The Conquering Tide (66 page)

Hedding's orders were to observe and report, not to attack—but Crommelin elected to fly low over the Japanese airfield on the pretense of taking a closer look. He strafed a G4M as it taxied toward the runway, and set it afire. He banked and came around for another strafing run. Before he reached the edge of the field, Crommelin's cockpit was hit directly by a 20mm antiaircraft shell. The blast destroyed most of his instruments and shattered his Plexiglas canopy. Crommelin suffered severe shrapnel wounds in his face, neck, chest, and right arm. He lost all vision in his left eye and could barely see through his right. The windshield was intact, but a spider-web pattern of cracks obscured visibility. Crommelin, barely able to see through the blood, managed to open his canopy so that he could look out of the right side of the cockpit. He leveled off at 300 feet. A wingman flew alongside and escorted the skipper 120 miles back to the
Yorktown
. The chances of a successful recovery seemed dubious, but Crommelin made a perfect approach, snagged an arresting cable, and then taxied forward to the parking area and shut his engine down. While trying to hoist himself out of the cockpit, he collapsed. Jocko Clark's action report noted, “He was lifted from the cockpit in a semiconscious condition, suffering from severe shock and loss of blood.”
⁹¹
Crommelin was carried down to sickbay on a stretcher. His left eye was saved. After a lengthy recuperation in the United States, he was reassigned and flew again.

Aerial torpedo attacks continued almost every night, depriving the
crews of rest. On the
Yorktown
, Clark told the officers on duty to awaken him each time a strange plane appeared on radar. Depending on its location, course, and speed, Clark would decide whether to arise and return to the bridge in pajamas to take the conn.

During these frequent night attacks on Task Force 50, the Combat Information Centers on the various carriers were scenes of intense activity and nervous tension. Green blips moved across the radar screens, sometimes turning and approaching the center of the screen. A plane making a torpedo run would approach at high speed and then bank sharply away. At that moment the operators could assume that a torpedo was in the water. “Those minutes seemed like years, when you are sitting there waiting to see whether you're going to get hit,” recalled Fitzhugh Lee, an officer on the
Lexington
. “CIC was not a happy place to be.” Most of the young radar operators did their jobs with icy skill. Now and again a man would break down under the strain. “We had a few who lost control of themselves and started weeping, crying, praying, and things like that.”
⁹²
Whenever it happened, Lee relieved the man at once, lest his hysteria spread and cause a general contagion.

Despite having suffered two consecutive days of heavy air losses, the Japanese doggedly hurled their remaining land-based bombers against Task Force 50. November 23 was another long day of furious air combat. The
Lexington
's fighters (VF-16), flying combat air patrol, intercepted an inbound airstrike and shot down seventeen of the nineteen intruders. The next day, the same squadron claimed another dozen enemy planes. Lieutenant (jg) Ralph Hanks, an Iowa pig farmer before the war, became an “ace in a day” by shooting down five Zeros in a single skirmish. In a fifteen-minute air engagement, his throttle never left the firewall and his Hellcat surpassed 400 knots in a diving attack. Hanks had to stand on his rudder pedals and use his entire upper-body strength to keep his stick under control. Intense g-forces caused him to black out several times. This first massed encounter of Zeros and Hellcats did not bode well for the future of the now-obsolete Japanese fighter plane.

The instinctive rivalry between the
Yorktown
and
Lexington
air groups was stoked by the former's perception that the
Lexington
's fighters were always lucky to be aloft when the enemy appeared. VF-5, gloated the pilots of VF-16, had been “skunked.” Captain Clark, competitive as he was, sent a genial signal to the
Lexington
's skipper, Felix Stump: “Well, you've beat us out so far. I hope we have better luck next time.”
⁹³

Late-afternoon sorties often required night recoveries, and in these situations returning airmen tended to look for any friendly flight deck. Cases of mistaken identity were endemic among the
Essex
-class carrier air groups because the ships were built on identical lines and were difficult to tell apart even in daylight.
Yorktown
planes landed on the
Lexington
on the evenings of November 22 and 23, and in each case the pilots were not aware of the mismatch until they climbed out of their cockpits.

Heavy thunderheads moved into the area late that afternoon, and Pownall ordered all planes aloft to recover and secure. Five FM-1 Wildcat fighters from the
Liscome Bay
(which would be destroyed the following morning) lost their way in the squall and could not pick up their ship's YE homing beacon. They flew west and radioed the
Yorktown
to ask permission to land aboard and return to their carrier the next day. Clark, after consulting with Pownall, assented.

The planes entered the landing circle as the last light drained out of the western sky. The first three FM-1s landed without mishap. The pilot of the fourth forgot to lower his tailhook and was given a wave-off by the landing signal officer. The pilot ignored or did not see the wave-off, came down hard, bounced, gunned his throttle in an apparent bid to get airborne and come around for another try, then came down again and somersaulted over the crash barrier. Several parked planes were destroyed, and four plane pushers were killed immediately. The crashed plane burst into fire, and the flames quickly spread to engulf most of the flight deck amidships. Within twenty seconds the crew had foam hoses on the fire, but the parked planes had been gassed up and armed for morning launch, and their tanks and ammunition went up in a chain of explosions. Magnesium flares ignited and lit up the ship and the sea all around her with an intense yellow light. The wing gun magazines of the parked F6Fs began firing their .50-caliber rounds, forcing the fire brigade to duck and take cover.
⁹⁴

Clark kept the ship headed into the wind to prevent the fire from spreading to as-yet-undamaged planes parked farther forward. “The intense heat was almost unbearable on the island superstructure,” he later wrote. “If the island caught fire, navigation and ship control would be nearly impossible.”
⁹⁵
Clark shouted over the noise to direct the firefighting efforts. “I remember Captain Clark leaning over the navigation bridge, directing the firefighters doing a remarkable job to save the ship,” Truman Hedding later recalled.
⁹⁶
Men in asbestos suits dragged hoses directly into the heart
of the conflagration and spread a 3-inch layer of Foamite throughout the stricken area. Tractors towed burning planes to the edge of the flight deck, where they were shoved overboard. The fire burned for half an hour before it was entirely extinguished at 7:05 p.m. Remarkably, the
Yorktown
had suffered no serious damage and resumed normal flight operations the next morning.
⁹⁷
Several firefighters received commendations for their courage and initiative.

Task Force 50 had done plenty of damage to Japanese airpower in the eastern Marshalls, but the aviators agreed that more could have been accomplished. The brownshoes shared a growing conviction that the carriers were not being properly deployed. With newer and better airplanes and ships, the carrier forces could and should accept more risks. Hedding, years later, offered tactfully measured criticism: “I think there was a tendency to be rather conservative and a little careful of what might happen. We didn't want to have our ships damaged.”
⁹⁸
Clark was blunter: “The fallacy of confining carriers to defense sectors had cost us one carrier sunk, another put out of action, and many lives lost.”
⁹⁹
The blackshoe admirals at the top of the command chain, in Clark's view, had been slow to understand the capabilities of the new fast carrier forces, and the only remedy was to promote aviators into senior policy-making jobs in Washington and Pearl Harbor.

On November 26, with Tarawa firmly in American hands and most of the Fifth Fleet bound for Pearl Harbor, Nimitz released the carriers from their defensive positions and recommended that they raid Kwajalein (where about sixty torpedo planes were thought to be) and other enemy bases in the northern Marshalls. Four heavy cruisers joined up with Pownall's force, and new planes flew over from the departing escort carriers and landed aboard to replace losses. Rear Admiral J. L. “Reggie” Kauffman was sent aboard the
Yorktown
as an observer; his assignment was to watch Pownall and report to Nimitz on his performance.

Shortly after sunset that evening, another round of air attacks fell on the northbound task force. Two G4Ms approached to within a mile of the
Yorktown
and dropped flares onto the sea, apparently as a guidepost for other attackers. Pownall again slowed the task group to reduce the visibility of its wakes. The main attack instead fell on the
Enterprise
and her consorts (Task Group 50.2), some twenty miles west.

The
Enterprise
Air Group commander was Butch O'Hare, the famed fighter pilot who had become the navy's first flying ace in February 1942
by destroying five Japanese planes in a single flight. The deed had earned him the Medal of Honor. O'Hare and colleagues had improvised a night fighting “Bat Team” consisting of two Hellcats and a single TBF Avenger equipped with an airborne radar system. Their tactic was to send the three planes out on a vector provided by the fighter director officer (FDO). The Avenger would follow its radar bearings to the intruders. The fighter pilots would fly wing on the larger plane, peering through the darkness in hopes of glimpsing the enemy's exhaust flames. If the fighters made visual contact, they would break off and attack.

As a solution to the threat of night attacks, the Bat Team concept was makeshift and provisional. Better tactics would have to await improved technology and much more training. In November 1943, however, it was the only solution at hand.

When radar screens in the
Enterprise
's Combat Information Center discovered inbound bogeys, just before 6:00 p.m. on November 26, the carrier launched two Hellcats (one piloted by O'Hare, the other by Ensign Andy Skon) and sent them on a heading to intercept. The radar-equipped TBF Avenger, launched a few minutes later, would follow and rendezvous with the two fighters, or so it was hoped, nearer to the approaching enemy formation. This was to be the first combat trial of Bat Team tactics. The TBF was piloted by Lieutenant Commander John C. Phillips, skipper of the carrier's torpedo bombing squadron (VT-6). The bomber also carried a radar specialist, Lieutenant Hazen Rand, and a third man, ordnanceman and gunner Alvin B. Kernan, who would describe the flight in his postwar memoir,
Crossing the Line
.

The venture was anarchic from start to finish. The
Enterprise
's FDO did his level best not only to guide the three planes toward a rendezvous, but also to give new bearings directing them toward the targets that showed up intermittently on the ship's radar. About an hour after O'Hare left the ship, the FDO radioed to say that he appeared to be directly among “many bogeys,” but neither O'Hare nor Skon could see anything at all. The
Enterprise
radar also showed Phillips within a mile of the two Hellcats, but neither the fighter pilots nor the crew of the Avenger could see any sign of the other. They and the Japanese were all adrift in a deadly game of blind man's buff.

Kernan, peering out of the TBF's gun turret, lost all sense of the horizon. “You stare out into the dark night, and after a time you don't know up from down. The first few turns are okay, but then disorientation begins. A flicker
of light could be a star in the sky or a ship on the ocean or another plane coming at you on a fast angle.”
¹⁰⁰
Occasionally he saw a flare burning in the distance, presumably dropped by enemy planes, or a burst of antiaircraft fire from one of the American ships. The FDO continued to relay headings to Phillips, and Rand obtained intermittent returns on his radar scope. A few minutes after 7:00 p.m., Rand reported a large cluster of six blips about three miles ahead. Phillips gave chase and Rand called out the diminishing range—three miles, two miles, one mile, a thousand yards. At 400 yards, Phillips saw the telltale blue exhaust flames, and radioed, “I have them in sight. Attacking.”
¹⁰¹

Phillips's decision to attack was not in line with Bat Team doctrine. The TBF did not possess either the maneuverability or the firepower to take on a large formation of heavily armed bombers. But Phillips did enjoy the advantage of complete surprise—the Japanese had never been challenged by carrier planes at night, and had no reason to anticipate such an attack. As the TBF overtook the formation, Phillips could make out the long cigar-shaped outline of the darkened planes. He opened fire on the rightmost G4M with his two fixed .50-caliber machine guns and apparently struck the gas tanks at the vulnerable wing root, because the plane immediately caught fire. Phillips pulled up and left, mindful that the other planes would return fire promptly; as Kernan's turret gun came to bear, he opened fire in turn, aiming at the flames. “He blew up all at once,” wrote Kernan. “A long trail of fire went down and down into the blackness of the ocean below, where it kept on burning, a red smear on the black water.”
¹⁰²
The Japanese, surprised and flustered, apparently began exchanging fire among themselves. Their tracer lines struck out at one another, but they did not come near the Avenger as it pulled away to safety.

O'Hare and Skon saw the G4M go down and turned toward the melee. This brought them within visual range of the TBF and the remaining enemy bombers. O'Hare, wary of firing on the wrong aircraft, asked Phillips to turn on his recognition light. Phillips flashed it, briefly. The Japanese planes apparently saw the light and opened fire, striking the Avenger's underbelly and wounding Rand; at the same time, Phillips fired back. Again, he scored; and again, Kernan poured more fire into the burning wing. The G4M went down in a long controlled dive, apparently attempting a water landing. It left an extended trail of burning fuel on the ocean.