Chenango (CVE 28) - Naval Cruise Book

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- - -- 'vv-.nur-v-1-3-fvv-v-.1714 'THE WAllTINlE,HIST0P1Y' of u. S. S. CHENANGO - 0. V. E. TWENTY-EIGHT tifftttiftiifiiiiffifikifiiiitititiitfiti k'k'ki'i ki k'ki'i'kittittiifitttfiiififiiiiffffitiiff HIS IS THE STORY of a combat escort carrier . . . the only combat carrier to escape 'damage from the enemy for 38 straight months. It attempts to take you with CNENANGO and her pilots on eleven combat operations. lt tries to show you how her crew, her planes and the ship herself contributed to the defeat of our enemies in both oceans. It tells you how she got those J ap flags on her bridge and leaves to your imagination the thousands of hours of routine, unexciting, backbreaking work necessary to sail her nearly nine times around the world . . . 218,000 miles. The story ends at San Diego, California, two and a half months after V-I Day. During this seventy-five days the ship evacuated from the atomic bomb blasted city of Naga- saki, Kyushu, Japan, eighteen hundred eighteen freed prison- ers . . . Aussies, British, Netherland East Indians and Dutch as well as Americans. Some of our U. S. Army troops had been captured at Bandoeng and' Batavia bomber bases in early 1942. Fifteen Navy boys had saved themselves when the heroic cruiser Houston, after firing the last of her shells in almost one hundred steady salvos, was literally' blasted beneath the Java Sea by four torpedo hits and the attacks of fifty ,lap bombers.-She carried to freedom some of the 1500 civilian, workers who had been slave labor for their brutal Jap captors ever since Wakelsland fell two days before Christmas, -1941. After two of these Evacuation trips CHENANCO ran at top speed for two thousand miles clear down Manila way while dodging two different typhoons and rode out another which blew 87 knots across her flight deck in sheltered Sasebo Harbor. Then came a few days of standing by to stand bv while Occupation forces es- tablished themsclves in Southern Kvushu, a hurry up call to bomb some mine fields outside Fukuoka, a 'dash up to Tokyo Bay for a last look around ,before she began her 23- day trip back to Uncle Sugar. And even on this long awaited trip home there was a brief adventure. She ran into a freak three day storm in an area of the Pacific where no storms had been known to blow in the past 48 years! I The story begins two-and-a-half years before Pearl Har- bor. CHENANGO was a pre-war vessel. She was launched on April Fool's Day, 1939, as the Eastern States Standard Oil tanker, E550 NEW ORLEANS. Her keel had been laid nine months before from blue-prints which had been jointly anproved by Standard Oil of New Jersey, the United States Maritime Commission and United States Navy. ESSO NEW ORLEANS was designed to go to war as a Navy Fleet Oiler whenever she was needed. The phony war in Europe, after the Nazi invasion of Poland. had dragged along for wearvmonths. The beaches of the Atlantic Ocean were coated with oil from ships sunk in a real war . . . a war of transportation . . . when, on 20 April, 1941, the Navy took NEW ORLI-2.455 over. She began to operate for the Naval Transportation Service as U. S. S. Chenango L40 311. lAs a river class Navy oiler she was named after Chenango River in New York State . . . Chen- ango is an lndian name meaning Big Bull .l U Page 16 l ' b '-Yi .sr 1:1 z:.s. ir' .-' - L . .. ' Tz3.sse:Lz1:.'.f'z 1---'.':. ,5- . , .,- -hi.,-2.1, .L-., .--w From 2 July, 1941, until 16 March, 1942, CHENANCO, the oiler, steamed 47,000 miles through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Coast, Caribbean Sea and the Pacific as far as Honolulu before coming home b way of Aruba, Netherlands West Indies. It was at Aruba that the legend of her luck arose. Nazi torpedoes had already missed her twice. ,She'd had a close call when the tanker dead ahead of her in convoy suddenly exploded and sank flaming in the night. She reached Aruba- low on fuel and wormed her wa to shelter in a harbor jammed with defenseless shipping which Nazi torpedoes and shell-fire soon began to smash and burn all around her! CHENANGO was untouched. She got safely back to Mariner's Harbor, Staten Island, New York, there to undergo conversion into an escort air- craft carrier, the secondof four ships of her class. Commis- sioning ceremonies were brightened by the presence of Madeleine Carroll, the motion picture star. Captain Know Commodorcl Ben H. Wyatt put her into fighting commis- sion on 19 September, 1942, at a time when our Boating airfields were frighteningly few. . Her .first carrier job was to ferry 78 P-40 fighters over to North Africa through the sub-infested Atlantic. Reports of her loss on this operation were slightly exaggerated . . . although ships were sunk-fore and aft of her and on either side . . .four in all! She arrived and waited.-patiently off Port Lyautey for our forces to get an airfield so she could send her cargo flying ashore, delivered 77 P-40's fone plane splashed before it reached shore' and then went into Casablanca harbor. Here she sat while 21 destroyers drank half of. her three million gallons of fuel oil and 'Nazi air and underwater raiders swarmed the area. Captain Wyatt had plotted on his big area, chartthe positions of 59 German U-boats all at one time! During her first night, in Casablanca a tanker was hit outside the nets. The crew 'could see oil buming on the surface. An escort of the CHENANGO was sent to pick up survivors and was torpedoed after leaving the nets! Yet her crew felt that the biggest danger was from snipers on the beach' and the nervous trigger fingers on other ships in crowded Casablanca harbor. . The return from Africa was even more perilous than the initial crossing. Three days out of Casablanca she ran into a hurricane. By the morningof the fourth day out her com- partments amidships and forward were awash with six inches of sea water which poured in through the ventilation systems. By afternoon all hands had been ordered aft of the forward elevator. And by evening seaswere breaking over the flight deck. At midnight she had lost many-of her life rafts and her motor whaleboat and her catwalks forward were beginning to go. The crew was warned that all 'areas tnpside forward of the bridge were unsafe. Also Captain Wyatt was concerned that no personnel be washed over- board by the water which streamed down the flight deck.- The crew must stay below . . . and two-thirds of them were - ' , ' lffonlinued on page 2U ...- -'-Q., - .:,:....-.--