The USS Guadalcanal, (CVE-60), is in the history books as flagship of the jeep carrier hunter-killer group that boarded and captured the German submarine U-505. The U-boat, which is probably remembered even better than the ship, is now installed on concrete cradles alongside the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, dedicated to those men who lost their lives defending the country at sea. More than eight million people have visited her.
The Guadalcanal has another, earlier claim to fame than the capture of the U-boat. It involved more blood, sweat, and tears than the capture, and it probably affected the Battle of the Atlantic at least as much. She is the ship that broke the ice on around-the-clock flight operations in the U. S. Navy in 1944.
In early 1944, carrier flying was still a dawn-to-dusk operation. True, some of the big carriers in the Pacific had a few specially trained night fighter pilots. But they were a small, elite group. Before the war, most carrier pilots had made a few night landings, on a steady deck, under the light of a full moon. But this was always very special. Regular flight operations at night simply were not deemed possible from carriers.
A bench mark on the state of the art in 1944 is that wild night in June, right after the Marianas Turkey Shoot, when Admiral Marc Mitscher gave the order to, “Turn on the lights.” Two hundred planes got caught out after dark that night. Nearly half of them wound up in the water. In 1944, flying off even the big Essex-class carriers was still very much a daytime job.
In January 1944, the Guadalcanal shoved off from Norfolk on her first hunter-killer cruise. She was the first of the Kaiser-class CVEs to appear in the Atlantic. These were a new type of makeshift, assembly line ship. They were built to minimum merchant ship standards, had flight decks 512 feet by 63 feet, displaced 11,000 tons, and could make only 19 knots. They were just barely good enough to do what they had to do. Flying off these little jeep “spit kits” was a tough way to make a living. Naturally, working hours were from sunrise to sunset.
In those days, U-boats surfaced only at night. Our CVEs of the Card and Bogue class had taken a heavy toll among them in late 1943. U-boat skippers knew now that it was unsafe for them to surface anywhere in the Atlantic in daylight. This meant that our CVEs, which made their kills by catching U-boats on the surface, were nearly out of business. They were keeping the U-boats down all day—but they weren’t getting any more kills.
At this time all CVE air groups were doing night bounce drills at fields ashore and were checking out in actual night landings on board the Charger (CVE-30) in Chesapeake Bay. But in Chesapeake Bay, the planes were landing on a steady deck, and if an erratic pilot couldn’t make it, you could just send him back to the beach. In the North Atlantic, with a heaving deck, the boys had to make it—or else. This made a big difference.
The high command did not see fit to order night operations in the Atlantic. No CVE skippers were willing to stick their necks out and try it without orders.
Some CVEs had been dabbling around the edges of night operations. They took the bombs off the planes and put in special fuel tanks. This enabled them to launch at sunset and bring the plane in at dawn. But no one was yet willing to plunge into around-the-clock operations and landings in the dark. So, when the Guadalcanal put forth in January 1944, the sub hunting business was pretty slow.
Early in the cruise we got a tip from 10th Fleet that a U-boat refueling rendezvous was slated to take place in our area on 16 January near sunset 500 miles west of the Azores. We decided to keep well clear of that area, with all our planes on deck, until just before the rendezvous time. Then we put up eight TBM Avengers to comb the area until sunset.
We had a busy time that afternoon. Two of my boys caught the milk cow refueler with one submarine alongside and another standing by. Diving out of the clouds, they plastered them with depth charges. As the depth charge plumes subsided, the ocean was littered with wreckage, 32 survivors were swimming around in a large pool of oil, and all three submarines had disappeared. This was just before sunset, and about 40 miles from the ship.
It was an overcast day, and I knew there wouldn’t be much twilight. So the big idea was to get our eight planes back on board before it got dark. This was, of course, easier said than done.
Each pilot in the air figured it was essential to the war effort for him to fly over the scene of the kill and take a gander. Despite urgent recall messages from the ship, they all flocked over to have a look. By the time we got them back to the ship, the sun had gone down and it was beginning to get dark.
The first four got aboard okay. But they used up a lot of time because of wave-offs for bad approaches in the gathering dusk. The fifth landed too far to starboard and wound up with both wheels down in the gallery walkway and his tail sticking out into the landing area.
This is the sort of thing that separates the men from the boys—three planes in the air, darkness closing in, and a foul deck. We turned out to be small boys that night. We were a new ship; this was the first time real pressure had been put on us, and we got butterfingered. We simply couldn’t clear the landing area. We couldn’t get that plane back on deck to drag it forward. We couldn’t even heave it overboard. After ten minutes of futile fumbling, it was pitch dark, and the boys in the air were getting low on gas.
The planes that had landed reported seeing a fourth submarine in the area of the kill. It’s not a good idea to show bright lights when you think there are U-boats breathing down your neck. But in this case we had no choice. To have any chance of getting our boys aboard, we had to turn on the lights. You might as well go for broke in such a spot, so we lighted up like a saloon on a Saturday night.
Then I got on the voice radio and made the following pitch to the boys in the air—“That tail sticks out only about 15 feet into the landing area. If you land just a little bit to the left of the center line, everything will be lovely.”
It didn’t work. By this time everybody had the jitters. The boys came in too high, too fast, and too far to port. Finally one of them took a desperate “cut,” hit the deck, bounced high in the air, rolled over on his back, and plunged into the sea to port. The plane guard destroyer fished all three of the crew out of the water unhurt.
But that was enough of that. I had all ships turn on searchlights pointed at the water. We ditched the other two planes and picked up the crews. Then we blew out the lights and got the hell out of there.
What I had just been through was a miniature preview of Admiral Mitscher’s Moment of Truth six months later after the Turkey Shoot. I have always wondered why the feature writers made such a whoop-de-doo over Pete Mitscher’s order to turn on the lights—and I’m sure Pete did, too. In a spot like that, you have to turn them on. If you get torpedoed and lose your ship—that’s very bad luck. But if you don’t turn them on and lose your flyers, you probably won’t sleep well the rest of your life. And you won’t deserve to.
For the rest of that cruise, we stuck to daylight flying only. Our landing signal officer and the pilots were too shook up by that debacle to try any more night landings. We did a lot of flying, but saw no more U-boats. It was quite obvious that at this stage of the Battle of the Atlantic, daylight flying was almost a waste of time—except that it did keep the U-boats down until dark. I made up my mind to have a shot at night operations next cruise.
Meantime, my flight deck crew learned how to clear a crash out of the landing area. Every day we trundled out the wreck that had gone into the walkway and shoved it over the edge of the deck again. Then, while I held a stop watch and cracked a big black whip, the boys would haul it back on deck and drag it clear of the arresting gear. By the time we got back to Norfolk, they were experts at it, and could clear any deck crash in less than four minutes. They were also damned well fed up with that daily chore, and our poor old Turkey was so badly battered it wasn’t worth repairing. I let our jubilant deck crew give it a decent burial at sea.
For the next cruise, we got a new LSO, Lieutenant Jarvis R. Jennings, and a new air group VC-58, Lieutenant Commander Dick Gould, commanding. Before sailing, I got them together and told them what I had in mind. As soon as we had a good moon and smooth sea, I proposed to start around-the-clock operations. For the first few night landings, the boys would have a full moon. As the moon gradually got smaller, I thought they would be able to adapt to the darkness. If it turned out that they couldn’t—we would call it off. We would use whatever deck lights we found to be necessary.
Jennings and Gould were both Gung Ho types. They were a bit skeptical, but agreed there wasn’t much use in going out unless we did fly at night. They agreed to give it a try.
For the first half of the cruise, conditions were not right for making the breakthrough. When the moon was big enough, the sky was overcast and the sea was rough. We flew dawn to dusk for three weeks in an area where 10th Fleet said there were plenty of submarines. But we didn’t find any.
We refueled in Casablanca and returned to the area near the Azores, 8 April 1944 is a date that is a milestone in naval aviation history. That’s when we found conditions to our liking and took the plunge into night flying. We had a full moon, a clear sky, and a smooth sea. Just before sunset, we launched four Turkeys, fully armed, to return about 2230. Although we tried to be matter of fact, we all had stomachs full of butterflies.
It took just three hours for us to hit the jackpot. One of our Turkeys spotted a submarine fully surfaced, charging her batteries, about 30 miles from the task group. He maneuvered down moon from her, and coming in with the submarine clearly silhouetted, laid a stick of depth charges across her. The attack did no serious damage, but shook the submarine up badly and forced her to crash dive immediately.
Now we had the perfect setup for a CVE hunter-killer group—a sure sighting, within easy range, on a submarine with a low battery. As long as she stayed submerged, the U-boat could only average four knots. She couldn’t stay submerged for more than 24 hours. So she had to surface to recharge her battery within 100 miles at the most from the spot where last sighted. It was standard operating procedure to keep that area covered with planes and nail her when she came up again. I peeled off two DEs for the spot of the sighting and we kept four planes in the air all night.
The U-boat skipper thought the first sighting was by a shore-based plane which would soon go away. He just couldn’t believe he had a CVE on his back at night. The submarine surfaced again several times during the night. Each time our planes spotted her and drove her down again. Each sighting gave us a fresh fix for our DEs, and at about seven the next morning, they got sonar contact on her.
But this U-boat skipper knew his business. For seven hours he led us a merry chase. The U-boat twisted and squirmed, went deep, released decoys, and even sent up oil and junk. We shook her up badly many times, but couldn’t kill her. Finally, around 2 p.m. on Easter Sunday, she reached the end of her rope. Her battery was flat, her air was foul, and she had been heavily mauled. She surfaced, and the order was given to open the scuttling valves and abandon ship. We rescued 45 of the crew, including the skipper.
It turned out that we had made quite a haul. She was the U-515, one of Hitler’s ace U-boats, Oberleutnant Werner Henke, Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, commanding. To date, he had sunk 27 enemy ships piling up a grand total of 163,000 tons.
During the hold-down on the U-515, we had made a “possible” contact on another submarine about 60 miles away. After fishing Henke and his men out of the water, we went after that one. We kept planes in the air again all night long, and caught her on the surface charging her battery just at daybreak next morning.
Three planes ganged up on her, coming in out of the dark western sky. This time they didn’t miss. They plastered her with machine guns, rockets, and depth charges, and tore her hull wide open. She sank, leaving only her three lookouts swimming around in the wreckage. By the time we got to the spot an hour later, only one man was alive. Hans Kastrup was his name. He still sends me an Easter card each year from Essen. His submarine was the U-68, another ace boat, with a record of 30 ships sunk, making a total of 200,000 tons.
By this time one thing was obvious. In three weeks of dawn-to-dusk operations, we had done nothing. But in our first two nights of flying, we had made two kills. Night flying was here to stay. The endurance of our Turkeys was four hours. We kept four in the air at all times. So, no matter how you jockeyed your flight schedule catering to the moon, you had to bring eight planes aboard between sunset and sunrise. As the moon got smaller, we kept going, and by the time it was gone, we could get along without it. The boys were landing on board in pitch darkness as if they had eyes like owls. This would soon be SOP for all the Atlantic Fleet CVEs.
No one knows better than I that we had a couple of very lucky breaks. One of them was in getting two kills right off the bat. Nothing can give an iffy project a bigger shot-in-the-arm and cure the jitters quicker than immediate, spectacular success.
Another lucky break was in the matter of lights. Our regular shielded deck lights were useless. We had to improvise. Although we were in an area where 10th Fleet said there was a constant stream of submarines going in and out of the Bay of Biscay, we used as much light as we thought necessary, whether we could shield it or not. When there was no moon during landing operations, we lighted up like Broadway. Had we been torpedoed, I am afraid I might have had trouble justifying this.
But this is what we military men smugly refer to as a calculated risk, after we get away with it! The War College definition of a calculated risk is a shot in the dark that you take when you can’t think of anything else to do. If it doesn’t work, it is classified as stupidity.
Another thing that helped a great deal was a couple of remarkable rescues. Twice we had planes go in the water at night a long way from the ship. Both times the crews thought they were goners. Expert work by our CIC—and other planes—coached destroyers to the spot and saved them. Several times, planes lost all radio power. Our alert CIC spotted it right away and we turned a big searchlight straight up in the air to guide the boys home.
If the boys in the air group know that you go all out to help them when they get in trouble, they are a little happier about sticking their necks out themselves on a calculated risk.
Two officers played key roles in this operation. One was the squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander Gould. If he had balked and said, “My boys aren’t ready for this,” I couldn’t have forced them into it. I’m sure Dick had some doubts about the job. He knew that for over 20 years, carrier operation had been a dawn-to-dusk business. But he had confidence in his pilots and they had it in him. He had guts enough to say, “We’ll try it,” when it would have been easy to say, “No can do.” He took his regular turn on the dark nights and showed the other lads how to do it.
The other key man was Lieutenant J. R. “Stretch” Jennings, my Landing Signal Officer. In those days, before the mirror landing system, the LSO drew more water with the pilots than any admiral did. His signals were not advisory. They were direct orders that had to be obeyed. In daylight, a pilot might cheat a little bit, second-guessing the LSO, taking a peek at the deck and using his own judgment at times. But not at night, when he couldn’t see the deck. He had to rely on the LSO. And the LSO had to be almost a soothsayer to tell whether that tiny light boring in out of the darkness was fast or slow. If it was too slow, the plane would spin in—too fast would mean a bad deck crash. Either could be fatal. So the LSO literally had the lives of each plane crew in his hands when he brought them up the groove. It took iron nerves, expert judgment, and split-second reflexes to be a flag waver at night.
Jennings had them all. He was a lanky six-footer, and the boys called him “Stretch.” They used to say he would stretch out from his platform and grab the stick if they started to go wrong. He wore a throat mike so he could talk to the pilots, as well as wave flags at them—no lighted wands in those days.
Time and again, I have heard Stretch talk a jittery pilot out of trouble on a bad approach. It got so the boys would land, saying smugly to themselves, “This is easy for a hot shot like me.”
I have also been in the ready room when Stretch came down from the flight deck afterwards to tell the boys how they had done that night, and his language almost made me blush. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this angry, roaring man in the ready room was the same one who had been singing lullabies on the air only a few moments before. But without exception, the pilots all loved that big guy, and so did I.
Despite many black landings on a pitching deck during that cruise, we had no bad crashes and no injuries. But most of my gray hairs sprouted during that period.
A fringe benefit from this cruise was a windfall of information for the Office of Naval Intelligence. We worked a little hanky-panky on the crew of the U-515 while we had them on board. As a result, they sang like canary birds to our O.N.I. interrogators and disclosed a lot of things we were very curious about. But that is a story in itself.
On our next cruise we got a new air group, VC-8, Lieutenant Norman Hodson, commanding. They adapted to night flying just as nicely as VC-58 had. As a result, we brought the U-505 home from that cruise on the end of a tow line. That clinched the argument for flying at night. From then on, around-the-clock operations became a “must” for the little CVEs in the Atlantic.
Over a year later, when I took command of the Hancock (CV-19) out in the Pacific, dawn to dusk was still the routine for the big carriers in Halsey’s 3rd Fleet. Their flight decks had over twice the area of the jeeps, and they could make 35 knots. When I told the boys out there about around-the-clock operations for 21 days from a jeep in the Atlantic, they were all skeptical, and some regarded it as a plain lie.
There are two final observations to make. In breaking the ice on a brand-new field like this, the initiative almost always has to come from the bottom up. You can’t expect the high command to order you to go out and do something, when it has been an accepted fact for many years that it can’t be done. For the same reason, if you ask permission to try it, the chances are your answer will be, “No.” The way you test thin ice is to put your weight on it and see what happens. It isn’t good for your ulcers, but sometimes you find the ice is stronger than you thought.
Lastly—and at least as important as anything else—you’ve got to be lucky. I can’t tell you anything about how to do that.
But the jeep carrier Guadalcanal, affectionately known by her crew as the “Can Do,” was always a lucky ship.