USS Hornet

USS Hornet by Gordon Elmer Douglass

            In May or June of 1942, Captain Mitschner of the USS Hornet was promoted to Rear Admiral.  Generally, the rank of Commodore is bypassed and a Captain goes to Rear Admiral.  Sometimes an officer is promoted to Commodore to be in charge of a flotilla of destroyers or some other kind of small ship.  Anyway, he needed a staff and at the time the Big E (Enterprise) didn’t have an admiral so he used his rank and ordered us to come with him on some training maneuvers.  I was excited about getting a change in my routine, but the others were disgruntled. 

We went out to sea for about 15 days.  During that time we had every kind of drill and I became worried because things had always gone so smoothly on the Big E, but on the Hornet every drill dragged on and on.  The problems was that each drill different and each man has an assigned staion for each drill such as abandon ship drill, fire drill, collision drill, general quarters or whatever.  The Hornet was a sister ship to the Big E and just as old, but the men just didn’t know their assignments.  A drill that would take 3 minutes on the Big E was taking 45 minutes to an hour on the Hornet.  There was a different feel to the crews as well.  The Big E officers and men kind of looked forward to battle, but the Hornet crew seemed scared.

            Every time that I went in the wardroom it was filled with torpedo plane pilots.  They were playing poker or acey deucy.  The torpedo planes were never used for scouting so these fliers only went up to fly their planes ashore before the ship entered port and to bring the planes aboard when we went to sea again.  The pilots knew that due to the torpedo planes’ poor maneuverability that they would be shot down.  One day a frustrated scouting plane pilot, after a day of several take-offs and landings came through the wardroom and griped about his tough schedule while the torpedo plane pilots just goofed off all day.  One torpedo pilot lost his cool and I thought he was going to fight.  He shouted, “yeah you guys in a battle will drop your bombs and fly away and we will be shot down before we can even launch our torpedoes.”  This proved prophetic in the Battle of Midway, because this entire torpedo squadron was shot down and only one pilot was saved.

            Immediately, upon entering port, the new admiral on the Enterprise sent for us to return to the ship.  I was just as happy as the others to return.  We did get a fringe benefit for going.  We discovered that the flag allowance was allowed some of the better rooms on the ship.  My former room mate on the Big E was Ross Glasssman.  He had failed to get promoted so when I left they took our room for someone else.  When I came back to the ship they tried to put me in a bunkroom.  I went to Commander Dow, who was my boss and told him what had happened.  I showed him the numbers of the rooms that we should have and he called the billeting officer while I was with him and told him to give us the rooms that we were entitled to.  Later the billeting officer saw me and said he had good news that I could have my old room back.  I said that I didn’t want that room back, I wanted the room to which I was entitled.  He said he couldn’t do that because he would have to kick out a ship Lieutenant Commander.  I said well let me phone Commander Dow to straighten this out.  So anyway I got a real nice single room.  I liked a single room, because it was difficult to get a roommate who didn’t smoke.  If the billeting officer had been more fair with me and given me my original room when I first came back I think I would have taken it, but hwen he was unbending I thought “well, I can be unbending too.”