CHAPTER 5

En Route to Hawaii

5 April 1942

Finally underway from Gravesend Bay for Panama, there to report to CinCPac [Commander in Chief, Pacific] and get further orders. We always seem to get underway on Sundays.

We are now, of course, considered as full-fledged members of the fleet, just over 3 months after commissioning, which itself was 2 months ahead of schedule. Boy, what a mess! Tools for Gunnery Dept., 50% on hand, spares, 30%. Instructions & drawings, 70%, but the new and troublesome stuff is what has its drawings, etc., missing.

Intended complement, 21 officers (though the greatest boob would know quite a few more required), accommodations provided for 27. 34 on board, 4 double rooms having been made into 2 bunkrooms, 17 regular, 17 reserve. 13 in Gunnery, 6 of whom are reserve Ensigns (3 have previous sea duty, however). Original crew complement 540; 670 on board. Mess compartments filled with crew’s bunks; lots of them jury-rigging hammocks. A draft of 125 men, 10 days in the Navy was received one day in filling up.

8 April 1942

Arrived Pacific end of canal 1800. Many barrage balloons, much AA stuff visible, signs of much more, invisible. Blackout every night, curfew, etc. Bent a prop, probably on a lock safety chain, just as we were clearing the last lock, and docked with one engine. Have to stay awhile for a check-up. Many sub alarms enroute; 1 sighted. No attacks.

12 April

(Sunday again) Underway. We were docked in the Balboa dock to have the prop straightened. Also found the bilge keels bent, I think by the knuckle-headed pilot putting her on a shoal trying to get around and into the slip at the dock entrance. About 30% of the supposedly red-hot new type plastic anti-fouling paint had fallen off the bottom, too, perhaps on account of being painted on in freezing weather in the N.Y. Yard’s great rush to “get us out.” Nothing was done about this; we undocked with nothing on the bottom but rust, in the large areas involved.

We were to have a sleeve target, for a little AA practice. Being Sunday, though, such was considered “not practicable” by ComUtWing [Commander Utility Wing].

Enroute Pearl Harbor, via Clipperton Island, which we are to reconnoiter for signs of possible use by Japs.

17 April

Arrived off Clipperton Island, a low atoll, with one big rock. Uninhabited since the last war. We came in all loaded for bear, ready to bombard areas, using the rock, etc., as aiming points for offset shooting, with grids all laid out, etc. Or anything else—air, surface, or sub. An undercurrent of excitement—the Japs might have been there, fueling subs, etc.

Found a schooner lying off “Skidbladnir” of San Pedro, Cal., fishing for sharks for their livers. Capt., Mate & one hand had landed on island, for curiosity, leaving cook & 1 hand. Blow made up, she dragged & they had her underway. Unable to get the men off island on account of the surf. Decided they could make out okay and left.

***

After getting underway from Gravesend on April 3 at 1024, Captain Jenkins called his crew to General Quarters for a half hour as the ship passed the Ambrose Lightship and turned onto a southeasterly heading toward Florida and the Caribbean. Once out into the Atlantic, Captain Jenkins spoke to the crew using the 1MC general announcing system. The crew learned that Atlanta’s destination was the Panama Canal and that the ship expected to arrive there in a few days. Jenkins also promised his crew that throughout their service together, he would brief them on upcoming operations as they left port. In addition, he emphasized that the cruiser was steaming unescorted through submarine-infested waters so the crew needed to remain alert.¹

As indicated by Lloyd Mustin’s muster report, Captain Jenkins had a good size audience. Atlanta was not short on crew, steaming with a full wartime complement of 670.

In contrast, a ship of comparable size in today’s Navy is operated by a crew one third in size. The difference in the size, of course, was that every function on Atlanta was more labor intensive, from working the gun mounts, to operating the radars, to firing the boilers that drove the light cruiser’s engines.

As Lloyd notes, there was a split in the wardroom between regular and reserve officers. All of the senior line officers—the captain, executive officer, and department heads, except for the medical and supply officers—were graduates of the Naval Academy. Most of the junior ensigns such as Corboy were graduates of the V-7 officer training program that had been initiated in 1940.

Despite implementing a zigzag scheme as a countermeasure to U-boat torpedo attack, Atlanta made rapid progress down the East Coast. Wary of that threat, Captain Jenkins would have his crew at their General Quarters stations at dawn and at sunset when lighting conditions made the ship most vulnerable to submarine attack. This routine would continue into the Pacific. Suspecting that the approaches to the Panama Canal on the morning of April 8 could be U-boat infested, Captain Jenkins again sent the crew to their battle stations.²

Atlanta got head-of-the-line privileges as the pilot, Capt. F. A. Dear, of the canal’s Marine Division, came aboard and met Captain Jenkins on the bridge. Passing the city of Colón off the port beam, the cruiser steamed to the entrance of the canal to make—due do Panama’s geographic position—a west to east passage to the Pacific. Ashore Army soldiers stared at the sleek new ship as she slid by and Atlanta’s sailors stared back. At midday the light cruiser made its way up through the three steps of the Gatun Locks for a total lift of 85 feet. As lines were cast ashore to guide the ship into each 1,000-foot-long lock, the word was passed to shift colors and a signalman hauled down the national ensign from the main mast while others raised a national ensign on the fantail and the jack up the staff on the bow.

The passage through Gatun Lake allowed fresh water to flush out the ship’s condensers, fire main, and toilet-flushing systems. Once across the lake, Atlanta passed through the Gaillard Cut, the 8-mile excavation at the continental divide, and then descended via the Pedro Miguel Lock followed by a pair of locks at the Miraflores complex. The near perfect transit was then marred at approximately 1814 by a sudden vibration on the port shaft after the cruiser had cleared the west Miraflores Locks. The port engine was immediately secured, and Atlanta continued along using starboard shaft with the helmsman adjusting her rudders to compensate. Arriving at Balboa, Atlanta tied up at the fueling dock to take on 224,764 gallons of black oil, and early the next morning, a Panama Canal diver descended below. Returning to the surface, the diver reported to Captain Jenkins that one blade on the port propeller “was bent back at a distance of 4 feet from hub cap for a length of about 8 inches.” Captain Jenkins asked for and immediately received permission to dry dock his ship to repair the blade.³

The unexpected delay in the trip to Pearl Harbor proved to be a boon to the crew in the form of liberty.

On Saturday April 11, Atlanta eased into the 1,076-foot-long graving dock that the Navy had built soon after the completion of the canal. As the water drained, to Lloyd’s dismay, the drydocking exposed vast areas of the underside where the paint coating had fallen away. However, with the rush to repair the blade and return to sea, there would be no opportunity to remove the rust and apply a new coat.⁴

With the repair made, water flowed into the dry dock and Atlanta again floated. The boilermen lit the burners and the ship slowly began to build up steam to get underway. Departing for Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning, April 12, in accordance with orders issued by the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, Lloyd had hoped to obtain the services of some tow planes to get some target practice, but the aircraft were not operating on the Sunday Sabbath. The lack of tow plane services did not deter Captain Jenkins from calling his crew to General Quarters to continue the process of breaking in the new arrivals.⁵

Years later, Lloyd recalled that the Navy’s carriers had been conducting token raids against Japanese-held islands:

I think there were probably two strategic purposes, one of which was to give the country something to take as reassurance that the war wasn’t going entirely as the Japanese chose to have it go. The other was hopefully to slow the Japanese down a little bit in some of the apparent feeling of complete freedom to range at will over the whole world.

The enemy had earned American respect for their ability to use sea power to strike across vast expanses of ocean. As stunning as the attack on Pearl Harbor was, Lloyd remembered being impressed about reports of Imperial Japanese Navy operations against British installations in the Indian Ocean. His recollections affirmed his diary notes that there was a concern that the Japanese fleet could be operating east of Oahu: “I can tell you we resented bitterly the inadequacy of that little SA radar up at the mast head. We had a crow’s nest up there. We kept a lookout aloft at the masthead 24 hours a day, and this was no foolishness.”⁶

En route to Hawaii, Atlanta received orders to check out Clipperton Island, located in the eastern Pacific Ocean approximately 1,000 miles west of Balboa. Lloyd described it as “a single solitary rock sticking out of the ocean.”⁷ He believed it had once hosted a guano mining operation. Claimed by the French, the island was suspected of serving as a Japanese refueling station for submarines that could operate against the Panama Canal.

Lloyd recalled that Captain Jenkins timed the approach of the island to coincide with daybreak, so that Atlanta’s guns could be unleashed on an unsuspecting submarine or merchantman. The crew stood poised at General Quarters. “As this gray dawn broke, lo and behold, sure enough here right close aboard the Island was a ship and behaving in a very suspicious way.” Lloyd looked out and saw a beautiful white painted schooner, but the sails were not rigged. Captain Jenkins ordered Lieutenants Perkins and Smith to lead a boarding party. Armed with sub-machine guns and other weapons, the boarding party stepped into the motor whaleboat and were lowered over the side.

“The boarding party got aboard the schooner, and, lo and behold, then things were even more suspicious.” Lloyd recalled Perkins interrogated the cook who said that Skidbladnir was a shark fishing schooner. “They fished for shark for the shark livers commercially.”

Perkins discovered that “they had found themselves in the vicinity of Clipperton Island, and looking through binoculars they could see the remains of this guano mining industry, a few overturned carts, and some little narrow gauged railroad tracks, and so on.” The cook told the lieutenant that the captain and first mate and another crewmember had taken a boat ashore to look around the island. Unfortunately, while the crew explored the remains of the guano mines, the wind caused the Skidbladnir to drag her anchor off the narrow shoal into deep water. “Here she was, the anchor just dangling down touching nothing.” Meanwhile, the surf kicked up by the sudden gusts trapped the skipper and his fellow shark hunters ashore as they helplessly looked out at their schooner drifting away.

Fortunately, Perkins, with his New England background, knew something about sailing and instructed the boarding party sailors on what needed to be accomplished. Once the anchor was hauled in, Perkins got the Skidbladnir underway with her sails, and Atlanta’s sailors nudged the shark schooner close enough to the island to drop the anchor to get a firm hold. Lloyd remembered they “wished them well and went on our way, an incident of the war that I am sure appears in absolutely no history books whatsoever and probably never will.”⁸

In contrast, a few hours after Atlanta’s Clipperton Island adventure, on the other side of the date line, the carrier Hornet launched Army B-25 bombers against Tokyo and other Japanese targets. Led by Col. Jimmy Doolittle, the raid caused minor damage to the intended targets and could hardly claim to have avenged Pearl Harbor, but the strike boosted American morale and served as a psychological blow to make the Japanese realize the homeland was not invulnerable. Just as the Japanese had exploited the mobility of naval forces to project power over vast distances, the Americans were determined to let their Pacific opponent know that two could play the game.

Along with Hornet, Enterprise made the North Pacific crossing to provide air cover for the American Task Force. With B-25s strapped down on her deck, Hornet was extremely vulnerable. Lloyd had a personal connection with the mission in that his stepfather George Murray commanded Big E.⁹