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by Ronald Russell
(The following originally appeared
in Veterans Biographies, distributed during the annual Battle of Midway
commemoration in San Francisco, June 2007)
In January 1939, at the age of eighteen years and two
days, Miles Putnam joined the Navy for a four-year enlistment. After recruit training at San Diego, he was
sent to Norfolk, Virginia for training as a metalsmith, followed by extended
training as an aviation metalsmith. He
was then assigned to duty with Bombing Squadron 5 (VB-5) aboard the USS Yorktown
(CV-5), then serving with the Atlantic Fleet.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Yorktown
transferred to the Pacific fleet and became a participant in history’s
first carrier-to-carrier naval battle in the Coral Sea. The ship was heavily damaged by a Japanese
bomb, but many of its aircraft also sustained battle damage in aerial
combat. Miles and his shipmates in VB-5
were kept very busy restoring some of the squadron’s SBD dive bombers to
operational condition.
As the Yorktown underwent
repairs at Pearl Harbor in advance of the Battle of Midway, its air group was
reinforced by squadrons from the USS Saratoga (CV-3), also out of
service for repairs. Merging the two
air groups resulted in an unusual name change for the squadron: for the upcoming Battle of Midway, VB5 was
to be designated “Scouting Squadron 5” (VS-5), and has been identified as such
in most history books. But the
squadron’s proud mechanics and other support personnel will quickly tell you
that it was the men of VB-5 that kept those planes in the air.
Experience in the Coral Sea had
taught Miles, by then an AM1/c rating and the senior aviation metalsmith in the
squadron, that the ship didn’t have nearly enough antiaircraft guns. So he crafted a stationary base on which to
mount a pair of the .30 caliber machine guns normally carried on the SBDs, and
mounted it on the ship’s port side catwalk, directly opposite the island. He was firing those guns when the first of
three bombs struck the base of the island directly behind him. He grabbed a fire hose nozzle while a
shipmate charged its foam canister, but the water pressure quickly gave
out. He and some fellow gunners then
gathered several CO2 fire extinguishers and did what they could to combat the
flames and smoke from the bomb hit.
That damage was temporarily
repaired, and Miles was back at his guns a short time later when the ship was
struck by two aerial torpedoes on the port side, one just a little forward of
his makeshift gun mount. He remembers
looking down the catwalk where numerous other gunners had been, and both they
as well as the catwalk itself were gone.
The order to abandon ship came soon
after, and recalling advice from others who had abandoned ship in the Coral
Sea, he headed back to the fantail where fire hoses had been deployed over the
side for the sailors to descend to the water.
“I didn’t want to go down on one of the ropes,” he says. “Those who did it in the Coral Sea mostly
got their hands severely burned. It was
pretty easy on the fire hose.”
After swimming in the oily water for
some time, Miles was rescued by the USS Benham (DD-397), along with
hundreds of other Yorktown survivors.
He was initially transferred to the cruiser USS Portland (CA-33),
then to USS Fulton (AS-11) for the return to Pearl Harbor.
Needles to say, the expiration of
his four-year enlistment in 1943 came and went as an uneventful day—he and
everyone else in the Navy was in it “for the duration.” That duration ended for him in 1945 while he
was a Chief Aviation Metalsmith working at Ford Island Naval Air Station in
Hawaii. He transferred to the Naval
Reserve and retired as a lieutenant commander in 1965 after twenty-six years of
combined service.
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