The fifth USS Enterprise, seen here in 1893. She was a steam-powered sloop of war who once sailed around the world. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive
Such was the lot of the interim Enterprises and the Sailors who manned them. But all of that would be turned around in ways Benedict Arnold and William Barnes could never have dreamed of when Enterprise VII sailed into the Pacific Ocean in the late 1930s.
The First Big E
Eighteen-year-old Alvin Kernan reported aboard Enterprise in November 1941. He later remembered his first encounter with her as he arrived in a boat dispatched from USS Procyon, the ship that had brought him from the West Coast of the United States to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. “The Enterprise was tied up on the western side of Ford Island taking on fuel and bombs, and as the motor whaleboat came up under her counter on her seaward, port, side, she towered a hundred feet above us, grayish white, nearly nine hundred feet long, beautifully shaped despite her size. . . . It was a total and instant love affair with this great ship, never lost and never felt again in quite the same way for another.”
Commissioned in May 1938, this seventh Enterprise was one of the U.S. Navy’s earliest aircraft carriers, as evidenced by her hull number, CV-6. It was a time when battleships were still considered supreme among naval vessels, and carriers were seen as supportive rather than primary in naval warfare. That was about to change.
Kernan was assigned to an aircraft squadron embarked in Enterprise. As a seaman second class, his duties would be unexciting at first. But that too would change.
On his first day aboard, Kernan wandered about the ship, “staring with wonder at the complicated machinery, stowage spaces, elevators, and spare planes tied up in the overhead of the vast hangar deck. It was all so extraordinarily busy, the Sailors in spotless white shorts and T-shirts rushing here and there—a crew of nearly two thousand—the public address system constantly blaring out bugle calls, the shrill of boatswain’s whistles, and unintelligible orders to ‘hear this’ or ‘hear that.’” By afternoon he was already at work, chipping paint off the three-foot links of the ship’s anchor chain. It was hard work, particularly in the warm Hawaiian climate, and Kernan was glad when it was over so he could join the ordnance gang in his squadron to begin “learning the ropes.” Being an inexperienced striker, he was paired up with a veteran petty officer, and together they were responsible for three of the Devastator torpedo bombers—belting ammunition, fuzing bombs, moving torpedoes around on special hydraulic trucks, changing bomb racks, and loading bombs and torpedoes onto the aircraft.
The seventh USS Enterprise. When he first saw her, Seaman Alvin Kernan described the aircraft carrier as “beautifully shaped despite her size.” U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive
His squadron was required to supply men for the flight deck crews, and, before long, Kernan was manhandling aircraft on the windswept deck, wearing a dark blue T-shirt and a canvas helmet dyed to match. His days began before dawn and ended after dark, pushing aircraft at a dead run from one spot to another in a seemingly endless choreography of launch and recovery. In years to come, catapults and tractors would come to carrier flight decks, but in 1941 the planes took to the air by the power of their engines and were moved about the deck by the muscles of men like Alvin Kernan. It was very hard work, less tedious than painting anchor chains but physically demanding. And so very important: as events would later prove, battles would be won or lost by the relative skills of the flight deck crews on each side’s carriers.
The long hours of training were paying off for Enterprise. Though barely three years old, the ship already had a good reputation as a “hard worker,” where discipline and training allowed few excuses, and results were paramount. In the fleet, ships competed for the coveted efficiency award, to earn the right to paint a large “E” on their superstructures. Enterprise’s growing efficiency and her formal name soon earned her the nickname “Big E.”
At the end of November 1941, Enterprise left Pearl Harbor to deliver aircraft to Wake Island, accompanied by a task force of three heavy cruisers and six destroyers. Although the war in Europe seemed a long way off, and isolationists in the United States had so far managed to keep America out of the struggle against Hitler, the admiral in charge of this task force, William F. Halsey, was convinced that war was coming to the Pacific, probably sooner rather than later. They were hardly under way when he issued orders warning that the task group was to consider itself “in wartime conditions” and that any unidentified ship or aircraft approaching the force was to be destroyed.
Halsey was more than a little prescient. Before the task force could get back to Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft and midget submarines attacked the air and naval bases there, sinking or disabling nineteen ships (including all eight battleships), destroying 188 aircraft and damaging another 159, and killing more than twenty-four hundred. Enterprise had been scheduled to arrive at Pearl Harbor on 6 December, but bad weather slowed the task force, causing her to miss the attack on the morning of the seventh. The feisty Halsey tried to find the Japanese force, but it was probably just as well that his reconnaissance aircraft came up empty—good reputation or not, the Big E would not likely have fared well against the six Japanese carriers that had carried out the surprise attack.
Needing fuel, the U.S. task force entered Pearl Harbor late on the eighth. In the fading light, Kernan peered out from one of Big E’s catwalks at the eerie scene. Many fires still burned, and a heavy cloud of smoke blanketed what had been a beautiful tropical paradise the last time he had seen it. Great quantities of heavy black oil covered the surface of the water, and the smell of burned paint and hot steel filled his nostrils as the ship made her way through the channel, now made narrower by the protruding stern of a battleship grounded in the mud on one side. Off the port side Kernan saw the devastation on Ford Island, where the hulks of aircraft smoldered and the roofs of hangars lay collapsed inside shattered walls. In the foreground were the remnants of Battleship Row, where the carcasses of once formidable ships lay broken, twisted, capsized, and sunk.
There was something so horribly depressing and yet positively prophetic in that scene, as the unscathed aircraft carrier passed by the broken battleships. For the next several years, it would be the aircraft carriers far more than the battleships that would decide the outcome of the raging conflict in the Pacific. While submarines and troop-laden amphibious ships would play major roles as well, and countless destroyers and various other ships would fight ferociously in what would prove to be the greatest sea war in history, it would be the carriers that would strike the most telling blows against the Japanese navy, and it would be Enterprise who would become the most famous carrier in the war.
Kernan later recalled that on this second night of the war, he and his shipmates worried that a follow-up attack might catch them helpless here in the confines of Pearl Harbor. So there was a sense of relief when, before dawn, “the lines were cast off, and the Enterprise began to edge her way out of the harbor, down the channel, through the nets, and into blue water, picking up speed as she went, the sun rising, the water beginning to hiss alongside, and the smell of burning oil, charred paint, bodies, and defeat left far behind. The planes came aboard and the war had begun.”
There would be many moments of sheer terror and adrenaline-laden excitement in the next few years as Enterprise led the way across the Pacific in battle after battle, ever closer to the home islands of Japan and to ultimate victory. But those moments were few in comparison to the many hours of wartime routine that blended days into weeks into months of hard work and tedium. Kernan and his shipmates learned that war is the worst combination of endless work and gnawing fear, a strange brew of boredom and terror that makes life seem terribly difficult, yet frighteningly tenuous and so precious. Alvin Kernan, and legions of other young men like him, suffered this existence, answering the call to arms in their nation’s hour of need to ensure the survival of the American way of life.
In the immediate aftermath of t
he devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, there would not be much to cheer about for America and its allies. The Japanese seemed unstoppable as they chalked up victory after victory, spreading the boundaries of their empire farther and farther out until half the Pacific was under their control. For the first few months of the war, Enterprise conducted several raids on the Japanese-controlled Gilbert and Marshall Islands. These attacks were more symbolic than tactically or strategically significant.
For Seaman Kernan, every spare hour initially was spent in the ship’s interior pounding away with a chipping hammer. At Pearl Harbor the Navy learned the hard way that paint and linoleum serve as fuels for fire and produce a heavy toxic smoke, so one of the early tasks for Enterprise’s crew was to strip both from the decks, bulkheads, and overheads. Kernan and others spent countless hours chipping and scraping until the ship’s spaces were down to bare metal. The result, according to Kernan, was “depressing, as if the ship had already been burned out.”
His days became cycles of red, white, and blue: the red lights of the berthing compartment during predawn reveilles and late-night taps; the blinding white light of the tropical sun as it beat down on the flight deck during air operations; and the blue of the battle lanterns during general quarters whenever danger—real or suspected—lurked close by.
Then, in early April 1942, things suddenly changed. Enterprise left Pearl Harbor on the eighth, but instead of heading southward as before, she and her escort of four destroyers and an oiler turned northwest. Scuttlebutt began to circulate that something important was about to happen, but when word arrived that the Americans holding out for months against the Japanese onslaught at Bataan in the Philippines had at last surrendered, morale plummeted.
For three days Big E and her escorts steamed farther north, the weather turning colder and bleaker as they went, and morale continued to deteriorate. Then, just before 0600 on the twelfth, a lookout reported another aircraft carrier approaching from the east.
Kernan and his squadron mates peered through the gray mist as the other carrier and her escorts—two cruisers, four destroyers, and another oiler—closed on the Enterprise group. Beneath leaden skies colors were subdued, but it soon became clear that the aircraft strapped to the approaching carrier’s deck were not blue like those on Enterprise, but were brown and much larger, with twin engines. Someone identified them as Army Air Corps B-25 bombers. Someone else speculated that the mission must be to deliver them somewhere, perhaps the Aleutian Islands, near Alaska.
But soon it became clear that truth, for once, had outdistanced scuttlebutt. The glare of a signal lamp’s beam pierced the gray atmosphere with a brief but powerful message: THIS FORCE IS BOUND FOR TOKYO.
Morale instantly skyrocketed. Shouts reverberated through the steel passageways and men slapped each other heartily on the back as the word spread. Enterprise’s general announcing system crackled to life with details of the mission. The other carrier was Hornet, and the two carrier task groups were headed to a point a mere five hundred miles from Japan where the B-25s would be launched to strike at Tokyo and other targets in the Japanese homeland. The bombers would fly on to land in China. It was a daring plan, not only because it required two of the U.S. Navy’s very few carriers to penetrate deeply into enemy-controlled waters, but also because the Army pilots would have so little deck space from which to launch their bombers. The first B-25 to take off, piloted by the mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, would have only about three hundred feet of “airfield” from which his bomber would either become airborne or drop into the cold waters of the North Pacific.
For the next several days the force steamed westward, covering nearly four hundred miles per day. Then, at 0315 on 18 April 1942, Enterprise’s surface search radar picked up several contacts ten miles ahead. Admiral Halsey ordered the force to turn north until the contacts faded; then he turned the force westward again. The possibility of detection was increasing with each mile they steamed westward, but each mile also meant an extra gallon of fuel for the Army aviators to fly their dangerous mission. So the force pressed on.
Several hours later, an Enterprise reconnaissance plane flew low over Big E and dropped a beanbag onto the flight deck. A yellow-shirted member of the flight deck crew scooped it up and dashed to the bridge. The scribbled message attached to the beanbag reported that the pilot had spotted Japanese patrol craft fifty miles ahead. Worse, the pilot was certain the enemy had spotted him.
Still the Navy task force pressed ahead, buying more miles that the bombers would not have to fly. The tension was palpable as anxious eyes peered into the gray gloom. Soon, masts could be seen among the great gray troughs of the sea ahead. The American task force was about one hundred miles short of the intended launch point, but the risk had become too great. It was time to launch.
The moment of truth had arrived as both Enterprise and Hornet turned into the wind. Big E’s aircraft, along with the cruiser Nashville, engaged the Japanese ships while Hornet set about the task of launching her unusual payload. Never before had Army bombers been launched on a combat mission from the relatively tiny airfield provided by a Navy carrier.
No one had any illusions about the mission. It was certainly not going to win the war, nor would it have much tactical significance in the grand scheme of things. But at that moment in the war, the American people needed to strike back, to deliver a blow—no matter how small—against this enemy that for the last few months had seemed unstoppable, had chalked up all the victories, had humiliated the United States of America. So every Sailor watching was focused on those olive drab bombers, virtually willing them into the air.
From his perch on Enterprise’s flight deck, Kernan had a “ringside seat” from which he could watch history being made. He remembered the cold and windy morning as “near gale-force winds, gray and blue everywhere, with high dark green waves and the real taste and smell of the northern ocean.” But the wind would be an ally as Hornet turned into the gale to launch the giant bombers. “So powerful was the wind added to the full speed of the ship—about seventy-five knots combined—that the B-25s needed only to get about thirty-knots’ speed to float off the deck like some great kites, only slowly moving ahead of the ship, which seemed to remain almost stationary below them.” Kernan remembered cheering loudly with his shipmates through “patriotic tears” as one after another the entire squadron took to the air.
Later that same day, the men in the coding room were listening to Radio Tokyo’s afternoon propaganda broadcast (in English) when, suddenly, excited Japanese voices could be heard in the background and the broadcast went off the air. The U.S. bombers had arrived.
Kernan and the other Big E crew members were justifiably proud of their role in this first strike at the enemy’s vitals. Though it would be a long time before U.S. forces could again hit the Japanese homeland, this early attack served its intended purpose. American morale received a badly needed boost and Japanese pride had been seriously injured—so much so that it altered their strategic thinking and caused them subsequently to make some costly decisions.
An Army B-25 bomber takes off from the deck of USS Hornet headed for the very heart of the Japanese empire. Naval Historical Center
Enterprise remained on the offensive for the rest of the war, taking part in most of the major engagements, often playing a pivotal role. She was one of the three carriers that defeated a vastly superior Japanese force at Midway, literally turning the tide of the war. She fought off Guadalcanal and participated in the occupation of the Gilberts and Marshalls. She struck at the powerful Japanese bastion at Truk and dealt a devastating blow to Japanese naval aviation at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Her aircraft struck at the Bonin Islands, Palau, Nansei Shoto, Formosa, Indochina, Hong Kong, Canton, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. And in February 1945, she once again struck Tokyo, this time with her own aircraft at a range that permitted them to return.
Sadly, fate would deny her the victorious entry of the U.S. fleet into Tokyo Bay f
or the Japanese surrender. Struck by a kamikaze off the coast of Japan late in the war, she had sustained serious damage and was undergoing repairs at Puget Sound Navy Yard when the war ended.
Alvin Kernan also survived the war, though he tempted fate by becoming a gunner in the rear seat of a torpedo bomber. He took part in the first night-fighter action in history and was awarded the Navy Cross. After the war, he learned that Big E was slated to be scrapped and that a campaign had been launched to raise enough money to save her as a museum ship. “I thought about it but decided not to contribute because I couldn’t bear to think of her sitting around in some backwater, being exploited in unworthy ways, invaded by hordes of tourists with no sense of her greatness. Better by far, I thought, to leave her to memory of those who had served on her when she was fully alive, vibrating under full steam at thirty-two knots, the aircraft turning up, guns firing, heeling over so sharply that the hangar deck took on water to avoid the bombs.” Others must have agreed with Kernan. Enterprise VII made her rendezvous with the cutter’s torch early in 1959. No longer pulsing with the life of a crew, she gave up the ghost and became, once again, the piles of steel and Douglas fir from which she had been built.
But in a gigantic graving dock at Newport News, Virginia, the spirit of the Big E was being revived as Enterprise VIII began to take shape. In 1961, a commissioning ceremony bestowed the now-hallowed name of Enterprise on the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. In the decades to follow, this great ship would carry on the “Big E” tradition in the confrontation with the Soviet Navy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, six combat deployments to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, the protection of Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf and launching of strikes against Iranian naval units in 1988, support for the NATO intervention in Bosnia, enforcement of the no-fly zones over Iraq after the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and the attack on al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan in the early days of the War on Terrorism. She still steams today.
A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy Page 13