A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (31 page)

America's first man in space, Alan Shepard, is recovered from his space capsule by fellow Sailors from USS
Champlain. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

Alan Shepard and the other space pioneers changed the Navy (and the world) through their courageous steps beyond the norm. They were carrying on the same tradition that had motivated a young man to go beyond the familiar and the comfortable, to want to take the helm of a “cheese box on a raft,” and steer her into the history books.

Like most specialized subjects, warfare has a vocabulary of its own. Among the most used—and misused—terms dealing with war are
strategy
and
tactics.

When Vernon Highfill reported to the aircraft carrier USS
Lexington,
he had no way of knowing that he would soon be in the midst of one of the earliest and most significant battles of World War II.

Highfill found himself in a strange new world unlike anything he had experienced before. The big flat deck on top of the ship, where airplanes took off and landed, was an amazing and unforgiving place whose big aircraft moved about in unpredictable ways, their spinning propellers a constant hazard to anyone who “skylarked” for even a moment. The hangar bay was a vast cavern of open space, yet it was so packed with aircraft that walking through it was a constant exercise of bobbing and weaving to avoid the many potential dangers, not the least of which were the many bombs, torpedoes, and belts of machine-gun ammunition.

Soon after he reported aboard, a petty officer showed Highfill around the engineering spaces where the young fireman would spend most of his time. Like the flight and hangar decks above, this too was a strange world, where daylight and darkness had no effect, where boilers bigger than some of the houses back home roared like man-made volcanoes, where the smells of lubricating oil, steam, and sweat filled the pressurized air.

During the tour, Highfill learned about the opening to a small crawl space that ran vertically alongside the ship's smoke stack. It was almost like a second skin surrounding the big tube that ran from the boilers straight up through many decks to expel the hot gasses of combustion to the atmosphere. This small space, he was told, was there to allow firemen like him to clean and perform other maintenance tasks on the stack. Highfill was in no hurry to take on that duty.

When they got to the forward engine room where Highfill would be standing his watches among the whining turbines, the petty officer pointed
out that there were eight inches of steel armor surrounding the space and that the ship's fire-main pumps could pump thirty-six thousand gallons a minute; in a world of so many combustibles, this was all comforting information.
Lexington
seemed a good place to be if one had to go to war with the Japanese.

In May 1942, Japanese and U.S. fleets converged in the waters of the Pacific bounded by the Solomon Islands, Australia, and New Guinea—an area known as the Coral Sea. The Japanese had come to these waters to invade Port Moresby on the southeastern side of New Guinea. The Americans were there because they had successfully broken the Japanese code and, knowing the enemy's intentions, were determined to stop them. If the Allies lost Port Moresby, that would give the Japanese a very favorable position from which they could cut off sea communications between the United States and Australia and might well threaten Australia itself.

At this point in World War II, the U.S. Navy had but five aircraft carriers available in the Pacific. Two—
Enterprise
and
Hornet
—had been sent on the morale-building mission of attacking Tokyo using Army B-25 bombers launched from
Hornet
's deck, and
Saratoga
was being refitted in a shipyard on the U.S. West Coast. That left only
Yorktown
and
Lexington.
Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, decided to commit them to stopping the Japanese capture of Port Moresby.

For the invasion, the Japanese had assigned two of their most powerful carriers—
Zuikaku
and
Shokaku,
both veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor—as the muscle for a main striking force. They also sent a smaller aircraft carrier,
Shoho,
along with four cruisers as an escort force for the ships bringing the invading troops.

As it developed, this initial major engagement of U.S. and Japanese naval forces would become the first naval battle in history in which the ships of the two opposing fleets would never see one another. This new way of fighting at sea, brought about by the development of naval aviation, would become the model for most of the major battles for the remainder of the Pacific War. Besides the “firsts” and its strategic importance, this battle would also be characterized as one of much confusion.

As the forces converged in the Coral Sea, foul weather joined them, making air reconnaissance exceedingly difficult. The opponents moved about in the Coral Sea like blind boxers—a lot of punch, but unable to deliver it.

The Japanese were the first to make contact; on 7 May one of their scout planes reported seeing a U.S. carrier and a cruiser. Determined to take advantage of this fortunate discovery and thus strike first, Admiral Takeo Takagi launched all of his attack aircraft from
Zuikaku
and
Shokaku.

But the scout pilot had been mistaken. What had seemed to him to be a cruiser and a carrier were actually an oiler—USS
Neosho
—and a destroyer—USS
Sims.
The two U.S. ships never had a chance and were overwhelmed by the Japanese air armada.
Sims
was sunk, and
Neosho
was left a floating derelict. Their terrible loss was not in vain, however. The mistaken identity had preoccupied the Japanese and prevented their aircraft from discovering and attacking the much more vital U.S. carriers.

Meanwhile, American scout planes had discovered several Japanese cruisers, and they too had mistakenly identified them as aircraft carriers. This time it was the Americans who took the bait and launched a full strike. Their mistake was somewhat offset when, en route to the attack, they discovered the Japanese escort carrier
Shoho
and hit her with thirteen bombs and seven torpedoes, sending her to the bottom. Sinking a Japanese aircraft carrier, even a small one like
Shoho,
was uplifting to the Americans after the months of Japanese successes that followed Pearl Harbor. The U.S. flight commander happily radioed back, “Scratch one flattop!”

The confusion continued on into the afternoon, with the bad weather causing further misidentifications, some chaotic fighter engagements in the air, and several Japanese pilots actually trying to land on
Lexington.
As night fell, the ships faded into the cover of darkness, with the score one oiler and one destroyer lost by the Americans versus one Japanese escort aircraft carrier sunk. In the cold calculus of war, where units are given relative values, it seemed the U.S. Navy was winning this first carrier battle.

The next day, 8 May, the scorecard would change significantly. Locating one another's carrier forces at last, both the Japanese and the Americans launched nearly simultaneous strikes. Although each side's forces were nearly equal in strength, the Japanese aircraft were generally superior, and their pilots at this point in the war had more experience. To further tilt the tactical advantage toward the Japanese, their carriers were operating under a partial cloud cover, while the U.S. ships were completely exposed under bright blue skies in their part of the Coral Sea.

When the U.S. aircraft arrived, the carrier
Zuikaku
headed into a passing rainsquall, where she was adequately hidden from her attackers.
Shokaku
was not so fortunate. American dive-bombers screamed down out of the sky and managed to score three hits. Though she would live to fight another day, the
Shokaku
was sufficiently damaged to put her out of action, and her returning aircraft were forced to land on the undamaged
Zuikaku.
With so
many aircraft crowded on board,
Zuikaku
was no longer able to conduct air operations and was, therefore, effectively out of action as well. Both carriers would ultimately head back to Japanese home waters for repairs and reallocation of aircraft.

While the U.S. pilots were attacking the enemy carriers, their Japanese counterparts were simultaneously hitting the American flattops. A single bomb struck
Yorktown
causing serious but not fatal damage.

As Japanese aircraft swarmed about
Lexington,
torpedo bombers came in on both bows, flying into a hail of gunfire from the carrier's more than one hundred antiaircraft guns of various calibers. Red and white tracers filled the sky on the port side as men fighting for their lives poured out a curtain of rounds into the path of the approaching enemy. Those up forward could see “fish” dropping from the underbellies of the bombers, and
Lexington
's captain ordered a starboard turn in an attempt to minimize the target profile of his ship by presenting her narrower stern to the oncoming torpedoes. Dive-bombers dropped out of the sun. One of their bombs nicked the tube containing the lanyard used to operate the ship's siren from the bridge so that an eerie wail joined the din of hammering weapons and swooping aircraft. Several of the Japanese aircraft were shot down, but nothing could stop the torpedoes. Shortly after the delivering aircraft were either destroyed or fading from sight, two of the deadly fish slammed into
Lexington
's port side.

Manning his station near a screaming turbine down in the forward engine room, Fireman Vernon Highfill felt that “hell broke loose” when the reverberations of the torpedo explosions rattled everything around him. Remembering what the petty officer had told him about the armor and those powerful fire-main pumps helped him remain calm.

But things were more serious than Highfill believed. Within minutes, the big carrier was listing 7 degrees to port as water rushed in from the sea and filled a number of compartments below the waterline. Three fires were burning, and numerous pieces of vital equipment were inoperable, including the aircraft elevators used to hoist the planes from the hangar deck to the flight deck. Damage control parties went to work fighting back the fires, shifting fuel from port-side tanks to starboard, and jury-rigging inoperable equipment. Soon they had the wounded ship—and her airfield perched on top—on an even keel, and she was able to recover her returning air wing. It seemed that despite the serious damage, she would survive. In reporting the ship's status to the captain, the damage control officer quipped, “I would suggest, sir, that if you have to take any more torpedoes, you take 'em on the
starboard
side.” But it would not be more torpedoes that would put
Lexington
in more jeopardy.

Ruptured fuel lines caused vapors to settle into the lower parts of the ship; these eventually ignited, causing powerful explosions that were followed by raging fires. Her Sailors fought hard to save “Lady Lex,” as she was affectionately called. Stan Johnston, a war correspondent riding the carrier at the time, described the ensuing struggle: “Many of [the Sailors] who fought on with such downright guts, and completely without heroics, and without compensation (the satisfaction of shooting back) that battle brings, had been in the Navy for only a few months. They were choking and burning as they strove, unseen, deep inside the smoke-filled galleries of the lower decks. They were aware every second that the
Lexington
's own ammunition stores might shatter her at any moment sending them to the bottom with her. Yet they never faltered; they battled on unselfishly.”

The fires grew worse, communications within the ship deteriorated, and fire mains ruptured. Fireman Highfill was still at his station when suddenly the lights went out, plunging him into complete darkness until the beams of battle lanterns and waving flashlights here and there cut through the smoky air. His strange world beneath the waterline had just gotten stranger. Then he heard the ventilation blowers winding down as electrical power began to fail, and he immediately felt the temperature begin to soar. Soon, some of the men were passing out from the infernal heat. Someone reported that the temperature had climbed to 157 degrees. Highfill “ate lots of salt tablets and drank a lot of water but that did not help much. So I took off all my clothes except my pants, trying to keep cool.” He watched as large blisters of paint formed on a nearby bulkhead, obviously caused by the intense heat of a fire in the next compartment.

Fires were raging above and all around Highfill's engine room, and smoke billowed about in great suffocating clouds. Before long, steering control from the bridge was lost, and
Lexington
began yawing back and forth unpredictably, becoming a danger to her escorting destroyers, some of whom were trying to close in to render assistance.

On the bridge, Captain Frederick Sherman was informed that only one sound-powered phone line to main control was still working, and it was growing weak. He knew once that last line of communication was lost, he would have no way of telling the men in the engineering spaces to leave. He also knew that without being told to abandon their stations, those men would stay there, hemmed in by red-hot bulkheads, until they perished.

He ordered the boilers and turbines shut down and the men out of the engineering spaces. The Sailor manning the sound-powered phone on the bridge relayed the captain's order but received no acknowledgment. For several tense seconds, Sherman feared the worst, but then a great hissing
roar signaled that the boiler's safety valves had been lifted, and he knew that his order had been received.