Heroes: the U. S. Navy

 

"...The pilot of this particular Wildcat fighter was wounded, and he made a rough landing. He failed to de-activate the firing circuit and all six wing-mounted machine guns on the plane touched off, killing and wounding about twenty-five people. Among the dead was Lieutenant R. R. Ingersoll..."

 

 

image of american flag

 Alvin "Whitey" Grahn

 

  • Branch of Service: U. S. Navy
  • Unit: Served aboard battleship Tennessee, carriers Hornet and Princeton
  • Dates: 1937 - 1944
  • Location: Pacific Theater
  • Rank: Gunner's Mate First Class
  • Birth Year: 21 December 1916
  • Entered Service: Roseau, MN
  • 1957: Retired Chief Electrian's Mate
  •  

 

 

INCIDENT ABOARD THE HORNET

 

   The U.S. Navy labeled it "The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands." In a day-long aerial clash of arms, the Japanese Combined Fleet won a tactical victory over an American battle force half its size. But there was a butcher's bill to pay: one-hundred-and-forty-eight of Japan's most highly trained naval aviators and aircrew fell prey to the U.S. Navy carrier pilots and gunner's mates of Task Force 61.

   Alvin Grahn, a GM1 aboard USS Hornet (CV-8), remembers October 26, 1942 as a battle within a battle - a molten crucible in which his shipmates stayed the course and rowed the measured mile - and beyond.

   All shipmates, that is, but one.

 

 

 

   "Roseau, Minnesota. That's my birthplace, up near the Canadian border. Twelve, twenty-one, sixteen. Six boys and five girls in the family. In the eighth grade they turned the farm boys loose spring and fall to help with the fieldwork. My schooling stopped at age fourteen. By the time I was twenty I knew I had to get away. Signed on the dotted line May 4, 1937, in Minneapolis. Some time before, my father had made a visit to his native Sweden and he'd had a pretty rough ocean crossing both ways. When he found out I was going in the Navy he took me aside and said in Swedish: 'Son, you mustn't do that! You're going to spend all your days throwing up!'

   "I knew from nothing. Except one thing.I loved being a sailor. I mean, I embraced the Navy from day one. Norfolk, Virginia. Every white hat hates Norfolk. Hey-I loved Norfolk! I went straight to sea from Great Lakes boot camp, to the battleship Tennessee ported at San Pedro. One day we were steaming. I was shining brightwork. It's raining. Raining on my beautiful handiwork. The division officer, Lieutenant Levin, came by and I collared him. I told him I had to have a goal, something I could grab onto besides tarnished brass. Maybe my plea struck a soft spot, because all of a sudden he said, 'how would you like to become a turret striker?' My God! I was dumb-struck. It took three to four years to work your way to a billet in the gun turrets, and I'd been aboard less than a year. But I had an attitude-then and to this day. Whatever job I'm facing, I go after it with everything I have. Looking back, I think maybe my brightwork really stood out.

   "The next day I transferred into number two turret, forward. Wow!-was I in my element or what. My job was training the fourteen-inch guns. Henry Nelson was the turret captain, a great instructor and my mentor. What a crew. Fourteen guys moving like greased lightning.

   "A word about that number two turret. At Pearl Harbor on December seventh, a Jap bomb landed atop the center barrel of number two turret and exploded, killing the ship's commanding officer who was outside on the starboard bridge wing. I missed being there by about six weeks. If some of my old gunnery crew were in that turret, they probably got away with a mild concussion and counted themselves fortunate.

   "Anyway, sometime in 1940 the Navy decided the Tennessee needed anti-aircraft armament. We ended up with some miserable fifty-calibers left over from World War One. LOUD! Somebody needed to man them. Wylie Buchanan and I drew straws. Whitey Grahn got the short straw-but also advancement to second class gunner's mate. The guys in the division called me Whitey because my hair was as white as it is now, though I owned a bit more of it back then.

   "My enlistment was about over, and around that same time I heard that the Navy was re-activating a squadron of mothballed four-stack destroyers. I knew the head-hunters would be out combing the fleet for warm bodies. So what I needed was a plan of action, or else sure as hell I'd end up on one of those old tin cans the minute I re-enlisted.

   "So I got out of the Navy, went back home and had a glorious time for ninety days. Then I re-enlisted with my rating of Second Class Gunner's Mate. The Navy welcomed me back with open arms. What would I like? I said I wanted to be an underwater sailor. New London sub school, here I come. I tore into the training manuals. But it wasn't to be. Suddenly one day I was called to the yeoman's office. Grahn, pack your seabag. You're going to the aircraft carrier Hornet. Well, hallelujah!

 

USS Hornet (CV8) glides across San Francisco Bay in early 1941, following lengthy sea trials. She has yet to be fitted with her full armament of anti-aircraft weapons.


   "Everybody knows about the Doolittle raid, our first retaliation against the Japanese homeland after Pearl Harbor. We had sixteen B-25 bombers loaded aboard and ready to go. Our skipper, Marc Mitscher, was just as superstitious as any sailor. It's April Fool's Day, the ordered departure date. So he announced that we'd just stay tied up alongside the pier until the next day. No sense toying with fate.

   "After we cleared the Golden Gate Bridge, he came on the ship's loudspeakers and announced: 'Tokyo, here we come! Let's give it to 'em!' The day before takeoff there was a big ceremony on the flight deck and Jimmy Doolittle tied a bunch of honorary Japanese medals and ribbons to his bomb load. Postmaster! Return to sender!

   "The weather was rough and stormy. Doolittle launched first and circled the Hornet wiggling his wings. When we got to the next-to-last bomber, a friend of mine named Bob Wall was helping hold the plane's restraining ropes that had been untied from the deck. The ship's bow came climbing up the face of a big wave and as it started down the wave's backside, the bomber's nose wheel jumped up off the deck and Wall was yanked forward into a prop. An aerial gunner on the sixteenth plane, just behind, climbed down and dragged Wall out of the way. His left arm was gone at the shoulder, but Bob survived the accident.

   "With the last plane up and away, we reversed course and hauled ass for Pearl, flank speed. Mitscher was anxious to get provisioned. We were due to join a task force in the Coral Sea. But we missed the biggest part of that action by a couple days, and were ordered back to Pearl.

 


Marc Mitscher, pioneer naval aviator, was Hornet's first skipper and sailed her into Japanese waters to bomb Tokyo. He later commanded a number of carrier divisions and died at sea, a vice admiral, in 1947. Jimmy Doolittle, Medal of Honor winner, died in l993 at age 96 and is also buried in Arlington National Cemetery (composite photo via Juris Ozols).

 

   "Navy intelligence knew the Japs were planning to extend their outer ring of island defenses. We were reading a good bit of their coded radio traffic and the clues pointed to Midway. So the Hornet, Enterprise, Yorktown and Wasp headed for the island with five cruisers and a bunch of destroyers to meet the Jap invasion force. In the battle that followed, Hornet was very, very lucky not to be engaged by enemy aircraft. Torpedo Squadron Eight was decimated and the Yorktown sunk. Hornet recovered a number of her surviving aircraft. It was one of these aircraft that led to a series of events that-to my mind-led to the eventual destruction of the Hornet.

   The pilot of this particular Wildcat fighter was wounded, and he made a rough landing. He failed to de-activate the firing circuit and all six wing-mounted machine guns on the plane touched off, killing and wounding about twenty-five people. Among the dead was Lieutenant R. R. Ingersoll.

   "Lieutenant Ingersoll was a gunnery officer, with control over all the big guns aft of the island superstructure. When the plane bounced, it sprayed the island aft and Ingersoll caught a fifty-calibre round in the stomach. This man was everything an officer was supposed to be, and more. His father was an admiral, but that had nothing at all to do with my respect for him. In many ways he was an amazing individual, and I wasn't the only gunner who held him in high esteem. We buried him at sea that night, off the port side.

   "Ingersoll's replacement from the First Division was a jay-gee by the name of Wells. This officer was in charge of the radar-controlled guns aft of the island, which in this case were five-inch thirty-eights, the largest guns aboard and our long-range anti-aircraft defense. I'm not finished yet with Lieutenant Wells. I just want you to be prepared to meet him.


The American-designed, American-made "one-point-one" 28mm four-barreled quad, standard Navy issue since 1935. Grahn and others disliked the weapon because of operating problems that included excessive vibration and habitual jamming. Its rate of fire was only half that of the Oerlikon, hence the multiple barrels. By late 1943 it had been removed from all the Navy's major warships and largely replaced with the Swedish-designed 40mm quad Bofors.

 

   "My job was captain of the number two quad gun mount. Guns one and two were located on the flight deck just forward of the island structure. Numbers three and four were on the starboard side, just beside and aft of the island. All these guns were referred to as one-point-ones, and mounted four barrels. They were water-cooled and tended to jam when they got hot, which could make them useless after a few minutes of rapid fire. They were clip-fed, seven rounds to a clip. The shells exploded on impact.

 

Hornet carried more than a dozen Oerlikons (pom-poms) mounted along the portside catwalk. This Swiss-designed 20mm weapon was capable of firing 265 explosive cannon shells a minute. A three-man crew was customary.


   "The Oerlikons, on the other hand, were Swiss-made and very dependable. These guns were twenty-millimeter single-barrel weapons, fed from a large ammo drum. A dozen of these Oerlikons were mounted aft of the island, strung along the port side catwalk of the Hornet. The gunners' heads were just visible, sticking up above the edge of the flight deck. This tended to put them in harm's way if a plane's arresting cable broke, or from shrapnel should we happen to take a bomb hit on the flight deck.

   So let's sort out the three different calibers of guns. First, the five-inch thirty-eights, which were the most powerful and had the longest range. Then the cantankerous one-point-one quads, which reached out to around seven-thousand yards -- I was captain of one of these. And finally the single-barrel twenty-millimeter Oerlikons, for close-in work. When the sailors below decks learned to recognize their distinct firing sound -- pom-pom-pom-pom-pom -- they knew one or more of the attacking planes had broken through the Hornet's outer defenses and were closing fast on the ship. The quads and Oerlikons were entirely crew-controlled, while the five-inch thirty-eights were operated from two director stations located fore and aft of the island superstructure. As I mentioned before, all of the aft five-inch guns were under the control of Lieutenant Wells.


Scale model of Hornet's forward island structure includes a pair of 28mm (1.1) quad gun mounts. Grahn was gun captain of tub #2, closest to island (arrow). Together, the two guns flamed the "Val" dive bomber seen here attacking from overhead. The doomed aircraft continued down and plunged into the ship's interior (marked X). The plane's unarmed 500-pound bomb careened across the flight deck and fetched up under Grahn's gun tub, intact. The shrapnel splashes in the foreground are from an exploding 5-inch shell (black cloud) fired from the Hornet. (armorama.com/via Peter Van Buren)

 

   "And so after Midway we were steaming in force maybe a hundred miles southwest of the San Cristobal Islands, in support of the Guadalcanal landings. It was September 15, 1942. General quarters sounded and not seeing anything, I ran aft around the island structure. In the distance I saw the carrier Wasp, and she was all afire. Her lines were loaded with avgas and she was refueling planes. A Jap submarine put two torpedoes into her, missed with another two, and pretty soon it was the Hornet's turn. A second Jap sub was also lying in ambush just up the line.

   "The destroyer O'Brien spotted the fish meant for us. She raced ahead flank speed and just managed to catch the torpedo with her bow. That's what I saw, that's my interpretation. A deliberate intercept. It must have taken most of a minute for the tremendous column of water to subside. The sub got away, and believe it or not so did the O'Brien but minus her bow. Moments later, the battleship North Carolina also took a torpedo and limped off for repairs. And of course the Wasp went down, with a couple hundred dead and many hundreds wounded.

   "So now let's jump ahead a bit to The Battle of Santa Cruz. On the morning of twenty-six October, it was the Hornet's misfortune to find Lieutenant jay-gee Wells manning the aft fire-control director.

   "Around nine in the morning radar control picked up a single plane approaching from astern. At this time the carrier Enterprise was hidden in a rain squall some miles away, so the Hornet was the only American flattop visible from above.

   "After a few minutes, a single Japanese dive bomber broke out of the cloud cover. Just at this moment, Lieutenant Wells drove all of the five-inch thirty-eights under his control into the stops. Into the stops! Five of our most lethal guns now sat with their barrels locked in place. They would have made mincemeat out of that plane.

   "The bomber came down and dropped its ordnance dead center on the flight deck aft. Now the Hornet was no longer an aircraft carrier. It could not fly or land its planes. The Hornet's fighter cover, whose job it was to protect us from aerial attack, now had to fly to the carrier Enterprise to refuel and rearm. This meant the Hornet was left naked and exposed to more than a hundred planes from the Jap carriers.

   "You won't find it in any combat report, but here's what happened next. When the smoke cleared, some of the five-inch gun captains left their station and made their way through the debris on the flight deck to the after-director. Every gun captain wore a forty-five automatic on his belt as a badge of authority. None of these side arms were loaded-as I said, they were only symbolic. A couple of the gun captains had the same thought in mind-to kill this son-of-a-bitch. One gunner-Tom was his name, from New Orleans- told me he actually pointed his pistol at Wells. An assassination! Too bad! Too bad! (subject becomes visibly agitated, jumps up from his chair). Lieutenant Ingersoll was dead-and this fool Wells was alive!

   "Lieutenant Wells had long before proved himself a bad apple. Just for instance, if he happened to notice somebody climbing up the captain's ladder, he would shout at them to get the hell off, that it was reserved for the ship's captain. It happened to me once, and I ended up at captain's mast. Stuff like that. But who could have guessed these were warning signs leading to something worse-that this Annapolis graduate was capable of disabling the ship's biggest guns in a moment of peril. Believe you me, the gun captains took this very, very personal. All his training, everything-right out the window. One Jap plane, and Wells just froze up. Total paralysis. Among so many brave men, he was a total misfit. And later on, he had the gall to write a letter to every member of the first division, praising them for their heroic actions that day aboard the Hornet. Does that tell you what kind of person he was? I can just imagine how proud the boys were to receive that letter of commendation, signed by none other than the fearless Lieutenant Wells. And how was it, they all wondered, that he failed to show up later at any of the Hornet reunions so they could thank him in person?

   "We fought the Hornet hard. Just kept trying to beat back one attack after the other. Dive bombers, torpedo planes and everything all mixed together. Then in the early afternoon we spotted a group of about six land-based high-level bombers approaching the port side at around 15,000 feet. Through my binoculars I saw the bomb bays open and almost immediately the bombs came tumbling out. Hornet was dead in the water and I thought, well, we've bought the farm. My one-point-one gun mount opened up even though the planes were beyond range-it was more of a defensive reflex. Those six bombs just about drowned us in columns of water. I couldn't honestly tell you if any landed aboard or not.

   Whenever I could, I left my post to help out. One time I came across Lieutenant Wells lying face down amongst the dead and dying. Some on stretchers, others mixed up in the wreckage. And I thought, you (deleted), you got yours. I rolled him over and it was somebody else.

   "Another time I made my way aft of the island to the number three gun turret and as I rounded the tub I came upon the gun captain, a marine. He was on his back and his left foot was missing and he was making the sign of the cross. And he died. Then the quartermaster-how he ever got down from the bridge I don't know. Ohhh-so burned. He begged me to take off his dog tags which he had made into a bracelet, said it was hurting his wrist something terrible. As I was removing the tag, a Jap Zero that was providing fighter cover for the attacking torpedo bombers came down and started shooting up the flight deck where all the wounded were laid out. I took off on a dead run back to my gun station. A couple days later I found the dog tag in my pocket and it dawned on me that without that tag the medics couldn't determine his blood type for a live-saving transfusion. I kept asking around among the survivors and finally found out he'd passed away after being transferred to a rescue destroyer. Imagine my guilt.

   "During these attacks we needed extra ammo handlers to feed the guns. After we lost power, all the five-inch guns had to be trained and fired manually. Lieutenant-Commander Smith, the assistant gunnery officer, came by and wanted to know how many rounds my crew had shot off. I told him I hadn't the faintest notion. There were so many fires going on around us that we kicked the live ammo out of the hot spots along with the empty brass just to be on the safe side. Now, for some reason the number fifty-nine sticks in my head. That's the number of planes that were counted that attacked the Hornet.

   But who really knows. Though I sure remember the one that almost got me and my crew.

 


A "Kate" naval torpedo bomber from the Jap carrier Shokaku eludes the gunfire of Northampton and bears down on the carrier Hornet. During the Santa Cruz engagement, the cruiser made three failed attempts to tow disabled Hornet to safety.

 

"This Jap dive bomber flew right above the ship and then tipped over at about four or five thousand feet and came almost straight down. We flamed him but he kept right on course. It looked like he was going to dive down the ship's stack. But instead he hit the signal bridge and killed everyone on it, then slammed through the deck into one of the pilots' ready-rooms below. I looked down into the hole and saw the tail of the plane engulfed in fire. His bomb busted loose and rolled around and ended up under my gun mount, but it never went off because it hadn't armed.

   "My buddy Dan Chandler. You gotta know about him. Gunner's mate second. He was the captain of mount number five. This one-point-one quad was rigged just under the flight deck on the very bow of the Hornet.

   "With our air cover gone, the Japs had it pretty much their own way. Dive bombers and torpedo planes, like I say all mixed up. There were destroyers and cruisers zig-zagging all over the place and firing their guns like mad, and the Jap torpedo bombers had trouble trying to line up on the Hornet with so many other vessels in the way. The torpedo planes finally were able to find an opening along our starboard side and that's when we really caught hell. One of them dropped a torpedo and then swooped up and over the flight deck. Somebody hit him good and he caught fire. Just a mass of flames, with the landing gear falling off and all. The pilot layed his plane right over and made a tight circle and came back and smashed into the port side just aft of Dan's gun station. How Dan and his crew escaped the fireball is beyond my understanding. The plane's engine and fuselage penetrated four or five staterooms and kept right on going and ended up in the forward elevator pit. All this punishment left us without power or water pressure, dead in the water and fighting fires with bucket brigades. I think in all we took seven aerial torpedoes and for sure that many bombs, and probably more.

   "The Enterprise was ordered to depart the battle scene with all the surviving aircraft, leaving us with a few heavy cruisers and destroyers for protection. Twice the cruiser Northampton tried to tow us. The last torpedo to hit Hornet happened when she was under tow, giving her a very bad list. By early afternoon the word went out to abandon ship, now that all the wounded had been removed. A Jap task force was reported headed our way. Of course, none of those still on board knew anything about what was happening except that the fires were finally out and we were still afloat.

   "Twice my gun crew refused to leave its station and jump aboard the rescue destroyers which had come alongside. By seven o'clock the Hornet was pretty much a deserted ship.

   "Around that time I remembered my sweetheart's engagement and wedding rings were still in my locker. In Honolulu, I came up forty bucks short of the rings' purchase price and borrowed that amount from Dan Chandler. I was hoping that Norma would say yes, when the time came to pop the question. So I went below decks and retrieved the rings. This took quite a while and when I came back topside all my gun crew was gone. I took a quick walk around and couldn't find anybody.

   "I went down along the port side and found a lifeline and that's how I got off the ship. I may have been the last man alive off the Hornet, but I'm not making the claim. What I do know is, the Hornet's captain beat me off the ship by a couple hours.

   "Between attacks throughout the day, a couple destroyers circled around picking men out of the water. But now I was in the water all alone and couldn't see a solitary ship in any direction. All the while I kept patting my pants pocket to make sure the little ring box was still there and hadn't floated off. I paddled around in my life jacket for about forty-five minutes, trying to keep my mind off the sharks. Then suddenly this destroyer came out of nowhere and spotted me. I believe it was close to nine o'clock. I swam to the stern and a couple guys grabbed me and hauled me up. And this voice says: 'Damn it, Whitey, where in hell is my forty bucks!'

   "I said 'Chandler, you know darn well I don't have any money.' And this sailor from the Morris - the destroyer that picked me up-he says, I'll give you forty bucks for your pistol and holster. So I said OK, and this guy hands me the money and I fork over the gun. Then Dan says to the guy, I'll roll you one time, forty bucks. Dan must have been feeling lucky, and thought he could double his money. Out comes a pair of dice and this guy from the Morris wins the roll. Dan grabs the forty bucks out of my hand, and the Morris guy grabs the money out of Dan's hand, and that's how a perfect stranger ended up with both my money and my gun.

   Can you believe Dan and I were the only two Hornet crew members on the Morris? Out of nearly three-thousand men rescued by the various ships? At the Hornet reunion in 1994 in Portland, I reminded Dan of all this and he couldn't recall a bit of it. And he kept saying 'Damn it Whitey, where is my forty bucks?'

   "Pretty soon the destroyers Anderson and Mustin show up. Sink the Hornet! Mustin fires away with her torpedoes, then its Anderson's turn. American torpedoes weren't much good in the early days of the war. Which was pretty frustrating. Then both destroyers open up with their five-inch deck guns. They fired more than four hundred rounds. Pretty soon the Hornet is burning stem to stern. When the flames reach the flight deck, the anti-aircraft guns start to cook off and begin firing their ammo into the night sky. The admiral on the cruiser Pensacola, Rear Admiral Murray, he sees this and cries out -'Look, somebody is still aboard the Hornet and they're firing the guns!'

   "Soon after, the Japs are spotted headed our way with a destroyer squadron. They're hoping to tow the Hornet back to Japan-sweet revenge for them. They find the Americans gone and the Hornet a blazing wreck. Four Jap destroyer torpedoes are fired at the Hornet, and down goes their grand prize. In sixteen-thousand feet of water. And of all things, don't you know it was an hour after midnite, October 27, which is Navy Day.

   "Next day the Morris put us ashore at Noumea, New Caledonia, a French protectorate. Some natives invited us to go wild boar hunting. They even loaned us hunting rifles. Nobody could understand anything anybody was saying, but who cares. We had a great time even though we never saw a pig. I remember it to this day because it stood in such complete contrast to the hell we'd just been through.

   "The Navy sent the Hornet survivors home in style. The SS Lurline was a cruise ship on loan to the military. What a beautiful eight-day cruise that was-first class all the way to San Diego.

   "Norma and I were married in Las Vegas on November 22, 1942. After I was assigned to the carrier Princeton, Norma's sister came out to Philadelphia and I told her there were two guys I wanted her to meet, and to pick out the one she wanted. And she said 'Hey, I'm a school teacher from Iowa and my name is Shirley. And I will never marry a sailor.' I said 'Look, just meet these guys and you'll change your mind.' My favorite candidate was Paul Jackson, another gunner's mate on the Princeton. A guy a lot like myself. So they meet. They get married. Norma and I went with the bride and groom on their honeymoon. Why? Because she didn't know him very well! (laughs). That's the honest-to-God's truth. We had a beautiful honeymoon. And just like Norma and me, Paul and Shirley are still married after more than sixty years and live in Wilmington, Massachusetts.

   "So I spent the next year and a half on the Princeton, but I wasn't learning anything. Then a draft came through, ordering the Princeton to transfer one first class gunner's mate to hydraulic gunnery school at Washington, DC. I went to see Commander Kelliher, the gunnery officer, and we sat around his quarters one evening over a quart of whiskey while I did my best to convince him I was the deserving candidate. The more whiskey that was dispensed, the more he warmed to the idea.

   "At one of the early Princeton reunions I told him - 'Commander, when you signed that transfer chit, you saved my life.' And that makes him the nicest guy in the world that I know. Because I know in my heart I would have gone back aboard Princeton to help fight those awful fires just before the big explosion that sent the bow one way and the stern the other, killing all those hundreds of men.

   "And Mr. Kelliher, he smiled and said it was nothing special, that he was just doing his duty.

_________________________________________________

 

   After the war, Chief Gunner's Mate Grahn became Chief Electrician Grahn and spent most of his remaining time-in-service as an instructor. He and his wife Norma raised two daughters and two sons, one of whom flew more than 300 combat missions as an Air Force pilot in Vietnam. Retiring in 1957 after twenty years active duty, Grahn went on to earn a degree in education, then taught both mathematics and electronics at Portland Community College for nearly two decades. The Grahns now make their home in Woodburn, Oregon. In their beautifully landscaped back yard is a floatation life ring from the USS Hornet (CV-8). Weathered and scarred - like some of Hornet's survivors - it hangs beneath a Japanese Kwanzan cherry tree.

 


Al Grahn retrieved his sweetheart's engagement and wedding rings from his locker below decks, then abandoned the Hornet (he thinks he may have been the last man off the ship). Sixty-two years later, he still has the cotton-stuffed empty ring box - and wife Norma still wears the rings.

 


Gunner's Mate Alvin Grahn., veteran of the carriers Hornet and Princeton and a twenty-year Navy man. Now a sprightly 87, he enjoyed a second career as Professor Grahn and retired 22 years ago. This souvenir from Hornet was a gift from his two sons and helps decorate the backyard.

 

 

A very special THANK YOU is extended to Mr. Alvin Grahn for his kind and generous permission to use the materials contained on this web page. Stories such as this story go a long way in preserving yet another piece of the overall picture that was World War II.

Also, a special THANK YOU for Mr. Earle "Tony" Welch for his efforts in bringing this story to light and for his continued contributions to our WWII oral history project.

 

Some web sites that are about the U.S.S. Hornet (CV-8) and related material:

USS Hornet CV-8

U.S. Navy - A Brief History of the Aircrat Carriers -- USS Hornet (CV 8)

USN Ships -- USS Hornet (CV-8)

HyperWar: USS Hornet (CV-8)

Doolittle's Raiders and the Story of the USS Hornet

CV-8 USS Hornet

USS Hornet by Dan Hamilton (Trumpeter 1/350)

The USS Hornet & a B25-Doolittle Raiders

National World War II Memorial

American Battle Monuments Commission: WWII Honor Roll

WWII Hero Interviews

 

 

Original Story submitted 17 July 2004.

Story updated on 17 July 2004