“Lady Gallant”
Under the command of Admiral William F. Halsey, the Third Fleet had made a high-speed approach to a launching point off Luzon to hit targets in the Philippines. On 25 November 1944 two kamikazes hit the Cabot, killing 35 men and wounding dozens more. Steward’s Mate Second Class Gary Bell wrote this account shortly after the attack.
More than a year has passed since I first boarded the Cabot. At that time, though her decks were young and her hull sleek and clean from fresh paint, 1 wondered what I had done in my young life to deserve such a deal. To me then, the “Iron Woman” was just a hunk of steel, rivets, and wood. Within a few days, however, there were few men of her 1,600 I did not know.
Yesterday, as I leaned over the gun tub, I looked down at her rusty, salt-scarred hull. There were dents here and there from the dashing of waves. I thought back to all those months. Days at Pearl Harbor, Majuro, Ulithi, and all along the line. Excitement; adventure; happy faces at mail call. Then I thought of the strikes we’d been in, and of the fellows I’d known who had shared as many of Cabot’s adventures as I had.
For a long time we had been quite lucky, and were one of the few ships that had not been hit. The hand of fate guided us safely—until that day in November, just off Luzon. Planes dove on the ship, only to be shot down and explode into the sea.
The day was a really busy one. At that particular time, we were in general quarters, and fellows below deck were held in suspense. Topside, the sky was dark with smoke from gunfire. Many times before when planes dove and were shot down, only a few rounds were fired and then we secured. This time a plane dove. It was hit and yet it kept diving. The guns were still firing. Suddenly, there was a loud, deafening thump! Faces were frozen with fear! Hearts beat rapidly! In the wardroom, men were being stretched out on tables. It was like a hospital. Doctors, corpsmen, steward’s mates, and others were busily going about their tasks. The Cabot had been hurt.
It was in that minute that I changed my mind. The Cabot was no longer a hunk of steel and wood. She was a living thing. I felt her own aching inside me. Her deck was tom and ripped. The steel—her skin—was ragged. The very mount which I stood on yesterday was gone, and those men kept firing. I knew them all—Nonnemacher, Smith, Clark, Dagger, Johnson.
They kept firing. Still the gallant lady fought on. She was still alive. If you don’t think we were proud of her, ask the men from the New Jersey and the Iowa. Perhaps one day there will be a hall of fame for ships, with a special berth for the Cabot. Even when we’re home, we’ll not forget her or the men who so gallantly sailed her and earned for her the title of “Lady Gallant.”
Landing on a Narrow Deck
I was part of Fighter Squadron 31 in August 1943 when we joined the Cabot for shakedown training shortly after the ship was commissioned. At that time I had not yet operated from an Essex-class carrier, so to me, landing on a CVL was routine. The only actual difference was that the deck of the Cabot was much narrower than in the larger carriers. You had to be lined up coming in. There was no way to be off center and make your landing. Length had nothing to do with it, since your landing area was about the same length as the landing area on the Essex class. The narrower width was mandated by the CVL having been built on a predesigned cruiser hull. With the flight deck added on top of this cruiser hull, the CVL had a tendency to roll much more than the Essex class. In moderate to rough seas, you were fighting a pitching and rolling deck.
Other than that, certainly our ship’s acceleration was greater than the Essex’s, being on that clean-cut cruiser hull and having the designed cruiser engines. She was good for 32, 33 knots quickly. She could come up to speed much faster than the wide-bottomed Essex class.
The operations were different in that the air group personnel knew the shipboard people, whereas on the Essex class you could be there for a year and not know who the first lieutenant was. But in our case aboard the Cabot, being a smaller ship with a smaller crew, it just seemed that you were more of a family-type group than aboard the larger carriers. The camaraderie was much better, 1 thought, than it was on the Essex class. There was the feeling, once a CVL pilot, always a CVL pilot. We carried the belief that our crew and air group could do a tough job faster and better than the big-carrier men. A CVL pilot landing on an Essex-class carrier would always put the needle in by asking, “Do I land on the right runway or the left one?”
Excerpted from the Naval Institute’s oral history of Captain Arthur R. Hawkins, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Cabot Kicks Up Her Heels
After a tour ashore, I was sent in 1943 to Camden, New Jersey, as prospective commanding officer of the Cabot. The New York Shipbuilding Company built nine of these vessels. They had originally been contracted for as cruisers. Then it became apparent that we were going to have cruisers running out of our ears and that we needed more carriers, so it was decided to convert these to light carriers, and a very successful job it turned out to be.
My ship was already launched, and about the first of June we were turned over to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where we went into commission. Then we went on down to Trinidad and operated for a month on a shakedown cruise, getting the air group in apple-pie order. We had 30 airplanes: 18 in the fighter squadron and 12 in a torpedo bomber squadron.
We later returned to the Philadelphia yard to learn about damage control and firefighting. When we left there, we were sent up to Rockland, Maine, to run the standardization trials for our class of ship. The standardization party came on board and started explaining to me that they wanted to get the ship going at 100% of her full power and then apply full rudder. 1 was aghast because, in the course of our shakedown cruise, we found out that if we were running along at 20 knots and put on a good deal less than full rudder, the ship would heel so that everything that wasn’t nailed down would fall over. We had busted crockery and so forth all over the place. So 1 had issued orders that we would never use more than just standard rudder if we were making over 25 knots. I said. “My God, she’ll capsize!”
It was a standard test, I guess. It was finally agreed that we would approach this subject with caution. We would work into it and see what happened. As it turned out, everything was perfectly okay, because no matter how fast we went, she heeled just so much and then she stuck there. In fact, the faster we were going, the sooner we got out of trouble, because as the ship turns, she skids as she comes out of the turn. So here we’ve got the ship trying to go sidewise through the water before she gets going toward where she’s headed. As a result, she slows down very rapidly.
We could go into one of these turns making 30-some knots and put that rudder over, and by the time we’d turned 90 or 120 degrees, we wouldn’t be making over 12 knots through the water, and the ship would be coming back to an even keel. But if you really wanted to have some fun, the thing to do was to let her turn about 60 degrees, then put the rudder amidships. Then she really would stand on her ear!
Excerpted from the Naval Institute’s oral history of Rear Admiral Malcolm F. Schoeffel, U.S. Navy (Retired)