Before retired Navy Capt. Cecil B. Hawkins was in what would later be known as Top Gun training, before he was escorting Russian bombers out of Cuba when the world was on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, before he was impersonating a Japanese fighter pilot attacking Pearl Harbor, Hawkins had to line up three pieces of rope to the correct pegs while looking under his knees.
If Hawkins could not have done that, a decorated and adventurous 26-year career as a Navy pilot would have been grounded.
As a graduation gift from Arkansas City, Kansas, High School in 1951, Hawkins and 39 others got their draft notice as the Korean War raged. Hawkins didn’t want any part of the Army. He wanted to fly.
As a 9-year-old, Hawkins had a newspaper route that took him to the south end of Ark City near the Arkansas and Walnut rivers. There were no paved roads, and Hawkins made his deliveries on horseback.
One of his customers, Lloyd Pickett, was a Naval carrier pilot. Nearby was the Ark City airport. Hawkins mowed Pickett’s yard every other week and let his horses out to graze.
“My payment wasn’t money, but a ride in an old T-1, just a single-engine two-seater,” Hawkins says. “At least I understood and appreciated aviation.”
That played a part about 10 years later when Hawkins received his draft notice. There were 41 who went to Olathe, Kansas, for physicals after their draft notice. Four passed the entrance into the Naval Aviation Cadet Program.
“It was all about depth perception. You had to get on your knees and look under your legs,” Hawkins explains. “There were three ropes and pegs. They mixed them all up. You had to line them up correctly while looking through your legs. If you didn’t, you couldn’t go in the flight program because you didn’t have the required depth perception. Only four of us did, and I was one.”
The program required two years of college, and so after four semesters at Arkansas City Junior College, Hawkins found himself in the Navy. He reported to Pensacola, Florida, in 1953 and was among 40 in Class 3953. Eighteen months later, the class had winnowed down to 17, including Hawkins.
Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book, The Right Stuff, took a deep dive into what made those first NASA astronauts in the 1960s special and different. It was a combination of confidence, skill and machismo.
You either have it or you don’t. As a Naval pilot, Hawkins had it.
Over the next few years, Hawkins made nearly 1,000 carrier landings on 22 different carriers, including the famous USS Saratoga and USS Yorktown. He says he still holds the Navy record for the most night carrier landings at 332.
Landing on a carrier is an intricate and dangerous maneuver because the runway is just 500 feet long. A pilot uses a tailhook on an aircraft’s underside to catch an arresting wire that stops the plane on a dime. More than 200 pilots have died attempting carrier landings.
“You just have to make sure you get your aircraft set for landing,” says Hawkins, simplifying an otherwise complex and risky operation. The extraordinary don’t often see their special skills as anything but ordinary.
Landing signal officers grade each landing with a “1” being the best. That was almost always Hawkins’ grade.
“Out of the 900-something carrier landings, it was never more than a ‘2,’” Hawkins says, “and just about always a ‘1.’”
Hawkins was selected for Top Gun training before there was a Top Gun. Tom Cruise made those select pilots famous in movies Top Gun in 1986 and Top Gun: Maverick in 2022.
In the early 1960s, about the time Cruise was born, it had a much less glamorous name: FAGU (Fleet Air Gunnery Unit). Training was in El Centro, California, where temperatures routinely broke 110 degrees. The mission? Special training for nuclear weapons delivery.
“There was one pilot for every squadron and the object was to go to FAGU, learn nuclear weapons delivery and go back and train others,” Hawkins says.
Just practice though, not the real thing?
“Three different times I carried nuclear weapons, a Mark 7 (2,000-pound air burst) and a Mark 9 (nuclear artillery shell), but at least they had been retired by then,” he says.
Nothing had been retired in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense 13-day standoff between Russia and the 90 miles off the U.S. coast.
There was posturing on both sides. The breathless world believed nuclear war was possible, if not likely. The epic standstill ended with President John F. Kennedy ordering a Naval blockade around Cuba. The Soviets dismantled the weapons and returned to Russia. War was averted.
Hawkins was part of attack squadron VA-35—also known as the Black Panthers—off the carrier Saratoga. He was one of two pilots with very specific orders toward the end of the crisis. They were to escort four Russian Tupolev Tu-95 bombers out of Cuba.
“We were behind those Russian Bears (bombers). We were locked and loaded,” Hawkins says. “We were in the hot position. If they made the wrong move, we were ordered to fire on them with Sidewinder missiles.”
Lights! Camera! Takeoff!
Hawkins’ Navy career already felt a bit like a Hollywood production. Then, in 1968, the actual Hollywood came calling. MGM, the movie company, was making the film, Tora! Tora! Tora!, the definitive movie of the 1941 Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2,390, sunk five battleships, destroyed 188 planes and thrust the United States into World War II.
MGM was looking for Navy pilots with tailhook landing
experience on carriers. Hawkins, stationed in Florida, certainly fit
that. After he made the cut from 50, he found himself along with
27 others headed to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, the air station outside San Diego in November 1968.
“We all had to take a leave of absence from the Navy,” Hawkins says, “and were contracted with MGM. We were part of the stuntmen’s union.”
For the movie, the Japanese attack planes included 12 AGM Zero fighters, eight “Kate” torpedo bombers and eight “Val” dive bombers. They were all actually heavily modified RCAF Harvard (T-6 Texan) and BT-13 Valiant pilot training aircraft from a company in Canada.
The Japanese carrier? It was the Yorktown, scheduled to be decommissioned two years later. Only a few would know U.S. carriers had an angled deck, which the Japanese Akagi and others did not have.
Hawkins spent 10 days on which he made nine launches off the Yorktown as well as flying in formation. He was in a full Japanese flight uniform, and at 6-foot-3, probably the tallest “Japanese” bomber in the war.
For historical accuracy, the pilots were filmed taking off from the Yorktown at night, from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., which added to the danger. In fact, during a practice exercise later in Hawaii, a pilot named Jack Stone failed to pull up in time and crashed into Ford Island. He was killed.
Each of the pilots had a $1 million insurance policy—$500,000 to MGM, and $500,000 to a beneficiary. The pilots even got a raise from their original $180 per jump.
“One of our pilots put a senior stuntman in the backseat of a bomber and made a carrier landing,” Hawkins says. “They got done, and our pilot, Jim Shannon, asked the stuntman if he wanted to go on another landing.
“He said, ‘Not with me in it.’ And we got a raise to $380 per flight.”
Thanks to two weeks of shooting, Hawkins pocketed $10,000 from MGM, a nice windfall for a Navy pilot pulling down about $300 a week.
There were other perks, as well. Actor John Wayne, who had a financial stake in the film, brought his chuckwagon with his cook to Miramar and served breakfast for the pilots—at
11 p.m.
“He shot the bull with us,” Hawkins says, “and on a couple of occasions, he brought his boys with him.”
Actor Jackie Gleason’s yacht became a temporary floating officers club. At night, an American and Japanese historian would discuss real-life events from 1941.
“That was probably the most interesting thing of the whole she-bang,” says Hawkins. “Once we broke the ice with the Japanese guy, we asked him a lot of questions. He was very fluent and knowledgeable about the strike.”
The head of the group, George Watkins—or as some derisively called him, “Gorgeous George”—learned the hard way there were limits on the yacht.
“We had three women hostesses, and he made a pass at one of them,” Hawkins says. “The three of them picked him up and threw him off the yacht. It was about a 60-foot drop. Some people in another boat picked him up, but we never saw him again.”
Tora! Tora! Tora! was a co-production of Americans and Japanese. It took three years to plan—longer than the actual plan of the attack—and eight months to shoot. It was the ninth-highest grossing film in 1970 and nominated for five Academy Awards.
“I loved the movie,” Hawkins says. “It was a tremendous experience.”
Four years later, at age 39, Hawkins became the youngest captain in the Navy. His Navy career ended in 1979 after 15 months as commanding officer of the USS Milwaukee.
After a dozen moves courtesy of the Navy, he and wife Sandy moved one last time—to Amarillo on July 3, 1979—where he intended to take a job with Pantex as a quality control engineering chief. But then one more opportunity fell in his lap.
A day after they arrived, Amarillo ISD Superintendent B.J. Stamps called with an offer. There was an opening to head the Junior ROTC programs in AISD. Would he consider temporarily filling that? Hawkins said yes. He retired from that temporary job 16 years later, in 1995.
Sandy, his wife of 66 years and 6 months to the day, died in October 2022. Today, at age 91, Navy Capt. Cecil B. Hawkins lives in Amarillo, off Hillside, with his daughter. The walls of his home paint a picture of a Naval life few have ever lived, from Arkansas to Hollywood, by way of the world’s oceans and the skies above them.
“I got to live my dream,” he says.
