One afternoon six months after I turned in the manuscript for this book, I was at the post office in my little mountain town and I noticed an elderly gentleman behind me in line. He wore a battered green cap with the words “Lexington, CV-2” emblazoned on the front. It didn’t seem possible, but I had to ask: “Were you on the original Lexington?”
“Yes,” he answered proudly, “but it was sunk.”
“I know,” I replied, “at Coral Sea in 1942.”
That exchange made eighty-nine-year-old Bill Dye and me quick friends. Dye had enlisted in the navy right out of high school. After basic training and electrician school, he reported aboard the Lexington at San Diego in October 1941. After Pearl Harbor, Dye was promoted to Electrician’s Mate, Third Class, the inside joke being that he was now qualified to screw in a light bulb without stripping the threads.
May 8, 1942, proved the fatal day. From his station in E Division, Bill Dye felt the Lexington shudder as two torpedoes slammed into the carrier’s portside. These were followed by three bomb hits along the flight deck. The ship listed to port with its engineering spaces partially flooded and fires raging. The crew fought back, counterflooded some compartments, and soon had the ship making twenty-five knots. Then vapors from spilled aviation gas ignited. Dye and his shipmates scrambled topside as the order was given to abandon ship.
Afterward, it was the little things Dye remembered the best: The neat line of shoes along the edge of the flight deck as sailors took them off and went over the side. The ice cream—usually a rationed treat—that appeared as if by magic and was devoured by greasy hands. The twenty-six dollars Dye left in his wallet in his locker below.
Out of a complement of 2,951 on board Lexington that morning, only 137 were killed. That was due, Dye says, to the fact that “not one man on that ship got out of line.” Dye was put on a transport and shipped back to San Diego. From there he served on the submarine chaser PC-626 off North Africa and in the invasions of Sicily and Italy. By the time he finally got to New York City on leave, Dye remembers, “there wasn’t a bad-looking woman in the world.”
Bill Dye is one of the few remaining members of the greatest generation who sailed into harm’s way as fresh-faced teenagers. He once admitted to me that he couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast, but his memories of the Lexington, he said, were crystal clear.