Aboard the USS Lexington with Task Force 11,
far into enemy waters
Two and a half years later: February 20, 1942
Butch lay in his bunk, still in his flight suit, flipping playing cards into the hat of his dress uniform across the small sleeping room. He had a championship run going, forty-four cards without a single miss. The unofficial all-time wardroom record was in sight.
He paused his target practice as the ship listed slightly to starboard, and he felt the rumble of the carrier’s engines as they labored to turn the Lexington into the wind for another launch.
He sighed, flipped another card into the hat, and recalled a phrase he’d heard a thousand damned times from his instructors.
A lot of war is waiting.
All through the Academy, and then later on in flight school in Pensacola, Florida, that was the wet blanket some old-timer would toss out whenever a rookie was overheard fantasizing about the exciting life of a navy flyer.
No, the wise guy would say, that’s not the way it is. There would be hours and days and even months of tense anticipation followed quickly by a few terrifying minutes of heart-stopping, blood-curdling, adrenaline-pumping chaos. If you were brave and prepared and skilled and exceptionally lucky, that flash of chaos could be kept just barely under your control. You might even live to tell your grandkids about it all.
Butch’s father had once said that if you ever want to hear God laugh, all you’ve got to do is make a plan. At the time, his dad’s comment concerned his own struggles to build a business and support his family through the depths of the Great Depression, but his admonition was as true in battle as anywhere else. The military brass often spent weeks on their brilliant strategies and tactics, only to see the tables turned in a last-minute frenzy when the enemy failed to behave as expected.
The day’s plan, for example, was set to be supervised from the flag bridge by Vice Admiral Wilson Brown. Before it all blew up it had probably looked just swell on paper.
The USS Lexington and the rest of Task Force 11 had been ordered to attack the enemy base at Rabaul, a major strategic prize off the coast of New Guinea that had recently been overtaken by the Japanese. The loss of this base was a major blow to the Allies. As the enemy ramped up air and sea forces there it would become a huge threat to vital shipping lanes.
While this small task force didn’t pack nearly enough muscle to actually retake the base, their job was to throw a monkey wrench into the machine and cause as much damage as they could. Butch’s air division had been chosen to lead the assault—bombing runways, sinking ships in the harbor, destroying as many hangar-bound Japanese Zeroes as possible. Down the road, a larger Allied operation would follow up, conquer the base, and send the Japs packing.
The battle plan hardly had a chance to get going, before a long-range enemy scouted the American ships. Butch had just returned from his morning patrol by then and could only watch as other fighter pilots from the Lexington took off and went after the airborne spy.
Butch’s shipmates had taken the scout, but before he was shot down the sneaky bastard had almost certainly radioed his position and sent a warning to his distant commanders.
And that changed everything. A surprise attack by a minor strike force was one thing, but without that element of surprise, Task Force 11 was just a slow-moving target, a sitting duck in the middle of some very hostile waters. Another enemy reconnaissance flight soon followed, another Japanese spotter plane was splashed, and that was all the convincing required to turn the whole mission into a bust.
But at this point, even running away wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.
TF 11 had already made it to a waypoint a little over 450 miles from Rabaul, and now the enemy was alerted. By this time Admiral Aritomo Goto had likely cooked up a surprise of his own for the discovered Americans—one involving a swift and overwhelming retaliation with a squadron or two of his long-range bombers and torpedo planes.
Though the American attack was off, an official retreat hadn’t yet been ordered. Admiral Brown was famously reluctant to give up on a strategic goal, so for the moment all the task force could do was stay the dangerous course toward Rabaul, keep a sharp eye on the skies, and wait.
Butch wondered how he might stack up in an all-out, life-or-death dogfight like the one that might be coming soon. That was one test he hadn’t faced so far.
According to his reviews, he was an exceptional pilot, and since he was a boy he’d been an excellent marksman. Putting those two skills together, though, had proven to be the biggest challenge of his twenty-eight years. He’d flown plenty of missions, but he still hadn’t had the opportunity to fire a single shot in battle.
Butch flipped one card and then another for two more direct hits.
In the calm before the storm, he thought about his father.
The last letter he’d written to him a few years ago had been dashed off and routine, nothing like the note he would have written if he’d known there’d never be another. He’d let an awful lot go unsaid over the years, but thank you was the one sentiment that Butch had probably neglected the most. And when his father was murdered—gangland-style, no less—a number of unpleasant things that had gone unspoken were confirmed.
A busload of reporters and photographers had nearly ruined the funeral. But, after a few ugly days of lurid headlines—CAR CRASH KILLS CAPONE CANARY, SHOTGUN JUSTICE FOR UNDERWORLD SNITCH—the stories shrank and slipped to the back pages and were gradually forgotten.
Mother said that’s what his father would have wanted in the end: to be forgotten by all except his family. Whatever his failings, Dad had been proud of his boy and girls. Flaws and all, he’d done the best he could for them, and he had hoped that the tarnish on their family name would fade with time.
But his bad choices had left quite a dubious legacy. Easy Eddie was survived by a criminal record, a broken marriage, a young trophy girlfriend, two fine daughters who’d grown up mostly without him, and a fairly shy, slightly overweight, navy pilot son who was pushing thirty years old and still waiting to prove himself among his peers.
Butch drew in a deep breath, took aim past the brim of the hat, and flipped the last card that would tie his personal best.
The door to the cabin banged open, swatting the flying queen of diamonds cleanly into the trash can. His friend and wingman, Marion “Duff” Dufilho, stood there, trying to catch his breath.
“C’mon, Butch, we’re up!”
Out in the hall a loud Klaxon had begun to wail. As the two men clattered up the stairs toward the flight deck they felt the big ship beginning to maneuver and accelerate, and heard the repeating action order booming over the horns from high on the bridge:
Battle stations!
Battle stations!
Battle stations!
No need for a stop by the ready room; they got their mission briefing on the run.
• • •
Radar had picked up what looked like a jagged V about seventy-five miles west. As it disappeared and reappeared among the shifting storms the operator soon realized what he was seeing: a large contact that wasn’t one of us, inbound at eight thousand feet and making 150 knots. A patrol was scrambled and launched to investigate.
Meanwhile, an earlier air patrol was returning, low on fuel and ready to land, but the remaining idle planes on the deck had been cleared and stacked astern to allow the just-departed squadron to take off. Now all those planes had to be moved to the bow again so the returning out-of-fuel patrol could be recovered before they started dropping dead-stick into the drink.
The flight deck was helter-skelter and crowded wingtip to wingtip. All available hands were occupied with respotting the planes, fore and then aft again. Aircraft were being fueled and rearmed, and the air boss was bullhorning and directing it all like a mad orchestra conductor.
“Pilots, man your planes! Thach, take thirteen, Sellstrom in number two, O’Hare in fifteen, and Dufilho in four!”
T
he microphones from the radar room and the tower had been routed directly to the topside loudspeakers, and an operator’s voice blared out:
“Contact! I’ve got a contact! Bogies inbound, forty-seven miles west!”
Butch and Duff had been ordered to man the last two F4F Wildcats on the deck and given call-signs of Raven 5 and 6. After a last confirmation of orders both men were soon squeezing into their narrow cockpits.
“That contact,” Butch shouted back over the rising noise, “is that the same one our boys have already gone after? Or another one?”
“Do I look like I know?” Duff yelled forward. “Just strap in, cross your fingers, and get her ready to roll!”
The last plane from the previous patrol had finally caught a cable and was down, and the desperate front-to-back respotting began again. Butch looked to the storm-darkened sky and saw a stuttering exchange of tracers from machine-gun fire lighting up the distant clouds.
He put on his headset, got the signal, and called out ahead to clear the nearby crew. As he started up his engine and ticked through his preflight checklist, the radio told him what was happening up there: A formation of nine Japanese bombers had been found heading straight for Task Force 11. The latest patrol was doing all they could to shoot them down before they got close enough to drop their deadly load.
That created another emergency. The deck of the Lexington was crowded with fully fueled aircraft, a prime target for incoming bombers. The planes on the deck were the scouts, torpedo planes, and land attack craft meant for the raid on Rabaul. But they were useless now; the only thing needed in the air right then were fighters.
And there were only two of them left. Butch and Duff were sitting in those fighters, last in line to depart. They could only sweat it out and wait their turn as the rest of the vulnerable inventory was launched, one by one, into the relative safety of the open air.
The action in the sky was now close enough to see with the naked eye. A couple of enemy bombers had already spiraled into the sea, and now another one, the lead plane of the Japanese formation, was on fire and badly disabled—but it was still homing in on the carrier.
Thundering anti-aircraft guns cut loose from the Lex and the surrounding cruisers and destroyers, filling the attacker’s flight path with flak and blooming black bursts of shrapnel. But the plane kept coming. There was nothing left to do but watch as the flaming twin-engine bomber leveled, descended, and approached with suicidal intent, its pilot obviously struggling to hold his course on a kamikaze run toward the carrier deck.
At last focused gunfire tore through the cockpit and destroyed some final, vital system. The shredded enemy bomber lurched and snap-rolled into a screaming, careening, knife-edge pass and disappeared just shy of the hull of the carrier. It had only missed its mark by a stone’s throw as it crashed into the churning water beside the vessel.
Butch looked back to the runway. There was only one departing plane left in front of him, and Duff, in the last ready fighter, was the only backup behind him. He tuned his engine and ran it up to begin his taxi, pulling the canopy forward and closed. Soon the flag dropped to send him barreling down the white line behind 1,200 horsepower, and he was off like a homesick angel.
As soon as airspeed allowed, he banked into a climb toward his hastily assigned coordinates, fighting against buffeting winds as he cranked the heavy handle beside his leg thirty-two times in order to pull up the landing gear.
Manual retracts were one of the many pains-in-the-butt of this aging airframe. But what the Wildcat lacked in other areas, it made up for in pure iron guts and toughness. Butch had seen one of these birds come back from a sortie with more than five hundred bullet holes, perforated from end to end, and it was still out fighting again the next day.
By the time the wheels were up and locked Butch was nearly at altitude. He banked again onto a heading toward the aerial battle, which was now taking place well within sight of the American ships.
As his wingman joined alongside, Butch saw more enemy planes going down in the distance. Some of the survivors had dropped their bombs even as they struggled to evade the fleet’s defenders. So far those falling salvos were missing their targets by a comfortable margin.
Within seconds the few remaining Japanese bombers were breaking formation and scattering. Those that were able were bugging out and heading home defeated, with American fighters hot on their tails.
Butch keyed the radio.
“Raven Six, this is Raven Five. Duff, let’s have a gun check.”
“Roger that, though I don’t know why the hell we’d go to the trouble. Looks like we missed the party again.”
“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride,” Butch replied. Duff was right; by then the sky was empty and the high-speed chases had already disappeared from view. Nevertheless, procedure was procedure. He flipped on his illuminated sights, charged his guns, and fired a quick test burst from the four .50-caliber cannons mounted on his wings.
“Hey, Butch,” Duff radioed, forgoing the call-signs. “I’ve got a little problem over here—”
His wingman’s voice was abruptly cut off by a shouted transmission from the Lexington’s tower.
“Raven Five and Six and all available, we have bogies inbound, repeat, bogies are inbound from the east at—” The remaining words were obscured by a sharp crackle of static, maybe the interference of a stroke of lightning from one of the surrounding storms.
“Lexington, this is Raven Five,” Butch answered. “Say again, say again from ‘inbound.’ Did you say fifty miles out?”
“Raven Five, I said fifteen miles, one-five, large radar contact at your three o’clock low. Check that range, now twelve miles, twelve miles, it looks like a second damned full formation and she’s right on top of us, inbound dead astern at angels niner and descending!”
Twelve miles.
Butch checked his own coordinates as he did the math. Whatever was there was only a couple of minutes from the undefended flank of the task force—and, by his rough calculations, only a few thousand feet directly below his current position.
He pushed the nose down, Duff still on his wing, and soon, as he settled through a thick bank of haze and rainclouds, there they were.
Six—no, eight Japanese twin-engine land attack bombers—“Bettys,” as they were called in the briefings—were lined up on Task Force 11 in a tight formation, clearly on the final leg of an uncontested bombing run.
In the flurry of radio traffic during his descent, one thing became clear as a heart attack: No other fighters were anywhere near close enough to help in time. And while Duff was still with him, that problem he’d mentioned before was a fatal one: His guns were all jammed and he couldn’t fire a shot.
Butch was flying the only armed plane left in the sky—with a mere thirty-four seconds of live ammunition—the last man standing between that squadron of enemy bombers and the thousands of sailors and airmen below.
If this had been the Japanese plan all along, they’d executed it perfectly. They’d taken some losses, but they’d also drawn away every defending aircraft from Task Force 11 and left the door wide open for a devastating strike that could send several ships, including a U.S. carrier, straight to the bottom. Their victory was just ahead, and there was nothing the Americans could do to stop it.
Like hell, Butch thought.
He keyed the mic and looked over to his right. The two planes were close enough that he could see the grim expression on his wingman’s face.
“Duff, you stay clear, now.”
“What the hell are you going to do, Butch?”
“The same thing you’d do, buddy: whatever I can.”
• • •
If Butch had any advantages, they were raw speed and surprise. He rolled hard left and then pitched his Wildcat into a screaming descent, setting his sights on the trailing bomber on the right-hand side of the V formation. He streaked in from the high side and stayed off his guns until the Betty’s starboard engine crept into the cro
sshairs. When he fired, it was with a rifleman’s precision.
Those first few precious bullets tore through the enemy’s cowling and a cloud of black smoke and flames burst forth as a second careful volley pierced the wing tanks. Target number one dropped out of formation, badly disabled and barely under control.
Butch’s dad had taught him to shoot long ago and, so far, he would have been proud. The score was one down and seven to go, but from here on out it would be different. They knew he was there.
Butch jinked and evaded but held his heading as the Japanese tail-gunners swung their own cannons around and began returning fire. He took three quick shots at the next bomber up the line, and then, as Butch leveled off and rocketed through the crumbling formation, another Betty dropped out and spun downward in flames.
He pulled up and rolled out to set up for another run—this next one surely doomed to fail—and caught a brief glimpse of another lone Wildcat weaving its way through the bright tracers of the enemy defenses. It was Duff, dead guns and all, flying like a man possessed, trying his level best to distract their adversaries and draw their fire.
The second pass began just like the first, but things changed fast. As Butch pulled the trigger on the left-rear bomber he felt several heavy impacts thudding through his airframe. The Wildcat absorbed its punishment without a hitch. Meanwhile, Butch’s latest target had taken critical damage. The big plane banked to flee the fight, one engine afire, and dropped his bombs into the empty ocean below as he made a limping turn away.
Butch was amazed when he came around for his third high-side pass and saw only four bombers left in formation. The Lexington was now clearly in sight down below. Fierce anti-aircraft fire began to fill the air ahead. He dove in again, but this time there was nearly as much danger from the flak of the ship’s response as from the guns of the Japanese.
By the count in his head, his guns were running low. He again fired in metered bursts toward the most vulnerable points on the enemy planes. Through the crosshairs he watched one of the engines on the nearest Betty burst into flames, then he shifted toward the head of the V, scoring yet another direct hit on the leader that sent his port-side radial engine exploding out of its nacelle.