Challenge for the Pacific

Kinkaid had already ordered a search of what were to be the battle waters, a thousand square miles of South Pacific to the north of the Santa Cruz. It was a wise decision considering his lack of information on the enemy; but unfortunate in the fact that a few minutes after sixteen Dauntlesses took off, he received a Catalina report, delayed two hours, placing the enemy about two hundred miles to the northwest.

By then the Dauntlesses, each armed with a 500-pound bomb, “just in case,” had paired up and fanned out over the battle water by twos.

Some of the pairs found the Vanguard Group commanded by Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, and a few of them made unsuccessful attacks on cruiser Tone.

But it was not until a few minutes before seven that Nagumo’s carriers were located. They promptly put up smoke and altered course. The Dauntlesses began fighting off the Zeros buzzing in on their tails. But their report also drew Lieutenant Stockton Strong and Ensign Charles Irvine to the area. They saw the smaller carrier Zuiho below them. They nosed over, a pair of small bombs between them, and went screaming down.

Commander Hara gaped. The American scout planes had come down from the overcast undetected and were already pulling up over Zuiho. Hara could see the silver streaks of their bombs flashing toward the unsuspecting ship. Then Hara groaned. A pair of explosions shook Zuiho and black clouds rolled skyward.

Just two bombs, and both had hit in almost the same place, tearing open a fifty-foot hole in Zuiho’s flight decks, knocking out gun batteries and starting fires. Zuiho signaled that she could launch planes but could not receive them. Nagumo ordered her to fly off all of her fighters and withdraw.

Of five flattops which had sailed from Truk, only three were left.

Moreover the Lord, thy God, will send the Hornet among them until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.

To Hornet’s fighting sailors, many of whom carried this capital-H quotation from Deuteronomy inside their wallets, no comment on the battle could be more appropriate. And at half-past seven that morning Hornet was first to strike at “they that are left and hide themselves.” Lieutenant Commander William (“Gus”) Widhelm led fifteen Dauntlesses, six Avengers and eight Wildcats aloft, to be followed by forty-four additional aircraft from both carriers.

Behind these seventy-three aircraft winging northwestward, the American ships prepared to receive Nagumo’s sixty-seven warbirds roaring southeast.

Aboard the carriers flammables were heaved over the side, deck hoses were shut off and men stood by with buckets of foamite to fight flames. Liquefied carbon dioxide was fed into gasoline lines to freeze and crystallize as protection against fire. Damage-control units fanned out through the ships while men who worked the huge sprinkler systems stood by in control rooms ready to flood any section of the ship upon order.

Sailors and Marines everywhere put on their helmets and flash clothes, their life jackets as well, if they did not interfere with movement, and the brigs were thrown open and prisoners temporarily freed to take up their battle stations: in the sick bays, in the engine rooms, in the galleys, or on the guns.

Inside soundless turrets made of thick steel, gunners and ammunition passers checked the chains which brought up shells and powder bags from magazines below, while less protected gun crews on weather deck mounts stood by their sights or wiped the oil from gun barrels. Aboard Enterprise, men trained to fire the new 40-mm antiaircraft guns spoke confidently to each other of what these sleek new beauties would do to “bastards,” as American seamen, with characteristic delicacy of phrasing, called enemy aircraft.

Big new battleship South Dakota also mounted the new gun, an American version of the famous Swedish Bofors, and she had them because of an accident.

Rushed to the South Pacific through the Panama Canal, South Dakota had torn her belly open on a coral pinnacle near Tongatabu, and had had to limp into Pearl Harbor for repairs. While there, she was fitted with dozens of the new forties. And her skipper, Captain Thomas Gatch, had made sure his men could shoot them, for Gatch may not have had much passion for clean fingernails or white-glove inspections, but he did like a bull’s-eye. All the way from Pearl Harbor, Gatch had kept his men busy at target practice. Squeegees and buckets lay neglected in South Dakota’s lockers and the big ship became a slattern. At Santa Cruz she was probably the dirtiest ship in the United States Navy, but also one of the deadliest.

And so the ships made ready, and on Hornet, thoughtful cooks baked thousands of mince pies and doughnuts. They hoped, if there was a lull in the battle, to take them throughout the ship, along with buckets of hot coffee, to feed Hornet’s hungry fighters.

Colonel Masajiro Furumiya was in a torment of hunger and thirst. The preceding night, he and the five other survivors of the Seventh Company had attempted to break out of the American lines and rejoin their comrades. They had gotten to within a hundred yards of the American wire and had been pinned to the ground by the terrible hail of fire which riddled General Maruyama’s second nocturnal assault.

They had crept back to a clump of underbrush, and now, as they lay there on the morning of October 26, tortured by hunger cramps, their lips cracked and their mouths swelling—tantalized by the smell of cooking issuing from the nearby encampment of Marine mortars—Furumiya again toyed with the idea of suicide. But then, he decided to make one more attempt to escape and save the colors.

At nightfall, calling upon all the strength remaining to them, they would break up into two-man groups and try to crawl to freedom.

There would be no lulls for hungry sailors.

Shortly after nine o’clock that morning, while Enterprise slipped into the sanctuary of a rain squall, the Japanese fliers found Hornet.

There were twenty-seven of them—fifteen Val dive-bombers, twelve torpedo-carrying Kates—and they pressed their attack with great courage, straight into a storm of five-inch and lesser fire from Hornet and her screen. Such attacks seldom fail, and mighty Hornet began to rock and shudder from enemy hits.

The first struck the starboard side of the flight deck aft, and then two near-misses hammered her hull. Next, the Japanese squadron commander came thundering down on a suicide dive. He carried three missiles—one 500- pound bomb and two 100-pounders—and one of the smaller bombs exploded as he smashed into Hornet’s stack. His own momentum and the thrust of the explosion drove him on down through the flight deck, where the second 100-pounder exploded and tore into a ready room below. The big bomb was a dud, but it remained wedged below decks to menace the men of the Hornet as they turned to face the far greater ordeal of the torpedo-bombers.

Though some of the Kates blew up and others plummeted into the sea, the others bored in low astern. Two torpedoes struck to starboard in swift staggering succession, tearing away the ship’s armor and ramming into the engine rooms.

Belching smoke, ablaze from gasoline fires set by the suicider, Hornet lurched to starboard, slowed to a stop, and began taking in water.

Two more 500-pounders struck aft and a third landed slightly forward.

And then a blazing Kate made a suicide run from dead ahead, crashing into the forward gun gallery and blowing up near the forward elevator shaft.

In five minutes Hornet had been left a helpless, drifting, blazing hulk. Her fire mains were broken and her power lines were cut, communications were out, and six fires were burning fiercely, threatening at any moment to engulf the ship, or worse, detonate the deadly 500-pound egg lodged in her vitals.

She seemed surely lost, and there was one despairing moment when Captain Charles Mason issued the order, “Prepare to abandon ship!” But minutes later the bullhorns blared: “Belay that… Belay that… Fires under control!”