The Battle of Midway (12 page)

The fighter pilots made some adjustments on their own. In late January, Lieutenant Jim Gray urged Wade McClusky, the commander of VF-6 on the
Enterprise
, to authorize the installation of a sheet of 3/8-inch boilerplate steel behind the pilot’s seat of the squadron’s Wildcats. McClusky agreed. Like the Marines in Iraq sixty years later who had to “up-armor” their Humvees themselves, the pilots of VF-6 installed their own armor. Eventually, armor plate behind the pilot’s seat became official and routine, but initially it was a pilot initiative. Gray soon had reason to be very pleased with his innovation.
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Like the scouting and torpedo squadrons, the fighting squadrons “belonged” to the carrier they rode, though circumstances could lead to their being transferred from one ship to another. Before the
Yorktown
left Norfolk to return to the Pacific, her regular fighting squadron (VF-5) had gone ashore for training and was temporarily replaced by a squadron from the USS
Ranger
(CV-4), a much smaller carrier that would remain in the Atlantic for most of the war.
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The replacement was supposed to be temporary but ended up being permanent, and as a result, in addition to Scouting Five (VS-5), Bombing Five (VB-5), and Torpedo Five (VT-5), the
Yorktown
also carried eighteen Dash 3 Wildcats of VF-42 under Lieutenant Commander Oscar “Pete” Pederson, who later became the commander of all the squadrons on the
Yorktown
, or CYAG (commander,
Yorktown
Air Group). Similarly, when the
Saratoga
headed back to the West Coast for repair in January, her fighter squadron (VF-3) joined the
Lexington
while the
Lexingtons
fighter squadron went ashore on Oahu for training. This willingness to treat air squadrons as interchangeable parts contrasted sharply with Japanese doctrine in which air squadrons were inextricably tied to their host carriers. This gave the Americans flexibility that the Japanese did not have and would pay important dividends in the battles to come.
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The American VF, or fighting squadrons, had a slightly different culture from the bombing or torpedo squadrons. The Wildcat was a single-seat aircraft, so there were no enlisted backseat gunners, and in the air each pilot was on his own. As one pilot put it, “The fighter pilot is a lone shark. He flies by himself, he gets angry by himself, and he talks to himself.” Though all brown shoes had a kind of warrior’s flair due to the inherently dangerous nature of carrier flight operations, fighter pilots had a special swagger. All but seventeen of the 138 fighter pilots in the fleet were officers. A few were lieutenants or lieutenant commanders, including some graduates of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but most (70 percent) were lieutenants junior grade or ensigns, and most of those were products of the Naval Aviation Cadet (AVCAD) program.
²⁴

The AVCAD program produced pilots for all of the Navy squadrons. To enroll, a candidate had to be between 18 and 26 years old, unmarried, and a high school graduate with two years of college (later in the war the Navy began accepting candidates right out of high school). In general, they were men of action rather than contemplation. They tended to be athletes—often in several sports—and greeted one another with wisecracks and backslaps. Needless to say, given the era, they were all white. One aviation cadet who went through the program in 1941 recalled “a heavy majority of Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage,” including a statistically disproportionate number of men with blue eyes. After passing a rigorous physical, they endured a short boot camp that stressed physical training, especially swimming, as well as classroom instruction. After that, they were sent to Pensacola, Florida (the “Annapolis of the Air”) for a three-month course. Some “washed out” fairly quickly; they simply couldn’t handle the disorientation of air maneuvers. On the other hand, nine out of ten who survived that first
phase of training completed the program. Unlike the Japanese, who sought to ensure that only the very best got through, the goal of the American program was to qualify as many pilots as possible. While Japanese instructors supervised only four student pilots at a time, American instructors each had ten students. Moreover, while a Japanese flight instructor who failed most of his students might be praised for having high standards, an American instructor who did the same would more likely be called on the carpet as an ineffective instructor.
²⁵

After primary flight training, aviation candidates received fourteen weeks of intermediate training, which included twenty-two hours of solo flying, usually in an open-cockpit Stearman N3N biplane, which, since it was covered in yellow fabric, was dubbed the “Yellow Peril” by the students. Advanced training included instrument flying and specialization, including acrobatics. Pilots had to learn how to do “snap rolls, loops, wingovers, the Immelmann, split-S, and falling leaf.”
²⁶

Then, for those selected, came carrier qualifications at Opa-Locka near Miami, Florida. Mostly this consisted of field-carrier landing practice: taking off from and landing on carrier-sized outlines painted on a runway. The student pilots learned to control their aircraft while watching the landing signal officer (LSO), who stood on the deck of the faux carrier holding colorful paddles the size of tennis rackets to indicate if the pilot was coming in too high, too fast, or off line. If the approach was too high, the LSO held out his paddles in a V, bringing them down slowly as the pilot leveled out; if the plane was coming in too low, the LSO made an inverted V. If he was on track for a good landing, the LSO gave him the “cut” sign, slashing a paddle across his throat, and the pilot landed. Otherwise, the LSO gave him a “wave off” and the pilot had to go around again for another try. Mastering landing on that small a space was difficult and frustrating, as much for the LSO instructors as it was for the pilots. On one occasion, the LSO at Opa-Locka simply dropped his paddles to the ground and stood there with “a disgusted look on his face” as a rookie pilot who had ignored his signals roared past. At least once, he threw a paddle at a plane out of annoyance. Difficult as it was, however, these practice landings were much easier than landing on an actual carrier that
was moving at 20 to 30 knots and heaving as much as ten or fifteen feet with the rolling sea.
²⁷

Finally, the pilots-to-be headed for San Diego or Norfolk for Advanced Carrier Training. Eventually every pilot-in-training had to make an arrested landing on a carrier deck. As he approached the stern of a carrier that was steaming into the wind, he had to maneuver so that a hook hanging from the plane’s tail section caught one of several wires stretched across the carrier’s deck; this brought the plane to a stop. Even when the new pilots successfully learned to perform this maneuver, they often did so in trainers. As a result, many new pilots who reported to the fleet in early 1942 had never made an arrested carrier landing in the type of plane they would fly in combat. After December 7, the Navy opened a number of additional training facilities and converted several vessels into practice carriers to provide more realistic training. In the first few months of the war, however, most of the American carrier pilots were relatively green.
²⁸

They were also relatively young. In early 1942, the fighter pilots assigned to the Navy’s three Pacific aircraft carriers averaged 25.3 years of age, and the ensigns and junior-grade lieutenants averaged 23.8. The oldest fighter pilot in the fleet was 39-year-old Wade McClusky, who subsequently became the air group commander on the
Enterprise
. The youngest was Ensign Robert A. M. Dibb, a product of the AVCAD program, whom everyone called “Ram” because of his initials, and who would not turn 21 until April 1942. Dibb’s debut as a fleet pilot occurred in March. Making his first carrier landing in a Wildcat, he hit the deck hard and bounced. His hook failed to catch a wire, and, still airborne, he crashed into the barrier erected across the flight deck to protect the planes parked forward. “A bright blanket of flame” shot from the nose of the plane, and Dibb jumped from the cockpit, did a shoulder roll off the wing, and landed sprawling on the deck.
²⁹

Dibb was not the only pilot sent to the fleet with little or no experience. Seventy percent of the fighter pilots on the American carriers had less than three years in service, and nearly a third had joined the Navy within the last year. Everything was new to them. Reporting aboard a carrier for his first sea service in December 1941, one new pilot expressed surprise that the dining area was called the “wardroom.” Along with their youth and
inexperience, however, they also displayed the confidence of their years, flying their trainers with joyful abandon, and often guilty of what one called “damned fool, scatter-brained flathatting.” They believed they were immortal. “You understand you can be hurt or killed,” one recalled after the war, “but emotionally [you think] there’s not a chance in the world. Not me, anybody else but me. Not a chance in the world.”
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Commissioned officers they might be, but in the winter of 1942, these young brown-shoe officers, and their sometimes even younger backseat gunners and radiomen, for all their daredevil courage and enthusiasm, had nowhere near the length of service, the physical and mental training, or the combat experience of their Japanese counterparts. Nevertheless, in January of 1942, the three American carrier groups, with their embarked aircraft flown by young and untested pilots, were the only offensive weapons Nimitz had to hand, and he planned to use them aggressively. The Kid
ō
Butai was supreme in the Pacific Ocean, but there were other targets of opportunity available to the American brown shoes.

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America’s only other carrier at the time was the small converted collier
Langley
(CV-1). Thirteen steel girders supported a 523-foot-long flight deck some forty feet above her hull, giving her the appearance of a long building with a flat roof and no walls. This gave rise to her nickname, “The Old Covered Wagon.” In 1937, she was converted into a seaplane tender (AV-3).

*
Grumman claimed that the F4F-4 could climb at a modest but respectable 1,950 feet per minute, but in combat conditions, pilots complained their Dash 4s could ascend only at about 1,000 feet per minute.

*
The
Ranger
was the first U.S. Navy warship to be built from the keel up as a carrier, but her designers conceived of her as a way to provide air cover for the battle fleet rather than as an independent strike platform. As a result, she lacked both armor and internal watertight integrity. A single bomb could sink her. Thus she was kept in the Atlantic, where she subsequently provided air cover for the landings in North Africa.

T
he key question for Nimitz at the beginning of 1942 was how to employ his scarce resources. With only three carrier groups—and little else—he was in no position to seek battle with the Kid
ō
Butai. Nor did he need to. Within a year he could expect the arrival of the first of the new-construction carriers and other warships that would give him a significant materiel superiority over the Japanese. That suggested that one possible strategy was simply to conserve his strength, hold on to Hawaii, and wait for those ships. That would have been consistent with the principle of “Germany First,” the strategic concept adopted by the government just weeks before the war began. Of course that was before the Japanese had struck at Pearl Harbor, which had immediately created public pressure to strike back. Moreover, Nimitz was unwilling to concede the initiative to the Japanese. He planned to use his carriers to hit their bases in the central Pacific, striking targets of opportunity to keep them back on their heels.

His boss, Ernie King, had similar thoughts. If anything, King was more eager than Nimitz to begin a counteroffensive. He shared with Nimitz the
instinct (in King’s words) to “hold what you’ve got and hit them when you can.” But unlike Nimitz, who could focus his attention and energies exclusively on the Pacific, King had to fight a global war, including the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats. In addition, King was under pressure from America’s allies, including Australian prime minister John Curtin, to maintain the communications and supply link between Hawaii and Australia. King was acutely sensitive to the fact that Japanese occupation of New Caledonia, Fiji, or Samoa in the South Pacific would sever that link, and he wanted Nimitz to focus his attention southward, writing his Pacific commander that the protection of the lifeline to Australia (see map 1, p. 68) was second only to the defense of Hawaii itself, and not by much. He ordered Nimitz to commit both Halsey’s Task Force 8 and Fletcher’s new Task Force 17—two-thirds of America’s carrier force in the Pacific—to protecting and screening a convoy that was carrying reinforcements from San Diego to Samoa. Only after Samoa was secure would those carrier task forces become available for offensive operations.
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