A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  USS SARATOGA

  0400

  The American invasion force crept slowly eastward in the predawn darkness across an ebony sea. In the hot, overcrowded transports, nineteen thousand men of the 1st Marine Division prepared to disembark as soon as they reached their landing beaches at Guadalcanal and Tulagi.

  Boredom from the long sea voyage was replaced with growing anxiety.

  So far, their luck was holding. The previous day, August 6, had been gray and overcast, cloaking the eighty-two ships from the eyes of Japanese scout pilots. Late that afternoon, the sun had broken through, bathing the invasion force in golden light.

  Aboard the Saratoga that evening, Commander Felt assembled his pilots in the wardroom to go over their assignments for the last time. After the briefing was over, a group of Filipino mess stewards attempted to play the latest swing music of Glenn Miller on their ukeleles. Most of the officers turned in early.

  They were awakened about two hours before dawn, and the pilots assembled for breakfast in the wardroom. After more than a month at sea without reprovisioning, the Saratoga’s morning menu was reduced to coffee, stewed tomatoes, toast, and powdered eggs. It didn’t inspire a healthy appetite.

  The pilots assigned to fly in the first wave of attacks headed straight to their planes, which were already spotted on the dark flight deck. Overnight, the seas had turned violent, and the wind was gusting at twenty knots. Standing in the darkness at the edge of the deck, Lieutenant Pete Peterkin silently prayed that all of the squadron’s Avengers were ready to go.

  In the weeks since Swede had ordered him and Chief Hammond to get the planes squared away, Torpedo Eight had continued to be plagued with mechanical failures and engine malfunctions. A number of its flights had to be aborted. In addition to losing Evarts’s Avenger on the barrier wire a week earlier, several pilots had made rough landings aboard the carrier, resulting in further damage to their aircraft.

  The sarcastic jibes from the other squadrons had gotten so bad that Peterkin and Hammond defiantly offered to bet any takers on the ship that all of their aircraft would have successful takeoffs on Dog Day. It was about pride, but the two of them stood to lose a lot of money if even one of the planes failed to get airborne.

  At 0500, the blue flash of exhaust gas garishly lit up the flight deck as dozens of airplane engines were started and slowly warmed up. After ten minutes, they were turned off, and it was quiet once more.

  Bert Earnest sat in the gloom of his cockpit and wondered why he felt so nervous. His Confederate ancestors in Virginia, at least those who had survived the Civil War, had sometimes referred to their first time under fire as having “been to see the elephant.”

  Whatever the words meant, he had been to see the elephant on his very first mission at Midway. Hell, he had seen a good-size part of the whole Japanese navy. So why should he be nervous now? He decided that nerves would probably be part of every combat mission he ever flew. It all came down to how much luck a man had. If fate was something like a cat’s proverbial nine lives, he wondered how many he had already used up at Midway.

  Far off on the port side of the carrier, he was startled to see a sudden eruption of brilliant flame in the inky darkness. The flash lasted only a few moments and was gone again. He knew there were escort ships in that direction, and wondered if one of them might have been hit by an enemy torpedo or bomb.

  Waiting to take off behind him, Gene Hanson was nervous, too. Like most of the pilots in the squadron, this would be his first combat mission, and he was worried about taking off in the dark. There had been a sliver of a pale new moon earlier, but it had waned to nothing. He could barely see his hands in front of his face.

  How would they find each other in the middle of it all? The seven Avengers in the first attack were supposed to rendezvous above the carrier and then Swede would lead them to their assigned target. That sounded fine except that dozens of planes would be taking off from the three carriers at the same time, all trying to join up in the crowded airspace.

  They were under strict orders to maintain radio silence until the first Japanese targets were hit, so all he could do was follow the taillights of the plane ahead of him and hope they eventually found each other.

  In spite of his nervous-ness, Gene Hanson felt confident and prepared. He was a thorough pilot, and had made a personal check of every important mechanical system on the aircraft. Using a flashlight, he had even inspected the bomb racks before getting into the cockpit. The armorers had loaded him with nine one-hundred-pound concussion bombs and three incendiaries.

  His dad had been a machinist back in Burlington, Iowa, and Gene had grown up with a reverence for all things mechanical. Descended from Swedish immigrants, the stoic six-footer had started work at the John Deere tractor company in Moline, Illinois, right out of high school. He had lived in a cheap Moline rooming house while working on an assembly line making threshers. After saving up enough money, he had put himself through junior college, and then joined the naval reserves. He had won his wings in December 1941, a week after the attack at Pearl Harbor.

  Gene’s best friend in the squadron was the unlucky Bob Evarts. He and Evarts were built almost exactly alike, and when their backs were turned, it was hard for the crews to tell them apart. They had both started out the war clean shaven, but in recent months Gene had nurtured what the other pilots scathingly called his “Clark Gable” mustache. After sending his fiancée a recent photograph, he was waiting to find out whether she liked it or not.

  Waiting behind Hanson on the flight deck were John Taurman, Red Doggett, Jack Barnum, Bob Ries, and Swede Larsen. Swede, who was leading his first combat mission, would be the last pilot in the flight to take off.

  If Swede was nervous, it wasn’t apparent to Yeoman Jack Stark, who was standing on the flight deck to watch as the squadron prepared for its mission. To Stark, Swede looked like an excited thoroughbred in the starting gate at the Kentucky Derby.

  At 0530, the three American carriers turned southeast into the wind and began launching their aircraft. The Grumman Wildcats went off first, quickly followed by the Dauntless dive-bombers. Everything was going like clockwork until Ensign William Bell took off in one of the last dive-bombers aboard the Saratoga.

  As Jack Stark watched in horror, Bell’s Dauntless suddenly stalled in midair, hovering there for a moment as if in suspended animation. Then the plane and its three-man crew disappeared off the bow into the boiling sea. In the predawn darkness, there wasn’t a chance of their being saved.

  Torpedo Eight’s seven Avengers moved up to take off after the last dive-bomber. As Bert taxied forward to the starting line, Pete Peterkin made his way to the plane across the slick flight deck.

  After the tail-hook accident that had cost Bob Evarts’s plane a few weeks earlier, Peterkin had decided to crawl under each aircraft just before takeoff to make sure that its tail hook was locked up. It was a dangerous job, particularly in the dark. The gusting force of prop wash from moving airplanes on a slippery deck had caused several deaths aboard the carriers, which was why Peterkin had assigned this job to himself.

  One by one, the big Avengers roared down the flight deck and lifted off into the black sky, each pilot following the taillight of the man ahead of him. Swede was the seventh and last. As he came up to the starting point, Peterkin checked that the tail hook was stowed before scuttling back to join Chief Hammond at the edge of the flight deck.

  Swede revved the engine to the straining point, and the takeoff control officer gave him the signal to go. Swede released his brakes, and the plane quickly began to pick up speed.

  Suddenly, Peterkin felt a lash of spray on his face. It wasn’t seawater. He smelled the reek of motor oil, and realized that Swede’s engine was spewing it out of the breather pipe. He could now hear the engine misfiring, once and then again, as the plane continued lumbering down the deck.

  Chief Hammond yelled out for him to cut the engine. If Swede reacted right away, there was still a chance he
could stop the plane before it dropped into the sea like the doomed Dauntless ten minutes earlier.

  But Swede never hesitated. With the engine at full throttle, his sputtering Avenger slowly clawed its way into the air. The dark shape of the aircraft briefly dipped below the bow of the carrier before finally disappearing into the murky sky above them.

  The first seven had all made it. When the last one was gone, Peterkin and Hammond went down to the hangar deck to do a final series of checks on the eight Avengers that would go out in the second wave of attacks.

  The dark sky above the carriers now held a confusing mass of pilots struggling to find one another. Planes from the Saratoga quickly found themselves entangled in formations from the Enterprise and Wasp.

  In getting his own troubled plane into the air, Swede had lost contact with the rest of the flight. His windshield was covered by a film of oil, and it was impossible for him to see anything clearly.

  The standing orders from Commander Felt were that no pilot should spend more than five minutes trying to locate the rest of his formation. If unsuccessful, he was to head off on his flight’s preplanned compass bearing. Hopefully, the lost pilots would find the rest of their group once dawn broke.

  After searching for the others, Swede gave up and headed east on his own. By then, the deputy flight leader, Lieutenant Jack Barnum, had assumed command and was headed toward their first target.

  Torpedo Eight’s initial objective was Florida Island, where aerial reconnaissance indicated that the Japanese had built a command installation. As Barnum’s formation flew over the dark mass of Guadalcanal, Gene Hanson saw yellow splashes of light erupting out of the darkness far below him as bombs and tracer rounds from the first wave of fighters and dive-bombers hit their targets. With radio silence no longer necessary, his cockpit radio suddenly came alive with excited chatter.

  Flying alone at full throttle, Swede followed them across the crowded sky over Guadalcanal. His engine was running fine now, and a brief rain squall had cleared his windshield. Dawn was breaking when he caught up with the rest of the squadron as they approached the western coast of Florida Island. Swede radioed to Jack Barnum that he was taking back command.

  Their assignment was to destroy the Japanese headquarters at Point Purvis, which was located about twenty miles northeast of Guadalcanal across Sealark Channel. When they arrived there, it was light enough to see that the installation was already reduced to smoking rubble. A few smaller buildings were still standing, and Swede led the formation down in a low-level “flat-hatting” attack to destroy them.

  Their second objective was on the coast of Malaita, a much bigger island to the east of Florida. The mission called for them to use their remaining bombs to destroy any enemy ships they found in the Maramasike Estuary.

  Unfortunately, thunderheads blocked the passage leading to the estuary, and Swede decided to lead them up the western coast of Malaita to a point where they could cross a mountain range to reach their objective. Bad weather again forced them to turn back.

  Swede decided to head farther north.

  As they flew on through the lightening sky, Gene Hanson saw that Malaita was made up of different shades of green. There were the blue-green mountains, darker green jungle, and the pale green of its grassy fields and coconut palms.

  After miles of uninterrupted jungle, Swede came to a small, sheltered harbor along the northwest coast. He immediately thought the place looked suspicious. The lagoon was large enough for Japanese torpedo boats and maybe even bigger ships. He then saw what appeared to be boat moorings dotted around the harbor.

  Swede was now sure it was a Japanese torpedo-boat base disguised as a fishing village. The torpedo boats were probably hidden in the dense jungle along the shallow creeks that fed the lagoon.

  To John Taurman, Bert Earnest, and Gene Hanson, the place appeared to be nothing more than a native settlement. A cluster of primitive huts ringed the lagoon. Tiny figures in canoes were paddling along the inlet that led toward the settlement. More canoes were beached along the shore line.

  Swede didn’t wait to hear their opinions. Over the radio, he ordered them to follow him down in another flat-hatting attack. Coming in low, he opened up on the huts with his nose machine gun before releasing his first bomb on the largest one in the clearing. He then went into a steep climb to give his machine gunners a better angle to strafe with their machine guns. Barnum, Ries, and Hanson followed Swede in, dropping their payloads on other huts in the settlement.

  As he swept in behind them, John Taurman decided not to release his bombs. Heading in on his own run, Bert Earnest saw little stick figures running out of the huts in every direction. They didn’t appear to be wearing clothes, much less Japanese uniforms.

  “Knock off the firing,” he called out on the intercom.

  After two more passes, Swede ran out of ammunition and ordered the rest of them to form up behind him for the return flight to the Saratoga. It was now full daylight.

  Flying back over Guadalcanal, Gene Hanson could see an American cruiser pounding the landing beaches with salvos of shell fire, the explosions tossing palm trees like match sticks into the air along with geysers of sand and debris.

  Offshore, American transport ships were disgorging dark masses of men as Higgins landing craft idled in the water alongside them. Waves of landing craft were churning toward the invasion beaches, crammed with men and equipment. Farther inland, a long brown gash cut straight across the green landscape. It was the packed-earth runway of the Japanese airfield.

  USS SARATOGA

  0800

  Aboard the Saratoga, the second flight of Torpedo Eight’s Avengers was preparing for its own mission. Bruce Harwood would lead the eight-plane formation. His orders were to find and destroy any enemy positions still left on Guadalcanal.

  Sitting behind Harwood in the second seat was Clark Lee, a correspondent for the Associated Press. It was the first time a journalist had been given the chance to fly on a combat mission in the Pacific.

  Lee liked the big, taciturn Harwood. In the midst of all the pandemonium on the carrier deck, Harwood had an almost uncanny sense of calm. Lee turned on the radio earphones in his flying helmet and heard the jumbled voices of pilots hitting targets on Guadalcanal and Tulagi.

  Pete Peterkin and Chief Hammond watched nervously as one by one, the eight Avengers took off from the flight deck. After the last plane was in the air, he and Hammond celebrated their achievement by shaking hands. They would collect on their winning bets later.

  Once airborne, Clark Lee could see the mountains of Guadalcanal rising through the clouds in the distance. He felt the plane shudder as Harwood had his flight crew test their machine guns before they came down over the north shore of the island.

  Lee took in the panorama of the American invasion force.

  A long line of landing craft was beached parallel along the dun-colored sand. Higgins boats full of men and equipment were waiting offshore to unload their cargoes when a free spot opened on the beach. Offshore, the transports were still untouched by enemy fire. They all faced bow-in toward the shoreline, steadily unloading more men and equipment into the landing craft.

  As far as Lee could see, there was no serious enemy resistance on Guadalcanal. Apparently, surprise had been complete. Harwood led the formation in a pass over the newly constructed, packed-dirt airfield. A group of frame buildings adjoining the runway was already ablaze.

  Smiley Morgan, who was flying on Harwood’s wing, searched the landscape below them for possible targets. He watched as a Wildcat fighter went in low to strafe what at first looked like men on horseback trying to escape across the grassy plain. As their flight drew closer, he saw that the fleeing men were a panic-stricken herd of cattle.

  Harwood received orders over the radio to bomb a section of dense jungle near the airfield where Japanese troops were thought to be hiding. As the explosions burst behind him from Harwood’s five-hundred-pound bombs, Clark Lee scribbled into the open not
ebook on his lap, “Hit ’em. Hit the bastards. Kill the lousy Japs.”

  It was the first payback he had personally witnessed since Pearl Harbor.

  USS SARATOGA

  1000

  Aboard the Saratoga, Swede’s flight had just landed. He ordered the squadron’s planes to be rearmed and fueled. The pilots were given thirty minutes to relax before their next mission, and they headed down for coffee and sandwiches.

  In the wardroom, Gene Hanson could see that John Taurman was incensed. The big pilot went straight over to Swede and told him they had just bombed a native village. Worried that a physical confrontation might land Taurman in the brig, Hanson joined them at Swede’s table. When Taurman repeated the assertion, Swede heatedly denied it.

  “What the hell were we shooting at?” asked Bert Earnest, coming up to join them.

  “Didn’t you see that Jap torpedo boat?” asked Swede.

  None of them had. Swede said it might have looked like a native village, but it was actually a cleverly concealed Japanese torpedo-boat base. He had seen one of the boats lying camouflaged in a creek near the settlement.

  The boat moorings in the lagoon were the tip-off, he said. Fortunately, they had taken out the base before the Japanese could use it to launch an attack on the invasion force. He would write it all up in his After Action Report.

  Bert hadn’t seen a torpedo boat or any moorings. The only thing he remembered seeing were the thatched-roof huts and the tiny stick figures running in every direction after the first bombs hit the settlement.

  Taurman still wasn’t convinced, and he was right in Swede’s face. Gene Hanson got in front of Taurman and urged him to calm down. They had another mission to fly and it was too late to do anything about it now.

  Twenty minutes later, they were back in the air. Swede’s orders were to again cross over the Maramasike Estuary on Malaita, and search it from end to end for enemy ships.

  No longer hindered by bad weather, the flight made it through this time, but their search yielded no enemy ships or planes. Suddenly, they spotted a group of buldings at the edge of a small bay. Sweeping in low, they flew over a cluster of people standing in one of the clearings waving white objects at them.