We were intercepted 30 miles out by one of our fighters. I gave him the hand sign for no radio. He rocked his wings, flew ahead of us, and led me safely over and through all those trigger-happy cruisers and destroyers right into the approach pattern. We weren’t alone. It looked as if most of the catch-game strike had made it back about twenty minutes before we did. The fighter-biter banked away and headed back to his CAP station. I had plenty of time and gas to go through the landing checklist with Rooster, and then I joined a holding pattern of three SBDs five miles off the carrier’s starboard bow. The western horizon behind the carrier was getting darker and darker as all those thunder-bumpers got organized. We were orbiting at 2,000 feet and those storms were probably 30 to 40 miles away, which meant that their heads were bumping up against the stratosphere. Fortunately the land-launch course for max winds over the deck was still almost due east.
My landing was uneventful, although I was surprised to see quite a bit of white fire-fighting foam on the port side of the flight deck, and what looked like some big gouges in the wooden flight deck. The flight deck crew directed me to a spot over on the starboard side and then signaled for me to shut her down. Once in the ready room we got the full story from the other pilots. Formation discipline had become the first casualty when the Jap fighters jumped the unprotected Bombing Six gaggle. The SBD is a bomber, not a fighter. Doctrine called for dumping any heavy ordnance if the bandit problem was bad enough, just as my division lead and most of the others had done. Apparently I was the only one who’d held on to his bomb and actually used it.
Rooster and I huddled with the post-strike intel officers and told our story. We were claiming two Zeros and an ammo ship. They’d have to take that on faith as the SBD didn’t have a gun camera forward like fighters did. Once the ship secured from flight quarters the skipper called a quick meeting. We’d had one loss, one of the NavCad pilots and his gunner, who’d been seen to crash and blow up in the ocean after two Zeros shot it up. Otherwise, the SBDs had given good account of themselves, knocking down several Zeros.
“That’s a pretty good showing,” the skipper began. “Considering we had no fighter cover. They were all back here around Enterprise, fighting off a formation of Bettys. One of the Bettys lost half a wing and was on fire when he elected to car-qual onboard the Big E. That’s all the foam you saw topside. CAG was wounded in the left forearm and leg, but he’s determined to get back in the cockpit, and knowing him, he will.”
“Are we gonna try another strike?” one of the guys asked.
“Negative; it seems that the Lexington took two torpedoes from a Jap sub. She’s still afloat and under her own power, but you saw what those Jap torpedoes can do back in Pearl, so she’s probably Bremerton bound. Saratoga is getting fixed up in Pearl, so for right now, it’s the Big E and Yorktown to cover the whole Pacific.
“There was one bright spot: Nugget Bobby Steele here,” he said, pointing at me. “Flamed one Zero, and his gunner made a second Zero’s canopy turn all red for a possible. Then he ducked into a cloud and took his thousand-pounder to Malawit atoll and parked it in an anchored ammunition ship, which blew up in spectacular fashion. Well done, Nugget.”
There were noises of approval from my squadron mates, grateful that someone had managed to uphold the honor of Bombing Six on what was supposed to be an air group strike. I reminded myself to make sure that Rooster received appropriate recognition. I would have never thought of that hit-the-dive-brakes tactic, even though we’d been taught that back in flight school. I had to admit it: I’d clutched up when those tracers began to envelop my cockpit.
The post-attack meeting broke up and we all headed for the wardroom, not having eaten anything since very early this morning. Now that we were at war, the wardroom remained open on a round-the-clock basis and that night was no exception. Lieutenant Cox stopped by my table as I was finishing up.
“I meant that ‘well done,’” he said. “It allowed me to report that we sank at least one substantial ship, which was enough to mollify the admiral. How’d you manage that?”
“A Zero got on my tail. I deployed the dive brakes and cut power, which forced the Zero to bust past me and then I flamed him. After that, I couldn’t find anybody in all those big clouds, but I could see an island, so I decided to head for that. There were some ships and they were all anchored, so I chose the biggest one and got lucky.”
“Dive brakes,” the skipper said. “That’s fighter stuff. They teaching that in SBD operational training?”
“They are, but I kinda froze up. It was my gunner, Baynes, who yelled for dive brakes.”
“The Rooster Baynes?” the skipper asked. I nodded.
“That boy is a genu-wine piece of work,” he said with a smile. “You want him for your permanent gunner?”
“If that’s possible, yes, sir, I would. Why’s he called Rooster?”
“Go on liberty with him one time. You’ll see. Heavy-duty skirt chaser. He still do that rebel yell bullshit?”
“Often,” I said. “And loud, too.”
“I wish the Japs could hear that just once,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get him for you. Again, good job today.”
I went back to my stateroom, suddenly dead tired. Chuck’s stuff was all still there. I wondered what they did in this situation. He hadn’t been declared killed in action, just missing. There was a knock on the door. It was Yeoman Sykes, the squadron admin officer.
“We’ve got word Mister Snead is officially MIA,” he announced. “When you get time can you gather up all his stuff? You’ll know what’s yours and what was his better than anyone else. We’ll come get it when you’re ready.”
“What happens to it?” I asked.
“Gets boxed up and stored aboard until we get definite word. On a regular strike they’d have had some ships looking, but that deal today, well…”
“So if they do get recovered, it’s gonna be by the Japs?”
He nodded, a dismal expression on his face.
“Right,” I said. “I’ll call you.”
“Thanks, sir. Sorry.”
“Me, too,” I said.
The next morning we were still a ways out of Pearl, so I had time after breakfast to gather up Snead’s personal effects and cram it all into his seabag. The word around the breakfast table was that there was no word. One guy said that translated to no chance, and then looked embarrassed for saying it. I realized I’d have been one of the missing if it hadn’t been for Rooster. I went back to the stateroom and called Sykes. He came and got Snead’s seabag. I told him I wanted to write Rooster up for a commendation. He told me he’d get me the paperwork. Neither of us could think of anything else to say, so he just left.
I sat down and jotted off a note to my folks back in Omaha since we’d have mail going off in Pearl. Home seemed a million miles away after my first taste of war. I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of three children. My father was a mechanical engineer at the Union Pacific Omaha Works, which was a major repair and overhaul facility for the railroad. We lived in north Omaha, not far from Fort Omaha, where Custer had lived before he went west to teach the Indians a lesson. My upbringing was pretty traditional, attending local public schools, participating in Scouts, and, once old enough, accompanying my father and older brother on pheasant-hunting trips out near a town called Hastings. My older brother, Geoff, went east to college, where after a year he succumbed to the ravages of the influenza outbreak of 1934, the year I graduated from high school.
I had always assumed that I’d follow my dad into the railroad engineering business, starting at the bottom as he had done, but there was a depression on and one of the ways the railroads were hanging on was by cutting their employee levels to the bone. My father was by then a senior engineer so his job remained relatively safe. He solved my problem by sending me to Creighton College, a Jesuit school, to get a start on an engineering degree. I’d always been good in math and science, so at first it was a good fit, but after a year of the mandatory review courses for the benefit of all the freshmen who were not that good in math and science, I was bored. I’d been dating a pretty girl from Council Bluffs at the time, and her older brother had won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Being from the Midwest, I was completely ignorant of what the Navy was all about, but I met him when he came home for Christmas leave and found out that Annapolis was quite the place.
Long story short, I went through the admissions process and then the political appointment winnowing, both of which were by competitive examination. I ended up as the first alternate for our congressman’s appointment quota, and when the principal failed the physical examination, I became a lowly plebe, the purposefully degrading term for a first-year midshipman. Everything about the academy was foreign to me except the high academic standards and a truly nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic demanded by the academy. That was nothing new for me, having enjoyed a year under the gentle tutelage of the Jesuits. One-third of my entering class had “bilged out” by the end of my second year, either by resigning because they hated it or because they’d failed on the engineering-heavy academic side. Those who remained became a fairly homogenous cadre of prospective naval officers, known as the class of 1939. Prior classes during the Depression had had the option of graduating but delaying acceptance of a commission. The Navy changed that policy when the war clouds gathering over Europe began to look like a repeat of 1914, especially after Hitler revealed his ambitions by invading Poland.
I had opted for the aviation career path upon graduation and was tentatively accepted, but there was a catch. I had to complete that required two years of sea duty first. Naval aviation was still the bastard child in the minds of many senior officers. More maddening to the battleship navy was the fact that naval aviation was beginning to absorb serious budget money, which they thought would have been much better spent on yet another battleship. Going aboard my sea tour cruiser was an exercise in being very circumspect about my future flying career. The aviation board members who’d approved me for flight training actually told me to say things like: I haven’t made up my mind yet, because I want to see what the “real” fleet is like before I commit. That would ensure that your ship would treat you as a prospective career surface guy and act accordingly.
I did enjoy my sea tour in Helena, although not much of it was spent at sea because in 1939 there was little or no money to send the fleet to sea. There were a couple of annual fleet exercises, but otherwise, the big ships spent most of the year swinging to the hook or moored to concrete buoys in the various ports. In sharp contrast was the local Army airfield, where we saw planes going up every day of the week. To get a squadron of battleships to sea cost millions; to send up a biplane for a training hop cost about twenty-five dollars in aviation gasoline, if that.
In the spring of 1941 I received orders to report to Pensacola and began flight training. It hadn’t been quite two years, but there were straws in the wind about what might be coming for the United States in Europe, and those straws were glowing, every one. From within the military establishment we could see that President Roosevelt was executing a careful balancing act with respect to the German onslaught across the European continent. The American public was dead set against a repeat of the ghastly casualties of the first go-round with Germany. In retrospect it seemed a little stupid, but there were still a whole lot of families who’d lost sons and husbands “over there.”
Flight training was enjoyable. I had no trouble with ground school, avionics, aircraft engineering, and the like. The flying was great, made more so by the undercurrents of unspoken urgency that permeated Pensacola. About the time that most of my class was getting a little cocky, the Navy sent down a pilot who’d been secretly seconded to the RAF during the Battle of Britain. He soon knocked the wind out of our sails with his quiet but fearsome stories of going up against the Luftwaffe. I finished training in late ’41 and then went to advanced training at San Diego in October. And now, here I was: an honest-to-God carrier pilot, or, nugget first class.
Now I wanted to reassure my family that I was okay and also tell them some of what we’d been doing. That, of course, was not allowed. All letters had to be read by the squadron censor, who, inevitably, was Lieutenant Quantrill. He’d explained in detail what we could say and what we couldn’t, so my note home was filled with platitudes about being on a great ship, the good chow, being really busy, meeting exceptional pilots, and the fact that we were taking the fight to the treacherous enemy. The rest of it was made up of questions: how’s my younger brother, is the Omaha Works doing well, are you getting enough to eat now that there’s rationing, any tornadoes yet, etc.
I’d left my academy ring with them when I headed west for San Diego. That had been a precarious moment, with all of us understanding the reason for doing that but no one willing to express it in words. A lot of the other pilots who were married had left their rings with their wives. Some had even written final letters to be sent in the event that they were declared killed in action. I’d looked in Snead’s stuff, but hadn’t found one. I finished my letter with some upbeat, “I’m fine and my squadron is great” words. Then I’d just sat there at my little fold-down desk, my mind in neutral, until I realized I needed to get my unsealed letter to Quantrill’s basket in the squadron office if I had any hope of getting it off in Pearl.
Pearl was in such a shambles that the usual routine of an air group fly-off wasn’t possible. Most of us stayed aboard the ship and got some sleep. There was an island-wide sundown-to-sunup curfew so the fleshpots of Honolulu, such as they were, were in limbo. The officers’ club had finally been cleared of wounded but now would require a couple weeks’ worth of sanitizing and repainting. The Enterprise ship’s company (the crew) faced the usual round-the-clock flurry of on-loading everything conceivable in the way of supplies, food, bunker oil, aviation gasoline, ordnance, and replacement aircraft.
Getting some much-needed sleep was enough for most of us, but our “vacation” didn’t last long. On the third day in port we got some more nuggets to replace our losses. We also received six replacement aircraft, which meant pilots were needed to check out the new SBDs that had arrived, in sections as usual, via cargo ships. I thought there might be competition to get one of the new birds, but more experienced hands remembered what it was like to take what they called a “factory bird” up for the first time. There were sometimes unpleasant surprises, so we nuggets were assigned to take our pick and then to join the mechanics in physically mounting the wings and testing the avionics, the hydraulics, and the gun systems. It was during this period that I really got to know the SBD, working alongside the mechs, finding loose wires, unconnected piping, flat tires, and even dinged propeller blades. Apparently the Douglas Aircraft Company was producing the dive bombers so fast and the need was so urgent that the new planes were never test-flown. They left that to the operational flight crews, who, after all, had the biggest stake in the plane performing to specs.
Rooster Baynes joined me on the second day of the delivery process and pitched right in wherever he could help. He’d been told I’d asked for him as gunner and was apparently pleased with that assignment. I think he’d also heard that I had put him in for a commendation. The SBD gunners were special people. They came from the various enlisted ratings but their role was as much co-pilot as gunner. Rooster had a colorful reputation, which included some dramatic run-ins with shore patrols in various ports. He was a dedicated bachelor and apparently a master escape artist, a useful talent when an unsuspecting husband came home unannounced. He was a wizard with carrier plane avionics, a speed-key with the Morse code, and he loved his guns, as evidenced by his efforts to trade the carrier’s ordnance chief our SBD’s twin thirty for a twin fifty. The chief just laughed and told Rooster to get lost.
That night the skipper called a meeting in the ready room to inform us that we were going back out, this time to attack Wake Island. The Japanese had invaded Wake Island four days after they hit Pearl. The first time they were driven off by the small but determined Marine garrison; the second time they sent two carriers, whose bombers and fighters overwhelmed the vastly outnumbered Marines and Navy defenders. Wake was 2,300 miles away from Pearl, and actually closer to Tokyo, which was “only” 1,990 miles away. According to naval intelligence the Japs were bulking up their logistics capabilities on Wake. The scuttlebutt on the Big E, however, was that the real reason we were going out was because Halsey wasn’t happy with our last outing and was itching to bomb something. There was no thought of retaking the island, so the plan was to make a surprise attack, and then run back to Pearl. Everybody had an opinion about the mission, but I agreed with the skipper: he thought it was more a case of showing the Japs that no place in the Pacific was safe from American carriers.
The strike date for the Wake attack was set for February 24th. It turned out to be a costly effort with very little to show for it. Basically, the intel was all wrong: there was just about nothing there. We made the first strike, went back to the carrier, rearmed, and then hit Marcus Island, another godforsaken outpost in the vast emptiness of the central Pacific. The AA fire was more intense and we lost more planes and pilots. We had little to show for it except more forlorn seabags in storage.
Back in Pearl, the air group went ashore and Enterprise went into the shipyard for some mysterious “configuration changes.” None of us knew what that meant, and we spent the next month and a half integrating replacement planes and pilots, training more nuggets, and taking some time off down at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Each squadron got a long weekend on Waikiki and the chance to behave like aviators ashore. My sojourn to the Oklahoma kept my drinking limited to two beers a night. I caught a lot of static over that but I couldn’t erase the memories of sitting on the battleship’s overturned hull, watching sailors burn in the harbor right in front of me. She was still there, although now we’d heard they were trying to pull her carcass upright.
At some point, Hornet slipped out of Pearl, which gave rise to all sorts of rumors. The carrier was going to sea—but without her air group? Only towards the end of our six-week stint ashore did we learn that the Big E had hosted the Doolittle Raid over Tokyo, launching a clutch of stripped-down Army Air Corps B-25 Mitchell bombers that proceeded to strew bombs all over downtown Tokyo at rush hour. They then flew over Japan and into China, where some of them made safe landings. In terms of wartime damage, the strike was more like a stunt than a real bombing attack, but all of us could imagine the consternation in the Japanese capital at the sight of American bombers roaring low overhead and dropping bombs in downtown Tokyo.
Following the shock and shame of Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid was an amazing morale booster at home. Morale needed boosting: the Japanese had conquered the Philippines, Burma, Java, Singapore, the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and the Solomon Islands. They’d destroyed the last effective Allied naval fighting force in the western Pacific at the Battle of the Java Sea. They’d bombed Darwin, Australia, and taken Guam. Our pinpricks in the Marshalls and at Wake didn’t look like much in comparison.