Pushing the Envelope: The Career of Fighter Ace and Test Pilot Marion Carl

Pushing the Envelope

The latest edition of this work has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 1994 by Marion E. Carl and Barrett Tillman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Bluejacket Books edition, 2005

ISBN 978-1-61251-548-9 (eBook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Carl, Marion E., 1915-1998

Pushing the envelope: the career of fighter ace and test pilot Mario Carl / Marion E. Carl, with Barrett Tillman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Carl, Marion E,. 1915-1988. 2. Fighter Pilots—United States—Biography. Test pilots—United States—Biography. I. Tillman, Barrett. II. Title.

UG626.2.C374A31994

358.4’34’092—dc22

93-36021

CIP

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

98765432

Title page photo: Marion Carl set the world speed record on 25 August 1947 in this Douglas Skystreak (D-558-I) at Edwards Air Force Base. (Douglas Aircraft Co.)

For Edna, of course

Contents

In Memoriam

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE: Beginnings

CHAPTER TWO: Pensacola

CHAPTER THREE: Midway

CHAPTER FOUR: Guadalcanal

CHAPTER FIVE: Edna

CHAPTER SIX: Pax River

CHAPTER SEVEN: Jet Squadron

CHAPTER EIGHT: Flight Test—Again

CHAPTER NINE: Banshees over China

CHAPTER TEN: War College and Washington

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Vietnam

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Sheriff of Cherry Point

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Retirement and Hunting

Bibliography

Index

In Memoriam

Remembering Marion

The two-lane blacktop of Route 99 East winds through the lush greenness of the Willamette Valley between Portland and Salem. Farm vehicles and pickups are always around the Oregon hamlets, so it is not a fast way to get to where you’re going.

But I wasn’t in a hurry. I was thinking of Marion Carl, who had been killed defending his wife during a robbery ten days before. At age eighty-two, he had died fighting on 28 June 1998.

At the north end of Woodburn, a signpost caught my eye: Carl Road Northeast. Two miles north is a cheery greeting: Welcome to Hubbard, Home of the Hop Festival. Population 2,185.

In 1939, when Marion Eugene Carl was commissioned a second lieutenant and aviator in the U.S. Marine Corps, Hubbard was home to 387 souls. There had been even fewer when he was born there in a tent on 1 November 1915. But that humble beginning—surely the humblest of any great aviator—launched Marion on a spectacular career. He was a fighter ace, test pilot, holder of three world records, and survivor of World War II clandestine flights over China and then Vietnam, where he finished his combat career as a brigadier general current in jets and helicopters.

In aviation, we speak of the natural pilots—those apparently born with a gift for flying. They are exceedingly rare, as normal humans are not genetically engineered for performing in three dimensions. Marion Carl apparently was: he soloed after two and a half hours of dual instruction (eight to ten is usual) and just got better. I’ve always said that I’ve only known two geniuses—genius being defined as an innate ability to consistently perform extremely difficult tasks extremely well. Marion was one of them. The other was Douglas Aircraft designer Ed Heinemann, whose products figured prominently in Marion’s career. Ed had almost no engineering education, but he produced an exceptional variety of supremely successful military and experimental aircraft.

Marion had the flying gene. It must have been similar to the divine spark that gave Mozart his awesome ability from childhood and endowed Ted Williams (another Marine aviator) with unmatched skill at batting.

If that sounds like hyperbole, so be it; I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.

If Marion was anything, he was a hunter. One of his partners said, Marion will hunt anything on two legs or four; one engine or two. He was competitive as a fighter pilot and as a deer hunter. But, as his neighbor Capt. Joe Reese elegized, Marion wasn’t rash or excitable. I think that where others saw daring or even brashness, Marion saw acceptable risk. He had enormous self-confidence because he possessed enormous skill and knowledge. That combination allowed him to succeed at high-risk ventures that others wouldn’t try. Perhaps the best example occurred over Guadalcanal in September 1942. Marion was attacked in the traffic pattern by an audacious Zero pilot who was deterred by alert antiaircraft gunners. Cranking up his wheels, Marion gave his Wildcat full throttle and gave chase.

Over the beach, in view of hundreds of U.S. Marines, the Japanese aviator accepted battle. He abruptly reversed course, approaching the apparently vulnerable Grumman from overhead. Marion pulled his nose into the vertical, got a brief sight picture, and pressed the trigger. His aim was superb; the Zero exploded, showering parts onto the beach.

The Japanese pilot probably was Lt. Junichi Sasai, an ace and leader. He could not have known that his opponent was the finest fighter pilot in the American camp—one possessed of the willingness and ability to risk an all-or-nothing act. For, when Marion pulled his nose above the horizon, he was fully committed to win or lose. Had he missed that vertical deflection shot, he would have been caught beneath the Zero’s guns, out of speed and out of options. Instead, he remarked, This is the kind of place I like—where you have to shoot ’em down just so you can land.

Unlike every other Guadalcanal veteran I ever knew, Marion harbored no resentment—let alone hatred—of the Japanese. His was a supremely professional attitude, and he enjoyed meeting former enemies. The appalling atrocities customary to the Japanese military are too well known to ignore, but Marion’s war was—literally—above all that. Once, he said, I prefer to refer to ‘victories’ rather than ‘kills.’ Though he killed quickly and efficiently, he did not know the meaning of malice.

One measure of Marion’s status among his contemporaries was the assumption that he held the Medal of Honor. Though Marion was never a ribbon hunter—he didn’t even apply for the dozen or more Air Medals and Distinguished Flying Crosses he could have gained in Vietnam—he learned in 1943 that he had been nominated for the Congressional. His explanation was that his commanding officer (CO), Maj. John L. Smith, already wore the pale-blue ribbon and, presumably, their squadron would not be awarded a second Congressional Medal of Honor. However, I learned later that the Navy Department would not forward the recommendation because the Army objected to the number of leathernecks being awarded major gongs during that phase of the war. The fact was, of course, that the Marines were engaged in the most intense combat from the summer of ’42 into early ’43. But World War II was fought on many fronts, including Washington, D.C.

Suffice it to say that the big one has been awarded for vastly less than what Marion accomplished at Guadalcanal. As it was, he finished with two Navy Crosses (some official sources say three), five Distinguished Flying Crosses, and fourteen Air Medals. He never even alluded to his Legions of Merit, which he regarded as senior officers’ good-conduct medals.

Despite his world-class accomplishments, I think that Marion regarded his greatest achievement as marrying Edna Kirvin in 1943. They met while he was touring New York City, where Edna was a nineteen-year-old Powers model. Though she was nine years younger than Marion, friends regarded the age difference as the least of the couple’s potential problems. Marion and Edna seemed proof of the conventional wisdom that opposites attract: she’s a genuine people person who can literally draw a crowd just by entering a room. Marion retained a shyness throughout his life; he was not an extrovert. Edna used to joke, Oh, Marion’s so dull and boring. He never wants to go anywhere unless there’s a war on! I’ve heard that when other Marines met the bride, bets were made: fifty-fifty that the marriage wouldn’t last twelve months. Instead, the Carls had a daughter, Lyanne, and a son, Bruce, and remained married for the next fifty-five years.

As a professional Marine aviator, Marion spent perhaps a quarter of his time during the first three decades of their marriage away from home. There was never any doubt of his devotion to flying: he commonly made weekend transcontinental flights, but such things were common in the heady days of nearly unlimited fuel and hot new aircraft appearing annually. When he finally hung up his hard hat, Marion’s 13,000 hours were twice those of his nearest contemporaries.

If any one flight demonstrated Marion’s eerie skill, it was neither a combat mission nor any of his world speed records. Rather, a September 1949 local flight from MCAS El Toro (Los Angeles) to NAS North Island (San Diego) resulted in his greatest challenge. Flying an F9F-2 Panther, Marion was cruising at 27,000 feet and about to make a night landing when, in order, he lost electrical instruments, lights, and radio. Then his engine quit.

Unable to call North Island, Marion expended some of his remaining altitude to buzz the tower and alert the duty watch to his predicament. He wrapped the Panther into a tight, descending 270, but on the base leg, his windscreen suddenly iced over. He slipped the straight-wing Grumman to keep the runway in sight, set down, and rolled out.

Marion waited and waited. Eventually, he walked 5,000 feet back to the tower and informed the operators that they might want to send a truck to tow his plane off the runway. They had no idea anyone had landed. Curious as to why his buzz job had been ignored, he was told, Oh, we just thought that was somebody flat-hatting.

Marion had safely landed a jet fighter, dead-stick, at night, without instruments and without lights. He would have been fully justified in pointing the nose west and pulling the handle, but he just could not resist a challenge to his airmanship.

If Marion enjoyed anything nearly as much as flying, it was leadership. He led the Marine brigade committed to South Vietnam in 1965 and, despite the star on his shoulder, he was much like Germany’s Field Marshal Erwin Rommel—an intuitive shooter. Rommel led the Seventh Panzer Division through northern France in 1940—not in the first Mark IV tank, but often in the lead scout car, manning the MG-34 machine gun. Similarly, Marion was most comfortable in a Huey gunship, though he was also combat qualified in the H-34 and three types of jets: A-4 Skyhawks, F-4 Phantoms, and F-8 Crusaders. I suspect that Marion saw more direct combat as a general than any American since Nathan Bedford Forrest 130 years before.

When Marion retired, the stars came off and they stayed off. Unlike the majority of former flag officers, he was unimpressed with his previous title. In the twenty-five years I knew him, he never called himself General Carl. He always answered the phone with, This is Marion. The only way I ever heard him explain his career was, I’m retired military. The man was completely devoid of pretense or ego; he was incapable of anything but ruthless honesty.

Of course, in a bureaucracy like the armed forces, his plainspoken manner worked against him. Marion was a warrior—he was made for war—and he never understood how anyone else in the profession felt otherwise. When he took command of the Second Marine Air Wing at Cherry Point, North Carolina, in 1967, he had no patience with the peacetime stateside ambiance. Other Marines who had been to Vietnam could adopt a that was there; this is here attitude, not Marion. He was on his third war among people who were in their first, and some of them resented his perfectionist, mission-oriented approach.

The operators, however, almost unanimously admired Marion, and the others certainly respected him. As well as his awesome reputation, there was the constant of his military life: exceptional combat leadership. It was nothing he learned in ROTC or even in the Corps; it was innate, like the flying gene, and it manifested itself in many ways.

When Marion commanded VMF-23 with Corsairs in 1943, a nearby Army squadron was learning to fly P-38s. Marion knew the CO and renewed an old acquaintance. The Army major explained that he would like his pilots to learn the overhead gunnery pass taught by the Navy, but the Lightning was so clean, it accelerated too rapidly for them to master the problem. Marion took some of his limited free time to teach the P-38 pilots how to perform the overhead.

When he assumed command of VMJ-1 prior to the 1955 recon flights over China, Marion found that the Seventh Fleet chief of staff had ordered all markings removed from the Banshees and had prohibited the pilots from carrying ID cards. It was a stupid order that would have fooled no one—least of all the Chinese Communists. But Marion had an ethical as well as a practical objection. If any of my pilots were captured, they could have been executed as spies, he said. So he jumped the chain of command and got the order rescinded by Commander, Seventh Fleet. It might have ruined his career, but Marion didn’t care. If he had failed to get the order changed, he planned to assume responsibility and ignore it on his own.

Another example, one of many, took place in Vietnam. Marion’s seeing eye lieutenant was Lyle Prouse, an A-4 pilot temporarily assigned as his aide. On one occasion, Prouse was riding in Marion’s Huey when they landed at a Special Forces outpost. The Green Beret captain greeted Marion by name, saying, Sir, we really appreciate that generator you got for us. Prouse thought, Well, the old man’s been here before! He had never heard of a Marine general obtaining supplies for an Army captain, but said in retrospect, That was General Carl. He was really the last of the old warhorses.

Marion’s attitude toward leadership never abated—not even in retirement. Like most of the Guadalcanal generation, he regarded the succession of self-absorbed politicians in Washington as sadly inevitable in the Age of Aquarius. He was far less sanguine about the abdication of leadership in the naval services. A former participant in Tailhook symposia, he remained sympathetic to that much-maligned organization, which nearly a decade later remained an outcast despite having done no wrong. Even worse, however, was the failure of a generation of admirals and generals to stand up for their innocent aviators. For Marion Carl, there could be no greater sin.

Aside from his profession, Marion was perhaps the most competent person I ever knew. He could do almost anything: weld steel, wire a house, butcher an elk, fell a tree, play the commodities market. I’ve always believed there are only two kinds of people—givers and takers—and Marion probably agreed, but with different categories. In his world, there were copers and non-copers; he lived in a meritocracy and judged people’s worth by their ability. I learned that lesson early on: during his first hunting trip to our part of Oregon, he arrived prematurely and had quietly watched me shooting some pistol drills against multiple targets. When I holstered my .45 and turned around, there he was, grinning that Marion grin. He said, Gee, we could have used you on Guadalcanal! He was joking, of course, but I learned the key to understanding Marion Carl: if you demonstrated competence at something that interested him, he became more approachable.

Marion liked nothing more than a challenge. His fellow test pilot Joe Rees tells the story of flying somewhere in a twin-engine Beech with Marion asleep in the right seat. In worsening weather and gathering ice, one of the engines coughed, and Marion was instantly awake, literally rubbing his hands in anticipation and asking, Do we have an emergency yet?

Marion was built for emergencies. Three years before his death, two boaters overturned in the icy Umpqua River behind the Carls’ house. Marion, at eighty showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease, immediately grabbed a rope and dashed downstream, standing as far out from shore as he could. One man quickly drowned; the other was nearly immobilized by hypothermia in the 40-degree water. Marion had one chance to save him before the current swept him away. Marion swung the rope a couple of times, judged the distance, and made his cast. The line landed within inches of the boater, who was barely able to hold on while Marion hauled him in.

Marion didn’t regard that event as noteworthy; I didn’t learn of it until more than a year later.

But for all his innate ability, even Marion had limits. When we finished the manuscript of his memoir, Edna was visiting the East Coast, so Marion said, You and I will have to batch it. I helped him clear the table and was surprised as he began hand-washing the dishes in the sink. Marion, don’t you want me to load the dishwasher? I asked.

There was a one-beat pause, then a sideways glance with a self-conscious smile. Oh, Edna knows how to run that.

I waited a long time to tell that story to mutual friends. They appreciated the irony of a two-time fastest man alive who didn’t know how to operate a kitchen appliance.

While driving through Hubbard in July 1998, I pondered again the differences between the man I knew and the legend that survives him. When we name the great aviators of the first century of powered flight, Marion will undoubtedly make the short list. In his elegy, Joe Foss proclaimed Marion the number one pilot in history. The aptness of the title is unknowable, of course, and the public remains largely ignorant of him. Reporters described him as the Chuck Yeager of the Marines, and that prompted leathernecks to demur, saying, Marion was a triple ace when Chuck was a cadet. (When Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, he also broke Marion’s first speed record.) Both were superb professionals in a dangerous, demanding business, and nobody could live on the difference between them. However, the Air Force was far too large to produce a Marion Carl—one pilot who dominated the service for thirty years.

What remains is the essence of the man. His record is there for anyone to see, and it’s true that, to a large extent, what he did is what he was. But down deep, where it counted most, Marion Carl was always the honest, decent Oregon farm boy who never strayed from his moral roots. I am reminded of German ace Ernst Udet’s assessment of