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