The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
Page 8
If Sprague helped create this world, it in turn placed its mark upon him. It was evident in the physical structure of his countenance. Early in his naval career Sprague acquired what people in the aviation trade called an “instrument face,” the pug-nosed look of the test pilot. When the arrester hook on the tail of his plane snagged the wires stretched across the experimental flight decks upon which he practiced, as often as not the jerk caused his plane to stop with considerably greater suddenness than his face did. His frequent collisions with the cockpit instrument panel literally reshaped the contours of his appearance. His nose was slightly flatter than it should have been, his teeth looser. Aviation was a dangerous business, to be sure. By the time the war was over, nearly a quarter of Sprague’s Pensacola class—eight out of thirty-four—had been killed in mishaps on the flight line.
Despite this revolution’s stark dangers, Sprague was thrilled to be part of it. He loved airplanes, cherished the very idea of flight. But like any revolution, naval aviation came up against a reactionary old guard, many of them at the highest levels of Navy command. The battleship officers, whose traditional “gun club” culture had long dominated the fleet, wanted nothing to do with these flaky flying futurists who seemed blind to the beauty and breathtaking power of an eight-gun main-battery broadside. Sure, battleships carried airplanes. Parked on catapults mounted on their sterns and after turrets, floatplanes were useful for scouting and gunnery spotting. But by and large they were considered bothersome contraptions notorious for soiling the handsome teak of the dreadnoughts’ quarterdecks with oil and grease.
As for the men who flew them, the old guard didn’t see commissioned aviators as special or different. They were simply regular officers with a peculiar specialty. Naval aviation was a sideshow. This conceit revealed itself in the fact that in 1923 eighty-eight out of the hundred pilots trained that year were transferred back to duty in surface ships so that they could sharpen their talents as line officers. Advocates of airpower resisted this chauvinism, stating that “aviation is essentially and fundamentally a different profession…. Practically every country in the world … has accepted the assignment of personnel to aviation as a permanent life work.” But the old guard at Annapolis would hear none of it. Chief of Naval Operations William S. Benson listened to the proponents of the brave new wild blue world and dismissed it all as “just a lot of noise.” The officer he appointed to supervise the Navy’s air arm held the lofty rank of lieutenant junior grade.
By the mid-1920s, however, while Ziggy Sprague was trying out catapults and putting arrester systems through their paces at the Ana-costia Naval Air Station near Washington, D.C., neither rhetoric nor administrative gamesmanship could trump the arrival of an idea whose time had come. The U.S. Navy was on its way to becoming a carrier-based fleet. The Lexington and the Saratoga were operational, converted in midconstruction from battlecruisers to aircraft carriers. The move was in part motivated by the need to satisfy the new limitations on large warship construction that the Washington Naval Treaty imposed upon the United States, Britain, and Japan. But their transformation was also a clear sign of the shape of wars to come. Their eight-inch main batteries were shunted aside to starboard, making room for spacious flight decks that stretched from stem to stern. Beneath those 888-foot expanses of wood, the flywheel catapults Sprague had tested would launch aircraft into the sky. On landing, they would be brought safely to a stop by the arrester wire systems he had helped Carl Norden to refine.
In 1925 Sprague married Annabel Fitzgerald, whom he had met at a naval officers’ party on Christmas Day, 1924. Their wedding was notable for the absence of her brother, a wanderer whose migrations seemed to intensify whenever important family occasions loomed. She was not close to F. Scott Fitzgerald; she did not approve of the author’s fast lifestyle. Annabel must have been dismayed at some level too by the life her husband had chosen. He was away on assignment when their first daughter was born and was routinely called to service at times when his family needed him. Courtney, his first daughter, would one day explain, “The Navy was his life, and it came first. It never entered our minds that the Navy didn’t come first.”
In March 1928, assigned to the Lexington, Sprague moved from the laboratory to the front line. He was given a plum, highly visible job as its flight deck officer and assistant air officer. Like a cello virtuoso appointed to conduct a symphony, the veteran test pilot relished the intricacies of command. Orchestrating the movements of planes and the tempo of flight operations aboard ship drew on all of the knowledge he had gained, all of the instincts he had developed in previous assignments. He learned how to coordinate the flight deck crews as they moved planes for launch and recovery operations and how to anticipate what weapons and equipment would be needed and when, the sequence in which they were to be used, and the order in which the planes would fly off the ship. He rehearsed the choreography that would make the Lexington, home to two thousand sailors and seventy-two airplanes, an efficient fighting ship.
Though distrust of the Japanese was widespread in the Navy, Sprague was among the first to appreciate exactly what the Japanese might do. In June 1928 the Lexington participated in a mock surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. By night the ship crept to within 250 miles of the great Pacific base and launched its planes at dawn. As the American planes flew close overhead, interrupting innumerable breakfasts with the rattling reverberations of their piston-driven engines and an onslaught of flour-filled sacks dropped from their bomb bays, the defenders on Oahu received a bracing glimpse of the future. To Sprague and others in naval aviation, it was proof enough of the hitting power of their new weapon. The following year the Lexington took part in a successful air raid drill on the Panama Canal. Slowly but steadily aircraft carriers were breaking the battleship’s monopoly in the business of projecting offensive power at sea. Sprague spent fourteen months aboard the Lexington before doing a tour on shore duty in May 1929. He was in the vanguard of the new wave. But if any lessons were distilled from those early mock assaults on the Pacific Fleet Headquarters, the Navy had all but forgotten them come December 7, 1941.
That day, as captain of the seaplane tender Tangier, Sprague watched every ship tied up to Ford Island except his get hit during the Japanese attack. Loaded with torpedoes, an inferno awaiting its spark, the Tangier early in the battle became shrouded in smoke from the burning wrecks around her. The previous day, December 6, Sprague had upbraided his crew for their sloppy performance during an intensive series of drills. He broke with his nature and let them have it. Gathering his officers in the Tangier’s wardroom, Sprague said, “We’re not prepared. We can’t trust the Japanese. How do you know the Japanese won’t attack tomorrow?” The next morning the Combined Fleet struck. The Tangier’s gunners were by many accounts the first in the harbor to fire on the Japanese. They brought down three enemy planes, and their ship was never hit.
Among his classmates in the Annapolis class of 1918, however, Sprague was among the last to lead an aircraft carrier into action. Forrest Sherman was captain of the Wasp as early as 1942. J. J. “Jocko” Clark commanded the Yorktown. Thomas Sprague—no relation to Clif—began skippering the Intrepid in June 1943. When Sprague was ashore at Annapolis serving as a flight instructor ten years out of the academy, one of his students was a man who would become the most publicly acclaimed naval officer since Dewey. Capt. William F. Halsey decided early on to stake his professional fortunes on the wings of the naval air service. “I was eating, drinking, and breathing aviation,” Halsey wrote in his memoirs. “I flew as often as … Ziggy Sprague would give me a ride.”
While Sherman, Clark, and Tommy Sprague were living on the sharp edge of the naval air war against Japan, Ziggy Sprague was ashore, first supervising air defenses along the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines of Florida, then commanding Seattle’s Sand Point Naval Air Station. But soon enough Sprague would have a new seagoing command. It would only strengthen his appreciation for what carrier-based airpower could do.
; In October 1943 Sprague took command of the newly minted Essex-class fleet carrier Wasp, the ninth Navy ship to carry that storied name. The Wasp’s most recent namesake, captained by Forrest Sherman, had been sunk by a Japanese submarine off Guadalcanal the year before. But American industry saw to it that Wasp number eight was replaced by an even more formidable ship. Built to house nearly 3,500 officers and crew, the Wasp’s newest incarnation was launched at Quincy’s Fore River Shipyard on August 17, 1943.
Ziggy Sprague was slow to make his mark on the new ship, slow even to be noticed. The ship’s newsletter reported that Captain Sprague, true to modest form, “came in quietly and took over with so little fanfare that it was several days before the word got around.” But there was no doubting his effectiveness. One of Sprague’s officers aboard the Wasp was Lt. John Roosevelt, the youngest son of the president who would shortly make Sprague an admiral. Lieutenant Roosevelt wrote that Sprague “took a very green crew and molded us together into a unit that each and every one of us had a personal pride in.”
At the Wasp’s commissioning ceremony in Boston, Sprague had told the assembled crew, “The air group is the only reason for the carrier’s existence. Remember that…. Their comfort and efficiency is our major concern.… A carrier, offensively, you know, is no better than the air group it supports.” They were the words of a true fly-boy.
Sprague’s appreciation for his air groups was shared at the highest level of carrier command. The Navy’s leading maestro of carrier operations, Vice Adm. Marc A. Mitscher, knew that a pilot’s value went beyond economic calculation. “You can train a pilot for $50,000. But never, ever tell a pilot that,” Mitscher would tell his biographer. “We can’t buy pilots with money…. The whole striking force of this carrier, all we spend in preparation and operation up to this point, finally is spearheaded by a hundred young pilots. Each of these boys is captain of his own ship. What he thinks, his confidence in what he is doing, how hard he presses home the attack, is exactly how effective we are…. We don’t hypnotize them. These kids aren’t crazy.”
As important as pilots were, good old-fashioned seamanship remained essential in carrier operations too. On this score Sprague performed admirably. At the helm of the Wasp under air attack during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, he maneuvered the ship so skillfully that he dodged three bombs dropped by Japanese planes and won the Navy’s Legion of Merit for the engagement.
About three weeks later, on July 9, 1944, Captain Sprague was appointed to the temporary wartime rank of rear admiral by order of President Franklin Roosevelt. The president’s son, Lieutenant Roosevelt, observed, “When he was promoted from Captain to Admiral, we were all happy that his fine quality of leadership had been recognized but, at the same time, we felt a personal loss when he left the ship.”
Sprague, at age forty-eight, was one of the youngest flag officers in the fleet. But admirals did not command individual ships. He would leave the Wasp and graduate to bigger things—though in his case bigger things meant smaller ships. In August he found himself assigned to command Carrier Division 25, which consisted of the escort carriers Fanshaw Bay, Midway, White Plains, and Kalinin Bay. When the Seventh Fleet’s escort carriers were divvied up into three task units for the Leyte operation, Carrier Divisions 25 and 26 were joined under the rubric of Taffy 3. Sprague commanded the combined unit from his flag quarters on the Fanshaw Bay.
The Fanshaw Bay’s skipper, Capt. Douglass P. Johnson, was a gentlemanly Cincinnatian who had graduated in the Annapolis class of 1920 and earned his wings during the genesis of naval aviation. Johnson had endeared himself to his crew on the Fanny B.’s maiden voyage, ferrying aircraft to Australia. Fleeing an enemy sub, Johnson was informed that the carrier’s boilers were reaching their temperature limit. In the fine rhetorical tradition of Farragut, Dewey, and Nelson, Captain Johnson shouted into the voice tube, “Piss on them then. We need more speed.”
Ziggy Sprague was not ambitious in the outwardly grasping manner of some of his colleagues at the flag rank. His predecessor in command of Carrier Division 25 was Rear Adm. Gerald F. Bogan, who was promoted to command one of Halsey’s Third Fleet carrier groups. During his tenure aboard the Fanny B., Bogan could not seem to bear the perceived indignity of flying his flag from the cramped quarters of an escort carrier. He made sure his officers and crew participated in his misery. Though most were new enlistees and reservists who had never before been to sea, Bogan demanded perfection of them, or at least perfect compliance with “Rocks and Shoals,” which began with the declaration: “The commanders of all fleets, squadrons, naval stations, and vessels belonging to the Navy are required to show in themselves a good example of virtue, honor, patriotism, and subordination.”
The indelicate assessment of one senior Fanshaw Bay enlisted man was that Bogan was a “first-class horse’s rear end.” And the disdain was decidedly mutual. With only one officer excepted, Bogan later wrote, “the entire crew [of the Fanshaw Bay] was incompetent.” Years after the war he would harbor bitterness toward the carrier, decrying it as “the worst ship I’d ever seen in any Navy.” If Bogan’s attitude toward the Fanshaw Bay was determined by the drag he thought it exerted on his professional ascent, perhaps an ambitious officer was bound to hope that his assignment to command an escort carrier division was a short one. Climbing the flag ranks required heading to the front lines with the big fleet carriers, not sitting in a rear area aboard a dawdling Kaiser coffin. Quiet, gently ironic, professorial in bearing, Sprague never let his ego interfere with his work.
As flag commander, Sprague was no stranger to the well-being of the Fanshaw Bay’s crew. He made it his business to walk the decks of the Fanny B. and stay mindful of the predicaments of the enlisted man. His style had long been one of good humor and egalitarian informality. He knew how to put nerves at ease with offhand storytelling and easy good humor, a habit of character that was evinced in the wrinkled laugh-lines around his mouth. He was the kind of officer who stopped by the radio room after midnight in his robe and slippers to chat over coffee with whomever he found on duty. At sea he allayed homesickness by easing the enforcement of certain regulations: the galley and mess hall stayed open at all hours, and gambling, while never encouraged, was quietly tolerated. As it was on more than a few Navy ships, gambling was a cottage industry aboard the Fanshaw Bay. Marathon craps and poker games were run on the sly in the ship’s metal shop and other hideaways belowdecks. The sharp sound of dice ricocheting off metal bulkheads could keep a light sleeper awake through the night. But Ziggy Sprague turned a deaf ear to it, considering it a harmless vice. At best it was a dependable morale-builder for enlisted men, far from home and at sea for the first time.
A Fanshaw Bay crewman recalled, “For the first time we had a man in charge of the task unit who made us feel like we were on his team. A man who wasn’t mad because he hadn’t received an Essex-class command.”
Ziggy Sprague was wise to use a light hand with the reservists and greenhorn enlistees who manned the Fanshaw Bay. Coming from the factories and high schools and cornfields of America, many had received aboard the Fanshaw Bay their first sight of the open sea. With several exceptions among the small core of career officers and petty officers on the ship, they were the very definition of a motley crew, in the words of one, “a conglomeration of farmers, ranchers, mechanics, scholars, carpenters and about everything there is but actual sailors.”
Harold Kight enlisted in January 1944 at age twenty, joining fifteen of his buddies on a train from Holdenville, Oklahoma, to San Diego for boot camp. The oldest of five children from a 250-acre farm in Gum Springs, Oklahoma, south of Tulsa, he had grown up helping his father cultivate corn, peanuts, cotton, pecans, and cattle—whatever would sell in the uncertain economy of the post-Depression plains. Working the fields with his three brothers and sister gave him an appreciation for nature’s bounty. Assigned to the Fanshaw Bay as a seaman, he struck for a ship’s cook rating, working as a mess cook in S Division, which comp
rised the galley staff and the ship’s supply department.
The quality of food at sea was a crapshoot whose odds tended to vary with the length of time the ship had been away from port, despite the blandishments of the 1944 edition of the Cook Book of the United States Navy: “Active men need large amounts of energy, 3,000 to 4,500 calories per day…. Planning the menu, therefore, should be of primary importance to the commissary personnel, for upon it depends, to a great extent, the health and morale of the men in the general mess.” The Cook Book suggested that menus be prepared a week in advance. A chart offered seasonal pattern menus for the three daily meals—breakfast, dinner, and supper. In autumn, a Tuesday breakfast should feature orange juice, hot wheat cereal, scrambled eggs and ham, coffee cake, butter, milk, and coffee. Main supper dishes included pork sausage links and sauerkraut pie, smothered ham slices, tomato rarebit on toast, and spareribs with barbecue sauce. “While the emphasis in menu planning is placed on the nutritive value of the food,” the Cook Book said, “attention must also be given to providing meals which are interesting, attractive, varied, and satisfying. This is helpful in maintaining good morale.”