This unsettled weather continued until the evening before the night run to Panama. We had run all day at 30 knots, with a section of fighters on the take-off spot, ready to launch the moment the weather cleared. The Omaha had reported running short of fuel, giving us a new worry. Unless she could last the route at full speed, we would have to launch without a plane guard. Cruising along from one squall to the next, elated by the luck that had protected us against prowling Lexington scouts, we suddenly broke out into the clear in an area of unlimited ceiling and visibility. It was about 5 P.M. when the fighters roared into the air.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Frigate Birds
Up until this moment, everything done had been in rehearsal. Now, with the possibility of enemy contact at any instant, the flag bridge took on a new atmosphere of high tension. The admiral stood out on the bridge, binoculars glued to his eyes, while the breeze fingered his beard. Frank Wagner hovered beside him, alert for a suggestion or command, a quizzical expression in his eyes, indicative of his humorous reaction to stress. As we followed the tiny fighters racing directly ahead along our course, we were startled by a quick reversal that brought them racing back to the carrier.
At that time, fighters carried no radio. They zoomed across the bow at low altitude to drop short sections of garden hose as message holders. The fighters had sighted a destroyer dead ahead, an enemy scout, the Breck, heading for us on a collision course. Even as we read the message, we made out the ship’s mast, dead ahead. We’d been caught.
The Breck turned to parallel our course, well out of gun range, and seemed to be looking us over. The flag-chief quartermaster, gazing at her through his long glass, turned to the admiral.
“Sir,” he remarked, “it looks funny to me. I wonder if he thinks maybe he’s sighted the Lexington.” The admiral lowered his binoculars and turned to me.
“Well,” he asked, “what do you want to do with her?” Now, the lack of a plane-guard vessel for the next morning had lain heavily on my mind. We had enough worries without risking a take-off crack-up and a lost pilot. It must have been this that prompted my facetious reply.
“Tell her to plane-guard us, sir!” I laughed.
Quick as a flash the admiral barked the signal to the flag-chief quartermaster. As the bright flags fluttered in the late afternoon light, the Breck answered. Then to our amazement, she turned and swung into position directly astern of us, four hundred yards away. There we might have left her save that Ken Whiting, the official umpire, felt obliged to make a ruling. And so we theoretically opened fire on her with the after ten-inch, and theoretically sank her. Ken signaled the Breck that she was now disabled without radio to communicate our position.
We were just congratulating ourselves on this break and sweating out the rest of the daylight, when the Omaha reported being attacked by the cruiser Detroit. Her captain, Dick White, who had once been my skipper on the destroyer tender Bridgeport and was an old friend of Admiral Reeves, had doped out our intentions, and disregarding his orders, had left his scouting station to look for us. Even then he was broadcasting our position in plain English, instead of code, begging the Lexington to come and get us.