Marine Fighter Pilot at the Jugular of the Solomons

By Capt. Wallace B. Thomson

Could an unobtrusive, skinny, bookish teacher who loves classical music and poetry become a fighter pilot in one of the bloodiest theaters of war our country has known? Could this modest self-described dreamer become the pilot of a Corsair F4U, the fastest plane built—equipped with six menacing, Browning .50 caliber machine guns, a primitive navigation system and a 16-cylinder engine so powerful that it could spin the plane over and crash if accelerated too fast? How far did Wally Thomson, the teacher, travel to become Captain Wallace B. Thomson the war hero of his hometown, Hackensack, New Jersey?

In this memoir, Wally describes vivid wartime details that are often insightful, humorous or critical to a life or death decision. He also stands back to provide context for his role in the war effort, describing some of the most relevant battles preceding his arrival in the Pacific. And he reflects on some of the strategies, tactics, mistakes and successes of the Allies and the Japanese while he explains the tasks at hand—flying a powerful aircraft to carry out his missions, leading his men to attack the enemy and to survive to fly another day. Through his telling, we recognize the friendships, fears, romance, humor and the courage he witnessed in the Pacific.

Wally’s is just one of the remarkable stories about the countless ordinary men and women who were asked to act in extraordinary ways during World War II. But each story is unique and each one deserves telling. This is Wally’s story—the story of Captain Wallace B. Thomson, a Marine Pilot at the Jugular of the Solomons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543470925

Capt. Wallace B. Thomson

About the Author Capt. Wallace “Wally” B. Thomson from Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, was a marine fighter pilot during WWII. After college and teaching high school, he entered flight training months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Wally flew sixty-one missions in the Pacific over a twenty-one-month period. He and his wife, Jane, raised three children. He enjoyed an exceptional career in the aerospace industry, earning six patents and the Engineer of the Year award. Wally published more than sixty technical and scientific papers and reports and cowrote the book of his brother, John, about John’s career as a famous race aviator and commercial pilot.

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Copyright © 2017 by Capt. Wallace B. Thomson.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2017918657

ISBN:             Hardcover             978-1-5434-7091-8

                        Softcover               978-1-5434-7090-1

                        eBook                    978-1-5434-7092-5

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Rev. date: 12/19/2017

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1     My Early Days

Chapter 2     My Father

Chapter 3     Teterboro Airport

Chapter 4     My Brother, John

Chapter 5     School And College Days

Chapter 6     The Impending War

Chapter 7     My Flight Training

Chapter 8     The Ongoing Pacific War

Chapter 9     Transferred To Palmyra Island

Chapter 10   We Return To Hawaii

Chapter 11   Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides

Chapter 12   Australia

Chapter 13   Transferred To The Russell

Chapter 14   Based At Bougainville Island

Chapter 15   Bougainville: Cutting The Jugular

Chapter 16   Green Island

Chapter 17   We Return To The States

Chapter 18   Postwar Activities

Postscript

Bibliography

LIST OF FIGURES

3.1       Bernarr Macfadden, wealthy eccentric (courtesy of AHOF)

3.2       Richard E. Byrd (center) with Lindbergh and Chamberlin (courtesy of AHOF)

4.1       John Thomson banking his aircraft

4.2       John Thomson racing

4.3       One of John’s several parasol planes

4.4       John with Salmson engine and wing ribs in 1933

4.5       John with wing and ribs in the backyard

4.6       John’s Silver Cloud glider

4.7       John on his tractor in one of his airport runways

4.8       John and Dorothy by their airport entrance

4.9       John at one of his airport fly-ins

8.1       Bombing of USS Shaw—Pearl Harbor

8.2       Battleships burning—Pearl Harbor

8.3       Bombing Battleship Row—Japanese view

8.4       View of Pearl Harbor attack from Ford Island Naval Air Station

8.5       Japanese pilot view—Pearl Harbor

8.6       Wake Island aircraft wreckage

8.7       Japanese fleet—invasion of Rabaul (photographed by RAAF, public domain)

8.8       Bombing of Darwin, Australia

8.9       Doolittle with a 500 lb. bomb just prior to takeoff

8.10     Doolittle’s B-25 leaving the USS Hornet for the raid

8.11     Battle of the Coral Sea major forces’ movements

8.12     USS Lexington exploding after attack

8.13     Aircraft carrier Shoho burning

8.14     Aerial view of Midway Island before battle

8.15     Japanese flagship Akagi

8.16     Sinking of Japanese cruiser Mikuma

8.17     B-17 bomb attack misses carrier Hiryu

8.18     USS Yorktown at moment of torpedo impact

8.19     Battle of Guadalcanal—US Marines beach landing

8.20     F4Us at Guadalcanal

8.21     USS Quincy in Japanese searchlights and under fire

8.22     Eastern Solomons—map of major actions

8.23     Japanese bomb explodes on the flight deck of USS Enterprise

8.24     USS Enterprise under attack and burning on August 24, 1942

8.25     Battle of Cape Esperance—USS Boise damage

8.26     Battle of Santa Cruz—USS Enterprise in action

9.1     Kingman Reef—aerial view

9.2     Palmyra main runway

9.3     VMF-211 on Palmyra (Wally is the first person on the left of second row.)

9.4     Wally in Palmyra 1943

9.5     Inspectors—December 1943

10.1     Chance Vought F4U

10.5     F4U Corsair glide bombing

10.3     Ewa (Hawaii) Marine Corp Air Station camouflaged concrete aircraft revetments

10.4     VMF-211 Squadron at Ewa (Wally is the first person on left, back row.)

10.5     Mt. Mauna Loa—June 1943

10.6     Mauna Kea, Hawaii

10.7     John Hudley, Wally, and Jack Thornton on Oahu

11.1     Escort carrier Prince William

11.2     Boating in Espiritu

11.3     Bombers in Espiritu

11.4     Ward Hower, Wally, and Adolph Vetter in Espiritu, 1943

11.5     Pilots at Espiritu

11.6     Destroyers at Espiritu

11.7     Espiritu Santo entering base

12.1     Sydney Harbor Bridge—aerial view (Fairfax Syndication)

12.2     Wally in Sydney, Australia

13.1     Solomons and New Britain

13.2     F4U Corsairs on Russell Islands

13.3     Japanese marker on Munda Island

13.4     Wally in Solomon Islands

13.5     Japanese wreckage at Munda

13.6     Admiral Halsey in New Georgia

14.1     Bougainville Island

14.2     Bob Alexander’s grave

14.3     Japanese squadron at Rabaul

INTRODUCTION

For many people, World War II has receded far into the pages of history, and accurate stories of that monumental conflict have faded from the memories of the very few remaining veterans of the army, navy, and marine armed forces. This book traces the path of one skinny Marine Corps fighter pilot’s journey through that time. This story takes the reader from Wally Thomson’s childhood and young adulthood, through the Solomon Islands Campaign in the Pacific, then through a challenging aerospace career, and finally, in his nineties, his enjoyment of an active retirement in Arizona.

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I grew up right next to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, ten miles west of New York City, where famous aviators and famous aircraft took off, buzzed through our skies, and landed in what seemed like a perpetual parade. At Teterboro, flyers like Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Clarence Chamberlin, Floyd Bennett, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, and Ivan Gates and his Flying Circus were in that parade. Aircraft designers and builders such as Anthony Fokker, Giuseppe Bellanca, and Charles Day applied their gifts for design to innovate and construct ingenious aircraft with features that we take for granted today. Bellanca’s Iron Horse roared through the skies over our little town of Hasbrouck Heights. My brother John and I were fascinated and found that aviation was in our blood. Aviation was only twenty to thirty years of age, and it and was figuratively and literally flying forward with incredible speed.

Then there was my father, Jay Earle Thomson, a track star at Syracuse University and the supervising principal of our town’s three schools. He was a world traveler and a captivating lecturer. He was also once president of the New Jersey Schoolmasters Association and author of fifteen middle school textbooks—including one entitled Aviation Stories. He was an inspiration to his three children: John, Doris, and your author, Wally.

Then there was my brother, John—what a guy! Starting at the age of six until the end of his eighty-seven years on this earth, he was obsessed with aviation. By age twenty-two, he had built and flown fourteen gliders and aircraft. He met his wife, Dorothy Miller Thomson, because of not one but actually two forced landings. Their meeting resulted in a marriage that lasted an adventurous sixty-three years. For several years, John was an airplane and seaplane instructor. He was a pilot for Trans World Airlines for thirty-two pioneering years. Always interested in airplane racing, John was also a racing pilot for thirty-seven years, mostly small Formula One craft but also a World War II P-38 Lightning aircraft. He retired to Florida and constructed his own airport, where he refurbished and flew various antique planes. To cap off his aviation life, he was inducted into the New Jersey Aviation Hall of Fame in 1979, joining such illustrious flyers as Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Clarence Chamberlin, Admiral Byrd, and many others mentioned in this book. After John’s death, I picked up the beginnings of his autobiography then wrote and edited most of his book, My Trips on Flights Fantastic: The Saga of an Aviation Pioneer.

My younger sister, Doris, married my lifelong friend and classmate, Jack Volkhardt. Doris was an artist and was active in archeological digs (China, Easter Island, and Nigeria). Jack and Doris raised three daughters. Jack went on to become president of Best Foods Inc.

And I, Wally, was active in all sports, hiking, and camping. I was shy and inattentive in school. I was a dreamer and a bookworm. My father, being a school principal and a writer, filled our home with all kinds of books. I read the magazines Boy’s Life and American Boy. I was mesmerized by all the Tom Swift books and dreamed of adventures and space flight, but I never thought I would be a fighter pilot. However, life, being what it is, changed many things.

1

MY EARLY DAYS

FAMILY ORIGINS

My relatives, going back about three generations, were mostly farmers in Southern New York State and Northern Pennsylvania. Henry Thomson, my great-grandfather, came over from Scotland about 1806, and the Moses family on my mother’s side arrived in the US in the 1840s. Henry Thomson was a stonemason. He worked on the Starrucca Viaduct in Northeastern Pennsylvania, a bridge reputed to be the largest railroad bridge built without mortar. My great-grandmother on my mother’s side came from England with her husband and six children. Her sister, also with husband and six or seven children, decided to migrate to Australia. They sent letters from places like Cádiz and Mallorca (in the Mediterranean) but, after a time, became silent. And they were never heard from again. Shipwrecked? Pirates? Slavery or disease? No one ever found out.

THE TOWN OF HASBROUCK HEIGHTS

In 1914, my father, Jay Earle Thomson; my mother, Adelaide; and my brother, John, moved from Holland Patent, New York (where Pop was a teacher), to the little town of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. Hasbrouck Heights lies on a north-to-south ridge that was parallel to and ten miles west of the Hudson River and New York City. When my parents moved there, the population was about three thousand. Between our town and the river lay the Hackensack Meadows (wrought by the last Ice Age), which were swampy and mosquito ridden. Dutch settlers, who arrived in the 1600s, were prominent in Northeastern New Jersey and left their imprint on the names of towns (Hoboken, Paramus, and Moonachie) and citizens (Brinkerhoff, Gernert, Blauvelt, and Wisse). During the Revolutionary War, the British controlled New York City, and the conservative Dutch settlers remained mostly pro-British, leading to conflict between the more western patriots and the Dutch. At the foot of the Hasbrouck Heights ridge, where it joins the meadows, lay Teterboro Airport, which was to become an almost mythical part of my childhood.

My father had taken the position of supervising principal of the three schools in Hasbrouck Heights. He had been encouraged to come by Dr. Roy Gates Perham, who, along with my father, was on the Syracuse University track team. Doc Perham brought me into this world in 1917 and remained as our family doctor until he died in 1949. Doc had a boy’s camp at Gardiners Bay near East Hampton, Long Island, where I worked for four summers. Besides the meadows on the east, Hasbrouck Heights was bounded by Hackensack on the north and Lodi to the west, while to the south was a cornfield, later to become the town of Wood-Ridge.

Public transportation in those days were trolley cars that ran south and north along our boulevard, giving us a romantic ride to Rutherford on the south or north to Hackensack. There were no buses or major highways, and there were very few private autos. We could see the New York City skyline from town, but it lacked the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the George Washington Bridge. There was a fairly rapid period of construction during that time so that by 1935, most lots in Hasbrouck Heights had homes on them. In the years that followed, the trees grew, but the homes stayed about the same. All in all, it was a very pleasant town.

OUR FAMILY

My family included my father, Jay Earle (1885–1950); my mother, Adelaide (1883–1979); my brother, John (1912–2000); me, Wallace (1917–2009); and my sister, Doris (1919–2005).

In 1909, when just out of Syracuse University, my father married a cute schoolteacher in Johnson City, New York, named Adelaide Moses. Adelaide was raised on a hardscrabble farm of forty acres ten miles south of Binghamton, New York, and just across the border from Pennsylvania. One morning in 1890, Adelaide awoke to find that she now had a baby brother, Everett, but her dear mother had died in childbirth. That left her (age nine); her sister, Bertha (age twelve); and brother Oscar (eight) to raise Everett and help their father, Charles Moses, manage a farm that grew rocks. It was a difficult life. Adelaide had rock-solid character and, later on, succeeded in holding our rather flighty family together.

HOME

It was not until 1920 that my parents established a permanent home in Hasbrouck Heights. Pop picked out the highest point in the Heights and, with great energy, contracted to build three homes there. In our home, I slept in what we called a sleeping porch. There were seven windows, no heat, and no insulation. It was like sleeping in a barn. The seven windows would rattle all during the long winter nights. We had a coal furnace. I was elected to shake down the fire, shovel on the coal, shovel out the ashes, and once a week, carry the cans of ashes out to the street. Because of his poor circulation, my father would always have us run the furnace way too hard. So every day or two, the steam pressure would become so high that the furnace would blow off. This would cause a family emergency where someone would have to go down into the steam-filled cellar, check the fire, and then tweak the emergency valve so that the blow-off would stop.

MY CHILDHOOD ACTIVITIES

Unlike my brother, John, I was not interested in mechanical things. I was definitely a bookworm, and since our home was loaded with books, I read everything I could with great fascination. Since my father was into writing textbooks, we had acquired The Book of Knowledge, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and many literature collections—maybe one thousand books altogether. I had the arrogant feeling that I was smarter than my classmates were; but at the same time, I was incredibly lazy about doing homework. In retrospect, I sure could have used a little discipline. Both my father and mother were well-educated people and should have needled me a little. But I was so quiet and thoughtful, they probably assumed I was doing all right in school—but I really wasn’t. Despite being bookish, I was seriously interested in athletics. Every afternoon, we indulged in the seasonal athletics: football, basketball, baseball, track, sleigh riding, hockey, and tennis. This all stopped at age sixteen when I came down with a severe digestive disorder and lost at least thirty pounds. Forty years later, my illness was finally diagnosed as ileitis, or Crohn’s disease, but it was probably scar tissue remaining after a devastating intestinal infection acquired during a fishing trip to the Saint Lawrence River. This could have been a crippling disease; but in my case, I gradually recovered, with only occasional problems in later life.

VACATIONS

My father’s brother, Walter Thomson, my uncle, opted to live in the city now known as Johnson City, one of the so-called Triple Cities—Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott, New York. This area was located where the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers joined and, early on, was called The Point. The main industry in those days was the production of the well-known Endicott-Johnson shoes. Walter developed a thriving insurance and real estate business. Walter also became active in local politics, where he became an efficient and honest servant of the people. In 1924, my uncle Walter (one of my lifelong heroes) bought a cottage on the Tioughnioga River—in a spot that, in those days, was pristine and remote. Other relatives bought or built nearby cottages, forming a friendly colony of five summer dwellings. For ten years, we would go there every summer. I can’t imagine having better vacations than that. There was swimming, boating, fishing, hiking, camping, ball games, homemade ice cream, and well water. There were card games, outside toilets, kerosene lamps, starry nights, deer, and woodchucks. Each day was an adventure.

2

MY FATHER

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

My father, Jay Earle Thomson, grew up on a farm in Vilonia Springs in Southern New York State. In spite of his family’s poor circumstances, he managed to graduate from Syracuse University in 1909. While there, he became a track star (quarter mile, hurdles, high jump, and long jump)—quite an achievement since he had a damaged heart from an illness originally diagnosed as scarlet fever but, later, thought to have been rheumatic fever. Good as he was at track, he never could defeat a classmate, a young Native American from Carlisle College named Jim Thorpe!

My father and his only sibling, Walter Phelps Thomson, both managed to graduate from Syracuse University. They both succeeded apparently because of the strong insistence of their Methodist minister. Both of the brothers became track stars at Syracuse. Another track star there was a muscular young man, Roy Gates Perham, who was studying medicine. Doc Perham later had a strong influence on our growing family. When Dr. Perham settled down to practice medicine in 1913, it was in the little town of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, about ten miles west of New York City with a population of 1,500 souls.

My father married Adelaide Moses in 1911, and in 1912, Jay Earle and Adelaide had their first child, John Earle Thomson. Little did they realize what a stubborn, dedicated, and talented child they had brought into the world—a child who would play a significant role in the lives of so many people.

TEACHER AND PRINCIPAL

My father taught mathematics and served as the school principal in the towns of Holland Patent and Olean, New York.

Earle (as my father was most often called) was offered a job at the schools of Tuxedo, New York. However, schoolmate Dr. Perham notified him that there was an opening in Hasbrouck Heights for the job of supervising principal of their three schools. So in 1914, Earle brought his little family down to the Heights—a growing town overlooking the vast Hackensack Meadows and ten miles west of the growing and (at night) the glowing city of New York.

AUTHOR, WORLD TRAVELER

Pop took to writing school textbooks, authoring fifteen in his lifetime. To gather supporting material for his books, he traveled widely—to such places as Nova Scotia, Alaska, the Canal Zone,