Valor Off Samar - September ‘98 World War II Feature

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Valor Off Samar

Ed Huxtable led the valiant airmen of the escort carrier Gambier Bay against overwhelming odds during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

By Cindy Hayostek

It is one of those wonderful twists of fate that the man who commanded the aviation squadron of the only U.S. carrier sunk by naval gunfire during World War II became the person who flew the surrender documents into Japan.

That man, Edward J. Huxtable, Jr., was born in 1913 and grew up in Douglas, Ariz., a town where community leaders actively promoted aviation during the 1920s and 30s. As a result, many area boys grew up to become aviators during World War II. Ed Huxtable was one of them.

Huxtable graduated from Douglas High School in 1931, attended prep school and in 1932 entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. There he was on the football and outdoor rifle teams every year until his graduation in 1936.

His first assignment was as assistant navigator aboard the cruiser USS Quincy. He served briefly on the destroyer USS Truxton as torpedo officer before beginning flight training in Florida in February 1939.

In January 1940, Huxtable became part of the scouting squadron serving the carrier USS Ranger. This was followed by service with USS Yorktown’s anti-submarine squadron in 1941 as that carrier escorted British ships across the Atlantic.

Huxtable spent the next two years of World War II in Florida as an instructor with the advanced carrier training command. Then he was transferred to California to assume command of a composite squadron of planes assigned to USS Gambier Bay.

Gambier Bay was an escort carrier with the designation CVE, a classification that resulted from the United States’ prewar insistence on making battleships the stars of its fleet. In the early days of World War II, it was soon learned that naval fleets needed air cover that only carrier planes could provide. But the United States had few carriers.

Henry Kaiser, whose company produced the famed Liberty Ships for the U.S. merchant fleet, proposed building a small carrier to take up the slack. The first of these ships was commissioned in early 1943. During the summer of 1943, the hull of the 19th escort carrier was laid. In November this ship was commissioned USS Gambier Bay. Named after an Alaskan bay, which had in turn been named for a British naval officer, the carrier was quite small. It was also lightly armed and slow because of temperamental engines. The ship’s real weapons were the 30 planes it carried.

The shortcomings of the so-called “jeep carriers,” or “baby flattops,” were pointed out the same month Gambier Bay was commissioned. In November 1943, Liscombe Bay, the second baby flattop built, was hit by a Japanese torpedo and sunk in 15 minutes, prompting cynics to label the carriers “Kaiser koffins.” Veterans would say that CVE stood for “Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable.”

VC-10, Huxtable’s squadron of fighters and bombers, boarded Gambier Bay on April 5, 1944. By the end of May, the ship was in Pearl Harbor and on June 15 saw its first action during the invasion of Saipan in the Mariana Islands.

Huxtable, then a lieutenant commander, flew the Grumman TBM Avenger, a torpedo bomber. He had tried flying the Grumman FM2 Wildcat, a fighter, while still Stateside but quickly gave it up. Edwin P. Hoyt, in the book Men of the Gambier Bay, explains that Huxtable had no trouble with the Wildcat until he tried to land. He cranked the wheel-locking handle 32 times instead of the required 33. So the wheels retracted upon landing, and the plane skidded down the runway.

Hoyt wrote: “Gasoline began spilling out of the tanks, ignited, and flames began to chase the plane. The Wildcat came to a screeching halt, with the firemen spraying furiously, and Skipper Huxtable got out and walked away disdainfully. ‘It takes a dammed athlete to fly one of those,’ he muttered as he went.”

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