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Landing an airplane on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier maybe one of the most difficult trials that man has ever devised for himself.
The carrier is going a certain speed, the aircraft is going
a certain speed, the ship is often rolling with the seas, and the area a pilot has to hit is woefully small. When the plane does hit the deck, a tail hook must grab a steel cable that will bring the
flight to shuddering stop.
In his Navy career, Claude Schmidt estimates he made as many as 600 carrier landings — all successful.
"Oh, I was waved off a few times, but not that many. It was the
takeoffs I really didn't like."
The takeoffs from a World War II-era carrier included a launch from a steam catapult that brought the plane from zero to 100 miles an hour on 90 feet of screeching
rail.
Between the takeoffs and the landings, Schmidt managed to fly 75 combat missions and earn two Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Air Medals. He also shot down six enemy planes (actually a
few more) making him an official ace.
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Schmidt grew up on the mining town of North Hibbing in Minnesota, a community surrounded by the
world's largest iron ore mine. The town was eventually moved south about two miles to where present-day Hibbing now lies, and much of the previous town became part of the Hull-Rust Mine.
He attended
the Washington and Lincoln Schools in North Hibbing before graduating from Hibbing High School in South Hibbing in 1935. Like so many Range kids, he went to work in the mines — first working on the track
gang, and later on the churn drills.
Doing his college work during the winter when the mines shut down, Schmidt managed to get his degree from Hibbing Junior College in 1938. "It took me three years,
and by that time there weren't any more courses left that I hadn't taken. It was very comfortable to be at home, but I went down the "U."
The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, up to that point,
was the furthest south Schmidt had ever been in his life.
At the University, Schmidt became aware of a Navy Cadet pilot program for those who had two years of college. Sometime earlier, Schmidt had
seen an airshow in Virginia that had included military aircraft, and he had become intrigued with the idea of becoming a flyer. He enlisted in the Navy in December, 1939.
On Jan. 15, 1940, he
began what was called "elimination base" training at Wold-Chamberlain Airfield in Minneapolis. The 12-hours of flying were designed to quickly separate would-be pilots from the ones who had the right
stuff.
Schmidt passed the weeding out process, and he was sent to Pensacola, Florida, for flight training.
"I never thought I'd make it through, but I had a couple of friends from Hibbing who were
ahead of me a few classes at the school. They helped a great deal. Both of them were later killed early on in the war."
Schmidt did well in the ground school training, and then was selected along with
eight others in his class for an experimental accelerated training program. A year's worth of flight training was done in half that time, and by December, 1940, the nine were done with school.
"They
didn't give us our commissions for another month, though. They were just about to graduate a class from Annapolis, and they wanted them to have seniority over us." In January 1941, Schmidt was
commissioned, and he was ordered to the VF-5 Squadron aboard the USS Hornet. The problem, though, was that the Hornet was still being built.
Instead of waiting for the Hornet, Schmidt went through
flight instructor school at Pensacola. "By the time I got through that school, I had about 175 hours of flight time. My first student was a Pan-Am pilot who was coming back into the Navy. He had about
15,000 hours of flight time."
When an opening came up for a flight instructor at the newly opened flight school in Corpus Christi, Schmidt volunteered and he became a primary instructor there in May
1940.
While there, he heard that an old Hibbing friend of his, Tom Dougherty, was at the school waiting to begin instruction. "I went over to his room, and he was sleeping. I yelled at him, 'Cadet,
get your ass out of bed.' He jumped pretty good, but then he saw it was me."
Schmidt invited his friend to dinner at the officer's club, but Dougherty demurred. He wasn't yet an officer. Schmidt
coerced him, though, to wear one of his own officer shirts, and they dined at the 'O' Club. "Tommy didn't want to do it. I know he didn't enjoy that meal at all."
Schmidt's next job was to become a
flight trainer inspector of sorts. He would pose as a cadet and observe the instructors. "I would do everything to break the rules just to see how they reacted." The Navy at this time was trying to cut
down the amount of cursing and the harassment of cadets.
Schmidt managed to make it home to Hibbing in September 1940 and married his hometown sweetheart, Vi Soderstrom. Jeno Paulucci, Schmidt's high
school classmate, was best man. Paulucci went on to entrepreneurial fame as the creator of Chun King, Jeno's, Michelina's and other frozen food products.
Schmidt advanced to Lieutenant j.g. by June
of 1941 and made lieutenant in December, just as the news came about Pearl Harbor. "I remember that Sunday. We had just flown for 15 days straight, and I was looking forward to a day off. I got up about
noon and turned the radio on. We were surprised, but we felt it coming."
At this point, in January of 1942, Schmidt got orders back to his squadron on the Hornet. By that time, however, the squadron
had already gone through carrier training and the ship sailed without him. Schmidt later learned that another reason he wasn't taken back on the Hornet was that it was preparing for a secret mission and
his space on the ship had been taken over by some Army pilots.
A few months later, Jimmy Doolittle led a raid from the Hornet that bombed the Japanese mainland in the famed, "Sixty Seconds over Tokyo."
Instead, Schmidt was sent to another squadron aboard the USS Princeton, another carrier that was just about to be commissioned. "I remember once when we were training on the Princeton, and
some guy spoke to us and said that the war would be over in about two hours because the Japanese planes had wings made of paper. I think some of our pilots were surprised when they first came up against
the Japanese Zeroes.
The squadron was based for a time at Barber's Point in Hawaii, and Schmidt had a very famous roommate, the boxer Gene Tunney.
"We didn't really talk that much because our
shifts didn't match up. I was usually asleep when he came in. But all the guys in the squadron wanted to know what it was like to room with Gene Tunney. I just told them that I said to Tunney, 'You stay
on your side of the room and I'll stay on mine, and we won't have any trouble.'"
Schmidt remembers trying on Tunney's blue Navy officer's coat. "It just hung down to my knees. He had a like a 50-inch
chest."
The Princeton headed to the western Pacific and the pilots saw their first action over the Japanese held island of Nauru. "We saw this zero coming up, and I snagged him. We must have surprised
him. I don't think he expected us there."
Off the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the Princeton pilots discovered an interesting phenomenon. Every day at noon, the Japanese would send a
patrol out, one day in a clockwise direction and the next day in a counter-clockwise direction. "And every day, we'd shoot him down."
"The pilots would draw straws to see who got the 10-2 shift."
In November of 1943, the Princeton launched a pre-dawn flight to support the invasion of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. "I was the strike leader. I would launch and go out ahead about three minutes, and
then come back and the planes that were launching later would form up on me. It was dark as hell, and I was scared to death."
Once the planes were formed, the first thing they would do is to charge
their guns, or fire a short burst from the six guns to make sure everything was working. Schmidt said there were so many American ships in the area, that firing the guns was a nervous business. "We
were all afraid we'd be shot down."
Flying his F6F Hellcat over the airfield at Betio in the Tarawa Atoll, Schmidt caught a Japanese plane just taking off and he knocked it down. It was his second
kill.
The fighters, flying in groups of eight, also strafed the beaches just ahead of the Marine landings. They also tried to take out the Japanese anti-aircraft guns.
"I was one of the first
planes in and after I made my run, I got out and let the others make theirs. I was circling around, trying to stay out of melee. I kept seeing these flashes in the sky, and I thought they were bomb
drops. I thought we were really kicking the heck out of them. Then my section leader got on the radio and said, 'You know, the anti-aircraft fire is getting pretty close, maybe we should go somewhere
else.' All the those pretty flashes I was seeing were AA fire. We got out of there in a hurry."
On the second day, they put bombs on the fighters. "The pilots didn't like that very much. The Marine
spotters would tell us where to drop them, but you don't always know where a bomb is going to go."
The early days of combat were painful for Schmidt, not only losing men in his own squadron, but also
friends from home. Navy Flyer Davy Roach of Hibbing was killed at Midway and Hibbingite Bob Stolpe was killed when the USS Liscome Bay was sunk.
The Princeton had 30 Hellcat fighters on board, and 36
pilots when the complement was full. At least four planes would be in the air at all times, from sun up to sun set. Unlike the Army bombers, the planes were not decorated with artwork, and it was common
that a pilot would take a different plane each time out.
For Schmidt, who was a strike leader and later executive officer of the squadron, there were some privileges. He did have his own plane, and
it was respotted by the ground crew to be always ready to go.
After a break in Hawaii for replenishment, the Princeton headed back to the western Pacific where the carrier participated in attacks on
Buca and Bonin. The ship's homeport in those waters was at Esperito Santo.
The carriers Princeton and Saratoga were assigned major roles in an attack on Rabaul, a major Japanese naval base. The air
wings were asked to take out the cruiser and troops ships at the base.
"It was the hairiest raid I'd been on up to that time," Schmidt recalled.
The carrier's entire complement of planes took off
on the long, slow flight to Rabaul. "We could only go as fast as the slowest planes, and the torpedo bombers were very slow planes. As we approached Rabaul, I could see the Japanese zeroes taking off. I
radioed that we should get down there and try to get those SOBs before they could get in the air."
The plan was for the fighters to make a pass over the targets, shooting all six guns and doing as
much damage as possible. The attack, it was hoped, would draw off fire and allow the torpedo planes to do their work.
Peeling off after the attack, Schmidt tried to regroup his four planes. "Everybody
was scattered all over the place. I was twisting and turning, and the other planes were supposed to follow me. I couldn't see my wingman, George Matlock, and I finally got on the radio and asked him
where the heck he was. He said he was right on my wing. I looked, and there he was."
On the way back, the torpedo planes radioed that they were coming under attack from Japanese fighters. Schmidt led
his fighters to the rescue, with one little problem. "Usually, when we attacked something, we only used four guns and saved the other two for reserve. But when we attacked that cruiser, we gave it
everything we had. As we headed back to help those torpedo planes, we didn't have any ammo left.
"The SBDs were taking a lot of fire. There were only about eight of them left from the attack. A few
of the back seat flyers had been killed already by the fighters."
As two zeroes zoomed down to attack, Schmidt headed in to cut them off. "I told Matlock, 'If they go after the SBDs, I guess I'll try
to ram them.'"
As Schmidt headed toward the Japanese planes, they wheeled and fled the scene. They never knew he didn't have one shell left in his guns.
Back on the flight deck, Schmidt looked
around. "We lost a lot of airplanes. Usually the flight deck was full, but it wasn't that day. I asked, 'Where the hell is everybody?'" Many of the pilots were later picked up by rescue craft or were
found by the Australian coast watchers.
The next day, the Princeton flyers went back to Rabaul for another attack. "This time it was much tamer. We came in from the sun so they couldn't see us, and we
got quite of few of their planes on the ground."
Back in Espirito Santo, the carrier picked up new planes and new pilots. While having a beer at the officer's club, Schmidt made the acquaintance
of a young torpedo boat pilot named Jack Kennedy. "Nobody knew who he was or would become at that time, of course. But I knew his brother, who had been killed, from training." The PT boats often
rescued the carrier pilots. "We had a lot of respect for them, and the feeling was mutual."
The club was a major gathering point for the flyers when the ship was tied up. "At 2 p.m., they'd ring a big
bell,and for an hour they would serve whiskey. I didn't drink whiskey, but they had cheese and crackers and other snacks."
At one point, the ship pulled into New Zealand for some R&R. Schmidt and
the others were anxious to get ashore and see what kind of trouble they could get into. A stop at the Red Cross, however, proved fatal for Schmidt's dreams. "I was going through the Red Cross when I
heard a voice say, 'Hello, Claudie!' I turned around and there was one of my school teachers from back in Hibbing. She worked for the Red Cross, and was probably in her 50s. For the next three days, I
was escorted around New Zealand by my teacher. It was not exactly what I had in mind."
At one point, the legendary flyer Charles Lindbergh came on board to talk with the pilots. "He told us that when
we had used up our drop tanks, we shouldn't jettison them like we had been doing. He told us that each one of those tanks was worth as much as a Cadillac. But the pilots didn't like the tanks and
thought they were dangerous. I remember one pilot in my group came out that meeting muttering, "Screw those Cadillacs. I'm dropping those tanks as soon as I can."
When the pilots got back from a
strike, there was a certain amount of pandemonium on the flight deck. "We were all charged up. We were keyed up. And we just wanted to get out of our airplanes."
After landing, they would often have
to wait as the planes were moved or taken down to the hangar deck. In the meantime, planes were landing right behind them. "You're just sitting there defenseless if somebody misses the cables or the
barrier. I remember praying, 'For heaven's sake, after all I've been through, don't let me get killed sitting here.'"
Landing on a carrier was difficult at best, but Schmidt said he never had a
problem in his hundreds of landings. "It's just training. It's training and training and training. When you come in, you're on the back side of the power curve and the plane is just about to stall when
you touch down."
One of the worst things that could happen was to bounce and miss the cables. "We were always told that if you bounce, don't try to take off again. You just don't have enough speed to
make it. Instead, you should just head into the net barrier. You'll probably have to get a new engine, but it's safer. A friend of mine tried to touch and go after a bounce, and his wing hit the super
structure. He went into the ocean, and we never saw him again."
Schmidt was often the first flyer to land after a mission. "The fighters had the least gas, and so they got to land first. And then
I was the strike leader, so I got to go in first. The captain liked to start the landings as soon as the ship turned into the wind. I would try to time it so that I could land just as the ship turned,
but I was too early sometimes and I got waved off."
He said most of the pilots would write a last letter before every dangerous mission. "Then they'd tear them up when they got back. The guys always
accused me of not putting a date on my letter so I wouldn't have to rewrite it every time."
Schmidt said that when he did write his wife, the two of them had worked out a code for showing her where he
was at that time. Otherwise, the censors would quickly remove any reference to ship movements. The code involved a gridded map, and a pinhole in the letter. "But by the time my mail got home, it was
usually in the newspapers where we had been. One time, someone sent me dates for Christmas. By the time I got them in July, they had fermented."
The Princeton was the flagship and had the admiral on
board. The admiral was not popular with the men after Tarawa when he refused to send a rescue flight to save a pilot. The pilot was later captured by the enemy.
Later, on another mission, one of the
pilots in Schmidt's group took off and immediately had major engine problems. He signaled that he needed to land, and he did. The admiral called him to the bridge, chewed him out and told him that it
wasn't his choice on whether to land or not. The pilot informed him that it was his choice and not the admiral's. The admiral promptly grounded him.
"I went to the captain of the ship and told him we
were already short of pilots, and we couldn't afford to lose another one. The captain said I should ground him for one mission, and then put him back on the schedule. The admiral never knew who was
flying anyway."
By this time, after many months of combat missions, most of the pilots thought it was time for a trip back to the United States for a break. And there was a rumor to that effect on the
ship. "We thought we had probably done our share of the fighting."
Instead, the ship got orders to participate on a mission to Truk, the Japanese Pearl Harbor in the western Pacific. On this mission,
the fighters were carrying bombs.
"Nobody liked that very much. They were strapped under one wing, and they made the airplane unstable. We broke through a hole in the clouds, and the AA looked like a
wall. We had a lot of planes shot down. We dropped our bombs, and went back and refueled and got ready for another bombing run."
After the second bomb run, Schmidt encountered a Japanese fighter just
taking off. "I just ran into him. Beggars can't be choosers." It was Schmidt's third kill of the war.
Schmidt estimates that he had at least three other kills during the war, but his squadron only
allowed kills if they were supported by the gun camera. "It didn't matter who saw it, it didn't count unless it was on film."
Next up for the Princeton was the invasion of Guam. "It was really nothing
for us, just a little anti-aircraft fire. No big problem." During the mission they encountered a flight of five Japanese planes, and they shot them all down.
"We split them up. Everybody got one, and
I got two." It was Schmidt's fourth and fifth kills, making him an ace.
After Guam, the next battle was at Okinawa, and then the carrier supported MacArthur's landing in the Philippines. Over
Hollandia, New Guinea, Schmidt shot down his sixth and final official kill of the war.
For Schmidt, it was his final duty on the Princeton as he had a chance to head back to the States for a new
assignment. He was to be the Air Boss on a new carrier, the Prince William.
His new ship debuted in the Atlantic, made it through the canal to the Pacific, but never caught up to the war before Japan
surrendered in August, 1945. The carrier then participated in the "Magic Carpet" operation of bringing the troops home. "They got rid of all the planes, and converted the hangar deck into bunks. We had
thousands on board."
After the war, Schmidt decided to stay in the Navy. He first had orders to the Minneapolis Naval Air Station and later to St. Louis, Glenview, Miami and Atlanta. He was the
commanding officer at the Miami NAS.
He retired in 1961 as a full commander. Schmidt's days of working in aviation, though, were far from over. He got a job with the FAA, and was later transferred to
Minneapolis as an inspector.
After 11 years, and under the threat of being transferred to Chicago, he joined the staff of the Metropolitan Airports Commission. He worked his way up to Airport
Director before he retired again in 1984. Later, when the airport had a personnel crisis, he came back as temporary executive director for about seven months.
Schmidt, 86, enjoys golfing and reading,
although recent eye problems have made reading books impossible.
He and his wife, Vi, have three children, six grand children and two great grandchildren with one on the way. They live in Bloomington.
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