Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [59]
Slanting into their glide bombing runs, the big Grummans opened their bomb bay doors. Pattie wrote, “We bore down with vengeance. To insure an effective attack I held my release till the last moment, pulling out right at the treetops.” He glanced over his shoulder, pleased that his four 500-pounders had punched through the building’s roof. The squadron’s other bombs also seemed to impact within the factory.
Meanwhile, another Atlantic Fleet veteran made his presence known. Essex’s Lieutenant Dean Laird already had two Germans to his credit and had dropped a Sally bomber the day before. Now he scored a Tony and a Tojo during a strike on the Nakajima Tama engine factory. Thus, “Diz” Laird became the only Navy ace with kills against Germany and Japan.
* * * * *
In the early afternoon the marginal weather only worsened. Mitscher canceled scheduled strikes and, recovering his airborne planes, reversed helm for Iwo Jima.
The recovery posed a major challenge to pilots and landing signal officers (LSOs). Landing a high-performance aircraft on a moving ship is probably the most demanding task that humans have ever routinely performed. In heavy seas even the big-deck carriers bucked and rolled, requiring exquisite timing from the LSOs, who had to judge the “cut the throttle” signal to the second. Too early and the aircraft could smash down in a “ramp strike,” hitting the aft edge of the flight deck with disastrous consequences. Too late and the landing plane might sail over the arresting wires, resulting in an aborted pass at best or a crash into one of the woven-steel cable barriers. As one veteran aviator said, “On straight-deck carriers you either had a major accident or an arrested landing.”
Landings were especially tough on pilots who flew from Independence class light carriers. Their decks were only seventy-three feet across—twenty-three feet less than the Essexes.
The LSOs stood on a small platform portside aft, facing astern. Some ships rigged a framework for a canvas barrier against the wind, but the “wavers” still had to balance themselves against the ship’s motion while pantomiming the standard set of signals with bright-colored paddles. They coached each pilot into “the groove” representing the optimum glide slope to snag an arresting wire with the plane’s extended tailhook. It was more art than science. The best LSOs developed an intuitive feel for the visual and audio cues: airspeed, attitude, engine sound. And each airplane was different: Hellcat, Corsair, Helldiver, and Avenger all had their quirks.
At the exact moment that experience and judgment told him was right, the LSO slashed his paddles down from the “Roger” position (extended outright from the shoulders). The right paddle went to the throat and the left arm dropped across the body in the cut signal—chop the throttle, drop the nose, check the movement, and land the aircraft. Usually it resulted in a “trap.”
Otherwise, the LSO gave a wave-off, ordering the pilot to go around and try again. A wave-off carried force of law: to ignore it was carrier aviation’s gravest sin. A landing pilot might not see a fouled deck beneath his plane’s nose, so he had to rely upon “Paddles” to think for him and fly the plane by remote control.
In all, during two days the tailhookers claimed 341 Japanese planes in the air and 190 on the ground. On the debit side of the ledger, Mitscher lost more than eighty planes to all causes. But high among the U.S. Navy’s strengths was the fact that it could absorb such losses and continue operating. That month American factories produced more than 300 new Corsairs and nearly 600 Hellcats.
Actual Japanese aerial losses remain uncertain. Imperial Headquarters admitted seventy-eight but was less specific about those bombed or strafed on their fields. In turn, Japanese fliers claimed at least 134 kills versus the sixty carrier planes actually lost to flak and fighters.
Whatever the score, something remarkable had occurred. For two days a major American fleet had plied Japanese waters, established air superiority