The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  Sky Control was a partially enclosed platform on the tripod mast. At 110 feet above the waterline it was the best vantage point on the ship. Benny had a commanding view of the southwest corner of Oahu as Enterprise cleared Barbers Point. Shortly thereafter, an escort group of three cruisers and nine destroyers joined the carrier. Once in formation, all bows pointed due west.

  Compounding the mystery of Enterprise’s present mission was the mimeographed order that was handed Benny next: to supply all aircraft with war-ready torpedoes and live ammunition. It also directed him to arm the ship’s mounted guns and antiaircraft batteries with the same. Benny sent a message back to Enterprise’s captain, George Murray. If they prepared the torpedoes for war shots, they wouldn’t be able to participate in the scheduled battle exercises on their return to Pearl. Word came back promptly: “Prepare torpedoes for war shots.”

  Such preparation took scores of men hundreds of hours. Stored ammunition was loose, and a million rounds had to be belted, clipped, and installed on all the guns on the ship. Torpedo gangs had to attach TNT warheads to the carefully stored bombs. At the same time, the ship’s mechanics worked around the clock to put the marine planes in top-notch condition; there were no servicing facilities wherever they were going.

  When the flotilla was safely at sea, the mission was announced at last: transport the twelve fighter planes and their pilots two thousand miles to Wake Island. The strategic mid-Pacific American base, with no fresh water source and only one known mammal—the rat—needed immediate fortification. After the 2,800-strong Enterprise crew and pilots were notified, yet another startling order circulated the ship and, by signal, transmitted to all escort vessels. The announcement was signed by both Captain Murray and Admiral Halsey, Enterprise’s flag officer:

  CV6/A16-5(10-11t)

  USS Enterprise

  At Sea

  November 28, 1941

  BATTLE ORDER NUMBER ONE

  1. The Enterprise is now operating under war conditions.

  2. At any time, day or night, we must be ready for instant action.

  3. Hostile submarines may be encountered.

  4. The importance of every officer and man being especially alert and vigilant while on watch at his battle station must be fully realized by all hands.

  5. The failure of one man to carry out his assigned task promptly, particularly the lookouts, those manning the batteries, and all those on watch on deck might result in great loss of life and even the loss of the ship.

  6. The Captain is confident all hands will prove equal to any emergency that may develop.

  7. It is part of the tradition of our Navy that, when put to the test, all hands keep cool, keep our heads, and fight.

  8. Steady nerves and stout hearts are needed now.

  G. D. Murray (signed)

  Captain, US Navy, Commanding

  Approved, November 28, 1941

  W. F. Halsey

  Vice Admiral, US Navy

  Commander Aircraft,

  Battle Force

  Enterprise at war? Scuttlebutt regarding the strongly worded memo shot from one end of the ship to the other. The crew shifted to an unfamiliar state of high alert, and more than one school of fish drew torpedo fire along the way. But the convoy’s crinoline wakes were the only visible disturbance on the water’s surface all the way to its destination.

  On November 30 Enterprise crossed the International Date Line, and the calendar skipped to December 2. At daylight the next morning, the marine pilots boarded their planes, took off in a line, and lowered onto the largest of Wake’s three tiny spits of coral, sand, and scrub.

  On December 3, under blackout orders and radio silence, Enterprise and her escorts swung around and immediately began the trek back to Pearl. Having regained a day at the 180th meridian, they sailed through two December fifths. On the first of these, a young flyer named Ensign John H. Vogt returned from his patrol and reported seeing ships’ masts through the haze at the outer perimeter of his search; the information was logged but not acted upon.

  On the second December fifth, the convoy ran into a tremendous squall. High winds lashed and battered the convoy. Thirty-foot waves broke high over Enterprise’s bow as the carrier rose and fell in heaving seas. Benny lurched along slippery, crazily slanted walkways as he moved from gun emplacement to gun emplacement. He was not alone in wondering whether getting to Pearl on December 6 as scheduled was more important than getting there in one piece. Benny’s concern was that pelting rain was blinding his already raw-nerved gunners, not to mention challenging their tenuous holds on the gun mounts.

  Only when powerful trade winds collided with the mountainous seas and threatened to crack the bows of two destroyers did a reluctant Admiral Halsey order reduced speed. The convoy’s scheduled arrival at Pearl Harbor was thus postponed to Sunday morning, December 7.

  Benny and the crew were as relieved as they were disappointed. The slowdown eased their nerves, but after nine grueling days at sea, the delay also meant no Saturday-night dissipating at the Moana Hotel or Sunday on the links. Adjusting to the news, the men going off rotation gravitated to the gymnasium-like hangar deck to watch Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, a movie about a draftee-turned-World War I hero who saved hundreds of his comrades’ lives while braving a hailstorm of enemy fire.

  As the men settled into the film, Enterprise and her escorts slowed their eastward pace but remained on a near-convergence course with another convoy, Kido Butai, a mammoth six-carrier Japanese armada complete with 414 planes and 49 support vessels pounding southeast from its own late-November sortie, a remote anchorage in the Kurile Islands. The Japanese convoy was traveling under radio silence outside normal shipping lanes to avoid detection.

  At dusk on December 6, scout planes again returned to the ship after their customary two-hundred-mile scan in all directions. Flyer D. W. Halsey (no relation to the admiral) jumped from his dive bomber, still zipped in his orange jumpsuit. He had an urgent report. Young Halsey felt sure he had observed the top of ships’ masts on the horizon at the end of his northwest search. The admiral questioned sternly why he didn’t investigate further. He quietly responded that he would not have had enough fuel to return to the ship. Because the pilot was relatively inexperienced, Captain Murray and Admiral Halsey decided to disregard the uncorroborated report.

  In the predawn hours of December 7, Benny was on the “dog watch,” which ran from 0400 to 0800. Damp cold and edgy nerves had him on full alert that morning. He paced back and forth in Sky Control, alternately raising his field glasses to scan the obsidian sea and swilling from a bottomless cup of coal-black coffee. At 0500 the day’s first general quarters (“man your battle stations”) sounded. Flight quarters (“pilots, man your aircraft”) then blared from the loudspeakers.

  It was customary to send one air squadron to Pearl Harbor ahead of the ship on the day of its arrival. This duty was sort of a rotating perk among the flight squadrons. Leaving Enterprise several hours early to arrange for the convoy’s berthing allowed the pilots to greet anxious wives and girlfriends in two short hours instead of the five or six it took Enterprise to get there. On this particular morning, the honor went to Scouting Squadron Six, led by Commander Brigham Young.

  As the pilots assembled, Benny sent an inquiry to the flag bridge as to whether the live bombs and antiaircraft ammunition were to be removed from Scouting Six’s planes. After some delay, a runner brought word back from flag staff: remove the bombs but leave the ammunition. Benny nodded and transmitted the message. After Battle Order Number One, why should this surprise him?

  Out on the Sky Bridge, he could see the pilots suiting up and preparing for takeoff. Crewmen huddled around them, asking the flyers to notify loved ones of the ship’s impending arrival. Enterprise had departed so suddenly that many of them hadn’t had the chance to explain that they might be gone longer than a routine weekend of maneuvers. Benny always felt a quiet pang overhearing the men chattering about wives and families waiting for them
. Once again, nobody would be waiting for Benny.

  Benny had already said his good-byes to Scouting Six pilots Vogt and Roger Miller, the men who had joined him for a day of revelry during Barton’s stopover. They made a fast plan to go to Waikiki the following week when they all had leave. At 0615 the flight deck was finally cleared, and Squadron Six’s eighteen planes took off and set a due east course. They would do a 180-degree sector sweep ahead of the ship, then land at Ford Island, the islet in the center of Pearl Harbor, by morning colors.

  TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY miles north of Oahu, nearly the same distance that the Enterprise now stood west of her port, the Imperial Japanese fleet pressed southeast at flank speed. Its twenty-seven submarines were already well ahead of the fleet. At 0550 the Japanese Imperial Navy’s six aircraft carriers and escorts had commenced the launch of 184 Zero fighters.

  AFTER THE ENTERPRISE PLANES took off, Benny fiddled with the radio dial until he found the squadron’s flight frequency. This had become a habit in Sky Control on approach to Pearl, often just to relieve the boredom. The bravado chitchat among the pilots, usually on the bawdy side, was always a source of amusement.

  About 0745, through the crackle and buzz of interference, Benny was jolted by the pilots’ voices rising with alarm over the radio transmitter. They were shouting to one another.

  “Hey, did you see that army plane shooting at me?”

  “That’s no army plane! That’s a Japanese plane! Look at the red circles on his wings!”

  “That bastard! I’m going to shoot back!” The charged back-and-forth continued as Squadron Six and the equally surprised Japanese pilots tangled in view of Pearl Harbor.

  Relieved of his watch, Benny raced past the duty bugler and the officer of the deck, then past the quartermaster and the helmsman. He was heading for the secret radar console between the flag bridge and the ship’s bridge. Benny found Jack Baumeister, Enterprise radar officer, hidden behind a long black curtain. Heart at a gallop, Benny told Jack what he’d heard on the pilot’s frequency. “Can we get anything on radar?”

  Perspiring, Jack leaned forward in his chair and peered at a cluster of echoing blips of unknown origin making their way across the screen of the ship’s new radar machine. “It’s strange,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of bogies, but I shouldn’t be getting any. We’re a hundred and forty-four miles away, so they have to be flying really high for me to even get them on radar—I mean at least twenty thousand feet.”

  “Have you reported this?” Benny asked, incredulous. Jack replied that he had, but his tone betrayed a lack of confidence in the new radar technology. By then, however, numerous planes had sent messages back to Enterprise confirming the worst. Benny and Jack stood together staring at the screen, the top half seeming to crawl with ants. Within seconds, the ship’s sirens screamed. The radioman had received an official coded message: “Enemy air raid on Pearl Harbor X This no drill.”

  The quartermaster pulled the general quarters alarm, triggering its seventeen spine-chilling buzzes. The message blared repeatedly over the ship’s loudspeakers as men scrambled to their battle stations. Back in Sky Control, Benny issued rapid but succinct instructions in preparation for a possible attack on Enterprise itself, first to the men on the large five-inch antiaircraft mounts and on down the line to the machine gunners amidships.

  As Benny barked orders to his gunners, Halsey issued his own from the flag bridge. After sending up a combat air patrol (CAP) to search for enemy ships, the admiral motioned to the signalmen. In a finger snap, a new set of multicolored flags were yanked from their flag bag and hoisted up the yardarm. The message to the fleet: “Prepare for battle.” With Enterprise’s battle flags now flying from her forepeak, the signal went out to the ships in the convoy to do the same. Wordless, from the ship’s highest perch, Benny watched the opening scenes of Enterprise at war.

  OVER THE NEXT TWO hours, the enemy force, commanded by Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, leveled the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Enterprise’s Squadron Six, outnumbered ten to one, fought the swarming Zeros with everything it had. The pilots’ voices through the crackling radio static rang in Benny’s ears for days, especially that of Ensign Manuel Gonzales. “Please don’t shoot! This is Six-Baker-Three, an American plane!” Next came Gonzales’s urgent command to his rear gunner, “We are on fire—bail out!” The transmission went silent after that. They disappeared without a trace.

  Brigham Young carried Admiral Halsey’s staff officer, Lieutenant Commander Bromfield Nichols, in the rear of his plane. Nichols was carrying the classified report on Enterprise’s delivery of the fighter planes to Wake. Through the wind and static, Benny heard Young say something about antiaircraft puffs over the harbor and army planes over the marines’ aviation hub, Ewa Air Station.

  Next, Nichols shouted that bits of their left wing were gone. The next thing Benny heard was a long series of invectives, and then nothing. He later learned that Young barely made his landing on Ford—after taking more fire from confused US gunners on the tarmac than the Japanese pilots in the air.

  News of the rest of Squadron Six trickled in. Lieutenant Clarence Dickinson and Ensign Bud McCarthy had been lucky. Under attack by six Zeros, they shot down one but were no match for the rest. Both their planes were riddled, but the men bailed out at low altitude and survived to tread water off Battleship Row, witnessing firsthand the entire horrific show. Ensign Edward Deacon landed in the water short of the runway. Holding his wounded gunner, he grabbed his raft from the sinking plane and paddled ashore.

  Squadron Six leader Earl Gallagher miraculously avoided the enemy planes by flying back out to sea, low above the water. He felt sure the enemy ships had retired to the northwest. He then landed on Ford Island amid more confused American gunfire. After refueling, Gallagher flew 175 miles in the direction of the retreating planes but found nothing but empty seas. When the worst of it was over, Benny asked around for news of Ensigns Vogt and Miller.

  Vogt’s Dauntless dive bomber was last seen by marines at Ewa Station in a dogfight with three Zeros, firing his fixed and free guns with everything he had. Then he got on the tail of one of them and poured tracers into it, but it pulled up so sharply that Vogt collided with it. He was able to bail out but his parachute failed to deploy, and he died after slamming into a tree. Roger Miller managed to take out a Zero also, but he, too, was killed. Benny’s two good friends had been struck down within minutes of each other in the first hour of the war.

  STILL A RELATIVELY SAFE distance from Pearl, Enterprise searched for the retreating Japanese fleet for the next twenty-four hours. The Pacific Ocean had become a vast hiding place for an invisible foe, however, and the attackers were nowhere to be found.

  The search was abandoned late on Monday afternoon, December 8. At sunset, Enterprise and her convoy nosed up the channel and into Pearl Harbor. It was a silent, ghoulish glide through thousands of feet of smoldering wreckage and floating bodies. Soot-smudged soldiers manning antiaircraft guns lined the docks. “Hey, you better get out, or they’ll get you too!” yelled one shell-shocked sailor. Another cried, “Where the hell were you?”

  A dumbstruck Benny surveyed the devastation from the ship’s superstructure. Grim-faced sailors lined the ship’s rails, and thousands of faces fastened on the horror from every gun mount, hatch, and portal. Nevada was overturned and aground, Utah blown to pieces, its remains slouched in harbor mud. The capsized Oklahoma had rolled 150 degrees, her tripod mast jammed deep into the sludge.

  Only the bottom of Oklahoma’s hull was visible. As the Enterprise crew gawked helplessly, word traveled that hundreds of Oklahoma’s sailors were trapped alive inside. Men huddled on and around her hull, frantically working pneumatic drills to free them before their oxygen expired.

  The spit-and-polish harbor Enterprise had departed nine days earlier was aflame and clogged with charred ship remains and floating death. A pall of black smoke fed by the still-burning Arizona hung heavy and low over the entire anchorage.
For Arizona, it was too late for heroics. Four Japanese bombs found their mark on the ship, and 1,700 men perished, among them 23 sets of brothers. By Benny’s count, at least twenty ships had been sunk or damaged. He wondered with dread how many of the dead he knew.

  Enterprise put in at a new berth, F-2, just astern of the stricken battleships. Utah sat capsized and burning at her usual slot, F-9; she had docked there only after Enterprise’s sudden departure for Wake Island. The torpedo that felled Utah was no doubt intended for the larger spoils of flattop Enterprise. Thanks to the diligent surveillance of the spy Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese ensign disguised at one point as a Filipino dishwasher in the harbor’s navy mess, the enemy had been well apprised of the harbor layout. Yoshikawa’s last communiqué to Japan in late November had noted Enterprise’s abrupt departure, but it was received too late for Admiral Yamamoto to alter his attack plan.

  Once the lines were secured, the Enterprise crew promptly shifted gears to reprovision the carrier for immediate redeployment to a hostile sea. By the light of the burning Arizona, Benny set about his next exhausting task: rearming the ship. The work had to be done faster and to a greater capacity than ever before. And while the antiaircraft magazines were packed to the brim, millions of gallons of fuel oil gushed into the ship’s tanks, and storerooms were crammed with a myriad of supplies.

  Hundreds of thousands of pounds of potatoes, flour, eggs, chicken, wrenches, gun grease, bacon, cooking oil, soap, paper, pens, bandages, toothpaste, aspirin, and shoes were hauled aboard and stowed. Coffee stores alone for 2,700 measured in the tons. Instructions were shouted up and down long lines of sweating sailors pitching in from the docks. During rare pauses for rest, the Enterprise crew could hear the agonizing tapping on Oklahoma’s overturned hull by the oxygen-deprived men trapped inside. By the time Enterprise loosed her lines, the voiceless tink, tink, tink had stopped—and 429 sailors had presumably suffocated to death.