The Big E - The Story of the USS 'Enterprise', okręty INNE
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The Big E
THE STORY OF THE USS ENTERPRISE
COMMANDER EDWARD P. STAFFORD,
U.S.N.
FOREWORD BY ADMIRAL ARTHUR W. RADFORD, U.S.N. (RET.)
A DELL BOOK
Published by DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.
750 Third Avenue, New York 17, N.Y.
Copyright © 1962, by Edward P. Stafford
Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
All rights reserved
Reprinted by arrangement with
Random House, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Dedication: This book is for all the men who sailed in ENTERPRISE, but especially for those
who went to war in her and did not come back
First Dell printing—February, 1964
Printed in U.S.A.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
BOOK ONE
1 PEACE
2 WAR
3 GUARDING THE ISLANDS
4 INTO THE SOUTH SEAS
5 BACK TO WAKE
6 COLONEL DOOLITTLE GOES TO TOKYO
7 CORAL SEA CRUISE
8 ACTION OFF MIDWAY
BOOK TWO
9 PEARL AND A MISSION TO THE SOUTH
10 FIRST VISIT TO AN UGLY ISLAND
11 THE EASTERN SOLOMONS
12 ORDEAL OFF SANTA CRUZ
13 THE SLOT
14 ESPIRITU, NOUMEA AND CHICAGO
BOOK THREE
15 INTERMISSION
16 MAKIN AND THE MARSHALLS
17 FIRST STEPS WEST
18 PENETRATION TO PALAU
19 A MONTH IN THE MARIANAS
20 FORAY TO THE PHILIPPINES
21 LEYTE IN THE FALL
22 HUNTERS IN THE DARK
23 RETURN TO JAPAN
24 TOMI ZAI
EPILOGUE
CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF EVENTS, USS ENTERPRISE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
FOREWORD
The Big E became a legend in the Pacific during World War II and her story is long overdue.
One of few in the beginning and one of many at the end—she was without a peer in that
illustrious company of United States Navy Aircraft Carriers that dominated the naval actions of
those drama-packed years.
In the words of Secretary of the Navy Forrestal,
Enterprise
was "the one ship that most nearly
symbolizes the history of the Navy in this war." But a ship is only a hull without its crew, and it is
of an almost mystical blending of men and metal into one of the most efficient fighting machines
in the history of war at sea that Commander Stafford has written.
The story takes me back to the noisy, windy days and the long nights I spent on the flag bridge of
Enterprise
off the Gilbert and Marshall Islands in December of 1943. It rings true because it is
true. Life on an aircraft carrier in wartime is like no other kind of life, and this story of the Big E
and her men is a complete and dramatic picture of that life at its apogee.
In these days our people can and should learn from the trials and triumphs of this great ship.
The indomitable courage of her men when the chips were down should be an everlasting
inspiration to all our citizens.
This was a needed book and I am glad it has been written.
Arthur W. Radford, Admiral USN (Ret.)
Washington, D.C., August, 1962
Map of Actions the Big E Was Involved In
BOOK ONE
1 PEACE
In Europe the Second World War was in its third year, but two oceans and a continent to the
westward, on the sunny tips of the mid-Pacific mountains, the long habit of peace remained
unbroken. The islands lay scattered in the sea as if some boastful Titan had braced his feet at
Vladivostok, balled earth and rock together, and hurled at Patagonia. It was a long throw, even
for a Titan, yet he might have made it had the missile stayed together. But in the thin air high
over the 30th parallel it came apart and fell, the small pieces striking first and the heavy ones
carrying farther toward the target. So they lay in the days of the Titans when the earth was
new—Midway, Laysan, Maro Reef, the Gardner Pinnacles, French Frigate Shoals, Neck-er,
Nihoa, Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Maui and Hawaii—in a broken chain from northwest to southeast,
dreaming greenly in the sun.
And so they still lay in November of 1941. Over all the islands the trade wind blew white puffs
of cumulus and the surf hammered patiently at the black rocks and white beaches. During the
afternoons the cumulus built up and darkened, and in the high places the warm rain fell, rattling
on the leaves, and the wind blew in sudden violent gusts.
On the leeward side of Oahu, protected by the green ridge of Koolau, forever topped with banks
of clouds, Honolulu faced southwest to seaward. To its left was Diamond Head, which looks
from the sea like a narrow cape but which is really a round volcanic crater on the shore. Then,
nearer, was Waikiki where, with Europe closed, business was better than ever and the big
outriggers and the surfboards crowded the breakers and the Kanaka beach boys pretty much took
their choice of the lush young flesh that covered the sand in front of the Royal Hawaiian. Then
there was the city itself and the Aloha Tower, where the cruise ships still arrived and departed
regularly to the ukeleles and the leis, and the factories which process the pineapples can be
smelled for miles when the wind is right
West of the city was the U. S. Army air base at Hickam Field, where the B-18s and the P-40s and
a few new B-17s stood in neat rows ringed with sentries; then Pearl Harbor, loaded with gray
ships, awnings rigged over the holystoned wood and the young Officers of the Deck erect and
military on their quarter-decks with gloves and glass. In the middle of Pearl Harbor, Ford Island
lay flat under the concrete of the Naval Air Station; traveling cranes towered at the docksides. A
few miles away, in the cane fields beyond Pearl, was the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa
(approximately rhymes with "nevah").
Toward the end of November, 1941, two big ships, among others, got under way from Honolulu.
The
Lurline
sailed from the Aloha Tower for the Coast. Her passengers were necklaced with
fragrant leis. On the pier the ukuleles plunked and strummed and a line of hula girls with
gardenias at their temples motioned with their graceful hands and swung their grass skirts and
dark hair in farewell. Decks and dock were bright with flowered shirts and dresses. From ship
and shore the waving and the shouting continued even after the long, hoarse, deafening whistle
swamped them as she backed away.
Just a week later the second ship departed. No music, no hula girls, no party. Strictly business.
The only colors except gray were in the ensign at her gaff. Nor did she sail from the Aloha
Tower, but slipped quietly out of Pearl Harbor, passed Hickam and Fort Kamehameha and
through the torpedo nets to sea. There she turned her sharp bow west This was the United States
ship,
Enterprise
, an aircraft carrier, destined in a few terrible years to hold as proud a combat
record as any ship of any nation in any war, but now, like her people, young and well trained, but
untried
Eight hundred and twenty-seven feet long, 114 feet wide and displacing 20,000 tons when empty
and unarmed, the
Enterprise
was both a warship and an airfield. Steam turbines turning four big
bronze propellers gave her better than thirty knots of speed and behind the propellers a single
rudder as big as the side of a house swung at a touch from the bridge to provide the
maneuverability she needed. Captain and mess cook, pilot and fireman, more than two thousand
men lived, and would fight, in her. Like any warship she had guns; long five-inch, dual-purpose
rifles to reach out across the surface or far up into the sky, and dozens of smaller caliber
automatic weapons for infighting. And she had a new and secret device called radar, whereby,
according to those who understood and believed in it, planes, ships and coastal areas could be
made out, ranges and bearings accurately measured to them and the enemy found in the blackest
darkness or the thickest fog. Millions of gallons of fuel oil sloshed in her storage tanks and
nearly two hundred thousand gallons of high-octane gasoline were ready for her planes. Her
magazines were stacked with ammunition for her own guns and bombs, torpedoes and machine-
gun cartridges for the aircraft. In her storerooms were all the rags, potatoes, cotter pins, engines,
toothpaste and Spam, all the shoes, wrenches, paper and soap to keep her at sea for many weeks.
Her generators could light a city, her galleys feed it. On the hangar deck each Sunday the
congregations met, and every evening a first-run movie entertained the crew.
But the reason the
Enterprise
existed was the flight deck that covered her from stem to stern and
the eighty-odd aircraft which operated from it. The deck was broken only by the "island"
amidships on the starboard side, which housed the control centers of the ship. On both bows
were catapults, across the after third stretched the cables of the arresting gear, and forward, aft,
and amidships a heavy-duty elevator took planes from the flight deck to the cavernous hangar
deck below it, crammed with parked aircraft and lined with shops for storage, repair or rearming.
Without her aircraft
Enterprise
was nothing. With them she was a fast, self-sufficient, elusive
nest of death and destruction. She could, if the war games had proved anything, slam her load of
bombs and torpedoes and machine-gun bullets into an enemy base or fleet at dawn from a couple
of hundred miles at sea and by the next dawn do the same thing to another enemy force a
thousand miles away. And in the meantime let them try to find her in all that ocean. And if they
found her, let them try to get at her through her fighters and her guns. Already, at the age of
three,
Enterprise
had a reputation, earned in the strict sweat of peacetime training where the
discipline is harsh and quick and the old proven traditions insisted upon. She was known in the
fleet as an effective, efficient ship, where somehow things always "clicked," where everyone got
along with everyone else, and the job got done and well done. Because "E" stands for
Enterprise
and excellence and the coveted Efficiency award, for which all ships of the fleet compete each
year, and because she was young and big-muscled and her crew loved her, they came to call her
the Big E, and that is the only nickname that ever really stuck.
As she swung west from Oahu that November morning, the long flight deck, which looked
anything but long from the air, was empty. Then in midmorning the sound of planes came from
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