The Twilight Warriors by Robert Gandt Read Free Book Online

himself.
    Erickson didn’t know whether to cheer or moan. The CAG could have picked anyone he wanted as his Tail End Charlie. Itmeant that Hyland trusted Erickson to cover his tail. It also meant that if Erickson somehow screwed up and
didn’t
cover Hyland’s tail, he was dead meat.
    O ff they went, in flights of four, headed for California and the USS
Intrepid
. It was not a smooth journey. Before they reached Alameda and their new carrier, two more Tail End Charlies were gone.
    One was an ensign named Charles Jensen, who decided to take a detour over his hometown of Mesa, Arizona. In a classic case of boldness exceeding judgment, Jensen was buzzing the floor of the desert when he clipped the ground. The Corsair crashed and exploded in full view of the pilot’s horrified family.
    Almost as soon as they reached California, they lost another. Ens. Spence Mitchell took off on a training flight over the cloud-covered Pacific. He was never seen again, and no trace was found of his fighter. The best guess was that he’d become disoriented in the clouds and spun into the ocean.
    Meanwhile, the pilots of the new bomber-fighting squadron had one more square to fill. They flew out to the Navy’s ordnance testing facility at Inyokern Naval Air Facility, in the California high desert country, for indoctrination in the new weapon called the Tiny Tim. Inyokern was part of the Navy’s China Lake ordnance test base. The place looked like the set of a movie Western. There were a couple of bars and a motel, but not much else of interest to young fighter pilots.
    No one got a good feeling when they first saw the Tiny Tim rocket. The weapon already had a bad reputation. In one of its first test firings at China Lake, it had killed the crew of the SB2C launch plane when the rocket blast destroyed the Helldiver’s control surfaces. The fix the engineers came up with was to drop the weapon far enough to clear the aircraft before igniting the rocket with an attached lanyard. The fix didn’t always work. If the rocket wasn’t released from a precise 45-degree dive, the missile couldfly through the airplane’s propeller. Or it could veer off and hit an unintended target, such as the plane that launched it.
    Even the name seemed like a joke. The Tiny Tim was a monster—over 10 feet long and more than half a ton in weight, with a diameter of 11.75 inches, which by no coincidence was the dimension of a standard 500-pound semi-armor-piercing bomb, the warhead of the Tiny Tim. It also happened to be the diameter of standard oil well steel tubing, which was used as the casing for the rocket. The Tiny Tim had a solid-propellant motor that could accelerate it to nearly 600 mph, with an effective range of over a mile. When it leaped from beneath its launching aircraft, streaming a trail of fire, the Tiny Tim looked like a creature from hell.
    Between classes and missile-firing sorties, the pilots had time on their hands. They played cards, checked out the drinking establishments, and pursued the local girls. It was mostly a futile chase. After Atlantic City, Inyokern seemed like a desert outpost, which in fact it was.
    Finally came the end of Tiny Tim training. Someone decided that the newly qualified pilots should conduct a firepower demonstration for the Navy brass. Eight Corsairs, each armed with a Tiny Tim and eight 5-inch HVARs—high velocity rockets—dove in formation on a practice target. Led by Johnny Hyland, they salvoed their weapons on signal.
    It was spectacular. Spewing flame and smoke, the rockets roared toward the earth at nearly supersonic speed. More than six tons of high explosive slammed into the target like the broadside from a battleship. The concussion rumbled across the desert floor, rattling every window in Inyokern and sending a eruption of dirt, sagebrush, and black smoke hundreds of feet into the sky. The senior officers watching the demonstration were flabbergasted. Even the citizens of Inyokern, long accustomed to