Mobile Might

CARRIER WAR--Lieut. Oliver Jensen, U.S.N.R.--Simon & Schuster ($2.50) and Pocket Books (50-c-).

At daybreak on Saturday, April 18, 1942, a bald, slight naval officer with a skin like a dried red apple stood on the bridge of the aircraft carrier Hornet, 850 miles from Tokyo. Marc Andrew Mitscher, muffled in blues, was the captain of the ship; he had small part in the decision reached by Lieut. Colonel James H. Doolittle (at his side) and Vice Admiral William F. Halsey (aboard the nearby carrier Enterprise) to fly 16 B-25 medium bombers off the Hornet for the first stunt raid on Japan's capital.

Allowing for the time difference, it was only 5 p.m. on Friday in Newport News, where riveters and welders were hard at work on the growing hulls of two other aircraft carriers: the Essex, and one to be called the Bon Homme Richard. U.S. carrier warfare, whose spectacular history Lieut. Oliver Jensen, a writer (on military leave) for LIFE, has now chronicled in one of the best-written and incomparably the best-illustrated book on the Navy in World War II, was in its feeble, hit & run infancy.

On the Bottom. Fourteen months later, the Hornet was at the bottom of the ocean. So were the Lexington, the Yorktown and the Wasp. The Enterprise was at Pearl Harbor, recovering from a year's accumulation of battle wounds. There was only one U.S. carrier fit for actioa in the Pacific, the old Saratoga. Marc Mitscher, now a rear admiral, was sweating in open-necked khakis in a Dallas hut by the Lunga River on Guadalcanal, commanding land-based aircraft in the Solomons.

Outwardly, there was nothing to indicate that June 1, 1943 was an auspicious day for naval air forces and a turning point in the Pacific War. But on that day high-ranking officers, one after another, trooped out on the top "deck" of the concrete headquarters building at Makalapa, overlooking Pearl Harbor, focused their binoculars on a grey shape across the loch, by Ford Island. The Essex, first of America's post-Pearl Harbor battle carriers, had arrived to take her place in the battle line. Soon her sister ship, now named Yorktown instead of Bon Homme Richard, and a first cousin, the Lexington, would follow.

Task Force to Truk. The new team was tuned up in training raids against Marcus and Wake Islands. It showed its power in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. But not until Kwajalein was secured did the seaborne air power of the U.S. Navy show its immense reach. Then Admirals Spruance and Mitscher set off with the fast carriers and fast battleships to neutralize Truk. Task Force 58 was on its road to glory.

Lieut. Commander Philip Torrey, skipper of the Essex' Air Group 9, was a brave man. But when the target was announced, he later recalled, "My first instinct was to jump overboard." On the first day at Truk, 127 land-based Jap planes were shot down, 77 more were bagged on the ground. On the second day, not one got off the ground. Two of the hardiest myths of the war in the Pacific had been exploded: 1) Truk was not impregnable; 2) in a contest with seaborne planes, land-based air power was no better than its planes and pilots.

Mitscher, the wizened little man in the baseball cap, was now flying his flag on the reborn Yorktown. (Soon it would have the three stars of a vice admiral.) Oliver Jensen, after a tour of duty in the Atlantic chasing submarines, went aboard to put together the story of how the U.S. carrier fleet, puny and crippled in 1942, had become the most mobile and most lethal weapon of 20th-century warfare.

How It Happened. The record is here: Marcus, Wake, Rabaul, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, Truk, the Marianas, Palau, Hollandia, a return engagement at Truk, ("This time," said Commander Cameron Briggs, "we intend our performance to knock them completely off their feet"), the battles in the Philippine Sea. The Navy has let Jensen disclose some of its jealously misguarded secrets: the complete war records of some carriers, and frequent identification of other carriers and their air groups engaged in various battle; the makeup of a typical carrier task group; some of the "hideous errors," as well as the feats of skill and daring, which have marked the development of carrier war. But beyond the what, when & where of naval air war, Jensen tells the how: how a boy from Alameda feels in combat over Truk ("Those Grummans are beautiful planes," said Lieut, (j.g.) Eugene Valencia; "if they could cook, I'd marry one"); how a baby-faced lad from Athens, Ga. came to be known as "One-Slug" McWhorter ("You just sat back, pressed the button and he blew up and wasn't there any more"); and how planes are lost, in combat or accident; and how the Navy risks everything to save downed flyers from becoming drowned or captured flyers.

The communiques now being issued on the bombing of Tokyo by "Pete" Mitscher's massed air groups from Task Force 58 will have vastly richer meaning to readers of Carrier War.

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