Kamikaze
   Images


Only search Kamikaze Images

 
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