by Ian W. Toll
From the bridge, the captain looked down on a flight deck that was showing increasing signs of the trauma below. Even after the first big explosion, the carrier had continued to launch and recover aircraft, but the explosion at 2:42 p.m. had shut her flight operations down for good. The forward elevator was glowing red-orange, with tongues of flame licking around its perimeter. Wounded men were brought up from the hangar deck, now rendered uninhabitable by smoke and flames. Stroop recalled explosions “that sounded like a freight train rumbling up the hangar deck. Actually, it was a rushing wall of flame which would erupt around the perimeter of the elevator. These flames would shoot up two or three feet, and these were occurring with increasing frequency.” As dense smoke and searing heat drove the damage control parties farther aft, they took increasingly desperate actions to get hoses on the fire. A hose was snaked down one of the ammunition hoists in hopes of dousing the fires below by flooding the burning compartments. But nothing could arrest the advancing conflagration. “The forward part of the ship was ablaze, both above and below the armored deck with absolutely no means left to fight the fire, which was now spreading aft on the flight deck,” wrote Commander Seligman, the executive officer. “It was inevitable that the 20-odd torpedo warheads on the mezzanine of the hangar deck must eventually detonate.”
The ship’s internal communications were failing fast, and Sherman and Fitch found it increasingly difficult to get accurate reports of the situation in the lower regions of their crippled ship. The main telephone to the bridge had failed hours earlier, and much of the communications between the captain and the damage control teams had been done by runner. The power cables to the helm cut out, and steering was reduced to an emergency system that required course changes to be relayed by word of mouth. As water pumps failed, her port list returned and she settled lower into the water. Fitch ordered the screening vessels to keep clear, as the Lexington was becoming considerably more difficult to handle. A sound tube to the engine room (requiring no electricity) continued to function for some time, but the sound quality deteriorated steadily. Captain Sherman realized that if he did not order the engineers to evacuate, and the last remaining communications link cut out entirely, the men stationed there would remain at their posts until consumed by the flames. At 4 p.m. he ordered them to douse the engines, blow off the steam from the boilers, and evacuate to the flight deck. The excess steam rushed up the funnel with a throaty whoosh, the engines felt silent, the four big propellers came to rest, and the Lexington lay dead in the water. The carrier’s loyal escorts, the destroyers Anderson, Hammann, and Morris, and the cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans, drew in close to the dying ship and awaited instructions.
At 4:30 p.m., Sherman sent a messenger to find Commander Seligman, who had taken over the remaining damage control efforts, to bring all remaining crewmen up to the flight deck. The hunt through the lower decks was a dangerous job, but it had to be done—the loudspeaker system was long gone, and every man needed to know that he had been ordered away from his station. Injured men were being brought up to the flight deck in a steady stream, many suffering from severe burns or smoke inhalation, but there was never a shortage of volunteers who were willing to go below and help retrieve other members of the crew. Lifeboats and other flotation devices were made ready in anticipation of the abandonment. Destroyers nosed up close under the port quarter and stretchers were lowered onto their decks.
Time was short. Every man aboard knew that the bombs and torpedoes on the hangar deck were slow-roasting as the fires proceeded. The temperature of the metal casings surrounding the torpedo warheads had been measured at 140° Fahrenheit. Eventually, they would reach detonation point and blow the ship to kingdom come. But by five o’clock, when it was clear that no hope remained, and preparations to abandon the ship were well underway, the captain still had yet to give the order. Sherman may have waited a bit longer than Fitch thought prudent, because at 5:07 p.m. the admiral leaned over the balcony, looked at the skipper on the signal bridge, and said: “Let’s get the boys off the ship.”
Knotted lines were secured to the net railing along both sides of the ship, and several dozen circular “doughnut rafts” were lowered into the sea. Men began going down the lines, some descending directly into the rafts, some onto the decks of the faithful destroyers, some into whaleboats, and some directly into the water, 50 feet beneath their feet. It was a calm night, and the sun went down in a typically spectacular blaze of tropical glory. The abandonment was oddly leisurely. There was no rush, no panic, and many seemed in no hurry to leave. A tub of ice cream was brought up from the ship’s service store and served out in paper cups. Antiaircraft crews lowered 20mm gun barrels and ammunition clips to the decks of the destroyers, to save them going to waste when the carrier went down. Men stood in orderly lines behind each rope, and left their shoes in neat rows on the edge of the flight deck. They gave three cheers for the captain. Lieutenant Gayler dived from the flight deck and swam out about 100 yards, then swam back and climbed back up one of the ropes to the flight deck. When asked why he had returned, he replied: “Oh, I got a bit lonely out there. I didn’t know any of those guys. When are you fellows going to come?”
Admiral Fitch left the island, now deserted, trailing a small entourage of staff officers. A marine orderly continued to observe correct punctilio, following one step behind Fitch with the admiral’s coat folded neatly over his arm. “I remember going across the flight deck and realizing it was pretty hot and pretty soon the whole thing was going to be in flames,” Stroop recalled. “Port side, forward, we had what little breeze there was that made that the coolest part of the ship.” Stroop, as Fitch’s flag secretary, used his arms to make a semaphore signal to one of the cruisers: “Send a boat for admiral.” A motor launch pulled up directly under the spot, and Fitch lowered himself down the line and stepped swiftly into the launch.
By six o’clock, only a handful of men remained on the Lexington. The flight deck was painfully hot underfoot. “Little licking tongues of flame raced in erratic patterns across the wooden expanse, only to die out and to be replaced moments later by others,” recalled Signalman Beaver, one of the last men to leave the ship. “We could see nothing aft but fire and smoke. The bow was still clear, but the tar caulking between deck planks was beginning to bubble up. We could feel the heat on our faces.”
The captain and executive officer were the last to go. They had paced the flight deck one last time, looking for stragglers. Finding none, they stood above one of the knotted lines on the Lexington’s stern for a moment, both apparently unwilling to take the final step. Sherman ordered Seligman to go down ahead of him, as it was the captain’s “duty and privilege” to be the last man to leave the ship. As Seligman lowered away, an explosion went up amidships, throwing flames and airplanes high into the air, and Sherman ducked under the edge of the flight deck to get cover from falling debris. Seligman shouted at the skipper to come down the line. “I was just thinking,” Sherman replied: “wouldn’t I look silly if I left this ship and the fires went out?” The captain later wrote that abandoning the Lexington was “heartbreaking,” and “the hardest thing I have ever done.” But the venerable old carrier had run her race, and it was Sherman’s duty to deliver himself, physically intact, into the continuing service of the U.S. Navy. He went down the line and dropped into the warm dark water of the Coral Sea.
The sea around the burning carrier was dotted with the heads of hundreds of swimmers awaiting rescue. Many later remembered that the sea felt pleasant, neither too warm nor too cold, and a welcome respite from the heat of the Lexington’s fires. Their life jackets kept them afloat. They could hang onto a line from one of the rafts and drift comfortably while awaiting their turn to be hauled into one of the whaleboats or destroyers. Some men held packets of cigarettes aloft. The healthy swimmers took their time, allowing their mates who were weakened or dog-tired to be taken on board first. The destroyers Morris and Hammann picked their way through the swimmers with ex
treme care, and men climbed into their cargo nets. Those too weak to climb were winched up on cranes.
Twilight having fallen, the burning carrier made a beautiful and terrible sight. Lit up against the night sky, she looked even more enormous than usual. Every aperture in her hangar deck revealed the maelstrom of red and orange flames within, and parts of her hull glowed like molten lead. Beaver recalled: “She listed heavily and burned with dirty red flames that blossomed from time to time as bombs in the parked airplanes—and the airplanes themselves—exploded on her flight deck. The darkening waters reflected the fire’s light in a way that made the scene seem even more terrible than it was.”
By this time the torpedo warheads and bombs on the hangar deck were nearing ignition temperature, and at 6:30 p.m. they went up in a vast, rippling explosion. A dozen aircraft on the flight deck were blown overboard like a child’s toys. The No. 2 elevator, amidships, popped off the flight deck like a bottle cap, and from the breach rose a solid sheet of flames. From a nearby cruiser, Stanley Johnston saw “bits and particles, airplanes, plates, planks, pieces large and small all going up into the air in the midst of a blinding white flame and smoke. We pressed lovingly against the heaving steel sides of that cruiser, hugging her for seconds while the debris splashed into the sea for hundreds of feet around.”
Admiral Fletcher had already decided against making another attack that day, and ordered the entire task force to make way to the south to draw off from the enemy. He had considered but rejected a proposal to send the cruisers and destroyers after the Japanese task force to draw them into a surface action, as they would probably meet with heavy air attack. That decision probably saved most of the Lexington’s crew by ensuring there were enough ships to take the survivors aboard. The men were picked up and distributed to the cruisers and destroyers of the task force, which were heavily overpopulated as a result. But the crews went out of their way to offer hospitality to the now-shipless men of the Lexington, sharing their extra clothes and yielding up their bunks so that all could sleep in shifts.
Fletcher ordered the Lexington sunk, both to prevent her falling into enemy hands and to eliminate the danger that she might serve as a signal beacon for enemy planes. The destroyer Phelps moved in to a range of 1,500 yards to carry out the dreadful task. Captain Sherman, choked up, watched from the cruiser Minneapolis. The Phelps fired a spread of eight torpedoes into the carrier’s starboard side; it appeared that four detonated. Sherman recalled: “The stricken vessel started getting deeper in the water, slowly going down, as if she too were reluctant to give up the battle. With her colors proudly flying and the last signal flags, reading ‘I am abandoning ship,’ still waving at the yardarm, she went under on an even keel, like the lady she always was.” At 7:52 p.m., the Lexington went down in a cloud of hissing steam, taking the bodies of more than a hundred of her crew with her. About a minute later, a tremendous underwater explosion was felt and heard for miles around, even on the other ships of the American task force a full ten miles away. It was “Lady Lex’s” last defiant roar. She was on her way into the abyss.
THE YORKTOWN, smaller and more maneuverable than the Lexington, had dodged eight torpedoes and perhaps a dozen bombs. Captain Elliott Buckmaster had conned the ship from the signal bridge, shouting, “hard to starboard!” and “hard to port!” Taking advantage of his ship’s tight turning radius, Buckmaster had dealt with the torpedoes by taking them “bow on”—that is, he turned the Yorktown directly toward the incoming tracks and neatly threaded them, missing the nearest by less than 50 feet. “The ship’s wake was boiling into a large, white curve as she turned,” recalled William G. Roy, a photographer stationed near Buckmaster on the bridge. Those violent turns at more than 30 knots had caused the ship to roll steeply, obliging crewmen to seize hold of whatever handholds they could find to avoid sliding across the deck.
The Yorktown took one hit from the dive-bombers, a 500-pound bomb that struck near the island and went right through the flight deck, leaving a 14-inch hole in the steel plate; it passed through a ready room, the hangar deck, the second deck, and the third deck, and finally detonated deep in the ship, in an aviation storeroom on the fourth deck. For a bomb to puncture six decks without exploding gives some idea of the force with which it was delivered—it was traveling perhaps 500 miles per hour. A sailor stationed aft on the hangar deck judged that the blast “raised the whole stern of the ship at least ten feet”—high enough to lift the carrier’s propellers clear out of the water, and the sound of the racing engine was heard over the din of battle. The internal bulkheads and deck were buckled visibly by the blast. Thirty-seven men were killed outright, and many more injured. Seaman Otis Kight was assigned to the cleanup detail, and recorded his recollections years later: “There were parts and particles: some ship, some shipmate. . . . We sorted out the pieces of the ship, put pieces of the crew in the body bags, and put the other trash in garbage bags until the compartment was clear enough to use shovels, then fire hoses, then disinfectant and swabs. And always, ‘the sweet smell of death.’ And the thought crossed my mind then and many times later, where is my number?”
Surprisingly, perhaps, the ship did not suffer much beyond that initial damage; the fires were brought under control, the flight deck operations continued, and she was able to maintain 24 knots. The chief engineer, asked by the captain whether the engines should be throttled down, replied, “Hell, no. We’ll make it!”
While the Lex burned, the Yorktown kept constantly on the move, both to avoid making herself an easy target for Japanese submarines and to collect her airplanes. When it became clear that the Lexington would not survive, Admiral Fitch had had the foresight to send off as many as possible of the Lexington’s undamaged planes to land on her sister ship while flight operations remained possible. Reinforced with more than a quarter of the Lex’s aircraft, Yorktown’s air strength was better than it had been at the start of the battle. Yet Fletcher’s range of options was limited. The American aviators had claimed hits on both Japanese carriers and were confident that one must have sunk. But afternoon sighting reports confirmed that two Japanese carriers were afloat and did not appear to be on fire or otherwise crippled. With Lexington gone, the Americans could not afford to lose the Yorktown. Moreover, fuel reserves were worryingly low, and the screening vessels of the task force were heavily encumbered with more than 2,700 Lexington survivors. Fletcher first intended remaining in the Coral Sea, but late in the afternoon of May 8 he heard from Nimitz. Fletcher was to withdraw out of attack range. Task Force 17 turned south.
On the destroyers, the Lexington sailors took up every spare patch of deck space, and it was difficult to move around the ships. No meals were served in the mess hall: sandwiches and black coffee were passed out to the men where they sat. Hundreds of men slept on the deck that night, their exhaustion overcoming the uncomfortable conditions, and not even the sheets of salt spray thrown back from the bow were enough to awaken them. The doctors and corpsmen worked around the clock to treat the wounded. Burn cases were numerous, and they were treated with tannic acid, applied directly to the burns, and copious injections of morphine. Bandages were wrapped and rewrapped; plaster casts were set on broken bones. The worst of the burn cases were given plasma transfusions. Several of the destroyers were laboring and rolling heavily as they charged southward: those ships were small enough that the weight of extra passengers diminished their seaworthiness. The problem grew more acute as fuel levels fell, which raised each destroyer’s center of gravity. Fletcher ordered that Lexington survivors be redistributed onto the cruisers.
The Yorktown made good speed, but her internal damage was severe, and she was bleeding oil into a long slick that trailed behind her for miles. That was a dangerous state of affairs, as a slick could be tracked by hostile airplanes. Fletcher ordered one of the destroyers to follow close behind in the carrier’s wake in hopes of breaking up the slick. The passengers and crew, being told nothing of the enemy’s whereabouts, tended to assume that th
e Japanese were in hot pursuit. Lieutenant Wally Short confessed: “We were running scared, if the truth were told.”
Task Force 17 turned east in the early hours of May 9, and snuck out of the Coral Sea by a route south of New Caledonia. Low on fuel, the Yorktown paused in port at Tongatapu in the Tonga Islands, awaiting the arrival of another oiler. Several of the surface ships put in at Nouméa, capital of New Caledonia. The fleet buzzed with rumors about a forthcoming operation in the North Pacific.
THE JAPANESE WERE ALSO IN HEADLONG RETREAT. On the afternoon of May 8, Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue concluded that he had no other choice but to call off the Port Moresby landing and send both aircraft carriers back toward Truk. “Port Moresby attack will be postponed to a later date,” he radioed Yamamoto. “Your approval is requested.” He had several respectable motives for his decision, including a low fuel state and the risk that the invasion force would come under devastating air attack if sent back toward Moresby. Even if both American carriers had been sunk, as the Japanese airmen would have him believe, the heavy presence of Australia-based army bombers had been noted. The Shoho, which was to have provided air cover for the troopships, was gone; and although the Zuikaku was in one piece, the Japanese carrier air groups had been decimated in the air battles of May 7 and 8. At the end of the second day, total carrier air strength had been reduced to thirty-nine planes—twenty-four Zeros, nine dive-bombers, and six torpedo planes. Many of the best and most seasoned aircrews had been shot down or lost at sea.
