Bunker Hill (CV 17) - Naval Cruise Book

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rejoin her when she came West, as most young Ships were doing in those days. W. L. White Wrote of heruglaring acres of spruce on the flight deck and he rounded up her pre-com- missioning heroes in an article for The Reaa'er'.v Digest. Perhaps you read Flattop: Where Courage is Routine. He was our first notable correspondent, and he promised to come visit us again. One day in the South Pacific a young pho- tographer joined the ship, showing for creden- tials indentification slips from Lyfe Magazine and ZW-Davis Publications. He came to be a permanent fixture on board, and members of the crew soon came to think of him in terms of what it takes to make an excellent pho- tographer: crazy as hell. He fiew as much as three hops per day over enemy-held ter- ritory, snapping pictures of sinking ships, burning airplanes and airfields converted into Tojo-held infernos. Twice he came back in airplanes that showed shrapnel marks as big as brickbats. But W. Eugene Smith got the pictures and you saw them in Lie and other publications, including this one. Raymond Clapper was our extra-special guest, because we had read him for years. We had heard that President Roosevelt con- sidered him one of the better reporters and commentators of our time. He won the crew's heart, hands down. We often saw him down in their messing compartments, eating with them and chatting away merrily. He bragged about having his picture made with the warrant officers, and he could call a num- ber of Chief Petty Ofiicers by their first names. Four days before he wrote his last story we chatted with him out on the flight deck, abreast the island structure. He had counted the Jap flags painted there, made notes on the ships the Bunker Hill's airplanes had sunk, he told us he wanted to write a little article about the fine record we had. Later in the afternoon we saw him in his stateroom, writing a story about how a crew feels when a battle approaches. He related the story our chaplain had told him, the story Of a tail gunner who had a prem0I1ifi0I'1 Of death. I can't quite forget that man . . . ' Clapper wrote. C It was just several days later that we walked 1nto the wardroom at noontime. An aviator came in and sat down. His face was expres- S10U1CSS, as if he had just heard something he couldn't believe. Turning to us, he said: Raymond Clapper and Frank Whitaker got killed over there this morning. Lieutenant Commander Whitaker, often referred to as the best torpedo pilot in the business, fiew Correspondent Clapper over Jap soil on a raid. Two planes collided in mid-air, there were no survivors. And America, the Navy, and the Bunker Hill had lost one of its dearest friends. He was out here getting the news for you, and more than once he remarked that he was prouder of America than ever before . . . because of its youth, whom he was meeting in abundant, vigorous portions all over the world. Spencer Davis, AP desk man in San Fran- cisco before packing his typewriter for war transit, told some good yarns about the South Pacific. They call her the gray ghost . . . he wrote of the Bunker Hill following her reveille routines at Kavieng. He saw us through some pretty tight pinches, and ofiicers and men alike thought he was the best writer out since Count Leo Tolstoy. But Spence had a crush on foot-soldiering, having hitch-hiked over Guadalcanal, Bougainville, New Guinea and other fantastically poor touring grounds. We last heard of him when he was on Biak with General MacArthur and a group of soldiers who had their backs to the wall. Typical of APman Davis, he was the only correspondent left on the island . . . just as he had been the only touch-typist i-n the guise of a newspaperman to fiy over Truk during one of the strikes against the Jap base. Washington is a hell of a place to spend a war, according to Phil Reed, International News S ervice reporter who came to the Bunker Hill for a visit last Spring. He had been on duty in the Capital for some time, until one day, half disgusted with the weather and its effect upon ten million people living

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whelming success of our bombing and torpedo attacks against shipping in Manila harbor. Enemy fighters were able to offer only sporadic resistance in the air. The Japs at Clark field were completely demoralized, according to returning Amer- ican pilots. Said Ensign William McCormick of C502 Aldine St.D Chicago, a Hellcat pilot: On the first strike, we saw two fires spring up along the runways and installations. There were two columns of smoke, going up to five or six hundred feet in altitude. JE, : Q1 It 1 N 9- ' .. l 5 1 3-if WE LOOK AT THEM ar brings out unbelievable talents in a man. It has been known to make an ordinary fighting man a writer, and some writers have been hailed as conquerors on the field of battle. Here's what we mean: in the Spring of 1943 four press correspondents armed with type- writers and mechanized by means of a jeep drove into a Tunisian town looking for the American Army. The town, until then an Axis possession, surrendered to the newsmen. On the other hand we know of a newspaper- man who spent nearly three years with the British Eighth Army, He came home on leave, contemplating a book on Monty and his men, only to discover that a soldier had beaten him to the job. One look in the book- store window on any corner will convince you that many fighting men have turned writers. Since marching away to the wars, the Bunker Hill has mothered her share of war correspondents, some of them famous, some less well-known, and some whose by-lines you don't remember from one story to the next. These press representatives had an opportunity to look at us and write about us, now we're assuming the author's pose and we're going to write about them. They've stood shoulder to shoulder with us in some trying hours, their job was to keep the public informed as to how the war was progressing, and their commentaries have become recorded history. Stories of successful attacks, of surprise tactics, of air battles over land and sea. There have also been stories of personal tragedy, of valor and bravery, and a host of unbelievable epics that censorship, of neces- sity, must preclude. These men have ex. posed themselves to the same dangers and hardships that our men must face, in time of battle they court the most dangerous localities in order to see the story in its most effective light. If you will check the files of authorized war correspondents, you'll find that their casualties run high. Most of the correspondents that came aboard the Bunker Hill were our friends, even after they departed for other stations. They have told their stories with a sympathetic effectiveness, always bearing in mind that the public back home consists of the mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters of the kids of whom they write. There's a big difference between sitting at a desk and writing about a war and going to the war as a part of it, these writers have found that difference. And their personal glory is only an infinitesimal fraction of the largely thankless service they render. Spencer Davis, of the Associated Press, flew over Hellcat-dominated Truk the day Navy fiiers exploded the myth regarding the Jap- anese bastion, and he knew of what he wrote finger-like pattern of torpedo wakes con- verging on a Nippon cruiser. Raymond Clapper, noted and respected columnist for Scripps-Howard, lived with the crew and successfully captured their preoccupation with battle, and he wrote of . . . floating up 21 river toward the day of battle with effective realism that is seldom achieved in wartime reporting. Clapper was our most distinguish- ed reporter-guest, and we somehow suspCCf that his world-wide popularity was a result Of his honest simplicity in talking to people and then writing about them. Newsmen first came to the Bunker Hill while she was still a gleaming hulk of steel and welding torches. They followed her thr0Ugh shakedown doctoring, and they came back t0 when he sat down that night and told of the,

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in a town built to take care of 500,000, he took up military visas and set sail for the South Pacihc. About this time the press abounded on the Bunker Hill: Also present were Elmont Waite, Associated Press writer, and Dan McGuire, United Press man who stayed long enough to get onthe Navy pay list. Dan's whoppers were characteristic of his good nature: . . . flak from anti-air- craft fire so thick that you could walk on it . . . .Of an action off Truk, when Jap torpedo planes attempted to attack our carrier forces, Monty Waite wrote: . . . Then the Hellcat dropped like a hawk from far above, and the torpedo plane literally dis- integrated and vanished in one quick blast. Flame and smoke arose momentarily from the water. That was all.. . Colorful language, as we look back on it. He was bringing to John Q. .Public pictures of what Mr. Public's kids are doing out here. Another visitor to the Bunker Hill was United Press, George E. Jones, outstanding for reporting the Navy's war. His datelines became familiar sights back home, just as his dynamic sentences hit you: War's jagged lightning can strike twice in the same place. It happened today at Clark Field, forty miles north of Manila . . . That was the day Hellcats roared down Dewey Boulevard, and Filipinos ran out into the streets to Wave at returning American pilots. There was William McGaHin, Chicago Doib, News correspondent, and there was Bill Baldwin of the Blue Network who recorded one of our battles, complete with actual sounds and the bona fide quavering of his voice. Lloyd Tupling, of the United Press, joined the ship late in October to become the most recent of the growing roster of Bunker Hill's Gentlemen of the Press. . . . They come and they go, and we still remember them, something they said or the way they looked in a tin hat. Their job is a long, often times boring, frequently dangerous studyg their thanks are few and far between. The press is more or less taken for granted- until it makes a mistake. You never actually realize just what a service they are perform- ing, or, actually, just how much they influence your lives. New words, they give you: flak, robomb. They introduce you to today's heroes, and you feel as if you know the heroes personally-but you seldom think about the guy who introduced you to them. Right this minute he's probably off on another mission, seeking out one of the kids and getting his slant on the war. 1