Presentation Date: January 27, 2005
MAJ Phil DeGroot MARINE CORPS
Fighter Pilot, WWII & KOREA - * Assigned to One of First VMF Squadrons to Fly F4U-1 Corsairs, * Assigned to Gillespie Field, San Diego, Becoming XO and CO, * After WWII, Joined Reserves, VMF141, Oakland, Flying F6F Hellcats, * KOREAN War Started, Called-Up With VMF323 Flying Corsairs, * Severely Wounded On Low-Level Attack; Successful, Risky Forced Landing, * While at El Toro MCAS, Flew Most of Aircraft Scenes for Movie "The Flying Leathernecks", * Flew 2000 Flight Hours as a Fighter Pilot in Two Wars Fighter Pilot, WWII & KOREA Marine Corps Fighter Pilot
* Born In Deer Trail, UT; Grew Up In Oakland, CA Area
* Earned Wings of Gold as a Fighter Pilot, Corpus Christi, TX, February 1943
* Assigned to One of First VMF Squadrons to Fly F4U-1 Corsairs
* Assigned to Gillespie Field, San Diego, Becoming XO and CO
* After WWII, Joined Reserves, VMF141, Oakland, Flying F6F Hellcats
* KOREAN War Started, Called-Up With VMF323 Flying Corsairs
* Severely Wounded On Low-Level Attack; Successful, Risky Forced Landing
* Returned to USA, Oak Knoll Hospital in Oakland ~ 6 Months
* While at El Toro MCAS, Flew Most of Aircraft Scenes for Movie "The Flying Leathernecks"
* Flew ~ 2000 Flight Hours as a Fighter Pilot in Two Wars
On December 7th, 1941, Phil De Groot was a junior at Cal. As many other young men thought at that moment of national crisis, Phil thought, "I’d better do something pretty desperate or I’ll find myself slogging in the mud someplace."
The Deer Trail, Utah native had been in the Sea Scouts while growing up in Oakland, California, and he thought the Navy would be the place to be. Phil had already heard of what was called the ‘V-7’ or ‘90 day wonder’ program.
"If you had enough college, you went into 90 days of specialized training and the Navy would commission you as an ensign."
Phil says he took his transcripts and went over to San Francisco’s Federal Building, where the reviewers discovered De Groot lacked one semester of college mathematics.
"I was kind of devastated... and I asked, is there something else."
The response he got was to consider the V-5 program. De Groot was told he could look into it down at the Ferry Building, only a streetcar ride away and a shuffle upstairs.
"I went up and there was Tony Martin. He was a Chief and he was sitting behind this desk and he said, ‘Go in and take your clothes off and take a physical. ‘
"Which I did, and when I learned I passed the physical, I asked what the V-5 Program was, and was told it was for Naval Flight Training."
"He said, ‘You have a choice. You can either go out to St. Mary’s for six months, with a lot of athletics and so on, or... you’re from Cal? We have about three slots left in something called the Flying Golden Bears.’ "
That sounded good to De Groot, and the choice put him into an organization targeted to aid in the recruitment of naval aviators.
In July 1942, the Flying Golden Bears were called up to Oakland NAS. The recruits were told to bring only a toothbrush. Phil says three weeks later, he was still wearing the same pair of corduroy pants as when he reported, and he had worn holes in his shoes from marching drills.
"I used to wash out my underwear and shorts and everything, and put it on the radiator to dry at night. There were no uniforms."
Finally, though, uniforms arrived. But not before the Flying Indians (from Stanford) came into the base.
"That was neat, because we were senior to them," recalls De Groot, stopping short of revealing details why it was good to have ‘underclassmen’. "You couldn’t beat that!"
Livermore, near the site of today’s Lawrence Livermore Radiation Lab, became the next stop for the trainees.
"It was a big round field down there, so you could land in any direction."
The training base was so new, it had no shower facilities, forcing the recruits to find other ways to handle hygiene issues. This was especially important before the young men were turned loose for weekend liberty.
"We had to do a five mile run through the Livermore hills before we could go on liberty. After running those five miles, we were sweating, basically and a farmer up there had one of those wooden tanks with the windmill on top of it and we’d all go jump in that."
Part of the trainees’ work, their physical education, became swinging picks and shovels, landscaping the base and building an obstacle course, of which De Groot fondly recalls, "After we finished it we had to run it."Flying started in the N3N biplane, and after a couple of hours shifted to the Stearman. One of the flying drills was called the ‘slip to circles’. Starting at one thousand feet altitude, trainees would be signaled to cut their engine, then slip the biplane to make a landing in a particular circle marked below.
"You’d land and let your instructor out. Then he’d go sit by the circle and grade you. This one fellow came around and he was so fast... he kept on hauling back on the stick and hauling back on the stick and brought the nose up and... boom. It was dead center on the circle.
"The instructor said, ‘Anybody who wants to do that, putting that much effort into it, deserves a nod.’ "
Three months late, in February of 1943, De Groot rode the railroad with the rest of his class to Corpus Christi Texas. There, they flew the SNV, with its variable prop. And they flew the OS2U Kingfisher, sporting landing gear instead of floats, as most often seen on shipboard observation aircraft. Then came advanced flight training in the SNJ.
Soon, a transfer to Kingsville, Texas brought night flying to the training regimen.
"This one fellow took off at dusk to meet up with his flight leader. About an hour later, as the two aircraft separated to land, all of a sudden you could hear him say, ‘My God! My plane’s on fire! May Day! May Day! I’m bailing out!!" De Groot says the pilot had suddenly noticed all the exhaust from his SNJ and panicked. The pilot still got his wings.Flying SNJs continued at Opalocka, where De Groot says he and his fellow pilots were put into a pattern simply to mark time until the Navy figured out what to do with them next. During this so-called Pre-Operational Training, they flew the Brewster Buffalo, a stubby pre-war fighter which suffered from a number of design problems. Some of those problems were complicated by the lack of 100 octane fuel for fighter training, as high-grade fuel was hoarded for the North African invasion.
"We were flying on 80 octane gasoline, and our Engineering Officer had a real hot deal. He said, ’We’ll just retard the spark, and you don’t carry too much manifold pressure.’
"I think the manifold pressure was down to about 40 inches. Opalocka didn’t have too long a runway and the pine trees at the end looked pretty big, because you didn’t have any wind. So what happened, people would be going down the runway, those pine trees were getting closer, and they’d inch up over what they were supposed to do with the throttle, get up one hundred feet in the air and (premature) detonation would set in. And down through the trees they’d go.
"Four of them went down like that. One pilot was killed and another was badly injured."
De Groot also recalled the Buffalo’s hydraulic landing gear, which didn’t always work.
"The emergency system was a valve, down below the feet. You’d open the valve to bleed all the hydraulics out of the system. Then you had a pair of cutters and you’d reach way down below the instrument panel where there were three wires, one thin one and two thick ones. You’d cut the thin one which went to the tail wheel, the other two went either to the rudder or the elevator, I don’t remember which."
Phil also recalls two fire pulls up underneath the cowling, handles which would release carbon dioxide into a piston to drop the wheels, just short of locking into position. Hauling on the other fire pull then activated a knuckle to push the piston down the last inch, so a spring loaded locking pin could fire across and lock the landing gear into position. It was a Rube Goldberg design that failed to inspire much confidence in pilots.
Neither did the generator that was part of the Curtiss electric propeller system. De Groot says the first warning of impending problems a pilot got came when the radio began failing, meaning the battery was running down. Without the battery, the pilot didn’t have enough current to switch the prop to high pitch to land.
"Up underneath the instrument panel was a string, and you’d pull on this string to make a contact with a solenoid, now your generator was charging and then you could change the pitch of your prop.
De Groot says gunnery training brought out the Buffalo’s tendency to do a high speed snap roll when pulling out of a dive. Pilots experiencing difficulty making the elevators respond by pulling back on the stick, would roll the trim tab fully back, and then the plane would respond, but would pull out so fast the fighter would snap roll into the ground.
"It wasn’t habit forming."
The other hazards of training at Opalocka were provided by the region itself - - swamplands crawling with alligators and inhabited by Seminole indians. The pilots were reminded that the Seminoles had never signed a peace treaty with the United States.
Carrier qualifications came next and for that De Groot found himself at Glenview, Michigan, to work with the converted sidewheel tour boat USS Wolverine.
The SNJs used for carrier landings were crudely modified for that purpose. A tail hook was rigged to the plane with a cord that ran through a pulley and alongside the fuselage to the pilot’s armrest. There, the cord was looped around the armrest to hold the hook out of the way while flying.
"As you came in to make your landing you’d throw that rope out and the tailwheel would come down. You also didn’t have shoulder straps, so as you came aboard , your technique was you chopped the throttle off, put your hand up on the cowling and laid your head against it right at the last moment.
"Well , I came in fat, dumb and happy... and scared. I chopped the throttle off, hit the deck and my head went against the cowling. It broke my goggles, glass was falling out, and my arm had gone back forward with the throttle, to full throttle.
"Next thing I knew, a man jumped up on the wing, pulled the throttle back,
hooked the rope back, cinching back up the tailhook, and the Flying Officer was signaling me to go. And I was airborne again, glass still falling from my goggles."
After qualifying, there was a thirty day leave, during which Phil came back to the Bay Area to marry Suzy. Then he reported to Miramar Naval Air Base in San Diego for assignment. Since the squadron was just forming up, personnel hadn’t all arrived and there were no planes, yet.
De Groot says that after three weeks, the pilots became desperate to fly something and to earn flight pay, which they hadn’t been earning. Approval came for the squadron to fly some F4F Wildcats at North Island.
"We’d never flown these before, but we read the manuals and got a little cockpit checkout . We took off and were flying at about 2000 feet towards El Toro, when my engine quit. I tried and tried to get it re-started, and decided I better bail out of this thing. The F3F you didn’t belly-in, unless it was soft, plowed ground, because there was a gas sump underneath and if that sheared off, you were in trouble and caught fire.
I decided to head out to the ocean so I wouldn’t hit anyone along the highway, and was just ready to jump when I’d forgotten to disconnect the earphones. I got back in and the last time I’d looked at the altimeter I was at about 800 feet.
"I jumped toward the leading edge of the wing to clear the tail, which went by. I pulled the cord and looked down and thought, ‘My God, I’d never seen that fire before. ‘
"I was coming down into this fire, the heat from it actually lifting the chute a little bit, and due to the offshore breeze, I missed the fire. When I had jumped, I had stalled the Wildcat, and the moment I got out, it went straight down. That was my own plane. It had gone down and hit right on the cliff above the beach. That was the fire I was looking at.
De Groot says his landing in the parachute was less than perfect, and he tumbled ‘head over tea kettle’. Some people nearby helped him out, and a doctor gave him a ride to El Toro.
The squadron’s planes finally arrived by train - - F4U Corsairs. Also arriving was a legend of aviation, Charles Lindbergh, who was there to teach the Marines how to fly the bent wing bird.
"The moment you got a Corsair below a three point attitude, the left wing just kicked out, like a snap roll. We were told to bring them in tail low, and when you hit your wheels, you rocked forward on it so you could see where you were going.
"These first Corsairs had a birdcage canopy instead of a bubble. Visibility ahead was pretty poor. You held the tail up as long as you could, and at that instant you lost the rudder control, blocked out by the fuselage. The control, he (Lindbergh) said, was to hit the right brake briefly , as the tail dropped down, you kicked that right brake real hard. The tail dropped down, of course the tail wheel was locked, and then you rolled on out. It became second nature to us. It was just the way you flew them." Gunnery practice in the F4U offered a chance to mix it up with P-38 Lightnings from the training school in Santa Ana. The Army Air Force pilots would roll themselves into a Lufbery circle. De Groot says the Marines would get a loop going in the center of their Lufbery.One time, says Phil, he encountered a P-39 pilot at about 10,000 feet over the Mojave desert. "This fellow rolled over and just dove. He could dive away from the Corsair, so I followed him down while he leveled off across the desert at about 50 feet. I was flying behind him, but not right behind him because the slipstream would force you into the desert. Phil slipped to one side and the P-38 slid across in front of him. The two airplanes ‘scissored' several times before they broke off to head for home.
"I later found out he’d been in North Africa and had more hours flying than I ever did."
From El Toro, De Groot had a brief posting in Mojave for an ‘intensive flying ‘ regimen, then he was set to fly by Pan Am clipper to Ewa Field on Oahu. But he was diverted by a request for pilots to immediately be sent to the Pacific, and that meant riding for 14 hours on a C-46 to Hawaii via Samoa. The C-46 carried rubber fuel bladders in the cargo cabin. Twice during the trip the cargo plane’s engines stopped running, only to catch again with a couple thousand feet to spare. De Groot says the pilot was changing tanks based on flight time, and was burning fuel faster than expected, much to the discomfort of the fighter pilots flying as passengers.
In Hawaii, the hazards of operational flying were pressed home on a number of occasions. The squadron lost a pilot when a pilot tragically took off the wrong way and struck a fire truck and an ambulance at the foot of the flight tower. Four men in the vehicles were also killed.
And on one of his inter island flights, Phil had to dead stick his F4U into a landing strip on Molokai. It turned out a broken diaphragm in the carburetor was the culprit.
De Groot recalls that part of the flying the Marines were doing with their Corsairs involved stretching the legs of the new fighter.
"We did some fuel consumption tests, looking for the most economical cruising on the Corsair. We got down to about 1300 turns and pretty high manifold pressure. It was like a two-to-one ratio, so your prop was only doing about 650 RPMs. You could almost read the ‘Hamilton-Standard propeller’...Hamilton-Standard propeller’ as it came past the windscreen."
Among the Corsair modifications during this time were a spoiler on the right wing that forced it to stall at the same rate as the left wing, and an extension on the tail wheel gear, providing better visibility for the long nosed fighter.
Funafuti, in the Gilbert Island chain was the next stop for De Groot. There he flew frequent Combat Air Patrols (CAP) and scrambled into foxholes when Japanese ‘Betty’ bombers made low level surprise bombing raids.
On one of De Groot’s CAPs, he was vectored towards an unidentified incoming aircraft. He circled for awhile, but could see no ‘bogey’.
"All of a sudden I looked down and underneath the scud, down about three-or- four thousand feet here’s what looked like a Betty coming. It had a big glass nose on it. So I tally ho’ed, rolled over on my back, charged my guns and turned on my gun switches. I got him in my sights and thought, ‘Boy, I ‘m going to be the first guy in the squadron to get a plane.’ I was just figuring out the number of mils to lead, when all of a sudden, here comes the big Stars and Bars out of the wings. It turned out it was a DC-2. They only built a very few of those and they put a glass nose on them and used them for instructing bombardiers.
"This was General Merrill, and he was using the plane just as a transport, and didn’t have his IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) on. I came down and as I passed underneath
him I squirted off a few rounds, and boy was the air blue, ‘Plane making the attack break off, break off!!’
"I almost got me a plane... I was always hoping to be an ace. I had three planes to my credit. Unfortunately, all three belonged to the Federal government."
Also on Funafuti, Phil was entertained at movies. He remembers well the brief ‘floor show’ as squadron personnel gathered, sitting on palm logs and facing the film screen, and a rat would wallow down a wire stretched between two palm trees.
"Once he made it across, the lights went off and the movie started."
From Funafuti, De Groot’s squadron moved up to Kwajalein. But before all the unit’s gear, ammunition and bombs could be put on transports for the trip, a single bomb during a Japanese air raid hit the depot, digging a hole reportedly 50 feet across and 20 feet deep.
"All this ammunition went up. It burned up all of our gear. And what was really sad was the officer’s liquor mess burned in a beautiful blue flame."
At Kwajalein, the missions became strafing attacks against Japanese held islands that had been bypassed by Marine and Navy invasion forces. But on one hot afternoon, De Groot recalls he was lying on his bunk when a air raid warning rang out.
"I threw on my gear, ran out and jumped on the back of a jeep. The skipper was driving eight of us on this jeep and we went screaming off to the base. About that time a stake truck pilled out in front of us. We hit that, I bounced off the stake truck, banged myself up a bit, but was fortunate , because the blockhouse we were right in front of was the hospital. The Corpsmen just came out, picked us up and took us in to work on us. After awhile they decided they couldn’t fix me up enough."
Sent back to Oak Knoll for some medical work and to rehabilitate Phil was next assigned to Gillespie Field near San Diego. De Groot quickly became Executive Officer, and three months later was promoted to Commanding Officer there.
After WWII, De Groot joined the Naval Reserve and VMF-141, which was flying Flying F6F Hellcats at Oakland NAS.
In 1952, the Korean War saw De Groot called up to serve with VMF-323. That involved re-training to fly the F4U at El Toro, and some ‘extra-curricular activity’ at a little airstrip on the north end of Camp Pendleton. The Marines were assisting in the production of the motion picture Flying Leathernecks, starring John Wayne, and De Groot helped with most of the aerial scenes.
"They put some sand all over the strip and some palm trees, and built a little pagoda there, simulating Guadalcanal. My job was, if they needed a single plane, I’d fly it... for a flight of planes I’d call up to El Toro and they’d bring down enough planes and we’d fly formation on John Wayne.
"They had a DC-3 and they’d taken the cargo door off and put a simulated cockpit there. And John Wayne would be sitting there, and the cameras would be over here and would see the airplanes in formation on the other side of John Wayne."
Following the re-training at El Toro, VMF-323 was sent to K-1 at Pusan, South Korea where it provided close air support missions and interdiction involving road reconnaissance and targets of opportunity.
Severely wounded on a low-level attack, De Groot made a risky, but life-saving forced landing at a short emergency field, primarily used for liaison planes. Just then, the field was being overrun by the enemy, and he barely escaped!
He was returned to Oak Knoll Hospital in Oakland for six months of recovery. Phil De Groot had logged some 2000 flight hours as a fighter pilot in two wars. Although promoted to Major, the recovery time from his injuries forced him to be retired as a Marine Captain.