Old Indestructible

ARMY & NAVY

On Feb. 21, 1945, the veteran Saratoga finally got it. Last week the Navy told how.

For more than three years the Navy's biggest,*oldest carrier had fought through the Pacific war, taken two submarine torpedoes but never a hit from an enemy aircraft. On that February afternoon, as she was launching her own planes off Iwo Jima, nine Jap planes closed on her.

Five got through her fighter cover and her wildly crackling antiaircraft fire. Four of them smashed into her. The fifth plane, knocked into the sea, freakishly bounced into her side and exploded, rupturing her skin near the waterline. Flaming gasoline spewed across her hangar deck. One bomb penetrated four decks, wiping out living quarters. Fire swept the forward part of the flight deck.

Men turned hoses on blazing planes (see cut). Gradually they got the fires under control, but not before planes parked on the hangar deck had been turned into charred skeletons. Gunners fought off a second plane attack. One bomb landed. Total casualties: 123 killed or missing; 192 wounded.

But the 17-year-old "Sara" crawled away, pulled herself together, managed to take her circling pilots aboard, and lived to limp back into Bremerton Navy Yard. Workers set a record clearing her wreckage, patching her up and refitting her. Last week she was back in the Pacific. Also back in the Pacific, after extensive repairs at the overworked Bremerton Yard: the veteran light cruiser Nashville, the destroyers Haraden and Lamson--all victims of Kamikaze planes. And at San Francisco's Mare Island Yard was the destroyer Hazelwood, topsides wrecked after an encounter with Jap suicide planes.

-* Neither the new 45,000-ton Midway nor the Franklin D.Roosevelt has yet been commissioned.

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