The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Although the imaginary bulkheads that separated the air group from the ship’s company were thinner and more permeable aboard CVEs than aboard the larger carriers, fliers on both generally considered themselves a breed apart from their deck-bound counterparts. They were concerned with different things, their world uncircum-scribed by the boundary of their ship’s hull. From high altitudes they were accustomed to seeing their carrier for the rectangular mote that it actually was, traversing a watery plain that reduced it to but fleeting consequence. Flying on a combat mission, they watched their carrier vanish into the vast expanse of ocean. Returning to it was like a homecoming. Befitting these differences, pilots lived in quarters separate from the ship’s company. They ate separately, slept separately, socialized separately. They made the ready room their home, gathering there to learn what was new in the world, to read Time magazine and listen to Tokyo Rose. Her tauntings, exquisitely delivered in a singsong Nipponese accent, were seldom irritating enough to defeat the bliss of hearing the Glenn Miller Orchestra six thousand miles from home. Pilots listened to her while playing Acey Deucy and Red Dog, while shooting dice. As often as not, Tokyo Rose’s broadcast was rooted in just enough truth to be informative and just enough falsehood to be entertaining.

  Jones seemed to understand the value of a little sporting rivalry in the squadron. Like his task unit commander, Admiral Sprague, he tolerated gambling in the wardroom. And whenever the Avenger and Wildcat pilots started trading jabs about their aviation pedigree, he just smiled. Larry Budnick, a Wildcat jockey, said, “We razzed the torpedo pilots a lot. We were the guys who were winning the war, you know. It was a friendly rivalry.” Just as the Avengers were dubbed “turkeys” or “pickle luggers,” the FM-2 Wildcats, with their noisy nine-cylinder, fourteen-hundred-horsepower Wright engines, were “Maytag Messerschmitts.” For all the horseplay, mostly they were a serious group, soft-spoken and focused on their mission. Lt. (jg) Leonard “Tex” Waldrop, an Avenger pilot who sported a red beard in mute defiance of squadron guidelines, was affable and agreeable, expansive in a way that befitted the stereotype of his native state. Lt. Tom Van Brunt from Tallahassee was a widely respected TBM pilot too. Though he was among the senior pilots in the squadron, having served stateside as a primary training instructor, Van Brunt had made fewer carrier landings than anyone else on the St. Lo. Most of VC-65’s pilots had four months of combat experience already. Van Brunt would have been a section leader but for the fact that he was nearly as green as a freshly commissioned ensign when it came to touching down on a flight deck. He had made just five of them—and not one since his wheels last touched the deck of the training ship Wolverine during carrier qualifications.

  * * *

  BILL BROOKS’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER HAD been a whaling captain who sailed from ports all along coastal Massachusetts during the mid-1800s, doing his part in the ravenous harvest of the Atlantic coast whale population. When the onset of the Civil War boosted demand for oil, he and other whalers decamped from New England’s over-picked seas and took their ships south, around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where they continued to hunt blubber, ranging out to the waters off Maui, then “uphill” against currents and winds to the bounteous waters off Alaska.

  A hunter like his great-granddad, Brooks pursued an altogether different sort of Pacific Ocean quarry: the steam-powered gargantuans that flew the pennant of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The twenty-four-year-old pilot was positioned to continue in his great-grandfather’s footsteps, if only the U.S. Navy would let him. The sole complication was the fact that the Avenger pilots who flew from CVEs had been, by and large, stripped of their harpoons, their Mark 13 torpedoes. They were not meant to attack enemy surface warships. That job fell to the fliers aboard Admiral Halsey’s carriers. Charged with antisubmarine patrol and striking at ground targets in support of Army troops, the Avenger crews of Taffy 3 watched as the war moved beyond them with respect to their primary mode of attack.

  Taffy 3’s aviators contented themselves with perfecting a type of warfare that was in its infancy and critical to the retaking of the Philippines: the close support mission. The pilots of VC-65 had been pressed into this vital work from the first day of the Leyte invasion. Before the troops went ashore on October 20, Navy special-operations frogmen swam to the beach to clear away obstacles that might impede the progress of the landing force. When their work was finished, Brooks and his squadronmates buzzed the beach at daybreak, cruising low over the wave tops, guns, bombs, and rockets primed and ready as motorboats below zoomed in with big hoops hung overboard to scoop the frogmen out of the water before the enemy could find the range with their shore batteries. With Brooks and his buddies overhead, a Japanese gunner would have been a fool to open fire.

  Other times the payload in Brooks’s bomb bay was of the nonex-plosive variety: bundles of printed leaflets exhorting the Philippine people to support their American liberators. As Brooks took his plane down to 250 feet, treetops zipping by below, his radioman, Ray Travers, opened the bomb bay doors and released a paper storm over the scattered Filipino villages. Though the brutality of the Japanese occupation had all but ensured their wholehearted support in any event, the propaganda boosted their hopes and secured MacArthur’s legacy as their savior.

  Like the rest of the Avenger crews, Brooks, Travers, and turret gunner Joe Downs preferred more direct forms of engagement with the enemy. Barges, truck convoys, ammo dumps—all were suitable and rewarding targets for a weapons-laden Avenger on a ground support strike. Every day since the landings began on October 20, planes from all three Taffies ranged up and down the Philippine archipelago knocking out enemy infrastructure, interrupting troop movements, playing havoc with communications. Hugging the jungle canopy a hundred feet off the ground, Brooks would hunch forward, looking through his dashboard-mounted gun sight, hunting for quarry. A pilot flying ground support was wise to mind the danger of lingering too long over a target. Those who came in too flat often paid with their lives. Wildcat fighter planes had enough agility for their pilots to fly in steeply. Plummeting at a sixty-degree incline, nearly perpendicular to the ground, they presented the smallest possible target, forced the antiaircraft gunners into a difficult high-angle shot, and built up maximum speed to flee a target area that was sure to be popping with hot lead. Brooks in his Avenger couldn’t manage such a steep dive, but he knew the value of maintaining his airspeed for a fast escape. Rather than pull up sharply and make a high-altitude exit, as some instructors had taught him, Brooks liked to stay low and fly away at treetop level. That technique kept him moving fast and shrank the breadth of terrain from which enemy gunners could hit him. Another way pilots minimized the amount of shrapnel lodged in their tails was to approach the target in a curving pattern. That enabled them to stay out of the path of fire directed at the plane ahead. Boring in straight, close behind another pilot, was a sure way to get eaten up by the inevitable fusillade of wayward ordnance that missed the lead aircraft.

  On the inland strike missions, pilots risked exposure to any number of unseen enemy gun positions hidden beneath the trees. And they took a lot of fire from panicked gunners on American ships too. A few barrages of forty-millimeter tracer fire from a friendly ship was all it took to convince many pilots of the ineluctable stupidity of the average gun crew. It was downright harrowing to be airborne while battleships offshore were bombarding targets ashore. Pilots flying gunnery spotting missions became sandwiched in an invisible corridor between salvos from the big ships offshore. While they spotted shell bursts and called in corrections, fourteen-hundred-pound battleship shells flew overhead in trios, plainly visible to the eye. Below, the smaller warheads of the cruisers whizzed past.

  Close support of troops was a new job for naval aviators, and the CVE pilots were the first to master it. On a close support mission Brooks would fly to an assigned station and report to an Army air coordinator skimming the trees in a Piper Cub, keeping tabs on his men on the ground. The coordinator would radio instructions:
“Proceed to point Able. Make pass to 000 down to 180, along that ridge.” Usually directed to fly parallel to the line of battle, Brooks would wing over to the attack, when possible dropping out of the clouds to mask his plane from Japanese antiaircraft gunners.

  With a payload ranging from ten hundred-pound fragmentation bombs for attacking troops and vehicles to a pair of five-hundred-pound semi-armor-piercing bombs for hitting reinforced targets, a fully laden Avenger was a veritable flying ammunition depot. And if he banked the plane sharply, turning it up on a wing, Joe Downs could swing the sphere of his turret out to the side and cut loose on targets of opportunity with his single-mount fifty. Swooping down in elements of three or four planes at a time, the Avenger pilots tended to get the attention of the Japanese. “Stuff would be coming up all around you,” Brooks said. “You’d think, How come I’m not being hit? You’d thank the dear Lord that you weren’t. You’d come through it. You’d join up with your buddies. When you made your exit, you felt like you had conquered the world.”

  Brooks became proficient in the art of skipping bombs into caves. He would start the attack at four thousand feet, then go into a dive, juking to dodge flak. But rather than drop his bombs at the customary altitude of two thousand feet, he would fly right down to the deck. By lifting the nose of his plane at the last minute, he could skip his delayed-fuse bombs off the ground and right into the mouth of the cave. More than once he felt the sickening thud of the concussion and shrapnel from his own payload ravaging the tail section of his plane. About as often as not he would discover, on his return to the carrier, fronds of coconut trees stuck in the creases of the wings and fuselage.

  Seven years Brooks’s junior, just seventeen, aviation ordnance-man third class Joe Downs regarded his pilot with no small measure of awe. “He seemed fearful of nothing. And he had this burly manner. If you tried to lie to him or something, he would just look at you as if to say, ‘Do you want me to beat you into the ground now or just throw you overboard?’ But he had a great sense of humor.”

  Of their various missions, aviators enjoyed antisubmarine patrols the least. They offered none of the kinetic thrill of pursuing an enemy truck across a bouncing jungle trail, bullets and rockets tearing down and converging at the point of attack. On A/S duty, a pilot stuck to his quadrant and flew slowly, watching the glittering sea for hour after hour. “It’s all sea and sky, sea and sky, for hours,” said Tom Van Brunt. Spotting a periscope from four thousand feet required eagle-sharp eyesight and tremendous sustained concentration. Though no pilot was ever documented to have crashed his plane by falling asleep at the stick, drowsiness was a constant threat. Perhaps this was why Avengers carried three men: they could keep each other awake.

  “It used to get so hot at night aboard ship,” Joe Downs said. “The sleeping situation was miserable. You’d have fifty, sixty guys in the bunkroom, with poor ventilation, no A/C. You’d get up early for morning general quarters, have chow, then go out on submarine patrol around five A.M. You’d hit this nice cool air, and it was the darnedest thing to stay awake. By six or seven o’clock, your eyes just didn’t want to stay open anymore.”

  From his cramped position in the ball turret, Downs could spread his knees and look down at Ray Travers on the radio set. The drone of the piston-driven engine drowned out all attempts at speech, and the intercom was used sparingly, to avoid bothering Ensign Brooks in the cockpit. But every now and then Downs would get suspicious of the inert form below him. He’d give Travers a hard poke with his foot, just to make sure he was conscious. With a sharp slap on the ankle, Travers would return the favor.

  * * *

  NINETY PERCENT OF A pilot’s life was standing by and waiting. Pilots waited in the ready room to get called to their planes, playing cards, talking aviation (always talking aviation), and boasting of their victories, confirmed and otherwise. One thing pilots never talked about was death.

  A memorial for a fallen member of the air group was unfailingly a requiem of silence. Since June, in action over the Marianas and Mo-rotai, VC-65 had lost six pilots and ten crewmen. The men were not mourned, at least not openly. “The skipper would assign someone to gather his things and clean out his stuff. We’d get to port and ship it home. There were no eulogies or comments,” Bill Brooks said. “This was an unwritten law. And there was dignity in it, because everybody knew that at any given moment it could be us. You just didn’t want to dwell on it. You had a job to do, and if you dwelled on it too deeply, it impeded your own proficiency. The fellow would be replaced, and you’d feel damn lucky it wasn’t your turn.”

  If a body was recovered, there would be a burial at sea, a solemn ceremony led by the chaplain and attended by all hands; the body was wrapped in canvas sheeting and dropped over the side weighted with a five-inch shell. But his squadronmates did not talk about him, did not discuss the circumstances of his end. “You might get upset if someone got drunk and got hit by a truck. But combat was another matter,” Brooks said. With so much time spent waiting, mourning could not be allowed to ferment into despair. For the faithful, there was ample opportunity to pray.

  On the St. Lo those who sought other forms of salve could join the group of enlisteds who gathered on the flight deck three nights a week to hear ordnanceman John Getas sing. The quality of the diversions available aboard a ship at sea depended on the talents of its citizens. In Getas the St. Lo happened to boast one of the better operatic baritones in the fleet. Though the boys from Kentucky and Alabama and other points south preferred their hillbilly music, Getas could count on a turnout of ten, fifteen, twenty guys who would enjoy his renditions of “On the Road to Mandalay,” or any of three hundred-odd other numbers he had memorized. Joe Downs kept a hand-cranked Victrola record player in the enlisted sleeping quarters, sandwiched between the hangar and the flight deck amidships, suspended from the bottom of the flight deck.

  Life in the war zone permitted quieter diversions as well. At Seeadler Harbor on Manus, the staging ground for the Leyte invasion, Tom Van Brunt discovered that his younger brother Bernard was on a cargo ship, the Luna, that happened to be in port too. They were seven years apart but good friends. Van Brunt got permission from his skipper to go ashore and seek out his brother’s ship. The dock foreman told him that the Luna was anchored at the far side of the harbor. The foreman said he could get Van Brunt to the ship, but wasn’t sure he could get him back in time for the Midway’s scheduled departure the next morning. As Van Brunt was trying to figure out what to do, a motor whaleboat gurgled up to the dock and tied up to the other side. The boat was making the Midway’s mail call. Its coxswain was Bernard Van Brunt.

  Tom summoned his best officer’s vox Dei and called down to his brother, “Hey, coxswain, don’t come alongside until I tell you to come alongside. Okay: come alongside.” The surprise of their reunion was proportionate to their distance from home in Tallahassee. The brothers went aboard the Luna for dinner, which was fine except that their brotherly bond could not withstand the curiosity of the cargo ship officers captivated by the novelty of entertaining a combat pilot. Tom ate in the wardroom with them while Bernard went belowdecks with the crew. That night, though, the two men returned to the Midway, and Bernard got a tour of a CVE.

  Courtesy of the wardroom steward’s mates, they enjoyed a feast worthy of officers’ country. Then they retired to the flight deck. “It was a glorious, beautiful, tropical evening,” Tom Van Brunt recalled. All night long they watched the ships in the harbor flash their big searchlights off the clouds overhead, blinking messages to each other via Morse. They spent the night talking, and from the conversation Tom Van Brunt learned something surprising: that his kid brother had become a man. The next morning news came down that the name of the Midway would be changed to St. Lo. His brother was the only person in his family who knew.

  The men of the St. Lo stole fun where they could find it. But mostly the crew diverted themselves with endless, repetitive work. The nine-hundred-man complement of a CVE was like a one-comp
any town working perpetual overtime. That they were a coherent community was obvious to all. A jeep carrier’s thin hull enclosed all the trappings of small-town life: the barber shop, the doctor’s office, the post office, the power plant, the waterworks, the church, the soda fountain, the boxing ring, the sweatshop factories, and the tenement-style housing. Its residents, loosely grouped into three classes—the pilots, the airedales (as the flight deck crews, aviation mechanics, and technicians were known), and the ship’s company who operated the ship—worked around the clock. Aviation machinist’s mates labored through the night tuning aircraft engines for their morning missions. Ord-nancemen and armorers bore-sighted machine guns, snapped rounds into ammo belts, pulled dollies laden with bombs, and hoisted rockets onto launch rails. Parachute riggers packed chutes. Aviation met-alsmiths repaired damaged wings and fuselages. Deckhands swept down the hangar deck and swabbed the redwood flight deck, cleaning up oil and grease. And there was always paint to chip. That was an all-purpose time-filler, but crucially important. The Navy had learned the hard way, at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere, that handsomely painted surfaces burned furiously, producing clouds of poisonous smoke. The monotony of the remedy had at least one immediate benefit: most every sailor in the fleet soon acquired the thick wrists and forearms that came from repetitive scraping.