The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  A torpedo attack, uniquely dangerous, required a pilot to fly low, slow, and perfectly straight. The mantra, drummed into every torpedo bomber pilot during flight training, was “needle-ball and airspeed.” The challenge was to keep his eyes focused on two instruments, the needle-ball, which indicated the plane’s orientation on the horizontal plane, and the airspeed indicator. If the pilot could keep both instruments within the narrow parameters needed for a successful drop, the torpedo would enter the water like a free-style swimmer hitting the water from a racing podium: flat, straight, and true. A pilot who flew too fast, or with any degree of pitch, yaw, or bounce, or at an altitude that caused the torpedo to enter the ocean with excessive force, was likely to see his torpedo veer off course or “porpoise.”

  The cruelty of the torpedo pilot’s trade was that the greater his proficiency at straight, slow, and exquisitely stable flight, the greater his chances of being blown from the sky. By reputation, fighter pilots were the wilder breed of aviator—daring individualists who itched to match reflexes with an enemy counterpart in the skies. In less sober moments fighter jocks were prone to razz the Avenger guys as “pickle luggers,” their bulky aircraft as “turkeys.” Yet when the Wildcat drivers paused to consider what their buddies at the stick of an Avenger might be called upon to do—bore in on a hostile warship, one eye focused on needle-ball and airspeed, the other on the target, alight from stem to stern with guns aimed their way—few were eager to trade places with them. A TBM pilot from the escort carrier St. Lo, Ens. William C. Brooks, said, “They looked at us and said, ‘Good God, I wouldn’t get into that thing and do what you do for all the tea in China.’”

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  THE OLDEST SALTS ABOARD the USS St. Lo, its chief petty officers, knew a thing or two about ship names. They knew at least this: that according to tradition, it was plain bad luck to have your ship’s name changed when under way during wartime. The blessings of the Navy’s christening ceremony were many and manifold. You just didn’t throw that away. If you did, disaster was sure to follow.

  Although the Navy secretary’s custom had been to name Henry Kaiser’s new Casablanca-class escort carriers after bays, when CVE-63 came off the ways at Vancouver, Washington, on August 17, 1943, the triumph at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 was still de-liciously fresh in mind. And so in a rush of bureaucratic exuberance, perhaps, the ship was christened two months later in honor of the battle that had turned the war’s tide. The USS Midway was born.

  But someone in the Navy Department soon thought better of giving such an outsize name to the decidedly in-size ship. The honor of carrying the name Midway should belong to a carrier more majestic than a Kaiser coffin. Midway, the battle, had turned the course of the war. Midway, the ship, should reflect the glory of its namesake victory just as proudly as the Saratoga and the Lexington did theirs. With the Navy’s next big carrier, a 45,000-ton thoroughbred designated CVB-41, under construction at Newport News, Virginia, the name was summarily wrested from CVE-63 and given to the new leviathan.

  On October 10, 1944, as the Midway lay at anchor in Seeadler Harbor, at Manus in the Admiralty Islands, news arrived that the jeep carrier would be renamed the St. Lo in honor of the Army’s recent triumph in France after the D-Day landings. Few of the veteran crew aboard CVE-63 seemed disposed to appreciate the honor, however. When the news came down of the name change, the groans of the chief petty officers reverberated through the ship’s brittle hull so loudly as to defy the rumpus of the Uniflow engines. “Damn Navy,” said an old chief boatswain’s mate. “You don’t change the name of a ship. It’s an ill-fated ship. It’ll be at the bottom of the ocean in two weeks.”

  As career sailors—many were in their forties—they had served in the U.S. Navy since the Depression, had lived and breathed the legends and superstitions that formed the core of Navy tradition. Stories circulated of newly renamed ships taking to sea, never to be seen again. In some divisions on the St. Lo, as many as ninety percent of the men requested transfers. Still, many younger members of the ship’s company—the teenage seamen, the twentysomething ninety-day wonder ensigns and lieutenants junior grade—brushed off the superstitions of their elders. “We didn’t shudder and shake about it,” said Ensign Brooks, the junior ensign in the St. Lo’s resident squadron, VC-65. “We respected their view, but we didn’t get all uptight about it. We were too busy doing something else.”

  Ever since the St. Lo had taken position off Samar with the Fan-shaw Bay and the other ships of Taffy 3 on October 18, there was indeed no shortage of things for pilots to do. Fliers assigned to morning patrol were roused from their quarters at four A.M. After reveille the Filipino stewards served them a quick breakfast of coffee, eggs, and navy beans. Then, chart boards in hand and parachute harnesses strapped to their backs, they climbed to the flight deck before the sun was up, vaulted into the cockpits of their planes, and ignited their big radial engines to life. Running through the preflight checklist as plane handlers muscled the aircraft into their harnesses on the catapult track, the pilots pressed back against their headrests as the compressed-air system under the flight deck slung the planes from zero to seventy knots in just sixty feet of space. Spitting flames from their exhaust stacks under their cowlings, the heavily laden torpedo bombers dropped from the flight deck toward the water before their big propellers grabbed enough air to carry them away into the predawn darkness ahead of the ship.

  Flying at three or four thousand feet, with their fourteen-cylinder, nineteen-hundred-horsepower Wright radial engines throttled back to minimum RPMs and the manifold pressure set for efficient fuel consumption, the TBM-1C Avengers could remain on station for up to six or seven hours on a single mission. Their extended vigilance—patrols were more customarily four or four and a half hours—put tremendous pressure on any Japanese submarines aiming to take a shot at Taffy 3. The enemy often stalked American ships by dawn, hoping to catch a carrier silhouetted against the sunrise for an easy torpedo attack. But when the morning light was just right and the wind was in check and if the sub was not too deep, a pilot looking down at the proper angle to the ocean’s reflective sheen could actually see the silhouette of the underwater predator, like the dim form of a trout in a shaded pool. If friendly surface ships were close, the pilot would radio the contact to the fleet, summoning a destroyer to hunt it down. Then he would dive down and drop his depth charges on the target.

  The urgent tempo of wartime operations always put a little guesswork in the difficult business of distinguishing friendly subs from foe. It was a lesson that the St. Lo’s aviators had learned the hard way three weeks before taking up station off Samar, during the invasion of Morotai. On October 3 a spread of torpedoes had appeared from the deep, narrowly missing the St. Lo and the Fanshaw Bay, and struck the USS Shelton in the stern, leaving the destroyer escort dead in the water. At eleven A.M. that morning Bill Brooks, launched to conduct a “hunter-killer” search, spotted a suspicious contact close to the enemy sub’s expected location, and radioman Ray Travers blinkered that day’s Morse code signal to the submarine.

  The sub, running with her decks awash but her conning tower still clearly visible, not only failed to return the correct signal but did not respond at all. It continued to dive. By the time Brooks swung around again and winged over to strike, the submarine was under water. He dropped a stick of depth charges some fifty to seventy-five yards ahead of where he guessed it had submerged, then released a canister of fluorescent green dye to pinpoint the vessel’s last known location. Brooks reported his attack and remained on station until relief arrived in the form of the destroyer escort USS Rowell.

  The Rowell’s ping jockeys heard through their headsets the telltale ping-woo-woo-oo that signaled contact with an undersea target and began dropping depth charges. Shortly after the foam of the last detonation settled, the Rowell’s crew watched as iridescent bubbles of oil surfaced near their ship. Floating up with the mess was an assortment of flotsam and debris that signaled the end for th
e target and all hands aboard her—the American submarine USS Seawolf.

  After investigation by a board of inquiry, no discipline was taken against Brooks or his crew. But the lesson of the Morotai incident was clear: when bad luck strikes, it is usually the function of a cause far simpler and more readily determinable than crossed stars or a changed ship name.

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  LIKE THE REST OF the pilots of the fleet, Taffy 3’s fliers were the product of a carefully structured, multilayered training system that did for the Navy’s raw human assets what the great coastal and riverine shipyards were doing for its steel. The Navy’s aviation program had ballooned in scope since the early 1920s, when Ziggy Sprague joined Pensacola’s inaugural class of cadet fliers. By 1943 pilot training had been standardized and systematized. With some thirty thousand aircraft rolling out of America’s factories each year and Detroit’s automotive production lines ramped up and recalibrated to the close tolerances needed to build airplanes, the Navy scrambled to find enough pilots to fly them.

  Mostly the service looked to college students to swell its naval aviator ranks, although a college degree was not required if one had the strength and smarts to complete the rigorous training. At first the Navy restricted the privilege of flight to newly commissioned ensigns and other officers. Then grudgingly the Navy relented in the face of war’s demands, allowing senior enlisted men to enter pilot training. In 1943 the Navy announced its goal to train 25,000 student naval aviators that year in order to keep pace with combat and operational losses and fill the flight decks of carriers under construction. A network of preflight and primary flight training schools sprung up all across the country, from Long Island to San Diego, from Corpus Christi to the Great Lakes.

  Bill Brooks did his preflight training at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, learning the basics of aerodynamics, meteorology, mathematics, survival swimming, naval etiquette, and other subjects that did not require strapping oneself into a cockpit. Emerging from Chapel Hill as a cadet, he first flew solo during primary flight training at Bunker Hill Naval Air Station in Indiana. There he became acquainted with the N3N Yellow Peril, a two-seater biplane trainer that was forgiving to green hands practicing stalls, rolls, loops, and S turns but that had a dangerous tendency to ground-loop—to cartwheel on landing from the torque created by the engine and the narrowly set landing gear. A pilot could be killed on impact, or a hard shock could rupture a fuel line in the exposed, air-cooled engine, causing a catastrophic fire.

  Certified proficient at the entry level, Brooks and his thirty-five classmates moved on to intermediate training at Pensacola, where they flew increasingly powerful single-wing planes: the Vultee Valiant, better known to its trainees as the Vultee Vibrator, and the North American SNJ Texan. Now that the trainees had more or less proven their physical and psychological resilience, their reward was to fly planes that were actually armed. Training at Whiting Field included low-level bombing, strafing, night flying, aerobics, and combat tactics. When they finished the syllabus, the pilots had a choice to make: would they go on to fly fighters, torpedo bombers, or dive-bombers? For Brooks—six foot one, 185 pounds, a former member of the Southern Cal football team—sitting down in a fighter plane’s cramped cockpit was “like getting into a shoebox.” His knees were jammed up under his chin, the controls too close for his long arms. So he chose the more spacious cockpit setup of torpedo bombers.

  To train as a torpedo bomber pilot, Brooks went to Baron Field Naval Air Station near Mobile, Alabama—nicknamed “Bloody Baron” owing to the occasional crashes that resulted when the airfield’s swirling red dust gummed up the planes’ air-cooled engines. There Brooks rehearsed higher-risk operations like night missions, tactical flying, and field carrier landings. Nearly one-third of the trainees washed out before they completed intermediate training. It was the final hurdle before Cadet Brooks returned to Pensacola to get a set of wings pinned to his chest and the single gold stripe of a commissioned Navy ensign sewn into his sleeve.

  At advanced flight training at Opalaca, Florida, the discipline and danger of attacking a ship while flying with fixed needle-ball and airspeed was drummed into Brooks day and night. He spent several days there flying the accursed Douglas TBD Devastators. “They flew like a bus,” Brooks said of the sluggish old death traps of the Battle of Midway. Brooks did not relish the thought of riding the misnamed Devastator into battle. But soon enough the next-generation Grum-man Avengers arrived. Flying the faster, more powerful plane—dropping torpedoes, both dummy and live, into hundred-foot-long target sleds towed by tugboats—pilots experimented with higher altitudes and faster airspeeds for dropping a torpedo and speeding to the escape. The Avenger could successfully drop while flying at 280 knots at an altitude of 500 feet. That was more than double the optimum attack altitude for the Devastator and twice its rated speed. At the same time the pilots went to ground school to refine their knowledge of emergency procedures, hydraulics, and cockpit layout. They drilled until they could operate all systems blindfolded—an exercise that could save the life of a pilot whose windscreen was blown out during combat and who became blinded by a hot spray of engine oil.

  After he finished advanced training, a young man aspiring to become a certified naval aviator had to pass one last test: mastering the difficult art of landing on a moving redwood flight deck and catching an arrester wire with the tail hook. Before entering the pool for a squadron assignment, a trainee pilot had to land six successful touch-and-go’s at the Navy’s Carrier Qualification Training Unit, which operated two makeshift aircraft carriers on Lake Michigan, converted paddlewheel excursion boats named the Wolverine and the Sable. Completing this task required the instincts, courage, and feel that separated a carrier pilot from his land-based brethren. Those traits had to be second nature, because a pilot returning from combat might well have to perform this feat while fatigued after a long afternoon in the air, or while slowly bleeding to death from wounds suffered in battle. Sometimes a pilot had to do it at night, when the cues from the landing signal officer—who for an aviator is the most important individual on the ship after the captain—were but two red fireflies darting to and fro in the darkness.

  The final air strike of the Marianas campaign was a case in point showing the dangers of nighttime carrier landings. Vice Admiral Mitscher’s decision to launch late in the day—too late for a daylight return—was a calculated gamble. When the pilots returned after dark, locating their carriers in the void of the nighttime sea was nearly impossible.

  As his fliers felt their way home through the night, their fuel tanks nearly empty, Mitscher broke the strict nighttime blackout rule, designed to hide the fleet from enemy submarines. He had won the lifelong love of his aviators by following through on his own affection for them. With his pilots desperately searching for a place to land, Mitscher ordered all ships of his task group to switch on their lights.

  Jittery about possible exposure to submarine attack, some of his carrier skippers were restrained in their pyrotechnics. But Capt. Clifton A. F. Sprague of the Wasp complied with gusto. Sprague lit up his ship like an oceangoing Christmas tree, impaling the night with the probing white fingers of his giant arc spotlights. He switched on the red flight deck lights. Sailors pointed aloft hand-held flashlights. Destroyers fired star shells to illuminate the storm-threatened night. The light show was glorious, like “a Hollywood premiere, Chinese New Year’s, and Fourth of July rolled into one,” according to the historian Samuel Eliot Morison. With exhausted American aviators bouncing down onto any flight deck that presented itself, losses were kept to a minimum.

  Mitscher’s gallant risk deeply impressed his aviators. A dive-bomber pilot from the Enterprise wrote, “I heard pilots express the opinion that the admirals looked upon the fliers as expendable, and I suppose they must to a certain extent, but I shall never again feel that they wouldn’t do everything conceivable in their power to bring a pilot back.… It was a demonstration I shall never forget.”

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  WHEN BROOKS COMPLETED HIS training at Glenview, Illinois, he flew to the Grumman factory near Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island to pick up a TBF Avenger, then ferried himself cross-country to San Diego to await a squadron assignment. With none immediately forthcoming, Brooks was ordered to the ordnance depot at Whidbey Island, Washington, where he and other pilots worked with engineers from all around the country—Caltech, Harvard, Columbia, General Electric—to solve the problem of the dud torpedoes, which for the first two years of the war had submarine skippers and torpedo pilots alike risking life and limb in a potentially fruitless effort. A simple engineering miscalculation had resulted in firing pins that failed to ignite.

  Completing the syllabus at Whidbey in June 1944, Ensign Brooks boarded a Pan Am China Clipper from San Francisco to Oahu, gathering with hundreds of other newly minted pilots at Ford Island Naval Air Station to await assignment to the fleet. From there he hopped toward the front, from island to exotic island. At Eniwetok, the Navy’s forwardmost base at the time, Brooks joined VC-65, the squadron assigned to the escort carrier then known as the USS Midway.

  The pilots of VC-65 were older than their ship’s company. Averaging twenty-three to twenty-four years of age, they had wives and kids. The thirty-year-old squadron commander, Lt. Cdr. Ralph M. Jones, well liked for his fairness and seasonable temperament, knew his business and minded it so long as his pilots knew theirs. If one of them screwed up, he didn’t need to raise his voice to register his displeasure. He just glowered—gave them the “big glom.” With a graduate engineering degree from MIT, he was a skilled TBM pilot with a Navy Cross to his name. Jones’s plane was always first in line for the catapult whenever a combat mission was scheduled.