ACTION OFF SANTA CRUZ
By: Commander Edward P. Stafford
From: The United States Navy in World War II
Compiled and edited by: S. E. Smith
At 3:00 P.M. on the twenty-third, the combined task force began a sweep to the northwest to interpose between Guadalcanal and the threatening enemy fleet to the northward.
By destroyers and barges at night and an occasional daylight landing, the Japanese had slowly built up their forces on Guadalcanal. Their strongest naval forces since Midway were at sea; four carriers –Shokaku, Zuikaku, Zuiho, Junyo–eight heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and twenty-eight destroyers. The goal of the Japanese Army on Guadalcanal and the Navy a few hundred miles to the north was Henderson Field. The Army was to capture the field. Carrier planes would fly in at once. Caught between the carriers and Henderson, U. S. naval forces would be sunk or forced away and the U. S. Marines, cut off, could be mopped up. The evil-smelling, worthless, priceless island would be back in Japanese hands, the threat of an American counter-attack up the Solomon chain ended, and the march to cut the U.S.-Australian life line could be resumed. But first it was necessary to capture Henderson Field.
October 22 was selected as the date on which the all-important airport would change hands. The Marines upset the schedule by driving back tank and infantry attacks. They upset it again around midnight of the twenty-third. By this time the Big E had arrived from Pearl to double U. S. Naval strength in the Solomons.
By the twenty-fourth the big enemy sea forces had been circling between Truk and Guadalcanal for nearly two weeks. Oil and patience were running low. Admiral Yamamoto in Truk radioed the Army commander on Guadal that unless Henderson Field could be delivered quickly, naval forces could be counted out. Fuel would be too low to risk battle.
In the small hours of the twenty-fifth, the Army announced Henderson in Japanese hands and Yamamoto’s fleet turned southeast. At daylight the enemy soldiers were no longer so sure about Henderson, and Kinkaid was approaching head-on at 20 knots with Enterprise and Hornet SBDs fanning out ahead. Unless the Japanese retreated hurriedly, they were committed to action, Henderson or no Henderson.
At ten minutes of one on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth Admiral Kinkaid, then some 250 miles east and a little north of the Santa Cruz Islands, learned the whereabouts of his enemy. A PBY out of Espiritu had found two carriers 360 miles ahead steaming southeast at 25 knots. With the range closing at nearly fifty miles each hour, 12 armed SBDs left Enterprise at 2:30 P.M. covering from west through north out to 200 miles. An hour later the air group commander led off an attack group of 12 more Dauntless and 7 Avengers escorted by 16 fighters. The search extended beyond the Santa Cruz Islands and well to the northward over the darkening Pacific. It found nothing. It was an hour after sunset when the planes got back over the carrier. Many of the younger pilots had never made a night carrier landing. Lieutenant Frank Miller flew his Wildcat into the sea forty miles from the ship and was killed, probably as a result of insufficient oxygen during the long, high-altitude flight. Three TBFs and three SBDs used the last of their fuel in the landing pattern and ditched. Destroyers picked up all the crews. The moon was just clearing the horizon as the last plane caught a wire and was snubbed to a stop on the Big E’s blacked-out deck.
All night Admiral Kinkaid’s ships zigzagged northwest toward the enemy at 20 knots.
Every man in Enterprise knew the next day would bring action with the enemy. The brand-new, eager air group was just ten days away from classrooms and training flights of Kaneohe. Throughout the ship new men wondered how they would act under the bombs or guns of the Japanese and the old hands went carefully about their duties assuring themselves that their particular equipments were ready for the morning and, to the best of their ability, closing their minds to the coming battle.
Commander John Crommelin called his pilots together in the wardroom. While they sat in their open-collared khaki along the green-covered tables with coffee cups before them and the smoke flattening out among the trunks and cables on the overhead, he gave them the straight, true, vigorous words they needed to hear. They had all been carefully and throughly trained, he told them; they knew how to drop a bomb and have it hit. And he damned well expected them to do just that. The safety and success of the Marines in their long, miserable struggle for Guadalcanal now depended 100 per cent on how well the Big E’s pilots did their duty. There was no room for waste, no excuse for misses. If they were going to get out there and miss, it would have been better if they had stayed back in the States and given good pilots their bunks and a crack at the enemy. Crommelin’s Alabama accent thickened as he made his last point and the lights on the low wardroom overhead glittered on his sandy, graying hair. He hoped no one had any illusions about being overworked. The men in that room were a major part of all that stood between the Japanese and Guadalcanal. And on Guadalcanal depended the war in the South Pacific. He would use them however and whenever necessary and the better they were the better their chances. He would use them over and over and over again. Now they were to rest and knock those sons-of-bitches off the face of the earth in the morning.
All the Enterprise pilots knew Crommelin’s combat record, had seen him slow roll across Kaneohe at a hundred feet to give them confidence in their planes, knew he was requiring nothing of them he was not well able to perform himself and they went to their bunks and fell asleep with his words stringing across behind their eyes–“. . . Over and over and over and over again.”
Before daylight on the twenty-sixth–while early breakfast was being served to sailors with faces still creased from their bedding, while aircraft were being armed and rechecked and pilots briefed–a message was received from headquarters of the commander, South Pacific Force, at Noumea. It was in a familiar style. Three words:
ATTACK, REPEAT, ATTACK
Only one man could have sent it and the Big E’s men knew him well. Bill Halsey was back in the war.
Halsey had taken over as commander, South Pacific Area and South Pacific Force, on the eighteenth and it was by his order that Kinkaid’s task force was engaged in the northwestward sweep which had found the enemy. A new confidence stirred through the Enterprise.
At 6:00 A.M., twenty-three minutes before sunrise, sixteen Dauntlesses left the Big E’s deck and fanned out in pairs to search the morning sea from southwest through north to a distance of 200 miles. A few moments later eight Wildcats clawed steeply up to establish a Combat Air Patrol and six more SBDs circled out on the watch for subs.
The battlefield has been chosen. It was a thousand square miles of the South Pacific lying just to the northward of the fiercely malarial Santa Cruz islands. The sea was calm except for the long ground swell that is never still and the friendly ripples of a six- to ten-knot breeze. From 1,500 to 2,000 feet drifted white and gold cumulus clouds covering nearly half the dawn sky. Above them there was no ceiling and below visibility was unlimited.
Like exploring fingers the Big E’s scouting sections probed westward across the sea that had to hold the enemy. Eighty-five miles out, Welch and McGraw on Bombing Ten passed a single-float enemyscout on the opposite course, and twenty minutes later they made the first contact, the strange pagoda-like superstructure of a Kongo-class battleship breaking the clean line of the horizon ahead. The two SBDs pulled up into the bases of the low clouds and circled the enemy force at ten miles, alternately in the bright sunlight and the gray turbulent insides of the cumulus. At 7:30 A.M. the “dits” and “dahs” of Welch’s contact report beeped loudly into the Big E’s code room with the unhurried clarity of a communications drill:
TWO BATTLESHIPS, ONE HEAVY CRUISER, SEVEN DESTROYERS. LATITUDE 8 DEGREES 10 MINUTES SOUTH, LONGITUDE 163 DEGREES, 55 MINUTES EAST. COURSE NORTH. SPEED TWENTY KNOTS
Bareheaded and short-sleeved among the Big E’s helmeted and life jacketed bridge crew, Admiral Kinkaid paced and fretted. The admiral stopped for a minute to watch the big bedspring antenna of the air-search radar slowly sweeping the sky, then walked to the rail and looked for the twentieth time at the loaded SBDs and TBFs crowded together on the flight deck. Ducking through the crowded pilothouse to the starboard wing of the bridge, he lifted the binoculars hanging around his neck and saw a bigger deck load of planes ready on the Hornet ten miles away. This was the Big E’s day to search and follow with a small strike. The real punch was on the Hornet.
At ten minutes of eight Kinkaid heard what he had been waiting to hear. The radios in the coding room came alive again and the watch could recognize the firm clear hand of Chief I. A. Sanders, flying with Lieutenant Commander J. R. “Bucky” Lee, skipper of Scouting Ten:
TWO CARRIERS AND ACCOMPANYING VESSELS, LATITUDE 7 DEGREES 5 MINUTES SOUTH, 163 DEGREES 38 MINUTES EAST
The admiral stopped into Flag Plot and looked closely at the chart. Two hundred miles to the northwest. The bright flags soared out of their bags to the yard arms and the shutter clattered on the 36-inch signal searchlight trained on the Hornet. Force speed went up to 27 knots and the bows swung into the northwest.
Fifteen miles east of the Japanese carriers, Lee and his wingman, W. E. Johnson, noses up and throttles forward, struggled for attack altitude. In Lee’s rear seat Chief Sanders hammered out his contact report three more times to be sure it was received and then dropped his key and swung his guns up to the ready. Below them the enemy ships, as though in terror of the two thintailed SBDs, turned westward at high speed and fouled themselves with thick clouds of black smoke. From high overhead two four-plane sections of the Zero CAP spiraled down to attack. Lee and Johnson turned their Dauntlesses into fighters with guns at both ends, and in a wrapped up, heavy gutted, low-altitude swirl of wings and props and stringing tracers, with the horizon usually vertical and the ocean frequently overhead, shot down three of the overconfident Zeros before ducking into the friendly cumulus. In the desperate aerial game of hide and seek that followed, Lee and Johnson became separated. There was no chance of approaching the enemy ships again, alone, and, their mission completed, they returned singly to the ship.
Lieutenant Barney Strong, with Ensign Charles Irvine on his wing, were at the tip of the third of the Big E’s probing fingers to the northward, a hundred miles from the two carriers reported by Chief Sanders. They had believed John Crommelin’s words and absorbed the aggressive, determined spirit in which they were spoken. Garlow and Williams in their two rear seats had copied Welch’s contact report on the battlewagons. Obviously the action was all to the south. Here the 500-pound bomb they each carried was wasted, the two loads of fuel and ammunition lugged around the sky for nothing. Strong could hear John Crommelin’s confident voice loud in the wardroom: ‘There is no room for waste, no excuse for misses!” Working fast, he plotted the Japanese battleship position on his board, drew the course line, figured briefly in pencil off to the side, glanced at his fuel gauges and motioned to Irvine, close on his wing. The right wings of the two Dauntlesses tipped up sharply as they turned south. Both pilots as they started climbing on the new course, eased back their mixture controls, watching the RPM and listening intently to the engines. They would need every yard they could get out of the gas they had left in their tanks now that they had added to their long search a climb to attack altitude, an extra hundred miles, and a fight if they could find it.
When Lee’s report on the carriers came in a few minutes later they had to alter heading only a few degrees.
Lieutenant Stockton Barney Strong had no illusions about the two-plane attack on a task force that he was planning. He has been on carriers since the war began. The Gilbert Island strikes. Coral Sea and the August battle off the Eastern Solomons were all behind him, plus raids on Tulagi and the Lae Salamaua area off New Guinea. At Eastern Solomons he and Ensign Richey had located the Ryujo, carefully and accurately reported her position, course, speed and the composition of her force but had not attacked through the fighters and the flak. Strong had been thinking about that since the twenty-fourth of August and every time he thought about it, he thought it had been a mistake. He would not repeat it.
In the bright sunlight at 14,000 feet the four men in the two slim Dauntless stalked the heart of the enemy’s naval strength.
The carriers that Lee and Johnson had found were Shokaku and Zuikaku. Their CAP was up, their guns loaded and trained out. A heavy cruiser and seven destroyers surrounded them.
Although they had been navigation only between careful visual searches and checks of engine instruments and fuel gauges, guessing at wind drift, Lee’s contact report and Strong’s interception were exactly accurate. At 8:30 A.M. Strong picked up two narrow yellow decks sliding toward him far below. They were Shokaku and the light carrier Zuiho, Zuikaku, and a few miles away, was out of sight under a cloud.
Chuck Irvine saw them at the same time and moved in close. Both pilots charged their guns. Garlow and Williams clicked the safeties off their twin 30s., Strong led the section in a left turn, heading for an up sun attack position. Below, the small yellow rectangles disappeared occasionally under puffs of cloud. The Zeros and the AA were overdue. Strong knew that luck alone was providing him with these moments and he was not a man to question the gift. Directly up-sun from Zuiho, the nearest carrier, he patted his head to Irvine, pulled up, split his flaps and rolled into the long dive that since December had become the purpose of his life. A thousand feet behind, Irvine followed down. Still there were no Zeros. Unruffled by any flak the dive was as smooth as a training exercise. The gunners lay on their backs wondering at the empty sky, waiting for the bouncing of the AA while the two pilots leaned forward, sweating with pure concentration, an eye pressed to the tubular scope where every pressure of right hands and toes moved the crosshairs on the expanding deck. There was time to notice that both decks were empty, that the enemy air groups had been launched. In succession at 1,500 feet their left hands went down and forward, found the release handles and pulled. It was done. And as the bombs fell away the AA came up and the Zeros closed from all directions. But it was too late. Both bombs plunged into the enemy flight deck near the stern and opened it wide with two splintering blasts rapidly followed by a pouring of black smoke.
Then the SBDs were flat down on the white caps, slipping, jerking, twisting under the lash of AA fire from the ships and repeated runs by the Zeros. With mixtures, throttles and prop controls all pushed forward over the end of the control quadrant, bombs gone, the pilots dodged and weaved and tried to cover each other. But Garlow and Williams, with their swinging, hammering .30-calibers, held the only real hope of getting the section back to base. Occasionally a Zero got careless. One of the first to attack ceased firing too soon and banked away, showing the plane’s defenseless belly. Garlow stitched it thoroughly with lead during the instant it was exposed, and the fighter exploded into flame and rolled inverted into the sea. A few moments later Williams got one too and after that the attacks were not pressed home so closely. But the Zeros still came on, banking in from astern, all prop disk and wings with the guns blinking along the leading edges. And they could not all miss. Holes appeared in Irvine’s right wing and tail, slowing him. Strong, seeing the holes and remembering his depleted fuel supply, doubted that they would make it home. But it was important that Admiral Kinkaid (and Commander Crommelin) know of the damage to the carrier. So with the Zeros still attacking, and Garlow doggedly giving them burst for burst, he opened up on his radio and announced the two hits, giving position, course and speed of the enemy force. Then he repeated it. The task force commander had to have the tactical information and John Crommelin had to know that with two SBDs they had put two 500-pound bombs on the target–two out of two. No waste of bombs or planes or gas or training. You couldn’t do any better–unless you could get home too.
The two Dauntlesses took to the scattering clouds and at nine o’clock after a forty-five-mile chase, the last of the Zeros turned back. Now it was only a problem of flying home. But home was a hunted carrier, maneuvering on unknown courses at unknown speed and maintaining radio silence some 150 salt-water miles away. With nearly empty tanks and shot-up airplanes only a direct and perfect course would provide a chance of success. At 10:26 A.M., Robin Lindsey’s paddles waved Strong and Irvine aboard the Enterprise on the first pass, and with sufficient fuel for another had it been necessary.
Every SBD of the sixteen-plane dawn search returned safely to the ship. Half had made contact with the enemy. They had shot down seven Zeros attempting interception and left a carrier and a cruiser burning.
Now it was time for Thomas Kinkaid to strike his enemy. It was, in fact, past time.
A Hornet strike of 29 planes went off first. Enterprise followed with every flyable plane aboard except for 20 fighters of the CAP, and another Hornet group of 25 fell in behind. Loaded with bombs and torpedoes and with the target 200 miles away, the various formations could not wait to join up, but departed immediately and separately in the direction of the enemy.
The Enterprise strike consisted of eight Avengers, heavy with the long torpedoes in their bomb bays, three SBDs with 1,000-pound bombs and an escort of eight Wildcats. Behind and above, Commander Gaines, the air group commander, controlled the flight from a ninth TBF. With six Dauntlesses at the bottom of the sea after last evening’s long search, six more on anti sub patrol for the task force and sixteen straggling back from the morning scouting flight, the Big E was desperately short of dive bombers.
The attack group, conserving fuel, climbed slowly out on course. To the right and left, ahead and a thousand feet above, the two four-plane divisions of Wildcats weaved gently back and forth, throttled back to avoid outdistancing the slower Dauntlesses and Avengers. Navy Cross winner Lieutenant Commander James Flatley, the skipper of the “Grim Reapers” of Fighting Ten, led the right-hand division, Lieutenant John Leppla the left. Lep had been hand-picked by Flatley out of a Dauntless squadron on the old Lexington where he and his gunner John Liska had also won a Navy Cross at Coral Sea.
Twenty minutes after take-off and about forty-five miles from the ship, the fighter pilots at 6,000 feet were getting around to charging their guns, wondering what lay ahead of them and how they would conduct themselves. Below and behind them, at 4,000, some of the Avengers had not yet turned on their radio transmitters. The earphones of all the pilots crackled gently. Nothing was on the air. Jim Flatley led his division in another shallow turn to starboard and held it for about a minute. Then slowly he turned back and glanced over his left shoulder at the formation. The TBF piloted by Lieutenant Commander John A. Collet, the CO of Torpedo Ten, was spinning, with flame and smoke pouring from the engine and back over the cockpit. A second Avenger was slanting toward the sea, the canopy shattered and the pilot slumped in his seat. Behind and below, the four Wildcats of the other division were locked in a series of tight turns and climbs with a dozen Zeros. Two Zeros were falling away from the action in black ribbons of smoke. Ahead another was turning toward the TBFs for a second run. Flatley attacked in a diving left turn; the Zero turned right and pulled up but Flatley recovered above him and attacked again with a long burst at maximum range. The Zero began to smoke but continued straight ahead; on his next attack the fighter skipper hammered it into the sea.
When the seemingly endless string of Zeros flashed down out of the sun and through the torpedo plane formation, Ensign Dusty Rhodes reacted like the others in his Wildcat division, with shocked disbelief for about two seconds and then with a hard right turn toward what was left of the other group, shucking his drop tank, charging guns, jamming throttle, RPM and mixture into the stops in an attempt to close the dangerous speed advantage the diving Zeros held and to keep them off the remaining bombers.
The heavy, rugged F4F required an altitude advantage, which its weight could quickly convert to speed, in order to match the maneuverability of the Zero. Here the Zeros had caught the Wildcats slow and committed to the altitude of the bombers they were escorting, so they could not even dive away to gain speed and fight it out at low altitude. While Leppla’s division closed up under full power and turned in to the enemy, the Japanese fighters literally looped around and through their formation, making run after run until the blue wings were pocked with holes from the 20-millimeters and 7.7s, canopies were smashed, pilots wounded.
Rhodes and Reding had opposite kinds of trouble, both bad. Rhodes’ drop tank would not release and enemy tracers set it flaming like a huge blow torch under his wing. Reding’s tank released and fell away but when it did his engine stopped, leaving him helplessly spiraling down trying to restart while Rhodes circled over him with his built-in fire, covering and receiving repeated runs by the Zeros.
In the sudden nightmare of looping, swirling fighters, of flame and tracers and engines screaming under wide-open throttle, with the G forces of wrapped-up turns tugging at his abdomen and the horizon everywhere except horizontal, Dusty Rhodes had his canopy riddled , his pushed-up goggles shot off the top of his head and his instrument panel so completely shattered by gunfire that his electric gunsight swung by its wiring before the empty space where it had been. And somehow in the midst of the holocaust his mind had time to remember how impressed he had been with the bullet hole in Machinist Runyan’s instrument panel which he had seen on first reporting to the Big E, and to hope he could get this one back to show the guys.
Dusty did not see Al Mead after leaving the formation to cover Reding, and the last he saw of John Leppla was Lep in a head-on run against one Zero and with another on his tail. Later he caught a glimpse of a half-opened, streaming chute dropping seaward and thought it must be Lep. Then Chip Reding got his engine going on the internal tanks, and Dusty’s fire burned itself out with the last of the fuel in his drop tank, and the two F4Fs joined up against the cloud of Zeros.
Rhodes’ radio was shot to pieces along with his instrument panel and Redding’s whole electrical system was out, including radio, but, by hand signal and an understanding developed out of long hours of flying together, they joined to execute a defensive, scissoring maneuver worked out by Jimmy Flatley and his friend Jimmy Thach which was beginning to be known as the Thach weave. Neither pilot could see his own tail but each could see the other’s. Rhodes started out to Reding’s left. Reding saw a Zero begin a run on Rhodes’ tail and at once turned left toward Dusty to bring his guns onto the enemy. Rhodes, seeing Chip’s turn and knowing its meaning, turned right toward Chip to draw the Zero into Chip’s line of fire. The Zero turned away and the two F4Fs leveled out again, having reversed position, with Rhodes now on the right, ready to execute the same maneuver again. They worked the weave together for minutes that passed like hours and the Zeros usually turned off when the Wildcat noses began to bear on them. But there were too many. While Dusty and Chip were weaving against a couple behind, several more were making runs from ahead on the flanks. Then, at about 2,500 feet, Rhodes’ engine stopped, its bearings burned out and fused together, the prop not even windmilling––just stationary before him. He nosed over to keep his speed and started a turn upwind to ditch, but the Zeros were not finished. Another one came in from behind and Dusty felt both his rudder pedals go slack as the control cables parted. He thought he might be able to set it down on ailerons and elevator and he remembered an old chief in flight training who had said never bail out below a thousand feet, but well below five hundred. Dusty Rhodes, in nearly a single explosive motion, hurled back the shattered canopy, stood up in the cockpit, booted the stick full forward into where the instrument panel had once been and pulled the ripcord on his chute. The riddled Wildcat with its dead engine shot under him, the parachute opened and snatched him erect, and as he swung down under it he hit the water.
He hit hard and went deep but going down he released the snap hooks that held his chute and when he broke the surface again he was clear of it. Overhead, he could see Chip Reding’s F4F headed south with three Zeros behind it and in the sudden watery silence he could hear the whine of the four engines under full power. He noticed that one of the Zeros was smoking.
When he rejoined the Big E’s strike group, Flatley found it halved. The enemy ambush, driving straight out of the sun so close to friendly forces, had destroyed outright two Avengers, including the squadron commander’s, forced a third to ditch and send fourth back to Enterprise with a damaged engine. Three of Leppla’s four fighters had gone down, and the survivor, Chip Reding, dazed and shaken at the sudden overwhelming attack and heavy losses, outran three Zeros and gentled his riddled Wildcat back toward the Big E.
The Big E’s best punch was now reduced to four Avengers and three Dauntlesses with a four-Wildcat escort. Commander Gaines, unnoticed or disregarded by the enemy, made a radio report of the action and continued with the reduced attack group.
At 10:30 A.M. the enemy battleships and cruisers came into sight, ploughing northward between the spreading shadows of the cumulus. For ten minutes the planes circled, searching behind the building clouds for the carriers. Then Lieutenant Thompson, leading the Avengers after the loss of his skipper, asked Flatley if he had enough fuel to go another ninety miles in search of the carriers. Flatley’ s fighters decidedly did not. Having shucked off their wing tanks to counter the Zero ambush, they had barely enough to return. Accordingly, the Big E’s strike took on the enemy battleship force instead.
The three SBDs (Bombing Ten planes flown by Scouting Ten crews) lined up on a Kongo-class battleship. Richey put his big bomb flush on the top of number two turret and Estes planted his amidships on the starboard side. The big battlewagon shook and smoked but plowed ahead on her mission.
While Jim Flatley’s fighters kept the gunners busy with repeated strafing runs, the Avengers circled in low to attack a heavy cruiser. They bored in close and dropped the big fish straight but the enemy skipper was able to evade them all.
On the way home a single Zero pilot made the last attack of his life into the combined fore of the three SBD gunners, and two-thirds of the way back, the Big E’s eleven planes passed directly over shouting, whistling, waving Dusty Rhodes, seated uneasily in a half-inflated, half-swamped one-man raft some 165 miles north of Santa Cruz and east of the Stewart Islands, nursing a bullet nick in his left leg, and full of salt water and a feeling of amazed gratitude that he was still alive. They did not see him.
The dive bombers of Hornet’s first strike did much better. They avoided contact with the enemy air until nine Zeros tangled with the escort Wildcats over the battleships. None got through to the SBDs, and at 10:30 they found Shokaku and Zuiho. Even from 12,000 feet they could see smoke coming from two holes in light carrier Zuiho’s flight deck. With Zuikaku under a cloud at the moment of attack, it was Zuiho that Strong and Irvine had hit. The Hornet’s bombers fought through the enemy CAP and put several 1,000-pounders into Shokaku. They left her burning from stem to stern and barely making steerage way.
The torpedo planes of that first strike, and her entire second wave, like the Big E’s battered attack force, never found the carriers but made some hits on a cruiser.
Admiral Kinkaid’s morning attack was over. Shokaku and Zuiho were out of the battle, a battleship and a cruiser badly battered. But Zuikaku and Junyo were untouched and, worse, unlocated and now launching strikes.
The Zeros that surprised and shot up the Big E’s strike only forty-five miles from her deck were part of a sixty-five-plane attack group from Shokaku, Zuikaku and Zuiho, which fifteen minutes later had the United States task force in sight. The fighting ships of Kinkaid’s Task Force 16 were formed into two tight, gray circles ten miles apart. Each circle, with the flat rectangle of a carrier at the center, raked the morning sea with parallel white lines at 27 knots. High overhead and westward in the enemy direction thirty-eight Wildcats circled, controlled through the eye of radar and the voice of radio by the Enterprise fighter director officer.
As close around the Big E’s priceless deck as high speed and full rudder would allow were a new battleship, and an anti-aircraft light cruiser. Eight destroyers formed an outer ring around the heavy ships. One of them was the Shaw, a ship that had had experience with Vals flown from Shokaku and Zuikaku. They had caught her helpless in dry dock and blown off her bow in Pearl Harbor on the seventh of December. The same skipper and some sixty of the same men were aboard.
Hornet, flying the two-star flag of Rear Admiral George Murray, the Big E’s old skipper, was protected by two anti-aircraft cruisers, two heavy cruisers and six destroyers.
Shortly after ten o’clock, her deck empty and every flyable plane in the air, Enterprise, at the center of her armored circle, was passing under the base of one of the big cumuli that covered more than half the sky. Warm rain rattled in her gun tubs and on the helmets of her sailors. Radar had enemy aircraft on the scope close in and several divisions of Wildcats were ordered to intercept.
It was too late and most of the fighters out of position.
The enemy strike group missed Enterprise in the shadow of her rain squall and spread out, driving, to attack the Hornet. Enterprise and Hornet Wildcats scrambled desperately after the enemy planes, following them down through the thickening five-inch bursts and the shifting tracer streams. Lieutenant Stanley W. Vejtasa, climbing steeply, was able to slow one down with a long burst from his six guns just before the enemy pilot reached his push-over point. Lieutenant Albert D. Pollock, carefully conserving his ammunition and firing only two of his outboard guns, silenced the gunner of an enemy dive bomber with his first burst, then, with the Japanese well into his dive on the Hornet, he turned on all six guns and burned the belly out of the enemy plane. He had to pull up hard to avoid the wreckage. Ensign Steve Kona of Pollock’s flight got one in the same dive. Ensign Donald Gordon on his second attack blew up a torpedo plane ten feet off the crests of the swells and just a few hundred yards from the force. “Flash” Gordon was ten days out of Kaneohe and this was his first action.
But most of the bombers got through. Over George Murray’s task group the automatic weapons of the new anti-aircraft cruisers and the five-inch guns of those and the other ships poured tons of hot steel and high explosive into the sky. Many of the Japanese planes, still unmistakable with their obsolete fixed landing gear, suddenly caught fire in their dives and twisted out of control. Others, hit by the five-inch, disintegrated in a flash and a ball of yellow flame and black smoke from which large and small pieces fell. But there were too many, and they dived in close and made their drops courageously and well. The commanding officer of the enemy bombing squadron, already badly hit, drove through the Hornet’s flight deck with two big bombs. Four more bombs and two torpedoes stopped her and set her afire and a torpedo plane flew into her port bow.
At 10:25, when Enterprise turned eastward into the wind to recover her search planes, the men topside could see Hornet off to the southwest dead in the water at the base of a slanting column of black smoke. Hornet’s four big bronze screws had made their last revolution, and the deck from which Colonel Doolittle’s B-25s had flown to Tokyo would rest that night on the dark mud of the abyss three miles below the Big E’s keel.
Enterprise was now the only effective United States aircraft carrier west of Oahu.
The Japanese may not have known that, but they knew very well she was the only one left to cover Guadalcanal. And Nagumo still had two untouched carriers, with their strikes on the way.
At eleven o’clock Enterprise radar reported large groups of hostile planes at twenty-three miles, closing. Again the Wildcats flew to intercept, and again they were mostly below and behind when they finally saw the bombers. Frequently the leader of a four-plane division of F4Fs would be told to “look on the port quarter” or “look on the starboard bow.” To a pilot miles away and frequently out of sight of his task force, such directions based on the ships’ heading at the moment meant nothing, and the division leaders would have done better had they simply been stationed high above the force and out in the enemy direction, provided with radar data on enemy aircraft and permitted to act according to their own judgment. The radar performed well, but poor use was made of the information it supplied.
Some two minutes after radar’s warning, Dave Pollock, orbiting over the task force with three F4Fs of his CAP division, noticed one of the destroyers dead in the water beside the bright yellow oval of a rubber life raft. A pilot was being rescued and Dave hoped he was one of the Big E’s fliers, missing on the morning strike. As he watched there was some sort of activity in the bright blue sea a few hundreds yard off the destroyer’s beam. Something was circling erratically just under the surface and leaving a wake. A torpedo. From a mile up Dave could make it out well enough, but he knew that from the low deck of the destroyer, or even from her thirty-five-foot bridge it would be hard to see. He had to warn the ship but he had radio contact only with the FDO and there was no time on the already too busy circuit to relay. He decided to go down and explode the tin fish with his guns. He knew the jittery shipboard gunners would fire on him but at least he could call attention to the torpedo. He turned over the lead and dived his Wildcat for the water. As expected, the destroyer opened fire at once, and her sisters joined in viciously. Pollock, cursing, tried to ignore the tracers and made repeated strafing runs on the circling torpedo, his bullets churning the sea around it. After the second run, the surface gunners saw his friendly markings and ceased fire. The destroyer simultaneously recognized his warning, and her screws began to churn just as the torpedo exploded amidships in a towering burst of white water and tumbling debris. Pollock sadly pulled up and rejoined his division.
The destroyer was the Porter. She completed the rescue of Lieutenant R. K. Batten and his gunner R. S. Holgrim. Batten had ditched his Avenger after the morning ambush of the Big E’s strike. The Porter could not be salvaged with the enemy so close. Batten and Holgrim jumped across to the Shaw when she came alongside to take off survivors, and watched from her deck as she sunk the wounded Porter with her five-inch guns.
While the badly positioned, poorly directed Wildcats were struggling for a shot and Pollock was trying to save the Porter, the Big E’s fire control men were working hard to bring the new fire-control radar onto the approaching enemy. Theoretically and in controlled tests, the five-inch guns firing under the direction of this equipment could knock down targets at long ranges and invisible from the ship in clouds or darkness. Now its scopes would not pick up the incoming planes. At 11:15, as at Eastern Solomons, the men of Enterprise could see the shining dive bombers of the Imperial Navy plunging out of the clear sky directly overhead. They were flashes of silver that made small popping noises. At first they seemed ridiculously small and unmoving, but they looked unmoving only because they were moving straight toward the eye of the looker. Then swiftly they began to grow, and on all the waiting ships the gunners opened fire. One of Flatley’s Reapers, glancing down at that moment, thought the San Juan had been hit and exploded, but she had simply commenced firing with all her guns. On South Dakota a hundred muzzles flamed in steady mechanical unison and the dark brown powder smoke sprang from her decks and superstructure and drifted out astern. The Portland and every destroyer in the screen hammered steel into the sky. But the Enterprise Orrin Livdahl’s gunners had the easiest shooting. For them there was no deflection. Each plane was pointed down the barrels of her guns. She was the bull’s-eye of the task force target.
On the bridge Captain Osborne B. Hardison held his helmet on with his left hand as he looked straight up at the chain of dive bombers twisting down on his ship, and maneuvered with full rudder to spoil their aim. A scant thousand yards away 45,000 tons of battleship matched his every turn, remaining at the Big E’s side like the wingman in a flight section.
Enterprise staggered through a storm of bombs and falling planes. The sea spouted into columns around her and her hull jarred and rang with the water hammers of submerged explosions. For four minutes she fought it out with the seasoned, determined Japanese airmen who were less than two hours off the decks of her old enemies, Shokaku and Zuikaku. Half of them were caught and dismembered in the shifting web of tracers and became momentary flares of gasoline on the broad surface of the Pacific. Others were harassed by the rising metal into dropping early and turning away, often into the guns of Flatley’s frustrated Wildcats. Through the measured booming of the five-inch and the steady hammering of the smaller guns the men topside could hear the mounting roar of enemy engines which faded suddenly as they pulled out across the deck. Below, men braced their feet wide on the oily gratings of the engine and fire-rooms as the Big E heeled to full rudder, first one way, then back. The men of the repair parties had checked and rechecked that the 662 water-tight compartments were buttoned up tight, with every hatch and door and scuttle not used to fight dogged down solidly. Now they sat on the steel decks of passageways and small compartments with their tools and apparatus around them in the dim red battle light, and waited for the clank and the blast that would give them something to do.
It came at 11:17. John Crommelin, standing life-jacketed and helmeted on the open bridge and watching the incoming dive bombers with professional detachment, suddenly announced, “I think that son-of-a-bitch is going to get us.” The 550-pound bomb ripped through the forward overhang of the flight deck just to port of the center line, was in the clear again for some fifteen feet, went through the fo’c’sle deck and then left the ship again through her portside. Its delayed-action fuse, intended to fire in the vitals of the ship, detonated it in the open air just above the ocean surface and close to the port bow. Fragments sprayed the side of the ship, leaving jagged holes of all sizes from a quarter of an inch to a foot. A Dauntless parked on the starboard bow was blown overboard. With it to his death went Sam Davis Presley, a first class aviation machinist’s mate, manning the twin 30s in the rear seat.
Another man was killed and several wounded in the Radio Direction Finder Room. A tank was flooded with salt water. A small fire licked the edges of the hole in the flight deck and others burned below in the holds. Another SBD caught fire and gasoline ran from its pierced wing tanks to feed the flames. Machinist Bill Fluitt, the gasoline officer, charged forward on the flight deck, yelling and getting help as he ran. He took down the guard rails and, as the attack went on and enemy gunners swept the deck with machine-gun fire, pushed the burning plane and it’s rapidly baking 500-pound bomb overboard.
Ralph Baker, a first class photographer’s mate, calmly taking pictures of the action on the forward edge of the flight deck, had his left index finger severed and his camera deeply dented by a bomb fragment as he held it a few inches from his head.
In the same minute, another bomb hit just aft of the forward elevator in the middle of the flight deck and broke in half. Part exploded in the hanger deck, destroying two spare planes lashed to the overhead and five more below them. The nose half went through two more decks and detonated in the officers’ quarters where Repair Party Number Two was stationed. Repair Two was wiped out. So was the medical party which had been manning the battle dressing station there. Forty men were blown apart or fatally seared by the blast. Stubborn fires flared up in bedding, clothing and the personal effects of the officers whose quarters had been demolished. Light, power and communication lines were cut. The fire mains were damaged. Salt water from the ruptured mains mixed with blood and oil. Pieces of men, internal and external, slid back and forth as the ship heeled, and the choking smoke poured into the hangar deck and out through the small neat hole above. From forward and aft Herschel Smith’s damage control parties closed in on the flaming shambles.
Of the six men in the handling room crew adjacent to Repair Two, four were killed. The other two were knocked out by the blast and came to in the dark, smoke-filled wreckage littered with the torn bodies of their shipmates. Jim Bagwell, a third class gunner’s mate, groped his way, only half alive, through the flames to where a shattered hatch let in light from the hangar deck above. As he started painfully up the short vertical ladder, William Pinckney, a third class officers’ cook and the only other survivor, found the same hatch. In the first seconds after the bomb, the burnt area was worse than any imaginable inferno. Flames towered out of the smoke that burned the eyes and lungs. There were dark holes where the steel deck had been. Even a half-conscious man could smell gasoline enough to blow the whole deck again any second.
Carefully, little colored Bill Pinckney helped Bagwell up the ladder, but when the gunner’s mate got his hands on the hatch combing at the top he yelled sharply with pain and fell back to the deck unconscious. With fires above and below, the hangar deck hatch was hot enough to sear the flesh. Nearly blind with smoke and barely able to breathe, still in shock and his ears ringing from the bomb blast a few feet away a few seconds ago, Pinckney picked Bagwell up and lifted him through the hatch to safety before he climbed the ladder himself.
The battle did not stop to let Enterprise dress her wounds. The chain of Vals still unwound down the sky, each link lashing viciously as it flashed overhead. Sho and Zui’s pilots could see the holes and the smoke and they were eager to complete the kill. Their bombs threw tons of water on the Big E’s deck, knocking her men from their feet, throwing the guns out of position. The bullets of their gunners searched her decks and gun positions. On their five-inch, 40s, 1.1s and 20s the Big E’s men steadily and angrily returned the fire. And South Dakota supported them with a beautiful seamanship which kept her close, and a constant, effective fire from a hundred guns.
Japanese aircraft fell out of the sky at the rate of one to every two bombs dropped. At a single instant three were visible from the Big E’s bridge, bright flares streaking black smoke down toward the sea. The cost was high, but just one bomb might finish the only carrier the Americans had left and give Guadalcanal back to the Emperor.
At nineteen minutes after eleven there was a muffled explosion aft of the island on the starboard side and almost every man standing on his feet aboard the Enterprise was knocked to her deck. The wounded, driven ship shook the full length of her eight hundred feet so violently that any given point shipped up and down through a foot and a half, every second for several seconds. Machinery and equipment were flicked from their foundations. With the carrier turning hard to port, the flight deck slanted to starboard, and each time it whipped, the parked planes rose in the air and banged down nearer the starboard side. The farthest SBD forward and to starboard went overboard; a little farther aft another landed in the gun gallery. Tools and equipment secured to the overhead crashed down onto the hangar deck. Mercury spilled from the big master gyros. The entire foremast rotated one-half inch in its socket, throwing out of alignment all the complex antennas mounted on it. The after-bearing pedestal on one of the high-pressure steam turbines which drive the ship was cracked. A fuel tank was opened to the sea and Enterprise began to leave a broad trail of oil for the enemy to follow. Two empty fuel tanks were flooded and she listed a little to starboard. At 11:20 the attack appeared to be over.
Loading crews cleared the hot piles of empty casings from around the guns. Some of the 40-millimeter crews, working fast, changed barrels; the used barrels hissed briefly in the cooling tanks.
On the bridge Captain Hardison stood close to his talker, receiving reports of damage and corrective action being taken from Herschel Smith and George Over in Central Station. He quickly granted permission to counter-flood as necessary to take the list off the ship and frowned at news of the heavy casualties in Repair Two.
Admiral Kinkaid hunched over his chart in Flag Plot with his staff and listened to radio reports of the attempts being made to save the Hornet. Admiral George Murray was shifting his flag to the cruiser Pensacola since radio communications no longer existed in Hornet. Northampton was attempting to take her in tow.
Enterprise was showing less smoke as the fire-fighting crews from forward and aft converged on the fires around Number One elevator. Her propulsion machinery, except for the cracked bearing pedestal, was undamaged and she maintained a steady 27 knots. But in the battle dressing stations, Commander John Owsley, the senior medical officer, Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Adair and other medical personnel worked steadily against pain and loss of blood and death, injecting drugs, applying tourniquets and splints, dressing burns, suturing wounds, amputating shredded limbs.
And down on the first platform deck ten men were trapped in the five-inch ammunition handling rooms for the forward guns. The only way out was through the access trunk directly above which now was eight feet deep with salt water from the hoses which battled the fires overhead. One of the men trapped was little twenty-year-old Vicente Sablan of Guam, who at Pearl Harbor had known the Japanese to be “very bad and tricky. But we Americans too smart. We catch him and give him hell.” Sablan had grown much older in the ten months since those words were spoken and most of his aging had been to the sound of the remote hammering of the guns on deck and the huge booming of near misses in the deep handling room where he was now sealed with nine other men, three Caucasian, four Negro and two Filipino.
At 11:27 a lookout reported a periscope off the starboard beam, and the Big E leaned hard to put her stern to it before it was identified as a porpoise.
At 11:44 another periscope was reported in the same position but there was no time to maneuver. Fifteen torpedo planes were boring in from both bows to catch the Enterprise as they had done the Hornet, whichever way she turned.
Admiral Nagumo has launched these torpedo planes with his dive bombers from Sho and Zui. They were to attack at the same time, dividing the fire of defending guns and complicating almost hopelessly the problem of evasion. But they had arrived half an hour after the bombers, and now it was the guns of the task force against the shining Kates, flat on the water, holding their torpedoes for close-in drops.
The regularly spaced black five-inch bursts building neat rows close to the surface flamed one plane five miles out. Briefly the spray rose above the greasy smoke where he went in. Captain Hardison held his ship on course, waiting for the AA to take effect, waiting to see which group of planes dropped their torpedoes first. On either bow the destroyers increased speed with chuffs of smoke to take position between the carrier and her enemy and take the torpedoes themselves if necessary. The guns were trained horizontally and there was no problem of loading at high-elevation angles or squinting into the bright sky. The tracers skimmed straight and flat to meet the planes. Three miles out a Kate on the port bow pulled up suddenly, rolled inverted and crashed. Two more came apart and skidded in as the 20-millimeters opened up at two miles. Then, in quick succession the five remaining Kates on the starboard bow made their drops and turned away. Captain Hardison looked quickly to port; four more were coming in but had not yet released. To starboard and a little ahead now he could see the parallel wakes of three torpedoes close together and moving fast, the middle one slightly ahead. It was a beautiful drop and if the Big E continued on course they would hit her amidships and rip out her insides. For a second the bridge watch was silent, poised. The quartermaster at the helm, the seaman at the engine order telegraph, the officer of the deck, waited for the skipper’s command. At the end of that long second it came.
“Right full rudder.”
“Right full rudder, sir!”
The helmsman spun his wheel, pulled over the top and down hard with his right hand, letting it carry around to the bottom, then reaching up for another hold, getting his back into it, bending his knees a little with each downward pull. The gray pointer slid down the right side of the rudder angle indicator mounted by the wheel until it stopped at 35 degrees right. Back in the steering engine room the starboard ram was all the way aft, the full gleaming length of the port ram exposed. The three-story rudder with its top ten feet below the hull was angled far out to starboard and the wash of the starboard screws poured onto it, increasing its effect. The Big E’s stern began to slide across the sea to the left, and slowly the bow came right toward the bubbling eschelon of the torpedo tracks, as though to meet them. The flight deck with its smoldering holes leaned down to port and, having done all that could be done, Captain Hardison stood on the port wing of the bridge to witness its success or failure. Admiral Kinkaid came silently to stand beside him.
Now there were only a few hundred yards separating Enterprise and the three bubbling lines on the sea’s surface. They seemed to increase speed as the bow swung onto them and then from the bridge they were out of sight under the port overhang of the turning deck as the Captain ordered: “Rudder amidships” and the quartermaster spun the wheel down to port. The Big E straightened up from her turn and the three torpedoes, running straight and true, passed ten yards down her port side, parallel, at 40 knots.
Enterprise, safe for the moment from the most threatening of the torpedoes launched against her, was now headed straight for the destroyer Smith, which already had enough trouble without being rundown by a carrier. An enemy torpedo plane, smoking and barely under control after tangling with a pair of Wildcats, had flown straight into her forward gun mount. Flames shot up higher than her mast, engulfing her bridge and superstructure, and as they were beginning to recede the Kate’s torpedo had baked off with a roar, making everything forward of the stack untenable. Somehow, the destroyer had stayed on course and at fleet speed, and her after guns continued to hammer away protectingly at the planes attacking Enterprise.
Captain Hardison came left again and cleared the Smith, which dropped back and then moved up astern of South Dakota and buried her burning bow in the high wake of the battlewagon. In another few minutes her fires were out and her skipper returned to the bridge and resumed his duties in the screen.
But Enterprise was still in trouble. Another torpedo was sighted on the starboard bow. There was no room this time to turn inside it. It was too close and too fast. The bow was already across the torpedo course. Once again Captain Hardison came hard right, and the Big E’s stern skidded clear to port as the “fish” passed thirty yards to starboard. A half-mile farther up the fading torpedo wake, Enterprise plunged past the wreckage of the Kate that had dropped it. From the debris two half-drowned oriental faces looked up in hatred.
From dead astern now five more Kates, fast and low on the water, maneuvered for attack position. Like Gene Lindsey attacking the Kaga at Midway, but with far faster aircraft, the Japanese pilots swung wide for a shot at the Big E’s port beam. Like the Kaga’s late commanding officer, Osborne Hardison kept swinging to starboard, presenting only his narrow stern while the task force guns blasted steadily at the circling torpedo planes. And, as it had been at Midway, the tactic was successful. Within a mile of Enterprise, three were shot down in rapid succession by the storm of 20-millimeter fire from every gun in the force that would bear. The fourth, nearly at dropping point, pulled up sharply, releasing his torpedo in a climbing turn, then continued in a diving left bank to the sea. The fifth made a good drop from nearly dead astern and Captain Hardison paralleled the torpedo attack and watched it pass his ship to port.
There would have been eleven more to deal with if it had not been for Lieutenant Vejtasa.
Swede Vejtasa was the leader of a division of four F4Fs launched at 9:00 A.M. to augment the twelve Wildcats already on Combat Air Patrol and to intercept the enemy dive bombers. With him were Lieutenant Harris and Ruehlow and Ensign Leder. Although caught underneath the incoming raid, Vejtasa, by climbing hard and shooting well, was able to knock down a Val before it could begin to dive on the Hornet. Since he was too late and too low to intercept the other bombers, he led his division in an attack on two which had completed their drops and were retiring. Both flamed and fell off into the sea. For a long time, under orders from the FDO, Vejtasa’s flight circled at 10,000 feet searching the sea for torpedo planes, while more dive bombers came in overhead to attack Enterprise.
Shortly before noon, Swede heard the FDO order another flight of fighters out to the northwest and led his own in the same direction. Just as the FDO warned that the incoming aircraft might be friendly search planes returning, he made out eleven dark-green, shiny Kates below in a stepped-up column of three-plane V’s with a two-plane section at the rear. Ruehlow and Leder, after a brush with a pair of Zeros, had spotted the Kates and were already attacking. With Harris close on his wing, Vejtasa pushed over in a steep, fast, high side attack. The enemy torpedo planes were already close and slanting in at 250 knots to make their runs on Enterprise. On their first pass Vejtasa and Harris each set a Kate explosively afire, then used their speed to overtake one of the three-plane Vs just as it entered a large cumulus. In the turbulent gray belly of the cloud Harris and Vejtasa became separated but Swede did not lose the enemy. He was angry at the misdirection of the FDO and the chances lost all morning but he was clear and cold in his head. The Wildcat in his hands felt like the smooth stock and grip and trigger of a familiar rifle. And he was careful and absolutely accurate. He began with the left hand plane of the V. He flew in close, directly astern and blew him up with two short bursts of his six guns. Methodically, Vejtasa kicked rudder and slid his wildcat to the right in behind the leader. His first burst brought the Kate’s rudder soaring up and over his head, his second as the enemy began to yaw set him on fire and he fell away in a spiral to the left. In the cloud the tracers glowed like accelerated Roman candles. Still in the gray damp of the cloud, Vejtasa eased over behind the remaining enemy who began a shallow right turn. Swede’s six guns raked it from engine back to tail in a single long rattle of bullets and it flamed violently and nosed abruptly downward.
In the shredding fog above him and to the left, Vejtasa saw the shadow of another Kate and he pulled up hard in a low side run but failed to knock him down. He followed him out of the cloud where the task force AA at once took over. Swede could see the enemy was too high and too fast for an effective drop and let the AA have him. It was this plane that crashed the Smith.
Vejtasa circled at 3,000 feet outside the ring of destroyers and with the last of his ammunition shot down a fifth torpedo plane as it was attempting to retire low on the water after its run.
Thus did Swede Vejtasa, on a single-combat flight, shoot down two enemy dive bombers and five torpedo planes with one more probable. Out of the eleven Kates which he discovered deploying for an attack on his ship, he presonally destroyed five and led his wingman on a run that accounted for a sixth. Three others jettisoned their torpedoes and fled and it was the opinion of Vejtasa’s commanding officer, Jim Flatley, that “the other two were so demoralized that they were ineffective.”
Captain Hardison, by clear, fast thinking and flawless timing, had evaded nine torpedoes dropped with the same determined skill as those which had just reduced Hornet to a drifting hulk. It is improbable that without Swede Vejtasa’s help he could have evaded eleven more.
At noon, under the low broken clouds, Enterprise was making 27 knots at the center of her bristling task group. South Dakota, still on her starboard quarter, could see she was down by the bow. Black smoke streamed aft from the holes in her flight deck. Within a radius of twenty miles, almost her entire air group circled in small formations or singly, low on fuel and ammunition, waiting to come aboard. Hornet’s successful strike, having laid Shokaku open like a sardine can had only the Big E’s deck on which to land. But Enterprise could receive no planes on her holed and smoldering deck, with the raw ulcer of bomb damage below and bogies still showing on her scopes. With her guns trained out and ready, her radars and binoculars searching the sea and the sky, she concentrated on repairing her damage and saving the lives of her men.
The second bomb had ruptured three decks just aft of Number One elevator on the Big E’s center line. A tangle of broken planes was burning in the hangar deck and flaming gasoline had run down into the forward elevator pit. On two decks staterooms, washrooms, dressing stations, gear lockers and ammunition handling-rooms were demolished. Flames licked at several electrical cables, wrecked equipment and steel rubble in the smoking darkness. Doors and hatches were blown open, decks and bulkheads blasted out of shape, piping slashed, machinery scored and riddled. And below the worst of the damage, in the ammunition handling-room for the forward five-inch runs, were Sablan and his nine mates. Aft of them were the five-inch powder magazines, on both sides narrow void spaces separating them from fuel tanks and, on the other side of a solid watertight bulkhead forward of them, workshops, and elevator machinery. Below them was aviation gasoline and above were smoldering staterooms directly under the bomb explosion point. There was only one access to them, a vertical trunk leading up through the storerooms to the wrecked living quarters. There was a firmly closed watertight hatch in the trunk on the overhead of their compartment. A similar hatch directly above in the deck of the demolished living space had been blown off by the bomb. The trunk was eight feet deep in salt water and chemical foam from the fire fighting above and clogged with wreckage and parts of bodies. There was no light and dangerously little air. The battle telephone was dead. Paul Petersen, electrician’s mate second class, was senior petty officer in charge. With him were Carl Johnson (another electrician’s mate), five officers’ cooks––Bagsby, Richardson, Cordon, Taijeron, and Sablan––two mess attendants––Ramentas and Howard––and Schwab, a seaman. There was no panic, or hysteria. Petersen conserved the batteries in his battle lanterns and told his men to remain quiet in order to use a minimum of the valuable air. One man kept on the headset of the silent phones, hoping that they would come alive again. Overhead they could hear the encouraging sounds of the fire fighting. The two electricians knew how the ship was organized for damage control and that if she survived the action they would be rescued. The ten men waited in the dark.
In Central Station, Herschel Smith and George Over marked the damaged area on their schematics and received reports from fire-fighting and repair parties. A few minutes after the explosion scores of men were at work to minimize its effect.
The combined labor of the repair parties began to show below decks. The fires went out under salt water and foamite, and blowers were rigged to suck out the smoke and provide fresh air. The wounded were taken out and emergency lighting strung. The battle telephone connections were repaired and Chief Forrest got in touch with Petersen below.
“For Christ’s sake,” he told him, “don’t open that hatch. There’s eight feet of water on top of it. Just relax and we’ll get you out, but it’s going to take a little while.”
At a quarter past twelve John Crommelin’s began to take aboard his planes, holes or no holes, damaged or not. Back on the port quarter of the deck Robin Lindsey signaled them in with his eloquent paddles. No LSO ever had more difficult conditions. Many planes were damaged and not under full control. Number Two elevator was temporarily stuck in the down position, leaving a huge square hole in the deck less than three hundred feet from the stern. With continuous reports of bogies and periscopes coming in, Enterprise twisted under the low clouds, her deck heeling each time the rudder was put over. To the incoming pilots the narrow, smoking, shifting deck with a yawning pit in the landing area looked impossible. But they remembered Lindsey’s competence and their empty tanks and grimly came on in. One after another, answering Lindsey’s signals, they snarled in over the wake and droppped onto the extreme stern. The arresting cables pulled out reluctantly and stopped each plane aft of the stuck elevator. Then with a roar of throttle they taxied around the hole and forward out of the way.
Only a few pilots got aboard before a third attack came in. The others rolled up their wheels and banked away as the task force guns opened up at 12:21.
Twenty more of Nagumo’s dive bombers slashed at the Big E, dropped suddenly out of the cloud bases in 45-degree dives. The fat clouds sheltered them at first from the searching gunfire but, when they broke out, their shallow dives were terribly vulnerable. The Big E’s seasoned, angry gunners chopped down eight and riddled others so that they dropped short and turned away. Robin Lindsey threw down his paddles and jumped into the rear seat of an SBD he had just landed to empty its remaining ammunition into the attackers. Near misses threw up their familiar water spouts around the ship. With Enterprise leaning hard to port in a tight starboard turn, one bomb glanced off her exposed starboard side below the water line and detonated eight feet away and fifteen feet below the surface, dishing in her side and flooding two void spaces through breaks in the skin. The ship lashed throughout her length, her decks again whipping a full foot for several seconds. Number One elevator jammed in the up position. The damage controlmen sweating under jury lights on the third deck were sent sprawling into the blood and oil and torn metal underfoot. Petersen, Sablan and the others tensed in their dark hole where water, leaking down through broken vent trunks, was by now nearly up to their waists.
Some two hundred feet above the sealed-off, slowly flooding handling room, the whiplashing near misses and enemy strafing had so damaged the Big E’s main antenna that her search radar was blinded. Without her radar, Enterprise could see only as far as the eyes of her lookouts, which were thwarted by clouds, haze, dazzling sunlight and shadow. She was helpless to control her fighters. Lieutenant Brad Williams was the radar officer, in fact the first, in the U.S. Navy, to be so designated. More even than his admiral or his skipper, Williams knew the capabilities of his equipment and the odds against the survival of a radar-blinded ship under those enemy infested skies. He climbed the mast with a loaded tool box and went to work at the highest and most exposed point on the ship while Captain Hardison and his gunners fought off the enemy planes. The painted metal under his hands was granular with salt and sooty with stack gas and he had to hold strongly to it with one hand while trying to repair the antenna and its drive motor with the other. It was not a single-handed job and Williams finally had to lash himself to the antenna and work with both. If he noticed the continued strafing or the near misses or the violent swinging of the radar platform as the Big E leaned into her turns, no one below could tell it. He could almost look down into the five-inch muzzles that we’re answering the strafing of the Vals and feel the heat when they fired. The 40s and 20s along the deck edge barked steadily and their tracers soared past him to meet the enemy. The bomb that glanced off the Big E’s starboard side missed his so closely that for a moment, as he looked up, its blunt torpedo shape was foreshortened to a ball. The bomb’s blast destroyed his hearing for weeks and would have knocked him off the mast but for his lashings. Working hard and fast, hampered by bolts jammed with paint and salt and corrosion, Williams finished the job. In the radar room below it was evident that Enterprise would see again. Eager to get back in operation, a technician switched on the antenna training motor and Brad Williams revolved a dozen times at the masthead, his angry shouts swamped by the voices of the guns, until an officer on the bridge noticed that his majestic sweeps around the horizon were apparently unintentional.
There were perhaps three minutes of tense and busy silence for the men topside and of relative relief for the sailors trapped in the darkness below before the repaired radar picked up another strike inbound. Coached on by radar, the high-power telescopes of the forward range-finder found it seventeen and a half miles away at 17,000 feet. There were fifteen Vals in two groups with an escort of nine Zeros above. After nearly two and a half hours of attack and the threat of attack, the defending Wildcats were out of ammunition and low on fuel. Now it was up to Orlin Livdahl’s gunners and their determined supporters of South Dakota and the other ships of the force.
At eleven miles, still only high flecks of sunlight in the sky, the enemy raid disappeared behind a rain cloud. For two minutes the main barrels swung silently and the thousands of young eyes stared upward, trying to penetrate the clouds and outstare the glaring sun. Then the Vals were overhead, steep in their dives, and the guns blasted into action again. By this hour of the early afternoon, the kids who gripped the wide handle bars of the 20-milimeters and peered through cartwheel sights to follow the tracer flight, and the ones who sat in the farm-tractor seats of the 40s rotating with their humming mounts, were true veterans. They had seen that their weapons could kill the enemy before he could kill them, and seen too the bloody damage of the bombs. Now they were cool and steady and Orlin Livdahl’s careful training was paying off. Glancing up, most of them could see him high in the island at Sky Control––exposed, calm, deliberate, completely competent. As the Vals strung down for the third time that day, Livdahl’s tracers rose to meet them, shifting and converging steadily with no breaks as the loading crews worked smoothly and the well-kept guns had few jams or failures. Battery officers shifted targets to take the most threatening enemy under the heaviest fire. Chief Turret Captain Willson alone probably saved the Big E from serious damage when he directed his five-inch mount against a dive bomber which had already missed but was turning back to crash on board.
In South Dakota a bomb detonated on top of the forward turret, which was so well armored that most of the gun crew didn’t know of the hit, but a fragment seriously wounded the battlewagon’s skipper and steering control was shifted to the executive officer aft, who for a moment had no communication with the helm. Big, fast, heavy South Dakota, so magnificently handled throughout the battle, headed straight for Enterprise, and Captain Hardison turned away just in time.
San Juan took a heavy bomb that went through all her light decking and out through her bottom before it exploded. The blast shook the fast but fragile cruiser so fiercely that circuit breakers protecting her steering mechanism popped and she too lost control of her rudder in a high-speed starboard turn. The ships of the task group saved themselves by scattering until she regained control.
At 12:45 P.M. radar finally showed a sky clear of the enemy and Enterprise began again to take aboard her planes. Fighters and dive bombers were given precedence over the longer-legged Avengers but even so there were many ditching. The pilots who survived the skips and ragging splashes had plenty of time to get out their rafts while the planes floated nose down, held up for a while by the empty fuel cells in the wings. The destroyers were kept busy with rescue work.
Number One elevator, the farthest forward, seemed permanently jammed. With planes landing over the other two, it was impossible to strike any below, and by four o’clock the Big E’s long deck was so jammed with Enterprise and Hornet aircraft that Robin Lindsey could bring no more aboard. Slim Townsend’s flight-deck crew, after the long morning of work and action, fell to again. By lowering planes on the after elevators, and launching thirteen Dauntlesses for planes on the after elevators, and launching thirteen Dauntlesses for Espiritu, they made enough room to get the last air-borne Avenger aboard.
It seemed that the enemy had made his last attack. Probably he had little left to launch. He had lost 100 planes in the attacks of Enterprise and Hornet and in the defense of his own ships. Two of his carriers were out of action. More planes must have gone down from fuel exhaustion and accidents.
Admiral Yamamoto ordered his carriers to retire to the northwest and sent fast surface forces in for a night attack. But Kinkaid, with ten months of experience with the Japanese, outguessed him and pulled off to the south. The enemy destroyers found only the burning, listing derelict that had been the Hornet and quickly sent her on her long tumble to the bottom . . .
