Army & Navy – Battle Carriers

Now that the aircraft carrier has replaced the battlewagon as the Navy’s capital ship, the carrier is beginning to grow. The Navy announced that somewhere between the drafting tables and the shipways are three new carriers which will be the biggest in naval history. Some time before year’s end, the keels of two will go down; construction of the third will start early in 1944.

Biggest carrier now afloat is the 33,000-ton U.S.S. Saratoga, originally laid down as a battle cruiser. The new class (CVB), proudly announced by Secretary Frank Knox last week, will be 45,000-tonners big as a battleship of the Iowa class. Almost twice the tonnage of the Essex class carriers, they will be faster, able to take “a lot of punishment above & below the water line.”

The new CVB’s will be “the base of operations for planes larger than any which have heretofore been operated from the decks of aircraft carriers.” This, said Knox, meant planes bigger than the B-25s which left the Hornet to raid Tokyo. Actually, the Mitchells did not “operate” from the carrier they merely took off. But by the time the CVBs are finished (18 to 24 months from keel laying) there will be newer and bigger planes to make full use of their spreading flight decks.

Helena

She was fleet and lean, 10,000 tons, with a 100,000-h.p. heart and fifteen 6-in. guns for her voice. Only her boxy stern, where she could carry eight planes, and the squat derrick cocked on her fantail, marred her clean lines. She was water-borne in the murky tide off Brooklyn in August 1938, while Japanese “fishermen” could still map soundings off U.S. coasts. She died in the early dark of July 7, 1943, deep in the Kula Gulf between New Georgia and Kolombangara in the South Pacific. Her pallbearers: the eleven Jap cruisers and destroyers which had gone down under her guns in her short career of headlong action.

That was the light cruiser Helena.

Last week the Navy released her story, for the honor of the men who served in her, and for the tradition that she made.

First Look, First Blood. Putting in at Montevideo on her shakedown cruise in 1939, the Helena got her first look at war when she passed close aboard the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, scuttled in the bay. Her second, closer look came at Pearl Harbor. She was hit, and that day her crew became a fighting team. Her 5-in. anti-aircraft battery, her light weapons spoke with the trained, nervous insistence of a machine. Helena knocked down six Jap planes that calamitous day.

Patched up at Pearl Harbor, she limped to Mare Island, Calif, for permanent repairs. With new men aboard, she sailed for the South Pacific, trained incessantly at the job her men prized most—gunnery. She made two runs to Guadalcanal, served as escort for the carrier Hornet, then joined the task force which included the Wasp. The Helena was there when the Wasp was torpedoed, took aboard many of the survivors.

On Oct. 11 last year, the Helena steamed into her first major engagement. She was part of the task force ordered to intercept the strong Jap force moving to reinforce their units on Guadalcanal. In the Battle of Cape Esperance, the U.S. force turned back the Japs, sank four cruisers, four destroyers and a transport. The Helena cashed in then on her gunners.

Six Minutes, Two Ships. At 14 minutes before midnight, her batteries spoke. Her target was a Nip destroyer. Just 98 seconds later it was ablaze. As the enemy ship exploded and sank, the Helena swung her guns on a cruiser.

Four and a half minutes later the blazing cruiser sank. The Helena turned on another cruiser slugging it out with a U.S. cruiser near by. The enemy went down.

A Jap destroyer slipped in close, let go a torpedo. The Helena dodged, wheeled, finished off the attacker, which was already under fire from another U.S. ship. The enemy fleet turned and fled.

The Helena’s score in her first battle: four targets, four ships sunk, with two assists by other U.S. craft. On the Helena: no hits, no casualties.

She cruised with a task force looking for Japs, escorted convoys, dodged a second torpedo attack—this time from a submarine. She put in one busy day silencing shore batteries which had bracketed U.S. transports unloading at Guadalcanal. The Japs sent over bombers. The Helena got four of the nine shot down by the U.S. ships.

First Sight, First Shot. The decisive Battle of Guadalcanal began in earnest that night. The Helena was the first to sight the enemy ships. A Jap cruiser slashed the darkness with her searchlight, caught the Helena, opened fire. The Helena was already on the target. She fired from the hip: a full salvo. The Jap burned like a torch, lighting the way for the U.S. destroyers. As the Jap cruiser began to sink, the Helena’s secondary battery pounded down a destroyer.

The Japs began a withdrawal. One of their cruisers was slamming shells at the San Francisco, which had tangled with a Jap battleship and taken the salvo which killed Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan and her skipper, Medal-of-Honorman Cassin Young. The Helena sank the cruiser and a destroyer, shot up three other Jap ships. The U.S. beachhead in the Solomons was finally secure.

The Helena steamed on to her destiny. She pounded enemy airfields, troop areas, shore batteries. Down in her log went names now legendary: Munda, Vila, Kolombangara, Enogai Inlet, Bairoko Harbor. Finally came the Battle of Kula Gulf, a turning point which cost the Jap something between nine and eleven cruisers and destroyers. It cost the U.S. one ship: the Helena.

Last Train, Last Battle. The Japs, landing troops to reinforce Munda, were caught flatfooted. At 1:55 a.m., July 7, the battle was joined with the “Tokyo Express.”

TIME Correspondent Duncan Norton-Taylor, on the bridge of another U.S. ship, was an eyewitness. He cabled: “Five of their ships died in our first onslaught. Others spoke back . . . but soon it was plain they were depending more heavily on another weapon. The frantic enemy was firing torpedo spreads.”

Torpedoes got the Helena. Her main battery had been trained on one of the big Jap ships. She opened up with a blinding burst of flame, sank it. Her secondary battery smashed one Jap destroyer then another. Other U.S. ships were firing salvos, but the Helena chose to use “continuous fire.” Her gunflames flared from stem to stern. In the brief moment left of her life she loosed perhaps a thousand rounds from main batteries alone and her thunder could be heard for miles.

Final Fling. Her bow had been blown off, but the remaining turrets were still blazing away. She was firing so fast that she was constantly lit up in the dark, “like liquid fire squirting from a hose.”

Then suddenly the Gulf was dark again. There were no more targets, they had been destroyed. The U.S. ships moved off. Said Norton-Taylor’s dispatch:

“It was then that we picked up, in the beam of a searchlight, a ship’s bow protruding from the quiet sea. The Admiral ordered a destroyer to investigate. For a long time the destroyer was silent, as she also threw a beam. The Admiral kept asking ‘Who is it? Who is it? Acknowledge. Acknowledge.’

“His impatience was plain over the TBS (“talk-between-ships”) loudspeakers on the bridges of the U.S. ships waiting in the dark. It seemed an unconscionable time before the destroyer, her searchlight still probing, answered: “I am sorry to report it is Five Zero.”

That was the Helena. She had gone down in 20 minutes, but her bow had floated a little while longer. Then it, too, was gone. She sank gently, without exploding, the thick oil bubbling black as the Pacific night from her shattered hull. The men went over the side, into the oil. There was no fire.

Last week the Navy added a postscript: nearly 1,000 men of the Helena’s complement “today stand fit and ready to fight again.” Some of them, oil-smeared and haggard, were picked up near the ship’s grave. Others got to nearby islands, lived with the resourcefulness of good fighting men, were finally retrieved. They went to other ships, other stations. But they were still Helena men, would always be.