and their screening destroyers, scoring a damaging near miss on Mogami in the face of heavy antiaircraft fire. This earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross. Hornet returned to Pearl Harbor following the Battle of Midway, and its air group, shore-based, returned to operational training. While on a routine three-plane bombing flight off Oahu on the morning of 19 July 1942, Bebas pushed over into a dive on a target boat maneuvering off Naval Air Station Barbers Point, and released his practice bomb at . Instead of immediately recovering, however, Bebas "entered a relatively steep right turn…" and either blacked-out or could not overcome the heavy stick forces present in the dive, and his SBD-3 (BuNo 4573) crashed into the ocean, killing Bebas and his passenger, Ensign William M. Stevens, D-V(G), USNR. History Originally allocated to the Royal Navy under lend lease, BDE-10 was laid down on 27 November 1942 at the Boston Navy Yard. The ships was launched on 9 January 1943 and reallocated to the United States Navy on 25 January 1943. Sponsored by Mrs. Angeline M. Bebas, Ens. Bebas's mother, in a special christening ceremony just before commissioning, she was commissioned at Boston, Massachusetts on 15 May 1943. Operational history After arriving off Bermuda on 17 June for shakedown, the destroyer escort steamed back to the New York Navy Yard for repairs between 24 and 29 June. After returning to Bermudan waters to resume her interrupted shakedown training, Bebas completed that evolution during July and then spent the next few weeks in coastal escort and patrol operations out of Casco Bay in Maine, Boston, New York, and Norfolk, Virginia. Upon departing Hampton Roads on 24 August in company with three of her sister ships, Bebas sailed for the Pacific. After transiting the Panama Canal on 1 September, she proceeded via the Galapagos and Society Islands to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. The warship operated out of that port during October and November, conducting patrol and escort missions to Nouméa, New Caledonia, and to Guadalcanal in the Solomons. Highlighting this service was her attempt to salvage the Liberty ship John H. Couch that had been set ablaze by a Japanese aerial torpedo during a raid on the night of 11 October. Bebas, patrolling an antisubmarine sector off Lunga and Koli Points, Guadalcanal, went to general quarters at 0149 to investigate a "fire explosion at sea." The destroyer escort