US, Aussie heroes relive the Battle of Coral Sea

Teens who joined forces 75 years ago reunite in NY for salute by prez & PM

THE Japanese planes roared in like summer thunderstorms, raining brief but brutal showers of bullets and bombs into the sticky South Pacific air and onto the US and Australian warships below.

The dive bombers looked as if they were coming “right out of the sun” says Roger Spooner, who was just a 19-year-old farm boy from Georgia sailing in shark-infested waters 9,000 miles from home and about to face his first real firefight aboard the USS Yorktown on May 8, 1942.

He was terrified — he’d joined the Navy six weeks before Pearl Harbor with no idea war was on the horizon — but for the next hour, Spooner swallowed his fear, loading shell after shell into his gun turret.

“If a man got killed, sad to say, within 10 foot of you, you didn’t know it until it was all over. You were doing your job,” says Spooner, now 94.

He was just one of hundreds of courageous American and Australian servicemen who stared down death in that four-day skirmish now known as the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Together, these gutsy kids from opposite sides of the planet changed the course of the Pacific war — and forged a special military relationship between our countries that remains to this day.

On Thursday, almost 75 years later to the day, Spooner and a handful of surviving veterans from both countries will meet with President Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on board the USS Intrepid in the Hudson to finally give this little-known battle the recognition it deserves, at a gala dinner hosted by the American Australian Association.

MOST people are familiar with the Battle of Midway a month later, where the Allies first inflicted a major blow against the Japanese, but it was Coral Sea was where the tide first started to turn, according to the association’s president, former ambassador to Australia John Berry.

“It’s an ugly war, but we’re on the offensive. It shifted from defense to offense at the Coral Sea,” said Berry.

Until that point, Japan seemed unstoppable. It had already toppled Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya, and the Aussies had just intercepted communications that Japanese forces were about to land in New Guinea. Australia was sure to be next. With the British Royal Navy’s re- gional forces decimated from earlier battles, and the rest of its troops tied up fighting Hitler in Europe, Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of America’s Pacific Fleet, answered the Aussies’ SOS without a second thought.

“The captain told us this was an English country, these are our English counterparts,” recalls John Hancock, 92, then just 17 and another Peach State kid fresh from the farm serving aboard the Yorktown. “They were trying to keep supply lines open to Australia.”

Nimitz deployed two US carrier groups — one with the Yorktown, the other with the USS Lexington — while Australian Rear Adm. John Crace commanded a joint support force that included two Aussie cruisers, the HMAS Australia and HMAS Hobart.

The two sides began dueling from a distance on May 4, but the real battle began on May 7, when US planes discovered a Japanese light carrier and tore it apart in a hail of bombs and torpedoes, killing 638 Japanese fighters.

The Japanese exacted some damage of their own, taking out a US oiler and a destroyer, but their attempts to sink Crace’s force were largely a bust, thanks to the Aussies’ fearless defense.

The two Australian cruisers skillfully outmaneuvered the onslaught while their men blasted back into the skies.

“The captain drove the Hobart like a Formula One motor car to dodge the torpedo and bombs,” Gordon Johnson, then a 19-yearold, recently told the national daily The Australian.

“They strafed the ship with machine guns, and along with our anti-aircraft guns and the whine of the turbines, the noise was extraordinary. It was like putting your head in an empty 44-gallon drum and someone whacking it with a hammer.”

THE next morning, the battle reached its brief, bloody climax as both sides discovered and attacked their counterparts’ most valuable assets: the carriers.

The Americans hit first, sending out 75 aircraft that did serious damage to an enemy carrier, but the flyboys struggled to see the other boats, which were obscured by bad weather.

Then the Japanese hit back, and suddenly, Spooner and Hancock were in the thick of battle.

“I fired at the Japanese planes, like everybody else did, [but] who knows who was shot and who was hit,” Hancock recalls. “I fired about five canisters — and there are 250 rounds in a canister.”

Over on the other side of the craft, Spooner was loading shells as fast as he could.

“I was scared to death. Anybody says they weren’t scared, I don’t believe them. Planes were coming in every which way — you were scared,” he says.

It was over by midday. Sea battles are short and brutal like that, Hancock says, explaining, “It just raises hell for an hour or less and then it’s over.”

The Yorktown came out relatively unscathed — it had dodged eight torpedoes and was hit by only a single bomb. But 66 men were killed or seriously injured.

The Lexington — the slower of the two carriers — fared worse. Its captain evaded five torpedoes but two found their target, sparking a fire that tore through the ship.

The craft remained afloat for the battle but was ultimately too damaged to continue, and the crew abandoned ship before it was scuttled.

The “Lady Lex” lost 216 men, but thousands made it out alive.

Hancock didn’t really take in what had happened until it was all over and he came face to face with some of the bodies.

“I went to get some sandwiches for the crew — that’s where I saw my first dead,” he recalls. “It kind of gets to a kid whose never seen death before.

“They had coconut pie there. For years and years, I could never eat coconut pie.”

The teens watched as dozens of dead were buried at sea that night.

“There were bodies everywhere. We buried them at midnight, they were prepared for burial and over the side,” Spooner says.

Hancock’s hammock was “blown all to heck” in the fight, and he had to spend that night sleeping on the deck with a life jacket for a pillow.

The Allies didn’t actually win the battle — Tokyo considered it a tactical victory because its forces had sunk the largest ship — but they did enough damage to take Japan’s newest carriers out of commission, which proved to be a decisive advantage at Midway.

And it introduced our naval leaders to the new realities of warfare on the seas.

“This was the first naval sea battle where the ships never see each other — they were five hours apart by sea, 20 minutes by air. The devastation that’s wrought by air shows everybody that naval warfare has totally changed,” says Berry.

CORAL Sea also halted Japan’s advance toward Australia — and it is something the Aussies have never forgotten.

Norm Tame, 93, who sailed on the HMAS Australia, plans to tell them so in person at Thursday’s anniversary, according to the former ambassador.

“I asked him, ‘You’re going to meet the president. What are you going to tell him?’ He said, ‘I want to tell the president and all the Americans thanks for what they did for Australia in the Battle of the Coral Sea. It was more than a battle. It was the start of the alliance between our countries,” Berry says.

For Berry, the occasion is also deeply personal — some of the Aussies who fought in Coral Sea also served alongside his father, a Marine, who fought the following year in the brutal six-month Battle of Guadalcanal and then spent time on R&R in Australia.

“He said when he left Guadalcanal, he wondered if there was any good left in world,” Berry says. “A week’s time with Aussies reminded you that not only is there good in world, but it is damn well worth fighting for.”