by Hugh Ambrose
June 17 dawned with better flying weather. The early sortie comprised twenty planes flying a huge search sector of 150 degrees to 240 degrees, or "the area generally west of the Marianas," with the mission "to detect the approach of the suspected enemy fleet."134 Attacks on "the Jimas" had ended and everyone knew why. The Fifth Fleet, still stationed off the Marianas to protect the marine landing on Saipan, needed Task Group 58.1 to return for the battle with the approaching enemy fleet.
Admiral Clark had Hornet fuel up all of his escorts in preparation for battle before ordering full speed ahead. U.S. submarines had reported nine Imperial Japanese carriers, six battleships, thirteen cruisers, and twenty-seven destroyers churning toward Saipan, in the Marianas. Airfields in the Philippines held hundreds of more enemy aircraft. A carrier battle as big as all the others put together looked to be on the horizon. Later that day some pilots would have caught a whiff of "hot dope," or inside information. Admiral Clark had discussed the idea of steaming more west than south in order to place his task group and Harrill's 58.4 in a position behind the Imperial Navy.135 Yorktown's captain endorsed the idea; Admiral Harrill rejected it and had continued to steam south toward the other carriers, well ahead of Hornet, Yorktown, and their comrades.
Apparently Clark decided not to take on the enemy's fleet of nine aircraft carriers on his own, because at ten thirty-two the next morning, Task Group 58.1 rejoined 58.2, 58.3, 58.4, and 58.7 on a line running just west of Saipan. The U.S. flattops carried a total of 950 planes, in the midst of six hundred ships and submarines. An armada such as the world had never seen, the Fifth Fleet eagerly awaited a showdown. The scouts flew search sectors of 350 miles to prevent surprises and to provide the United States the opportunity to launch the first sortie. The scouts returned empty-handed and the radar screens picked up only the occasional bogey. A submarine reported sinking an enemy flattop, so they were out there, somewhere. Admiral Jocko Clark and many of his naval aviators concluded the moment had come to steam west and find them. The Fifth Fleet, though, turned east at dusk, into the wind to catch their last scouts, away from the enemy, and much to the consternation of eager naval aviators.
The adrenaline of expectation started pumping early the next day. A few bogeys rose from airfields on Guam, less than a hundred miles away from the U.S. carriers. Their presence came as a surprise. Obviously they had come from the Philippines the previous day and they were heard to report the U.S. fleet's position. An early flight of navy fighters found lots of enemy planes on Guam and another eight Hellcats were dispatched at nine fifty-three a.m. A report of a "large group of bogeys at 250deg, 110 miles" was received at ten fifteen a.m. These had been launched from the enemy carriers. Hal Buell, set to lead a strike of fourteen dive bombers accompanied by twelve Hellcats and seven Avengers, got the order to "clear flight deck of aircraft and neutralize Guam airfields." With enemy inbound, the admiral wanted the deck ready for fighter operations. The deck crews had been so busy with Hellcats they had not completed arming Buell's planes. Most of them left without a bomb in their bay.
Out on the horizon, the screening ships fired black clouds of AA flak into the air at intervals throughout the day. The fighter strikes came and went hour after hour, with the first rumors of victory beginning to resound in passageways belowdecks. Hornet's radar picked up the third wave of bogeys just before one p.m., when Buell's planes began returning. A cruiser off the carrier's port quarter cut loose with a barrage of flak. In the debriefing, Buell admitted that most of his planes had simply circled overhead. They had planted four bombs on the airfield of Agana, Guam's largest city.
The waves of enemy fighters had been handled easily by the Hellcats. Hundreds of Zeros, or "Zekes," "Vals," and "Kates" of the Imperial Japanese Navy had gone down in flames. Denying the few enemy survivors access to the airfields on Guam would drive another stake into the heart of the Japanese carrier fleet. Micheel walked out on the flight deck just after two p.m. to lead fourteen Helldivers against Guam.136 His Ouija Board held the details for the destruction of Orote airfield and his plane had been loaded with one thousand pounds of TNT. Being first to launch meant getting the shortest deck. The twenty-foot drop off the bow forced Mike to pucker until the ungainly Beast gained flying speed.
Twelve Hellcats and seven Avengers accompanied Mike's sortie. They flew through heavy clouds. The target lay a shade less than a hundred miles distant. The ships would steam east behind them, making Point Option, where they would meet back with their flattop, closer. He took them in from the south. The Japanese fired a thunderous chorus of AA guns. He flipped over into his dive and went down, watching the target become clear. On the end of the airfield a large phony airplane had been erected. He aimed for a large battery of AA guns and toggled the release higher than usual, at five thousand feet. Mike pulled out and swung around to watch. As strike leader he had to report. Six explosions ruined the runway and five others detonated near the batteries of big guns.
They returned about two hours later to find their carrier furiously moving aircraft. Mike and half of his striking force landed. They and their planes were hustled below. Another wave of bogeys had just appeared on Hornet's radar screen. The cruiser off their carrier's port quarter began firing AA guns. A wave of fighters landed. The ship's deck catapult threw a sortie of Hellcats off; then Buell led fourteen wolves aloft. In the ready room, more reports of a massive victory filtered in. The fighters were shooting down enemy planes by the hundreds, if the initial reports were to be believed. The remainder of Micheel's strike landed with bad news. One of his group was MIA. Another pilot reported that he had lost his rear seat gunner. AA fire had hit his plane and set it afire. He had ordered the gunner to jump out, which the airman, Arne Ulin, promptly did. It looked like Arne's parachute had come down at least two miles from the island and not far from the rescue sub. The pilot had decided he could fly his plane back and had done so.
The big day ended with the Hellcats of Clark's Task Group 58.1 accounting for one-fourth of the 402 "confirmed" kills for the entire task force.y More fighter pilots became Aces-in-a-Day. The United States lost thirty-one aircraft, although some of the pilots had been rescued, and a few dozen sailors on those few ships the enemy had managed to reach. The Helldiver pilots must have felt some disappointment not to have had more of a role. They received good news: the task forces, led by 58.1, were going to churn westward all night long and hunt down the enemy flattops in the Philippine Sea. The fighters had had their turn; now the dive-bombers wanted to finish the job. At long last, the wolves would get a chance to fulfill the mission for which their dive-bombers had been created. They were heartily sick of bombing airfields.
The phone rang in each of the pilots' staterooms at four thirty a.m. When a pilot answered it, he would hear: " This is the Duty Officer. GQ in twenty minutes."137 He got dressed and climbed the ladder to Ready Room Four before the alarm sounded general quarters and all hands reported to their battle stations. Twenty minutes later, the catapults threw off eight fighters and four Helldivers--their bomb bays empty to increase their range--for a 325-mile search pattern covering sector 285 degrees to 325 degrees. Hours later Search One returned. No carriers had been sighted. Search Two took off after lunch. The presentation of medals to some of the Hellcat pilots, who had scored the great victory the day before, enlivened the long day's wait. At three forty-nine p.m. Hornet "received report of enemy fleet at Lat. 15deg 00' N, Long. 135deg 25' E, course 270deg, speed 20 knots."138 Moments later, Jocko ordered his air group to take off. A deckload of planes had been prepared: fifteen Hellcats, eight Avengers, and fourteen SB2C Helldivers. Commander Campbell, who had always led the first strike against new targets, led this one with Buell in charge of the second division. Working through their navigation, the wolves realized this mission required them to fly close to their maximum range and return at dusk or beyond. They talked a lot about how to conserve their fuel. Instead of circling the ship after takeoff, Campbell would fly the heading to the target at a minimum spe
ed to allow his men to catch up. The first plane launched at four nineteen p.m.
Micheel and those scheduled on the second strike would have watched the first. This was too important. The wings came down and were locked in position as the SB2C taxied forward. Up on the PriFly, a board with new navigation information was put up. It announced that the enemy carriers were another degree of latitude, or 60 miles, farther away. The round-trip had just increased an additional 120 miles. The pilots of Bombing Two, along with Fighting Two and Torpedo Two and all the other strike groups of all the other carriers, knew strike number one was in big trouble before it took off.
A familiar feeling crept over Lieutenant Vernon Micheel. "Oh, always the same ol' stuff. They'd launch us further than we could really go safely." The airplanes were bigger and faster and there were more of them, but on this mission "we knew it was going to end in the dark when they got back." The deckhands began loading aircraft on Hornet's three elevators and sending them up to the flight deck. Down in the squadron's ready room, the pilots of Mike's sortie "were gouging around every place to get colored ammunition. They were just taking it by the fistfuls." Firing colored ammo with their .38 pistols would help the destroyers find them floating at night in the Pacific. Fire a white bullet and "they might not come near you." A blue one or red one would attract a friendly ship. Fear had made them a little crazy, though. With respect for their experience, Mike suggested that bulging pockets of colored ammunition "might be detrimental." In other words, if they landed in the water at night, they might not have time to get the life raft deployed. In that case, all a man would have was his Mae West life preserver. "You might well have to throw all that stuff out of your suit to stay buoyant." He said all that and it didn't work; he stuffed his pockets full of ammo, too.
Hornet steamed into the wind. The daylight already had that late- afternoon quality to it. Mike climbed onto the port wing of the Beast, the plane captain stood on the starboard wing. Mike put his left toe in the step on the fuselage and swung his leg into the cockpit, then sat down while the captain helped him arrange his chute behind him, get into his harness, and connect his oxygen and radio cords. The veteran ran through his checklist. His dive bomber was number one for takeoff after his fighter escort. The props on the Hellcats began turning over. "I was sitting there just puckering away," wondering "why every time you're going to go on a tough strike, you're going to be short on gas." Once the launch began it would go quickly. The plane captain would have yelled "Clear!" so Micheel could start his engine and prepare to taxi. It would be full dark before he reached the enemy carriers. "We were out of range . . . so I was afraid." In that moment an "Angel of Mercy" intervened and saved him from the mission he was pretty certain he would not survive. As the first Hellcat revved its engines for the flight director, the admiral scrubbed it. The relief came out of Micheel with an "Oh boy. . . ." The deckhands began clearing the deck for the return of Strike 1A. Hornet swung around onto course 270 degrees, the last known course of the enemy, and tried to close with her Helldivers, Hellcats, and Avengers.
Mike decided to wait outside for his friends. He knew if they had found the enemy, there would be very little daylight remaining. Whatever they had encountered with the enemy CAP and AA, Bombing Two would have to get down, get out, and join up before full dark. Joining up after dark would be difficult because the little white running lights started to resemble little white stars. Unfortunately, the moon was not lighting the night sky on this evening. Mike knew what it felt like to be that pilot, flying in the darkness. Life came down to fine-tuning the engine and dialing in the right trim, while ignoring the urges to climb higher or go faster and ignoring the fear produced by not being able to distinguish the sea from the sky. The plane's homing device, the YE/ZB, had a good range and its radar would help once a man got close. Inside the ship, cryptic radio messages began to be received. "I'm hit," and "I'm out of gas, going into water."
Jocko Clark, the admiral who had ordered his squadrons to attack even before he had heard from his CO, knew what was happening. His flagship, USS Hornet, turned on her white truck lights at seven fifty-nine p.m. The massive illumination made her a perfect target for enemy submarines, but it had to be done. The pilots deserved it. The Landing Signal Officer (LSO) took his place on the aft port quarter, his lighted paddles ready to guide the boys in. Mike heard the approach of aircraft; the first two arrived very close together. "I sat up there on one of those catwalks and watched those guys trying to come in two at a time . . . those guys were racing for a spot in the landing pattern to get aboard." One plane got the cut from the LSO. Plane two lengthened out his final downwind turn to give plane one a chance to clear the deck. Out of the darkness a third plane dashed in ahead of plane two. Mike did not blame him--plane three might not have even seen plane two in the darkness. More planes approached, their pilots expecting their tanks to run dry any second. He could see discipline giving way to "me or you." The landing pattern became a melee. It hurt too much to watch. "I just got out of there." Down in the ready room, he heard that the "screening vessels began firing star shells and turned on searchlights to aid returning planes in locating the task force."139 That began at a quarter to nine. The radio messages from men going down somewhere out there were heartbreaking. In the next hour, two crash landings and a shift in wind direction caused costly delays, as the deckhands pushed the wreckage over the side and the captain brought the ship about. One aircraft landed in the water near the starboard bow. At ten fifteen the LSO waved in the last plane, "no others being in the air."140
In the dark waters around the ships the rescue of downed pilots and airmen continued as Air Group Two counted noses. One Helldiver had been hit making its dive on the target. Two of fifteen Hellcats and one of four Avengers were missing. The SB2Cs presented the biggest problem: nine of the fourteen Helldivers failed to land on a flattop.141 A total of nine Hornet planes had crashed while landing, killing one airman. As usual, the Beast had the worst record: only one of fourteen would be ready to fly the following day. Reports of Air Group Two planes on other carriers began to arrive.
General quarters sounded at five twenty-two a.m. the next morning. Some of the news heard in the squadron's room was good: the wolves had been credited with eight to ten hits on a carrier of the Shokaku class, an Imperial Japanese Fleet carrier. The escort ships and a few other flattops had, however, escaped. No new contact reports had come in. The admiral expected the IJN to sail north, toward Japan. Micheel led nine dive-bombers, accompanied by a number of fighters and torpedo planes, on a mission "to strike enemy fleet if within range."142 In his logbook, though, he noted a slightly different priority: "search for buddies and Jap fleet."143 Headed north, he saw "numerous oil slicks . . . and considerable wreckage." When he had consumed half of his gasoline, he turned around and flew back.
He found Hornet to be a happy ship.144 All of the air group had been accounted for. Five planes flew back aboard, having landed on other carriers the previous night. Only one of these returnees was a dive-bomber. In another amazing turn of events, destroyers had recovered the eight pilots and airmen of Bombing Two who had landed in the water. Lieutenant Hal Buell, however, stepped aboard Hornet after crash-landing on the deck of Lexington. Ashen and wincing in pain, Hal had been wounded by shrapnel. He had also accidentally killed a Bombing Two gunner. It had happened in the crash. Buell had been about to get his cut when he got a wave off instead. In that split second, Buell thought about his Beast, with a big hole in its wing and no gas in its tank.145 He cut the throttle. His tail hook missed, and his plane bounced over two of the wire safety gates and landed on top of his friend Dave Stear's Helldiver. His plane killed Dave's gunner and one of the plane pushers. Some of the men aboard Lexington had angrily denounced Buell. They thought he had cut in when he should not have.146
Hal Buell came home to a warm welcome on his carrier, though. No one wanted to talk too much about the return landings for a near-suicidal mission. Hal had done what he had set out to do.
He had put himself ahead of Campbell's division by plotting his own course and by flying at a lower altitude. As the strike groups had arrived over the top of one of three groups of IJN ships, Lieutenant Buell began his high-speed approach as he asked for and received permission to attack--not from his skipper, but from the air group commander.147 Buell's division had pushed over from 13,500 feet into very heavy enemy AA fire. Red, green, and orange puffs of AA, "as well as white phosphorus streamer shells," were aimed at them. Set against the darkening sky, the pyrotechnics were unlike anything anyone had seen. While the fighters watched and a photographic plane off of Bataan snapped pictures, "a cone of fire focused on Lieutenant Buell's section."148 The enemy carrier had swung hard to starboard and had completed a ninety-degree turn before he released. Buell managed to run his division over its length and ignite its destruction with several well-placed thousand-pound bombs.149 Campbell had followed with several more. No formal rendezvous had followed. A few enemy planes briefly attacked as the pilots raced for their ship. The flak had chased them for fifteen miles. One of those bursts had blown a large hole in Buell's wing and lodged some sharp bits of metal in his back.
Others told equally scary stories of landing at night in the Pacific. The discussions about the previous night's mission, the most dramatic of their tour of duty thus far, had only just begun. Hornet refueled. The scouts failed to find the remainder of the enemy fleet. Still steaming north the next morning, the sailors standing watch "began spotting numerous life rafts, the ship being in the area where pilots were forced to land in the water the night of 20 June. Screening destroyers were sent out to investigate."150 A lot of carriers had downed pilots. Once the destroyers had checked all the rafts and the searches failed to find more, the carrier fleet gave up the chase. Every carrier task group retired after the battle, steaming back to the fleet anchorage, except for Jocko's group. Hornet and her companions set sail for Iwo Jima. The fighter sweep launched just before six a.m. on June 24.