David Sears is a New Jersey-based business consultant and author.
David's business consulting expertise encompasses executive and professional staffing, compensation and incentives, organizational change consulting, executive coaching and human resources process engineering. His book Successful Talent Strategies has been published by AMACOM. A forthcoming book Best Sellers , also to be published by AMACOM, profiles best human capital practices in solution selling across multiple industries.
David's early career included service as a United States Navy officer with extensive sea duty aboard a destroyer and a tour of duty as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy during the Vietnam conflict. His book The Last Epic Naval Battle: Voices of Leyte Gulf chronicles the exploits of 60 sailors and aviators in the last and most decisive sea battle of World War II.
David has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MS in Industrial Relations from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
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August 29, 2005
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An email brought terrific news about someone I hold as both friend and inspiration -- even though we've not yet met in person:
“I am Mike McGraw. My father is Joe McGraw, one of the VC-10 FM-2 pilots mentioned in your book. I thought that you would be interested in learning that my father and others will be inducted into the Commemorative Air Force (CAF) 'American Combat Airman Hall Of Fame' this September in Midland, Texas. There will be a dinner ceremony prior to the annual 'AIRSHO' on October 1st and 2nd. Of course we are very proud of him and all of the heroes who bought for us, our great country and way of life, as well as those carrying the fight to the enemy today. We are also very grateful for the work that organizations like the CAF are doing to keep their memories and sacrifices alive and appreciated. My father is like so many of his generation, in that I had to become a fighter pilot in my own right and ask him about the Navy Cross he wears before he would share his story.”
Interested? I was ecstatic! I "met" (Retired Navy Captain) Joe McGraw as part of what became a vast network of veteran sailors and airmen (and generations of their families and friends) as I researched and wrote a history of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Joe and I spent hours on the phone as I probed his life story and his experiences in the last strategic sea/air battle between U.S. and Japanese forces in the Southwest Pacific.
Joe McGraw proved to be both an author's fondest wish and most secret dread: his words told his story much better than my own words ever could. Fortunately for me, Joe had apparently found neither the time nor the inclination to commit his story to hard copy. Fortunately, for all who read the book, Joe's story could still be snatched from the wild blue -- where, as a teenaged Navy Wildcat fighter pilot flying from the cramped flight deck of the escort aircraft carrier Gambier Bay, Joe became an ace, won his Navy Cross and now, sixty years later, gained entrance to CAF's Hall of Fame.
Joe McGraw grew up in Syracuse, NY (he and his wife now reside in Washington State). Immediately after high school graduation in 1942, 18-year-old Joe was off to Navy flight training. “I got into the beginning of the NavCad (Naval Cadet) program. There was a group of us from Syracuse called the ‘Syracuse Avengers,' a name dreamed up by some publicist. In those days, they really needed pilots badly.”
Months of flight training eventually brought Joe to VC-10 (Joe flew Stearman bi-planes, Vultee Vibrators, SNJs and even Brewster Buffaloes; he did his CarQuals on the Wolverine, a converted Lake Michigan excursion boat topped by a jury-rigged flight deck). VC-10 was an air group formed in Astoria, Oregon near the terminus of the Lewis and Clark Trail. VC-10 pilots and crews flew two types of aircraft (the 'C' in VC-10 stood for composite): single-seat FM-2 Wildcat fighters and multi-seat TBM Avenger torpedo bombers.
While all combat pilots needed to be blessed with ego and self-assurance, these two types of carrier aircraft demanded different skills and mental makeup. Torpedo bombing required icy restraint and single-minded focus to block out the approach of imminent destruction. In a wave-skimming torpedo run, Navy TBM pilots were like boxers limited to one punch. While waiting to throw the punch, they exposed themselves and their crews to lethal punishment. They couldn't flinch or heed the all-too-human urge to pull up and away into safety.
Fighter pilots needed to be ever oriented, ever anticipating, and ever reacting. If Navy torpedo bomber pilots were stone-nerved one-punch boxers, then fighter pilots were boxers throwing punches at a scrum of opponents, most approaching from behind, while bobbing and weaving through an infinite arena of sky.
Joe was fighter pilot material -- you can almost see it in his sharp hawkish gaze, then and now: “In the air I always seemed to see things before anybody else did.” The fighter plane was the FM-2 Wildcat, the predecessor to the more famed F6F Hellcat. (The FM-2 was actually an intermediate upgrade of the F4F; it was, in Joe's words, a “wilder Wildcat. It could climb faster. It was lighter and it could turn tighter. And the word was if you didn't let a Zero sucker you below 180 knots, you could stay right with it.”)
Despite their differences in flying acumen, both VC-10's FM-2 and TBM pilots shared another distinction. They became skilled in launching off and landing on the truncated decks of Navy escort carriers such as Gambier Bay. Many escort carriers (designated CVEs) were constructed around thin-skinned merchant class hulls, a design that spawned a lot of nicknames, including "Baby Flattops" and "Jeep Carriers." To their crews, they were known as "Kaiser Coffins" -- a morbid tribute to their builder (Kaiser Industries), their slow speed, and their frightening lack of armor protection.
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