“Bird in the hand,” said his XO. “We know where the Frogs are, just like you say.”
“Suppose the Japanese come at us again?”
“Then leave all the Wildcats here. Hell, the French don’t have anything that will bother our boys. We busted them up pretty bad the first time out.”
“I don’t know,” said Hansen. “I don’t like piling it on the second stringers when the A team is out there gunning for us.”
“Well, hell then,” said Howard. “We can’t very well run off east now with Houston going down. There’s 1100 men out there and the Alden can’t pull but a hundred out of the water. We’ve got to hold station here until we get those men safely aboard. So let’s get after the Japs.” He slapped his fist in his palm to emphasize the point, and Hansen gave him a nod.
It was going to be a long shot, but he would now launch everything he had left, eight SBDs and eleven TBDs, along with half the fighters, leaving him with ten he could hold on combat air patrol during the recovery operation. So he was sending 29 planes out this time, on a heading that followed the Japanese point of withdrawal. Along the way, some of the escorting Zeroes realized the Americans were behind them, and radioed ahead to warn the Hiyo they were coming. Then they broke off and went back to try and bust up the American formation, like hawks falling on a flock of geese. There were only four left, but they kept things hot and busy for twenty minutes, fighting a rearguard action. One of the TBDs took a wing hit and lost enough fuel to force it to return to Shiloh. The Wildcats eventually drove the four intrepid Japanese pilots off, or so they believed. In truth, the Japanese were low on fuel and had to break off the action, racing ahead to rejoin the strike planes approaching Hiyo.
Six more Zeroes would be waiting over the Japanese task force when the Americans finally got there. Lieutenant Commander Murray put on speed, racing ahead of the strike planes now as he led the fighters in, but this time it was even odds, with ten Zeroes against an equal number of Wildcats. It’s been said that there are two kinds of fighter pilots—one that goes out to get kills every time he flies, and the rest, who secretly fear they will be the ones in the crosshairs when they fly. Jake Murray was the first kind, and he would personally put streams of hot lead into two enemy Zeroes, though he was amazed at how many others twisted away when he thought he had a good shot.
Unfortunately, the rest of his Wildcats were filled with the other kind of fighter pilots that day, young, inexperienced men, seeing their first real combat in a place they never thought they would have to fight. The Japanese were going to get six kills in that dogfight, the Wildcats claiming three, the pair Murray got, and one other that had to splash when it finally ran out of fuel.
When the strike planes got there, the combined flak from the Hiyo, her four destroyers, and the heavy cruiser Chokai was fairly thick. But the US got just a little payback as the sun began to fall. Matoba Shigehiro, Chief Engineer of Hiyo, was going to be a busy man that day. One of the American dive bombers put its bomb right on target, in the aft section of the ship, just behind the rear elevator. It took out a deck mounted AA gun there, blasted right on through to the deck below to destroy a boat, and kept right on going into the innards of the ship, where it blew into the engine compartments. Casualties were heavy, and Hiyo saw her speed quickly fall off to just 16 knots. She was now walking wounded, able to still launch and recover planes, but not nimble enough to dodge the torpedoes off those TBDs.
No one ever gave a passing thought to going after the slow moving Japanese transports. The Americans had made the same mistake the French pilots had made when they first found the Pensacola Convoy. They saw that Japanese carrier and went after it with single minded or perhaps myopic determination. So the Ichiki Regiment would get to Noumea, and that was going to mean trouble and tears for US war planners from that day forward.
Out of the ten Avengers that had started the run on Hiyo, flak got two, and the Zeroes two more. That left six pilots pulling the stick to get their fish into the water, and one was going to get his hit, Ensign Earl Kincaid, a young buck from Texas who thought flying his TBD was just like breaking in a good horse. The other US pilots heard him yee haw when he saw that fish run smack into the target, right on the port side of the carrier, about 50 feet forward of the island.
Earl the Pearl had scored a hit, and Captain Beppu Akitomo cursed when he felt the torpedo striking his ship… but, to his great relief, it did not explode.
Their fight over, the American planes pulled away, got themselves back into a group, and headed northeast. Six Avengers, eight SBDs and four Wildcats came home, and Hansen told them all to land on the Shiloh. He waited nervously on the Bridge of Antietam for the next two hours, watching the recovery operation as Houston finally rolled over and went down. They got most everyone off, but 186 would not survive that ordeal in the sea, most casualties from the moment the bomb and those two torpedoes struck the ship.
Captain Rooks would face a board of enquiry when he eventually was flown back to Pearl Harbor, but Hansen came to his defense, telling him it was just flat out bravery under fire that had saved his battlecarrier that day. At that moment, America needed heroes. So instead of a rebuke for not turning away and saving his ship, the captain got a medal, and ‘Rooks’ Gambit’ would be a question put to every young officer in the training schools for the next three years when they were all asked to weigh in as to what they would have done.
He had figured heavily in the outcome of that battle, for Antietam and Shiloh both made it safely east to find the stricken Pensacola Convoy. They had been too late to save the Admiral Halstead and those 9,000 drums of high octane Avgas, but what was left of that small air group would come in very handy when the French Admiral Decoux got a hair up his ass and decided he was going to continue on east and avenge the loss of his prized carrier.
Far to the south, the last element of this complex battle was coming up from Brisbane, a three ship task force led by the heavy cruiser Canberra, under Captain Harold Bruce Farncomb, RAN. With him were Captain Philip Boyer-Smith on the Australian light cruiser Perth, and Captain Hugh Barnes on New Zealand light cruiser Achilles. It seemed anyone could get in on this bar fight, and the arrival of that task force on the scene would now add ships from two more countries to the mix.
Hiyo, however, was out of the action. Captain Beppu decided the best thing he could do was get his wounded carrier to Noumea, where he was to have delivered his planes in any case. Getting the Ichiki Regiment there safely was his first responsibility, and so he turned away, recovering his planes and heading south with a standing patrol of Zeroes overhead the whole long way.
All that night the ships that still had any fight in them would close on the position of the Pensacola Convoy. The following morning the final chapter of the battle would be written, with the French fleet facing off against those three Kiwi cruisers, the US heavy cruiser Pensacola and destroyer Alden. Antietam and Shiloh would make all the difference in the world, even though their combined air wing could now only put up 28 of the original 48 planes, and most of those were Wildcats.
Admiral Decoux thought he had the upper hand with his four cruisers and four destroyers against just five enemy ships, but those two hybrid battlecarriers were just over the horizon, unseen and determined to stay in the fight.
Chapter 15
The French had learned much from Captain Louis Delfino, and they learned it very quickly. The battle they had just fought taught them that the pomp and protocol of the military, its seeming civility with fresh pressed uniforms, stiff armed salutes, and all due respect, was nothing more than a mask. Behind that mask lay the violence inherent in the machinery and weapons they commanded, and the end of their use was inevitably death—death of a plane, a ship, a man.
War was not dashing, nor gallant, nor the display of honor. It was simply a carefully controlled, yet murderous craft of destruction. Seeing the Bearn ravaged by bombs and fire, and finally gutted by that torpedo, had shaken Admiral Decoux’s resolve, as
it might any man. But seeing what Louis Delfino did, a single man alone in his plane, had forged the steel of the Admiral’s resolve, at least that night, as darkness descended on his task force.
He learned where the American convoy was, and steamed hard for it all night long. At dawn, he thought he might see the tall charcoal smoke from that action, but the last fading remnant of the violence that had ended the wartime career of the Admiral Halstead had become nothing more than a muddy smear that slowly turned ocher in the lightening sky.
The Pensacola Convoy, had turned due south, thinking to evade any further enemy harassment, but Decoux had seaplanes off his cruisers up that morning, searching the rosy dawn. It was not long until they found the convoy, but soon after that report, another came in with news of the Australian led squadron to the southwest. The Admiral now had to decide whether or not to go in after that convoy, or first deal with the constable on the beat, and in doing so he took his own advice as he gave it to his pilots after that ill fated first strike.
He decided to ignore the three ships rushing to the scene, and instead put on speed, hell bent to get at the Americans. He was on their horizon at 08:00… but so was Antietam with its sidekick Shiloh. They were just about to make their rendezvous with the convoy when the uninvited guests arrived, and a Wildcat up in early morning search had seen the French coming. Captain Hansen and his growling XO Cliff Howard had every plane left spotted and in the air twenty minutes later, and Decoux looked up to see them coming, his ardor for battle suddenly dampened again.
Only six Dauntless dive bombers and an equal number of Avengers were flyable, but Hansen had ordered six more Wildcats to go up with bombs strapped to their wings. If the Japanese showed up again, they could always jettison the ordnance for a dogfight, but by now, the Hiyo group was far to the west, heading for Noumea with that precious troop convoy.
Down they came, six intrepid dive bombers with a hunger for revenge. They had never thought that France would be their enemy out here. In fact, Antietam had once called on French ports in these waters, and received a warm welcome. But seeing what they had done to the Admiral Halstead had fired up the pilots, and coming off a good round with the Japanese, they were ready for a fight here.
Down they came, the first flight lining up on the French cruiser Emile Bertin, and one of the three scored a direct hit that put a forward turret out of action. The second flight went after the Cruiser Lamotte-Picquett, bettering their brothers by putting a 500 pounder right amidships, and another near miss that rolled the ship heavily to starboard. Decoux ordered a hard turn, but looked to see six more planes coming in like a line of heavy cavalry, low on the water.
They were lined up well, and all six would get torpedoes off. Unfortunately, half would fail due to mechanical problems that would plague American torpedoes for months at the onset of the war. Of the three that ran true, two would find enemy hulls. Destroyer Fougueux would not survive the hit it took, nearly blowing off the small ship’s bow. Then the light cruiser Emil Bertin, her bridge shrouded in heavy smoke from the bomb hit forward, could not see to maneuver out of harm’s way. The cruiser took a damaging hit in the aft quarter of the ship that cut her speed in half and caused her to quickly fall out of the French battle line.
Decoux now looked to see his brave charge thinned out by the loss of those two cruisers and a destroyer. He still had Suffren and Jean De Arc, and the destroyers Frondeur, Lansquenet, and Le-Hardi, a handful of ships that now represented most of what he could command by way of a navy for the foreseeable future. He did not yet know how bad the damage was, but he did know one thing, those planes could land, rearm, and continue to stalk him for hours.
The Wildcats wheeled about, now delivering their bombs to the sea for the most part, as not a man among all those fighter pilots had any training against fast moving naval targets. Flight leader Murray straddled Jean de Arc with his two small bombs, rattling Decoux further, and impressing upon him just how severe the loss of the carrier Bearn had been. He could see, in this brief encounter, the same lesson that was being learned by navies all across the world. This was a different time, a new era at sea, a different war. The days where the battleship reigned supreme were coming to an end. It was aircraft that ruled the skies over the seas now, and nothing passed there save by their leave.
The Admiral’s resolve wavered, and then, dark on the horizon, he saw the threatening silhouette of the American heavy cruiser Pensacola, like a mother bear out to savage the wolves that had dared to attack her cubs. Bright fire rippled through the dawn, and the long arc of those 8-inch shells hissed and whooshed in, the opening salvo surprisingly accurate. The Admiral’s knuckles were white on the binnacle as the tall geysers dolloped up from the sea off his port forward quarter.
Before being pronounced Commander in Chief of the French Far East Navy, the Admiral had commanded little more than a sloop and frigate, in the early 1920s, with a brief posting to a ship of the line in 1929. The fact was, he had little idea as to how to properly fight a naval battle, and when the action opened at 18,000 yards, the tall white spray of Pensacola’s very accurate gunfire knocked the Louis Delfino out of him in five minutes. It was one thing to give scolding orders to his pilots, but quite another to follow them himself. The simple fact of the matter was this—he had no idea what he was doing, and the American ships out there did.
He turned when he should have kept steady on, and he ordered his ships to fire when the range was beyond their means. He insisted his last three destroyers remain at the back of his battle line, thinking them no more than a nuisance. Then, when Canberra showed up with Perth and Achilles, he lost his nerve completely, finally employing the one thing his ships could use to prevent an even greater disaster than the one he already had on his hands—their speed. The Admiral turned about, looked for the nearest empty horizon, and sped away with his feathers thoroughly ruffled, and his wounded pride unhealed.
The Aussies came in, the big cruiser Canberra sighting on the wounded Emil Bertin. Three salvos out they saw the bright flash of yet another explosion, and then, strangely, a watchman called out that he could see a white flag being hoisted. The radio man also reported the French had put out a message in the clear that they wished to seek terms. They had no intention of dying bravely that day.
Louis Delfino was of a different stripe. There were men like him in every army, and in every navy and air force. There were men that were just a cut above the others, and then there were those you would have to stack three high to make half a man in combat. This was war, with heroes and slackers, artful warriors and clumsy fools, all thrown into the same arena.
It was no failure of the French Navy, for their ships of the line would acquit themselves very well in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. It was just the men on the scene that mattered now, not the ships. Some men had the will to fight, and knew how to go about it. Others did not. Lacking both will and skill at sea, the result of this engagement for Admiral Decoux was inevitable. He would return to Noumea, thankful to be under the protective umbrella of Japanese land based air power, all the planes from the carrier Hiyo. There he would stew, realizing that he would not even be master of that island, or even the port where his ships were docked. His war was a long, sullen slog from that day on, until the Americans would come calling one day… And they had long memories.
So ended the First Battle of the New Hebrides, and it was a mixed result for all concerned. The French had lost the Bearn, the destroyer Fougueux, and found both Emil Bertin and Lamotte-Picquett surrendered to the enemy and interned at Fiji. The Japanese had seen Hiyo limp off to Noumea, where it would remain for some time while crews tried to repair her damaged engine compartments. The Americans had lost the heavy cruiser Houston, but even worse, they had lost 9000 drums of Avgas on the Admiral Halstead. The Damage to Antietam would send that ship home to Pearl Harbor, and then to the west coast for a new “Triple Six” gun turret, and Hansen’s air group would have to be rebuilt from planes arriving in Hawaii.
/> The Pensacola Convoy received the warm embrace of those three Aussie led cruisers, and the convoy sailed for Brisbane. For the time being, Shiloh sailed to Pearl with Antietam, where she would soon team up with the Enterprise and the newest kid on the carrier block, the USS Saratoga, arriving from San Francisco. Soon those three ships would sortie again, out looking for trouble, and just a little retribution under the command of yet another bulldog who was going to make an enormous difference in the long struggle ahead. Unlike Admiral Decoux, he had both will and skill in abundance, Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey.
* * *
So the lost convoy and Operation PLUM never got to the Philippines. Instead it made its way south and then west to Brisbane, and the main effort of the Japanese Army was raging on. They had landed at Lingayen Gulf north of Manila, and then drove relentlessly towards the city. In the south, troops arrived from their island outpost at Palau to land at Legaspi, where they raced up the lower reaches of the main island, meeting little resistance. It was virtually impossible for the defenders to try and meet them on the beaches. In the south alone, there were four broad bays and over 250 miles of beaches they could choose from to land, and defending them all with the forces available was out of the question.
Manila was a mill of rumors and fear. Some said the US Navy was coming with everything they had to the rescue. Others said it had all been destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Shop keepers boarded up their windows, sandbagged their doors, and families fled to the countryside to find lost uncles and aunts out of immediate harm’s way. Like any large urban area, panic could spread very easily, making the streets a morass of animal drawn wood carts, bicycles and a few cars. People were packing up household belongings, living or dead, and it was common to see a father behind a hand cart, laden with everything he owned, including three squealing pigs and five chickens, and with his poor wife and a gaggle of children in tow.
Tide Of Fortune (Kirov Series Book 20) Page 13
