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by Ronald Russell
(The following originally appeared in Veterans
Biographies, distributed during the annual Battle of Midway commemoration
in San Francisco, June 2006)
As a teenager, young Otis Kight had been
influenced by an uncle who had served on a battleship in the 1920s. He joined the Navy immediately after high
school, and eagerly awaited his first assignment. He expected that his high test scores would get him into a
desirable mechanic or electronic school, but the Navy didn’t always do what was
expected. He found himself posted as a
“plane pusher” with Fighting Squadron 42 (VF-42) aboard the USS Yorktown (CV-5). In the days before tractors on flight decks,
aircraft were spotted by ten-man pusher crews, using muscle power alone. That was Kight’s primary duty, along with
the usual extra assignments in the galley, the ship’s laundry, and wherever
else manpower might be needed.
Kight’s battle station was as
ammunition runner for one of the .50-cal. antiaircraft machine guns on the
ship’s starboard catwalk. In the Battle
of the Coral Sea in May 1942, a Japanese bomb fell within fifteen feet of him,
just beyond the catwalk, barely missing the ship as it exploded in the
water. He remembers the sudden
realization that he felt at that moment:
there are people out here who are actually trying to kill me!
“But as for fear or terror,” he says, “there was none
of it anywhere I could see or hear—just a pure dedication to fight the enemy
with all that we had; to survive with our ship. The Coral Sea Battle served me well. It was ‘Combat 101’ that taught me what to really expect at
Midway.”
His expectations for Midway were
fully realized as the Yorktown suffered two devastating air attacks on
the first day of the battle. Three
bombs and two aerial torpedoes smashed it in the space of an hour, resulting in
an “abandon ship” order as the big carrier listed sharply to port, so much so
that the hangar deck was nearly at sea level.
Kight exited the ship by simply stepping into the ocean from the hangar
deck, and was picked up by a motor whaleboat from the cruiser USS Astoria (CA-34). He especially remembers the ingenuity of the
cox’n operating the whaleboat: it was
packed to capacity with Yorktown survivors, but there were hundreds more
in the water who needed rescue. The
cox’n had tied a 100-foot line behind his boat, with life jackets lashed to the
line at short intervals. He then
steered the boat through a large number of swimmers who were able to grab the
life jackets and thus be towed to the Astoria.
After Midway, Kight went on to
gunnery and radio schools, becoming a turret gunner on a TBF torpedo
bomber. After several strike missions,
he was offered advancement to chief petty officer after one more mission, or as
an alternative he could be detached immediately from the squadron for stateside
training. However, leaving the squadron
would delay any advancement in rank. He
opted for the school instead of the rank, and later learned that his aircraft
was lost on its next bombing mission, along with the gunner who had replaced
him.
Kight
continued his career in naval aviation, serving on carriers and air stations
around the world as well as the Naval Aviation Safety Center. He retired in 1971 to begin a career as a
sailing instructor and sailmaster in Virginia, capitalizing on a skill learned
in his off hours while stationed in the Philippines.
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