FM-2 Wildcat

In time, new Wildcat versions, called FM-2s, began to replace the F4Fs.  Joe McGraw became a Wildcat connoisseur--especially of the version he eventually flew in combat.  “The Navy wanted the next generation F6F fighters real badly, so they made Grumman turn over F4F production to General Motors. Meantime Grumman had been advancing the design and performance of the F4F—by then they’d gotten to the F4F4 version. When they got to the F4F8 version the designers decided to jerk out the old heavy Pratt & Whitney engine and put in a lighter weight nine-cylinder Wright radial engine. They took out some of the armor, two of the guns and a lot of the ammo to lighten it up. They also put a higher tail on it.  Those were the plans Grumman turned over to GM, which cranked out the FM-2. So actually what we were flying were F4F8s, only they were made by GM.”

The FM-2 was a Wildcat, but a wilder Wildcat: “It could climb faster. It was lighter and it could turn tighter. And the word was if you didn’t let a Zero sucker you below 180 knots, you could stay right with it.” Lighter and tighter, the FM-2 was also stronger: “The old Pratt & Whitney engine only had 1250 horsepower. They boosted the Wright radial engine up to 1350 and chief mechanics on the line claimed they could get the horsepower up to 1400. I don’t know if they really did. But it sure could consume a lot of fuel.”

--Forming Up
 

TBM Avenger

The bomber piece of the composite squadrons was the TBM Avenger—another General Motors manufacture of a Grumman design. The Avenger was a big, lumbering aircraft with a three-man crew: pilot, turret gunner and radioman. At nine tons fully loaded, the whale-bodied Avenger was the largest and heaviest-single engine airplane ever flown from a carrier deck. The Avenger’s air combat virtues would turn out to be its rugged simplicity, reliability, and stability as a weapons platform--though its tragic first baptism under fire offered little first evidence of this. Five of six early version Avengers operating from Midway Island were shot down during a sortie against Japanese main force carriers at the Battle of Midway. The one surviving Avenger was severely mauled and its gunner killed. Its return to the airstrip proved only that the Avenger could absorb a lot of punishment before being disabled or splashed.

--Forming Up
 

USS California (BB 44)

During the Pearl Harbor attack, California had been a ready victim as she sat in Battleship Row’s southernmost berth. Many of her watertight doors—doors zoning off warship compartments to limit internal flooding--were already open in preparation for a walk-through inspection scheduled for the next day. Within the first few minutes of the attack, a trio of aerial torpedoes had torn open two massive gashes in California’s port side.  Two vertical bombs hits followed, both of them penetrating and exploding below decks. One explosion set off an antiaircraft ammunition magazine, the other ruptured the seams in the ship’s bow plates. Oil fires raging on the surface of water enveloped California and continually ignited shipboard fires fueled by teak deck planks and painted surfaces. With no watertight integrity, onrushing seawater poured on top of internal flooding from California’s own fuel tanks and lines. Listing eight degrees to port, California quickly settled into the mud of East Loch all the way up to her superstructure. Ninety-eight of her crew lay dead on her decks or in her flooded compartments.

--Citizen Sailors
 

USS Gambier Bay
(CVE 73)

In April 1943, at the Henry Kaiser Swan Island Shipyard in Portland, Oregon, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt christened the USS Casablanca, the first of 78 escort carriers built during the war.  The CVEs were constructed around thin-skinned merchant class hulls, a concept that spawned a lot of nicknames, including ‘Baby Flattops’ and ‘Jeep Carriers’. To their crews they were known as ‘Kaiser Coffins’—a morbid tribute to their builder, their slow speed and their frightening lack of armor protection.

The CVEs may have been slow, but their construction was swift. Casablanca was built from scratch in nine months. By early autumn of 1943, it took only six months to build a new CVE, and, by November, only seventy days.  In December, as a Christmas present to President Roosevelt, Kaiser Shipyard workers even accelerated this schedule to launch Gambier Bay, one CVE ahead of the 1943 construction quota. By the end of the year, a whole new use had devised for the escort carriers. They would accompany Pacific island invasion fleets, freeing up larger attack carriers to roam freely and launch first strike missions closer to Japan’s homeland.
 

USS Albert W. Grant (DD 649)

As the Marines ashore battled inland from the landing beaches, bombardment stopped until the ships could establish radio contact with Marine shore-fire-control shore parties. Once they made contact, the ships guns became ‘call-fire’ batteries to take out inland targets holding up the Marines’ advance.  On Grant the wait dragged on for hours and was punctuated by a close glimpse of war’s carnage and by a real but unseen tragedy. As they stood by, guns silent, prowling closest to shore of any of the invasion DDs, Grant’s crew took aboard a returning landing craft’s cargo of eight wounded Marines.  In the officer’s wardroom-- converted to an aid station and operating room—Grant’s medical officer C.A. Mathieu, pharmacist mates and mess stewards tended to the victims: stopped bleeding, cleaned wounds, removed shell fragments, treated shock,  administered morphine, changed bandages, comforted and consoled. (For some Marines the trauma of combat was itself the wound. They could be sedated but not comforted.) Meanwhile, after hours of fruitless attempts to establish radio contact with their shore fire-control party, Grant’s crew learned there would be no contact: the party—men they never met and never heard from-- were wiped out during the assault. Grant would be assigned to another shore-control-party the next day.

--Opening Shots

USS Hoel (DD 533)

As Hoel returned to the carrier screen, she was hit twice more, this time astern. “An explosion just aft of my 40 millimeter buckled the deck,” Larry Morris recalled. “There was steam everywhere. The other loader on the mount, a guy named Ingram, just flat out disappeared---I never saw him again.”  Explosions knocked out Hoel’s after fireroom and port engine and silenced mounts 3, 4 and 5.  Hoel’s rudder jammed hard right and the ship circled northwest towards battleship Kongo.

On Hoel’s fantail, Sam Lucas lay flat, head down behind the shield of a 20 millimeter mount. The smoke generator cylinders had been damaged and the generator nozzle sprayed wildly. “Chemicals were flying across the deck—guys took cover to avoid the spray as much as the shrapnel.” Mount 4’s barrel had been sheared off.  When its crew tried to fire manually, the round backfired and the gun exploded.  “Each time we changed course, 4’s gun house banged back and forth between the port and starboard stops. I didn’t expect to get out. I knew we’d be staying until the last dog.”

--Morning Off Samar
 

USS Johnston (DD 557)

Hoel and Heermann turned northwest to confront the Japanese ships while Johnston, Taffy 3’s other DD, raced from the far side of the formation to join them.  The maneuver brought Johnson closest to the Japanese and her two forward 5-inch guns, mount’s 1 and 2, fired first.  Mount 4’s gun captain Bob Hollenbaugh recalled: "The skipper got on the squawk box telling us we’d be going pretty close to the Japanese. I looked out my hatch and I could see their masts. Then we closed up and began firing in automatic."

---Morning off Samar
 

USS Richard P. Leary (DD 664)

Standing at Leary’s helm, Quartermaster Bob Durand was suddenly busy: “As we closed, the target turned 90 degrees to port. I brought the helm over to head us southwest. The torpedoes were set to go off to starboard, but we’d changed the angle of the attack, so they had to be reset for the port side. Just as we fired, somebody hollered ‘torpedoes to port!’ and I got a ‘full right rudder!’ from the skipper. I spun the wheel over against the stops. Two torpedoes went up the port side, close aboard. Then someone hollered: ‘Jesus Christ, torpedoes to starboard!’  I expected the next command, so I swung the wheel back and those fish missed us astern.”

--Night in Surigao
 

USS McDermut (DD 677)

By the time of McDermut’s return, Dick Ralstin had advanced to first class motor machinist mate and had been more or less continuously at sea for two years. As the two DDs passed San Francisco Lightship and glided between the Presidio and the Marin headland toward San Francisco Bay, Dick recalled seeing only one greeter—a woman perched against the seaward railing of the Golden Gate Bridge, her arm waving. Spotting the same lone greeter, many sailors aboard the Melvin tossed their white hats up into the air. The hats drifted away in the morning breeze and settled into the bay.

--Epilogue
 

USS Melvin (DD 680)

To battleship and cruiser sailors, DDs  became known as ‘tin cans’. The DDs were light and fast, but they also carried little armor protection. Well-place armor piercing shells could easily rip one apart. (Despite this, destroyer crewman quickly embraced the reputation being tin can sailors.) By the beginning of the war in the Pacific, DDs were firmly established as resilient fleet workhorses.  Like the dependable Model T, the new Fletcher proved to be the classic design for a classic ship. The Fletchers were fast, well-sized, well-equipped and sturdy.
 

USS Monssen (DD 798)

When McDermut  and Monssen swung left to get into firing position, the Japanese opened fire on Monssen. Monssen’s CO swung her even further left and even closer to the Japanese, this time to make sure her torpedo mounts weren’t masked by McDermut. A chorus of anxious groans went up from crew watching from the weather decks. “We were awfully close as it was,” recalled Mel Melvin. “Getting even closer didn’t seem like such a good idea. A lot of us were saying under of breath ‘Turn right, dammit, turn right’.”

Both ships finally swung south, fired torpedoes and continued careening to starboard as they retreated northwest.  McDermut  and Monssen cranked up speed, sent up covering smoke from stacks and smoke generators and zigzagged frantically. Spotlights and gunfire chased them; shell splashes washed over the after mounts.  

--Night in Surigao
 

PT Boats

Smallest of the small—at 80 feet in length and 45 tons of mahogany and plywood—were the Patrol Torpedo (PT) boats. PTs’ size defined them as boats, not ships; they were, in fact, reincarnations of 19^th century torpedo attack boats.  Design and testing for this latest torpedo boat version began in the late 1930’s—first as a craft for a small-boat navy proposed by Douglas MacArthur to defend against a Japanese invasion of the Philippines, then (coming full circle) as a quick-strike craft able to torpedo large warships under cover of darkness. If not been for one crucial design difference, PT planners might have been accused of losing sight of the torpedo boat’s demise barely half a century before.

This crucial difference was the new PT’s hull: in technical terms a warped V-bottomed, reduced transom immersion, stepped hydroplane.  Starting nearly halfway aft, the PT hull’s backbone or chine swept up and into a raked, spoon-like stem.  With the right dose of speed—supplied eventually by three high octane gasoline-powered Packard engines—the PT hull became a lifting body, defying its own element to skim above the surface of the water. Hydroplaning, speed and maneuverability were design features intended to make the boats so elusive that they could never be hit.

--Forming Up
 

USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE 413)

A hasty or undiscerning eye could have mistaken a Butler class destroyer escort (DE) for a Fletcher class destroyer. Bow to stern, a Butler DE displayed a similar lean, elegant hull line. As with the Fletcher, a topside deckhouse ran two-thirds the length of the Butler main deck; the deckhouse was capped forward by the same sort of bridge structure (though, to be sure, it was lower and more compact). Both the bow and fantail of the Butler carried the same 5-inch 38 dual-purpose gun mounts carried on the Fletcher. Midships, the familiar profile of a torpedo mount perched behind a raked smoke stack.

From there, the similarities began to break down. First impressions aside, it was clear the DE carried less of just about everything. Where the Fletcher mounted five 5-inch 38 guns, the Butler mounted only two.  Instead of two stacks, the Butler had one. Behind the single stack there was a lone torpedo mount; though it looked similar in profile, the mount carried just three Mark 15 torpedoes, not five. The Butler hull, so similar to the Fletcher in line, was nearly 100 feet shorter, its draft a full yard shallower. Additional details drove home the differences: a displacement of 1350 tons, less than two-thirds the heft of the Fletcher; two propulsion boilers instead of four; 24,000 combined shaft horsepower compared to 60,000 for the Fletcher; a maximum speed of 24 knots compared to the Fletcher’s 33 (though it, too, could squeeze out a bit more); a crew of 186 officers and men, just over half the Fletcher complement of 330. The DE was less in nearly all respects: shorter, lower, lighter, slower, much less formidably armed and much less versatile. In fighting capability the DE was probably more like the four stackers it was replacing than the Fletchers. Its one basic mission was to shield groups of larger combatants and service ships against submarine threat. If the DDs were small boys, the DEs were (and were sometimes called) ‘small small boys’.

--Forming Up
 

USS St Lo (formerly USS Midway) (CVE 63)

Minutes before, Tom Van Brunt had nursed his TBM back to the St. Lo and found she was at last recovering aircraft. “I radioed our LSO: ‘Gabby, do you think you can bring me in on a right hand turn? I haven’t got any left rudder.’  He said he could as long as I had good control, but I had to wait until everybody else got aboard.”

Tom circled at 1500 feet and waited for the others to land. “All of a sudden the wing of a Japanese plane fluttered right in front of me. The plane had been shot down by flak.  I didn’t see the wing and almost hit it.” Then he saw a second plane careen towards St. Lo and watched as it too was shot out of the air.  What Tom didn’t see—and what St. Lo gunners missed as well—was a third Japanese plane approaching astern. “He came right up the wake, pulled up, nosed over and crashed into the flight deck. It was a huge explosion and you could see people right away jumping over the side.”

--Divine Winds
 

USS West Virginia (BB 48)

The column of battle line ships paraded east west through smooth seas brushed by a light southeast wind, under clear dark skies interrupted by occasional squalls. The serene steel majesty above decks hid human exhaustion within.  The long wait and oppressive heat sapped energy from battle line gun crews who’d had been at GQ since well before midnight. Above decks, buttoned up in the thickly armored lozenge-shaped gun houses or entombed in hot, airless, watertight spaces below decks many were beyond misery.  Four levels down in West Virginia, Marvin Childress, an 18-year old Missourian, was one of twenty men waiting it out in the after powder magazine.  “We were down about as far as you could go.  We went in early and stayed a long time at GQ. They’d shut off all the hatches and we’d pretty much used up the little cooler of water we had down there. One man wore earphones, but there wasn’t much information coming our way.”  Few had a sense of the history that was unfolding to the south.

--Night in Surigao