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I was a young USMC
second lieutenant in VMF 452 flying off the
Franklin
on
March 19, 1945
when she was hit by a Japanese dive bomber and blew up spectacularly
and at great cost in human life – and yet never sank.
Here are two excerpts from my recently published memoir, Old
Gods, New Nations: A Memoir of War, Peace, and
Nation
Building
. The first
describes my training as a naval aviator.
The second recounts what happened to me and some of my squadron
mates on that chilly gray day in March 1945 off the coast of
Japan
.
Excerpt from Chapter 3, “A Passage at Arms”
III
A
Passage at Arms
Finally, in the winter of 1944, the news we had awaited for so
long came. Major Pat Weiland, the commanding officer, called us to the
squadron ready room to announce our immediate assignment to the Naval
Air Station at
Santa Rosa
, north of
San Francisco
on the Pacific coast, for carrier training and qualification. That
completed, we were to board the aircraft carrier “
Franklin
” to join the Pacific fleet. The
Franklin
, we were told, had been seriously damaged in the fall of 1944 by a
Japanese suicide attack in the battle of Leyte off the
Philippines
and had just finished repairs in the Navy shipyard at
Bremerton
,
Washington
.
As the power equation tilted slowly and inevitably against
them, the Japanese tide in the Pacific was draining away. But they
still held Okinawa and much of
China
. The Japanese home islands were widely believed to be a formidable,
if not impregnable, redoubt. The Japanese had earned a reputation for
suicidal courage as they fought to hold island after island. In
Europe, where virtually no Marines were assigned, the Allies had
landed in
Normandy
and were fighting their way eastward towards
Berlin
.
In its pattern of naval fighting and island assaults, the
Pacific war was very different from that in
Europe
. John Gregory Dunne, writing in the New York Review of Books to
review three Pacific war memoirs and history, remarked that in
addition to these dissimilar strategic challenges the Pacific war was
characterized by “the uncompromising hatred between the Japanese
military and the forces – American, British and Australian –
arrayed against them…Some of it was undoubtedly racial.”
In the Pacific, soldiers on both sides routinely hacked body
parts – heads, sex organs, fingers, gold teeth – off the dead
bodies of enemy soldiers to be used as souvenirs. To be taken prisoner
in
Europe
was bad but survivable. To be captured in the Pacific fighting was
unlikely, since battle casualties were so high. If it happened, it was
considered a fate possibly worse than death. The Marines were not
unfamiliar with what Americans regarded as the lesser races: one of
their famous marching song contains the rousing stanza “Oh, the
monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga,” recalling the Marines fighting
the Muslim rebels against American colonial rule in the
Philippines
in the early twentieth century.
We said good-bye to the drafty barracks and sunny, windy desert
days of Mojave and went up to the fogs, rain and mists of Northern
California to fly endless carrier landing practice patterns around the
Santa Rosa
air station. These “bounce” drills taught the pilot how to fly at
slow speeds and low altitudes while he came into the final legs of the
landing pattern and picked up the fluorescent paddles of the Landing
Signal Officer (LSO), himself a qualified naval pilot, who then
employed a simple set of arm and body signals to help the pilot fly
the airplane onto the deck.
When the LSO leaned his body and paddles in one direction, the
pilot tilted the airplane to respond. When the LSO brought the two
paddles rapidly together in a gathering motion, indicating the plane
was coming in too slowly and might stall and crash, the pilot pushed
on more throttle adding power and speed. When the LSO cut the
right-hand paddle across his chest, the pilot cut his throttle,
dropped the nose for a second, then pulled the stick back and landed
in a full stall. When the LSO waved and crossed his paddles arms
vigorously in front of his head, either because the approach was
unsatisfactory or the flight deck or runway wasn’t clear, that
constituted the famous “wave off”, and the pilot had to go around
the entire landing pattern again. In contemporary carrier flying, the
LSO has disappeared and this is all done with mirrors and lights,
which old timers find sad. Good LSOs and their brilliantly clad deck
crews were the dance-masters of a unique technological ballet: the
interplay between the signal officer and the pilot, the never-still
sea, the looming massive deck of the ship, the final, always shocking
moment of the touchdown -- or slam down if the deck was dropping away
in the swell, the plane catching its landing hook in the restraining
cable which slowed and stopped it within a second or so after hitting
the deck, rolling backwards for another brief second to disengage the
tail-hook from the cable, and then charging forward to clear the
momentarily lowered crash barrier at mid-deck.
The flight deck of a carrier looks impossibly small from the
air but in two important aspects landing at sea is easier than landing
on a land runway, unless the sea is really boisterous and the swells
running high and rough. That is because the carrier turns precisely
into the wind both to launch and receive aircraft. Planes, like birds,
land into the wind. The pilot at sea thus enjoys the advantage of both
the speed of the prevailing wind plus the speed of the carrier itself
– WW II carriers could steam at up to thirty-plus knots – to
deduct from the airspeed at stall out and touchdown. As far as speed
is concerned, a carrier landing is therefore both more manageable and
safer. On land, the pilot must deal with cross winds or no wind and
much higher relative touchdown speeds. The first touchdown on land
after a long spell at sea is always tricky.
During two chilly, foggy days off the
California
coast, we went through this rite of passage on an old battle and
accident-scarred carrier, the USS Ranger. Most of us managed the eight
required landings without serious problems. But we lost one Navy pilot
whose fighter skidded on the oil-soaked wooden deck of the old Ranger
and went over the side into the ocean. I found parking on the deck,
following the hand and arm signals of the flight deck crew, dressed in
an array of brilliant colors like courtiers at a Renaissance court and
leaning into the thirty-knot wind, more alarming than the landing
itself. I followed the deck crewman’s hand and head signals to park
right up at the very edge of the deck with my plane’s wings folded,
staring straight down at the ocean fifty feet below while the huge
ship rolled and tossed under us.
On February seven, VMF 452, the “Sky Raiders” as we had
chosen to call ourselves, boarded the USS Franklin at the
Alameda
naval air base in
San Francisco
bay. The
Franklin
was a monster: 27,000 tons, 872 feet long, 150,000 horsepower. It
could steam at thirty-three knots carrying a crew of 3,400 men. The
ship was fresh from the navy yards at
Bremerton
,
Washington
, where large hunks of its flight and hangar decks, blown up in
Japanese suicide attacks off the
Philippines
in October 1944, had been repaired and replaced. It was, everyone
noted, CV-13, which meant simply that it was the thirteenth big attack
carrier listed in the Navy arsenal. We steamed out under the
Golden Gate
Bridge
, taking a last look at the fabulous city and plunged into the mighty
Pacific swell. Our first stop was
Honolulu
to carry out night landing drills, beginning with night bounce
practice sessions around the Marine Corps field at Barbers Point.
VMF 452 was to fly off the
Franklin
as a Marine Corps squadron as part of Navy Air Group Five, which
consisted of two fighter squadrons, each of thirty-six aircraft, plus
a twelve-plane torpedo squadron and a dive bomber squadron of twelve
aircraft. It was not an easy relationship.
We were there in a Navy-run and staffed operation because of
our presumed competence with the Corsair, which was proving
increasingly valuable in the air war with
Japan
. But our Commanding Officer, who was a gentle man, had to report to
the Navy Air Group Commander, who of course outranked him and was a
Naval Academy graduate as well while our Major Weiland came into the
Marine Corps out of South Dakota and civilian pilot training at the
University of Miami. We made some friends among the Navy pilots but
generally we stuck to each other.
In
Hawaii
, we became creatures of the sea and the air. By night, we flew
landing patterns, dragging slowly at dangerously low altitudes around
the Barbers Point MCAS field, picking up the fluorescent paddles of
the LSO and dropping down hard onto the asphalt runway, then hitting
full throttle and going around again to repeat. In the free time in
the mornings, we took a couple of jeeps, loaded with beer, out to the
northern beaches and swam and dozed in the sun. WW II Honolulu
belonged to the Navy and Dole Pineapple. Its honky-tonk bars were
crowded with sailors. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel was the only luxury
hotel in all the islands.
I never did make a night carrier landing. Our departure was
moved up before the night I was scheduled to fly aboard. When we left
the dock to steam out to join the fleet in the western Pacific, the
LSO we had trained with, who had been with the Franklin since its
earlier Pacific actions in which it was severely damaged, was there,
visibly intoxicated, to see us off. “I got off,” he shouted,
laughing. “You should get off. Get off, get off! It’s an unlucky
ship. Thirteen is unlucky. The ship is unlucky.”
We sailed west for what seemed forever towards the war, the
great ship rising and falling slowly as it sliced through the Pacific
swell. I discovered a catwalk hanging below the flight deck at the
furthest forward point of the flight deck where one could sit or lie
and watch the prow of the carrier scything through the water, flying
fish exploding out of the sea below us and skittering along flashing
in the sunlight. We flew occasional training drills as we went,
including a formation south of our route to see if there was any
aerial activity in the general direction of the island of Truk, where
a tiny Japanese contingent was dying on the vine of a once huge
Japanese redoubt, isolated and cut off from supplies as the war spun
westward.
Our immediate destination was Ulithi. The Navy captured this
extraordinary geological formation from the Japanese in September,
1944. The Ulithi atoll is an enormous, circular, coral reef-ringed,
deep natural anchorage five hundred miles east by north from the
eastern tip of the
Philippines
. Ulithi had become the principal forward marshalling point for the
endgame with
Japan
. Navy engineers blasted entrance channels into the atoll for the huge
capital ships of the fleet and reinforced a tiny island in the middle
of the atoll and put a landing strip on it. We steamed silently into
the anchorage just before sunset in early March 1945. In every
direction, all the eye could see was American fighting ships: fifteen
big carriers (our arrival made it sixteen), four battleships, eight
heavy and light cruisers, sixty-plus destroyers and hundreds of
transport and utility ships – oilers, munition carriers, freighters,
and landing craft of all sizes and shapes. This was Task Force 58,
alternately known as Task Force 38, the designation depending on its
commanding officer. Two brilliant Admirals, Mark Mitscher (Task Force
58) and Bull Halsey (Task Force 38), took turns commanding this
awesome machine, the greatest naval fighting force the world had ever
known. I thought to myself: “I am glad I am not a Japanese.”
Outside Ulithi, coming into the harbor passage, we passed a
long line of landing ships and smaller landing craft, heavily loaded
and low in the water, heading north. We were close enough to wave down
to the men on some of them. I found out much later that my brother,
Murray, was on one of these landing craft with his Marine artillery
unit, headed north for the Okinawa invasion, the blood-soaked
semifinal chapter of the Pacific war before the anticipated final
assault on mainland
Japan
. I had not seen
Murray
since the war started.
In Ulithi, we finally learned our specific assignment: to
attack Japanese airfields and military bases to interdict Japanese
movement of troops and aircraft from the main islands down to
reinforce
Okinawa
. We loaded fuel, munitions including a brand new large aerial rocket
called “Tiny Tim,” and additional crew. The
Franklin
was to be Task Force 58’s flagship with an admiral and his staff. In
addition, a special photography crew had come aboard to shoot a
propaganda film on “Tiny Tim.” The ship was jammed: we totaled
some 3400 men. The junior officer quarters were so crowded that I
begged a sleeping space on a luggage shelf built into the wall of a
cabin occupied by two first lieutenants who were willing to put me up.
The only really comfortable place was the squadron ready room, just
below the flight deck with which it was connected by a short stairway,
equipped with air conditioning and leather lounge chairs. It was there
that pilots were briefed and debriefed and awaited the order over the
public address system: “Pilots, man your planes!”
In mid-March, the fleet lifted anchor and steamed out. At sea,
in battle formation, the fleet was even more awesome than at anchor.
The task force divided into four carrier divisions of four carriers
each, each division with its own cast of supporting cruisers and
destroyers. The four divisions changed course frequently day and night
in maneuvers designed to avoid submarine attacks, although by early
1945 most of the Japanese submarine fleet lay at the bottom of the
ocean. The entire task force covered a thousand square-mile area of
water, steaming day and night at speeds of up to thirty-three knots.
It was a marvel of American military planning and training and a
triumph of military technology. Most of the men running and manning
the ships and aircraft, like me, had probably never set foot on a ship
before the war or dreamed of flying an airplane.
As we bore north towards
Japan
, the sunny skies and blue seas of the equatorial Pacific disappeared.
Low-lying gray clouds covered the sky.
The sea turned gray-black. The air grew chilly. Our moods
turned pensive. Those of us -- the great majority -- who had never
been in combat were nervous, although trying not to show it. Along
with many others, I thought it wouldn’t hurt and might even help and
went to a chapel service. Our commanders told us that if we were hit
by Japanese fire or had engine trouble over
Japan
we should try to reach the Chinese mainland where, with luck, we would
be picked up by the Chinese Nationalists rather than by the Japanese.
As we pressed towards the main islands combat air patrols found
no significant Japanese contacts. The first heavy fighting was
expected to start March 18 with attacks to destroy airfields, harbor
facilities and Japanese aircraft on the
island
of
Kyushu
, the southernmost of the major Japanese islands, and
Honshu
. I was assigned to fly as the two-plane section leader in a flight of
four Corsairs covering two Navy Hellcat photo aircraft to take aerial
photographs of
Nagasaki
. The division leader was Major John Stack, a decorated veteran of the
Guadalcanal
fighting who had shot down three Japanese fighters in that earlier
campaign. Stack was a short, muscular reddish-haired man with a bushy
mustache, not much one for talking but respected as a purposeful, hard
driving flier. Flying on Stack’s wing was Tom Pace. On my wing was a
first lieutenant named Bo Little, a gentle, small town boy from
Oklahoma
who didn’t drink, didn’t smoke and went to
Los Angeles
on liberty to see movies.
We launched shortly after daybreak, climbed up through the
cloud cover to 20,000 feet, donning our oxygen masks as we gained
altitude, and picked up the two Navy Hellcat photo planes. It was
bitterly cold. We had no gun heaters, which had failed to arrive in
time to be installed, and had been told our fifty-caliber wing-mounted
machineguns would freeze up if we didn’t clear them occasionally by
firing a few rounds. The jumpiness I felt was compounded by watching
lines of tracer bullets zip past below me or off to one side from
other groups as pilots cleared their guns in the larger formation
heading for
Kyushu
.
At launching, we were only fifty miles off the coast of
Japan
, closer than any major American ship had ever gone in the war. Within
less than half an hour, the clouds began to break up as we approached
the coast. As we came into Japanese air space, Tom Pace radioed Major
Stack that he was having both engine and radio problems and must
return to the ship. Stack asked if Pace was sure he could make it
back. Pace said he could, and peeled off to head back. Stack motioned
to me to join up in formation on his wing.
Unrolling below us as we flew northward above the two Hellcat
photo planes were the wooded green hills, ocean bays, coastal towns,
rice paddies and industrial plants of Japan. We kept a constant scan
of the skies around us for Japanese fighter planes, flying an
interconnected side-to-side weave of slow turns from right to left and
back to cover the whole sky with our vision and protect against attack
from the rear. (This maneuver was known as the “Thach” weave after
the navy pilot who invented it.)
We made two passes over
Nagasaki
at the northwest tip of
Kyushu
island. The photo planes headed south back towards the
Franklin
. Flying south down the island we suddenly heard a pilot shouting
excitedly on the radio that he was under attack by Japanese planes
above a “smoking mountain.” That “smoking mountain” had to be
the active volcano in the hills above the bay at
Kagoshima
, a big industrial and port city at the southern tip of
Kyushu
. Major Stack waved good-bye to the photo planes. Our three-man
formation headed for
Kagoshima
.
Within minutes, flying on Stack’s right wing, out of the
corner of my right eye I saw a Japanese Zero curving in toward us. He
was heading slightly below us and Stack immediately turned hard right
and then left to drop in behind him. Stack fired several rounds, then
pulled off above. I slid
in for a few seconds behind the Zero and fired two machine gun bursts
at him before the Zero suddenly rolled over and in an abrupt dive
disappeared straight down. For a minute or so the sky around us was a
great ball of Corsairs and an occasional Japanese fighter. At least
one Japanese plane was on fire spiraling steeply down to the ground. A
couple of Japanese parachutes were floating further down to the paddy
fields. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. No Japanese
planes, no Major Stack, no wingman Bo Little. I began a slow circular
turn to see what was going on. Within a minute or so, four Corsairs
joined up to fly formation on my lead. I was low on gas so I headed
back for the fleet with my newly acquired formation of pilots, even
more confused than I was, following me. By the time I found the
Franklin
with my flock I had five minutes of fuel left.
The ready room was full of exhilarated pilots. A number of
Japanese planes had been shot down. Stack was convinced he had killed
the Japanese we had been after. I thought I had hit the same plane
with my firing. We were never to know. The sobering question came up
immediately: Where was Tom Pace? Stack explained the circumstances
under which Pace decided to return to the ship. Standing orders were
that planes in trouble must be accompanied back to base. But Stack had
issued no such order. Pace had not landed on the
Franklin
. 1st Lieutenant Pete Schaefer, a close friend of Tom’s
and mine, indignantly challenged Stack’s failure to act. At first it
was thought possible that Tom had landed on another carrier, or that
he ditched in the sea and had been picked up by a destroyer. We
eventually found out that he had been shot down and killed that same
morning by anti-aircraft fire from a
US
destroyer whose crew mistook him for an incoming Japanese plane when
he failed to identify himself.
The next day, March 19, not scheduled to fly an early mission,
I was half-asleep on my luggage rack bunk shortly after seven a.m.,
listening to the racket of a dive-bomber flight taking off immediately
above my head on the flight deck.
I heard a loud explosion and then for a minute nothing. I
thought immediately that a dive-bomber must have crashed over the bow
on takeoff and exploded in the water. Then two huge explosions shook
the ship along with a fierce rattle and pounding of what I thought
were the ship’s antiaircraft guns. I jumped out of my bunk in my
shorts and went out into the narrow corridor. The rattling and
explosions were growing in their intensity. I thought we were under
attack and firing at enemy planes. A ship officer whom I knew slightly
came running up the corridor from amid-ship. I asked him what was
going on. “We’ve been hit by a bomb and we’re blowing up,” he
shouted at me. “That’s our own ammunition blowing up.”
I ducked back into my room and hurriedly dressed as the banging
and rattling and explosions continued. When I came back to the
corridor officers and men were milling around in all directions. Up
along the narrow corridor from the hangar deck, stygian figures of men
burned black were staggering forward towards the focsle deck area.
Black smoke was pouring in from the rear. Huge explosions,
reverberating in the steel walls and ceilings, rocked the ship.
Another ship officer shouted that we should all head as far forward as
possible and get out into the open focsle deck at the prow just below
the flight deck. Within minutes about a hundred men, some so badly
burned they were barely conscious, shivering in the cold, moist wind,
had assembled on the open deck. The ship was losing speed and
beginning to list. As the explosions continued, a ship’s officer
shouted at us to assume a pushup position on the deck using our
fingers and toes to avoid ankle and leg fracture because of the
pounding, hammering action of the deck under our feet.
After about an hour, the explosions abated momentarily. I
followed a ship’s officer up a catwalk to the flight deck to help
fight the fires consuming the entire rear half of the ship behind the
multi-story island where the ship’s command post was located. As we
went back to lend a hand with the fire hoses, a horrifyingly loud
explosion blew the outboard elevator, which carried planes up and down
to and from the flight and hanger decks, several hundred feet into the
air. All over the forward portion of the deck wounded men were limping
and being carried forward from the fires and explosions towards the
stern. I came across a friend and squadron-mate, Lt. Jim Ormond, lying
on the flight deck in pain, his leg shattered at various points from
the concussions. I got an arm around him and we limped forward as far
as we could get.
By mid-morning, the
Franklin
was dead and low in the water, listing increasingly to starboard.
Explosions and fire raged through its entire rear half. The tilting
deck was slippery with fire fighting foam. A Navy light cruiser, the
USS Santa Fe, slid into formation with us off the starboard side and
slowly crept in towards the listing flight deck. It became apparent
the
Santa Fe
intended to take off survivors. Within a half hour, directed by the
ship’s crew, the remnants of the air crews and sailors on the flight
deck were able to rig a makeshift breaches buoy system to transfer
wounded men across the narrow gulf separating the two ships, which
were pounding up and down dangerously in a fifteen foot swell.
Finally, the
Santa Fe
threw caution to the winds and headed in even closer to tie up
directly alongside the
Franklin
.
Shortly after
noon
, an order was passed around orally – the public address system was
an early casualty of the day – that all hands except the permanently
designated salvage crew should abandon ship. Jim Ormond had been
hauled over to the
Santa Fe
an hour earlier. I decided it was time to go myself. I judged the rise
and fall of the Santa Fe in the swell, waited for the exact moment
when the top of the Santa Fe’s left gun turret came level for a
second or two on the rise of the swell with the right edge of the
Franklin’s slippery flight deck, and took a running jump across the
six foot gap. I landed on my feet just below the cruiser’s command
post, stumbled for a second, and then they pulled me up. “I’m glad
to be aboard, sir,” I said. It was corny but I never spoke truer
words.
**********
The
memoir as a whole deals not only with my wartime experiences but my
postwar career as a journalist, a career foreign service officer serving
in Latin America,
Russia
and Asia, and a private foundation executive working in
Russia
and
Asia
.
It is available online through Amazon.com; Barnes & Noble.com,
and numbers of other internet sites, as well as through some Barnes
& Noble stores.
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