Yorktown's Arlington of Carrier Aviation story began over half a century ago when Lt. E.T. "Smokey" Stover was lost in the first strike on Truk on 16 February 1944.  Today, the Smokey Stover Yorktown Memorial Theatre and its nearby Arlington exhibit of memorial plaques aboard USS Yorktown at Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum, Charleston SC lists 8,080 names of carrier aviation men lost in World War Two and all wars thereafter. Stover's is the first of those 8,080 names.

Smokey was an unusual young man who loved poetry and classical music, and wrote in his journal a half century ago about "going to the moon and beyond".  Ironically, the USS Yorktown was the prime recovery ship for the first aviators to travel to the moon.  He was a skilled and respected pilot, and was featured in the famous "Fighting Lady" film about Yorktown.

Stover flew the F4F Wildcat and F6F Hellcat bravely and well.  At age 24 he served in Yorktown under her skipper Captain J J Jocko Clark, and as it happened received a highly decorated cake on 9 February 1944 just one week before his death, for making the carrier's 7,000th landing.

"High Flight"

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. an American serving with the Canadian Air Force 1941

 

On the morning of 16 February 1944, Smokey was oiling his pistol to prepare for the possibility of being shot down and taken alive.

Earlier, Smokey walked across the hangar deck to the place where Chaplain Alexander was leaning on a rail.  As the two men talked, Smokey pulled from his wallet a poem he had clipped from a magazine.  It was High Flight.  the last line is "Put out my hand and touched the face of God."  Smokey had a premonition that he would soon touch the face of God.  Smokey put on a brand new pair of shoes with his flight suit on his last day.  When asked why he would wear new shoes on a combat mission, he calmly said that when he got shot down he would need a new pair of shoes because the Japanese would not give him any.

The pilots were in their planes at sunrise.  Twelve planes took off in three divisions with other carriers joining in the first-ever a strike at the defenses at Truk.  Smokey's fellow pilots saw his Hellcat badly hit, then saw him jump.  His chute opened normally, and Smokey gave a thumbs up sign as he climbed into his raft.  Dye markers were not possible lest they lead Japanese ships to him.  Though pilots kept flying that day and next morning over his last known position, no one saw him again.  It is felt that he did survive, but drifted to a reef where he was captured, interrogated and killed the next morning by the Japanese.




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