I met Jack Morrison on the day before his 100th birthday. He was born on Nov 11, 1916, two years before it became Amistice Day. Jack was commissioned into the Marine Corps Reserve in Feb 1941 from near his home at Kansas City. He went to flight training and received his wings in mid December 1941. He told me of learning to take off and land from aircraft carriers on a converted side wheel paddleboat named the USS Wolverine in Lake Michigan because all the real aircraft carriers were in the Pacific. The Wolverine had a flight deck built on top and it was just 27' above the water. They didn't even have a catapult to launch them and when the planes came off the end of the flight deck they would drop until the landing gear almost touched the water. Only the ground affect kept the planes from going into the lake. Jack said he never wanted to take off from an aircraft carrier the rest of his flying career.
Jack was trained to fly the Grumman F4F at an air station near Miami (Opalaka if I recall correctly). He then was assigned as an instructor at NAS Jacksonville.
Jack did not receive orders to the Pacific until 1943 and was assigned to VMF 224 flying the F4U Corsairs. He said that flew from San Francisco to Honolulu on an flying boat with sleeping berths in the wing. From Honolulu they continued hopping islands to reach their base on Samoa. His squadron was the first squadron to fly Corsairs in the Pacific. The pilots were shuttled to Samoa where they offloaded their Corsairs from a cargo ship and had to clean off the Cosmolene and assemble them from pieces. I never really thought about it but fighter aircraft had to be shuttled to their bases in WWII because they didn't have the range to cross the long distances.
The squadron trained in the Corsairs for several weeks on Samoa before undertaking compbat missions.
He told me that the pilots in his squadron were very concerned that if they released their bombs from the gull wings in a steep dive that the bombs would hit the prop blades. They sent a telgraph message to the Naval aviation bureau about their concerns. The aviation bureau sent an expert to Samoa to investigate the issue. A week later, the expert arrived and it was none other than Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh told the ground crew to load up a Corsair with bombs on the wings and then he demonstrated releasing the bombs in a nearly vertical dive over the ocean. Lindbergh landed and told the ground crew to re-arm the aircraft and he did it again. After repeating this several times Lindbergh landed and asked if anyone still had concerns about dropping bombs at a steep dive angle. Nobody was worried anymore.
Jack said that his first opportunity for combat was a special mission with one other pilot from the squadron to assist a British garrison on an island that was a couple of hundred miles from Samoa. About once a week, the British garrison and air strip would get bombed at night by a line Japanese Betty bomber. It always came from the same direction but the British planes didn't have the speed or the range to catch the Betty as it ran after dropping its bombs. They needed Corsairs to do the job.
Jack and his wingman were on steep alert every night waiting for the radar operator to get an inbound track. After about a week on the island, the radar picked up an inbound enemy aircraft on the azimuth where the Betty usually came. They scrambled to get airborne. Jack said he was so excited that he didn't remember to raise his landing gear until he was 6000' in the air. The radar operator talked him onto an intercept path with the Betty until their paths crossed but Jack could not seen the Betty anywhere because it was dark and the Japanese plane had good light discipline. The first generation radar could provide an azimuth to the aircraft but not an altitude. The Betty dropped its bombs and departed and they never laid eyes on it. Worse yet, it cratered the landing strip from which they had taken off and they had to remain in the air until the combat engineers repaired the runway.
In early 1944 Jack received orders back to CONUS and in April 1945 received orders back to the Pacific theater as an individual replacement. He was assigned to VMF 223 on this second combat tour.
Jack's final mission of the war with VMF 223 was a rocket and strafing attack on Tojiro airfield on the Japanese mainland on Aug 7, 1945. He was a Major at that time and led the mission. They launched from Okinawa at 0700 and flew 400 miles to their target which was about 100 miles north of Hiroshima. The BOD time for the airfield attack was 0930. He said that he and the rest of the squadron had no awareness of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima until they returned to Okinawa about 1200. They only learned of it when the President made a radio broadcast that evening. Jack said that he laid claim to leading the last non-nuclear planned attack of WWII.
After WWII Col Morrison was assigned to Naval Test Pilot Class #1 in 1946 at Patuxent River. He was only allowed to remain on active duty and become a test pilot because he had an engineering degree. He attended AWS and was then assigned to be an instructor in what used to be called Advanced AWS. He recalled feeling uncomfortable teaching senior Colonel's who had fought in the Pacific on "defense against air attack" when they all had far more experience in doing that than he did.
In 1954, he was assigned as a Liaison Officer to observe French carrier air operations against the Viet Minh. Jack said that he was appalled at how dirty and disorganized the French aircraft carrier air operations were. They ran two sorties of two aircraft a day and that was all the temporary they could generate from their carrier. Jack reported that in his assessment, the French had no idea how to fight an air campaign and that the US should not get involved with their Indochina War.
Col Morrison later commanded 1st ANGLICO and some other commands I cannot recall from what he told me. He retired from the Marine Corps in 1968 and the last fighter he flew was the F-8.
He moved to the Mayflower retirement home in 1989. I visited him a couple of times a year until his death in March of 2022 at the age of 105.