The Pacific (56 page)

Micheel and those scheduled on the second strike would have watched the first. This was too important. The wings came down and were locked in position as the SB2C taxied forward. Up on the PriFly, a board with new navigation information was put up. It announced that the enemy carriers were another degree of latitude, or 60 miles, farther away. The round-trip had just increased an additional 120 miles. The pilots of Bombing Two, along with Fighting Two and Torpedo Two and all the other strike groups of all the other carriers, knew strike number one was in big trouble before it took off.

A familiar feeling crept over Lieutenant Vernon Micheel. "Oh, always the same ol' stuff. They'd launch us further than we could really go safely." The airplanes were bigger and faster and there were more of them, but on this mission "we knew it was going to end in the dark when they got back." The deckhands began loading aircraft on
Hornet
's three elevators and sending them up to the flight deck. Down in the squadron's ready room, the pilots of Mike's sortie "were gouging around every place to get colored ammunition. They were just taking it by the fistfuls." Firing colored ammo with their .38 pistols would help the destroyers find them floating at night in the Pacific. Fire a white bullet and "they might not come near you." A blue one or red one would attract a friendly ship. Fear had made them a little crazy, though. With respect for their experience, Mike suggested that bulging pockets of colored ammunition "might be detrimental." In other words, if they landed in the water at night, they might not have time to get the life raft deployed. In that case, all a man would have was his Mae West life preserver. "You might well have to throw all that stuff out of your suit to stay buoyant." He said all that and it didn't work; he stuffed his pockets full of ammo, too.

Hornet
steamed into the wind. The daylight already had that late- afternoon quality to it. Mike climbed onto the port wing of the Beast, the plane captain stood on the starboard wing. Mike put his left toe in the step on the fuselage and swung his leg into the cockpit, then sat down while the captain helped him arrange his chute behind him, get into his harness, and connect his oxygen and radio cords. The veteran ran through his checklist. His dive bomber was number one for takeoff after his fighter escort. The props on the Hellcats began turning over. "I was sitting there just puckering away," wondering "why every time you're going to go on a tough strike, you're going to be short on gas." Once the launch began it would go quickly. The plane captain would have yelled "Clear!" so Micheel could start his engine and prepare to taxi. It would be full dark before he reached the enemy carriers. "We were out of range . . . so I was afraid." In that moment an "Angel of Mercy" intervened and saved him from the mission he was pretty certain he would not survive. As the first Hellcat revved its engines for the flight director, the admiral scrubbed it. The relief came out of Micheel with an "Oh boy. . . ." The deckhands began clearing the deck for the return of Strike 1A.
Hornet
swung around onto course 270 degrees, the last known course of the enemy, and tried to close with her Helldivers, Hellcats, and Avengers.

Mike decided to wait outside for his friends. He knew if they had found the enemy, there would be very little daylight remaining. Whatever they had encountered with the enemy CAP and AA, Bombing Two would have to get down, get out, and join up before full dark. Joining up after dark would be difficult because the little white running lights started to resemble little white stars. Unfortunately, the moon was not lighting the night sky on this evening. Mike knew what it felt like to be that pilot, flying in the darkness. Life came down to fine-tuning the engine and dialing in the right trim, while ignoring the urges to climb higher or go faster and ignoring the fear produced by not being able to distinguish the sea from the sky. The plane's homing device, the YE/ZB, had a good range and its radar would help once a man got close. Inside the ship, cryptic radio messages began to be received. "I'm hit," and "I'm out of gas, going into water."

Jocko Clark, the admiral who had ordered his squadrons to attack even before he had heard from his CO, knew what was happening. His flagship, USS
Hornet,
turned on her white truck lights at seven fifty-nine p.m. The massive illumination made her a perfect target for enemy submarines, but it had to be done. The pilots deserved it. The Landing Signal Officer (LSO) took his place on the aft port quarter, his lighted paddles ready to guide the boys in. Mike heard the approach of aircraft; the first two arrived very close together. "I sat up there on one of those catwalks and watched those guys trying to come in two at a time . . . those guys were racing for a spot in the landing pattern to get aboard." One plane got the cut from the LSO. Plane two lengthened out his final downwind turn to give plane one a chance to clear the deck. Out of the darkness a third plane dashed in ahead of plane two. Mike did not blame him--plane three might not have even seen plane two in the darkness. More planes approached, their pilots expecting their tanks to run dry any second. He could see discipline giving way to "me or you." The landing pattern became a melee. It hurt too much to watch. "I just got out of there." Down in the ready room, he heard that the "screening vessels began firing star shells and turned on searchlights to aid returning planes in locating the task force."
¹³⁹
That began at a quarter to nine. The radio messages from men going down somewhere out there were heartbreaking. In the next hour, two crash landings and a shift in wind direction caused costly delays, as the deckhands pushed the wreckage over the side and the captain brought the ship about. One aircraft landed in the water near the starboard bow. At ten fifteen the LSO waved in the last plane, "no others being in the air."
¹⁴⁰

In the dark waters around the ships the rescue of downed pilots and airmen continued as Air Group Two counted noses. One Helldiver had been hit making its dive on the target. Two of fifteen Hellcats and one of four Avengers were missing. The SB2Cs presented the biggest problem: nine of the fourteen Helldivers failed to land on a flattop.
¹⁴¹
A total of nine
Hornet
planes had crashed while landing, killing one airman. As usual, the Beast had the worst record: only one of fourteen would be ready to fly the following day. Reports of Air Group Two planes on other carriers began to arrive.

General quarters sounded at five twenty-two a.m. the next morning. Some of the news heard in the squadron's room was good: the wolves had been credited with eight to ten hits on a carrier of the Shokaku class, an Imperial Japanese Fleet carrier. The escort ships and a few other flattops had, however, escaped. No new contact reports had come in. The admiral expected the IJN to sail north, toward Japan. Micheel led nine dive-bombers, accompanied by a number of fighters and torpedo planes, on a mission "to strike enemy fleet if within range."
¹⁴²
In his logbook, though, he noted a slightly different priority: "search for buddies and Jap fleet."
¹⁴³
Headed north, he saw "numerous oil slicks . . . and considerable wreckage." When he had consumed half of his gasoline, he turned around and flew back.

He found
Hornet
to be a happy ship.
¹⁴⁴
All of the air group had been accounted for. Five planes flew back aboard, having landed on other carriers the previous night. Only one of these returnees was a dive-bomber. In another amazing turn of events, destroyers had recovered the eight pilots and airmen of Bombing Two who had landed in the water. Lieutenant Hal Buell, however, stepped aboard
Hornet
after crash-landing on the deck of
Lexington
. Ashen and wincing in pain, Hal had been wounded by shrapnel. He had also accidentally killed a Bombing Two gunner. It had happened in the crash. Buell had been about to get his cut when he got a wave off instead. In that split second, Buell thought about his Beast, with a big hole in its wing and no gas in its tank.
¹⁴⁵
He cut the throttle. His tail hook missed, and his plane bounced over two of the wire safety gates and landed on top of his friend Dave Stear's Helldiver. His plane killed Dave's gunner and one of the plane pushers. Some of the men aboard
Lexington
had angrily denounced Buell. They thought he had cut in when he should not have.
¹⁴⁶

Hal Buell came home to a warm welcome on his carrier, though. No one wanted to talk too much about the return landings for a near-suicidal mission. Hal had done what he had set out to do. He had put himself ahead of Campbell's division by plotting his own course and by flying at a lower altitude. As the strike groups had arrived over the top of one of three groups of IJN ships, Lieutenant Buell began his high-speed approach as he asked for and received permission to attack--not from his skipper, but from the air group commander.
¹⁴⁷
Buell's division had pushed over from 13,500 feet into very heavy enemy AA fire. Red, green, and orange puffs of AA, "as well as white phosphorus streamer shells," were aimed at them. Set against the darkening sky, the pyrotechnics were unlike anything anyone had seen. While the fighters watched and a photographic plane off of
Bataan
snapped pictures, "a cone of fire focused on Lieutenant Buell's section."
¹⁴⁸
The enemy carrier had swung hard to starboard and had completed a ninety-degree turn before he released. Buell managed to run his division over its length and ignite its destruction with several well-placed thousand-pound bombs.
¹⁴⁹
Campbell had followed with several more. No formal rendezvous had followed. A few enemy planes briefly attacked as the pilots raced for their ship. The flak had chased them for fifteen miles. One of those bursts had blown a large hole in Buell's wing and lodged some sharp bits of metal in his back.

Others told equally scary stories of landing at night in the Pacific. The discussions about the previous night's mission, the most dramatic of their tour of duty thus far, had only just begun.
Hornet
refueled. The scouts failed to find the remainder of the enemy fleet. Still steaming north the next morning, the sailors standing watch "began spotting numerous life rafts, the ship being in the area where pilots were forced to land in the water the night of 20 June. Screening destroyers were sent out to investigate."
¹⁵⁰
A lot of carriers had downed pilots. Once the destroyers had checked all the rafts and the searches failed to find more, the carrier fleet gave up the chase. Every carrier task group retired after the battle, steaming back to the fleet anchorage, except for Jocko's group.
Hornet
and her companions set sail for Iwo Jima. The fighter sweep launched just before six a.m. on June 24.

THE MARINES ON PAVUVU HAD HEARD ALL ABOUT THE CARRIER BATTLE IN THE Philippine Sea, with "better than 300 nip planes down," almost as it happened. Some news came every night with the movies, some hot dope came through more official channels. The 2nd and the 4th divisions had landed on Saipan. Unlike the experience at Guadalcanal and Gloucester, though, those divisions had not walked ashore. Word that the army air corps' B- 29s had detonated hundreds of tons of bombs on Tokyo arrived on Pavuvu on June 16 and brightened everyone's day.

Eugene and Sid got together most afternoons. They made plans for after the war. More immediately, Sid promised to carry Eugene's seashell collection home to Eugene's mother and to visit the Sledges upon his return if--Sid smiled--his own parents ever let him out of the house again. On the night of Sid's two-year anniversary of being overseas, June 22, the outdoor theater showed
Gung Ho
. The film depicted a USMC Raider Battalion's raid on Makin Island, which had occurred about the same time as the 1st Division landed on Guadalcanal. The marines threw themselves on barbed- wire fences to allow others to climb over them. They ran headlong at Japanese machine guns--bravely getting mowed down until one marine took off his shirt and ran at the bunker half naked with a grenade. The bloodless violence and corresponding level of bravery generally failed to impress the veterans of the 1st Division.

Sid and Gene had a last afternoon together before Private First Class Sidney Phillips reported aboard a troopship. The ship steamed away from Pavuvu's steel pier on June 24. The division, perhaps understanding that a lot of marines would have liked to have sailed home, served each man two fried eggs and a cup of cocoa. Sledge lounged the next day, Sunday, reading a Sunday edition of the Mobile newspaper, studying the map of the Pacific, and enjoying his photographs of home. Sid had promised to go to their favorite Civil War site and take some photos and send them to him. Gene wrote his parents, asking them to let Sid borrow anything in his room, including his good camera. A visit to Eugene's parents meant Sidney would get grilled by them, but Sledge liked the idea of Sid telling his parents everything that he could not put in a letter because of censorship. "Believe everything he tells you," he wrote his parents, "& don't think he is trying to stop you from worrying about me. He'll tell the truth." The loss of Sid, though, meant that Eugene Sledge's only friends in the world were the men of King Company, 3rd Battalion, Fifth Marines, 1st Marine Division.

ON JUNE 29, JOHNNY SPENT THREE DAYS IN THE SICK BAY OF CAMP PENDLETON. He had fever, chills, vomiting, and headaches. He had had malaria on the Canal, so its appearance elicited little interest from the medical staff treating him. The recurrence may have been brought on by the pressure he now found himself under. He was about to get everything he wanted.

Johnny and Lena Mae had been busy planning their wedding. They had visited with the regimental chaplain to see about getting married. The chaplain had agreed to preside over their marriage in the chapel on Camp Pendleton after Lena underwent two weeks of "instruction."
¹⁵¹
Lena was having none of it.