The Conquering Tide (17 page)

With the
Enterprise
tearing through the sea at 27 knots, Davis ordered maximum rudder right, then maximum rudder left, and the ship heeled radically to port and then to starboard. Behind her stretched a long, foaming, serpentine wake. The gunners threw up a wall of 5-inch, 1.1-inch, and 20mm antiaircraft fire. Black, brown, and white bursts blemished the sky. The
South Dakota
, said a witness, was “lit up like a Christmas tree,” emitting so much fire and smoke that the battleship appeared to be herself ablaze. The sea all around was mottled by falling antiaircraft shell fragments, as if under a heavy rainstorm. Several dive-bombers were blown to pieces. Ensign Fred Mears watched the burning remains of one Aichi “flutter down like a butterfly and kiss the water.”
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Several more flew through the 5-inch bursts and emerged with fire or smoke training behind. But it was a huge attack—Davis estimated one plane every seven seconds for four consecutive minutes—and many got through unscathed.

The Aichis released their bombs about 1,000 feet above the ship. Each black cylindrical shape separated from the fuselage and took a steeper trajectory as the pilot pulled out of his dive. Some bombs flew straight and true like a missile; others tumbled end over end. Nine fell close aboard to port and starboard and detonated upon striking the sea, throwing up columns of whitewater that crashed down over the flight deck. Men in the catwalks were thoroughly drenched.

At 5:14 p.m., the
Enterprise
took her first hit. A 1,000-pound, armor-piercing, delayed-action bomb smashed through the flight deck just forward of the aft elevator and continued through four steel decks and two bulkheads before detonating deep in the ship. The blast claimed the lives of thirty-five men in an elevator pump room and the adjacent chief petty officers' quarters. Seventy more were injured. A chain of explosions blew
down all the bulkheads in the area and tore a hole through the starboard side at the waterline.
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The force of the explosion caused the after part of the hangar deck to bulge upward, leaving a two-foot “hump.” The aft No. 3 elevator was jammed and out of action. But the
Enterprise
surged ahead, her speed undiminished.

Three minutes later, after several more near misses, a second 1,000-pound bomb struck the aft starboard 5-inch gun gallery. Thirty-eight men were killed outright. The blast ignited the ready service ammunition casings, and fires raged throughout the area. The
Enterprise
plowed ahead, still making 27 knots, but she trailed a nasty column of oily black smoke. Hoses were put on the fires, wounded men were brought up on deck, and the ship was ventilated to release any flammable gases. Less than two minutes later, a third bomb struck just forward of the No. 2 elevator. The explosion gouged a ten-foot hole in the flight deck and put the No. 2 elevator out of commission. Photographer's Mate Marion Riley, stationed on the island veranda, pressed his shutter button at exactly the moment it detonated. The photograph—expanding spikes of flame and smoke, rushing out from the midline of the
Enterprise
's flight deck—was to become one of the most famous of the war.

At the Battle of Midway, four Japanese carriers had taken similar punishment and been destroyed by secondary explosions and uncontrollable fires. Aboard the
Enterprise
, damage-control measures quickly brought the fires under control, and the ship continued to maneuver deftly and keep pace with the task force. Counterflooding corrected the starboard list. Wood planking was used to patch the holes torn in the flight deck. The rupture in the starboard side was plugged by whatever came first to hand, including mattresses, lumber, wire mesh, and wooden plugs. Most of the
Enterprise
dive-bombers, launched just before the Japanese attack, flew into Henderson Field. Orphaned by the damage to their ship, they would operate as part of the Cactus Air Force for the next several weeks.

Based on the reports of his returned dive-bomber crews, who believed they had destroyed an American fleet carrier, Nagumo celebrated a tactical victory. Losing the little
Ryujo
was not a calamity. She was the smallest flattop in the Combined Fleet, and her sacrifice (as intended) had drawn most of the American carrier planes away from the
Shokaku
and
Zuikaku
. As more was learned about the fate of Tanaka's transport group, however, the picture darkened. His ships had suffered heavily under air attack. Marine
dive-bombers and fighters flying from Guadalcanal had planted a bomb on his flagship, the cruiser
Jintsu
, and sank a transport, the
Kinryu Maru
. Later that afternoon, B-17s operating from Espiritu Santo sank a destroyer, the
Mutsuki
. The Japanese were learning that they could not safely operate ships in the Slot without first suppressing the airpower of Henderson Field. As in the earlier carrier battles at Coral Sea and Midway, the encounter ended with the Japanese forced to abort a planned invasion. On the following day, August 25, Yamamoto cancelled Operation KA and recalled his forces.

S
O CONCLUDED THE
B
ATTLE OF THE
E
ASTERN
S
OLOMONS
, the third carrier duel of the Pacific War. It had been a confused and scattershot encounter, in some respects analogous to the Battle of the Coral Sea three months earlier. Fletcher had been plagued by dreadful radio communications and spotty intelligence. Still, he had won a modest tactical victory by destroying the
Ryujo
while saving the
Enterprise
, and by losing only twenty-five aircraft while claiming seventy-five of the enemy's. In forcing back the Japanese troop convoy, the Americans had also earned a strategic victory. The temporary loss of the
Enterprise
(to major repairs at Pearl Harbor) was counterbalanced by the arrival in SOPAC of the
Hornet
. Most importantly, perhaps, the battle had bought time for Ghormley—time to expand the supporting bases, to bring in air reinforcements, to transfer more cargo ships from North America, and to improve Vandegrift's supply situation.

The
Enterprise
had suffered heavy casualties: two officers and seventy-two men killed, six officers and eighty-nine men wounded. The first bomb had detonated deep in the ship, and the carnage was appalling. Most of the dead had perished quickly, but their bodies had subsequently roasted in the fire, making individual identification impossible. On August 26, as the
Enterprise
and her screening ships headed south toward Noumea, the bodies were collected and prepared for burial at sea. Fred Mears left a visceral impression:

The majority of the bodies were in one piece. They were blackened but not burned or withered, and they looked like iron statues of men, their limbs smooth and whole, their heads rounded with no hair. The faces were undistinguishable, but in almost every case the lips were drawn back in a wizened grin giving the men the expression of rodents.

The postures seemed either strangely normal or frankly grotesque. One gun pointer was still in his seat leaning on his sight with one arm. He looked as though a sculptor had created him. His body was nicely proportioned, the buttocks were rounded, there was no hair anywhere. Other iron men were lying outstretched, face up or down. Two or three lying face up were shielding themselves with their arms bent at the elbows and their hands before their faces. One, who was not burned so badly, had his chest thrown out, his head way back, and his hands clenched.
⁶⁷

Lack of time and manpower on the stricken ship ruled out committing each body individually to the deep. Under the supervision of the ship's chaplain, a single unidentified sailor was buried with the traditional honors. The remains were laid on a pantry board under an American flag. A bugler played “Taps.” The marine guard presented arms. Four sailors lifted the board, and the remains slid into the ship's wake. Some seventy other dead, collected in canvas sacks and weighted with spare metal, were dropped from the fantail without ceremony.

Chapter Four

F
OR A DECADE, FDR'S CRITICS HAD HAMMERED AWAY AT HIS MUDDLED
and sporadically anarchic style of presidential leadership. He reversed major decisions without admitting or even seeming to know what he had done. He hated to fire a man no matter how egregious his performance had been, and blithely piled one new government agency on top of another without spelling out their relative spheres of authority. He seemed to agree with whatever advice-giver had most recently held his ear. Not even his most ardent loyalists would call him a talented administrator. “He was just not a routine executive,” said Robert H. Jackson, who served as Roosevelt's attorney general and was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1941. “He certainly was not accomplished as an administrator and in normal times . . . it is doubtful if he could have been a distinguished president.”
¹
When FDR had not made up his mind about a given policy, Jackson observed, it was impossible to elicit a presidential decision. The president would stall, procrastinate, filibuster, and refuse to act for months on end. At other times, he would render far-reaching decisions “with an apparent nonchalance that sometimes took away the breath of his advisers.”
²
Harold Smith, the White House budget director, admitted that many of Roosevelt's domestic programs were poorly conceived, but defended the president as an instinctual and intuitive visionary, “a real artist in government.”
³

From the school of Jackson Pollock, the critics might have riposted. Or the Marx Brothers. “Bold experimentation” had been a New Deal lodestar, but could a nation at war afford to tinker with unproven methods? If not, would the price of failure be paid in American blood?

To defeat the Great Depression, the president and his men had brewed
up an “alphabet soup” of new federal agencies. To beat back the Axis, they concocted another—OPA, OPM, DPC, WPB, OWI, WRB, SPAB, and too many more to cite here without cluttering the page.
^*
The veteran newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, by no means a partisan critic of the Roosevelt administration, threw up his hands at the inveterate backbiting and turf-skirmishing among the heads of these various outfits. “A great deal of the trouble arises from Mr. Roosevelt's inability to remove even the lamest of his lame ducks,” he wrote in the
Washington Post
:

Since no one has to give up his titles and emoluments, no matter how inadequate he is or how badly he has failed, Mr. Roosevelt at the top of the Government sets an example which destroys the discipline down the line. It is taken for granted that if an official is out of place, his functions may be removed but that he will remain. This makes intrigue, indirection, and slickness a habit in getting things done, good things and bad things alike. If everything has to be done by beating around the bush, men lose the habit of going forward on a straight line.

The amount of nervous energy that is burned up by the able men as they move in and out and around and across the immovable lame ducks, the fossil remains of Mr. Roosevelt's earlier political commitments and previous political mistakes, would, if it were released, electrify the whole conduct of the war.
⁴

Though his party commanded towering majorities in both the House and the Senate, its prospects in the 1942 midterm elections were dismal. The Democrats' once-unassailable New Deal coalition—the urban-union-liberal-ethnic-Catholic vote in the North and upper Midwest combined with the dependably solid South—had been fractured and diluted by the war's disruptions. Millions of servicemen and war workers had been uprooted from their homes and hereditary polling precincts. Voter turnout was expected to hit record lows, and the remaining electorate skewed toward older, rural, and affluent voters who leaned toward the Republicans.

By the early summer of that year, the post—Pearl Harbor mood of bipartisan unity had taken an ugly turn, and the customary thrust and parry of political combat had returned with undiminished vehemence. All recited the shopworn mottoes of patriotic unity, but criticism of the administration grew freer and more vigorous, both in the anti-Roosevelt press and on the floors of Congress, and Republicans angrily spurned any suggestion that politics be suspended for the war's duration. What were the Allies fighting for, if not the right of democratic opposition? In April 1942, the Republican National Committee had pledged to work for a “complete victory” over the Axis powers, but added “solemn protestations” that the GOP would “preserve the constitutional form of government . . . and the two-party system.” When the president proposed that the party organizations be reconstituted as civil defense associations, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio barked to reporters, “I'll be goddamned if I'll bow to Roosevelt and stand on the street corner as an air raid warden with a tin hat, flashlight and a bucket of sand.”
⁵

The newspaper tycoons whose broadsheets had fought the New Deal and carried the torch of prewar isolationism—most prominently Robert McCormick, Cissy Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst—now purported to support the war, but they assailed the president for waging it ineptly. Roosevelt's enemies in Congress, among them the leading isolationists of 1940 and 1941, now agitated for a concentration of resources against Japan rather than Germany, and complained bitterly about American combat losses. More out of habit than real conviction, perhaps, they seemed determined to undermine the administration by any means at hand. Many observant pundits doubted that their hearts were really in the war. Marquis Childs, a Washington correspondent for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, was unsparing: “No matter what they said for the record on December 8, the blindest and the stubbornest would continue to believe that Pearl Harbor was no more than [what] America deserved for not having remained pure and isolated as such wise men had counseled.”
⁶