With his right hand, he reached down and grabbed Wiley Bartlett’s pistol from his hip holster. In one motion, he pulled back the slide and cocked the hammer. The distinctive sound of a forty-five shell being loaded from the magazine into the firing chamber drew the eye of every man in the circle. Harry Ferrier couldn’t believe it was happening.
No one said a word.
Swede turned to look back at him as Del raised the pistol to his chest and yelled, “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!”
A moment later, Bill Dye grabbed Del’s right arm with both hands, and someone else was wrestling him to the ground. Dye forced the pistol out of his hand as Del dropped to his knees under the weight of the man on his back. Sometime later, he could hear Bill Dye asking him if he was all right, and he nodded.
The rest of the men watched as Del was led away. No one else in the circle had moved. Swede was still staring after Delchamps as Bill Dye took him over to a tall coconut palm at the far end of the clearing and sat him down.
“You stay here,” he ordered.
Inside the circle of men, the silence seemed to last for a long time. Finally, Bruce Harwood said that they were dismissed. Harwood began talking with Swede as the rest of the group broke up and went back to their quarters.
Del was still sitting under the tree an hour later. By then, he had cooled off enough to know he was in big trouble. He could be fac-ing a general court-martial for the attempted murder of his commanding officer. Dozens of men had witnessed it. If convicted, he would be facing twenty years in a military prison. They could even hang him.
Del knew one thing for sure. If they hadn’t tackled him, he would have shot Swede dead. He was still sitting there alone when one of the pilots came over to him. Without saying a word, he reached down to shake his hand, and walked away.
By the time Bill Dye came back to get Del, a whole bunch of the officers and enlisted men in the squadron had come over to shake his hand or whisper, “Way to go, Del.” One pilot told him he only wished Del had finished the job.
Dye asked him if he had finally settled down, and when he said yes, Dye told him to go back to his quarters. Del asked if he was under arrest, and Dye said he didn’t know. Del returned to his tent and saw that someone had taken away his pistol.
That night, even more men sought Del out to give him a thumbs-up as they packed for the trip back to the States the next day. It struck Del that he wouldn’t be going home with them now. Although he didn’t have any close family waiting for him in Alabama, it made him sad to think he might not ever see his friends again.
Wednesday, 18 November 1942
Espiritu Santo
Torpedo Squadron Eight
Del was talking to a man in the ordnance tent the next morning when Bruce Harwood came by looking for him. His face was grave. Here comes bad news, Del decided.
“Let’s you and I take a walk together,” said Harwood.
They headed up the apron next to the bomber strip as planes landed and took off alongside them. Del waited for him to say something, but Lieutenant Harwood never said a word the whole way to the end of the runway. They were almost halfway back when Harwood finally spoke.
“I guess you know that was a very foolish thing you did yes-terday.”
“Yes, sir,” said Del.
“I would like to help you if I can,” said Harwood.
Del thanked him.
Harwood told him that he had a friend who had just arrived in command of a new Dauntless squadron that was heading up to Guadalcanal. He said that he could get Del a transfer into his friend’s outfit. He would tell him that Del was interested in dive-bombers. Nothing would ever be said about what had happened in the clearing.
Del might have been only eighteen, but he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. He thanked Lieutenant Harwood for trying to help, but said he had no interest in dive-bombers, and that he had spent enough time on Guadalcanal to know that he wouldn’t be much help to anyone up there right now. All he wanted to do was go home with the rest of the boys in the squadron, he said. Then the Navy could do anything it wanted with him.
They walked along a little farther.
“All right,” said Lieutenant Harwood, finally. “But I want you to promise me something, Del. That the next time the skipper makes you as mad as he did yesterday, you’ll count to ten before you do anything else.”
“Yes, sir,” said Del. “You have my word.”
Harwood told him that no action would be taken against him, and that he would be free to board the ship with the others. When Del went back to his quarters to pack his things, the other men were amazed to learn that he wasn’t going to face punishment.
It wasn’t until he was aboard ship and had thought a good deal more about the whole thing, that it struck him that maybe Swede Larsen didn’t want anyone outside the squadron to know what had happened in the clearing any more than Del did. At the time, he also didn’t know that he was the second man in the squadron who had tried to shoot the skipper.
USS Kitty Hawk
Torpedo Squadron Eight
The Kitty Hawk left Espiritu Santo with a brilliant sun setting in its wake, homeward bound at fifteen knots on the first leg of its long voyage across the Pacific to San Diego.
As had been predicted, the ship was packed with officers and men, more than eight hundred of them in compartments and staterooms designed to hold two hundred fifty.
Fred Mears had been assigned a cot on the open deck, and he was a lot happier to be up there than in the airless compartments belowdecks. At night, the ship was blacked out, and the men gathered in the lounges and staterooms until they were ready for sleep.
He began his first game of Monopoly.
Swede Larsen spent time aboard the Kitty Hawk undertaking a sad responsibility that many of the men would have been surprised to know he thought was important. He was writing letters to the parents of the men in the squadron who had been killed in action over the previous months.
They weren’t just the customary few lines to each grieving parent or widow. These were individual letters, incorporating his personal recollections of each man. The letter to Chastian Taurman, John Taurman’s father, was three single-spaced pages, and deeply poignant in its depiction of John as an extraordinary young man. The letter culminated: “We in the squadron miss John terribly and nothing in the world would give me more pleasure than to be able to send you some good news concerning him. With very kindest regards, believe me, Very respectfully yours, H. H. Larsen.”
Later on, Swede sat with Jack Stark and dictated the finishing touches to what would be the final entry in the war diary of Torpedo Squadron Eight. The diary had an entry for every day the squadron had been in the Pacific, commencing with its time aboard the Hornet, and continuing through its fateful day of destruction at Midway, its weeks of combat action aboard the Saratoga, and its two harrowing months on Guadalcanal.
“This entry completes the war diary of Torpedo Squadron Eight,” Swede dictated to Jack Stark. “The spirit, the history, and the tradition of this squadron will never die. It was a pleasure and a privilege to have operated with so fine a group of officers and men against the Japanese forces. H. H. Larsen, Lieut., USN, Commanding.”
Saturday, 21 November 1942
Pearl Harbor
Smiley Morgan
Smiley had been waiting at a transit center in Pearl Harbor for four days, hoping to be assigned a berth on one of the many ships heading stateside, but all of the ones sailing in that direction were already packed to overflowing. He, Bob Ries, and Andy Divine had been told they would have a better chance of finding single billets, so they had split up to improve their chances.
It had taken three days just to get to Pearl Harbor, and Smiley was beginning to worry that his thirty days of home leave would be over before he ever got there. After spending most of each day at one of the transit centers, he would go back to a temporary transit barracks where the junior officers slept ten cots to a room.
On the fourth morning after he arrived, Smiley came down to the front desk to find a message ordering him to report later that day to an admin building at the submarine base. It sounded suspicious. One of the officers at the barracks suggested that it might mean a transfer to one of the new carrier units being assembled to go back out to the South Pacific.
He finally decided to follow orders, even if it meant a transfer. Once the Navy bureaucracy tracked you down, there was no escaping its wheels. When he arrived at the submarine base, it was to discover that his recommendation for the Navy Cross had come through. It was for the mission in which he had led Andy Divine against the Japanese cruiser Tone on August 24, and it was going to be presented in a medal awards ceremony that very afternoon.
The ten officers who were slated to receive awards for valor were assembled in a line on a small drill field near the sub base. As a band began playing “Anchors Aweigh,” Smiley watched an officer in dress whites approach the line. The officer looked familiar to him, and a moment later he realized why. He had seen him once before on a rainy morning at Guadalcanal.
It was Chester Nimitz, the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. Following at his feet was a small dog. At first glance, it looked to the veterinarian’s son like a collie mix. The dog halted when the admiral came to a stop in front of the first man in line. A staff officer read a brief citation, and the man was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. After pinning it on, Admiral Nimitz exchanged a few words with him, and moved on to the next man. The admiral’s pet took a few more steps and sat down again. Smiley thought that the dog must have attended these ceremonies before.
Then it was Smiley’s turn.
“?‘For extraordinary heroism as pilot of a torpedo plane,’?” the staff officer began reading.
Smiley kept staring forward. Admiral Nimitz had a friendly, benign smile on his face. To Smiley, he looked more like one of the kindly parish priests he knew back in Florida than the commander of the Pacific Fleet.
“?‘. . . Lieutenant Morgan, defying terrific fire from hostile antiaircraft batteries and Japanese Zeroes, launched a vigorous and determined attack which scored a direct hit on an enemy cruiser.’?”
When the staff officer finished reading the citation, Admiral Nimitz stepped forward and pinned the Navy Cross to his chest.
“Congratulations, Lieutenant,” he said, shaking Smiley’s hand.
Then he was on to the next man, the small dog following along in his wake. The ceremony was over in less than thirty minutes. Smiley briefly celebrated back at the BOQ before returning to the transit center to await news of a ship heading back to the States. Now that he had received the Navy Cross, he thought that the admiral’s staff might pass the word along for him to receive a stateroom on the Lurline or one of the other passenger liners.
Five days later, his name was finally called for a berth aboard a ship that was leaving Pearl that night. It was bound for San Diego, the same destination as the rest of the squadron aboard the Kitty Hawk.
This ship was named the Sacramento. The name sounded good to him.
Smiley asked what kind of ship it was, but the sailor in the transit center didn’t know. He only told him that the ship was anchored out in the harbor, and that a coxswain would take him out to it in a motor launch later that night.
It was pitch dark when the launch pulled away from the wharf and motored out into the mooring area where all of the troop and transport ships stood silently at anchor. Aside from Smiley, there were a few officers going out to board other troop carriers.
Pearl Harbor was still under blackout restrictions, and as they chugged slowly between the shadowy outlines of the darkened vessels, the coxswain kept calling out the name of the ship they were trying to find.
When there was an answering call, the coxswain brought the launch close to a boarding ladder that rose into the darkness far above them. Once the other officers were aboard, the launch continued in its search for the Sacramento.
“Sacramento . . . Sacramento,” the coxswain kept hollering into the black night.
Smiley finally heard an answering cry.
“Sacramento here,” came a voice out of the darkness.
The voice hadn’t come from very far above them, as with the previous ships. It sounded more like the sailor had been hailing them from the pier of a dock. When they pulled up next to the Sacramento, there was no boarding ladder to climb, just a quick set of steps leading to an open wooden deck. As the launch chugged away into the darkness, Smiley’s heart sank.
This was no converted passenger liner, and it wasn’t filled with returning nurses. The Sacramento turned out to be an old gunboat that had seen long duty in China, and was barely larger than a garbage scow.
The ship was under way almost immediately, and a sailor escorted Smiley to his small cabin. He was relieved to see that he had it all to himself, what there was of it. The cabin was just large enough to hold a single bunk the size of a large dog bed and a built-in wooden cabinet with a tin pitcher and bowl for washing.
Smiley went out to explore the rest of the ship. Pulling aside the blackout curtains to enter what he had been told was the main passenger lounge, he was surprised to see several military policemen armed with rifles standing guard inside.
The reason was quickly evident. They were guarding a group of American men in fatigues who were congregated at the back of the lounge. Some of them had their hands and feet manacled together. A big white “P” was painted on the backs of their shirts.
The Sacramento was taking them back to the States for incarceration in military prisons and stockades. The group included deserters, rapists, thieves, and murderers. A few of them glared back at him with obvious contempt. Instead of beautiful nurses, they were to be his principal dinner companions. Aside from the crew, Smiley was one of the few non-prisoners aboard. This is going to be a long voyage, he thought.
It was.
In spite of the fact that the thirty-year-old ship had once been known as the “Galloping Ghost of the China Coast,” her best days were clearly behind her, and she wallowed along at barely ten knots.
It also turned out that most of the toilets for the ship were located just on the other side of the bulkhead from his own cabin. Day and night, the men in the johns would flush the toilets using a jet of sea water from high-pressure foot pumps. Smiley thought that each effusion sounded like a belching walrus.
Once they were out in the middle of the Pacific, things took a turn for the worse. They began to run into heavy weather, and it persisted for days. In rough seas, the little gunboat pitched and rolled like a cork. The sound of men retching and the commodes flushing became an almost permanent anthem.
Surprisingly, the food was pretty good, at least by Guadalcanal standards, and Smiley usually enjoyed the meals, particularly when he could keep them down. It took the Sacramento almost two weeks to reach San Diego. By then, there had been an outbreak of fever among the prisoners, and Smiley contracted it, too. He spent the first week of his leave recovering at Balboa Park Hospital.
Upon finally reaching his parents’ home in Florida, Smiley found mail waiting for him. The Navy communication stated that Torpedo Squadron Eight had been officially decommissioned, and Smiley was being assigned to a new unit being formed in Seattle, Washington. It made him sad to think he would never again see many of the men he had served with during the most exciting seven months of his life.
Torpedo Eight had written its final chapter in the skies over the Pacific.
Epilogue
Today, Midway Atoll’s airfield on Eastern Island, the place from which Langdon Fieberling led the first six aircraft that attacked the vanguard of the Japanese fleet on June 4, is an eerily desolate place, a windswept landscape primarily left to the gooney birds and sand crabs. There is little hint of what occurred there during one of the pivotal battles of World War II.
The carrier USS Hornet, from which Lieutenant Commander John Waldron and his men went gallantly to their deaths, rests
in an unfound grave at the bottom of the Pacific. The USS Saratoga, “Sister Sara,” from which Bruce Harwood’s flight of Torpedo Eight took off to sink the Japanese carrier Ryujo on August 24, 1942, was assigned in 1946 to become part of Operation Crossroads, in which it was used to test the effect of an atomic bomb blast at Bikini Atoll. The ship now lies at the bottom of the lagoon there.
Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field, from which Torpedo Eight made its important contribution to stopping the Japanese advance in the Pacific, is now named Honiara International Airport, after the capital city of the Solomon Islands. It would be unrecognizable to the men of the Cactus Air Force who fought there, and is now the center of an important economic hub.
Torpedo Eight earned a unique record of achievement in the annals of the United States Navy. In the Midway and Guadalcanal campaigns, the squadron was officially credited with sharing in the destruction of two enemy carriers, one battleship, five heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, one destroyer, and one transport, along with numerous enemy aircraft.
Torpedo Eight sustained the highest number of casualties of any naval air squadron that fought in the Midway battle, as well as of all the naval squadrons that flew with the Cactus Air Force on Guadalcanal. At Midway, forty-five of the forty-eight officers and men serving in Torpedo Eight were killed. At Guadalcanal, seven of the remaining squadron members were killed and another eight wounded.
Its thirty-five pilots won an astounding thirty-nine Navy Crosses. The enlisted men in the squadron earned more than fifty medals for bravery in action, including multiple awards of the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Silver Star, and the Air Medal. Although official Navy records of military awards are not maintained on a squadron-by-squadron basis, Torpedo Eight might well have been the most highly decorated air squadron of the war.
Torpedo Eight earned another distinction that was unparalleled among the naval squadrons operating in the Pacific in 1942. It was the only unit to be awarded two Presidential Unit Citations from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first for the squadron’s contribution to the victory at Midway, and the second for its distinction at Guadalcanal.
A Dawn Like Thunder Page 41