The standard procedure was not to hook up these four snaps until you are airborne so that you will be less encumbered in case of entering the water after an aborted take-off for any of a million reasons. My routine had been to hook just the two front snaps, then hook up the safety belt, then unhook and lay the parachute straps across the safety belt so that they would be handy once I was airborne. If the safety belt was hooked first, the straps would be somewhere below the seat and I had found it to be irritating to be searching for these straps in the bottom of the plane while trying to take a position with the other planes in my flight. This procedure had worked out very well for me except for this one occasion when I had neglected to unhook the straps. The result of this over sight was that when I was crawling out of the plane the parachute and raft were trailing along behind and became lodged between the side of the plane and the wind shield. This prevented me from being able to remove myself from the cockpit. Upon reentering the plane and sitting down then coming straight up and out of the cockpit, the chute and raft followed along very nicely. It was a hard and embarrassing lesson but not so embarrassing that I would not share the dumb experience with the other members of the squadron in hopes that someone else would not get caught up in a similar situation.

Once I was free of the harness I remembered seeing something in the water while I was watching the carrier sail away. Another look around revealed a ship's raft floating about 25 feet away from me. The plane had knocked it off the railing as we went over. This was a big raft that was designed for 50 men in case of abandoning ship. No two man raft for me! I swam to the big raft, climbed up on it and watched the Petrof Bay fade away. In a matter of a few minutes a destroyer, the USS Lardner that was part of the carrier screen, came slowly sliding through the water and threw me a line. I lashed the line to the raft and the raft swung into the side. The DD had a cargo net slung over the side and two big burly sailors were clinging to it. As I grabbed the net they grabbed me and the next thing I knew I was on the deck. I was not injured or tired but they absolutely insisted that I lie down in a first-aid basket and be carried to sick bay which turned out to be the Captain's cabin. To resist was absolutely futile, so I complied. I had to lie down on his bunk and in a couple of minutes I discovered the reason for all the attention. In came a pharmacist mate with the medicinal brandy. Enough for everybody. There had to be at least a dozen guys in that cabin for a two ounce bottle of brandy.

They were a considerate bunch of swabs, cleaned and oiled my gun and washed and dried my flight suit. In about a half an hour the destroyer was up along the starboard side of the carrier and I was returned to the Petrof Bay in a breeches buoy suspended between the destroyer and the fantail of the carrier. I was told before leaving the Lardner they had bent their crane on the stern trying to hoist the raft aboard.

Breeches buoy

Three and a half hours later I'm up on the signal bridge of the island to watch the skipper and the rest of my flight return to land aboard when a signalman pointed to the water on the port side of the ship in exactly the same place I had gone over four hours earlier. There was the biggest damned shark I have ever seen anywhere cruising along side the ship. I don't know where he had come from but I'm willing to bet that he wasn't very far away while I was splashing around earlier. This shark, or at least the thought of it will come up again before I'm through with this story.

Since the end of the war, it has been brought to my attention that the destroyer sailors who plucked "downed" aviators from the sea and returned them to their carriers in exchange for 10 to 20 gallons of ice cream, considered the value of the aviator as about the same as the price of the ice cream, about two-bits a quart or about ten to twenty dollars.

The aviator on the other hand may well have appreciated being plucked from the sea by the sailors who have just saved his butt from being shark bait. But he might have been the aviator who had shot down a kamikaze that might well have saved the same sailors from having their butts singed.

So the aviator might consider himself as being worth his weight in gold, thirty five dollars on the gold standard that existed during the war or three hundred dollars an ounce on today's market. But perhaps he was worth more as twenty gallons or 160 pounds of yellow gold--ice cream that is! For that is one precious item the carriers had that the destroyers did not have-ice cream!!!

It so happened that the plane I drove over the side was number 17. This one happened to have been the plane with my name printed on the side under the cockpit. The plane numbers were assigned according to the seniority of the fighter pilots. It was also the photo reconn plane with all the cameras for a fighter plane mounted in the fuselage. This is the reason I was not to fly any photo missions. It was some kind of a coincidence that this plane was in the right place on the deck for me to be assigned to it. Almost without exception we were assigned to planes as our names appeared on the flight schedule. The planes were lined up in a random fashion.

After the crash I was taking in a little sun on the forecastle and was having a conversation with one of the ship's navigation officers. He informed me that the depth of the ocean in the area of the crash was 1500 fathoms--that is 9000 feet deep. Part of the subject under discussion was: What is the density of the water at a 9000 foot depth and will the plane sink to the bottom or sink to a depth where the density of the steel and the density of the water are the same and will the plane just float until it runs aground or continue to sink to the bottom. We didn't come to a conclusion as to the density of the water at a great depth but did agree that the plane would sink to the bottom.