Memorial of the USS Wasp (CV-7)

 

Artist Tom Lea's painting "The Death of the Wasp," which he was a witness to. 

by Fletcher Pratt

Sailors often choose their ships the way women do horses at a racetrack—by their names. There is a certain amount of justification for this, ships have a habit of repeating the performances of others with the same name, as though their destiny were predetermined by the act of christening. The British Navy, where a long history gives this imponderable sufficient weight to make the choice of lucky names a conscious process, has seldom had a great sea fight in which a Dreadnaught, a Centurion, or a Revenge did not perform nobly. Its long line of cruisers Arethusa stretches back to 1759, all eight of them with brilliant records.

In our own service the third Brooklyn is now on the seas, and her people are conscious of a tradition they must regard with care; each of the first two at the crucial moment of a battle made a sudden turn that threw the line into confusion. Or take the five New Yorks, silent partners in all our wars till the present one, not one of them having fired a gun in action or the two Jacob Joneses, torpedoed in essentially the same manner twenty-four years apart; or the extraordinary good luck of all five ships named Enterprise…

Or the record of the Wasps. There have been six vessels of the name in the American Navy. Three were commercial ships purchased and armed. There is nothing either bad or good in their history; they played it out as undistinguished members of the naval team. The other three were built into the service in time of war or the near rumor of war. Wasp (I) was the first of those magnificent sloops-of-war which, even more than the frigates, did so much to establish the reputation of our Navy in its golden age of 1812, the first to reach sea, the first to win a victory—in that action where she so slaughtered HMS Frolic that the latter had only three live men left on deck when the crew of the Wasp boarded. Half an hour later, before the American cruiser could repair her damaged rigging, a British battleship came down and captured her.

Wasp (II) broke through the blockade in 1814 under Johnston Blakely. She was probably the most efficient single fighting machine the American Navy ever had. She ran into the English Channel, destroyed their thirteen sail of enemy merchant ships, and fought down and destroyed two cruisers of her own weight, sinking one of them in a night action before two of the latter's consorts, already within sight, could interfere. A week or so later she disappeared forever.

The norm was being established for USS Wasps—a brief, dazzling career, an unfortunate end.

USS Wasp, sixth of the name, was authorized under the Vinson-Trammell Act of March 1934. It sounds odd in view of later events, but the "big-Navy men" had trouble enough getting any carrier at all into that bill and in their Wasp had to take a 14,000-ton ship, well below the standard of the previous Enterprise and Yorktown in size, speed, and capacity to handle planes. Her designers had to feel their way through the intricacies of designing an entirely new type of ship, with nothing quite so big or good or efficient as they wished. It was 1 April 1936 before her keel was laid at the Quincy, Massachusetts, plant of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company, and the perplexities caused by the interplay of these limitations with the illimitable scientific mind are neatly illustrated by the story of the urinals.

Aboard a modern warship there have to be for every hundred men so many cubic feet of air space, so many bunks, tables—and urinals. This final item apparently offered difficulties in the way of finding wall space; for when the Wasp's crew came aboard for the commissioning they found eleven of the things neatly arranged round the sides of the paint locker, with the piping thoughtfully disconnected so they could be removed with the least possible difficulty. The demands of scientific planning had been met.

The date of the commissioning ceremony was 25 April 1940, when the fighting in Norway had already proved that the Allies could not win by sitting comfortably behind their blockade, and just two weeks before the big invasion that made it certain we were going to be involved. A new Wasp, according to custom, was being launched at the edge of battle under omens of splendor and misfortune, duly furnished on commissioning day. The ceremony is an impressive one, particularly on an aircraft carrier in peacetime. Officers and crew wear their full-dress uniforms and a carrier's decks are roomy enough so that guests can be invited. On the Wasp sweethearts and wives were the guests; they wore their full dress too, grouped near the line of glittering officers. Five minutes before the ceremony reached its climax the clouds opened and one of the most magnificent rains in the history of Boston came down to reduce them all to the appearance of drowned rats.

As her first captain the ship drew John M. Reeves, now a rear admiral with wider responsibilities. He is a rather smallish man, very neat and precise, with an ingrained hatred of red tape. A hard taskmaster, he held fast to the Navy tradition that there are no excuses; when something goes wrong someone is to blame. He had strong theories about such matters as the gunnery and engineering competitions in the fleet, believing them to have been overweighted with form and formula till they had become merely a means of enabling higher officers to escape the disagreeable duty of deciding which was the better man or ship.

The war was, in a sense, a stroke of fortune for the Wasp. The situation in the Atlantic developed so fast and so evilly that she never had a chance to run with the other carriers and compete with them; her skipper had to do all of his training in a vacuum, the way he wished to do it anyway.

It is no secret now that the Germans accepted the famous destroyer-base deal as an unadmitted declaration of war. "Whatever comes before our torpedo tubes will be sunk," said Hitler; and upon the Wasp, as soon as she finished her trials, devolved much of the duty of seeing that things were not sunk. The business was complicated by the fact that she was still in the shakedown stage. Trials are only what the word calls for—tests to assure the Navy it is buying a mechanically correct machine. They end with the acceptance of the ship by the government. There follows a period of cruising—the shakedown, which may take as much as six months for a battleship or a carrier. It is a time of adjustments, both of the mechanical order (such as removing eleven non-functional urinals) and of the personal. Men and officers learn to know each other and the vessel till they form a coordinated whole in which the unspoken order or the order that flies in the face of all precedent receives obedience as crisp as though it were routine.

A good example of this was furnished aboard the Wasp not long after 1 July 1940, when the ship's career officially began, with Commander J. J. Cassady making the first takeoff from and the first landing on her deck. The meteorologists (the skipper always called them "mythologists" and insisted he could tell the weather better than they) had released one of their little balloons from the flight deck forward and were observing it to catch the drift of the air currents as it soared lazily upward. Captain Reeves turned to the talker who always stands on the bridge with his headset buckled over his ears and remarked abruptly, "Port forward five-inch open fire on balloon."

The boy, who had come from another carrier with hash marks on his arm, goggled and stuttered. The captain snatched the telephone and gave the order himself. Wham! went the port forward five-inch, wham, wham. Black-and-yellow flowers blossomed round the balloon and it disappeared.

Reeves turned to the talker. "Why didn't you give the order?"

"But, sir, I thought the regulations said we had to put up a flag and run down the range before starting target practice."

"Never mind what the regulations say; on this ship you do what I say. What if it had been one of those Stukas? They don't wait for you to run down the range."

The story went round the ship and it became less easy to surprise men aboard the Wasp, no matter how outlandish the emergencies—on their shakedown, on the way down to the Canal and back across the Caribbean.

It had been intended that the ship should run on through and conduct flying operations off the Galapagos Islands, which were of great interest to Naval Air as a highly probable scene of future operations, then show the flag down the western coast of South America to Valparaiso. But the destroyer-base deal came through before she reached Colon. There was some possibility that the Germans would attempt to do something about the new outposts before we could get them organized for defense, and so the new carrier was turned back into a frantic round of errand-running, taking planes to temporary fields in the base islands, covering cargo carriers and transports for the islands against possible interference by submarines.

It was the hurricane season and she was shaken up as well as shaken down; off Bermuda on one trip the seas actually broke green across her flight deck, seventy-five feet from the waterline, and bent the massive forecastle stanchions beneath it till they looked like the knees of a high jumper. Off Hatteras in March 1941, the ship won her first official commendation. On a dark night in a full gale a foundering lumber schooner was sighted; Captain Reeves maneuvered his clumsy ship alongside as though she had been a motor boat and picked off four of the crew of eight. The pounding seas threatened to smash both craft; he had to pull away, but the Wasp put over a boat and four brave men pulled it through battering timbers to rescue the remainder of the schooner's crew. Their leader was Chief Boatswain H. O. Warren.

In the meantime personalities began to develop and stand out aboard the ship. There was the chief air officer, Commander Michael J. Kernodle; on the strength of an indented nose and a face with the contours of a rocky mountain, he claims to be the ugliest man in the Navy, which is not true but important, since his unflattering estimate of himself has given him an imperviousness both to criticism and to received opinion which makes him one of the more independently thoughtful members of the service. Later he was to direct air operations from Guadalcanal with enormous credit to himself. There was Com­mander Witherspoon, the chaplain, who looks like a first-string tackle and has been one, a man almost fantastically active, a great believer in the kind of education one gets for oneself. He could not talk for five minutes without thinking of a book or magazine that bore on the point in question and trotting off to his cabin to get it, so that half an hour with him always ended with a little mound of printed material between the talkers. He was indefatigable in gathering reading material, never made port without persuading someone to contribute magazine subscriptions to his ship; so the Wasp became one of the best-read vessels in the Navy.

There was Mitchie, the old chief signalman, with grizzled hair under his cap and five hash marks on his arm, who had come from the Lexington and was custodian in ordinary of the coffee pot perpetually simmering in the "dog house" on the signal bridge. The signal bridge traditionally has the strongest if not the best coffee aboard, and the skipper himself was known to come up and have a cup of it on black-out nights in the middle of the Atlantic, when only the sternlight of the destroyer ahead showed and he could say "How are things going?" and "Good night" there, where the dark concealed his gold braid and he could get an answer without the "Sir" that set him apart from the crew. Mitchie would criticize the skill with which the plane-guard destroyers made their turns or kept station, or remark how the Wasp's crashes (every carrier has occasional planes that crash) compared with those aboard his old ship. "That's nothing. Nobody ever gets hurt aboard this ship. Why I remember one day when the arrester gear on the old Lex gave way and one of those Marine pilots ran into the barrier…"

When you hear remarks like that from chiefs the shakedown is over. They know more and have seen more than anyone else aboard; for them the ship is either a floating madhouse or the best goddam scow in the Navy, and all comparisons with other vessels, even former loves, are to the disparagement of the latter. It would be the chiefs who tagged the Wasp "USS Swoose" in affectionate derision as she went north, with her shakedowns done, to take up the errands of a ship of war in wartime. One of the trips at least was both interesting and important: the Wasp went with the second convoy to Iceland, the one that took a formation of Army P-40s.

She carried the P-40s. It was the first time Army planes had tried to operate from a Navy carrier and her experience shows how rapidly the improvisations necessary in war eliminate preconceived ideas. The "in­de­pen­dent air force" will be useless for American purposes until planes far exceeding anything now in use have been developed. But in insisting on the separate character of their services the aviators of both Army and Navy had reached a stage of failing to consider the others' problems. Both sets found this out with something of a shock when they were thrown into association in the Wasp's wardroom. The young Army pilots, many of them thinking in terms of air power über alles, were not a little surprised at meeting fliers as youthful and sanguine as themselves, whose minds yet worked on another pattern; who thought of the plane not only as the decisive weapon in future fleet tactics, but as something against which defenses would be developed which no aviator could afford to neglect. "What they're going to do one of these days is take down all that superstructure, trunk the funnels over the side, and let planes do the spotting for gunfire. Then they'll have armored turtlebacks on their battleships, full of anti-aircraft guns, and we'll be in a lot of trouble."

But the Navy took as well as gave, particularly in such matters as air tactics, where the Army men offered them the rationale of aerial combat which the Army fliers had thought through so carefully. The idea of waiting to get a plane with all-round superior performance is nonsense; any well-built fighter will be superior to the enemy under some conditions. It is the business of the good combat pilot to discover this belt of superiority and to do his fighting within it. "The way I figure it everybody has to be brave to get in this war. They pay off on being smart too."

Daily the Army men crowded the tall signal bridge to watch take-offs and landings when the patrols went out; or accompanied the Navy pilots to their ready-room, where "Ob­jec­tive—Enemy submarines" was always written at the top of the blackboard, and watched navigation problems being worked out; or joined them in the wardroom for fliers' shop talk, bridge, and Coca-Cola; or asked questions of the mechanics on the hangar deck. "Jees," commented one of the mechanics, after being put over the hurdles, "I never seen so many educated bastards in one place in my life. They know more about motors than I do, and I been working on them for fifteen years."

The "enemy submarines" line was no mere convention for training purposes in spite of the technical state of peace. The run up to Iceland is always a hard one for aviators, carrying as it does through waters where the gelid Labrador current meets the warmer central Atlantic across a broad front and throws up either low-lying cold mists or storms or both. It was only about the third day out when one of the scouts returning to the carrier swung into the landing circle low around the ship, last of the squadron. The others reached the deck, but before he could be flagged in, ice got his carburetor and into the water he went, the knife-edge of his wings peeling up a tall shaving of spray. One of the destroyers dashed in, throwing out a boat toward where the plane was being held from sinking by the big yellow balls of its flotation gear. The Wasp blew her whistle and, with signal flags fluttering to advise the rest of the convoy of her intention, came round in a long curve and halted to pick up her plane.

Next day, while this machine was being patiently taken apart to have each piece sluiced down with fresh water (salt rots dural), it happened again, with only the slight variation that the carburetor iced in the interval between the moment when the pilot had cut his gun to float toward the carrier's stern and the moment when he gave it to her again for the leap to the deck. The plane dived into the boiling wake and the Wasp turned back for the rescue; but this time there was a flicker of searchlight signals from the Admiral to say that if a third plane dived in, one of the destroyers should pick up its pilot and leave the plane to drown—no chances to be taken on a carrier standing still in a region where she might get a torpedo.

Next day there was a chart in the room back of the bridge which the Army could see on their tours of the ship—the Atlantic with notations, zones that marked where submarines were known to be operating, points with the day and hour beside each—"June 7, 0715, June 9, 1420." These were spots where a submarine had been definitely located, perhaps because someone had pursued her with depth charges, perhaps by directional radio when the U-boat had talked with its base.

Some of the points were connected by lines to indicate the same sub, and some carried references to a sheet below which told that the sub had found a victim. As the convoy moved up toward Iceland the points on this chart showed a curious drawing together in that direction, as though the Germans were aware of the convoy's existence and course, in spite of the skill with which it had been secretly assembled at sea and radio silence had been kept. "Wouldn't it be nice for the Heinies if they could start their war by torpedoing a carrier?" remarked one of the lieutenants, gazing thoughtfully at the chart; and next morning, as the Wasp drove slowly through the usual fog with all the pilots playing bridge in the wardroom, the flagship shouldered alongside and began a long conversation by blinker.

That night the scuttlebutt had the news from the signalmen—the Wasp was not to put in at any Iceland port, but was to speed up as she approached the island and shoot the P-40s from her deck as though they were Navy planes—the first time such a feat had been attempted. "All right with us as long as they don't try to put us out of those catapults," commented the Army men; "they'd push your head right through the fin."

But the problem was not simple with those hot Army ships used to a minimum three-thousand-foot runway instead of the seven hundred feet of a carrier's deck, and offered difficulties in navigation too. In the Iceland region the magnetic compass makes its widest variations from true north; ten miles either side of a given line it will be as much as five degrees different. A pilot flying at an angle across these lines of variation could conceivably miss the island altogether. It became important to launch the planes so that a straight course along such a line of variation would carry them to the airfield. Add to this the fact that the planes had to be launched far enough out to avoid the sub danger but not too far for the range of the P-40s, at a time of day when the Army men could land on a field they had never before seen; and the fact that the Wasp could neither speed up nor slow down very much without getting away from the convoy to which she was furnishing air cover. Nice job.

At this time of year sunset comes at 10:30 in those high latitudes and dawn about 2:00. Submarines liked to attack at the twilight hour, which meant that the Wasp's own fliers had to run patrols of special vigilance at such times—a hard billet since their numbers had been cut to make room for the Army planes. The patrols had been out for two hours, and all the other planes were put in air to clear the deck when the carrier reached her rendezvous with a point in the ocean, turned into the wind at full speed, and brought the P-40s up to try their perilous experiment.

The moment of launching planes is always the most exciting in a carrier's existence, with its split-second timing, the voice on the loud speaker thundering instructions, the launch flag snapping in the wind of her speed, and the flight officers going through their expressive athletic gestures on the deck. This time the tension was that of a violin string as the squadron leader sent his plane down the deck, lifted her nose, dipped a trifle, and was up and away. A half-voiced cheer came from the runways as the second machine followed, and the third. There was a momentary gasp as the next one down the deck, finding himself a trifle off line, used his brakes to straighten out as land-based pilots do, narrowly missing the "island" superstructure and dropping almost to the spray before he picked up, but he too made it and then they all did.

The Wasp took in her own planes and turned south back to the United States.

What she did between that time and some months after Pearl Harbor is still covered by censorship and not of very much interest to anyone but technicians of naval strategy. The important fact is that she showed up at Scapa Flow at the break of spring in 1942, when the Germans were in the midst of their terrific aerial siege of Malta. While they were running their convoys through for the Rommel offensive against Egypt they made Malta the most bombed spot in the world. The island was in urgent need of many things, but most urgently of fighter planes and fresh pilots. Not a man there but had parachuted at least once from a damaged plane, and no matter how brave and skillful a pilot may be he becomes inefficient through sheer nervous fatigue under such a regimen.

Food, medical stores, and ammunition could be taken in by submarine or fast warships making the run through twilight and unloading in the dark to get away before the bombers came. But airplanes are bulk cargo, of which such ships could not carry enough to matter; they are delicate cargo that can be wrecked by a couple of splinters puncturing the case in which they come; and the moment the Germans saw any ship bringing in planes they would be sure to concentrate against it enough force to hit the objective at any cost. Airplanes delivered to Malta would have to be flown in, and the British did not then possess enough of Libya to permit them to be flown in from land.

Nor did they have a carrier available to undertake the job from the other, Atlantic, end. The reasons for that are official secrets, but what with convoys to Russia, ships in drydock, and something for the Japanese in the Bay of Bengal, it can be seen how easily such a contingency might arise. As there were no British carriers available, the British asked whether the Wasp would take a cargo of Spitfires to Malta, placing the request on a voluntary basis, for the undertaking was perilous. The Wasp had handled P-40s, but the Spitfire is an even hotter ship than the P-40 and there was an excellent reason why our carrier should not go into the Mediterranean at all.

She was a soft-top. British carriers are built to the strategic requirements of the Royal Navy, which include working close to the continent of Europe, where they are likely to come under the attack of short-range fast light bombers, which nothing in the world will altogether keep away from the ship. They are accordingly armored right up to the ears, with plating on the sides of the hangar deck and across the top of the flight deck thick enough to shed a light bomb. If this decreases their vulnerability to air attack in close waters, it also decreases their plane capacity and makes it impossible to warm planes up in the hangar (on account of fumes) before taking them to the flight deck in the elevator. This means that the number of planes they can get away in a given time is limited.

But the Wasp was built for the great reaches of the Pacific, where the weather is such that enemy air attack can be scouted a long way off, and, when it does come, is made by relatively few planes of a slower, heavier type, against which her protection would be her own fighter planes which could leave the deck so rapidly. The topside armor of a British carrier would be of no use against the big bombs of such planes, so the Wasp had no armor at all; but when Captain Reeves heard things were so touch-and-go at Malta that we might lose the place he said yes, he would take her in.

The trip had to be secret; this was a sneak operation, not a battle. The planes were loaded by night at a secure port and stowed in the hangar deck with its curtains down. The Wasp's own fighters and scouts took the flight deck; she picked up an escort of British cruisers and destroyers, and ran for the gate of the Mediterranean. This was the crucial point: the Spanish press and radio delight in making free with information that will embarrass the Allies. Watchers on the shores of the Straits not only tell their good friends in Germany about anything passing through but also tell the world—thus helping to foster the legend of totalitarian omniscience which is so much of the enemy's psychological stock in trade.

But it is characteristic of the Axis mentality that it should be wooden even in psychology. Experience had shown that if these watchers did not publicly announce the passage of a ship through the Straits they had missed seeing it altogether. Gibraltar was the crucial point, then. The Wasp approached it carefully, leaped up to high speed in the dark of night, and shot through. Inside, destroyers from the famous Force H joined the escort and were bouncing through the short Mediterranean swells beside the carrier by daybreak; they brought no word of any Spanish news of their passing and the Axis radios were silent. The first and greatest danger had been passed.

In a literary sense it was the defect of the operation that all the other dangers were passed as lightly. Submarines? There were one or two alarms; the escorting destroyers dashed around, barking their heads off, but there were no attacks. Airplanes? The only ones visible during the trip bore the white star of the U.S.A., the Germans were busy at the other end of the Mediterranean, and British fliers had taught the aptly named Italian Cants to let the southern end of the sea alone. Nothing happened; the British fliers downed gallons of ice cream sodas and, like good guests, refrained from commenting on the absence of the rum ration, though they did amiably suggest that American coffee, even of the signal-bridge variety, lacked the kick of their own tea. They played checkers in the wardroom and beat everybody aboard the ship at it; and one morning they all soared away into the kind of dawn Turner used to paint.

That was all; no incidents, no accidents, no planes lost or even endangered, and they all reached Malta safely. The Wasp turned back and ran out of the Straits as she had run in, unremarked by enemy eyes, and so back to Scapa. The Germans never knew how it was that the fighter defense of Malta was so suddenly increased.

But they did not stop the raids. In Libya General Rommel would attack in a month—object, the breakthrough to Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez Canal. It was of most urgent importance to him that his troop, supply, and equipment convoys be uninterrupted. Malta was the leading stumbling block—a stumbling block which, with luck and good management, could be taken and converted into an asset. The Luftwaffe attacked daily willingly spending two planes for one in hardheaded anticipation of a day when a defense that could not be reinforced would break under mere attrition. Against such a strategy the Wasp's dash had provided only the most temporary respite; she was hardly back at Scapa before it became evident that the task was all to do over again.

There was a British carrier available this time—HMS Eagle, which had, strangely, begun life as a Chilean battleship, and was the oldest and slowest vessel of her class in the Royal Navy. Her presence and the Wasp's earlier success gave the strategic heads the idea that they could use both carriers and put enough planes into Malta to achieve something beyond mere defense: provide local fighter cover for long-range bombers operating from Libya against Rommel's sea supply lines, and directly attack the air convoys flowing past the island. An air force with many planes available would suffer less from attrition; it would meet the enemy in the air with such force that his losses might be not the two-to-one he was prepared to spend, but three or four to one, which he was not. So the Wasp and Eagle put out together with their cargoes of Spits and ran for Gibraltar.

Until they reached the moment of launching planes this adventure was a carbon copy of the earlier one—all safe through the Straits, all safe on the voyage in—and the sun of launching day came up through wild red clouds over a calm sea. Eagle turned into the wind, Wasp turned, their own planes left the decks to cover the delicate launching operation, and the Spits began to run clear, But this time one of the Wasp's group had an accident; pilot tried to lift off before he really had flying speed, dropped back, and was so checked by contact with the deck that he did not have flying speed when he went over the prow and shot straight on down to the bottom of the Mediterranean. One man lost to begin.

They thought they were going to lose another. The Wasp had hardly steadied on course for the return run before voice radio brought in an appeal from one of the young British pilots, Flight Officer Smith. In some way the detachable auxiliary fuel tank with which his plane had been fitted for the long run to Malta had detached itself and dropped into the sea. A Spit gets much of its wonderfully high performance through accepting low radius of action; he was left with gas enough to make Sicily and be a prisoner or French Africa and be interned, and he wanted rather to try the one-hundred-to-one chance of making the landing on a carrier's deck, which no such plane had ever attempted. "Clear the deck," said Captain Reeves, "and let him come in."

A moment later Smith and his Spitfire were visible, whirling around the ship in the landing circle he had seen the naval fliers make, but at a speed that left them gasping. The Wasp turned again into the faint breeze and her engines worked up the last ounce of power they could develop to give Smith a landing head wind. Landing Officer MacCampbell poised like a quarterback on his platform, signal paddles outstretched, ready to give the wave-off at the plane's slightest alteration from an utterly straight line; for only absolute perfection would serve: a Spit has no landing hook to catch the arrester gear and using the barrier would probably crash the plane and kill the pilot. The plane turned in, leveled, balanced once as MacCampbell swing his arms slightly, then dived for the rapidly sliding deck as he brought both his hands down hard. It bounced, rolled—rolled—and came to rest—not ten feet from the bow over which one British officer had plunged to his death not half an hour before.

Even from his station far at the stern, MacCampbell was one of the first to reach the pilot as he climbed from his plane. "That was the best landing I ever saw," he said. "My hat's off to you. Here, you keep it for a souvenir"; and while a new auxiliary tank was being put on the plane, the fliers of the Wasp hunted out a pair of wings and, strictly against regulations, pinned them on the Britisher to make him an honorary member of the U.S. Naval Air Service.

He missed the big show though. When the other Spitfires, flying in perfect formation from the two carriers, came in over Malta sometime later they saw from afar puffs of anti-aircraft dotting the sky, while above the puffs soared planes, many planes, with the black cross of Germany on their wings. The Spits fell on them quite literally out of a clear sky, and in less than half an hour the Germans had met one of the worst aerial defeats of the war, in a battle that rivaled the great days of the blitz on London without inflicting the damage below that London suffered. The British count forty-three bombers shot down for certain (their smoking ruins were seen on the ground); the probables and possibles run the figure to one hundred and one if one does not choose to be conservative

The fortress island was to endure much, including the worst of the food shortages, before the October victory at El Alamein opened the way to set it free; but it is probable that the decisive moment of the siege will be counted as that when the Spitfires of the Wasp and Eagle arrived in the midst of a battle. The Germans took heavier losses than they had ever suffered in any such contact, far heavier than they were prepared for. Their entire system was thrown out of gear; they had to call in planes and pilots from the reserve, far back in Germany, and though the bombing continued in a rather one-legged manner, the prospects for Malta were now getting better and better. The raids were less intense, more costly; the fairly close aerial blockade relaxed, Malta was held, and Rommel did not have quite enough punch to make Alexandria.

As for the Wasp, she went back to Scapa, where there was a message waiting from Winston Churchill—"Who says a Wasp can't sting twice?"—which was a nice compliment if bad entomology; and thence home for her crew to get a spot of leave and the ship a dockyard overhaul and some new officers. The attack on the Solomons had already been decided upon and the Wasp was to be a part of it, but without the captain who had been so intimately associated with her; for Reeves was getting his admiral's stars and wider assignment.

In his place came Captain Forrest Sherman, like so many of our ranking officers, in this conflict a destroyer man from the First World War, who had gone to Pensacola in the years just following that earlier war and learned to fly at a time when it was our only naval air station and most of the planes were being laid up. He may have had the aviation bug before that; but if not, the Pensacola course certainly gave it to him, for his service record from that point on was one of continual requests for aviation duty—requests that the Department was pleased to grant, since in those days there were few enough officers of the line who were also competent fliers. Thus 1927 found him on the old Lexington, when she went into commission; and 1931 on the Saratoga, as leader of Fighting Squadron 1. He put into force some ideas he had about shooting as the main function of a fighter pilot, and won the aircraft gunnery trophy for his squadron and a special letter of commendation for the Secretary of the Navy. The Wasp was his first command, a big ship to begin on.

She took in her new officers, and some new men for the extra anti-aircraft guns that had been added, and pushed down through the Caribbean on a kind of second shakedown that was not the arduous process of the first because the Wasp was already a going concern, a happy ship with a crew that swaggered and told the new men they were lucky to be aboard.

At San Diego new planes were taken aboard—replace­ments for some of the F4F fighters and some of the terrific Grumman torpedo planes that had already done so much to win the battle of Midway. That meant work for everybody aboard and at high pressure, for the planes were a new type aboard the Wasp. All the handling crews, the landing officers, and those who direct take-offs had to learn over again how to make the lightning calculations of distance and speed by which they know the proper moment to send planes away or order them in for the deck, or how far to allow them to roll. By one of the mysteries of naval nomenclature, the job is called that of qualifying the planes; the Wasp did it, turned back to "Dago" for six months' stores, and steamed out to sea, bound for the South Pacific.

On the evening of 6 August the loud-speakers called "Atten­tion, please," and the slow resonant voice of the new chaplain, Williams, read a memorandum from Captain Sherman—a summary of the operation they were undertaking. The Japanese were in the Solomons, with a new big base developing round the harbor at Tulagi and an airfield being built on Guadalcanal. It was their outpost of the southwest; from it they would presently strike at New Caledonia, Samoa, even New Zealand. The Wasp and her many consorts riding across the sea on every side were to grip this blade and turn it back against its owners. The Wasp herself was to furnish air cover over Tulagi and observation for the Marines who would attack that place. There would probably be heavy fighting. Good hunting all, and God bless.

Excitement ran through the ship, though she had been so many times in danger. Chaplain Williams remembers one young flier moistening his finger to touch the shoulder of his squadron leader as a woman would a flatiron—"Boy, is he hot!" There were some who found the eternal bridge game tasteless and some who did not sleep, but for the older hands it was early and soundly to bed, and up very betimes for the 3:30 "battle breakfast" of steak and potatoes. At 4:00, still in black night without a moon, General Quarters was sounded; at 4:30 the word came to man planes and the pilots all shouted as they raced across the deck. They were airborne with the first light, and Wasp's fighter patrol went up over the carrier group.

The transports, with the cruisers that were to furnish gunnery support and their accompanying destroyers, had steamed right into the maze of the Solomons around the north end of big, useless Florida Island. But it was felt that the quarters there would be too tight for carriers, so these had circled the whole island group to approximately the position from which Admiral Fletcher's carriers had murdered the first Japanese fleet at Tulagi, three months before. Aboard there was nothing to do but wait, with the handling crews standing round the flight deck chattering earnestly while the loud speaker gave such small announcements as "Scouting Seventy—two safely away"—all the news there was.

Out over target it was proving a typical Wasp operation—so skillfully conducted that there was no thrill. Surprise was complete; some eighteen Japanese planes were destroyed without a loss, without a scratch for our side, most of them before they had a chance to leave the water, including one giant four-motored patrol bomber. The Wasp's fighters found themselves with nothing to do and actually came home to the carrier with fuel in their tanks. The bombers found most of the anti-aircraft emplacements unmanned and sent the Japanese scampering from their beach defense points in the first rush, but they had plenty to do all day, pacing the Marines in the savage fighting among the limestone caves of Tanambogo. They kept coming back all day long and when night closed down air operations the weary deck crews reckoned they had handled—refueled, reloaded, checked—a total of five hundred planes. No alarms except one brief one, and the Japanese planes which caused that were evidently at fault in their search for the carrier, for they veered off in another direction. Next day, 8 August, there was another dud alarm, but over both Guadalcanal and Tulagi sharp air fighting. The Wasp lost two planes—a fighter driven to a forced landing in which the pilot came out all right, and a scout really shot down, with the rear gunner killed. The Japanese had paid for him in the two days with forty-seven of their own planes, pilots and all.

Tomorrow was to be more of the same, but there never was a tomorrow. In the dark before the dawn the Japanese came down the "slot" off Savo Island with their fast torpedo-carriers to achieve their only true, their only unalloyed victory over the U.S. Navy in this war. The Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria were sunk and the anchorage, for practical purposes, was stripped of gunnery cover. The transports, cargo ships, and tankers pulled out, many without unloading. Our destroyers were perilously low on fuel, there was no place they could now get it without going to one of the Allied islands, and a carrier without destroyers is dreadfully naked to submarine attack. The Wasp was withdrawn to the south, away from the scene of action.

The end of her story is tragedy and unfulfillment, like that of the other two fighting Wasps. She spent the next month furnishing air cover for convoys and running patrol to and fro across an area of the South Pacific, in support of the developing Guadal­canal operations. War is a game in which you match your shortages against those of the enemy, and in this case there seems to have been a shortage of destroyer cover, with so many Pacific convoys bound here and there and the Atlantic alive with German submarines. The Japanese knew it; there had been numerous contacts with their scouts, and just after lunch on 15 September the Wasp patrol came in with word of shooting down a four-motored Mitsubishi.

That was the second such plane of the day, the first having rushed through an overcast and past the bows before anything could be done about it. It meant the Wasp's position was known to the enemy, but everyone aboard had been so long friends with danger that Jack Singer, the correspondent, was in the wardroom quietly writing a dispatch and the Chaplain on the signal bridge was descanting on the virtues of green salad when someone on lookout shouted "Torpedo!"

Before anything more could be said or done it hit her, forward, just under the starboard five-inch battery, with a shock that lifted a man two feet straight in the air from the bucket seat of a gun clear across the deck. He had no sooner picked himself up than the second torpedo hit right in the hole made by the first, then a third, close beside it. The triple shock was so violent that a young officer in that starboard battery was blown into the laps of men on the bridge, the only survivor of his group, for tremendous flames broke out instantly all up the side of the ship and a moment later the big bombs in the magazine began to let go. Everyone in the wardroom or near it was killed.

Captain Sherman ordered the ship stopped, then backed on right rudder to keep smoke and flame from blowing over any men who might be on the forecastle under the projection of the flight deck. He was right; there were one hundred and twenty there, most of whom came through safe. With anything like luck he might have saved his ship, for her good compartmentation kept the engine room sound, she still had power and pumping equipment, and in a wonderfully short time the damage-control division got her near an even keel again. But over the Wasp hung the fate of the earlier Wasps. The blow had come at just the worst possible moment, when gasoline was running through every fuel line to load up the planes that had just landed. The triple shock ruptured all those lines; flames licked up the liquid, especially on the hangar deck, where the fuel tanks of waiting planes exploded and began to burn.

No chance. The Wasp did not give up easily and many courageous things were done, as in the port forward five-inch battery, where the crew picked up cartridge cases with their cork tips already smoldering to throw them overboard. No chance, though all hands fought the fire for three hours, and some were burned as explosions drove them back. Toward the end of the afternoon they had to abandon ship, sliding down ropes and nets to the lukewarm water, where some floated, some got life rafts or boats till destroyers came and picked them up. The casualties were surprisingly few; ninety per cent of the crew were saved.

So the Wasp is gone, and now there is a new Wasp under construction. She will be a dangerous ship, but more dangerous to the enemy than to those aboard, and those who served on the old Wasp are eager to be of the new.

Wasp (CV-7) anchored in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, while dressed with flags for Navy Day, 27 October 1940.

The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Wasp (CV-7) burning after receiving three torpedo hits from the Japanese submarine I-19 east of the Solomons, 15 September 1942.

The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Wasp (CV-7) burning after receiving three torpedo hits from the Japanese submarine I-19 east of the Solomons, 15 September 1942.

The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Laffey (DD-459) in harbor, probably at Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, with survivors of USS Wasp (CV-7) on board. Wasp had been sunk by a Japanese submarine on 15 September 1942. Note Laffey's 127 mm/38 guns, depth charges, and life rafts. The light cruiser in the center background is USS Juneau (CL-52).