Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

  While at Pearl, the Lex had been shorn of her 8-inch guns, relics of an era when it was thought that an aircraft carrier should be capable of exchanging fire with enemy surface ships. The two heavy mounts had been located fore and aft of the island, and could be fired only to starboard—had they been turned and fired to port, their muzzle blasts would have smashed the flight deck. Even now, at that early stage of the war, it was evident that what every carrier needed more of—what every ship of every class needed more of—was “ack-ack,” or antiaircraft weaponry. The Navy Yard had installed several new batteries of 5-inch/38-caliber dual-purpose guns on the bow and stern. These powerful weapons, when handled skillfully, could knock down a heavy bomber passing over the ship at an altitude of 10,000 feet. More than a hundred shorter-range guns—1.1-inch and 20mm Oerlikons—were mounted on the galleries around the perimeter of the flight deck. They were ineffective at long range, but could be fired rapidly and aimed by a single man strapped into shoulder braces, making them handy for last-ditch defense against incoming aircraft.

  In the Lexington’s combat experience to date, the performance of her gunners had not been at all encouraging, and Captain Frederick C. Sherman ordered an intensive training regimen. The guns were manned every hour of every day and night, in two twelve-hour watches; the gunners stood or sat by their weapons with steel helmets pushed back on their foreheads and kapok life vests drawn tight around their chins. When the carrier’s own airplanes were aloft, the 5-inch gun crews swung their muzzles to follow them in a pantomime of ranging and sighting. The off-duty crews spent an additional hour each day with a “dummy loader” on the machine deck, mastering the steps of manhandling the 60-pound shell into the breech, setting the fuse, pointing the weapon, and mock-firing. The crews learned to work together, to anticipate one another, to function as a creature with one mind and eight sweaty hands; with constant repetition their error rates fell and their rate of fire rose. On the Lex, some of the 5-inch batteries were manned by sailors, others by marines; and as Johnston observed, “the healthy rivalry between the two units in practice shoots sure was something to behold.”

  Most days at sea, the Lexington held live-firing drills. One of the 5-inchers threw up a time-fused target shell, which ejected a magnesium flare attached to a parachute. The other guns opened fire, their incandescent red tracers stretching up toward the target in intersecting lines. The trick was to estimate height properly and to fire quickly, before the target was destroyed by one of the competing batteries. “Inside of two weeks after leaving Pearl Harbor,” Johnston wrote, “these gunners were able to tear the small parachute to shreds, or shoot the flare to bits in a few rounds.” Hitting a fast-moving target proved more difficult. In one of Sherman’s drills, a cruiser scout plane passed over the carrier, towing a brightly colored target sleeve from a 4,000-foot cable. The 5-inchers blasted away on the first pass, at high altitude; then the plane returned at lower altitude to let the Oerlikons have at it. The recurring problem with antiaircraft fire, both in combat and in live-firing exercises, was that the gunners tended to aim too low and did not “lead” the target sufficiently. Their bursts, it seemed, were always low and behind, never high and ahead. On the Lexington, the gun crews took turns skeet-shooting at clay pigeons with shotguns off the carrier’s stern, to inculcate a better instinct for leading their targets. With time and practice, results improved. The ship’s crew watched these drills with curiosity, aware that their collective safety depended on how well the gunners mastered their craft.

  As the Lex approached the equator, her crew prepared for the traditional “crossing the line” rites, which divided the ship’s company into the “shellbacks”—those old salts who had crossed the line before—and the “pollywogs,” who had not. For twenty-four hours, the shellbacks would impose a reign of terror over the pollywogs, initiating them by various hazing rituals into the domain of Neptunus Rex, sovereign ruler of the Raging Main. An academic dissertation will someday be written about that peculiar seafaring custom, with its centuries-old lineage and its overtones of ancient pagan idolatry. “Neptune’s Court” allowed distinctions of rank to be put to one side, and military authority to be briefly subverted—only on a ship at the equator, for example, might one see a navy commander crawling on his hands and knees before an enlisted man. It was a period of high hilarity, when tension was released and the veterans flexed their muscles against the Lexington’s fresh recruits, about 500 of whom had never been to sea. The ship’s combat readiness was never relaxed; the air patrols took off and landed as before, and half the crew always remained at their duty stations. Indeed, several of the leading officers of the ship were actively involved in the ceremonies, including several of the air squadron skippers and even Commander Mort Seligman, the ship’s executive officer, who headed the court that determined each man’s status and passed “sentences.” Not coincidentally, the officers saw to it that the shellbacks were assigned to their posts while newcomers were left idle, and could not therefore plead that duty ought to release them from the looming ordeal.

  The court and jury convened in the mess hall, two decks below the flight deck. A “Grand Inquisitor” interrogated the pollywogs with the help of “scribes” and “kibitzers.” The accused were asked preposterous and insulting questions, and no matter how they answered, they were likely to be held in “contempt of court.” Some pollywogs were defiant, others submissive; all were bullied equally, though leniency could be bought by bribing the court with Coca-Cola, ice cream, or cigarettes. An officer who testified that he had served in naval intelligence was convicted of perjury, on the grounds that no such thing had ever existed. Rookie pilots were required to spend the day in fur-lined winter flight suits with helmets and gloves, scanning the horizon for icebergs using “binoculars” fashioned from a pair of Coke bottles.

  The ceremony closed in the afternoon on the forward end of the flight deck, where King Neptune (usually a long-serving chief petty officer) wore a crown, held a trident, and sat on a throne, flanked by his “queen” and the “royal baby.” Each pollywog was stripped to his underwear and painted (“anointed”) with a concoction blended from egg yolks, banana oil, torpedo grease, and whatever else might have been scrounged in the galley or machine shops. After receiving the sea-king’s benediction, each painted victim was forced to “run the gauntlet” down an 800-foot lane flanked by several hundred shellbacks who smashed him on the buttocks with canvas tubes. Staggering to the end, he was awarded a certificate stating that he had entered King Neptune’s domain, and could call himself a genuine shellback. Johnston, watching the scene from the Lexington’s bridge, looked out at the cruisers and destroyers of the task force and noted that the same ritual was being played out on every other deck.

  The Lexington’s sailors forgot how it felt not to sweat, and found it difficult even to imagine cool weather. Their blue shirts and dungarees were soaked through within minutes of putting them on. They were plagued not only by the debilitating heat and incessant sweat but by the odor of their own bodies—for as one carrier sailor from that period observed, “This was before the popularity of deodorants.” They could shower as often as they liked, but they took saltwater showers with a brief freshwater rinse. Signalman Beaver recorded that the Lexington’s washrooms collected 3 or 4 inches of “soapy oil-and-dirt streaked water that rushed from side to side with the rolling of the ship and sometimes slopped over into the passageways outside.” They shaved with salt water and endured the toll it took on their faces. The salt also aggravated their heat rash, a condition apparently suffered by almost every man aboard. It was worst around the waistline, where sweat-soaked underwear and clothing chafed at the skin, and the raw red welts rose to a height of a quarter of an inch. Belowdecks, powerful fans circulated air through the passageways and berthing compartments, but the wind from the ducts was as hot as a hairdryer. Few men could sleep in that heat; Kernan recalled “endless nervous shifting in the bunks and constant movement back and forth to the heads in the red
glare of the night-lights.” Some sought refuge above, in the bomb nets off the flight deck, with a blanket thrown across the metal mesh for padding. With the breeze generated by the forward progress of the ship, the air was actually pleasant after midnight.

  New orders arrived from Nimitz on April 19. The Lexington and her screening ships were to proceed at “economical speed to point acorn,” about 300 nautical miles northwest of New Caledonia, where they would fall in with Yorktown, Task Force 17, and a force of Allied cruisers and destroyers under Rear Admiral Crace of the Royal Navy (Task Force 44). They continued on their southerly course, their long foaming wakes tailing off toward the northern horizon; they climbed up and over the equatorial bulge, toward the familiar waters of the South Pacific. Everywhere the sea looked the same: a rich deep blue, “the blue of vast deeps.” The mid-Pacific was one of the most remote and inaccessible regions in the world. The Lex might have been cruising on some sweltering ocean-planet, where the occasional low-lying palm-crowned atolls were prizes to be studied through binoculars but never approached. Each day merged into the next, and only the night sky betrayed their progress. Polaris, the North Star, edged closer to the northern horizon each night; Crux, the Southern Cross, rose in the south. The night that Lexington crossed the equator, sailors on deck could see both on opposite horizons.

  It was a region of glorious sunsets, painted on a broad western palette with mauve, lavender, turquoise, and rose—“flaming skies with cloud embers strewn about them,” as Casey remembered them, with “bands of weird luminous green at the horizon.” Southward, toward the southern edge of the doldrums, each passing day seemed faintly cooler, if only (as Casey remarked) “as much as melted lead may be cooler than melted brass.” Soon they picked up the southern trade wind, a fine steady breeze that blew out of the southeast instead of the northeast, as it did north of the line. On April 29, under overcast skies with frequent rain squalls, they passed between New Hebrides and the Solomons and entered the northern Coral Sea, where (wrote Navy Lieutenant James Michener, stationed on the nearby island of Efate) “the waves of this great ocean formed and fled in golden sunlight. There was a fair breeze from Australia, as if that mighty island were restless, and from the Tasman sea gaunt waves, riding clear from the polar ice cap, came north and made the sea choppy.”

  AS THE LIGHT CAME UP on May 1, at latitude 16° 16’ south and longitude 162° 20’ east, the Yorktown was visible in the distance. Admiral Fletcher, a frosty Iowan who had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1906, assumed overall command of both task forces. His first concern was fuel; he wanted every fighting ship’s tanks near full when the main action commenced. But the task force was supported by fleet oilers that had made the long run from Pearl Harbor, and underway fueling was still a slow, painstaking process. The Lex and her escorts, freshly arrived from a long voyage, needed more fuel and thus more time to refuel. By visual signals, Fletcher ordered Task Force 11 south to meet the heavy cruiser Chicago and refuel from the oil tanker Tippecanoe. Yorktown and her charges refueled from another tanker, the Neosho, and then turned north toward the Louisiade Archipelago. All crews were placed on twenty-four-hour alert. Fletcher concealed his presence by maintaining absolute radio silence and by hanging back beyond the outer range of Japanese patrol flights.

  Army air patrols operating from Townsville, Australia, had reported that Japanese units were moving down from the Bismarcks into the eastern Solomons, and those reports were corroborated by fresh intelligence breaks at Hypo, which had revealed that the Japanese intended to take the little tropical island of Tulagi, just off the south coast of Florida Island. Fletcher hoped to catch the invasion force on the beach, when it would be most vulnerable. On May 3, the Tulagi Invasion Force landed unopposed, the Australian garrison having been withdrawn a week earlier. Construction teams got to work on a seaplane ramp right away, and most of the Japanese naval forces that had escorted the invasion convoy withdrew to the north. At 7 p.m. that evening, Fletcher received confirmation, also from Australian-based army air patrols, that the landing had occurred and Japanese ships were anchored off the island. Under cover of darkness, the Yorktown and her escorts dialed up 27 knots and raced north to launch a strike at dawn on the 4th. The Lexington, still fueling and more than 100 miles south, was left behind. Strict radio silence was the order of the day, and Fletcher had not a moment to lose—in that first skirmish of the unfolding battle, Yorktown would go it alone. He sent off the Neosho in company with a destroyer, the Russell, to find Fitch and instruct him to rendezvous at a point 300 miles south of Guadalcanal, the following morning.

  That night, as the Yorktown’s engines raced at near-peak speed, the carrier’s air groups gathered in their ready rooms and studied maps and photographs of the intended target. The entire region was obscure, and the only maps that were available were rough photographic copies with little detail. After taking off from the Yorktown the next morning, they would fly directly over the 70-mile-long island of Guadalcanal (a name that did not yet hold any special significance for them). The long east-west axis of Guadalcanal was a spine of sharp-toothed mountain peaks reaching as high as 6,000 feet. They would conceal the approach of the American carrier planes and improve the likelihood of total surprise. Passing over that hump, the planes would be a mere twelve miles from Tulagi—they would trade altitude for speed, passing across the body of water that had not yet been named Ironbottom Sound, and lay waste to the Japanese ships off Tulagi and in the adjacent Gavutu harbor.

  At first light on May 4, the Yorktown was about 100 miles south of Guadalcanal. A cold front had overtaken them, and the weather had turned nasty, with heavy overcast, winds gusting to 35 knots, and sporadic rain showers. That was fine with the officers and crew: a carrier’s most desirable situation was often to remain concealed in murk, thus protected against counter-air attack, while her planes flew out of the front into clear weather. They were awakened well before dawn by the bugle call—“boots and saddles”—pumped through the loudspeakers. The strike package included twenty-eight dive-bombers and twelve torpedo bombers. Six F4F fighters were first off the deck, at 6:31 a.m.; they would fly CAP over the task force. The first bomber was airborne by 7:01 a.m. Each of the dive-bombers was armed with a big 1,000-pound bomb; the torpedo planes carried Mark 13 torpedoes.

  The bombers ascended quickly toward Guadalcanal, soaring well above the island’s central peaks in the hazy morning light. As the verdant northern slopes fell steeply away, they flew into fine clear weather. The cobalt panorama of Ironbottom Sound unfolded ahead, with Florida and Tulagi islands clearly laid out in front of them, their contours matching up to the maps they had scrutinized. They pushed their noses down and picked up speed. Lieutenant Commander William O. Burch, Jr., leader of Scouting Five, was the first over Gavutu harbor, at a little after 8 a.m. He and his pilots, at altitude 19,000 feet, thought they saw a powerful Japanese fleet spread out beneath them, but their ship-recognition training failed them. They believed they saw a light cruiser, two destroyers, a seaplane tender, five troopships, and sundry gunboats and small craft. What was actually there, as it was later revealed, was a minelayer, two small minesweepers, a small transport, two destroyers, and a few landing barges.

  Most historians of the war have explained such errors as the result of poor visibility or pilot inexperience, but the curmudgeonly Samuel Eliot Morison was not so accommodating. He noted that the aviators’ tendency to overestimate the size and class of enemy ships was endemic, and did not diminish over time: “As usual throughout the war, the pilots overestimated what they saw; all their swans were geese, and all their geese, ducks or goslings.”

  The raid came as a complete surprise to the Japanese, who had no air cover and were virtually defenseless. Their ships threw up some antiaircraft fire, but their unpracticed gunnery was very poor, and no American planes were lost in that first wave. The torpedo planes followed sometime later and attacked without scoring a hit, but were equally untroubled by the flak. Their bombs and torpedoes e
xpended, all of the Yorktown’s planes turned south and flew back to the waiting carrier, which had in the meantime drawn twenty miles closer. They rearmed and refueled so quickly, Lieutenant Commander Burch quipped, that the aircrews did not have time to get a cup of coffee before being ordered back into their cockpits. By 11 a.m. they were back into the air to give Tulagi and Gavutu another working over. So close was the Yorktown—the hop over Guadalcanal required little more than half an hour of flying time—that the carrier managed to launch three separate attacks before the day was done, sending more than sixty planes into battle and losing only three.

  The triumphant aircrews believed (and reported to Admiral Fletcher in rich, convincing detail) that they had wiped out an entire Japanese surface fleet. After interviewing the Yorktown pilots, journalist Stanley Johnston concluded that they had sunk or heavily damaged fourteen of fifteen Japanese ships in the harbor, including three cruisers—and added that “our fliers again demonstrated that combined dive-bombing and torpedo-plane attack is the most certain, destructive and deadly method yet devised for attacking ships.”

  Not until later was it revealed that the claims had been enormously exaggerated. No Japanese cruisers had been in the vicinity, and the raid’s complete tally had been one destroyer, the Kikuzuki, one small transport from which troops had already disembarked, and two patrol boats. The torpedo attacks had been almost embarrassingly unproductive. The dive- and torpedo-bombing attacks had not been well coordinated because the squadrons had not arrived at the target simultaneously. The SBD pilots complained that their bombsights and windshields had fogged over as they dived through 7,000 feet, limiting their visibility and spoiling their drops. (A lower altitude approach provided part of the solution; eventually the sights and shields were redesigned to eliminate the issue altogether.) An immense amount of ordnance and ammunition had been flung at the little Japanese fleet: 22 torpedoes, 76 1,000-pound bombs, and 12,570 rounds of .50-caliber and 7,095 rounds of .30-caliber ammunition. Nimitz later told King: “Considering that there was practically no air opposition and very little antiaircraft fire, the ammunition expenditure required to disable the number of enemy ships involved is disappointing.” The action, he added, had emphasized the “necessity for target practices at every opportunity in order to keep pilots completely trained in all phases of aerial warfare.”