GENERAL LEE MARONA
On June 5, 1942, the day after Torpedo Eight was virtually wiped out at Midway, Lee applied for flight training aboard the USS Hornet. His inspiration to become a Navy flier was Robert Miles, the young enlisted pilot who replaced Frenchy Fayle after his injury at Pearl Harbor, and was killed in his place at Midway. Miles had become a mentor to the young Marona, and Lee wanted to honor his sacrifice.
After the squadron was decommissioned in December 1942, Lee and his brother Jess were transferred to an engine overhaul unit, Acorn One, based in Espiritu Santo, a decision that made neither one of them happy. In mid-1943, Lee was standing in the rain near the runway at Espiritu Santo when he saw a jeep go by with a familiar figure in the back. It was Swede Larsen. Lee told Swede that although he had applied for flight school a year earlier, he hadn’t heard anything since. A few weeks later, Lee’s orders assigning him to flight training came through.
Assigned to the same flight class as Eddy Velazquez and Frank Balsley, he won his wings at Pensacola and became a commissioned officer. In 1948, his plane was forced down in Japan during a storm and he met his future wife, Mary Armstrong, the daughter of an Army major serving there in the occupation forces. He and Mary had three sons, Christopher, Jonathan, and Patrick, before Lee retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander. His last active service was as the guided-missile officer on the USS Midway off Vietnam in 1964.
Lee started an insurance business in Phoenix, spending as much time as possible skiing, fishing, and hunting with his three boys. He and Mary still live there. His younger brother Jess lives in San Francisco, California.
FREDERICK MEARS III
Arriving back home in Seattle in the middle of a January blizzard, Fred basked in the company of several young women before deciding to write a reminiscence of his experiences as a Navy flier, beginning with the day he and several other Navy pilots learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
He showed the first few chapters to his sister, Betty, an award-winning writer, and she pronounced it highly readable. She recommended submitting the pages to an editor she knew at Doubleday, Doran publishers. After reading the work, the editor expressed interest in publishing the finished manuscript. Drawing heavily on the daily journals he maintained through the first year of the war, Fred completed the manuscript in less than three months, the last part of it while training with his new air squadron, VC-18.
Upon receiving the completed draft, the editors at Doubleday agreed to publish it in early 1944, and expressed the hope that he would consider writing a follow-up book. By then, his new composite squadron, VC-18, was still training near San Diego. On June 26, 1943, Fred took off in his Avenger on a routine training flight, leading a formation that included two other planes.
Fred was leading the formation in a bombing exercise about one mile north of Otay Mesa, California, when he pushed over and dove his plane at an almost vertical angle. As he was attempting to pull out from his dive, part of the plane’s tail surface peeled off, followed by the plane’s left wing. Hopelessly out of control, the Avenger dove into the ground and blew up.
The investigative report on the accident concluded that Fred was flying too fast. Killed in the aircraft with him were his two crewmen, gunners Jack Booth and Joe Daniels.
Smiley Morgan was deeply moved by the news of Mears’s death. One of his enduring memories of Guadalcanal was Fred wearing his striped pajamas and steel helmet as he streaked to his bomb shelter during the Japanese shelling attacks. Fred’s death was particularly hard on his mother, Jessie, whose brother, four-star general Jonathan Wainwright, was still being held prisoner by the Japanese. Fred was her only son.
When his ashes arrived home, Betty asked Bob Ries, who was then stationed in Seattle with his new squadron, to fly them out over Puget Sound and scatter the ashes to the wind.
Fred’s book, Carrier Combat, was published by Doubleday, Doran in 1944. It was met with critical acclaim, and hailed as one of the finest combat memoirs to come out of the early war years.
DEWITT “PETE” PETERKIN
Pete was the first member of the squadron to make it back to the States, managing to secure a coveted seat on a clipper leaving Pearl Harbor, and landing in Alameda, California, on November 22, 1942, exactly six months from the day Torpedo Eight had departed for the Pacific aboard the USS Chaumont.
After calling his wife, Jane, to say that he was all right, he arranged to visit the grieving family of Langdon Fieberling at their home on Wesley Avenue. Lang’s fiancée was already there when he arrived. After six months of agonizing uncertainty, she was still clinging to the hope that he might be alive. Pete tried to sound encouraging.
Assigned to another carrier squadron, Pete remained on active duty in the Navy until the end of the war. After going into private life, he decided to stay in the naval reserve, eventually reaching the rank of captain. For his leadership in helping to keep Torpedo Eight’s Avengers flying at Guadalcanal under appalling conditions, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.
Pete spent the rest of his professional career working as an executive at J. P. Morgan & Co., eventually becoming vice chairman of the bank. Retiring in 1976, he undertook a range of philanthropic pursuits, serving as chairman of United Fund-NY, president of Roosevelt Hospital, chairman of the Yale University development campaign, and chairman of the board of trustees, Kent School.
Married to Katharine Urban after the passing of his first wife, Jane, Pete was father to five children: Clare, Kate, DeWitt III, George, and Patrick. He passed away on August 29, 1997.
CARROLL “JACK” STARK
While home on leave in Terre Haute, Indiana, Jack met a girl from Bismarck, North Dakota, who was visiting a neighboring family. He and Adeline were married in 1943, shortly before he returned to the South Pacific for his second overseas tour.
Promoted to chief yeoman, he was honorably discharged from the Navy in October 1945, went to college on the GI bill, graduated from Indiana State in 1948, and then served as a high school guidance counselor until retiring in 1985. He and Adeline were married for fifty-nine years, and had a daughter, Kimberly Anne.
Sensing the importance of what Torpedo Eight had accomplished during its months in the Pacific, Jack saved copies of many of the records from his service with the unit, including the daily diary of the squadron, and individual records of the men who served in it.
He passed away from cancer in the summer of 2007.
WILLIAM TUNSTALL
The machinist’s mate whom Swede once accused of trying to kill him came back to the States and promptly fell in love with a young woman who was serving as a Navy WAVE. He and Dottie were married on August 21, 1943.
Assigned to the carrier Kitkun Bay, Bill went back out to the Pacific in 1944. In the climactic Battle of Leyte Gulf, the carrier received fire from the largest battleship in the world, the Yamato, before barely surviving a kamikaze attack. The Japanese plane came straight over the catwalk where Bill Tunstall was standing and exploded farther down the deck.
Later in the war, he was promoted to ensign for his distinguished service, and left the Navy as a lieutenant in 1946. With his and Dottie’s first daughter on the way, he tried selling insulation door to door, and made one sale after three weeks of effort. It was time to try something else. He went to work for the Bell Telephone Company and has never looked back.
Thirty years later, he retired to focus on enjoying life with Dottie in Portland, Oregon. In 2007, he visited Midway Atoll with a small group of veterans to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the American victory there.
EDWARD VELAZQUEZ
One of the handful of Torpedo Eight machine gunners who was credited with shooting down a Japanese fighter, Ed learned long after the war that the pilot of the Zero he shot down on August 24, 1942, had claimed credit for destroying several of the Torpedo Eight aircraft at Midway less than three months earlier.
Ed returned to the States with the same ambition as man
y of the enlisted men: to become a Navy flier. After earning his wings as a naval aviation pilot, he was assigned to fighter squadron VF-12A, based in San Diego.
He met his future wife, Charlotte, on a train heading from Omaha to Los Angeles. After marrying, they raised five children together. Ed left the service with the rank of lieutenant commander, and moved his family to California. After discovering his gifts as a printer and linotype operator, he went on to develop several successful entrepreneurial ventures.
Edward Velazquez lives today in Huntington Beach, California.
ERVIN “JUDGE” WENDT
Swede’s favorite turret gunner, and the man whom Gene Hanson credited with teaching him many of the skills he needed to survive as a combat pilot, spent months recovering from the wound he received while flying air support missions on Guadalcanal. At Pearl Harbor, doctors removed the shrapnel still embedded in his arm and elbow.
After his arm healed, Judge was assigned as a senior instructor at the training school for bombardiers in San Diego. Eighteen months later, he was assigned to a patrol squadron based on Saipan that rescued B-29 flight crews forced to ditch in the Pacific after they attacked Japan.
When the war ended, Wendt was given a succession of important operational assignments, including a senior instructional position at the Fire Control School in Jacksonville, Florida. Later on, he served as the senior noncommissioned officer responsible for maintaining the seaplanes operating out of Adak in the Aleutian Islands. He remained in the Navy for thirty years.
On home leave in Audubon, Iowa, in 1943, he met Marie Smith. They enjoyed fifty-nine years together before her death in 2002. At the age of ninety-two, Judge Wendt now lives in San Diego. His home overlooks the naval base where he served for many years.
The author urges readers to visit the Web site Adawnlikethunder .com, which is devoted to the memory of the men who served in Torpedo Eight, and includes material about each of them, including many of the letters, diaries, and photographs that could not be included in the book. Hopefully, the Web site can be updated to reflect information provided by other family members in the years ahead.
APPENDIX ONE
The Undaunted Mr. Weisheit
In A Dawn Like Thunder, I set out to write a story about the men of a single torpedo squadron who gave their lives helping to buy the precious battle time that allowed another group of brave aviators to win an incredible victory in the battle that changed the course of the Pacific War.
It was not my intention to gather evidence that at least some of these men died that day because of the egregious mistakes of their commanding officers, and that these mistakes would later be suppressed in a cover-up of the truth.
Admiral Marc “Pete” Mitscher died in 1947. At his request, his personal papers from the Second World War were burned. In Theodore Taylor’s subsequent biography, The Magnificent Mitscher, which was published in 1954, Admiral Mitscher was justifiably lionized for his exceptional performance as a carrier task force commander during the last years of the Pacific War.
By any measure, including his own, Admiral Mitscher was clearly not magnificent during the Battle of Midway, his first engagement against the Japanese navy. I did not come to this harsh judgment through any personal animus. My uncle flew an Avenger off the USS Cowpens as part of Admiral Mitscher’s legendary Task Force 58, and he revered him.
Yet the conclusions are seemingly inescapable, even accepting that men’s memories are imperfect, that confusion often reigns in the fog of battle, and that honest mistakes are inevitable for every commander in war. In this case, the harsh judgment is compounded by the fact that Admiral Mitscher attempted to evade responsibility for his decisions, and to veil the unpleasant truth of his failures in a long-standing lie. Given the emerging consensus among distinguished historians about what actually occurred on June 4, I felt it was important to tell this part of the story.
Few men were aware of what occurred on the bridge of the Hornet on the morning of June 4. Admiral Raymond Spruance, Mitscher’s task force commander, surmised the truth, and he passed it along to his own superior, Admiral Nimitz, who chose not to address the issue publicly.
In June 1942, naval aviation was faced with a burgeoning rivalry with the Army Air Forces, which were actually claiming credit for winning the Battle of Midway. Admiral Nimitz was not about to air the Navy’s dirty linen in public. The cover-up was allowed to stand, just as a few years later, Admiral Nimitz would give Admiral William Halsey similar dispensation in the wake of Halsey’s disastrous decisions during a December 1944 typhoon, and his impetuous actions during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Nimitz’s only punishment of Mitscher for his actions on June 4 was to give him a dull shore assignment when he was desperately anxious for another combat command aboard fast carriers.
One can imagine the humiliation and embarrassment Mitscher felt at his failures during the Midway battle. If it had been lost, his actions might well have cost him his professional career, just as Admiral Husband Kimmel was publicly humiliated and cashiered after the Pearl Harbor disaster. But Midway had been a great victory, and, fortunately for Mitscher, no one in Washington wanted to see the Navy’s first triumph of the war tarnished.
According to his biographer, Mitscher was melancholy and at times distraught on the passage back to Pearl Harbor because he felt he had “personally failed to deliver.” Some of his actions on the trip were bizarre. For example, a young lieutenant apparently misplaced a pair of bridge binoculars while standing watch during the battle and Mitscher ordered that the ship be searched for them. The binoculars were not found, and Mitscher came to the conclusion they had been stolen. After the ship arrived at Pearl Harbor and his crew was given leave, Mitscher had naval intelligence agents scour the pawnshops in Honolulu looking for the binoculars. Later, they were found behind a couch in the Hornet’s chart room.
The falsehood about where the Hornet air group was sent on the morning of June 4 withstood public scrutiny for more than thirty years. In their superb historical works on Midway, historians Samuel Eliot Morison, Walter Lord, and Gordon Prange never probed beneath the surface of Mitscher’s “official” account of the Hornet’s actions on the morning of June 4.
The lie remained embedded in the public consciousness until Bowen P. Weisheit, a trial lawyer from Bel Air, Maryland, embarked on a personal quest to discover the truth. The reasons he did so are worth noting.
One of the pilots in the Hornet fighter squadron who was forced to ditch in the Pacific on June 4 was Ensign Markland Kelly Jr. Along with Ensign G. R. Hill, he was never seen again. Kelly’s death was a great blow to his father, a wealthy Marylander who owned the Buick automobile dealership in Baltimore, Maryland. Mr. Kelly died shortly after the war, leaving his estate to a foundation created in honor of his son.
Bowen Weisheit, who was a fraternity brother of Ensign Kelly’s, was eventually appointed one of the trustees of this foundation. While attending a board meeting, he noticed a ten-dollar bill framed in a glass case, and was told that it was the “short snorter” bill that had been presented to Mark Kelly’s father by a PBY rescue pilot who had rescued four of the fighter pilots after they ditched in the Pacific near Mr. Kelly’s son. It was a Navy tradition that after a man was rescued from the sea he would give his rescuer the largest bill he had with him at the time. These were called “short snorter” bills.
When Bowen Weisheit removed the ten-dollar bill from its frame and turned it over, he saw that the rescue pilot, Jerry Crawford, had recorded on it the navigational course the plane had been flying when it had picked up the survivors, along with the longitude and latitude of the spot where the PBY had landed in the sea.
Bowen P. Weisheit was not just any Maryland lawyer. As a student at St. John’s College in Annapolis, he had not only learned the classics, but had studied celestial aerial navigation under the legendary Annapolis professor of navigation, Commander P. V. H. Weems. After finishing law school at the University of Virginia, Weisheit was recruited to teach
navigation at the newly created Weems School of Navigation.
In 1942, Weisheit joined the Marine Corps, becoming a navigation instructor, and eventually flying hundreds of hours as a navigator, many of them across the Pacific. As Weisheit pointed out to me when we first met, he had plotted long-range ocean aircraft flights to a point where they were part of his fabric.
After making a copy of the short snorter bill, Mr. Weisheit went home to examine his old navigational charts of the Pacific, carefully plotting the coordinates of the location where the pilots had been rescued. After comparing the location to the accounts described by Samuel Eliot Morison and Walter Lord, he was astonished to find that Crawford’s coordinates pointed to a spot that was nearly two hundred miles east of the place where the ditching had supposedly taken place.
So began Weisheit’s mission to solve the mystery.
Eventually, his relentless intellectual curiosity took him all over the country to conduct personal interviews with every living Hornet fighter pilot he could locate who had flown the June 4 mission. He also interviewed several of the dive-bomber pilots, including Walter Rodee, as well as Admiral John Foster, Mitscher’s air operations officer during the Midway battle. Later, he was able to track down Jerry Crawford, the PBY pilot who had presented Mark Kelly’s father with the short snorter bill. The detailed account of Weisheit’s three-year journey can be found in his self-published book, The Last Flight of Ensign C. Markland Kelly, Junior, USNR.
After sifting through his fifty hours of interview transcripts, Weisheit began to reconstruct the flight of the Hornet air group from the moment it left the carrier until the mission came to its tragic end, eventually building a body of evidence that permitted him to come to one inescapable conclusion. The course reflected in the official map that was part of Admiral Mitscher’s After Action Report was irreconcilable with the course the air group had actually followed that morning.
A Dawn Like Thunder Page 44