The sinking of USS Wasp

At around 2.45 p.m. on 15 September 1942, in the waters south-east of the Solomon Islands, the Japanese submarine I-19 fired a spread of six torpedoes at the American aircraft carrier USS Wasp. Together with Hornet, the ship was covering a convoy carrying reinforcements for the besieged Marines on Guadalcanal. Hit forward, near the aviation fuel tanks and ammunition magazines, Wasp was engulfed in flames that could not be put out. Half an hour later her captain ordered the ship abandoned, and in the evening an American destroyer finished her off with torpedoes. 193 men were killed. The same spread also damaged a modern battleship and a destroyer that sank a month later. It was one of the most successful submarine attacks of the entire war.

Wasp is sometimes called a light carrier. This is inaccurate: she was a fleet carrier designated CV-7, smaller and less well protected than her predecessors, but classified and used as a full-sized carrier. In the US Navy light carriers (CVL) were a separate class, built only from 1942 onwards on cruiser hulls as the Independence class.

A carrier from leftover tonnage

Wasp was a child of naval arms limitation. The Washington Treaty set the United States a total carrier tonnage, and after Ranger and the two large Yorktown-class ships had been built, about 15,000 tons of it remained. The designers wanted to fit on such a small hull an air group not much smaller than Yorktown’s, so they economised on everything else: engine power, armour and above all torpedo protection. The boiler rooms and aviation fuel tanks had practically no side protection. The navy was aware of these weaknesses from the start, but within the permitted tonnage it could not remedy them. Wasp was commissioned on 25 April 1940 as the only ship of her class.

For her first two years she served in the Atlantic, where the threat was expected to be smaller than in the Pacific. In the summer of 1941 she ferried fighters for the troops occupying Iceland and took part in neutrality patrols, and in the spring of 1942, placed under the British Home Fleet, she twice delivered fighters to besieged Malta. In Operation Calendar on 20 April, 47 Spitfires took off from her deck, most of which the Germans destroyed within a few days. In Operation Bowery on 9 May, Wasp and the British Eagle flew off more than sixty fighters to the island, which this time went straight into action. Prime Minister Winston Churchill then thanked the crew with a signal: “Who said a wasp couldn’t sting twice?”

To the Pacific

In May and June 1942 the Pacific Fleet lost Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea and Yorktown at Midway. Admiral Chester Nimitz had only three carriers left – Saratoga, Enterprise and Hornet – and Wasp had to join them. After a short refit at Norfolk the carrier, commanded since the end of May by Captain Forrest P. Sherman, passed through the Panama Canal in June and at San Diego embarked a full air group: Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers and Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes hoisted his flag aboard her.

On 7 August Wasp’s aircraft covered the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, destroying a dozen or so Japanese seaplanes and flying boats at their moorings. When the Battle of the Eastern Solomons was fought on 24 August, however, the carrier was far to the south, where Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher had sent her to refuel; the next day her aircraft could only search for the retreating enemy. The battle cost the Americans damage to Enterprise, which left for repairs, and on 31 August the Japanese submarine I-26 torpedoed Saratoga, putting her out of action for nearly three months. From then on only two American carriers remained in the South Pacific: Wasp and Hornet.

Both now cruised the waters south-east of the Solomons, between Espiritu Santo and Guadalcanal, covering the route by which supplies reached the island. The Japanese navy had deployed a dozen or so submarines in these waters, lying in wait for heavy American ships. Sailors called the area “Torpedo Junction”. The risk was known, but the carriers could not withdraw: without their cover the reinforcement convoys would not have reached Henderson Field, around which Major General Alexander Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division had been holding out since mid-August.

The convoy with the 7th Marines

By mid-September the situation on Guadalcanal was critical. On the nights of 12–13 and 13–14 September Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s brigade came close to breaking through the defences on the ridge south of the airfield, and only after fierce fighting did the Battle of Bloody Ridge end in a Japanese defeat. Vandegrift, however, had too few men to close the perimeter with a continuous line, and the commander in the South Pacific, Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, had long hesitated over whether to risk transports in waters controlled at night by Japanese warships. In the end he agreed that Rear Admiral Richmond Turner should carry to the island the 7th Marine Regiment, which until then had been stationed on Samoa.

The transports, carrying some 4,200 men with their equipment, ammunition and fuel, left Espiritu Santo in mid-September. Distant cover was provided by a force that Noyes directed from Wasp: the Wasp group with cruisers and destroyers, and a few miles away the Hornet group, which included the new battleship USS North Carolina. The ships were steaming about 150 nautical miles south-east of the island of San Cristobal, today Makira.

15 September passed quietly. In the morning Wasp sent out reconnaissance aircraft, which found nothing, and at noon one of her Wildcats shot down a Japanese flying boat. At about 2.20 p.m. the carrier turned into the wind to launch a new patrol – eight fighters and eighteen dive bombers – and to recover eleven aircraft returning from the previous flight. Once the recovery was complete the ship began turning back to starboard. Aircraft fuelled and armed for the next launch stood on the flight deck and in the hangar.

I-19’s spread

Meanwhile, lurking near the force was I-19, a large ocean-going Type B1 submarine, commanded since the summer by Lieutenant Commander Takakazu Kinashi. Kinashi, who had once graduated bottom of his class at the naval academy, was an experienced submariner; in June he had commanded another boat at Midway. According to Japanese and American studies, he managed to slip through the destroyer screen and get very close to the carrier – by some accounts to about half a kilometre. At 2.44 p.m. he fired a full spread of six oxygen-driven Type 95 torpedoes, which left almost no wake on the water, from his bow tubes.

A lookout on Wasp reported “three torpedoes on the starboard side”. The ship put her rudder hard over, but it was too late. At about 2.45 p.m. explosions followed one another at short intervals on the starboard side forward. In his first report Captain Sherman wrote of three hits; a later analysis by the Bureau of Ships, based on the accounts of a larger number of survivors, concluded that two torpedoes had hit and that the third explosion, a dozen or so seconds after the first two, was a secondary one. All of them occurred in the area of the aviation fuel tanks and ammunition magazines.

The effects were immediate. Aircraft on the flight deck and in the hangar were thrown up and slammed down so hard that their undercarriages broke; machines slung beneath the hangar deckhead fell onto those parked below. Fire broke out in the hangar and below decks. The heat set off ammunition at the anti-aircraft guns on the starboard side, and one of the gun mounts was blown overboard. Worst of all, the explosions had wrecked the water mains in the forward part of the ship – the firefighters had nothing with which to fight a blaze that was reaching more bombs, torpedoes and fuel tanks. The ship took a list of 10–15 degrees to starboard, and leaking oil and petrol burned on the water around the hull.

Abandoning ship

Sherman slowed down and manoeuvred so that the wind would drive the fire towards the bow and keep it away from the stern. It was in vain: within less than half an hour of the hit there were three more violent explosions of petrol vapour. Damage control central ceased to function and telephone lines were cut. After consulting Rear Admiral Noyes, Sherman gave the order to abandon ship at 3.20 p.m. The badly wounded were lowered onto rafts and floats; many unhurt sailors had to jump into the water from the stern, because the bow was in flames. According to the captain’s account, the evacuation was orderly and without panic, and delays arose because men did not want to leave the ship before the wounded. Sherman was the last to leave, at about 4 p.m., after making sure that no one was left alive aboard.

Despite the threat of further submarine attacks, the force’s destroyers and cruisers – among them Laffey, Lansdowne, Helena and Salt Lake City – picked 1,946 men out of the water. Almost all the aircraft that had been airborne at the time of the attack landed on Hornet; 45 aircraft went down with the ship. The burning wreck drifted, and at dusk it was shaken by further explosions. The destroyer Lansdowne was ordered to finish her off. The first two torpedoes failed to explode – these were the same faulty American torpedoes that were also letting down the submarines in 1942. The next three, with their magnetic exploders deactivated, went off, and at about 9 p.m. Wasp sank bow first.

Of the 2,139 men aboard, 193 were killed and 366 wounded. I-19, hunted by destroyers, survived a depth-charge attack and got away. The Japanese command learned of the carrier’s sinking from another submarine, I-15, which was watching the area.

North Carolina and O’Brien

Two of the six torpedoes passed ahead of Wasp’s bow and ran on towards the Hornet group, a few miles to the north-east. At about 2.51 p.m. one of them struck the bow of the destroyer USS O’Brien, which was taking evasive action to avoid the other. Moments later another torpedo hit the battleship North Carolina on her port side, about six metres below the waterline, tearing a hole of roughly 10 by 5.5 metres in her plating. Five sailors were killed. The battleship listed 5.5 degrees, but the crew quickly righted her by counter-flooding and she kept up a speed of about 25 knots. Even so, she had to leave for repairs at Pearl Harbor, which lasted until mid-November. Older studies, among them Samuel Eliot Morison’s history of the US Navy, attributed the hits on the battleship and the destroyer to a second submarine, I-15; today, on the basis of Japanese documents, it is accepted that they all came from I-19’s single spread.

O’Brien appeared to have suffered little and reached Espiritu Santo under her own power, and then Nouméa, where she was given temporary repairs. The explosion, however, had weakened the whole structure of her hull. On the way to the United States the leaks grew worse, and on 19 October, not far from Samoa, the ship’s bottom split open. The destroyer sank after covering almost 3,000 nautical miles from the place where she had been torpedoed; her whole crew was saved. A single spread from I-19 thus sank a carrier and a destroyer and put a battleship out of action for two months – it is often called the most successful torpedo salvo of the war.

The reinforcements reach the island

The loss of Wasp did not stop the convoy. Turner decided to sail on, and on 18 September the transports anchored off Lunga Point. Within twenty-four hours the 7th Marines were landed with their equipment, together with stocks of ammunition, food and the aviation fuel that the aircraft at Henderson Field were waiting for. Thanks to the new regiment, from 19 September Vandegrift was able to close the airfield’s defences with a continuous line and to make his first attempts at offensive action on the Matanikau River.

Kinashi returned to base a hero. Less than two months later he was promoted to commander, and Emperor Hirohito received him in a personal audience. In the winter of 1942–1943 I-19 carried supplies for the garrison on Guadalcanal; she was sunk with all hands on 25 November 1943 by depth charges from the destroyer USS Radford off the Gilbert Islands. Kinashi himself was killed in July 1944 as commander of the submarine I-29, sunk by an American submarine on the way from Europe to Japan. The wreck of Wasp was found in January 2019 by the research vessel Petrel at a depth of more than 4,300 metres.

Place in the war

The sinking of Wasp was the most painful blow that Japanese submarines dealt the American fleet in the whole Guadalcanal campaign. After it only Hornet remained in the South Pacific; the damaged Enterprise and Saratoga were under repair. For several weeks a single carrier determined whether the Americans could cover the convoys to the island, and the Japanese, with several serviceable carriers nearby, gained an advantage at sea that they were nevertheless unable to turn into a decision on land. The strain of those weeks also told on the command: Nimitz grew increasingly critical of the cautious Ghormley, who in mid-October was replaced by Vice Admiral William Halsey.

The carrier’s loss also exposed the design flaws and inadequate fire protection of American warships of the early war years. The reports on her sinking, like those on the losses of Lexington and Yorktown, became a lesson for the navy, which it drew on in improving the protection of fuel systems and the training of damage control parties on the new carriers entering service from 1943. Before that happened, in October 1942 Hornet and the repaired Enterprise fought the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, in which Hornet too was sunk. The autumn of 1942 was the darkest period of the Pacific War for the American carriers – but the Japanese never recovered Guadalcanal, whose defence they had served.