Bunker Hill (CV 17) - Naval Cruise Book

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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

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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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From The Fargo to Rabaul By Rod DeCamp QFormer Qua t . .-ff.Ns..oe.4tes.fif-..,..fr,.ftk,,g..s,f,..f,im -Wherein Are Found Some of the Little Things That Make Up Carrier Duty ,hat's-where it all began- the Fargo. Although officially known as The Receiving Station, Boston, the former wool warehouse down on Beantown's Summer Street will, in Navy talk, always be known as the F argo. Renowned for its chow, elevators, canteen feminine employees, Sunday dances and brig, its chief claim to fame was its locale, pro- nounced Bahston. 3 It was in the pleasant atmosphere of that peer of receiving stations that the embryonic crew of the Bunker Hill gathered and forth- with proceeded to spawn rumors anent the activities of the ship, even though, at that time, the ship hadn't even an island structure to call its own! These rumors largely con- cerned the lapse of time before the ship would be commissioned, and beyond that, it was any man's ball game. Even at that early date, the inaccuracy of the scuttlebutt was some- thing out of this world! A solemn rule of the house, enforced by Boats' Wheeler in his more lucid moments, required that all hands be made to arise and partake of breakfast. This arousal required 3 goodly racket, generally produced by the vigorous pounding of a wooden slat against the steel bunkfjframes, accompanied by such merry rhymes as Let's go, let's go-let'S 121811 and stow, let's- etc., etc. Much praise is due the cooks for their thoughtfulness, however, in providing such matutinalihre-quenchers as tomato juice and other liquids calculated to calm a digeSt1VC SYStem quiteifoften in outrageous clam01'- With a substantial breakfast tucked away, the hardier spirits moved about purpOSCfUllY, 1' ermaster, transferred to V-7 Programj .ia ...!.wQ,.41xi4f' ' A X cleaning up, shaving, washing and attending to other duties of the morning. It must be regretted that all the spirits were not hardy, nor were they convinced yet that they had definitely arisen, for large numbers crept cravenly back to their sacks, and it was noted with some misgivings that the future crew of the Bunker Hill had an amazing faculty for going to sleep after a meal-even on top of all that good New England food, too! This affinity for the horizontal position was discouraged by the occasion of Quarters for Muster each morning, and certainly wasn't helped by standing at attention through the playing of The Star Spangled Banner, executed with agonizing slowness and fidelity to detail, to say nothing of the British and, as I recall, the French national anthems, also played in honor of Naval personnel of those countries, also present at the Fargo. The lads spent the remainder of the day attempting to evade, with varying degrees of success, various exercises and lectures, some necessitating a march to the Boys Club, which meant going out of the nice warm Fargo Building into the cold street. Then too, there was the ever-present danger of being instructed in the sooty art of fire-fighting, an exercise guaranteed to ruin clothes and dis- position in gaining first hand knowledge of the heat of oil fires and what to do about getting them out in a hurry. One of these Hre- Hghting classes shot a day all to hell. The dangerous period lay between the dis- missal from Quarters, and the opening of the canteen on the ninth deck. During this time one had to stay beyond the reach of Wheeler, and other of his ilk, who seemed stubbornly determined that the crew should do something other than sleep before liberty commenced. Once open, the canteen offered a splendid