A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (19 page)

At the end of November 1941,
Enterprise
left Pearl Harbor to deliver aircraft to Wake Island, accompanied by a task force of three heavy cruisers and six destroyers. Although the war in Europe seemed a long way off, and isolationists in the United States had so far managed to keep America out of the struggle against Hitler, the admiral in charge of this task force, William F. Halsey, was convinced that war was coming to the Pacific, probably sooner rather than later. They were hardly under way when he issued orders warning that the task group was to consider itself “in wartime conditions” and that any unidentified ship or aircraft approaching the force was to be destroyed.

Halsey was more than a little prescient. Before the task force could get back to Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft and midget submarines attacked the air and naval bases there, sinking or disabling nineteen ships (including all eight battleships), destroying 188 aircraft and damaging another 159, and killing more than twenty-four hundred.
Enterprise
had been scheduled to arrive at Pearl Harbor on 6 December, but bad weather slowed the task force, causing her to miss the attack on the morning of the seventh. The feisty Halsey tried to find the Japanese force, but it was probably just as well that his reconnaissance aircraft came up empty—good reputation or not, the Big E would not likely have fared well against the six Japanese carriers that had carried out the surprise attack.

Needing fuel, the U.S. task force entered Pearl Harbor late on the eighth. In the fading light, Kernan peered out from one of Big E's catwalks at the eerie scene. Many fires still burned, and a heavy cloud of smoke blanketed what had been a beautiful tropical paradise the last time he had seen it. Great quantities of heavy black oil covered the surface of the water, and the smell of burned paint and hot steel filled his nostrils as the ship made her way through the channel, now made narrower by the protruding stern of a battleship grounded in the mud on one side. Off the port side Kernan saw the devastation on Ford Island, where the hulks of aircraft smoldered and the roofs of hangars lay collapsed inside shattered walls. In the foreground
were the remnants of Battleship Row, where the carcasses of once formidable ships lay broken, twisted, capsized, and sunk.

There was something so horribly depressing and yet positively prophetic in that scene, as the unscathed aircraft carrier passed by the broken battleships. For the next several years, it would be the aircraft carriers far more than the battleships that would decide the outcome of the raging conflict in the Pacific. While submarines and troop-laden amphibious ships would play major roles as well, and countless destroyers and various other ships would fight ferociously in what would prove to be the greatest sea war in history, it would be the carriers that would strike the most telling blows against the Japanese navy, and it would be
Enterprise
who would become the most famous carrier in the war.

Kernan later recalled that on this second night of the war, he and his shipmates worried that a follow-up attack might catch them helpless here in the confines of Pearl Harbor. So there was a sense of relief when, before dawn, “the lines were cast off, and the
Enterprise
began to edge her way out of the harbor, down the channel, through the nets, and into blue water, picking up speed as she went, the sun rising, the water beginning to hiss alongside, and the smell of burning oil, charred paint, bodies, and defeat left far behind. The planes came aboard and the war had begun.”

There would be many moments of sheer terror and adrenaline-laden excitement in the next few years as
Enterprise
led the way across the Pacific in battle after battle, ever closer to the home islands of Japan and to ultimate victory. But those moments were few in comparison to the many hours of wartime routine that blended days into weeks into months of hard work and tedium. Kernan and his shipmates learned that war is the worst combination of endless work and gnawing fear, a strange brew of boredom and terror that makes life seem terribly difficult, yet frighteningly tenuous and so precious. Alvin Kernan, and legions of other young men like him, suffered this existence, answering the call to arms in their nation's hour of need to ensure the survival of the American way of life.

In the immediate aftermath of the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, there would not be much to cheer about for America and its allies. The Japanese seemed unstoppable as they chalked up victory after victory, spreading the boundaries of their empire farther and farther out until half the Pacific was under their control. For the first few months of the war,
Enterprise
conducted several raids on the Japanese-controlled Gilbert and Marshall Islands. These attacks were more symbolic than tactically or strategically significant.

For Seaman Kernan, every spare hour initially was spent in the ship's interior pounding away with a chipping hammer. At Pearl Harbor the Navy
learned the hard way that paint and linoleum serve as fuels for fire and produce a heavy toxic smoke, so one of the early tasks for
Enterprise
's crew was to strip both from the decks, bulkheads, and overheads. Kernan and others spent countless hours chipping and scraping until the ship's spaces were down to bare metal. The result, according to Kernan, was “depressing, as if the ship had already been burned out.”

His days became cycles of red, white, and blue: the red lights of the berthing compartment during predawn reveilles and late-night taps; the blinding white light of the tropical sun as it beat down on the flight deck during air operations; and the blue of the battle lanterns during general quarters whenever danger—real or suspected—lurked close by.

Then, in early April 1942, things suddenly changed.
Enterprise
left Pearl Harbor on the eighth, but instead of heading southward as before, she and her escort of four destroyers and an oiler turned northwest. Scuttlebutt began to circulate that something important was about to happen, but when word arrived that the Americans holding out for months against the Japanese onslaught at Bataan in the Philippines had at last surrendered, morale plummeted.

For three days Big E and her escorts steamed farther north, the weather turning colder and bleaker as they went, and morale continued to deteriorate. Then, just before 0600 on the twelfth, a lookout reported another aircraft carrier approaching from the east.

Kernan and his squadron mates peered through the gray mist as the other carrier and her escorts—two cruisers, four destroyers, and another oiler—closed on the
Enterprise
group. Beneath leaden skies colors were subdued, but it soon became clear that the aircraft strapped to the approaching carrier's deck were not blue like those on
Enterprise,
but were brown and much larger, with twin engines. Someone identified them as Army Air Corps B-25 bombers. Someone else speculated that the mission must be to deliver them somewhere, perhaps the Aleutian Islands, near Alaska.

But soon it became clear that truth, for once, had outdistanced scuttlebutt. The glare of a signal lamp's beam pierced the gray atmosphere with a brief but powerful message: THIS FORCE IS BOUND FOR TOKYO.

Morale instantly skyrocketed. Shouts reverberated through the steel passageways and men slapped each other heartily on the back as the word spread.
Enterprise
's general announcing system crackled to life with details of the mission. The other carrier was
Hornet,
and the two carrier task groups were headed to a point a mere five hundred miles from Japan where the B-25s would be launched to strike at Tokyo and other targets in the Japanese homeland. The bombers would fly on to land in China. It was a daring plan, not only because it required two of the U.S. Navy's very few
carriers to penetrate deeply into enemy-controlled waters, but also because the Army pilots would have so little deck space from which to launch their bombers. The first B-25 to take off, piloted by the mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, would have only about three hundred feet of “airfield” from which his bomber would either become airborne or drop into the cold waters of the North Pacific.

For the next several days the force steamed westward, covering nearly four hundred miles per day. Then, at 0315 on 18 April 1942,
Enterprise
's surface search radar picked up several contacts ten miles ahead. Admiral Halsey ordered the force to turn north until the contacts faded; then he turned the force westward again. The possibility of detection was increasing with each mile they steamed westward, but each mile also meant an extra gallon of fuel for the Army aviators to fly their dangerous mission. So the force pressed on.

Several hours later, an
Enterprise
reconnaissance plane flew low over Big E and dropped a beanbag onto the flight deck. A yellow-shirted member of the flight deck crew scooped it up and dashed to the bridge. The scribbled message attached to the beanbag reported that the pilot had spotted Japanese patrol craft fifty miles ahead. Worse, the pilot was certain the enemy had spotted him.

Still the Navy task force pressed ahead, buying more miles that the bombers would not have to fly. The tension was palpable as anxious eyes peered into the gray gloom. Soon, masts could be seen among the great gray troughs of the sea ahead. The American task force was about one hundred miles short of the intended launch point, but the risk had become too great. It was time to launch.

The moment of truth had arrived as both
Enterprise
and
Hornet
turned into the wind. Big E's aircraft, along with the cruiser
Nashville,
engaged the Japanese ships while
Hornet
set about the task of launching her unusual payload. Never before had Army bombers been launched on a combat mission from the relatively tiny airfield provided by a Navy carrier.

No one had any illusions about the mission. It was certainly not going to win the war, nor would it have much tactical significance in the grand scheme of things. But at that moment in the war, the American people needed to strike back, to deliver a blow—no matter how small—against this enemy that for the last few months had seemed unstoppable, had chalked up all the victories, had humiliated the United States of America. So every Sailor watching was focused on those olive drab bombers, virtually willing them into the air.

From his perch on
Enterprise
's flight deck, Kernan had a “ringside seat” from which he could watch history being made. He remembered the cold
and windy morning as “near gale-force winds, gray and blue everywhere, with high dark green waves and the real taste and smell of the northern ocean.” But the wind would be an ally as
Hornet
turned into the gale to launch the giant bombers. “So powerful was the wind added to the full speed of the ship—about seventy-five knots combined—that the B-25s needed only to get about thirty-knots' speed to float off the deck like some great kites, only slowly moving ahead of the ship, which seemed to remain almost stationary below them.” Kernan remembered cheering loudly with his shipmates through “patriotic tears” as one after another the entire squadron took to the air.

Later that same day, the men in the coding room were listening to Radio Tokyo's afternoon propaganda broadcast (in English) when, suddenly, excited Japanese voices could be heard in the background and the broadcast went off the air. The U.S. bombers had arrived.

Kernan and the other Big E crew members were justifiably proud of their role in this first strike at the enemy's vitals. Though it would be a long time before U.S. forces could again hit the Japanese homeland, this early attack served its intended purpose. American morale received a badly needed boost and Japanese pride had been seriously injured—so much so that it altered their strategic thinking and caused them subsequently to make some costly decisions.

An Army B-25 bomber takes off from the deck of USS
Hornet
headed for the very heart of the Japanese empire.
Naval Historical Center

Enterprise
remained on the offensive for the rest of the war, taking part in most of the major engagements, often playing a pivotal role. She was one of the three carriers that defeated a vastly superior Japanese force at Midway, literally turning the tide of the war. She fought off Guadalcanal and participated in the occupation of the Gilberts and Marshalls. She struck at the powerful Japanese bastion at Truk and dealt a devastating blow to Japanese naval aviation at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Her aircraft struck at the Bonin Islands, Palau, Nansei Shoto, Formosa, Indochina, Hong Kong, Canton, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. And in February 1945, she once again struck Tokyo, this time with her own aircraft at a range that permitted them to return.