False teeth at war

 

I've been reading "The Mighty Moo", a book about the fast light carrier USS Cowpens during World War II.

It's a very interesting in-depth look at the experiences of one ship and the men who crewed her during what is (so far) the most prolonged, deadly and costly war in human history.

Despite the dangers, however, there were lighter moments.   Two of them involved the false teeth of one of the senior pilots on board, who rose to become Commanding Officer of the ship's Air Group.  Since I have an upper denture myself, I had to both laugh and sympathize as I read them.

The Cowpens’ pilots were no stranger to the bar while the ship was operating in the Chesapeake, but one particular incident while she was in dry dock became a squadron legend and set the stage for a related incident in combat more than two months later. Shortly before Cowpens’ departure for Trinidad, a hungover Mark Grant reported to the airfield for an early morning flight after a hard night of drinking at the O club. Grant was scheduled to fly a racetrack pattern over the Moo so her crew could calibrate the ship’s radar. The natural swaying and bobbing of the aircraft quickly made Grant nauseous, and not having a bag to vomit into, he opened his canopy and let fly into the slipstream. While this resolved Grant’s immediate crisis, it created another, as he lost his upper and lower dentures in the process. A full set of teeth (real or artificial) were a requirement for sea duty, and so Grant had to rush to get replacements made before Cowpens departed for the Caribbean. Their commander’s embarrassing mishap was the talk of the air group.

. . .

[During air strikes on Wake Island in 1943] Air Group 25 Cmdr. Mark Grant was another victim of the Japanese ground fire. With Anderson Bowers as his wingman, the pair made four separate low-level strafing runs against enemy positions. Bowers flew CAP the previous day and was eager to get in on the action for the first time. The “AA was terrific, it was still dark, and it was tough,” Bowers later wrote in a letter home. Grant and Bowers screamed in, machine guns blazing, skimming just above the ground the whole length of the island from north to south. They turned around to repeat the trick and, in Bowers’s words, “flat-hatted the length of the island very low.”

On their third pass, the duo flew in over the lagoon; Bowers described how he was filling a water tower with .50-caliber holes when his plane was jarred with the impact of what he described as “a big hit in the right wing. I looked over, and could see them shooting at me on the lagoon side. So on the next run, I cleaned them out.” It was on this run that Bowers lost Grant, whose engine quit after multiple hits, forcing him to ditch just offshore.

. . .

The 311-foot-long US submarine Skate was waiting just offshore of Wake Island to pick up downed airmen ... one of the sub’s lookouts spotted something bobbing on the waves three miles distant on the port bow. She drew in close to investigate and discovered a life raft with its cover flap closed to shield its occupant from the sun. With a yell of “Ahoy, the raft there!” Skate’s officer of the deck awakened Cowpens’ air group commander, Mark Grant, who by then had been adrift for three days. Suddenly startled awake, he flung back the cover, clearly surprised by the sub’s appearance. Skate’s captain described how Grant flung himself out of the raft with a whoop and “flew through the water to the vessel’s side and up its steel ladder like a squirrel.”

Despite his long wait in the raft, Grant never lost confidence he would be rescued—as his luck at Wake had been so lousy that he thought it could only improve. Japanese gunners peppered his aircraft with hits on his last low-level strafing run with Anderson Bowers, and the skipper claimed to have seen the Japanese rifleman whose bullet finished off his already-damaged engine. While Grant was upbeat about his chances of rescue, after firing at seagulls and gooney birds in hopes of obtaining lunch, he had saved the final round in his pistol for himself just in case. To pass the time, Grant amused himself planning his conversation with his rescuers, concluding that the correct opening remark was “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Moreover, remembering the loss of his dentures off Norfolk, he removed his shoes and placed the teeth in one of them, thinking they would be safest there. But the Skate’s sudden appearance caught Grant off guard; not only did he forget his prepared speech, he left his dentures in his shoes in his raft. He only realized his mistake when the sub’s commanding officer ordered one of his deckhands to sink the raft with machine-gun fire, and Grant dove back into the water to retrieve them. In subsequent retellings of the story at the Honolulu O club, Grant claimed he was fully aboard and the sub submerged when he convinced Skate’s captain to resurface and allow him [to] retrieve his teeth.

Wouldn't it have been fun (not!) if the proximity of Japanese aircraft or submarines had forced the Skate to crash-dive, leaving CDR Grant's teeth floating in the raft as a belated war trophy?

If you're interested in the operations of the nine Independence-class fast carriers of World War II, another very good book from an unusual perspective is "Paddles!", written by the Landing Signal Officer (LSO) of the USS Belleau Wood.  

Both books are very informative and entertaining.  The second, in particular, provides details of wartime air operations from a support perspective that's not often encountered.  Recommended reading.

Peter