I went ahead and transcribed the entire first page to make it easier to read before I realized that Mark had posted the enlarged section. Oopsie.
Anyway, I'd rather not let all that typing got to waste, so here's the transcript if anyone wants to use it for anything.
Mark Allen M wrote:
Tom Lea wrote:
"HORNET'S" LAST DAY
TOM LEA PAINTS DEATH OF A GREAT CARRIER
The sinking of the U.S.S. Hornet by Japanese planes on
Oct. 25, 1942 is no longer a news event. It now
belongs to history. But of all the great stories of the
war, none is more filled with heroism and tragedy
than the loss in the South Pacific of this mighty air-
craft carrier.
Four days before the Hornet’s last fight, Tom Lea,
artist-war correspondent on assignment for LIFE,
transferred from her to another ship. For 66 days he
had lived aboard the Hornet. Since then he has been
working on a series of paintings showing what happened
on the day she was sunk. Research material for the
paintings came not only from his own penciled sketches
made before he was transferred, but from accounts
given to him by officers and enlisted men who survived
the sinking. His drawings and paintings are reproduced
on these eight pages.
Tom Lea says that the days he spent aboard the
Hornet were the proudest days of his life. In a letter
written to LIFE he describes the emotions he feels
about the ship. “I have been trying to write you about
how a ship seems to be a living thing and how each
ship has her own particular personality. Yet a ship does
not begin to live merely because she has engines, and
steel, and docks and a flag. She begins to live only as
she receives from the men who sail her the best part
of their personalities. Men endow a ship, not only with
their own souls, their own hopes and desires, but also,
because a ship’s performance depends upon the men
who sail her, with their own behavior.
“If this is true of all ships, it is particularly true of a
man-of-war. Such a ship achieves her destiny only in
destruction, and her quality of living is somehow shaped
by her quality of dying. Men on a warship think of
dying just as normally as they think of living.
“An aircraft carrier is by her very nature a most pe-
culiar warship, for she belongs not wholly to the sea
nor sufficiently to the sky. Without heavy deck guns
or stout armor, she is physically the most vulnerable
of warships, carrying within her the seeds of her own
destruction. Whenever she goes to sea she is loaded
with bombs, shells and high-octane gasoline, all con-
cealed behind her thin steel plates. With this vulner-
ability goes a dashing speed and a monumentally big
shape. The result is that her men are proud of her
power but aware of her weaknesses. They must be pre-
pared to live greatly and die greatly.
“Such a ship was the Hornet. She feared bombs, but
she also knew that probably only torpedoes would sink
her. There is no way to describe how terrible a torpedo
seems as it head for a carrier. It leaves a strange wake,
a rather thin, white, bubbly line like fluid ice, cold as
the death it presages. Against the ship’s side, it ex-
plods with an appalling concussion and a wild flash of
pink flame. Within the ship there is a terrible wrench-
ing. Decks and bulkheads are twisted like tissue paper,
and all things note secured by iron belts are smashed.
“The Hornet died under a moonlit sky on a shining
tropical sea. She had been hit by two waves of Japanese
planes, the first in the morning, the second in the after-
noon. After the second attack, her crew knew she was
doomed. Torpedo hits started fires which grew rapidly
out of control and the ship took on a heavy list. Then
came the last order: ‘Abandon ship.’ The men went
over the side on knotted lines, down to life rafts, to
floating debris, or simply to the water. Behind them
their ship died a smoking death.
“But war is a communal experience and it has its
comradeship. The great carrier was no alone. She had
destroyers and cruisers with her, and they aided in the
work of hauling the Hornet’s crew from the sea. In a
few hours it was all over. Those whose fate it was to
live were alive, and those who had to die were dead.
A tropical sunset colored the hulk of the carrier and
the stars came out faintly. After dark she went down.”
The drawings and paintings, except for the one
above, are here arranged in order. They cover the whole
period from dawn to duck of the Hornet’s last day.
*Apparently, the forum auto corrects my historically accurate use of "J A P" to "Japanese".
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I kept racking my brain as to whether I remembered a recent expedition that went back and recovered it. The other possibility in my mind was that someone removed it before it went on its last voyage, but that didn't make any sense. I had never considered that it might have been removed when she was sinking. I am used to thinking of a sinking happening rather quickly, I forgot that Hornet's was rather slow. I can understand why and how they would do such a thing; it still seems a bit odd though.
