Above & Beyond

BY Paul Rogers

Proud to serve.” That’s retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Cash Barber’s typical response whenever he’s thanked for his service. Barber, who served in World War II, during the Berlin Airlift, and two tours in the Vietnam War, receives plenty of thank-yous.

“I gave ’em thirty years and a couple of tours in Vietnam,” Barber said. “I’ve been retired 54 years, so I guess I’m getting even with them.”

Barber is one of the few surviving veterans of both World War II and the Vietnam War. And to this day, at age 101, the highly decorated former Navy aviator gives weekly presentations about his service at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida.

Barber joined Sumner County, Tennessee, Chapter 240 last year, and has made an impression on its president, Bob Schricker. “What I appreciate about Cash is that he is willing to go to the Naval Aviation Museum on a Navy base and explain what his time in service meant to him,” Schricker said. “We’ll never know how many families he has impressed or impacted.”

Courtesy Bob Schricker

Clyde Cassius “Cash” Barber was born in Drennen, Colorado, in 1924. One of seven children in a farming family, he describes himself as “just an old farm boy.” When he turned 17 in 1941, Barber convinced his parents to give their consent to join the Navy before he got drafted.

Why join the Navy? “I wanted clean sheets every night and I wanted good chow,” he said. “And they paid me $21 a month, and that’s the most money I ever had in my life. So, I was a happy sailor.”

After graduating from Aviation Machinist’s Mate training at Naval Air Station Alameda, Barber’s entire class of thirty was assigned to Patrol Bomber squadrons in Hawaii. They were on a transport ship en route to Hawaii when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The ship turned around, and returned to California, and Barber and his classmates were transferred to the U.S.S. Procyon, an attack cargo vessel loaded with medical supplies for the nearly 1,200 military and civilian casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack. Meanwhile, the U.S. had entered the war, so Barber and company found themselves manning the Procyon’s gun mounts during an anxious voyage to Oahu.

“When we entered Pearl Harbor, there was a battleship laying on its side right at the entrance,” Barber said. “And then the further we went down inside the channel there was Battleship Row with all those battleships down. Everything was oily, messy. You just can’t imagine it. It was very much a heartbreak for all us young guys.”

Rather than being discouraged, witnessing the horrific aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack only seemed to harden Cash Barber’s resolve to serve.

Carolyn Deal, Barber’s daughter and a retired Naval Intelligence captain, sees this as her father’s “tipping point,” in that, he had told her, “We may have been caught with our pants down once but we’re fighting back, and we’re not going to lose this.”

With the PBY Catalina amphibious aircraft that Barber and his classmates were supposed to be crewing destroyed by the Japanese, his service in Hawaii unexpectedly began with guard duty in a foxhole near the beach. “The local people were really concerned and shook up,” he said. “They expected [Japanese] commandos to land on the beaches anytime,” he said.

But when the squadron received replacement PBYs, Barber was assigned to a flight crew on long patrols as third mechanic, operating a 50-caliber machine gun. Within weeks, a friend from training was killed in an air crash.

What followed was three years of service throughout the Pacific Theater. Barber’s squadron: took part in Guadalcanal operations, during which another pal, whose PBY was shot down, was killed; flew patrols from Canton Island and Crawley Bay, Australia; and conducted bombing and strafing raids out of Port Moresby in New Guinea against the Japanese in the Vitu Islands in the Southwest Pacific.

“It was a blessing to stay in the same type of plane all during that time,” Barber said. “But the first year we had terrible losses. We were just too big, slow and vulnerable, and we lost several crews. But that’s when somebody got the bright idea, ‘Why don’t we paint those PBYs black and let them start flying at night?’” Which is how the squadron got its “Black Cat” nickname.

Barber met his future wife, Eileen Allen, during leave in his cousin’s hometown of Bakersfield, California. Five days after arriving home from New Guinea in December 1944, they married in San Francisco.

Courtesy Bob Schricker

Now a married man with a growing family, Cash Barber stayed in the Navy. His transport squadron, VR-8, was one of two Navy squadrons that supported Operation Vittles (the Berlin Airlift) in the late 1940s. During 20 years of enlisted flying, Barber logged more than 7,500 crew member hours before being commissioned as Lieutenant Junior Grade and becoming an Aviation Maintenance Limited Duty Officer in 1961.

After serving in Okinawa, Japan, and at NAS Moffett Field in California, Barber went on to serve two tours in Vietnam with Patrol Squadron 42 (VP-42) in Saigon in 1967, and at Cam Ranh Bay the following year.

“We had a different mission there, completely home-based in the Philippines and then usually three crews would go into Vietnam for a period of time and rotate back out,” Barber said of his time working as a maintenance officer on Lockheed P-2 Neptunes patrolling Vietnamese waters.

“Our job was to make sure that no North Vietnamese boats landed to support their people.”

After his tours in Vietnam, Barber returned stateside as Commander of the Fleet Air Wing at NAS Whidbey Island, Washington, where VP-42 was disestablished in 1969. Two years later, Lt. Cmdr. Barber was piped over the side after more than 30 years of active naval service – but not before personally commissioning his daughter Carolyn as a Navy Ensign.

The Vietnam War “was a terrible mess, and how and why we got into it, many of us still wonder,” he said. But because Barber returned to the large Navy community on Whidbey Island, he sidestepped the difficult homecomings that many Vietnam War veterans endured. Nevertheless, he is well aware of what his fellow veterans went through after coming home from the war.

Over the course of his remarkable career, Barber earned eighteen campaign and service medals and ribbons, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. Today, he proudly wears Combat Aircrew wings with three gold stars and senses very different public attitudes toward Vietnam War vets.

“The [lack of] respect we received at end of the war was terrible, but certainly I don’t think there’s any of that type now,” Barber said. “People don’t think about it anymore, right?”

For the past decade, Cash Barber has spent Tuesdays at the National Naval Aviation Museum, where, in front of a cutaway PBY-5, he recounts stories from his long service, answers questions from visitors, and points out features of his former aircraft. He also makes appearances on special occasions at the museum, including parties on his 100th and 101st birthdays.

“His faith was very strong,” Carolyn Deal said of the qualities that underpin her father’s exemplary service. “Church and Sunday school were important, and family was important. And I guess protecting this really hard-fought freedom.”

Bob Schricker first met Barber at the National Naval Aviation Museum early last year. Upon learning that he was a Vietnam War veteran, Schricker visited Barber to present him with the Vietnam War Veteran Lapel Pin. He also enrolled Barber in Chapter 240 and announced plans to honor him with a dedicated brick on the chapter’s Wall of Honor.

“I thought it would be just great to be able to honor him in any way that we can,” Schricker explained. “He’s not about to beat his own drum. He just explains what it means to [serve] in our armed forces.”

In 2004, Cash Barber finished writing his 261-page memoir, Fly Navy with Cash Barber 1941-1971, with the help and encouragement of his family. The book is dedicated to his children, grandchildren, and future generations.

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