Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

“Pilots, man your planes! Thach, take thirteen, Sellstrom in number two, O’Hare in fifteen, and Dufilho in four!”

The microphones from the radar room and the tower had been routed directly to the topside loudspeakers, and an operator’s voice blared out:

“Contact! I’ve got a contact! Bogies inbound, forty-seven miles west!”

Butch and Duff had been ordered to man the last two F4F Wildcats on the deck and given call-signs of Raven 5 and 6. After a last confirmation of orders both men were soon squeezing into their narrow cockpits.

“That contact,” Butch shouted back over the rising noise, “is that the same one our boys have already gone after? Or another one?”

“Do I look like I know?” Duff yelled forward. “Just strap in, cross your fingers, and get her ready to roll!”

The last plane from the previous patrol had finally caught a cable and was down, and the desperate front-to-back respotting began again. Butch looked to the storm-darkened sky and saw a stuttering exchange of tracers from machine-gun fire lighting up the distant clouds.

He put on his headset, got the signal, and called out ahead to clear the nearby crew. As he started up his engine and ticked through his preflight checklist, the radio told him what was happening up there: A formation of nine Japanese bombers had been found heading straight for Task Force 11. The latest patrol was doing all they could to shoot them down before they got close enough to drop their deadly load.

That created another emergency. The deck of the Lexington was crowded with fully fueled aircraft, a prime target for incoming bombers. The planes on the deck were the scouts, torpedo planes, and land attack craft meant for the raid on Rabaul. But they were useless now; the only thing needed in the air right then were fighters.

And there were only two of them left. Butch and Duff were sitting in those fighters, last in line to depart. They could only sweat it out and wait their turn as the rest of the vulnerable inventory was launched, one by one, into the relative safety of the open air.

The action in the sky was now close enough to see with the naked eye. A couple of enemy bombers had already spiraled into the sea, and now another one, the lead plane of the Japanese formation, was on fire and badly disabled—but it was still homing in on the carrier.

Thundering anti-aircraft guns cut loose from the Lex and the surrounding cruisers and destroyers, filling the attacker’s flight path with flak and blooming black bursts of shrapnel. But the plane kept coming. There was nothing left to do but watch as the flaming twin-engine bomber leveled, descended, and approached with suicidal intent, its pilot obviously struggling to hold his course on a kamikaze run toward the carrier deck.

At last focused gunfire tore through the cockpit and destroyed some final, vital system. The shredded enemy bomber lurched and snap-rolled into a screaming, careening, knife-edge pass and disappeared just shy of the hull of the carrier. It had only missed its mark by a stone’s throw as it crashed into the churning water beside the vessel.

Butch looked back to the runway. There was only one departing plane left in front of him, and Duff, in the last ready fighter, was the only backup behind him. He tuned his engine and ran it up to begin his taxi, pulling the canopy forward and closed. Soon the flag dropped to send him barreling down the white line behind 1,200 horsepower, and he was off like a homesick angel.

As soon as airspeed allowed, he banked into a climb toward his hastily assigned coordinates, fighting against buffeting winds as he cranked the heavy handle beside his leg thirty-two times in order to pull up the landing gear.

Manual retracts were one of the many pains-in-the-butt of this aging airframe. But what the Wildcat lacked in other areas, it made up for in pure iron guts and toughness. Butch had seen one of these birds come back from a sortie with more than five hundred bullet holes, perforated from end to end, and it was still out fighting again the next day.

By the time the wheels were up and locked Butch was nearly at altitude. He banked again onto a heading toward the aerial battle, which was now taking place well within sight of the American ships.

As his wingman joined alongside, Butch saw more enemy planes going down in the distance. Some of the survivors had dropped their bombs even as they struggled to evade the fleet’s defenders. So far those falling salvos were missing their targets by a comfortable margin.

Within seconds the few remaining Japanese bombers were breaking formation and scattering. Those that were able were bugging out and heading home defeated, with American fighters hot on their tails.

Butch keyed the radio.

“Raven Six, this is Raven Five. Duff, let’s have a gun check.”

“Roger that, though I don’t know why the hell we’d go to the trouble. Looks like we missed the party again.”

“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride,” Butch replied. Duff was right; by then the sky was empty and the high-speed chases had already disappeared from view. Nevertheless, procedure was procedure. He flipped on his illuminated sights, charged his guns, and fired a quick test burst from the four .50-caliber cannons mounted on his wings.

“Hey, Butch,” Duff radioed, forgoing the call-signs. “I’ve got a little problem over here—”

His wingman’s voice was abruptly cut off by a shouted transmission from the Lexington ’s tower.

“ Raven Five and Six and all available, we have bogies inbound, repeat, bogies are inbound from the east at— ” The remaining words were obscured by a sharp crackle of static, maybe the interference of a stroke of lightning from one of the surrounding storms.

“Lexington, this is Raven Five,” Butch answered. “Say again, say again from ‘inbound.’ Did you say fifty miles out?”

“Raven Five, I said fifteen miles , one-five, large radar contact at your three o’clock low. Check that range, now twelve miles, twelve miles, it looks like a second damned full formation and she’s right on top of us, inbound dead astern at angels niner and descending!”

Twelve miles .

Butch checked his own coordinates as he did the math. Whatever was there was only a couple of minutes from the undefended flank of the task force—and, by his rough calculations, only a few thousand feet directly below his current position.

He pushed the nose down, Duff still on his wing, and soon, as he settled through a thick bank of haze and rainclouds, there they were.

Six—no, eight Japanese twin-engine land attack bombers—“Bettys,” as they were called in the briefings—were lined up on Task Force 11 in a tight formation, clearly on the final leg of an uncontested bombing run.

In the flurry of radio traffic during his descent, one thing became clear as a heart attack: No other fighters were anywhere near close enough to help in time. And while Duff was still with him, that problem he’d mentioned before was a fatal one: His guns were all jammed and he couldn’t fire a shot.

Butch was flying the only armed plane left in the sky—with a mere thirty-four seconds of live ammunition—the last man standing between that squadron of enemy bombers and the thousands of sailors and airmen below.

If this had been the Japanese plan all along, they’d executed it perfectly. They’d taken some losses, but they’d also drawn away every defending aircraft from Task Force 11 and left the door wide open for a devastating strike that could send several ships, including a U.S. carrier, straight to the bottom. Their victory was just ahead, and there was nothing the Americans could do to stop it.

Like hell , Butch thought.