"Sea calm," Commander Stephen Jurika wrote in USS Franklin's deck log that morning, "with a 12-knot wind from about 060 true, sky overcast with occasional breaks...horizontal visibility excellent." March 19, 1945, thus began in routine fashion for the 26,000-ton aircraft carrier. It would end in disaster.

USS Franklin, nicknamed "Big Ben," was one of 24 Essex-class carriers, home to 3,500 crewmen and 100 aircraft, bristling with 5-inch and 40mm anti-aircraft guns and topped by a Douglas fir flight deck. Franklin was commanded by Captain Leslie E. Gehres, a former enlisted man and veteran aviator.

Franklin was part of Task Force 58, the cutting edge of Vice Adm. Raymond A. Spruance's Fifth Fleet, headed for Japan. Franklin and 16 other carriers were to launch the first naval air strikes on Japan, hitting the southern home island of Kyushu.

The carrier was loaded with ordnance and men, among them Lt. Cmdr. Joseph O'Callahan, one of Franklin's two chaplains. O'Callahan cut an impressive figure behind his altar-boy face and spectacles. He was a collegiate track star, a poet, a writer, a mathematics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, and formerly the Catholic chaplain of the carrier Ranger in the Atlantic. Another passenger was the strict, reticent Rear Adm. Ralph E. Davison, who led Task Group 58.2 from Franklin.

By Sunday, March 18, Task Force 58 had begun its attacks. On Franklin, O'Callahan and his Protestant counterpart, Commander Grimes Gatlin, held separate services on the hangar deck. Lieutenant Budd Fought and his VMF-214 shipmates flew off Franklin to attack Kagoshima Bay. VMF-214 was a famed outfit -- the "Black Sheep Squadron," once led by Major Gregory "Pappy" Boyington.

After VMF-214 bombed Kagoshima, the Japanese counterattacked that night. Franklin went to general quarters 12 times, exhausting everyone aboard. No hits, but one Franklin sailor died from drinking torpedo fluid. The dead sailor was to be buried at sea on the morning of March 19. A half-hour before dawn, Franklin prepared for the burial ritual; Marines mustered on the fantail with Gatlin and the executive officer, Commander Joe Taylor. Meanwhile, flight deck crews readied Air Group 5 to pulverize Kure naval base with 12-inch-wide Tiny Tim rockets. At 6 a.m., the Chance Vought F4U Corsairs rumbled off the flight deck.

Franklin secured its dawn action stations. All over Big Ben, crewmen headed for breakfast. Chow lines snaked through the cavernous hangar deck between the Tiny Tims on their ordnance carts. Messmen slapped powdered eggs, tomato juice, coffee, toast and apples on steel trays.

In the pilothouse, Ensign Dick Jortberg was junior officer of the deck. He watched the Corsairs and the Curtiss SB-2C Helldivers warm up while aviation ordnancemen loaded the Tiny Tims.

But the Kure strike was delayed. A snooper plane had just picked out two Japanese ships, the battleship Yamato and the carrier Amagi, in the Inland Sea. Crewmen were ordered to remove the contact bombs and load armor-piercing ordnance.

Up on the bridge, navigator Jurika started scribbling in his log. Franklin turned into the wind and cranked up to 24 knots, ready for launch. At 6:57 a.m. the first Corsair was airborne. At 7:05, Jurika heard a scratchy message on the TBS (talk between ships) radio from the carrier Hancock: "Enemy plane closing on you...one coming toward you!"

Franklin's Combat Information Center (CIC) reported at 7:06, "Bogey orbiting on port beam, range about 12 miles." Firing Director One picked up a moving target bearing 10 degrees but then lost it in the clutter of Task Force 58's launching her planes.

Down in damage control, Yeoman 2nd Class Joe Lafferty, the captain's yeoman, was on his way to chow. He decided to stop at his office, where he found a Navy journalist who had been sent out with Franklin to write human interest stories. The journalist said to Lafferty, "It was great standing on the bridge seeing the gun flashes and the enemy planes splashing into the dark Pacific."

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