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By Al Zdon
Leon Frankel knew he wanted to be a flyer from the time he was a young boy growing up in St. Paul.
Little did he realize as he played with his toy planes and read books about aviation that
he would one day fly airplanes off aircraft carriers, help sink a Japanese cruiser or do his part in founding a new nation.
Frankel was born in a neighborhood in St. Paul that no longer exists. Just to the
east of the State Capitol, land that once was houses and stores and neighborhood streets has been replaced by Regions Hospital and other developments.
In the 1920s and 30s, though, it was a tough, little
neighborhood. Most of the people living on Frankel's street were Jewish, and there were two synagogues in the neighborhood, one with a red brick façade and the other with white bricks.
"Of course, we called them
the red shul and the white shul, and you didn't want to accidently go to the wrong one. My parents went to the red shul."
Frankel was born in 1923. His father supported the family during the Depression as
the owner of a small grocery store on the corner of Mt. Airy and Lorient.
Memories of growing up include spending a great deal of time at the Central Community House, a neighborhood center which was located next to his home.
"There was a woman who ran it named Faye Biederman, and she
ran it with an iron hand. She kicked me out for a whole year at one point because I called her 'Warden Biederman.' She made me apologize to her in public."
Frankel recalls that he wasn't overly religious in his
youth, and he refused to go to Hebrew school. Getting his bar mitzvah was a challenge, and his mother hired a series of tutors to give him the wisdom to fulfill the requirements. "They were all old men and I went
through three of them. Two of them died, but the third one got me through. And then he died."
Frankel attended Mechanic Arts High School, and managed to graduate in 1940 while he was still only 16 years old.
"I had this grandiose idea that I wanted to be a doctor. My parents scraped together enough money to pay my tuition at the University of Minnesota for a brief period. I used to get a ride to Folwell Hall every day
from the Blommer Beer truck. I'd have to take the streetcar or hitchhike to get home. In the end, I dropped out. I couldn't handle it."
The government started drafting people in 1940, but for a while Frankel was
protected because he was working for a defense industry plant in Rosemount. "I was a shovel operator," he said with a smile. "That means I was using a shovel to put the sand back on top of this huge pipeline
they were building."
Frankel got the job by going to a relative who happened to be head of a union. "There were guys all over the office trying to get into the union, but I walked in and told him who I was. He
had me fill out an application, and I was working the next Monday. It taught me that great lesson: It isn't what you know, it's who you know. I was making $65 a week, which was huge money in those days."
Later,
Frankel went to work for a machine shop that built dies for the New Brighton arms plant.
He knew, though, that the military was in his future. On December 7, 1941, he was at Bilbo's Pool Hall, his day-long haunt
every Sunday, when he heard the news of the Japanese attack on Hawaii.
Frankel had thoughts of joining up, but he was sure he didn't want to be in the infantry. "I had grown up right after World War I, and I used
to hear all these horrible stories from my relatives and others about the trenches, the gas, the bullets flying everywhere. I knew that wasn't for me."
Frankel loved to fly. Once he and a friend had pooled their
resources, two dollars, and had gone for ride in a Piper Cub at Holman Field. "I knew after that that this was it. I had all the model airplanes, and read all the pulp magazines about the World War I aces like
Rickenbacher and the Red Baron. I was really fascinated with the thought of flying."
One day, he decided to head over to Ft. Snelling and see if he could enlist in the Army Air Corps.
"Of course I had to stop
at Bilbo's Pool Hall on the way over because it was right on the street car line. I ran into one of my buddies, "Red" Fogerty. I told him what I was doing, and he said, 'Why don't you join the Navy instead, and he
told me about the V-5 program."
The program aimed at taking young men and making them ready for flight school. So Frankel changed his direction from Ft. Snelling to the Wold-Chamberlain air base where the Navy
was headquartered. He found he would need three character references, and he got one of them from his old nemesis at the neighborhood center, Faye Biederman.
"I had to go before a board of review where they all
sit at a desk while you stand in front of them. That was a trying experience. It was like an inquisition team. They keep firing questions at you to see how you stand up to it."
Frankel passed all the tests
and was sworn into the V-5 program, but there was a problem. There was no room in the program in early 1942 with so many people volunteering for the service.
Finally, in the fall of 1942, Frankel was put in the
Civilian Pilot Training program, and he ended up at Hibbing Junior College in the dead of winter. The training was in Piper Cubs, and resulted in Frankel's first chance to solo.
One flight didn't go very well. "I
was on my third solo one morning when it started snowing out. Everything was covered with snow, and I couldn't find the field. I knew I was getting low on gas, and I thought it would be prudent to come down and land
somewhere.
"I found what looked like level land, and I put her down. I was doing all right for 50 or 100 feet, but then I hit a furrow or something. It flipped the airplane right over, and I was hanging upside
down by my seatbelt. I opened the seat belt and went crashing right through canvas roof of the plane."
There was minimal damage to the aircraft, and the instructors were able to attach skis, fix a few broken
parts, and fly the plane back to the airport.
"One thing I remember clearly was that there was no indoor plumbing at the airport. It was a one hundred yard dash to the outhouse, and, boy was it cold out there."
Frankel finished his training in Hibbing and went back to Wold-Chamberlain. His next training stop was the University of Iowa at Ames, where he joined the 18th battalion to go through the cadet school there.
It was Frankel's first taste of real military training. "I was walking down the street one day and I passed up this guy. It turned out to be Bernie Bierman, the former coach at the University of Minnesota. Now he
was a colonel in the Marine Corps. When I went passed him, I didn't say, 'By your leave, sir,' and he spun me around and gave me a good dressing down. After that I salute cab drivers, anybody who was wearing a cap."
There were about a dozen Jewish students in the program, and the college Hillel organization offered Sunday services for the cadets. "I didn't know about it, and I was just going along to the Protestant services
every week. You had to go somewhere. But a friend, Martin "Ham" Ginsberg from Hector, Minnesota, told me about Hillel. I thought it was great because there were a lot of sorority girls down there."
Frankel joined
the boxing team because he was the only one in the program in the under 130-lb. weight class. He remembers one bout. "We would wear these helmets and 16-ounce gloves and just pound each other. At the end of one
fight, the referee brought us to the center of the ring and raised my hand. I walked over to the corner and collapsed. The guy who had lost the fight, walked away okay."
Primary flight training was at Olathe,
Kansas, for three months learning to fly Stearman trainers. The next phase was at Pensacola, Florida, where the cadets flew the Navy version of the AT-6 trainer, the SNJ.
Part of Frankel's instrument training was
taught by WAVES, and that wasn't his only connection with the distaff side of the Navy. His room in the barracks at Pensacola faced a hallway in an adjoining barracks where the WAVES lived.
"Every night when the
WAVES would go by heading for the showers, I couldn't even get in my room because it was filled with cadets taking in the show. You couldn't get another person in there. Of course, the WAVES knew what was going on
and sometimes they'd wave their towels and laugh."
Frankel once took a woman instructor up for a flight. "She taught us how to use the simulators. She had never actually flown in an airplane before, but once we
were in the air I let her take the controls. She could do perfect turns, no skidding, no slipping. She couldn't have landed the plane, but she sure could fly."
Advanced training was at Barin Field in Alabama,
known in the cadet corps as "Bloody Barin," in part because the Royal Navy pilots trained there. "They were reckless. There were so many accidents and so many killed there."
Frankel was set for a Naval career of
flying fighters, but then one day at Barin, a British pilot landed a TBM Avenger. It was love at first sight for Frankel and a fellow pilot.
"The officer in charge spent an hour with us trying to talk us out it,
but in the end he signed off."
The TBM, manufactured by Grumman and General Motors, was the heaviest single-engined airplane in the military. It had a crew of three, and it could carry torpedoes, bombs, mines, or
rockets.
Frankel was off to Ft. Lauderdale to train in the Avengers, but after graduation he was faced with the classic "hurry up and wait" syndrome common to the military. There were no slots for TBM pilots at
that time.
He and some other flyers were sent to New York finally to ferry some new TBMs to San Diego, a trip that included five stops along the way. When flying into El Paso, the new TBM being flown by Frankel's
friend, Grady Jean, lost power just before landing and crashed. Jean was unhurt and Frankel flew him the rest of the way to San Diego.
"When I saw him go down, I hovered over him to make sure he was all right.
Later he said I was only concerned because he owed me $200."
At San Diego, it looked like another long wait for orders, but it turned out that Jean was from the same hometown in Arkansas as the assignment
officer. "It was again one of those cases of it's who you know."
The two were soon assigned to Torpedo Group 9 and sent to Pasco, Washington, where the group was re-forming after a cruise to the South Pacific.
While there, he was summoned to the commanding officer's office. The skipper asked if he would take a car to the train station and pick up his wife.
Eager to please, Frankel told the skipper he'd be happy to do
so. What he didn't tell the skipper was that he didn't know how to drive. "Yes, I learned how to fly airplanes before I learned how to drive. I went and got his car, and I practiced driving it around the airfield
for a half hour, hoping nobody would see me. I managed to get his wife back without any incident and I gave him back his keys. I hope he didn't see the sweat pouring off me."
The training was moved back to San
Diego where Frankel learned how to land a plane on an aircraft carrier, no small endeavor.
Then there was training on how to take off from an aircraft carrier. "The first time I did it, I was hooked to the
catapult. You just put your head back on the head rest and go to full throttle, full power. You do everything the opposite of what you'd been trained. You did your trim tabs the opposite, you go to right full
rudder, and full nose down. Otherwise, that catapult will send you right into heaven."
Frankel found he was adept at landing on the moving target. "I had 67 landings on carriers during the war, and I never even
blew a tire. I was only waved off once, and that was because the deck was fouled. I was good, I really was, and that's not just a bunch of ego."
The pilots took a ride on the carrier Yorktown to Hawaii for yet
more training, and then were shipped to the Admiralty Islands and finally to Ulithe in the Caroline Islands where they joined the air crew of the famed USS Lexington.
All the training made the pilots some of the
best in the world, but it was also frustrating. "It's funny because the guys who were out there couldn't wait to go home. We couldn't wait to get there."
On February 16, 1945, Frankel participated in the first
Navy raid on Tokyo. The plan was to take out as many Japanese airplanes and airplane plants as possible prior to the landing at Iwo Jima.
The Japanese were anxious to defend the homeland, and Frankel's group was
met by about 40 or 50 fighters and heavy anti-aircraft fire. "It was the wildest thing you ever saw, and one of the Japanese planes ran right into the skipper's airplane and damaged his propeller. I flew alongside
him, and tried to defend him. That's where I got my first DFC."
The citation for the Distinguished Flying Cross says, in part: "Flying through intense and accurate antiaircraft fire, Lieutenant Junior Grade (then
Ensign) Frankel pressed home damaging attacks on an important Japanese aircraft factory and, when two planes in the formation suffered crippling damage over the target, fought a running battle with enemy fighter
craft across eighty miles of the Japanese homeland while flying at a reduced speed in order to protect the impaired planes."
As the missions went by, the excitement of finally being in combat wore thin. "After
you've been there for a while, the edge wears off. You look forward to when you can go home."
The TBMs were a large, stable plane and Frankel enjoyed flying them. They were even equipped with an ashtray in the
armrest for those long four-hour missions. Everybody on the plane smoked, except during times when they were using oxygen.
Torpedo Squadron 9 changed ships from the Lexington to the Yorktown in March, as the Lex
was scheduled to go home for a while.
On a mission over Iwo Jima, Frankel ran into a hornet's nest. "I don't know if it was the Japs or the Marines, but when I got back we counted over 50 holes in the plane. I
was trying to make a low pass to drop some bombs."
By this time in the war, the Japanese had starting using kamikaze missions extensively on the U.S. fleet. "Everybody says, 'Oh, you were at the end of the war.
You had it easy.' Well, the kamikazes were coming at us morning, noon and night. It kind of got on your nerves."
The pilots were ordered to disperse about the ship, and to take shelter in the wardroom, three
decks down, and hide under the tables during an attack. "You could tell by which guns were firing as to how close the kamikazes were. When the five inch guns were blasting, they were still 10,000 or 12,000 feet
away. When the 40 quads began booming, they were getting close. And when the 20s started firing, you knew they were right on top of you."
Frankel didn't always obey the orders to disperse. He remembers one
kamikaze attack on a neighboring ship where he and some other pilots went up on deck to take in the spectacle. When three of the four attackers were shot down, "We were all cheering like crazy."
Another time, he
and a buddy were playing cards in the ready room, near the flight deck, when an attack came. "We definitely weren't supposed to be there. The kamikaze hit the other side of the ship, just opposite of where we were.
It was a tremendous jolt. The fluorescent fixture above my head came crashing down and hit me. I looked at him and he looked at me, and, boy, did we run."
There was supposed to be no liquor on board the ship, but
it was common practice for pilots to get a two-ounce shot of brandy from the medical personnel after a mission. "It was supposed to settle our nerves. Some guys would save it up from a half dozen missions and then
really tie one on."
A bunkmate of Frankel's had family in the canned food business, and now and then a package from home would arrive. "The cans would say they contained fruit or something, but when you opened
them up they had these exotic liquors inside like Grand Mariner. He was a good roommate."
All the packages from home were greatly welcomed by the pilots, although by the time they found their way to the south
seas, their condition was sometimes not good. "There would be mold on the salami, and the cookies were nothing but crumbs, but it was okay. The folks at home were doing their best to support you."
The most
memorable day of action for Torpedo 9 came on April 7, 1945, when it joined a huge wave of about 400 airplanes sent to intercept a Japanese task force led by the battleship Yamato. The Japanese fleet had been
bottled up for some time, and this foray was basically a suicide mission to Okinawa. The Japanese admirals wanted to beach the immense battleship on Okinawa and use it as a stationary platform for its huge 18-inch
guns during the American invasion.
Frankel took time before the mission to inscribe one of the torpedoes, "From Faye Biederman and all the gang at CCH" (the neighborhood house where he spent his childhood). "It
turned out to be one of the torpedoes that hit the cruiser Yahagi. I told her about it when I got back, and she broke down in tears."
The Navy was tracking the Japanese fleet carefully. "We took off about noon,
and it was a long ways off, about 300 miles. They gave us an extra fuel tank. Our planners gave us a tremendous vector. They had a hunch where the Japanese might be, and we went right to them. Other squadrons that
day never did find them."
Frankel's group was ordered to attack the cruiser Yahagi and an accompanying destroyer. The American flyers that had attacked earlier had done their job, and the Yahagi was dead in the
water, with the destroyer pulled up alongside, perhaps to take sailors off the wounded ship.
The fighters attacked the ship first and dropped bombs on the stricken cruiser. In a well coordinated attack, the
torpedo planes moved in less than a minute after the fighters had done their work.
As the Avengers turned for the attack, Frankel ended up in the lead. He told his radio operator, called a "tunnel man" in the
parlance of the TBM crews, ARM Third Class K.V. Kistler to concentrate on the Japanese cruiser and give him readings on the radar.
"We had very good radar on the TBMs." The torpedoes had to be released as exactly
the right time to hit the water and be armed by the time they found the target.
"I hit the pickle, and felt the torpedo release. It was running hot, straight and normal and was heading for the center of the
ship. I was going as fast as I could go. I couldn't jinks on the way in because we had to go straight. In the end I was so close that I couldn't turn. We probably didn't get hit because we were going so fast.
"I
had to go right over the cruiser, and I went about 50 feet above the bow. We almost hit the mast we were traveling so low. Then I started jinksing like crazy, and we got out of there.
"As we headed for the
rendezvous, one of the pilots who had been behind me came up beside and gave me the thumbs up that my torpedo had hit its mark."
The result below was hellacious. In all, five torpedoes struck the Yahagi within a
few seconds. The large ship simply broke into fiery pieces and sank within a minute.
Frankel continued on, and by chance the rendezvous point brought him close to the Battleship Yamato. When he was about a mile
away, the torpedo and bombing attack on the battleship had its conclusion.
"I saw this unbelievable explosion. It was like pictures I saw later of the atomic bomb. The sea around the ship was just blood read from
the explosion."
The Yamato broke into two large pieces and quickly sank.
Frankel and the others now had to make their way back to the Yorktown while running very low on fuel. It was the longest mission any of
the pilots had flown.
"In my logbook, it says the mission lasted six hours. Even though we had left at noon, I got credit for a night landing because the sun had set before we got back.
The attack on the
Yahagi earned Frankel a Navy Cross, the second highest honor in the American military. The citation read, in part:
"For extraordinary heroism… Frankel broke through the clouds and pressed home his attack to
point-blank range in the face of intense antiaircraft fire to score a direct hit and contribute materially to the sinking of the hostile cruiser a minute later. Subject to a cross fire of intense antiaircraft fire
from the cruiser and destroyer during his retirement from the strike, he brought his plane and crew through unscathed."
Those weren't Frankel's only moments of trepidation in his 25 combat missions.
"We had
been told to always switch to a full tank before going in for an attack so that we wouldn't have any fuel problems during the attack. One day we were attacking these Japanese-held islands, and I saw I still had 40
gallons in the tank. I thought that was enough."
It wasn't.
"I was about 200 feet off the surface when my engine stopped. It just quit cold. I thought, 'Oh, know, I'm going in the drink. I'm going to be a
POW. Oh, my God why is this happening?' I switched tanks, and the emergency fuel pump worked, and the engine caught."
Later his fellow pilots inquired why his plane suddenly appeared to be standing still in the
air. "I just told them to forget it."
One of Frankel's strongest and saddest memories came in an attack on the Japanese troops on Okinawa. The group was to have close fighter support as they made their run, but
the fighters got too close. Frankel was flying right behind Commander Byron Cooke, the commanding officer of Torpedo 9.
"I saw a fighter sweep across and hit the skipper's plane. It was right in front of me. I
pulled back and I saw the wing fall off his plane. He was such a great guy, we all just loved him.
"I was so unnerved by what I just saw that when we got to the target, we were supposed to fire our rockets two at
a time, but I just fired a salvo, all of them at once."
Another time, Frankel's squadron was ordered to bomb a target on Okinawa. The Avengers were in formation waiting for orders where exactly the target was,
and the waiting went on for some time.
"I was just sort of playing with the pickle (the device that unlatches the bombs from the bomb rack) when I heard a thud and there was a sudden lurch in the plane. I asked
the radio operator to see if he could see what had happened.
"A few minutes later, he came back on the intercom. 'Sir, I found out what it was. The bombs are laying on the bomb doors.'"
Frankel had
accidentally dropped his load of bombs, but since the bomb bay doors were closed, they only dropped a few feet. They had partially split open the doors and the air was whistling in, perhaps enough wind to trigger
the device on the bombs that armed them.
"It was pretty scary. I opened the bomb bay doors, and they tumbled out into the water. Of course I still wanted credit for a mission, and so I went in with the group but
only strafed the target."
Frankel's final Distinguished Flying Cross was given to him when he completed his 25 missions. He had a large chunk of leave coming, and he took it at home in St. Paul. He was home on
leave when the war ended in August, 1945.
After his active service, he stayed in Navy Reserve until 1958 with one leave of absence. In 1948, he got a call asking if he would fly for the newly born nation of
Israel.
That's another story, for which there is no room here, but suffice it to say that he flew another 25 combat missions, this time mainly in Messerschmitt 109s that were built in Czechoslovakia. Once again,
he survived a war.
Frankel spent time in car sales, and later as a manufacturer's rep. He married Ruth in 1951, and they had two children. He retired in 1987, and he and Ruth now live in Minnetonka.
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