American Added to Atomic Bomb Victim List
The Japanese recently added the name of a U.S. Navy pilot to the roll of atomic bomb victims at their state-run memorial hall in Hiroshima. Ensign John Hantschel was only 23 when his F6F Hellcat was shot down over Seto Island on 25 July 1945 and he was taken to a military headquarters jail in Hiroshima, just a quarter mile from ground zero.
A-bomb survivor and historian Shigeaki Mori researched Hantschel's record, which ends at Hiroshima. The first of two atomic bombs dropped by American B-29 bombers destroyed the city on 6 August 1945. Earlier this year Mori found the ensign's niece and sister.
Hantschel, a native of Appleton, Wisconsin, enlisted in the Navy on 24 September 1943 and was flying a strike mission against Japanese warships in the Sea of Japan with VF-16 from the USS Randolph (CV-15) when his plane crashed into the sea. His flight leader saw him climb into a rubber raft, but a sea-rescue plane arriving seven hours later failed to locate him. Four days later, a Japanese fisherman picked up Hantschel, who was taken to the Hiroshima jail.
Ensign Hantschel brings to 12 the number of American prisoners of war killed in the atomic blast. The other victims were crewmen from three shot-down Navy and Army Air Forces aircraft. Over the past 30 years Mori tracked down almost all known relatives of the Americans and had them sign applications for their loved ones to be added to the Hall of Remembrance at the Hiroshima Peace Park National Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. His motivation is simple: "I did it out of sheer desire to console the souls of those who died in pain, just like [the] Japanese."
-Kevin Hymel
Will Missing Ships Be Found?
An audacious three-year plan by Parks Canada to search for the Arctic's Holy Grail-the lost ships of the doomed 19th-century Franklin expedition-is now in jeopardy. Launched in August 2008, the search had been supported by the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier. This year, with no coast guard ship available, the park agency asked the Canadian Navy for help. The navy, however, rejected the request in May.
"Unfortunately, we can't support the mission," said Major Paul Doucette, a Halifax-based navy spokesman. He said the navy plans to have ships sailing in the Arctic this summer, but none as far west as O'Reilly Island in Queen Maud Gulf, where Parks Canada has been concentrating its search. He added that it is too early to know whether the navy would be able to participate in the third and final year of the search, scheduled for 2010.
The (Toronto) Globe and Mail reported that Parks Canada-akin to the U.S. National Park Service-requested the navy's help in the final two years of the high-profile quest for the missing ships. With the navy rejection and no agreement with the coast guard, this year's search was cancelled in early July.
In a surprise move, a private company, ProCom Diving Services, invited Parks Canada to join its expedition to find the lost ships beginning in late August. So far, no decision on whether to accept the offer had been made.
In May 1845, Sir John Franklin set out from England with 128 handpicked crewmen on board HMS Terror and Erebus to locate the fabled Northwest Passage to Asia. The last the ships were seen by Europeans was that July. With no word from the expedition after three years-the period covered by the ships' provisions-the Royal Navy began one of history's largest searches, lasting from 1848 to 1859. In the process, the Northwest Passage was discovered. There were 25 more searches over the ensuing four decades.
Modern scientific and forensic techniques, however, have revealed tantalizing information. An expedition uncovered the perfectly preserved remains of Petty Officer John Torrington, who was 20 when he died, in an ice-filled coffin in 1984. Later, the bodies of two other crewmen, Seaman John Hartnell, 25, and Royal Marine William Braine, 33, were exhumed in 1986. Studies of their bodies revealed possible causes of deaths. This includes lead poisoning caused by the solder that sealed cans of their provisions. The ships, however, have remained missing.
Experts believe the Terror and Erebus were lost in 1848 after they became locked in ice near King William Island and that the crews had abandoned them in a hopeless bid to reach safety.
Astronaut Recalls Riding a Monster
Retired Navy Commander Scott Carpenter remembers his encounter with a demon. The challenge was clear: If he wanted to become a Project Mercury astronaut in 1959, he had to endure being whirled around by the world's largest centrifuge at speeds up to 165 mph. "People who ride it learn a lot about themselves," he recalled in April on a return trip to that fantastic machine in Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia. "I remember climbing out of the gondola afterwards and strutting. I wanted to show that this machine can't hurt me."
In demonstrating that right stuff, Carpenter became one of NASA's first seven astronauts and later rode his fiery Aurora 7 spacecraft in three orbits of the Earth on 24 May 1962. He was the second American and first in the Navy to do so.
Carpenter's reunion with the moth-balled centrifuge came at an open house and kickoff of a $3 million fund-raising campaign last April to establish the Johnsville Centrifuge and Science Museum. The facility is located at the former U.S. Naval Air Development Center in Warminster Township. Much of the base has been redeveloped into housing and businesses, but the three-story centrifuge inside the base's Navy Aviation Medical Acceleration Laboratory is to become a lasting memorial to the space program.
Carpenter, still with aviator's trim at age 83, chatted easily with visitors, signed autographs, and posed for photos beneath the massive centrifuge. He marveled that it was exactly 50 years to the day that he was among seven out of 110 test pilots selected for NASA's Project Mercury to put a man into space. Though terming it a monster, he said he came to appreciate the centrifuge: "It was my tutor. It exactly created the conditions of my space flight. Just perfect."
The centrifuge certainly prepared men to endure accelerated flight on the nose of a rocket ship. The mechanism looks much like a giant Erector Set placed on its side and attached to a revolving pedestal in the hollow of a 11,000-square-foot circular room with 16-foot-thick concrete walls lined with copper sheathing. In its day, the centrifuge created gravitational forces that space flight would exert on the human body.
As with all other astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs, Carpenter, wearing a pressurized flight suit, was strapped into a spherical gondola on the tip of the centrifuge's 50-foot arm. His vital signs were electronically monitored and reactions televised back to a control room as the machine reached escape velocity in as little as seven seconds at up to 48 revolutions per minute. The test required him to control the pitch, yaw, and roll of the gondola and even an abort procedure while under extreme gravitational pull.
The stomach-churning, eye-squeezing, skin-stretching experience revealed who had the skill and endurance for space flight. Afterward, Carpenter successfully hid his wobbly discomfort. Much later he saw a film of cosmonaut Gherman Titov stepping out of the cockpit of the Soviet version of the centrifuge. He staggered and was cross-eyed. "Now there is an honest man, I thought to myself," said Carpenter. Both men were to become close friends.
On leave from NASA in 1965, Carpenter became an aquanaut in the Navy's SEALAB II program. He spent 30 days living and working 250 feet down on the floor of the Pacific off La Jolla, California. Rejoining NASA, he was involved in the design of the Apollo Lunar Landing Module and later the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project until his retirement in 1969, after which he went into private business.
At the centrifuge in April, visitors asked his opinion of manned space exploration. "If we keep our resolve, we will get to Mars in 20 years," he predicted. "If not, China lurks and that's all I need to say about that."
-Carl LaVO
Happy Anniversary Savannah!
The world's first nuclear-powered merchant ship, the N.S. Savannah, celebrated the 50th anniversary of her 21 July 1959 christening and launch with an "open ship" on 18-19 July at her berth in Baltimore Harbor. It was the first time the 596-foot ship was open for general tours since she left Patriots Point, near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1994.
Other activities on the 18th included a recreation of the ceremony in which then?First Lady Mamie Eisenhower served as the ship's sponsor. A 49-star flag was raised to the top of the Savannah's gaff, and at 1555, the minute of her launch, the ship's recently restored horn sounded for the first time in more than 35 years.
Earlier in the day, a tugboat parade saluted the Savannah with the vintage 1902 tug Jupiter, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, leading the way. She had been present when the Savannah was launched.
Overdue Recognition
In 1973, the U.S. Navy accepted eight young women into its pilot training program amid publicity that they would be the first women to fly American military aircraft.
It quickly became clear that they weren't the first. In fact, 1,074 preceded them in an all-but-forgotten program during the height of World War II. Replacing male pilots who were being sent into combat, the women were recruited to ferry thousands of combat aircraft coming off production lines to bases throughout the United States.
This past July, 65 years after their service ended in 1944, President Barack Obama signed legislation that awarded more than 300 surviving veterans of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor. The President noted, "Every American should be grateful for their service, and I am honored to sign this bill to finally give them some of the hard-earned recognition they deserve."
"We were pioneers," beamed Betty Jordan, an 86-year-old grandmother from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who was a WASP pilot but unable to attend the award ceremony.
Jordan, after graduating from college, joined a program inspired by legendary aviators Jacqueline "Jackie" Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love. Authorized by the Army under the command of General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, the WASP corps in July 1943 melded Cochran's Women's Flying Training Detachment with Love's Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, two civilian female pilot organizations.
The WASP training program was rigorous, employing the same methods used to train male pilots. Out of 25,000 applicants, 1,830 were accepted for training at the all-female Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. After months of training in single- and multi-engine aircraft in a program that required the aviators to become competent aircraft mechanics as well, the women earned their wings. For that, they received $250 a month without military benefits and little honor except the right to fly, often.
"We loved flying and we'd do anything the government asked us to do," recalled Jordan.
The government asked for plenty-and it was dangerous. In less than two years, the women logged more than 60 million miles, flying every conceivable aircraft type from factory to airbase. Often they served as test pilots, including proving the worthiness of four-engine B-29s.
During the 18 months the corps existed, 38 WASP pilots lost their lives. When her roommate was killed during training in Texas, WASP Louise Bowden Brown rode with the casket in a train to New York for the funeral. It was her duty rather than the Army's to inform the parents of their daughter's death. There were no military honors and no flag presented to the parents. It was up to the WASPs and their families and friends to raise the money to transport the deceased home for burial.
Although Jordan is proud of her medal, she admits the award is bittersweet and long overdue. When the war started winding down and male pilots began coming home, the WASPs were dismissed from service and the program ended in December 1944. After the war, all records involving WASP were sealed. Congress began to make amends in 1977 when those records were finally opened. The G.I. Bill Improvement Act of 1977 further granted WASP veterans full military benefits. Simultaneously, American theater ribbons and campaign medals were awarded to corps members.
Jordan looks back with satisfaction on the corps' accomplishments. For her, the thrill of flying was rewarding in itself. "You get up in that plane at 10,000 feet and look out and up and you can do anything, turn upside down or roll, and you feel like you're in heaven-and you are."
-Carl LaVO