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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 2007)
In January 1939, at the age of eighteen years and two
days, Miles Putnam joined the Navy for a four-year enlistment. After recruit training at San Diego, he was
sent to Norfolk, Virginia for training as a metalsmith, followed by extended
training as an aviation metalsmith. He
was then assigned to duty with Bombing Squadron 5 (VB-5) aboard the USS Yorktown
(CV-5), then serving with the Atlantic Fleet.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Yorktown transferred
to the Pacific fleet and became a participant in history’s first
carrier-to-carrier naval battle in the Coral Sea. The ship was heavily damaged by a Japanese bomb, but many of its
aircraft also sustained battle damage in aerial combat. Miles and his shipmates in VB-5 were kept
very busy restoring some of the squadron’s SBD dive bombers to operational
condition.
As the Yorktown underwent repairs at Pearl Harbor
in advance of the Battle of Midway, its air group was reinforced by squadrons
from the USS Saratoga (CV-3), also out of service for repairs. Merging the two air groups resulted in an
unusual name change for the squadron:
for the upcoming Battle of Midway, VB5 was to be designated “Scouting
Squadron 5” (VS-5), and has been identified as such in most history books. But the squadron’s proud mechanics and other
support personnel will quickly tell you that it was the men of VB-5 that
kept those planes in the air.
Experience in the Coral Sea had taught Miles, by then an
AM1/c rating and the senior aviation metalsmith in the squadron, that the ship
didn’t have nearly enough antiaircraft guns.
So he crafted a stationary base on which to mount a pair of the .30
caliber machine guns normally carried on the SBDs, and mounted it on the ship’s
port side catwalk, directly opposite the island. He was firing those guns when the first of three bombs struck the
base of the island directly behind him.
He grabbed a fire hose nozzle while a shipmate charged its foam canister,
but the water pressure quickly gave out.
He and some fellow gunners then gathered several CO2 fire extinguishers
and did what they could to combat the flames and smoke from the bomb hit.
That damage was temporarily repaired, and Miles was back
at his guns a short time later when the ship was struck by two aerial torpedoes
on the port side, one just a little forward of his makeshift gun mount. He remembers looking down the catwalk where
numerous other gunners had been, and both they as well as the catwalk itself
were gone.
The order to abandon ship came soon after, and recalling
advice from others who had abandoned ship in the Coral Sea, he headed back to
the fantail where fire hoses had been deployed over the side for the sailors to
descend to the water. “I didn’t want to
go down on one of the ropes,” he says.
“Those who did it in the Coral Sea mostly got their hands severely
burned. It was pretty easy on the fire
hose.”
After swimming in the oily water for some time, Miles was
rescued by the USS Benham (DD-397), along with hundreds of other Yorktown
survivors. He was initially
transferred to the cruiser USS Portland (CA-33), then to USS Fulton (AS-11)
for the return to Pearl Harbor.
Needles to say, the expiration of
his four-year enlistment in 1943 came and went as an uneventful day—he and
everyone else in the Navy was in it “for the duration.” That duration ended for him in 1945 while he
was a Chief Aviation Metalsmith working at Ford Island Naval Air Station in
Hawaii. He transferred to the Naval
Reserve and retired as a lieutenant commander in 1965 after twenty-six years of
combined service.
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