Arriving at San Francisco, we found Chance Vought waiting with a new Corsair single-float amphibian which he had personally chaperoned all the way from Long Island City in a baggage car. The Naval Aircraft Factory at Philadelphia later supplied two more of a somewhat different design. After testing them, I came in for a good deal of ribbing from Langley pilots who, like Chance, insisted I had spoiled good airplanes by overloading them with junk. The craft may have been “klucks” but they lifted a heavy load from the staff conscience.
The fleet sailed on schedule with the aircraft squadrons ready in all respects. Some of our wives, including mine, were to all sail later on a passenger steamer from Los Angeles. With our convertible coupe in the ship’s hold and my own recollections of an earlier visit to Honolulu in the old Armored Cruiser Squadrons in mind, we looked forward to a pleasant sojourn.
During passage, the fleet passed the steamer at sea, where the wives got a close-up of the Langley launching and receiving planes. We had been assigned a fixed station “6,000 yards astern of BAT DIVS,” an order that irked the admiral no end. To launch and receive aircraft, the Langley had to leave her station and head into the wind, a fact that seemed to cause acute distress to those elements of the fleet accustomed to cruising in precise formation.
On the slow journey westward, daily exercises, morning and afternoon, developed our flight-deck technique to the ultimate. As a plane floated in over the ramp, to drop into the gear and be brought up with a jerk, squads of deck handlers swarmed out of the nettings, cleared hooks from landing wires, caught wing tips, and hustled the craft forward of the barrier, just in time to clear the gear for the next plane, even then floating down the groove. It was Bull Reeves who pressed always for more speed. Always quick to condemn a miscue or commend smart action, he finally inspired the Langley officers until they cut the take-off interval between planes down to ten seconds and the landing intervals to thirty.
At the crack of dawn, one lovely Sunday morning, we headed into the wind to launch aircraft for the assault on Pearl Harbor. We had selected this day in the knowledge that the defenders, after the usual Saturday night festivities, would be sleeping late.
First across the bow was Gerry Bogan of Fighting One; the rest of his flock zoomed after him at ten-second intervals. Fighting Six followed, led by “Injun Joe” Tomlinson. Finally scouts and amphibians roared into the air, leaving the deserted flight deck a bleak expanse of silence. After their attack on Pearl Harbor, the squadrons were to land ashore.
Our striking force, undetected by the defenders, caught Army and Navy pilots flat on their backs in bed, just as their successors were destined to be caught some thirteen years later on Sunday, December 7. It now seems likely that the casual Japanese oil tanker that managed always to find herself in the center of our operating areas off San Pedro, or those “fishing” sampans that busied themselves off Honolulu that very morning, later communicated our movements to the Japanese high command. It was natural for their admiralty to assume that we understood the import of the new weapons we were exercising. They could not have believed the intelligence that our own high command had so discounted the striking power of aerial bombs and submarine torpedoes that they had neglected to equip their vessels with adequate gun defenses. Recognizing in FLEET AIR—as they surely did—a revolutionary instrument of sea power, they sped their own development and hastened to exploit it in the rapid expansion of their East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.
During the remainder of the Hawaiian exercises, we conducted joint operations with local naval forces and with the Army, polishing our flight techniques at sea. One day, a shift of wind, sweeping yellow volcanic dust from an extinct crater, cut our surface visibility to a dangerous low just after Gerry Bogan, with nine fighter bombers from Fighting One, had roared over the bow to attack a distant enemy fleet. Our worried staff found some comfort in the knowledge that one of our radio-liaison Corsairs was supposed to be plane-guarding the unit, ready to lead the flock back aboard after its mission had been completed. But when we radioed the Vought, the pilot reported he had lost the fighters. After homing the Corsair and taking her aboard, we began really sweating it out, peering hopefully into the yellow spaces, looking for Gerry Bogan. Finally at long last came the drone of engines. One by one the planes lurched into the gear and taxied forward. The admiral sent his orderly for Bogan.
“Where the hell have you been anyway?” he demanded with unwonted truculence.
“Fightin’,” replied Gerry.