Grasshopper Pilot
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Grasshopper Pilot

A Memoir

Julian William Cummings, Gwendolyn Kay Cummings

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eBook - ePub

Grasshopper Pilot

A Memoir

Julian William Cummings, Gwendolyn Kay Cummings

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About This Book

The thrilling memoir of a light-aircraft pilot during World War II

During World War II the ability of American ground forces to advance in the face of fierce resistance was largely dependent on the precision of artillery barrages. Aerial observation was frequently the only effective means to locate enemy targets. For this mission the Army air corps used prewar light civilian airplanes (usually reconfigured Piper Cubs) known as Grasshoppers for their ability to take off from and land in tight places like dirt roads, grass fields, and ships. In addition to pinpointing enemy artillery, these aircraft were often assigned other missions—medical evacuations, reporting on enemy troop movements, and reconnaissance—often armed only with handguns.

Julian W. Cummings began flying lightweight Piper Cubs as a young man and was recruited for the experimental and high-risk aerial reconnaissance unit of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division. In this memoir he chronicles his daring missions from first flights in the North African campaign through the end of the war. He flew 485 missions in both theaters, and for his extraordinary bravery in Sicily he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Grasshopper Pilot gives long-overdue attention and credit to the crucial role these courageous men played in combat and adds valuable information to an understudied dimension of the war.

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Year
2015
ISBN
9781612774329

• 1 •

Born to Fly

I was born on December 17, 1915. That was the twelfth anniversary of the first heavier-than-air flight made by man at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I was born to fly. Now, that sounds a little egotistical; nevertheless, flying influenced my life in my early years, and in later years it put wings on me.
The very first thing I remember as far as flying was concerned happened one day when I was four, maybe five, years old. We were living in Salt Lake City on the south slope of the north hills. Aviation was still in its infancy, and to see an airplane was quite a novelty. It was a cloudy day. Suddenly there was a roar outside, and everybody in the family ran out on the front porch to see what it was. An airplane was flying over the top of the house, and we thought it was going to knock the bricks off the chimney. It didn’t—it headed west to the airport about fourteen miles away. To the best of my recollection, that was my first experience with flying.
The years rolled by, and when I was about eleven years old Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean and in the process became America’s hero. He visited city after city, and Salt Lake City hosted him, in its turn, one memorable morning. We young boys who belonged to the Mormon Church’s Boy Trail Builders (similar to the Cub Scouts) were all down at Liberty Park to view Lindbergh as he came around the oval street in the center of the park.
We were standing there waiting when somebody shouted, “There he is, high in the sky!” In the southeast was a silver monoplane, and it headed northwest toward the Salt Lake Airport. Everyone was screaming, “There he is! There he is! There’s Lucky—Lucky Lindy flying high up in the sky!” We waited and waited. Soon a big open touring car came around the bend of Liberty Park. In it was Lindy, sitting high on the back with all the dignitaries—the mayor, the governor, and who knows who else. All eyes were on Lindy, the man who had flown alone across the Atlantic Ocean. I didn’t fully understand the implication of this great feat, but to me it was wonderful. My heart pounded in my chest at seeing this remarkable pilot who had become such a hero.
image
Enthusiastic Billy Cummings, even at age one.
Time went by, and my uncle, Dean R. Brimhall, was op ening the Ogden, Utah, airport, which he owned. He had brought in an autogiro for the celebration. My dad took me to the airport. Oh, what a thrill to see an autogiro, which was the closest thing there was to a helicopter in those days. Dad was going to go for a ride, and Uncle Dean said to him, “Julian, I want you to take a ride.”
I begged, “Can I go? Can I go?”
My dad said, “Little boys are to be seen and not heard.” I didn’t go for a ride that day, but my dad did. When I got home I found a two-by-four about twelve inches long and cut a couple of one-by-fours out of scrap lumber for wings. I put them on the two-by-four like a biplane and made an improvised plane. I tried to get something I could use for wheels, made a spinner prop, and that was my first airplane. It was a crude one, but it was mine, and I loved it.
Max Bodine was a good friend of mine, and his dad was chief mechanic at Western Air Express. We would ride our bikes down there and just wish we could go for an airplane ride. Neither of us got a ride on those airplanes. I remember once seeing a Boeing, which could fly four people under the hood as passengers. We would watch them take off and others come in. Later on Tommy Thompson, who was my local hero, had a twin-engine plane, but I still didn’t get a ride. I never did get a ride.
Sometime later I found some articles in one of the magazines (Popular Science or Popular Mechanics) titled “Barn Storm,” by Randy Enslow, who used to barnstorm with Lindbergh. He was going to teach us to fly in those articles. So I would sit in one of my mother’s kitchen chairs and get the broomstick out. That was the joystick. I would put my feet out like I had pedals behind them.
Now you’re ready for takeoff. Push the throttle ahead, neutralize the stick, now pull back a little on the stick. You have some speed coming up. Go ahead and gradually push the stick ahead a little bit to neutralize the altitude, and pick up some more speed. Now, let’s make a left turn. Push in on the left rudder and also push the stick to the left. Don’t push the stick down too far or you might dive. If you pull it back too far, you might stall out. All right, neutralize your stick, and neutralize your rudder pedals. Now you’re heading in the other direction. Now let’s make a right turn. Push on the right rudder pedals. Push the stick to the right. Neutralize the stick. Neutralize your pedal. Now you’ve made a right turn.
He had us make climbs and gain altitude. He told us how to watch our instruments. I learned how to fly in my mother’s kitchen. Flying around with Enslow in the kitchen left much to be desired, but at least the desire to learn to fly was still in my bosom, even though I hadn’t been off the ground yet.
My one cousin, Rulon Cummings, and I went up to Roy, Utah, to visit another cousin of ours, Arnold Hardy. We went down to talk to the kid who lived just south of Arnold. We started talking, and I suggested that we build an airplane. Rulon said, “What are you talking about?” I told him that we could build a glider. I told them to get some one-by-two lumber and that we could use some of the canvas off his dad’s chicken coop. We made a wing about six feet long and two feet wide and a couple of longerons that I could grab hold of with my hands. We put a tail on the longerons about two feet to the rear. We got it all set up. There was a tail surface, and there was a wing surface. I got up in the barn, and they handed the contraption up to me. The tail just fit inside the entrance to the hayloft.
I looked at the pile of straw about twenty feet out ahead and said, “I’m going to make it to that pile of straw.” They looked up at me and kind of shook their heads. I yelled, “Okay, here I go!” and I jumped. Well, I hit a pile all right, but it wasn’t a pile of straw—it was a pile of manure directly below me. You see, what I failed to take into consideration was wing loading. I knew nothing about wing loading. I wasn’t an aeronautical engineer; I was just a kid building an airplane. Anyway, the aircraft, such as it was, broke my fall.
In 1934, when I was nineteen years old, the Mormon Church called me on a mission to Argentina. I had a companion who loved airplanes. He had worked at the airport in Central Deglaja in Central America but had never learned to fly. We both loved flying and would go out to the airport at Secareo and look up at the planes, wishing we could fly.
I completed my mission in 1936 and returned home to Utah, where I started working at Utah Copper and enrolled in classes at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 1938 I married my sweetheart, Marjorie Kane. Working fulltime, going to college, and fulfilling my responsibilities at home and at church often allowed me less than four hours’ sleep at night. I felt lucky to have a job, but our budget was tight with few luxuries. In spite of my heavy financial obligations, I was determined to fly even if I had to pay for lessons. I stopped off at the field at South Salt Lake Airport and took a lesson from Vern Carter in a Piper Cub. Vern had been with Uncle Dean at Ogden Airport. By this time, Uncle Dean had gone to Washington, D.C., to help set up the Civil Aeronautics Administration, so Vern opened his own school down in South Salt Lake. Vern had written the course for the government program. It was Pilot Course 2 of the Civil Aeronautics Administration. What a fantastic thing the government had done. It saw the handwriting on the wall, with a war coming on and few trained to fly. There were some exceptions, a few select people who had gone to Kelly Field and into the Navy to learn to fly. There were also some who had paid good prices at civilian pilot training schools.
At this time I applied to get into Navy flying, and the flight sergeant told me that everything was “go.” I had the education, and I was in top shape physically, but he told me that the Navy was only taking 500 pilot trainees a year and that the quota was filled for that year. Again, my heart sank, but I was determined. My plan at this time was to get into Navy flight training and then go into the Marines as a fighter pilot, as a number of my friends had done. This did not work, so in early 1940 I decided to take Pilot Course 2 at the University of Utah. Upon completion of the course I received my wings from the university.
To build up more hours of flying experience, I bought into a club. There were twenty-seven members in the club, and only six of us knew how to fly. It was nice of those other twenty-one guys to help us pay for our new airplane, a brand-new Taylor Craft.
One morning in the summer of 1941, I went down to get my flight physical. When I went into Dr. Vance’s office, I didn’t feel very good. He told me to lie down on the table and said he would be back in a few minutes. Forty-five minutes later he came back, and I immediately got up. I felt a little dizzy, and when he wrapped my arm to take my blood pressure, I passed out. A few weeks later there was a knock at my door. When I opened the door, there stood Mr. Hughes from the Civil Aeronautics Administration.
He said, “I have come here for your license.”
“What do you want with my license?” I asked.
He said, “You passed out in Dr. Vance’s office. You can no longer fly. The orders are from Washington, and if you want to know more about it you will have to write to them.”
I had to give him my license. However, I still kept flying my club’s plane until I sold out to Meg Jensen, who was a secretary out at Utah Copper. She bought my membership when I was called to active duty.
When I graduated from the Reserve Officers Training Corps unit at the University of Utah, I received my second lieutenant’s commission in the Field Artillery and was sent to Camp Roberts, California. Once I got there I still wanted to fly, so I decided to look into going through cadet training as an officer. I was getting ready to fill out my papers when the artillery said that all the officers who had sixty hours or more of private flying were to put in for flight training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for specialized training. I immediately applied. I was chosen to be one of the first combat pilots in the invasion of Africa.

• 2 •

How the Grasshopper Came to Be

The adoption and formation of observation planes for the Army did not happen overnight. Numerous trials and maneuvers were performed before the Army could reach a decision. It knew what it wanted observation planes to do, but it was unable at first to find the kind of aircraft that would perform properly.
It was in the early 1940s, and the military was holding some of these maneuvers in Texas. A lot of the upper brass thought it might be a good idea to have observation planes for the Army. The Army Air Corps came out with the O-46 and O-47. These were large planes. One of them weighed about two tons. These airplanes needed a long runway. That wasn’t at all what we wanted. We wanted something organic, something that would allow close contact with our artillery units. We needed to get up and take off in a small space, and we needed to be close to the front lines. We had to have a plane we could fly to locate enemy gun positions or movement and radio the information to the artillery. While we were up there, we needed to adjust the artillery fire. We needed that kind of airplane, and these monsters were not right for us.
Some of the authorities decided to let the civilian aircraft people (Piper, Aeronca, and Taylor Craft) send some of their own boys down, at their own expense, to fly their types of aircraft. Old Hank Wann from Piper Aircraft flew in over the desert using a short-field procedure, landing over a barrier, taking off over a barrier, and hopping around. As Wann got out of his Piper Cub and walked in, the commanding general of the Second Cavalry Division said, “You look like a bunch of damn grasshoppers out there.” The name took and became the symbol for military light planes.
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Lt. Julian William (Bill) Cummings, commissioned Grasshopper pilot.
During maneuvers at Camp Polk, Louisiana, Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who himself was a licensed pilot, became an enthusiastic supporter of the Grasshoppers. The final verdict on the Grasshoppers’ performance during the summer and fall Army maneuvers was that they were indispensable. They could take off and land on the same roads used by armored units, and they could use the same gasoline, rather than high-octane fuel. The Grasshoppers didn’t need a hard surface runway, and their maintenance and repair requirements were simple.
In June 1942 the War Department approved the formation of a special branch of the Army officially dubbed Organic Air Observation for the Field Artillery, meaning they were now considered an integral part of the organization. Thus, the Grasshoppers became not only official but also finally and formally recognized as a vital part of military strategy. We had a song that we often sang to the tune of “Field Artillery” (“Over Here, Over There . . .”). It said something about our being as hard to find as fleas and that “we’ll give the Axis fits” with our “Maytag Messerschmitts” but also repeated a refrain that said that we were the “eyes of the field artillery.”
As official as the Grasshoppers had become, there still were scores of civilians and military who didn’t have any idea that the Grasshopper existed. Most people in the service didn’t know what a Grasshopper pilot was. At first they were unaware that these Piper Cubs and their pilots were making a big difference in the war effort.
In the invasion of Sicily one of those Cubs, in a two-and-a-half-hour flight, saved 15,000 lives, according to Gen. George S. Patton Jr. How many fighters and how many bombers have made that short a mission and saved that many lives? The only one I can think of is the Enola Gay, which helped stop the invasion of Japan and kept us from losing thousands of our boys going in there. That’s the only plane I can think of other than this little Piper Cub.
The Grasshoppers were used for many risky tasks. Besides observation and artillery fire control, they were the eyes in the sky for detecting troop movements, communication centers, and supply installations. They ran aerial resupply, aerial evacuation of the sick and wounded, and aerial photography and message relay. They located motor convoys and did camouflage inspection. They were rapid transportation for senior officers as well as unit commanders.
An article by Konrad F. Schreier in Aviation History, “How the Grasshopper Earned Its Wings” (May 1996), observed that “the Army did not even call them airplanes, classing them officially as ‘vehicles.’ Nevertheless, they directed much of the deadly U.S. Army field artillery fire, the most eff...

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