From Jennies To Jets

By Jack DeChant - Originally Published November 1953

When Lieutenant Colonel Marion Carl arced into the stratosphere to set his unofficial new world's altitude record of 83,235 feet, he marked the shape of things to come for the Corps' Air Arm in this atomic age-and logged a new page in its global history.

That new Marine record, coming as it did during the 50th anniversary of powered flight, was typical of the major contributions which Marine Aviation has made to both the headlines and new horizons in the history of flight.

The Corps' airmen have been logging new records and girdling the globe in the interests of aviation progress since 1917 in World War I when Major A. A. Cunningham, father of the Devilbirds, took his squadrons into combat against Germany. Those were the days of the Jennies, Spads and Camels and DH-4s, when Baron Manfred von Richtofen and his Flying Circus were vying for headlines with America's early combat air aces like Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and the pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille.

Marine Aviation, then very much in its infancy, managed to give a good account of itself during its brief months of combat over Europe. The Corps' First Aviation Force, with a loss of four dead, downed approximately a dozen enemy planes, made five supply drops and dumped 52,000 pounds of bombs on 57 missions.

Four of Cunningham's squadrons, flying the two-place De Havilland bombers, became the Day Wing of the U. S. Navy's Northern Bombing Group, which was operating out of the Calais-Dunkirk area against the German submarine pens. The Marines got their operational training both in France and England. While waiting for their planes to arrive, many of the Marines joined a British replacement pool, flying volunteer missions in fighters and bombers over France, Belgium and Germany.

Their first blood was drawn when Sergeant T. L. McCullough was attacked by eight German planes over Coremarch, Belgium. He shot down one before he was forced out of action by a jammed machine gun. Several weeks later Lieutenant Everett Brewer and his rear gunner, Sergeant Harry Wershiner, were jumped by 15 enemy scout planes. The Marines downed three of them before they were both badly wounded.

The Air Arm's first spectacular ground support mission came in a supply drop to a French regiment cut off by the Germans near Stadenburg. Captain Francis P. Mulcahy (now a retired lieutenant general), Captain Robert S. Lytle, Lieutenant Frank Nelms and Gunnery Sergeant Amil Wiman loaded their bombers with canned food and bread. Despite heavy machine gun, artillery and rifle fire, the Marines made four supply drops at 100 feet to the Frenchmen. They were awarded the DSM for this action.

Two Marine airmen won the Medal of Honor for action in France. The pilot-gunner team of Lieutenant Ralph Talbot and Gunnery Sergeant Robert G. Robinson, shot down one enemy plane. On a later action with the RAF, they were hit by 12 German fighters. Robinson shot one and it went down in flames just as a machine gun burst ripped away most of his elbow. He continued fighting, operating his gun with one hand, until he collapsed from wounds in the stomach and thigh.

While Cunningham's Day Wing was busy over France, Major Francis T. Evans' 1st Marine Aviation Company was in action on a new front. His unit took over the search for German subs off the Azores from the British early in 1918. Eighteen Marine seaplanes scoured the Atlantic convoy lanes from sunrise to sunset but returned to the States with no kills to their record.

Then came the Banana Wars-and the years of nominal peace. Unlike Army and Navy fliers, the Marines took part in a series of actual combat missions between the World Wars. Because of these expeditionary missions, the Air Arm not only improved its own knowledge of combat tactics and operations but was able to pass on its lessons to the nation's other air services.

Haiti was the first of the new spots on the globe to beckon to Marine airmen. Twelve planes of the Fourth Air Squadron joined the First Marine Brigade in its mission of subduing the Cacos, hill country bandits, who were terrorizing the civilian population. During the prolonged campaign against the Cacos, the Marine squadron flew attack missions and scouting patrols, took aerial photographs and ran a regular combat airmail and passenger service between infantry units.

It was in the hills of Haiti that the Corps' airmen began their revolutionary dive bombing experiments to improve their battle support of the infantry end of this air-ground team which is now unique in the world's military annals.

Using a makeshift bomb rack made from a sack and a rifle barrel for a sight, Lieutenant Lawson H. M. Sanderson (now a retired major general) made several glide attacks on practice targets at Mirabelais in September, 1919. Soon the squadron was using the new infantry-support tactic with excellent results.

The Fourth Squadron saw the last of the Cacos rounded up by the Brigade in 1921. The ground and air units remained on duty in Haiti until 1934.

Concurrent with the early action in Haiti, other Marine expeditionary forces were operating against guerrillas and bandit gangs in the Dominican Republic. During its several years of action there with the Second Brigade, the First Air Squadron, flying DH-4s, expanded the usual variety of tactical missions to include evacuation of wounded and airlifting of doctors and medical supplies to patrols and forward outposts.

The first harbingers of Marine Aviation's future role in the Pacific came with two new outpost assignments -Guam and China. In 1921, a small flight of planes from the Fourth Squadron was stationed in Guam for training and weather flights. Six years later, most of this outfit-by then Scouting Squadron One-was shipped out to China with the Third Marine Brigade.

During 18 months of operation there, three Marine squadrons ran up a total of 3800 flights of the usual ground support variety-with emphasis on recon flights. They flew a daily patrol over an 8000 square mile area to keep the American forces informed of the activities of the opposing Chinese armies.

By contrast with what was to happen later in the Pacific, these tours of duty in Guam and China made no sensational headlines back home but they did provide invaluable training for the combat to come.

Marine Air got its major combat workout during "peacetime" over the hills and jungles of Nicaragua during a six year campaign with the Second Brigade against the guerrilla forces of the bandit leader, Sandino. Major Ross E. Rowell (later a lieutenant general and now deceased) commanded the first air units in this new war. Early in the game he led a five-plane dive bombing and strafing attack against the bandit forces at Ocotal, resulting in nearly 300 casualties.

The Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism was awarded to Lieutenant Christian F. Schilt (now a major general) for a series of air evacuation missions. Two Marine columns were ambushed by six to eight hundred bandits in the wild jungle country near Quilali. While planes covered the relief expedition, Lieut. Schilt made 10 flights into the combat area to evacuate the wounded. Every landing and take-off on the crude airstrip was made in the face of considerable enemy fire. Similar action was not to come again until the first SCAT planes ran their mercy missions into Guadalcanal under heavy Japanese ground and air fire in September, 1942.

The infantry units were warm in their praise of the six years of combat performance by the Air Arm in Nicaragua. With the exception of air opposition, the 5000 missions flown were not unlike those they were to face in the Solomons years later. Among the new aerial tactics developed were actual coverage of a boat-to-shore landing, aerial message pickups and mosquito dusting of camps in the battle against malaria.

Back home, during these years of nominal peace, Marine aviators zealously worked to improve their tactical efficiency and to explore the new horizons of flight. Some of these Marine exploits made headlines, others added to the lore and laurels of the Air Arm while the nation's air services struggled against the usual peacetime odds.

They flew the longest unguarded flight ever made over land and water in a jaunt from Washington to Santo Domingo and return. Two years later, in 1923, they broke another land plane record by completing nearly an 11,000 mile flight from Haiti to San Francisco and return, the longest flight in American aviation history and the second longest in the world up to that time.

Rescue and emergency flights became part of the Marine airman's stock in trade-whether for Mississippi flood victims or forest fire patrols.

The Herbert Schiff trophy for safety in flying during 1925-26 was awarded by the President to Captain Harold Campbell (now a retired major general). Captain Arthur Page made the record "blind" flight of those days in a 1000-mile instrument flight through storms and heavy cloud cover from Omaha to Washington. Earlier, Page had won the Curtiss Marine Trophy speed race, averaging 164 mph.

The Air Arm moved into another field of operation when two of its squadrons were assigned regular carrier duty with the fleet in 1931, serving on board the Lexington, Langley and Saratoga for three years.

Marine aviation also picked up another dot on its growing air map when the old Haitian observation squadron became the garrison air force for the Virgin Islands in 1934.

Farthest flung in the Corps' global assignments was the duty of Marine airmen with the Byrd expeditions to the South Pole. When Admiral Byrd discovered a new mountain range in the Antarctic in 1929, the pilot of his plane was Marine Captain Alton N. Parker. Two Marine enlisted airmen won Navy Crosses on this expedition for their technical exploits. One of the men, Gunnery Sergeant Victor H. Czegka (now a retired commissioned warrant officer) won the Navy Cross again as general manager of the second Byrd expedition to the Pole.

Then came the days of the Blitzkrieg, the Wermacht and the Luftwaffe when Colonel Lewie G. Merritt (now a retired major general) became the only Marine pilot shot down by the Nazis in World War II. While serving with the RAF out of Cairo, Col. Merritt took off in a Wellington bomber on a recon mission over Rommel's forces in the famed Halfaya Pass region. Flak chewed up the bomber and then pinned down its crew after the crash landing in the desert. Rescued by British armored cars, Col. Merritt was released from the field dressing station and continued his study of fighter command operations.

A group of Marine airmen concentrated on night-fighter tactics, studying with the RAF in England. Out of their experience came the major answer to the marauding Japanese night bombers in the Pacific and the remarkable efficiency and high kill scores racked up in the Pacific by the Marine night fighter squadrons.

It was a long, hard sky road from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay but Marine aviation was in the forefront of the action from the day it started to the day it ended in victory. Marine airmen, and their wings, groups and squadrons, ashore or afloat, took a vicious toll of things Japanese all along the way, in a two-pronged air sweep over the vast reaches of the Pacific, its coral atolls and stinking jungles which were the aerial beachheads between the continents of North America, Australia and the Asiatic mainland.

First came the holding phase over the Pacific fly-speck islands of Wake and Midway. Down in the South Pacific came the first major offensive actions-bitter, costly but successful-on the drive to Tokyo. The move up for Marine air began at New Caledonia in May, 1942.

Then came the Cactus Shivaree at Guadalcanal-the bursting place for the high-tide of Japanese aggression in the southern latitudes. Once the handful of Marine airmen seized the aerial beachhead over Henderson Field they held on to it in the grimmest and most hopeful action of the new Pacific war.

Nearly a year later, with Guadal secure, the Marine Air Arm took on the role of spearheading the Allied drive up the Solomons, well aided by an assortment of Army, Navy and New Zealand airpower.

The offensive north rolled faster now-up the Solomons chain till it came to Bougainville, forward airbase for the move against Rabaul-last air stronghold of the Japanese in the Bismarck Archipelago. What was left of enemy land and sea forces saw their once formidable air umbrella ripped out of the skies.

The Solomons squadrons continued their island hopping in a new direction when they moved from Emirau into the Central Pacific to support Marine ground forces at Palau in the Caroline Islands. From there the move was into the Philippines for an unusually successful mission-close air support in the combat-proved Marine fashion, for Army Divisions eliminating Japanese opposition in those islands.

Okinawa was next. There the southern prong of the Marine air drive joined forces with the northern units which had been milk-running up through the Central Pacific. Starting in Samoa in April, 1942, the northern forces worked their way up the atoll chain-Ellice, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Mariannas, Ulithi, Iwo-and then Okinawa.

While their island-based brethren were beating their way to the Island Empire of Japan, other Marine squadrons found a faster way to get at the enemy in his home islands and surrounding territory. These were the Marine squadrons serving aboard the Navy's fast carrier task forces that roared over the Asian mainland at Saigon-then Hainan-Formosa and finally over Tokyo and the Japanese home islands.

The first Navy carriers with all-Marine flight complements were the four Marine CVEs which supported the ground troops at Okinawa and ranged enemy waters to Borneo and targets in the East China seas.

World War II ended and Marine airmen had ranged the globe in defense of freedom. The record they left behind them of courage, skill, sacrifice and combat excellence added up to the simple fact that Marine Aviation's efforts in the Pacific could neither be denied nor gently praised.

After a 17-year absence, Marine air went back to China to carry out one of its typical "peacetime" missions. Four air groups joined the ground forces in China for repatriation duty. Based at Tientsin, Peiping and Tsingtao, the Marine airmen tangled with the Chinese Communists and bandits in North China without actual open warfare. Their planes were fired on regularly and, on one occasion, the fliers aided in the rescue of some ground troops captured by the Communist forces. For almost a year, the Marines maintained the air defense of the North China area. In the meantime, other air units joined ground force occupation units in Japan, primarily at Yokosuka, Kyushu and Nagasaki.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, the Air Arm was back in combat. Two fighter units landed at Itami in Japan and an observation squadron joined the Marine Brigade in Korea at Chinhae. In the first real counterattack by the UN forces in Korea, Marine fighter squadrons covered Brigade troops in the drive on Chinju.

Carrier and land based squadrons put on their biggest show providing air cover for Marine and Army troops fighting the Chinese Communist forces on the movement from the Chosin Reservoir to Hungnam.

Planes of the First Marine Aircraft Wing flew 110,550 sorties in Korea between August, 1950, and May, 1953. More than 36,000 of these were close support missions for the UN infantry forces.

As usual, the Marine fliers logged some new "firsts" for the Corps and for military aviation generally. Marine Transport helicopters flew the first mass supply operation in combat history and made the first helicopter-borne landing of a combat unit. A major innovation was the use of an airborne operations center; the First Wing controlled 210 flights in operation over a six-day period involving nearly 900 fighter planes.

There is peace in Korea now-but the First Wing is still there. Around the globe, either horizontally or vertically, Marine airmen are hard at their task of military air combat proficiency. In our efforts to keep the peace, the Marine airmen will be finding new horizons around the world in this "age of peril."