A Ship To Remember: The Saga of The Hornet

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Text originally published in 1943 under the same title.

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A SHIP TO REMEMBER

The Saga of THE HORNET

By

Alexander R. Griffin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

A NOTE TO THE READER 5

1. GENESIS 7

2. NO HONEYMOON 14

3. WHY ARMY PLANES? 21

4. TIGHT SQUEEZE 26

5. SCRATCH ONE FLAT-TOP 34

6. THIS IS IT! 42

7. MIDWAY 47

8. The Men of Torpedo 8 53

9. THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA 62

10. INTERLUDE 70

11. BIG RENDEZVOUS 77

12. DEATH OF THE WASP 84

13. A BALL OF WEATHER 92

14. JOB AT GUADALCANAL 99

15. GRIM HORIZON 104

16. GUS WIDHELM SPEAKING 109

17. THE KILL 114

18. FAREWELL TO A HAPPY SHIP 120

APPENDIX 125

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 145

DEDICATION

To Mary

A NOTE TO THE READER

JUST before publication of this book I received a letter from Captain Frank Akers, who before his promotion was for a time the navigating officer of the Hornet. Captain Akers, who had contributed considerably to the book, asked to add one thought. He wrote:

"I have been on many ships during my twenty-one years of active duty, and in the ways of a Navy man I have loved each one of them. I have had the time with each of them to learn to love them.

"With the Hornet, it was different. There was no orderly time, except in the hurried days of watching her born, as it were. Then we took her—a beautiful ship whose structure had not worked in the sea and whose decks had not known the steps of other Navy crews. No one had charted her course. This privilege was ours.

"I know that Captain Mitscher had the same feeling and the natural pride in so fine a command. I felt keenly my responsibility as Navigator and gloried in it. The time was short and we found our country at war, with the disaster of Pearl Harbor upon us. It then became an immediate task for this new ship to take its part in stopping the enemy thrust to give us time to muster our strength. There was a job to do, and now; and if the necessity arose, to sacrifice this ship. There was no hesitancy nor holding back; the Hornet was straining and ready to go and take whatever chances were necessary.

"Results were a necessity, and the Hornet produced these results. The price the enemy paid was great, and the Hornet in her short life fulfilled her destiny.

I am glad I was spared the sight of her last minutes above the sea. I prefer to remember her as alive with a bone in her teeth and the Air Group taking off for attack.

To my mind, Captain Akers has spoken not only for himself, but for the entire 2,000-odd officers and men who made up the ship’s company. Nothing I could add would more eloquently explain why the Hornet was truly a ship to remember.

Instead, let me extend my thanks to those who assisted in compiling and writing this great ship’s story. To name a few: Rear-Admiral Charles Perry Mason, Captain Akers, Captain Apollo Soucek, Lieut. Commander William J. Widhelm, Lieut. Commander Edward B. Harp, Jr., and Lieut. David Berger, all of the Hornet; Lieut. Commander Walter Karig, Lieut. Commander Walter H. Neff, Lieut. Leon W. Shloss, and Lieut. Alan McElwain, of the Navy Department, Washington; Lieut. Hugh Fleming Jr., Naval Air Station, Corpus Christi, Tex.; and Captains John H. Breiel, Everett Callow and Norman White, of the United States Marine Corps, stationed, respectively, at New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Especially must I thank Niver W. Beaman, editor of Greenwich (Conn.) Time; Charles Fisher, columnist for the Philadelphia (Pa.) Record; Mary MacNeill Griffin and Jean Barrett Lit for assistance with the manuscript. Without it, I doubt if the book could have been completed.

To the editors of Life Magazine, who made available as source material Sidney James’ splendid story on Torpedo Squadron Eight and artist Tom Lea’s commentaries which appeared with his portraits of the Hornet and her personnel, also goes my appreciation.

Alexander R. Griffin

September 15, 1943.

1. GENESIS

IT was almost dusk and the Hornet waited in the windswept Atlantic to pick up her planes. She was out of Hampton Roads, off the Virginia coast, a brand new aircraft carrier, waiting to gather her fledgling eagles to her bosom for the first time. Her flight deck spread clean and bright. Below, her hangars awaited their tenants, now somewhere in the clear, wintry sky seeking their haven. The sun, withered and weak and only a tepid shadow of his radiant summer youth, was preparing to slip away in the West.

Suddenly, against the yellow background of this sun, the Hornet’s eighty-odd planes appeared in the sky and danced their way toward the carrier, whose deck smiled broadly up at them. The Hornet, her fresh gray paint unsullied yet by the salt of the spray, turned into the wind.

It was biting cold. A chill deeper than the day itself lay over all America, for this was the day after Christmas, 1941—nineteen days after Pearl Harbor. America, for the first time in her history, was feeling cold fear.

The war news was bad. The story of Japanese treachery at Honolulu lay raw in every mind. There were rumors abroad: that the whole United States Pacific fleet was sunk; our West Coast was wide open; we had nothing to stop the Jap, was the gossip. False rumors, but unnerving.

The Philippines were doomed, and everybody knew it. Off Malaya, the underrated Japanese had sunk Great Britain’s mighty battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, in less than ten minutes. Radio newscasts approached hysteria, with speculation, report and sheer deduction. Fear festered in American hearts. The optimist blundered, America has never lost a war. The skeptic said, Neither has Japan. America floundered in her doubt. She had been caught unprepared; stabbed in the back on the Pacific when she thought the danger lay in Europe.

America’s hopes of pulling out rested in soldiers who were still civilians, sailors yet uncalled to the colors, guns and tanks which were only visions in engineers’ minds, ships that existed mostly on paper. There were a few solid things. One was the Hornet, a modern weapon of war, who looked more matronly than Martian out there in the slapping sea, as she gathered in her planes one by one, so very contentedly.

The check wires caught as the planes dropped down on the Hornet’s flight deck a minute apart, snubbing them safely as children to a mother’s apron strings. Crews hustled the planes off to the elevators to give the great ship elbow room in which to sweep more and more of them down to rest.

Perhaps she wasn’t a beauty, the Hornet. The carriers aren’t the pretty ladies of the fleet. Certainly she wasn’t in the eyes of Alonzo Stagg, her chief quartermaster.

The old C.P.O., gray, tough and salt-crusted to the roots of his soul, his mind filled with memories of destroyers and battlewagons, gazed long and hard as she folded the planes to her. Then he spit over-side to the leeward and said:

She ain’t nothin’ more than a barn door laid over top of a bathtub.

But the old quartermaster kept watching her, studying the curve of the water at the bow, feeling her stir comfortably under the impact of the landing planes. His eyes showed that he knew she handled well. She was steady in the sea, with no crankiness in her.

A kid from Minnesota, just out of boot camp, stepped by the old timer and said:

Isn’t she a honey, Chief? A great, big, beautiful honey?

Stagg looked at him sourly. Mebbe, he said, his eyes going back to the bow and the strong, honest curves of the hull. Mebbe, he said again. But it was less curt. It is hard to tell why men come to love a ship, or how or when that love begins. Perhaps he, like the kid, had suddenly sensed the beauty inherent in the structure of the ship, something that transcends superficial ungainliness. In men it’s a Lincoln-like beauty. In ships, it’s sheer strength.

Her planes, which were the Hornet’s armament and striking power, were taken aboard without incident and she headed south, gathering about her like a cloak her escort of destroyers and her fellow travelers—two battleships as new as herself.

She was a beautiful Amazon of armament as her bow sliced neatly ahead in the darkening submarine-infested sea. The barn door—her flight deck—extended for eight hundred and nine and one-half feet, the length of a good city block. Her speed was—and still is—a naval secret, but it was faster than land-bound motorists are permitted to drive their cars under wartime regulations. Her width at the beam was eighty-three feet, and forty-five million dollars had gone into the statuesque twenty-thousand tons, which, gliding along, she displaced like a lady.

She was girdled in four-inch armor, and when necessary could retire coyly into a neat little number of her own creation. It was a solid mantle of lead, the fire-power of her eight 5-inch guns, sixteen 1.1 Chicago pianos (pom poms) and sixteen .20 calibre machine guns also suitable for anti-aircraft work. Nine immense boilers nestled within her big, but trim, bulk, and her geared turbines turned up one hundred and twenty thousand horsepower to give her the swoop of a sea gull. With more than 2,000 men aboard, she was actually a good-sized village afloat.

Living conditions aboard the Hornet were far superior to the conveniences found in many a small town. She had kitchens that could turn out the hot meals fighting men need; a bakery probably unequalled in any community of 2,000-odd population. She even had a mechanical cow that gave ice cream under any conditions and at any time. Ice cream for a couple of thousand men is a bit of an order—but the Hornet could fill it.

On her broad flight deck and in the storage hangars below were her eighty-odd stingers—fighters, scouts and bombers and torpedo planes. There was room for fifteen more.

To the uninitiated or casual observer, she was self-sufficient; a mammoth weapon of war, powerful to the point of apparent unconquerability. But to those who knew—and her veteran commissioned and non-commissioned officers, the cream of the Navy, knew full well—she was vulnerable.

Many of her planes, among the world’s best when designed, already were obsolete. Her torpedo planes were old Douglas Devastators. Her scout and dive bombers were Curtises of a vintage rapidly bordering on the ancient. Even her fighters, with the exception of a few Grumman Wildcats, were old hat.

Fit only for training, as Commander Frank Akers, her navigator, was to put it.

Half her fliers were veterans, although untested in combat; but the other half still had the dew of Pensacola behind their ears. Her enlisted personnel were seventy-five per cent green. Seven hundred, in fact, were rank novices, boys fresh from civilian life who had had only ninety days’ training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station before boarding ship. These seven hundred had joined the Hornet less than two hours before she was placed in commission by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox on October 20, 1941. (America was then at peace, an uneasy peace whose final months were marked by a frantic rush to prepare for the war that was closing in on her.) So bewildered and inexperienced were the seven hundred when they first reported to the Hornet that Commander Akers, then in the midst of major domoing the commissioning ceremony, had snapped in exasperation:

Tie ‘em together as best you can. If we don’t watch out, they’ll get lost.

His irony seemed justified. Many of them, boys from factories and farms, never before had seen so large a ship. They were eager and willing, but right then they were as green as the trees they had left behind for battle paint.

The men who must man anti-aircraft guns—the 5-inchers and the pom-poms and the single-snouted machine guns—had never before worked together as teams. And theory never won a battle yet. The Black Gang, which dealt with the very heart of the ship—her boilers and turbines—was seventy-five per cent green, as were all other departments. Even the cooks, the galley hands and the messmen were three-quarters of them inexperienced. They had the finest equipment in the world, but never actually had dealt with the problem of serving twenty-nine hundred men at battle stations. Food is as important to fighting men as courage and shot and shell.

Yes, the Hornet was forty-five million dollars worth of the best fighting machine ever made—but she was a champion without a punch. She was, in point of fact, on her shakedown cruise. And she wouldn’t pack a wallop until her crew was seasoned.

But the picture was not all black, any more than at first glance it appeared overly bright.

The twenty-five per cent of the operating personnel and the fifty per cent of the fliers who had experience were the very best, second to none in the world, with years of training on all types of vessels. They were qualified experts on carriers, in particular. Many of them had served aboard the Langley, the Lexington, the Saratoga, the pioneers on which our carrier tactics were developed long before the outbreak of war.

For months before this day, when the Hornet was nosing out to sea, this smattering of skilled help had been in the yards of the Newport News Ship-building and Drydock Company, near Norfolk, learning every vital part about the ship. They saw her come alive under their eyes. They were the mid-wives at her birth. Above all, they had great faith in ships of this type. To a man they believed that the function of a carrier is to strike; that a carrier is primarily an instrument of offense rather than defense. They knew that a carrier, properly handled, is as deadly a weapon as the biggest battleship....

The Hornet’s bombing and torpedo planes were her sixteen-inch guns. Her fighter planes were her twelve-inch armor plate. Collectively, her flying squadrons were an umbrella of steel. Her anti-aircraft fire a second shield.

The job ahead was to train her crew to hair-trigger response to orders, to perfection in gunnery, ship’s operation, flight attack and combat. This was the task of command. And the Hornet’s command was superb in the background of wisdom, experience, initiative and accomplishment. The officers were the personification of the highest traditions of the United States Navy.

The Skipper, Captain Marc Andrew Mitscher, held the Navy Cross, won in May, 1918, when he made the first Navy trans-Atlantic flight as pilot of the NC-1, which took the long overseas hop from Newfoundland to the vicinity of the Azores. Born in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, January 26, 1887, he was appointed to the U. S, Naval Academy from Oklahoma in 1906 and was graduated in 1910. He was a leader, a man who if he had any nerves, never showed the fact. He could batten down his feelings in moments of crisis in the same methodical manner he would order his crew to lock a ship’s air-tight compartments. He was calm and precise with the swiftness of the unhurried, sure executive. He knew how to delegate responsibility, yet keep fingertip control.

Thirty-one years of sea experience, and almost as many flying years, were back of him, for he was a pioneer flying officer, who started his training in 1915 at the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida—in the time of naval aviation’s birth. He began flying after sea duty aboard the battleships Colorado, South Dakota and California, the destroyers Whipple and Stewart and the gunboats Vicksburg and Annapolis.

He never left naval aviation after he first touched it. He was at Pensacola until April, 1917, when he went to the U.S.S. Huntington for duty in connection with catapult-launching experiments and remained aboard her while she was on troop convoy duty in World War One. Later, he served at Montauk Point, Long Island, and commanded the Naval Air Station at Rockaway Point, Long Island, and the station at Miami, Florida. After the trans-Atlantic flight for which he was decorated, he joined the U.S.S. Aroostock, then flagship of the air detachment of the Pacific Fleet, in September, 1919, and served until December, 1920, when he took command of the Naval Air Forces at the Fleet Air Base, San Diego, California. He commanded the air station at Anacostia, D.C., from June, 1922, until November, 1925, when he joined the Langley, the Navy’s Old Faithful of aircraft carriers. He assisted in fitting out the carrier Saratoga, and in November, 1926, when she was commissioned, went aboard her as head of the air department. He served as her executive officer from June, 1929, to June, 1930, and was attached to the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics from then until May, 1933, when he became chief of staff to the commander of aircraft, Base Force, aboard the flagship U.S.S. Wright. After a year at that post, he put in another year as executive officer aboard the Sara (Saratoga) and had two years more with the Bureau of Aeronautics. In