Tillman - Enterprise : Americas fightingest ship and the men who helped win World War II

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To the carrier aviators, aircrewmen, and sailors of the U.S. Navy who fought and won the Second World War.

Eternal father, strong to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bidst the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

O hear us when we cry to thee,

For those in peril on the sea.

Lord, guard and guide the men who fly,

Through the great spaces of the sky;

Be with them always in the air,

In darkning storm or sunshine fair.

O hear us when we lift our prayer,

For those in peril in the air.

THE NAVY HYMN

Though naval usage employs nautical miles (1.15 statute miles), throughout the text distances are rendered in statute miles for a general readership.

Japanese aircraft code names appear throughout the book for the convenience of many readers. Zeke, Betty, Val, and other Allied names were assigned in late 1942 but are employed anachronistically here from Pearl Harbor onward.

Kearny, New Jersey, 1958

I n the tidal flats of the Hackensack River rested a warship waiting to die. She was the most honored man-o-war in her nations history. In the spring of 1958, however, USS Enterprise (CV-6) was just one more project in a long line of structures due for dismembering.

Lipsett Incorporated was vastly experienced in demolition. Among its credits were dismantling New York Citys Second Avenue and Third Avenue elevated lines, as well as many previous ships.

An obsolete aircraft carrier, Enterprise had been stricken from the Navys register in October 1956 and purchased for scrap. Lipsett reckoned that it could turn the half-million-dollar acquisition into a profit by rendering the ships components into salvageable materials.

The carriers distinctive tripod mast had been removed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, toppling onto the flight deck so she could clear the East River bridges en route to the Kearny, New Jersey, execution site. Propelled by tugs, Enterprise s final journey had taken her past Brooklyn Heights and Governors Island, southwesterly into Upper Bay, thence across to Jersey. Despite the foggy weather, thousands of people and scores of small craft had turned out to witness her dolorous trek.

Now, riding easily alongside Lipsetts pier, Enterprise was still intact, her cavernous hangar deck empty of men and aircraft. Only the large scoreboard depicting her wartime tally reminded visitors of what she had been, where she had sailed, and what she had done. She was already thoroughly demilitarized: her last aircraft gone since 1945; her antiaircraft batteries removed; her communications and radar equipment stripped away.

In her ready rooms, the chairs for pilots and aircrewmen stood empty, facing large blackboards still bearing grids for navigation, plane assignments, and weather data.

It was easy to think, Here there be ghosts.

Up in flag quarters Vice Admiral William F. Halsey had learned the stunning news of the Sunday surprise at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He had vowed that before he and Enterprise were finished the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.

On the after part of the flight deck, on February 1, 1942, a machinists mate had leapt into a parked dive-bomber and grasped a .30 caliber machine gun to shoot at a Japanese bomber bearing down upon the ship. His heroic initiative earned him aircrew statusand after the Battle of Midway, a terrible fate at the hands of his captors.

In a once boisterous ready room, Torpedo Squadron Six had been briefed for its disastrous date with glory on June 4, 1942. Fourteen Douglas Devastators had rumbled off the deck to attack the Japanese fleet threatening Midway: four returned, one so badly shot up that it was pushed overboard.

Portside aft was the landing signal officers platform where a darkly handsome lieutenant had delivered a virtuoso performance, bringing aboard plane after plane onto the increasingly crowded deck after bomb damage on October 26, 1942.

In the combat information center, specially trained officers and men had conducted the first generation of electronic warfare. Tracking phosphors on radar screens, they had conducted electronic triage, naming various blips as friendlies, bogies, and hostiles, taking appropriate action for each.

In the forward elevator well a Japanese pilot had plunged his Zero on May 14, 1945, killing himself and a dozen sailors and ending the Big Es combat career.

But all that was in the past now, fast disappearing in the memory of a nation bursting with excitement over the dawning space age, hula hoops, and television.

Disposal of the shipexpected to take eighteen monthswas placed in the hands of a master executioner. W. Henry Hoffman was a man of the sea. He had seen combat with the kaisers navy in the Great War, sailed in the Norwegian merchant marine, had taken himself to America where he demonstrated an intuitive grasp of engineering. Becoming a foreman on the New York subway system, he then returned to his nautical roots by joining Lipsett.

By 1958 Hoffman had dismantled three battleships and the luxury liner Normandie. With that extensive background, he brought to the task at hand an appreciation for the history inherent to every ship. His feelings for USS Enterprise were evident in the way he documented her destruction: Hoffman carefully recorded the process with 150 photographs, showing the phased reduction from a recognizable warship into 20,000 tons of scrap metal.

In 1959, before the project was finished, Hoffman donated the carriers stern plate, bearing her name, to the nearby township of River Vale, New Jersey.

Meanwhile, the process continued. The wooden flight deck was smashed to splinters by air hammers, permitting access to the cavernous hangar deck below. After the three aircraft elevators were cut up, work began dismantling the structure. It was a tricky job, as removing eight-by-forty-foot steel slabs affected the ships balance, and Lipsett devoutly wished to avoid capsizing the hulk. Alternately, large hunks of the bow and stern were severed, working toward the middle. Occasionally partial flooding of the hull preserved Enterprise s trim. Fifty-ton gantry cranes hoisted each slab sliced from the hull as the process continued day by day, month by month.

Where high-powered aircraft engines once had revved up, spinning three-bladed propellers; where antiaircraft guns had chattered and boomed at inbound attackers, another cacophony erupted. The hull was crisscrossed with air lines for pneumatic hammers that raised a din while oxy-acetylene torches gushed and sparked as they bit into tempered steel.

Enterprise s flight deck of Douglas fir was burned. Some profit was realized by stripping out miles of copper wiring and burning off the insulation so the base materials could be recycled.