Sunset: First, the eerie shrilling of the bosun’s pipe, and the frozen fraction of a second in which all life aboard the big carrier seems suspended, listening…
Even as the wailing whistle dies, there comes the clanging thud of thousands of pounding feet pelting across steel decks and up resounding iron ladders while the loudspeaker shouts:
“General quarters! All hands, man your battle stations!”
A stuttering, excited bugle takes up the warning, only to break off in the swift, steady whang-whang-whang of the big alarm gong. Men come tumbling helter-skelter up every hatchway—sweating, straining, rushing men from Bronxville, from Wichita, from San Diego—to see black bursts of ack ack already polkadotting the world’s most beautiful sunset.
The Kamikazes are coming—the first we have ever seen—on this lovely evening of June 15, 1944, away out west of the Marianas.
The first suicide plane is a black speck, growing swiftly against the background of flame-streaked sunset. More than a hundred guns of our own carrier join the thunder of the sprawling fleet.
Red-hot tracer fire is a latticework, but the plane bores through—so close, now, that the shells of our crashing five-inch batteries seem to burst just outside the muzzles and spectators know a moment of panic. The world seems to be blowing up. There is nowhere to run.
Then a shellburst catches the Japanese torpedo plane squarely; a wing leaps from its fuselage and fragments tumble jerkily, trailing sheets of flame.
A second plane, off our port bow, suddenly is gone, too. There is only a spot of seething fire on the water.
A third pops up over our bow and skims the length of our flight deck, trailing orange fire like a comet. The pilot tries to pull over and crash into the bridge from which tough, wiry little Vice Adm. Marc A. Mitscher watches tensely. The pilot’s right-hand engine is too far gone; his plane skids off to the right, with men along the edge of the flight deck ducking beneath the searing breath of heat. Amid the terrific uproar of the guns, the plane seems to drift past in silence, and crashes a few yards astern.
Spectators leaning over the rails watch bubbly torpedo wakes streaking down both sides of the great ship—harmlessly.
Dawn:
It’s the squawk box again, on the morning of June 19.
“We have seven ‘tallyho’ reports over Guam; our fighters seem to be mixing it up.”
9:45 a.m.: Ships’ guns all along the horizon open fire.
10 a.m.: “Many, many bogeys (unidentified planes) at 110 miles.” It is the first time any of us has heard that ominous phrase, “many, many.” Ships now are firing all around the horizon; black smoke puffs litter the gauzy clouds, criss-crossed by the sweeping vapor trails of fighting Hellcats. There are dogfights everywhere in the distance.
Noon: “Sixty bogeys, 40 miles.”
12:10 p.m.: “Our fighters got all but two; our fighters got all but two.”
One vanishes into the ragged black cloud of ack ack as it nears the carrier on our right. It never reappears. Another crosses our own bow and crashes aflame into the sea. A tall pillar of smoke and spray rises gauntly a few yards behind us. It is a bomb that missed.
12:15 p.m.: “Another group of bogeys—”
12:30 p.m.: “Lieutenant jaygee Alex Vraciu has just splashed six Japanese bombers…”
12:50 p.m.: The first few pilots to return report 21 enemy planes shot down. Deckhands break into a spontaneous cheer.
1:17 p.m.: Ships far to our left begin firing heavily, while Hellcat squadrons lacing the distant skies report: “Splash 15 more Zekes!”
1:45 p.m.: They are Japanese carrier planes, not land-based. Mouse Albert (Ens. Walter H. Albert, Braintree, Mass.) brings the word. He pulled his Hellcat close to the tail of a Japanese bomber to see if it had a tailhook (used only by carrier planes). It did.
“Then I saw that Japanese rear-seat gunner looking straight down his gun barrel at me—and for some unknown reason he didn’t shoot. He just looked at me, tucked in his gun, slammed shut the canopy and shrank down out of sight. I shot the plane down.”
And with his own electrical instruments shot out in earlier combat, Mouse limps back 200 miles to the carrier—with nothing to guide him but a one-inch compass set into the top of a little plastic matchbox he’d found in his pocket!
(This was the day in which air group 16, on Mitscher’s carrier, shot down 45 Japanese planes without loss—and in which task force 58 downed more than 400, to wipe out Japan’s carrier-based air power.
(Vraciu, an eager boy from East Chicago, Ind., became the navy’s top carrier ace that day; his total grew to 19 kills. “I’d just sit up there and say, ‘Now, let’s see, which one of those (Japanese) don’t we like? That one!’ And plink! down he’d go!”)
Darkness:
It is late afternoon next day, and Admiral Mitscher perches in his special backward-facing chair on his bridge, spooning ice cream intently from a paper cup. There’s a clatter on the iron ladders, and up races Gus Widhelm (Commander W. J. Widhelm, operations officer and an early dive-bombing hero of the South Pacific).
“Admiral, admiral, contact reported; the Jap fleet has been sighted! Position, uh, position—”
“Gawd damn it, go back and get that position!” drawls the grinning Capt. A. A. Burke, chief of staff.
A lilting bugle sounds flight quarters, and the squawk box blats:
“Pilots, report to your ready rooms, on the double, on the double!”
5 p.m.: Two of the fliers left aboard sit in their otherwise empty ready room, playing acey deucey. They say all the others in their squadron have taken off—“the poor devils!”
7:30 p.m.: “Hits on four enemy carriers; hits on four enemy carriers!” It’s the first flash report from Lt. Cmdr. Ralph Weymouth, dive-bombing squadron skipper.
8 p.m.: Too dark now to write notes; still no planes coming back. How can they find us in this blackness?
Admiral Mitscher makes a shocking decision; he orders the traditional blackout shattered. Destroyers throw up tall, white beams from their huge searchlights, like guideposts. Many ships begin firing starshells, blobs of white light that drift down lazily on their little parachutes. Red pinpoints flick on, marking ships’ superstructures as obstacles to be avoided. A thing like this has never been done in this war, but these boys must be saved.
Time? Too dark to see a watch. Our planes are coming back! There are tiny clusters of red, green and white pinpoints on the horizon. The first set grows, and circles us swiftly. A howling Grumman comes up the groove to a perfect landing.
Everyone on deck cheers.
Soon the whole sky is filled with moving, colored lights, and there’s a new worry. They’ll collide; they’re bound to collide; it’s going to be a bloody mess!
Their gasoline is gone, too; it must be—they flew nearly 800 miles on that too-long strike that knocked out a great Japanese carrier force. One plane drops into the sea astern of us—no fuel for that last hundred yards.
Lt. James A. Seybert, 26-year-old veteran of Scotland and Malta, lands and tells us:
“I couldn’t stand it to listen; I finally had to shut my radio off. I kept hearing scraps of conversation like this:
“‘None of us has enough gas left to get back; it’s foolish to straggle along, going down one by one. We’d better all land together, right here.’” (“Right here” was a dark, distant stretch of ocean; but down they went, in formation.)
Seybert is surprised by the warmth of the greeting he gets from the deckhands; and when he reaches his ready room, “guys begin shouting at me like they hadn’t seen me for years. Then I get it. I’m the only one of my squadron who has come back.”
Tomorrow we will learn that all but one of his squadron was saved; and that from the 95 American planes lost at sea, more than half the personnel was rescued.
Tonight, though, is a nightmare of whirling, colored lights as frantic pilots seek to land in clusters, their gasoline gone. The despairing landing signal officers can only wave them off, and around they come again, still close-clustered, all trying to come aboard at once.
And away out amid the shattered Japanese fleet, Lt. Warren McLellan of Fort Smith, Ark., is bobbing in his life jacket with a little handful of his praying shipmates, feeling through the dark water the dying explosions of another big enemy carrier. These men, too will be saved tomorrow; but this is tonight.
McLellan is singing at the top of his voice:
“No Love, No Nothin!”
★★★
Elmont Waite entered the AP service at Kansas City in 1942… he was assigned to San Francisco for Pacific duty in January, 1944… went on to Honolulu… then on a tour with Admiral Mitscher’s famous Task Force 58… on to the Philippines to help cover MacArthur’s return… finally back to San Francisco… he was born in Walthill, Neb., in 1909.