“We were at GQ [general quarters] before the first hit. We took one plane on the starboard side that actually was glancing. But it hit next to the 40-mm sponson in the starboard boat pocket. That caused a lot of damage. Then the flames on the after end of the flight deck were pretty visible. We couldn’t see much of the bow from where we were.
“But the fire was really the outstanding memory—almost to the point where the rest of it is a side issue. I think all of us felt that the danger to the ship was from the fire. But they [the crew] got it under control, and, of course, the fire was on the hangar deck. They were fueling planes down there, and that’s what really fueled the fire.”
Years after the violence, Roger L. Bond, in interviews for the U.S. Naval Institute’s oral history program, thought back on the 21 February 1945 Japanese six-plane, bomb- and kamikaze aircraft attacks on the carrier USS Saratoga (CV-3) in combat off Iwo Jima.1 The Saratoga, her flight deck and catapults destroyed, returned to the United States never to fight again. Quartermaster Third Class Bond went on to his next ship. Combat in the Pacific during World War II is the story of giant fleets, armies, and air corps in heroic, immortalized battles. It is also the story of unsung, dedicated young Americans at the heart of those battles fighting for their country.
Bond, who started his days in Wisconsin and ended them in Minnesota, was 17 when he enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and had recruit training in San Diego. His first tour was in the South Pacific and off Guadalcanal as a non-rated sailor with a 5-inch gun crew in the new Fletcher-class destroyer USS Saufley (DD-465). Pneumonia sent him to sick bay on board the destroyer tender USS Dixie (AD-14) in May 1943. He was discharged a month later with new orders to the Saratoga.
The Sara, as she was known, was building by then on a very distinguished career. She and her sister ship, the USS Lexington (CV-2), had begun construction as battle cruisers and been converted to aircraft carriers as part of U.S. compliance with the new limitations set on major navies by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. From the time of their commissioning in 1927 through their wargame Fleet exercises in the 1930s, they demonstrated the effectiveness of carriers as an offensive weapon. They were pathfinders for the new Navy. “The Lexington and the Saratoga were not experimental. They were large, fast carriers that could sail and fight with the battle fleet. And those two ships enabled aircraft designers to build effective naval aircraft.”2
By June 1943, the Saratoga had been in action off Wake Island and Guadalcanal—her air groups in action against the Japanese—and had been twice torpedoed and sent to the yards for repairs and upgrades. When Bond came aboard, he talked his way out of gun-crew duties and into the navigation division. “The thing that was amazing about my work with the quartermasters was that it just really changed my whole naval awareness. . . . I was in the nerve center of the ship, you might say. I kept contact with all different branches of the ship, interacted with them, knew what was going on.”3 His work paid off; he was rated quartermaster third class in February 1944.
Bond’s duties now included watches as ship’s helmsman. The 40,000-ton carrier did not have a wheel. He steered her standing in front of a small console and a pair of compass repeaters, manipulating a slender eight-inch steering lever with his left or right hand. “You had to kick the rudder hard to get the ship moving and also to stop it moving,” he recalled. “And you had to anticipate it because you could swing past the right course very easily. It was particularly tricky in slow speeds, and that’s when you were entering or leaving port, and particularly Pearl Harbor, which is pretty tight. The Saratoga almost always tied up to mooring quays on Ford Island. . . . So we would go down the west side of Ford Island. Then as you came around, you’d need a tug, because with that sail and that slow a speed, you just couldn’t make the turn in the channel.”
Bond served under three commanding officers and had the chance to observe them closely in the crowded confines of the pilothouse. His favorite of the three was Captain John H. Cassady. “One time we were coming in and Cassady said, ‘Come right ten degrees rudder.’ With a questioning tone I said, ‘Come right, ten degrees rudder?’ He said, ‘Yes, come right.’ Well, this time we went down the east side of the island, and a tug took us all the way around. We came back and we tied up. Cassady said ‘I’m really glad you questioned me about that because that shows you’re involved. That damned garbage scow was coming down the west channel, and I just didn’t want any problem with him. But I really appreciate the fact that the quartermaster is thinking with me, and is thinking ahead, anticipating. That’s a comfort, because it is perfectly possible for me to mean left and say right.’”4
In March 1944, the Saratoga was ordered to join the British Far Eastern Fleet in Australia with the carrier HMS Illustrious under Admiral Sir James Somerville. The target was the Japanese fleet in Singapore, major Japanese installations in Sumatra, and the harbor of Soerabaja, Java. As the United States and the British readied for the highly successful April 1944 attacks, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander, Allied Eastern Forces, paid a visit to the Saratoga.5
Bond recalled being quartermaster of the watch when Mountbatten arrived. Some 2,200 to 2,400 crew members had been assembled for inspection. “The quarterdeck on the Saratoga was located in that space on the flight deck between the bridge structure and the stack structure. He went out and he looked towards the bow, he looked towards the stern, and he said, ‘They look very good. Now let’s bring them all together in the shade of the stack.’
“Then he started telling them about the war in the China-Burma-India theater, why the Saratoga had been requested. They really thought he was the greatest thing they had every seen—from the British Navy, anyway. ‘I just wish I could go with you,’ he said, ‘I know what you’re thinking, but I really do wish. I remember back when we were on destroyers in the war in 1939 and ’40. We’d been tossed around that English Channel. We come in and get a little bit of fuel and food, and some gray-haired old bastard from Whitehall would come down and say, ‘Go to it lads. I wish I were with you.’ We’d grit our teeth and say, ‘Yeah, you’ll be in bed with your old lady when we’re out.’ But I really would like to go.’”6
With the joint operation concluded, the Saratoga returned to Pearl Harbor, then to Bremerton, Washington, for overhaul, then several weeks of night-fighter training, followed by her return to the Pacific and the February 1945 savage attack by the Japanese aircraft—followed two hours later by another such attack.7 While the carrier again prepared to return to Bremerton, Bond boarded a converted French passenger-liner transport at Eniwetok for his return to California and new orders to the small-craft training center in Miami. There he received assignment to the nucleus crew of a patrol-craft escort (rescue)—the PCE(R)-858—under construction by the Pullman Standard Company in Calumet, Illinois. The ship was 193 feet long, 900 tons, with two diesel engines.
“There were only 12 or 13 of us that went up to Chicago and brought the ship down the Mississippi River. . . . The PCE(R) was like a toy to us, and the fellow that was handling her as acting captain was a river pilot. After about a week he was satisfied with it, so they unstepped the mast and we went down the Illinois waterway. . . . You know, when you’re at sea one thing you don’t ever want to do is run aground—certainly not on purpose. One time, we were coming along and just sort of drifting with the current. There was a railroad bridge and this unending train of coal cars going across, and the pilot said, ‘Just run her ashore right over there. Just nose her in.’ He parked there a lot of times.
“Then the bridge opened and we went through. We were getting into Peoria towards the evening, and it was getting dark. He said, ‘Now when you hear a dog barking ahead, I want you to come right, right away. Don’t wait for me.’ We were going along, and there was this big bluff up ahead. All of a sudden I heard a dog bark. He said, ‘Come right, come right!’ So I came right, and the river made a right-angle turn.
“I said, ‘What’s going to happen when that dog dies?’ He said, “The next guy’s going to have problems. But after that everybody will know.’”8
After arrival in New Orleans and fitting out, the PCE(R)-858 was commissioned on 5 May. Bond sailed with her and served on her in the Pacific. With the war over, he rode with her back to the East Coast for decommissioning, left active duty, received his college education through the GI Bill, and headed out into civilian life.
1. The Reminiscences of Roger L. Bond, interviewed by Paul Stillwell (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1995), 200.
2. Paul M. Craig, “Lexington and Saratoga: The New Beginning,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 802, no. 12 (December 1969), 92.
3. Bond, interview, 68.
4. Ibid., 127–28.
5. Clark G. Reynolds, “’Sara’ in the East,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 706, no. 12 (December 1961), 76-78.
6. Bond, interview, 152-55.
7. Clark G. Reynolds, The Fast Carriers, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 335.
8. Bond, interview, 215-19.