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Back to Iwakuni
When we were assigned a home base for our six month deployment I was delighted. Iwakuni, Japan was my old stomping
grounds. I would feel right at home. I’d been there during the Korean war with a small detachment out of Atsugi. It was an Australian base then.
The Australians were long gone and this time we got
our own hanger instead of a Quonset hut. It was an old hanger, still full of bullet holes from the WW2 days when it had been a Japanese air base. We also had warm barracks with showers that dispensed warm water 24
hours a day. The last time I was there we had no heat and took ice-cold showers.
The trip from Hawaii wasn't according to plan; we arrived a week after the rest of the squadron. In those days Hawaii
to Japan wasn't an eight hour flight at 550 knots. We plodded along at 180 knots stopping for fuel several times along the way. We stopped at exotic Pacific islands such as Kwaj, Wake, Midway, and Guam. Coming into
Guam we lost an engine and had to wait a week for the replacement part to arrive from Hawaii. Guam was not an exciting place to spend a week. The transit barracks was not the Hilton. Guam was hot and humid and our
barracks didn't have air conditioning. There was nothing to do but wait an sweat.
Eventually the part we needed arrived and we were able to continue our journey. The delay was not all bad though.
When we arrived in Iwakuni the drudgery of moving in had been completed. However, we were accused of planning our own delay so we wouldn't have to join in on the initial setting up process. But we’d have gladly
exchanged our boring week for a chance to pass the time working.
We were immediately assigned a schedule of daily patrols. The plan was to rotate through 12 crews, continuing the cycle for six
straight months. Our skipper was determined to make our squadron have a better than average record on this cruise. We did it too and it was all because of our Intelligence Officer, an ex- school teacher who used
child psychology on us. His name was Lowe.
Before our first round of patrols started we had a crew meeting. Lowe stood before us like a third grade school teacher and opened the meeting with
something like, "All right children, we're going to play a game." It wasn't quite that bad, but almost. He proceeded to show us colored pie charts, bar graphs and a table showing how we’d be scored on our
ship pictures, ECM cuts, etc. Each crew was to be given a score on all the data turned in after a mission. We would compete and the crew with the best score got a trip to Hong Kong or something like that. There was
much groaning and some laughter but this didn't phase Lowe in the least. He just continued laying out his plan.
Nobody took it seriously until the first 12 missions were completed and we had another
meeting. Lowe gave us our scores. When crew 3 found they had a lower score than crew 6, the fun was over. Arguments started brewing all over the room. Lowe's large graphs, displayed in living color on the
walls of the briefing room, told the world where each crew stood in the competition. Now they were taking it seriously. From then on, every crew went out on patrol determined to improve their score.
One of the things they got us on was the photographs of the ships. If the ship wasn't dead center in the picture and level, points were lost. It was impossible to take a picture of that quality holding a 60 pound
camera with an eight inch diameter lens up to a ten inch round hole while the plane was bouncing all over the sky. Everyone knew that. But after the second round of patrols all the crews were doing it. After the
third round we all realized we’d been the victims of Lowe's child psychology. We also realized we were producing better results than we ever dreamed we were capable of, and we were proud of it. At the end of the
cruise, the squadron received a commendation from the Navy for it's outstanding contribution. We never did get the trip to Hong Kong.
In later years, as a civilian electronics instructor, I used a
similar technique on a group of electronic classes with the same gratifying results. There's something to be said for child psychology.
Next: Poopy Suits
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