Presentation Date: November 18, 2004
CMDR Bill Ambrosio USN (RET)
* Assigned To VF-27, Flying F4F Wildcat Fighters, Aboard USS Suwannee, * Participated in Operation Torch, Invasion Of North Africa, * Flew combat at Guadalcanal-Henderson Field, January-April 1943, * Rotated To USA; Reassigned To VF-18 On USS Bunker Hill, F6F Hellcats, * Flew Combat In Pacific, Aboard USS Bunker Hill, October '43--June '44 * Completed "Elimination Flight Training" In Long Beach, CA
* Earned Naval Aviator Wings of Gold , Class 8A 41-C, Corpus Christi, TX
* Assigned To VF-27, Flying F4F Wildcat Fighters, Aboard USS Suwannee
* Participated in Operation Torch, Invasion Of North Africa
* Flew combat at Guadalcanal-Henderson Field, January-April 1943
* Rotated To USA; Reassigned To VF-18 On USS Bunker Hill, F6F Hellcats
* Flew Combat In Pacific, Aboard USS Bunker Hill, October '43--June '44
* Cadet Classmate of USN CAPT Cecil Harris, ACE With 24-Aerial Victories
* At Guadalcanal, Roommate With Marine Pilot Tom Furlow, Wingman For Joe Foss
* Flew Over 160 Combat Missions; Flew Fighters And (Later) Multiengines
* After 27 Years Active Duty, Retired In 1967 And Began A Long Successful Real Estate Career
A Two-Ocean War
Bill Ambrosio got the flying bug at a time when the United States military was seeking trained pilots for what would prove to be the Second World War. In college in 1940, Bill signed up for the flying program at Long Beach Municipal Airport. There, a half dozen J-3 Piper Cubs were available for training in a government subsidized program.
Ambrosio puts it, “Ten hours of basic and they figured I could solo.”
One part of his 35 hours worth of training Ambrosio remembers well was his cross country trip.
“About 35-40 miles away was the town of Corona... I figured that a little bit above takeoff you could almost see it. And it was very distinct in that the city was a big wheel, and within, a little wheel and the streets came out from that. Pretty easy to find, so I didn’t get lost. I came back to Long Beach.’
Bill liked to fly and started looking right away to get into the military. He went to an administrative office in Long Beach to find out the requirements - - 19 years of age, two years of college - - and he signed up. Two weeks later he was called, took his physical and passed it. Another couple of weeks and Ambrosia was in among about 85 potential pilots.
Ambrosio called this “E” school, for elimination, as about 1/3 of the candidates would be washed out of flying at this stage of the program.
“Ironically, just because I had the flight in the morning, I was the first person to solo. The next thing, we all lined up on the ramp.”
The Navy’s flying schools were then at Pensacola and Jacksonville, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas, and one by one the graduating class was assigned to one of these locations. Except for Ambrosio, who was told to report to the administration building.
“While I was going through this training, they’d raised the age limit to 20. And they said, ‘We can’t send you till you become 20. So, you can go home and we’ll call when you become 20 and send you on to your training.’
The alternative, which Bill decided was better than working in a gas station, was to don the uniform blues and white hat of a seaman and stay in the Navy, working for a Ground Training Officer, until reaching the new age requirement. Ambrosio says he corrected papers for the officer, learned to field strip a .45 caliber pistol, and when he had nothing else to do, he sat at the ramp watching airplanes landing.
Soon, Ambrosio found himself in Corpus Christi, Texas, one of about 275 cadets in Class 8-A. Amidst all the military drill there were six hours of flying in the Stearman N2S before he soloed again and moved on to SNCs, SNDs and the OS2U. Instrument training and cross-country practice ensued.
Then came news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I had just come home from church, nothing to do, sitting there hanging around. From that day on, we never got a day off. We just worked seven days a week, right on through.”
Ambrosio’s desire to be a fighter pilot was quickly awarded by experience in Grumman F3F biplanes, an introduction to retractable landing gear and machine guns. “They gave us a cockpit check out, and kind of a little book to read to tell us what we’re supposed to do to make things start to happen. One of the real fun things was the landing gear was on a crank. You had to crank the landing gear up...”
He continued three plane formation flying, aerobatics and dogfighting, and in short order, he began flying the F4F - - the frontline Navy and Marine fighter then battling the Japanese Zero in the Pacific.
Soon he was assigned to a squadron, VF-27 at Norfolk, Virginia for training including gunnery, four plane formations and field carrier landings, to prepare for upcoming carrier qualifications.
Six of the squadron’s new pilots joined at the same time, and Ambrosio recalls squadron mates C.E. Harris ( ultimately a Captain, with 24 aerial victories in the Pacific ) and Tom Furlow (who became one of Joe Foss’ wingmen on Guadalcanal). Bill says they competed in practice dogfights, and regarding Harris he remembers, “After about five minutes you knew where he was. He was right on your tail.”
The carrier that VF-27 found itself aboard was the USS Ranger, part of the Atlantic Fleet, preparing for the invasion of North Africa.
“I got six or seven landings and theoretically was carrier qualified. You tried to catch one of the first three of thirteen cables in the landing area. Each cable had a sailor who operated a lever which popped this little thing up, and the cable would be raised above the deck. Then you came in, put your tailhook down and just snagged that tailhook. It was like landing with four wheel brakes on a car, it put you forward a little bit. But it wasn’t too violent.
“Of course at the end of the thirteen cables we had three barriers on three different stanchions. If you caught the last couple (cables) or didn’t catch any at all, you ended up in the barrier, with the cables wrapped around you and the prop and everything. It was kind of violent. You didn’t want to do that very often.”
Ambrosio says carrier landings are made just with the rudder, because once you come around and got a ‘cut’ sign from the Landing Signal Officer,”It is a cardinal sin to do anything but cut the engine and land.”
Bill says on typical touch and go drills, the pilot never touched his brakes. The wind down the flight deck would be about thirty knots, and after the cable was lowered, you’d give the fighter the throttle and take off again. There would be four or five F4Fs in the pattern around the carrier, each taking turns making a landing and taking off.
With the squadron’s pilots all qualified, VF-27 was bound for North Africa, on board the USS Charger, an oiler converted into an escort carrier. On a stop in Bermuda, VF-27 was transferred to the USS Suwanee to complete the trip, and provide a Combat Air Patrol over the fleet.
“There were four carriers, the Suwanee, Shenango, Santee, and Sangamon. One of them was loaded with P-40s, and our mission was to fly the CAP over the carrier and occasionally take the bombers in.
“We only stayed there five or six days, because they took the beach, took an air field and that was the primary target for us. Because once they had the airfield, they launched the P-40s off.”
Ambrosio says during Operation Torch, there wasn’t much but Arabs on camels to shoot at, so he didn’t have much to do.
“Everybody thinks these wars are straightforward. You know what you’re going to do, everybody knows what they’re going to do, but it’s kind of like organized chaos.
“One of the guys in our squadron was up on the CAP and any airplane that didn’t come in and out from a certain corridor, they were ‘bad guys.’ This airplane came in through a wrong corridor and they sent the planes out off after them.
“They saw this airplane out there and just said ‘he’s a bad guy’ and they went down and shot him down. A destroyer went over and picked him up and found out they were British pilots, which wasn’t too good, but they shouldn’t have been out there.”
With Operation Torch completed, the fleet sailed to the Panama Canal. The planes of VF-27 landed in Panama before the carrier started through the canal, and then rejoined the carrier after she passed through the final lock into the Pacific Ocean. Suwanee was headed to the southwest Pacific, part of a carrier fleet that had been whittled down in battles with the Japanese.
Ambrosio says the next major stop - - lasting from January, 1943 to April of that year - - was Guadalcanal, to relieve one of the air Groups that had been flying missions from the Fighter One air base.
“We got to make runs on all of the islands up and down the string there, Munda, Bougainville... we had coast-watchers that would tell us what was coming down the Slot.”The coast-watchers were also instrumental in returning downed Navy and Marine pilots to safety. And after the squadron’s first mission against about forty Zeros, when nine F4Fs were lost, six USN pilots were recovered to return to flying.
The day after, Ambrosio says, a total of eight F4Fs rose against another estimated forty Zeros coming down the Slot. As the Wildcats dived on the Zeros, Bill found himself in a pickle.
“Every time I could get on a Zero, I’d see little pieces start flying off behind me. And when I looked behind me, there was someone shooting at me. I never got comfortable where I could really get in on him.
“After about three or four times like that, I didn’t get any chance to shoot at any planes for sure because they were always chasing me. And this one bad guy got on my tail and wouldn’t turn me loose. There was nobody around to shoot him off, so I found this great big cumulus cloud and dove into it, and he couldn’t find me. I made it safely home.”
VF-27 left Guadalcanal and Bill was reassigned to fly a newer fighter, the F6F Hellcat, with another fighter squadron - - VF-18, aboard the fleet carrier USS Bunker Hill.
Tarawa was the first scheduled target for the carrier, in support of the Marines’ amphibious assault of the Japanese held atoll.
Ambrosio was on the first flight, just before the sun came up, to hit ground targets on Tarawa. Behind him were dive bombers and torpedo planes.
“Nothing. “ Bill says that was the enemy response to his fighter arriving over the island to deliver its payload. “Everybody was asleep, and we woke ‘em up.”
“We pulled back up and came back down, and I thought the island was on fire, there were so many guns around. The battleships went up to one end, turned around and came back, firing their guns all the time, and the smoke got so high that it would be up where we were doing our CAP at 10,000 feet.”
After Tarawa, Bunker Hill and VF-18 joined a couple of other carriers for an attack on Rabaul, the forward headquarters and key staging area for the Japanese Navy. The target was Simpson Harbor with its usually high number of anchored warships. Bill and his fellow pilots were escorting bombers and torpedo planes.
Bill says his squadron never had a single plane shot down by a Zero, but lost a lot of planes to antiaircraft. On this mission, Ambrosio says a number of torpedo planes were rendezvousing to return to the carrier, one of them streaming heavy smoke from an antiaircraft hit.
“It evidently had hit the hydraulic fluid, it was smoking pretty bad and brought a lot of Zeros out. I had my four planes and we positioned ourselves over the torpedo planes, two on each side and we must have had ten Zeros. They’d be up here way above us and start down. Our tactic was to head towards him and scare him away.”
“They never made any real attacks and we never got anywhere close to them, because as soon as they pulled back, we got back into position for the next guy. We got all the planes home safely.”
Bill says when the mission photos were analyzed, a second strike that day was called. Only eight of VF-18’s Hellcats were sent back to escort the bombers and torpedo planes for the follow-up.
While en route to the target, the carrier group was told fleet radar had spotted incoming Japanese planes. Rather than divert the fighter escort, the message came that the fleet would deal with the intruders.
“We kept fudging over a little toward the direction they were coming and finally we could see them, a bunch of dive bombers. I had four planes, and we started shooting them down. We shot down five airplanes. I got two of them, was on another one with my wingman and the other two guys got one.”
The Hellcats had plenty of gas because the pilots had held onto their 150 gallon belly tanks. Finally, Ambrosio started noticing black bursts around him as he was chasing more Japanese planes. He rallied his flight up and away, and got clearance to land when the air had cleared and the carrier was ready to take them.
VF-18 next took its strafing attack to Kwajalein. There they found sitting ducks in the form of seaplanes tied up in the lagoon. Ambrosio says the F6Fs also hit ships anchored in the lagoon, and on the last run he saw a Japanese plane flying across in front of him.
“I was coming down fast, down from a dive, and shot about one burst before the guns jammed. So I pulled up and my wingman’s attempt wasn’t much better. So all of us made a pass at him and nothing happened. He took off down the runway, five feet off the ground, guns on both sides were shooting at us, so we pulled out and went out to sea.
“I said, I know what I’ll do - - I’ll chew his tail off. He’s not going to get away. I had a .38 (caliber pistol) ...“
But, figuring the runway had so many bomb holes on it that the Japanese plane probably wouldn’t be able to land anyway, Ambrosio thought better of any further chase, and let the plane get away after all. When he landed, Bill discovered from his ordnance man that the guns wouldn't shoot because the ammunition trays were all empty.
Other strafing missions came at Eniwetok, Guam, Tinian and Saipan. When shooting at a Japanese destroyer escort off Saipan, Bill says he had a unique experience:
“We had armor piercing, incendiary and tracers. I think that’s the way our .50 calibers were loaded. When we ran across this ship, I must have hit an ammunition depot, gas tanks or something, because -- I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a magician throw a towel over something and... it disappeared. I was shooting, and all of a sudden it was gone. I got credit for sinking a ship, which is kind of unusual for a fighter.”
Ambrosio was also credited for downing a Betty bomber, after radar spotted the night intruder heading toward the fleet and sent up Bill with three other Hellcat pilots.
“They used to harass us all the time, as soon as the sun would go down. They would carry torpedoes and tried to sink our ship. They were bad.
“We finally spotted this one and we swooped down on him. I was leading and got the first shot at him. He started smoking a little bit and dove down on the water. We were only bout 10-15 miles an hour faster than he was. They were pretty fast. But, since I was diving, I caught him finally and shot him down.”
Ambrosio was aboard USS Bunker Hill from October 1943 to June1944, a tour in which he was credited with three aerial victories. In all of his WWII service he flew more than 160 combat missions. After the war, Bill continued to fly for the Navy, moving to multi-engine aircraft. After 27 years of active duty, Bill Ambrosio hung up his Gold Wings, retiring in 1967 as a Commander and starting a long successful career in real estate.