Chapter 35. Falling

Lakehurst/February 1945

I was glad to put 1944 behind me. All those months, when the bad news kept coming, it had been a relief each time to just get back to work. I liked Lakehurst—working in the Big Hangar. I knew what I was doing—what needed to be done.  And I didn’t have to worry the way I worried at sea. I never minded being out there on the ocean. I actually loved it, in a way. I was one of the guys who never got sick no matter how bad the storms were. But everyone on any Navy ship knows: if the ship goes down, you could be gone before you even knew what was happening. That’s what happened to Richie.

And after Henry was killed, I was glad to be stuck on the ground. Of course, a Navy blimp was a heck of a lot safer to fly in than a P-47 Thunderbolt. Not much chance of an accidental crash. Not much chance of being shot down; that had happened only once. Back in 1942, K-74 actually got into a shootout with a U-boat…and lost.

I decided I was lucky to have a job that kept me behind the scenes.

I was on watch nights, from 8 at night until 8 in the morning, readying the airships for their daytime missions. It was a crazy schedule, but I got used to it. I’d eat my main meal at midnight, have a little something more to eat when I went off watch, then sleep most of the day; I’d get up and have my breakfast—and my coffee—when most of the rest of the world was having supper. I got used to it.

We had a checklist of things to do routinely. The skippers would leave notes for us about any warning lights they got during their flights.

Speaking of lights, one of the trickiest things I had to do sometimes was changing a light bulb. For some of them, all I had to do was go up on a ladder and maybe climb the little rungs on the side of the ship. But for the running light on top of the blimp…well that was a two-man job. For that I had to go up on a bosun’s chair. That’s a little platform suspended on a rope and tackle type of rigging hanging from the rafters. One guy sits on the platform, the other guy mans the rope.

Well, this one night I had to got up there and the guy working with me—Rugo—he was such a Nervous Nelly I thought he was going to drop the rope and I’d be a goner. I’m up there reaching out for to take off the globe and he keeps hollering, “Hang on to the rope, Joe! Don’t let go of the rope…”

I holler back, “How’m I supposed to change a light bulb with one hand, Rugo? Just hold the damned rope and stop shouting at me.”

He finally did stop; I got the job done. And he got me back down without killing me. One of the simple (but not to-simple-to-do, tasks) that added up to a good night’s work

So I’d say light-bulb-changing was about as dangerous as my job got. A hell of a lot safer than sea duty. Or that’s what I thought. Until the night of the ice storm.

I got called in early. I was added to a ground crew that was going to need extra men.

There was a blimp coming in to land. It was from South Weymouth—the only blimp still in the air that afternoon on the entire East Coast. A fast-moving storm coming out of the Northeast had grounded all the others. This ship had been caught out at sea. It was closer to the Jersey shore than to its home base, so Lakehurst was its best option. This storm was one of those ugly Nor’easters. The rain had turned to freezing rain, and the freezing rain had turned to sleet. By the time the blimp reached Lakehurst it was covered with ice. Weighted down like that, the ship was in trouble. Ordinarily, when coming in to land, a blimp would kill both its engines. But the pilot didn’t do this; he knew that if the crew wasn’t able to pull him in on the first pass, he would have to circle around and try again. He must have figured he wouldn’t be able to get back up without those engines and he would be in the drink.

What I didn’t realize when I headed out to the landing pad was that the standard rigging at the two different airfields was not the same. Our ships out of Lakehurst had four separate straight lines that hung from the ship like a cat’s whiskers—two fore (one on each side) and two aft. Ships out of Weymouth used a slip line on the back. Instead of four separate lines, the Weymouth ship dragged only two looping lines. These were attached at the bow and stern ends of the ship, one end attached to the starboard side, the other to the port.  The slip line offered an extra chance to secure a ship that was proving difficult to bring in. But it had a huge disadvantage. As I found out.

As the ship came in, we grabbed the lines and were struggling to tie them down. But the wind was knocking the ship around. It was being propelled forward by its idling engines, and it got away from as. As the blimp lurched forward, its slip line caught me right at the back of my knees. I fell backward. And up I went, my knees hooked over the line. With the motion of the blimp, my knees slid the length of the line and slammed into the cable hook. Fortunately, it released. Or broke. Either way, I was just plain lucky the blimp was still low enough to the ground that I wasn’t killed.

It was a miracle. Until that cable broke I though I was a dead man for sure. Rosemary must have been praying to keep me safe. That’s all that I could think of. Maybe God decided he’d taken enough of our family in ’44. He wasn’t going to take any more in ’45. Whatever the reason I survived. I was grateful.

I had landed on my head, but I never lost consciousness. Somehow the men on the ground managed to land the ice-covered blimp without me. And the ambulance, always standing ready at every landing, rushed me to the hospital. The doctors said it was a wonder I had no broken bones. I was badly cut up on the back of my head. The backs of my knees had rubbed raw, and I had what they said was a pretty severe concussion. Concussion! Hell, I was lucky I wasn’t dead.

I was in the hospital for a week or so because of the head injury. I was having terrible headaches. This one day, I was just lying there with my eyes closed, and I could hear there were a bunch of people coming. I opened my eyes to look, then closed them again. It was a doctor, making his rounds followed by eight or ten others—trainees, I was guessing. He was stopping at every bed and making a few comments. When he stopped at my bed, he must have picked up my chart and looked at it. He said only one word, “Circumcision.” I opened my eyes, and turned down the bedcovers. Of course the doctor and everyone with him could see immediately I didn’t need a circumcision. And that the one I had took place a long time ago. I watched him. He looked at the chart again. “Oh,” he said. “Concussion.”