Our striking force, undetected by the defenders, caught Army and Navy pilots flat on their backs in bed, just as their successors were destined to be caught some thirteen years later on Sunday, December 7. It now seems likely that the casual Japanese oil tanker that managed always to find herself in the center of our operating areas off San Pedro, or those “fishing” sampans that busied themselves off Honolulu that very morning, later communicated our movements to the Japanese high command. It was natural for their admiralty to assume that we understood the import of the new weapons we were exercising. They could not have believed the intelligence that our own high command had so discounted the striking power of aerial bombs and submarine torpedoes that they had neglected to equip their vessels with adequate gun defenses. Recognizing in FLEET AIR—as they surely did—a revolutionary instrument of sea power, they sped their own development and hastened to exploit it in the rapid expansion of their East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. During the remainder of the Hawaiian exercises, we conducted joint operations with local naval forces and with the Army, polishing our flight techniques at sea. One day, a shift of wind, sweeping yellow volcanic dust from an extinct crater, cut our surface visibility to a dangerous low just after Gerry Bogan, with nine fighter bombers from Fighting One, had roared over the bow to attack a distant enemy fleet. Our worried staff found some comfort in the knowledge that one of our radio-liaison Corsairs was supposed to be plane-guarding the unit, ready to lead the flock back aboard after its mission had been completed. But when we radioed the Vought, the pilot reported he had lost the fighters. After homing the Corsair and taking her aboard, we began really sweating it out, peering hopefully into the yellow spaces, looking for Gerry Bogan. Finally at long last came the drone of engines. One by one the planes lurched into the gear and taxied forward. The admiral sent his orderly for Bogan. “Where the hell have you been anyway?” he demanded with unwonted truculence. “Fightin’,” replied Gerry. Years later when I read of Gerry Bogan’s fantastic exploits in the Pacific, and especially Bill Halsey’s estimate of his courage, I recalled this laconic yet complete answer—as well as the way it had parted Bull Reeves’s whiskers in an appreciative grin. At Pearl Harbor, one day, we got news of the arrival in San Francisco of the long-awaited _Lexington_. She planned to proceed at once to Honolulu on a trial run at thirty knots. Day by day we watched her phenomenal performance, and we admired her from afar as she anchored in triumph off Waikiki with Diamond Head as a fitting backdrop. There her captain, Frank D. Berrien, welcomed us warmly as we transferred aboard.