The ubiquity of meat products on the template menus suggests a degree of optimism on the part of War Department nutritionists. CVEs were short on refrigerated storage space, and so meat and other perishables never lasted long. The Army guys who came aboard from time to time professed to love the food. Coming from their jungle hellholes where they subsisted on lizards, frogs, worms, and who knew what else, they must have seen a plate of mutton garnished with the ever-present navy beans as an exotic and flavorful indulgence. “Hey, we had good chow; they bragged on it,” Kight said. “You couldn’t find any better bakers than the Navy had aboard those ships,” he said. The bread was fine, so long as weevils didn’t infest the flour.
If the cooks of S Division could not hope to please all comers, at least they could serve them efficiently. Like the victory gardens and scrap metal drives back home, the Cook Book reflected the nation’s preoccupation with using limited assets efficiently.
[A] large mess serving 1,000 men will use less food than ten messes each serving 100 men. To conserve food and avoid great amounts of leftovers, the following reductions are recommended: For messes of 500 to 1,000 men, reduce the ingredients in the recipe by 5 per cent. For messes of 1,000 men or more, reduce the amounts of the ingredients in the recipe by 10 per cent.
The imperative to avoid waste was contagious. Inside the front cover of his Navy cookbook, Harold Kight scrawled a recipe for making cottage cheese out of sour milk: “Pour milk into double boiler, heat over warm water until soft curd has formed, pour into thin cloth bag and drain. Remove curd from bag, break into fine pieces and moisten with cream and season to taste.” In the wartime Navy, you learned to make do. You made food out of waste. You took shortcuts to get the job done. Indeed, the very same notion of efficiency and making more out of less was at the very core of the small carriers that Ziggy Sprague would take into harm’s way.
* * *
ESCORT CARRIERS HAD MANY nicknames, only a few tinged with anything resembling affection: jeep carriers, Woolworth flattops, Kaiser coffins, one-torpedo ships. Wags in the fleet deadpanned that the acronym CVE stood for the escort carrier’s three most salient characteristics: combustible, vulnerable, expendable. That most everyone seemed to get the joke—laughing in that grim, nervous way—was probably the surest sign that it was rooted in truth.
When the Fansbaw Bay, the Samuel B. Roberts, and the rest of Taffy 3 took up positions off the Philippines, painful memories of the escort carrier Liscome Bay were still fresh in their minds. The disaster that befell her became an indelible memory for all who served on CVEs. Before dawn on November 24, 1943, Capt. Irving D. Wiltsie was turning his ship into the wind to launch the morning antisubmarine patrol off Makin Island in the Gilberts chain when an explosion shook the ship and a tall column of water rose from the starboard side. Faster than the human mind could register fear, the collapsing column of seawater was turned to vapor by a massive, flaming secondary explosion triggered deep within the bowels of the ship. A torpedo from a Japanese sub that had slipped past the screening ships hit the escort carrier on her starboard quarter, bursting in the aircraft bomb stowage compartment below the waterline.
The explosion blasted skyward a storm of oil, molten metal, splinters of burning decking, and shredded human flesh, a grisly potpourri that rained down on ships of the task group for miles around. The Taffy 3 destroyer Hoel was bombarding Makin at the time. “It didn’t look like any ship at all,” wrote Lt. John C. W Dix, the Hoel’s communications officer. “We thought it was an ammunition dump…. She just went whoom— an orange ball of flame.”
Fourteen pilots and aircrew from the Liscome Bay’s squadron, VC-39, sitting in their planes awaiting launch, met fiery deaths at the controls of their aircraft. Hundreds of men belowdecks were incinerated by fire, slain by force of shock, or cooked by superheated steam released from broken boilers. Flames that would have overwhelmed four alarms’ worth of firefighters in a major city formed an inferno whose roar drowned out all but the loudest shouts. But they were quenched altogether just twenty-three minutes later when the Liscome Bay’s eviscerated hull slipped hissing and groaning beneath the waves. Lost with her were 644 men, including both Captain Wiltsie and Rear Adm. Henry M. Mullennix, the commander of the escort carrier group.
The Liscome Bay, a product of the shipyard at Vancouver, Washington, had survived just 109 days from her commissioning. But for the rest of the war the memory of her hellish end lurked in the consciousness of anyone aboard an escort carrier.
In 1944 a journalist traveling with the Taffy 3 escort carrier White Plains wrote, “A jeep carrier bears the same relation to a normal naval vessel that is borne to a district of fine homes by a respectable, but struggling, working-class suburb. There is a desperate effort to keep up appearances with somewhat inadequate materials and not wholly successful results.” Nonetheless, in important ways the Fanshaw Bay and her five sister ships in Sprague’s Taffy 3 task unit—the Gambier Bay, the Kalinin Bay, the Kitkun Bay, the St. Lo, and the White Plains— were the very emblem of American power. The way they were built and deployed signified both the Navy’s unparalleled mastery of the vital business of carrier warfare and America’s coming-of-age as a nation of shipbuilders.
Like her larger cousins the Lexington and the Saratoga, the Fanshaw Bay and her sisters in the Casablanca class of escort carriers were adapted from blueprints for a vessel with an altogether different nature and mission. An escort carrier was built on a cargo ship’s hull. Shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser was the Lee Iacocca of his day, a visionary industrialist whose name was a household word. Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser’s shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days.
Seeing that he was in a position to bolster not only America’s merchant marine but also the Navy’s offensive capability, Kaiser’s next brainstorm was to reconfigure his merchantmen as aircraft carriers. However brilliant their means of construction, Kaiser took shortcuts on components and materials. Escort carriers did not have many watertight compartments, a standard damage-control feature on American combatants. The ships were driven by inexpensive, idiosyncratic Skinner Uniflow steam engines, peculiar in design and nonconforming with Navy specs for cylinder lubrication, filtering, and quality of fittings, and foreign to the young mechanics coming out of America’s wartime technical schools. In combat conditions breakdowns were common. The hull of a CVE was no better than its engines. High in sulfur and phosphorus content, the thin steel was brittle, a deficiency that worsened when all the hatches, vents, and other structural discontinuities were accounted for.
Though compromise had its costs, it was necessary if the ships were to be built in time and the Navy was to pursue the war using naval airpower. The escort carrier’s most essential variation from the design of the Liberty ship was the addition of a 477-foot flight deck. It was made of wood, inlaid with steel fittings for tying down planes. The expense of the cross-deck wood planking could not be avoided. A carrier spent much of its day enveloped in an invisible cloud of aviation-fuel vapors. A dropped wrench, a bomb dolly unloaded too hard onto a metal flight deck, could create a spark that could well be disastrous. A wooden flight deck reduced the frequency of sparks that could ignite a carrier’s tinder. If fire was a concern, heat wasn’t. Temperatures belowdecks on warships cruising the equatorial latitudes were sweltering. In his campaign to cut costs, Kaiser did not install blower systems to ventilate the lower compartments. Crews sweated miserably.
Accompanying Atlantic convoys in 1943, the CVEs and their air groups were deployed to defend merchant convoys against submarine attack. Soon other missions came their way. There was certainly no shortage of new CVEs looking for work. In a one-year sprint of production from July 8, 1943, to July 8, 1944, Kaiser’s ship
yards launched fifty Casablanca-class escort carriers. Ferrying new aircraft to the front was one such job, unglamorous but essential to maintaining a high-tempo air war against Japan. The Fanshaw Bay’s first mission was to take a load of P-38 Lightnings to Australia in 1944. If some belittled them as “buckets,” escort carriers formed a highly effective bucket brigade, carrying urgently needed planes to the far reaches of the Pacific. And the Marines soon learned to love them as well. Sailing with invasion fleets to give air support to American troops, CVE pilots became expert in placing bombs into hard-to-hit caves and crevices. The learning curve was steep, but so was the cost to Japanese defenders.
Significantly too, the low cost of the CVEs was its own form of defense. With the escort carriers’ aerial striking force spread over a larger number of small flight decks, the loss of any one ship did little to reduce the group’s overall strength. With its six escort carriers, Taffy 3 fielded the same number of aircraft—about 165—as two large fleet carriers. But if a Japanese plane got lucky, penetrated Sprague’s defenses, and scored a bomb hit that sank one of their number with most of its planes aboard, the group’s collective striking power would drop by only one-sixth, not one-half. This simple arithmetic was itself a powerful military virtue. With so many wooden-planked flight decks arrayed against them, be they the 477-footers of the CVEs or the 872-footers of the Essex-class fleet carriers, Japan had little hope of whittling away America’s control of the skies.
The Fanshaw Bay’s baptism by fire was rather less calamitous than the Liscome Bay’s. It came in June, during the invasion of Saipan, two months before Sprague came aboard as commander of Carrier Division 25 and the other ships of Taffy 3. Launched by catapult in his fully loaded TBM Avenger, Lt. (jg) Joseph W Oberlin, one of Composite Squadron 68’s outstanding pilots, lost power on takeoff for a predawn mission. The plane hit the sea ahead of the ship. With the carrier bearing down on the sinking plane, Captain Johnson ordered a stop bell. As engineers in the firerooms worked furiously to slow the steam, the ship narrowly avoided running over the pilot and his two crewmen. But a few minutes later, after the VC-68 plane had slipped beneath the surface, several deep explosions shook the water and rattled the ship’s brittle hull. It was the Avenger’s depth charges, exploding at their preassigned depth. “Boy, I thought we’d bought the farm, and so did everyone else!” recalled crewman Vernon Miller. “The pipes rattled, and the dust about choked us. But when all settled down and we got the full-speed bell again, we were still afloat.” Lieutenant Oberlin and his two enlisted crewmen, gunner Don Yoakum and radioman George Koepp, were less fortunate. The shock from the undersea blast killed them in the water.
Two days later the American invasion force came under attack by some seventy Japanese bombers and torpedo planes. Leonard Moser, an aviation machinist’s mate first class, was standing on a catwalk near the after elevator. Leaning on the rag mop he had forgotten he was holding, he watched the Japanese planes bear down on the Fanshaw Bay. Intense fire from her gunners and the surrounding destroyers knocked three Japanese planes into the sea. A sleek Tony fighter plane survived the barrage, flew over the ship, puffs of smoke reaching back from its fuselage into its slipstream as the shells struck home. Moser thought the plane would explode in midair, right above the ship. But then he saw the bomb. It fell from the plane’s wing, arced downward, and struck the Fanshaw Bay smack on the after elevator. The bomb penetrated the elevator and exploded in midair above the hangar deck below, where plane handlers were fueling and arming their aircraft for battle.
The bomb’s detonation burst Leonard Moser’s eardrums and set aflame the business end of his mop. But the most serious damage was belowdecks. When the bomb exploded, Lt. (jg) Tommy Lupo, a TBM Avenger pilot from New Orleans, and his roommate were running across the hangar deck to the ladder that led up to the flight deck. Lupo and his buddy were talking as they ran, and when Lupo turned to say something to him, his roommate was headless. The pilot ran at least five steps without his head.
Fire consumed the aft part of the hangar deck. Fourteen men died there; twenty-three more were wounded. The blast burst a saltwater main, and as water raced through open compartments, the ship began to founder. With water rushing in faster than the submersible pumps could send it back out, the ship began to list and settle. Asbestos insulation shook loose from the pipes and ducts overhead and choked the pumps with its detritus.
Members of a repair party dove beneath the surface of the chest-deep water, scooping handfuls of asbestos from the intakes of the pumps. Augmented by bucket brigades manned by all available hands, the pumps needed four hours to bring the water level down to the kneecaps. The ship would survive.
The Fanshaw Bay was lucky. The bomb’s blast had shredded a thick braid of intertwined electrical cables, which began to burn, dropping molten chunks of the conductive alloy onto a rack of aerial torpedoes stacked on the hangar deck. “Whatever kept them from exploding I’ll never know,” Leonard Moser wrote. “Had they exploded, I’m sure it would have sunk the ship. God was with us.”
Offshore of the sprawling deathscapes of Makin and Tarawa atolls, the bomb blast left fourteen men dead aboard CVE-70. They were duly buried at sea en route to Pearl Harbor for repairs. The Fanny B. was still a lucky ship: she had been one live igniter switch away from becoming a full-scale reenactment of the calamity of the Liscome Bay.
Rear Adm. Clifton A. F. Sprague had not grown up religious. Formal worship had played no role in his upbringing in Massachusetts. When he made the Fanshaw Bay his flagship on August 28, just ten weeks after its near catastrophe off Saipan, he came aboard a ship that had already once tested the extent of its blessings. Sprague would soon have his own opportunity to try the fickle mercy of King Neptune, or God.
Six
Warships have two names: the one they are christened with and the letters and numbers that designate them in the fleet’s inventory. Ziggy Sprague’s flagship the Fanshaw Bay was named for a scenic bay in Alaska, a name that conferred upon the ship an identity by which the crew, the public, and history might remember her. But she was known to the fleet’s record keepers as CVE-70, the letters indicating her type, and the number giving her just enough individuality to set her apart on the Bureau of Ships’ ledgers.
The aviators who made their home aboard the Fanshaw Bay during the Philippine operation had no name to give them a collective identity. Under the command of Lt. Cdr. Richard Spalding Rogers from Berkeley, California, who had finished a tour in the Atlantic flying antisubmarine patrols against German U-boats, they were known simply as VC-68. The letter V indicated that the squadron flew heav ier-than-air vehicles. This designation was a relic of naval aviation’s early days when helium-filled dirigibles appeared to be permanent fixtures in the fleet. The C indicated the squadron’s type: a c omposite squadron, one composed of a mix of aircraft types. Larger carriers had two or three distinct squadrons, each specialized by their mission: VT for torpedo bombers, VB for dive-bombers, and VF for fighters. Escort carriers had no such luxury. One group was all they had.
VC-68’s complement of aircraft and personnel varied. It typically had at its disposal twelve to sixteen FM-2 Wildcat fighters, eight to twelve TBM-1C Avenger torpedo bombers, and four pilots for every three aircraft. It was a versatile mix. Although Wildcats no longer flew from the frontline fleet carriers—those ships fielded the F6F Hellcat fighter, superior in every way—the FM-2s were sturdy and dependable. When flown well, especially at lower altitudes, Wildcats could hold their own against the nimble Japanese A6M Zeros. The Wildcat pilots learned to depend on their plane’s native advantages: its armored cockpit, self-sealing fuel tanks, and heavy armament of four .50-caliber wing-mounted machine guns. On these inherent strengths squadron tacticians developed and refined team-oriented tactics that could defeat the faster, more maneuverable Zeros. Though their primary mission was air-to-air combat—shooting down enemy aircraft while protecting American ships and attack aircraft—the Wildcats could carry a light bomb load to
o. Their pilots, however, found to their dismay that the bombs could be difficult to drop: a pilot had not only to pull the bomb release but also to jerk the plane’s rudder back and forth, shaking the plane in midflight to dislodge the bombs from their notoriously sticky mountings.
The TBM Avenger torpedo bomber was a marvel of aviation engineering, faster, longer-ranged, and more powerful than the death trap that was its predecessor, the Douglas Aircraft Company’s TBD Devastator. Designed by Grumman but manufactured later in the war on the more capacious assembly lines of the General Motors Eastern Aircraft Division, the Avenger packed a tremendous punch. Its massive bomb bay could carry either a single 2,000-pound Mark 13 aerial torpedo—devastating against enemy shipping—or four 500-pound bombs. The plane’s big weapons bay could hold a still larger number of 100-pound antipersonnel bombs for attacking troops on the ground. Or the planes could be outfitted with depth charges for antisubmarine patrols. The plane’s wings were fitted with rails—four on each side—for firing air-to-surface rockets five inches in circumference, useful for blasting targets ashore or at sea. Finally, the Avengers had a pair of wing-mounted .50-caliber machine guns, a third housed in a rotating, flat-sided glass-domed turret behind the plane’s long greenhouse canopy, and a smaller. 30-caliber machine gun, the “stinger,” behind the weapons bay and below the fuselage. It took three men to fly the Avenger: a pilot, who was usually an officer, and two enlisted men—a gunner to operate the turret and a radioman below.
The potential mix of weaponry made the Avengers marvelously versatile. Tactics evolved to maximize the value of all of these weapons types. Avenger pilots could put their aircraft into a shallow dive, fire their wing-mounted machine guns to zero in on a target with phosphorus-tailed tracer bullets, then let loose with the rockets, which were aligned to follow the path of the bullets. Avengers carrying bombs could place them on target in any number of ways. They could be dropped from higher altitudes or placed with greater accuracy from a shallow dive. Since the Avengers were primarily designed to attack ships with torpedoes, flying level as they approached their targets, they were not optimally equipped for steep dives. They had no air brakes, the flaps of perforated metal that swung down from the trailing edge of the wings to slow and control the plummeting plane. Some Avenger pilots treated their lumbering aircraft like dive-bombers nonetheless, plunging from the clouds to lay bombs on enemy targets with pinpoint precision. They were as likely to die from impact with the top of a palm tree as from the inevitably withering enemy antiaircraft fire.
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors Page 9
