Iron & Fire №2: Aviation Summer
Life at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1930
(Note: This text is an excerpt from the autobiography of my grandfather, Bruce McCandless, which he dictated to his daughter Sue in the late 1950s. I am editing the manuscript for possible publication. While Bruce eventually saw extensive combat in World War II, this section of the memoir is fairly lighthearted.)
The following summer my class was kept at the Academy for what was euphemistically called “Aviation Summer.” True, several large, lumbering twin-engine flying boats (as patrol planes were called back then) were moored to buoys in the Severn and in these doughty craft we were taken on short hops by even doughtier aviators for “familiarization” purposes. But most of our time that summer was taken up with ground school stuff: disassembling and reassembling engines and guns, practicing navigation, and doing lots of random assignments that various departments wanted us to work on while they had us captive. Frankly, I suspect a lot of this work was manufactured just to keep us busy — the Navy having a signal abhorrence of idle hands among the ranks.
Despite the many tasks set before us, though, an adventurous spirit took root among many of us. We’d made it through two years at the Academy, after all, and were fairly certain we’d seen the worst that it could dish out. A sort of unrestricted warfare broke out, with us trying to see how much we could get away with and the Executive Department attempting to make sure we didn’t get away with a thing. In consequence, not a few of my classmates were packed off to the station ship Reina Mercedes to serve a modified confinement that generally lasted from two weeks to a month. The Reina was not, as is periodically stated, a “prison barge.” On the other hand, she wasn’t exactly a luxury liner either. Built as a cruiser by the Spanish in 1887, she was sunk by the Spanish Navy in 1898 in order to block the entrance to the harbor in Santiago, Cuba so that American warships couldn’t enter. We entered anyway. Later, the Navy raised the Reina Mercedes from her watery grave and towed her back to the States, where, eventually, she found a home in Annapolis. The Ship Squad, as her temporary inhabitants were called, ate on board, slept in hammocks, had early reveille, and were mustered frequently so as to check for truants — and all the while, classes continued apace. While a stay on the Reina Mercedes wasn’t debilitating, it was tedious and uncomfortable even by Academy standards. It was an able deterrent, and the subject of many an unhappy meditation.
On two occasions I narrowly escaped serving a sentence on this queen of the seas. The first occurred when my pal Jack Wintle and I met a couple of attractive young women when we were out sailing one morning. Jack was a genial sort, a broad-beamed, flaxen-haired Kansas farm boy who claimed to be a buffalo hunter. He wasn’t much for math, but he could talk a blue streak. As a result of his heroics, we soon won our way into the good graces of our new acquaintances and even wangled a date. In those days the Academy went to lengths that can only be described as maniacal to keep its midshipmen away from unescorted females. I won’t bore you with the details, but the plan Jack and I concocted to get ourselves out of the yard that day and into a car that could take the four of us — Jack, me, and the two young ladies — to Washington rivaled the stratagems of Hannibal and Caesar. Unfortunately, it was cut short in its infancy, when we pulled up next to an automobile containing the wife of a captain who was on the staff of the academy. The woman — no names, please — was known to be a censorious busybody. Her gaze caught mine. She then surveyed the other occupants of the car, lingering for a moment on our lovely accomplices. She gasped, and I knew the jig was up. Home, Jeeves! Jack and I barely escaped disaster when Lieutenant “Dog Face” O’Donnell arrived later that afternoon to check on a report he’d received that we’d gone over the fence. He seemed disappointed to find us dutifully poring over our books.
If that episode wasn’t enough to make a compliant middie out of me, what happened next did. I was invited to dinner one Sunday evening at the quarters of the superintendent of the Academy, Rear Admiral S. Samuel Robinson. Just why I was chosen for this honor is unclear, for also present was the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Charles F. Hughes — better known as “Handlebars Hughes” for the resemblance borne by his magnificent mustache to a bicycle’s steering apparatus. Maybe the CNO just wanted to see what a midshipman looked like these days, and I was selected as a suitable specimen. At any rate, there we were, the Alpha and Omega of the United States Navy, chatting away in the only place in the world I, as a midshipman, was allowed to be on a Sunday evening other than my own quarters.
I can truthfully say that it was rewarding in more ways than one. Upon returning to Bancroft Hall, I found the place in an uproar. It turned out that a couple of my classmates had brought two young women into the mess hall for supper. They’d been visiting for the afternoon, lingered a little too long, and were eventually convinced to don “white works” — the pajama-like uniforms we wore in the summer — over their clothes and stay for supper. It was 1930, and though the era of the flapper had come and gone, girls still wore their hair bobbed, so the white caps were no problem. The young ladies marched into the massive mess hall unnoticed amidst the sea of identically dressed midshipmen in white and were led to the very table at which I usually sat — to which I was assigned to sit, in fact. Unfortunately, they were caught, bread-handed, as it were, and it soon became apparent that heads were going to roll. While it seemed to many of us to have been a harmless prank, the superintendent seized upon it as an incident of rank insubordination and used it as an excuse to crack down on what he thought was a little too much leniency in the ranks. As a starter, all 22 midshipmen who were assigned to that table were given Class A conduct reports and slung on the Reina Mercedes for a month with varying charges. The two poor saps — one was from Massachusetts, the other from Texas — who’d allowed (induced?) the girls to stay for dinner were dismissed from the navy altogether after serving their time in the pokey. When I was summoned before my company officer to discuss the incident, I knew the knives were out. I was told that I was on report for neglect of duty for failure to report the presence of the girls in the mess hall that night.
“But sir,” I said. “I wasn’t there.”
“You weren’t there, eh? Very well. I’ll change the report to changing seat in mess hall without permission, aggravated.” I wasn’t sure this was an actual offense, but I didn’t think it was the time or the place for quibbling. “The punishment will be the same, so you might as well get ready for a month on the Reina Mercedes.”
“But sir,” I replied. “I was having dinner with the Chief of Naval Operations.”
“The Chief of Naval Operations.”
“Yessir. At the Superintendent’s house.”
This was about as likely as me having dinner with Babe Ruth and Herbert Hoover, of course, and my interrogator regarded me wearily, as if the weight of the world’s sins and prevarications were now resting squarely on his shoulders.
“You? At the Superintendent’s house.”
“It’s true, sir. You can check my story.”
“Thank you for your permission, Mr. McCandless. I certainly will. And for your sake, I hope you know what you’re saying.”
I did — and it would have been hard to conceive of two better witnesses for a midshipman to have.
Alas for the third platoon of the third company! I was its sole survivor. In addition to the 21 of us sent to the Reina Mercedes over the Mess Hall Mufti incident, we had several waterborne already: one for putting a pound of sugar in the gas tank of Lieutenant Coco Solo Joe’s automobile, where its overhead valves had a wonderful taffy pull, and three who were caught sneaking off-campus on their hands and knees through the tall grass at the engine test stand across the river. When the company fell in for supper formation after this latest punishment had been meted out, the first, second, and fourth platoons assembled at their appointed places. Then I fell in, occupying an entire platoon front by myself. As I obviously couldn’t be my own platoon commander, the mustering petty officer, and the platoon too, I was soon merged with the fourth platoon. More accurately, fourth platoon moved over toward me, closed the gap, and I was unceremoniously anschlussed into my new unit.
So ended Aviation Summer.
