from Midway, Guadalcanal. Flew 100 missions during Berlin Airlift in R5D.
- From Alabama, joined NAVY August 1941
- Completed training @ NAS Alameda as Aviation Machinist
- Assigned to VP-12, a PBY "Catalina" Squadron
- Flew throughout Pacific, including operations from Midway, Guadalcanal,
- Flew 100 missions during Berlin Airlift in R5D (C-54, DC-3) & good friend of the "Candy Bomber", Gail Halverson
- Served at numerous locations, after Berlin Airlift, including Patuxent River, Md. & Vietnam
- After Navy retirement, successful real estate career for 25 years in Silicon Valley
Black Cats & Candy Bombing
Tom Flowers, retired Chief Petty Officer, began his US Navy career before World War Two started, at the young age of fifteen. He made it pay off.
Tom Flowers was born June 15, 1926, in Alabama, a descendant of the Few family, a framer of the Constitution of the United States. By the time Tom was nine years old, he says he was compelled to join the U.S. Navy, after seeing a retired naval Petty Officer in the splendor of dress whites coming down the dusty road. The officer told him stories of the Great White Fleet.
Even though Tom was born more than 60 years after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Tom says he was aware growing up that the Civil War had never ended. "When I joined the Navy, it was still very evident, because those guys from West Virginia and those guys from New York were shoving each other around the barracks."
In August 1941, Flowers joined the US Navy in Selma, Alabama. "In 1939 and '40, things were serious. We were hungry and... pretty bad off, actually. I had run away to join the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). We ran a little grocery store and I took a dollar out of the cash register and I went to the county seat and asked if I could join the 'three Cs', because they would send 25 dollars back to the family. I had four younger brothers and sisters. My mother and I couldn't produce enough on the farm to support the family. I had a step father who had a heart condition at that time and we were totally dependent upon what my mother and I could produce.
"I convinced her that if I could join the Navy I could send part of my pay back home. This is how it worked out. I went to Selma... to the recruiting office."
The recruiters asked Tom how old he was. When he replied that he was seventeen, they asked for proof. Returning home, Tom told his mother, who produced a 'Vital Statistics' form from Montgomery, Alabama. She told Tom if he figured out how to submit the form as 'proof' he was seventeen, she wouldn't stop him. "It was just a simple form, written in ink that would run. So I... changed the six to a four. I dropped a little water on it and it ran and turned into a four, real nice."
In August 22, 1941, Tom Flowers, an eighth-grader who weighed less than 130 pounds, joined the Navy. After boot camp and a short leave, Flowers was sent to the west coast for radio school, but... "Dih-dih-da-da and I just didn't get along. So I went to the officer in charge of the school and said 'I can't take this. I love the maintenance, I love the semaphore, and all the things about it, but the code and my ear, we just don't get along. "
Unable to convince an officer that he should transferred to Aviation Machinist Mate, Tom ended up cooking in the mess. On that memorable December 7, 1941 he was in the barracks in Alameda. Yet by June, 1942, Tom had graduated from Mech school, as a Third Class Petty Officer. He also stepped up his payments to his family. "I made an allotment out to my mother for fifteen dollars. I was getting 21 dollars a month... When I got out here to Alameda I became a Second Class Seaman, went to 36 dollars a month and I made my allotment out to 25 dollars a month. That continued until 1947, when my third child was due to be born."
Pearl Harbor was Flowers' next stop. And he found it shocking. "You can't imagine the devastation I saw when I got out there around the 15th of July. All the ships were pretty well beat up. The hangars were still beat up, the aircraft were still sitting about, and were being used for spare parts..."
The next assignment came to VP-12, a PBY "Catalina" Patrol Wing based at Kaneohe. Being the lowest man on the totem pole, Flowers was assigned to barracks cleaning. On leave in Honolulu after thirty days of work, he missed the bus back to base and hitchhiked up Pali Road. Flowers was then sent packing his bags for assignment to Midway Island, where he was to start as a machinist and a gunner in a PBY-5A Catalina.
The PBY was a twin engined flying boat of pre-war design. Flowers says when he was not stationed at his .50 cal. machine gun in the starboard blister of the plane, he was in the tower - - the huge central pylon attaching the wing to the fuselage. In the tower's mechanics compartment were instruments for the two Pratt & Whitney R-1830 engines.
While the Catalina's official armament was two torpedoes, or four depth charges or 500 lb. bombs, Flowers recalls some 'personal' payloads. "We did a few things on our own. We would sneak beer bottles, incendiary bombs and things like that, and put 'em back in a tow hatch (behind a bulkhead aft of the flying boat's hull). I have watched the incendiary bombs we walked across an island, although I never saw any major fires from it. But we did harassment. The beer bottle tactic made a sound like a bomb coming down.
"The Japanese did the same thing to us. They would come and bomb us every night. Anytime I was on the ground I was always looking for a foxhole."
Midway was a 1000 mile trip at 100 miles an hour. Flowers says thanks to pilot "Chubby" Ellis, Tom got time piloting the amphibian to Midway.
Ellis already had aviator stories to tell before he flew PBYs. Flowers says Chubby was one of the most experienced pilots in VP-12, having flown for Hawaiian Airlines before the war. And before that, Chubby had been a circus stunt pilot. Flowers says when Chubby was in Navy training at Pensacola, his instructor cut the power on Chubby's first takeoff. Chubby responded by split-essing the trainer and immediately putting it back on the runway. The instructor got out of the plane and told Chubby,"I can't teach you anything."
While stationed at Guadalcanal, Flowers had one of the most dangerous experiences of his life. On a day off from duty, Tom and one of his friends decided to arm themselves with two .45 cal automatic pistols apiece and all the ammunition they could carry. They went to the front, dressed in what you might call 'Rambo gear'.
The two young men tromped down a path cut through the jungle and ended up in tall grass. When they became bored, they pulled out the .45s and began firing off rounds - - until they heard a man call over to them. Flowers says the upset GI explained to the two gun-toting boys they were walking a "no man's land" separating US Army troops and Japanese soldiers.
Later, as Flowers and his buddy returned to base, they observed a Japanese aerial attack on the US fleet offshore of Guadalcanal, the sinking of a Navy destroyer hit by a bomb, and a Wildcat pilot who ditched his plane and angrily shook his fist after being shot down by a Zero.
From Midway, VP-12 did a tour of the Southwest Pacific, ranging from Samoa to Guadalcanal. Flowers remembers flying from Guadalcanal the night of January 23, 1943, when his PBY spotted for destroyers who bombarded a Japanese-held plantation on Vella Lavella island. "One of the prettiest sights you want to see is when ships are sitting out to sea about fifteen miles, lobbing shells into a site. We went in over the target and when the searchlights turned on, we would orbit back out and the ships would then get a bead... then they'd overshoot and undershoot. Then they'd 'rock the cradle' - - firing back and forth and walking (their shells) right across an area. For about thirty minutes this goes on. You really get a view up there."
Flowers says in March of 1943, he took his first flight physical at Espiritu Santo and passed it. He couldn't figure out why the fellow with him was off to flight school, leaving Tom behind. In time, Tom realized his lack of high school kept him out of navigation and other specialized education required of pilots.
In June 1943, Flowers was headed to San Francisco, and on his 17th birthday, he came in under the Golden Gate bridge. It had been a year and three months earlier, while still stationed in Alameda, he had met Jeanette. "First thing I did was to call my wife-to-be. Took 30 days leave and went off to Alabama, and then we set a date for after she graduated from high school in 1944. But for one reason or other, it kept moving forward, just kept moving up. So we got married September 12, 1943. My first son was born almost a year and ten days later."
Back at Alameda, and without much experience as a mechanic because he'd been an aircrewman instead of maintenance on the PBYs, Flowers launched into intensive training. A chief by the name of Drake mentored the teenager from Alabama. "He taught me everything about being a Mech. He took me under his wing. He'd look at a bolt and when the wrench fit, it was a half-inch. That's the size I figured I needed for a nut. So I'd go ask for a half inch nut, but he'd say, 'whup, it's 5/16th'.
"He taught me how to change magnetos, change engine filters, replace engine cylinders... We maintained all the aircraft that were coming through, going west. He would inspect everything I did. He would go out and put me on a job, tell me what to do, come back and inspect it. And this guy ran all over acres and acres of ground, inspecting things.
"And would you believe along with that - - here I'm a First Class Mech, I'm also a guy wearing Combat Airman's wings and the Asiatic-Pacific medal - - all these guys hadn't been there. Most of them were older than I, considerably older, since I'm seventeen years old. But all of a sudden I'm placed in charge of 100 and some men... If you want to accept the responsibility, you can do it. But I had to do a lot of bluffing."
Flowers especially remembers Drake giving him a job on Lockheed PV-1s. The patrol bombers had a fuel starvation problem, and a failure on takeoff of one of its R-2800 engines would spell disaster. To counter the problem, a valve modification kit was created. Mounted on the wing spar between the pilot and co-pilot, the 'mod' would allow better selection of fuel tanks. Flowers was selected as the first Mech to install these systems in PV-1s at Alameda NAS. When he got through testing the new installation, Flowers was told to go up in the airplane with him up for a test hop. "If you can't do the job - - if you repair an aircraft and can't fly them yourself - - you better not do it. I was never afraid of flying an airplane."
In 1945, in one of the hangars at Oakland Airport, Tom Flowers was promoted to Chief Petty Officer. He was still only 20 years old.
When the war ended, Tom looked at the GI Bill as a way to further his education, and to do something for himself, starting with a pilot's license. He soloed at Belmont Airport, then started working on his commercial license.
Next, though, came orders to go with VR-6 to Guam, followed immediately by orders for the squadron to fly to Germany. The Soviet Union had built the wall dividing East and West Germany, and the Berlin Airlift was forming.
By November 17, 1948, Flowers was flying on transport missions from Frankfort and other cities to Berlin. Navy transport squadrons flew R5D (C-54) and R4D (C-47) cargo planes alongside Air Force transport squadrons, delivering food, clothing and fuel to the Berlin hostages of Soviet occupation.
"We were turning around, twelve hours on and twelve hours off. They say weather conditions were some of the worst in Germany in years."
The routine was a tightly timed affair, with 30 minutes to get up, get dressed and catch a bus from barracks to the base, 30 minutes to eat, and then 30 minutes to arrive at the airplane, already loaded and ready for takeoff. The times were specific, to keep materiel flowing steadily to the beleaguered German capital. Each crew flew two trips a day.
"We flew flew between five and ten thousand feet... at assigned 1000 foot altitudes. And we had a 20-mile corridor we had to fly in through. The actual flight to Berlin was about an hour and 35 minutes, one way. We were on the ground there roughly 30 minutes or so, and then back another hour and 30 minutes. Then you'd get loaded back, and go again."
That kind of schedule allowed the airlift effort to proclaim that 1478 flights were made into Berlin's Tempelhof Airport on Easter Sunday, 1949. Flowers says that meant one flight was landing in less than one minute for a 24-hour period (1440 minutes). "We made the statement to the Russians that we could do the job."
In December of 1947, Flowers says he started to get lots of experience taking off and landing R5Ds. Word of his smooth handling of the transports from the pilot's seat spread throughout the crews and increased his piloting hours, until by the end of Flowers' 101 Berlin Airlift missions he'd flown 33 of them.
One special theme of the airlift was its "Candy Bombers", transport pilots dropping candy by miniature parachutes to German children near the airport runway approaches.
A newspaper article written 50 years after the airlift, led Jurgen Kaiser, one of the children who received candy from those drops to contact Flowers. The two men continue to communicate five years after that contact. Tom also has become good friends with the original "Candy Bomber", Gail Halverson.
Flower says the most challenging work he had with the Navy was his stint as maintenance chief for a carrier fighter squadron in the Mediterranean Ocean.
"You start off over the flight deck at 5:30 in the morning, and you're watching (aircraft launches) every three to four hours and recovery every three to four hours. Every time we went to sea, we went though a rigorous training program, and we had aircraft in the air over the ship all day until about nine o'clock at night."
Tom Flowers retired from the Navy in 1961. After 20 years of service, he was still only 35 years old. That left plenty of time for successes in a 25 year real estate career in Silicon Valley.