The Big E: The Story of the USS Enterprise
by Edward P. Stafford
Dell, 1962, 512 pages
The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) participated in 20 of 22
major battles during the Pacific War. The exciting history of The Big E
describes the exploits of this aircraft carrier and her air group until she got knocked
out of the war by a kamikaze aircraft attack on May 14, 1945, during the Battle
of Okinawa. Enterprise and her air group downed a total of 911 Japanese
planes and sank 71 ships during the war.
The author Edward P. Stafford, after commanding a subchaser in World War II,
served as destroyer escort Abercrombie's First Lieutenant and later as
Executive Officer until May 1946, just before the ship was decommissioned. He
has authored other books including Far and the Deep: The Submarine from U-Boat to
Polaris (1967), Little Ship, Big War:
The Saga of DE343 (1986), and Subchaser (1988). His World War II
naval experience contributes to The Big E's realistic depictions of
battles and shipboard activities.
This classic ship history has been highly acclaimed since its original
publication in 1962 by Random House in hardback and Dell in paperback.
Ballantine published two separate editions in 1974 and 1980. As evidence of the
book's enduring popularity, the U.S. Naval Institute published new editions of
The Big E in 1988, 2002, and 2016. Although the 1962 Dell paperback
edition used for this book review lacks photos, more recent editions of the book
include photos. The Dell edition does have a map of the western Pacific Ocean to
show locations of significant actions of Enterprise during World War
II.
The Acknowledgments and Biographical Notes sections in back summarize
Stafford's meticulous research, which included examination of Enterprise's Deck Log and
official Action Reports and War Diaries. He also interviewed numerous former
officers, crewmen, and air group members. In addition, he used about 100
questionnaires returned based on a solicitation that was coordinated by the historical
board of the USS Enterprise Association in the years just after World War
II. The depth of the stories included in this history reflect Stafford's
comprehensive research. He focuses on the history of the ship and her air
group, and he does not mention many personal stories
The last chapter entitled "Tomi Zai" has four pages about the Japanese
kamikaze attack that heavily damaged Enterprise. The final moments are
described below (pp. 497-499):
But from the navigating bridge, as the pretty, deadly, brown-green Zeke
with the big bomb under its belly slanted down over the port quarter, it
looked as if he would overshoot and crash to starboard. The enemy pilot must
have thought so too, because halfway up the deck he rolled left through the
forward elevator. In the next split second, while the sounds of torn timbers
and tortured metal were still at crescendo, the bomb roared off five decks
down, and incredulous watchers on nearby ships saw the Big E's Number One
elevator, the cap of a heavy pillar of gray and white smoke, soar 400 feet
into the sky, hang for a second and fall back into the sea.
…
Enterprise was badly hurt. Fire towered redly under the black
smoke that filled the hole where the forward elevator had been. Flames
filled the forward end of the hangar deck and licked at the ammunition
supply for the forward five-inch guns on both sides. The flight deck was
blasted up three feet aft of the demolished elevator. Other fires smoldered
in clothing and bedding in the ruined officers' quarters around the elevator
pit. The gasoline system was wrecked, its pressure main crushed and three of
the four tanks leaking. The forward guns were out of action. There were
twenty-feet holes in her decks down to the third. Watertight integrity
forward was nonexistent. With her buckled deck and gaping elevator hole she
could no longer operate her planes. Worst of all, her holes and her smoke
marked her as a cripple for the other Kamikazes closing the force.
…
Seventeen minutes after she was hit, Enterprise had her fires
under control and in another thirteen minutes they were out. Never, during
that time, did she leave her assigned station in the formation. But she was
down seven feet by the bow and up three by the stern with the 2,000 tons of
water that had entered through the ruptured fire main and had been poured
onto her fires. Pumps of all kinds were rigged, and in thirty-six hours her
trim had been restored to normal.
The Big E, with her competence, had also had luck. The enemy bomb had
exploded in a storeroom full of baled rags, in the vicinity of stored sheets
of heavy steel hull plate, smothering a large part of the shrapnel. The
Number Two elevator had been in use at the time of the hit and the men who
would normally have been in the forward were well aft and out of the way.
Her casualties had been light for such heavy damage, thirteen killed and
sixty-eight wounded. Eight men who were blown overboard were promptly picked
up by the destroyer Waldron, some standing, comfortably drying out,
on a fifteen-foot section of the elevator.
For over 50 years, it was thought mistakenly that Enterprise had been
hit by a Zero fighter pilot named Tomi Zai. This name was determined incorrectly
from information found in a pocket when his body was found (p. 499). Kan Sugahara, a graduate in the 77th class at the Japanese Naval Academy at
Etajima, was instrumental in the determination of the correct identity of the
kamikaze pilot who hit the carrier Enterprise. He examined Japanese records of
Kamikaze Corps Zero fighter-bomber pilots who died on May 14, 1945, and
concluded that (Shunsuke) Tomiyasu had to be the same person named Tomi Zai by the
Americans based on the similarity of the kanji (Chinese characters) in the names
and based on Tomiyasu's sortie time from Kanoya Air Base. See web page on Shunsuke Tomiyasu
for related information.
On April 11, 1945, a Japanese Suisei Dive Bomber (Allied code name of Judy) hit Enterprise. The following paragraph describes the hit
(p. 486):
To the gunners in the two port quarter 40-millimeter mounts it seemed a
personal duel. The Judy was headed directly for them, desperately trying to
crush and burn the gun tubs full of sailors by his own death. They had
learned that their only chance was to take his plane apart with their
bullets before it reached them. They stuck to their weapons, hammering at
the Judy until it filled the world before them, hit and disintegrated in a
roar and blast and sudden silence like the end of the earth. A seaman was
blown overboard and two more fell with broken legs and arms. The Judy's wing
had hit between the two mounts. His engine dished in the hull plating, and
his bomb grazed the ship's side and detonated under the turn in the bilge,
shaking her as a terrier shakes a snake. Two hundred and twenty-five feet
from the explosion, high on the island a few feet forward of the mast, the
structural supports for the big SK air search radar were snapped, and it
ground to a stop. The yardarms whipped so violently that the starboard one
snapped off six feet from the end and fell, dangling by its guy wires and
fouling the surface search antenna. Four pedestal mounts for the propeller
shaft bearings were cracked. The after mounts of two of the four generators
were fractured. Mercury was washed out of the bowl of the master gyro
compass in Central Station, splashed onto electrical connections and badly
overloaded the circuits. Eight fuel tanks were ruptured, and 150 tons of
salt water flooded into the torpedo blister through the breaks in the skin
in the ship. A few guns lost electrical power. Loose gear flew, and secured
gear broke loose and fell on men below, as the massive flexural vibrations
whipped through the ship.
Stafford makes a few negative comments about Japanese kamikaze pilots that
reflect attitudes of many American veterans and citizens when the book was
published in 1962. For example, "There was something inhuman, something
homicidally insane, about the Kamikaze, which violated the instincts of the
American sailors" (p. 443). In another place, he refers to "fanatical,
half-trained pilots" in the Kamikaze Corps (p. 482).
In August 1945, Navy Secretary James Forrestal praised the aircraft carrier
Enterprise as "the one ship that most nearly symbolizes the history of
the Navy in this war." The many feats vividly described in The Big E demonstrate
why the ship deserved such acclaim.
Hardback cover of Random House's
original publication in 1962
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