Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  After dropping their bombs, the Dauntlesses swung around and flew back over the field for low-altitude strafing runs. “An eccentric rain of dark red slanting lines” shredded a row of parked planes and cut down men running across the airfield. Dickinson saw a man on a bicycle pedaling across a causeway connecting Namur Island to Roi Island: he may have been a pilot trying to get to one of the Japanese planes. One of the American SBDs dived over the causeway and strafed him. “Probably in the history of wheeling no bicycle has ever been pedaled more furiously than that one, crossing the trestle ahead of the red-hot whip lashes of U.S. bullets,” wrote Dickinson. “But with a froglike jump for the water the Jap defaulted the race.”

  Those Dauntlesses that had dropped their entire payload turned away to make good their escape. They were chased by flak bursts and by the Japanese fighters, mostly now above them and looking for an opportunity to make high side runs. The pilots poured on all the throttle their engines would take. The rear-seat gunners fired their tracers at the pursuing Japanese fighters and beat them off. These fighters were not the feared Zeros but the older, slower, less maneuverable Nakajima Ki-27 Type 97s (Allied code name “Nate”). At least one was shot out of the sky by a rear gunner.

  The American pilots would report a smashing success over Roi, with three enemy fighters shot down, seven bombers shot up on the ground, two aircraft hangars leveled, a fuel tank destroyed, an ammunition storage unit blown to kingdom come, and a radio station flattened. Four American SBDs had been lost with the death of all their crews.

  The torpedo planes meanwhile flew on to attack the ships anchored off Kwajalein atoll, forty-four miles to the south. Arriving over the anchorage, Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey radioed that there were “suitable objectives” at Kwajalein. Air Group Commander Howard L. Young, circling high over Roi, relayed the report to several SBDs that had dropped only their smaller wing-mounted bombs, preserving their 500-pound bombs, and ordered them south to join the Devastators over the anchorage. Young’s message was picked up on the Enterprise, and Halsey ordered aloft nine more torpedo planes that had been held in reserve.

  The southward flight of the Dauntlesses over the huge lagoon was slow, because they had dived low over Roi and would have to climb back to altitude to regain proper attacking position. They soon caught sight of the big anchorage inside the atoll, which resolved as “a vast ruffle of beach sand embroidered with lacy surf and touched here and there with green.” There were about twenty Japanese ships moored there, including a pair of heavy cruisers and three or four submarines. The work done by the torpedo bombers was evident, as several ships were emitting columns of heavy black smoke, and others were listing visibly. All of the ships were firing their antiaircraft weapons, and a complex geometry of tracer lines reached up for the American aircraft. But there were no enemy fighters at that end of the atoll, and the accuracy of the antiaircraft guns was very poor.

  The SBDs made proper dive-bombing attacks, at a 70-degree dive angle, with lots of flak bursts blossoming in the air around them, but none was shot down. Bombs struck around the ships, sending up tall geysers near the decks. About an hour later, the reserve strike of nine torpedo planes arrived and made a low run, flying directly through the largely ineffective flak, and sent torpedoes into two oil tankers and a 17,000-ton converted ocean liner that had been hit once earlier. One of the cruisers made a run for the sea but was stopped dead by two torpedoes. Several other ships were torpedoed. The dive-bombers and torpedo planes would grossly overestimate the damage they had done to the ships in the lagoon at Kwajalein, but the score was still good. The attackers had sunk a 6,500-ton transport and a subchaser, and had damaged nine other ships, including the light cruiser Katori. The local shore support facilities were very limited and the damage would not be easily repaired. Eighteen planes had been damaged or destroyed. The attack had also killed about ninety Japanese, including the Marshall Islands commander, Rear Admiral Yukichi Yashiro.

  Shorn of their bombs and torpedoes, the Dauntlesses and Devastators banked east for the long flight back to the carrier. They had ample fuel and were not pursued by enemy planes. The sun was well above the horizon and the overcast had started to break up. When their navigation boards indicated that they were almost home, they peered down at the sea and immediately spotted the flat, rectangular deck of the Enterprise. They entered the approach circle in an orderly procession and landed without difficulty shortly after 9 a.m.

  As each aviator stepped down off his wing, he demanded to know the status of his squadron mates. What planes had failed to return? Which chairs in the squadron ready rooms would be empty? Famished and tired, hair matted, flight suits stained with sweat, they descended to the wardroom and took sandwiches from trays. The pilots ate quickly, knowing they might be ordered back into the sky at any moment. The deck crews and ordnance gangs were busy refueling and rearming their airplanes. The day’s action was far from finished—there were more strikes to be flown, and there was the constant danger that Japanese planes not yet destroyed on the ground would find the Enterprise and pounce on her. “These young pilots acted as if they were playing football,” Admiral Halsey later said. “They’d fight like the devil, then take a short time-out, and get back into the fight again.”

  Live radio transmissions from the American fighters engaged over Wotje and Taroa on the nearby Maloelap atoll were piped into the squadron ready rooms, and the aviators listened to that chatter intently, with expert ears. “I could hear voices from the planes making the attacks,” recalled Lieutenant Dickinson; “just the voices lifted out of the whole concert of battle noise. You could recognize the voice of the group commander as he portioned out the field, then recognize the voices of the squadron commanders assigning objectives. . . . Now and then we heard an exultant voice and even whoops as somebody hit his target.” It was more than the adrenaline-fueled excitement of air combat. It was a dam burst of pent-up anxiety, a flood of relief to be finally engaged with the enemy almost two months after Pearl Harbor. “Bingo! Bingo! I got one! . . . Ease off to the right. . . . That big one’s mine. . . . Get that cruiser heading off to the right! . . . Take ’em home, boys, take ’em home! . . . I’m all out of ammunition. . . . Who has lots of gas and ammo left? . . . Affirmative from Blue. . . . OK, I will go along. . . . I will pick up that guy yet. . . . We sure got that big bastard, didn’t we, sir?”

  Those attacks were being carried out by the twelve F4F Wildcats of Fighting Six, which had been pressed into service as short-range bombers, with 100-pound bombs tucked under each wing. Six planes under the command of the VF-6 skipper, Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, had been sent to attack Wotje; six more under Lieutenant James S. Gray had been dispatched to attack Taroa, farther to the south. Wotje was no more than thirty miles south of the Enterprise, close enough that men on the carrier’s deck could actually see columns of smoke rising from the stricken airfield, the black antiaircraft bursts, and even the tiny silver glints of the airplanes.

  McClusky’s group, flying the short hop to the target, had climbed to 10,000 feet and then descended over Wotje at high speed in a dive-bombing attack. They had aimed their first set of 100-pound bombs at a cluster of support buildings alongside the small coral airstrip. The base below was quiescent during their first run, but when they turned back for a strafing run, the antiaircraft guns soon blazed from the island batteries and the ships in the lagoon. There was no fighter opposition and none of the Wildcats was lost. McClusky circled to assess damage, counted several burning buildings, and then hauled off to return to the carrier.

  On schedule, racing in at flank speed from the east, were Admiral Spruance’s cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City and the destroyer Dunlap. The three ships formed a line of battle, and at 7:15 a.m. they opened fire on a pair of merchant ships anchored in the lagoon at Wotje. That promising bombardment was broken up by a periscope sighting, which prompted Spruance to order an abrupt change of course. During the ensuing lull, the Japanese ships in the lagoon weig
hed anchor and ran for safety. “Then we reversed course and stood along the atoll looking for targets and for the airfield,” Spruance later wrote. Japanese shore guns opened up and sent towers of water around the hulls of the American ships. “Pretty soon the splashes came closer to us, and we were straddled by splashes.” During that artillery duel, Spruance’s first experience of combat, the unflappable admiral stood erect on his bridge, observing the fall of the enemy’s salvos, and did not flinch when members of his staff ducked for cover. His cruisers scored some productive hits on shore targets, leaving some of the buildings on Wotje in flames, but lookouts continued to see periscopes on every side (all of those sightings were probably in error) and emergency course adjustments interfered with the accuracy of the gunners. Spruance remained engaged for almost three hours, suffering no hits to his ships. Shortly before 10 a.m., he ordered his little squadron away to the east for his scheduled rendezvous with the Enterprise.

  Lieutenant Gray’s group, sent farther south to seek out the mysterious island of Taroa at the southern end of Maloelap atoll, at first attacked the wrong target. From 15,000 feet, they mistook the uninhabited island of Tjan for Taroa. Lieutenant Gray and his wingman, Lieutenant (jg) Wilmer Rawie, dived low and dropped one each of their wing-mounted bombs on the unoffending little wisp of beach and palms. Grasping their error, they climbed back to 5,000 feet and led the sextet of Wildcats farther southeast. When Taroa came into view, there was no mistaking it: it was a much more substantial air base than the intelligence reports had led them to expect. There were two long coral runways, one more than a mile in length. There were half a dozen large hangars and support buildings. Several twin-engine Mitsubishi G3M medium bombers (Allied code name “Nell”) were parked along the runway. Captain Thomas M. Shock’s ships, sent in to bombard the island from the sea, had already been sighted by coastal lookouts, and the base was a hornet’s nest.

  Three Japanese fighters managed to get into the air right ahead of the arrival of the Wildcats, and they rose to intercept the intruders. Gray pushed down his nose and led his little squadron of makeshift bombers in to attack the parked G3M bombers. Those bombers, he knew, represented an existential threat to the Enterprise, just 100 miles north—should they be armed, fueled, and launched, they could easily overtake the carrier and send her to the bottom. Better to wipe them out while they were still on the ground. The Wildcats dived low and strafed the bombers, but they had not been armed with the incendiary rounds best suited to that kind of work, and in many cases their .50-caliber machine guns jammed. Half a dozen 100-pound bombs were dropped on the airfield, punching craters in the coral.

  The fighters—not Zeros but the previous-generation A5M4 Type 96 (“Claudes”)—gave heated pursuit. Lieutenant Rawie maneuvered beneath one of those planes and fired a close-range burst that tore the fighter’s bowels out. Witnesses on the Chester were cheered to see the Japanese fighter go down: “One specklike plane expanded magically into a ball of flame and plunged into the palms, leaving a hot red streak above it.” That was the first recorded kill of the war by an American navy fighter pilot. Rawie continued on, banked sharply left, and headed back to make a head-on pass at another Japanese plane. Both pilots now held course into the oncoming propeller of his adversary: neither betrayed any inclination to turn away. “This being my first head-on approach,” Rawie wrote in his diary, “I muffed it & pressed home too far & hit the Jap’s wing with my underside.” Both planes suffered in the glancing collision, but the sturdy Grumman remained in the air while the lighter and more fragile Mitsubishi was forced to circle back to the airstrip for an emergency landing. Rawie was then chased by a third Japanese fighter, and saw tracer bullets reaching out for him across his peripheral vision, so he gunned the throttle and banked out over the lagoon and into the clouds. He returned safely to the Enterprise.

  All that time, the Japanese ground crews bravely soldiered on, pushing their fighters and bombers into takeoff position; and several more enemy planes rose from the airstrip while the aerial melee raged over their heads. Several Japanese aircraft flew out to attack the Chester and her two accompanying destroyers offshore, which had kept up a steady fire on the air base for about twenty-five minutes, blowing big craters in the airstrip and setting some of the buildings on fire. The Chester maneuvered violently to avoid the air attacks, but she could not manage to escape one of the Type 96s that made a steep diving run from 8,000 feet and planted a 30-kilogram bomb on her stern, blowing a hole in her deck and killing eight of her crew. She was able to proceed under her own power at normal speed, however, and Captain Shock signaled a withdrawal to the east.

  The Wildcat pilots, frustrated nearly to the point of tears by the recurring problem of jamming guns, all got away cleanly. Gray’s was the last American plane in the vicinity, and he had to twist and dive to escape a horde of vengeful Japanese fighters. His airplane was badly shot up, but he managed to shake free of his pursuers by flying into a bank of low-lying cloud. When he landed on the Enterprise, the deck crew was amazed that the bullet-ridden plane had managed the return journey. The Enterprise supply officer thought it “looked like the moths had been at it in the attic all summer.” The jury-rigged armor plating, installed the day before, was thoroughly nicked and scarred, and had probably saved Gray’s life. Here was dramatic proof that the F4F Wildcat, for all the criticism of its sluggish performance, could stand up to heavy punishment.

  The American pilots reported that only one of Taroa’s twin-engine G3M bombers (out of nine) had been set afire on the ground. Halsey wanted the bombers knocked out: the base would have to be attacked again. The admiral ordered a second strike by Dauntlesses returned from Kwajalein. This strike was led by Lieutenant Commander Bill Hollingsworth, skipper of Bombing Six. The 500-pound bombs carried on the bellies of the SBDs did not have to score direct hits on the parked bombers: a near miss was enough to wreck those planes. The Japanese fighters were all on the ground, apparently to be refueled and rearmed. “This attack encountered no aerial opposition but there was heavy AA fire,” the Enterprise’s after-action report read. “A fuel tank, two hangars, and a radio station, four or five two-engine bombers, and several fighters are known to have been destroyed on this attack.” None of the American planes was lost. A third strike of SBDs, led by Lieutenant Richard Best, poured on more destruction. A radio installation and several fuel tanks were set on fire, and a new stone administration building was reduced to rubble. A fourth strike left the Enterprise at 11:22 a.m., this one aimed at Wotje, and comprising eight Dauntlesses and nine Devastators under Commander Howard Young. Shortly after noon they arrived over Wotje, found no fighter opposition, and took their time hitting the airfield installations, buildings, and the ships in the anchorage.

  The Enterprise had been a hive of activity since long before dawn, her flight deck constantly engaged in recovering and launching airplanes. Conceived as a quick hit-and-run raid, the attack had instead developed into a nine-hour shuttle-bombing operation in which returning planes landed, refueled, rearmed, and then headed back into the sky to revisit the enemy bases. She had also kept a combat air patrol of F4F fighters orbiting protectively overhead. At one point during the morning, she briefly had every aircraft in her inventory aloft. For all those hours she remained in a five- by twenty-five-mile rectangle north of Maloelap atoll. She had thrown heavy punches at Japanese air bases all up and down the Marshalls, and done plenty of damage.

  The deck crews were hot and tired, their blue chambray shirts stained with sweat and grease; they listened with burning interest to the radioed voices of the pilots piped through the ship’s loudspeakers. Men on the carrier kept their eyes peeled for incoming planes, and the antiaircraft gun crews remained alert at their weapons. When green blips appeared on the Enterprise’s primitive radar screens, the fighter director officer (FDO) classed them as “bogeys,” or unidentified incoming planes. He radioed the patrolling fighters and vectored them out on a course to intercept. The Wildcats raced out toward each new c
onstellation of specks on the southern or western horizons, gave them a long hard look, and confirmed that they were the carrier’s own airplanes. The Enterprise prepared to receive them by swinging her bow into the wind, gunning her engines, raising her speed to near maximum; on the flight deck, the arresting cables were tensioned and the crash barriers were raised. All men on the deck retreated to safety.

  As the planes entered the landing circle they passed close to starboard, circled across the bow, flew downwind to port, and then made a final turn aft, directly above the wake. A spotter confirmed that landing gear, flaps, and tailhook were all down. The landing signal officer (LSO) stood prominently on the port quarter and held his two yellow paddles high over his head. At the moment of truth he either waved both paddles above his head—the “wave-off,” requiring the pilot to pour on throttle, pass over the deck, and return to the landing circle for a fresh approach—or drew his right-hand paddle across his throat—the “cut,” telling the pilot to chop his throttle and let his aircraft fall to the deck, where the tailhook seized one of the cables and brought the plane to an abrupt, jarring halt. The deck crews sprinted out to release the cable from the hook; the hydraulic crash barriers retracted into the deck; and the pilot abruptly gunned his engine to taxi his aircraft forward of the barrier. The barrier shot back up, the arresting wires were tensioned, and the deck was made clear for the next plane in the landing circle. “A tricky and a dangerous business,” wrote Ordnanceman Kernan, “and everything depended on doing it fast and doing it well.”