Beyond combat casualties, the log of a Marine Corsair squadron on Essex showed that during a typical fortnight, one plane ‘splashed’ taking off on each of two successive days; on the second of these, another plane crashed on landing. Three days later, one Corsair was lost at sea. Thereafter, three more went into the sea at two-day intervals. Hard deck landings damaged airframes. Sherwin Goodman, an Avenger gunner, suffered a typical mishap one morning when the flightdeck hydraulic catapult failed in mid-launch. His plane slumped into the sea. Seconds later, the huge ship passed close enough to strike the sinking Avenger a glancing blow. A destroyer retrieved the crew intact, however, collecting the usual six gallons of ice-cream ransom for returning them to their carrier, and to operations.
‘Oh I’d rather be a bellhop than a flyer on a flat-top,’ the pilots sang, ‘with my hand around a bottle not around the goddamn throttle.’ Unpredicted violent weather could write off whole squadrons of aircraft, because it made navigation problematic. Error meant a descent into the sea when gas ran out. As on shore, almost every aviator wanted to be a ‘fighter jock’, with the thrill of engaging enemy aircraft in the war’s best carrier fighter, the Grumman Hellcat. It is intoxicating to go into battle knowing that your own side possesses much better-trained, and thus more proficient, pilots than the enemy. By late 1944, the average Japanese flier had just forty flying hours’ experience before entering combat. His American counterpart had at least 525 hours, and it showed. In the last phase of the war, US carrier fighters were inflicting amazingly disproportionate losses on their failing foes. Cmdr Winters: ‘Most of our kills were from the rear end. [The Japanese] are scared to death of the Grummans. Only when they outnumber you terrifically will they even stay near you. They will make passes, but stay far away and scram when you turn on them.’ Such cautious enemy behaviour seemed a long march from the kamikaze spirit, of which so much would be heard in 1945.
Flying became more hazardous, however, when planes were committed to ground strafing or ship attacks. Low-level dive-bomber and torpedo-carrier missions remained gruelling to the end. Lamade of Hancock was shocked by the intensity of the Japanese barrage as he and his men dive-bombed targets around Hong Kong. With unusual sophistication, enemy anti-aircraft gunners followed the American planes down almost to ground level, from 15,000 feet to 8,000, then 3,000. ‘From pull-out, I looked back and saw five planes of my group going down in flames. We’re going to have to figure out some way to combat that AA,’ Lamade told navy debriefers. ‘After that attack, Admiral McCain said he was very sorry we had lost so many pilots. I told him we…can’t go on fighting Japs continually without suffering some losses.’
To beat flak, pilots learned to dive faster and more steeply than they had ever trained for. Cockpit glass fogged with the dramatic change of atmosphere as they pulled out of a descent and soared upwards after releasing bombs. As ever in combat, the men who survived were those who were determined but careful: ‘We had four or five pilots who were over-eager,’ Fred Bakutis of Enterprise told debriefers. ‘They were excellent boys, very energetic and hard to hold down. It is these people who generally don’t come back, because they are so anxious to do damage to the Japs that they take risks beyond reason.’ Yet there were also shy pilots, content to release their bombs and swing away towards safety with a carelessness of aim that exasperated their commanders. And because these were very young, sometimes wild young men, they were sometimes reckless in the use of their lethal weapons. Senior officers were irked by the frequency with which American planes misidentified as Japanese were shot down by ‘friendly fire’ from combat air patrols. A pair of bored young pilots unable to identify an enemy target might work off their frustration on a Filipino fishing boat or lumbering cart ashore.
The job nobody wanted was night operations. Take-offs and landings in darkness were more hazardous, the monotony of patrols usually unrelieved by action. If a pilot made a poor deck approach in daylight, he was ‘waved off’ to try again, but in darkness he had to land and take the consequences, rather than hazard the ship by having it switch its landing lights on again. ‘What the boys want to do,’ said a night-fighter squadron commander, Turner Caldwell of Independence, ‘is to get into a day fighter squadron or a day torpedo squadron and get to be aces and sink Jap carriers and that sort of thing. And so we have to give them inducements of various kinds because they are kids and they don’t understand enough about the military life to know that this stuff has to be done. All they know is that they don’t want to do it.’
While the carrier crews might remain at sea for years on end, the men of the air groups knew that they were only passing visitors. If injury or death spared them, they were rotated ashore after six months’ duty. After two combat tours, asserted a navy report, pilots ‘lose their daring…feel they have done their parts and other pilots who have not fought should take over the burden’. One pool of replacement pilots was held ashore on Guam. A second group waited on fleet supply ships, condemned to weeks of crucifying boredom before being abruptly informed one morning that their turn had come, and trans-shipped by breeches buoy to join an air group. Some replacements idled at sea for months before reaching a carrier. ‘Upon arrival,’ complained a squadron CO, ‘they were practically worthless, because they had forgotten everything they had been taught.’ It was tough for a man to be pitchforked among strangers, beside whom within hours he was expected to fly and die. ‘All of a sudden,’ said Jim Lamade of Hancock, ‘they’re expected to go ahead and hit the ball right smack on with a combat fighting squadron…those boys get discouraged and you can’t blame them.’ Some such men reported sick. Flight surgeons felt obliged to be harsh. ‘Combat fatigue is a word we use continuously,’ said Lamade, ‘and nobody knows what it means. It covers a multitude of sins. I think it ought to be thrown out of our language.’
Squadron commanders found that the strain of leading their men in combat left them little patience or energy for routine duties back on the ship. They complained about bureaucracy and paperwork. A CO was exasperated to find that after some of his men hit the airfield of neutral Portuguese Macao by mistake, a court of inquiry was summoned. Planes, by contrast, were casually expendable. Salt corroded paintwork, yet the remedy was always in short supply, because nobody cared to store large quantities of notoriously flammable paint aboard a carrier. If an airframe was badly damaged, or a plane completed eight months’ service, it was most often tipped overboard. With American factories producing new aircraft by the thousand, a worn one seemed worth little.
There were accidents, always accidents. When tired young men were pushing themselves and their equipment to the limits, mistakes were inevitable. The guns of aircraft parked on flightdecks were triggered, injuring neighbouring planes and people. Badly battle-damaged planes were discouraged from landing on their carriers, to avoid messing up flightdecks. Ditching in the sea was an almost routine occupational hazard. Destroyers shadowed carriers during flight operations, to retrieve sodden fliers. As long as pilots were lucky, and ensured that their cockpit hoods were locked open to avoid plunging to the bottom with their planes, they could expect to survive an ocean landing. Ninety-nine men in Jim Lamade’s air group endured the experience, most with an insouciance conceivable only at such a time and place.
Fred Bakutis of Enterprise spent a week on a raft in the Sulu Sea after coming down in the Surigao Strait. Comrades dropped him a two-man liferaft. ‘That plus my own one-man raft made my seven-day tour of duty out there pretty pleasant,’ he told his debriefers with studied nonchalance. ‘The weather was pretty good except at night when it rained pretty hard. I had lots of water, using my one-man raft as a water wagon. My food consisted of minnows, seaweed, candy rations. My main problem in the raft was to stay comfortable. The hands became very sore—and also my rear end.’ On Bakutis’s seventh night adrift, he was wakened from a doze by the sound of diesels, and for a few heart-stopping moments feared that a Japanese vessel was approaching. Instead, however, to his infinite relief an American submarine loomed out of the darkness.
The submarine rescue service, often operating close inshore amid treacherous shoals or under Japanese fire, received the gratitude of every American flier. Together with ‘dumbo’ amphibians and patrolling destroyers, the submarines