Both of the large carriers in our task group had the forward part of the flight deck smashed down around the bow. All the battle wagons and cruisers had their seaplanes turned over and smashed up. The cruiser Pittsburgh lost 28 frames of her bow completely and was limping into port. On CVE, and escort carrier, had her bow hanging on and did not know whether she would make port or not. There were no casualties on the Pittsburgh as all hands cleared the fo’castle before she broke loose.
We switched all the TBF’s (Torpedo Planes) to the light carriers and put only fighters on the damaged carriers as they could only launch fighters.
We headed north in port of Leyte in the Philippines on June 12. It was our first time in this harbor and for the first time in over a year we saw women and even though they were natives they really were beautiful. At least we thought so.
We remained in port until June 27 and during this time we worked every day getting the ship ready for sea. A new paint job made her look like a real lady – a fighting one at that.
We left port on the morning of June 27 with two other cans and the carrier Yorktown. We went out for gunnery exercise and on this run rescued two pilots who crashed when taking off from the carrier.
We returned to port the next day and remained in port until July 1st. Our last few days in port were busy ones as everyone was getting ready for sea as we knew we had another strike coming up.
We left on the morning of July 1st and for 7 days we had all sorts of gunnery exercises. We fired all types of weapons during the week and had plenty of fireworks for July 4th.
On July 8th we were spotted by a Japanese hospital ship. The ship was first intercepted by our advance pickets. She did not turn away however and when she saw our entire task force heading for Japan we had to board her. One of the destroyers in the group had this job and they found everything in order as she had 540 wounded Japanese soldiers she had taken from Wake Island. This was the same hospital ship that the destroyer Murry had sighted near Wake and had allowed her to pass after boarding her and checking to see that she carried not troops.
Since Japanese had already seen our main striking force we silenced her radio’s and forced her to steam to Saipan with one of our destroyers along as guard. The hospital ship will be forced to remain in Saipan until after this raid is over.
On July 10 we hit the airfields in and above Tokyo. All day we had air strikes going in and over 2000 carrier based planes blasted 67 airfields with little opposition. During the day we were out on advance 40 mile picket with three other cans. We remained at general quarters from 0315 to 2000 that night. However nothing happened during the entire day and we never fired a shot. The task group had three waves of enemy planes over the formation the first two waves consisting of 20 planes a piece and the third wave 30. Out of the 7- planes which attacked the main force, 57 were shot down with no damage to our fleet.
The real experience of the day belonged to 6 of our pilots who were attacked by 55 Tony’s. Our fighters shot down 43 and damaged two more. All six of our planes were shot down but of the pilots were rescued shortly after.