Heroic efforts were made to control Lexington’s fires: Lt. Milton Ricketts, sole survivor of a damage-control team wiped out by a bomb, was himself mortally wounded, but ran out a hose and began playing water on the flames before collapsing dead. Soon, however, in Stroop’s words ‘fires had gotten increasingly violent and we were beginning to get explosions…that sounded like a freight train rumbling up the hangar deck…A rushing wall of flame…would erupt around the perimeter of the elevator.’ Leaking gasoline fumes triggered a massive blast below decks: ammunition began to cook off; the decision was made to abandon the ship. Its senior officer, Admiral Fitch, walked calmly across the flight deck accompanied by a marine orderly clutching his jacket and dispatches, to be picked up by a destroyer’s boat below. Men in their hundreds began to leap into the water. The rescuers were so effective that only 216 of Lexington’s crew were lost out of 2,735, but a precious carrier was gone. Yorktown was severely damaged, though she was able to complete landing on planes two minutes after sunset. In the small hours of darkness, the dead were buried over the side, in expectation of renewed action next day.
But the battle was done: both fleets turned away. Fletcher’s task groups had lost 543 lives, sixty aircraft and three ships including Lexington. Inoue lost over 1,000 men and seventy-seven aircraft – the carrier Zuikaku’s air group suffered heavy attrition. But the balance of destruction favoured the Japanese, who had better planes than the Americans and handled them more effectively. Amazingly, however, Inoue abandoned the operation against Port Moresby and retired, conceding strategic success to the US Navy. Here, once again, was a manifestation of Japanese timidity: victory was within their grasp, but they failed to press their advantage. Never again would they enjoy such an opportunity to establish dominance of the Pacific.
In the course of the war, the US Navy would show itself the most impressive of its nation’s fighting services, but it faced a long, harsh learning process. Several early commanders were found wanting, because they were slow to grasp the principles of carrier operations, which would dominate the Pacific campaign. American fliers’ courage was never in doubt, but at the outset their performance lagged behind that of their enemies. At Pearl Harbor, albeit against an unprepared and static enemy, Japanese planes achieved the remarkable record of nineteen hits and detonations out of forty torpedo launches, a record no other navy matched. When US carrier planes attacked Tulagi anchorage on 3 May 1942 against slight opposition, twenty-two Douglas Devastator torpedo-bombers achieved just one hit. Attacking Shokaku two days later, twenty-one Devastators scored no hits at all. Most American torpedoes, the Japanese said later, were launched too far out, and ran so slowly that they were easily avoidable.
Among US naval aircraft, the Coral Sea battle showed that the Dauntless dive-bomber was alone up to its job, not least in having adequate endurance. The Devastator was ‘a real turkey’, in the words of a flier, further handicapped by high fuel consumption. Worst of all, Mk 13 aerial and Mk 14 sea-launched torpedoes were wildly unreliable, unlikely to explode even if they hit a target. A most un-American reluctance to learn from experience meant that this fault, afflicting submarine as much as air operations, was not fully corrected until 1943.
War at sea was statistically much less dangerous than ashore for all participants save such specialists as aviators and submariners. Conflict was impersonal: sailors seldom glimpsed the faces of their enemies. The fate of every ship’s crew was overwhelmingly at the mercy of its captain’s competence, judgement – and luck. Seamen of all nations suffered cramped living conditions and much boredom, but peril intervened only in spasms. Individuals were called upon to display fortitude and commitment, but seldom enjoyed the opportunity to choose whether or not to be brave. That was a privilege reserved for their commanders, who issued the orders determining the movements of ships and fleets. The overwhelming majority of sailors, performing technical functions aboard huge sea-going war machines, made only tiny, indirect personal contributions to killing their enemies.
Carrier operations represented the highest and most complex refinement of naval warfare. ‘The flight deck looked like a big war dance of different colors,’ wrote a sailor aboard Enterprise. ‘The ordnance gang wore red cloth helmets and a red T-shirt when they went about their work of loading machine-guns, fusing bombs, and hoisting torpedoes…Other specialties wore different colors. Brown for the plane captains – one attached to each plane – green for the hydraulic men who manned the arresting gear and the catapults, yellow for the landing signal officer and deck control people, purple for the oil and gas kings…Everything was “on the double” and took place with whirling propellers everywhere, waiting to mangle the unwary.’ The US Navy would refine carrier assault to a supreme art, but in 1942 it was still near the bottom of the curve: not only were its planes inferior to those of the Japanese, but commanders had not yet evolved the right mix of fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-carriers for each ‘flat-top’ – after the Coral Sea, captains deplored the inadequate proportion of Wildcats. US anti-aircraft gunnery was no more effective than that of the Royal Navy. Radar sets were short-sighted in comparison with those of the later war years. Damage control, which became an outstanding American skill, was poor.
The US Navy boasted a fine fighting tradition, but its 1942 crews were still dominated by men enlisted in peacetime, often because they could find nothing else to do. Naval airman Alvin Kiernan wrote:
Many of the sailors were there, as I was, because there were few jobs in Depression America…We would have denied that we were an underclass…There wasn’t such a thing in America, we thought – conveniently forgetting that blacks and Asians were allowed to serve in the navy only as officers’ cooks and mess attendants. Our teeth were terrible from Depression neglect, we had not always graduated from high school, none had gone to college, our complexions tended to acne, and we were for the most part foul-mouthed, and drunkenly rowdy when on liberty…I used to wonder why so many of us were skinny, bepimpled, sallow, short and hairy.
Cecil King, chief ship’s clerk on Hornet, recalled: ‘We had a small group of real no-goodniks. I mean these kids were not necessarily honest-to-God gangsters, but they were involved in anything that was seriously wrong on the ship – heavy gambling and extortion. One night one of them was thrown over the side.’ For most men, naval service required years of monotony and hard labour, interrupted by brief passages of violent action. A few, including King, actively enjoyed carrier life: ‘I just felt at home at sea. I felt like that’s what the Navy’s all about. Many times I would wander around the ship, particularly in the late afternoon, just enjoying being there. I would go over to the deck edge elevator and stand and watch the ocean going by. I feel like I’m probably one of the luckiest people in the entire world…for having been born in the year that I was, to be able to fight for my country in World War II; this whole era…is something that I feel real privileged for having gone through.’
The expansion of the US Navy’s officer corps made a dramatic and brilliant contribution to the service’s later success, and some learned to love the sea service and the responsibilities it conferred on them. Most ordinary sailors, however – especially as ships began to fill with wartime recruits – did their duty honourably enough, but found little to enjoy. Some found it all too much for them: a sailor on Hornet climbed out on the mast yardarm, and hung 160 feet over the sea trying to muster nerve to jump and kill himself until dissuaded by the chaplain and the ship’s doctor. He was sent to the US for psychiatric evaluation – and eventually returned to Hornet in time to share the ship’s sinking, the fate of which he had been so fearful.
Those who experienced the US Navy’s early Pacific battles saw much of failure, loss and defeat. The horrors of ships’ sinkings were often increased by fatal delays before survivors were located and rescued.