Hornet was being avenged.
Her Dauntlesses had found Shokaku, accompanied by still-smoking Zuiho. Just as the Japanese had struck at their own ship, the Americans went plummeting down through layers of flak with enemy fighters clawing at their tails, and they put three to six 1000- pound bombs into Shokaku’s vitals.
Pouring out columns of smoke, her flight deck shredded and her hangars in ruins, all of her guns useless, Shokaku turned away.
Commander Hara aboard Amatsukaze watched her departure in agony, but then he hastened to obey the retiring Admiral Nagumo’s orders to join the screen protecting Zuikaku.
Fortunately for Japan, the American Avengers never found Shokaku, and were unable to finish her off with torpedoes. They struck, instead, along with riddled flights from Enterprise, at Admiral Abe’s Vanguard Group, damaging cruiser Chikuma and forcing her to withdraw. But they had missed the prize: the carriers.
Even so, big Shokaku was out of the war for nine months.
Hornet looked like a good risk.
Damage-control teams led by Commander Henry Moran, and greatly assisted by destroyers Morris and Russell lying alongside to hose the burning ship with sea water, had brought all fires under control by ten o’clock in the morning. Commander Pat Creehan’s black gang had provided steam by hooking up three undamaged boilers to unruptured pipes ingeniously connected to the after engine room. Hornet was fit to be towed, and cruiser Northampton came cautiously forward to secure a line to her.
But then a lone Val swooped down to drop a bomb that missed, but which also canceled towing operations and sent the apprehensive screening ships racing wildly around the crippled giant.
They need not have bothered, for the enemy aircraft were at that moment concentrating on Enterprise.
“I think,” Commander John Crommelin said thoughtfully, studying one of the diving Vals with professional detachment, “I think that son of a bitch is going to get us.”2
He was right.
Plunging at an angle, the 500-pounder slammed through the forward overhang of Enterprise’s flight deck, came clear for fifteen feet, ripped through the fo’c’sle deck, and tore out of the ship’s port side to explode under the port bow, ripping jagged holes in the ship’s side and blowing a Dauntless into the sea.
Thus, at 11:17 A.M., the onslaught on the only undamaged American carrier in the entire Pacific was begun.
Only an hour before, Enterprise had already lost destroyer Porter out of her screen. Japanese submarine I-21 had launched a spread of Long Lances at Big E, but Porter had taken them in her fire rooms and had had to be sunk by gunfire from destroyer Shaw.
And so Captain Osborne Hardison, Enterprise’s new skipper, had also to think of subsurface attack when the enemy dive-bombers came hurtling down from the blue. Fortunately, he did not also have to deal with simultaneous aerial torpedo attack. The Japanese had planned it that way, but of the forty-four planes that were to make co-ordinated torpedo and bombing assaults, the twenty-four dive-bombers arrived a half-hour earlier and went immediately into action.
Steel and flame spouted up to meet them. Aboard mighty South Dakota a hundred muzzles flamed and fell, flamed and fell, like lethal pistons, and a cloud of dark-brown powder smoke drifted off her stern. South Dakota would claim thirty-two enemy aircraft shot down that day, she would be officially credited with twenty-six, but she, and all the other gunfire ships, all of Enterprise’s guns taking full aim at the relentless Vals coming straight down on their twisting, maneuvering ship, could not deny the enemy.
Moments after the first bomb struck, another crashed abaft the forward elevator, breaking in two on the hangar deck where one half exploded and the other half drove down to the third deck before exploding and killing forty men. Fires broke out; light, power, and communications lines were cut; and then a third bomb hit aft of the island superstructure to starboard.
Enterprise was whiplashed. She shook along every inch of her 800-foot length. Nearly every man on his feet was slammed to the deck, her entire foremast turned a half inch in its socket— knocking the antennas on it out of alignment—and a fuel tank was torn open to trail a wake of oil behind as Hardison swung his stricken ship hard to port.
Then the bombers departed and the torpedo-bombers arrived.
There were eleven dark-green Kates in the first wave, but after Lieutenant Stanley (“Swede”) Vejtasa got through with them there were only five. In one of the great flying feats of the war, Swede Vejtasa, who had already shot down two Vals over Hornet, sent six torpedo-planes into the sea before he ran out of ammunition. Three or four more Kates were shot down by other Navy pilots, but still, fifteen broke through the fighter screen. They came flat over the water toward Enterprise, boring in off both bows.
Captain Hardison stood on the Big E’s bridge, his helmet in his left hand, watching the enemy aircraft, staying on course, with South Dakota following a thousand yards distant like a wingman, watching while American firepower whittled the enemy. Five miles out a Kate burst into flames and dove into the ocean with a brief plume of spray. Three miles out another skidded into the water. Two more came apart. But then, five Kates on the right bow made their drops.
Hardison looked quickly to the left. Four more Kates were coming in but had not yet launched. He looked again to his right.
Like a dreadful V, three torpedoes sped straight and true toward him, the middle one slightly out in front. They would strike and sunder Enterprise amidships.
Hardison studied the wakes intently. Everything—Guadalcanal even—depended on his judgment. For one long calculating second Hardison stared at those three long lines of bubbles…
“Right full rudder.”
“Right full rudder, sir!”
Slowly, ponderously, Enterprise’s stern swung left, while her rudder—a huge steel blade three stories high—swept tons of water to the right. Slowly, with fraught majesty, her great bow swung toward the torpedo tracks. Captain Hardison walked to the left wing of his bridge to watch.
Admiral Kinkaid came to stand silently beside him.
As though increasing speed, the wakes bubbled toward Enterprise, and then they were out of sight beneath the left overhang.
“Rudder amidships!”
The helmsman swung his wheel to left. Big E straightened, the enemy’s terrible trio sped harmlessly past the ship’s left side.
But now destroyer Smith was on fire. A wobbling, smoking Kate had flown straight into her forward gun mount. Smith’s bow was a mass of flames.
Hardison turned left again, and Smith dropped back to come astern of South Dakota; and then, her guns still firing, she buried her flaming nose in the battleship’s high foaming wake to put her fires out and return to station.
“Torpedo on the starboard bow!”
There was no chance to turn inside the wakes this time, the torpedo was too close. Hardison made no calculated delay before coming hard right again. He gave the order instantly, Big E’s stern
