The Nugget Page 11

  TWELVE

  Two weeks after Rooster and I got back aboard the Big E the ship departed Nouméa and headed for the waters east of Guadalcanal in company with the carriers Wasp and Saratoga. The intel briefers came to the ready room to tell us what was going on the second day out. The Japanese had mounted a major operation to retake Guadalcanal and they were coming out in force. Two large carriers, Shokaku, Zuikaku, and the light carrier Ryujo, plus an entire herd of battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and even one of their big seaplane tenders were headed south from Rabaul and Truk. A convoy of troopships carrying over 15,000 Japanese troops was close behind.

  Our mission was to break this effort up. The main problem was finding the Japanese carrier formations, preferably before they found us. As we all knew, any carrier, theirs or ours, presented a large and vulnerable target to a flight of determined dive and torpedo bombers. Bombing Six and Scouting Six began flying scouting missions, augmented by PBY flights out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. We searched the northern sectors of the Solomon Islands for the entire day and found nothing. That night, the Wasp was detached because she was low on fuel, so it was just Saratoga and the Big E left to take care of business.

  Saratoga’s scouts got lucky on the following day by finding the light carrier Ryujo. A strike was launched immediately to go get her. A PBY had actually issued the first sighting report, which was confirmed a couple hours later. We kept waiting for Admiral Fletcher to launch a strike from Enterprise, too, but he wanted to hold our air group back until he knew where the much bigger, so-called fleet carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku were lurking. At around four in the afternoon Enterprise radar detected an incoming strike formation 80 miles out. Fighting Six launched everything that could fly that wasn’t already airborne on CAP stations, while Bombing Six aircraft were struck below in anticipation of the attack. The engineers drained all the avgas lines leading to the flight and hangar decks and filled them with CO2. GQ was sounded and the ship buttoned up. We aviators didn’t really have GQ stations, so we gathered in our ready room to await developments. It was an unpleasant wait. We were locked into a space just below the flight deck by fire-isolation doors in the passageways around the ready rooms. The ventilation systems had been turned off for general quarters. Our skipper had gone to the admiral’s combat information center to watch the bigger picture. The rest of us could only sit and wait.

  We could feel the Big E increasing speed and easing into a gentle turn. A circling carrier was harder to hit than one running in a straight line, as we had learned from the Japs at Midway. We knew there were already dogfights in progress as the outer CAP went after incoming bombers. One of our gunners, who was also a radioman like Rooster, managed to patch in the CAP control radio circuit to a speaker in the ready room, so we got to listen in to the increasingly urgent chatter as our Wildcats went head-to-head with the bombers and their escorting fighters. Every pilot in the room felt the itching in his hands; we wanted to be up there. Our trusty SBDs were dive bombers, but we could knock a Zero or another bomber down almost as well as the fighters if they made the mistake of getting too close to us.

  Enterprise’s maneuvers became a little more forceful when the five-inch batteries along the flight deck opened up. All of our escorts would be shooting, too, and the sky would be turning black by the time-fused five-inch fragmenting shells. Then we felt a deep, thumping blast somewhere aft, followed by another one which sounded like it went off on the flight deck, followed instantly by a bigger blast. A minute later there was a third hit, again on the flight deck, and this one was pretty close to our ready room. A fine mist of dust and ceiling tile debris bloomed in the ready room and the lights went out for a few seconds. The flight deck guns never stopped shooting, but it felt as if the ship was slowing down. That first bomb had gone deep, and that could be seriously bad news. We got a whiff of smoke coming out of the ventilation ducts. Since they were shut down, that meant fire wasn’t too far away.

  One of the pilots shouted: Look! He pointed at the door that led to the passageway outside the ready room. The smoke wasn’t coming from the vent ducts—it was curling in around the seams of the ready room door, which, being one level beneath the flight deck and way above the waterline, was just a plain metal door. The nearest pilot got up and gingerly touched the door, recoiling immediately. There was a scramble to get something stuffed into those seams. One of the guys pulled down the briefing stage curtains and another poured coffee from the pot all over them. They then jammed the edges into the door seams.

  Lieutenant Quantrill got up onto the stage, pulled a chair up with him, and touched the overhead. It, too, was hot to the touch and we suddenly got a whiff of woodsmoke. That meant that the flight deck was on fire above us. The Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers had opted for steel flight decks; the US Navy had chosen wood to reduce topside weight and to provide a better surface for landings. A coffee cup began a slow slide off the stage table, which is when we realized Enterprise had developed a list. Quantrill, who was the senior officer present, was calling somebody on a sound-powered telephone to let them know we were stuck in the ready room and that we were getting smoke.

  Five minutes later the guns went quiet, but we hardly noticed. It was growing progressively hotter in the ready room. The coffee-soaked stage curtains had stopped most of the smoke, but the ship was still at GQ, doing damage control, so there was no ventilation. Then somebody banged on the door and shouted for us to back away. An axe crashed through the door handle side and then a large man wearing an oxygen breathing apparatus kicked the door in. Immediately the room began filling with acrid gray smoke, but the big guy was followed in by several men, each wearing and carrying an OBA. We began putting them on and trying not to screw it up; all of us had been trained, once, how to put on and energize an OBA, but that had been a long time ago. The damage-control team helped us get the systems going, and then we formed a line at the door and followed the team out into the passageway, where we could see absolutely nothing except small cones of yellow light from battle lanterns. They instructed us to grab the belt of the guy in front of you.

  They took our little conga line forward, away from where all the blast noises had come from, and finally up and out onto the flight deck, forward of the island structure. We got the OBAs off and gulped down fresh sea air. Behind the island there was a pretty substantial fire, but Enterprise was still moving forward under her own power. The gun crews were out on the flight deck helping to snake fire hoses aft to fight the fires. The deck near the five-inch mounts was littered with brass shell casings, which were trying to slide down the hill created by the ship’s list. I could see Saratoga in the distance. She appeared to be recovering aircraft. The skies were clear of AA bursts and enemy aircraft, for the moment, anyway. Big E was surrounded by escorting destroyers who had formed a ring of AA guns around their carrier. Still, we’d been hit by three bombs, and nobody topside seemed to know how much damage that penetrating bomb had done or even where it had detonated. The list was subsiding as the engineers did some counter-flooding way down below.

  We were all surprised to hear the call to flight quarters to recover the planes from Fighting Six. The ship began a slow turn into the wind. That put the smoke from the flight deck fire, which was mostly gray smoke now, off to the starboard quarter. We learned from one of the five-inch gun crews that a bomb had hit the base of the aftermost twin five-inch mount and set off the ready service ammunition inside. That’s what was burning, although it was almost out now. Twelve men had died inside the mount and in the handling room just below it. Another bomb had hit between the island and the upper five-inch mount, detonated on the deck, and caused a second fire, including setting some of the wooden flight deck itself ablaze. That fire had been put out as well. The gunners had no word about the first hit, other than that there was smoke coming out of the very back end of the hangar bay. When the Wildcats started landing we headed back down to the ready room. The passageway still stank of smoke but the air was clear now
that ventilation had been restored. Lieutenant Cox met us in the ready room and told us to suit up. Someone had located the two fleet carriers who’d just pounded Mother Enterprise.

  It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon, which meant a late-day attack depending on how far away the two big boys were. I was halfway into my flight suit when the GQ alarm went again. The Japs had sent a second raid and our fighters were being sent up again. Bombing Six was told to stand down. I elected to go topside, not wanting to be trapped in the ready room again. I watched six fighters get off the deck before that launch was also canceled. Long-range radar had seen the Jap strike formations turning around and heading back north. Our admiral decided that enough was enough and turned our formation south, away from where we thought the Japs’ big decks were, after first recovering our fighters.

  The ship secured from general quarters, so I took a fresh-air hike to the back of the ship to take a look at the damage. Both after five-inch gun mounts were wrecked and there was a big hole in the flight deck in the parking area near the blackened gun mounts. Thirty-five men had been killed in the gun mounts and handling rooms, and another thirty-five had died way down on the fifth deck, with an additional seventy men injured. The word was already out on the flight deck: we were going back to Pearl for repairs. The ship’s welders were already burning away at the hole in the flight deck, but replacing those gun mounts plus whatever had happened down below would take a shipyard.

  Saratoga’s Bombing Three had been shining while Enterprise was under attack. They’d found and wrecked the light carrier Ryujo. Then they’d launched a second strike against the bigger carriers but had been unable to find them, but they did find the 15,000-ton seaplane tender Chitose, a floating base for those nasty Kawanishi flying boats, and obtained enough hits to bring her dead in the water with major flooding. I felt like Bombing Six had been sidelined for this scrap. Wasp had left before anything started because she was low on fuel, so Sara carried the water during this particular carrier battle. It was not like the spectacular victory we’d achieved at Midway. On the other hand, the Japs had lost another carrier. That meant five since I’d begun actual flight ops. I wondered if all those graybeards in Washington had gotten the message: carriers were not some flashy distraction. Maybe the Japs had done us a favor by sinking the battleships at Pearl. We’d had a battlewagon with us during the past few days, but all she was good for was five-inch AA fire. Give them their due, they could fill the skies with frag shells from all those bristling five-inch barrels clustered along their sides, but those big sixteen-inch guns had remained centerlined.

  The skipper called a meeting that night to talk about the future. Enterprise was going back to Pearl for repairs, which might take up to two months, if you included the thousands of miles of transit involved. Once back in Pearl, the ship’s air group would be going ashore, mostly for yet more training. Some of our pilots would go back to the States to train the next class of nuggets. Others would be cross-decked to a new carrier that was coming out, but her arrival date was unknown. There were two other possibilities, but decisions had to be made before the Big E left the theater of operations, as in, tonight.

  The first option was to go to Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. They needed bomber pilots to attack the steady stream of Jap convoys coming down from Rabaul bringing Jap army reinforcements to Guadalcanal. The second was to cross-deck to Hornet, who’d missed the battle of the eastern Solomons but needed replacements in both their fighter and bombing squadrons.

  I had zero desire to go back to Pearl for yet more “training” while living in Spartan Marine barracks on an increasingly crowded island that was still doing blackout every night. And having already been to the island paradise known as Guadalcanal, I opted for the Hornet. I was a carrier dive bomber pilot, and Hornet would be staying out here and hopefully sending carrier dive bombers out to kill Japs. Any volunteers for Hornet? I raised my hand.

  The next morning Rooster and I ferried an SBD over to the Hornet to join Bombing Eight. I’d hoped it wouldn’t be another episode of nugget-training new guy in new squadron, but I needn’t have worried. They greeted me as “Fish” Steele, and the skipper had promotion papers in hand, courtesy of a message from Bombing Six. I was now Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Steele. No more En-swine jokes. Three other pilots from Bombing Six had also cross-decked, so I didn’t feel lonely. Rooster disappeared down into the hangar bay with the SBD I’d flown over. I knew I could count on him to get the straight skinny on my new squadron by day’s end, but my first impression was of a competent and friendly outfit. It was interesting to watch them try not to think about the pilots and gunners who were gone when they saw all the new faces in the ready room.

  We cross-deckers met with their flight officer, Lieutenant “Skivvy” Hastings, for a review of Bombing Eight’s formation procedures, tactical radio rules, and other standard operating procedures. There wasn’t much that was different from the way we’d been doing things in Bombing Six, but there were still bad feelings in Hornet’s squadrons about what had happened at Midway, where her air group essentially missed the show by flying out the wrong way. The fact that I had been at Midway and obtained direct hits led to my being asked what I thought of their SOP, which was quite a contrast from my first days with Bombing Six. For once I had the good sense not to offer any sage advice to my new squadron mates. Midway was still a raw nerve with these guys.

  We had about a month to absorb all this before we found out that the Japanese navy was coming in force to settle the Guadalcanal issue once and for all. That was the good news. The bad news was that Saratoga had been torpedoed, again, and was on her way back to Pearl, leaving Hornet the only carrier in the southwest Pacific. Enterprise would be returning soon, but her exact arrival date was unknown. The other big news was that Vice Admiral Halsey had relieved Vice Admiral Ghormley as the overall naval commander in the southwest Pacific. Halsey had an interesting reputation and was known for his aggressiveness. He was also an aviator. The Bombing Eight skipper knew him and told us to stand by for a new way of doing business. True to form, one of Halsey’s first fleet-wide messages ended with the exhortation to kill Japs, kill Japs, then kill more Japs. It was a stark contrast to the way the carriers had been handled under Ghormley’s command. In late October we got our first taste of Halsey’s fondness for offense. The Hornet task force was ordered to head northwest to take on a Japanese carrier fleet bearing down on Guadalcanal. Enterprise was back and would rendezvous with Hornet in thirty-six hours, and then both carriers would begin the deadly scout plane dance.

  Two mornings later, we were ordered to suit up for a strike against the Jap carrier formation. Enterprise had already launched. Hornet’s fighters were being kept back on the theory that the Japs would be coming, while Enterprise fighters would accompany her bombers and provide cover from Zeros over the Jap formation. Rooster and I climbed aboard the SBD we’d brought over from Enterprise. She was armed with two 500-pounders due to the long range to the targets. Half of the fighters launched ahead of us; the rest were kept back aboard on five minutes readiness so that they’d be fresh and fully fueled if the Japs did show up. We were fifth to launch, but as I brought my bird up to full power the engine stuttered and then lost RPM. I throttled back and tried again. This time the engine wouldn’t even go to full power. I hand-signaled the launch crew that I had a bad bird. They signaled me out of the lineup and back down the starboard side to the parking area. Number six in the takeoff order launched without incident, as did the rest of the strike, a total of twelve SBDs. I was cursing the engine as the flight deck crew attached a pusher boom and headed us for the after elevator. I’d never missed a strike. I told Rooster it was all his fault, and he acknowledged that he was, indeed, the guilty bastid. I knew he was as disappointed as I was, but there was nothing we could do about it.

  I climbed up to the primary flight deck control center, called PriFly, which was a steel box overhanging the flight deck on the island, much like an airport’s tow
er. I asked if there was another bombing bird. No such luck. Did Scouting Eight have any birds? All gone hunting. Relax, Fish. You hit three carriers; you need to give some other guys a chance to shine. I was making it known that I wasn’t too happy about that when an alert came from the combat information center down below: many bogies, inbound, range 55 miles. Launch the CAP. I looked at my watch: 1045. Our strike and their strike were going to pass each other.

  There was an immediate scramble down on the flight deck as the rest of the fighters, whose pilots had been sitting in their cockpits, lit off their engines and crowded forward. I told Rooster to lay below into the hangar deck. For myself, I didn’t want to repeat the experience of being trapped in the ready room if the Japs got lucky, so I slipped out of PriFly and went down two levels and around to the outboard side of the island, away from the flight deck. I found a small niche on a gallery catwalk between two stacks of the new-model twenty-man inflatable life rafts. It gave me a great view of the action and some protection from the 40 knots of wind streaming over the ship. To my surprise I was joined by Rooster, holding onto his white hat and close on my heels. Apparently he didn’t fancy being on the hangar deck during an air attack any more than I did the ready room.

  The ship was going to general quarters as the remaining fighters wobbled off the front end and began clawing for altitude. The wind across the bow grew noticeably stronger as Hornet increased speed. When the last Wildcat went off the bow she began a slow, shallow turn to port. I could see the escorting destroyers moving in closer, their gun mounts training out in the direction of the approaching swarm of Jap bombers. I moved out to the edge of the gallery deck, found a perch on an equipment box just below the signal bridge, and settled in to watch the show. The skies were partly cloudy, the seas relatively calm, and every gun on the ship was manned and ready. I started scanning the sky for Japs. Rooster stayed back in the notch between the life rafts and sat down on the trembling deck.