The Conquering Tide (67 page)

In the melee the Hellcats and the TBF again lost contact, but they were
coached into a rendezvous by the
Enterprise
FDO. All three planes turned on their recognition lights long enough to slide into formation, the two fighters above and behind either wing of the Avenger. For the first and last time that night, the three American planes were flying in formation as planned. Kernan caught a glimpse of Butch O'Hare's face, lit up by his canopy light. His canopy was open and his goggles pushed back on his head.

About a minute after the three American aircraft had lit themselves up, a fourth aircraft closed in from behind on the starboard side. It was a wayward Mitsubishi that had become separated from its formation and had mistaken the American planes for friends. Realizing his mistake, he opened fire and struck O'Hare's plane. Kernan fired back and may or may not have hit the enemy plane, which veered sharply away to port.

O'Hare's plane was gone, and he did not respond to radio hails. “Something whitish-gray appeared in the distance,” wrote Kernan, “his parachute or the splash of the plane going in.”
¹⁰³
Skon rejoined with difficulty, and the two American planes circled the area at low altitude. There was no sign of O'Hare. At about 9:00 they headed back toward the
Enterprise
, tracking the ship by following its long fluorescent wake. The carrier turned on the hooded flight deck lights that could be seen only from aft and above. Remarkably, both Phillips and Skon recovered safely, without damage to their planes. Dawn searches by carrier planes, a PBY seaplane, and a destroyer turned up no sign of O'Hare or his aircraft.

O'Hare's loss was headline news in the United States. He was one of the most famous flyers in the American armed forces, a singular hero to Irish Americans, and one of the most respected and best-liked men in the carrier navy. A Solemn Pontifical Mass of Requiem was held at the Basilica of Saint Louis in Missouri. O'Hare received a posthumous Navy Cross and gave his name to the busiest commercial airport in the world.

Sorrow tended to obscure the fact that this first attempt to use carrier fighters against a nighttime air attack had been a success. The Americans had shot down two and possibly three twin-engine medium bombers at the cost of one fighter. Phillips was credited with destroying two G4Ms, and it is likely that Kernan shot down a third. (No one saw what happened to the Betty that shot down O'Hare, but the Japanese recorded three planes lost.) No American ship had been struck by a torpedo.

Two task groups, 50.1 and 50.2, now churned north through squalls and scud to attack the source of the persistent night attackers—the enemy's
huge airfields on the atoll of Kwajalein. Jocko Clark met with Truman Hedding and the
Yorktown
squadron leaders to devise new procedures for defense against night attacks, and promised his fighter pilots that if they were unable to land on the ship at night he would pick them up at sea. Two new Bat Teams drilled for hours in daylight.

Launching and recovering the three-plane sections tended to derange the task force's cruising formation, and getting the ship back into its assigned position at the center of the screen gave Clark (and Pownall) plenty of heartburn. Clark reluctantly concluded that his air group was not ready to operate at night. If attacked, the
Yorktown
would have to rely on her antiaircraft guns and her helm.

The endless series of attacks, day and night, threatened to exhaust the crews of the several carriers and their cruising ships. Airedales curled up on deck in the passageways around the hangar and caught an hour of sleep whenever they could.

The two task groups rendezvoused on December 1, several hundred miles northeast of the Marshalls. At a shipboard conference on the
Yorktown
, Pownall declined suggestions that he launch a fighter sweep over Kwajalein on December 3, returning with a full airstrike on December 4; he chose the less risky option of sending everything in his arsenal against the atoll at dawn on December 4, and beating a quick retreat that afternoon. The task force commenced a high-speed approach toward the heart of the Marshalls, and against expectations arrived at its launch point at dawn on December 4 without any sign of being detected by enemy air patrols.

The six carriers began launching their fighters and bombers at 6:30 a.m. Lieutenant Commander Edgar E. Stebbins, who had been tapped by Clark to replace the slain O'Hare as
Yorktown
's air group commander, was first over the atoll about ninety minutes later. He counted thirty ships in the lagoon, including two cruisers. The strike had caught the Japanese by complete surprise. Only a handful of Zeros were at altitude, and all were quickly destroyed by the F6F squadrons. John C. Phillips, piloting the same TBF Avenger that he had flown in the successful night action a week earlier, soared above the atoll at 20,000 feet. From that commanding height, Kernan recalled, the atoll “spread out before us in an enormous boomerang of narrow white-beached islands, with a big lagoon in the center, dark blue here, light there.”
¹⁰⁴
Phillips took inventory of targets ashore
or in the lagoon and directed the bombers in his squadron to attack them in turn. “Black antiaircraft bursts rocked the plane,” wrote Kernan, “and the fighter planes taking off from Roi-Namur far below seemed more interesting than ominous.”
¹⁰⁵

TBF Avengers glide-bombed the anchored ships and sank three transports. Heavy flak perforated many of the sturdy planes, but none were destroyed. Hellcats strafed a seaplane base at Ebeye, setting more than a dozen Kawanishis afire. At least two dozen Zeros scrambled as the initial strike was underway, and chased the retreating bombers into the north. Tail-gunners took down several more Zeros during the flight back to the carriers.

The morning strike returned to the task force singly or in isolated groups of two or three. For more than an hour Pownall's ships steamed into the wind and recovered planes. Nearly the entire American strike returned safely to the task force. The exceptions were few. Just two F6Fs were shot down in the morning's action. A gang of about ten Zeros pounced on VF-5 commander Ed Owen, whose plane was thoroughly shot up as it dived to escape. Owen pointed his nose north, but his instruments had shorted out and he began losing altitude. His engine conked out, and he deadsticked down toward the sea, intending to try a water landing. But the sea below was rutted with daunting waves, and Owen thought it unlikely that he could ditch safely. He unbuckled, pushed himself out of the cockpit, pulled his chute, and hit the water. Floating alone on the sea, he wondered whether he was finished, but a destroyer presently came over the horizon and picked him up. He was back aboard the
Yorktown
in time for lunch.

The Japanese air groups on Kwajalein had been badly roughed up, but they had fought with their familiar determination and persistence, and there was every reason to expect a fierce counterstrike on Task Force 50. Ed Stebbins reconnoitered and photographed a large airfield on Roi that appeared to have been left completely unmolested. He counted about sixty apparently undamaged G4Ms parked on the field. These long-legged bombers could be expected to attack the task force, either that afternoon or after dark. Stebbins radioed the
Yorktown
to urge that another strike be launched against the field in hopes of destroying the planes on the ground. A Combat Information Center officer hand-carried the message up to Pownall on the flag bridge.

After conferring with Admiral Kauffman, Pownall rendered his decision—he would not order another strike on Kwajalein. The plan
of operations, agreed several days earlier, had called for an afternoon strike against Wotje, which lay about 150 miles east. That strike would be recovered as the task force ran north at its highest effective cruising speed. Adding another strike on Kwajalein would keep the carriers within that atoll's air-striking range for another twenty-four hours. Pownall did not want to push his luck, and saw no reason to upend the existing plan.

By his own account, Jocko Clark was “dumbfounded” and could barely contain his fury. As the
Yorktown
's air squadron leaders landed aboard and reported to the bridge, all pleaded to lead their planes in another attack on Kwajalein. Clark beseeched Pownall: “You'd better get back there and knock out those Bettys, or they'll come and get you!”
¹⁰⁶
Pownall listened with diminishing patience. The strike on Kwajalein was to have been a hit-and-run raid. Clark and his aviators put emphasis on the “hit,” while Pownall was more concerned with the “run.” The admiral summarily ordered his flag captain to prepare the strike on Wotje as planned. The task force was going to clear out, and it would defend against the inevitable counterstrikes as they came.

The first wave of intruders arrived shortly before noon—a group of single-engine Nakajima B5N torpedo planes (“Kates”). They approached at low altitude in order to stay off the American radar screens and avoid the F6Fs orbiting high above. The screening ships opened fire as they came into range, and the sky was mottled with black flak bursts. One went down just off the
Yorktown
's starboard quarter.
Lexington
skipper Felix Stump steered sharply to starboard to avoid a torpedo, which very nearly clipped the ship's port bow. The surviving bombers turned away and ran for home, and the antiaircraft guns fell silent. Less than an hour later, another wave of Kates came skimming in from the south. The antiaircraft fire started up again, and the F6Fs, having come down from altitude to repel the first wave, now shot down all but four of the attackers. One dropped a torpedo on the
Lexington
, missing widely. The three others flew over and around the cruiser
San Francisco
and bored in toward the
Yorktown
. The carriers' short-range antiaircraft guns opened fire, narrowly missing the cruiser. One Nakajima went down, then another; a third flew on toward the carrier, its wing guns strafing the flight deck and its rear guns firing back at the
San Francisco
. Clark stood on the bridge and shouted to his gunners to destroy the plane. They did not need to be coaxed. Three different calibers of fire (40mm,
20mm, and 5 inch) converged on the lone plane as it came level with the catwalk of the
Yorktown
. As the line of fire passed across the
San Francisco
, Admiral Pownall leaned out and shouted from the flag bridge: “Cease fire! Cease fire! You are firing at that cruiser!”
¹⁰⁷

Once again, Clark was speechless. Did the admiral not see that an enemy torpedo plane was bearing down on the
Yorktown
? He pretended not to have heard the order. “I heard it all right but I didn't obey it, because I wasn't about to let that plane hit me.”
¹⁰⁸
When the Nakajima was less than 150 yards away, a 40mm shell connected with its left wing root and tore the wing off. The plane crashed into the sea just astern of the
Yorktown
. The landing signal officer, who had flung himself prone to avoid a strafing attack, stood up and mockingly raised his paddles to make the signal for a “perfect landing.”

Photographer's Mate Al Cooperman, stationed in the catwalk, had captured the moment that the enemy plane was struck by 40mm fire. The photograph, one of the most famous of the Pacific War, depicted the aircraft disintegrating in midair. Clark ordered a copy distributed to each member of the crew.
Life
magazine later featured the photo as its “Picture of the Week.”
¹⁰⁹

Task Force 50 had needed more than a little luck to escape serious damage, and all were unnerved by the sudden appearance of two waves of attackers in broad daylight. The
Yorktown
's gunners had peppered the
San Francisco
badly, killing one man and injuring twenty-two. Her skipper, A. Finley France Jr., knew that the friendly fire was unavoidable and deliberately did not report the incident out of consideration for Clark's chances of promotion to flag rank. Pownall apparently drew the same conclusion, because he never raised the issue of Clark's failure to obey his order to cease fire.

The task force launched a large combat air patrol and braced itself for more attacks. Clark would have liked to turn the formation around and launch another strike against Kwajalein, but Pownall was definitively committed to getting his ships out of there. At three in the afternoon, the Wotje strike returned and landed aboard. The task force rang up 25 knots and raced north. The weather was now working against the Americans. The destroyers labored heavily in rough seas, forcing Pownall to slow the entire task force to 18 knots. In addition, the sky was clear and visibility unimpeded, offering the fleeing ships no opportunity to hide from aerial snoopers.

Clark was thoroughly disgusted with Pownall's decision to run. The midday air attack, in his view, had proved his point that the task force should have remained off Kwajalein and slugged it out with the Japanese. He repeatedly smashed his fist down on the chart table and exclaimed, “Goddamn it, you can't run away from airplanes with ships!”
¹¹⁰

Those sixty-odd G4Ms on Roi had not yet appeared, but they could be expected to attack in darkness. Sure enough, the radar screens began to light up shortly before sunset. They depicted a large number of blips flying in expanding search squares. At 7:45 p.m., Bettys and Kates first made contact with the
Essex
group. For the next several hours, wave after wave of enemy planes tracked the ships, dropped parachute flares, and launched torpedoes. What followed, as recorded in the
Essex
cruise book, was “the longest sustained night torpedo attack of the war to date. For seven and a half hours, enemy planes were continually pressing attacks, and
Essex
personnel remained at battle stations until two o'clock the next morning—almost 24 hours after starting the attack on the atoll.”
¹¹¹
Antiaircraft fire repeatedly lit up the sky in a fantastic spectacle and took down dozens of attackers. A three-quarter moon rose in the east and illuminated the task force and its long white wakes. Many torpedoes missed narrowly; no ship in the group was hit.