Hysterical Journey to Historic Places

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LT PHILLIP M. RASMUSSEN



The Curtiss-Wright P-36A Mohawk was the fighter that replaced the Peashooter in our arsenal of warplanes, after the Peashooter had found its way onto the discard heap. Glen Curtiss, that old swindler, was a motorcycle racer that was interested in aviation. He got his start in the airplane business by trying to steal the patent for controlled flight from the Wright Brothers. Early competition with the Wrights eventually resulted in a merger between the former adversaries, but they were not commercially successful until they hired an engineer named Don Berlin away from Northrup Aviation. Berlin designed the ‘Hawk and after a few fits and starts it performed admirably enough in trials to win a production contract of 215 planes from the Army Air Corps. Nine hundred additional planes were built for worldwide export, 75 of which were purchased by Finland. When the Nazis took over political control of Finland those planes were put to use against our Russian allies. The Hawk featured a retractable landing gear mechanism that was patented by the Boeing Corporation who received loyalties on each plane sold. The planes came into service in 1938 at a cost of twenty-three thousand dollars each. They were a superb bargain, but had numerous design faults that restricted their performance. By the time those issues were resolved advancements to other airplane designs made the P-36A obsolete.



In the spring of 1941 a young pilot named Phillip M. Rasmussen arrived in the waters off the Island of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. He was aboard the USS Enterprise and was a newly minted second lieutenant assigned to the 46^th Pursuit Squadron in the15th Pursuit Group of the Army Air Corps. They were among the very first air corps pilots to succeed in a carrier takeoff. The air corps had decided that it would be much more expedient to ferry their planes over to Hawaii aboard an aircraft carrier than it would be to disassemble the planes, load them into crates, ship them over on cargo ships, unload them onto a dock, haul them by truck to an airfield and then reassemble them without losing any parts. The navy had to show the army pilots how to trim their flaps for a carrier take off, but the rest was easy; just stand on the brakes for all your worth, run the engine to full throttle hoping that the brakes would hold, and when the flag drops let go of the brakes and try to steer a straight course off the deck. Thirty- nine planes made the short hop from the Enterprise to a happy landing at Wheeler Airfield although none of the pilots had ever been there before. It must have been an exciting morning for those new pilots. They did not see such excitement again until the morning of December 7, 1941 when the Japs launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Hot Bloody Hell raged down in a torrent on Oahu that day, and Wheeler Field was hit hard. Of the 39 planes that the 46^th Pursuit Squadron arrived with only four of them made it into the air. One of the four pilots was Lt Rasmussen. When the attack began he sprang from his cozy bunk, saw that the airfield was under attack, and then strapped on his pistol belt and rushed off to join the fun. When the four planes got into the air they were ordered to Kaneohe Bay on the east side of the island. When Rasmussen went to charge his machine guns above Kaneohe he forgot, in his excitement, to release the trigger. A hapless Jap dive bomber flew into that prolonged burst and exploded. It was the first air victory scored by an army pilot in WWII. Rasmussen’s plane was quickly shot to pieces and he was forced to return to Wheeler. He landed safely somehow with no rudder control, no brakes, no tail wheel, and no canopy. Lt Rasmussen was awarded the Silver Star for his actions that day, but what he is remembered for is wearing his pajamas into battle.

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