Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [133]
As Zeros and Dauntlesses engaged in their murderous dance, a Japanese pilot lined up Widhelm’s plane and pulled a burst from his twenty-millimeter cannons. As Widhelm’s squadron mates were hurtling down upon the Shokaku in seventy-degree dives, heads hunched forward peering into their bomb sights, dive brakes gripping the air, it was a sure mark of their spirit that as Widhelm’s engine coughed smoke and died, his comrades found their hearts on fire listening to his Navy-grade cussing about the lack of effective help from the Hornet’s fighters as he guided his smoking aircraft into the sea. Surviving the crash landing, Widhelm would be left to observe the exploits of his comrades from a bobbing yellow life raft.
It wasn’t long before Lieutenant James E. “Moe” Vose, the leader of the Hornet’s second flight of Dauntlesses, from Bombing Squadron 8, found Nagumo’s carriers. Radioing a sighting report, they pushed over on the Shokaku and piled in. Dauntlesses flying search or “scouting” missions carried a half-sized five-hundred-pound bomb, the better to extend their range. Dauntlesses armed for strikes carried a thousand-pound egg. Vose’s aviators were loaded for bear. As they dove down on the speeding, swerving Shokaku, the veteran of the Pearl Harbor attack gamely skidded out of the path of the first three or four big bombs. The next few, all of them thousand-pounders, scored heavily, shattering the carrier’s flight deck and destroying her center elevator. By nine thirty, with fires sweeping through her hangar deck, the Shokaku was no longer capable of flight operations. She could still make thirty-one knots, but she, like the Zuiho before her, was out of the fight.
The heavy cruiser Chikuma, less valuable than the Shokaku but an important naval asset nonetheless, took a couple of bombs from Hornet Bombing Squadron 8 aviators, and two near misses from Enterprise Dauntless jockeys, and was left battered and burning but navigable, with almost two hundred dead.
Thirty minutes after the U.S. attack pilots first set upon their targets, they were finished with their attacks and bound for home.
DURING THE LULL that followed the first attacks on the Hornet, the Northampton maneuvered to take the crippled carrier under tow. Several miles away, in Task Force 16, Admiral Kinkaid learned of the Hornet’s ill fortune when the word reached him that his flagship, the Enterprise, was to land all returning planes, including those from the Hornet. The Big E was preparing another air strike at the time, her ordnancemen loading bombs onto racks, pulsing fuel hoses everywhere. If an enemy attack arrived in that vulnerable window, it could be disastrous. As it happened, it was an American plane that drew first blood from the Enterprise task force.
It was the fluky kind of thing that only seems to happen in wartime. Just before 10 a.m., the pilot of a damaged Avenger was waved off from his first approach on the Enterprise. Unable to circle for another landing attempt, he ditched near the destroyer Porter. As he and his crew scrambled into the life raft, the destroyer approached them and stopped. The deck force was preparing to take the flight crew aboard when a lookout yelled, “Torpedo wake on the port bow!” Pilots overhead spotted the missile, tracing a counterclockwise circle ahead of the Porter. They dove down and made two