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Dougherty at first tried the Army Air Corps and took a physical prior to enlisting in January, 1941. "The doctor said, 'Read those letters,' and I said. 'What letters?' He told me I'd better have a physician look at my eyes when I got home."
Back in Hibbing, Dougherty again had his eyes checked, and they proved to be 20-20. "I asked him how it was I couldn't see anything during my Army exam, and he asked me if I'd worn sunglasses on my drive to the examination." It turned out that Dougherty was probably snowblind from driving in the bright snow that day.
"I just took all my Army materials over to the Naval Reserve, and I signed up." After passing the exam, his recruiter advised him to take his oath right away in case he got drafted. "Sure enough, two weeks later I got my draft notice. I was told to report, but I didn't go.
"The head of the draft board in Hibbing got hold of me, and he was really angry. He told me I could go to jail. I explained that I'd already enlisted, and he said I should have told him. I said, 'No, I didn't need to tell you.'"
Dougherty headed to Wold-Chamberlain Airport in Minneapolis for what was called elimination training. All the candidates were given seven hours of flight instruction, and at that point they had to solo. If you didn't, you were out of the program.
Dougherty passed the first hurdle and went on to Corpus Christi, Texas, for additional flight training. From there he was sent to Pensacola, Florida, for advanced flight training.
He was now training in an OS squadron on the Kingfisher, a scout plane designed to be catapulted off the deck of a battleship or cruiser.
"It was a helluva good plane, but it's top speed was only 110 miles an hour. It was no match for any fighters."
On December 7th, 1941, Dougherty learned the news of the surprise attack at his barracks in Pensacola. That night, he was standing a watch, and when he went down to the watch office to get his flashlight, the officer handed him a .45 pistol to wear on his belt.
"I said, 'Where's the ammunition?' and they said I didn't need any. I said, 'Just in case I run into a Japanese, what do I do, club him to death with the pistol?' They didn't think that was very funny. That was typical Navy to give a guy an empty gun."
As the training wound down, Dougherty was called into the headquarters and ushered into a room with Capt. A.C. Read, a Naval legend who had flown the first seaplane across the Atlantic. Read had him raise his right hand and take the oath. "He said, 'You are now an officer and a Naval aviator. Good luck.' And that was that."
Dougherty's orders were to the USS Massachusetts, a battleship just being completed on the East Coast. "This was just three months after Pearl Harbor, but they really needed people. I was the greenest of the green, but I was off to my first assignment."
He took a week's leave to drive his car back to Minnesota and say goodbye to friends and family. On his way, he stopped overnight in Memphis, and found himself in a hotel elevator with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Hollywood starlet Joan Bennett.
"I was pretty flustered to be with those people, but I had on my green uniform and my wings, and I was feeling pretty good. I said to Joan Bennett, 'Why don't you have dinner with me instead of these two old guys?' Hope and Crosby didn't think that was very funny. She said she'd like to except they were in the middle of a war bond drive."
His leave over and his car sold, Dougherty reported to Quonset Point, Rhode Island. He was met by the battleship's senior aviator and told to be ready to fly at 0700 the next day.
Dougherty's mission was to fly anti-submarine reconnaissance. "After I flew that first day, I thought we were going to lose the war. You remember the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez? Well, that was a drop in the bucket compared to the oil that was washing up on the East Coast from the submarine attacks. There wasn't a white pebble from Maine to Virginia.
"And everywhere you could see the hulks and the wreckage of ships the Germans had sunk. At Sandy Hook, I counted the masts of 17 ships that had gone down."
Dougherty said there was an effort not to let the general population know about the devastation caused by the submarine attacks along the coast. If a civilian aircraft was found flying where the wrecks were, it was quickly escorted back to land. "They didn't want any pictures."
One of Dougherty's duties on patrol was to check out every fishing trawler. It was suspected that some of the trawlers were spies for the Axis, and that the submarines would raise their periscopes right next to the fishing vessels to provide a cover from the airborne patrols.
On May 12, 1942, Massachusetts was commissioned, and on the 15th she set out on her shakedown cruise. "The Massachusetts was the biggest thing we had in the Atlantic, and it tells you a little bit about how short of ships they were at that time that even on our shakedown cruise we were sent to Iceland to make sure a couple of German pocket battleships didn't break out from the Norwegian harbors. Thank God they didn't because we weren't ready in any way to fight a battle."
Aboard ship, the small clutch of aviators enjoyed both a celebrity and a Jonah status among the crew and fellow officers. Their landings and takeoffs were well attended by crew members who could get away from their daily duties. Their presence in the wardroom with their snazzy leather jackets, however, was not well received. The fact that they drew extra pay and did not stand watches while in port also grated on their peer's nerves.
Dougherty earned further enmity by striking up a relationship with the ship's cooks and often taking a meal with them. Finally he was called in by his senior officer and told, "You can't eat with the crew. You are an officer." Dougherty said he responded, "But the food is better than what we're getting."
"That was the first hoop-do-do I got involved in aboard ship. But I still had a meal now and then with the cooks. And then there was the bakery with those jelly rolls. Oh, they were good."
The Kingfisher crews practiced spotting for the big guns, and at one point Dougherty was asked to simulate an air attack on the ship and was told to try and sneak by the ship's radar. "I had a bright idea that I could get to the ship and avoid the radar by coming down the river that emptied out near where the ship was moored. So down the river we came. I'll never forget one guy in a rowboat fishing. As we came right over his boat, he just got up and jumped in the lake.
"At the end we had to hop over some houses in town to get to the ship, and we nearly took the chimneys off them. Well, the townspeople weren't too happy about that, and I got put on report. In the end, they dismissed it though. It was legal 'flat hatting.' I'd been ordered to do it."
Part of Dougherty's training was to practice the three different types of recoveries available to the Kingfishers. The scout planes were launched from catapults at the stern of the ship, using explosives to hurtle them down the rails and into the air. "You had to brace yourself pretty good for that."
Getting back on the battleship was a little harder. The Kingfishers' choices were Able Recovery, when the ship was at anchor, Baker Recovery, when the ship was at sea but the sea was calm, or Cast Recovery, when the sea was rough. ("Charlie" hadn't yet replaced "cast" as the naval symbol for the letter C.)
The first two were fairly easy, considering. In the Baker Recovery, the pilot could land anywhere in the sea and then taxi the float plane to the stern of the ship where a large cargo-net like apparatus called a "sled" would capture it in the water, and where it could be held while it was attached to a hook dangling from a crane off the stern of the ship.
Once the plane is captured, the radioman had to get out of his cockpit, stand on the wing, and guide the hook from the crane to a ring on the plane. The hook itself weighed over 200 lbs. and the exercise was extremely dangerous. Once that was accomplished, both the pilot and the radioman had to attach cables to the wings to stabilize the plane as it was hoisted aboard.
The Cast Recovery was very difficult. The pilot had to time his landing to land close to the end of the ship, which itself was traveling at 25 knots. The theory was that the ship's wake would provide a smooth patch of sea to land on.
In order to be qualified for a Cast Recovery, Navy regulations said a pilot first had to sit in the back seat of the two-seater airplane while an experienced pilot performed the task. Secondly he had to try it himself while the veteran pilot was in the back seat.
By now, USS Massachusetts was part of a convoy of 300 ships heading for North Africa.
Dougherty had never done nor was he qualified to do a Cast Recovery when he returned from a flight one day. "We flew along the starboard side of the ship, and we could see that they flying the pennants that indicated they wanted us to do a Cast Recovery. We weren't too happy to see that."
It didn't help Dougherty's confidence when he watched the pilot in the other Kingfisher, who was qualified for a rough water recovery, hit a wave and bounce 20 feet in the air and then bounce several more times before he could get his plane onto the sled.
Adding to the complication in the procedure, the battleship also had turn just before the landing to assure the pilot of the smoothest sea surface to land on. "And you've got to remember that when the battleship turned, all of the 300 other ships in the convoy had to turn also."
With great trepidation, Dougherty lined up his landing. "It wasn't like an aircraft carrier where you had people helping you make the decision about whether to land. The first time I came around, I decided I was too close to the ship and I turned away at the last minute."
Dougherty circled the ship and came in for a second try. This time he timed it out just right. "That's how I know there are guardian angels. I came in, and just like that the plane was up on the sled. It was the best Cast Recovery I ever did."
Still, as he descended the ladder from the Kingfisher, he was shaking so bad that he missed a rung and fell the last six feet to the ship's deck. At that point he was informed that he was to see the captain immediately.
Dougherty convinced the other pilot, the senior aviator and a lieutenant, that he had to go with him to face the captain, who he was sure was going to chastise him for taking two approaches for his landing.
"But when we got there the captain said, 'Ensign, that was the most beautiful landing I've ever seen. Lieutenant, you can take a lesson from this man.'"
"So now, all of a sudden, I was qualified to do Cast Recoveries."
The trip across the Atlantic took about 12 days. "They woke us up about 4 a.m. one morning to tell us we'd arrived." They were just off the African coast at Casablanca, and Operation Torch was about to begin.
The Massachusetts had lost one of its three planes coming over during a violent storm, and so only Dougherty and Lt. Carl "Dutch" Doerflinger were scheduled to fly. The aviators had been briefed about their mission on the way over, and Doerflinger was able to use maps and photos to construct a topographical map of the Moroccan Coast using sand and molasses.
"It's a good thing he did that or we wouldn't have know where the hell we were."
Dougherty and his radioman Bobby Ethridge had flown many practice and anti-submarine missions by this time. "We had a deal. I taught Bobby how to land the plane. I told him, 'If anything happens to me, you land it. And if anything happens to you, I'll land it. I won't jump.'"
The men were in their planes on the catapults before dawn. Their job was two-fold. The first job was to fly over the end of the long jetty that came out from Casablanca Harbor and see if a white flag was flying from the pole.
There had been much debate and much last-minute diplomacy to convince the Vichy French not to fight against the Allies. The white flag on the pole would have been a signal that the French were not going to respond to the invasion.
The second job for Dougherty was to spot for the ship's big guns if it was determined the French would fight.
Doerflinger was catapulted, and a few minutes later, Dougherty also was blasted forward from the stern of the Massachusetts. "I never saw Doerflinger again that day. We were told we'd have to get back to the ship on our own initiative. They said, 'We're not going to be waiting around for you.'"
Dougherty said the orders reminded him of the standing joke about battleship aviators. "When they launched you off one side, they threw your seabag over the other side to balance the weight. They knew you weren't coming back."
Dougherty took his OS2U Kingfisher to the coast and was able figure out the landmarks from the molasses and sand map. As he cruised over Casablanca, the sun was just coming up.
At first, Dougherty didn't encounter any opposition, but there also wasn't any flag on the end of the jetty. Cruising at 1,000 feet, he began to notice puffs of smoke in the air. "It was kind of pretty, like the Fourth of July," he said.
The next round of anti-aircraft fire, however, nearly blew Dougherty and his Kingfisher out of the sky. He immediately radioed in the code for encountering hostile enemy action: "Batter up."
The ship's response was to be "Play Ball," meaning to launch the attack.
Within seconds he heard a radio message from the ship, "salvo," meaning they had launched their 16-inch shells toward the Jean Bart, the French battleship that was tied up in the Casablanca harbor.
The Massachusetts was 10 miles or about 18,000 yards off the coast, and so it took a while for the shells to arrive. The gunnery people timed the arrival of the shells, though, and indicated to Dougherty when they should arrive by the word, "splash."
Dougherty looked down and saw the splashes of the shells short and to the left of the target. After making corrections, seconds later, the ship again radioed to the spotter plane, "salvo." Again, some time passed before the message, "splash."
This time Dougherty could see no splashes at all. Dodging between the puffs of AA fire, he quickly radioed back, "No observation." Swinging down for a closer look, though, he saw the gantry towers next to the big French battleship were toppling over. He radioed: "Belay that last message. Rapid fire, no change."
The Massachusetts was now dialed in on its adversary and began raining shells toward the beach.
In the air, though, Dougherty suddenly had a new problem. A French fighter came out of the blue and was firing at him.
"On the first pass, he shattered the canopy. We dove for the sea. The only protection we had from fighters was to get down to right over the ocean, and then when he comes at us to turn."
Radioman Ethridge was firing at the fighter with his 50 cal. machine gun at the rear of the Kingfisher, and Dougherty tried firing his forward mounted gun. "But it jammed after about the 10th shot. That was normal for that gun."
The fighter made another pass, again raking the Kingfisher with bullets. "We hadn't quite got down over the water, and this time they got Bobby. They also blew out my instrument panel and the windshield. He must have hit something else because my engine stopped."
Fortunately, the Kingfisher was nearly at sea level by that time, and Dougherty was able to bring the plane in for a landing. The French fighter flew over, but did not fire again at the American plane.
The plane drifted into shore and was nearly there when it sank in the shallow water, its pontoons filling up with water from the bullet holes. From over the dunes at the shore a group of French soldiers came and took the two Americans into custody. "I had a hell of time getting Bobby out of the back cockpit."
Dougherty and the wounded Ethridge probably were the first two American POWs in the African campaign, and of all the campaigns across the Atlantic.
The soldiers put them in a truck and took them to a French shore patrol jail. Ethridge was then taken to a Casablanca hospital. "There wasn't much in that jail, just wooden planks to lay on and no blankets." Dougherty was being held with three other pilots from the carrier USS Ranger who had been shot down.
After three days, the four officers were taken to a soccer stadium in the heart of Casablanca where they joined about 20 GIs who had also been captured in the invasion. After two days at the stadium, the men woke up to find their captors had disappeared.
Dougherty went out to the street, and it was filled with American heavy equipment moving through. He flagged down a jeep and the army officer stopped to look over the four naval aviators standing on the street. "What the hell are you doing here?" he asked. One of Dougherty's compatriots answered, "Well, we were here before you were."
The jeep brought the men to a villa at the top of the hill that had been taken over as U.S. headquarters. It had been abandoned only hours before by the German high command.
"We were brought into this beautiful room, and we were greeted by this white haired general. The villa was really luxurious, with big swastikas carved into the floor. There was a picture of Goering on one side of the room and on the other side was an oil painting of Hitler had been removed from the wall and was laying on this ornate table. The general knew we were Navy pilots and he came over and shook our hands. He said, 'You know, if it wasn't for you guys I wouldn't be here right now. Let's drink a toast to this victory.'"
The general called for the wine steward and had him bring some bottles of fine French champagne. The general wanted to use the crystal glasses in the cabinets, but the G-2 experts wouldn't let him because the furniture had not yet been checked for booby traps. Instead, the staff rounded up five tin cups.
"At one point, someone had poured the wine and was about to put the frosty bottle down on the table. The general immediately grabbed the bottle and said, 'No, don't do that, you'll leave a ring.' And he put the bottle down on Hitler's picture.
"A few days after out toast I saw this same general in the hospital where Bobby was and he was going from bed to bed and talking to every man. I had a lot of respect for him."
"I never knew who he was until sometime later when I read about the general who had been removed from duty because he slapped a soldier in a hospital. I looked at his picture and realized that I'd been drinking champagne that day with General Patton."
Patton gave orders to the Navy officers to go to the Anfa Hotel, the best in town, and stay there until a capital ship came in to take them back to the Navy.
About a week later, the USS Augusta, a cruiser, came into port, and Dougherty headed down to check on board. "The officer on deck asked me where my orders were, and I explained that I'd been shot down, been a prisoner, and all the rest. I was a little angry because now I was getting gas from my own people." After a brief and heated exchange, the ship's officer told Dougherty to, "Get the hell off the ship."
On his way, though, Dougherty encountered another officer, a captain, who was wearing the aviator's wings. The second officer intervened and Dougherty was allowed on board.
The ship's officers were restricted to the ship, but Dougherty was able to come and go because he was visiting Ethridge at the hospital daily.
The liberty allowed him to shop for souvenirs for himself and for others in the Augusta's crew. For spending money, he had the $300 in cash that had been sewn into his flight jacket in case he was forced to land in enemy territory. The French had searched him, but never found the money.
Dougherty also got a chance to get back down to the beach and examine his aircraft.
"While we were on our shakedown cruise, one of the officers determined that we could make the plane lighter and extend its range by removing the armor plating behind the pilot and radioman's seats. But when we got to North Africa, the gunnery officer insisted that we put the plating back in. When I got to look at the plane, I counted 14 pock marks in the back of my seat from the bullets. One of the bullets also went right through the top of my overseas cap and knocked off the wings I had pinned there. If I'd adjusted my seat one notch differently, I wouldn't be here talking to you."
After a couple of weeks, the Augusta steamed for the United States. "We left on Dec. 5th, and we went at flank speed with no escort. We were going too fast for any submarines." The Massachusetts was already back in the U.S.
When Dougherty reached the United States, he put in a call home. What he didn't know was that the Navy had sent a telegram after he had been shot down to his family listing him as "missing in action." When he had been released from captivity, another message had been sent saying he was okay. Unfortunately, the second message never arrived.
"My father had received the telegram saying I was missing in action. He didn't tell anyone else in the family. He took it all on himself. In fact, the only person in town he had confided in was a friend, John Nehiba, who had already lost a son in the war.
"And so when I called home, my aunt answered and she said to my mother, 'Tom's on the line.' Well, my father just about collapsed."
On his way home on the train, he stopped in Marquette, Mich., and picked up his fiancee, Jeanne. The two were married during that seven-day leave.
Later, Dougherty served as a chief flight instructor at Corpus Christi, and then he trained on multi-engined planes. He flew PBYs in New York, looking for submarines, and then finished out the war with an assignment in Puerto Rico.
He got out in March of 1946, and went back to Hibbing to again run the funeral home. He stayed in the Naval Reserve and continued to fly out of Wold-Chamberlain for some time. "Then one day I was flying and I lost an engine. I almost ended up at Ft. Snelling National Cemetery, literally. I took that as a sign it was time to get out of the Reserves."
In 1949, he moved to Duluth to take over a funeral business there. He and his wife Jeanne have been married for 60 years and they have 10 daughters and two sons. They also lost a son in infancy. The Doughertys have 39 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
At 86, Dougherty still hasn't officially retired. "I still help out when they're busy or when it's a personal friend."
This article originally written by Al Zdon
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