17 July 2009
Issue Number: 2009-27
Our 12th Year
~ AROUND THE TABLE ~
MEMBERS’
TOPICS IN THIS ISSUE:
1. New Photos of Yorktown Sinking
2. Color Photos of Kido Butai and Other Ships
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1. NEW PHOTOS OF YORKTOWN SINKING ( see issue #22 )
Ed. note: the following is excerpted from a letter
by Bill Roy to the Naval History and Heritage Command concerning the recently
identified photos of USS Yorktown sinking on 7 June 1942. Bill, as one of the ship’s photographer’s
mates, had taken the pictures from a nearby destroyer. You can find them on our Links page. This letter repeats some of Bill’s BOM story
that we’ve seen on the Roundtable before, but it will be new to many members
who have recently joined.
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10 June 2009
From: LCDR William G. Roy,
USNR-Ret
Florida
BOM vet, photographer’s mate, USS Yorktown (CV-5)
I was very pleased to see that, finally, all of the photos that I made
of Yorktown sinking, June 7, 1942, have been found and now published,
with descriptions.
The only reason that these photographs were made is that I was out of
film with my 4x5 Speed Graphic still camera.
The Yorktown photo lab had been gutted with the bomb that went
down the stack and burned the photo lab on the hangar deck. I went back to the lab [on June 6th,
during the salvage attempt] to look for any film, perhaps in a file
drawer. I then saw the K-20 Fairchild
aerial camera that I kept loaded with a roll of film to give to a dive bomber
gunner. That is the camera that I had
along with my Speed Graphic.
I hurt all over from the explosion of destroyer Hammann being
torpedoed and blown up in my face as I ran across the hangar deck to get a
photo of the bos’n with a fire axe trying to cut the lines holding Hammann to
Yorktown. I ended up thrown back
into a bulkhead but hanging on to my camera.
The next two torpedoes struck Yorktown to starboard, rolling her
hard from stem to stern, throwing sailors overboard. I got up and made three photos of Hammann’s stern drifting
back by Yorktown, with sailors clinging on for their lives. Hammann’s stern was sinking and went
out of sight. Sailors were everywhere
in the water. When Hammann’s stern
reached its set depth [for its armed and ready depth charges], the 18
depth charges exploded with a mighty eruption of water, higher than Yorktown. I was knocked over. When I got up and made the last photo, there
was no one to be seen in the water.
They were all gone. The Pacific
Ocean was smooth, like an eraser had wiped it clean.
Captain Buckmaster asked me to come with him on the USS Balch (DD-363). The aerial camera had a telephoto lens. It was a perfect camera for the job because
we were not too close. A Speed Graphic
would not get the close-up photos or details.
Also, why so many photos? The
K-20 had a long roll of film, so I just shot away as the Balch circled
the sinking Yorktown. I could
clearly hear the compartments rupturing as Yorktown was sinking, and
water boiling up with debris: boxes, crates, garbage, metal, cloth, oil.
When Yorktown finally disappeared, everyone was crying; not a
dry eye.
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Ed. note: two of Bill’s photos of Hammann are
found on the NHHC
web site, and those two plus a third can be seen on page 160 of A
Glorious Page In Our History. They’re
also in That Gallant Ship, pages 172 & 174.
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2. COLOR PHOTOS OF KIDO BUTAI AND OTHER
SHIPS ( see issue #26 )
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9 July 2009
From: Don Boyer
Hawaii
The
Japanese website of "digitally colored" photographs is a fun site to
look through. Some of those
"photos," though, have to be complete digital creations, because they
don't fit the existing collection of photos...after 45 years of researching the
Japanese navy, I think that about all the photos have emerged by now, and if
they hadn't, their publication now would have created a stir among
historians on both sides of the ocean. I haven't noticed any stirs over
"new" IJN ship photos.
I
may well be wrong, but, for example, that photo of Akagi taken from an
airplane taking off the flight deck is just wrong in several respects,
including wide focus and proportionally. Also, it duplicates in
construct the famous Enterprise photograph taken from an SBD just
a bit too closely for my taste. I haven't gone through all 238
pages, but I am up to about 50, and I've seen several photos that just don't
jive, although they are gorgeous re-creations themselves. Would that the
old history books were as well illustrated in some respects.
Also,
the captions require additional grains of salt. Example: "Hornet
arriving at Pearl Harbor, 30 April 1942." It might be 30 April, but
I live in Hawaii and for the mountains in the background to show, Hornet has
to be LEAVING Pearl Harbor. Truly a
wonderful site to visit, but keep your salt shaker at hand.
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~ NOW HEAR THIS! ~
NEWS
& INFO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Hooked: Tales & Adventures of a
Tailhook Warrior
- Link of the Week
- Editor’s Notes
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HOOKED: TALES &
ADVENTURES OF A TAILHOOK WARRIOR
by CDR Clayton E. Fisher, USN-Ret (2009)
Clay Fisher has been a major contributor to the Roundtable for many
years. His wealth of experience as a Hornet
VB-8 pilot at Midway has contributed greatly to our body of knowledge about
the battle. Clay flew on all five
strike missions launched by TF-16 in the BOM, including as Stanhope Ring’s
wingman on the infamous “flight to nowhere.“
But he had a 21-year career as a naval aviator, and as harrowing as his
BOM experience was, he had several more death-defying episodes to get past
before taking that final salute at his retirement ceremony. At least one of them made Midway pale by
comparison; maybe more than one.
Hooked is Clay’s narrative of his flying career, beginning with
one day at age four when he hid in fear after seeing his first flying
machine. The fear quickly transformed
into an obsession to become a pilot, a goal that was finally achieved after an
assortment of challenges, detours, and disappointments. The narrative progresses through his Navy
flight training and assignment to the brand new USS Hornet (CV-8) just
before Pearl Harbor. He is given a
personal introduction to the ship and squadron by Ring himself, which Clay
mainly remembers for his first view of Ring’s personal aircraft—it had
obviously crashed on deck! Clay didn’t
know it at the time, but that was something of an omen concerning his squadron
commander.
As you might expect, a good deal of the book concerns Clay’s
recollections of the BOM, which will be quite familiar to you if you’ve been
with us for a few years. Less familiar,
though, are his subsequent combat missions, starting with the most traumatic of
them all, during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. There, Clay’s life is saved by his gunner
who gets in a good shot on a Zero about to administer the coup-de-grace to
their battered SBD. But the plane
succumbs to a violent ditching, from which Clay is saved again by being
literally dragged aboard a rescuing cruiser.
And yet, this is only one episode in which he dodged near-certain death
during his career. By my count there
are nine of them documented in this book, and that doesn’t include a
number of near-misses, like the time when he misjudged the cut while landing on
an Essex-class carrier for the first time and wound up catching the
first wire. If you know something about
carrier landings, you know that means he missed crashing into the stern of the
ship by about a half second.
The book continues with his experiences as a flight instructor, which
accounted for one SB2A dive bomber, two F6F fighters, and three of the above
near-death experiences. During
training!
It doesn’t stop there. Clay
violated a military man’s cardinal rule (“don’t volunteer”) by volunteering for
a west coast assignment in 1951. He got
VF-53, indeed on the west coast briefly while aboard USS Essex (CV-9),
which promptly departed for Korea and another shooting war. The final portion of the book details Clay’s
combat missions over North Korea, including strikes against the renowned
bridges at Toko-Ri.
I’ve probably known Clay’s personal story better than most other
Roundtable members, but I still found the book intensely interesting and hard
to put down. For anyone who has enough
interest to read this review and these newsletters week after week, I believe
this is one you’re going to want.
Since I have a reputation as a detail-focused editor, I have to say
that Hooked does have several errors in composition that might cause
readers to stumble a little as they go through it. However, I find it easy to let all of them pass in this
case. The story is compelling, and if a
phrase is twisted here or a minor historical fact is missed there, no harm is
done to the book’s core value, which is that of an aviator’s amazing personal
story, the likes of which few have ever experienced and fewer still can even
imagine.
The book is abundantly illustrated with photos, many from Clay’s
personal collection. It’s available on
Amazon.com as well as other on-line vendors, and you can order it from walk-in
bookstores with its ISBN number:
978-1-4327-2279-1.
I’ve added Hooked to the Authors page on our Roundtable
web site. Click
here for Amazon’s listing.
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LINK OF THE WEEK
For the past couple of
years we’ve been awaiting the appearance of the new Spielberg-Hanks production
that is said to be the Pacific Theater version of “Saving Private Ryan.” It now appears that the miniseries, entitled
The Pacific, is complete and will air on HBO next year. Thanks to Paul Turner in Australia for
sending us this link, which is an advance trailer for the film. On first glance, the close combat scenes are
as dramatic and realistic-looking as “Ryan” but I’m not so sure about the
expansive views of massed amphibious invasions and the like—the CGI struck me
as not quite up to the realism that we’ve seen in other productions, like the
2001 Pearl Harbor movie. Perhaps
it will look better in the full version.
Click
here for the link of the week
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EDITOR’S
NOTES
For a glossary of abbreviations, acronyms, and terms used in The Roundtable
Forum, click here or go
to our home page and click "The Roundtable Glossary" link.
Unless otherwise noted, all
original content in The Roundtable Forum, the Official Newsletter of the
Battle of Midway Roundtable is copyright 2009 by Ronald W. Russell (see the
“About the BOMRT”
page). Permission to forward, copy, or
quote from this web edition is granted if the following citation is included: “The Roundtable Forum, official
newsletter of the Battle of Midway Roundtable, www.midway42.org.”
Webmasters: we'll appreciate a
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