A Dawn Like Thunder
Page 25
“You have to forget about it, Smiley. It’s best not to look back until this is all over.”
It didn’t make Cook’s death at the age of twenty-four any easier to accept. Sitting in their stateroom, Smiley found the words to write a letter to James Hill’s mother. He hoped it would give her some comfort to know that his last days aboard the Saratoga had been good ones.
Sunday, 23 August 1942
USS Saratoga
Torpedo Squadron Eight
1340
As the Saratoga headed northwest to engage the Japanese fleet, PBY search planes sighted an enemy task force of eight warships. It included heavy cruisers, destroyers, and transports, but no carrier.
Commander Felt assembled the pilots of the dive-bomber and torpedo squadrons in the Saratoga’s wardroom. “The Japanese are about to make a major effort to recapture Guadalcanal,” he said. “The weather is very bad, but we will try to find them.”
Felt told them he would be leading the formation of thirty-one Dauntlesses. Swede would lead the accompanying flight of six Avengers carrying torpedoes. Clark Lee, the AP correspondent who had flown with Bruce Harwood on Dog Day, received permission to fly with Swede.
While PBY search planes continued hunting for the Japanese carrier forces, the pilots waited in the wardroom. An hour passed. Frustration mounted as an hour and then a second one slipped past. The jarring sound of the telephone on the bulkhead wall finally broke the tension. Commander Felt listened to the message and replaced the phone.
“No carriers yet,” he said. “We’ll attack the cruisers.”
At 1440, the Saratoga turned into the wind to launch the attack. Felt’s thirty-one dive-bombers and the six torpedo planes formed up above the carrier and headed northwest. As they climbed through the dark overcast sky, Clark Lee noted that Frenchy Fayle was flying on Swede’s port wing. Bert Earnest was on his right.
The planes broke through the first layer of overcast at about one thousand feet. Within minutes, they flew into a violent storm front with ferocious winds and torrential rain. Clark Lee lost sight of Fayle and Earnest in the murky gloom. He became terrified that Swede might collide with one of the other planes.
The turbulence continued to grow as the formation continued on the course that hopefully led to the enemy cruiser force. Lee had finally managed to calm himself again when they began encountering a sickening combination of updrafts and downdrafts.
One moment they would be flying along on a level course. The next moment the Avenger would be plunging straight down in free-fall. For the first time, Lee felt the physical sensation of having his heart in his throat. He clutched the steel frame of his cushioned seat and held on.
Over the Pacific
Torpedo Squadron Eight
Newton Delchamps
1500
As Commander Felt’s thirty-seven-plane formation continued northward, Bill Dye and Bob Evarts were fighting southeast through the same violent sky, attempting to find the Saratoga after a two-plane flight from Guadalcanal.
Aviation Ordnanceman Third Class Newton “Del” Delchamps had never experienced anything like it before. Delchamps, a ruddy six-footer from Theodore, Alabama, was the tail gunner in Bill Dye’s crew. A month earlier, he had celebrated his eighteenth birthday aboard the Saratoga. Some of the men thought he was a bit hot-tempered, but had plenty of guts. It was probably because he had pretty much raised himself after being orphaned before the age of ten.
Del had already seen enough combat to last him for a while. He had been aboard the Yorktown at Midway, and was one of the last men off the ship. An exploding bomb had trapped him in a badly mangled steel catwalk. He was still entwined in it when the announcement came over the loudspeakers: “All hands abandon ship.” He had finally freed himself and slid down a line to the sea.
As a boy, Del had lived through the killer hurricanes that regularly battered southern Alabama. The storm they were now flying through was worse. From the tail, he couldn’t see where they were going. He could only see where they had just been, and that was all over the goddamn sky.
Earlier that day, they had ferried Commander Walter Schindler, Admiral Fletcher’s staff gunnery officer, from the Saratoga to Guadalcanal. Del had wondered why they were going over until he got inside the tail compartment and found the cargo of freshly baked bread, rolls, pastries, and a decorated layer cake. It struck him there was a big difference between the chow they served up in Admiral Fletcher’s flag mess, and the crap the enlisted men had been eating for weeks.
A staff officer was waiting for them at Henderson Field. He had two Marines remove the precious cargo and stow it in his jeep. No one asked Del if he had sampled the baked goods.
It was afternoon when Bill Dye found Del at the mess tent and told him to prepare for takeoff. Commander Schindler had returned and they were heading back to the Saratoga. When Del climbed into the tail again, it no longer smelled like a bakery.
The compartment was crammed with Japanese military gear: Nambu pistols, rifles, helmets, swords, flags, and uniform jackets with brownish stains. Unlike the bakery, it didn’t smell very good, although once they were headed down the runway, the fresh air streaming through the turret carried the odor away.
They ran into the storm front soon after leaving Guadalcanal. The vicious combination of updrafts and downdrafts made him sick to his stomach. One moment it was like he was on a rocket ship heading to the stars, and the next it was like the bottom had dropped out of the world.
The storm wouldn’t have been quite so bad except for the Japanese souvenirs. Each time the plane hit a downdraft, the compartment would fill up with flying military gear. The helmets were the worst. He found himself punching at them as they flew up at him from the deck. It wasn’t enough that he had to fight the Japanese while they were still alive. Now their junk was beating him to death.
Finally, he heard Bill Dye’s voice on the intercom. They had been in the air for a long time, but Del had no idea where they were. Dye told Commander Schindler that they had marginal fuel to make it to the Saratoga, and adequate fuel to make it back to Guadalcanal. He was asking Schindler to make the decision.
“You’re the pilot, Bill,” said Commander Schindler. “You make the call.”
Dye radioed Bob Evarts to say that they were returning to Guadalcanal.
Over the Pacific
Torpedo Squadron Eight
Swede Larsen
1630
Clark Lee was ready to give up flying altogether if they ever made it back to the Saratoga. He decided there were plenty of other good stories to cover in the war without ever getting in another combat plane.
So far, Swede had managed to fly through the blinding rain and fierce winds without colliding with any of the others. Personally, Lee thought it was a miracle. More incredibly, Commander Felt was still searching for the Japanese cruisers.
The weather had finally moderated a little when they arrived at the place where Felt expected the Japanese cruisers to be found. Descending through the clouds, the thirty-seven planes slowly circled in formation over the area. The ocean was empty.
Commander Felt radioed the group that he would lead them farther north, but ten minutes later they encountered a new storm front. Felt broke off the search and radioed that they would head for Guadalcanal instead of returning to the Saratoga. The rain and winds followed them as they flew south.
About an hour later, Lee, sitting in the seat behind Swede, heard his voice on the radio. Swede had spotted a landmass off to starboard and thought it might be Savo Island. The northern coast of Guadalcanal slowly emerged ahead in the rainy darkness. As they came in over Lunga Point, Lee could see that the Marines had lit bright flares along both sides of the runway. It was like a wonderful beacon welcoming them home.
The Japanese gave them a different welcome. The first Dauntless was coming in on its approach to the field when blue tracer bullets from enemy machine guns in the jungle near the field began arcing toward the plane.
There, Lee ran into Commander Schindler, whom he knew from his time aboard the Saratoga. Schindler had his own hairy story to tell about his aborted flight back to the carrier. He invited Lee to join him at General Vandegrift’s command post for drinks.
Across the airfield, Del Delchamps was sitting on an empty gasoline drum under the wing of Bill Dye’s Avenger and wishing he had a drink, too. As a curtain of warm rain fell in sheets off the lower edge of the wing, he wondered where he was going to sleep that night. It definitely wasn’t going to be in the tail compartment with the smelly Japanese souvenirs.
Suddenly, he heard the distant boom of thunder. A few moments later, he saw a cannon shell explode in the trees north of the airfield and realized they were under attack. He ran for one of the slit trenches.
A Marine lying alongside him in the mud told Del that a Japanese submarine surfaced almost every night in Sealark Channel and lobbed shells into their positions. None of them came close, but Del didn’t get much rest.
When Clark Lee and Swede Larsen came back from Vandegrift’s headquarters after sampling some captured Asahi beer, Lee curled up in Swede’s tail compartment, falling soundly asleep as rain hammered the metal fuselage above him. Swede slept in the cockpit.
Japanese Battleship Yamato
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
2200
As his flagship moved through rain squalls north of the Solomons, Admiral Yamamoto issued final orders for the counterstrike that would wrest control of Guadalcanal’s airfield from the Americans.
In the weeks since the landings, he had tried to convey the strategic importance of retaking the airfield to the high command of the Japanese Imperial Army, but with only marginal success. They did not fully share his views, and had committed only ten thousand troops in total to the effort. Convoys carrying the first reinforcements were on their way to Guadalcanal.
Yamamoto’s goals were more ambitious than landing reinforcements. As he had planned at Midway, he wanted to destroy the American carriers. To hold Guadalcanal, he was sure the Americans would have to expose them, and he was ready.
Now converging on the Eastern Solomons were three Japanese naval task forces. They comprised the bulk of the remaining striking power of the Imperial Navy, and consisted of three aircraft carriers, a seaplane carrier, two battleships, fourteen cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers.
At dawn on August 24, Japanese scout planes would be launched to the east and south to find the American carriers. If their search was unsuccessful, the focus of Yamamoto’s carrier attacks would be the airfield at Guadalcanal. Denying the Americans the use of the field was almost as valuable as taking it back. The carrier attacks would be supported by Japanese bombers and fighters flying from Rabaul.
Yamamoto’s two big carriers, Shokaku and Zuikaku, would launch their full complements of ninety dive-bombers and torpedo planes, supported by thirty-six fighters. A third carrier, the Ryujo, would be sent on ahead of the other two, escorted by the cruiser Tone and two destroyers. If its thirty-three attack planes failed to locate the American carriers, they, too, were to bomb the airfield at Guadalcanal.
The Ryujo was a lucky ship. In English, the word meant “Galloping Dragon.”
Monday, 24 August 1942
Guadalcanal
Newton Delchamps
0700
Overnight, the ferocious storm fronts had finally moved off, ushering in a torrid morning on Guadalcanal. Shortly after his breakfast of oatmeal and black coffee, Del Delchamps was told that the Marine air group on Guadalcanal was short of bombs, and that he was to remove the four five-hundred-pounders from Bill Dye’s plane.
As an ordnanceman, Del had been taught the proper procedures to both arm bombs and safely defuse them. First, he needed a bomb hoist to place under the open bomb bay, so that the bombs could be safely unloaded when he finished defusing them.
When he asked a Marine sergeant where he could find a bomb hoist to remove the four bombs, the sergeant just laughed. They only had one, he said. A Marine slept with the goddamn thing, and it was a good stretch away on the other side of the field.
Forget the bomb hoist, he told him. Del should just disconnect the safety wires from the bomb shackles, get up in the cockpit, and pull the salvo lever. The bombs would drop five feet to the ground and then be carted off by the Marines.
It didn’t sound good to Delchamps. He had been taught to do it the Navy way, and there had been plenty of warnings back at ordnance school of what could happen if a bomb accidentally fell out of an airplane, even if the plane was on the ground, and even if the bomb had been defused. And this was four bombs, all dropped together.
He looked around for Bill Dye to ask him what to do, but the pilot was nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, the Marine sergeant was yelling at him to get to work removing the bombs so the planes could be gassed for takeoff.
Getting under the open bomb bay, Del quickly removed the wire leads to each igniter. Then he climbed up on the wing and got into the cockpit. As he looked down at the salvo release lever, a horrible thought went through his mind of the bombs hitting the ground, exploding, and disintegrating him. Freak accidents happened all of the time.
After calling out for everyone to get clear, he was about to pull the salvo release lever when he heard a shout from just behind the wing. “What the hell are you doing up there?” screamed Swede Larsen. “Get out of that cockpit and come down here!”
The big eighteen-year-old climbed out and dropped down from the wing. He started to explain that there was no bomb hoist and that the Marine sergeant had told him to release the bombs onto the ground. Swede didn’t let him finish.
“You’re an idiot, Delchamps,” he shouted. “Do you want to blow up all these planes?”
Del looked around for the Marine sergeant but he had disappeared. The crews from the nearby planes were grinning at him like hyenas as Swede continued to dress him down as a loser and a disgrace to the Navy.
“Go find the bomb hoist and do the job properly,” Swede shouted.
In the middle of the tirade, Del had started feeling really hot. There was no need for Lieutenant Larsen to put him down in front of everybody, not when he hadn’t even given him a chance to explain. It was suddenly all he could do not to swing at the son of a bitch. But Swede was already walking away.
After using the bomb hoist, Del found out that the Dauntless crews had been ordered to unload their bombs, too. With only one hoist available, most of them had toggled their bombs into the mud, just as the Marine sergeant had told him to do.
USS Saratoga
0930
At midmorning, an American search plane sighted a new Japanese task force far to the north. It included a single carrier. Based on the search pilot’s position, the enemy carrier was about three hundred miles north of the Saratoga, and still out of striking range. Thirty minutes later, the Saratoga’s air staff received a report that another PBY had spotted a second task force that included heavy cruisers and destroyers.
At 1100, Commander Felt arrived from Guadalcanal with the group’s dive-bombers. Swede landed behind him with seven Avengers, including Bill Dye’s plane, which was carrying Commander Schindler. Bob Evarts’s Avenger had to be left at Henderson Field after it had a mechanical malfunction.
After arriving back aboard with Swede, Smiley Morgan had gone below to shower and change into fresh khakis. As soon as he got to the wardroom, he knew that something big was up. The word was that enemy carriers were coming at them from the north, bringing along half the Japanese navy.
Clark Lee sensed the excitement, too. “It was like the last few seconds before the gong rings to start a heavyweight championship fight,” he wrote in his journal. “This was the day, and no mistake.”
&nb
sp; Aaron Katz had been assigned to fly in Gene Hanson’s section, and Gene pulled him aside over coffee to let him know that he was fine with the decision. He thought Katz was a good guy, but that Swede’s constant baiting and criticism might have taken something out of him. Swede’s favorite expression for Katz was “Jew boy,” and he said after Katz’s arrival that he wouldn’t fly with him unless the whole squadron was going out together.
Hanson felt bad for Katz, but there was little any of them could do except show their personal support, particularly in front of Swede. Hanson had found Aaron to be modest and unassuming, the exact opposite of the way Swede claimed that all Jews were. Gene told him he was glad to have him flying with him. Aaron thanked him for his confidence.
Above them on the flag bridge, Admiral Fletcher continued to hold back his dive-bombers and torpedo planes in readiness for a solid sighting of the big enemy carriers. At 1320, the Saratoga’s radar sets picked up a large formation of enemy planes headed for Guadalcanal. Fletcher’s staff reasoned that they had to have been launched from a Japanese carrier.
Fletcher decided he could wait no longer. He ordered half the air group to locate and attack the carrier. The remaining dive-bombers and torpedo planes were to stay aboard as a reserve force in the event another carrier group was sighted later. When flight quarters sounded, the pilots assigned to the flight tore out of the wardroom to man their planes.
Swede was convinced that the mission was another wild-goose chase, just like the one the day before. The sighting report of the enemy carrier was several hours old and hadn’t even been confirmed. Believing the real action would come when the main Japanese carrier force was sighted, he told Bruce Harwood to take the first flight.
Going with Harwood were Gene Hanson, Aaron Katz, Bert Earnest, Andy Divine, Tex Grady, Bill Dye, and Smiley Morgan. Remaining behind with Swede were John Taurman, Red Doggett, Frenchy Fayle, Jack Barnum, and Bob Ries.