Reporting from a World War II Aircraft Carrier

For the Battle of Midway, International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis sailed on the USS Hornet from Pearl Harbor and watched as its pilots set off to do battle with the Japanese fleet. What was it like? Here is how Tregaskis described his experience:

"Watching a modern sea battle from an aircraft carrier is like witnessing a football game from the locker room.

It consists mostly of seeing the boys dash out the door, then waiting nervously, endlessly, for them to come back, and finally putting together a picture of what has happened from the stories they pant out as they sink into welcome relaxation.

Between the times they run out and come back (IF they come back) you have the noises of the crowd to guide you in your nervous guessing game—the clouds of smoke that rise beyond the horizon, and the garbled mouthings of the interplane radios coming from a span of perhaps more than 100 miles.

If you are lucky, this remote contact with the battle is your only contact. If you are unlucky, the enemy bombers find your ship while your own planes are out, and your period of waiting is punctuated by blasts of high explosives.

That, at least, is what the veterans will tell you; if you ask them ‘what’s it like on an aircraft carrier during a battle?’ and my own experience during the Battle of Midway, confirms the impression. I was aboard an aircraft carrier which launched slugging divebombers, torpedo planes and fighters against the Japanese.

I remember the tenseness in the air as we watched the boys take off for battle on the bright morning of June Fourth, the first and decisive day of the Midway fracas. All of us knew these lads were heading for the climactic experience of any military man’s life. We knew the chances they were going to have to take, the whirlpool of action and chaos and gunfire they were going to become embroiled in that morning.

The enemy had been sighted and his position and strength fixed. The teletype machine in the pilots’ ready rooms had snapped the lads into action as the message was pecked out, word by word: 'Pilots will man planes . . . . maintain search attack procedure. . . . each group attack one carrier. . . . we will continue closing. . . . pilots man planes.' The captain had authorized the use of profanity in referring to the foe, on this particular day: 'Go get the bastards,' clicked the teletype.

The pilots had been waiting for this final word ever since the details of an enemy contact had flashed over the teletype nearly an hour before. I had been one of their restless number squirming in the armchairs of the ready room, fidgeting, smoking cigarettes in chains, trying to read the smudgy magazines that lay about, jumping nervously each time the teletype began to peck out a message.

Now, that message, had begun to come through at last. The boys leapt to their feet, rummaged in their gear lockers, pulled helmets and goggles on their heads. This, one of them shouted, was IT.

Now they had pulled open the heavy, watertight ready room doors and were thumping along to their planes. I heard the shout 'Stand clear of propellers' relayed along the deck by hoarse, excited voices. Then, 'Stand by to start all engines.' And after that, the hiss and sputter of the start, the rough, raucous sound of the engine catching and shouting out the rowdy, discorded sound of its horsepower. The mounting of the sound of engine upon engine left the deck shaking with the power of it.

From the second level of the bridge I looked down on the planes warming up, the shimmering arcs of propellers mingled amidst a disorderly pile of wings and fuselages, punctuated by the blue flame and spitting smoke of exhausts. The deck operations officer, his ridiculously small, checkered flag in his hand, staggered out amidst the multiple gales of propeller slipstreams and prepared to send the first plane on its way to battle.

Up in the flight control gallery on the bridge I could see the green 'go' flag in the wind. I saw the deck officer glance up at it, and then, with an intent straight look at the first pilot in line, bring his own flag sharply downwards.

And so the first plane, her motor roaring full gun, began to waddle forward. I tried to detect the expression of the pilot’s face as he swept by gaining momentum, but even with my field glasses I could make out only his goggles trained fixedly forward, his drawn, intense cheek, his hands aptly busy with the controls.

The roar of his motor reached a peak of sound as he swept by, an upleasant rough-throated gargle rising to a shout—and then he was near the end of the deck, his wheels lifting a thin distance off the boards, then sweeping off over the blue water.

Now the second plane was moving into line, beginning her take-off run; and it was the same as the first; the same motor roar, reaching a peak pitch, the same intense pilot’s face going by, same deft hands working in the cockpit, and then the ominous flattening of the motor sound as the plane dipped from the end of the deck, its wings shadowing water.

It was not hard to imagine the thoughts passing through the pilots’ minds at this time of stress: the forward straining of their nerves as they swept down the deck knowing they were heading for combat; the quick imaginings of the action that might wait for them; the reality of the presence of death, the first straight look into the eyes of death; and superimposed against this thought-landscape, the hand and foot motions, the habited reactions, the intricate worry of simply flying—of the oft-repeated technique of simply getting a plane into the air.

This was the modern beginning of the modern conflict; far different, perhaps, from the slow-swinging battle lines, the ponderous maneuvering that preceded an old-style naval engagement—but every bit as exciting. And, strangely, a reversion to the old style of knights rattling out to meet the foe in a tourney.

When the last planes had taken off, time seemed to sag and stop for a few moments—as we all knew it would be some time before our planes would reach the enemy. But there was no sense of relaxation. We stood at battle stations, anxiously squinting at the horizon. For we knew a plague of Japanese bombers might pop into sight at any minute.

Below me along the deck I could see the circular nests surrounding the anti-aircraft guns, with white blogs and dark goggles marking the upturned faces of the crews. I could see several gunners strapped into position, their feet ready on the trigger pedals.

But for some time at least, they were not to have a change to fire. Staring at the sphere of the sea, we could see nothing but our own craft for a space of many minutes, although lookouts turned in many a false alarm. And then there was the hue and cry and sudden movement that comes when something unmistakable is sighted; and now, astern and to our port side, we could see a turnip-shaped cloud of smoke rising, just over the horizon.

I turned my field glasses on the smoke column—and as I looked, a peppering of dark spots suddenly flung against the sky near the smoke. I knew that I was watching anti-aircraft bursts. I could see not planes among them; the distance was too great. But I knew that somewhere over the horizon, planes were diving on a ship; and the ship was defending itself with clouds of ackackfire.

As I watched, I could see the swarm of bursts growing larger, spreading over the sky. And then, suddenly, amidst the black flecks, a brilliant little yellow light winked into being, like a tiny flashlight hanging over the horizon.

Now, as I saw it settling towards the curved horizon-rim, still burning brightly, the fact that this was a plane, afire, seeped into my brain.

Visually, it was far removed, only a tiny, impersonal signal light in the distance; but I knew that for the pilot, the light meant the color and the searing heat of flames, and perhaps the agony of knowing that he was dying. Or perhaps, mercifully, he was dead of wounds before his plane became a roman candle and snuffed itself into the sea.

'It’s a flamer, a flamer,' said the young signal officer standing next to me. His eyes burned with excitement.

But for me, the excitement of the moment came with suspense; the suspense of wondering what the flamer and the smoke-display indicated. Did they mean success or defeat for our side? Did they mean that squadrons of Japanese bombers might soon target us, or that Japanese planes and ships had been put out of action? And who had died in that flaming plane—one of ours or one of theirs?

There was some respite from the suspense of wondering what was happening. Down in the air pilot room, sitting amidst rows of radio equipment, one could hear quick words being passed between planes in battle; crackling, distorted voice of fliers in the midst of breathless action. And we knew from what we heard that many of our flying men were machine gunning the enemy from the air and hitting assigned objectives with bombs.

“You take the one to the left and I’ll take the one to the right,” said the voice, clearly. And a few seconds later, the same voice repeated: 'You take the little one over there to the left. Somebody’s taking the one over to the right.' Evidently our fliers were still picking their targets.

And so the day went; by watching the sea from a high level, keeping an intent eye on the horizon, and listening to the radio in snatches, one could patch together a conception of what MIGHT be happening out there. But it was only when the fliers returned to tell their excited yarns, that the suspense of wondering what was occurring out on the ocean gridiron, was relieved.

When the fliers came back, and stormed into the their ready rooms full of jubilant shouts and congratulations, we gathered a fairly coherent story: on that day four of the enemy carriers and some other ships had been blasted and set afire. One of our own carriers had been attacked by dive bombers—and that explained the net of anti-aircraft fire, and the flamer we had seen, which incidentally was one of many Japanese aircraft knocked into the drink on that attack,

On this and subsequent days of battle, I was struck by the effect that intense action evidently produced in the fliers. It was like intoxication: many of them talked liked whirlwinds, their eyes dilated, and they seemed to have little control over the volume of their voices.

I remember particularly one young lieutenant whom I saw in his ready room following a successful attack by our divebombers upon a Japanese battleship. It had been his first attack.

His hair was standing askew on his crown like a disordered pile of feathers. His eyes stared. He talked so fast his words fell over each other. He gesticulated like a marionette.

'We hit em,' he said, and repeated it over. 'And we’ll go back and do it again.'

I asked him whether he had left the battleship afire. But he did not seem to focus on the question. 'Everything was black,' he said.

'Was it smoke,' I asked, 'or the color of the battleship?'

'I don’t know,' he said. 'Everything was black. We’ll go back and hit ‘em again. What are we waiting for?' And that is a literal transcription of his conversation.

Two days later, when the battle had come to an end, and the pilots had a chance to relax, to settle down in the wardroom and regain their usual composure, I saw the same pilot in a blue funk. His face looked drawn and there were pockets under his eyes.

'Feel bad?' I asked him.

'Terrible,' he said. 'Like a hangover.' Which I presume was the truth. He was suffering a hangover after a jag of the most intense excitement in the world."

 

Richard Tregaskis, the USS Hornet, and the Battle of Midway

From his perch on the second level of the bridge on the USS Hornet on June 4, 1942, correspondent Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service could see below him the carrier’s Air Group 8—Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, and Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers—warming up on the flight deck. The “shimmering arcs of their propellers mingled amidst a disorderly pile of wings and fuselages, punctuated by the blue flame and spitting smokes of exhausts,” he recalled.

With the roar of the engines reaching their peak, a deck-operations officer, clutching a “ridiculously small checkered flag in his hand,” staggered out against the multiple gales of propeller slipstreams to send the aircraft hurtling off the flight deck into their first clash against the Kido Butai, Japan’s combined carrier battle group.

As the first plane—its motor roaring full force—began to waddle forward, Tregaskis tried to detect the expression on the pilot’s face as he swept by, gaining momentum. Even equipped with field glasses, however, the reporter could make out only the pilot’s goggles “trained fixedly forward, his drawn, intense cheek, his hands aptly busy with the controls. The roar of his motor reached a peak of sound as he swept by, an unpleasant rough-throated gargle rising to a shout—and then he was near the end of the deck, his wheels lifting a thin distance off the boards, then sweeping off over the blue water.”

Tregaskis kept trying to pick out the faces of the men he had come to know while on the ship as they roared by, but they appeared to him merely as parts of their machines, “indistinguishable faceless men, one like the other, going out on a job of death.” The Hornet airmen were on their way to make their mark on one of the turning points in the war in the Pacific—the Battle ofMidway.

Shortly after the Hornet left Pearl Harbor on May 28, its crew heard from its commander, Marc Mitscher, that the Japanese were approaching “for an attempt to seize the island of Midway. We are going to prevent them from taking Midway if possible. Be ready and keep on the alert.” With a battle imminent, the pilots tried as best they could to deal with the news. Some of them had to fulfill rigorous schedules for patrol flights seeking enemy air and surface craft. In the evenings, however, instead of going straight to bed, they relaxed by engaging in numerous “bull sessions” that were full of talk usually involving either their families or the women they knew in civilian life, Tregaskis noted.

Lieutenant William J. “Gus” Widhelm, executive officer for one of the scouting squadrons, provided plenty of diversion from the strain of waiting by playing records on a phonograph he had brought onboard. Pilots with idle moments drifted in, night or day, to Widhelm’s cabin, located in the ship’s forecastle, to pick out their favorite popular music from his “ample collection,” said Tregaskis, adding that Widhelm, “one of the lustiest recounters of personal experiences of all sorts, entertained in intervals.”

A frequent visitor to Widhelm’s quarters was Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. “Pat” Mitchell, who commanded Fighter Squadron 8. Mitchell particularly enjoyed the song “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” playing it again and again, as its singer crooned the tune’s haunting lyrics, “I’ll never forget the people I met braving those angry skies / I remember well as the shadows fell, the light of hope in their eyes.” Tregaskis found something touching in Mitchell’s fondness for the tune, “with its nostalgic longing for days of peace.”

Tregaskis tried to get the pilots to talk about the dangers they seemed sure to face, but most did not want to discuss the subject. “Some of them, I believe,” he noted, “never considered the possibility of dying and had thus resolved no particular attitude towards the subject. This was for them a job and the risks were only incidental fixtures in their everyday lives.”

On the morning of June 3 Tregaskis reported that the ship’s radios had picked up a plain-language message from a navy operator in Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands that the naval and army bases there were under attack by Japanese aircraft. He and others wondered if the American fleet had been outsmarted by the enemy, “if they were going to slam a wedge of landing forces into Alaska and menace our coast, now that the bulk of our Pacific naval strength hovered near Midway.” Later that day came another dispatch indicating that the Midway Defense Forces had sent a squadron of B-17 Flying Fortress bombers to hit enemy warships and transports.

Tregaskis slept “only intermittently through the night,” thinking he was about to witness his first great sea battle, but also suspecting that it might be another of “those imminent battles which faded like mirages; making the mental reservation, to ward off possible disappointment, that after all it might never happen and might be instead only another near miss like our venture into the Coral Sea. In the flashes of anxiety which come and go often, like swift shadows in such times, the thought that the anticipated battle might not develop into a fight was comforting.” He said his predominant feeling was “anxiousness that the excitement should begin.”

That evening, gathered in Ready Room Number 4, the members of Torpedo 8 were handed a mimeographed message from their commander, John C. Waldron. The message read: "Just a word to let you know I feel we are all ready. We have had a very short time to train, and we have worked under the most severe difficulties. But we have truly done the best humanly possible. I actually believe that under these conditions, we are the best in the world. My greatest hope is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don’t and worst comes to worst, I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make final run-in, I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with us all. Good luck, happy landings, and give ’em hell!"

As his squadron read his message, Waldron spoke, warning them that the approaching battle promised to be the biggest of the war, and could also be a turning point for the American cause in the Pacific. “It will be an historical and, I hope, a glorious event,” Waldron told them.

Ensign George H. Gay Jr.’s logbook for the day indicated that he had checked his plane until he knew “every bolt on it. It’s in the pink, . . . . Things are oiled and ready.” He remained nervous, however, because the Midway mission would mark the first time he “had ever carried a torpedo on an aircraft and was the first time I had ever taken a torpedo off a ship, had never even seen it done. None of the other Ensigns in the squadron had either.” Of course, Gay noted, he and the others had a few months earlier watched as Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle and his army pilots, who had never seen a carrier before, all took off safely in their B-25B Mitchell bombers from the Hornet, so “we figured if they could do it, well we could do it too.”

Although nervous, not unlike the feeling one had before a big football game, Gay said, the squadron had full confidence in its commander. “We could almost look at the back of Comdr. Waldron’s head and know what he was thinking,” Gay recalled, “because he had told us so many times over and over just what we should do under all conditions.” The torpedo plane pilots knew they were at a disadvantage in combat because of their outdated Douglas TBD Devastators. Their aircraft could not climb to the same altitude as the fighters and dive-bombers, so they expected to be on their own. “We didn’t expect to run into the trouble that we found of course,” Gay said, “but we knew that if we had any trouble we’d probably have to fight our way out of it ourselves.”

Tregaskis joined the other Hornet pilots as they gathered in their ready rooms on the morning of June 4. In one room he found the men draped as usual in relaxed postures in their overstuffed chairs, responding quickly to any message that came in over the teletype. Their eyes remained fixed on the growing lines of letters until the words made sense. The early messages were innocuous—“wind 18,” “weather fair,” or identification signals. Then came a radio message from Midway that Japanese bombers were swarming on them in large numbers. “The black letters of type popped onto the teletype screens to spell out the position, distance, course and composition of the Japanese forces, which included four carriers. This was not going to be easy,” Tregaskis realized.

Finally, the Hornet flyers, who had never flown in combat, were ordered: “Pilots, man your planes.” Tregaskis watched them as they pulled open the heavy, watertight hatch and ran out to their aircraft. “I heard the shout, ‘Stand clear of propellers’ relayed along the deck by hoarse, excited voices,” he said. “Then, ‘Stand by to start all engines.’ And after that, the hiss and sputter of the start, the rough raucous sound of the engine catching and shouting out the rowdy, disordered sound of its horsepower. The mounting of the sound of engine upon engine left the deck shaking with the power of it.”

The Hornet sent out fifty-nine aircraft for its first mission—ten Wildcat fighters, thirty-four Dauntless dive-bombers, and fifteen Devastator torpedo bombers to find the four large carriers of the Japanese striking force—the Kaga, Akagi, Soryu, and Hiryu. Before leaving the Hornet, Waldron, according to Mitscher, has stressed to his captain that Torpedo 8 was “well trained and ready and that he would strike his blow at the enemy regardless of consequences.” When the last plane was gone, the carrier became strangely quiet. Gun crews stood at alert, scanning the skies for any Japanese planes that might “fleck the blue horizon at any moment, and in a few seconds grow into diving animals pregnant with bombs and torpedoes,” remembered Tregaskis.

Stopping in at the air-plot office, Tregaskis noticed a group of officers sitting on a leather-upholstered couch and standing between the map boards and bank of radio equipment awaiting word from the Hornet squadrons. “No one spoke, and the radio speaker, except for a few cackles of static, made no sound,” he recalled.

Checking in again later at the air-plot office, Tregaskis discovered the listeners gathered there in a state of tense excitement—they had finally received word of the first contact with the Japanese fleet. They had heard Waldron’s voice shouting something about “Zeros,” the dangerous Japanese fighters, and asking “Stanhope,” Commander Stanhope Ring, commander of the Hornet’s air group, for help as the enemy latched on to his aircraft. Also heard over the communication gear was Waldron’s sharp order to his squadron to immediately attack.

The messages, however, were garbled by distance and distorted by the crackle of static, which only served to confuse those listening in on the Hornet. Tregaskis had plenty of questions: “What had happened? Had our attack been pressed home successfully? Had our people all been shot down? Why didn’t they come back? They were overdue, for it was past noon. What had happened to John Waldron and the Zeros? Where was our dive-bomber force? Most important, where were our fighters, whose gasoline should be running out at just about this time?” Finally, he wondered, “where were the Japanese?”

Early that afternoon Tregaskis had some of the answers to his questions when a few dive-bombers returned to the Hornet. Climbing down from their planes, Ring and Walter Rodee, who led the scouting squadron of Dauntless aircraft, wore “forlorn faces,” said Tregaskis. They had missed the enemy fleet and, with their fuel exhausted, had barley managed to make it back to the carrier. Tregaskis also learned that the Wildcat fighters could not find their way back, had run out of gas, and crashed into the sea (eight of the ten pilots were eventually found and rescued by Consolidated PBY Catalina patrol planes from Midway). “What about John Waldron’s TBD’s?” the reporter asked.

One of the radioman/gunner on a returned Dauntless indicated that his group had lost track of them, but he believed the torpedo squadron had found its way to the Japanese fleet. “He [Waldron] said he was being jumped by Zeros and asked for fighter protection,” the crewman told Tregaskis. The grim news was received “with a noticeable deflation among all present,” remembered the correspondent. “One could see our morale sinking.”

Down in one of the ready rooms Tregaskis came across a fighter pilot who always seemed to complain the most among the crew. The young officer was not happy, saying, with his voice rising and quivering: “Same old snafu business. Everything all f----- up. Why don’t they get rid of the old fuds running this war? They won’t win anything until they do.”

The officer’s mood would not have improved if he knew the full story of what came to be known as the Hornet aircrew’s “flight to nowhere” that morning. Air Group 8 had set its course for due west, 265 degrees, with the forty-four fighters and dive-bombers flying at an altitude of 20,000 feet, while the fifteen torpedo planes were far below at 1,500 feet. Although they were supposed to observe radio silence, Waldron, believing they were taking the wrong course, could no longer contain himself, yelling at Ring that he was leading the squadron the wrong way if he wanted to find the Japanese carriers. “I’m leading this flight,” Ring responded. “You fly with us right here.”

A frustrated Waldron, disobeying his superior’s orders, radioed, “I know where the damned Jap fleet is,” and led his squadron to the southwest. Before leaving the carrier, Waldron had told his squadron not to worry about their navigation, but to follow him, “as he knew where he was going,” said Gay, who also noted that his commander had been able to fly straight to the Japanese fleet “as if he’d had a string tied to them.”

A short while later, the Wildcat pilots, with their fuel beginning to run low, also abandoned Ring and attempted a return to the Hornet. Radiomen on the dive-bombers eventually heard snatches of messages from Waldron, trying to reach Ring, as well as the warning, “Watch those fighters!” and the order, “Attack immediately!”

Waldron had found the enemy, but, with no fighter protection, his squadron, flying low and slow to launch their white-nosed torpedoes, proved easy prey for the Mitsubishi A6M Zeros protecting their carriers. “Zeros were coming in from all angles and from both sides at once,” said Gay. “They would come in from abeam, pass each other just over our heads, and turn around to make another attack, . . . . The planes of Torpedo Eight were falling at irregular intervals. Some were on fire, and some did a half-roll and crashed on their backs, completely out of control.”

Waldron had been shot down early on during the attack. Gay saw his commander’s Devastator burst into flame and watched as Waldron tried to stand up out of the fire, putting his right leg outside of his cockpit before his plane hit the water and disappeared.

Gay heard his radioman/gunner, Bob Huntington, call out that he had been hit and then heard no more from him. With his gunner out of action, Gay no longer had to fly straight and level to provide him a solid firing platform from which to shoot, so he could dodge the incoming Zeros. With his plane “pitching like a bronco,” Gay believed he had been able to drop his torpedo, aiming it to strike the Soryu, but could not tell for sure, as he had never done it before. His electrical release system had been knocked out by enemy fire, so he had to release his torpedo manually, flying right at the carrier, “balls to the wall,” as he described it, trying to present the smallest target possible. He never knew what happened to his torpedo, if it ran true and hit the Japanese carrier, dived down and hit the bottom of the ocean, or if it turned around and headed for Pearl Harbor. “What I know for sure is I tried,” Gay said.

Flying over the carrier, he could see action on its bridge, including an officer “waving his arms. I could even see a pair of binoculars in one hand and a Samurai sword in the other. He was pointing at me like they couldn’t see me.” With his Devastator shot to pieces, the ensign had to ditch it in the Pacific. Gay survived, but the other twenty-nine members of his squadron had been annihilated. Mitsuo Fuchida, an officer on the Akagi, observed the slaughter and noted that nearly fifty Zeros had intercepted the “unprotected enemy formation! Small wonder that it did not get through.”

On the Hornet, the spirits of Tregaskis and others had been cheered somewhat as they could see the Enterprise recovering its fighters, dive-bombers, and even a “few straggling torpedo planes” it had launched earlier. The correspondent learned that planes from the USS Enterprise had found and hit the Japanese carriers. “No further details for the moment, but the critical ensign must have been gratified,” said Tregaskis. The forty-one torpedo planes launched from the Hornet, Enterprise, and USS Yorktown had been badly mauled, with only four surviving to return home and none scoring any hits.

American dive-bombers, however, had far better luck, delivering fatal blows to the Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu. Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach, who commanded the Yorktown’s fighter planes, had a tough time with the Zeros, remembering that the air “was like a bee hive, and I wasn’t sure at that moment that anything would work” to counteract the enemy’s attacks. “I was utterly convinced then that we weren’t coming back,” he recalled.

Suddenly, Thach saw a “glint in the sun—it looked like a beautiful silver waterfall—these were the dive bombers coming down. I could see them very well, because that’s the direction the Zeros were, too. They were above me but close, not anywhere near the altitude of the dive bombers. I’d never seen such superb dive bombing. It looked to me like almost every bomb hit. Of course, there were some near misses. There weren’t any wild ones.”

The one large Japanese carrier left undamaged, the Hiryu, responded, launching its dive-bombers and torpedo planes against the Americans, eventually tracking down the Yorktown. Tregaskis remembered that the Hornet had been maneuvering normally on the bright, sunlit sea, when everyone began to move and talk fast and the ship put on a sudden burst of speed and began a sharp turn, “heeling over on her beam ends, so that one had to brace against the slope.” He looked around and could see the ships in Task Force 16 making full speed and turning in several different directions. “Our wakes must have looked like crazy scrawls on a blackboard, from the air,” he noted.

Tregaskis did not know what was happening from his position at sky control. He remembered thinking at the time that if he had been a more seasoned correspondent, he might have tried to run to the bridge or the communication office to overhear the latest information from the task force’s commander. Being new to his job, however, he labored “under the delusion that a sea battle could be understood if it was merely watched. I believed I could see everything; and with some commonsense, I felt that the moment I ducked below, Jap aircraft would surely come in, attack, and be gone before I could catch a glimpse of the action.”

The correspondent could see, on the Hornet’s port side, astern, a mushroom-shaped black geyser that grew fatter and taller as he watched. “What had happened?” he wondered. “Everyone about me seemed to be too busy to be bothered. I wondered if this could be a Japanese ship, which our planes had hit. Or one of ours? How about the carrier Yorktown, which was working with us, but over the horizon somewhere[?] Could this be the Yorktown?” It was; the carrier had been hit by bombs from three Japanese Val dive-bombers, with one bomb landing forward, one amidships, and one astern. With the carrier badly damaged, Fletcher had to transfer his command to a nearby cruiser, the USS Astoria, and planes that had been stationed on the carrier had to look elsewhere to land.

One of the Yorktown fighter planes, a Wildcat, flown by Ensign Dan Sheedy, tried to find sanctuary on the Hornet after protecting a squadron of torpedo planes from his carrier from the deadly Zeros. The Hornet turned into the wind and a LSO took his place at the stern to wave Sheedy in for a landing. Tregaskis could see, however, that the stubby Wildcat did not “swing in the conventional wide landing circle. Instead, it cut a swift, ragged half circle directly towards the side of the ship, skidded sharply in with one wing low. A wounded pilot? We waited for the crash.”

Sheedy had been wounded in the shoulder and ankle, and his plane had suffered damage severe enough to knock out the safety mechanism for his six .50-caliber Browning machine guns that were supposed to be switched off when landing. Instead, the guns were ready to fire. “I watched one wheel and wing crumple under the impact, and then machine guns chattered and stopped and chattered again,” said Tregaskis, “and I saw the wings of the crashed plane smoking. Her guns going off.” At almost at the same instant, he saw a  figure jump from the Wildcat’s cockpit and take a few limping steps across the fight deck before being aided by deck crewmen.

When the fighter’s guns finally stopped firing their steel-jacketed rounds, Hornet emergency personnel ran to the after end of the island, as there were reports that men had been injured and killed. “I felt in the air the sickening shock that comes after a terrible accident, and hesitated about going aft,” Tregaskis remembered.

Finally, Tregaskis screwed up his courage and went over to peer into the circular shield of an antiaircraft gun position. He saw, inside the ring around the gun, four bodies “looking sodden and heavy, like rough piles of gray sandbags. Next to the ring, outside of it, sprawled a dead marine, arms streched out, legs stretched out in the middle of a circular red sheet of gore. The gray face looked straight up. There was no top to the head, for the head became red above the eyebrows and melted into the pool of gore.” An officer informed Tregaskis that five men had been killed and twenty more seriously wounded. “I gulped. Well, the accidents of war . . . bound to happen . . . lucky it hadn’t happened to me . . . yesterday I had stood here to watch the planes landing . . . oh well,” he thought to himself.

Tregaskis visited Sheedy in one of the ready rooms, where the pilot had been taken, given a sandwich, and had his injured leg propped up awaiting medical attention. The correspondent looked at the pilot’s face to see how he had reacted to the accident, but could see that the ensign was too shocked to know anything:

“His words rolled over each other: ‘Plane’s shot up like a sieve . . . the Zeros riddled the hell out of me. . . . I shot one down. . . . I followed him down to the water and he fell off one wing and went right in . . . then they shot me up . . . through my cockpit . . . all around me . . . hit me in the ankle. . . . I just made that landing . . . plane no good for anything . . . they threw it overboard.”

Tregaskis asked Sheedy how he came to land on the Hornet instead of his own carrier, and finally received confirmation that the Yorktown had been hit and was on fire. “No one asked the pilot then if he had left his gun switches on when his plane crashed on our deck,” Tregaskis noted. “Any anger we might have felt about those killed, was put aside . . . accidents, bound to happen, even in the best organized war.”

Repair crews patched the Hornet’s flight deck so air operations could resume and planes set off to find the surviving Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, which had been spotted by search planes from the Yorktown. About a half hour after the Enterprise had sent off twenty-five Dauntlesses, including some from the Yorktown, the Hornet launched sixteen dive-bombers to find the Hiryu. “I tried to get more specific information on what had happened, but none was available,” said Tregaskis.

Again the Hornet began to maneuver erratically, with the wakes of the ships in Task Force 16 crossing and crisscrossing and men scanning the skies for the enemy. On this occasion, Tregaskis could see the bump of a ship on the horizon, probably, he thought, the Yorktown. Suddenly, the sky above the ship became spotted with specks of black breaking out like a rash, spreading, smudging, and growing larger, with other flecks—antiaircraft fire—also visible. “The anti-aircraft fire continued to burst on the horizon, where the sky was already smudged, and now I saw a spot of light flash among the bursts,” Tregaskis noted. “It seemed like a small electric bulb, rather high in the sky. It was a bright yellow color. While I watched, fascinated, knowing it was a plane falling in flames, the little bright light sank slowly to the horizon, then disappeared against the blue.”

A nearby crewman exclaimed, “Flamers! Three down! I saw three!” Tregaskis had seen only one plane fall, but the excitement was so great among those on the carrier that he could not be sure who was right. Six months before Midway, Tregaskis would not have believed it was normal to be confused during a battle. “Now, I knew that confusion is unavoidable,” he mused.

After some more wild maneuvers by the Hornet, Tregaskis spied the shape of a ship on the horizon with the box-like shape of a carrier. “Then everything I had seen became clearer to me,” he said. “The ship was the Yorktown. She had been hit in the earlier afternoon attack, and now she had been hit again. She was dead in the water. Listing. She must be badly hit.”

Tregaskis could not know from such a distance, but Japanese planes had penetrated Task Force 17’s defenses and slammed two torpedoes into the Yorktown’s side. Some of the carrier’s pilots achieved a measure of revenge by working with Enterprise dive-bombers to hit and set afire the Hiryu, the fourth Japanese carrier put out of action by the Americans that day. Coming onto the scene, a pilot from the Hornet reported that the enemy carrier was “burning throughout its entire length.”

Anxious to catch up on the latest information, Tregaskis hurried to one of the fighter ready rooms, which were already filled with pilots, including several from the Yorktown. The shock of their first contact with the enemy affected the rookie Hornet fliers “as variously as alcohol intoxication,” Tregaskis remembered.

Ensign George Formanek had been greatly depressed by the experience of shooting down an enemy plane, with his face dark and despairing as he told the correspondent: “That was terrible! I saw him explode . . . a big ball of flames! He burned.” Ensign Morrill Cook, who had downed two Japanese torpedo planes, had quite the opposite reaction. Cook, said Tregaskis, smiled happily at the memory “as he might after having tasted some pleasant dish at the table.” Ensign Warren Ford also “spoke with an exaltation that was almost defiant, as he told about knocking down one of the attackers.”

The pilots from the Yorktown seemed calmer, which was natural, said Tregaskis, as they had seen action at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Lieutenant Arthur Brassfield, a former high-school principal from Browning, Missouri, told the reporter in a matter-of-fact, humorous manner about how he had shot down four Japanese. “It’s a rough game,” Brassfield said with a smile. “If they don’t knock it off pretty soon, somebody’s going to get hurt.”

 

 

A Different Kind of War: Richard Tregaskis and David Halberstam in Vietnam

At the age of twenty-eight, journalist David Halberstam received a challenging assignment from his employer, the New York Times. In September 1962 he arrived to cover a civil war in a small Asian country named Vietnam.

President John F. Kennedy’s administration had decided to increase America’s commitment to help South Vietnam fight off communist insurgents from the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, often referred to by the Americans as the Viet Cong, and Halberstam would be there to write about what happened. While in South Vietnam he also encountered one of his heroes—veteran journalist Richard Tregaskis, whose work from the frontlines of World War II Halberstam knew well.

Tregaskis visited South Vietnam from October 1962 to January 1963 to research a book eventually published as Vietnam Diary (1963). He tried to obtain a “firsthand, eyewitness look at the strange, off-beat, new-style war in which we find ourselves engaged in the miserable little jungle country called Vietnam, which our nation’s leaders have decided is pivotal and critical in our Asian struggle with Communism.”

The two journalists seemed to have much in common. Both were Harvard graduates (Halberstam class of 1955 and Tregaskis class of 1938) who had worked diligently at their craft and had seen war before—Tregaskis in the Pacific and Europe during World War II and Halberstam in the Republic of the Congo in Africa. They shared a respect for the approximately 10,000 American military personnel supporting South Vietnam, especially those young officers tasked with molding the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (simplified to ARVN or Arvin in newspaper stories) into a professional fighting force against the guerilla forces backed by North Vietnam.

Tregaskis and Halberstam also supported the Kennedy administration’s commitment to resisting communism in Vietnam and shepherding its government toward democracy. Halberstam feared that “if the Vietnamese, who are perhaps the toughest people in Southeast Asia, fell to the Communists, the pressure on the other shaky new nations would be intolerable.” He believed that just as America’s commitment to South Korea in the early 1950s had discouraged “overt Communist border crossings ever since, an anti-Communist victory in Vietnam would serve to discourage so-called wars of liberation” in other countries in the region.  

Halberstam accompanied Tregaskis on a few assignments, including a trip along the Saigon River with the Vietnamese Junk Fleet (patrol boats searching for smugglers) and a resupply mission to U.S. Special Forces bases at the Montagnard villages of Ple Yit and Plei Mrong. “He was pleasant-spoken, well-educated, of good family background,” Tregaskis noted of his colleague. “He very evidently yearned for adventure, he had a newsman’s penchant for pursuing a story, attempting analysis of facts, and trying to achieve exclusive understanding or bring out news breaks. And, if the story were bad and it were being concealed by officialdom—which it always seemed to be—dragging it out in the open.”

The young Times reporter believed it was his job, and the responsibility of other journalists in Vietnam, including such resident reporters as Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press and Neil Sheehan of the United Press International, to report on the news, positive or negative. “We were finding out stuff we didn’t want to find out,” he recalled. “We were going against our own grain. We wanted the Americans to win.” Unfortunately, he came to understand that to U.S. officials in the country, including Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, head of Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, it was vital that “the news be good, and they regarded any other interpretation as defeatist and irresponsible.”

Tregaskis must have heard the rosy scenarios outlined by the top officials in Vietnam, and Halberstam wanted him to talk to lower-ranking U.S. officers he trusted and knew would offer the visiting writer an accurate assessment of the war’s lack of progress and problems with the American-backed government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Halberstam decided to take the forty-five-year-old Tregaskis on a daylong excursion to review how the war was going in My Tho, located south of Saigon in the critical Mekong Delta. The area had been the site of a sharp engagement between the ARVN and VC at a small hamlet known as Ap Bac on January 2, 1963. The guerrilla forces stood their ground against ARVN soldiers ferried into the battlefield via U.S. helicopters, as well as troops attacking from M-113 armored personnel carriers.

In Halberstam’s estimation his day with Tregaskis had gone well, as the veteran reporter had been well informed about the severe challenges ahead, especially the ARVN’s inadequacies in the field. But Tregaskis did not react to this information as Halberstam had expected.

Years later, Halberstam recounted that the older reporter had turned and said to him: “If I were doing what you are doing, I’d be ashamed of myself.” Halberstam likened Tregaskis’s comment to being slapped in the face, especially because he had a “reverence toward World War II people and Korean War people,” noting his father had been a medic in World War I and a combat surgeon in World War II.

As for Tregaskis, he made no mention of such an incident in his Vietnam book, nor did he directly disparage the young reporter’s work anywhere in the volume. But in a review of Halberstam’s 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire for the Chicago Tribune, Tregaskis quoted Nolting’s description of the Times reporter: “He’s always looking for the hole in the doughnut,” which Tregaskis viewed as apt, considering Halberstam’s “fundamental attitude in covering the Viet Nam war: that something must be wrong rather than right with it.”

Tregaskis also included a much harsher quote from an unnamed embassy official, calling Halberstam a “young punk who’d never seen a war before and thought it should always go well. He just didn’t know about wars. It didn’t seem to occur to him that in all our American wars in the past, we had to run a little short of absolute complete democracy for the sake of winning.”

As Halberstam pointed out, however, the senior U.S. officials in South Vietnam, who had been urging reporters to “get on the team,” had lost their credibility with him and other journalists through their own mendacity. They continually lied to a group of tough, talented young reporters “whose friends are being killed, who have seen guys their own age killed, who are risking their lives themselves. Go and lie to them and then try to court-martial their sources. That will draw lines in the sand.”

Halberstam, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1964 with the AP’s Browne, pointed out that since mid-1962 some American military officers had turned to the handful of reporters in Saigon, using them as a conduit to air their complaints and skepticism to the public and government officials in Washington, DC. “The journalists kept showing up in the countryside,” Halberstam recalled, “and it was only a matter of time before they saw how hollow the entire operation was, how many lies were being told, and how fraudulent the war was.” Eventually he added, a “version of the war and the [Diem] regime, far more pessimistic, began to surface in the American press.”

President Kennedy’s aides remembered a time when the president, reading Halberstam’s stories from Vietnam in the Times, exploded with frustration: “Why can I get this stuff from Halberstam when I can’t get it from my own people?” Tregaskis maintained that top diplomats in Vietnam complained to him that the president gave “more attention to Halberstam’s dispatches than to the reports of all his own people there.”  

The uncharitable view Tregaskis held of Halberstam, and the other young reporters based in Vietnam who questioned the official, optimistic view of events from top administration officials there, seemed to be prompted by his experiences in combat during World War II; his unflinching belief to the end of his life in the need for the United States to respond forcefully to communist aggression, especially in Vietnam; and his continued admiration for the skill and bravery of U.S. troops in the field.

The product of a generation accustomed to taking at face value what its government told them, Tregaskis believed that criticizing the war belittled the courage of the troops, while Halberstam saw pointing out errors in how the war was being run as helping the troops in the field. Tregaskis also believed that casualties and defeats on the battlefield were a small cost to pay to help stem the tide of communism from sweeping over South Vietnam and throughout Southeast Asia.

Tregaskis remained committed to victory in Vietnam for the rest of his life, making regular visits to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance before his death on August 15, 1973, just a few years before North Vietnamese captured Saigon, marking the end of a long, brutal conflict.