Smiley

Friday, 29 May 1942
USS Chaumont
Torpedo Squadron Eight

His first glimpse of the Hawaiian Islands was just a distant smudge on the sun-splashed sea, but it was enough for him to feel a shiver of excitement. Like many of the Navy pilots crossing the Pacific on the military transport Chaumont, twenty-four-year-old Ensign Corwin F. Morgan of Tampa, Florida, savored the prospect of high adventure awaiting him aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet.

They called him Smiley.

With his rugged, square-jawed face, he didn’t look like a Smiley, and he didn’t smile more than any other pilot in Torpedo Squadron Eight. Morgan had earned his enduring nickname at a poker game back in Norfolk, Virginia, after joining the torpedo squadron shortly before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Rain had washed out the afternoon’s training flights, and a group of pilots had started playing poker. The game went on most of the night. Morgan was an inspired gambler, and had won more than two hundred dollars when someone started dealing blackjack and he encountered a run of terrible cards, losing hand after hand. The sudden twist of luck struck him as absurd, and he couldn’t stop grinning as he gave back half of what he had won.

“I can’t believe you, Morgan,” said James Hill Cook, the boyish-looking Southerner with the deep drawl from Grand Cane, Louisiana.  “You smile when you win and you smile when you lose. From now on, I’m calling you Smiley.”

The name stuck.

Smiley Morgan had grown up in Richmond, Missouri, the self proclaimed mushroom capital of the world. His father was the local veterinarian. One summer afternoon the boy had been dozing near a swimming hole at his grandfather’s farm when he happened to gaze up and notice a flight of barnstormers doing loops and barrel rolls over the county fairgrounds a couple miles away. Like a youth answering a religious calling, he had tramped through cornfields and pastures until he finally reached the fairgrounds, where he stood mesmerized next to his first airplane.

At the University of Florida in Gainesville, he proved to be an exceptional athlete, and a not-so-motivated student. Before he dropped out of college, he joined the Civilian Pilot Training Program and earned his flying license. Deciding to join the Navy, he was accepted for flight training. After he won his wings in Pensacola, Florida, Morgan was assigned to Torpedo Squadron Eight in Norfolk, Virginia.

When he arrived at East Field in Norfolk, he was told to report to the squadron’s commanding officer. Lieutenant Commander John Waldron had just returned from a training flight, and was still wearing his flight suit. He kept Morgan standing at attention in his office while he quickly signed a batch of papers. Looking down at Waldron as he worked, Smiley thought he looked old enough to be his father, and then some.

“Ensign,” said Waldron without looking up, “I am going to give you your first duty in this squadron. Go over to the blackboard and print your name.”

Smiley wrote, “Corwin F. Morgan.”

Standing up, Waldron repeated it aloud and came over to shake his hand. His fierce-looking face looked gaunt. The imprint of flying goggles was etched on his cheeks.

There was a lot for him to learn about flying a torpedo plane, he said, and he would have to work hard to master it all. They started every morning before dawn, and worked until well after dark.  “Welcome to the outfit,” he concluded.

That was one of the few times Smiley ever talked to the Skipper alone. Nine days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. From then on, Waldron ran the squadron like there was no tomorrow, seven days a week without letup. Smiley had never worked harder in his life. As the months passed, he began to feel a deep sense of pride at having mastered flying in every kind of weather and at all hours of the day and night.

Now he was on his way to war.

There had been little for the pilots to do aboard the Chaumont as it crossed the Pacific. During the day, they sunbathed on deck, ate their meals in the wardroom, exercised, studied torpedo attack problems, and read the dog-eared books and old magazines in the small wardroom library.

After dark, the ship was always blacked out in case a Japanese submarine lurked in their path. Morgan spent most of the night hours on the fantail with his friend Ensign John Taurman, a big, easygoing pilot from Cincinnati, Ohio. The two of them would sit against a stanchion, gazing backward as the ship’s wake cut a crystal path behind them in the roiling sea, wondering what would await them when they finally arrived at Pearl Harbor.

Torpedo Squadron Eight had been temporarily split in half back in Norfolk. In early March 1942, Lieutenant Commander Waldron and most of the senior pilots had gone to sea aboard the carrier Hornet, sailing for the West Coast via the Panama Canal, after which the carrier headed out to the Pacific to engage the Japanese. Waldron’s squadron was equipped with the Navy’s outmoded torpedo plane, the Douglas TBD Devastator.

The second half of the squadron had stayed behind in Norfolk to receive delivery of the Navy’s brand-new torpedo attack plane, the Grumman TBF Avenger. After the new planes had been flight-tested, Smiley and the rest of the pilots had flown them across the United States. In San Francisco, the crews and their aircraft had been put aboard fast transport ships. Their goal was to catch up to the Hornet before the next big battle against the Japanese.

The sea was almost flat calm as the Chaumont finally turned for the final leg of the passage between Molokai and Oahu, the islands lush and inviting beneath green mountains under the midday sun.

All of the pilots crowded the deck railing to get their first look at Pearl Harbor. Like the others, the twenty-four-year-old Morgan had seen the newspaper and magazine photographs of the devastation caused by the Japanese attack less than six months earlier. He thought he was prepared for what they would see. He was wrong. 

After passing through the submarine nets protecting the entrance to the harbor, the Chaumont steamed slowly past Battleship Row.  Lying upside down at one mooring, the capsized Oklahoma was dull brown in the sunlight. More than two football fields long, its rust covered hull rose above the oily surface like a humpback whale. Next in line lay the battleship West Virginia, which had sunk at its mooring after taking six torpedoes and two armor-piercing bombs. 

Farther down the anchorage, a small utility vessel was tethered next to the shattered wreck of the Arizona, its work party of salvage divers trying to start a gas engine suction pump. 

What remained of the Arizona’s superstructure above the waterline was nothing more than a rusting mass of battered metal. The officers’ boisterous shouting suddenly ceased, and they sailed slowly past it in awestruck silence. If there was any lingering doubt about what they were fighting for, it ended there.

When the breeze dropped, Morgan smelled the reek of crude oil mixed with the fetid water seeping out of the ships. Along with the stench of the oil, he could smell something else. 

“Hundreds of guys never made it out of the ships,” said one of the officers at the deck railing. “They’re all still down there.”

Beyond the ships, the cluttered shoreline was fouled by almost a foot of sludge. A slew of dead birds were snared in the coils of barbed wire that had been strung along the beach in the days after the attack.

Suddenly, another shout went up and Morgan turned in time to see a gigantic aircraft carrier towering high above one of the Pearl Harbor dry docks. At ten stories, the ship’s island almost blocked out the landscape.Hundreds of workers were swarming over her, the flash of their torches arcing brightly across the water. Along with the welders and steamfitters, Morgan could see electricians crawling past fire-blistered hatches and torn bulkheads, and dragging heavy electrical cables behind them. It reminded him of the scene in Gulliver’s Travels in which the Lilliputians frantically tied down the giant with heavy hawsers.

 “It’s the Yorktown,” someone shouted as the Chaumont nosed into its pier at Ford Island and came to a stop. 

The Yorktown was one of the three American carriers left in the Central Pacific after the Japanese had sunk the Lexington a month earlier. But where were the Hornet and the Enterprise? Morgan wondered as he anxiously scanned the rest of the anchorage. The other two carriers weren’t in sight.

Across the dock, antiaircraft batteries were dug in behind mounds of sandbags. Armed military policemen carrying gas masks were manning a roadblock at the gatepost to Luke Airfield, which occupied most of Ford Island.

Carrying their overseas bags, the seventeen pilots of Torpedo Squadron Eight disembarked from the ship. Lieutenant Harold “Swede” Larsen, the strapping blond Annapolis graduate temporarily in command, was waiting for them near the foot of the gangway with Lieutenant Langdon Fieberling, the second-highest-ranking officer in their detachment. The pilots gathered in a loose circle. 

Larsen told Fieberling to take them over to the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters and wait for him there, while he went to find out where Lieutenant Commander Waldron and the rest of the squadron were. 

They set off on foot across Ford Island carrying their bags. As they passed the transport ship Hammondsport, a crane was already extracting one of their new, bluish gray Grumman Avengers from the ship’s hold. The torpedo plane rose slowly into the air above them, its retractable wings folded back along the fuselage like a dozing mallard’s.

At the gatepost to Luke Field, Lieutenant Fieberling had to produce his Navy identity card before they were allowed through. When they came to the first hangar at the edge of the airfield, Morgan saw that it had been reduced to a steel skeleton by Japanese bombs. A bulldozer was scraping together a massive pile of charred timber, concrete rubble, and airplane parts.

They found the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters at the end of the runway near the northern tip of the island, its once manicured lawn scarred by newly dug slit trenches. Inside the crowded lobby, the officers dropped their overseas bags and immediately headed toward the bar.

The manager stepped forward to tell Fieberling that the new facility was full. There were men already sleeping in the corridors, he said apologetically. The detachment was welcome to eat its meals there, but that was all the BOQ could provide. 

“Where can we find a temporary billet?” asked Fieberling. The manager said that they might still have room over at the old BOQ, which was down near the shoreline along Battleship Row.  Morgan remembered the smell from the sunken battleships as the men plodded over to the older facility in a long, ragged line.  Through the trees that ringed the grounds around the building, he could see the tangled wreck of the sunken Arizona that they had passed on their way into the Chaumont’s anchorage. 

At the lobby desk, the manager informed them that there was no room for them there either. Fieberling, who was leading-man handsome, flashed a confident grin and asked for the manager’s name, telling him that his squadron’s orders to lodge there had come directly from Admiral Nimitz, and he would need to advise the commander-in-chief why his order had been disobeyed. It was a bald-faced lie, but the manager nervously disappeared into his office. A minute later he came back out smiling at Fieberling as if he had just won the lottery.

“I’ve arranged to set up cots for all of your men in the lanai,” he said.

The men moved their bags out to the BOQ’s screened porch and sat down to wait for Swede Larsen. When he finally arrived, his face was tense. He sought out Fieberling and the other senior officers. 

The Hornet had left port yesterday with the Enterprise, he told them bitterly. No one was saying where they went, but it sounded like the carriers were going into action. They had gotten there just one day too late.

Swede said that he had been ordered to get their planes checked out as quickly as possible in case of another Japanese attack on Hawaii.  The city was under martial law, and a curfew and blackout were in place after sundown. Swede said he was heading over to Luke Field to make sure the squadron’s mechanics would have the planes ready to be flight-tested in the morning.

Langdon Fieberling called the pilots together and gave them the news. To a chorus of groans, he told them that because of the island-wide curfew they were restricted to the base. There would be no excursions to the nightspots in Honolulu. He then softened the blow by giving them the rest of the day off to explore Ford Island. 

Sitting on his newly unfolded cot in the screened lanai, Smiley Morgan watched Ensign Vic Lewis unpack his overseas bag. At twenty-two, Vic was the youngest pilot in the squadron. It looked to Morgan like he had brought a library with him, including hardbound books on military history and ornithology. The prim, open-faced Lewis grinned at him and said he thought they would probably have a lot of time to read when they weren’t flying. 

Smiley nodded encouragingly, but his own ambitions were decidedly different. When they weren’t flying, he wasn’t planning to do any reading. As soon as the curfew was lifted, he was going to head straight for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel to hopefully meet a beautiful Hawaiian girl.

Across the porch, the tall, lanky John Taurman tossed his bag down on another cot. Morgan asked him if he wanted to explore the island with him, and Taurman agreed. Together, they headed across the lawn and down to the edge of the anchorage. 

Two cage masts that had once adorned the stricken battleships lay piled in a heap near the shoreline. Smiley and Taurman started walking south along the cluttered shoreline. Farther down the anchorage, they came to a long gangplank that led over to the deck of the battleship West Virginia. The deck and superstructure were coated with a film of oily scum, as if the ship had recently been refloated. At Smiley’s urging, he and Taurman decided to go aboard. 

When they crossed the still-sloping deck plates to observe the extent of the damage, Morgan saw that the ship had been hit by a number of armor-piercing bombs. One of them had wrecked the port casemates, causing a big section of the deck to collapse. 

Behind a massive gun turret, he and Taurman encountered a team of salvage divers taking a break from their work. The divers confirmed that the ship had been raised about a week earlier, and was to be towed over to a dry-dock facility.

One of them said that while he was searching an air pocket in a watertight compartment deep inside the ship, he had found a 1941 pinup calendar. One of the sailors trapped inside the compartment had marked off the days after December 7 while he waited for rescue.  The last date he had scratched off before he died was December 23, more than two weeks after the West Virginia was sunk. 

Morgan and Taurman decided they needed a drink, and walked back to the bar in the new BOQ at the end of the runway. As they were drinking a cold beer, Smiley heard a booming laugh and his friend Ensign Bob Ries lumbered up to join them. Smiley hadn’t seen him since they had gotten into trouble together in San Francisco.

Ries was a relentless skirt-chaser, and with his apple cheeks and reddish-blond hair, he occasionally scored. He and Morgan had been having dinner at the Bal Tabarin restaurant with Taurman and a few of the other pilots when Ries spied the legs on the hatcheck girl. An hour later, he had persuaded her to go barhopping with him. 

Smiley was invited to go along, and they had stayed out until four in the morning before the three of them ended up at the girl’s apartment.  By the time Smiley woke up on the couch in her living room, they were already two hours late for Swede Larsen’s final squadron meeting.

When they reported in, an angry Larsen restricted them to the ship until it left port the following day. He thought of an additional punishment the next morning, ordering Ries to vacate the stateroom he was sharing with Morgan aboard the Chaumont, and make the Pacific crossing on the Hammondsport, the older transport that had once ferried Key West passenger trains. It was carrying the squadron’s planes and enlisted men.

Now Ries was glad to be back with Morgan and the other officers. 

It was almost midnight when Smiley returned to the darkened porch facing the anchorage. Through an open window above him, he could hear Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine” playing on a portable phonograph. It had been his favorite song before the war. 

The lanai was already filled with sleeping men when he stripped off his rumpled uniform and dropped onto his cot. Lying there in the darkness, he could smell Pearl Harbor, even if he could no longer see it. An hour later, he was still wide awake.

Rolling over, he stared out into the night. From the far side of the trees fringing the shoreline, he could hear the slow, steady rhythm of the gas-engined suction pump he had seen earlier that afternoon on the buoy tender anchored by the Arizona. He wondered what they could still be pumping out at this hour.

Someone had managed to acquire a bottle of whiskey, and a few of the pilots were silently passing it back and forth between swigs.  The lit embers of their cigarettes glowed like fireflies across the room, but the smoke didn’t mask the sepulchral smell from Battleship Row.

Morgan couldn’t rid his mind of the horrible vision of the hundreds of men still entombed just a stone’s throw from where he was lying. He forced himself to think of home, and the last Florida Gators football game he had gone to see in Gainesville with his girlfriend, Caroline. It didn’t work. As the hours dragged slowly past, his earlier excitement at the prospect of high adventure aboard the Hornet was replaced by somber thoughts on the grim reality of death.  He never slept. The pump ran all night.

Copyright © 2008 by Robert J. Mrazek