WWII Black Sheep Squadron vet dies

[Flashermac]

Honolulu Advertiser

1 February 2009

 

Bruce Matheson, 87, member of famed WWII unit

 

By William Cole

 

 

 

The legends of the air from World War II have one fewer name on their rapidly dwindling rolls.

 

Retired Marine Brig. Gen. Bruce Matheson flew with the famous "Black Sheep" squadron in World War II and later moved to Kailua. He died on Thursday from a combination of lung cancer and a heart attack, his family said. He was 87.

 

When he was sent to the South Pacific in 1943, Matheson was the youngest member of the famed "Black Sheep" squadron under the command of Maj. Greg Boyington â?? who was later awarded the Medal of Honor, and whose exploits inspired the 1970s TV show "Baa Baa Black Sheep."

 

On Oct. 17, 1943, Matheson shot down a Japanese Zero in the Solomon Islands. He was hit with shrapnel in his legs but was able to land his damaged F4U Corsair. By the end of his second Black Sheep tour, Matheson had three confirmed kills and one-and-a-half "probable" kills, his family said. Matheson also confirmed Boyington's final aerial victory before Boyington was shot down.

 

The Black Sheep brought down 97 Japanese aircraft â?? 95 of which were fighters â?? and received a Presidential Unit Citation, said the Marine pilot's son, Scott Matheson. Out of 51 in the squadron, only 10 are still alive. It's a similar story for other famous units of World War II. When navigator Thomas Griffin made a visit to Hawaii for the recent 67th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, he did so as one of only nine surviving members of the "Doolittle Raiders." The Raiders flew 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers off the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet to attack Japan.

 

The Black Sheep's Boyington, an ace with the Flying Tigers in China, pulled together unassigned pilots in the South Pacific to form Marine Fighter Squadron 214, or VMF-214.

 

Scott Matheson said his father didn't talk much about his combat exploits, but he did talk about and have respect for Boyington. "He was quite a colorful figure and had lots of foibles," Matheson said of Boyington. "He drank heavily and he brawled, but he was an absolute terror in the sky. He was very, very proficient, and these guys loved him. He kept them alive. He taught them how to do it, and what to do."

 

Matheson said it was a misconception that Boyington was called "Pappy." "That was something they put together after the war and the TV series," he said. "They called him Gramps or Skipper."

 

Bruce Matheson later flew night escort for Air Force bombers in an F3D Skyknight in Korea, and had about 400 missions flying Huey helicopters in Vietnam. He received three Legions of Merit, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, more than 30 Air Medals and a Purple Heart. He was stationed in Hawaii in the early 1950s and late 1960s, and he and his wife, Mary Jo, bought a house here. After a 34-year Marine Corps career, Matheson sang with the Barbershop Society, the Honolulu Symphony Chorus and Hawaii Opera Theater Chorus, and was vice president and treasurer of Windward Realty Inc.

 

For 25 years, Bruce Matheson ran and later walked the beach in Kailua, notching five miles a day. "He walked me into the ground," said Scott Matheson. "He was fit. He was tough â?? those Marines." Scott Matheson said his father didn't want to have any funeral services. Bruce Matheson also is survived by his wife, Mary Jo, and another son, Kerry.

 

[drogon]

Once a Marine always a Marine.

May he RIP

 

 

[drogon]

U-boat captain who shot down NZ VC-winner found

 

The captain of the U-Boat whose anti-aircraft fire shot down New

Zealand Victoria Cross winner Lloyd Trigg's Royal Air Force Liberator

more than 60 years ago is still alive in Germany, an Auckland

aviation researcher has discovered.

 

Arthur "Digger" Arculus has also unearthed fresh details about the

fierce Atlantic action that cost the lives of Trigg, his seven crew

and many of the submarine's complement.

 

Uniquely, it was the testimony of the enemy skipper, Klemens

Schamong, and the other few survivors from U-468, destroyed by

Trigg's exploding depth charges as his aircraft plunged into the sea,

that led to the posthumous award of the Commonwealth' s highest award

for bravery.

 

Trigg and his men perished on August 11, 1943, 386km off Dakar, West

Africa, as they attacked U-468 on the ocean surface. Shells from the

German vessel's flak guns ripped into the Liberator but the sheets of

flames that erupted did not deter Trigg.

 

The depth charges released moments before the aircraft crashed

exploded alongside the submarine with devastating effect. Schamong

told Arculus they "damaged the boat to death".

 

Now 90, the old seaman lives in a small town not far from Kiel where

his U-Boat was built, and commissioned exactly a year before its

sinking.

 

When Arculus began researching Trigg's story for young Australian Sam

Biddle, an eight-year-old grandson of a Trigg cousin, who wanted to

know more about his famous relation, he decided to try to find out

what had happened to Schamong.

 

Arculus, 80, started his Schamong quest by e-mailing a German

contact. The man's detective work eventually turned up a John

Schamong, a Captain in the German Navy. More checks showed he was

indeed the son of the old submariner and, yes, his father was still

alive.

 

Schamong Senior responded to an Arculus letter with a short note

about the sinking and several enclosures, among them an old letter

from the Canadian navigator of the RAF Sunderland that found the U-

Boat survivors.

 

Schamong remembered the Atlantic action vividly: "We opened deadly

fire from our `two 20mm cannons' and the first salvo at a distance of

2000m set the plane on fire. Despite this, Trigg continued his

attack. He did not give up as we thought and hoped. His plane. . .

flew deeper and deeper. We could see our deadly fire piercing through

his hull. And when Trigg was almost over us we saw his `ash cans'

coming down on us and (they) exploded and damaged the boat to death."

 

It was not surprising Schamong expected Trigg to "give up" because on

an earlier patrol the sub's flak frightened off a Grumman Avenger

from a US carrier escorting an Atlantic convoy.

 

Schamong told Arculus that he informed interrogators after his rescue

that "such a gallant fighter as Trigg would have been decorated in

Germany with the highest medal or order".

 

The letter said little else so Arculus asked Horst Ahrens, a friend

in Kiel, to put a handful of questions to Schamong. Unfortunately the

ex-skipper did not wish to go further.

 

It might have ended there but Arculus has since received a copy of

the now declassified October 1943 Naval Intelligence Division (NID)

report disclosing what had been learned from the interrogation of

Schamong and the other survivors after their arrival in Britain as

POWs.

 

The report said the U-Boat's shooting was so accurate the Liberator

was on fire before she had properly lined up the sub.

 

"She nevertheless ran in to attack with great determination and

without deviating to avoid the U-Boat's sustained and heavy fire."

 

The aircraft crossed the submarine behind the bridge at a height of

just 15m, hit the sea 300m away and blew up. But as she roared over

the U-Boat the depth charges tumbled down, two exploding with

tremendous force within 2m of the submarine.

 

"The whole U-Boat was thrown violently upward and suffered

catastrophic damage."

 

The massive blasts ruptured the hull, tore engines, motors and

transformers from their mountings, blew the fuel tank above the

diesels down and shook equipment off bulkheads.

 

Water poured into the battery compartment and the sub filled with

clouds of choking, killing chlorine gas, submariners' worst

nightmare.

 

The U-Boat went down inside 10 minutes, leaving 20 swimming crew

battling the horror of sharks and barracuda, attracted by blood

leaking from wounds.

 

Then miraculously a rating found an RAF rubber dinghy floating in the

aircraft's debris, inflated it and climbed in with two other seamen.

Eventually, Schamong, his first lieutenant and an engineer officer

supporting a wounded rating on his back were hauled in â?? seven

survivors from a crew of 39.

 

A Sunderland, searching for the missing Liberator crew, spotted the

dinghy the following day, its crew understandably jumping to the

conclusion the waving men were their RAF mates.

 

Arculus' research trail led recently to Patrick Dempsey, 84, the

Sunderland's Canadian navigator, now living in Florida.

 

Dempsey says he remembers watching sharks circling the dinghy and

some swimming under it. "We could see them very plainly from the

air."

 

He worked out the position of the dingy, radioed it to base "and then

we prepared to drop two emergency supply packs which were about the

size of a man each".

 

The Sunderland made two runs, the first so accurate the package

almost hit the dinghy, scaring the Germans out of their wits. The

second was much further away â?? too far away to recover because there

were no paddles in the survivors' dinghy.

 

The patrolling aircraft dropped marker dye and headed home. HMS

Clarkia arrived the next day and took the Germans aboard.

 

The NID report called Schamong "a civilised type with considerable

poise and charm, in marked contrast to many U-Boat officers. He

nevertheless had very firm ideas of the duties of a German officer in

captivity, was constantly on his guard and divulged nothing

concerning his boat except the story of the sinking".

 

Arculus was unable to discover anything about Schamong's postwar life

until he got an unexpected e-mail recently from Wolfgang Schamong, a

nephew, who unravelled this small mystery.

 

The younger man revealed his uncle became a lawyer after the war,

eventually joined Germany's Defence Ministry and in the mid-1970s

headed a liaison team in Paris working on German-French naval ships.

He and his wife had son John and twin daughters.

 

Schamong also told Arculus an astonishing story about his uncle's

mother, a devout Catholic.

 

"Now, the same day when the `Atlantic' fight took place she was at

home in Cologne asleep and suddenly woke hearing the noise of water

streaming into the room. She first thought of some damage to the

water pipes but then said to her husband, `It's not here. I see

Klemens' U-Boat sinking but he and some others are safe'."

 

A mother's intuition perhaps.

 

Oberleutnant zur See Klemens Schamong, who joined the German navy in

1938, was the only skipper of U-468 and it was his first and last

command.

 

The U-Boat didn't have much luck as she hunted with submarine packs

in the North Atlantic during her first two patrols, sinking only one

Allied ship, a small empty west-bound tanker.

 

She left La Pallice, on France's Atlantic Coast, on her third patrol

on July 7, 1943, and was sunk by Trigg barely a month later.

Schamong's fuel-short boat was returning to base when Trigg found

her, creeping along the West African coast.

 

Flying Officer Lloyd Allan Trigg, born at Houhora, Northland, in May

1914, was about four years older than Schamong. He farmed, then

became a salesman before enlisting in June 1941.

 

Trigg trained in Canada and after reaching England was posted to 200

Squadron in West Africa flying Hudsons.

 

He did about 50 operations â?? shipping reconnaissance, convoy patrols,

anti-submarine flights â?? on the twin-engined aircraft before flying

to the US in May 1943 for a conversion course to fly Liberators, much

bigger four-engined American bombers.

 

The New Zealander died not knowing he had already been awarded the

Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for two determined attacks on U-

Boats in March 1943. Notification had not reached his squadron before

his death.

 

Four of the other seven airmen killed with him were New Zealanders â??

Ivan Marinovich (navigator), 26, from Auckland, Arthur Bennett

(wireless operator), 29, Lower Hutt, Lawrence Frost (gunner), 22,

Auckland, and Terry Soper (gunner), 21, Takaka.

 

Marinovich and Bennett were in Trigg's original Hudson crew and

together the five hugely experienced New Zealanders collectively

totalled more than 250 ops. Frost had done no fewer than 65. Two

Britons and a Canadian made up the rest of the crew. All eight are

commemorated on the Malta Memorial to the air war dead.

 

The final two sentences of Trigg's citation declare that the

Liberator captain's exploit stood out in the Battle of the Atlantic

as an "epic of grim determination and high courage. His was the path

of duty that leads to glory".

 

The same could be said too of all his crew.

[cavanami]

Semper Fi