Presentation Date: April 22, 1999
Raleigh E. Dusty Rhodes
Battle of Santa Cruz F-4F Wildcat Pilot, POW, and Post War Blue Angle F-4F Wildcat Pilot, POW, and Post War Blue Angle. Raleigh "Dusty" Rhoades was shot down in the Battle of Santa Cruz, off Guadalcanal, and was captured. He tells of enduring his captors' torment, meeting other Allied survivors, and repatriation.
"Surviving the Battle of Santa Cruz"
April's Golden Gate Wing speaker survived being shot down and captured to lead the Blue Angels and fly in the Korean War
Raleigh E. ("Dusty") Rhoades was commissioned and assigned to VF-10 (Fighting Ten) and his unit was sent for forward training at Maui, until the Enterprise came out of dry dock to repair its damage from the Battle of Midway. With the carrier's repairs complete, VF-10's pilots had carrier trials for a couple of days. Those who didn't make it onto the flight deck were left behind.
In late October, 1942 the Enterprise was back out in the South Pacific, operating with the carrier Hornet in the waters east of Guadalcanal. A Japanese fleet steamed south to destroy the two U.S. carriers. In what would become known as the Battle of Santa Cruz, the Hornet would ultimately be lost to submarine-launched torpedoes.
When PBY patrol planes spotted the Japanese northeast of Guadalcanal, Enterprise launched planes to do battle. The next morning, another attack group was launched. Rhoades was leading a flight of four F-4F Wildcats, escorting SBD dive bombers and TBF torpedo planes when the group was jumped by Japanese Zeros.
"We'd just been off the deck about 20 minutes when some Zeros dove out of the sun. First time I was aware of anything was when I saw a couple of TBFs go down out of the formation and Zeros were coming down right on top of them. In the flight I was was in, we turned into the Zeros and tried to pull them off the bombers. And I guess they thought they'd make quick work of us so they stayed with us and the rest of the bomber and fighter group proceeded on towards the Japanese fleet."
We didn't fare too well, the four of us, three of us went down and one guy did get back to our carrier.
"I was in the water for 24 hours or so. I saw a destroyer coming toward me. It was gray and had the forward turrets I recognized as a destroyer. It overshot me and then backed up and a rope came over the side. I grabbed the rope and it wasn't until then I realized that this was not the destroyer I thought it was. There were all these Japanese sailors leaning over the side, looking down at the water."
The Japanese took Rhoades to Truk Island, then the headquarters for the Japanese Navy and Admiral Yamamoto. They had also rescued another Wildcat pilot Al Mead, though neither pilot knew about the other until they were on Truk.
"He called us in individually and tried to find out what out what our fleet consisted of. After we were there a couple of weeks, we were told by his interpreter we would be taken to Japan where they would really try to get the information out of us." As a measure of the beatings and starvation diets the prisoners endured, Dusty's weight dropped to 85 pounds.
"We were put in the hold of a tramp steamer, and when we arrived there they put blindfolds on us and I realized we were going through a tunnel.
They took us to a camp with 14 other prisoners of war. Only they said we weren't prisoners of war but captives. And we were to be questioned - - couldn't talk to each other and were kept in solitary confinement.
The 14 captives were a varied, interesting lot. There was Gunnery Sgt. Reed, the sole survivor of Colin Kelly's B-17 (Kelly had flown his crippled B-17 into a Japanese cruiser in the Battle of the Philippines); the senior surviving officer (who was an interpreter) from the cruiser Houston , which had been sunk in the Java Sea ; and the skipper of the submarine Perch Dave Herd(?), also sunk in the Java Sea; a British Army Captain and two PBY pilots, one an American co-pilot and the other a Canadian senior officer named Birch.
The Japanese put their captives in camps where they worked and lived - - a lumber yard, cargo docks, and plants for crushing peanuts and coconuts for oil. The Japanese finally separated the fourteen men. Rhoades and Birch had what could have been a fatal incident one day in the peanut-oil camp. The two men had been smuggling oil in small corked bottles, tied with string to hang down the inside of their pant legs. The oil at least gave some flavor to their meager daily rations of grain. Their group of men were being searched and one of Birch's bottles had become uncorked, spilling oil which soaked the bottom of his trouser leg. Fortunately, they weren't searched, and the Japanese didn't spot the stain.
A little healthier now at 120 pounds, Dusty was moved in with about 80 American and a like number of British officers. There, the prisoners had grandstand seats to bombing raids by B-29s, by day at high altitude and by night. Incendiary bombs rained down and eventually burned down the camp.
It was a mystery to Dusty why, at night, the B-29s would come in at 10,000 feet, "at 20 second intervals, on the same flight path, and the searchlights picked them all up, just a lit highway. They sure got shot down, one right after another. And they never changed the tactics."
Another transfer brought the POWs to Niigata, a port city in northern Japan. Rhoades was amazed at the devastation wrought by the fire bombing.
Dusty recalls the day USN dive bombers dropped cigarettes and leaflets to POWs, and some tail gunners threw their high-laced black shoes over the side for the POWs to wear.
Two days later, B-29s made the drops. As some of the cargo fell through the bomb bay doors, parachutes failed to slow the containers' fall. Rhoades says, "Big drums of fruit and all kinds of foodstuffs killed two Japanese just outside the camp and demolished our barracks."
Even though the war was over, getting back to the states proved an adventure. Rhoades and some of the POWs were put on a train to the docks at Tokyo. There, Dusty was told he would return on the hospital ship Benevolence . Instead, Dusty went onto the hospital ship and crossed the deck to a destroyer tied alongside. The skipper of the destroyer took Rhoades out to an LST anchored in the bay and ordered the pilot be taken to the airdrome on the other side of the bay for a flight out the next day.
After a four month rehabilitation in the United States, Rhoades rejoined former VF-10 ace Jim Flatley. Refresher flight training at Patuxent River got Rhoades back into the swing of things and gave him a first look at the Blue Angels, which he joined in 1947 and then led for two years until 1950. Rhoades flew F-8 Bearcats and transitioned to F-9 Panthers while with the Blues. When the Korean War started, Rhoades found himself flying missions as a squadron executive officer. He retired from active duty October 31, 1961