CLAY FISHER TALKS ABOUT HIS LIFE

My first encounter with an airplane was when I was about four years old. A barnstormer WW I pilot buzzed the little rural town my family lived in by flying a Curtiss "Jennie" at about 200 feet right over our house. I had never seen an airplane before, and I guess I thought it was some kind of huge bird. I panicked and ran screaming toward the front door of the house and rammed my hands against the glass window in the door. My father took me out to see the airplane operating out of a cow pasture. I gingerly touched the propeller and then could not understand why the "driver" sat in the back seat!

Commander Clayton Fisher, USN (Ret.)

Later we moved to Janesville, Wisconsin and lived near the local fair grounds. Barnstorming pilots used the grass areas inside the race track for their flight operations. I got rides in various types of aircraft including a Ford all metal tri-motor. I was hooked and deep down I wanted to fly.

My first military experience was in the Wisconsin National Guard. I needed money to help pay my tuition to a small college near my home. You had to be eighteen years old to enlist, so I lied about my age. I was seventeen years old and signed a three year enlistment contract. I was now a member of the Tank Company of the 32nd Division (The Red Arrow Division). I transferred for my third year of college to the University of Wisconsin and was able to get an early discharge from the National Guard after two and a half years on my obligation. National Guard units were being nationalized shortly after I was discharged and my tank company was sent to Fort Knox and assigned to the 192nd Tank Battalion. The unit was sent to the Philippines in November of 1941. Of about 130 officers and men of the original unit only about eight survived as prisoners of war.

At the University of Wisconsin, I was majoring in chemical engineering. I was fully supporting myself and made the mistake of overloading the number of classes and lab courses I was taking. I became physically exhausted and very discouraged. The Germans were overrunning Europe and it was obvious the US would eventually become involved. I decided to apply for flight training and chose the Navy. A close older friend had gone to flight training at Pensacola and was a dive-bomber pilot in Bombing Squadron 5 assigned to the Yorktown Air Group.

I passed the Navy flight physical examination and reported to the Naval Air Station (NAS) Glenview for "elimination" flight training in October/November 1940. I was then ordered to NAS Jacksonville in January of 1941 for primary and basic flight training. In June, I was selected for carrier operational flight training at Opa Locke, Miami, Florida. On August 8, I received my gold wings and was commissioned an Ensign in the Naval Reserve. I had orders to Bombing Squadron 8 of the Hornet Air Group training at NAS Norfolk.

I met 2nd Lieutenant Anne Koster, an army nurse who was stationed at Fort Story, Virginia, on a Sunday afternoon in September 1941 at the officers' club at NAS Norfolk. She was with a pilot from our squadron and his wife. His wife had gone through nurses' training with Anne at Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago, and after graduation, they both were employed at the Doctors' Hospital in Washington D.C. I asked Anne for our first date, and we attended a rugby game in Norfolk between the officers of the HMS Illustrious and HMS Formidable. The two carriers had been heavily bombed at Malta and were being repaired at the Newport News naval shipyard. Anne's mother had become gravely ill, and Anne had requested to be discharged from the Army so she could care for her mother. Her discharge had been approved on December 6, 1941, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. She was notified her discharge had been rescinded, but a few days later she was notified that she had her choice to take a discharge or stay in the Army. It was patriotism versus duty to family, and family won. The cadre Anne would have been assigned to before her discharge was sent overseas. The cadre ended up in a hospital evacuation hospital on the Salerno beachhead. The hospital was bombed by German Stuka dive bombers.

Clay and Anne Fisher at Fort Lauderdale on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary.

In November 1941 our squadron was sent to Columbia, South Carolina to provide dive-bombers for large army maneuvers near Fort Jackson. The Army Air Corps did not have any dive-bomber capability at that time. I used a pay phone at the airport and asked Anne to marry me and she accepted.

In spite of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a shakedown cruise by Hornet in the Gulf of Mexico in January, intensive squadron training, the unexpected death of my father, and the impending departure of the Hornet from Norfolk for an unknown destination, Anne and I decided to get married. We were running out of time. We wanted to be married in the Navy chapel at NAS Norfolk, but Virginia law required blood tests and a three day wait. The alternative was going to South Mills, North Carolina about thirty miles south of Norfolk. On the morning of February 18, 1942 we decided to get married in South Mills that evening after I finished flying, but we started getting cold feet. Luis Muery, a squadron pilot, and his girl friend told us we were going to get married and that they would drive us down to South Mills. Getting married on a dreary rainy night by a justice of the peace; you hardly felt like you were married! Anyway we celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary last February 18 with only our two children and five grandchildren.

Luis Muery was to become a factor again in Anne's and my life. Luis had survived twenty-four days with his gunner in a rubber raft in the South Pacific just before the Battle of Midway. I have spoken about my participation in the Battle of Midway elsewhere. He had engine failure while on a 200 mile search mission in his SBD. We were both stationed together at Fort Lauderdale in 1943. Anne became pregnant, and was extremely nauseated and had lost over twenty pounds. We were almost at the decision time that her doctor was going to recommend terminating the pregnancy to save Anne's life. As a last effort, it was decided she needed a blood transfusion. Luis had the correct blood type and donated a unit of blood. The transfusion evidently stopped the nausea. Modern medicine has now determined the cause of the extreme nausea was a form of hormone imbalance. Luis retired as a Captain in the Naval Reserve and now lives at Topsail, South Carolina.

Commander Joe Taylor who was the Commanding Officer (CO) of Bombing Five on the Yorktown during the Battle of the Coral Sea was the Training Officer at Fort Lauderdale. When he found out about the seriousness of Anne's physical condition he had requested my pending orders to NAS Glenview as an LSO be terminated and that I should be ordered to an operational training base in Florida . Cdr Taylor never told me about his request. I was completely surprised to receive orders to NAS Vero Beach while at Glenview. I was expecting orders to a carrier as an LSO.

I received orders to NAS Vero Beach as an operational flight instructor for dive-bombers. The station's mission was changed to training fighter pilots in Hellcat F6F-3s, and then to a high priority night fighter training center. During that tour, I had a landing gear hang up on a SB2A Brewster dive-bomber, and ended up making a dead stick, wheels up, landing on the field. I had a Hellcat engine quit while making gunnery runs and ditched fifteen miles east of Melbourne, Florida. A few months later, I was making a strafing run on a target flying a brand new Hellcat. As I pulled up to 1,500 feet, the engine quit cold with no warning. I was able to make a dead stick landing on a small sandy emergency landing strip running through a dive-bombing target. A loose nut was found in the oil pump.

I next had a two year tour, 1946-47, at NAS Kodiak, and became a qualified single and multi-engine seaplane pilot. I also learned how rough and tough it was to fly the Aleutians.

In 1948, I attended a one year Navy "Line School" at Monterey, California. A school to qualify Naval Aviators for duty in the surface navy.

I was ordered to the Aviation Ordnance Branch of the old Bureau of Naval Ordnance in Washington D.C. in 1949. I became the Assistant Contract Administrator for the procurement of a new bomb director system which would replace the famous old Norden Bomb Sight.

I was going to get orders in 1950 to command a jet fighter squadron in the Atlantic fleet, and I requested my orders be changed to a fighter squadron in the Pacific Fleet. I had a problem with a home I had purchased in Carmel, California while attending the Navy school at Monterey. At that time, it looked like the Korean conflict was almost over. In November 1950, as I was driving through Elko, Nevada, en route to San Diego, with my family on a cold blustery day with snow flurries, I heard over my car radio the Chinese armies were pouring into North Korea. I told Annie, "Hell, I have volunteered myself into another shooting war!" I was ordered in as the Executive Officer (XO) of Fighter Squadron 53 of the USS Essex Air Group. I flew eighty combat missions in the F4U-4B Corsair over North Korea during 1951/52. Winter flight operations on an aircraft carrier are rough and tough, especially for the flight deck personnel. The water temperature in Wonson Bay in January of 1952 got as low as 33 degrees! During our eight month tour we lost about twenty-one pilots. We lost the "baby" of our squadron while we were attacking the railroad bridges made famous in the movie "The Bridges of Toko-Ri".

I was assigned in 1953 to the Schools and Training desk in the Personnel Division of ComAirPac, at NAS North Island, San Diego.

In 1954, I was ordered to Pensacola for two years and was assigned as the Officer-in-Charge of the Basic Instrument Training Squadron stationed at Corry Field. The squadron received the new T-28 trainers during the last year of my tour.

I was ordered back to San Diego in 1955 to be the CO of Utility Squadron 3. We provided target drone services for the Pacific Fleet. We controlled old F6F fighters converted to drones for targets for fighter squadrons firing Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles. We had squadron detachments on cruisers to provide catapulted small target drones for ship's AA guns.

My final and last duty station was NAS Miramar (Fighter Town USA), 1958/61. My first year I was the Air Operations Officer and it was rough, too many crashes. I next was the XO and finally was the CO relieving Captain Norwood Campbell who retired. Captain Campbell was an LSO on the Yorktown at Midway. I was CO for about six months until the new CO arrived.

I came up for selection to Captain in 1960. I was in the "hump", a large number of WW II naval aviators who had transferred to the regular Navy from Reserve status. The attrition rate was 75 per cent instead of the normal 25per cent of the year before. Admiral Rodee (CO of Scouting 8 on Hornet at Midway) sat on the selection board. He told me the board eliminated officers without a college degree and naval aviators who had not had a tour in a ship's billet. I had about 90 college credits but never managed to get back to a college and pick up the necessary credits for a degree. When I could have been an air officer on a carrier, I was flying combat missions over North Korea. Admiral Rodee drove out to Miramar to see me, and told me he was able to get me "continued" with forty-six other officers. This meant I could stay in the Navy and come up again for selection the next year. I thanked Admiral Rodee and told him I had decided to retire. My daughters were starting high school and each move on transfer orders was getting tougher on the girls and Anne.

Admiral Rodee told me I was making a huge mistake and he was right. Adjusting to civil life wasn't easy for me. I worked as a stockbroker for two major New York Stock Exchange companies and was never very happy. I finally became a real estate broker and organized my own company doing mostly property management. Anne also became a real estate broker and became associated with an office doing re-sales in a marine development with water front homes and condo's in Coronado. She knew her business, knew how to sell, and was very successful. This past year, Anne and I finally terminated our last property management account of some apartment units in Coronado.

How about that, retiring at the ages of eighty-three and eighty-five respectively!

Our oldest daughter, Susan McClure is an occupational therapist and works for the San Diego City School Systems. My youngest daughter Bobbie Dennis is a Navy wife and works for the Public Relations Department of the City of Chesapeake, Virginia. Her husband just made CPO and is in the VFC Squadron (A "Top Gun" training squadron) stationed at NAS Oceana, Virginia Beach. While I was visiting Bobbie this last October/November, I was invited to visit the squadron and talk to some of the pilots in their ready room.

Our oldest granddaughter Alison McClure works for Washington Mutual in Santa Cruz, California and is a marketing specialist. In fact, she is my stock broker!

Clay and Anne are shown here with their two daughters Bobbie McClure and Susan Dennis
on the occasion of their 60th wedding anniversary at their home in Coronado, California.

We have two grandaughters attending Mills College at Oakland, California. Both gals were given full scholarships because of excellent grades in the performing arts high school at the Chula Vista high school. Megan McClure the oldest has an excellent voice and is majoring in music and mathematics, and is in her senior year. Heather McClure, the youngest, is a freshman. Heather already has made a lot of friends and is bringing two of her friends to our home in Coronado for Thanksgiving.

Our oldest grandson (Bobbies son), Mike Beauchamp, graduated from UCLA and is a marketing director for United Airlines and has most of California, Nevada and the Hawaiian Islands. He spends a couple of days a week in his San Diego office and stays at our home when he can. He works hard, about a fifty to sixty hour week. This is a tough time to be working for the airlines. And our youngest grandson, Evan McClure, for whom I bought a computer in his junior year in high school, hopefully to keep him out of trouble, is now a systems net work administrator.

The older I get, and have a chance to watch the development of my children and grandchildren, it really hits home what a great and terrible loss for those who died in the Battle of Midway. I don't know how lucky I was to marry a gal like Anne. She is a very strong person. Our children, and especially our grandchildren, love to be around her. They all respect and seek her advice.

One of the toughest things Anne ever had to do was accompany the Navy chaplains to tell the wives of two of the pilots we lost from our squadron on the Essex that their husbands had been killed.

FISHERINDEX