World War II veteran Doug Birdsall / Denise Goolsby, The Desert Sun
Provided photo
DOUG BIRDSALL
Age: 89
Born: June 15, 1921
Hometown: Ontario, Calif.
Residence: Palm Desert
Military branch: U.S. Navy
Years served: 1941-66
Rank: Captain
Family: Wife Carla; four children, David Birdsall of San Diego, Stuart Young of Palm Desert, Steven Young of Indian Wells and Robin Kelly (deceased); six grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming Wednesday
Women's Royal Air Force veteran Iris Moore of Palm Desert.
LEARN MORE
Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii.
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Doug “Bird Dog” Birdsall flew 70 different types of airplanes during his 25-year career in the U.S. Navy — followed by a 13-year stint with the commercial airline Air California.
“I knew I wanted to fly from the time I was a young boy,” Birdsall said.
By the time he finished his second year at Chaffee Junior College in Ontario, he'd already completed primary and secondary pilot training through the Civil Aeronautics Association.
“I got my pilot's license when I was 19 years old,” he said. “I wanted to get into VF-5, the Navy flight program.”
To qualify, a candidate needed to be at least 20 years old and have completed at least two years of college.
“By happy coincidence, I graduated from junior college on my 20th birthday,” he said. “A week later I was signed up down in Long Beach. The Navy had a small flight station at Long Beach Municipal Airport.”
The station, referred to as E-Base — short for “elimination base” — was where evaluators determined whether a candidate had the potential to go into the Navy flight training program.
It was June 1941, and the United States had not yet officially entered World War II, but military and political officials were gearing up for the inevitable.
They weren't interested in seeing how many pilots they could “wash out.” “They were very anxious to keep as many people as they could,” Birdsall said.
Pearl Harbor was attacked just six months later.
“I was in my advanced training in PBYs (a Navy patrol bomber, also known as a ‘flying boat') in Jacksonville, Fla., and they sent me up on the roof of the hangar to man a .30-caliber machine gun,” Birdsall said.
The military was taking precautions to protect all the coastal areas of the country.
At that time, precautions were ordered in the event of a German aerial attack on the East Coast.
Birdsall was on watch for two or three hours, until, “They decided there really wasn't going to be a threat,” he said.
Birdsall received his commission as a naval aviator in March 1942 and requested training as a carrier pilot. But the Navy had other plans.
“They needed more of us in patrol planes at that time,” he said.
Birdsall received orders to go to Hawaii, where he would join the VP-11 squadron.
“I was married on April 3 and had a short, two-day honeymoon — here in Palm Springs, as a matter of fact,” he said.
He couldn't remember the name of the place they stayed, but said there were only about three hotels out here at the time.
His new in-laws had moved to the desert from Iowa some years before, when a doctor recommended that a dry climate would be better for his father-in-law's health.
Days after his marriage, Birdsall was boarding a ship in San Francisco for the voyage across the Pacific Ocean.
Birdsall, the junior man in his PBY crew, started out flying as the crew's navigator.
The plane's captain worked him into the rotation, and the young pilot was soon making every third take-off and landing.
The squadron's aircraft carried depth charges on board, “Because we were looking for submarines,” he said.
Birdsall — who earned his nickname “Bird Dog” during his early days as a Navy pilot — flew more than 2,400 hours of patrol and bombing missions during World War II.
Based in Noumea, New Caledonia, Birdsall participated in an all-night mission prior to a major offensive operation against Japan.
The entry in Birdsall's well-worn aviator's flight logbook indicates his crew flew a 17.3-hour flight — from Aug. 6 to Aug. 7, 1942. The mission: “Patrol past (the) Solomons night before D-Day.” D-Day, in this case, was the invasion of Guadalcanal.
The crew's task was to search the seas for any enemy activity, “To warn them if there was a Japanese fleet coming in that was going to come in and mess up their invasion. We flew north of the Solomon island chain because we figured any Japanese fleet would be coming from that direction,” he said. The Japanese fleet never appeared.
In January 1943, Birdsall was back in the states, where he was assigned to VB-139 — a twin-engine patrol bomber squadron. The squadron would eventually be assigned to fly bombing and photo reconnaissance missions over Paramushiro in the Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan.
After training at Whidbey Island in Washington, the squadron was deployed to the Aleutian Islands, where they were initially stationed on Amchitka.
The U.S. and Japan were still fighting on the nearby island of Attu.
Birdsall's older brother, Charles, who was serving in the U.S. Army, was stationed on Kiska, an island less than 100 miles from Birdsall's base.
“He got permission to come over to Amchitka to visit me,” Birdsall said.
He flew over in a mail plane, but the plane was unavailable when he was ready to return, so Birdsall borrowed a PBY and planned to give his brother a lift back to Kiska. The plane was on the runway, with the engines warming up, getting ready for takeoff.
“We were climbing into the airplane, and an operations officer came charging up in a command car,” Birdsall said.
The officer told Birdsall that a P-40 fighter pilot had just gone down in the ocean off Amchitka, and that he needed to fly out quickly to try to rescue him. It was December 1943 in the cold north Pacific, and they knew the pilot wouldn't last long in the freezing waters.
“My brother got back off the ladder and waved to me as we taxied off,” he said.
A medical doctor and other crewmen joined Birdsall on the rescue mission.
“The seas were very rough,” Birdsall said. “I never made an open sea landing before.”
Birdsall was able to land the plane, but as the crewmen were pulling the pilot in through the plane's waist hatch they noticed liquid pouring from holes in the plane.
“We popped a whole bunch of rivets,” on the landing, he said. “It looked like a lawn sprinkler. I said, ‘we've got to get moving right away.'”
Birdsall got the plane airborne, and the pilot, who had been in the water for more than an hour and was unconscious for about a day, recovered, Birdsall said.
Birdsall retired from the U.S. Navy in 1966 with the rank of captain — just a rank shy of rear admiral.
