"Send up your badly wounded first." woody clipped the words over the side of the cruiser to the words over the side of the cruiser to the bobbing motor launch rising and falling in the choppy sea.
The coxswain, cautiously inching his craft toward the hull of the big ship, turned his head upward and shouted back.
"They're all badly wounded, sir."
Nearly twenty wire baskets were crowded into the boat. In each basket, helpless under tightly-buckled straps, was a wounded man from the Lexington.
A seaman fought against the hull of the No-Boat with a boat-hook to break the impact as the waves lifted the launch and its pitiful cargo eight or ten feet into the air, then smashed it downward and against the side of the cruiser.
Sailors in the launch pawed the air to catch the liens tossed overside from the cruiser. The helpless look in the eyes of a wounded lad on one of the stretchers stabbed through me as the lines were made fast at his head and feet and he began the treacherous transfer to the cruiser.
You knew what he was thinking. If a line should break he would go to the bottom of the sea like a rock. There was no chance to swim–not for these fellows bound hand and foot inside a metal cage.
"Easy there!" Woodhead barked. "Ease off on that aft line. Bring his head up a bit . . . that's it. Easy does it."
Dr. Harry Walker reached up to the basket as the seamen eased it to the deck. He spent no more than three seconds looking at the flame-seared man from the carrier. On his forehead a large pink M had been painted in mercurochrome. It told us he had received one injection of merciful morphine before leaving his dying warship.
"Take him to sick bay immediately," Dr. Walker ordered a pair of corpsmen at his side.
Another casualty was on his way up from the undulating launch. You could se he was unconscious. Soggy splotches of red oozed through the white gauze that bandaged his head. Another wide bandage covered a portion of his naked abdomen.
Walker looked calculatingly down at the launch and then toward the other boat pushing toward the cruiser.
"Bring all these men down to sick bay as fast as they come aboard," he ordered. Harry knew what to expect, and he ran to join Dr. Evans in sick bay to begin the dreadful task that was to keep him on his feet for the next thirty-six hours.
The rolling clouds of jet smoke coming from the Lexington now just five hundred yards off our port, hid most of her bridge. Her flight deck, leaning in a twenty-degree list, was crowded with more and more men. Some of her crew stood at the edge of the deck, pinched their noses with thumb and forefinger, and leapt feet-first to the sea. They looked like kids at home jumping from a diving-board.
The perilous task of getting the wounded down to the motor whaleboats and launches went on and on. The rows of stretchers on the flight deck grew longer and longer as more casualties were brought topside from the inferno inside the carrier.
I watched the men who leaped into the water. Their arms moved as though they were swimming, but they seemed to struggle, unmoving, in the same spot. Little spots of bright yellow began appearing here and there about the burning carrier as men pulled the rubber life rafts from the Lex's planes, threw them into the sea, and jumped in after them.
About fifty of the carrier's proud planes huddled with folded wings like frightened birds at the end of her deck as orange fingers of fire poked through the black smoke and felt about the flat landing area for some place to grab hold.
Between the No-Boat and the Lex the sea was dotted with little black bumps that were the heads of struggling sailors. Boats from our cruiser and the destroyers moved back and forth, pulling the men from the water. Distance at sea fools a lot of people. The No-Boat seemed but a short city block from the stricken flattop, and many of the Lexington men thought they could swim it with no trouble. A couple of them came aboard the cruiser hale and hearty; most of them fell to the deck, half-drowned and exhausted, after being pulled from the sea.
Lines tangled from the No-Boat deck to the water about every ten feet on the port side. Five or six men crowded about the deck at each line.
Twenty feet off the side of the cruiser a figure splashed almost listlessly in the water. He had swum all the way over from the carrier, but it seemed the energy necessary to propel his tortured body the remaining few feet had been spent. He appeared to be treading water rather than swimming. He pawed at the water intermittently and then lust lay there, moving his arms and legs only enough to keep his nose above the surface.
"Keep coming, mate. Just a little bit more and you'll make it," shouted one of the sailors at the top of the line near me.
They hauled the line to the deck and tossed it outward toward the struggling man in the water. The swimmer lifted his arms and grabbed at the air, but the line fell short, hung on the surface a couple of seconds, then sank from sight.
The men on the deck hauled the line back feverishly. One of them raced for a life preserver.
"Keep coming, Mac," the man with the rope encouraged the pitiful figure in the water, "We'll get you this time."
The No-Boat men made the life preserver fast to the end of the line and hurled it over the side. It splashed into the water and sent a green-white spray over the bobbing head. I watched the man's hands as they grasped the line. His fists clenched about the rope with the strength of steel vices.
"Hey, Mac! Put your leg through that life preserver and hang on," one of the men called from the deck.
The swimmer obeyed automatically. Eagerly the men pulled him aboard. They grabbed each side of his dripping body as he came over the side and shook the life preserver from his leg.
The lad, a short, two-hundred-pound Filipino cook, collapsed to the deck with a soggy thud. His brown, tropical skin seemed to glow a weird bluish color.
"He couldn't be that fat," observed one of the sailors. "He must be full of water."
There was no time to call for corpsmen. One man rolled the portly islander to his stomach. Another pulled out his tongue and adjusted the man's head on his limp arm.
The water-soaked Filipino was nearly dead. When a husky sailor straddled his back and began artificial respiration, unbelievable volumes of water gushed from his nose and mouth with each stroke.
"Keep pushing,"one of the sailors encouraged the man on the Filipino's back. "That guy's got about half the Coral Sea aboard."
The half-drowned figure on the deck grunted and coughed a couple of times. I leaned close to his face and heard him breathe and moan softly.
"He's going to be all right," I said to the sailors working on him. "Good work. Get him in a blanket as soon as you can."
As I walked forward to the well deck the scene was being repeated a dozen times. The sailors lining the side of the ship looked like an excursion of fishermen during the mackerel run. They stood there tossing their lines into the water and hauling their catches back to the deck. Artificial respiration was being applied to prone bodies scattered all along the deck.
A rugged, swarthy master-of-arms from the Lexington came up over the side from a rescue boat. His heavy crop of black hair clung wet against the stubble of his square, unshaven face.
As he stepped to the well deck his eyes caught sight of Pope, the No-Boat's chief master-at-arms.
"Ye Gods!" the dripping Lexington man bellowed. "Hey, Pope! Don't tell me you belong to this ship!"
Pope's face broke into a broad grin when he heard the voice of an old friend and former shipmate. Before he could reply, the newly-arrived survivor turned to the men about him.
"Throw me back into the ocean!" he thundered.
Pope laughed at the affectionate insult, threw his arms about the husky carrier man, and steered him to a bowl of steamed coffee. Cooks and mess attendants were pouring to the deck from the galley with huge kettles of coffee and stacks of soup bowls. The bedraggled survivors clenched their white, water-wrinkled hands tightly about the warm bowls and emptied them rapidly.
Flames, bright orange against the black smoke, were racing aft on the carrier's flight deck now. Only a few men, most of them officers who had been directing the abandonment, remained on the deck. They were clustered in a little group at the bow. They were too far away for me to make out faces or rank insignia, but I knew Captain Sherman of the Lexington was among them. He would be the last man to leave the ship.
The flames worked their way back to the half-hundred planes bunched together at the stern. One of the planes caught fire, blazed brightly a few seconds as the flames ran through its wings, then exploded. Plumes of burning gasoline shot like rockets into the air and fell upon the other planes. There was another explosion, and then another, as each plane let go with fiery anger. I could hear the sharp crackling of the dry, tinder-line warbirds as the after portion of the Lexington became a huge mass of red and yellow.
The figures at the front of the carrier dived and jumped into the water as fuel tanks from the blazing aircraft sent streams of fire spitting across the deck as though they came from the deadly nozzles of flame-throwers. A boat moved in close to the carrier to pick up the final handful of survivors.
"Sick bay is all full, Chaplain," MacFarland, the chief pharmacist's mate, informed me. "we're setting up a temporary bay in the hangar."
I made my way through the crowded deck. There were hundreds of men from the Lexington jammed aboard the New Orleans now, and more were coming. A couple of dozen of them, wrapped in blankets, huddled about a steaming coffee pot. They looked like blanketed Indians pow-wowing around a campfire.
I reported to Dr. Farquhar in the hangar. Doc and a corpsman were going down the long rows of the wounded, stretched out on the deck. They were spraying paraffin solution from Flit guns upon the burned hands and legs of the Lexington men. The paraffin hardened in a few seconds and protected the horrible wounds from infection. I thanked God for the paraffin we had found in that grocery store.
"What do you need, Doc?" I inquired.
"Blankets, Padre. Lots of blankets for these fellows. We've used up all the medical department's supply."
With a party of men I ran down to the sleeping compartment below. We grabbed every blanket we could find. There was no time for the formality of requisitions or orders. We just ripped blankets off the cots and hurried them up to the hangar.
The long rows of wounded extended from the after part of the hangar forward through the hangar and across the well deck to the crew's galley. There were about one-hundred and fifty men lying there on the deck. Many of them were suffering from sheer physical exhaustion and immersion. They were nauseated and shook under terrific chills. They coughed up gallons of sea-water to the deck beside them. There were far too few basins. Others sat upright and held out their hands with palms upraised. They said nothing, but there was a pleading in their eyes as they waited for corpsmen to come along and spray the soothing paraffin on the seared raw meat left by friction burns when they slid down the lines from their mortally-wounded carrier.
Most of the men in this emergency sick bay were so-called mobile cases. Among them, though, were many seriously wounded men who should've been in the main sick bay below. But there was no room down there.
I heard a low, continuous moan and moved down the long row of pain to a young marine gunner. A corpsman working on the boy didn't have to undress him. He merely pulled the shreds of what was left of his uniform away from the lad's charred skin and threw them to the deck.
The Marine had been in an AA gun crew on the Lex when a Jap bomb exploded near-by. The six-thousand degree heat generated by the blast seared nearly half of his body.
The corpsman explored through the charred cloth and burned flesh until he found a space of clear skin where he could inject a dose of morphine to deaden the suffering boy's pain.
Dr. Farquhar knelt alongside the young fellow and examined him.
"Take this man below to sick bay," he ordered.
"There is no more room down there, sir," the corpsman replied.
"Well, make room!" Farquhar snapped back. "This lad needs blood plasma and needs it badly. He's got a 40 per cent body burn and will probably die if you don't get him down there quickly."
Two corpsmen picked up the four corners of the blanket under the marine. He grunted in short, pitiful spasms as they moved him into one of the wire mesh stretchers.
"Easy, fella," one of the corpsmen said in a reassuring hoarse whisper. "You're going to be all right."
The Marine fought back the desire to scream to the full fury of the excruciating pain that ripped through his body.
I followed the corpsmen and their sorry load through the hangar to the well deck. I paused for a moment there and looked at the Lexington, still riding high in the water. Her flight deck was a long row of flame, and angry tongues of fire entwined her superstructure.
Suddenly the great flight deck of the carrier opened up amidships in a tremendous explosion. Huge flames squirted into the sky, and enormous chunks of debris went sailing hundreds of feet into the air.
"Take cover!" some one near me shouted just as the noise of the great detonation reached us. I saw several men in a small boat between the New Orleans and the exploding Lex fall prone and cover their heads with their hands.
Huge pieces of wreckage plummeted into the water from the sky. The lethal hailstorm included big portions of the flight deck and steel bulkheads.
I crawled back to my feet and continued below.
Before we got to sick bay I could smell it. The air was blue with the stench of burned flesh, ether, and vomit. The near-by marine compartment had been commandeered by Dr. Evans, and every cot in there was filled. Temporary cots had been set up in the passageway outside sick bay proper. Corpsmen were busy putting bandages on shrapnel wounds, applying compression pads to stop the dangerous flow of blood, and rigging plasma bottles above the cots. You could see the natural plasma of the men, a watery substance, oozing from their horrible burns. When enough of that leaves their bodies, they die of shock–unless the bottled plasma from the blood of people at home is injected into their veins to replace it.
A corpsman jabbed a long needle into the arm of a lad in front of me. The hollow needle was linked by a long tube to a plasma bottle swinging from the overhead. He secured the needle to the boy's arm with adhesive tape and moved on to repeat the process for the man in the next cot.
Inside sick bay I saw the white figures of Dr. Walker and a couple of corpsmen working on a young seaman. A large piece of shrapnel had entered one side of the boy's neck, severed his windpipe and jugular vein, and come out the other side. Harry was working feverishly about the boy's throat while a corpsman with forceps picked piece after piece of shrapnel out of the patients chest and abdomen.
A big, husky man cried feebly and reached for some object he could not–and never will–be able to see. The shrapnel that tore into his head ripped through the optic nerve. He it his white teeth into bleeding lips to keep from screaming as he lived over again those minutes when hell itself broke loose upon him.
I recognized Lieutenant Nixon, an aviator from the Lexington, sitting on a cot with his head buried in his hands. I had met Nixon when I shipped from California to Pearl Harbor to begin my duty aboard the No-Boat.
"Hello, Nixon," I said. "Do you remember me? I'm Chaplain Forgy."
He looked up at me, puzzled.
"Nixon. Nixon. That's right, isn't it? My name is Nixon. Yes, Nixon. Yes, I remember you, Chaplain."
"How do you feel?"
"How did I get here? Say, where am I?"
"You're aboard the New. . . "
He interrupted me with that impatient, pleading voice.
"Pardon me, Chaplain. What did you say my name was? Oh, yes, Nixon."
I told him that he was aboard the New Orleans, that everything was all right.
"What's the matter with the Lex, Chaplain? She got hit, didn't she? Say, pardon me again. I think you told me before, but I forgot. What did you say my name was? Oh, yes . . . sure . . . thanks."
The thread of memory, blasted thin by extreme shock, dangled the young officer on the brink of amnesia for hours. Over and over again a hundred times he pleaded for answers to the same questions. Who was he? Where was he? What did you say his name was?
Two corpsmen stepped from the operating table with the silent form of the boy with the bad shrapnel wounds. They placed him gently in a cot.
"What chance has he got, Doc?" I asked Walker.
Harry Walker frowned and shook his head negatively.
"I've done everything I can for him, Padre," the doctor said. "It all depends on the Man Upstairs now."
Tirelessly and ceaselessly, hour after hour, the corpsmen moved about the white cots and did their jobs like automatons.
I looked at one of the wounded boys lying motionless in a cot. He beckoned to me with his eyes. I walked to his side, and he slid a hand through the covers and took hold of mine.
"How are you feeling, lad?" I asked him.
"I don't feel so good, Chaplain."
A 30-caliber machine-gun bullet from the Jap strafers had gone through his chest and lodged next to his spine. Quite frankly and simply he looked up, without expression in his face.
"Chaplain," he asked, "would you say a prayer for me?"
I squeezed his hand a bit tighter.
"Let's both say a prayer, fellow," I suggested.
I shut my eyes in silent prayer for a moment. When I looked at him again his eyes were closed. There seemed to be an appearance of relief on his troubled face. I said "Amen" quietly, and the boy opened his eyes and forced a little smile to his thin, blue-gray lips.
I moved on down the bay from bed to bed talking to those of the wounded men who were conscious.
Some time later Dr. Farquhar walked into the room. I asked him how the boys up in the hangar were getting along.
"They'll be all right," Doc said. He paused a moment, looking at me.
"But you better go topside, Padre," he added.
I asked if something had gone wrong up there.
"No," he smiled, "but you look a bit green. C'mon."
I followed him, conscious now that I had been nauseated for hours by the sickening stench of sick bay. I was surprised when I stepped out into the well deck to discover it was nearly dark. The cruiser was racing southward through the sea.
"I didn't even realize we were underway," I commented.
Doc said we had been underway for more than an hour. I felt better. None of us dared tempt fate by talking about it at the time, but we all were uncomfortable during those hours when the No-boat sat dead in the water during the rescue operations. A Jap sub, even at distant range, couldn't have missed a big, unmoving target like that.
Miles off in the purple distance I could see the flames of the Lexington still burning against the tropical horizon. What a ship, I thought. She'd taken all those torpedoes, had been burning for hours and hours, and she's still on top of the water.
I went down to the wardroom for a cup of coffee. Crowded about the tables were several dozen officers from the Lexington. Most of them wore clothing borrowed from men of the No-Boat. They were clad in everything from dungarees to dress blues.
Suddenly the ship jumped under a violent whip. There was a tremendous report of a great explosion. Coffee spilled, and the cups rattled noisily in their saucer.
"Sounds like one of the cans has been torpedoed," an officer across the table form me exclaimed. We ran to the deck but could see nothing in the darkness.
The bridge reported receiving a message from one of the destroyers that her fantail had been blown off by a torpedo. A few moments later another message came from the same ship. She hadn't been hit at all. It was the Lexington blowing up as she sank. The explosion was so great it lifted the stern of the little destroyer–about ten miles away from the Lex–clear of the sea. We were fifteen miles from the carrier, and it felt as if the blast came from a depth charge at our side.
The molten steel and her white hot boilers exploding as the Lexington slid beneath the surfac detonated hundreds of thousand-pound bombs and torpedoes in one mighty explosion. . . .
We thought that was just like the great carrier. Proud Lady Lex was going down to the bottom of the sea, but her final, farewell salute was so tremendous that any Jap subs that might have been within a five-mile radius most certainly went to eternity with her.
Commander Hayter stepped to my side and spoke quietly.
"Padre, you've got a job to do. One of the boys has died down in sick bay. The body's in the way. Can't wait till morning."
He said the sailmaker would have a sack completed in about thirty-minutes.
I made my way slowly back to the stench and horror of sick bay. Harry Walker was beginning his twentieth operation of the night. A stretcher party finally arrived with the canvas sack, weighted with lead in the lower end. It was not in keeping with the traditions of the navy to short-cut the full ritual of burial at sea to give this lad a deep six in the darkness of midnight, but as I looked around the room I could see that there was no alternative. Life and space were precious. I called for six volunteers from among the Lexington survivors to serve as pall-bearers for their shipmate. When I saw the intent, reverent seriousness of their faces I knew the lack of ritual in the lad's burial would be more than compensated or by the true feeling of his surviving fellows.
The stretcher paused a moment as we entered the passageway just outside sick bay. We draped the canvas form with the American flag and continued our long trek to the well deck. Lexington and No-Boat men stopped whenever we encountered them in passageways. Thy stood silent and reverent as all that remained of a fallen comrade passed.
The night was pitch-black as we stepped onto the well deck. The stretcher-bearers made their way to the starboard side where they rested the foot of the stretcher poles on the gunwale. We bumped into one another clumsily as I felt in the darkness for the body.
There was no opportunity to read the burial service in this Stygian cave of the night. I rested my hand on the flag and from memory began to recite the committal service.
"I am the resurrection and the life . . ."
I found the words left my mouth almost mechanically. My own mind was crammed full of thoughts. This was my first burial at sea. How strange, how different from what I had expected. My words seemed to go out into the black emptiness of the universe. Was God, up beyond all this horrifying blackness, looking down upon this lad, or had He turned His back upon this whole day of inhumanity wherein brother rose in deadly battle against brother?
I found myself saying my own prayer within the prayer of the ritual. Mine was a pleading prayer that God would look down, that He would take the spirit of this body to dwell in a heavenly mansion which Christ had gone to prepare. Surely there must be a place up there for this lad who had given his all for those ideals which we believed made our cause just and right.
I couldn't see the other men standing there, but I heard their hushed, subdued, and throughly sincere voices as we repeated together the Lord's Prayer.
". . . For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever. Amen."
"Hold the flag, boys. It doesn't go down."
The men began to lift the poles at the head o the stretcher.
". . . We therefore reverently commit this body to the deep."
The men lifted the stretcher high now until the ends of the poles were above their heads. The canvas sack quietly disappeared in the darkness. There was no splash. The swishing of the sea as the cruiser cut through the waves buried the sound and the body. Miles below the surface of the Coral Sea, we knew, it would come to rest. May his soul rest, too.
One of the boys beside me was folding the flag he had removed from the body.
"Who was he, Padre?" he asked.
I gulped. I wanted to cry like a child, for no one will ever know who was in that sack. There was no means of knowing with a body ripped by shrapnel and scorched like his.
"He was a sailor . . . and some good mother's son," was all I could answer.
Quietly we made our way below.
–Lieutenant Commander Howell M. Forgy
From: The United States Navy in World War II
Compiled and Edited by: S. E. Smith
Part III: Chapter 5: Taking aboard Lexington's Survivors
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