ENS DONALD McPHERSON

IT WAS MARCH 19, 1945, and Donald McPherson, flying an F6F Hellcat off the USS Essex in his first combat mission, was about to undergo his baptism by fire. As his squadron attacked airfields on the Japanese mainland, McPher-son saw an enemy bomber struggling to take off to keep from being destroyed on the ground. He swooped down on it, but in the middle of his dive the Hell-cat’s engine suddenly quit. With the ground looming up, he somehow got the engine restarted and managed to pull out. He limped back to the carrier and after a hard landing discovered just how lucky he was when his crew found that a 20-mm cannon shell had smashed into his fuselage and severed the cable controlling the aircraft’s tail section. Born in 1922 as the youngest of seven children, McPherson grew up on a Nebraska farm where times were hard even before the Depression. The Uni-versity of Nebraska was only thirty miles away in Lincoln and he dreamed of going there, but his parents couldn’t afford the tuition, and after graduating from high school at sixteen McPherson went to work on the farm helping his family make ends meet. When he turned nineteen his father urged him to enlist in the Navy and try to become a pilot so he wouldn’t be drafted into the infantry. He was accepted for flight training and got his wings in the summer of 1944. By early 1945 McPherson was in VF-83 on board the Essex, enjoying the predawn missions most of all because the pilots who flew them were served steak for breakfast. On April 6 he got “lucky,” as he later said. He was return-ing from a mission, flying low, about 1,500 feet, on the way back to the car-rier when he spotted two Japanese divebombers skimming the water below him. “I had my trigger guard off safe and

was ready to fire,” he later remem-bered, “and all I had to do was push the nose down and put the sight on the first plane and squeeze the trigger.” As McPherson’s shells tore into the plane, the Japanese pilot slumped down in the cockpit and the plane crashed into the water. The second dive-bomber turned to run and McPherson chased it down and destroyed it too. Over the next few weeks, VF-83 supported the U.S. invasion of Okinawa, bombing the caves where enemy troops lay in wait to ambush U.S. soldiers. Then, as the Japanese sent waves of kamikazes against the American fleet, McPherson and the other Navy pilots tried frantically to guard the ships. On May 4, as 250 kamikazes approached, the U.S. fly-ers tried to get as many as they could. McPherson 152 shot down three enemy planes in quick succession, becoming an Ace. Another pilot got six. All told, his squadron shot down over one hundred Japanese aircraft in less than an hour. “But,” as McPherson said sadly, “we didn’t get them all.” Four U.S. Navy ships were sunk in the attack and many others seri-ously damaged. The loss of all those American lives haunted McPherson in the years that followed. But decades later, as journalist Steve Liewer wrote in the Omaha World-Herald, McPherson got some consolation from a telephone call from a former crew member of the USS Ingraham, a destroyer VF-83 had been trying to guard that day. After studying an archive of photos taken during the attack, the caller said, he had determined that the Ingraham, already badly damaged, would certainly have been taken down by another kamikaze headed straight for it if McPher-son hadn’t suddenly appeared and destroyed the Japanese plane before it could hit the ship.

McPherson was on the deck of the Essex when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and he saw the mushroom cloud boil up on the horizon. Later on, his squadron dropped packs con-taining comic cards and candies over POW camps where American prisoners were waiting to be repa- triated. He was in the air over the USS Missouri when the Japanese formally surrendered. Donald McPherson came back home to the farm, married and started a family, and became involved in his community’s life as a Boy Scout leader and Little League coach. He was employed as a rural letter carrier and continued to farm until he was almost ninety years old.

Special Thanks to Wings of Valor author Peter Collier and Photo by Ariel Fried.

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