Ira Wolfert - Torpedo 8 The Story of Swede Larsens Bomber Squadron

THE JAPS WIPED OUT THE UNITED STATES NAVY Torpedo Squadron 8 in a few minutes at the Battle of Midway. The minutes were hot and rough. The squadron was like a raw egg thrown into an electric fan, and only three men came out of the action alive. One of these is no longer fit for combat duty. His nerves are gone. They became unstrung in those few minutes, and in the ten months since then he has not been able to get them working again normally, although he has been out on the line trying his best, refusing painfully to give up.

Our Navy, too, has wiped out whole Jap squadrons in a few rough, hot minutes, and there has always been great curiosity on our part as to how the Jap airmen left to carry on were taking it. When, as happened late in October over Guadalcanal, two Jap squadrons of high level bombers took off for a routine bombing of a not especially important target and only a single airplane returned; when, a few days later, Jap torpedo bombers launched an attack on the carrier Hornet with nearly as many torpedo planes as they had used against the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor December 7, and not a single airplane survived; when, two weeks later, two squadrons of Jap torpedo planes, a force as large as the one used at Pearl Harbor, were destroyed to the last plane in a few seconds more than nine minutes when these hammer blows fell, how did the comrades of the dead feel, the men who had to step into the dead mens shoes and follow down their awful path? What was their reaction when they heard this news and how did they feel when they were ordered into similar planes and locked themselves in to take off on similar missions? Did they have left in them any of the confidence in survival necessary for the efficient operation of complicated machinery and necessary for the pressing home of an attack? Or did they have in them the unnerving efficiency-destroying emotions of men ordered to commit suicide and determined to commit suicide?

We wanted to know. We were most anxious to know, and on November 12, toward the end of a bloody afternoon on Guadalcanal, we found out. That was the day two squadrons of Jap torpedo bombers were obliterated. Two young Jap airmen had managed to live unhurt through the destruction of their plane and had been taken prisoner. They were both asked how they had felt when twenty-five bombers were sent out and one came back, when twenty Zeros were sent out and none came back, when thirty-three planes were sent out and only one came back, when, day after day, on mission after mission, it was only the odd planes that survived. They answered with enough difference to show that they had not been coached and that they were answering honestly, to the best of their ability. They did not blame their planes, their training, or their officers, or develop any great fear of us. Instead, each said he felt, as all Jap airmen felt, that the dead were responsible for their own deaths, they had not done their work properly,

Americans do not blame the dead for their deaths. Our traditions and teachings are against it. The Fascists and the Japanese are purer Fascists than the Germans or Italians, each of whom has had something of a democratic tradition cannot seem to conceive of their state or their superiors being wrong, but automatically think of themselves as being wrong. So they blame their dead for having died. But we, as democrats, have too much respect for the individual man to blame, without overwhelming evidence, our dead for having died. This reaction is as automatic in us as the Fascist reaction is in them. Also, we are too realistic and too sensitive to the worth of each individual man to accept a state or those in authority over us as being infallible. Nor do we have any inclinations for suicide or for suicidal actions in war. Our traditions, our teaching, and the whole American temperament are all against such antics.

So, when Torpedo 8 was wiped out on Thursday morning, June 4, 1942, in about the time it takes to stamp out a pile of ants, it looked to those of us on the outside as if torpedo bombing were about to become a lost art. That, those of us on the outside felt, was too bad because no man has ever thought of a more devastating weapon against a ship at sea than a torpedo, and the airplane has numerous magnificent advantages over the submarine and the destroyer in delivering torpedoes. But it is against our idea of how to fight a war to buy expensive planes for one-way rides and send men out who know they have no chance to come back. We are against it, if for no other reason than that it is inefficient. So, goodbye to torpedo plane. We on the outside consigned them to that grave for dead notions already occupied by the man-steered torpedoes the Italians had developed with such poor results.

But the Navy did not agree. Nor did Torpedo 8 agree. The Navy seemed to know without asking that Torpedo 8 would not feel this way, for, without being asked, Torpedo 8 was thrown directly from Midway into the Battle for the Solomons a series of engagements into which the Japs put about five times the naval strength they used at Midway, and much more naval strength than they used against the Malay Peninsula and Java.

Torpedo 8 went into the battle with two veterans of Midway, plus remnants of the old squadron who had not got into the action there, and plus replacements, as they are called. They did not, as the Japs do, blame their dead for having died. They wanted revenge for them. Up to Midway, the slogan of the squadron had been Attack. On June 12, eight days after the holocaust at Midway, the squadron commander in an official squadron memorandum changed the slogan to: Attack and Vengeance!

These deadly young Americans, committed like characters in romantic fiction to revenge for their dead comrades, exacted a vengeance greater than any fiction writer would dare imagine. In three months and one week, they carried out thirty-nine attack missions, sixteen against ships, twenty-three against ground targets. They were credited with two carriers. They also hit a battleship, five heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, one destroyer, and one transport. The Japs they killed to make up for their forty-two dead at Midway cannot be counted accurately, but must run into the thousands. They fought the enemys ships, planes, and troops. They strafed, and did dog-fighting. When there were no Jap ships to torpedo, they glide-bombed Japs on the ground. When the Japs blew up all their planes, and they had to wait for more to be sent, they took tommy-guns and rifles and helped the Marines hold the line, and when they were relieved there they went out sniper hunting, and found snipers and killed them.