Gallery: Elmer Taylor, sailor blues, arms crossed; Joe Shelley, black suit and tie; John Parker, whites and white cap; Vincent Ruscilli, black suit, sleeve insignia

In late summer 1942, the aircraft carrier USS Wasp zigzagged through Torpedo Junction, the area south of Guadalcanal where Japanese submarines were known to lie in wait. On board, the 2,247 officers and enlisted men were on high alert. During a lull in their duties, they often boxed, wrestled, and played volleyball on deck but, today, all hands were at their battle stations from before dawn until midmorning.

Many onboard were new recruits like 17-year-old Seaman Second Class Robert W. Reganold of Vancouver, Washington, whose older brother was also in the Navy. Gregarious William G. Bushek of Portland had been in the Navy for four months and Robert L. Howe from Eugene, who had one brother in the Navy and another fighting in Europe, for seven months.

They couldn’t know it, but just a few miles away in the Coral Sea, as the wind kicked up whitecaps, a Japanese submarine raised its periscope above the choppy ocean and spotted the Wasp.

On the Wasp’s flight deck, crews worked in crowded, choreographed synchronicity, launching eight fighters and 18 scout planes and dive bombers, and recovering 11 aircraft returning from patrol.

It was exacting, dangerous, and physical work that required concentration and coordination from everyone on the deck and in the air. Once their immediate duties were completed, some of the weary crew, all working a grueling schedule around the clock, took a break in the mess hall. Officers gathered to their wardroom lounge to eat, and on-duty pilots met in the ready room to debrief and await their next assignments.

Ensign John P. Parker, a 32-year-old from Portland with a wife and three young children waiting for him in San Diego, headed below to his officer’s stateroom to sleep. Aviation Structural Mechanic Elmer V. Taylor finished his watch servicing aircraft and crawled into his rack in the enlisted men quarters.

Nine miles away, Japanese submarine Lieutenant Commander Takaichi Kinashi began a slow and stealthy approach.

Above the flight deck in the Wasp’s radar shack, Radioman Second Class Joe H. Shelley, a lanky 22-year-old from Sandy, was listening to his assigned radio frequency, and transmitting and receiving signals. He enlisted in the Navy a year after graduating from Sandy High School -- eager to see the world and earn a paycheck doing it. Assigned to the Wasp just after the vessel was commissioned in April 1940, Shelley had already been to Scotland, Malta, Canada, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, and Cuba.

Others were experienced seamen, too. Boatswain Francis D. Kane of Portland spent five years on the USS Yorktown before being transferred into the Wasp. Ship Fitter First Class Ronald K. Patterson from Klamath Falls, in the Navy for seven years, had also served on the USS Seattle and the USS Tennessee.

Twenty-one-year-old Vincent Ruscilli, an Aviation Machinist Mate First Class, was a dedicated and capable “grease monkey,” known for his quiet confidence and ability to overhaul any type of Navy aircraft engine. That day, he was repairing an engine in the hanger bay.

At 2:44 p.m., the Japanese I-19 sub struck. Six oxygen-propelled torpedoes in quick succession were launched at the Wasp from 985 yards away. As one of the Wasp’s lookouts saw the telltale torpedo wakes heading toward them, he yelled, “three torpedoes…three points forward of the starboard beam!”

“Those have got us!” replied an ensign from the bridge.

The captain, Forrest P. Sherman, ordered the Wasp steered hard to starboard but it was too late. The first of three torpedoes smashed home near the aircraft ammunition and fuel stores, and the huge concussion threw all hands to the deck. The Wasp was traveling in a convoy and torpedoes killed five men on the USS North Carolina and caused extensive damage to the USS O’Brien.

Ruscilli, who would later retire to Lincoln City, had just regained his feet and started for the Wasp’s upper deck when the second torpedo exploded. Knocked down again, he scrambled up and just made it to the upper deck when the third torpedo struck, sending flames 60 feet high.

Fire broke out almost simultaneously below decks and in the hanger bay, which held engines, fuel tanks and heavy equipment. Spare aircraft hoisted for storage overhead crashed to the floor of the hanger deck in a crush of metal.

The water mains in the forward part of the ship were destroyed, and the water pressure in other areas was too low to reach the flight deck.

As the gun gallery caught fire, blast concussions killed men at their stations without leaving a mark on them. Elsewhere on board, flying shrapnel cut through the air, bombs detonated, and pieces of wood decking and superheated metal shot in all directions. A vapor explosion blasted one of the elevators into the air, and flying steel plating, expansion joint covers and barriers flew 150 feet.

Radioman Joe Shelley lost all communications. The telephone system, electrical announcers, and switchboard were inoperable. All lights in the forward part of the vessel were out and men used hand lanterns.

The quarters where John Parker had been sleeping were now an inferno, and the wardroom lounge where officers had been relaxing minutes before was demolished. The smoke was suffocating.

As the Wasp listed 10 to 15 degrees to starboard, Ronald Patterson scrambled to see if repairs could keep the vessel afloat.

While the captain maneuvered to get the wind on the starboard bow so the smoke and flames would blow clear of the ship, Elmer Taylor, who made it through the smoke from below deck, worked with other men to pull aircraft to the edge of the deck and push them into the sea. Gun crews formed human chains to throw the powder cases overboard. An enlisted man was incinerated when the one he was jettisoning exploded.

Shelley was ordered to evacuate a badly wounded gun captain who had been thrown 30 feet into the air and landed unconscious on the bridge. Shelley and another sailor retrieved the crewman and carried him down three decks without a stretcher.

Just 36 minutes after the first torpedo struck, the fire was raging out of control and steadily working its way aft. Sherman gave the order to abandon ship.

Mattresses, pillows, planks, hoses, and large cans were thrown overboard to serve as flotation devices. The wounded, most severely burned, were bundled into lifejackets, placed on stretchers, and carefully lowered over the side into life rafts and rubber boats.

As they prepared to evacuate, the men took off their shoes and placed them carefully on the deck, and holding their helmets, waited to go down the lines into the water. The chaplain made his way from group to group trying to calm them. Some quietly prayed.

Ruscilli, helping launch a cumbersome life raft, lost his footing and fell 60 feet into the ocean. Though he wasn’t a strong swimmer and didn’t have a life jacket, he made it to a raft and hung on to it for four and a half hours in 15-foot swells before being rescued. Elmer Taylor, who eventually retired in Vancouver, dove off the flight deck into the sea and was rescued along with 142 others by the USS Farenholt.

As captain, Sherman was the last to leave. At 4 p.m., he climbed down the fantail rope and dropped into the sea wearing only his shorts.

As the men floated and swam in the shark infested waters, five destroyers sent out boats to bring them in. Many survivors were so covered with thick, black oil, they had to be roped together on the deck of the rescue ship so they wouldn’t slide over the side.

Other ships in the convoy dropped depth charges trying to rout out the Japanese submarine. As the blasts thudded and water blew high from the concussions, men waiting for rescue grabbed their bellies and endured the painful compression waves.

The Japanese sub was never caught.

More explosions rocked the Wasp that day, Sept. 15, 1942, but still she refused to give up. At 9 p.m., the USS Lansdowne was ordered to send her to the bottom. As the Lansdowne fired a volley of five torpedoes into the hull, the Wasp listed deeper to starboard.

In a thundering explosion of steam and smoke, the Wasp sank, bow first, beneath the flaming water.

The vessel became a war grave to the 194 men killed or missing in action that day.

An expedition financed by Paul Allen, who died last year, found the wreck two and a half miles beneath the Coral Sea near the Solomon Islands. The Wasp was part of a convoy providing air cover to six transport vessels carrying Marine reinforcements and supplies to Guadalcanal, where the battle there was raging into its second month 77 years ago.

Covered with rusticles and bacterial corrosion, the pilot house door stands eerily ajar. Men’s dented metal helmets, shell casings, and pieces of iron railings are scattered in the sweeping field of debris. Aircraft remnants are strewn on the ocean floor, and black propeller tips protrude from the sand, their distinctive red and yellow stripes still visible in the frigid water.

On this Memorial Day, the sunken ship lying 14,000 feet deep is the final resting place for those on the Wasp from Oregon and southwest Washington who never made it home: Robert L. Howe, Seaman Second Class, USN; Francis D. Kane, Boatswain, USN; John P. Parker, Chief Warrant Officer, USN; Ronald K. Patterson, Ship Fitter 1, USN; and Robert W. Reganold, Seaman Second Class, USN.

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Lynne Hasselman is a writer from southern Oregon.