Lexington (CV 16) - Naval Cruise Book

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7:50 7:51 7:59 9:06 9:20 9:50 10:54 on here. Voices drop, and the routine is smooth again. Both task groups are continually maneuvering and altering their courses. The radar reports increasing numbers of single and small groups of enemy planes closing in on the task force from various directions. A battleship is ordered to a position astern of our task group. Casual conversation ends abruptly. The Captain moves in and out of the wheel-house, listening, watching. - The first barking of guns towards the western horizon indicates enemy aircraft have found and are closing in on task group 50.3. Sporadic firing continues in that direction. Battleships, cruisers in our own task group 50.1 open fire. Not only is radar reporting planes, but some units of the group report visual contacts. Now comes the closer Booivr- BOOM of five inch guns. Radar must have located something up in the sky that we can't see, it looks as if the five-inchers are shooting at the moon. ' ' A sudden glare on the horizon. A hit. A burning plane down. It burns too long. Maybe it's not a plane, maybe they got one of our destroyers. The Hames disappear, and the TBS reports one lap enemy plane downed by task group 50.3. Enemy planes have dropped some Hoat lights in the vicinity of task group 50.3. Detailed radar reports of the actions and movements of enemy planes are important information for the Hag admiral and stall on the Yorlqtowng they are hot and cold sensations to me. I pay very little attention to the reports that planes are 20 miles away, but when they are 3 miles away . . . then a few thousand yards and closing in . . . something in my chest tries to crowd up into my throat. Here is a long standing controversy coming to a test . . . a battle between naval vessels and land-based planes. Anti-aircraft gunfire from different ships of the task force now becomes continuous. The Enterprise reports she is being slowed up by engine trouble. Our speed is reduced. 124 ii

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It is dark, our planes are all in and accounted for, the tired deck crews have respotted the planes on the after-half of the deck. Everything is shipshape, all set and ready for whatever tomorrow may bring. The Captain and I are finishing our supper from trays across our knees. There is an obvious effort to make our conversation casual. We are still among enemy islands steaming hell-bent for leather out of there. An enemy bogie is picked up on our radar at 48 miles. The captain goes right on with our small talk as if he had not heard the report over the squawk-box. We are talking about the soil-less culture of plants. He calmly speaks of his retirement someday to a home in the country and a garden, a small place but he wants to grow things in a big way, and the scientific angle of hydroponics appeals to him. The radar reports more bogies 30 or 40 miles away from different directions apparently searching out our task force, of which two groups are traveling parallel to each other 8 or IO miles apart. The tension evident during the plane landing operations now becomes pronounced. Here is something more definite, more specific, and more ominous than any- thing the ship has experienced before. Enemy planes are ranging from I5 to 25 miles from us and there is as yet no indication whether they have located us or are simply maneuvering for position. A few filmy clouds are dabbed across the sky. Nothing in the aerologist's forecast to pin any hope for the concealing darkness a cloud cover would give us. lt is going to be a clear moonlight night. A stream of reports are coming and going via the intership phone system-TBS. Our own radar follows the enemy maneuvers and radar plot phones the information to the bridge. The Captain lends one ear to the voices and sounds in the wheel-house, the other to our conversation, as if he were carrying on two chess games. He delivers observations and directions to his officers in the pilot house in crisp staccato tones. When the cross talk in there gets to be a little hectic and confusing he barks, There is too much chatter going 125

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11:01 11:05 11:09 11:20 The Lexington opens fire. We change course. The moon is a blaze of brightness. Its broad glittering moonpath brings memories of a procession of other moon-nights . . . beginning far back in my teens . . . then in my twenties, when to me the moon and the moonlit scene were nature's supreme evocation of beauty, and the nocturne theme became the subject for many of my paintings. Another memory, strangely unrelated, brings up the vivid image of a farm tractor methodically rolling down my delphinium fields, the trailing disc-harrow chopping up the bloom spikes and churning them into the earth. Into this crazy-quilt pattern of memories, emotions, and reactions, flashes the thought that this very night's moon also bathes the hills and home in Connecticut . . . bathes them with a vast soft stillness. BOOM-BOGM-BQOM . . . BOP . . . ABLUMP . . . BUP-BUP-BUPBUPBUP . . . All hell is let loose around us. This moon is no neutral bystander, starkly it points out our ships to the enemy. I can see each unit of our task group, even the farthest carriers, as plainly as by daylight. Black black specks upon the ocher, green-gray tones of the sea, each unit of the fleet trailing a wake that makes a thin, sharp, screeching white line. Howl now hate that smooth bland moon, want to scratch it down, blast it to smithereens. A young officer reading and reporting the distance between us and the Yorktown mutters to himself Damn that moon. Intermittent firing in various quarters keeps on . . . my eyes follow the line of the tracer bullets like they follow color balls from roman candles on a Fourth of Iuly . . . I wish each roman-candle effect will reach and explode a lap plane. Sometimes a section of the sky is covered with colored ribbons made by the tracer shells. Four parachute flares drop almost directly ahead of us about five miles away. The flares slowly drop lower and lower, lighting up this area of the ocean in a new brilliance, with a sinking feeling comes the thought, now the covers are all off . . . we are naked and we'll have to fight it out with the bastards .... Strange satisfaction . . . this swearing E 125