A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Waldron had driven them hard, but the men sensed that each grueling exercise in the training regimen might one day save their lives. And they knew that Waldron drove himself just as hard as the officers and enlisted men he commanded. That wasn’t the case with Swede. They quickly got the sense that he genuinely enjoyed being a bastard.

  No one doubted his guts or personal courage. In an aircraft, he took chances that sometimes bordered on reckless. But, unlike Waldron’s, a lot of his methods seemed to have no purpose but to make their lives more miserable. He would often keep his pilots in the air until just after the mess hall had closed, forcing them to miss dinner. After the first few times, they knew it was intentional.

  Swede liked to rule by fear and public humiliation. Whenever he decided to upbraid one of the men, he invariably did it in front of the rest of them. It had led to simmering resentment, particularly among the enlisted sailors. After landing from a training flight a few months earlier, Larsen had climbed down from the cockpit and stormed over to the ground crewman who had been responsible for preparing the plane.

  “Goddamnit . . . you tried to kill me!” he screamed in the enlisted man’s face.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” came back Aviation Machinist’s Mate Bill Tunstall.

  “You never filled my gas tanks, goddamnit,” he shouted. “I almost ran out of gas out there.”

  “That’s not true, sir,” protested Tunstall.

  “You’re a liar,” shouted Larsen.

  Stepping back, Tunstall hollered over to Chief Petty Officer Ed Hawkins, who was in charge of the flights that morning. When Hawkins came up, Tunstall asked him to tell Swede what he had been doing just before takeoff.

  “You were topping off the fuel tanks,” said Chief Hawkins, who, like Tunstall, was from Massachusetts and spoke with a clipped New England accent. “I was right heah.”

  Larsen glared at them as if they were both in on the conspiracy to murder him.

  “I’ll remember this,” he had shouted before stalking off.

  Swede was an enthusiastic hater. He particularly loathed Negroes and Jews. Above all, he hated the Japanese, and what he hungered for more than anything was a chance to go up against them in combat. He had already vowed to one officer that he would come home from the Pacific with the Medal of Honor.

  Now he was stuck at Pearl Harbor after arriving just twenty-four hours too late to join the Hornet as it headed into harm’s way. The thought of missing the battle was enough to send him into a seething rage.

  Over the weekend, the squadron’s new Avengers were put through a set of rigorous engine, instrument, and hydraulic checks. Then the pilots began flight-testing each plane until it was pronounced ready, after which Larsen would activate it to combat status.

  At around midday on Sunday, May 31, Larsen headed over to the admin building to find out if there had been an update in their orders. Later that afternoon, Fieberling was working on the week’s duty roster with several of the officers when Larsen returned with electrifying news. He had been told to prepare six Avengers for a flight to Midway Atoll to augment the air garrison there. The planes would need to be equipped with belly fuel tanks in order to make it.

  The prospect of impending action apparently hadn’t made Swede any happier than when he had left. They quickly learned why. Admiral Leigh Noyes, who had issued the order, wouldn’t let Swede lead the mission.

  As second-in-command, Fieberling would be taking the detachment. Swede told him to ask for volunteers for the other five planes. He would then make the final decision and the list would be posted at the office in Carrier Air Support Unit Five.

  Word spread quickly about the upcoming flight. None of the pilots had any idea what the mission involved or what they would be expected to do once they got to Midway. Some of them didn’t even know where it was, but they all decided to volunteer, particularly after they heard that Fieberling would be leading the mission instead of Swede.

  Smiley Morgan was among the first. “I’ll pass along your request,” Fieberling told him.

  Some of the pilots went directly to Swede. Ensign Gene Hanson, a second-generation Swede from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sought him out to volunteer. Larsen told him he couldn’t go. “I need you here,” he said.

  Meanwhile, the squadron’s mechanics and ordnancemen had begun to prepare the six aircraft for the long flight. As the first Avenger was towed into the enormous hangar, another group of men went to track down the auxiliary fuel tanks that were to be attached inside the planes’ bomb bays.

  The pilots hung around the squadron office until they saw a yeoman pinning the typewritten list of who was going on the bulletin board near the door. Approaching it, Smiley Morgan felt the same sense of apprehension he’d experienced as a student when his exam grades had been posted at the University of Florida. He only had to glance at the list for a few seconds to see that his name wasn’t there. It read:

  Lt. Langdon K. Fieberling, Commanding

  Ensign O. J. Gaynier

  Ensign A. K. Earnest

  Ensign V. A. Lewis

  Ensign C. E. Brannon

  AMM1c D. D. Woodside

  Morgan felt a deep surge of disappointment. He could certainly understand why Ozzie Gaynier had been chosen. He was the senior ensign in the squadron after Waldron’s group left on the Hornet. But why Swede had chosen the rest of them, he had no idea.

  Albert Kyle “Bert” Earnest, of Richmond, Virginia, felt a jolt of excitement when he learned he was going. It meant he was finally going to get away from Swede. And he was glad that Charlie Brannon was going, too. The singles tennis champion at the University of Alabama, Charlie had been Bert’s roommate back in Norfolk, and Bert had served as the best man at his recent wedding.

  The pilots who wouldn’t be going began to slowly drift away. Langdon Fieberling sought out Smiley Morgan as he was heading out of the hangar, and pulled him aside.

  Smiley was the navigation officer, and Fieberling wanted him to pick up all the charts he could find that would help them plan the flight. Perhaps seeing the lingering disappointment on Smiley’s face, Fieberling told him not to worry, that they would all have plenty of chances in this war.

  CASU-5 suddenly came alive with furious activity. While mechanics swarmed under the bomb bays of the six Avengers, Fieberling brought the chosen pilots together for a preliminary briefing.

  Machinist’s Mate Bill Magee, who was helping fit a belly tank into one of the nearby planes, thought the pilots looked amazingly relaxed as they sat in a semicircle around Fieberling. As the sun touched the edge of the open hangar bay, he watched Charlie Brannon take off his uniform shirt so that his back could absorb the last rays.

  As night fell, the doors to the hangar were shut tight due to the strict blackout. Under the harsh glare of the hangar’s shop lights, the six Avengers looked gigantic. With a wingspan of fifty-four feet, each one was almost as big as a bomber.

  While mechanics worked to attach the auxiliary fuel tanks, the pilots and crews headed over to the old BOQ to gather their footlockers and personal gear. On his way back to the hangar with the navigational charts, Smiley heard a bugler blowing taps at one of the military installations near Ford Island. Knowing that he wasn’t flying with the others, he felt even more melancholy at the mournful sound.

  Inside the hangar, the frenetic activity continued. Surrounded by the noise of clanging metal, Ozzie Gaynier couldn’t stop thinking about his wife, Rete. She would be celebrating her twenty-third birthday in two days. Restricted to the base, Ozzie hadn’t been able to buy anything to send her. Sitting amid the clutter of machinery and personal gear, he sat down to write her a letter.

  As preparations were completed on each plane, it was towed out of the hangar to the compass rose at the end of the runway. At the compass rose, it was jacked up and slowly swung around in a full circle to make sure the compasses were running true. With a thirteen-hundred-mile flight in the offing, this was one of the most important step
s in the process.

  Back in CASU-5, Smiley was helping the pilots stow their gear aboard the planes when Darrel Woodside, the only enlisted pilot in the flight, walked over to him. Darrel had grown up in Clearfield, Iowa, population one hundred seventy.

  “I just wanted to explain about the ten dollars I owe you,” he said.

  When they had been flying the Avengers across the United States, bad weather had forced their flight down in North Carolina and they had ridden out the storm there. Several of the pilots, including Darrel, had run out of money, and he had borrowed ten dollars from Morgan.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Smiley told him. “It’s no big deal. Forget it.”

  Woodside shook his head and said that if anything happened to him, he had made arrangements with Red Doggett to cover it after the next payday. Doggett was another enlisted pilot in the squadron. He owed money to Darrel from when they were back in Norfolk.

  “You’ll get back,” said Morgan, embarrassed.

  “Sure,” said Woodside. “But just in case.”

  They shook hands.

  The Squire

  SUNDAY, 31 MAY 1942

  USS HORNET

  OFFICERS’ WARDROOM

  All that day, it had been damp and chilly with a dingy gray sky above them and ghostly patches of fog that would suddenly envelop the ship before releasing it a few minutes later. Due to the bad weather, patrol flights had been canceled, and gunnery practice had been called off.

  Aboard the Hornet, Steve Jurika was conducting another intelligence briefing, this one to all of the pilots in the air group, and the low-ceilinged wardroom was packed with men.

  As he had briefed the squadron commanders earlier in the day, Jurika told them they would soon be confronting a huge Japanese striking force, with carriers, battleships, and dozens of other screening vessels. A separate enemy invasion force was also on its way, he told them, with more carriers and battleships and transports loaded with Japanese soldiers.

  The Hornet wasn’t alone. In addition to the Yorktown and the Enterprise, the carrier Saratoga was on its way from the West Coast to hopefully join the battle. In addition to the aircraft carriers, Midway Atoll was garrisoned with a group of Marine fighters and dive-bombers, along with a squadron of B-17s.

  The next piece of news stunned the pilots of Torpedo Eight. Jurika announced that a detachment of new Grumman Avenger torpedo planes had arrived at Pearl Harbor, and some of them were being flown out to join the air garrison at Midway.

  It had to be Swede Larsen’s detachment of planes from Torpedo Eight.

  Twenty-three-year-old William Robinson Evans Jr. sat among the pilots of Torpedo Eight in the smoke-filled wardroom with his usual studied air of nonchalance. In truth, he was often far away from them, living in his imagination, visualizing another line in a new poem or essay, seeing the words come alive through his writer’s eyes.

  The man his squadron mates called “the Squire” didn’t think of himself as all that different from the others, but he was. Born into a Quaker family in Indianapolis, Indiana, on August 11, 1918, he was the youngest of the squadron pilots aboard the Hornet.

  He was certainly the only one in the squadron, maybe in the whole Hornet air group, who had decided to become a Navy flier after reading a book. In 1940, he had been finishing his senior year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut when a friend lent him Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It recounted the French pilot’s real-life adventures flying mail all over the world for Aéropostale in the 1930s.

  To Bill Evans it was far more than an adventure story filled with accounts of near fatal crashes in the Andes and the Sahara Desert. It represented a soaring of the human spirit, for intertwined with these tales of danger and breathless beauty was Saint-Exupéry’s almost mystical attitude toward the sea and sky, and his internal voyage of self-discovery to find his destiny.

  “I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars,” Saint-Exupéry had written.

  It was the book that changed Bill Evans’s life. For inextricably tied to his creative and intellectual gifts was a similar thirst for adventure. More than anything, Saint-Exupéry’s book appealed to his restless soul.

  In spite of his Quaker upbringing, Bill Evans was a pure romantic.

  From conscientious Eagle Scout, he had matured into a young man who enjoyed close-hauling a sailboat in fierce storms and racing a well-engineered car. One of his annual thrills was attending the Indianapolis 500 race that took place a few miles from his home.

  Behind Evans’s calm facade and whimsical charm was an inner intensity that drove him to explore the limits of his mind and body. He brought the same spirit to every challenge, whether it was skiing and sailing, or studying biology and poetry.

  His roommate at Wesleyan, Charles Gillispie, believed that in some inexplicable way Evans was on a higher plane than the rest of the students, possessing a fine-grained visionary quality that set him apart. If this was true, he wasn’t haughty or egotistical about it.

  To Gillispie, Evans did not appear unusually patriotic either, although one incident suggested that he held deep convictions on the subject. It was after England had entered the war, and they were talking one night in their dorm room about Gillispie’s friend Neil, who was a Scottish exchange student at Union College.

  “How can he remain a student here while his country is at war?” Bill asked quietly.

  After reading Wind, Sand, and Stars, Bill Evans’s new goal became flying. Upon his graduation with honors from Wesleyan, he was accepted as a naval aviation cadet and underwent flight training in Jacksonville, Florida.

  Flying high-speed aircraft turned out to be more exciting than any physical challenge he had ever undertaken. “There are few arts in this world more closely akin to communion with the gods than flying upwards to the morning sun,” he wrote to a friend while at Jacksonville.

  The pilots in Torpedo Eight knew Evans was different as soon as he joined the squadron in September 1941. At first, they weren’t sure what to make of him. With his crew-cut hair and boyish face, he looked more like the product of an expensive New England prep school than a red-blooded pilot in the United States Navy.

  Off duty, he often wore a tweed smoking jacket and two-toned saddleback shoes. When the others would head into Norfolk to try to pick up nurses, Evans usually stayed behind with his head stuck in a novel or a book of poetry.

  The other pilots didn’t need to romanticize flying. For them, it was something to be experienced, the sheer thrill of it, down to the core. Bill Evans felt that, too, but like Saint-Exupéry, his attachment to the sky was almost mystical, a spiritual thing.

  The rest of the squadron soon learned that while he might have had the soul of a poet, Evans could fly as well as any man in the squadron. And like most of the others, he was a natural athlete, although his favorite sports were skiing and tennis rather than football and boxing.

  As their training continued, he showed other strengths. In the seemingly endless classes Waldron conducted on technical flying issues, Evans’s impromptu answers to his complicated questions usually came out like well-researched essays.

  Waldron wasn’t easily impressed, but Bill Evans impressed him, which was why he decided to make him the squadron’s intelligence officer. Later on, Waldron would turn to him to settle any argument the men got into involving politics or history.

  “Our Yale man will know the answer to that one,” he would gently jibe him, well aware that Evans had gone to Wesleyan.

  The other pilots finally came to the conclusion that Evans wasn’t putting on airs. Hell, they decided, he probably didn’t even know he was different. It was just the way he was. In a joshing mood, one of them had called him the Squire, and the name stuck. After that, he was accepted.

  Aboard the Hornet, Evans spent a good part of his off-duty time writing in his personal journal. It wasn’t a diary. He wrote on whatever was at hand, from the backs of envelopes and old stationery to colored index cards. He wrote
poetry, letters, and his impressions of what took place around him. One sketch dealt with the death of a Hornet sailor and the funeral ceremony that took place on the hangar deck.

  Four destroyers, two heavy cruisers, and an aircraft carrier flew their ensigns at half-mast in tribute to one reserve apprentice seaman, symbolizing as effectively as anything I have yet seen, the tangible evidence that this nation holds the life of even its lowliest as worthy of tribute as the mighty. Where else in this world can such be so? Words speak poorly in trying to catch the mood of that last far journey across the horizon; even in our thoughts we cannot bridge the chasm which separates the mystery of life from the mystery to which we go. It is fitting that men and officers stand quietly in the sun, stand quietly while taps are sounded, stand quietly as the smallest of boxes returns the unexplainable to the unexplainable. How fitting that man and his creations take cognizance of these things in which they are so little. Tomorrow or the next day it will be done again and then again as from the beginning of time, as we return mystery to mystery, and the wisdom of the sea accepts them all.

  When Waldron released the pilots from duty, one of the things Evans enjoyed most was taking solitary walks around the ship, especially after dark. The Hornet was three football fields long and, belowdecks, he felt like he was plugged into the galvanic current of some huge alien life force, the internal organic components of which were never at rest. He wrote about his observations of the two-thousand-member crew in their various jobs, with red-, green-, or yellow-colored lamps in each passageway signifying the different workstations.

  He was struck by the obvious disparity between the lives of the men he served with up in “officers’ country,” and the enlisted men who were serving belowdecks. Exploring deep inside the ship, he would watch teams of men with iron bars chipping endless coats of paint off the rusting bulkheads. Down closer to the propeller screws, he could feel the steel plates vibrating beneath his shoes as he walked through massive sleeping compartments where the bunks were stacked five high from the deck to the ceiling.