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.