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Enterprise: America’s Fightingest Ship and the Men Who Helped Win World War II

by Barrett Tillman, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2012, $27

Fighters from the carrier Enterprise were defending against a noisy, chaotic onslaught by Japanese Aichi D3A “Val” dive bombers. On the ship’s deck, plane captain E.G. Johnston was trapped in the cockpit of his SBD Dauntless dive bomber. As Barrett Tillman writes:

Johnston watched the developing attack. As the next Val dived closer, he could see the bomb under its belly.“I felt the Jap had me in his sights so I let the SBD roll a little. The Val let his bomb go and he seemed to be following it down.” The weapon appeared to grow from the size of a baseball to medicine ball proportions. As the Japanese pulled out of his dive, seemingly below 1,000 feet, Johnston was convinced that the bomb was going to hit him. He began reciting the Act of Contrition but only started, “Oh, my God, I am…” when he felt “the most terrific explosion I have ever heard.”

Tillman reminds us that aviation isn’t only about pilots: Gunners, plane captains and wrench-turners count, too. Enterprise’s dust jacket calls Tillman “the man who owns naval aviation history.” Given the ease with which he writes about airplanes and air combat and the authenticity that can come only from interviews capturing individual voices, this claim is no exaggeration. Want to know how an F4F Wildcat pilot can win a close-quarters duel with the vaunted Japanese Zero? Curious to learn why torpedo bomber crewmen risked everything to attack with torpedoes that didn’t work? Tillman puts it into everyday words for the everyday reader.

Nominally about a warship launched in 1936 and retired in 1945, Enterprise is really a book about men, airplanes and battles. The latter began when Enterprise was one of the carriers the Japanese narrowly missed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—although several of its planes were hit by American anti-aircraft fire while attempting to land at Ford Island that same evening.

You may think there’s nothing new to learn about the Wildcats, TBD Devastators or SBD Dauntlesses with which Enterprise began its combat saga in the Pacific. But stories about those planes—as well as the F6F Hellcats, TBM Avengers and SB2C Helldivers that also called Enterprise’s wooden deck home—and the men who flew and worked on them sing across the pages of this Stephen Ambrose–style popular history. There is always something new to discover, because every sailor in the fast-carrier war had his own story.

Enterprise and its planes and men were in the thick of battle from the beginning. The carrier and its air group (“a giant, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle; a 20,000-ton Rubik’s cube,” as Tillman describes it) fought through practically the entire war, until a kamikaze hit disabled the ship in May 1945.

Tillman’s book is not for the bureau-number junkie or the technical guru. It’s a smooth, easy read for us regular folks, and also a fresh reminder of the courage of Americans who achieved victory at sea and in the air.

 

Originally published in the July 2012 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.