5/18/2023 0 Comments Yed williamsHe attended Ted Williams baseball camp and would see his father at camp once a week during the summer. Williams saw little of his father after his parents divorced in 1972. His mother was Ted's third wife, Dolores Wettach. There wouldn’t have been any complaints from the Marines if Ted Williams had decide to continue with his favorite team, least of all from his squadron leader.John Henry Williams (Aug– March 6, 2004) was the only son of baseball player Ted Williams. If I hadn’t had baseball to come back to, I might have gone on as a Marine pilot.” It was the second-best thing that ever happened to me. There were maybe 75 pilots in our two squadrons and 99 percent of them did a better job than I did. “Everybody tries to make a hero out of me over the Korean thing,“ Williams once said. Williams got out of the aircraft only moments before it was totally engulfed in flames. With no landing gear, dive brakes, or functioning flaps, the flaming Panther jet skidded down the runway for more than 3000 feet. Fighting to hold the plane together, he brought his Panther in at more than 200-MPH for a crash landing on the Marsden-matted strip. Glenn and another Panther flown by Larry Hawkins came up alongside Williams and lead him to the nearest friendly airfield. However, with his radio out, Williams could not hear their warnings and he could not see the condition of the rear of his aircraft. Glenn and the other pilots on the mission were yelling over their radios for Williams to get out. The standard orders were to eject from any Panther with a fire in the rear of the plane. His aircraft was indeed on fire, and was trailing smoke and flames. The tail would literally blow off most stricken aircraft. The red warning lights were on all over the plane.” The F-9 Panther had a centrifugal flow engine and normally caught fire when hit. Then everything went out, my radio, my landing gear, everything. I knew I was hit when the stick started shaking like mad in my hands. One such incident occurred when Williams was flying an air strike on a troop encampment near Kyomipo. Williams’ F-9 was hit by hostile ground fire. He commented later: “The funny thing was I didn’t feel anything. It was there that he learned to fly the propeller-driven, single-engine, single-seat Vought F4U Corsair, the famous bent-wing “U-Bird,” a favorite mount of Marine aces in the South Pacific. He then moved south to Pensacola, Fla., for advanced flight training as a fighter pilot. Upon graduation, Williams opted for the Marine Corps and was commissioned a second lieutenant. The ground-school curriculum included subjects such as engines, ordnance, aircraft characteristics, aerodynamics and navigation. There the academic load became more rigorous, but they actually got to fly. The surviving cadets then moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., for three months of preflight training. Prospective pilots got into shape and learned how to be military officers as they studied basic theories of how airplanes operated. Williams was sent to Amherst College in chilly Massachusetts for preflight training, a 90-day ordeal described as a combination of Officer Candidates School and a crash course in advanced science. He eventually would lose almost four years of playing time at the very peak of his career. After the 1942 season Williams voluntarily enlisting in the Navy reserve and was called to active duty in November of that year.This marked the first of two major career disruptions for military service.
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