The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Task Force 50 had done plenty of damage to Japanese airpower in the eastern Marshalls, but the aviators agreed that more could have been accomplished. The brownshoes shared a growing conviction that the carriers were not being properly deployed. With newer and better airplanes and ships, the carrier forces could and should accept more risks. Hedding, years later, offered tactfully measured criticism: “I think there was a tendency to be rather conservative and a little careful of what might happen. We didn’t want to have our ships damaged.”98 Clark was blunter: “The fallacy of confining carriers to defense sectors had cost us one carrier sunk, another put out of action, and many lives lost.”99 The blackshoe admirals at the top of the command chain, in Clark’s view, had been slow to understand the capabilities of the new fast carrier forces, and the only remedy was to promote aviators into senior policy-making jobs in Washington and Pearl Harbor.

  On November 26, with Tarawa firmly in American hands and most of the Fifth Fleet bound for Pearl Harbor, Nimitz released the carriers from their defensive positions and recommended that they raid Kwajalein (where about sixty torpedo planes were thought to be) and other enemy bases in the northern Marshalls. Four heavy cruisers joined up with Pownall’s force, and new planes flew over from the departing escort carriers and landed aboard to replace losses. Rear Admiral J. L. “Reggie” Kauffman was sent aboard the Yorktown as an observer; his assignment was to watch Pownall and report to Nimitz on his performance.

  Shortly after sunset that evening, another round of air attacks fell on the northbound task force. Two G4Ms approached to within a mile of the Yorktown and dropped flares onto the sea, apparently as a guidepost for other attackers. Pownall again slowed the task group to reduce the visibility of its wakes. The main attack instead fell on the Enterprise and her consorts (Task Group 50.2), some twenty miles west.

  The Enterprise Air Group commander was Butch O’Hare, the famed fighter pilot who had become the navy’s first flying ace in February 1942 by destroying five Japanese planes in a single flight. The deed had earned him the Medal of Honor. O’Hare and colleagues had improvised a night fighting “Bat Team” consisting of two Hellcats and a single TBF Avenger equipped with an airborne radar system. Their tactic was to send the three planes out on a vector provided by the fighter director officer (FDO). The Avenger would follow its radar bearings to the intruders. The fighter pilots would fly wing on the larger plane, peering through the darkness in hopes of glimpsing the enemy’s exhaust flames. If the fighters made visual contact, they would break off and attack.

  As a solution to the threat of night attacks, the Bat Team concept was makeshift and provisional. Better tactics would have to await improved technology and much more training. In November 1943, however, it was the only solution at hand.

  When radar screens in the Enterprise’s Combat Information Center discovered inbound bogeys, just before 6:00 p.m. on November 26, the carrier launched two Hellcats (one piloted by O’Hare, the other by Ensign Andy Skon) and sent them on a heading to intercept. The radar-equipped TBF Avenger, launched a few minutes later, would follow and rendezvous with the two fighters, or so it was hoped, nearer to the approaching enemy formation. This was to be the first combat trial of Bat Team tactics. The TBF was piloted by Lieutenant Commander John C. Phillips, skipper of the carrier’s torpedo bombing squadron (VT-6). The bomber also carried a radar specialist, Lieutenant Hazen Rand, and a third man, ordnanceman and gunner Alvin B. Kernan, who would describe the flight in his postwar memoir, Crossing the Line.

  The venture was anarchic from start to finish. The Enterprise’s FDO did his level best not only to guide the three planes toward a rendezvous, but also to give new bearings directing them toward the targets that showed up intermittently on the ship’s radar. About an hour after O’Hare left the ship, the FDO radioed to say that he appeared to be directly among “many bogeys,” but neither O’Hare nor Skon could see anything at all. The Enterprise radar also showed Phillips within a mile of the two Hellcats, but neither the fighter pilots nor the crew of the Avenger could see any sign of the other. They and the Japanese were all adrift in a deadly game of blind man’s buff.

  Kernan, peering out of the TBF’s gun turret, lost all sense of the horizon. “You stare out into the dark night, and after a time you don’t know up from down. The first few turns are okay, but then disorientation begins. A flicker of light could be a star in the sky or a ship on the ocean or another plane coming at you on a fast angle.”100 Occasionally he saw a flare burning in the distance, presumably dropped by enemy planes, or a burst of antiaircraft fire from one of the American ships. The FDO continued to relay headings to Phillips, and Rand obtained intermittent returns on his radar scope. A few minutes after 7:00 p.m., Rand reported a large cluster of six blips about three miles ahead. Phillips gave chase and Rand called out the diminishing range—three miles, two miles, one mile, a thousand yards. At 400 yards, Phillips saw the telltale blue exhaust flames, and radioed, “I have them in sight. Attacking.”101

  Phillips’s decision to attack was not in line with Bat Team doctrine. The TBF did not possess either the maneuverability or the firepower to take on a large formation of heavily armed bombers. But Phillips did enjoy the advantage of complete surprise—the Japanese had never been challenged by carrier planes at night, and had no reason to anticipate such an attack. As the TBF overtook the formation, Phillips could make out the long cigar-shaped outline of the darkened planes. He opened fire on the rightmost G4M with his two fixed .50-caliber machine guns and apparently struck the gas tanks at the vulnerable wing root, because the plane immediately caught fire. Phillips pulled up and left, mindful that the other planes would return fire promptly; as Kernan’s turret gun came to bear, he opened fire in turn, aiming at the flames. “He blew up all at once,” wrote Kernan. “A long trail of fire went down and down into the blackness of the ocean below, where it kept on burning, a red smear on the black water.”102 The Japanese, surprised and flustered, apparently began exchanging fire among themselves. Their tracer lines struck out at one another, but they did not come near the Avenger as it pulled away to safety.

  O’Hare and Skon saw the G4M go down and turned toward the melee. This brought them within visual range of the TBF and the remaining enemy bombers. O’Hare, wary of firing on the wrong aircraft, asked Phillips to turn on his recognition light. Phillips flashed it, briefly. The Japanese planes apparently saw the light and opened fire, striking the Avenger’s underbelly and wounding Rand; at the same time, Phillips fired back. Again, he scored; and again, Kernan poured more fire into the burning wing. The G4M went down in a long controlled dive, apparently attempting a water landing. It left an extended trail of burning fuel on the ocean.

  In the melee the Hellcats and the TBF again lost contact, but they were coached into a rendezvous by the Enterprise FDO. All three planes turned on their recognition lights long enough to slide into formation, the two fighters above and behind either wing of the Avenger. For the first and last time that night, the three American planes were flying in formation as planned. Kernan caught a glimpse of Butch O’Hare’s face, lit up by his canopy light. His canopy was open and his goggles pushed back on his head.

  About a minute after the three American aircraft had lit themselves up, a fourth aircraft closed in from behind on the starboard side. It was a wayward Mitsubishi that had become separated from its formation and had mistaken the American planes for friends. Realizing his mistake, he opened fire and struck O’Hare’s plane. Kernan fired back and may or may not have hit the enemy plane, which veered sharply away to port.

  O’Hare’s plane was gone, and he did not respond to radio hails. “Something whitish-gray appeared in the distance,” wrote Kernan, “his parachute or the splash of the plane going in.”103 Skon rejoined with difficulty, and the two American planes circled the area at low altitude. There was no sign of O’Hare. At about 9:00 they headed back toward the Enterprise, tracking the ship by following its long fluorescent wake. The carrier turned on
the hooded flight deck lights that could be seen only from aft and above. Remarkably, both Phillips and Skon recovered safely, without damage to their planes. Dawn searches by carrier planes, a PBY seaplane, and a destroyer turned up no sign of O’Hare or his aircraft.

  O’Hare’s loss was headline news in the United States. He was one of the most famous flyers in the American armed forces, a singular hero to Irish Americans, and one of the most respected and best-liked men in the carrier navy. A Solemn Pontifical Mass of Requiem was held at the Basilica of Saint Louis in Missouri. O’Hare received a posthumous Navy Cross and gave his name to the busiest commercial airport in the world.

  Sorrow tended to obscure the fact that this first attempt to use carrier fighters against a nighttime air attack had been a success. The Americans had shot down two and possibly three twin-engine medium bombers at the cost of one fighter. Phillips was credited with destroying two G4Ms, and it is likely that Kernan shot down a third. (No one saw what happened to the Betty that shot down O’Hare, but the Japanese recorded three planes lost.) No American ship had been struck by a torpedo.

  Two task groups, 50.1 and 50.2, now churned north through squalls and scud to attack the source of the persistent night attackers—the enemy’s huge airfields on the atoll of Kwajalein. Jocko Clark met with Truman Hedding and the Yorktown squadron leaders to devise new procedures for defense against night attacks, and promised his fighter pilots that if they were unable to land on the ship at night he would pick them up at sea. Two new Bat Teams drilled for hours in daylight.

  Launching and recovering the three-plane sections tended to derange the task force’s cruising formation, and getting the ship back into its assigned position at the center of the screen gave Clark (and Pownall) plenty of heartburn. Clark reluctantly concluded that his air group was not ready to operate at night. If attacked, the Yorktown would have to rely on her antiaircraft guns and her helm.

  The endless series of attacks, day and night, threatened to exhaust the crews of the several carriers and their cruising ships. Airedales curled up on deck in the passageways around the hangar and caught an hour of sleep whenever they could.

  The two task groups rendezvoused on December 1, several hundred miles northeast of the Marshalls. At a shipboard conference on the Yorktown, Pownall declined suggestions that he launch a fighter sweep over Kwajalein on December 3, returning with a full airstrike on December 4; he chose the less risky option of sending everything in his arsenal against the atoll at dawn on December 4, and beating a quick retreat that afternoon. The task force commenced a high-speed approach toward the heart of the Marshalls, and against expectations arrived at its launch point at dawn on December 4 without any sign of being detected by enemy air patrols.

  The six carriers began launching their fighters and bombers at 6:30 a.m. Lieutenant Commander Edgar E. Stebbins, who had been tapped by Clark to replace the slain O’Hare as Yorktown’s air group commander, was first over the atoll about ninety minutes later. He counted thirty ships in the lagoon, including two cruisers. The strike had caught the Japanese by complete surprise. Only a handful of Zeros were at altitude, and all were quickly destroyed by the F6F squadrons. John C. Phillips, piloting the same TBF Avenger that he had flown in the successful night action a week earlier, soared above the atoll at 20,000 feet. From that commanding height, Kernan recalled, the atoll “spread out before us in an enormous boomerang of narrow white-beached islands, with a big lagoon in the center, dark blue here, light there.”104 Phillips took inventory of targets ashore or in the lagoon and directed the bombers in his squadron to attack them in turn. “Black antiaircraft bursts rocked the plane,” wrote Kernan, “and the fighter planes taking off from Roi-Namur far below seemed more interesting than ominous.”105

  TBF Avengers glide-bombed the anchored ships and sank three transports. Heavy flak perforated many of the sturdy planes, but none were destroyed. Hellcats strafed a seaplane base at Ebeye, setting more than a dozen Kawanishis afire. At least two dozen Zeros scrambled as the initial strike was underway, and chased the retreating bombers into the north. Tail-gunners took down several more Zeros during the flight back to the carriers.

  The morning strike returned to the task force singly or in isolated groups of two or three. For more than an hour Pownall’s ships steamed into the wind and recovered planes. Nearly the entire American strike returned safely to the task force. The exceptions were few. Just two F6Fs were shot down in the morning’s action. A gang of about ten Zeros pounced on VF-5 commander Ed Owen, whose plane was thoroughly shot up as it dived to escape. Owen pointed his nose north, but his instruments had shorted out and he began losing altitude. His engine conked out, and he deadsticked down toward the sea, intending to try a water landing. But the sea below was rutted with daunting waves, and Owen thought it unlikely that he could ditch safely. He unbuckled, pushed himself out of the cockpit, pulled his chute, and hit the water. Floating alone on the sea, he wondered whether he was finished, but a destroyer presently came over the horizon and picked him up. He was back aboard the Yorktown in time for lunch.

  The Japanese air groups on Kwajalein had been badly roughed up, but they had fought with their familiar determination and persistence, and there was every reason to expect a fierce counterstrike on Task Force 50. Ed Stebbins reconnoitered and photographed a large airfield on Roi that appeared to have been left completely unmolested. He counted about sixty apparently undamaged G4Ms parked on the field. These long-legged bombers could be expected to attack the task force, either that afternoon or after dark. Stebbins radioed the Yorktown to urge that another strike be launched against the field in hopes of destroying the planes on the ground. A Combat Information Center officer hand-carried the message up to Pownall on the flag bridge.

  After conferring with Admiral Kauffman, Pownall rendered his decision—he would not order another strike on Kwajalein. The plan of operations, agreed several days earlier, had called for an afternoon strike against Wotje, which lay about 150 miles east. That strike would be recovered as the task force ran north at its highest effective cruising speed. Adding another strike on Kwajalein would keep the carriers within that atoll’s air-striking range for another twenty-four hours. Pownall did not want to push his luck, and saw no reason to upend the existing plan.

  By his own account, Jocko Clark was “dumbfounded” and could barely contain his fury. As the Yorktown’s air squadron leaders landed aboard and reported to the bridge, all pleaded to lead their planes in another attack on Kwajalein. Clark beseeched Pownall: “You’d better get back there and knock out those Bettys, or they’ll come and get you!”106 Pownall listened with diminishing patience. The strike on Kwajalein was to have been a hit-and-run raid. Clark and his aviators put emphasis on the “hit,” while Pownall was more concerned with the “run.” The admiral summarily ordered his flag captain to prepare the strike on Wotje as planned. The task force was going to clear out, and it would defend against the inevitable counterstrikes as they came.

  The first wave of intruders arrived shortly before noon—a group of single-engine Nakajima B5N torpedo planes (“Kates”). They approached at low altitude in order to stay off the American radar screens and avoid the F6Fs orbiting high above. The screening ships opened fire as they came into range, and the sky was mottled with black flak bursts. One went down just off the Yorktown’s starboard quarter. Lexington skipper Felix Stump steered sharply to starboard to avoid a torpedo, which very nearly clipped the ship’s port bow. The surviving bombers turned away and ran for home, and the antiaircraft guns fell silent. Less than an hour later, another wave of Kates came skimming in from the south. The antiaircraft fire started up again, and the F6Fs, having come down from altitude to repel the first wave, now shot down all but four of the attackers. One dropped a torpedo on the Lexington, missing widely. The three others flew over and around the cruiser San Francisco and bored in toward the Yorktown. The carriers’ short-range antiaircraft guns opened fire, narrowly missing the cruiser. One Nakajima went do
wn, then another; a third flew on toward the carrier, its wing guns strafing the flight deck and its rear guns firing back at the San Francisco. Clark stood on the bridge and shouted to his gunners to destroy the plane. They did not need to be coaxed. Three different calibers of fire (40mm, 20mm, and 5 inch) converged on the lone plane as it came level with the catwalk of the Yorktown. As the line of fire passed across the San Francisco, Admiral Pownall leaned out and shouted from the flag bridge: “Cease fire! Cease fire! You are firing at that cruiser!”107

  Once again, Clark was speechless. Did the admiral not see that an enemy torpedo plane was bearing down on the Yorktown? He pretended not to have heard the order. “I heard it all right but I didn’t obey it, because I wasn’t about to let that plane hit me.”108 When the Nakajima was less than 150 yards away, a 40mm shell connected with its left wing root and tore the wing off. The plane crashed into the sea just astern of the Yorktown. The landing signal officer, who had flung himself prone to avoid a strafing attack, stood up and mockingly raised his paddles to make the signal for a “perfect landing.”