He focused his attention on Red Doggett’s crew, and demanded to know whether they had strafed the target area after the bombs were dropped. J. D. Hayes, Doggett’s tail gunner, spoke up, saying that he had. Swede called him a liar.
J. D. Hayes was just over five feet tall. Since the Saratoga had been torpedoed, he had tried to grow a piratical beard to make himself appear a bit more menacing. Swede didn’t like beards. After continuing to ream Hayes out in front of the others, Swede ordered him to shave off the beard. He was walking away when the little gunner pulled his forty-five from his hip holster and raised it toward Swede’s disappearing back.
Red Doggett was standing next to him, and shoved Hayes to the ground. If Swede heard the scuffle taking place behind him, he never turned around. The men who were there all wondered what punishment Hayes would receive for pulling the gun on him, but no charges were filed, and he remained on active flight status. He didn’t shave his beard, either.
Monday, 28 September 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
There was no other way to describe it. Over the previous three days, General Vandegrift’s Marines had taken a brutal beating from the Japanese. Their losses in killed alone had exceeded those in the two nights of desperate fighting on Edson’s Ridge.
It had come at the hands of the survivors of the Kawaguchi force that the Marines had crushed two weeks earlier. Somehow, the survivors had managed to regroup to the west of the Marine defense perimeter near the Matanikau River. Seeking to expel them, Vandegrift had sent a battalion of nine hundred men from the newly arrived 7th Marines to confront the Japanese. In a fierce firefight, the Marines had been repulsed.
Vandegrift had then ordered Edson’s Raider battalion to buttress the next advance. As the Marines went forward in another costly and unsuccessful assault, the Japanese air force attacked Henderson Field with fifty-six fighters and bombers from Rabaul. Although the Wildcats shot down three of them, two of Swede’s Avengers were badly damaged on the ground.
Swede radioed Espiritu Santo for Harwood to bring up more planes. On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, four more Avengers arrived. They were piloted by Bruce Harwood, Aaron Katz, Andy Divine, and Bob Ries.
As part of a rotation plan to make sure that the pilots and crews remained fit and ready for combat, Swede headed back to Espiritu Santo with Jack Barnum, Gene Hanson, and Bert Earnest.
Thursday, 1 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
0930
Smiley Morgan was sitting in the squadron’s ready tent on Pagoda Hill listening to the rain drumming hard on its canvas roof when a pilot rushed in to say he had just seen Admiral Chester Nimitz going into the Pagoda.
At first, the rest of them were skeptical. What would the most powerful American naval officer in the Pacific be doing there? But Smiley and the other pilots were watching from the tent when Nimitz walked back outside with General Vandegrift.
For a few moments, it looked like the two commanders might make the rounds of the ready tents. Smiley wondered what he would say if the admiral asked him how he thought the war was going. He never got the chance. Instead, the commanders got into their jeeps and drove away.
Along with the others, Smiley wondered what the admiral’s visit might mean, or at least how it would affect their own lives in the days ahead. Clearly, something big was coming. The word was that the enemy was landing a thousand men at Cape Esperance every night. Smiley had flown two bombing attacks on the Japanese positions out there, but it had been so dark he wasn’t sure he had hit anything.
The heavy rains finally started to slacken later that morning. By early afternoon, the runway began to dry out, and Bruce Harwood told the pilots that he would be leading a flight of five Avengers up the Groove to search for Japanese warships. Bill Dye, Bob Ries, Andy Divine, and a replacement pilot named Larry Engel would be going with him.
They took off at 1815, and headed north. Visibility was good under the scattered clouds as darkness fell. For more than an hour, they searched the waters northwest of Guadalcanal without sighting anything. Then one of the pilots spotted some white wakes on the black sea. He counted four warships, all destroyers, heading for Guadalcanal.
With the destroyers sending up a continuous screen of antiaircraft fire, Harwood radioed that they would go after the two leading destroyers. Harwood, Ries, and Dye would attack the first one, Divine and Engel the second.
Harwood saw Ries’s torpedo explode against the starboard side of the first destroyer, sending a column of flame into the night sky. The ship was listing badly in the water as the pilots made their escape in the black night.
Friday, 2 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
While Harwood was leading his attack on the Japanese destroyers, Fred Mears had arrived at Henderson Field to rejoin the squadron after hitching a ride from Espiritu Santo on a B-17.
He was relaxing in his tent with Aaron Katz when a downcast Bob Ries came through the opening and told them that Bill Dye, Larry Engel, and Andy Divine had gone missing and were presumed lost on the mission they had just flown.
No one had seen or heard from them after the attack on the destroyers. As Mears and Ries discussed the crews’ chances of survival, Japanese planes arrived over the field to drop flares in advance of another shelling attack. By now, Fred prided himself on being able to detect the first flash of an exploding shell, and reach his sandbag-protected foxhole before the next one hit. No one got much sleep again.
At dawn, Mears, Katz, and Ries took off to search the coast around Guadalcanal for the missing Avengers. In a three-hour flight, they spotted the wrecks of more than a dozen aircraft that had been shot down or crashed on the beaches, but found no trace of the lost pilots and crews.
They had just landed back at Henderson Field when the sound of an air-raid siren signaled another enemy air attack. Instead of their slower-moving bombers escorted by Zeroes, this time the Japanese had sent thirty-six Zeroes to fight a duel for air supremacy with the Marine and Navy fighters. Thirty-six Wildcats were scrambled to meet the incoming threat.
The Wildcats were at an immediate height disadvantage and the Japanese shot six of them down, as well as two Dauntlesses that were returning to Guadalcanal from a bombing mission. One Japanese Zero was destroyed.
Saro Island
Newton Delchamps
Del Delchamps, Jim McNamara, and Bill Dye drifted along in the sullen gray sea, wondering exactly where they were. After losing his way back to Henderson Field in the darkness the night before, Bill had been forced to ditch their Avenger in the sea before it ran out of gas.
As the plane came to a stop, Del and Jim McNamara climbed out onto the wings to retrieve the life raft. There was an access hatch on both sides of the fuselage. In a comedy of errors, the two teenagers began pulling on it from opposite directions. When they finally got the raft out, it wouldn’t inflate. By then, the plane had sunk and they were treading water in the sea. Dye used an air pump to fill two of the chambers, and the three of them crawled into the raft.
The rain was coming down so heavily that two of them were forced to keep bailing with their bare hands. Since the raft kept leaking air, the third man pushed the hand pump. By dawn, they were exhausted.
At dawn, Dye could see the dark outline of a landmass through the rain. They slowly drifted toward it for most of the day. Del was the first to spot the speck on the gray horizon. As it slowly came closer through the rain, he could see it was a ship. It was too far away to tell if it was American or Japanese.
They had already heard plenty of stories about how the Japanese treated prisoners. All three of them were carrying forty-fives. After a brief discussion, they agreed to go down fighting.
For Del, the next twenty minutes were the most nerve-racking of his short life. From its forward silhouette, Dye finally decided it was a destroyer. As it came closer through the driving rai
n, the ship suddenly turned and they could see a red, white, and blue flag whipping on its fantail.
Bill Dye fired a flare in the air, then a second one. The ship turned again and came toward them. It was the USS Grayson, the same destroyer that had stood alongside the Saratoga to remove the support personnel of Torpedo Eight after the torpedo struck her.
When the three of them were aboard, they learned that Andy Divine, Larry Engel, and their crews had been picked up, too. The captain told them he would radio Guadalcanal that they were safe, and apologized for the fact that he would be unable to drop them back at Espiritu Santo for a while. Del didn’t mind. He was enjoying the best chow he had had in weeks.
Saturday, 3 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
0030
The nightly Japanese bombing and shelling attacks on Henderson Field usually didn’t cause a serious loss of life, but no one could predict where they would land. A direct hit was fatal. The pilots and crews had learned it was better to be safe than sorry.
Pete Peterkin always made a point of scouting out a deep hole before it got dark. One afternoon he found a big crater made by a Japanese bomb that looked perfect. As soon as the nightly attack began, he ran and dove into it as the bombs started falling. He regained consciousness a few minutes later. A bulldozer driver had filled the hole earlier that evening.
Many of the men went to sleep wearing their shoes. They didn’t want to have to search for them before running to their foxholes. The only shoes Smiley Morgan had brought with him were high-tops. They were big and cumbersome. That night he had taken them off before crawling under the mosquito netting.
When the attack started, he was out of the tent and streaking toward his foxhole before giving any thought to the fact that he was barefoot. He tripped over something sharp, and felt a jolt of pain. By the time he was ensconced in his foxhole, his foot was bleeding badly.
He wrapped a towel around it when he got back to the tent. In the morning, he removed the bloody towel and saw that he had a four-inch gash from the pad to the heel. He went limping off to find the Marine dispensary. At one of the encampments, he stopped to ask a fat, grizzled Marine sergeant wearing a T-shirt for directions.
The man looked familiar, and Smiley thought he probably worked over at the airfield. The Marine asked him what the problem was and Smiley showed him his foot. The Good Samaritan helped him over to the medical tent. As a corpsman took him inside, the fat Marine urged Smiley to “keep your pecker up.”
“Thanks, Sarge,” said Smiley.
While the corpsman was cleaning the wound, he asked Smiley what he and General Geiger had just been talking about, and Smiley realized why the old Marine had looked familiar.
After his foot was sewed up, the doctor told Smiley that because of the danger of infection, he was temporarily evacuating him. Later that day, Smiley flew out of Guadalcanal on a transport plane bound for Espiritu Santo.
As he was leaving, three more Avengers were arriving at Henderson Field. The new aircraft had been flown up from Espiritu Santo by John Taurman, Red Doggett, and another replacement pilot, Bill Esders. Esders was one of the two survivors from the Yorktown torpedo squadron that had attacked the Japanese fleet at Midway after Torpedo Eight was destroyed. He was greatly admired. For John Taurman, it was his first return to action since he had crash-landed off San Cristobal.
Pete Peterkin was particularly grateful for their arrival. Between the planes lost on various missions and the ones damaged and destroyed in the Japanese bombing attacks, the squadron was running out of planes.
At noon, forty-two Japanese aircraft attacked Henderson Field. Unlike the previous day, when they had brought only Zeroes, this time there were fifteen bombers along, too. Coast watchers had given Guadalcanal an early warning, and the Wildcats were ready. They had a field day. When the dogfight was over, nine Zeroes had been shot down.
Later that afternoon Fred Mears, Bob Evarts, and Bob Ries went out on a mission to search for a Japanese cruiser and two destroyers that had been sighted 150 miles northwest of Guadalcanal. They had closed on the reported location when Evarts spotted the ships in the distance. As the Avengers began circling to make their attack, Fred Mears’s gunner, George Hicks, saw Japanese fighters zooming up.
When Fred made his glide-bombing run on the carrier, one of them came after him. Fred could feel the plane’s vibration as Hicks opened fire with the fifty-caliber machine gun. A bit later, Hicks calmly announced over the intercom that he had shot the plane down.
Fred was making another bombing run when he felt a blow strike the plane from one of the ships’ antiaircraft batteries. It felt as if a giant had slapped his tail. George Hicks’s voice was suddenly on the intercom, telling him that their tail gunner was seriously wounded.
Fred set course for Guadalcanal and pushed the throttle to maximum speed. He radioed ahead that he had a wounded man aboard, and an ambulance was waiting for them when they landed forty minutes later. Warren Deitsch, the tail gunner, was unconscious when they pulled him out of the plane. Later, a surgeon told Fred that he had three pieces of shrapnel in his brain and was not expected to live.
Prior to the flight, Fred hadn’t been able to find his flying gloves, and he had asked Warren if he had seen them. Deitsch asked him if he was superstitious about wearing gloves on a mission. Fred admitted he was. “Well, I’m not,” said the tail gunner, giving him his own. Fred had the gloves on when Deitsch was hit.
Monday, 5 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
0130
Shortly after midnight, Mears was smoking outside his tent when an enlisted man came looking for one of the other pilots. He said it was for a “secret mission.” Intrigued, Fred decided to go in his place. He put on his khakis and joined Evarts, Taurman, and Ries for the briefing by Bruce Harwood.
Harwood told them they were going to make a dawn attack on a Japanese reconnaissance base at Rekata Bay, which was about 140 miles north of Guadalcanal at the tip of Santa Isabel Island.
The Hornet was coming in with its whole air group to launch an attack on Bougainville. The last American carrier in the South Pacific was hoping to catch a lot of Japanese ships at anchor there and sink them. Torpedo Eight’s job was to keep the reconnaissance planes that flew out of Rekata Bay from finding the Hornet, and radioing its location to Rabaul.
The five Avengers took off in total darkness at 0300, and headed north. They quickly ran into bad weather, which turned into the most ferocious storm Fred had ever flown through. Harwood began flying on instruments. The other four flew on contact, which meant that each pilot had to stay close enough to the plane ahead of him to see its flaming exhaust in the black, turbulent sky. They soon lost sight of one another in the grip of the storm.
When Fred had flown far enough and long enough to reach the coast of Santa Isabel, he was unable to see anything. The rain and heavy mist descended all of the way to the surface of the sea. He had no idea what had happened to the others, or whether they had made it.
Only the importance of the mission kept him from heading back to Guadalcanal. Climbing higher through the storm, he decided to circle around until the first morning light. Aside from flashes of lightning, he had no further contact with light or substance for two hours.
When dawn broke, he descended through the clouds. A landmass slowly took shape below him. He hoped it might be Santa Isabel, and after he flew along its northern coast for a while, the Japanese base finally emerged beneath the storm clouds in the distance. He told his crew to prepare for the attack.
One downed American plane was already burning in the sea as they came in. Up ahead, a Dauntless dive-bomber pilot was in the middle of his bombing run, and being pursued by a Japanese fighter. Fred called back to George Hicks and Ed Struble, his new tail gunner, to be ready for a fight.
As Fred was about to launch his bombs, a Japanese fighter attacked him from the left, raking the A
venger’s fuselage and wings with machine gun fire. A Zero came up at him from below and to the right before opening fire.
A few seconds later, it was over. George Hicks had shot down the first fighter, and Struble had knocked down the Zero. On their way back to Guadalcanal, Fred discovered that his bombs hadn’t released, but he decided it was a fair trade for two enemy planes.
After the long, arduous flight, all three men were pretty shaky when they reached the ground. Ed Struble, who didn’t look old enough to have pulled the trigger on his machine gun, was apologetic about what he had done.
“Gee, Mr. Mears, I didn’t mean to hit that plane,” he said. “I just meant to scare him. But he just caught fire and blew all to pieces.”
Putting on a stern face, Mears told Struble that “it would be all right this time.”
General Geiger personally commended Harwood’s pilots for making it to Rekata Bay through the storm. Fred was recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross, while Hicks and Struble were put in for Air Medals.
The strikes on Bougainville by the eighty-six planes from the Hornet air group were marginally successful. After braving the same violent storm that had bedeviled Torpedo Eight, the Hornet fliers had found cruisers, destroyers, and transport vessels in the harbor, but succeeded in making hits on only two cargo ships and a seaplane tender.
Tuesday, 6 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
1800
General Vandegrift continued to receive daily reports that the Japanese were being reinforced with troops, field guns, ammunition, and supplies. The possibility of their bringing heavy artillery ashore, including 150-millimeter howitzers that could pound Henderson Field from several miles away, was particularly alarming.
General Geiger ordered another attack on the Japanese landing areas at Cape Esperance as soon as possible. John Taurman, Red Doggett, and Bill Esders were chosen to make it.
Later that night, they took off in fifteen-second intervals, circled the field, and headed north in single file. The flight distance was only twenty miles, but with low cloud cover and overcast skies, visibility was nonexistent. Each pilot followed the exhaust flame of the man ahead.
A Dawn Like Thunder Page 32