In the Coral Sea, the small task force ran into a Jap convoy, heavily screened by warships, trying to sneak an end run around the corner of Australia. Two U.S. aircraft carriers had gone out to break up the convoy, but they were so outnumbered by the enemy that they were in a bad way when the _Plymouth’s_ force arrived on the scene under full steam. The Japs were taken by surprise, lost their tight organization, and fled north, leaving behind three troopships and four destroyers heading for the bottom. Scoot had been joyful at his first battle experience, but was angry that he had not been on the guns. “Just when the fighting starts I have to be down in the engine room,” he moaned. “Didn’t even _see_ anything, let alone take a shot at those dirty Nips!” “Well, I _saw_ plenty,” March replied, “but navigation officers don’t get a chance at much shooting, either!” Scoot, by dint of much pleading and arguing, got Commander Seaton to transfer him to gunnery, but then eight weeks went by without a sight of a Jap. The first shots Scoot fired were into shore installations of the Japs at Munda airfield in the Solomons, after the Marines had consolidated their hold on Guadalcanal and had decided to move forward to another island. The big battle had come almost ten months after they had shipped aboard the _Plymouth_, up in the Bismarck Sea northeast of New Guinea. Finally finding the sizable Jap force for which he had been looking, Admiral Caldwell, in charge of the U.S. force, had steamed right into the middle of the bevy of Jap ships and opened fire with everything he had. For seven hours, mostly at night, the battle had raged. Jap planes were attacking overhead, at least until U.S. planes drove them off at dawn. The firing on all sides was so deafening that no one could hear even Scoot’s whoops of glee and happiness. When three of his gun crew went down under a hail of flying fragments from a shell that landed on the _Plymouth’s_ deck not fifty feet away, Scoot carried on with the few that were left, but the rate of fire was cut. So he rounded up a cook and a messboy and turned them into expert gunners in five minutes and knocked three Jap planes out of the sky with his improvised gun crew in ten minutes. Meanwhile, March had not been idle. The shell whose fragments had laid low part of Scoot’s crew had landed squarely on one of the 12-inch gun turrets forward. March was the first man into the smoking and wrecked turret, pulling out the wounded and dead who were there. At any moment the ammunition below might have exploded—for no one knew if the shell had penetrated that far—but March had no thought of such a thing. Three of the men he lugged from the turret were still alive, though closer to death than March had ever seen anyone. Later, the medical officer told March those three had lived only because they got medical attention so fast.