Chuck Bayless, WWII

Torpedo bomber recalls travels and missions during WWII

Charles “Chuck” Edward Bayless saw a lot of action during World War II. He also saw a considerable amount of islands and locations throughout the Asiatic-Pacific Theater. Most of his view, though, was from a small window on the belly of a torpedo bomber aircraft.

“Torpedo planes had windows I’d look out of,” Bayless said. “I could see the targets, the ocean, the aircraft carrier, islands, you name it.”

As the radio man on board a Grumman TBF (Torpedo Bomber F Series) Avenger, Bayless was in contact with the pilot during flights. The radio man sat in the lower back half of the plane, under the gunner. The gunner sat behind the pilot on the top of the fuselage.

Charles “Chuck” Bayless today in his home near Alanson on Crooked Lake, pointing to photos of a Grumman TBF Avenger aircraft.

Never destined to win a beauty contest, the stout Grumman TBF Avenger series of aircraft would go down as one of the most potent torpedo bombers of WWII. The design was characterized by a portly fuselage that held the three-man crew; one pilot, one gunner, and one radio/torpedo man. The plane’s multifaceted capabilities endeared her to many airmen during the war, including Bayless.

“Torpedo planes had more radio equipment than other dive bombers,” Bayless said. “We carried four 500-pound bombs, or two 1,000 pound, or one 2,000 pound bombs. We could carry the big bombs.”

He fires off facts and statistics about the torpedo planes as if he stepped off one of the aircraft just yesterday. At 88-years-old, Bayless is as energetic as someone half his age, and his memory is sharp about events from 70 years ago.

Looking back on his military career

Bayless was in the Navy Air Corp’s Torpedo Squadron 81, flying with a VH (air group) of 18 fighters, 18 bombers and 18 torpedo planes. They flew from large aircraft carriers throughout the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Japan from early 1944 until April of 1945. He received the air medal, a citation for “Meritorious Achievement in Aerial Flight as a Radioman of a Torpedo Plane, VT 80 attached to the U.S.S. Hancock on Sept. 11, 1945.”

On each flight, Bayless was responsible for handling the radio communications between himself and the pilot, and the pilot and the command center. He was also in charge of setting or “arming” and releasing the bombs.

“We’d get near the target and the pilot would tell me, ‘Arm the bombs,’” Bayless said. “I had a little window to see the bombs (stacked up inside the plane’s belly right next to him). “There was a series of wires that ran down to a handle and then up to the nose of each bomb.”

When he pulled the lever, it armed the bombs. The Bombay doors would open, and the torpedoes would drop out of the aircraft.

“It would take 700-to-800 revolutions of the torpedo blades to get the wires to line up, and then it would explode,” Bayless said. The delay allowed enough time for the dive bomber to drop the bomb and then fly far enough away to avoid getting damaged by the flying debris once the torpedo hit its intended target.

The radio man’s responsibilities also included making sure all the bombs dropped every time. This was a critical task.

“One time a torpedo plane landed on the U.S.S. Hancock aircraft carrier, and when those planes landed on the deck it wasn’t always smooth,” Bayless said. “They hit that deck and one of the armed torpedoes hadn’t dropped and it exploded right there on the deck. All the crew died.”

That explained the large, gapping hole in the deck of the U.S.S. Hancock aircraft carrier when he and his crew first arrived. They had just left Torpedo Squadron 80 on the U.S.S. Ticonderoga near Japan.

“I wasn’t on the Ticonderoga when it got hit,” Bayless said.

Another one of his in-flight responsibilities was to conduct visual reconnaissance of everything below and take notes.

“Every radio man had a pad strapped to our leg,” Bayless said. “The pilot would tell me to set the bombs for 50 feet, or whatever the command was for that target. So I’d set the dial at a certain speed. I’d do it in sequence.”

“The pilot would open the Bombay doors and I’d drop the bombs,” he said. “And I’d have to write down how we did it, how many we dropped, at what coordinates, and all that.”

Radio men were also expected to write down everything they saw below.

“I’d look out the window and write down what I saw,” Bayless said. “I looked for targets of interest, and wrote it down. Then the intelligence team would interrogate us in the ready room after the mission.”

Bayless said sometimes his crew would be the last ones back. Before they could be debriefed, the other crews would talk about what they had seen and it could confuse other crews.

“You had to remember what you actually saw and what you heard other guys talking about and what you began to think you saw,” Bayless said. “It was important to keep it straight, because they made decisions on the next mission based on what we reported.”

Once a week, the best reports came out on paper. Bayless and his pilot and gunner would pore over those reports.  “It was a matter of survival,” Bayless said.

The torpedo bombers were equipped with several machines guns. The pilot had a .50 caliber machine gun in each wing that he’d use. The gunner had a .50 caliber gun in a swivel seat that could turn 360 degrees. And there was a smaller .30 caliber machine gun called “a stinger,” for the radio man to use for strafing. They could shoot 1,000 rounds per minute, Bayless said. During bomber training, Bayless had learned how to shoot, and once he was in the war, he and other airmen would practice often to “keep their eye up.”

“We’d sign up every morning for a flight,” Bayless said. “If a pilot wanted his flight pay, he had to fly. We’d go up and ride in the “rear seat” (the nickname for the radio man’s position).”

They’d practice firing their guns at “sleeves,” or long tubes about three-feet in diameter being pulled by another plane along side the torpedo bomber. Bayless and other aerial gunners would spray them with paint as practice.

“We went every two weeks to shoot shotguns at skeet to keep our aim up,” Bayless said.

Torpedo planes were tight quarters. Rather than wear their parachutes, Bayless and the other members of the three-man crew wore harnesses. The chutes hung on the wall.

“If you needed it, you clipped it on,” Bayless said. Fortunately, he never needed a parachute, though he did have parachute practice when he was in dive bomber training.

“I took a jump,” he said, accenting the “a,” indicating it was a one-time experience he didn’t want to repeat.

Bayless said he felt sorry for the parachute riggers because it seemed that all they did was repack parachutes. Once a month they blew out the packed parachutes, hung them to dry, then they would fold it up again.

“We’d joke with them all the time,” he said. “We’d ask them, ‘How do I know this is going to open?’ and they’d tell us, ‘If it doesn’t open, you bring it back.’ That was a good one.”

Charles “Chuck” Bayless, Aviation Radioman Third Class, U.S. Naval Reserve at machine gun school in 1944 in Jacksonville, Florida, front row, center, holding a .30 

Getting to the war

Bayless was celebrating his 16th birthday on Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He tried to enlist in the Navy Air Corp two years later when he turned 18.

“I wanted to be a bomber pilot,” Bayless said. “They told me I had an overbite and that I’d black out in a dive.”

Back then, pilots used to hold an oxygen tube in their mouth. During a dive, with the plane drawing 5 Gs, the tube would come out of a pilot’s mouth if he had an overbite. So the Navy rejected him.

A month later, at Mackenzie High School in Duran, (Detroit) Michigan, he graduated from high school in January. His class was so large that they would graduate some students early in the year. Betty, who would become his wife, graduated from the same school in June 1943.

Bayless was immediately drafted. He ended up in the Navy Air Corps after all. In March 1943 he went to boot camp. His company was the first one from Michigan to go to Farragut, Idaho, for boot camp.

“All the other bases were full,” Bayless said. “This was a new one.”

It took them three days cross country on a train to reach the camp. The train stopped often to pick up new recruits and draftees. He remembers stopping in North Dakota to pick up Sioux Indians. Farragut boot camp is now a state park on Lake Ponderay. He and Betty visited it years later.

After boot camp, Bayless was off to Memphis, Tenn., for radio and radar school. After 18 weeks of radio training, he was off to Jacksonville, Fla., for machine gun school. Following that, he had eight weeks of Naval air station dive bombing flight training, flying three hours in the morning, then three hours in the afternoon.

“That was mostly for the pilots,” Bayless said.

Bayless received 37-day delayed orders from the base in Florida to go to Seattle, Wash., by way of Detroit. While in Detroit, he and Betty were married in February 1944. She went with him to Seattle. After three months, the Navy sent Bayless down to San Francisco to a C.A.S.U. (Carrier Aircraft Service Unit), which is a pool to pick up other servicemen. Located on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco harbor, he and the others were sequestered, “quarantined,” he calls it.

“As soon as shipping was available, we were to be sent out,” Bayless said.

The Navy then began training the crews for BT 100, Bomber Training, where they combined fighter bomber torpedo groups.

“You knew you didn’t have long to be there,” Bayless said.

It turned out that they were doing the military’s famous “hurry up and wait” routine. While everyone was waiting to muster out, and pilots wanted to fly, but for some reason no one was being called up. Every morning they would check the roster at the bomber hut and find that there were no flights scheduled.

“At 1 p.m. we’d go to the movies if we weren’t on the list to fly,” Bayless said.

One day his gunner came over to him and said he needed a radio man. Bayless asked why, what was his doing? The gunner told him over on Maui they’re making up a squadron.

“The only thing we’re doing here is going to the movies,” the gunner said.

Bayless had never met the pilot before that day. They loaded up the plane with their belongings in parachute bags. Their flight to Maui was 90 minutes. They landed, got assigned bunks, got some chow, talked to a few other men, went to bed and at 5 a.m. the next morning they were loudly awakened with the announcement, “Let’s go, we’re moving out, you’re flying out on a carrier.”

Bayless was now in the war. His crew consisted of a pilot, a gunner and himself. They were part of an air group made up of 18 fighter planes, 18 bombers, and 18 torpedo planes. They were the 81st Torpedo Squadron.

“My gunner was 29 years old, I was 19, my pilot was 21,” Bayless said, noting how young they were.

While he hasn’t kept in touch with many other servicemen over the years, or attended reunions, he has kept in touch with his gunner, Udell Kenneth Colson, “Unc” to his crew.

“It was an experience to live with him,” Bayless said, smiling.

They were loaded onto a Jeep carrier that took them back to Pearl Harbor. The next morning they left for a nine-day journey to Guam. The U.S.S. Wasp aircraft carrier was there. Bayless and his crew switched with another air group.

“We were just starting our tour, they were ending theirs,” Bayless said.

He and his crew went on a few raids in that time, going aboard the aircraft carrier in September until November. They provided support for the Lady Invasion in Manilla Bay, among others.

They went to the atoll of Ulithi, a huge circle of small islands around a deep center. Bayless remembers that it was a beautiful collection of nearly 40 small islands roughly 20 miles long and 15 miles wide. One end of the atoll was designated for supplies, while the other end was where the ships stayed. Ulithi is situated 850 miles east of the Philippines and was for a good part of the war the world’s largest naval facility with as many as 700 ships at a time in its lagoon. Bayless and the other men never went Scuba diving, for fear of sharks and getting cut on the coral. They did swim at Ulithi.

“You could swim out from the sandy beach and dive down about 15 feet, then swim out a little further and the bottom would be 1,000 feet down,” Bayless said.

They left there after one mission and went back to Guam.

Throughout his tour, he and his crew flew missions to the Philippines, Formosa, the China Sea, Palau, Yap, Ryukyu Islands, Luzon, Bonins, and other areas around Japan, including Tokyo. They earned ribbons and citations and three stars for three separate Asiatic campaigns. Near Iwo Jima, they supported landings for four to five days. Then they went up to Tokyo on carrier raids for three to four days, flying every day.

Bayless experienced New Year’s Eve on Guam. Drunken servicemen were shooting off their guns into the sky, he said.

“The Navy cut the confluence from 18 to 15 (planes), so we were in limbo for about a month,” Bayless said. His crew was one of the three planes cut from each group.

Shortly after that, he and his crew got a call to go on another carrier. They left group 81 and joined VT 80, a group that had been out in the Pacific longer than the 81st.

“We got home six months earlier than VT 81,” (his earlier squadron) Bayless said with astonishment. “I can remember going under the Golden Gate Bridge on April 1, 1945. That was the happiest day of my life. That bridge was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

“It was one whole year out of my life,” Bayless said of his service “I remember little things,” he said of that time. In Honolulu, there were strict curfews for Naval personnel.

“No enlisted men were allowed on the streets after curfew,” he said. He remembers going into town only one time.

The Japanese hated sharks, especially tiger sharks, and the devil. American airmen painted shark mouths and teeth on the front of their planes to intimidate the Japanese. They also painted signs of the devil on their planes and sewed devil-inspired insignia on banners. Bayless has a banner made out of a parachute bag hanging in his garage with a painting of the devil’s face on it with the words “Grinning Dysophalis,” or “Grinning Devil.”

And he remembers some not so little things.

“The first time you saw a guy die,” Bayless said. “Ninety percent of the time (for him and his line of service on a carrier) it was because of an accident.”

Bayless said he was in a good group of guys, and while they lost four or five crew out of their squadron, all the men in his crew came back home together.

Life on an aircraft carrier

Charles “Chuck” Bayless today standing by the banner painted in 1944-45 of the “Grinning Dysophalis,” the name of his Torpedo Squadron in WWII.

Squadrons were “attached” to aircraft carriers, but they were separate from the carrier, Bayless explained.

“An aircraft carrier is a busy place,” he said. Carrying approximately 3,000 men at any one time, the carrier was much like a city, he said.

Out on the carriers, there was no such thing as going ashore with liberty. He and his crew worked seven days a week.

When they were near Japan, kamikaze pilots would fly over the aircraft carriers. The carrier crews wouldn’t let Bayless and his crew up on the deck to get to their plane until the last possible moment. Sometimes he and his crew would wait in the officer’s ward until the coast was clear. The officer’s ward was just below deck, so it was called “the ready room.” It was more comfortable than the hangar deck which was another flight below. Bayless remembers sitting in the ready room waiting to go up on deck when a propeller from a plane came right through the ceiling of the room.

“That plane missed the wire,” Bayless said.

When planes landed on the carrier, cables stretched across the carrier deck. Pilots were trained to catch one of three cables with a hook on the underside of the plane’s tail. Due to rough seas or a rough landing, sometimes the planes missed the cables and bounced down the deck. Or the tail hook could break. And sometimes the cables themselves broke. The deck was a dangerous place even without the threat of the enemy flying overhead.

“The carrier would be traveling at about 22 to 25 mph,” Bayless said. “The planes would be landing at about 90 to 100 mph, so the effective speed would be about 70 mph. If a plane was damaged upon landing, the crew would jump out and the carrier crew would just pitch it overboard.”

Through his tour, Bayless kept in communication with his wife, Betty, through letters, despite the Navy’s censoring of the mail. They created a written code based on the Navy’s 24 hour system. Bayless assigned places and locations to hours on the clock. When he wrote to Betty, a date and time told her where his squadron was heading next.

“It would take two or three weeks before you’d get mail, and then it would arrive in gobs,” Bayless said. The delay in the mail was frustrating for Betty and other family members who didn’t know what was happening.

“At that time, it was the first raid that was taking place against Japan,” Betty said. Their code system helped her to know where he was located when she heard news of the battles.

“The thing is, I survived,” Bayless said, awed by his good fortune.

The war ended in August – September, 1945. Bayless and other men rode from Guam to Pearl Harbor on a passenger cruise ship that had been converted into a hospital ship. The U.S.S. Laureline brought the airmen home in style, although it took nine days. Bayless saw the first casualties of Iwo Jima onboard the ship. Soldiers in full body casts had bullet wounds designated on the cast. “Bullet entered here,” and “bullet came out here,” Bayless said.

“It was so overloaded they had drained the pool and had bunks for the wounded in it,” he said.

The wounded were being transported from Pearl Harbor to the States for better care, he said. They were served two meals a day, and to him it seems as if they spent all their time in chow line. No one got paid while on the ship, so games of poker were played with IOUs.

Once back in the states, the Navy sent him to a base in Florida, then to the large Navy base on Grosse Isle in the Detroit River.

“I fought for eight weeks to stay there,” Bayless said. He and Betty had a small place in Trenton, and both their families were nearby. It would have been all right with him to stay.

But the Navy transferred him to Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where he served in a casual unit. It was while he was stationed there that he was presented with the Air Medal. Finally he got the news that he could muster out (leave the Navy) in December 1945. He took the train to Dearborn, Mich. Betty was in Rhode Island with him, but she flew home, because she was pregnant with their first child. The doctor didn’t want her taking a long train ride.

“It was hard to find a place to rent,” Bayless said, because of all the soldiers coming home at once. “Nobody had a job.”

As a recent high school graduate when he was drafted, Bayless didn’t leave a job for the service, so there wasn’t a designated job waiting for him when he returned. He got a job selling cars, then insurance, before he got into the heat-treating steel business. He worked at Sterling Steel for awhile. He and few other men left that company and started Globe Steel Treating. The company lasted four years before it was purchased by another. He then became the superintendent at Star Steel Treating. A few years later he joined Formsparg, a division of the Dana Corporation, which built over-running clutches. After working there for 23 years, Bayless retired.

Betty retired from her job at Midwest Chrome Company where she was the secretary to the president. During the war, while Chuck was in the Pacific, Betty worked in Seattle at Bowing, the large plane manufacturer. She was a secretary to three test pilots who flew the B17s, B24s and B29s. More than anything she wanted to take a ride in one of the new, shiny planes coming off the line.

“Bowing always had a big rah-rah when a plane came off the line,” Betty said.

She begged her bosses to let her go for a ride, but they all admitted that they’d get in a lot of trouble if she got caught. One day, one of the test pilots came into her office with a mail bag on wheels. “Get in,” he said. She climbed in the bag and he wheeled her out to a plane where he snuck her onboard. Betty went for her first plane ride over the Bowing plant and saw that the huge roof was camouflaged with paint to look like a farm from the air.

“It was wonderful,” she said of her flight. “The plane had just come off the line and it was clean and perfect.”

Together the Baylesses had four children, one son and three daughters. Years later they adopted another son when he was in high school. Today they have six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

They were especially proud of their son, Skip (Charles Robert) when he joined the Navy Air Force as a radar technician on an A3 aircraft and served three tours in Vietnam on an aircraft carrier. Bayless tells how Skip asked where his father’s tailor-made set of Navy blues (uniform) was, because Skip wanted to wear it when he was in the service. Skip made it home safely from Vietnam, much like Bayless came home from WWII.

Bayless began coming to Northern Michigan in the ‘40s when he came up to Camp Pet-o-se-ga on Pickerel Lake, a boys’ camp at that time. Years later, he and Betty rented a cottage on Crooked Lake, then bought a lot on Crooked Lake. They built their home on the lot in 1987. When they retired, they moved up permanently.

For 24 years they spent four months each winter in Palm Springs, Calif., near one of their daughters. These last few years, they stay on the lake and enjoy Northern Michigan winters. They’ve traveled to many of the places that Bayless saw during the war. Hawaii was a nice place to go, he said. But he’d still like to go back to Guam and Ulithi, just to see what it looks like today compared to during the war.

WWII Torpedo Bomber facts:

The Grumman TBF Avenger series of bomber aircraft saw nearly 10,000 produced during WWII. The TBF Avenger was born from a 1939 U.S. Navy requirement intending to replace outclassed Douglas TBD Devastator series of carrier-born torpedo dive bomber aircraft.