The Nugget Page 9

  As the meeting broke up I sat there in my chair for a moment, trying to make sense of everything. Lieutenant Quantrill walked by.

  “Chow time,” he announced with his usual stern face.

  “Not that hungry,” I replied.

  “That’s too bad. Get down to the wardroom and eat. We may have to do a night launch if the Japs press their case with those battlewagons. You’ll need fuel, Fish, just like your airplane.”

  The way he said “Fish” made it clear that I was not on his best-buddy list. He’d missed with his bombs on the first attack; I hadn’t. Could that be it? I knew that was a petty thought, but it wasn’t as if I’d just been along for the ride.

  Hell with it, I told myself, and went below to get some of that green-glaze ham and powdered mashed potatoes.

  TEN

  The next day a final strike was called. A Catalina from Midway had reported seeing a carrier and two damaged cruisers in the vicinity of yesterday’s strike. There’d been no confirmed sightings of the big support fleet that had come out with the four flattops with the invasion force for Midway Island. Despite that fact, they might still be nearby. The distance was just over 250 miles, a long run, but if the Catalina’s report was correct, there wouldn’t be very much opposition at the other end, and certainly no Zeros. My main concern was that we were missing some of our most experienced aviators due to the previous day’s action. We’d lost thirty-one planes from our air group alone.

  The flight out to the target area took us into fog and mist about halfway there. We were flying at 13,000 feet. When it was clear, we could see. The converse was also true. We finally got to the estimated position and found empty ocean. It turned out that the Hornet had also launched an earlier strike on the news that Hiryu might still be afloat. They’d found a lone destroyer in the area where we’d torn up Hiryu, but were unable to land a bomb on it. We got to that location as the Hornet guys were headed back and we tried our luck. Nobody could hit that feisty tin can and he never stopped shooting at us the whole time, even taking down one of our planes. We finally gave it up, and, with no sign of Hiryu, headed back to the Big E, arriving after dark for the major fun of night carrier landings. At least this time we had fuel left.

  The following day brought more reports of Japanese ships to our northwest. Hornet sent out a strike that found two heavy cruisers, apparently damaged and leaking a lot of oil, along with two destroyers, but no carriers. They promptly attacked. Big E had sent out a morning scouting mission looking for any threats to our northwest, but they’d found nothing. Everybody assumed that the Jap admiral had decided that, without any air cover, it was time to get his much diminished fleet out of there. Then in the afternoon we got the order to put a strike together and go after those two cruisers. The Hornet after-action report said that they had heavily damaged both of them.

  When we arrived they certainly looked damaged, but from the volume of AA fire that came sizzling up at us this wasn’t going to be a routine mop-up mission. We had come to the party with 500-pounders so that we could carry more avgas because of the long range. The first three guys to roll in achieved one hit and two very near misses. It helped that neither cruiser could maneuver. I was number four and planted my bomb centerline behind a cruiser’s main smokestack. It didn’t diminish her AA fire as I pulled out, though, and I clearly heard the snaps and pings of Jap metal bouncing off my plane. Still, I was satisfied that my bomb had to have gone off down in a main machinery space. When we left, both ships looked like goners, smoking from every orifice, topsides wrecked, the gun barrels of their turrets drooping over the side as if exhausted, and white plumes of steam bleeding out of the hull instead of the stacks. I told Rooster that if they did get them home, they’d be used for scrap steel.

  “They ain’t never gonna get them pogues home, Boss. Believe it.”

  I had to agree with him. And yet, throughout our attack, both ships had kept on shooting, and shooting pretty well. They had no air cover and only two small destroyers to help with the AA problem, but they kept fighting. When I pulled out I’d taken a good look at their topside areas and they were a shambles of broken and blackened metal, ruptured steel plating, leaning superstructure elements, and yet all of it populated by bright yellow and red flashes as those game bastards kept shooting at us. Above all else, that fact made an indelible impression on this ex-nugget.

  That night Admiral Spruance took the task force north, refueling as we went. The Japs had landed troops on Attu and Kiska Islands, part of the Alaska Territory island chain that extends 1,200 miles into the Pacific Ocean. We pilots spent a lot of time debriefing our exploits to the intel people and then catching up on some much-needed sleep. Down in the hangar deck the mechs worked round the clock to repair damaged or simply broken aircraft. The next morning I had a cigarette out on the edge of the flight deck and watched them push three SBD carcasses over the side. They’d been deemed too damaged to repair, so the mechs had stripped them of all usable parts and then the flight deck crew pitched them overboard.

  It was a sad sight. Those warbirds had done their job, so it was hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that they were as expendable as empty ammo crates. Like us, my disloyal brain reminded me. Somewhere back in the States a crew of aviation assembly line workers, mostly women, had put their everything into making those planes.

  Rooster showed up to join me in the morning cigarette ritual. He informed me that one of the planes just sent overboard had been ours. A Jap shell had cracked the keel during the cruiser strike. Good Boeing iron that it was, it held up until I landed and the tailhook caught, at which point the entire fuselage had been torqued ten degrees out of alignment. Damn, was all I could say.

  We were halfway up to Alaska and doing strike planning when Admiral Nimitz recalled the entire task force to Pearl. Apparently there was other business to attend to, although, once again, we pilots weren’t told any details. The skipper thought our reversal served the Japs right. Why in the world would they invade a couple of remote islands up there near the Arctic, he pointed out, unless to attract some American forces to an ambush. Now they can just sit there and shiver. And starve: rice doesn’t do well in Alaska.

  Our arrival in Pearl turned into something of a celebration. The Pacific Fleet command had put out a public news bulletin that the carrier fleet had defeated a Japanese carrier fleet at Midway. They were a little sketchy on the details of actual losses in the public release, theirs and ours, but the import was clear: for the first time since Pearl Harbor we’d smacked them hard and sent them packing. Among the naval commands at Pearl, however, the “butcher’s bill” was beginning to sink in. Still: we’d lost one carrier; they’d lost four. Everyone around the devastated harbor had a little more spring in their step after that news got out.

  Bombing Six had flown off the Big E from 50 miles out and landed at one of the new air stations on Oahu. The other carrier squadrons did likewise, and then there was a general rebalancing of three carriers’ worth of planes among the two surviving flattops. Pilots were reassigned to bring squadrons up to full strength again. The good news was that about a third of the guys we’d thought had been killed in action had been picked up by a three-day multi-plane Catalina seaplane sweep carried out after the Japs had retired.

  To my surprise some of the most experienced and senior pilots were sent back to the States to the aviation training command to teach the next crop of nuggets the ropes of carrier warfare. That served two purposes: the instructors were real combat veterans, and an eight-month tour in the training command was a great way to recover from the strain of carrier warfare. They’d be back to the fleet soon enough, rested, refreshed, knowing the latest technical and tactical stuff, and flying brand-new planes when they did come. The first week back I got to spend a couple of days down on Waikiki Beach at a fancy hotel. Each squadron got some beach time, and that was wonderful. The only thing missing was the sight of bathing beauties. Everywhere you looked there were only hundreds of young men loun
ging around in khaki shorts, Hawaiian shirts, and all sporting sunburns and exotic drinks involving rum, pineapple, and tiny parasols. I remembered those damned things well and stuck to beer. And thought about my classmate and Mai Tai buddy, who was probably still aboard the capsized Oklahoma. Goddamned war.

  The next week we regrouped as a squadron and spent our days completing a myriad of admin duties: maintenance, after-action reports, annual inspections, and all the other overburden associated with being a naval officer. The Monday after that the entire squadron, officers and enlisted, were called to the air station movie theater, which we found surrounded by armed Marines. A passing Jap bomber had strafed the air station and put several holes into the ceiling of the theater, so now there were white cotton plugs everywhere to keep out the occasional tropical shower.

  Once inside we found out what the big deal was all about. We were there for a highly classified briefing on something called Operation Watchtower. Apparently the Allies were going to seize a couple of islands down in the Solomons chain to prevent the Japs, who were already there, from achieving a stranglehold on the seaborne supply line between America and Australia. The Solomons were a very long way from Pearl, some 3,500 miles. The Japs’ main base was at some place called Rabaul, and they had begun construction of an airfield on an island called Guadalcanal, some 660 miles from Rabaul.

  These names were exotic and, of course, totally foreign. None of us had even ever heard of the Solomon Islands, much less Guadalcanal and Rabaul. You will, the briefer predicted. Everyone will. Admiral Nimitz was going to send three of his remaining four carriers to support the operation: Enterprise, the recently repaired Saratoga, and Wasp. We’d be under the overall command of Admiral Ghormley, based in the port city of Nouméa, in New Caledonia, which itself was nearly 1,000 miles from Guadalcanal. I was reminded of the time I’d taken a driving tour out in the great American West. Where’s the meteor crater, I’d asked a motel clerk. Just up the road, which in reality meant 200 miles. Just up the road in the Pacific started at 1,000 miles.

  The high command expected that the Japs would “respond vigorously,” as the briefer put it, to our occupation of Guadalcanal, and they’d do that from Rabaul. There’d be a British carrier and an Australian cruiser involved at some point but our Marines would be doing the heavy lifting by taking both Guadalcanal and a Jap seaplane base on a nearby island called Tulagi.

  There was silence in the theater when the briefer was finished. I think everyone was really surprised. We were going to stage an invasion? After six months of the Japanese overwhelming everything in their path, from Manchuria to Java, we were finally going to go over to the offensive? The skipper raised his hand and asked the most important question: When?

  “Carriers leave the first week in July. The invasion is planned for the first week in August.”

  I did some quick math: if this Guadalcanal target was 3,500 miles away it would take ten days to get there at the fleet’s most economical open-ocean transit speed. The skipper told us we’d spend that transit time training all the new guys after the Midway reallocation of planes and pilots. Our short “vacation” was clearly about to end. I realized I wouldn’t miss it very much. The “charms” of Waikiki were definitely overrated.

  ELEVEN

  We hit the seaplane base on Tulagi Island the afternoon before the Marines landed on Guadalcanal. Bombing Six and Scouting Six from Enterprise along with Bombing Three from Saratoga made successive strikes, apparently catching the Japs entirely by surprise. The seaplanes in question were the Kawanishi models, the biggest armed flying boats in the world, almost twice the size of our Catalinas. They carried a crew of ten, had a sea range of 4,400 miles, and were armed to the teeth with the capability to deliver big bombs, depth charges, torpedoes, and to shred the top hampers of any ship or submarine with 20mm cannon and large machine guns. We first bombed the piers and ramps in the harbor and then went down for strafing runs on the planes themselves, flaming every damned one of them. But it was on my second strafing pass that some lucky Jap AA gunner shot the propeller off my trusty SBD. One moment I was climbing through 3,000 feet after shooting up the harbor; the next something flew past the canopy and the engine ran away with an angry howl until the over-speed shutdown functioned as the mill redlined. The sudden silence was horrifying but not as scary as the sensation that our beloved warbird had just turned into a flying rock.

  Per training I shoved the nose down to maintain airspeed and yelled at Rooster to prepare to ditch. My first priority was to get as far away as possible from the hornets’ nest we’d just stirred up on Tulagi. The weather was relatively clear and the sea calm. I radioed our strike leader and told him I was going in, east of the island, heavily aware that there would probably be no Catalinas way out here coming to pick us up. I was hoping against hope that the Japs hadn’t noticed my plane had been disabled. There was no fire and we weren’t making smoke, so maybe, just maybe, we’d appear to simply be leaving the party. From the ground it would look like we’d just leveled off and flown away. More strafing runs were in progress behind us, which ought to keep their AA crews’ attention. I held her nose down at as shallow an angle as I could to gain distance from Tulagi, and then went into roller-coaster mode: kept her pretty flat until I felt a stall coming on, then dropped the nose sharply to restore airspeed, then eased back into the glide to gain more distance from Tulagi while Rooster ran through the ditching checklist. Truth be told, however, the SBD3A had the glide characteristics of a school bus.

  We both slid our canopies back and I made sure the life raft was free of any entanglements. We ate up those 3,000 feet of altitude much sooner than I would have wished. When we were 20 feet above the water and just about to stall again I lifted the nose slightly so that the tail would hit first. Five seconds later I felt the bump of the tailhook hitting the water, and then we were down in a huge crash of seawater, a painful pull on my straps, and the shock of something hitting me in the solar plexus, namely the stick.

  Immediately the plane stood on her nose, courtesy of that two-ton engine right in front of me plus a tidal wave of seawater flooding my cockpit. We’d been trained to wait for the initial crash energy to dissipate. The plane rocked its tail high in the air and then settled back down, not quite level, and began to sink. She slowly raised her tail again as our constant nemesis, gravity, discovered all that steel and seawater in the nose. That was the moment to get out. I hurled the raft over the side, holding on to its lanyard, unsnapped my straps, and tried to get up. Apparently we’d hit harder than I’d known because I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t do anything at all. Worst of all I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt like I’d been poleaxed.

  “I gotcha, Boss, I gotcha,” Rooster shouted in my ear. “Easy there, now.”

  He dragged me out of the cockpit and down onto the left wing which was already awash. I tried to say something but a wave came up and slapped me in the face. The next thing I knew I was immersed in the warm Pacific, spitting up seawater, kicking my legs to keep my head above water, and coughing my lungs out. Rooster reached around my chest and pulled my Mae West lanyard, which solved the problem of keeping my face out of the water. The plane was definitely sinking now so we pushed away from it, towing the black rubber bundle that was the life raft. Then the tail went perfectly vertical and she slid under the waves in a boil of air bubbles laced with avgas.

  We didn’t inflate the raft immediately. Other pilots had reported that if Jap fighters came looking and saw a raft, they’d strafe it every time. If it was a Kawanishi who found you, they would land, take you prisoner, and deliver you to a higher authority, usually at the headquarters which you’d just bombed. We could only imagine what happened after that, so our training called for us to watch for enemy planes for a little while before actually getting into the raft unless the sharks showed up. Fifteen minutes later we heard a familiar rumble of SBD engines. A pair of them from Scouting Six came overhead at 1,000 feet and waggled their wings. We both made a thumbs-up
sign and then they were gone. Our sense of relief was palpable. They knew we were down and alive. What they could do about that we did not know, but, by God, it was a start.

  We drifted somewhere east of Tulagi and Malaita Island for almost two days. There were some minimal supplies of food and canned water in the raft, which we rationed carefully. The rest of the time we kept watch for Kawanishis. At the first sound of an approaching plane we planned to go over the side and underwater. On the afternoon of the second day we did hear a plane coming. Looking into the sun we saw the silhouette of what had to be a seaplane, so over the side we went and hid under the raft. When the plane passed overhead we saw it was a Catalina, so we popped back up and started waving. The parasol-winged seaplane turned around, landed, and picked us out of the water. One of the guys helping us aboard stuck a big knife into our raft, and then we were off. By policy they weren’t supposed to land in the open ocean, but rescuing aviators had an informal dispensation from that rule.

  We learned that the Marines had taken the almost-completed dirt airfield on Guadalcanal without much of a fight and, using abandoned Japanese grading equipment, were scrambling to make the runway fully serviceable. A detachment of Marine fighters was expected in the next day or so. The PBY crew told us that they’d flown all the way from Nouméa, a distance of almost 1,000 miles, which was where the big boss for the south Pacific, Vice Admiral Ghormley, had his headquarters. A thousand miles, I thought. That should keep him safe. Maybe he was the Navy’s version of Douglas MacArthur.

  We flew south of the island of Malaita because capture of the Tulagi base was still in the mop-up phase. Then we flew the long way around to Guadalcanal and landed on the finished half of the dirt strip for fuel. There they found several Navy hospitalmen waiting with some wounded Marines in litters on the ground. That meant we two lost our seats so that the plane could take as many wounded as possible back to the Nouméa field hospital complex. A mud-splattered Marine took us across the red dirt of the airfield and into a pagoda-shaped structure on one side of the airfield, which was serving as a temporary control tower. Down at the far end of the field we could see construction machinery kicking up large clouds of red dust while a couple of stubby tanks kept them company. The occasional thump of artillery made the walk interesting, but our guide didn’t seem to notice it.