A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  This astonishing news didn’t frighten Harry. He knew his job, and he knew that their new Avengers were really good. He felt sure they would hold their own when the time came.

  In the meantime, Harry was bombarded with questions about the latest scuttlebutt back at Pearl Harbor. The simple answer had to be repeated over and over. He had no idea what was going on.

  Someone told him to take his personal gear over to a string of tents pitched near the perimeter of the airfield. It looked like a hobo jungle, with sagging canvas and crude lean-tos.

  He and the other enlisted crewmen from the six Avengers were assigned two six-man tents. They moved their gear inside before heading off to explore the island. The first thing Harry wanted to see was one of those big new B-17s. They were the biggest planes in the Army Air Forces, with fifty-caliber machine guns sticking out all over the place. In addition to the Fortresses, there were four other Army planes, Martin B-26 Marauders that were supposed to be fast. Bigger than the Avengers, they carried a crew of seven, including three machine gunners. The ordnance men had jury-rigged each Marauder to carry a torpedo instead of bombs.

  The B-26 crews seemed a little doubtful about their planes’ ability to successfully launch a torpedo. They had arrived a few weeks earlier at Pearl Harbor with six planes, and the aircraft had turned out to be balky even without carrying a torpedo. Two of them had crashed while landing at Ford Island.

  Aside from the planes, the first thing Harry noticed on the island was the horde of big, oddly shaped birds called gooneys. There were hundreds of them, comically trudging around the island on their oversized triangular feet, seemingly oblivious to their human visitors. The birds were so trusting that they rarely got out of the way of either men or machines. When they were being chased, the gooneys would always try to run in the direction of the wind, just as a carrier would turn into the wind before launching its planes. Using their sizable wing spread, the birds would catch the upwind breeze and rise slowly into the air before coasting down to a stop twenty yards away to resume their search for food.

  Harry spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the island, which was alive in a whirlwind of activity. In addition to the 6th Marine Defense Battalion, a company of Carlson’s Marine Raiders had arrived a few days earlier, and they were digging in to meet the expected Japanese attack.

  Those men seemed to be everywhere, bare-chested and dangerous-looking, wearing bandoliers across their shoulders, digging slit trenches near the shoreline, and setting up defensive positions. One group near the shoreline was filling empty whiskey bottles with gasoline to make Molotov cocktails.

  They had strung barbed wire everywhere along the beach, and most of the shore area had been laced with land mines. Machine gun nests were being set up to provide intersecting fields of fire at every point that Japanese assault troops might come ashore.

  Standing next to the bronzed Marine Raiders, Harry Ferrier was well aware that he didn’t cut quite so menacing a figure. In fact, he looked like a boy surrounded by grown men. As in truth, he was. He might well have been the youngest enlisted sailor or Marine on the whole island, for the date that appeared on his birth certificate and Navy enlistment papers had been doctored.

  Harry’s father had emigrated from Scotland, and had died when Harry was thirteen. His insurance policy had lapsed and Harry was sent to live with a family friend. When his mother married again, he was allowed to return home. The new husband turned out to be an alcoholic. Divorcing him, she married again. The third husband was both a drunk and abusive.

  Harry told his mother he wanted to join the Navy. At fifteen, he was still two years too young, even with her approval. Using a friend’s typewriter, he changed the last number in his birth certificate and went down to the recruiting office to sign up. At his physical, the doctor told him he had hammertoes. Three days after his sixteenth birthday, the Navy took him anyway.

  Just a hundred twenty pounds, he sometimes had to endure the nickname “Runt.” Harry Ferrier might have been pint-size, but he was smart and worked hard. After recruit training, he had been assigned to radio school in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was a standout in his class and able to key more than twenty words per minute in Morse code. Assigned to Torpedo Squadron Eight, he had again been promoted to the rank of radioman third class. Now he was about to go to war.

  After exploring the island, Harry joined Jay Manning back in their tent. Both of them were excited, and the two teenagers began to discuss what they could do to help defeat the Japanese invasion force.

  Harry was the one who came up with the idea, and Jay agreed it was good. Heading over to their Avenger, they took several needed measurements before assembling what they needed. Using strips of masking tape, they made what hopefully looked like a set of individual machine gun ports along the front edges of both wings. After taping them into position, they painted big black circles in the center of each one.

  The idea was that the Japanese fighter pilots would be so scared when they got close enough to see the full array of machine guns that they would take off. Standing back to admire their work, they agreed that it wouldn’t stop the Japanese striking force, but one never knew. It just might save their lives.

  Grant and Whitey

  TUESDAY, 2 JUNE 1942

  NORTHEAST OF MIDWAY ATOLL

  USS HORNET

  The typed message had come down to Ready Room Four from the bridge along with the Plan of the Day, which itemized the mundane daily routines and chores aboard ship, such as: “080 —VB-8 Squadron air bedding on forecastle.”

  The words of this typed message were neither routine nor mundane. They were electrifying. In the smoke-fogged room, Ensign Grant Teats listened to the message as it was read aloud by the Skipper.

  AN ATTACK FOR THE PURPOSE OF CAPTURING MIDWAY ISLAND EXPECTED. THE ATTACKING FORCE MAY BE COMPOSED OF ALL COMBAT TYPES INCLUDING FOUR OR FIVE CARRIERS PLUS TRANSPORTS AND TRAIN VESSELS. IF PRESENCE OF TASK FORCES 16 AND 17 REMAINS UNKNOWN TO ENEMY WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE SURPRISE FLANK ATTACKS ON ENEMY CARRIERS FROM POSITIONS NORTHEAST OF MIDWAY. FURTHER OPERATIONS WILL BE BASED ON RESULT OF THESE ATTACKS DAMAGE INFLICTED BY MIDWAY FORCES AND INFORMATION ENEMY MOVEMENT. THE SUCCESSFUL CONCLUSION OF THE OPERATIONS NOW COMMENCING WILL BE OF GREAT VALUE TO OUR COUNTRY.

  Navy patrol planes were already searching the skies northwest of Midway in hopes of an early sighting of the Japanese striking force. The Japanese had scout planes, too, the Skipper told them, and there was always the chance they might find the American carriers first. Things could break loose at any time.

  On the previous night, wild rumors had begun to course through the ship, passing from mouth to ear like a primitive telegraph system. The Japanese attack at Midway was just a diversion, according to one. The real invasion force had already slipped around Hawaii and was heading for San Francisco.

  Most of the rumors were ludicrous, but one thing was sure. They would be in combat soon. Ensign Grant Teats knew he should be focused on his first mission against the Japanese striking force, but it was hard.

  The reason it had become hard was a young woman named Diana. Grant had become unofficially engaged to her on the night before the Hornet had left Norfolk back in March.

  The first letter Diana had written to him was cheerful and upbeat.

  Grant dear,

  It’s a beautiful spring day here — trees are beginning to bud and flowers and shrubs blooming — just too pretty to stay indoors. Mother and Dad came for a visit on Sunday. I told them everything and Mother said to tell you that if you are half as good as I say, you are the one. . . . No matter where you are or what you are doing, I love you Grant and pray for you every night. . . . Hurry home and love always,

  Diana

  Now, as he sat in the squadron’s ready room holding the letters he had received since, Grant looked like a heavyweight prizefighter who had just gone fifteen rounds with Joe Louis. He was still trying to decipher them, as if they were in some long-extinct language.
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  Whitey Moore, his roommate and closest friend, was the one man in the squadron who knew why. In a way, Whitey felt responsible for everything that had happened. It was his girlfriend Betty Watkins who had arranged the blind date for Grant and Diana about a month before the Hornet sailed for the Pacific

  Diana was twenty-two years old and from North Carolina. Like Betty, she was a student nurse at Norfolk Naval Hospital, and she had recently broken up with her boyfriend after a long-term relationship.

  Grant liked her immediately. To start with, she was pretty, with long blond hair and a trim figure. But he had dated a lot of pretty girls before, and rarely asked them out a second time. Somehow, Diana seemed different. Part of it was her lilting Southern accent.

  More important, she said she was an outdoors girl, telling him she had grown up as a tomboy, fishing and hunting with her father in the woods of North Carolina. She also had a way of making him laugh, which took his mind off the war.

  He, Diana, Whitey, and Betty had had a great time that first night. Whitey was an incredible jitterbugger, the kind of fluid and acrobatic dancer who could twirl a small girl like Betty over his shoulder and pull her through his legs just like they did in the newsreels. At parties, other couples would often stop dancing just to watch them fly.

  Grant wasn’t an exceptional dancer, but he enjoyed it, and so did Diana. She quickly learned that Grant was different from the Navy fliers who seemed always on the make when it came to a pretty nurse. A raw-boned six-footer, he towered over Whitey, but his circus strongman physique belied a gentle nature and an unassuming personality. At first, it was hard for Diana to get him to talk about himself. It wasn’t that he was shy. He just didn’t feel he needed to prove himself in the company of others.

  When the evening was over, he asked her out again for the following night and she accepted. From then on, they were together whenever their work schedules allowed it. Diana didn’t wait for him to ask her to marry him. She proposed just two weeks after they met. She was honest in telling him about another young man she had fallen in love with before him, but said it had felt nothing like this.

  He tried to explain why it wasn’t the most prudent thing to do. After all, they had known one another less than a month. He also told her the risks that went with marrying a Navy combat flier, and how he had watched five flight cadets die in accidents at Pensacola. He didn’t mention that his mother frowned on wartime marriages, and had cautioned him about what to do if the situation arose. Any girl worth having would be willing to wait for him, she had written. “Grant, you must be sensible in these times.”

  But Grant had discovered there was nothing sensible about love.

  Growing up in the forested magnificence of Sheridan, Oregon, he’d been taught by his parents to always do the right and honorable thing. Everything he had accomplished, from his exploits on the football field to the track records he set under Coach Doc Swan at Oregon State University, reflected a serious young man who worked hard to make his family proud of him. His love for his parents and his sister Charlotte was central to his life.

  During the Depression, the Teats family had fallen on difficult times. It hadn’t always been so. One of his great uncles was Commodore William Bainbridge, who had commanded Old Ironsides. Another ancestor had founded the town of Sheridan in 1866. When Grant was growing up there, his father had been a highly respected high school principal.

  After retirement, Bert Teats had gone through a succession of jobs, eventually setting up a small insurance business at home. Grant’s mother, Jennie Teats, helped make ends meet by opening a small café next to the Yamhill River. In high school, Grant would eat his supper there after coming back from football practice and before doing his homework. In the summers, he worked at the plywood mill or in one of the lumber camps.

  It came as a shock to his parents when he first told them he wanted to fly. At the time, he had been a sophomore at Oregon State. A friend of his had joined the college flying program at an airfield near Corvallis, and Grant had become keen to try it himself. After finishing college, he went right into the Navy.

  During his months of flight training, Grant wrote more than a hundred letters home, long optimistic ones full of vivid descriptions of snap rolls, spins, loops, and whip stalls. They made his parents feel they were right there with him in the cockpit as he learned to meet each new challenge. Writing paper was often scarce, and some of the letters were written on sheets of scrap, every inch filled with his narrow, cramped writing.

  In many of them, he would include a money order to help them make ends meet. If he couldn’t, he would apologize for not sending anything. A portion of the $62.50 he earned each month went straight home, as did most of his monthly poker winnings, which often exceeded his paycheck.

  In addition to being a star athlete, Grant was good at games. At the age of twelve, he filled in at a bridge tournament attended by his parents. At the end of the evening, he had the highest score. He was even better at poker, playing conservatively but also having an instinctive sense of when to bluff. Over the months he served with Torpedo Eight, he was usually the biggest winner in the squadron.

  Beneath the forbidding brow, he also had a dry sense of humor. One of the challenges the pilots faced aboard ship was sheer boredom. As they sat in the ready room one afternoon, he got up from his chair and walked to the front of the room. Turning to face the others, he said, “It has come to my attention that no one here is familiar with the process of making plywood. Let me enlighten you.” He then began a lecture on the subject, speaking extemporaneously on the whole process from cutting down a tree to the final product. It was both illuminating and funny, and the rest of the pilots loved it.

  Although gentle in nature, Grant sometimes had to work at controlling his temper. Officers who thought it might be amusing to intentionally mispronounce his last name as “Tits” never did it a second time.

  When Swede Larsen singled him out for one of his public tirades back at Norfolk, Grant had almost lost control and decked him. Afterward, he wrote home to say that it had helped him to mentally picture Swede as the hind end of a horse.

  On their last night in Norfolk, Grant and Whitey took the girls aboard the Hornet for a candlelight dinner in the wardroom. They wore their best uniforms, and the girls were on cloud nine.

  When the Hornet arrived in San Francisco, Grant received the next batch of letters from Diana. The words almost sent him into a tailspin. She was supposed to finish her nursing training and wait for his return. Her thinking had obviously changed.

  Dearest Grant,

  First of all, I might as well tell you I hate this hospital and everything that goes with it. I’ll go crazy if I have to live through much more. We were so happy together those few weeks and to have it end with me here and you there. . . . Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Grant? Now that I’m living through these dark days, I must admit I am a coward and can’t make it alone. What do you want me to do? I’ll never finish nurse’s training. I just can’t.

  Love, Diana

  How could he possibly be with her now? He was on his way to fight the Japanese. They were in the middle of a world war. He wrote back that it was just as hard for him, as well as the other fliers in the squadron who were married, engaged, or in love. They had to go on with their work and do their best. He said things were bound to get better when she no longer had to work nights. He received her reply when the Hornet arrived at Pearl Harbor.

  Dearest Grant,

  I have a confession to make. Last night I went to the “O” Club with Bill Valentine. And I got plastered. A toast to the boys at sea, to the boys on shore, to our engagement, to Brownie’s marriage, and oh so many others. And was I sick . . . Bill’s opinion of me isn’t much I’m sure. But that doesn’t worry me. What do you think? Grant, it never would have happened if you had been there, I know. Scotch and water. I’ll never touch it again until you return. I promise.

  Whitey told him not to put too much stoc
k in the incident. Betty had written to him about it, too, and said that Diana hadn’t done anything wrong. All of the wives and girlfriends were just going nuts with worry.

  Anxious about Diana’s emotional well-being, Grant fell back on his principal weakness, food. Already the biggest pilot aboard ship, he had put on ten pounds since they had left Norfolk, and the Skipper started ragging him that he wouldn’t be able to fit in the cockpit. He didn’t care.

  He was able to write on May 28, the morning they left Pearl Harbor for Midway, assuring her that everything would be fine when he got back. He also took a minute to write a quick note to his parents in pencil. He wasn’t sure where they were headed, and wrote, “Someplace . . . Somewhere. I’ll do the best I can. Love, G.”

  One of Diana’s letters came in the next mailbag the Hornet received.

  Grant darling:

  I was thrown from my bike on my head and almost killed myself . . . and when I finally did come back to life my face was ruined I thought. The right side had lacerations upon lacerations and my right eye was closed. . . . I came out of the hospital yesterday afternoon. I don’t feel like living. I want to see you so badly I just can’t live much longer without you. No I can’t. . . . But don’t worry about me now Grant, ’cause I’ll pull through some way. Do you still love me? Grant, if you have changed your mind, well I’ll just end it all. It wouldn’t be hard to do. . . . Be sweet darling, don’t stop loving me.

  All my love, Diana

  Grant wasn’t the only pilot struggling with anxiety. With each successive clanging of the ship’s bells to toll the passing hours, the nervous strain on the men grew into something almost physical. They dealt with it in different ways. Sitting in the cushioned seat next to Grant Teats, Whitey Moore dealt with it by sleeping.

  His capacity for sleep had led Bill Evans to label him “the somnambulist” after a character in Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars. It had also led to a wager among the other members of the squadron as to just how deep Whitey’s slumber really was.