Scores of men perished on the flight, hangar, and gallery decks. Ready-ammunition lockers filled with rockets and shells detonated, and smoke billowed into the engine rooms below. Smoke and flame engulfed the planes on the flight and hangar decks, and violent explosions began to convulse the carrier. The flattop reeled as a column of black smoke poured from the forward elevator well and a sheet of flame shot up from the forward starboard edge of the hangar deck. The second bomb smashed through two after-decks and exploded on the third deck near the petty officers’ quarters. The first bomb slammed into the forward hangar deck, ripping a great hole in the three-inch armor plate and setting fire to fueled and armed planes. The carrier’s 5-inch and 40mm guns opened up on the plane as it released two 500-pound armor-piercing bombs, pulled up, and turned away only 50 feet above the flight deck. Suddenly, at 7:07 am, a Japanese Yokosuka D4Y Judy bomber flashed out of a cloudbank and hurtled down toward the Franklin at 360 miles an hour. O’Callahan of Massachusetts, the ship’s Roman Catholic chaplain. Thirty more Helldivers warmed up on the Franklin’s flight deck, while in the wardroom a few officers were eating breakfast. Ahead and astern of the Franklin were the light carriers Bataan and San Jacinto. A thousand yards away, the carrier USS Hancock was sending up her first planes of the day.
Joseph’s Day, another flight swept off the deck, bound for a strike at Kobe. The fateful day of March 19, 1945, dawned coolly as the Franklin swung into the wind to launch her first flight-a fighter group armed with special heavy rockets to attack enemy naval units at Kure.Īt 6:55 am that St. The Japanese reacted with characteristic fanaticism, and a dozen suicide planes were shot down almost within sight of the American task force. The raids continued all day long, and the Franklin’s air group alone downed 18 enemy aircraft and destroyed many others on the ground.
An hour before dawn the following morning, the flattops launched their fighters and dive-bombers against airfields on Kyushu. On the night of March 17, the fleet closed to a mere hundred miles from the Japanese coast. The armada steamed northward, stretching for 50 miles across the Pacific Ocean. Its mission was to launch the first carrier strike against the Japanese Home Islands since the Doolittle raid of April 1942. naval base of Ulithi, the Franklin’s Task Group 58.2 merged with three other forces to form Task Force 58. She was accompanied by the battlecruiser USS Guam. On March 3, 1945, the 27,100-ton aircraft carrier USS Franklin churned out of Pearl Harbor and headed westward for the war zone.
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