Alex Vraciu and the Mission Beyond Darkness

On this day in 1944, U.S. Navy ace Alex Vraciu, who the day before had downed six Japanese Judy dive bombers in just eight minutes, took off with other members of the USS Lexington's Fighting Squadron 16 on what became known as the "Mission Beyond Darkness" during the two-day Battle of the Philippine Sea.

At about four in the afternoon a plane from the USS Enterprise discovered the whereabouts of the Japanese fleet. Because of the distance involved between the two armadas (approximately 300 miles), there existed a good chance that many of the U.S. planes would not have enough fuel to make it back to their carriers, and those who did would not be able to make it back until night had fallen. Despite the risks, orders were sent to launch aircraft, and a force of seventy-seven dive bombers, fifty-four torpedo planes, and eighty-five fighters responded. The pilots had one main task in mind: “Get the carriers.”

Pilots on the Lexington were in and out of their ready rooms all day expecting a strike against the Japanese. When Vraciu finally received word of the enemy’s sighting, he said he and the rest of the fighter pilots figured their Hellcats would have enough fuel for the mission, but the same could not be said for the bombers. Many were also worried about the possibility of trying to land their planes at night.

Vraciu and eight other Hellcats, including his wingman, Ensign Homer Brockmeyer, flew escort for a group of fifteen dive bombers and six torpedo planes. “I saluted to the bridge as I took off,” he said, “because I didn’t think I was coming back. A lot of us didn’t.” The faster fighters had to continuously weave back and forth because of the bombers’ slower cruising speed.

The group came under immediate attack by a horde of Zeroes when it reached its target. A huge cumulus cloud hampered operations, as it separated Hellcats flying top cover from the planes below. “Brock and I were the only planes remaining with the bombers at that time and we appeared surrounded,” Vraciu remembered. Glancing down, he saw that one of the Grumman Avenger torpedo planes had been hit by the enemy and had caught on fire. The crew bailed out successfully and was later rescued.

The Japanese pilots encountered by Vraciu and his wingmen were tough opponents. “Now these guys were good,” said Vraciu. Both sides battled for position, hoping to slip in and rake their opponent with machine-gun and/or cannon fire. Outnumbered, Vraciu and Brockmeyer went into the defensive Thach Weave to hold off the Japanese and perhaps get into position to shoot down the enemy.

As the Americans struggled to survive, one of the enemy fighters caught on to Brockmeyer’s tail and fired. Vraciu was able to shoot down the Zero that had hit his wingman, but he had “the sad experience of seeing Brock going down. I still think I hear him faintly say, ‘I’m hit.’ I was able to get in another good burst at one of them, but I couldn’t tell whether he went down. I damaged it, I’m sure.”

Surrounded, Vraciu used a last-ditch defensive maneuver, diving down and away from the enemy. He flew on to the rendezvous area where he joined up with a damaged Avenger from another U.S. carrier. The pilot of the torpedo plane signaled to Vraciu that he was low on gas and did not have enough for a return to the American fleet. “The sun had already started to disappear on the horizon,” Vraciu said. “He stayed right down low and didn’t climb up for altitude.”

Eventually, the Avenger joined a group of seven planes circling low on the water; all of them were low on fuel and intended on ditching in the water. “It was dark by that time, and I gave them all a heartfelt salute,” said Vraciu. “I don’t know what ever happened to all those guys.”

Still several hundred miles away from the Lexington, Vraciu found himself alone in the darkening sky. Thanks to the lessons he had learned from his mentor, Butch O’Hare, he had been able to conserve his fuel and had enough to return home. Vraciu climbed his Hellcat to eight thousand feet to improve his radio reception so he could latch onto the directional signal from the fleet to help guide him back. Other American pilots were not as fortunate as Vraciu. “Some of the guys were real cool coming back that night,” he recalled, “but some of them were breaking down—sobbing—on the air. It was a dark and black ocean out there. I could empathize with them, but it got so bad that I had to turn my radio off for a while.”

U.S. naval officers were worried about their returning airmen. To aid in their return, the fleet sent out a signal for the pilots to land on the nearest carrier they could find. Admiral Marc Mitscher also sent out a simple order to his carriers: “Turn on the lights.” Otto Romanelli, who served on the Lexington, noted that he and other crew members “felt the tightness in our throats relax. We were doing the only thing that could be done to lead our ‘kid brothers’ home, at the risk of exposing our ships to any [enemy] submarines or bombers in the area.” The pilots who had been left behind on the carriers were astonished by Mitscher’s order. “They stood open mouthed for the sheer audacity of asking the Japs to come and get us,” noted Lieutenant Commander Robert Winston. “Then a spontaneous cheer went up.”

Some of the American flattops went as far as to point their twenty-four-inch searchlights straight up into the air to act as a beacon for their wayward pilots, and destroyers and cruisers helped by shooting illuminating star shells into the sky. One pilot described the scene as “a Hollywood premiere, Chinese New Year, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.” In the confusion, some pilots mistook destroyers for carriers, tried to land on them, and crashed or had to ditch into the sea. (Luckily for the U.S. fleet, there were no Japanese submarines in the area to take advantage of the situation.)

The sudden burst of lights from the fleet, however, stunned Vraciu and led him to think he had taken a wrong turn and ended up at Yap Island, a Japanese base in the Caroline Islands.

Although advised to land at the nearest carrier, Vraciu had enough fuel so he could wait and try to get back on the Lexington. He wanted to sleep in his own bunk that night and was “dehydrated and thirsty as hell and kept thinking about the ‘scuttlebutt’ [water fountain] on the ship.” Approaching his ship, he discovered a real mess. “Planes were everywhere, every ship was lit up, and some carriers had lost position,” he said. “They had overlapping traffic patterns; the upwind leg of some carriers seemed to merge with the downwind leg of others. I don’t know why there weren’t any collisions [between the vessels].”

After circling overhead for awhile, the way home began to clear and Vraciu started his approach to his ship. As he tried to land, however, the landing signal officer had a constant “wave off.” A damaged plane very low on fuel from another carrier had ignored a wave off from the LSO and crashed while trying to set down on the Lexington, killing and wounding some of the crew. Vraciu turned away and landed next door on the Enterprise on his first pass.

As he taxied his plane forward, Vraciu heard the blare of the crash horn, signaling that the aircraft landing behind him had slammed into the deck. “I was urged, after parking my plane, to get off the flight deck as quickly as possible,” he noted. “So I got off the flight deck in a hurry!” Vraciu retired to one of the ship’s ready rooms and found that the only other pilot he recognized was a dive bomber from the Lexington. “Thoughtfully,” Vraciu said, “the ship provided us with medicinal brandy to relax us.” He later discovered that each of the seven survivors from his squadron had landed on a different carrier that night. “It was a sobering thing—probably one of the toughest flights that any of the guys involved had ever had because of the way it turned out,” Vraciu added.

What came to be known as the “Mission beyond Darkness” led to the loss of eighty of the 216 American planes launched against the Japanese fleet, with most of the aircraft lost not through enemy action, but due to lack of fuel or accidents. Rescue efforts for lost crewmen were successful; only sixteen pilots and thirty-three crewmen died.

The June 20 strike did inflict considerable damage on the Japanese. U.S. planes sank the light carrier Hiyo and damaged two others. In addition, several tankers were destroyed and a battleship and cruiser received several hits, putting them out of action for a time. Also, sixty-five enemy planes were downed during the attack, leaving the Japanese with just thirty-five surviving aircraft from the 430 the fleet had the day before.