Longtime North Wildwood resident Curtis Napier arrived at the Air Station one week before Christmas of 1943. A farm boy from Harlan County, Kentucky, Napier worked for the Army Signal Corps building radios while attending college in Lexington. As the war continued, he felt pressured to join the Army. Instead, he chose to enlist in the Navy and requested a job in the fleet. “So they put me in aviation,” Napier recalled with a laugh. “That’s how they got us crazy guys to climb in the back seat.”
He went to Norfolk for ten weeks of aviation radio school and four weeks of gunnery school. “Then they sent us up to Wildwood to train and form a squadron of dive bombers.” There, Napier said, “We learned maneuvers flying together to do what we would do in combat.”
Napier described his job as a radio/gunner on the SB-2C Helldiver he trained for that winter. “There were two of us on the dive bombers, a pilot and a gunner. I worked the radio and let the bombs go.” The training runs took them north along the Delaware Bay.
They practiced going up to an altitude of 20,000 feet and released fourteen-inch smoke bombs onto the marshes below.
Soon Napier’s squadron was sent to the Pacific on the USS Hancock, at the time, the largest aircraft carrier in the Navy. Napier flew thirty-five missions, looking for Japanese boats and dropping two thousand-pound bombs on them. “Flying off the carrier wasn’t bad,” Napier recounted. His plane went up to an altitude of thirteen thousand feet, then dove and dropped its bombs. “You hung on and tried not to black out. You were trained for it. You have to get that in your mind. It’s a war, and you do it.”
Curtis Napier survived getting shot down in his plane and having his carrier bombed twice by Kamikaze pilots. He returned to New Jersey and married the sweetheart he met while training at the Air Station. They settled in Wildwood and raised their family.
Recently, Curtis Napier returned to the hangar to give a talk about his experiences during the war. Curtis sadly passed away in 2007 at the age 85.
