They advanced on a zigzagging track as a measure against enemy submarines, but that required mass-choreographed maneuvers that could easily go awry. When one of the cruisers missed a turn and dropped out of position, her captain received a sarcastic message by blinker light from Admiral Halsey: “May I suggest that if at all convenient you get where you belong?” Shortly afterward, he received another: “Have you any officer aboard able to judge distance accurately within 6,000 yards?”
On January 28, the task force refueled from the tanker Platte. The cruisers and destroyers completed their refueling during the day, but the Enterprise could not maneuver alongside the tanker until 8 p.m., as night was falling fast. Refueling at sea had been the bane of early carrier operations, and Halsey was determined that the Enterprise would get it right. Refueling was difficult even in daylight, especially in heavy seas, when there was a constant danger of collision. This was the first time a carrier would refuel at night. It was a supreme test of seamanship for both ships. No light could be shown on either vessel, so the work had to be done in the dark.
Carrier and tanker approached one another on near-parallel courses and closed to within about 70 feet. Each remained underway at a precisely identical speed of 10 knots. Steering and throttle control had to be maintained with perfect conformity to the captain’s orders. Heaving lines were thrown across, caught, and made fast. The crew had to work quickly and in perfect unison. Men handling the hoses were in constant danger of falling into the sea between the two vessels; destroyers stood astern to rescue them. Lines or hoses had to be dropped immediately upon the orders of the boatswain’s mates, and others stood by with axes, ready to cut them away and get free of the tanker on a moment’s notice, if that should be necessary. For obvious reasons it was very important not to be caught at sea, refueling, with large quantities of combustible fuel on deck, if an enemy bomber should appear overhead. The Enterprise completed the difficult operation at 1:30 a.m. The operation seemed to take forever, and Casey expressed frustration with the long delay. “Somebody observed last night that it takes just about as long to get into battle now as it did in 1812,” he wrote ruefully.
Coded radio messages from Pearl Harbor were plucked out of the air. Nimitz, fortified with new radio intelligence, urged Halsey to hit the Marshalls quickly. On January 27, the C-in-C sent new orders to Halsey, authorizing the latter to expand and extend his strikes on the islands. Nimitz ordered that the raids be “driven home,” with several airstrikes on the prime targets, and return strikes if necessary. Halsey’s chief of staff, Miles Browning, argued for a new plan of attack that would up the ante, to take the entire carrier group farther west into the heart of the islands and hit Kwajalein, the largest base in the Marshalls. It was risky: the American ships would be well within range of counterattacks by air. By approving the plan, Halsey was gambling that the initial wave of American bombers achieved total surprise over the enemy airfields. Halsey gave his go-ahead and remarked, “It was one of those plans which are called ‘brilliant’ if they succeed and ‘foolhardy’ if they fail.” The Enterprise pilots were thrilled. “Instead of just a hit and run raid we were going to make an all-day long attack,” wrote one. “Admiral Halsey had decided to put the carrier within twenty or thirty miles of two big Jap air bases. So, close in, the attack would be launched and we would get to work with plenty of gas. This suited us fine.”
On January 31, west of the date line, the Enterprise radar picked up a blip. It was a Japanese patrol plane, which apparently flew no more than thirty-four miles west (astern) of the American ships, but it did not make contact and sent no radio message. Halsey watched the blip move across the screen. He was deeply concerned that the enemy airmen would notice the trail of the task force’s wakes, even if they did not see the ships themselves. But no radio report was detected on the Japanese frequencies. The blip crept across the radar screen and trailed off to the south. As the range grew, it become evident that the task force had been lucky. Marine Captain Bankson T. Holcomb, Jr., a Japanese-language officer detached from Pearl Harbor’s codebreaking unit, picked up a transmission by a Japanese patrol pilot (probably the same one that had been picked up by the carrier’s radar). The aircraft had reached the end of its patrol route and the pilot had “nothing to report.”
Halsey remarked, “That yellow belly is just thinking about his fish and rice.” He had Holcomb prepare a leaflet in Japanese to be dropped on the islands the next day: “It is a pleasure to thank you for having your patrol plane not sight my force.”
At 6:30 p.m. on the 31st, the task force parted ways—Spruance’s cruiser force to bombard Wotje and Taroa to the south, the Enterprise and three destroyers to take a position to the north to launch strikes against Kwajalein atoll as well as Wotje and Taroa. A radio message came in from Nimitz: “It is essential that the attacks be driven home. Exploit this situation by expanding operations, utilizing both task forces in such repeated air attacks and ship bombardments as developments and logistics make feasible. If practicable, extend offensive action beyond one day.”
The final night’s run-in to battle was done at a breakneck speed of 30 knots. The engines roared and the hull throbbed. The Enterprise’s four huge propellers bit into the sea, turning 275 times a minute. There were pre-combat fears and jitters throughout the fleet. Sleeping was nearly impossible—the heat was intense belowdecks, and they all sweated through their sheets, and tossed and turned fitfully until before dawn. The captain of the Salt Lake City called the officers to the wardroom and went over the next day’s chronology, starting with reveille at 3:45 a.m., breakfast at 4:15, General Quarters at 5:15, and combat at 6:15 to coincide with the dawn. On the subject of combat, the captain and his officers were sober and determined, paying great attention to detail—“the disposition of the ships, the nature of targets, the rate of fire, the spotting process, the frequency to be used by spotting planes in reports, food, water, access to latrines, powder lot, ventilation, bombs, depth charges, airplane fuel.” Robert Casey was impressed by their poise, especially since not a man on the ship had any combat experience. “The captain was cheerful and businesslike,” he wrote; “the officers grave and interested but no more excited than they might have been over a prospective target competition.”
The Enterprise pilots were game, but they were also acutely aware that they knew little or nothing about the islands they were to bomb. They were Japan’s “mystery islands,” and the American fleet did not even possess accurate maps for them. They were relying upon crudely enlarged photostatic prints of old charts, many dating back to Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s “U.S. Exploring Expedition” (“Ex-Ex”) survey cruise of 1838–42. It was with a distinct sense of foreboding that they prepared for their mission.
Balanced against that unease, that gnawing fear, was their thirst for vengeance. The pilots wanted to hit back for Pearl Harbor and Wake Island; Casey observed that they “seem to feel as if they are personally responsible for the vindication of their service.” They passed the hours talking about flying and fighting, about the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Japanese planes, filing those morsels of potentially useful knowledge away in their minds so that they would be there when the moment of combat arrived. They had underestimated the Japanese pilots before December 7; but now, scarcely six weeks later, that was all part of the past. The prewar era seemed long ago. Hard as it was for the proud officers and men of the navy, recalled Alvin Kernan, they were now coming around to understand that “theirs was a better navy than ours: better aircraft, better trained personnel, better night training, better torpedoes by far.” It was a bitter pill to swallow, but it was also strangely invigorating, because it left every man in the fleet with the bracing realization that he would have to do his part to lift the navy’s game.
It was only on the eve of the battle that the pilots and crew of the Enterprise were informed that the attack on Kwajalein would not include fighters. At that early stage of the war there were simply not enough fighters on the carr
iers to fly combat air patrol (CAP) and provide escort for the bombers. When the bomber pilots got the word, they were appalled. “No fighters!” wrote bomber pilot Clarence Dickinson. “On a raid you want fighter escort. Whether they do much good or not, it is a psychological factor of tremendous importance to know they are with you. You fly towards your objective a lot more eagerly if you know you have fighter protection. After all, the thing of first importance is to drop the bombs, not dogfight with Zeros.” That night, the deck and hatches were lit up by small blue lights that threw just enough light to guide the footsteps of men whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness. It was in this moment, with danger imminent, that the men felt most deeply bonded to the ship. “However ghostly it seems, you sense solidity through the soles of your shoes and know yourself to be a part of something big and strong;” wrote Dickinson; “a thousand other men and more, great guns, a powder magazine, an electric power plant that could run a city, a machine shop, beds and kitchens; all of this is compactly organized inside a vast steel hull, your planet.”
This was Halsey’s moment. The first weeks of the war, beginning with the fruitless searches for Nagumo’s Kido Butai (carrier striking force) in the first forty-eight hours of the war, had been profoundly frustrating for him. He could not sleep. He chain-smoked, drank coffee, and read paperback novels. He lay awake in his bunk. Intermittently, he arose and returned to flag plot. Out on the flag bridge, at two-twenty in the morning, he felt sand blowing in his face. That could indicate the proximity of islands, so he called for an immediate position check. The waters were poorly charted and there was a real danger of running aground. It turned out the admiral had felt not sand but sugar dropped from the radar platform, where a sailor was pouring it into his coffee. Halsey retreated to his cabin. There was little he could do. The die was cast. By the end of the day they might be celebrating the first significant victory of the war, or the Enterprise might be resting on the ocean floor. Below, on the hangar deck, the ordnance gangs were loading bombs onto the wings and bellies of the attack planes. Their labor was edgy and intricate. The weapons were hoisted gingerly from the magazines below, pushed across the deck in carts, and locked into the bomb rack at the underside of the planes. The fuses were inserted into the bombs and wired into the arming socket. No mistakes were tolerated. All had to be checked and checked again.
Reveille came at 3 a.m., long before the first glow rose above the horizon astern. The pilots made their way to the big wardroom for breakfast. They sat at long tables, shoulder to shoulder in identical khaki uniforms, eating a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, and canned juice. Most were between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four. Dickinson observed their different temperaments: “Many were silent, gone deep inside themselves; a few were chattering with excitement yet saying very little about what was ahead of us. I heard scarcely any reference to what actually occupied our minds. These young aviators behaved as if it would be indelicate to speak of what we had to do.” Afterward they gravitated to the ready rooms, divided by squadron. There they listened to briefings and spoke freely among themselves. Most had slept little, if at all; they were running on adrenaline and coffee. But their minds were focused, and they paid great attention to detail. A yeoman in each ready room listened to reports over a telephone and then relayed them to the group. The aviators tinkered with their navigation plots, correcting for the carrier’s position, course, and speed, and adding further tweaks for the direction and force of the wind. Not all of them would be coming back, and they knew it. “Each man was challenging his own soul to tell him how he would measure up in battle,” Dickinson wrote. “No man ever lived who got the answer in advance.”
At the moment of truth the yeoman passed on the order that had come down from above: “Pilots, man your planes!” They walked out onto the flight deck, flight goggles pushed up on their foreheads, belts and shoulder straps festooned with gear, parachutes bumping against their rumps. It was a mild night. A radiant trail pointed across the sea to the west, where a full moon hung over the horizon. Deck crews guided each pilot through a maze of planes parked near the stern to his waiting aircraft, and stood by as he climbed onto the wing and slid down into the cockpit, buckled into his shoulder straps, and found the pedals with his feet. From the loudspeaker on deck came the order: “Start engines!”
The cartridge fired; the engine coughed, sputtered, and roared to life; the exhaust belched blue smoke that was quickly caught by the wind and carried away astern; the propeller spun, stopped, and spun again, then quickly dissolved into a blurred disk. The plane captain listened with cocked head to the engine, and when satisfied gave a signal; the pilot shoved his throttle all the way forward, with feet mashed down on the brakes. When given the all-clear (at 4:43 a.m.), the first pilot released his brakes and felt his aircraft lurch forward and clatter down the teak-planked deck. Accelerating into the teeth of the headwind, he balanced the rudder pedals to stay centered in his takeoff lane, demarcated by two parallel rows of hooded yellow lights. The moonlit shape of the carrier’s island superstructure flashed by on his right. At the last moment before plummeting into the rapidly onrushing sea, his nose tilted up and his wheels lifted free of the deck. He was airborne.
First into the air were six F4F Wildcats to fly combat air patrol. They were followed immediately by the planes forming two airstrikes headed for the giant atoll of Kwajalein, the furthest target at some 155 miles away to the west. Thirty-seven Dauntless SBD dive-bombers would hit Roi, the island air base at the northern end of the atoll, while nine Devastator TBD torpedo bombers would go after ships anchored in the lagoon near Kwajalein, at the southern end. Once in the air, the SBDs and TBDs flew a circular rendezvous pattern, trying to join up in an orderly formation for their outbound flights. Getting the planes into the air was no great problem (heavily laden though they were with bombs and fuel), but the night rendezvous was unfamiliar and dangerous. The planes lifted into the sky at the rate of one every fifteen seconds. Each pilot was to follow the plane ahead of him by keeping his eyes fixed on a white taillight that was easily lost in the stars. If his eyes were good and he was lucky, he might also make out the two faint blue exhaust flames on either side of the fuselage. At the same time he had to maintain steady speed to allow the pilot behind him to follow.
At altitude, the entire group circled and groped for their assigned places in the formation; the SBDs and TBDs ran afoul of one another and were lucky to avoid collisions. The two Kwajalein-bound strikes managed to form up and fly toward their targets without losses. But an hour later, when a group of Wildcats armed with 100-pound bombs took off for the closer targets at Maloelap atoll, one plane spun into the sea and the pilot went down with it.
The Kwajalein Attack Group climbed into the west, the full moon hanging over their engine cowlings, nearly centered in their windshields. Leveling out at 14,000 feet, the airplanes flew in formation—V’s interlocked with V’s, stepped down slightly in altitude—and the moon threw so much light that the pilots and aircrews could make eye contact and exchange hand signals. Spread out beneath them was a downy blanket of cumulus clouds; through intermittent gaps they spied moonlit sea and occasional stretches of surf-lined beaches. They were well into the heart of the Marshalls now, and islands were plentiful. The flight leaders studied those shorelines and tried to match them up to the crude nineteenth-century charts they held on their laps. Guesswork and dead reckoning put them over the northern part of the atoll fifteen minutes early, just as dawn was breaking—but morning mists obscured the island of Roi, and at first the SBD flyers could not pick out their assigned targets. They circled, craning their necks as they peered below and looked for anything resembling a coral airstrip, and the drone of their engines alerted the Japanese defenders, who rushed to man the antiaircraft batteries and scramble the fighters. There would be no surprise.
When at last the airfield and hangars of Roi came into focus, Lieutenant Commander Halstead L. Hopping of Scouting Six pushed his nose down and began his a
pproach. The others of his First Division followed close behind. They had intended a glide-bombing attack, with an attack angle of just 45 degrees, because such an attack would leave them with some altitude when they arrived over the target, so they could push their noses down and pick up speed to fly through hostile antiaircraft fire. Hopping apparently gave up too much altitude before arriving over the field, and therefore came in low and slow, his airspeed probably less than 200 knots. He dropped his 500-pound bomb, the first American bomb of the war to be dropped on Japanese territory, but a Nakajima Type 97 fighter locked in on his tail and hit him with tracer fire; simultaneously, his plane was struck by a very close burst of antiaircraft flak. His plane blew apart and spun into the lagoon. Three more First Division SBDs were lost to flak or fighters, but they also scored several well-aimed hits on the ground. Several buildings were destroyed, and two or three Japanese fighters were shot down.
The planes of the Second Division saw the bombs fall and explode among the hangars and along the airstrip. They came in with considerably more speed than Hopping’s division, about 300 knots—and although the Japanese gunners were now fully awake and waiting for them, they were able to fly right through the flak, rocking back and forth as the black bursts appeared on either side. Looking down, they saw Japanese fighters racing down the airstrip and leaving the ground. Lieutenant Dickinson dived low over the field and dropped two 100-pound bombs on a complex of buildings adjacent to the airstrip. A bomb dropped by his wingman, Lieutenant Norman West, hit an ammunition dump and touched off a secondary explosion that flattened every building in the vicinity. A tremendous, churning fireball rose thousands of feet into the sky. Dickinson kicked his rudder to yaw his aircraft, and peered back to observe the results. He called it “one of the most glorious fireworks shows I had ever seen. . . . All over the island there was an extravagant flowering of flame. Great white and pinkish streaked fire shapes bloomed profusely, each for just an instant. But these became unimportant as the bombs went off, in big bluish flashes two and two and two each time another plane glided in.”