Cranford Dalby; pilot developed radar-guided bombing system

WASHINGTON - In 1930, 8-year-old Cranford Dalby took his first airplane ride. He went up with his father, who hustled up customers for barnstorming pilots around Fort Worth.

Young Cranford was captivated by flight and 12 years later was back in the skies as a Marine Corps pilot who would go on to make a major contribution to aerial warfare. He learned to land a plane on a flight deck by practicing on a converted sidewheel excursion steamboat pressed into emergency duty on the Great Lakes.

Colonel Dalby, 86, who died Oct. 1 of a heart attack at his home in Alexandria, Va., participated in the Guadalcanal and Solomon Islands campaigns during World War II, but he made his greatest contribution to aerial combat after the war.

In 1948, he was one of 15 Marines assigned to a Navy missile test center at Point Mugu, Calif. The Navy was trying to devise a way to launch rockets from submarines.

Colonel Dalby, then a captain, organized an informal "Marine Guided Missile Unit" with his fellow Marines and sought to put the rockets to a different use.

"Dalby, the senior Marine and a fighter pilot, was quiet, persistent, thorough, and immensely curious," retired Marine Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak wrote in the 1984 book "First to Fight: An Inside View of the US Marine Corps." "He was the right man for the job and, as it turned out, he made history."

Combining high-tech experimentation with workbench tinkering, Colonel Dalby's Marines devised an early computer- and radar-guided system that could automatically release a bomb from a plane with pinpoint accuracy. The pilot wouldn't even have to see his target.

"Dalby's little group had stumbled onto a new continent in the world of Marine all-weather close air support," Krulak wrote. "Here, in their hands - the fruit of their own resolve and genius - was a system that, once perfected, would be able to drop bombs accurately in the dark and in bad weather."

Colonel Dalby's remote bombing device performed with consistent success, surprising many members of the military brass. By the time of the Korean War, he returned to the cockpit with a nighttime Marine fighter squadron called the Flying Nightmares. The new radar-controlled device was widely used throughout the war.

"Suddenly close air support was available around the clock and in the worst of weather," Krulak wrote. "In truth, a new era had dawned."

Marion Cranford Dalby was born in Fort Worth and grew up in Texas and New Mexico, where he learned to shoot quail and rabbit for the family dinner table. He used the Spanish he learned as a boy to help train members of the Dominican Republic Air Force in the 1940s.

He flew fighter planes in Vietnam - his third war as a combat pilot - but spent enough time on the ground to compile an official military reference guide to Vietnamese junks, or civilian boats plying coastal waters. He retired from the Marines in 1970.