The heavy cruiser Astoria (CA-34) was going down, and pilot Bob Schiller wondered if he would get off alive, let alone fly again. Miraculously, he survived one of the worst defeats in the history of the U.S. Navy and within months embarked on a new assignment, becoming one of the very few World War II Pacific aviators to fly combat missions off a destroyer.
Schiller, a tall man with an athletic trim, an easy-going smile, and sky-blue eyes, told his incredible tale on a dock at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, at a fall 2005 reunion of veterans of the USS Halford (DD-480).
As a young man growing up in Idaho in the 1930s, he had no dreams of becoming an aviator, let alone going to war. Because of economic hardship, the third-year forestry major at the University of Idaho dropped out to take a job on the Union Pacific Railroad helping build its Sun Valley ski resort. He also served as a bellhop, catering to Sun Valley regulars, including Ernest Hemingway, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert, and Gary Cooper. It was from them that he realized war was coming, and he feared being drafted into the infantry.
From Pensacola to the Pacific
At age 24, Schiller noticed the Navy was scouring the United States for prospective aviators with at least two years of college. Schiller applied, passed the test, and reported for training at Pensacola, Florida, in 1940.
Over the next 14 months, he learned to fly a variety of aircraft such as carrier fighters, large seaplanes, and scout-observation floatplanes. His hope was to fly the fast carrier planes, but after his commissioning as an ensign, he reported to Pearl Harbor for duty in the heavy cruiser Astoria where he was to fly one of the ship’s catapult-launched Curtiss SOC-3 Seagull biplanes. Barely five weeks later, he was on board while escorting the carrier Lexington (CV-2) to Midway Atoll when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The ships immediately turned back, arriving to the shocking carnage of sunken battleships.
Frustrating setbacks hounded the Astoria for the next month. The cruiser rendezvoused with a relief convoy headed to Wake Island as it fell to the Japanese, forcing a return to Pearl on 29 December. There it picked up the outbound carrier Saratoga (CV-3). A few days out of port, the carrier was torpedoed by an enemy sub, forcing a return for repairs on 13 January. Six days later, the Astoria cast off with the Lexington to meet up with the fully-loaded oil tanker Neches (AO-5). An enemy sub got there first, sinking the oiler. Without the fuel, the task force returned to Pearl, arriving on 24 January.
Finally on 16 February, the cruiser embarked for the Coral Sea with the carrier Yorktown (CV-5), four destroyers, another cruiser, and an oiler. Schiller flew daily antisubmarine patrols. The normal search pattern was to fly out 175 miles, turn, and continue 70 miles parallel to the Astoria before flying back. All of this had to be done without radio contact so the enemy would not detect the approaching battle fleet. “You had a compass, your air speed, the waves on the water to tell you how fast the wind was coming and from what direction,” explained Schiller. “You had a chart board and you figured it all out. But the triangle wasn’t a true triangle because all the time you were gone the ship was moving. If you were gone four hours, the ship could move as much as 80 miles. If you deviated from your course, you’d have to keep track of the direction you flew in and how long you flew that way and rechart it to figure how to get back to the ship.”
Witness to Coral Sea
It was dangerous to the extreme, exemplified by what happened on arrival in the Coral Sea in early March 1942. Four A sterna scout planes took off, but only Schiller made it back. Two other planes from another cruiser also vanished. It was three weeks before their fate was learned: They had been lost. Running low on fuel, they landed on opposite sides of a large island. “The natives were very friendly and helped them out,” said Schiller. The Royal Australian Air Force found them, refueled their planes, and directed the two-man crews back to their cruisers.
During a 110-day patrol of the Coral Sea, aircraft from the Yorktown and Lexington bombed enemy bases on the north coast of New Guinea and Guadalcanal. On 7 May, Japanese fighter planes located the Americans and made the opening salvo in what was to be the Battle of the Coral Sea.
“At first they found a tanker that we had just refueled and a destroyer, and they sank them both,” said Schiller of the Neosho (AO-23) and Sims (DD- 409). “I was in the air when it happened and I heard it on radio, their May Day calls. We were about 150 miles away.”
By the time the ensign tracked back to the Astoria, 104 aircraft from the carriers had gone into action. “The carrier planes took off and found the Japanese carriers at the same time that the Japanese planes took off and found us. Our planes sank one carrier [the Shoho] and slightly damaged another.”
Without defending aircraft, the two U.S. carriers zigzagged wildly as enemy planes concentrated on sinking them. The Astoria made such radical turns to stay in position on the flanks of the carriers that some of her plates sprung leaks. The cruiser fired every available gun at the buzzing aircraft, putting up intense antiaircraft screens over the Lexington and Yorktoum.
“One of the problems for aviators is they have no duties on the ship when they aren’t flying,” Schiller explained. “So if you’re on the ship, you have nothing to do, no gun to fire, no ammunition to help with, just stand by and watch. So you see all this and you get scared. Your mouth is dry as cotton. You’re nervous as hell. And when the ship fires the big guns you have to have cotton in your ears or your eardrums will burst. And you have to stand on your toes because if they fire a nine-gun salvo with 8-inch guns, the deck plates can come up a couple of feet. It’s hard enough to break your ankles.”
Schiller watched in horror as bombs ravaged the Lexington. “Huge pieces of the flight deck flew 200, 250 feet in the air,” he vividly recalled. “Explosion after explosion. I could see people running, being blown overboard. The ship finally started listing pretty badly and they ordered abandon ship. We spent a couple hours going around and picking up survivors including my roommate from Pensacola who was a fighter pilot.”
The Lexington stayed afloat for a while, and then was purposely torpedoed and sunk by the Phelps (DD-360). Though costly for the Navy, the battle was a moral victory: it was the first time the Japanese had been stopped during their southward advance in the Pacific.
The Yorktown and Astoria returned to Pearl for hasty repairs and then headed for Midway on 27 May. The carriers Hornet (CV-8) and Enterprise (CV-6) were already there. The Astoria operated north of them, detached from the main force. In the ensuing carrier battle to the south, Japanese aircraft and a submarine sank the Yorktown. But counterstrikes by American aircraft sank four enemy carriers and one cruiser, a devastating blow to the Japanese.
Voyage to Guadalcanal
The Astoria returned to Pearl Harbor on 13 June and in early July embarked on a southwesterly course. “We didn’t have a carrier with us,” said Schiller. “We were told why two days out: We were to join up with a whole lot of transports headed for Guadalcanal. We were to he the bombardment group.”
The cruiser had been equipped with a fifth plane because of anticipated heavy antiaircraft fire during the landings. “It was unnerving because it was a lot more dangerous,” said Schiller. “When you had a carrier with you, you had the comfort of knowing fighter planes and dive bombers are there to help you in case of trouble. For me it was a return trip and I wasn’t anxious to go back. You see one of those battles and it will last you a lifetime.”
En route, troops practiced landings on an island in the Fijis that resembled Guadalcanal. After a few days, Captain Lawrence F. Reifsnider, commander of Task Group 62.1, decided to alert Pearl that the convoy was ready to depart. Recalled Schiller:
He chose me to fly his communications officer into Suva [the capital of Fiji] that night. So this guy dressed all in white gets in the rear cockpit. They gave him instructions since he had never flown before. But he didn’t listen. He wasn’t patient. He stuck his head out to see what the delay was just as the catapult was fired and it jerked the hell out of him and blew his hat off with all the gold braid on it. He was madder than a wet hen, as if it was my fault. We got into Suva harbor and got the signal by lamp to tie up to a buoy. This boat was sent out and the officer went ashore and was gone three to four hours. And I was sitting out there and it rained like the devil. You can’t believe how hard it can rain. And when you’re just sitting there, the canopy leaks. Finally I got a blinker message from shore that the commander was staying ashore and to return to the ship. By that time I was soaked.
The convoy resumed its course. On the morning of 7 August 1942, the Guadalcanal invasion began. Schiller was one of the first pilots sent aloft to scout the landing beaches and reported little opposition as the warships began pounding the beachhead. “Each of the cruisers had a different dye in their shells so the aviators could tell which shells came from which ship,” he said. “You could tell if the shells fell short or long, right or left, and which ship they came from. We started out flying at a very high altitude. After a while, there was no antiaircraft gunfire. There was no resistance at all, so we came down and flew at 500 feet.”
Rude Awakening Off Savo Island
Though the landing was successful, Japanese troop carriers from Rabaul nightly hauled in reinforcements who engaged the Americans for weeks. The Astoria and her battle group lingered near Savo Island. On the night of 8 August, seven Japanese cruisers and a destroyer sneaked past the island undetected, broadsiding the Chicago (CA- 29) and Australia’s Canberra with torpedoes and shells at 0140. Both heavy cruisers sank. The enemy column split in two and attacked the Astoria and Quincy (CA-39) at 0150. The first four shells missed the Astoria, but the fifth hit her. The impact jarred Schiller awake.
“They didn’t even sound general quarters until the first shell hit,” he recalled. “The hit was amidships where all the planes were. They were loaded with gas, so right away there was one hell of a fire. That was our undoing. There were ten aviators assigned to the ship. The five senior aviators, I was one of them, went to the bridge to get flight instructions. The five that went down to the catapult died.”
Japanese gunners pummeled the cruiser with 65 direct hits. Those on board the Astoria fought for life as the Japanese retreated as fast as they had arrived. Injured crewmen, including Schiller, moved to the captain’s cabin until hot deck plates forced them to retreat to the forecastle. A bucket brigade made headway, driving the blaze aft of the gun deck. The destroyer Bagley (DD-386) came alongside and by 0445 had taken all the wounded off. The two ships were so close that Schiller was able to step from one to the other.
At dawn the cruiser, afire and holed below the waterline, was still afloat and taken under tow, but she began to list, turned over on her port beam, settled by the stern, and disappeared at 1216.
The sinking of four heavy cruisers and damage to another in the lopsided Battle of Savo Island was one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on the Navy. More than 1,000 American and Australian Sailors and officers were killed (235 on the Astoria), and another 700 were wounded.
“After the Astoria sank. I was as nervous as a burglar all the time. If someone dropped a pan behind me, I’d jump,” said Schiller. A hospital ship took him and the rest of the wounded to New Caledonia. “There was someone dying every day. We had a burial at sea every day for seven days.” Able survivors, including Schiller, shipped out to Pearl Harbor, where they boarded a military transport for the States.
The Navy, worried about the public impact of such a major defeat, decided to keep it a secret. Before the vessel left Hawaii, Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, came aboard. “He talked to us about the seriousness of the loss we had, and how it weakened Americans tremendously. And then he said. ...” Schiller paused, looking out across Lake Tahoe, his eyes welling with tears. “The Admiral said, ‘My first thought was to keep you all here until we announce [the disaster] to the public. Then we decided that no, that wouldn’t be fair to all of you. So we decided to send you back to the States. But I’m here today to ask you all on your honor, do not tell anybody. Not even your mothers and your fathers.’”
Schiller returned to his native Idaho a hero. “I was giving speeches in my hometown, going down to the high school, and I couldn’t say a word about it,” he said, again choking up. “I told nobody.”
A Destroyer’s Air Force
After 30 days’ leave, the pilot received orders to join an OS2U Kingfisher squadron at March Field in North Bend, Oregon, to patrol shipping lanes off the state’s coast in the spring of 1943. Then new orders arrived transferring him to the Navy base in Seattle. Recalled Schiller: “I said to my commander, ‘What the hell? I just got here.’ ‘I know,’ he says, ‘I’m surprised, too. But you’ll even be more surprised at what the orders are. Report to the DD- 480 for duty involving flying.’ We both figured somebody had gotten fouled up or something.”
But there was no mix-up. The destroyer Halford, being built in the nearby Navy Yard Puget Sound, was to be one of six (although only three were completed) destroyers altered to carry a plane. Schiller, in a possibly apocryphal anecdote, said this came about at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “When the president was out in the Atlantic on a cruiser for a meeting with [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill, he observed the speed and maneuverability of the destroyers in comparison to the cruiser. He figured if there was an emergency, he could get back quicker on a destroyer and if it had a plane, even quicker than that.”
This story aside, the Halford—along with the Pringle (DD-477) and Stevens (DD-479)—were built, despite many objections from the fleet, to carry a floatplane as a result of a 1940 requirement for gun spotting. “The guys firing torpedoes would have preferred another set of torpedo tubes,” Schiller said. “The guys on the antiaircraft guns didn’t like it either. They had to give up one of the 5-inch guns to make room for the plane. The ship lost 20 percent of its firepower right there. The skipper [Lieutenant Commander Gustave N. Johansen] wasn’t in favor of the plane, either; he wanted a fighting destroyer.”
On a shakedown cruise to San Diego, the ship practiced aircraft launch and recovery. It was necessary to smooth the sea—turn sharply in a circle—to prepare a landing zone for the plane. The aircraft would taxi into the zone where Schiller gunned the engine just enough to push the nose up on a sled deployed from the destroyer. A crane then angled out over the plane and dropped a large hook to slide through an eyebolt on the top of the fuselage. “An experienced radioman-gunner [in the rear seat] could hook it himself,” Schiller said. “Otherwise it was up to the pilot to engage the hook. You have to stand up on a seat that is pretty slippery and take your parachute off with nothing to hang onto. You’d have to stand up and catch that swinging hook. There was no real way to brace yourself except with your feet and sometimes you’d lose your balance and fall over the side to the amusement of those on the ship.” Occasionally, Schiller took shipmates and officers aloft, and on one flight he allowed a Hollywood cameraman to film the destroyer launching torpedoes. Most of the time Schiller, however, had nothing to do. “They flew the plane very, very rarely,” he said. “Every time we joined a new group, I would get to fly at least once. The captain or the admiral would want to see it fly. So we would fly around for his curiosity.”
Mixed-up Navy
The Halford’s first mission in the summer of 1943 was to convoy ships—including the HMS Victorious, on loan to the United States—from New Caledonia to Pearl Harbor. She then participated with a fast-moving task force of carriers and cruisers in raids on Marcus and Wake islands. After escorting a tanker to Midway from the South Pacific, the Halford was quite a topic of discussion around the “Gooneyville Lodge,” the atoll’s PanAm Hotel.
As the destroyer approached, Schiller flew ahead and landed in the lagoon, where he taxied onto the beach. Checking in with the commodore, he went to the officer’s club. There he met a friend from the Astoria who had transferred to submarines. The two traded insignia, Schiller pinning on the twin dolphins while his pal clipped on the pilot’s wings.
Later that night, the pilot went down to the boat landing to catch a launch back to the Halford. “A captain, a four-striper, also got on the boat. He sat down and looked at me,” Schiller recalled. “Pretty soon he said, ‘Which boat are you off of son?’ A boat is a submarine and I said, ‘I’m not off a submarine; I’m on that destroyer over there.’ ‘Well, ah,’ says the captain, ‘what are you doing on a destroyer?’ I said, ‘I’m an aviator on it.’ He looked and said, ‘A submariner is flying a plane off a destroyer?’ He was completely baffled.”
In the fall of 1943, the Halford returned to San Francisco Bay’s Mare Island Naval Shipyard, where the plane and catapult were removed in favor of extra torpedo tubes and a 5-inch gun. Schiller was reassigned to the Naval Air Station in Seattle, where he at last became the pilot of an FM-2 Wildcat, a fighter attached to Composite Squadron 78 (VC-78) on board the Saginaw Bay (CVE-82), a small escort carrier. “We went out to the Palau islands but by the time we got there, the big carriers had bombed everything,” Schiller said. “We went in to cover the landings, fly combat air patrols until the beaches were secure. Then we got sent to an island off New Guinea where the carrier anchored in a channel while we waited for the Leyte Gulf landing.”
After the Philippines invasion, Schiller returned to the States and reported to the naval air station in Sanford, Florida, where he served out the war as an instructor. He later married, fathered two children, and became a successful salesman and manager in the building materials industry. He never returned to aviation.
At Lake Tahoe and in Reno, he and Halford veterans shared stories and reminisced about the danger they faced and how distinctive their ship was for four months as a “carrier destroyer.” Schiller said it was an idea before its time. Today aviation has returned to destroyers in the form of helicopters.
The Halford Sailors brought Schiller up to date on what became of the destroyer. She was awarded nine battle stars for service in campaigns from the Northern Solomons to Leyte Gulf to the Aleutian Islands. She sank four Japanese merchant ships, downed four enemy aircraft, and assisted in the sinking of the battleship Yamashiro in the Surigao Strait. The destroyer, in the thick of many battles, never lost a man in combat.
Schiller was just as fortunate. The aviator flew aircraft off a cruiser, a destroyer, and an aircraft carrier. He escaped injury in the Battle of the Coral Sea and survived the sinking of a cruiser off Savo Island while becoming one of the very few pilots in World War II to serve as a destroyer aviator. Looking back, the 89-year-old flier smiled. “Someone was looking after me.”