SEVEN

Arrival of the “New Boys”

As Enterprise was slipping into Pearl Harbor on March 10, two of her Scouting Six aviators were being loaded on board a Japanese merchant ship bound for Yokohama on Japan’s mainland. Dale Hilton and Jack Leaming, forced to ditch off Marcus Island, had spent the better part of a week as prisoners of war.

Leaming endured the Japanese interrogations but soon found a great dislike for the seaweed, kelp, rice, and tiny fish that provided his only nutrition. On the third day, Hilton was taken away for questioning and was beaten when his answers did not please his interrogators. On the morning of March 10, the Dauntless crewmen were put on board the 12,755-ton transport ship Argentina Maru for passage to Japan. They arrived on Friday the thirteenth, and were moved ashore to a home for extensive questioning.¹

In their new place of internment, they met six POWs from Yorktown’s Torpedo Five who had been lost during the February strikes on the Gilberts. They were Lieutenant Harlan Johnson, Ensign Herbie Hein, and their enlisted crewmen James “Ace” Dalzell, Charles Fosha, Joe Strahl, and Marshall Windham. Leaming exchanged information with the Yorktown radiomen using Morse code to tap out words with their fists and open hands when the guards were not looking.²

Leaming, Hilton, Fosha, Dalzell, Windham, and five POWs captured from Wake Island were transferred on April 6 to the newly completed secret interrogation camp of Ofuna. Bathing was allowed only twice a week and most meals were of rice and some type of preserved fish. Leaming was smart enough to hide his high school ring under the flooring in his barracks. He pretended to have lost it when one of the guards demanded he hand it over. He convinced the guard that it was missing, but he received a terrible beating in the process.³

Shortly after the Doolittle raid of April 18, the VS-6 prisoners were placed on a train and moved from Ofuna to the camp at Zentsuji on the island of Shikoku. The food rations were barely enough to sustain life, and the prisoners were forced to perform slave labor six days a week, whether sick or well enough to work. According to Leaming, survival meant consuming anything the POWs could beg, barter, or steal.⁴

The first ray of hope came a month after their arrival at Zentsuji. During an inspection of the camp by the Red Cross, both Enterprise aviators were allowed to take part in a propaganda broadcast back to the United States. Dale Hilton and Jack Leaming found some relief in the knowledge that their families knew that they were still alive. The war was far from being decided, however, and it would be years before either Dauntless aviator would touch American soil again.⁵

• • •

As Enterprise was making her way into Pearl Harbor on March 10, the air groups of Lexington and Yorktown carried out a surprise attack against Japanese forces concentrated in New Guinea. They flew through a 7,500-foot pass in the rugged Owen Stanley mountains, and then descended upon shipping targets anchored off the towns of Lae and Salamaua. They sank three merchant vessels and a converted minesweeper and killed or wounded 375 Japanese men. In addition, they damaged a light cruiser, three destroyers, and a seaplane tender with their bombs and torpedoes. The Lae-Salamaua strikes by the Yorktown and Lexington aviators inflicted the heaviest losses on the Imperial Japanese Navy since the start of the war.⁶

Admiral Yamamoto’s Navy had enjoyed an almost unchecked string of victories in the past month. During mid-February, Admiral Nagumo’s First Air Fleet had conducted carrier attacks on Port Darwin on Australia’s coast. They sank the old World War I–era U.S. destroyer Peary, along with two American troopships and several other Allied vessels. In all, three warships and five Allied merchant vessels were destroyed and another ten ships were damaged. Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the first Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, was again head of the carrier aviators from Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu that pounded the shipping at Darwin on February 19. That afternoon, the Kido Butai’s carrier warriors attacked two American supply ships bound for the Philippines and sank both.

The darkest of months for the Allies continued a week later. A Japanese cruiser force near Surabaya pounded an Allied surface fleet in the Battle of the Java Sea on February 27. Three British and Dutch destroyers were sunk, along with two Dutch cruisers. On the same day, the U.S. seaplane tender Langley—America’s first aircraft carrier—was caught at sea by Japanese bombers and finished off. Further bad news came on March 1: The U.S. heavy cruiser Houston and Australian light cruiser Perth were lost in the Indian Ocean in Sunda Strait in a battle with Japanese landing force warships.

Nagumo’s Kido Butai was not to be left out of this victorious period. Between late February and the first week of March, Commander Fuchida’s carrier pilots attacked and sank eight merchant ships and several warships in the Indian Ocean south of Java. American losses to the First Air Fleet planes included the destroyers Edsall and Pillsbury, along with the oiler Pecos. It was only the surprise attack by Yorktown and Lexington carrier planes at New Guinea on March 10 that caused Japanese command to pause, postponing planned invasions of Port Moresby and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands for a month. During the time it took Japan to formulate new offensives in the Pacific, the American carrier air groups saw little action of significance.

Much of this time was spent in replacing lost aircraft and training new pilots. Yorktown remained at sea battle cruising, while Lexington enjoyed a short overhaul at Pearl Harbor. Enterprise remained in the Hawaiian Islands during late March, as Admiral Halsey had received orders to await the arrival of the new carrier Hornet, en route from the East Coast to the Pacific.

• • •

During the interim, the Enterprise Air Group shuffled personnel during mid-March. Commander Brigham Young was detached to new duties. His place as CEAG was filled by Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the former skipper of Fighting Six and an Academy classmate of VB-6’s Holly Hollingsworth and VB-5’s Lieutenant Commander Bob Armstrong. Hollingsworth also received new orders, and turned command of Bombing Six over to his capable XO, Lieutenant Dick Best. Four other experienced VB-6 pilots were transferred to other duties during this period: Jack Blitch, Jim McCauley, Keith Holcomb, and Leonard Check, the latter receiving orders to help teach at NAS Corpus Christi.

Bombing Six also lost three rear seat men to transfers: Jim Shea, Achilles Georgiou, and Carl Schlegal. In return, the squadron received a whole new batch of enlisted radioman-gunners to be trained for active flight duty. Dick Best also received seven rookie ensigns to bolster his pilot losses—Stephen Hogan, Don Ely, Harry Liffner, George Goldsmith, Bert Varian, Lewis Hopkins, and Gene Greene. The time ashore proved to be much needed for Best to work with his green young pilots on their bombing practice against land targets.⁷

Ed Anderson finally got his chance. On March 10, he was placed on VB-6’s tactical organization along with the unit’s eight new radiomen. He became the regular rear seat man for rookie pilot Lew Hopkins. Bombing Six operated for several weeks from Ewa Field, the Marine air base on Oahu. Anderson felt that the Marine chow, served family-style, was excellent. Best of all, he was gaining practical experience with all the training hops.⁸

Some of his first flights were more hair-raising than others. Ensign Hopkins forgot to open his dive flaps during one practice dive. They managed to pull out at only five hundred feet, screaming down at terminal velocity—estimated by Anderson to be around 350 knots. Pilot and gunner both enjoyed a good laugh over it later, but it had been a close call.

Earl Gallaher’s VS-6, sent ashore to NAS Kaneohe for training, was given a surprise on March 18. Their place on Enterprise was being temporarily assigned to Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie’s Bombing Three, which had been operating from Oahu since Saratoga had returned stateside for repairs. As disappointing as the news may have been to some, the time ashore would be well used by Gallaher in reshaping his depleted scouting unit. In the past month, he had lost the services of three pilots—one killed in the Wake raid, one taken POW at Marcus, and Perry Teaff, who had lost an eye in an SBD crash.

The pilots of Yorktown’s Bombing Three photographed in April 1942 while on temporary duty on Enterprise: (front row, left to right) Ensign John Roberts, Lieutenant Ralph Arndt, Lieutenant Dave Shumway (XO), Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie (CO), Lieutenant Syd Bottomley, Jr., and Ensign John Lough; (standing, left to right) Lieutenant (j.g.) Gordon Sherwood, Ensigns Roy Isaman, John Butler, John Bridgers, Bob Elder, Carl Peiffer, Charlie Lare, Randy Cooner, Bob Campbell, Paul Schlegel, and Frank O’Flaherty. Roberts, Lough, Peiffer, and O’Flaherty were on temporary duty with VB-3 at the time, but all flew with VS-6 at Midway, and all were lost in action.

U.S. Navy

In addition, Lieutenant Reggie Rutherford, the VS-6 executive officer who had joined in December, was transferred during the weeks at Pearl Harbor, and the three loaner pilots from Bombing Three—Oley Hanson, Bob Campbell, and Bud Merrill—were reunited with skipper Max Leslie. Another temporary pilot, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bill Hall, would soon transfer into Lexington’s VS-2 to take the place of a pilot lost during the Lae-Salamaua strikes. Finally, VS-6 pilots Cleo Dobson and Ed “Deke” Deacon were assigned as assistant landing signal officers in training under senior Enterprise LSO Lieutenant Robin Lindsey at Kaneohe.

The personnel losses and reassignments left skipper Gallaher with only eight other veteran VS-6 pilots: Dick Dickinson, Reid Stone, Charlie Ware, Dusty Kleiss, Pat Patriarca, Norm West, Willie West, and Mac McCarthy, the latter two only recently returned from injuries sustained in the first part of the war. Doctors had completed skin grafts on Willie West’s chest to patch the chunk of flesh that had been ripped away by a bullet in the Marshalls raid. “He had the doctors make a design on his tummy with a ‘V’ and then a dot, dot, dot, dash,” said his buddy Irvin McPherson. The symbols spelled out the International Morse Code symbol for V, as in victory.⁹

Dickinson fleeted up to become Gallaher’s XO and Charlie Ware became flight officer, the third-senior pilot. Scouting Six’s veterans would spend the next month checking out new dive-bombers and training new men. Fortunately, a fresh crop of rookie pilots had just arrived in Hawaii at the first of March from the Advanced Carrier Training Group (ACTG). Prior to the return of Enterprise, many of the fresh faces were blended into Lieutenant Commander Leslie’s shore-based VB-3 squadron. Among the new arrivals were ensigns John Butler, John Quincy Roberts, John Lough, Elmer Maul, Frank O’Flaherty, Raymond Miligi, John Bridgers, and Carl Peiffer. Most of these fresh aviators would become very familiar with the flight deck of USS Enterprise in the next three months.

Max Leslie—with more than four thousand accumulated flying hours—was one of the most experienced dive-bomber aviators in the Pacific Fleet. He had won his wings in 1929 and reported on board the battleship Oklahoma as an observation pilot. He had since flown patrol planes and fighters before switching to dive-bombers. In comparison, many of Leslie’s new ACTG arrivals had less than four hundred flight hours.¹⁰

Ensigns John Bridgers and Carl Peiffer, both from the Tarheel state of North Carolina, were representative of Leslie’s new junior pilots, whose lean flight hours were often made up for in their eagerness. Bridgers had received his naval aviator wings in Miami in November 1941 and had spent some of his early training at NAS Norfolk. “When you reported into ACTG, you were a ‘new boy’ and remained so designated until another batch of ‘new boys’ reported,” Bridgers said. “That could be a week or a month, and then the prior ‘new boys’ became ‘old boys.’”¹¹

The Norfolk training period included many hard lessons. Peiffer, an “old boy” slightly senior to Bridgers, was making a touch-and-go landing one afternoon when he decided he would bring his plane to a halt. Peiffer realized too late that his brakes could not stop him in the short distance and that he had lost sufficient speed to take off again. As he reached the far end of the field—still with considerable ground speed—he pulled back on the stick. Peiffer jumped the perimeter fence, whereupon his Dauntless flipped onto its back, straddling a ditch in the backyard of one of the homes surrounding the field.

His passenger began shouting from the rear cockpit, where he was suspended upside down by his belt. In the confusion of trying to figure out what had happened, Peiffer released himself and dropped on his head. The woman of the house chastised the pilot for making so much noise and waking her husband, who worked nights at the nearby Newport News naval shipyard.

Ensign Carl Peiffer.

The soft-spoken Peiffer could only mutter, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I brought her in as quietly as I could.”

Bridgers and his fellow new boys had become carrier-qualified by making three landings in an SB2U on the Navy’s first jeep carrier, Long Island (ACV-1), as she plied back and forth in Chesapeake Bay. They arrived at Pearl Harbor on board the troop transport ship SS President Hoover and had their first look at the U.S. Fleet’s damage. They would soon have their chance to help even the score with the Japanese Navy.¹²

The thirty-odd new pilots were distributed among squadrons on Oahu, many being temporarily assigned to Max Leslie’s VB-3. The next days were spent becoming familiar with the Douglas SBD Dauntless. It was a dive-bomber, said Ensign Bridgers, “none of us had previously seen, much less flown.”¹³

Lieutenant Robin Lindsey, the regular LSO for Enterprise, worked with the newer dive-bomber pilots. The month was tough on Lindsey, tough on the newer pilots, and hell on their SBDs. On March 31, Ensign Harry Warren Liffner—a new pilot for Dick Best’s Bombing Six—made a forced landing at sea off Hawaii during bombing practice. He and his gunner, AMM3c Peter William Altman, were safely recovered.

The mishaps escalated when Enterprise put to sea on April 1 for two days of training exercises and carrier qualification landings. New gunner Ed Anderson recorded his first carrier flight hours in his logbook that day after Lew Hopkins successfully trapped his tail hook. Ensign Ray Miligi, one of the ACTG pilots, hit the barrier upon landing. His face was badly cut and he was sent to the Pearl Harbor hospital to recover. Two more SBDs were lost on April 2 as the Big E was entering port. Two of the new-boy pilots, Harry Liffner and Stephen Hogan of Bombing Six, collided in midair when one of them failed to see their formation going into a right turn. Only the pilots managed to parachute to safety. Ed Anderson was stunned by the loss of two buddies—Peter Altman and Wilbur Thompson. The crash occurred at only about a thousand feet, and neither gunner was able to extricate himself in time. “With twin guns that weren’t designed for the plane, and armor plate in the seat that folds in front of your chest and stomach, you haven’t got much chance to bail out at that altitude,” Anderson said.¹⁴

The following day, Ensign Johnny Lough of VB-3 cracked up yet another Dauntless beyond repair while landing on Oahu. Bombing Six and Scouting Six each received some new SBD-3 model Dauntless aircraft while in Hawaii. Compared to their older SBD-2 planes, the newer models were impressive to the crews. Chief Jim Murray, now assigned to VB-6’s new skipper Dick Best, marveled at his new 6-B-1. It came fully equipped with radio gear, an Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) transmitter, a Zed Baker homing device, self-sealing fuel tanks, and armor plating to protect the pilot. Even better, Murray found the biggest “morale booster” to be an additional armor plate mounted on the twin .30-caliber machine guns to protect the radioman/gunner.¹⁵

The trials and tribulations for indoctrinating new pilots soon came to a close. The Enterprise Air Group was put on a two-hour sailing notice on April 7, as the new carrier Hornet approached Hawaii. Together, the two flattops would embark on a mission the likes of which their airmen could scarcely have dreamed to be possible.

• • •

The Hornet Air Group was the newest arrival to the Pacific Fleet during April 1942. The Navy’s eighth aircraft carrier had a full war load displacement of 29,100 tons, making her slightly larger than her sister flattops Yorktown and Enterprise.

The Hornet Air Group’s flight crews were scattered in and around the naval air station at Norfolk, Virginia, when war commenced for America on December 7, 1941. Ensign Roy Philip Gee of Bombing Eight, a conservative Mormon raised in Salt Lake City, was at a Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles football game with his roommate, Ensign Grant Teats of Torpedo Eight, when they first heard of the Pearl Harbor attacks on a portable radio. They raced back to Norfolk to join their air group as war was declared. “The Hornet pilots were like a group of racehorses chomping at the bit,” Gee said.¹⁶

Hornet’s green air group conducted extensive training during the next three months as the carrier was prepared for combat duty in the Pacific. The Commander, Hornet Air Group, was Lieutenant Commander Stanhope Cotton Ring, whose official CHAG acronym soon informally became “Sea Hag” to many of his pilots.

Not all of the men were confident in the Sea Hag’s leadership. Ensign Kenneth White of Bombing Eight recalled that Commander Ring became lost while leading a training flight in the Gulf of Mexico during January 1942. Ring had to be escorted back to the Hornet by Lieutenant Gus Widhelm in what was considered to be good weather. “He scared me,” said White. “To his credit, he looked like a naval officer; tall, handsome. He wore his uniform well.” Stan Ring had been the first pilot to make a landing on Hornet after the new carrier’s commissioning. Yet even this historic honor had not gone well for the Sea Hag as he settled into the groove with one of his air group’s SBC-4s. Ensign Troy Guillory of VB-8 was riding as the CHAG’s rear seat. Ring came in “high and fast,” according to Guillory, and his SBD barely caught the last arresting wire and slammed into the barrier.¹⁷

Lieutenant Commander Stanhope Cotton Ring, known to the men as Sea Hag.

U.S. Navy

Hornet transited the Panama Canal on March 12 en route to the Pacific, and she docked at San Diego on March 20. There, Sea Hag learned his ship would serve temporary duty as the training base for the Navy’s second graduating class of ACTG pilots. Some of these new boys would soon be mixed into Enterprise’s two Dauntless squadrons. The eager aviators were truly a cross section of America, hailing both from rural farming families and from wealthy inner-city upbringing.

Ensign Eldor Rodenburg would never forget his carrier qualifiation landings on the brand-new Hornet. Rodenburg hailed from the farmlands near Davenport, Iowa, and had spent summers on a tractor while studying civil engineering at the University of Nebraska. In December 1939, Eldor enlisted in naval aviation training and progressed to Pensacola for aviation cadet training. His twenty-hour check ride on June 20, 1941, had been given by a Marine major named Gregory Boyington, who would go on to become the famous Congressional Medal of Honor–winning fighter pilot known more affectionately as “Pappy” Boyington.¹⁸

Rodenburg earned his Navy pilot wings on October 20, 1941, and was soon part of the advanced carrier training group based at the NAS on North Island in San Diego. He and his fellow trainees were still learning the Dauntless dive-bomber when Pearl Harbor was attacked. On a day off from flying in January 1942, “Rodey” Rodenburg was introduced to a young woman named Virginia Nell Tipsword. They were married weeks later on March 1.¹⁹

Rodenburg and three dozen rookie ACTG pilots were ordered to pack their bags and board Hornet on March 23. It would be a short cruise to qualify them in carrier landings under the tutelage of landing signal officer Lieutenant Ray Needham. For many of them, it was their first experience aboard a Navy vessel, much less the newest and largest aircraft carrier in the fleet.²⁰

Hornet put to sea and Lieutenant Needham took his post on the aft LSO platform with his circular paddles as eight SBDs were cued up for the rookies. A large group of bystanders gathered on the island structure (“Vulture’s Row”) to witness these takeoffs and landings. Lieutenant (j.g.) Paul Holmberg landed too far to port and his left wheel nearly dropped over the edge of the flight deck. Ensign Bob Edmondson smashed his SBD into the island structure and a crash barrier on his second landing. Ensign Ralph Goddard landed far right of center, crumpling his right wing and breaking a wheel shaft as his bomber dropped into a bank of antiaircraft guns.²¹

There were more crashes the next day and even planes that went over the side. Ensign Tom Durkin watched an escort destroyer rescue the second pilot to cartwheel his aircraft into the ocean. “Only two more, and they’ll have enough for bridge over there,” he said to his buddy Fred Mears.²²

Hornet returned to port after four days of breaking in the fleet’s newest replacement pilots. Their training was complete. The new boys knew they might never see their hometowns again. Jim Shelton, who hailed from Great Falls, Montana, spent his last free hours with pilot Freddy Mears discussing their situation in their favorite bar. Ensign Jim Dexter from Seattle pounded down 150-proof rum with his girlfriend while talking over their future together. Ensign Bill Pittman also spent his last hours ashore with his girlfriend, Natalie.

Pittman was twenty-four and held a degree from the University of Florida. The young officer’s rugged good looks could have turned heads with the local ladies in the clubs. But his heart had been won by young Natalie, whom he intended to marry after his tour of duty in the Pacific. As a naval reservist, he was not bound by the two years of nonmarried status that the academy men faced. Pittman enjoyed his time with his girlfriend but felt an obligation to let off some final steam with his ACTG buddies.

On the night before shipping out from Coronado, he joined Dexter, Mears, and Shelton to breeze through the last of their pocket money. Broke, they had to write a check for the taxicab back to base. En route, Pittman found one last dollar bill his pocket and the four ACTG buddies tore it into four parts. Each stuffed a quarter of the dollar bill into their wallets as a good-luck piece. “These talismans were not very effective,” wrote Mears. “Only two of us ever saw the States again.”²³

Stan Ring’s Hornet Air Group made final preparations to ship out to war. Five of the new ACTG pilots were added to Fighting Eight to help fill roster slots. For the moment, Hornet’s Scouting Eight and Bombing Eight had but twenty-four planes between them, and her Torpedo Eight had only ten TBDs.²⁴

The reason for the shorthanded torpedo and dive-bomber squadrons soon became apparent. Captain Marc Mitscher moved his carrier from San Diego to NAS Alameda in San Francisco on March 30. There, sixteen Army B-25 Mitchell medium bombers were hoisted on board and arranged over most of the flight deck. Hornet’s Task Force 18 sailed with her deck so loaded with Army planes that any fighters able to launch could not be recovered again. Scuttlebutt ran rampant about the big bombers being transported to the Pacific. Few on Hornet knew the truth—their carrier’s first war duty was to deliver Lieutenant Colonel James Henry “Jimmy” Doolittle’s B-25s directly to Tokyo!

• • •

Admiral Halsey’s Task Force 16 departed Pearl Harbor at noon on April 8 to rendezvous with Marc Mitscher’s inbound Hornet force. The Enterprise Air Group had new faces. Max Leslie’s Bombing Three landed on board that afternoon as the temporary replacements for Lieutenant Gallaher’s Scouting Six. Leslie had pulled half a dozen rookies from the first class of ACTG aviators—who had arrived in Hawaii in early March—to help fill out VB-3. Among them were John Bridgers and his fellow Tarheel buddy Carl Peiffer, both recommended to skipper Leslie by Lieutenant Robin Lindsey based on their aptitude at Kaneohe. Bridgers made his flight out to the Big E as rear seat passenger in the SBD flown by Ensign Bob Elder.²⁵

Elder had been assigned to Bombing Three in June 1941, after earning his wings at Pensacola. He had been running track at his Milwaukie, Oregon, high school in 1935 when a Boeing F4B landed on the football field. The recruiting pilot who climbed out of the cockpit had already completed his mission. Elder never even considered another career path after that day.²⁶

During his carrier qualifications, Elder had to return with his SBC-4 to NAS San Diego due to engine problems. Once the engine was fixed, Elder jumped into his cockpit and flew out to sea to make his first carrier landing on Saratoga. His virgin foray into the groove was a success, but Elder was startled to suddenly see his rear canopy slide forward. Instead of the expected load of sandbags in his passenger seat, out climbed an Army colonel, a guest of skipper Max Leslie.²⁷

“Well done, lad.” The colonel grinned. “My first experience of landing on an aircraft carrier.”

“Mine too, sir!” quipped the young pilot.

Bob Elder proceeded to prove his merit as a first-class dive-bomber pilot in the months that followed. His attitude was all business when word made the rounds about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now we’re going to do what we were trained for, he thought. His part in the war effort had been sidelined by Saratoga’s torpedo damage in January. At long last, Elder and his untested fellow VB-3 pilots were at sea on Enterprise, heading straight for Japan.²⁸

Customarily, the captain or Admiral Halsey would offer some inkling of their mission over the ship’s intercom, but this night was different. No details were given after dinner on the first evening at sea. Most decided that the Enterprise air group was destined for some top-secret, highly important strike. So the rumormongers will have a field day, thought Bombing Six’s Jim Murray.²⁹

Enterprise made this war cruise with the unique distinction of sporting two dive-bombing squadrons—VB-3 and VB-6—and no scouting squadron. Lieutenant Best had made the most of his weeks at Oahu, and now at sea, he continued training his new Bombing Six replacement pilots.

Among them was Ensign Lewis Hopkins from the small farming community of Luthersville, Georgia. “Everybody was dirt-poor,” he said. “You didn’t know it because everybody was the same way.” Hopkins worked the hard life of a farmer’s son and completed high school by age fifteen. He worked his way through Berry College in Rome, Georgia, and graduated in 1939. Hopkins went to work for Sears, Roebuck in Atlanta and then as a junior salesman with the Royal Typewriter Company before joining the Navy in 1940.³⁰

He completed his training in September 1941, and was among the ACTG pilots shipped to Pearl Harbor on the first of March. Temporarily assigned to VB-3 at Kaneohe, Hopkins joined Enterprise’s Bombing Six just before the ship departed Hawaii for Tokyo. He found his new squadron to be quite experienced. His new skipper, Dick Best, was a “wonderful guy” who “was so interested in each of us becoming proficient.”

On the morning of April 13, Hornet’s task force appeared on the horizon, her deck crowded with the Army B-25s. As Dick Best returned from a search flight, he could not tell what was on the carrier’s flight deck. It looks like construction equipment, odd shapes, maybe tractors, he thought at first. From his rear seat, Jim Murray realized the shapes were large Army bombers. He assumed the new carrier was ferrying them to some advance base. One thing is for sure, Murray thought. Once they leave that flight deck they are not going to land back on board.³¹

Admiral Bill Halsey finally dispelled all rumors that evening by announcing that the task force was proceeding to a point five hundred miles east of Tokyo. There, Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s would be launched to bomb the Japanese mainland. “Halsey even said that a medal given to him by the Japanese government was being returned to them, strapped to one of the bombs that would be dropped,” said Murray. “With that, the crew went wild.”³²

• • •

The Tokyo-bound carriers crossed the international date line en route and skipped April 14. A strong storm was encountered on April 17, which helped to mask their approach. The Doolittle raiders were scheduled to launch the following day against mainland Japan.

The weather had grown noticeably colder, and the aircrews drew winter clothing to help keep them more comfortable on their scouting flights. Radioman Ed Anderson was well pleased with a package he received while Enterprise was refueling at sea. In it was a sweater knitted for him by a woman with the local Red Cross unit back home. “It couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment,” he wrote in his diary.³³

Lieutenant (j.g.) Ozzie Wiseman.

U.S. Navy

Enterprise conducted all the flight duties on the morning of April 18. Heavy seas caused water to cascade across her flight deck as the morning CAP fighters launched at 0508. They were followed by three SBDs of VB-3—piloted by Lieutenant (j.g.) Osborne “Ozzie” Wiseman, Ensign Charlie Lane, and Ensign Oley Hanson—to conduct a two-hundred-mile search to the west. A fourth Dauntless piloted by Ensign John “J. Q.” Roberts was launched for an inner-air patrol to the westward.

It would be an eventful day, to say the least.

At 0558, Wiseman sighted a small patrol craft forty-two miles from Enterprise. In accordance with his orders, he did not attack. He returned to the ship and dropped a beanbag message reporting his contact and stating that he believed he had been sighted by the vessel. At 0738, Hornet lookouts also spotted the ninety-ton whale catcher No. 23 Nitto Maru just ten miles away. The little Japanese picket boat spoiled Admiral Halsey’s element of surprise by sending out radio reports of American carriers approaching. By 0744, Enterprise lookouts had also spotted Nitto Maru, just five miles off her port quarter.³⁴

Halsey detailed the cruiser Nashville to sink the boat and passed orders to Captain Mitscher on Hornet to prepare his Army B-25s for launching immediately. Jimmy Doolittle’s pilots were now forced to fly some 650 miles in to their target instead of the four hundred miles planned.

The Enterprise SBDs found plenty of action with several picket boats as the B-25 crews hustled to begin taking off. Wildcats from Fighting Six began strafing Nitto Maru and a second vessel, the eighty-eight-ton converted fishing boat Nanshin Maru. The second boat had been spotted by J. Q. Roberts of VB-3 about twenty miles from Enterprise at 0745. Roberts tried to dive on the 125-foot-long metal boat but had to abort his first run when an F4F got in his way. On his second approach, his five-hundred-pound bomb sailed about a hundred feet over the target. Roberts and AMM2c Clarence Zimmershead in his rear seat both stitched the vessel with bullets.³⁵

Ed Anderson was sitting in the rear seat of his 6-B-12 on the flight deck. The little Japanese picket boat was barely visible to him on the horizon. Anderson, manning the machine guns while the ship was at general quarters, watched the cruiser Nashville turn and open fire at 0823. The Nashville is really throwing a lot of steel, he thought. Jim Murray was equally surprised when the cruiser opened fire. He had been seated in his SBD’s rear cockpit, hoping to tune in to a Japanese radio station with his radio direction finder. The luckless Nanshin Maru was pounded under the waves in short order as Anderson and Murray watched.³⁶

Bud Merrill of Bombing Three was topside as Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders began lifting off Hornet’s flight deck shortly after 0900. He saw the seventh big Army B-25, piloted by Lieutenant Ted Lawson, dip below the flight deck and then slowly crawl for altitude. On Hornet, Ensign Ben Tappan watched the launch from a flight deck gun tub with VS-8 buddy Helmuth “Lefty” Hoerner. Tappan had to jump up and down to maintain his view as the carrier pitched in the heavy gale. John Bridgers felt that all of them rushed to get into the air. He was surprised none of them hit the rising bow as they pulled up early.³⁷

By 0920, the last of the sixteen Army bombers was lumbering toward Tokyo. Admiral Halsey promptly turned his task force around and increased speed to twenty-five knots. The next two hours passed quietly, as both carriers dispatched fighters and patrol planes. At 1130, Enterprise additionally sent out thirteen Dauntlesses to patrol astern two hundred miles. Of this group, ensigns Bob Elder, Bob Campbell, and Johnny Butler of VB-3 were sent out singly to search to the southwest. Another group, Lieutenant Ralph Arndt of VB-3 with VB-6 ensigns Tom Ramsay and Tony Schneider, was sent to attack enemy surface vessels reported about fifty-eight miles from the carriers.³⁸

Twenty minutes after taking off, Campbell made two glide-bombing attacks on a 150-foot gray picket vessel. His bomb missed but he and gunner Harman Bennett took turns strafing the little vessel. At 1226, Arndt, Ramsay, and Schneider attacked another Japanese picket, a single motor patrol boat about seventy-five feet long with one radio mast. “I didn’t sink him but I lifted him out of the water and reversed his course,” said Schneider.³⁹

At 1245, Johnny Butler made three glide bombing attacks on a 125-foot metal vessel towing a small white boat. Between their bombs and bullets he and gunner David Berg sank the towed boat, collecting three small-caliber bullets in their SBD in the process. Task force lookouts spotted more Japanese patrol vessels near the retiring carriers at 1400, and Enterprise fighter planes and returning scouts continued to pound them. Lieutenant Andy Anderson and gunner Stuart Mason bombed and then strafed one little vessel. Their Bombing Six skipper, Dick Best, even joined in on the action. He and his gunner, Jim Murray, never used seniority to skip out on routine flight duties. Best also preferred that no one else fly his 6-B-1 command Dauntless, so he took part in whatever mission was launched based on where his plane was spotted on deck.⁴⁰

Best attacked a forty-foot Japanese trawler in his search sector, trying to hit the careening small ship by throwing his five-hundred-pound bomb at the last second. It fell short, and Best was further frustrated when his forward guns jammed and prevented him from even firing back at the bow gunner on the vessel.⁴¹

Murray in his rear seat saw that some of the patrol boats they passed over had radios and even guns on board. The temptation was too much for him.

“Captain, can I take a few shots at these boats?” he asked.

“No!” Lieutenant Best snapped.

Murray eventually decided his skipper was correct in not chancing the loss of their plane to such minor targets. But at the moment, he was left smarting. At the Marshalls, skipper Holly Hollingsworth had denied Murray the chance to shoot up two Mavis flying boats sitting on a seaplane ramp. I may go through this war without ever getting a chance to fire my guns at the enemy, he thought.

Ed Anderson had better luck with his pilot. He called over the intercom to Ensign Hopkins, “Let’s get in on the fun!”

Hopkins dived in and sprayed a Japanese trawler with his .50-calibers. He then made a hard right turn to bring Anderson’s .30-calibers to bear. “I poured 200 rounds of incendiary bullets from stem to stern in that Jap sampan,” he wrote. The seas were so rough when Hopkins landed back on Enterprise that the impact buckled the body of his Dauntless. The landing gear was damaged enough that Hopkins and Anderson’s bomber would be out of commission for days.⁴²

Lieutenant Lloyd Smith participated in the strafing, but suffered the misfortune of an accurate Japanese machine gunner who hit his 6-B-4 square in the engine. Smith nursed his SBD back to the task force and made a forced water landing at 1503. The cruiser Nashville, in the area to help shoot up the picket boats, picked up Smith and AMM1c Herman Caruthers within fifteen minutes.⁴³

Doolittle’s B-25 pilots reached Tokyo, bombing industrial and military targets near the port. Ensign Stanley Holm of VS-8 knew that they had made it when the Tokyo radio station went off the air. Holm was standing in Hornet’s Air Plot, which was so crowded that he could hardly move about. The long-term damage was not significant, but the use of long-range bombers fooled and completely shocked the Japanese. Enterprise’s pilots and the cruiser Nashville had also finished off five Imperial Navy picket boats, at the cost of one SBD lost.⁴⁴

Hornet and Enterprise rotated flight duty each day as they retired toward Pearl Harbor. During one of Enterprise’s down days, Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie took the opportunity to carrier-qualify some of his rookie pilots, including Frank O’Flaherty, Johnny Lough, John Bridgers, and Carl Peiffer. Vulture Row had a larger-than-usual crowd of onlookers gathered to watch from the walkways and in the gun sponsons on the island. The rookies were on the money this day, as they became qualified for carrier operations as dive-bomber pilots.⁴⁵

Bombing Three’s only plane loss of the trip came on April 20 during the return of her dozen morning scout bombers. Ensign Liston “Larry” Comer, an ACTG new boy from California, lost control and his SBD plunged over the port side. He and his gunner, AMM1c J. A. Browning, launched their rubber raft and were quickly picked up unhurt by the destroyer Ellet.

Hornet’s Bombing Eight was less fortunate the following day, when Lieutenant (j.g.) Gardner Durfee Randall became lost during his scouting mission. Randall made a water landing about a hundred yards from the destroyer Meredith. He and his gunner, RM2c Thomas Alvin Gallagher, were unable to escape their sinking plane and thus became VB-8’s first wartime casualties.

• • •

On April 25, the carriers entered Pearl Harbor. The Enterprise Air Group flew ahead to Ford Island, while the Hornet Air Group landed at Ewa Field. Ed Anderson had finally gotten in a full month of flying during the trip and had logged his first thirty-five hours of carrier flight duty. He had gotten little sleep, so the three days of R & R at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel were appreciated. “I had a good time,” he wrote. “Plenty of good chow and a bottle of good scotch.”⁴⁶

Max Leslie’s VB-3 would remain ashore in Hawaii, after having spelled Earl Gallaher’s Scouting Six during the delivery of Doolittle’s Tokyo raiders. Lieutenant Gallaher and his XO, Dick Dickinson, were frustrated by the time Scouting Six finally reported back to Enterprise. Near the end of April, they had but four SBDs remaining under their charge. “Fourteen more were issued to us,” said Dickinson. “We labored mightily getting them to satisfy our finicky taste.” Once they were almost satisfied, their planes were pulled out from under them and assigned to another squadron. “We swore and grumbled, drew eighteen more and worked on those all night, only to have them taken away,” Dickinson wrote.⁴⁷

As equally troubling as obtaining aircraft for Gallaher and Dickinson was the fact that Scouting Six had only seven other veteran pilots by late April. By month’s end, they would inherit a dozen new pilots. The most experienced of the newbies were Carl Peiffer, John Roberts, Frank O’Flaherty, and Johnny Lough, who had been temporarily assigned to Leslie’s VB-3 for the Doolittle mission. Scouting Six’s other eight new pilots—Eldor “Rodey” Rodenburg, Bill Pittman, Clarence Vammen, Jim Dexter, Tom Durkin, Dick Jaccard, Jim Shelton, and Vernon Larsen “Mike” Micheel—had never spent time at sea on a carrier.

The latter eight were among thirty-four pilots of the second ACTG class to reach Pearl Harbor. The group had boarded the transport President Hoover at San Diego on April 8, and arrived in Pearl Harbor on April 16. Rodey Rodenburg was disturbed by the sight of the capsized battleship Oklahoma. He would long be bothered by the thoughts he had of the sailors who perished when their warship had rolled over. One of his companions, Mike Micheel, quickly got over his initial wave of sadness at seeing the battered American shipping, replaced by desire to exact revenge on the Japanese.⁴⁸

Ensign Micheel, a former Iowa dairy farmer, had entered the Navy’s flight program in 1940, when he learned of his impending draft. He was still in ACTG training at North Island when the war started. Micheel was in danger of washing out after cracking up an SNJ trainer in December. His senior training officer grounded him from flying for three weeks.⁴⁹

The thirty-two new pilots were moved to NAS Kaneohe and then farmed, based upon their training, to various carrier squadrons in need of replacements. Eight went to Gallaher’s Scouting Six. During the shuffling of pilots, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bill Hall was transferred to Lexington’s VS-2. Hall, who had attacked the Gilberts with Yorktown’s VS-5 and had most recently flown from Enterprise for the Wake and Marcus strikes, was something of a grizzled veteran. He became known as “Pappy” to his new VS-2 comrades.⁵⁰

Earl Gallaher worked with the ACTG arrivals who joined his VS-6 ashore. Two of Gallaher’s new recruits, Bill Pittman and Dick Jaccard, had been carrier-qualified on Saratoga at the start of the war. “Our individual flight time totaled about four hundred and fifty hours, with each having four to six carrier landings,” Pittman said. “Since we had no previous combat nor definite fear of what war was like, we were more interested in adventure. It was apparent that as young ensigns, we were not thinking beyond each day.”⁵¹

Gallaher was only too happy when Enterprise put to sea for training on April 30 and his Scouting Six returned home. During the previous week, a VT-6 enlisted man had slugged a shore patrol officer while drunk and caused a mess of Navy routine and paperwork. Dusty Kleiss, for one, reflected of his squadron’s return to Enterprise: “The stupid court-martial and training of new pilots and alerts have worn us out, although this was supposed to be a rest. Back to ship and damn glad of it.”⁵²

While the new boys were being checked out, the old boys enjoyed a bit of a breather. Lieutenant Charlie Ware, VS-6’s third senior pilot, took the chance to write to his grandmother while the Big E was at sea for training. Nearly eight years out of the Naval Academy, he joked to her, “I’d better start looking around for a wife and some kids—or some kids and a wife.” Ware asked his grandmother to “scout around the hills a bit” in Tennessee for “a good-looking widow with some insurance.”⁵³

Enterprise and Hornet both conducted training exercises northwest of Oahu. Mike Micheel found himself rooming with Bill Pittman, who had been on Enterprise at the start of the war but still had no combat experience either. Micheel was also happy to be reunited with Johnny Lough, with whom he had gone through flight school since their preflight days in Iowa.⁵⁴

Gallaher and his fellow squadron commanders began carrier-qualifying their newest pilots the next morning. The rookies made a series of landings and takeoffs on April 30 in order to prove their abilities. For Ensign Micheel, it had been a month since he had made his four qualification landings on board Hornet. Micheel’s log showed that he had a cumulative 371.9 hours of flight time in his career when he became fully qualified that day.⁵⁵

Johnny Lough was the only one to smash up an SBD. The fuselage of his 6-S-2 broke at the forward cockpit, releasing two parachute flares that burned fiercely on the flight deck. Neither Lough nor gunner Johnny Snowden was injured.⁵⁶

Once the “car-qual” process was completed, the Hornet and Enterprise aviators learned that they would not be returning to Pearl Harbor again. Their task force was instead ordered into the South Pacific. On board Enterprise were twenty-one Wildcat fighters of Marine VMF-212, destined for delivery at an advanced Pacific base. The Dauntless squadrons of the two flattops rotated daily scouting duties as they moved toward Palmyra Atoll. Dispatches were received from Rear Admiral Fletcher’s Task Force 17 about carrier strikes having been carried out on Tulagi Harbor in the Solomons. Admiral Halsey realized that action was brewing in the Coral Sea, and he raised the speed of the Enterprise and Hornet force to race toward what he hoped to be a rendezvous with Imperial Japanese Navy forces.⁵⁷