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During the six month struggle for Guadalcanal in the fall and winter of 1942-43, the American and Japanese navies clashed repeatedly as they dueled for control of the seas around the southern Solomon Islands. In October, 1942, the Japanese launched one last main effort to recapture the island. Supported by four Imperial Navy aircraft carriers, this offensive became known as the Battle of Santa Cruz.
 USS Hornet CV-8
On October 26, 1942, both sides discovered each other and launched air attacks against the carriers. In the ensuing battle, the Japanese crippled the Hornet. She became the last full-sized American fleet carrier to be sunk in the Pacific during the war.
Aboard the Hornet that day was Commander Lawrence Bean, a close friend of my grandfather, Edward Bruning. Both Bean and Bruning practiced medicine in Southern California before Pearl Harbor. When the war broke out, Bean joined the navy and became a surgeon aboard the Hornet, while my grandfather Edward served as a battlefield head trauma surgeon with Patton’s 3rd Army.
When the first Japanese air raid struck the Hornet’s task force, Commander Bean, rode it out at his battle station three decks deep inside the carrier’s hull. He was assigned to sickbay, where he heard the anti-aircraft fire and felt the explosions that ravaged his ship. When power failed, the men with him saw to their battle lanterns, but they produced only halos of light in the darkness. As they waited there for wounded men to treat, Bean began to smell smoke. As the minutes passed, the smoke became worse, as did the starboard list.
Somebody announced, “Prepare to abandon ship!” Bean led his corpsmen and pharmacist mates to the hatchway leading upward, but the battering the Hornet had just endured had jammed it shut. At first, the warped hatch defied their attempts to gain entry, but finally somebody pried it loose, and they emerged on the hangar deck.
 Defending the Hornet
Up forward, in the elevator pit, the fuselage of a Japanese plane lay encased in flames from its ruptured fuel tanks. Nearby sailors had seen the Japanese crew roast alive as the fire engulfed them after their crash. Now, their burnt corpses were twisted and blackened, but mercifully still.
Bean moved through the hangar deck, treating the wounded lying nearby. Using battle dressings and supplies from emergency medical boxes, he and his men went from sailor to sailor, applying bandages and injecting morphine. While he worked with his corpsmen, he learned the fate of his fellow doctors and friends.
Spread throughout the ship at battle dressing stations, almost every doctor aboard the Hornet had been killed or incapacitated by this first Japanese attack. Most were killed outright as every battle dressing station was wiped out. Only a few doctors and dentists survived those five cataclysmic minutes.
Later, Commander Bean climbed up to the flight deck to assist the wounded up there. Smoke was pouring from one of the bomb hits in the forward part of the deck. As he walked aft, he came across Shigeyuki Sato’s corpse. Lying nearby was his blackened, burnt gunner. Both men were completely intact, sitting on the deck as if still in the cockpit, hands at their controls and guns. Bean later wrote they looked as if they were in some sort of “cataleptic state that even death could not break.”
 Under Attack
As the morning wore on, the crew managed to contain the fires and reduce the ship’s list to about 2 degrees. But with the engineering spaces flooded, the Hornet was not going anywhere under her own power. While the damage control parties worked, Bean and the other medical personnel moved the wounded to the ship’s fantail in the hangar deck. Eventually, they were all removed from the ship and taken aboard two destroyers.
Without any more casualties to treat, the doctors and corpsmen began identifying the dead, a horrible and frustrating task made even more difficult by the fact that about half the ship’s company had not worn their identification tags that morning. At one point, Bean came across an entire gun crew whose men had been decapitated by one of the bomb blasts.
When the dead were finally gathered and identified, the Hornet’s chaplain said a few brief words, and the men were buried at sea before the next Japanese attack.
Bombers struck the Hornet again, and Bean was forced to take a helmet removed from a dead sailor and use it for his own protection. He lay on the deck watching the flak claw down several planes, but the Hornet shuddered once again as more weapons struck home. The list returned, this time edging past 15 degrees.
It was time to abandon ship. Along with the rest of the crew, Bean went over the side—but not before checking thoroughly to make sure no wounded men were being left behind.
In the water, the Hornet’s crew endured another bombing attack. Later, they were strafed. Nobody around Bean was hurt in either case, but one young sailor suffered cramps for two days after a near miss blew water up his rectum in sort of a forced enema.
The two attending destroyers picked up the men, but by the time they got to Bean, he was so weak he could not climb up the knotted rope thrown over the hull to him. Twice he tried; twice he splashed back into the water. Being over 40 years old did not help that day at all.
Finally, just as another Japanese attack began, he made it to the deck and was hauled aboard. That night, he dreamt incessantly of Japanese planes, dive bombing, launching torpedoes, and strafing men in the water.
It was an ordeal he’d never forget, and one that at least in some ways prepared him for his war to come. In the ensuing two years, he had two more ships shot from under him. It was a hell of a way to fight a war for a middle-aged doctor from sunny California.
Editors Note: John Bruning is a frequent contributor to The Combat Report. He has written many books and articles about military history. His current book, The Devil's Sandbox, is available in bookstores everywhere and on Amazon.com
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