Presentation Date: May 27, 2000
Ralph Weidling
SBD Tail Gunner At Midway and Santa Cruz SBD Tail Gunner - Flew in the Battle of Midway and the Battle of Santa Cruz
"Tail-Gunner Ralph Weidling's USN Experience"
Here I was an engine mechanic who could shoot a .50-caliber and .30 caliber gun, and they make me a laborer. That's why I lost these digits. (re: PG&E)
In a bit more light-hearted look at service during World War Two than most Golden Gate Wing guests, former U.S. Navy tail gunner Ralph Weidling spoke at the May dinner meeting. He was joined by his wife Margaret who repeatedly reminded Ralph to "get to the battles!"...
Weidling joined the Navy while he was living in his home town of Patterson, New Jersey. It was July of 1941, and Ralph was about two months out of high school.
His dad had always wanted Ralph to join the Navy. So Ralph went down to the town recruiter, a sergeant who immediately thought Ralph should change his middle name from Robin to Robert. Ralph liked that, then heard the recruiter say, "now, you're a man."
Weidling's second military experience was with a dentist, who sent him back home to have permanent fillings put in some of his teeth. Then it was off to basic training.
Weidling recalls all the marching he had to do before he could get his first liberty, then the training required for him to learn to become a proficient gunner. That came on the "wide open" prairie of Purcell Oklahoma.
"We used to use 12-gauge and 20-gauge shotguns with ring sights on them. A ring sight is how you aim at a moving target, and get whatever lead you need to give," says Weidling. "It was a great way to learn, and we would shoot skeet as well as traps."
With .50 caliber machine guns, Ralph learned how to shoot using tracer ammunition, which showed him the trajectory of the bullets as they left the gun's muzzle.
On weekends at Purcell, in October of 1941, Weidling remembers only too well what happened on liberty after a rainstorm. The red dust of the prairie would float on top of the mud. The sailors had to wear their whites, and Weidling says, "by the time we got into Falls Valley or Norman, Oklahoma, our white uniforms would be aglow with red dust. You know, we looked like hell."
Ahhh, liberty. Weidling says you could buy beer, but it was 3.2% alcohol beer. You could find bootleg whiskey, but it was expensive, at five dollars a pint. A sailors wage in those days was 21 dollars a month.
Out of gunnery school, Weidling soon became a Seaman, First Class. He rode a Santa Fe train to San Francisco and then the "A Train" to Treasure Island. Lugging his seabag, he became quite uncomfortable. It wasn't the weight of the bag, but 'gastrointestinal problems'. That meant missing a few meals, but Ralph survived the discomfort.
He was then held up for two or three months at a receiving ship. Having no pay for that period of time, he and the other sailors in the same predicament were allowed to work as stevadores, loading and unloading ships at San Francisco piers..
"Get to the battles," Margaret commented.
Weidling was shipped out to Pearl Harbor on one of the slowest means of transportation the Navy had - - an LST (Landing Ship, Tank). The ship traveled at about 14 knots, making the trip in about fourteen days. To top it off, the ship was loaded with ammunition and 55-gallon barrels of high octane fuel, all bound for Australia.
The next assignment was far more interesting. Weidling was assigned to VB2 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, and he settled into the 'good life' in Hawaii.
"Ford Island chow hall chow was the best chow I had in the Navy," says Ralph. "The cooks would cut the roast, cooked to your taste."
"Get to the battles," Margaret commented.
"Still at that time, in '41, they (the Navy) were looking for Amelia Earhart. They did a lot of patrol in the mid-Pacific, north of Howland Island, and they never saw anything."
Weidling says he recalls the Lexington being sent to Midway to deliver F4F Wildcats and TBD Devastator torpedo planes, the latter type aircraft he describes as "not being worth diddley-squat."
The Lexington was no longer Weidling's home base after he took off on May 8th. While his SBD was in the air, the carrier was rocked by two Japanese torpedoes and soon sunk. Ralph's SBD, piloted by Bob Dixon, was recovered by the carrier USS Yorktown after its mission.
Ralph was assigned to VB-5 (USS Yorktown) during the Battle of Midway. Weidling knows the TBDs lost in that carrier conflict became a diversion, bringing the Japanese Zeros down to sea level where they decimated the torpedo planes - - but left the air over the Japanese carrier fleet unguarded.
"Those Zeros were something else. They were like mosquitoes. They just wouldn't let you alone. But we were going through their fast in the SBDs, that they'd just fly right by us and couldn't get a bead on us. So we lucked out...and sank the carriers. But the poor TBDs were ducks on the pond."
As Weidling sees it, a key to victory in the Battle of Midway was the persistence of
Commander Stanhope Cotton Ring had insisted on taking the whole Combat Air Group up that morning, losing in the early hours of the battle 27 of the Group's 60 planes.
Meanwhile, as Ralph notes, "Torpedo Eight commander John Waldron took the TBDs, without the benefit of fighter protection to find the Japanese fleet." The fighters had no luck, "but John Waldron's torpedo squadron found it...unfortunately for them. They saved the day for the rest of us."
As an aerial gunner, Weidling came to quickly know the weak points of the Japanese fighters. "They were flimsy. They had no armor around their pilots. We had, early on, self-sealing fuel tanks. They did not. If you use tracers like we did, they'd correct your aim so easily...you just blow 'em away, right in the sky. That's what really got to me after awhile. That battle down in the Solomons (Battle of Santa Cruz) really did me in. I felt like I was shooting every one out of the sky. It was so easy for me after awhile."
Weidling says he reached a point where gunnery was starting to get to him, that he wasn't being as effective as he should be. He turned to the Air Group Commander, Charles Crommelin and asked if he could stand down as a gunner.
Ralph says in a bombing run, the gunner sits backwards as the bomber dives from a minimum altitude of 15,000 feet. The first time he rode "backward into battle" in a dive, Ralph says he decorated his cockpit with his breakfast. And he was the guy who had to clean it up.
The pilot of Ralph's Dauntless, Dixon, was a southern gentleman who always brought their SBD back. Which wasn't always an easy job, both from the bomber's flight characteristics and from battle damage, which couldn't always be avoided.
"Coming out of the dive, that was the deal. You lose everything - - your blood from your brain. And that guy up front, he's the guy you want to stay alive. He's your ticket back to your ship."
Ralph and Margaret met at a Palo Alto jazz club called the Band Box. Sundays, it held jam sessions, and that's when the young couple met and fell in love. They were married June 14th, 1947.
Today, retired from a career at PG&E., Ralph serves as a docent aboard CV-11, the USS Hornet, in Alameda.