The Pacific (49 page)

WHEN THE ORDERS ARRIVED TO REPORT TO USS
HORNET
FOR "CARRIER OPERATIONS," all the wolves of Bombing Two smiled. " The orphans," Micheel's friend Lieutenant Hal Buell later said, "had found a home."
⁵⁹
Privately, Lieutenant Vernon "Mike" Micheel wished his ensigns had had more training time in the Beast. In early March they flew over to Ford Island, in Pearl Harbor, to meet their ship. They also met the members of the air group they were replacing, Air Group Fifteen. Bombing Two knew the pilots in Bombing Fifteen because both squadrons had trained at NAS Wildwood. At the officers' club, the new
Hornet
pilots got the word from the old
Hornet
pilots. Fifteen had joined the carrier soon after its commissioning in November 1943, and had gone through months of training under Captain Miles Browning only to be summarily replaced upon arrival in Pearl Harbor, before the first combat cruise. In the course of a few "Happy Hours," they told the men of Bombing Two what an awful, belligerent, and vindictive dictator the ship's captain was. Captain Browning had made
Hornet
a very unhappy ship.

During the Battle of Midway two years earlier, Browning had served aboard
Enterprise
. His critical role in the great victory at Midway had earned him a DSC, a service-wide reputation, and put him in line to command a carrier. The new Essex-class carrier
Hornet
was his first.
⁶⁰
The wolves' qualifications aboard Browning's carrier began on March 9 and went smoother than Micheel had dared hope. The pilots made their three successful landings. The longer they spent aboard, though, the clearer they came to see the crew's discontent. The attitude came from the top. The captain's capriciousness had everyone unsettled and mistrustful.

The prospect of working for such a captain pleased no one in Air Group Two or its bombing squadron. Mike's immediate future took another startling turn when he discovered that the admiral who arrived to hang his flag from the flattop's staff was none other than Rear Admiral J. J. "Jocko" Clark. A year previously Clark had expressed his unhappiness with Lieutenant Micheel's performance on
Yorktown
vociferously. Mike figured Clark might not recall him, since the problems with the Beast had caused the admiral to yell at a lot of people that summer, but he decided to stay out of Jocko's way just in case. Luckily, his job did not demand contact with Captain Browning or Admiral Clark. Micheel's responsibilities were the training of the men in his division and the maintenance of the airplanes in his squadron. He focused on the mission and so did his pilots, who weren't going to let the top brass ruin their tour. Micheel found their enthusiasm infectious and a week of training exercises went quickly. He embarked on his second combat tour with more than one thousand hours of flight time and sixty-five carrier landings under his belt. He felt like a hotshot navy pilot. "I had this thing all figured out."

The front line of the navy's carrier war lay pretty far across the Pacific Ocean in March of 1944.
Hornet
sortied from Pearl Harbor at eight forty a.m. on the fifteenth and joined up with her destroyer escorts and three other aircraft carriers. They steamed southeast for five days, conducting gunnery practice and other drills. Another flattop with its task group sailed about thirty miles south of them.
⁶¹
They entered Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands on the morning of March 20. A thin strip of coral ran in almost a complete circle, encompassing more than twenty miles of lagoon. The opening on Majuro's northern side allowed the supporting vessels of the U.S. Navy's great carrier fleet access to a perfect anchorage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The pilots of Bombing Two, as their flattop steamed into the lagoon, saw what looked like "the entire Pacific Fleet."
⁶²
Hornet
joined a task group made up of one other fleet carrier like theirs, two smaller carriers, and their escorts. Task Group 58.2 got under way soon after, steaming to the Palau Islands for the first combat mission. Two more task groups joined them at three p.m. along with the commander of the Fifth Fleet, Admiral Spruance.

With more pilots than planes in his squadron, Mike had not flown much since they departed Pearl Harbor. The new men needed all the experience they could get. When they departed Majuro, though, the air group commander scheduled a "group grope" to see how well his squadrons worked together in a coordinated attack. Micheel took off in his Helldiver and gained altitude, joining up his division. As he gained altitude, the great fleet came into view. "I never saw such a number of ships in my life." Comparing the sight before him with his memory of his first combat tour, "the difference was just phenomenal, how big our fleets were and how many ships we had. It seemed like they were all over. They were out 40 miles ahead." Thinking of all those trained pilots on all those carriers surrounded by all those support ships gave him a surge of confidence. "How could we lose?" The sight may have awed the wolves behind him as well, since the group grope went poorly.
⁶³
The problems went beyond a lack of concentration. Several of their Helldivers proved defective. Captain Browning had them pushed over the side.
⁶⁴

The training of Air Group Two, however, ended with that flight. The task force had been handed Operation Desecrate One, to destroy the enemy's offensive capabilities in the Palau Islands. The Palaus needed to be neutralized to facilitate General MacArthur's advance along the northern coast of New Guinea. The task force did not sail straight west from Majuro, though. Instead, it dipped south to stay clear of the big enemy base at Truk, and crossed the equator on March 25. Even with combat imminent, the ship's company took the opportunity afforded by crossing the equator to initiate those men who were making their first crossing. Veterans of Guadalcanal, Lieutenants Buell and Micheel had crossed the equator in 1942. Unfortunately, they lacked properly validated identification as a shellback from King Neptune, so they received their share of hazing along with the rest of the wolves. They endured an abbreviated ceremony, however. On
Hornet
, the pollywogs outnumbered the shellbacks by a considerable number, so the ritual humiliation could only be pushed so far.

Another task group joined them on the twenty-sixth, pushing the number of flattops to eleven.
Hornet
pulled alongside
Kankakee
to receive fuel oil and aviation gasoline. Topping off the fuel tanks, like the increased frequency of Combat Air Patrol (CAP) and the antisubmarine (ASW) searches, signified the final steps in long months of preparation. On the twenty-eighth one of the scouts spotted a Japanese two-engine bomber, called a Betty.
⁶⁵
The U.S. pilot, in a torpedo plane, took off after the enemy scout. The Betty dropped her load of bombs and fled. Her escape meant the enemy knew the big fleet was bearing down on them. Another Betty spotted them the next day. Close to enemy airfields,
Hornet
went to general quarters for the remainder of the day; the task force prepared for an enemy counterstrike. It arrived at eight forty-six p.m. No fighters went up to challenge them because the task force commander did not want to risk flight operations at night. The carriers commenced emergency maneuvers while the battlewagons belched showers of flak. None of the stalkers got close. Word came down from the bridge that the attack on the Palau Islands was being moved up to March 30, the next day.

IN EARLY MARCH, SOON AFTER LENA RIGGI RETURNED FROM HER LEAVE, JOHN called her at work. They talked for a bit before he asked her what time she got off work. She agreed to meet him that evening at the USO in Oceanside.
⁶⁶
At the club, John attracted a crowd. Lena decided that he had chosen her, so she did not need to get jealous at all the women crowding around him. A time to talk did come and they found a fair amount of common ground other than the Marine Corps. Her parents had both immigrated to the United States from Italy. Her mother had given birth to five boys and one girl. She had grown up on a farm outside of Portland, Oregon, and had learned to do everything her older brothers had done.
⁶⁷
She had eventually escaped the farm, moved to Portland and found work.
⁶⁸
Working as a clerk at Montgomery Ward, a department store, had bored her. "One morning I woke up," she said, "and I said to my girlfriend who was in the front apartment, 'You know what? I'm going to join the service.' " She set off that morning and had happened upon a Marine Corps Recruitment Center, enlisting on July 5, 1943.
⁶⁹
Her story would have reminded John of his own search for direction on July 6, 1940, which had led him to the USMC.

Like him, Lena had trained in New River, North Carolina, before being transferred to Pendleton. She had arrived in late January to discover that women had only just begun to be posted there.
⁷⁰
As a field cook, she would become a sergeant officially once the auxiliary formalized its rank system.
⁷¹
Her directness gave way to a sense of fun as she got to know him. He liked to laugh, was unpretentious, and was obviously close to his family. They shared an interest in playing sports and even ranked them similarly--their two favorites were softball and golf.
⁷²
John did not need to say much about his medal or the Canal, so when it came up he said, "My men earned it. I am just wearing it for them."
⁷³
At the end of their first date she would not kiss him good night. She had, however, taken to calling him Johnny.
⁷⁴
He stopped over to see her at the officers' mess after work a day or two later.
⁷⁵
Her friends liked him immediately. He obviously did not share the opinion of other guys at Pendleton, who referred to female marines as BAMs: Broad Assed Marines.

ON MARCH 30, BOMBING TWO ASSEMBLED IN THEIR READY ROOM TO THE sound of the general quarters Klaxon. Campbell briefed them on the strike again. Bombing Two would not fly as a squadron. Two divisions of six planes each would comprise the first sortie. The next two divisions would fly the second strike. The map of the Palau Island chain had a lot of strange names, like Babelthuap. Campbell, leading one division, and Buell, leading the other, would join up with some of their air group's fighter and torpedo planes to hit the enemy's ships in the harbor of the Island of Koror. The enemy knew they were coming. As Campbell went over the details of the raid as displayed on the blackboard and the Teletype--headings, distances, code words, and the like--the assigned pilots scribbled furiously, letting out the occasional "Dammit! Down in front."
⁷⁶
The loudspeaker blared, "Pilots, man your planes." With parachutes hanging off their backsides, the pilots of divisions one and two walked to the flight deck for the squadron's first mission. Micheel and the remaining pilots would have found a spot on Vulture's Row to watch the launch before going back to the ready room to wait.

With the tension of combat added to the men's natural exuberance, one of the wolves described the life in the ready room as "a cross between the Roman Coliseum in its heyday and Barnum's freak show."
⁷⁷
The truth was much less exciting, however, as they smoked cigarettes, played acey- deucey (backgammon), and prepared for the next mission. Eager pilots engaged in a fair amount of shoptalk, where the qualities of each type of aircraft--like its wing loading and wing aspect--were compared. A few hammocks swung from the ceiling. Down in the ship's store, cigarettes sold for seven cents a pack. Across the passageway outside, a young black man operated a small pantry. Seaman Roland E. Williams prepared light meals for flight crews when the wardroom was closed, and looked forward to the day when the war ended and he could go to hairdresser school. Other seamen cleaned the pilots' staterooms and did their laundry. On the flight deck above their ready room, teams of men spotted aircraft and handled the takeoffs and landings of the CAP and ASW missions.
Hornet
did not turn into the wind to launch these single-plane missions; it threw them into the air with its catapult.

The first strike returned almost three hours later and their news was mostly good. In the island's harbor the Helldivers had found eight enemy ships, most of which were five-thousand- to eight-thousand-ton transports, with one destroyer and one sampan. Bombing Two had scored two hits on two ships, one hit apiece on two others, but missed the destroyer. The sampan had been thoroughly strafed--and that was saying something with the SB2C's 20mm cannon; the pilots found "their destructive power . . . tremendous."
⁷⁸
Though enemy fighters were known to be operating off the nearby island of Peleliu, the only enemy plane spotted had been one "Tojo." It had fled. The enemy's antiaircraft fire, though, had been intense. One of their planes had not returned. The pilot and gunner, last seen as their plane entered its dive, were listed as missing in action.