Flying Into the Hell of Pearl Harbor

by Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson
in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes

You would well remember Pearl Harbor if you had seen the great naval base ablaze as we of Scouting Squadron 6 saw it from the air, skimming in ahead of our homeward-bound carrier. The shock was especially heavy for us because this was our first knowledge that the Japs had attacked on that morning of December seventh. We came upon it stone cold, each of us looking forward to a long leave that was due him.

It wasn’t that we pilots didn’t sense the tension that gripped the Pacific. You could feel it everywhere, all the time. Certainly the mission from which we were returning had the flavor of impending action. We had been delivering a batch of twelve Grumman Wildcats of Marine Fighting Squadron 211 to Wake Island, where they were badly needed. On this cruise we had sailed from Pearl Harbor on 28 November under absolute war orders. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., the commander of the Aircraft Battle Force, had given instructions that the secrecy of our mission was to be protected at all costs. We were to shoot down anything we saw in the sky and bomb anything we saw on the sea. In that way, there could be no leak to the Japs.

There was no trouble at all, and we headed back from the Wake errand with a feeling of anti-climax—all of us, that is, except one young ensign. The Wildcats had taken off for Wake at a point about 200 miles at sea, escorted by six scout dive bombers, and this ensign was in the escort. The mist was heavy, and once, looking down through it, he saw three ghost-like shapes that resembled ships. Immediately the scouting line closed in for a search, but found nothing. However, the ensign, rightly or wrongly, was convinced to the end of his life—not many days away—that what he had seen were Japanese warships. As we steamed back toward Pearl Harbor, the rest of us gradually came to look upon the incident as just another scare.

Bad weather delayed us and we were getting home on Sunday instead of on Saturday, as planned. While the engines were being warmed up on the flight deck early on Sunday morning, my rear-seat gunner and radioman, W. C. Miller, a lad of twenty-one or twenty-two, had a word for me as he stood on the wing and helped adjust my radio cord. He said that his four-year tour of duty was to end in a few days and that there was “something funny” about it.

“Mr. Dickinson,” he went on, “out of twenty-one of us fellows that went through radio school together, I’m the only one that hasn’t crashed in the water. Hope you won’t get me wet today, sir.”

“Miller,” I replied, “next Saturday we all go home for five months, so probably this will be our last flight together. Just stick with me and the first thing you know we’ll be on the Ford Island runway. That’s all we’ve got to get by—this morning’s flight.”

Miller and I were both North Carolinians, and had been flying together since I joined the squadron in April 1941. He was dependable and cool, the kind of man I like to have at my back when I’m in the air.

He climbed into the rear cockpit, faced the tail in his regular position, and the squadron was off; eighteen planes flying in nine two-plane sections; seventy-two eyes to scrutinize a 100-mile-wide corridor of ocean through which our carrier and its accompanying destroyers could follow safely. It was 6:30 a.m. When the squadron reached 1,000 feet, the prows of the vessels seemed to be making chalk-white V’s on slate. As we took off, the task force was 210 miles off Barbers Point, which is at the southwest tip of the island of Oahu. Barbers Point is about ten miles west of Pearl Harbor.

Several times on the way in I had Miller take a bearing with his direction finder on a Honolulu radio station, to be sure we were on the prescribed course. The last time he did it, it was about five minutes past eight and we were twenty-five miles or so off Barbers Point. It seems amazing now, but they were still broadcasting Hawaiian music from Honolulu.

I noticed a big smoke cloud near my goal, then saw that it was two distinct columns of smoke swelling into enormous cloud shapes. But I paid little attention. Smoke clouds are familiar parts of the Hawaiian landscape around that season, when they burn over vast fields after harvest.

Four ships lay at the entrance to Pearl Harbor, one cruiser and three destroyers. I could tell they were ours by their silhouettes. Ahead, well off to my right, I saw something unusual—a rain of big shell splashes in the water, recklessly close to shore. It couldn’t be target practice. This was Sunday, and anyway the design they made was a ragged one. I guessed some coast artillery batteries had gone stark mad and were shooting wildly.

I remarked to Miller, through my microphone, “Just wait! Tomorrow the Army will certainly catch hell for that.”

When we were scarcely three minutes from land I noticed something that gave a significant and terrible pattern to everything I had been seeing. The base of the biggest smoke cloud was in Pearl Harbor itself. I looked up higher and saw black balls of smoke, thousands and thousands of them, changing into ragged fleecy shapes. This was the explanation of the splashing in the water. Those smoke balls were anti-aircraft bursts. Now there could be no mistake. Pearl Harbor was under air attack.

I told Miller and gave him the order “Stand by.” Ensign McCarthy’s plane was three or four hundred yards to my right. I zoomed my ship as a signal. As Mac closed in, I was charging my fixed guns. I gestured and he charged his. Mac signified, by pointing above and below, that he understood the situation.

When we were probably three miles from land, we saw a four-engined patrol bomber that we knew was not an American type. It was a good ten or twelve miles away. Mac and I started for him as fast as we could go, climbing. We were at 1,500 feet, he was at about 6,000 feet. He ducked into the smoke cloud which loomed like a greasy battlement.

We darted in after him and found ourselves in such blackness we couldn’t see a thing. Not even then were we aware that the source of the smoke in which we hunted was the battleship Arizona.

Mac and I came out and headed back for Barbers Point for another look. In a few minutes we were over it at 4,000 feet, flying wing to wing. A glance to the right at McCarthy’s plane was almost like seeing Miller and myself in a mirror—there they were, in yellow rubber life jackets and parachute harnesses, and almost faceless behind black goggles and radio gear fixed on white helmets. Mac’s gunner, like mine, was on his seat in his cockpit, alert to swing his twin machine guns on the ring of steel track that encircled him.

Things began happening in split-second sequences. Two fighters popped out of the smoke cloud in a dive and made a run on us. Mac dipped his plane under me to get on my left side, so as to give his gunner an easier shot. But the bullets they were shooting at me were passing beneath my plane. Unlucky Mac ran right into them. I put my plane into a left hand turn to give my gunner a better shot, and saw Mac’s plane below, smoking and losing altitude. Then it burst into yellow flame. The fighter who had got Mac zipped past me to the left and I rolled to get a shot at him with my fixed guns. As he pulled up in front of me and to the left, I saw painted on his fuselage a tell-tale insigne, a disk suggesting, with its white background, a big fried egg with a red yolk. For the first time I confirmed what my common sense had told me; these were Jap fighters, Zeros.

I missed him, I’m afraid.

Those Zeros had so much more speed than I did that they could afford to go rapidly out of range before turning to swoop back after McCarthy. Four or five more Zeros dived out of the smoke cloud and sat on my tail. Miller was firing away and was giving me a running report on what was happening behind me.

It was possibly half a minute after I had seen the Jap insigne for the first time that Miller, in a calm voice, said, “Mr. Dickinson, I have been hit once, but I think I have got one of them.”

He had, all right. I looked back and saw with immense satisfaction that one of the Zeros was falling in flames. In that interval, watching the Jap go down, I saw McCarthy’s flaming plane again, making a slow turn to the right. Then I saw a parachute open just above the ground. I found out later it was Mac’s. As he jumped he was thrown against the tail surface of his plane and his leg was broken. But he landed safely.

Jap fighters were behind us again. There were five, I should say, the nearest less than one hundred feet away. They were putting bullets into the tail of my plane, but I was causing them to miss a lot by making hard turns. They were having a field day—no formation whatever, all of them in a scramble to get me, each one wildly eager for the credit.

One or more of them got on the target with cannon. They were using explosive and incendiary bullets that clattered on my metal wing like hail on a tin roof. I was fascinated by a line of big holes creeping across my wing, closer and closer. A tongue of yellow flame spurted from the gasoline tank in my left wing and began spreading.

“Are you all right, Miller?” I yelled.

“Mr. Dickinson, I’ve expended all six cans of ammunition,” he replied.

Then he screamed. It was as if he opened his lungs wide and just let go. I have never heard any comparable human sound. It was a shriek of agony. When I called again, there was no reply. I’m sure poor Miller was already dead. I was alone and in a sweet fix. I had to go from a left-hand into a right-hand turn because the fast Japanese fighters had pulled up ahead of me on the left. I was still surprised at the amazing maneuver- ability of those Zeros. I kicked my right rudder and tried to put my right wing down, but the plane did not respond. The controls had been shot away. With the left wing down and the right rudder on and only eight or nine hundred feet altitude, I went into a spin.

I yelled again for Miller on the long chance that he was still alive. Still no reply. Then I started to get out. It was my first jump, but I found myself behaving as if I were using a check off list. I was automatically responding to training. I remember that I started to unbutton my radio cord with my right hand and unbuckle my belt with my left. But I couldn’t unfasten my radio cord with one hand. So, using both hands, I broke it. Then I unbuckled my belt, pulled my feet underneath me, put my hands on the sides of the cockpit, leaned out on the right-hand side and shoved clear. The rush of wind was peeling my goggles off.

I had shoved out on the right side, because that was the inside of the spin. Then I was tumbling over in the air, grabbing and feeling for the rip cord’s handle. Pulling it, I flung my arm wide.

There was a savage jerk. From where I dangled, my eyes followed the shroud lines up to what I felt was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen—the stiff-bellied shape of my white silk parachute. I heard a tremendous thud. My plane had struck the ground nose first, exploding. Then I struck the ground; feet first, seat next, head last. My feet were in the air and the wind had been jarred out of me. Fortunately, I had jumped so low that neither the Japs overhead nor the Marines defending Ewa Field had time to get a shot at me.

I had come to earth on the freshly graded dirt of a new road, a narrow aisle through the brush to the west of Ewa Field, and had had the luck to hit the only road bisecting that brush area for five miles. Except for a thorn in my scalp, my only injury was a slight nick on the anklebone, where machine gun bullets had made horizontal cuts in my sock.

My main worry was to get out of the parachute tangle and on to Pearl Harbor to stand by for orders. As I got clear, a big red automobile van appeared, headed toward Barbers Point. I flagged it and the driver stopped and got out. He was a Japanese, excited almost to incoherence.

I yelled to him that he must turn around in a hurry and take me to Pearl Harbor. In good English he protested, with a show of white teeth, that he had to “pick up a friend down by the point.”

“Listen, I can’t waste a minute,” I said. “You’ve got to take me to Pearl Harbor. Understand? I’ve commandeered your truck.”

I was striding toward him. He began to run. He scampered up into the cab and roared away before I could grab him. My .45 Colt automatic on this, my first day of war, was miles off at sea, aboard the carrier. I couldn’t shoot him. So I cursed him, feeling pretty futile.

I walked and ran for about a quarter of a mile to the main road, bordered by cane fields. I knew this was the way to Pearl Harbor. There were curious tremors underfoot. Those were the bombs. It seemed, too, as if many carpets were being beaten. That was machine-gun fire. Heavier overtones came from anti-aircraft batteries not far off. I could orient myself by the smoke obscuring much of the sky. The nearer and smaller column tapered to earth nearby. So I knew that there on my right hand, possibly two miles away, was Ewa Field, the Marine air base. But five miles ahead everything was blackly curtained by smoke.

The first automobile that came along, a blue sedan about two years old, was headed my way. I stepped out and signaled by waving my white helmet. The car rolled to a stop where I stood. A nice-looking gray-haired man was driving. The woman beside him, wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot dress, was stout, cheerful and comfortable looking. They smiled cordially.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “but I must have a lift to Pearl Harbor. I’ve just been shot down.”

The man accepted the urgency in my voice without, I think, really grasping the significance of what I had said. He reached behind him and opened a door. I got into a back seat crowded with picnic things—a wicker basket brim-full of wax-paper packages, a vacuum bottle, and a brown paper bag of bananas. On the floor was a bottle wrapped in a clean dish towel.

The woman was speaking as much to her husband, I thought, as to me, when she half turned her head and said that it was too bad they wouldn’t have time to take me to my destination, because they were going on a picnic.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said, “but you have got to take me to Pearl Harbor.”

“But we turn, up here, and go to Fort Weaver. Our friends are waiting for us. We are bringing the potato salad and they have the chicken.”

The husband was driving slowly, still unable to believe what I had been telling him—that the noises we were hearing were from bombs dropped by Japanese, that the guns were our own guns shooting back. He continued to be concerned about his wife’s state of mind. It seemed to me he was trying to smooth her fur, to lead her out of her normal world as gently as he could. She was insisting that her husband was spoiling the picnic and being unforgivably rude to their friends. Japanese planes droned overhead. Taking a hand myself, I told her to look.

“Japanese planes? Those?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Suddenly she became tender and solicitous. Had I really been shot down? Was I hurt? Would I like something to eat? I told her I was thirsty. That was true enough. My mouth was so dry it was an effort for me to speak. But all they had was a bottle of whisky—it was what was wrapped in that dish towel. I didn’t take any because I figured I would have to fly again that day. By this time we were approaching a few houses and a general store in the cane fields. As far as I was concerned, the war was going to have to wait until I had a coke. We stopped.

As we started off again, the owner of the blue sedan identified himself to me as a civilian government official. He seemed to feel that by reason of his office he was in duty bound to assist me without regard to personal hazard, let alone inconvenience. His wife agreed and refused to be left behind, for safety’s sake.

Jap planes were strafing the road with machine guns and cannon. Through the rear window I could see a low-flying Jap, his guns winking like malefic jewels. He missed us, but hit a sedan fifty feet in front of us, in which another couple were riding. Riddled with tiny holes and jagged cannon slashes, the sedan careened, turned over and landed in a ditch in a cloud of yellow dust. As we sped on, we saw other bullet-torn automobiles that had either rolled or been pushed into ditches and fields along the way.

We got to Pearl Harbor just in time to see the big dive-bombing attack that was going on about nine o’clock in the morning.

It was just fifty-five minutes since Miller had taken that final bearing by tuning in on the Honolulu radio station. The leaning column of smoke I had seen then was now close enough for us really to see its source.

There was so much smoke the sun was obscured and lemon-yellow gun flashes pierced the somber backdrop. Except for the fiercely burning Arizona, all the ships were letting go with everything they had—battle­ships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines and little boats. The whole system of shore defenses was in action. From Fort Weaver, clear on the other side—where this couple with me had planned to spend a lazy day—the Army had angry guns shooting at the darkened sky. But where were all our planes, Navy and Army?

When we reached the southeast segment of the harbor, at the entrance of Hickam Field, I left the blue sedan and that admirable couple. I hope I thanked them adequately in my hurry. All over Hickam Field there were fires—answers to the questions in my mind about our planes. Rows of planes were blazing on the field. So were hangars, barracks and other buildings. Guns were rattling and pounding around the field. Men were fighting fires. I ran a quarter of a mile to the entrance gate of the Navy reservation.

A Jap plane was flying low and strafing the Marines on guard duty at the entrance. But you can’t strafe Marines without having them strafe back. I saw one of the Marines standing, feet wide apart, steadying his aim with his elbow fixed in the gun-sling strap. Firing as coolly as if on the rifle range, he emptied a clip into the Jap plane. It crashed into a near-by hill. I am sure that this was the plane the Marines on guard at the gate claimed afterward.

My saffron life jacket and my white helmet were like a signal to a naval officer who was passing in a station wagon. He picked me up and drove me a mile farther, to Officers’ Club Landing. He must have had more than a dozen men stuffed into that car. Some were civilian employees. These people were responding to a Navy broadcast in which they had been asked to come and man their posts. They weren’t obliged by discipline, but apparently they were obliged by something in their hearts. So they were swarming to their work, wherever it might be in that noise and smoke.

I got out of the station wagon and resumed running, toward Hospital Landing, which was some three miles farther on. At that landing I hoped to get a boat and be ferried across the channel to Fords Island, where the naval air base was located. While shortcutting across a parklike area, I came upon another Marine who was calmly taking aim and shooting his rifle at Jap targets overhead. He was standing in grass littered with his own cartridge shells. He was wearing his thin steel helmet, and I envied that because just as I was running past him we two were showered from the sky by fragments of 5 inch anti-aircraft shells.

Thirty yards out in the channel, and seeming to tower over us, moved the vast gray bulk of an old-type battleship. She was traveling slowly, and on her deck stretcher bearers were rushing to carry away the wounded, while steel was roaring skyward from her 5 inch anti-aircraft weapons, her lesser cannon and machine guns. Beyond her, at the far end of Battleship Row, lay the Arizona, the blackest sort of smoke belching from her broken, twisted wreckage amidships and forming fantastic, ominous shapes in the sky. One fighting top and tripod mast canted out of this incredible shambles. On all the ships in that double two-mile lane, guns were blasting at the planes. Yet all the terrific power of the biggest guns on those battleships was ineffective now. They were made to fight monsters like themselves, not a swarm of gadflies.

The ship near us was trying to get out to sea, and the Japs were trying to sink her in the channel, where her 29,000 tons of steel hull, machinery and guns would choke Pearl Harbor and bottle up the fleet. There was a tremendous ear-splitting explosion. A bomb had struck on her deck close to one of her anti-aircraft guns. Everywhere I could see, the crew was well under control. For the first time in my life I was seeing a naval vessel in action, and I was just watching in that helplessness in which you find yourself caught sometimes in dreams. But this was real enough, and what was striking at the battleship was a newer weapon, my kind of weapon. Dive bombers.

All the time I was watching the attack I was trying to evaluate the ability of the Japanese as dive bombers. They had concentrated at least the equivalent of one of our own dive bomber squadrons in an effort to knock out the ship. Eighteen, possibly twenty, planes took part, going at it one by one. They were so eager that bombs fell first on one side of the old battle wagon and then on the other. We on the landing had to throw ourselves flat before each explosion because the concussion was terrific. If caught standing, you would be knocked flat. Lying down on the concrete or on rocky earth, I had a frantic impulse to claw myself into the ground.

For years I had been questioning statements I heard about how a man could dodge a bomb dropped from an airplane. And there we were, doing it! We would see one leave a Jap plane possibly fifteen hundred feet above ground. Each time we stood, bewitched by the sight. Suddenly the bomb would appear to be swelling. Slanting toward us in its fall, it would seem to grow bigger and bigger. At some point in its fall we would have to make up our minds whether it would fall on our side of the battleship or beyond it; if beyond, we would stand and watch.

The battleship got clear of the channel all right, and grounded on a point of land opposite the hospital. Just at that time I had turned about to watch the bombing attack on the destroyer Shaw, which was going on behind us. As I watched, a bomb tipped her bow, and after the explosion fire broke out.

Just then a motor launch picked us all up and shuttled us across to Ford Island. A lot of damage had been done there. Three or four squadrons of PBYs, which are big patrol planes sometimes called Catalinas, had been massed on the point of the island. Only charred remains were left. I could distinguish the stumps of their tails.

One PBY was afloat in the channel and its crew was struggling to taxi it to a cradle in which it might be pulled by tractor out of the water onto the ramp, before it could sink. It was full of just such big jagged holes as I had seen made in my own wing, and again in that automobile on the road. Only one engine was working and the pilot and crew were having a difficult time.

I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. Hangars were afire and their glass-wall fronts were black with holes. In front of the nearest hangar was the appalling wreckage of those Catalinas. There was nothing shipshape anywhere in sight. As we watched from the concrete ramp, there was a great flare across the channel, and a tremendous blast. The destroyer Shaw had blown up. Fire had reached her magazine.

I saw a big ball of red fire erupt from her. It shot up like a rocket to about four or five hundred feet. Spellbound, I saw it burst open from the middle. It was like a rotten orange exploding, I was thinking, when the concussion knocked me on my face.

Someone yelled, “Here comes a Jap plane!” We swarmed into the undamaged hangar. Not one but a number of planes roared across Ford Island with their guns going. I was behind a steel column in that hangar.

In a few minutes I was on my way again, to the other side of the air field, where the carrier planes are based. The island is a little more than a mile long, and in places about three quarters of a mile wide. Right down its middle is a runway. Sprinting on that stretch of concrete I saw that it was strewn with pieces of shrapnel, misshapen bullets from Jap machine guns and empty cartridges that had fallen from their planes. I could guess, from the quantity of this stuff, that they had done a lot of systematic strafing here to keep our fliers on the ground.

When I reached the other side of the air field, I could find only three of the eighteen pilots with whom I had left the carrier about three hours before. Communications were pouring into the command center. I went to find out if the Japanese carriers had been located. My commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander H. L. Hop­ping, was there. He had been able to get in with just a couple of bullet holes in his plane. Others of our squadron trickled in until we had about half our planes and pilots on the ground.

We were all so glad to see one another alive that it was a deeply touching scene. It was not until afterward that I began to realize that some of those men previously had not been especially good friends. In some cases they had not even liked one another. There were one or two older officers regarded by younger men as unbending, crotchety martinets. I had such feelings about one older officer. But when I came face to face with him that day, he shook hands and put an arm around me as if I were his son, and I could scarcely believe he was talking to me when he said, “Boy, I am glad to see you! Thought you were a goner!” Well, I was just as glad to see him, and then, to make it better still, he pulled a nickel from his pocket and said, “Somebody go and get this officer a cup of coffee—or a coke.” (Two nights later, when again we met, he was his austere self again.)

All over the island, after the first attack, guns had been taken out of damaged planes and set up on tripods hastily improvised out of pipe. Sandbags had been piled around some of these.

It must have been about half past nine when, with a whoop of delight, I saw Earl Gallaher walk into the command center, to report for instructions. Lieutenant Gallaher was the executive officer of Scouting Squadron 6. As flight officer, I was third in the squadron—that is, next to Gallaher, who was second in command. We shook hands in an effusive greeting and then just stood there for a few seconds, grinning at each other. There wasn’t time to say much. We were expecting to be sent after those Jap carriers as soon as they were located. So we went back to see what planes we could find, and managed to get together nine planes that we could man. We had bombs put on them and the rear guns manned. There were still a lot of Jap planes overhead.

Lieutenant Commander Hopping came over from the command center and prepared to take off. He was going on a scouting flight himself to run down a report that Japanese troop transports had been sighted twenty miles off Barbers Point. The air was filled with false tips.

Well, our squadron knew positively that there simply could not be Jap transports twenty miles off Barbers Point. We had flown in from the west, scouting over an area so wide that no ship could have moved across it since we had seen it. Hopping was an extremely courageous man. Unwilling to tell us to go on what he considered a useless flight, he went alone—and nearly got shot down by our own people.

As soon as his plane was off the runway, it seemed as if all the ships and men with guns in Pearl Harbor were trying to bring the skipper down. There was a kind of contagion about it. Somebody manning a machine gun on a destroyer was the first; after that, others simply took it for granted that the plane trying to get in the air was a Jap.

I was listening on the radio and heard the skipper reporting as he searched an area thirty or thirty-five miles off the island. He said he had sighted nothing. He got back about eleven, and an hour later our patched-up, half-strength squadron of nine planes was in the air. Our orders were to search for the Jap carriers. We were in three sections, three planes each. The skipper had one section, Gallaher had one and I had one. Seven of the planes were our own; we also had two from Bombing Squadron 6. In the rear seat of a borrowed plane, in Miller’s place, I had a volunteer, a man named Young. We headed north-northwest. Although we went out to sea about two hundred miles and searched for four hours, we saw no trace of the Jap fleet.

As we neared home, we saw a solitary Army plane. From the haste with which he started climbing as soon as he saw us coming, we knew that he was going upstairs to attack us. Fortunately, before he started his run he recognized us as friendly. As we were flying by Wheeler Field, a couple of their machine guns opened up on us. There was no general barrage of big stuff, and the machine guns did no damage except to our nerves and tempers.

After reporting, we were on the field, standing by until dark for any further orders. Everywhere we heard fantastic rumors.

Those of Scouting Squadron 6 who were present and accounted for finally decided to get a little sleep. We had our orders—to be up and standing by at four o’clock the next morning. We picked our way over to the new Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, only to find it had been transformed into a combination hospital and nursery. All the children on the island had been corralled there, on the second floor. This was the only concrete structure on the island and it did offer a little protection from bomb splinters and machine-gun bullets. The rest of the building was jammed with survivors from the Arizona, many of them burned, some terribly. The hard-pressed doctors and hospital corpsmen were being assisted by just about all the wives of the officers stationed on the island.

The Arizona men who were rated ambulatory cases were running about as if at a masquerade. Practically all of them had been brought ashore without clothing, so the various officers’ wives had scattered to their homes to ransack closets. Not even bachelor officers’ wardrobes had been sacred. Even so, there was a lack of garments.

We went to sleep on cots. The next thing I knew, it was four a.m., and I was dressing in the dark.

We got orders to take off immediately and fly out to the carrier. We didn’t think much of that idea. We thought considerably less of it as somewhere a gunner began shooting redhot pin points into the overcast sky. He was directing his tracer bullets at the only point of light he could see overhead. Then it seemed as if every gun within a ten-mile radius was being fired. That lasted about ten minutes, until, one by one, they discovered they were shooting at a star.

Mr. Hopping was impatient to take off. Happily for us, it was daybreak by the time we started down the runway, and men on the destroyers down that way could see who was aloft. After flying in absolute radio silence some eighty miles to a rendezvous at sea, we found our carrier. She was out there with the task force, of course, and she was flying the biggest American flag that I had ever seen on a ship. It was her battle flag, flown only in battle. Seeing her out of sight of land, in fighting trim, we were more than ever grateful for the bad weather that had delayed our return from Wake.

I have been attached to one ship or another for about a fourth of my life. Almost invariably you develop a warm feeling for your ship, but for a carrier the feeling is deeper. When you fly as one of the air group of a carrier, you fly a land plane over water. No matter how confident you are of your ability as navigator, each time you actually find your carrier on an otherwise empty sea your heart sings a little.

Everyone on the carrier was wild with curiosity, and the experiences of each of us were heard over and over, with flattering attention. We got a few scraps of information on what had happened to other members of our squadron. One had jumped a Jap fighter about the same time I was shot down and in the same area, near Barbers Point. The Marines at Ewa Field had witnessed the action. Apparently, our man was doing a fine job and was getting the best of the Jap—a real test of his skill, because our scout bombers weren’t designed to outmaneuver fighters. He was so intent on keeping his fixed guns pouring bullets into the rear of his adversary that when the Jap pulled up the nose of his plane—possibly there was a dead pilot at the stick—and it lost forward speed, our man’s plane collided with it. Pilot and rear-seat man both jumped. But there wasn’t sufficient altitude, and their parachutes failed to open in time.

As we listened to stories like this one, a pattern of understanding soon formed and we realized that revenge was going to be our job. We would have to get those Jap carriers somehow, somewhere, someday, and not waste time and hurt our personal efficiency by brooding over the deaths of our friends. We knew our job was being shaped for us when our skipper, Hopping, and Earl Gallaher went high up in the island—the superstructure—to tell the admiral what they had seen ashore.

The Wednesday-morning scouting flight turned up several subs and we were sent out to get them. I took off after one of them around noon, when our carrier was two hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor. As my rear-seat man I took along a lad named Merritt, who was about twenty-one years old. He turned out to be an extremely reliable radioman and gunner.

The sub had been seventy-five miles to the south when seen at six a.m., and naturally had had time to move elsewhere in the interim. I flew a big rectangle over the probable area. After about an hour I spotted her, lying on the surface, about fifteen to eighteen miles distant.

I headed for her, meanwhile radioing the carrier: “This is Sail Four. Have sighted submarine. Am attacking.”

I was about eight hundred feet off the water, and to make a good dive bombing attack I would have to start from 5,000 to 6,000 feet, at least. So I began climbing, too, desperately hoping the sub wouldn’t submerge before I could unload. She didn’t, and as soon as I was within range, her deck guns began throwing shells at me.

“Is the bomb armed, Mr. Dickinson?” Merritt kept asking me. He was referring to the removal of the arming wires, which prepare the bomb to explode on contact. It is the pilot’s job to do this and the gunner’s job to remind him, lest the bomb fall a dud. This kid Merritt was getting his first chance and he was determined not to have a failure on his hands.

“Look here,” I finally said. “The bomb is armed. For God’s sake, relax. Maybe we can get this sub. Take my word for it, the bomb is armed.” At the same time, the carrier was calling me for a progress report. I replied that I would call in after dropping my bomb.

The Jap’s two deck guns fired at least twenty-five anti-aircraft shells at me. I had had him in sight for almost eight minutes. Yet he had made no attempt to submerge. All he was doing was turning to the right a few degrees. Obviously, there was something wrong with him. The plane from our carrier that had found him at six o’clock in the morning had dropped a bomb fairly close to him. So probably he was unable to submerge.

Now the Japs were firing a couple of machine guns too. The explosions from the anti-aircraft guns occasionally washed a slight tremor into the plane.

I was getting nicely set when my gunner spoke again, “Is the bomb armed, Mr. Dickinson?” I dived.

When I was about thirty stories higher than the Empire State Building I yanked the bomb-release handle. By the time I was able to pull out of the dive, and turn so as to get my plane’s tail out of my line of vision, it was probably fifteen seconds after the bomb struck. It dropped right beside the submarine, amidships.

Only one of her two big guns was still firing. The bomb explosion had apparently killed the Japs at the other gun. In a few seconds I had the plane turned and was flying back toward the sub. It had stopped, had no perceptible headway and had started to settle—as nearly as I could tell, on an even keel. The fact that she had no forward motion satisfied me right then that this was not a dive. She was really settling! In about three quarters of a minute after my bomb struck, the sub had gone under.

Right after she disappeared, from her amidships, as near as I could tell, there was an eruption of oil and foamy water, like the bursting of a big bubble. Seconds later—fifteen or twenty, I suppose—there was a second disturbance. Another bubble-like eruption of foam and oil churned to the white-capped surface of the sea.

This time I saw some debris. I reported to the carrier what I had done and what I had seen. But I was careful to say that “possibly” the submarine had been sunk. You simply can’t be sure on such evidence.

“Looks like we got him, Mr. Dickinson,” chirped Merritt.

“Yes, I think we did.”

“That’s certainly pretty nice, huh?”

I said it sure was.

U.S. Navy Douglas SBD-2 Dauntless of Scouting Squadron 6 (VS-6) in flight on 27 October 1941. U.S. Navy photo/Naval History & Heritage Command 80-G-6678. 

 

U.S. Navy Douglas SBD-2 Dauntless of Scouting Squadron 6 (VS-6) in flight. This is a composite photograph of nine planes in flight, with the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) and a plane guard destroyer below. The original photo is dated 27 October 1941. Note the differences in ocean surface wave patterns between the upper and lower images, skillfully blended to combine the two photographs. U.S. Navy photo/Naval History & Heritage Command 80-G-6678.