He was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) in March 1940 and served as a flight instructor at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. He was commissioned an ensign (A-V) on 1 March 1937. Naval Reserve on 7 October 1935 and reported for duty as an aviation cadet on 27 June 1936. He graduated from high school in 1928, worked his way through college with summer jobs as an ordinary seaman on the merchant steam ship SS Absaroka, and graduated from University of California-Berkeley sometime in 1933. Lieutenant Fieberling was known to his squadron mates as “Old Langdon” because at 32, he was one of the oldest in Torpedo Squadron 8 (VT-8).
His decision would lead to a sequence of events that altered the course of the battle, and of World War II. Naval Reserve, faced the most momentous decision of his life: whether to lead his detachment of six new TBF-1 torpedo bombers in following the attack plan laid out by the commander of the Midway air group or to proceed on his own initiative to attack the Japanese carrier force. On the morning of 4 June 1942, Lieutenant Langdon Kellogg Fieberling, U.S.