<Begin Segment 17>

BN: So what is he doing -- I mean, this is around the time you're born, so what's he doing when you're growing up?

JF: What is my uncle Harvey...

BN: Yeah. It sounds like they're a fairly large part of your life.

JF: He winds up in preflight with the only other Black cadet. A guy named David Campbell, Jr. David Campbell, Jr. was raised by a single mom in L.A. of places, but his mom dies when he's twelve years old. I don't know how, can't find records on it, and David is retrieved by his grandmother and grandfather in Augusta, Georgia, and that's where he grows up. Ends up becoming a star athlete, and is the captain of his basketball team. I don't know how he got into the naval aviator school, but he's there and he excels in that preflight class. He does so well, he's at the top of the entire regiment, and that's like four hundred cadets. So he's given the special honor where you're given these stripes to put on your lapel, and for two weeks you're given special recognition and stuff, and there's a little article about him too in the local paper that I dug out. But he and my uncle Harvey were kind of friends, buddies, because they were the only people of color in the regiment, probably on the whole base, Navy, at that time. So they wind up going from preflight to basic flight where my uncle has the real good fortune of having this Charles Parr be his lieutenant instructor, and that's who teaches him to fly in this really lucky -- that sound you're hearing, that's the dog eating. Anyway, so Harvey falls in love with flying, it just comes natural to him, thanks to Lieutenant Parr. And he has a successful basic flight, goes on to advanced flight. And at the end of advanced, you have to make twelve carrier landings. And David is doing well, too, but on the final landing, something happens, they don't know what, but he's washed out, he's disqualified because of that last landing. And Harvey never knew what happened, I can't find records of what happened. It might be in David's flight log, but I don't have that. I have Uncle Harvey's flight log. But yeah, from that point forward, Harvey's on his own. So with the carrier qual in advance, you're given your wings, your wings of gold. And this is in Pensacola, Florida, so my grandparents are in L.A. and traditionally it's your parents who pin your pilot wings on you. But since they weren't able to afford the trip to get over there, or the time, the admiral did it. I forgot his name, anyway, got a picture of him pinning the wings on Harvey.

And then from there, he went to all weather school where they teach you how to fly a plane in the dead of night just by instruments only. And then if you make that and you're still alive, then you go to just twenty hours of jet flight qualification, twenty hours. And then the jet you're flying is this old... I forgot the name of it... but it's this very early jet that kind of looks like a drone to me. I've seen black and white photos of it. Anyway, he trains in that, qualifies for jet flight school, but you don't land on a, I don't think you carrier qual with a jet. I have to double check that, but in those days, in the Korean War, the Navy was kind of caught flat footed because they had downsized considerably from the end of the war when they had the twenty-four carriers in the water, they had downsized to just eight by the start of the Korean War. So when that conflict broke out, only two carriers reported to the theater where they carried out operations off the carrier decks. But they were World War II carriers so they were straight deck, wooden plank, and not designed for jet aircraft. And these were first generation jet aircraft we're talking about. So they were... the Navy had contracted with different manufacturers to try and find a model that had the flight characteristics needed not only to get the job done over target, but to return, and then to complete the job by landing on this three hundred foot deck. So the model that my uncle was fortunate enough to fly and train in was the F9F Panther. That became the workhorse for the Korean War naval aviators, and he's lucky to be in that one versus some of the other jets, they had these grotesque names because of their flight attributes like Ensign Eaters or I forgot some of the other names.

BN: Ones you didn't want to be on.

JF: Yeah, the ones that, uh-oh. And the accidents that would happen early on, this is from 1950 to '53, you're talking... a plane would hit the deck, and you're talking about carriers that were not equipped with a modern day landing operations assistance apparatus. They still have them by the same location on the carrier deck, but they had an actual person standing on the little platform, the landing signal officer, and he had these two ping pong paddles that would mimic your wave level. And then all these signals that would communicate to you in the cockpit what you should do. And if you had to wave off, he would wave you off. And you had to apply power in order to make another go around. But the jets, that worked fine for the prop planes in World War II and for the carriers, half of the aircraft, more than half the aircraft on board were still prop driven, and they would use those during the Korean War for the bombing. And the jets, though, unlike the props, when you were given the cut signal by the landing signal officer to cut and come in for landing, the jet engines had a turbine that would drive the air compressor at the front of the engine. It was all kind of tied together, and this one tune that you straddled in the cockpit, that was your jet engine. So when given the cut signal, well, yeah, okay, it might stop running for a prop plane, but for a jet, that spindle kept turning for thirty seconds. That meant you still were powering down under the deck, so the accidents that would occur were when the jet hit the deck too hard, bounced over all the retaining wires, still plowed through the, they called it a Davis barrier which was like a tennis net. Of course, it was heavy wire and steel, and so it would just pierce that and then it would crash into all the unused jets that being stored at the opposite end of the deck. So again, it's World War II carrier design is having these conflicts with, jet technology, but that's just still in its experimental stages.

So I don't think, as a pilot, that my uncle Harvey really thought about that. Maybe he knew about those accidents and knew about the possibility, but he never spoke about it. So yeah, to a lot of the instructors there, they would tell their cadets, "What's the problem? It's got a stick and two wings, just get in there and fly it." And so some of the, like his commanding officer Bruce Bell, Lieutenant Commander Bruce Bell, he was in charge of this squadron of twenty-four pilots. And then they had like four divisions, sixteen aircraft, so four aircraft per division. Bruce Bell, Lieutenant Commander Bruce Bell, picked Uncle Harvey to be his wingman. And that's kind of an honor, but I was told that it comes as no surprise to everybody else in the squadron when you're picked as the squadron leader's wingman, because everybody knows who the best pilots are. And my uncle Harvey, just through a stroke of luck, had three months of extra training time in the F9F. So he had felt pretty comfortable in that plane. So naturally Bruce Bell recognizes that, picks him as his wingman, so he flew as, they called it... because of Bell's last name, they called it the Dinger Division. So Bruce Bell, the Lieutenant Commander was Dinger 1, and then my uncle Harvey flew as Dinger 2, and then Dinger 3 and 4.

But yeah, he saved the life of his lieutenant commander late in the campaign. This is maybe July, early July 1953. It was during the period of time during the war where automated aircraft, automated anti-aircraft cannons were being fired. So these were radar-controlled cannons shooting at you. So on one mission that they had to, I forgot, Wonson Harbor or something like that, my uncle Harvey was flying as wingman, which means you're trailing and off to the side of your leader, and your responsibility as a wingman is to make sure he can focus on the task, and in other words, just ensure his safety so that he can do what he has to do. Anyway, these radar-controlled guns began focusing on his jet. And usually the jets were fast enough to outrace these anti-aircraft streams of anti-aircraft cannon fire that were coming up through the air. They had red tracers, so it's like an inverted waterfall of these red tracers coming up, and they're going right for his leader. So he spots where the, on the ground where the fire is emanating from, and he takes a dive straight to them and then begins to fire his twenty millimeter cannon. These cannon shells were cartridges that housed the shell were about as big around as your wrist or a soup can, they're pretty powerful. And then the piece that comes out and is fired at the target varied from fragmentation to armor piercing and whatnot, it would kind of mix it up. Anyway, so he's down there and he's firing his cannon off at the radar assisted guns and now they start moving towards him. Luckily, his charges were on target, so the firing stops and he was given a special recognition for that. The commander of the fleet, a rear admiral at the time, they called him Jocko Clark, who was half Cherokee Native American, there's a photograph of Jocko Clark shaking the hand of my uncle Harvey had an all hands on deck award ceremony where you in the background could see all the crew members. So that was kind of a special deal.

BN: Yeah.

JF: So he stays after the conflict, and he stays in the reserves and keeps flying. He winds up being, he always wanted work that would take advantage of his training and education. So he winds up working for North American Aviation, who are developing the F-100 fighter, and they need someone who can design their bomb release mechanism. So he helps them with that, and then they get bought by Lockheed, I think, and they take on the construction of the Apollo project, the boilerplate of the control module. So he works on that team and designs that Hershey kiss thing. He's assigned to, or he winds up being the leader of the team that designs the safety harness mechanism at the top. Kind of a crucial piece, because if that fails, now you've done everything. If that thing fails, good grief. So that was a lot of responsibility for him, so he feels like, okay, finally, I'm doing what I should be doing.

BN: So we're a couple hours in, so I think we're going to have to wrap up soon. So can we just go part two?

JF: Yes.

BN: I'll be back definitely in June and we'll make arrangements for that. But this is all great stuff. I mean, you're a really good storyteller.

JF: Just telling the truth. [Laughs] I'm lucky that I got to videotape my mother and my dad on an inspired night. They told all these stories, also at our family's get-together, my mom's side of the family used to get together at Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmastime for dinner, and all those Nisei folks used to tell those stories about camp and camp days.

BN: Certain kinds of stories about camp.

JF: Yes, only the good things, the fun things for them.

BN: So many Sansei got only that version of camp.

JF: That was our case.

BN: Okay, very good.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.