The Ship That Held the Line
The U.S.S. Hornet and the First Year of the Pacific War
By Lisle A. Rose

BLUEJACKET BOOKS

Copyright © 1995 Lisle A. Rose.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-55750-008-8

Chapter One

Birth

By 25 September 1939 World War II was three weeks old and the German army had completed its rush across the sun-baked fields of Poland to surround Warsaw. Waves of Nazi Stukas appeared over the beleaguered city and in screaming dives terror-bombed the tormented inhabitants, who had only days of precarious freedom remaining. A week before, Soviet armies had pushed across Poland's eastern frontiers to help Hitler carve up the hapless nation and to provide Stalin a buffer against German aggression. In the West, Germany's enemies sat uneasily behind Maginot fortifications or squatted apprehensively beneath barrage balloons awaiting tyranny's next blow.

    Across the Atlantic that Monday morning, in Virginia, workmen in one of the two large slipways at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company began laying the keel of a new aircraft carrier. They were proud men, these shipbuilders. They had plied their trade for decades, and their motto was that they would build a good ship, at a profit if they could, at a loss if they must, but always a good ship. In the coming months, as the eight-hundred-foot hull gradually took form, Hitler became the master of all Europe. The fall of Poland was followed by a long winter of uneasy calm, the "phony war." Then in the spring of 1940 the Wehrmacht suddenly raced north through Denmark and into Norway, then turned on the Low Countries and France. To the collective horror of the West, the French, who had held out heroically against the Germans for four years a generation before, fell apart and sued for peace. Nazi troopers swaggered in serried ranks down the Champs-Elysées, while their comrades took positions on the coast of the Pas de Calais, only twenty miles across the English Channel from Dover.

    As the Luftwaffe began to soften up Britain in preparation for a climactic invasion, Americans bitterly debated the wisdom of isolation or intervention. Pundits, politicians, and citizens argued, shouted, and pleaded that Britain could or could not stand alone, could or could not be saved with American aid. On only one point could everyone agree. The nation had to rearm, either to protect its shores or eventually to project its power worldwide in the cause of freedom. The great ship emerging on the slipway at Newport News would be a key element in the fulfillment of whichever policy was eventually pursued.

    The vessel had been authorized under the Naval Expansion Act of May 1938, legislation that reflected the world's growing gloom over the probability of renewed conflict. In 1934 Japan had announced that it would no longer adhere to the international armament limitations agreed to at the Washington and London naval conferences; three years later it began a war against China that included reckless attacks against Western gunboats and property. The large, efficient Imperial Japanese Navy continued to expand dramatically, achieving the capability to overwhelm its U.S. counterpart in the Pacific. Congress responded by authorizing a major increase in naval tonnage, including forty thousand tons of new carrier construction.

    The first vessel to be built under the act would be a product of compromise both within the navy as a whole and in the smaller carrier community. Admirals and seamen remained deeply divided over the relative merits of the carrier versus the battleship, the warplane versus the big gun. It had been fifteen years since Billy Mitchell had convinced some skeptics that airplanes could sink battleships; no one could deny that planes had an exponentially greater range than did the largest naval gun. Between 1927 and 1938 five carriers entered service in the U.S. Navy, and fleet exercises in the late thirties suggested that these ships could play a dominant?not merely an auxiliary?role in future warfare. But "surface sailors" also seemed to have a good bit of history and technology on their side. While the aircraft carrier had become a promising new weapon of war, the battleship itself had been transformed. Britain's Dreadnought, launched in 1905, had revolutionized war at sea. Battleships were now huge vessels carrying many large naval rifles on enormous hulls that could at least theoretically be so minutely subdivided as to make them virtually unsinkable. Thus traditionalists continued to insist that the carrier's role was primarily as a scout platform and secondarily as a supplementary offensive weapon in fleet actions between opposing lines of battleships. The increasingly aggressive naval aviation community insisted just as vociferously that in any coming conflict the carrier would be the major strike weapon, projecting naval power many hundreds of miles farther, much more rapidly, and with much greater collective force than any line of battlewagons could.

    But the supremacy of carrier warfare remained unproven. The great naval battle of what was now being referred to as merely a first world war had conformed to custom. Long lines of British and German battleships and battle cruisers had blazed away at one another at Jutland, and Winston Churchill had observed trenchantly that Sir John Jellicoe, the British commander, was the only man who could lose an empire in an afternoon. The debate over the relative merits of guns and planes continued throughout the late thirties both inside and outside of the naval community. By 1938, however, a rough consensus had apparently been reached among moderates on both sides: Carriers would support the battle line, but they would do so offensively by aggressively seeking out and sinking opposing carriers so that the battleships could get at their enemy counterparts unhindered. Under the circumstances Congress and the White House made the expedient decision: The United States would build both battleships and carriers. In 1937 and 1938 Congress authorized six new battleships of the North Carolina and South Dakota classes, and by 1938 naval designers were developing a new six-ship class of very fast battleships whose lead vessel would be named Iowa. Thereafter, Congress allocated the major portion of capital ship spending for dramatic expansion of the modest carrier fleet.

    A new class, the Essex, would be constructed, incorporating all the lessons learned from operating the Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Yorktown, and Enterprise. But developing this advanced design would take time, and by late 1939 there was no time. The most recent two-ship Yorktown class had been developed years before, and although the vessels themselves were still young, they had exhibited some striking deficiencies in size, armor, and design. But if the U.S. Navy was to counter the large Japanese fleet successfully and provide some support in any naval war against Germany, it had to get as many carriers as possible into the water quickly. A smaller and marginally suitable fleet carrier, the Wasp, was due to be commissioned in the spring of 1940, but the first of the Essex class was not scheduled to touch water before 1943. The quickest way to get sufficiently large and fast flight decks to sea would be to replicate the Yorktown design. The new carrier would be the last of the old, not the first of the new.

    Few carriers have been as elegant as the Yorktown class. Battleship and cruiser critics derisively...