3

The Brown Shoe Navy

And what of the American carriers? Where were they during this rampage by the Kidō Butai? In January of 1942 there were three American carriers in the Pacific. Two of them were big, oversize carriers equivalent to the Japanese Kaga and Akagi—and for much the same reason. They had been laid down as battle cruisers in 1916 as part of America’s buildup for possible involvement in World War I. By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, it had become clear that the most urgent need was for destroyers to protect the convoys, and the United States halted work on the big warships to concentrate on escorts. When the war ended, their big hulls lay unfinished on the building ways. American sponsorship of the 1922 Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty made it clear that they would never be completed as battle cruisers, and like the Japanese, the U.S. converted two of them into carriers, naming them for battles of the American Revolution: the Lexington (CV-2) and the Saratoga (CV-3). At 50,000 tons each, they were even larger than Kaga and Akagi and capable of carrying as many as ninety airplanes each.*

In addition to these two behemoths, the United States had five other carriers on the Navy List. Two of them, Ranger (CV-4) and Wasp (CV-7), were smaller ships, generally equivalent to the Japanese Sōryū and Hiryū, but three of them, Yorktown (CV-5), Enterprise (CV-6), and Hornet (CV-8), were all relatively new, purpose-built carriers that displaced just under 20,000 tons empty and about 25,500 tons with their embarked air group of 60 to 80 planes, which made them roughly comparable to the Japanese Shōkaku and Zuikaku.

Had all five of America’s big carriers been deployed as a unit, they would have made a worthy opponent for the Kidō Butai. The United States, however, faced a two-ocean war, and consequently only one of those new carriers—the Enterprise—was in the Pacific. Until April 1941, the Yorktown had been there too, but that month Roosevelt had ordered her to the Atlantic to beef up the so-called neutrality patrols against Nazi U-boats. For its part, the Hornet was so new that, although she was commissioned in October, six weeks before Pearl Harbor, her final fitting-out kept her in Norfolk, Virginia, until March of 1942. In addition, both of the smaller carriers (Ranger and Wasp) were also in the Atlantic. Until the Yorktown returned to the Pacific and the Hornet was fitted out, Nimitz would have only three carriers: the Lexington and Saratoga, and the smaller but newer Enterprise.¹

Nimitz kept them busy, putting each at the center of a task force that conducted nearly constant patrols north, west, and south of Hawaii. In addition to the carrier, each task force had two or three cruisers and a squadron of destroyers to provide a screen, plus a fleet oiler to keep the warships (especially the fuel-guzzling destroyers) under way. A task force of one carrier, three cruisers, and six destroyers burned up 5,800 barrels of oil every day—and more when conducting high-speed flight operations. Throughout the Pacific War, fought as it was over a huge expanse of ocean, it was critical for both sides to pay close attention to the fueling needs of their warships; the loss of an oiler could severely restrict the operating capabilities of an entire task force.²

The commanding officers of these task forces were a disparate lot, and only one of them was a brown shoe. When Congress created the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAir) in 1921, it had mandated that all Navy flight squadrons were to be commanded by qualified pilots. In addition, a Navy board had recommended (but did not require) that only qualified aviators should command carriers. Because of that, a number of ambitious black-shoe officers, including several who were quite senior, applied for pilot training in order to have access to these new commands. Veteran pilots considered them opportunists and scornfully referred to them as “Johnny-come-latelys.” Even worse, from their point of view, other senior officers who never completed pilot training at all still managed to qualify for carrier command by going through a four-week familiarization program in Pensacola, Florida, to become “naval observers.” These men wore silver wings rather than gold, and though they were not certified to fly, they were authorized to command flight units, including carriers. Behind their backs, the pilots called them “kiwis” after the flightless New Zealand bird. Opportunism and careerism may have been factors for many, but some Johnny-come-latelys underwent a genuine conversion. One who did was William F. Halsey.³

Halsey graduated from the Naval Academy in 1904, three years behind King and a year ahead of Nimitz. Like most officers of his generation, he had spent most of his career as a surface warfare officer, serving aboard the battleship Kansas during the world-circling cruise of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet in 1907–9, and commanding destroyers during World War I. He commanded several more destroyers after the war until he was assigned to the Naval Academy in 1927 to take charge of the Reina Mercedes, a prize from the Spanish-American War that the Navy had turned into a training vessel for midshipmen. In that capacity, Halsey was responsible for all of the Academy’s floating property, including its small seaplane squadron. Eager to learn something about this new service, he asked the squadron’s young commander, Lieutenant Dewitt “Duke” Ramsey, to take him on a flight. More flights followed, some with Captain Halsey at the controls. “My whole naval career changed right then,” Halsey wrote later. “I became fascinated with it…. Soon I was eating, drinking, and breathing aviation.” Halsey was so excited by the potential of this new service that he applied for flight training at the end of his Naval Academy tour. He was hugely disappointed when he failed the eye test.⁴

After a year as a student at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and another at the Army War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., Halsey received an offer from King, then serving as chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, to command the carrier Saratoga if he completed the short observer’s course at Pensacola. Once he got there, however, Halsey managed to get himself transferred into the full pilot training program despite his age and his poor eyesight; he earned his gold wings as a 52-year-old grandfather. In January of 1942, he was the only vice admiral in the Navy who was a naval aviator. Officially he was commander, Aircraft Battle Force; operationally, he was the commanding officer of Task Force 8, built around the carrier Enterprise. Halsey did not command the ship itself—that responsibility fell to the ship’s captain, George D. Murray, a career naval aviator who had earned his gold wings in 1915. Murray was responsible for the day-to-day management of the vessel and its crew. Halsey was a kind of passenger on the Enterprise, having a suite of rooms known as flag quarters in the island amidships, and dispensing orders through a staff.

 Vice Admiral William F. Halsey sports gold wings on the breast of his forest-green aviator’s uniform. Note the cigarette in his right hand. (U.S. Naval Institute)

As a midshipman at the Academy, Halsey had played fullback on the football team and he possessed something of a fullback’s attitude. He was direct, often blunt, occasionally profane, and utterly fearless. Some thought his facial features resembled those of a bulldog, and not only did that give him his nickname, it added to his reputation for ferocity. To balance that, he was outgoing and gregarious, a bit of a showman and, like Yamamoto, willing to speak his mind openly. Once the war began, he became a favorite of newspaper reporters, who counted on him to provide some fiery rhetoric for their columns. He seldom let them down. After Pearl Harbor, he claimed that he had always distrusted “Japs,” and vowed that by the time he was through with them, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.⁵

The most senior of Nimitz’s task-force commanders was Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, who was in charge of Task Force 11, built around the big carrier Lexington. Brown was three years older than Halsey or Nimitz, having graduated from the Academy in the class of 1902. Brown was, in the words of one modern scholar, “an intelligent paragon of old school formality.” In the 1902 yearbook, Lucky Bag, his classmates described him as “modest and unassuming … with a sweet voice and a sweeter smile.” In short, he was a dramatic contrast to Halsey in almost every way. Like Halsey, however, Brown had started out in destroyers and commanded the destroyer Parker in the First World War. After the war, while Halsey was still commanding destroyers, Brown occupied a series of staff positions, including a tour as naval aide to President Calvin Coolidge. When Halsey underwent flight training, Brown remained in the black-shoe community and commanded the battleship California, then served a tour as the superintendent of the Naval Academy, a position in which his headmasterly qualities served him well. In February of 1941, ten months before Pearl Harbor, he was promoted to vice admiral and made commanding officer of the Scouting Force. His health was suspect. Though only a few years older than Nimitz and Halsey, he looked at least a decade older. Thin and pallid, he had a slight tremor that caused his head to twitch, leading irreverent junior officers to dub him “Shaky” Brown. As events would show, he was an intelligent and thoughtful officer, but he lacked the boldness and the energetic self-confidence of Bull Halsey.⁶

The third of Nimitz’s task-force commanders was Rear Admiral Herbert Fairfax Leary, who commanded the Saratoga group, dubbed Task Force 14. Leary was another black shoe, a 1905 classmate of Nimitz, a tall, thin, lantern-jawed man whose tenure was destined to be short. On January 11, a month after Pearl Harbor, the Saratoga was operating near Johnston Island five hundred miles southwest of Hawaii in seas so rough that Leary cancelled flight operations for the day. Waves broke over the bow and washed the flight deck. At 7:00 that evening, in the midst of the storm, a terrific explosion jolted the big carrier. A pilot on board said, “It felt like the whole ship had been moved about five feet.” A Japanese submarine, the I-6, had slipped through the screen of cruisers and destroyers and delivered a deadly Type 95 torpedo. The blast killed six men and flooded three fire rooms. Though the Japanese submarine skipper reported to Tokyo that he had sunk a Saratoga-class carrier, the big flattop managed to stay afloat and steam back to Pearl Harbor under her own power, arriving on January 15. Nimitz saw that the necessary repairs could not be completed in Hawaii and two days later reluctantly ordered her back to Bremerton, Washington.⁷

That loss would have reduced Nimitz to only two carrier groups but for the return to the Pacific that same week of the USS Yorktown. After Pearl Harbor, Yorktown had been rushed into dry dock in Norfolk for a quick overhaul, and by December 16 she was en route back to the Pacific. After passing through the Panama Canal, she arrived in San Diego at the end of the month. There she joined the heavy cruiser Louisville, a light cruiser, and half a dozen destroyers, plus the essential oiler, to comprise Task Force 17. To command this new task force, Nimitz picked a man he knew well and who had commanded the Saratoga task force during the aborted relief expedition to Wake Island: Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.

Fletcher was yet another black shoe, having served in cruisers and destroyers for most of his thirty-six-year career. Graduating from the Naval Academy in 1906, one year after Nimitz and two years after Halsey, Fletcher had been a cruiser and battleship man from the start; his most recent sea service was the command of Cruiser Division 6. Called “Fletch” or “Flap Jack” while at the Academy, he had what the Lucky Bag called “a sunny disposition” and the habit of gesturing with his hands while talking. He was well decorated, having received a Medal of Honor as a lieutenant during the Navy’s expedition to Vera Cruz in 1914 (an honor somewhat diluted by the fact that the Navy had handed out no fewer than fifty-five Medals of Honor for that expedition, passing them out, as one critic put it, “like crackerjack charms”). More important was the fact that Fletcher was well connected. He had served as naval aide to Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson in the early 1930s and as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation under Nimitz in the late ’30s. A biographer concedes that Fletcher’s “personal connections with the decision-makers of the war set him ahead of others for important assignments.” It was natural that the brown-shoe pilots on the Yorktown would feel an intense curiosity about their new boss.⁸

What they saw was an unremarkable man with a plain, open face, thinning dark hair, a generous nose, and dark eyes. Fletcher was neither flamboyant and outgoing like Halsey nor reserved and professorial like Wilson Brown. He was instead a straightforward, competent professional whose tight-lipped expression suggested the no-nonsense skepticism of a Midwestern farmer, which was fitting, as he had been born and reared in Iowa. He even smoked corncob pipes that he had shipped to him from the States a dozen at a time. Reporters seldom badgered him for interviews because he was not inclined to bloodthirsty pronouncements. Given his long service in battleships and cruisers, Fletcher would have preferred to make the heavy cruiser Louisville his flagship, but Nimitz wanted his task-force commanders to ride the carrier, and so in San Diego on New Year’s Day, 1942 (the day after Nimitz took formal command in Pearl Harbor), the black shoe Fletcher broke his flag on USS Yorktown. Fletcher may have felt somewhat out of place on board the big flattop. One historian suggests that “he was the proverbial stranger in a strange land.”⁹

 Though Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher was a “black shoe” admiral—a surface warfare specialist—he commanded U.S. forces in both of the major carrier battles of the first six months of the Pacific war: Coral Sea and Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The captain of the Yorktown was 52-year-old Elliott Buckmaster. Tall and handsome, Buckmaster was also quiet and reserved, even cold—though, as with Nimitz, that first impression often changed after close association. Buckmaster was a brown shoe with gold wings on his chest, but he was also a Johnny-come-lately, having passed the aviation course only five years before as a full commander. His first aviation assignment had been as executive officer (second in command) on the Lexington, and he had little experience as a carrier pilot. Perhaps because of this, the Yorktown’s executive officer, Commander Joseph “Jocko” Clark, who did have significant flight experience, was skeptical of both his commanding officer and the task-force commander. An acolyte of Ernie King, Clark thought that Fletcher and Buckmaster failed to enforce the kind of discipline he admired. That assessment, however, said more about Clark than it did about either Fletcher or Buckmaster. Clark found a lot to complain about on the Yorktown, writing later, “Yorktown’s hopeless department heads needed a lot of King’s brand of discipline.” It was probably just as well that Clark did not stay long on the Yorktown, though when he returned to Washington after his promotion to captain, he continued to disparage the Yorktown and her officers, including Fletcher, and over the subsequent months his comments very likely affected King’s assessment of both the ship and the task-force commander.¹⁰

Nimitz had hoped that the arrival of the Yorktown would give him four carrier groups, and the ability to begin a meaningful counterattack against the Japanese, but the loss of the Saratoga meant that he would have to carry on with only three: the big Lexingtonand the newer sister ships, Enterprise and Yorktown.¹¹

On board those three carriers, the Americans, like the Japanese, relied on three kinds of combat airplanes. The workhorse American carrier bomber was the SBD Douglas Dauntless, a relatively new (1940) monoplane with a crew of two: a pilot in the front seat, almost always a commissioned officer, and an enlisted radioman/gunner who sat behind him and was responsible for communications as well as a .30-caliber machine gun, later increased to movable twin machine guns. Compared with the Japanese Val dive-bomber, the Dauntless was both bigger and sturdier, and its pilots referred to it affectionately as “the barge.” Though the Dauntless was 25 percent heavier than the Val (thanks in part to its armor protection), it nevertheless had a slightly greater range because of its more powerful engine. It could also carry a bigger bomb load, consisting of either one 1,000-pound bomb or a 500-pound bomb plus two 100-pound bombs under the wings. The Dauntless was marginally faster than the Val, though slower than Japanese fighters. Officially, its top speed was 217 knots (250 mph), but it cruised at 130 knots (152 mph) and attained maximum speed only during an attack dive, when it might reach 250 knots (288 mph). (Its pilots joked that SBD stood for “Slow but Deadly.”) The Dauntless also boasted two .50-caliber machine guns in the cowling, and on occasion it was used to augment the combat air patrol (CAP).¹²

The idea behind dive-bombing was for the pilot to approach his intended target at high altitude, say 20,000 feet, and preferably from out of the sun to avoid detection. To spot the target, the SBD had a small glass window in the floor beneath the pilot’s seat, although it was rarely usable due to oil thrown off by the plane’s engine. After lining up on the target as best he could, the squadron leader deployed perforated “dive brakes” on the trailing edge of his wings and went into a steep dive, around 70 degrees, with the pilots of his squadron following his lead. During the dive, the pilots felt weightless, “like you were floating,” as one put it. The Dauntless did not have shoulder straps, only a seat belt, so it was “like you were hanging out on a string.” Between 2,000 and 1,500 feet, the pilot released his bomb by pulling back on a bomb release lever. When he did that, it was instinctive to pull back on the control stick at the same time, and that often threw the bomb off line. To prevent this, newer SBDs were equipped with an electric trigger that allowed the pilot to release the bomb merely by pushing a button on top of the control stick. Then he pulled out of the dive, usually doing a “snap pullout” that sometimes resulted in his briefly blacking out.¹³

Dive bombing an enemy ship that was twisting and turning at 25 or 30 knots was, as one pilot recalled, “similar to dropping a marble from eye height on a scampering cockroach.” It was especially difficult because often during these steep dives, the windscreen would fog up at about 8,000 feet, all but obscuring the target. One pilot said it was “like putting a white sheet in front of you and you have to bomb from memory.” “Believe me,” he recalled, “that’s a helpless feeling when you try to dive bomb and [can] hardly see your target.” All in all, it was both a physical and mental challenge to dive almost three miles straight down at nearly three hundred miles an hour with a fogged windscreen and with the target ship throwing up a wall of antiaircraft fire.¹⁴

It was equally challenging for the enlisted man in the back seat, whose job during the dive was to call out the readings from the altimeter, especially important when the windscreen was fogged and the pilot could not see. The backseat crewman was also the radio operator and gunner. When the pilot released the bomb and pulled out of the dive, the rear-seat gunner was pushed down into his seat with, as one recalled, “a force of one ton at eight G’s,” or eight times the force of gravity. Nonetheless, he had plenty to do. “Then the pilot tells you to go on the air, or switch to the homing frequency, or give hand signals to nearby crews in Morse code. All of this requires securing the guns, reaching forward, changing radio coils, and moving dials accurately and quickly.” Morse-code messages were sent by hand signal in order to maintain radio silence. The radiomen/gunners smacked their palm with their fist for a dot and slapped open handed for a dash. Those in nearby planes had to watch this and translate to their pilots. It required both intense concentration and a strong stomach to perform all these tasks flawlessly.¹⁵

Dauntless dive-bombers made up about half of an American carrier’s complement of sixty to eighty airplanes and were divided into two squadrons: one was officially a “scouting squadron” and the other a “bombing squadron.” Each squadron carried a numerical designation that bound the pilots, gunners, and crew into a unit. Every American air squadron was first designated by the letter V (which simply meant that it involved heaVier-than-air aircraft). The scouting squadron bore the additional designation S and the bombing squadron B, followed by the hull number of the carrier to which it was assigned. Thus the scouting squadron on the Lexington (CV-2) was VS-2, and the bombing squadron was VB-2. Colloquially, these units were known as “Scouting Two” and “Bombing Two.”

The men in these units developed a bond akin to the men in an infantry company, though the fact that the pilots were mostly officers and the rear-seat gunners were all enlisted men sometimes made for an awkward partnership. While in the air, the junior officer pilots depended heavily on their enlisted gunners, literally trusting them with their lives, yet aboard ship they were all but strangers. The gunners never came into the wardroom and seldom ventured into the squadron ready rooms except for “special sessions.” They never played cards with the pilots or sat around with them to “shoot the shit.” In the air, the relationship was fraternal and interdependent; on the ship, each man went his separate way. The gunners called the pilots “sir” or “mister,” and the pilots referred to the gunners by their last names only. As one pilot put it, “Pilots were treated as one class, gunners were treated as another class.” Another recalled, “We hardly ever got to talk to our gunners until we were ready to climb into the cockpits.” If they accidentally ran into each other aboard ship, there might be a moment of awkwardness. One pilot recalled seeing a group of gunners reloading machine gun ammunition belts and noticed that their conversation became instantly more profane as if “they were trying to impress me with how tough they thought they were.”¹⁶

In addition to the scouting and bombing squadrons, each American carrier also had a torpedo plane squadron (whose designation was VT), though both the planes and the torpedoes they carried were markedly inferior to their Japanese counterparts. The plane was the TBD-1 Douglas Devastator, which like the Japanese Kate could be used either as a level bomber or a torpedo plane, in which role it carried the Mark 13 torpedo, a smaller aerial version of the trouble-plagued Mark 14 used by U.S. submarines. The Devastator had been designed and built in the 1930s for a crew of three: a pilot in front, an enlisted bombardier/navigator in the middle seat, and a radioman/gunner in the back. When carrying a torpedo, however, there was no need for a bombardier, and so the middle seat was often empty. The Devastator was state of the art when it had joined the fleet in 1937, but it was already nearing obsolescence by 1942. Heavy at 10,000 pounds, it was agonizingly slow. Officially, it had a top speed of 206 knots (237 mph), although in practice it seldom exceeded 160 knots (184 mph), and cruised at just over 100 knots (115 mph). One pilot claimed later that when carrying the 2,200-pound Mark 13 torpedo, the Devastator actually cruised at no more than 80 knots (92 mph) or “with the nose down maybe 100.” When climbing, the Devastator was even slower. One pilot joked that while carrying a torpedo in a climb, the Devastator “practically backs up.” Even at such slow speeds, the Devastator had a limited range of a little over 400 miles which meant, accounting for assembly time over the task force and maneuvering over the target, that it could attack only those targets within about 175 miles. That assumed that the pilot did not need to search for the target.¹⁷

To launch their cumbersome weapons, pilots of the Devastator torpedo plane flew to their intended target at a fairly low level, between 1,500 and 4,000 feet, then dropped even lower for the run into the target. At only 100 to 150 feet, they throttled back to near stalling speed to release their torpedo so that it did not break apart when it hit the water. The release was crucial, for if the torpedo hit the water with its nose down, it might dive too deep to have any effect; if it hit with the nose up, it could “porpoise” along the surface. Since the torpedoes ran at 33.5 knots, which was only marginally faster than the ships they targeted, it was essential for the pilot to come in fairly close before dropping his “fish.” Even then he had to lead the target a little, and since the target was also maneuvering, it often took more than one pass to get a satisfactory angle on the bow. It took great concentration and a cool disregard for danger to fly a Devastator into its target, or to man the rear-seat machine gun, sitting backward and fending off swarming enemy fighters while the pilot lined up for a shot.¹⁸

 A Douglas TBD Devastator from the Enterprise flies over Wake Island in 1942. The Devastator was both old and slow and therefore an easy target for the swift Japanese Zeros. (U.S. Naval Institute)

By far the most serious problem with American torpedo bombing, however, was the simple fact that, like the Mark 14 used by American submarines, the warheads on the Mark 13 did not always function as advertised, and the torpedoes themselves were so delicate that when dropped at an elevation above fifty feet or at a speed greater than 110 knots they could easily be damaged upon impact with the water, meaning that they would fail to work at all. These facts were overlooked for far too long—for several reasons. One was that, as with submarine skippers, the brass at BuOrd simply refused to believe that the weapon was flawed and attributed failures to bad shooting. A few Devastator pilots contributed to this conclusion by reporting that they had scored a hit with the Mark 13 torpedo when they had not. Pilots who saw the wake of their torpedo lead right into an enemy ship understandably reported a hit, and with bombs sometimes exploding all around the target at the same time, it was easy to conclude that one of the explosions was the result of a torpedo strike. Finally, analysts in Washington who examined the damage reports of American ships in Pearl Harbor knew full well that the Japanese had great success with their aerial torpedoes, and they were simply reluctant to believe that Japanese torpedo technology was superior. Devastator pilots and their gunners would pay a high price for this unwillingness to acknowledge a technical problem.

As for American fighter planes, they were still a work in progress in early 1942. The U.S. Navy had adopted its first single-seat monoplane fighter only three years earlier. It was the Brewster F2A, named the “Buffalo,” an appropriate designation given its aerodynamic performance. While an improvement over the Grumman F3F biplane that it replaced, it was small (5,000 pounds), stubby (26 feet long), and relatively slow for a fighter (260 knots, or 300 mph). After the Battle of Midway, one veteran pilot wrote in his after-action report that the Buffalo “is not a combat aeroplane…. Any commander that orders pilots out for combat in an F2A-3 should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground.” Though quite a few Buffaloes remained on active service when the war began—as did a number of Grumman biplanes—a newer plane, the Grumman F4F, called the “Wildcat,” replaced both models in early 1942. The F4F-3, which was the first version to reach the fleet, was longer (30 feet) and heavier (7,000 pounds) than the Buffalo, and, with a top speed of 287 knots (331 mph), much faster. Though it was still markedly inferior to the Japanese Zero in maneuverability, Navy pilots nevertheless liked the sturdy F4F-3, which had two .50-caliber machine guns in each wing.¹⁹

The designers were still tinkering. Within months, a newer version of the Wildcat, the F4F-4 (which the pilots called the “Dash 4”) came into service. The newer version had folding wings so that more of them could be fitted into the confined spaces on the hangar deck and more could be spotted on the flight deck for an attack. Moreover, instead of four machine guns, the Dash 4 Wildcat had six. As far as the pilots were concerned, however, these changes were a mixed blessing. The folding wings meant that about 50 percent more fighters could be placed on each carrier, thus increasing the size of the VF squadrons from eighteen to twenty-seven, which was good. However, a number of pilots remained suspicious of the whole concept of folding wings. After all, if the wings could be folded up, might they not come off altogether in flight? Furthermore, the folding apparatus and the two additional machine guns added about 1,000 pounds of weight to the Wildcats, which affected their speed and especially their climbing ability. While the lighter, unarmored Zeros could climb at a rate of 3,000 feet per minute, a Dash 4 Wildcat could climb at only about 1,000 feet per minute.* American fighter pilots therefore sought to avoid engagements with Zeros at low altitudes, where the Japanese had a clear advantage, and sought instead to come in high so they could dive on their prey. These factors would play an important role in the confrontation at Midway.²⁰

The two extra machine guns were even more problematical. American designers added the extra guns to allow European versions of the Wildcat (which the British called the Martlet) to compete with heavier German bombers and fighters and to increase the impact of strafing attacks against ground targets. Yet the extra firepower was overkill against the lighter, and mostly unarmored, Japanese planes. Worse, it severely restricted the length of time a Wildcat pilot could fire. The four guns in the earlier version each had a magazine of 450 rounds, but since those guns fired 700 to 750 rounds per minute, that gave the pilots only about thirty-five seconds of firepower before they expended all their ammo. In the newer Dash 4 version, despite the two extra guns, there was no increase in the size of the total magazine, and as a result pilots in an F4F-4 Wildcat could shoot for only about twenty seconds. Movie depictions of pilots boring in on a foe with guns blazing are pure fiction; the pilots had to hoard their few seconds of firepower for use only under the most ideal circumstances. Even when they fired in short two-second bursts, they risked running out of bullets. Moreover, there was no evidence that having two extra guns made the Wildcats any more lethal. As the commanding officer of VF-3, Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach, put it, “The pilot who would miss with four .50-caliber guns won’t be able to hit with eight. Increased firepower is not a substitute for marksmanship.” Another problem with the new fighters was that the ammo belts of .50-caliber bullets, loaded into trays in the wings, shifted around violently during the high-speed maneuvers necessary in aerial combat, and as a result the guns occasionally jammed. More than once a Wildcat pilot lined up for a shot and pulled the trigger only to find that nothing happened.²¹

The fighter pilots made some adjustments on their own. In late January, Lieutenant Jim Gray urged Wade McClusky, the commander of VF-6 on the Enterprise, to authorize the installation of a sheet of 3/8-inch boilerplate steel behind the pilot’s seat of the squadron’s Wildcats. McClusky agreed. Like the Marines in Iraq sixty years later who had to “up-armor” their Humvees themselves, the pilots of VF-6 installed their own armor. Eventually, armor plate behind the pilot’s seat became official and routine, but initially it was a pilot initiative. Gray soon had reason to be very pleased with his innovation.²²

Like the scouting and torpedo squadrons, the fighting squadrons “belonged” to the carrier they rode, though circumstances could lead to their being transferred from one ship to another. Before the Yorktown left Norfolk to return to the Pacific, her regular fighting squadron (VF-5) had gone ashore for training and was temporarily replaced by a squadron from the USS Ranger (CV-4), a much smaller carrier that would remain in the Atlantic for most of the war.* The replacement was supposed to be temporary but ended up being permanent, and as a result, in addition to Scouting Five (VS-5), Bombing Five (VB-5), and Torpedo Five (VT-5), the Yorktown also carried eighteen Dash 3 Wildcats of VF-42 under Lieutenant Commander Oscar “Pete” Pederson, who later became the commander of all the squadrons on the Yorktown, or CYAG (commander, Yorktown Air Group). Similarly, when the Saratoga headed back to the West Coast for repair in January, her fighter squadron (VF-3) joined the Lexington while the Lexingtons fighter squadron went ashore on Oahu for training. This willingness to treat air squadrons as interchangeable parts contrasted sharply with Japanese doctrine in which air squadrons were inextricably tied to their host carriers. This gave the Americans flexibility that the Japanese did not have and would pay important dividends in the battles to come.²³

The American VF, or fighting squadrons, had a slightly different culture from the bombing or torpedo squadrons. The Wildcat was a single-seat aircraft, so there were no enlisted backseat gunners, and in the air each pilot was on his own. As one pilot put it, “The fighter pilot is a lone shark. He flies by himself, he gets angry by himself, and he talks to himself.” Though all brown shoes had a kind of warrior’s flair due to the inherently dangerous nature of carrier flight operations, fighter pilots had a special swagger. All but seventeen of the 138 fighter pilots in the fleet were officers. A few were lieutenants or lieutenant commanders, including some graduates of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but most (70 percent) were lieutenants junior grade or ensigns, and most of those were products of the Naval Aviation Cadet (AVCAD) program.²⁴

The AVCAD program produced pilots for all of the Navy squadrons. To enroll, a candidate had to be between 18 and 26 years old, unmarried, and a high school graduate with two years of college (later in the war the Navy began accepting candidates right out of high school). In general, they were men of action rather than contemplation. They tended to be athletes—often in several sports—and greeted one another with wisecracks and backslaps. Needless to say, given the era, they were all white. One aviation cadet who went through the program in 1941 recalled “a heavy majority of Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage,” including a statistically disproportionate number of men with blue eyes. After passing a rigorous physical, they endured a short boot camp that stressed physical training, especially swimming, as well as classroom instruction. After that, they were sent to Pensacola, Florida (the “Annapolis of the Air”) for a three-month course. Some “washed out” fairly quickly; they simply couldn’t handle the disorientation of air maneuvers. On the other hand, nine out of ten who survived that first phase of training completed the program. Unlike the Japanese, who sought to ensure that only the very best got through, the goal of the American program was to qualify as many pilots as possible. While Japanese instructors supervised only four student pilots at a time, American instructors each had ten students. Moreover, while a Japanese flight instructor who failed most of his students might be praised for having high standards, an American instructor who did the same would more likely be called on the carpet as an ineffective instructor.²⁵

After primary flight training, aviation candidates received fourteen weeks of intermediate training, which included twenty-two hours of solo flying, usually in an open-cockpit Stearman N3N biplane, which, since it was covered in yellow fabric, was dubbed the “Yellow Peril” by the students. Advanced training included instrument flying and specialization, including acrobatics. Pilots had to learn how to do “snap rolls, loops, wingovers, the Immelmann, split-S, and falling leaf.”²⁶

Then, for those selected, came carrier qualifications at Opa-Locka near Miami, Florida. Mostly this consisted of field-carrier landing practice: taking off from and landing on carrier-sized outlines painted on a runway. The student pilots learned to control their aircraft while watching the landing signal officer (LSO), who stood on the deck of the faux carrier holding colorful paddles the size of tennis rackets to indicate if the pilot was coming in too high, too fast, or off line. If the approach was too high, the LSO held out his paddles in a V, bringing them down slowly as the pilot leveled out; if the plane was coming in too low, the LSO made an inverted V. If he was on track for a good landing, the LSO gave him the “cut” sign, slashing a paddle across his throat, and the pilot landed. Otherwise, the LSO gave him a “wave off” and the pilot had to go around again for another try. Mastering landing on that small a space was difficult and frustrating, as much for the LSO instructors as it was for the pilots. On one occasion, the LSO at Opa-Locka simply dropped his paddles to the ground and stood there with “a disgusted look on his face” as a rookie pilot who had ignored his signals roared past. At least once, he threw a paddle at a plane out of annoyance. Difficult as it was, however, these practice landings were much easier than landing on an actual carrier that was moving at 20 to 30 knots and heaving as much as ten or fifteen feet with the rolling sea.²⁷

Finally, the pilots-to-be headed for San Diego or Norfolk for Advanced Carrier Training. Eventually every pilot-in-training had to make an arrested landing on a carrier deck. As he approached the stern of a carrier that was steaming into the wind, he had to maneuver so that a hook hanging from the plane’s tail section caught one of several wires stretched across the carrier’s deck; this brought the plane to a stop. Even when the new pilots successfully learned to perform this maneuver, they often did so in trainers. As a result, many new pilots who reported to the fleet in early 1942 had never made an arrested carrier landing in the type of plane they would fly in combat. After December 7, the Navy opened a number of additional training facilities and converted several vessels into practice carriers to provide more realistic training. In the first few months of the war, however, most of the American carrier pilots were relatively green.²⁸

They were also relatively young. In early 1942, the fighter pilots assigned to the Navy’s three Pacific aircraft carriers averaged 25.3 years of age, and the ensigns and junior-grade lieutenants averaged 23.8. The oldest fighter pilot in the fleet was 39-year-old Wade McClusky, who subsequently became the air group commander on the Enterprise. The youngest was Ensign Robert A. M. Dibb, a product of the AVCAD program, whom everyone called “Ram” because of his initials, and who would not turn 21 until April 1942. Dibb’s debut as a fleet pilot occurred in March. Making his first carrier landing in a Wildcat, he hit the deck hard and bounced. His hook failed to catch a wire, and, still airborne, he crashed into the barrier erected across the flight deck to protect the planes parked forward. “A bright blanket of flame” shot from the nose of the plane, and Dibb jumped from the cockpit, did a shoulder roll off the wing, and landed sprawling on the deck.²⁹

Dibb was not the only pilot sent to the fleet with little or no experience. Seventy percent of the fighter pilots on the American carriers had less than three years in service, and nearly a third had joined the Navy within the last year. Everything was new to them. Reporting aboard a carrier for his first sea service in December 1941, one new pilot expressed surprise that the dining area was called the “wardroom.” Along with their youth and inexperience, however, they also displayed the confidence of their years, flying their trainers with joyful abandon, and often guilty of what one called “damned fool, scatter-brained flathatting.” They believed they were immortal. “You understand you can be hurt or killed,” one recalled after the war, “but emotionally [you think] there’s not a chance in the world. Not me, anybody else but me. Not a chance in the world.”³⁰

Commissioned officers they might be, but in the winter of 1942, these young brown-shoe officers, and their sometimes even younger backseat gunners and radiomen, for all their daredevil courage and enthusiasm, had nowhere near the length of service, the physical and mental training, or the combat experience of their Japanese counterparts. Nevertheless, in January of 1942, the three American carrier groups, with their embarked aircraft flown by young and untested pilots, were the only offensive weapons Nimitz had to hand, and he planned to use them aggressively. The Kidō Butai was supreme in the Pacific Ocean, but there were other targets of opportunity available to the American brown shoes.

* America’s only other carrier at the time was the small converted collier Langley (CV-1). Thirteen steel girders supported a 523-foot-long flight deck some forty feet above her hull, giving her the appearance of a long building with a flat roof and no walls. This gave rise to her nickname, “The Old Covered Wagon.” In 1937, she was converted into a seaplane tender (AV-3).

* Grumman claimed that the F4F-4 could climb at a modest but respectable 1,950 feet per minute, but in combat conditions, pilots complained their Dash 4s could ascend only at about 1,000 feet per minute.

* The Ranger was the first U.S. Navy warship to be built from the keel up as a carrier, but her designers conceived of her as a way to provide air cover for the battle fleet rather than as an independent strike platform. As a result, she lacked both armor and internal watertight integrity. A single bomb could sink her. Thus she was kept in the Atlantic, where she subsequently provided air cover for the landings in North Africa.