Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [80]
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 do225,” 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 daring226…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 transshipped 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 use227 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 convened. 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 flight decks were triggered, injuring neighbouring planes and people. Badly battle-damaged planes were discouraged from landing on their carriers, to avoid messing up flight decks. Ditching in the sea was an almost routine occupational hazard. Destroyers shadowed carriers during flight operations, to retrieve waterlogged 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