P-MAN XIV Update #14 - Sharp-eyed readers and aircraft ID teaching points

1 April 2012

Happy April Fool's Day. But this is no joke. Just an update submitted by Reid.

Ahem. Sharp-eyed reader Mark Gran has called out Reid Joyce, who edits these Progress Reports, on a few words that he added to Flip's commentary about a photo of Capt. McCullah in Progress Report # 13, and provided a good opportunity for a mea culpa and a teaching point.

The McCullah family has provided the following photo of Capt. McCullah (and has given us permission to reproduce it). Here it is again, with Flip's original caption:

Captain McCullah during the war. But not in the Corsair that he ditched.

Reid, who often lets his mind wander and blurts stuff out without thinking, shot from the hip and added the following to Flip's caption: "...looks like an Avenger."

Wrong. As Mark Gran pointed out in his note to us, "Actually the Captain is sitting in the cockpit of a earlier version of the Corsair known as the F4U-1 or "Birdcage" Corsair (Birdcage due to the frame work of the main canopy)."

Mark is absolutely correct. Not only is the Avenger's cockpit and canopy much larger than the Corsair's (it's just generally a much larger aircraft) but there's also a structural member that's visible over the Avenger pilot's head when the canopy is open. The Vought F4U-1 differed from the F4U-1a and all subsequent versions of the Corsair in the configuration of its canopy. All subsequent models of the F4U and the FG series built by Goodyear had some variation of a "bubble" canopy without the "birdcage."

Here are some examples:

This is the canopy area for an F4U-1. Definiely "birdcage" construction.
(From Squadron/Signal publication "F4U Corsair in action")

This is the canopy area on an F4U-1a. This and most subsequent Corsair models
(including the FG-1 aircraft that Capt. McCullah ditched) looked like this.
(From Squadron/Signal publication "F4U Corsair in action")

This is the canopy on an Avenger. Obviously much bigger than the Corsair,
but built similarly to the early F4U-1's birdcage canopy.
(From Squadron/Signal publication "Walk Around TBF/TBM Avenger")

This kind of stuff is partly what often takes us so much time when we're trying to identify an aircraft solely based on bits and pieces that we find in a debris field. We seldom (well, actually never - except in the case of Capt. McCullah's remarkably preserved aircraft) find a completely intact aircraft, either underwater or in the jungle. Mostly we have to deal with widely scattered debris fields. If we find a tailwheel, for example, something like that can greatly help us to tell the difference between a Corsair and an Avenger because he tailwheels were unique and very different from each other. Canopy pieces, though, are obviously fragile and in a debris field they may only consist of a bunch of small aluminum strips with a few tiny bits of plexiglas still attached.

Both Avengers and Corsairs flew in Palau - they were all carrier-based in late March 1944 (Operation Desecrate I), late July (Operation Snapshot), and August-September (Operation Stalemate II) before the Americans captured Peleliu. After we controlled Peleliu, we immediately turned it into a base from which three squadrons of Marine Corsairs operated. I don't know for sure, but suspect that there were none of the very early F4U-1s among the Corsairs that the Marines flew from Peleliu, relatively late in the war. So when we find bits of "birdcage" canopy at a crash site, our first thought is "probably Avenger." Final identification never hinges on that initial assumption, but it often steers us first to that portion of our archives in which we have records of aircraft losses that we can sort by type.

So anyway, thanks to Mark Gran and everyone else out there who's determined to keep us honest. We (at least I) can benefit from an occasional smack up'side the head to help us disconnect the autopilot and keep our attention focused.

There's one other issue that I'd like to elaborate on, briefly. We often feel the need to be a little circumspect in our references to non-BentProp people with whom we work, or who contribute effort and information to what we're trying to do in locating MIAs. For the record, we are pleased to tell you that the world-renowned expert on soil sampling and analysis of the chemical products of human decomposition to whom I referred in report # 13 is Dr. Arpad Vass, and the organization for which he works is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And we've had to fill a bunch of administrative squares to be permitted by the Palauan authorities to acquire soil samples at our suspected POW-burial site and send them to ORNL in Tennessee. Honest, folks, we don't just dig stuff up and send it to any old lab. This is serious science we're doing, even if we occasionally seem to be distracted by pretty fish and Red Rooster beer, or appear to our readers to just be having too damn much fun.

- Reid Joyce

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