John Leary

Torpedo Bomber Pilot

    Midway was the turning point of the war. We had been at the Coral Sea where we lost the  USS Lexington.  The USS Yorktown was badly damaged, but in any event the Japanese did not continue to invade New Guinea or Australia.  Days later, after Coral Sea, when we arrived at Pearl Harbor we thought we were going home because the Yorktown was so badly damaged. But Admiral Nimitz had other ideas and he outranked most of us.  They put on civilian workers (to repair the damage) and when the Yorktown sailed 72 hours later it still had quite a few civilian workers still aboard repairing. They never mentioned their losses in the war.   Yorktown was hit again at Midway and they did abandon ship, but she stayed afloat and looked like she could make it, so about 200 men went back on board and unfortunately they were still on it when it was taken down by a submarine.  But the battle was won principally,  I think from our intelligence, because we outmaneuvered and outsmarted the Japanese...from the island,  the Marines were flying dive-bombers, which were outdated-the cockpit was made out of canvas, so they were a bit out of date.  They had no diving flaps and they would dive beautifully, but there was no guarantee they would come back up.  To say the least, they lost most of those.

    There were only six Dive Bomb Fighter (DBF) torpedo planes involved, they were based on the island, only one returned and on that one, both crewmen were dead.  These were the only DBFs they had; they had only torpedo planes, DBDs . There top speed was ...one hundred mph if they were doing well.  They were no match for the Japanese.  They launched fifty and had three come back. The carriers all together, that is all they had at the end of the day.  George Gay was the only one (to survive) he had a ringside seat to the whole battle.  He was in a life raft, so he was hanging on to them. George was the only survivor. He was a pilot and everyone else had been killed, everybody.

  The Marines also had Brewster fighters, "Brewster Buffalos," they called them, I think they had 27.  They lost all of those.  They were just no comparison with the Japanese Zero.  But with the help of God, the battle was won by the American carrier pilots, and we on Yorktown went over landed on USS Enterprise, some on USS Hornet.  So we were holding our own. Later on we ended up at Guadalcanal, not too long after the Marines landed. They got into some open field and with one very short leave we went from Guadalcanal, I'm sure these gentlemen would know (points at Marines in room). The 1st Marines were at Guadalcanal and the 4th were at the north end on Bougainville and we ended up on Bougainville so we covered the Solomon Islands, all of them.  And that cut the Japanese off because it destroyed their largest base at Rabaul Harbor, on New Britain.  Rabaul had five Japanese airfields, a great harbor and we could hit it from Bougainville, and we did. 

The correspondent that wrote this article -he was correspondent with the Chicago Tribune- two things about him:  number one, he “demoted” me from Lieutenant Commander to Lieutenant Junior Grade, and then he wrote the article in a spirit of a party-he just wanted to have a good time .

 ex-athletes team up to sink twelve ships 

 “Lieutenant Commander John Leary, Hudson Falls, was one of a group of former college athletes whose teamwork helped to knock out twelve Japanese ships in last Thursday's attack at Rabaul Harbor, the Navy disclosed today. The official account issued at a South Pacific airbase said that Leary, a coxswain of the 1941 Syracuse University crew, dropped a 2000 pound bomb with great accuracy on a Japanese cargo ship. He made the run over the ship at mast head height, braving heavy anti-aircraft fire from the vessel.  In the same attack Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Robert L. Reagan, 1941 catcher for the Harvard baseball team, demolished a Japanese vessel with a torpedo bomb and Lieutenant Junior Grade Bruce Bishop, star University of Tennessee quarterback, blew up a enemy patrol.”

 I took more fellas in with me than I brought home that day, unfortunately. It was 1944 because that’s when they went in, on November 1st... [I was]  about 23 or 24. It was the principal Japanese airbase. They had five Japanese airfields defending it.  They had about 200 to 250 Japanese fighters there, which could have been interesting.

  “Hudson Falls man is aboard plane bombing Japanese cargo ship." 

A short time ago, Mr. John Leary flew through a curtain of anti-aircraft machine gun fire to drop a 2,000-pound bomb on a Japanese cargo ship at Rabaul Harbor.   Lieutenant Commander. Leary, 24, of Wright Street, this village, a U.S. Navy torpedo bomber pilot and section leader in a hard-hitting squadron, flew in at masthead level to skip bomb the enemy ship.”

    Those ships were reported by one of our submarines and they couldn’t do anything about it, because they had just finished up a patrol and were out of torpedoes. They followed these people with their naval escort into Rabaul harbor.  They passed the word back to Pearl and they in turn got in contact with what they call Com-air South, or Command of the Air South.  We were then called because we were the oldest outfit there [Bougainville], we were briefed, then set out somewhere around midnight, we hit them around dawn.  We lost quite a few people, but the friends that I particularly had were in the troop transports. 

      We went up towards the Coral Sea on the U.S.S. Saratoga and two small carriers.  One of the  admirals came aboard, and he always wore a red cap.  Well our carrier had duty that day, anti-sub duty.  The Big DBF’s that had four large depth charges and all the sonar buoys and all that.  The sea on that day was as smooth as a tabletop, and they made only 17 knots on a good day.  So the captain of our ship, the air officer and the air group commander, recommended “catapulting” off the ship.  Just that, put on a catapult and shot off the ship.  But the admiral said  ‘suppose the catapults are damaged?’. Still, he would have liked to see how they would work; well, none of us really wanted to do it.  The first three planes went off, and they went down into the water and blew up, they never made it.  The  charges weren’t set properly.  A good friend of mine flew the last one off the ship, a man named Gibble.  He was older than most of us and was a professor at the university of Minnesota.  Well, Bob (Gibble) made it, he sunk below the bow, but eventually pulled up.  He went on his patrol and when he got back, Gibble was called to the deck, the captain’s deck and the admiral was going to question him.  Now this was a three star admiral talking to a young lieutenant!  Gibble didn’t blink an eye, he (the admiral) asked him "what did you do that the others failed to do"?  Gibble looked at the admiral and said, “ I think that when they tried to climb, they pulled back on the stick.”  (That’s the only way I ever heard of trying to climb was to pull back on the stick.)   Gibble said, with a touch of sarcasm, ”I just took the stick and held it off the water.”  Normally he would have been shot right there, but the admiral didn’t say a damn word to him because the was in a bad bind.   Gibble had the nerve to tell him he “held it off the water”.  So our people were thrilled with him.

The Marines and Navy pilots all went to the same flight school, although some had selected the Corps and some the Navy.  But they all went through the same training. Joe Foss ( leading ace of WWII, Joe Foss, the Marine pilot ) and I, and Marion Carl , were in the same flight class.  We’ve been friends over the years and Marion Carl ... was in charge of all investigations for the Marines until he retired, and he was murdered about a year ago.  Someone broke into his house trying to rob them and  attacked his wife, and he (Joe) tried to defend his wife, and he was killed. [I knew Joe Foss very well]... Joe sent me a story he wrote, an autobiography. He sent me a copy and I could hardly make out his signature. I called him and as it turned out that he had been in a little accident before that and had broken an arm and he was still trying to write with a broken arm... So Joe had let me know he had broken his arm.  Joe was part Sioux -he was first president of the AFL, then governor of South Dakota.

 When I came back finally, I had a couple of special projects.  I was chief gunnery pilot for the Banshee, one of the first jets.  One morning I went up for a test fire and a 20 millimeter shell exploded in the nose. The engines were in the back and when I pulled the trigger one of the 20’s jumped the gun, it wasn’t set right and blew the nose up.  It was hard to tell who was screaming loudest, myself, or the Banshee!  But it got down and landed all right.  And they were very kind to me, the next morning they had a ceremony, I still have the medal.  It’s bigger than this, but it has more things on it I can’t repeat here, but one of them was “enemy planes destroyed: none, ours: one”. 

  When I got out, I had a year in law school and I finished that up.  Then being an Irish Catholic of my generation, you only had three options, to be a priest, a farmer, or a cop.  So I went into the FBI.

[During the war] I was banged up a bit but [always made it back].  I had two young fellas that were with me and I lost them both.  My gunner was 18 years old, no 17,  because it was his birthday the day he died. So, obviously he lied about his age to get in, and had a couple of bad days.   There was a young man from around here, Randy Holmes, he hounded his parents to let him enlist because he was only 17.  He went through apprentice seamen training, then he was ordered to the USS Oklahoma and he was in 2 weeks before Pearl Harbor.  He was in it a couple days when it was bombed by the Japanese and capsized.  [Editor's note Randy Jones was on the USS Oklahoma on December 7, 1941, and had only been in Pearl Harbor 2 weeks prior to that.  Randy Holmes was from from Hudson Falls N.Y.]   

Interviewer (Matthew Rozell): He didn’t have much of a chance, did he?

Judge John Leary passed away on October 8, 2003.

Copyright © 2001,2007 by Matthew A Rozell and Hudson Falls CSD. All rights reserved.