firstblood

Contrary to the popular image of a large-scale scramble in which dozens of pilots run to their planes and roar en masse into the skies, the squadron's sixteen participating defenders took off over a period of thirty minutes. With plenty of advance warning, the Marines had no need to scurry pell-mell from Fighter One. First to roll were the eight Wildcats of Burnett's and Miller's divisions, already gassed after flying the earlier strike to Vila. They released brakes at 1320, followed ten minutes later by Vince Carpenter's division, recently returned from a Knucklehead patrol that had lasted more than three hours. Another twenty minutes passed before a fourth division joined the fray. This was an ad hoc bunch who decided not to wait around. Charlie Lanphier, Vic Scarborough, Chalky Cavanagh, and AIJensen simply grabbed leftover Wildcats and took off at 1350. Although Lanphier was the first off, he soon turned over the lead to Jensen, the only enlisted pilot in the bunch. Jensen had established himself as such a good pilot that rank mattered little, and the other pilots, Howard Cavanagh among them, agreed. "We just grabbed a few planes and told AlJensen-at that time he was already considered one of our better pilots-'You take us, Al."'

Together with Marines from VMF-213 and VMF-221 plus several dozen Army and Navy fighters, a total of seventy-six American combatants from three airfields climbed to face 177 Japanese aircraft. Radar controllers on the ground struggled to cope with the mass of blips on their primitive screens as they tried to sort friend from foe and pass intercept vectors to the nearest defenders.

It was a beautiful day, with crystal-clear visibility above scattered low cumulus clouds. From the air, the lush green jungle islands and vivid blue-green water might have resembled a travel poster were it not for the angry black blossoms of exploding AA, thrown by ships and gun emplacements below.

Aboard the fighter planes, with cloth helmets and oxygen masks strapped tight and protective goggles in place, grim-faced

defenders raced to intercept the attack, stretching against harnesses, straining to see over instrument panels for a first glimpse. Adrenaline surged as headphones broadcast radio chatter, described by one Marine as 'just a bunch of screaming and static." Among those about to engage in their first combat, a year and a half of training and endless hours of patrol were about to be tested. As the men activated gun switches and charged their machine g1Ins, no one knew what to expect, what reactions their first shots in anger would evoke.

Burnett and Miller were initially directed to thirty thousand feet heading toward the Russell Islands until ground controllers reported bogeys over Cape Esperance. Spotting a large group of air-craft north of Tulagi, Miller turned his division toward them, but he soon realized they were friendlies. He was turning back to the original course when Recon radar called bogeys southeast of Tulagi. Instead he sighted the enemy over Cape Esperance. Two separate formations of Vals, the fixed-gear dive-bombers so lethal at Pearl Harbor and Midway, were heading straight for Tulagi harbor. The approaching armada was a stunning sight to the American pilots, who in their wildest dreams had never seen so many dozens of planes in the sky at one time. Burnett's division spotted them, too. "Look at the bogeys! Christ, there's a million of them," Burnett hollered on the radio, turning his division toward the northernmost formation. Miller's division went for the other group.

Miller's tail-end Charlie (twenty-one-year-old) Mac McCall, had his hands full. The external tank was malfunctioning, perhaps because of a crimp in the wing attachment, and was useless, neither feeding fuel nor releasing when McCall tugged on the T handle. He had burned internal fuel at a prodigious rate in the climb, trying to hold This position in formation while struggling with the wing tank. Gaping at the approaching group of enemy airplanes-he counted seventy in the nearest formation-he grew concerned about the exposed fuel tank. One stray incendiary round and his Wildcat would become a flaming meteor.

Reaching a position to dive on the Vals from above, Miller nosed over, followed by Ledge Hazelwood, Bernie Bernard, and McCall. Using their altitude advantage to initiate the attack, Miller eased down at first to overtake the Vals, then pushed over at twenty thousand feet in a high-side run at almost full deflection. Six or seven vees, each with three Vals, were spread before him. He drew a bead on the leader of the last vee, his Wildcat plunging through the enemy formation almost as soon as he opened fire. The next two Marines gunned for the same plane, giving the hapless Val the equivalent of an eighteen-gun broadside. The Val finally exploded under Bernard's withering barrage. Bernie was then distracted by the sight of another Val's rear gunner, who looked him right in the eyes as he banged away. Bernard nearly collided with a third Val as he dived vertically through the cluster.

McCall's turn came next. He was still yanking on the drop tank's release handle as he lined up a Val in his sights, but the momentum of his dive took care of the drop tank when his speed exceeded the redline. A loud boom signaled the tank's departure just as he was about to trigger the guns. For an instant he thought the tank might have carried back into his tail, distracting him from an otherwise perfect high-side run.

Unable to get independent confirmation that the Val crashed, Mac was later given credit for a probable. Henry Miller, meanwhile, dropped beneath the enemy formation and pulled up to try for another shot from below. He remembered to check his own tail-a timely glance because the Vals' guardian Zeros were now pouncing, from over his left shoulder. He pulled into a protective cloud, then climbed again as he turned toward another group of aircraft over Tulagi. Judging that it would be impossible to get into position, he reversed direction once more and was suddenly in the midst of a dozen Zeros. Reacting instinctively, he held down the trigger and "flew through the whole pack, without hitting any to the extent of downing them." The next instant the sky around him was empty, his division scattered, the shooting over. Such was often the nature of high-speed aerial combat. One minute a pilot would be in the middle of a swirling melee, the next all alone. Miller's entire division eventually emerged unscathed, with Bernie claiming one Val destroyed and Mac receiving credit for a probable.

Smiley Burnett's division waded into their chosen formation of Vals with even better success, although he gave up his own plane in the process. Over Cape Esperance, Burnett and Jack W. Petit each singled out a Val and dropped both into the Slot on their first passes. Then the Zeros came down. One latched onto Burnett's tail, putting him on the receiving end. His F4F was hit hard in the engine, and he was forced to bailout over the channel, slightly wrenching a knee when he jumped. He floated down to the warm water, then waited only a short time before a Navy lighter was on the scene. Another member of the division, Lincoln Deetz, tipped the scales even further by exploding a Zero over Cape Esperance.

A few minutes later Vince Carpenter's division received a vector from Recon radar toward Savo Island, where several Zeros had been spotted above thirty thousand feet. The slow climbing Wildcats clawed for altitude and began dropping their wing tanks, but John Fidler found that his tank would not release. Like McCall, he knew that a well-placed incendiary could turn him into a fireball. Soon after he turned reluctantly for Fighter One, the remaining three Marines sighted eight Zeros. By now their F4Fs were practically staggering, they were near the limit of their performance ceiling as the fight began. Carpenter recalled:

However, there were plenty of other aircraft up at altitude, not to mention his own division. Responsibility won and he chose to remain where he was, letting the Zero go. But in the time it took to make the decision, the sky had suddenly emptied of aircraft.