When I sat down with Gil Hutchings this past week, he told me that he didn’t consider himself a suitable subject for a Veterans Day article. “I don’t understand why you want to talk to me,” he said at first, before continuing on to explain that he never shot a weapon at anything other than a target and only spent time “overseas” insofar as participating in a search and rescue mission far enough off the U.S. coast to be considered international waters. Truth be told, what makes someone a culturally acceptable enough veteran to celebrate on November 11th is not something I have the right to decide. But I think I’ve written enough to make the call on what makes a good story, and Gil has a great one.
When Gil was 17, he joined the Navy. It was May 1944, and he hadn’t even graduated from high school, so he needed his father’s signed permission to enlist. He’d been told to finish school first, then report in August. Gil said that was an “unusual” order, “but I didn’t realize, and I guess the country didn’t realize at the time (that) the war was turning around. We started winning.”
By this time, World War II was a little more than a year away from ending, and in May 1944, the “turning-point” Battle of Midway had been long won, and D-Day was on the near horizon.
Gil said he chose the Navy because, quite simply, “I didn’t want to join the Army, and the Army walks in boots in the mud and eats wherever they set up. In the Navy, you sleep in a bunk and eat in a chow hall.”
Fair assessment. He also wanted to be a pilot, but when he joined, the Navy had all the pilots they needed. But they still needed combat air crewmen, so Gil asked the operative question: “I said, ‘Do you fly?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘I’ll take it.’”
So Gil went into ordnance, his role being, as he explained it, to “learn to shoot and fire every gun the Navy has.” He first trained at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Norman, Oklahoma, and was there for 18 weeks before moving on to Naval Air Station Jacksonville. There he believes he had six weeks of gunnery school, where “we learned to take a 50-caliber machine gun apart and put it back together in the dark,” and to diagnose any issues with the weapon by how it fired or felt. Gil also spent time firing guns while in a flying airplane, at other airplanes, being towed by another airplane. And any hunter or gunsman can attest that, to hit a moving target, you have to aim in front of it. For Gil and other Navy ordnancemen, this often ended up being the friendly aircraft towing the target!
Alongside learning to shoot all of the Navy’s guns, Gil volunteered to become a bombardier. In order to do that, just like the guns, Gil had to learn how to take apart the bombs, set primers, sight the targets and load bombs into the planes. Gil said that the hardest course he took throughout his time in the Navy was which shackles held which bomb in the rack, because each bomb had a different type. “When guys were going to town on the weekend, I was staying in the barracks to study.”
After completing gunnery school, the ordnancemen were introduced to the revolutionary invention of radar. Gil recalls classes on radar bombsights, which were shrouded in secrecy where students were not allowed even pencil and paper to take notes to eliminate any risk that the information might fall into enemy hands. It was then up to Gil and a few of his fellow ordnancemen - the first to take those classes at Banana River in Florida - to then teach other soldiers how to use radar-enabled bombs. By now, Gil was a Petty Officer 2nd Class, equivalent to an Army or Marine sergeant. This was primarily how Gil spent the remainder of his time in the Navy until the end of the war.
Gil describes a typical bombing “run” as seven miles long. The runs would be completed in a PBY Catalina, with two instructors to teach their students. The instructors had cameras that took snapshots of the bomb hits for students to score on accuracy, judging by the puff of smoke the bomb let off. But don’t worry, these instructive bomb runs only disturbed the alligators in Lake Okeechobee. Gil and the other instructors’ radar bombing classes took six weeks to complete.
So that’s what Gil’s time in the Navy looked like from 1944 to 1946 when he was decommissioned, from learning the nitty-gritty of the weapons that the United States took to Europe and the Pacific to readying the men to use the high-tech bombing equipment. Of course, there are plenty of specific anecdotes that Gil shared about his time, so I hope you’ll stick around for next week’s part two and learn about the times Gil’s service had him brushing shoulders with the Tuskegee Airmen, Blue Angels and the infamous Bermuda Triangle.
