CASE-WILLIAM

AN  ACE  OF  WORLD  WAR II

Excerpts from webpage article of Acepilots.com, “Aces of Marine Fighting Squadron VMF-214”:

With 8 kills, Bill Case was the third-highest scoring VMF-214 pilot and he may have been the luckiest.  Like most of the experienced pilots who started in August 1943, he only served with VMF-214 for one tour.  Twenty-two-year-old 1STLT William N. Case had flown earlier in VMF-122.  He served a combat tour with VMF-112 and downed a Zero over Kahili when he was flying with 112.  He was one of those pilots who had a sense of invincibility which he first noticed in a head-on encounter with a Ki-61 Tony.  He bore right in, seeing but heedless of the orange and black gunfire he could see coming right at him.  Case never wavered, unwittingly playing 'chicken' with the Jap pilot, who pulled up at the last second.  Case's first victory as a Black Sheep (his second to-date) came on September 18.  He latched onto a Zero that took no evasive action at all, just a long sweeping turn into a cloud.  Case was so close, only 50 feet behind, that he could still see his quarry while in the cloud.  He fired but his shots bracketed the Zero due to the wide 15-foot spread of the Corsair's guns.  Finally, Case realized the problem and moved his plane off to one side, allowing three guns on one side to destroy the Zero.

Flying his commanding officer’s wing on an escort mission on September 27, he scored his third victory.  But he was shot up himself; enemy bullets punctured his F4U's oil reservoir, a 25-gallon tank under the engine.  As the last of his oil drained out, he made an emergency landing at Vella Lavella.  The Seabees there took care of him in just three hours, replacing the oil reservoir with one from another recently crashed Corsair.  When he finally arrived back at his base, several hours late, he found that his squadron mates had already split up his belongings.  He didn't ask any questions but went to the mess hall.  When he got back to his tent all his stuff had been returned.

Fortune smiled on Case with a couple of credits for aerial victories. On October 11, 1943, he saw a Zero about a mile away and decided to test-fire his Corsair's guns.  As he did so the distance had narrowed to about 800 yards.  As Case fired the Zero flew into the stream of bullets and went down.  Three days later he got into a dogfight and saw "something, possibly a drop tank" splash in the water.  During his de-briefing he noted that he had seen the splash from 16,000 feet.  He got credit for a victory, on the reasoning that any splash seen from three miles up must have been an aircraft.

But surely, good fortune smiled most at Case on October 18, his last day in combat.  A short fellow, Case always raised his Corsair's seat all the way up.  However, on this day he lowered it a notch (the only time he ever did so).  In battle, a Zero's bullet smashed into his cockpit and just bloodied his scalp.  If he had been sitting an inch higher the bullet would have killed him. Bill Case survived that day and lived for another 52 years, passing away in 1995.

NOTE:  William Northrop Case was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross five time, four during World War II and one in Korea.

Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)