Brett Ashton

VENGEANCE

Hatred and Honor

Because I Can

Introduction

After writing the original manuscript and passing it out to various friends and family for their opinions, some things came to my attention that I thought I needed to address.

The first is that the main character uses some very harsh language in describing the Japanese. You must keep in mind that this story takes place during World War II, and that kind of talk was to be expected at the time. This is not a book about battleships or the war; it is a book about hatred. Without the hatred, I simply would not have much of a story.

If this bothers you, I urge you to consider that in the navy in those days, the word “Nip,” for example, would have been surrounded by language that would have made a prostitute blush. It would have also been preceded and followed by large, heavy projectiles loaded with high explosives that would have caused a most painful and gruesome death should any of them hit you or explode near you.

I find it a striking commentary on our society that someone would notice the racial slurs and be upset about them but not be upset about the fact that we were killing people. Think about that for a second. If you were a Japanese pilot dive-bombing an American battleship, would you be more offended by the American sailors calling you bad names or the fact that twenty-five thousand rounds per minute of antiaircraft ammunition were being sent in your general direction?

But that was then, and this is now, and I do understand our society well enough to know which way the wind blows. And I do get it that some people are going to be offended by the main character’s language. If you are one of those people, I can only beg your indulgence until the end of the book. You will like how it turns out. I personally think that if the outcome of wars were determined by who could insult somebody else the worst and the high explosives were kept to ourselves, the world would be a much happier place.

The second and most obvious of these things was that when I said “battleship,” I meant something entirely different than what people who have no military experience mean when they say “battleship.” After talking about this with a few people, I came to the realization that what they mean is “any ship in the navy that fights, whether big or small,” which is not at all what one is. A battleship is a very specific thing. The big guns on one of these ships would throw a 2,700-pound projectile (about the weight of a Volkswagen) twenty-two miles. At a much closer range, that projectile would punch right through thirty inches of steel.

The first clue on this was that while I was watching some documentaries on World War II, I noticed that the men who served on these ships always spoke of them in a certain way. After listening for a while I realized they have a reverence for them. I began to wonder about this, and after doing a brief survey of the people I knew, I began to understand that people in general don’t know what a large role the battleship played in history in the formation of the modern world.

Thousands of years ago, man discovered that he could move large amounts of goods over water. Upon doing so, he became able to communicate and trade with other people in other parts of the world. And so the formation of nations was largely built on these trade routes, which became known as shipping lanes.

For as long as men have been able to move goods and wealth over water, they have desired to control the shipping lanes. If you controlled the shipping lanes, you controlled the wealth and fate of nations. Entire societies were made or destroyed by the movement over these lanes, which resulted in men who would desire power or wealth becoming very interested in them.

The merchants moving along the shipping lanes feared the pirates who clung closely to them in attempts to try and steal the wealth. The merchants employed navies to defend them from the pirates. As nations grew, kings and queens sent huge armadas to sea to protect them from pirates and the kings and queens of other nations because their kingdoms rested upon the strength of their rule of the sea. Those who would rule the world had to rule the seas, for if you ruled the seas, you could control anything the oceans touched. If you had a mighty navy, you were a superpower. If you didn’t, you were a nobody.

Somewhere around the fourteenth century, men discovered guns, and a new era of naval combat began. Instead of ramming or trying to throw fire at the enemy’s ships, they could shoot at each other.

They would square off in the open seas and slug it out, ship to ship. On each of them were the most powerful weapons their country could devise, directly facing the most powerful weapons their enemies could devise. Before long, the guns got bigger. Armor was invented to repel the bigger guns. Powerful engines were invented that replaced the sails. Soon, ships were made of steel instead of wood. Again, the guns got bigger, and the armor got thicker and would repel shots fired from bigger guns. Soon, more powerful engines had to be made to move all of the armor and guns.

From the fourteenth century until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the world discovered it was impossible to defend a ship from a large assault of relatively inexpensive airplanes, naval combat had remained basically unchanged: maneuver swiftly to deliver the hardest punch. Maneuver swiftly to evade the hard punches. And be able to take the hardest punches while still being able to deliver the hardest punches. No guided missiles, no airplanes dropping bombs, no guided torpedoes, and radar still in its infancy. Ship to ship and man to man, often in direct line of sight, was how combat was conducted, and he who was the best lived to fight another day while the other spent infinity in Davy Jones’s Locker.

The battleship was the culmination of those efforts. They were the queens of the sea and the most powerful weapons on Earth for more than ninety years.

The battleship sailors were an elite corps because through their hands, those who would rule the world would exercise their power. They, as battleship sailors, were the mightiest of the mighty and the proudest of the proud. They were the men who would dare to wield the Hammer of Thor.

The ones who are still living are the last of their kind.

The Interview

As the junior reporter at the local talk radio station, I usually get assigned by the program director to do a lot of “interesting” interviews for the entertainment and local interest segments of the news. An example of such an assignment usually comes in the form of a Post-it note on my desk or on my computer monitor saying, “Easter coming up—please go to the mall, find the Easter Bunny, and interview him for the news department next week.” So I spend a lot of time chasing down the people behind various fund-raising events, the local dogcatcher, the winner of the Best Hog Contest at the county fair, some of the more colorful homeless people, and at least once a year, even the venerable department store Santa Claus falls prey to my microphone.

So I wasn’t surprised when returning from just such an assignment—an important interview with a woman who swears she saw Jesus in a taco salad (or something like that)—to find another Post-it stuck in the middle of my monitor reading, “Please interview Jacob S. Williams—new centenarian, prior to his birthday, November 29.” “Wow,” I said out loud, “I get to do an interview with an old man.” Of course there were several chuckles from my nearby coworkers, who had learned to find amusement in the sometimes extraordinary nature of my assignments.

“A very old man at that,” I thought as I dutifully went about doing some basic research. “Centenarian, let’s see: that’s a hundred. When this man was born, what was going on in the world? Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States. The airplane was invented just three years earlier. The Panama Canal had not yet been built. This man may have witnessed Halley’s Comet, twice, if he can even remember it. This was before the Great Depression, before the Dust Bowl, before the Titanic sank or the Hindenburg blew up, before radio, television, and even movie theaters. My God! What did these people even do with all of their time?”

Just as I was thinking that he was born before World War II, a fairly good idea began to hatch in my mind. It was November the fifteenth, 2006. December the seventh was right around the corner. I was sure I would find the inevitable Post-it stuck to my monitor saying something like, “Please find World War II survivor and interview for a show on the sixty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.”

Brilliant! I can do both interviews at the same time. A little cut-and-paste in the editing room, along with some clever questioning, and I am set for an easy day of work!

“Let’s see,” I thought. “He was born November 29, 1906, so on December 7, 1941, he would have been thirty-five. Perfect; now, if only the old man can remember that far back, then I’ve got the show all wrapped up and on the road.

“Now I just have to find out where the old guy lives and hope he doesn’t die before I get there. I sure don’t want to spend the day hanging around some stinky old nursing home, but for an easy day of work, it may be worth it.”

I began searching for Jacob Williams at all the local nursing homes, but after half a day’s work, the closest I got to him was, “Yes, the name sounds familiar, but he isn’t one of the residents here.” I was getting a little frustrated.

“Sounds familiar? What in the ever living hell does that mean? Either he is there, or he is not,” I thought. “Where else would you go to find a one-hundred-year-old man?” I was sure he wasn’t out playing tennis at the club anywhere. So maybe he was in one of the hospitals. Duplicating my efforts with the nursing homes, I started calling the local hospitals. Upon inquiring at the fourth hospital, I got an unusual question.

“Do you mean the Jacob Williams?”

“Yes, I think so,” I said slowly, a little confused because of the extra emphasis on the word the. “But I didn’t honestly know that there was a the Jacob Williams.”

“Yes,” responded the young-sounding female voice on the other end of the phone, “he has donated a large amount of money to the veterans, cancer patients, and children in the hospital. Likes to stop by on occasion. Says he wants to make sure his money is well spent. He spends lots of time in the rooms talking to patients. Always leaves them smiling. I hope he isn’t ill or anything; really, he’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.”

This was an unexpected turn in my concept of this man, to say the least.

Beginning to grow suspicious, I had to ask, “The Jacob Williams that you are talking about, how old is he?”

“Oh, I don’t know exactly; mid-to-late nineties, I think; why?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Thanks for your help. I’m sure he’s fine. Have a good day.”

I was feeling a little flustered as I hung up the phone. Just finding this man was taking up the easy day of work I thought I was going to get earlier.

“One of the coolest people I’ve ever met…Always leaves them smiling.” Yes, that’s what she said. What does this guy do? Teach them how to play shuffleboard with a walker or from a wheelchair while they spoon-feed him poached eggs and change his diapers?

“Mid-to-late nineties…” she said. It had to be him. It had to be the right guy.

It was then I noticed the smirks and grins on several of the coworkers I share my office space with. “One of these days, I swear, I will have an office with walls,” I thought.

“What?” I said.

Then Joyce, the woman who works in advertising, who also occupies the desk directly across from me, looked over her reading glasses and said, “Maybe you should ask Scott who Jacob Williams is.”

“Why not?” I thought. “He is the one who left me the Post-it note asking me to interview this Williams guy.”

So off I went to the end of the room where there was an office door with the large gold capital letters on it that said, “SCOTT MURPHY—PROGRAM DIRECTOR.” I knocked.

“Come on in,” replied the voice on the other side of the door. “Ah, Don! How can I help you?” he said with a smile after I had opened the door and poked my head in.

Scott was one of the best people you could work for. In spite of some of the assignments he kept giving me, he was the friendliest person I’ve ever known. He was in his early thirties, totally honest, trustworthy, and always looked you in the eye, which made the striking blueness of his own really stand out. There were pictures of his wife and kids on his desk. Beautiful family, the whole bit.

“Yeah, Scott, about this interview with this centenarian you gave me to do. Joyce seems to think you may know how to contact him. I’ve called all the nursing homes and most of the hospitals in the city and can’t seem to get a lead on where he might be or how to contact him.”

“Oh, I didn’t give you his address?” Scott replied. “I’m sorry. Boy is my face red. Come in, sit down.”

“No, sir, you didn’t. But who is he? He seems to have some notoriety at the hospital.”

“Jacob Scott Williams is my great-grandfather,” Scott said as he opened the address book on his computer. “I got my first name from his middle name. I’d like to try to pattern my life from his; sort of the chip off the, chip off the, chip off the old block, as I like to say. What an inspiration, and a lot to live up to. He made a lot of money in the early days of electronics. Williams Industries, Inc. Owns a lot of interest in this station, as a matter of fact. As well as owning some small portion of about half the businesses in town. At least that’s the way it seems. He retired decades ago.

“He’s a totally silent partner, so if you’re thinking that’s how I got this job,” he added with a big grin, “get it out of your mind. I know exactly what he would say: ‘Son, I wouldn’t do you the disservice. The only opportunities worth taking are the ones you make for yourself.’ He’s the last person in the world who would do the ‘family favorites’ thing.”

About then, the printer finished spitting out the name, address, and phone number of Jacob Scott Williams, along with a map and specific instructions on how to get there.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Don?”

“No, sir,” I said, taking the information and exiting the office. “Thank you.”

Scott’s face wasn’t the only one that was red.

I had nothing else to do but dial the number on the paper Scott had just handed me and try to set up a time and date that I could talk to him.

“Eight in the morning tomorrow will be fine,” I said to the voice of the older woman on the other end of the line. “Yes, I will be prompt,” I replied to her comment that the “Admiral” doesn’t like to be kept waiting.

“Thank you, have a nice day. Goodbye,” she said in a very cheerful voice before she hung up the phone.

“Admiral? Admiral?” Yes, that is what she said. Then I realized, no longer having any idea what to expect and being totally off my guard and in a mild state of shock, that I was talking to myself out loud.

As I grabbed my microphone and recorder, making sure I had plenty of extra time on it, I couldn’t help noticing some snickering from the other office workers who were obviously having somewhat of a joke at my expense. “Yeah, you got me,” I said, realizing they had known all along. Grabbing my jacket and keys, I headed out the door at the end of my “easy” day’s work. I’d have to get up early in the morning and head straight to the Admiral’s place rather then come into the radio station.

Finding the Admiral’s place the next day was not difficult, given the directions his great-grandson gave me, but it did take awhile to get there. During that time, I tried my best to keep hope alive that this interview would turn out to be a good thing. But any hope of an easy day of work was rapidly becoming a distant memory. I’d already spent most of it in my search for this guy the day before. My consolation prize was that a retired admiral might know something more than the average veteran about the attack at Pearl Harbor. That is, if the old geezer could remember anything about anything at all. And what a hundred-year-old man would be doing that he would be so sensitive to being kept waiting, entirely mystified me.

Nonetheless he is my boss’s great-grandfather, so I will be certain to do as little as possible to irritate him.

After carefully following the directions to their end, I found myself driving up a small but paved country lane that led to what could be best described as a medium sized cottage in the woods. Everything was kept neat and trimmed. The grass, trees, and bushes were all cut with care. If it hadn’t been November, it would have looked like the quiet summer retreat you would see on a postcard. There was a small shed on one side in the back and a garage on the other. There was also another small cottage house a short distance off, with a stone sidewalk connecting them, much like the one I was walking on that connected the driveway to the house.

Still wondering what I was in for, I looked at my watch and found it to be 7:57 A.M. “Perfect; at least the Admiral won’t be angry at me for being late,” I said to myself as I stepped onto the welcome mat and rang the bell.

After about thirty seconds, I was just about to ring again when I found myself face to face with a woman most likely in her seventies. She was dressed pretty much as a woman her age would be expected to dress, but she was also a little taller and perhaps a little “straighter” than you would expect for someone her age.

“Yes, can I help you?” she said as she looked straight at me with shockingly bright blue eyes and the warm kind of smile that can only be worn by a person who genuinely cares to help someone.

“Yes,” I said, “my name is Donald Ritter. I called yesterday from the radio station about an interview with Mr. Williams.”

“Oh yes, come on in; he’s been expecting you. Would you like some coffee or tea?”

“No thank you; I wouldn’t want to impose.”

I was thinking this woman looked strangely familiar. The smile and the eyes reminded me of my boss. And seeing how I had already been bitten by the relationship of the Admiral to him, I wasn’t going to chance it by giving her anymore run around than I had to.

“It’s no problem,” she said waving her hand with a little laugh and her smile not fading. “I was just going to get some for the Admiral. What’ll ya have, hon?” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder and looking into my eyes in that certain way that made you think she could see right through you and somehow know you really did want something.

“Coffee, I guess; black will be fine.”

“Well, alright then. Why don’t you come into the den and have a seat? The Admiral will be here in just moment. He’s getting cleaned up from working out back.”

She led me through a door off to the side and I followed.

“Come on in and sit down anywhere except the chair behind the desk or the large one at the window. He likes those for himself. I’ll be back soon with your coffee.”

As soon as I set foot in the Admiral’s den, I knew any hope for an easy day of work was dead on arrival. It was one of those kinds of rooms that somehow looked larger from the inside than the house could contain from the outside. It had a rather large oak desk off to the right. The desktop was very neat with a laptop computer on it. A large picture window was straight ahead with a reclining chair next to it that I took to be the Admiral’s. Opposite the recliner were several other chairs arranged so that several people could comfortably sit and talk. The room had soft plush carpet on the floors and wood everywhere else. A small fire was warming the room from a fireplace on the left-hand wall, and a table with several chairs were placed in an orderly fashion nearby.

The thing that grabbed my attention the most was that all available wall space was covered with pictures, awards, and displays of all sorts—more than you could possibly imagine. Instead of finding a seat, like the old woman suggested, I started to look at the items on the walls. There were several keys to cities and awards from dozens of charities. Firearm shooting awards covered a large section of one wall. There were autographed pictures of celebrities like Bob and Dolores Hope, Errol Flynn, and Ronald Reagan as the actor, governor, and president. An autographed record of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” along with a photograph of Glenn Miller handing it to a young navy officer whom I took to be the Admiral. Military awards included letters of a commendation from more people than I can name, a Purple Heart, Navy Cross, Bronze Star, and Silver Star among them.

Behind the desk to the left was a display that looked like a family tree. Curiosity getting the better of me, I took a closer look. At the top was what looked like a recently taken picture of an older man; next to it was a picture of an older woman. Looking closer at the picture of the man, I noticed in the background was the wall with this family tree on it and realized this must be a picture of the Admiral. Under that, with the connecting lines, were pictures of four other people, two men and two women. One of the women I recognized immediately as the woman who welcomed me at the door. Below that, the tree began to branch out rather rapidly into twelve branches, almost fifty branches, and then abruptly narrowed back down to just nine. Two were pictures of younger children under the picture of my boss, Scott Murphy.

In the center of the wall behind the desk was a glass display case containing a Japanese Samurai sword and facing it a handgun with three silver stars on the handgrip. Relics from the war, I guessed. It was surrounded by pictures of several military ships, including a cruiser, several battleships, destroyers, a submarine, and an aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier had a name on it which said USS Hornet, and was signed by William F. Halsey and Jimmy Doolittle. Of course, there were pictures of the Admiral with Halsey and Doolittle. There was also a small display case that held rank insignia from the gold bars and silver bars at the bottom, through gold and silver oak leafs, a bird, to one star, two stars, and finally three stars at the top. Now I was certain why they called him the Admiral.

On the right side of the desk were diplomas. Not your usual collection for literature or basket weaving, or some such thing, but PhDs in history and philosophy. On top of everything else, this man was a college professor! This wasn’t just a den or an office for an old man; it was a collecting place, almost a museum, for a person who was involved with a hundred-year-long aggressive pursuit of life!

I was suddenly startled out of my amazement by an old man’s voice speaking softly behind me.

“Been keeping busy, son?”

Jumping slightly, I turned to see a pair of bright, clear blue eyes looking at me over the top of a pair of half-moon reading glasses. Any trace of hair he once had was just a memory. The face wore the same kind and gentle expression as my boss’s, although it was surrounded by an abundance of wrinkles. There was a clear familial resemblance between the Admiral and the woman who let me into the house. He wasn’t in a wheelchair or using a walker, but a single cane, which he only leaned on slightly. And he came in so quietly, I had not heard him. I would not have guessed he was much more than eighty, and there was a certain youthful air about him that suggested he was only in his mid-thirties.

“Sir, I-I w-was just was looking…” I stammered, caught off-guard.

“That’s alright. Perfectly fine,” he said holding his hand up. “You are here to interview me, and you should have some idea who you are talking to,” he continued as he stepped around to the chair behind the desk and sat down. “Besides, the only reason I can think of to put all of this stuff on the walls is for people to look at anyway. For some odd reason, my family thinks my den should be a museum,” he said, waving his free hand around. “You go ahead and look, and when you have questions, well, here I am. Ah, here comes June with the coffee.”

The old woman came in again and set the tray she was carrying down on the desk. “One coffee, black,” she said handing a large mug to me, “and one with cream and sugar. Is there anything else I can get you boys before I go?”

“No dear, we’ll be fine. Thank you.”

“Well alright, you know where to find me if you need anything,” she said as she left the room.

“My daughter,” the Admiral said, “is a wonderful girl. Both her mother and her husband passed away within several weeks of each other. I had the cottage next door built for her soon afterwards. She manages all of my affairs tirelessly. I can page her from right here if you need anything. It’s no bother.

“So shall we get started?” the Admiral added after a brief pause.

“Yes, sir.”

“Please, call me Jake. The sir stuff, for the most part, ended after I retired from the service. Although some people still call me Admiral, it’s not my favorite. I much preferred being called Captain, if anything. But it just goes to show that even admirals don’t always get things their way,” he said with a smile and a wink. “I think other people like the Admiral title better because there are less of them around than regular old captains.”

“Very well, Jake,” I said awkwardly. “What do you attribute your longevity to?”

“Now on that, I’m sure you wouldn’t believe, but I get a lot of questions like that at my age,” he replied, smiling. “But most of it, I think, has a lot to do with having a good sound purpose for living to begin with, whatever that purpose may be. A good hard honest day of work to back that purpose helps keep you going more than you would think.”

“Do you think there are a lot of people in society without a purpose?” I asked.

“Far be it for me to tell others how to live their lives, but I can tell you that what I did with mine worked for me. It just seems to me a lot of people these days, rather than earning their own way, want to try to force prosperity from somebody else in the name of ‘humanitarianism.’ Living like that doesn’t make sense to me because if you ‘Rob Peter to pay Paul,’ you will end up enslaving them both. And the chances of survival are pretty small for anybody with slaves around.”

“Your one hundredth birthday is approaching. How do you feel?”

“Like a man being cut down in the prime of his life by a hundred-year-old body,” the Admiral said with a bit of a chuckle. “Not that this body is in bad shape for its age, but I sometimes wish I could trade it in for another. It just doesn’t seem to keep up with me the way it used to,” he said, still smiling.

That statement, as if he were something separate from his body, seemed a bit odd to me for a moment until I thought of the PhD in philosophy on the wall.

The Admiral, looking at me with the bright, piercing blue eyes of a man with a hundred years experience of sizing people up, obviously saw my puzzled expression and added, “Look son, when you have gone as far as I have in life, you have to believe in something more than yourself, or you are more than what you have been led to believe.”

“Really?” I asked out of genuine interest.

“I think we are more than what we have been led to believe we are. I tend to lean toward the Eastern way of thinking. That when we die, we drop our bodies, much like a dirty pair of socks, and then get born into this world again as someone else. That’s why I try my hardest to make the world a better place. So when I come back, it will be in better shape for us the next time around.

“I guess I’m kind of like General George Patton in that respect, except he was the consummate warrior, whereas I seem to have developed a slight aversion to being bombed and shot at. War just never seemed to be that much fun to me, and it tends to make otherwise good people do very bad things.”

“Speaking of the war,” I asked seizing the opportunity to switch the conversation to Pearl Harbor, “were you involved in World War II much?”

“From the moment it began for the United States,” he answered.

“So am I to understand you are a witness to Pearl Harbor?”

That was the first time I noticed the smile on the old man’s face dim for a moment. Reaching up with his left hand, he took off his glasses, folded them, and laid them on his desk. “Glasses are for old people,” he commented, looking back up at me and staring at me for an awkward amount of time.

Just as I was thinking I had messed up bad and the old man was going to give me the boot he asked, “Do you really want to learn about Pearl Harbor or just get some sound bites for your program?”

“Yes,” I replied with some hesitancy given the sudden seriousness of the Admiral’s voice. “I would like to know about it; anything you could tell me would be great. But honestly, at the same time, Jake, I do have to use some of it for the program because it is my job.” I figured I was walking a thin line and had better be straightforward and honest with him because he was obviously the master, and I, the student.

“Now, let me be very clear about this,” he said, “because there are two things we can talk about here. We could talk about learning about Pearl Harbor or we could talk about learning from Pearl Harbor. Do you understand the difference?”

“No. What do you mean?” I asked, both trying to regain control of the interview and realizing I was now talking to a history professor.

“Well, if you want to learn about Pearl Harbor, the History Channel could tell you everything you want to know. You could learn, for example, that Dori Miller was the first African American to win the Navy Cross, or if the hatch would have been closed to the black powder magazine, the Arizona might have survived to the end of the war, or if the radar operator who saw the Japanese planes coming, or his officer in charge, would have sounded the alarm, we could have put up a better fight,” he said with a comical, almost robotic-sounding voice.

“They will tell you about facts, facts, facts, and more facts until you have them coming out of your ears and don’t know what to do with them. And ultimately, there is nothing you can do with them, except maybe use them to occupy time with your trivial pursuit game.

“It’s how you apply those facts that really counts. If you want to look closer, behind the cold facts, you will discover there were real people living and dying there. Fighting to stay alive during the most brutal and deliberate acts of violence—and struggling to take or learn something from it. The survivors left looking, sometimes for the rest of their lives, for something that could give any of it any kind of meaning at all, looking for anything to make it so your friends and shipmates did not die needlessly or in vain while you continued to live. My friends and my shipmates,” he added, looking across the desk at me with his blue eyes turning slightly red at the corners.

“Son, I’m a hundred years old and don’t have a lot of time left to waste, so if you want to just learn something about Pearl, you can watch the History Channel for a week and find out all you want to know.

“So let me ask you again,” he added after a short pause. “Do you want to know about what happened at Pearl Harbor or learn from what happened at Pearl Harbor?”

I felt those very sharp blue eyes bearing down on me. I knew from his look that if I just wanted a few cursory memories of what happened on that day, my interview with him would be over. Not that it mattered at all, because I was definitely interested. The old man had sold me. He had a real story to tell, and I was being given a unique chance to hear it. Even as a junior reporter, I knew chances like this were rare. And the respect I gained for him, in the few minutes I had known him, made me want to listen to everything he had to tell me anyway.

It was an easy thing to think that this man could very well lead other men into combat. I imagined if I had known him very much longer and was in the navy under his command, I would have done anything he ordered, even at the potential expense of my own life.

It only took a second for me to make up my mind.

“Yes, Admiral,” I said. “Please tell me about it.”

After airing the story about the Admiral’s one-hundredth birthday and informing my boss about my plans to get a longer Pearl Harbor exposé from the Admiral, I spent the next two weeks being waited on by the Admiral’s daughter while listening to and recording his story.

Their hospitality had no end.

The Admiral mostly talked and I mostly listened. During that time, he conveyed, yet never actually said so, the impression that everything he remembered was as if it happened only yesterday. I couldn’t help but think that some of the things he was saying he had never said to anybody before, yet had wanted to say for a very long time.

Only on occasion would he read from a log or diary of some sort. Several times, when breaking out one of his journals, he would say, jokingly, “Of course the keeping of personal diaries was strictly forbidden for security purposes on ships during the war.” And he “would just have to trust me to not turn him in to the Department of the Navy for breaking the rules.”

He never failed to be articulate and never paused for more than a few seconds to remember some specific detail. I could tell he was paying close attention to actually communicating his story, talking mostly in laymen’s terms rather than technical terms. And a lot of times, I could tell he was tempering a lot of “sailor talk.” But other than that, he held nothing back.

The following is basically a transcript of what the Admiral had to say as he passed it on to me, edited only to remove questions I had asked him, coffee breaks, or other such interruptions.

I feel compelled to also state it has been an honor to have had the opportunity to spend so much time talking with this man. His story fascinated me, as I hope it will fascinate you.

The Surrender: Part One

I didn’t really begin to understand the events of Pearl Harbor until the end of the war when I accepted the surrender of the Japanese submarine I-57. The memory of it stands out vividly in my mind. It was a life-defining moment, even more so than the actual attack or even the entirety of the war itself.

The fact is, I would have never imagined they would be like they were. Prior to actually seeing them, I pictured them in my mind as being beaten and broken, more like animals than men. Or more accurately, that is what I wanted them to be. I had been shooting at them for the last four years, not out of mere anger or self-defense, but instead, out of sheer hatred.

There were plenty of pictures and films of them, the few of them who surrendered, on Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and other such places during the course of the war. They were dirty, half-starved, and terrified-looking—beaten and defeated. Just the way you would want to see an enemy. That’s the price you pay when you have the arrogant audacity to screw with the United States of America. You get screwed right back, and we win. And it served them right as far as I was concerned.

But these weren’t those men. They were clean, shaved, and in their best dress uniforms. And with the exception of one officer and several crewmen to handle the ropes between our two vessels, they were standing at attention on the deck of the Imperial Japanese naval submarine, which was now tied up to the side of my very own ship.

And I hated them for it—even more than I did before. Especially after looking around at my own crew and seeing them in dungarees and khakis, dressed for battle.

“They damn well better be ready for battle,” I said to myself. “The Japs just cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted.” I had already paid too much by not being ready for them.

Now there are times as the commanding officer of a naval vessel that what the admirals and presidents order you to do is distinctly different than what you really want to do. There was no greater example of a time like this in my life than on this occasion.

It was a few days after the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki when I received the orders to proceed to a latitude and longitude that was somewhere to the southeast of Okinawa, to “find, rescue, and accept surrender from” a Japanese submarine.

My instincts utterly revolted. “Rescue them! What the bloody hell happened to killing them?” I thought.

They had their supply lines cut in the days that preceded the atom bombs and the agreement of the Japanese to surrender. A torpedo from one of our submarines sank an enemy sub tender, and as a result, they didn’t have enough fuel to make landfall anywhere, let alone get to the formal surrender point. So we were supposed to find them and tow them back to Okinawa.

Remembering my training at the academy, and not yet willing to set aside my career as an officer, I had to struggle against myself to put in my own discipline and follow the orders.

All of the possible scenarios passed through my mind, including what happened the last time I tried to rescue some of them after the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

I was tempted to not find them and leave them to drift endlessly at sea until they all died of starvation and thirst. That would not have bothered me a bit. How many American sailors did these Nips cause to die, drifting helplessly in the sea after torpedoing their ships?

That’s what happened to several crews of American ships like the Indianapolis for example, except they didn’t even have the benefit of a ship’s deck to stand on. Many of them died in the water, eaten by sharks. For all I knew this might have been the same sub that sank the Indianapolis or torpedoed this very ship earlier in the war.

The light cruiser I was in command of, the USS Buffalo CL-84, and the destroyer assigned to escort us found them right where they were supposed to be. I checked my sidearm just to be sure it was ready. This reeked of a time that I might have to use it.

With extreme caution (to make sure that this wasn’t some kind of ambush by a renegade sub captain), we approached them without incident. No sign of ships other than ours, no sonar contacts, and even better, no torpedo wakes. I wasn’t going to take any chances with my ship that I didn’t have to because there had already been a number of incidents of Japs refusing to surrender and choosing to die rather than follow their emperor’s order to stand down.

As we came around to tie up next to them, I turned to Major Johnson and addressed him. He was a very professional man even among marines; always in order and always to the point. He was in command of the marine detachment on board, and I knew he would feel about the same with this situation as I did. In addition, he was one of the few men on board who could speak Japanese. Right at this time, most of his unit was placed at strategic points all over the port side of the Buffalo, armed with as many thirty- and fifty-caliber automatic weapons as they could hold. And several of the twenty-millimeter guns were trained on the sub as well.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“You know the Nip customs?” I asked. (This, incidentally, was part of the reason he was on my ship.)

“Yes, sir.”

“I want this to be perfectly clear. If just one of those Nip bastards even blinks the wrong way I want you to cut that ship to ribbons. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, without hesitation or emotion. A simple man, the major, always followed orders without question.

He and his crew had the unfortunate duty of being the first to board the Japanese submarine and secure it, after which the sub commander would be brought on board to surrender to me. At least that’s the way the plan was supposed to work. And when Japs were around, things, more often than not, didn’t work according to plan. I was taking no avoidable chances.

Inside of myself, I was struggling with the hope that one of them would make a false move, daring me to act. What game was it they were playing? Or were they really surrendering?

Deciding to never trust a Jap, I looked over my shoulder for the destroyer that was escorting us. It was right where it belonged, but what good would it do against another submarine already positioned and silent?

I could see them so clearly in my mind, just below the surface, waiting patiently for the right time to strike. In less than a minute, they could surface to periscope depth, already lined up on the targets, periscope up, and five seconds later start shooting their torpedoes. Six of them in one salvo, in a straight line, would leave us with little chance of escape.

If he was good, he could hit the destroyer twice, sinking it. The destroyer’s momentum would carry it out of the way of the last four “fish,” which would slam, one after another—boom, boom, boom, boom—into the side of my ship. Repeatedly striking the exact same part of my ship, it would certainly break my ship in half and sink it. With six Jap torpedoes against a stationary target and a slow-moving target, it would all be over before we could respond. This ship had been hit by enough torpedoes to last me the rest of my command, and I had already been on enough additional torpedoed ships to last an entire lifetime.

I’ve got to hand it to the Japanese. They sure knew how to make a bad-ass torpedo. Especially the sub-launched ones. The USS North Carolina gave me experience with that, too much experience. They killed five good American sailors in the blink of an eye, let alone the ones lost on the Wasp and the destroyer O’Brien at the same time.

At least the sea was calm that day, not that it would do us any good, but maybe we could see any torpedo wakes in time to take some action. But even then, it was doubtful if that would be enough to save everybody.

The worst thought weighed still heavier on my mind. Maybe this sub itself was rigged to explode right alongside of us, taking us both out. I wouldn’t put it past them for even a second. Kamikazes, “The Divine Wind,” as the major would tell me, were a god-damned bunch of freak-show fanatics, if you asked me. What kind of a moral reprobate would load up a plane with explosives and deliberately crash it along with them into a ship?

Either way, we were screwed. Another cruiser sent to Davy Jones’s Locker in the name of “The Divine Wind and the glorious Name of The Emperor Hirohito for the Empire of Japan.” What a bunch of crap.

It would be better, as far as I was concerned, to break the lines to that ship and simply put a few shells in it and go home rather than risk spending the next few hours or days floating on the water, hoping for rescue. “One thing is for sure,” I thought to myself. “I do not want to repeat the last time I was in the water on account of these sons-of-bitches.” I remembered all too well the feeling of watching the USS Oklahoma roll over and sink with more than four hundred of my crewmates trapped below decks.

But there was still the matter of my duty. The inescapable truth of the situation called my attention back to the order to lower the liberty ladder to the deck of the Japanese submarine. Her crew was still immobile and resolute on her deck for some nefarious reason, which I still hadn’t been able to fathom. I could see the expressions on their faces from my place on the bridge and could take some small amount of comfort in the fact that they obviously were not taking the circumstances lightly.

“Good, the more misery for them, the better,” I thought.  Major Johnson told me that for them to have to surrender is an extreme dishonor. Personally, I didn’t see how they would have had any honor to lose.

Still, their faces were not unlike the faces of the pilots of the planes that attacked Pearl or the one that flew down so close to the North Carolina. I could see the whites of his eyes—slant eyes. Except at Pearl, the faces I could see had smiles on them, almost as if they were mocking us. They were flying that low. None of them were smiling now, which was all the better.

“Yellow bastards,” is all I could say for them. I very easily could have towed them to shallow water, welded the hatches shut with all of them inside, and sunk them well above crush depth so they would die slowly in darkness, with no hope of rescue. “No survivors,” my report would say. It’s too good a fate for the kind of scum who would shoot at helpless people in the water and laugh about it.

The major’s crew were crossing the liberty ladder to the Japanese sub. As expected, they executed their task with the brave professionalism and due diligence I had come to expect from the corps. I didn’t envy him for his job that day. He would be among the first men to die if the Japs decided to play any tricks.

From my vantage point, I could see the major take several marines below, providing each other cover while numerous other marines stayed above deck guarding the sub’s crew. It would take awhile for the major to secure the sub and make sure it wasn’t somehow rigged.

We had discussed beforehand that one of the first things I wanted verified, if the situation on the sub was reasonably safe, was the fuel level in the sub’s tanks. I reasoned that would give me the earliest possible clue of the crew’s true intentions. I fully expected the major to signal a trap, but no such signal ever came. Meanwhile, most of the sub’s crew was still in place, at attention, on the deck of the ship. Several Japanese officers had been asked by the major to go below decks with him.

I tried to avoid tapping nervously on the grip of my Colt forty-five as I rested my hand on it and waited for the signal from the major that either all was well, or it was time to fight. As the captain in a potential combat situation, you don’t have the luxury of letting the crew know how nervous you really are. They will follow your lead if they catch on, and I half-wanted them to not get trigger-happy.

As the seconds turned to minutes, I again found myself thinking about the war. All of the countless intelligence reports I had been briefed on flooded my mind. The gruesome violence the Japs had committed on enemy soldiers they had captured was not anything anybody should be exposed to—ever. Some victims could only be identified as soldiers of ours by the dog tags left behind. Let alone what these bastards were capable of doing to the civilian populations they had overrun. “Murder, rape, and torture were all in a Nip’s day of work,” I was thinking. Just then, the Major’s head appeared above the conning tower of the sub. He gave a hand signal that everything was well. “It’s a good thing the major’s head is still attached,” I thought, as I watched another marine come out of the hatch on the conning tower behind the major and climb down the ladder, cross the deck, and head for the liberty ladder back to my ship. A few seconds later, I was facing a slightly out-of-breath marine sergeant who handed me a hand-written note.

Thanking the sergeant and dismissing him, I read:

Have secured enemy sub. Fuel supply extremely low. Batteries the same. No detectable hidden purpose yet but still involved in searching the sub. Japanese captain and officers cooperating in every way. Captain speaks English well, attended University of Chicago. Expect ten more minutes to finish.

University of Chicago? I couldn’t believe it. Apparently everything good the Japs ever learned came from America. And those slant-eyed sons-of-bitches turned around and used it to bomb us. “Isn’t that about right?” I said out loud, no longer able to contain myself.

“Sir?” the officer of the deck replied.

“Major Johnson tells me the Jap bastard captain of that sub went to the University of Chicago.”

“Really?” replied the lieutenant.

“Yes, apparently so. We should have just shot him when we had him the first time, don’t you think lieutenant?

“Would have been a good idea, sir,” he said with a grin. “We could have saved all of those American war bond holders a lot of money on perfectly good ammunition.”

“No doubt,” I replied, ending the conversation, both out of not wanting to invite levity onto the bridge of my ship under such serious circumstances and another flood of hatred for these animals we called Nips welling up inside of me.

“There was nothing more we could do,” I thought as I remembered a time on this very ship not long ago. “We did everything we could to get those men out of there.” The horror, the sheer horror of it, but there was nothing that could be done; the bulkhead gave way and drowned them all like rats. All we could do was listen to them in their panic and pleas to God for a few more precious moments of life as the water flooded into the compartment. And no matter how many times I go over it in my mind, the helplessness still never goes away. There was just nothing more we could do. My promise to those men, that they would see their families again, was broken, and some of our own boys would never make it home as a result. Halsey’s plan of “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and kill more Japs” was still looking mighty good to me.

And as the seconds turned into minutes I gently tapped the grip of my holstered Colt forty-five. Since Pearl, I almost always kept my sidearm on me. Even when I didn’t think it was a likely time to find myself in combat. Not that it would do much good for a sailor most of the time. But on the other hand, I was a champion shooter, and it made me feel better that at least I could always shoot back with something.

It was loaded by my own hands just before the Japanese sub had been spotted. One round in the chamber, full magazine with four spares, cocked locked, and ready for trouble. I was ready for a fight. With all of those yellow bastards in close formation on the deck like that, I’d be sure to get at least several of them.

A recurring nightmare since the Buffalo was torpedoed came to my mind. I saw myself tied to the side of a Japanese sub shouting “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!” shooting at it in vain with my sidearm as it sank below the waves. Captain Williams or Captain Ahab from Moby Dick; in the end, what’s the difference?

Then I thought of my wife and children. What would they gain from it?

After a short time the marine sergeant interrupted my reverie by returning to the bridge bearing another note from the Major. I took it from him and told him to stand by while I read it.

Enemy sub secured. All weapons disabled and inert. The Japanese captain respectfully requests to come aboard and formally surrender.

“Sergeant,” I said, “run ahead and inform the major that I will be on the quarter deck at the top of the liberty ladder in two minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the marine; then he departed the bridge.

I picked up the sound-powered phones, which connected the bridge to the executive officer’s battle station, put them on, and keyed the microphone. “XO,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” came the usual acknowledgement of Commander Thompson’s voice.

“I’m leaving the bridge to go accept the sub captain’s surrender. You have the conn. Look sharp and keep your eyes peeled; I don’t trust these bastards.” Normally, in a potential combat area, the captain is not allowed to leave the bridge area. It’s very restrictive and almost like being in the brig to be confined to just the area of the pilot house, the navigation bridge, and my very small sea quarters. Even my meals were brought to me in my chair in the pilot house. I normally looked forward to any chance to leave the bridge, but this was an exception.

“Understood,” the executive officer said.

I would have rather told him, “I’m going down to the quarter deck to put a forty-five caliber hole right in the middle of that slant eyed bastard’s head. Send somebody down to clean his filthy bloodstain off the deck of my ship in five minutes.”

“Officer of the deck, XO has the conn. I’ll be back in ten minutes,” I said.

“Yes, sir. The captain’s off the bridge.”

I turned, stepped through the hatch, then down the ladder, and for the first time in weeks, left the bridge area of my ship.

“For all I know, this could be the same submarine and the same captain that torpedoed the North Carolina or even this ship,” I thought to myself as I stepped down onto the main deck.

I arrived at the top of the ladder down to the sub just before the major and a Japanese officer with a samurai sword stepped onto it and began to climb up the steps.

As he was climbing the ladder my thoughts once again strayed to my forty-five waiting in its holster. “I still could get him,” I thought, “I’m a good enough shot that I could hit him with no risk to the major. It’s an easy shot.”

Then they were at the top of the ladder. The Colt in its holster was feeling very heavy on my chest. They were ten feet in front of me, five, and then three.

The Japanese officer reached for his sword. I shot a quick glance at Major Johnson as I felt the snap on the strap of the holster which held my Colt pop loose against my index finger. “This is it,” I thought; “he is going to try to lop off my head with that thing. Well, if it’s him or me that is going to die, I choose him.”

Ever so slightly the major shook his head at me, his eyes widening, as if reading my mind.

The Japanese captain unhooked the sword from his belt, still sheathed, bowed, and holding it horizontally, offered it to me.

This was the only time in almost four years of war I had seen a Jap surrender without shooting at him first.

So as my sworn enemy stood in front of me, defeated and offering his sword, and me with my hand still on my forty-five, I began to feel I was missing something, something vague yet very important. I had planned and hoped for this day for some time now, and yet when the moment finally arrived, it seemed hollow.

A nebulous idea began to form in my thoughts, small at first, but growing, and very rapidly gaining energy like an avalanche, until it totally wiped out any concept of the things I had previously assumed were true. I found my mind suddenly racing backwards through time, looking at all of the events of the war that had led me to this point…

Okie

One important thing to understand about the attack on Pearl Harbor is the mindset of the United States, the navy in particular, and the world at that time. The Japanese and their friends in Europe had been stomping around, breaking things, making lots of noise, and generally creating havoc for quite some time. We in the military knew an attack was inevitable. It was going to happen and we were doing what we could to prepare for it. We just didn’t expect that attack at that time in that place, which is why it was so brilliant.

So Sunday morning, December the seventh, 1941, began very much the same as any other day for the American fleet. But it could not have ended much more catastrophically different.

Those of us on the Oklahoma had been out to sea on a weekly basis for the last several months, drilling hard for the war that we knew was bound to come. Every week, we went out for practice and drilled, then back to Pearl for the weekend and the occasional inspections.

This weekend was the USS California’s and Oklahoma’s turn, and we were doing everything in preparation for a visit from Admiral Kimmel’s inspection crew, if not the Admiral himself. We were tied up alongside the Maryland in Battleship Row. The West Virginia and Vestal were aft of us, with the Tennessee and Arizona next to them. The Nevada was berthed aft of the Arizona, and California was forward of us, around the corner, on the other side of a fleet tanker called the Neosho. It seemed like almost every ship in the Pacific fleet was there except for the aircraft carriers and a few of their escorts.

At that time, I was the assistant gun boss on the battleship Oklahoma. The “Okie” we called her or the “Old Okie” sometimes, because she was now one of the oldest battleships in the fleet. My responsibility was to make sure the main battery guns and crew were ready and trained for anything at any time. So that morning, like the many mornings before when we were in port preparing for inspection (and would rather have been on liberty), I called a meeting with my staff over breakfast in the wardroom.

I liked to keep these meetings relatively informal, but on the early side before the tropical sun made the inside of the ship heat up too much. So we would usually break bread starting at 0630, have a little fun talk, and at about 0700 get down to the business of running a battleship and training its crew. This morning was no different from the many weeks and months preceding it.

I was the last to arrive at the breakfast meeting that morning and found the other officers of my crew already assembled and eating. There seemed to be a cheerful atmosphere about them as I arrived. And I had some idea what was coming.

“Congratulations, sir,” said the young ensign down at the end of the table “I hear it’s a boy.” Ensign Flaherty was one of the newest officers on board. He was twenty-two years old and certainly the “youngster” of the group. As such, he was also the most likely to be picked on by the rest of us. “Can we expect a bunch more little lieutenant commanders to be running around the ship with us?”

“It doesn’t matter how little my kids are, ensign, as long as you remember they will always outrank you,” I replied with a smile as I handed him one of the cigars I was carrying. “Now would you please be kind enough to get my coffee for me?” The ensign’s assignment during these meetings was to keep us supplied with coffee. Not that we really needed anybody to do so. The wardroom had plenty of mess clerks to do that for us, but it was expected of the junior officer to serve the coffee at such times. The real truth about the ensign was he showed truly exceptional capability as an officer. I’ve never seen anybody learn more quickly and rise to the needs that any occasion demanded better than him.

As Flaherty got up from the table on his assigned “mission,” the rest of the officers offered their congratulations on the birth of my second son and third child, James Patrick Williams, and likewise, accepted their cigars. Born at almost midnight the preceding Thursday, I had missed his birth. The demands of the navy at the time were too much, with gunnery practice that week. Career officers like me didn’t have the luxury of taking leave any time we felt we needed to. It’s just one of the sacrifices of military life that my wife, Susan, and I had learned to put up with.

The good thing was she and the kids were living right there in Hawaii. In fact, from where the Okie was berthed, when I was in my battle station on top of the forward main mast, I could see across the harbor to the hospital where she was. So as soon as the ship had pulled in on Friday afternoon, I was given the first liberty launch and took it over to see my new son. The XO and CO, being family men themselves, did all they could to help make my visit possible.

“It’s got to be a pain to have to miss your son’s birth like that, isn’t it?” said Lieutenant Alexander. Alexander was the division officer for turret number one. Lieutenants Bernelly, Feinstein, and Lewis, the division officers for the other turrets, were there, as well as several other gunnery department lieutenants and lieutenants, junior grade.

“Yes, somewhat, but I did get my first visit with them the day before yesterday. And let me tell you, for those of you who don’t have children, you are always happy to hold them for the first time. Even if you are a day or two late,” I said, digging into my scrambled eggs.

“But you have to look at the bigger picture. We are officers on a United States battleship preparing for war. Would you rather drill and be ready to defend our country for our wives and children or die on a floundering battleship, out of not being ready?”

“Do you really think war is coming to us?” said the ensign, returning with my coffee.

“Well,” I said, “take a good look at the world and try to deny the possibility.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bernelly.

“Well, what do you mean?” I said. “You can’t be thinking that this world, as it is, is a completely happy and peaceful place, can you?”

“No sir, but the fighting is going on halfway around the world with a huge ocean between us and them on both sides. It would be nearly impossible for either the Japanese or Germans to attack and invade the United States.”

“Well that may be true,” I replied, “but you know we have interests and bases around the world. And while the president says he will not send us to fight in a European war, we are providing weapons and supplies to England. That has got to piss Hitler off pretty bad, and he is still giving the Brits a rough go at it even with our help. The Germans seem to be unstoppable these days, having taken most of Europe, and England is currently standing alone. They even got enough balls to take on Russia at the same time.”

“Well, on the positive side, the Brits seem to have repelled the Germans for the time being. Plus I’d say the Krouts are almost unstoppable, especially if you ask the crew of the Bismarck,” said Feinstein grinning. The intelligence reports of the sinking of the German battleship had been around for some time at that point.

“That’s true,” I said. “But that also shows, as an example, that battleships are sinkable. The Bismarck was new, with a well trained crew. The Brits reportedly got lucky with a torpedo and jammed the rudder, locking Bismarck into a big slow turn. And to add insult to injury, the old biplanes they used to launch the torpedoes are so slow and obsolete that the Germans couldn’t gear the anti-aircraft guns down enough to shoot back effectively. So what we have is a ship much more modern than the one we are sitting on being crippled by a lucky shot. Then being stranded in a big turn, finished off by a gang of smaller ships.”

“All the more reason to be ready all of the time,” Lewis added. “You never know what will happen in combat.”

I was glad to hear him say that. I had been trying for some time to get them to understand as a line officer on a ship, you have to be ready for anything.

“And that’s just the war in Europe,” I said. “The Germans and Japs are working together. The situation in the East has to reach a boiling point soon. They have been involved in their war in China and Mongolia for years now.”

“What’s that got to do with us?” said Flaherty.

“Well, ensign, we were supplying them with materials and fuel, which they were supposed to be using for industry to build the economy of their country. Instead, they have been using them to build weapons to attack the Chinese. They’ve been notoriously brutal, even for war, so we cut them off. I’m guessing they will be missing the oil most of all. They won’t be able to fight or run their industry for long without it.”

“But even if they start a war with us, that wouldn’t get us to start giving oil to them again,” the Ensign persisted. “So what would that gain them?”

“I would think, young Ensign Flaherty, if you study the maps and resources of the world, it would become obvious. Can anybody here tell the young Ensign where the Japanese could get the fuel for their war machine other than from us?” I asked.

“The Russians or the Dutch East Indies,” said Alexander.

“Very good but which is most likely?” I asked.

“The Dutch East Indies,” Alexander answered.

“Why?”

“Well, there is no love lost between the Japs and the Russians because of the Japs’ alliance with Germany. The Russians have the resources to fuel the Japs. But the Japs would have to take the resources by force from the Russians. Even so, the Japs are not strong enough to win against the Russians in open combat, which leaves the Dutch, who are currently part of occupied Europe, so they are less of a challenge,” answered Lewis.

“Still, I don’t see what that has to do with us,” said Flaherty.

“Can anyone remember their eastern geography and tell the young ensign what lies between Japan and the Dutch East Indies?” I asked.

“Oh!” he said. “The Philippines!”

“Yes, not only the Philippines, but the American Territory of the Philippines,” I added. “And do you think for one minute the Samurai warlords of the Empire of Japan are going to let us operate a major base right in the middle of their war, unmolested, while we are supplying the allies of the Dutch with weapons?”

“I see your point,” he said. “So you think they will attack the Philippines?”

“That would seem to be most logical at first, but then they would have to contend with us afterwards. I can’t begin to guess how they would do that, but they have had a lot of practice actually fighting a war, whereas we haven’t. Also to our disadvantage is our lack of aircraft carriers. Our three in the Pacific and four in the Atlantic versus their eleven, which they could focus almost entirely on us.

“At this point, the larger part of our entire naval strategy is based on battleships. I wonder just how well these old ships would stand up to a full-fledged air assault. It’s a good thing a lot of new ships are being built, especially carriers. It would be very comforting to have a lot of planes in the sky to cover our exposed topside. We do have some guns to shoot back with, but I think it would be a good thing to add more anti-aircraft guns to these old battlewagons. The new five-inch guns are supposed to be very good at longer ranges, but nothing will really reach high enough to effectively protect us from air attack, except our own planes.”

I was thinking about the attack of the British against the Italian fleet at Taranto Bay in November of 1940. Several Italian ships were taken out by planes with torpedoes. The battle provided a fundamental shift of power in the Mediterranean toward the British. It was becoming increasingly obvious that ships were no longer safe from determined attackers from the sky. I decided not to bring this point into the conversation at the time because some parts of it were still classified.

“The current fleet buildup couldn’t hurt with promotions, either. War or no war, a larger navy means more room to move up. If a war broke out now, most officers with any experience would move up in ranks and out to commands of their own. Things change very rapidly in war, but I wouldn’t want a war to break out just for a few more stripes,” I added, thinking promotions and pay raises were coming a little too slow for a man with a wife and three kids.

“But a little closer to the here and now,” I said, turning to the reason for our meeting in the first place, “are all of our respective departments ready for the big inspection this afternoon?”

The four division officer lieutenants responded in turn with their reports. The projectile and powder inventories were restocked the day before after being somewhat depleted from the target practice over the preceding week. The barrels and breaches of the ship’s big fourteen-inch main guns were cleaned and lubricated per navy specifications. The hatches were open to allow the inspectors easy access to the magazines with fire-watches posted at every single one of them, just in case. Compartments were clean, and gear was stowed for combat. And all of the cursed mounds of paperwork the United States Navy required was filled out and properly filed.

I never really much liked that part of the meetings with my officers. It was a boring routine and seemingly unnecessary. But the captain, or “Old Man,” as battleship crews were so fond of calling him, required his reports, and the admirals, in turn, required them from the captain. I’m sure none of it could have been made official without a whole lot of officers sitting around drinking coffee served by ensigns, as if none of us could have really used the time any better. And I’m almost certain the Japanese or Germans would not check our paperwork to make sure all of the blanks were filled in before attacking. It was just another one of those annoying little things we had to do in the military.

After the requisite reports were reported, I brought the discussion to the part of the weekly meetings I enjoyed the most. “Now that we all have our acts together, what condition is this ship in, in terms of overall combat readiness?” The other officers were never surprised at being quizzed by me like this. In every meeting I had with them, it was the signal that I had become tired with the mundane business and wanted to push their knowledge a little further than the status quo of running a ship. I would usually challenge them about some seemingly obscure design feature or piece of history about the ship. The Okie, being fairly old, had a lot of interesting design changes over the years. In fact, looking at some of the older pictures you could barely even tell it was the same ship compared to its current configuration, a fact that the young ensign found out to his embarrassment several weeks ago.

Evidently, a little betting pool had begun some time ago between themselves about which of the ship’s systems I would discuss at these meetings. I could usually tell by reading the expressions on their faces who had won as soon as I asked the question, but this time I had apparently thrown them a curve by asking for the overall battle readiness of the ship instead of a specific system. I couldn’t participate in their game for obvious reasons, but I wasn’t about to stop it, either. After all, at least they were thinking about the ship’s systems as a result, and it had the added benefit of adding some “all in good fun” to shipboard life. With a little bit of self satisfaction at having stumped them, I decided I would eventually narrow the discussion to the counter flood systems.

“Well, the main guns are ready,” answered Alexander.

I suspected he was trying to get me to narrow it down to the guns so he could win the bet.

“Yes, I know and expect that from a group of fine officers such as yourselves, but what about the rest of the ship?” I asked again.

“Overall?” asked Flaherty. “Why would we in the gunnery division need to know that?”

“You are a line officer in this navy aren’t you, ensign?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

The other officers began to grin, knowing where this was going.

“And if there is an explosion near the bridge disabling the CO, XO and the officer of the deck, and you are the most senior officer you can find, who is in command of this ship?”

“I am,” he said.

“That’s correct. And what if the ship is listing fifteen degrees to starboard and down by the bow?”

Nothing in return came from the ensign, which told me I was beginning to make my point. “You men are all line officers and need to be as ready to take command of this vessel and fight as she and her crew are. You have to know enough to have a general idea of the current condition of the ship and her readiness. And it’s not enough to just know that; you have to know the basics of her design and what the engineers were thinking when they first drew her, as well as what they were trying to accomplish each time they modified her. All of these changes were made to enhance her performance in combat. And you need to know what she will do under stress, and what she won’t do.”

The reaction was a little flat, so I continued.

“We have a kind of symbiotic relationship with Okie,” I said. “She is just a machine, and it is us who give her life. We are the brains, and she is the brawn. When we give her orders, if everything is working well, she follows them and protects us to the best of her ability. In return, we protect her. If we are in trouble and know her well enough, maybe, just maybe, we can convince her to do something she normally wouldn’t do and exceed the expectations of the engineers who created her. And God help us if we are too stupid to know what to do.

“And you also have to consider all of the engineers’ knowledge and intentions are based on purely theoretical combat conditions. It’s how these paper-pushing desk pilots think combat will occur, rather than any practical study of modern combat conditions. None of these battleships has ever seen combat. Nobody knows exactly what they will or won’t do. And combat is unpredictably random and will test their theories to the extreme limits and expose any weakness.

“Well,” I said looking at them with a smile, “I can tell that I am spoiling your betting pool by asking for the overall condition of the ship instead of just one system, so why don’t we talk about…” I said and added a long dramatic pause just to play with them. “… counter flooding.”

“Yes!” said Lieutenant Lewis with a big smile that told me he had won.

“Alright Lewis, since you win, you get to tell us about counter flooding as it relates to the battleship Oklahoma.”

“Okay. Originally the ship was divided into watertight compartments such that flooding would occur laterally so as to keep the ship upright.

“The funny thing is,” he continued, “side-to-side flooding was not considered on earlier battleships. They had a large watertight bulkhead that divided the ship, port from starboard, which ran down the center all of the way forward and aft. If watertight integrity was breached on one side, they would have had to do more counter flooding on the other to keep the ship upright.

“If the bilges and watertight compartments on this ship, particularly the x-ray hatches, are open such as they are now for the inspection this afternoon, the ship would tend to flood forward and aft on only one side because the listing would hold the water to one side. Then you add on top of that the later added torpedo blisters, which would have to be counter flooded very quickly to keep the ship upright. I think that the blisters, while they provide valuable protection to the internal systems of the ship from torpedoes, could become a liability if they were not counter flooded quickly enough, should they be breached.”

As I listened, I knew he was right. We were nowhere close to battle ready that morning, and I was glad to hear he knew why. “Very good, Lewis!” I said. “Anything else you would like to add to that?”

“We all know, even the young ensign here, the three conditions of readiness, X-ray, Yoke, and Zed, which successively divide the ship into smaller and smaller watertight fireproof compartments. With everything including the bilges open, we aren’t even at X-ray. The basic design of which is to control any flooding so as to occur from port to starboard instead of forward to aft along one side of the ship. If watertight integrity was breached in any meaningful way, all counter flooding systems would be defeated, and the ship would most likely sink rapidly if not roll over.”

“So do we all know why we have a base here at Pearl?” I asked.

“Yep,” said the Ensign. “It’s so we have a safe harbor like this one where we can do these kinds of high maintenance inspections instead of having to go clear back to the mainland or doing them in a high risk area like the Philippines. Seeing how the Japanese are being aggressive like they have been.”

“Good Ensign. I’m glad you are still awake,” I said. “The bad news is, because of the aggressiveness of the Japanese, we are going to be increasing the amount of drilling over the next few weeks. There is no doubt in the navy command channels that they are planning something. So those of you with families need to do whatever you have to do to be ready for a sudden departure. We may have to leave Pearl at a moment’s notice to keep the Philippines in our hands should war break out.” The groans I heard spoke volumes.

I shared their disappointment. I had a newborn son in the hospital, and here I was, preparing my crew for the possibility of war. “Believe me,” I said, “nobody wants this increase in drilling and practice less than me. My new son is just across the harbor and missing his father, I’m sure, but the admiral wants what the admiral wants. And right now, he wants me to be here with you, making the ship ready for his inspection.

“The stress has to be on continuous readiness for anything to happen when it is the most inconvenient and when you least expect it. An enemy, shipboard fire, or other emergency isn’t going to wait for you to study the manual before you react. You need to know now, in real time, what you are going to do. Think continually of what could happen in combat and how you would counter it. And share what you learn.

“What happens if this compartment floods? What if that fire main breaks? What if there is a fire in this or that compartment? You have to know these things instinctively. And you have to make sure the men are trained to know what to do during an emergency. It could save our lives.

“Does anybody have any additional questions before I officially end this meeting?” I asked.

After a pause, I could see the answer was no. “Alright, carry out the plan of the day.” And several of them nodded. Having finished their breakfast and paying their share to Lewis for having won the pool, they got up and left. I looked at the clock on the wall, and noticing it was 0745, realized the meeting had finished earlier than I intended. I would like to have kept them going until 0800, but we had achieved all of the goals for the meeting quickly, so I decided to let it go.

Those of us who remained behind continued eating and talking in casual conversation about things we wanted to do on liberty, our favorite baseball teams, and such.

“Well Jake, you missed the target practice last night. We had a good time but missed seeing your shooting tricks,” said Alexander.

That’s the way it goes, Frank; I never like to lose a chance to hone my shooting skills, but the baby and wife have the priority,” I answered.

I was the coach of the Oklahoma shooting team. We had formed a league between the Okie and several of the other battleships to compete against each other target shooting, both at sea and in port. Drinks would be provided by the losers to the winners each week afterwards on the in port competition shooting. Taunts would be exchanged over the losers of the at-sea competition about whose ship was best.

I was pretty good back in the day at doing trick shots and won a lot of bets shooting objects thrown in the air with my Colt forty-five. I was kind of a ringer on the team, though, because I was a very qualified marksman.

“Yeah, it’s not like you don’t have enough trophies at home anyway, is it?”

“Ah Frank, one can never have enough things for his wife to dust while one is at sea I always say!”

Lieutenant Feinstein was just making a point about how nobody would ever beat Babe Ruth and how the Yankees just were not the same since he left the team when the ship’s 1MC crackled to life and changed our lives forever.

“Air raid! Air raid! Real planes! Real bombs! This is no shit!”

Pearl Harbor: Part One

Puzzled and completely caught off guard by what we just heard, we sat looking blankly at each other for a moment. For the briefest time, everything went quiet. I looked around, and even the mess clerks stopped what they were doing and looked at whatever 1MC speaker was the closest to them.

I honestly was thinking, “Whatever joker pulled a prank like that will be court-martialed and personally keel-hauled by me,” when the 1MC came to life again with an all-too-familiar sound that we had only heard before in drilling: the call to general quarters.

“Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong! Battle stations! All hands battle stations! This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill! All hands battle stations!”

Still stunned the other officers sat for a moment, all looking at me.

“Well, go!” I shouted. “You heard him! Go!”

Simultaneously, we all jumped out of our chairs, knocking several of them over.

Just as we began to scatter, there was a violent explosion. Boom! The ship jumped, as if trying to leap right out of the water. Dishes and coffee cups flew from the table and shattered on the floor. Clouds of dust shook down from the overhead. The lights flickered for a brief second.

And that’s when I first fully understood this was for real. The Okie was under attack. But by whom?

I heard one of the other officers shout “What the hell was—” but he never finished his sentence, being interrupted by another explosion. Boom! Closely followed by another boom! The lights flickered again, more dishes broke, and several people were knocked down by the violence.

“I have to get topside,” I thought as I ran toward the passageway on the port side that leads aft from the wardroom. My battle station was on the top of the forward main mast. The ship’s big fourteen-inch main guns would not be of any use during an air raid, but battle stations are battle stations, and I could always assist the air defense officer in spotting targets if need be.

I could have taken the hatch just forward of the wardroom and gotten topside right away, but with the ship obviously under attack, I wanted to stay under cover as long as I could. Bombs and torpedoes throw a lot of sharp metal splinters, not to mention the probability of strafing fire. The long climb up the ladder to the spotting tower, while potentially exposed to enemy strafing fire, was not something I was looking forward to.

That decision led directly to my first Purple Heart, but may have also saved my life. I was a short way down the passageway when boom, another explosion. “Jesus!” I said, as I was thrown against the bulkhead and bruised my right shoulder. The lights flicked out, came back on for a second, and then went out again. Then all was dark.

You never think about it much when you are on a ship, but there is always some kind of noise. If it’s not the whistle blowing, or the continuous string of announcements, or ringing of bells to mark the time each half hour, there is the sounds of the boilers, the engines when you are underway, vibrations from the propellers, which work their way through the ship, or the ventilation fans and any number of electrical motors going on around you all of the time. These sounds just work their way into you and become part of what tells you the condition of the ship is normal. A better way to describe it is these sounds are the pulse and breath of life that is not part of the crew, but of the vessel itself.

All of a sudden, all of that was gone. The Oklahoma herself had died. There was nothing left except the sounds of her crew, frantically trying save her and themselves.

In the sudden pitch blackness that surrounded me, I could tell the ship was already beginning to list by feeling the slant of the bulkheads and deck I was standing on. I realized that the machinery spaces several decks below must have begun to flood, causing the power to fail. We were taking on water fast and were nowhere near battle-ready conditions.

“It’s a torpedo attack!” I thought, realizing I had not really known until then what exactly was causing the explosions. It was doubtful any armor-piercing bomb could reach that deep into the ship through the heavy armor topside that had been added when the ship was reconstructed.

Knowing the layout of the ship, I continued aft to try to get to a ladder up to the upper deck next to a hatch on the forward part of the superstructure, just aft of the number two turret. I could smell burning fuel oil and smoke filling the passageway as I moved, feeling my way along the bulkhead for guidance in the dark.

Boom! The left side of my forehead struck something from the shock of the next explosion. I don’t know to this day what it was, but it was very hard. I could feel the beginnings of blood trickling down my face as I felt the cut on my forehead.

I could tell by the slanting of the bulkhead next to me and the deck below my feet that the ship was listing more. The sound of the ship groaning under the stress could be heard in between the shouts of the other crewmen in the passageway. The smell of smoke was growing rapidly. “Why the hell don’t they get the emergency lights on?” I thought.

Just then, I saw a sliver of light to the left in front of me, shining down through the smoke. I had found the ladder up and could see sunlight beyond it. There was a crewman lying at the bottom of the ladder who had apparently been knocked off by the last torpedo blast and was still moving but stunned.

“Come on! Get up!” I shouted at him, picking him up off the deck. “Can you climb?”

“I think so,” he said.

“Go! Go! Go!” I replied, shoving him up the ladder before me.

Several other crewmen followed me closely up the ladder, having seen the light to the outside of the ship through the rapidly thickening smoke.

I reached the top of the ladder and stepped out onto the upper deck just forward of the superstructure.

One thing that always strikes me, even to this day, is when I emerged onto the main deck from that hatch, I found myself bathed in warm bright sunlight. You know how grey and dark those old photographs you see of the Pearl Harbor battle are? The old black and white pictures don’t show how truly beautiful a day it was. How strikingly blue the sky was. There was hardly a cloud in it. And the warm tropical sunlight just shone on the sparkling waters of Pearl Harbor, surrounding the ship and the white uniforms of the crew as they raced to their battle stations. The contrast between what I was seeing and what I was feeling was stunning.

I looked back at the hatch I had just come out of. It was dark inside and smoke was beginning to pour out of it, carried by the wind around the number two turret. Inside the ship, I could see a flashlight in the darkness and was relieved to know that it would be less difficult for the crew remaining inside to find their way out. However, on the outside of the ship, everything was covered in oily water, causing a lot of the crew to lose their footing and slip on the deck.

Then I looked up past the conning tower to the forward mast at the gunnery station on top and saw it was already leaning over about fifteen degrees. That’s when I knew the Oklahoma was in very serious trouble. Five torpedo hits, and it couldn’t have been longer than a minute and a half. The flooding below was obviously very serious and getting worse by the second.

My thoughts of the ship were suddenly interrupted by a popping noise in the air. The sound of bullets ricocheting off of the ship surrounded me. Everyone near cover rapidly took cover, but I was just a little too late. A bullet, or at least a fragment of one, hit on the right side of my body, putting a cut about five or six inches long on my chest. It was only a glancing hit, but it stung, to say the very least. Had I not begun to duck when I did, it would have been much worse, but it still needed at least a few stitches.

It was then I got my first look into the face of one of our attackers. An airplane flew by very low, very fast, with those large red circles that we called “meatballs” on the sides and wings. It’s the God-damned Japs, a Kate torpedo plane by the looks of it. If I only had been at my battle station on top of the forward mast and had my Colt forty-five, I could have shot the pilot right between his eyes, no problem. They were that close. I swore that if I survived this, I would never be caught in combat without my sidearm again.

Suddenly realizing the ramifications of the torpedo plane that had just flown over, I looked off the port side and saw exactly what I feared would be there. A torpedo was inbound fast and was going to strike the ship just below me. “Heads up! Take cover!” I shouted to anybody who might be close enough to hear me over the sounds of the battle raging around us as I ducked back to the hatch I had moments before come out of.

Boom! The torpedo struck the side of the ship, throwing a geyser of fuel, oil, and water at least a hundred feet in the air above the ship. I got more bruises on my arm and back as the shock threw me against the bulkhead again. My feet felt as if they had been struck straight up from the bottom. Metal splinters from the hull rained down on the deck, along with more oily water. That was the sixth hit, and I could tell those Jap torpedoes were tearing up the side of the Okie like a jackhammer on a beer can. The ship listed further over and more rapidly. I knew she wouldn’t last much longer.

I quickly did the thought process in my head of what we were discussing just minutes before about flooding and counter flooding. It’s surprising how fast you can think when you have to. There was no power, so pumps would be useless. The bilges were open anyway, so any counter flooding would just run over to the sinking port side and make it worse.

The only hope of her not rolling over at this point depended on the depth of the harbor beneath the keel. She has a thirty-one-foot draft and maybe twenty feet of water under the keel. If she bottomed out in the harbor soon enough, she may sink upright if we were lucky. But it would have to happen before the center of balance shifted further to the port side than the bottom edge of the sinking side of the ship. There is not much chance of counter flooding the starboard side that quickly under the best of conditions, let alone without power.

If the harbor is shallow enough, and she sinks fast enough, it might prevent her from rolling all of the way over, but still, large portions of the crew could be trapped below by the flooding going on above them. Okie has sixteen- to eighteen-foot freeboard aft, and about thirty forward; she would sink to the aft part of the main deck just under the water and the forward 01 level just above the water if she could just stay upright. Either way, the battleship Oklahoma was not the place for the crew to be.

Standard procedure was to call general quarters, as was done, but there was no way for us to know at the time that by doing so, we were condemning most of the crew whose battle stations were below decks to their deaths. And that’s the thought that made up my mind more than anything else. The Okie had to be abandoned. And fast.

There was not enough time to give the order to abandon ship by word of mouth, and the power was out, so I could not use the 1MC. And maybe I couldn’t save everybody below decks, but I had to try to save as many of the crew as possible. There was only one thing to do: move everybody to the starboard side of the ship and if it rolled over, they would be able to walk around the hull instead of being trapped under it.

As I started down the port side, I began shouting, “Abandon ship! Everybody to the starboard side! Abandon ship! Pass the word! Abandon ship starboard!” into every hatch and to everyone I passed along the way. Every time I came to somebody who was hurt, I grabbed somebody who wasn’t and ordered them to help the injured over to the starboard side. Not that it took a lot of ordering; the crew was pulling together and doing everything to help that they could. There was just a lot to do and not nearly enough time. Oil covered everything, making progress much more difficult.

As I went, I could see the crew leaving the port side, taking all of the injured they could carry.

“Damn it! No!” I shouted as several of the crew began jumping over the side. “You can’t go over here, not over the torpedo holes for Christ sake! Don’t jump!” I was too late. Four were already in the water. In the next several seconds, I watched in helpless horror as all four of the crew who jumped were sucked under and back into the hull of the ship by the water rushing in through the holes the torpedoes made.

One of the crewmen shouted at me in panic pointing at the water “Sir! My brother! My brother!”

“There’s nothing you can do, he’s gone!” I shouted back, recognizing this guy would jump if I let him. I grabbed him and held him back.

“You!” I shouted and I grabbed another crewman “Get this man over to the starboard side; knock him out and carry him if you have to; just get him there!”

“Yes sir!”

“Starboard side, goddamn it! Go!” I shouted to the rest of them and turned away. Not enough time. Not nearly enough time. A lot of people were already dying, and a lot more were going to die; I was sure of it.

Another Kate flew overhead, this time climbing to avoid the aft mast.

I was screaming at the passing aircraft, “Dear God Stop! We’re dead!” when a remarkable feeling of ambivalence came over me. The more torpedoes they wasted on an already dead ship like the Oklahoma, the less they would have for some of the others that may have stood a better chance. She was one of the oldest ships in the fleet, and with the old style reciprocating engines, the navy was looking for a good reason to decommission her anyway. On the other side of it was the realization that I was still on the Oklahoma and, along with the rest of the crew, fighting for my life. “Torpedo it if you like; just let us off first!” I said, more quietly to myself than to anyone else.

Boom! The seventh torpedo struck pretty far aft and very high up on the side of the ship due to its increasing list. I could see a crewman was down as a result of the explosion and needed help. There was nobody else around by then, so I slid down the ladder to the aft main deck, just above where the seventh torpedo had struck. The teak wood covering on the deck was splintered and uneven, with several shards of broken metal sticking up through it. The steel deck below had obviously been warped by the explosion of the seventh torpedo, which had struck right below where we were.

I recognized the injured crewman as Chief Joe Fitzgerald, one of the men who worked in the mezzanine under turret three. His left foot was at a disturbingly odd angle, and he was obviously in a lot of pain. It was doubtful he could get off the ship on his own, let alone climb the increasingly slanted deck to the starboard side. There was just not enough time.

“How are you doing, Joe?” I shouted over the din of the attack while still trying to keep him calm.

“I’ve had better days, sir!” he shouted with a small bit of a smile. “But I do need some help!”

“I see that! Don’t worry we’ll get you out of here! Can you swim?” I asked him.

“Looks like I’m gonna have to!”

“Alright then, put your left arm around my shoulder,” I said as I helped him up. “We have to get away from this torpedo hole.”

I was just beginning to wonder how, or if, we were both going to be able to move on the slippery and increasingly slanted deck when the Japs, unfortunately, solved the problem for me.

It seemed almost like slow motion as I watched a Zero dive into a strafing run straight toward us. I could hear the distinctive sound of a pair of twenty-millimeter cannons opening fire and each one of probably several hundred rounds struck the ship with a sound like hundreds of sledge hammers on metal. I felt the chief yanked out of my arm. Not like he was pulling himself away from me, but like he was actually knocked away. The force of it spun me around, and I fell to the deck.

Regaining my bearings, I looked around for the chief, finding him lying up against the number three turret. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. It’s absolutely gruesome what a twenty-millimeter round does to the human body. The upper right side of his body was completely blown off. His right arm was gone. Liver, rib bones, parts of lung remaining, heart twitching. His head was lying over to one side, obviously no longer supported by a spinal column. Chunks of meat, blood, and bones were splattered everywhere on the deck and running down the side of the turret as well as all over me.

The absolute horror was indescribable; surreal, really. The image of Chief Fitzgerald’s mangled body lying there in the warm bright Hawaiian sunlight is something that may never go away in my mind. The full weight of the cruel brutality of modern warfare came crashing down on me all at once as I stared at it. I lay there frozen for a period of time that was most likely only a second or two, but felt like time immeasurable. Minutes, hours, days, or weeks, and anything that could happen in them became meaningless to me.

I suppose it is what is meant when someone says their life flashed before their eyes. But now I knew the reason why. I had reached my limit and was looking for someplace else to go. I saw the academy where I graduated, my parents, brothers and sisters playing in the snow, as well as friends from high school, all far, far away. My girlfriend Susie and I were walking hand in hand in the park when I asked her to marry me.

And then my thoughts strayed to another time and place, many long ages ago, it seemed, yet little more than a day gone by, when I was holding my newborn son, looking at his innocent little sleeping face as his head rested on my forearm.

I was drawn back just as Chief Fitzgerald’s body began to slide on the oily tipping deck, leaving a large streak of blood behind it as it went. It only stopped when it hit and got hung up on one of the poles for the lifelines. His left hand dangled past the pole over the side of the ship and touched the water, which was then about six inches below the aft main deck, as if to point out to me and say, “Sir, it’s time to go.” Then necessity drew my attention back to the increasing urgency of my situation. I had to get out of there, now.

I drew myself back to my feet and calmly took one last look around at my ship. I looked at her turrets, her anti-aircraft guns, then the gunnery towers and masts, which were looming sharply over me. I stood on the deck, which was tipped over at an angle too far to even guess. It was impossible to even think of climbing back up to the starboard side, which several other crewmen were still attempting. At that point I knew there was nothing else I could do except say goodbye to the Okie.

I climbed down the port side aft to where the ship really began to narrow. I could tell no torpedoes had struck here because the teak wood on the deck, which now had water climbing over the edge of it, was still intact. I stepped into the water, over the lifeline and then off of the ship into Pearl Harbor.

The Oklahoma was going to roll, and nothing on earth was going to change that. But I still had to get out of the way, so I began swimming as fast as I could to get clear of the ship and the crane, which was now towering above me.

I swam for my life, all the while thinking of nothing but wanting to see my wife and children again and holding them in my arms.

I’d guess about a minute and a half later, two more Kates dove down from across the harbor and began to make their run. They dropped their payload very low, very close to the water, then began to pull back to avoid colliding with the ship they were attacking. I wondered if I was far enough away to avoid being killed by the pressure of the blasts and began to swim even faster.

Fortunately the torpedoes were heading toward the forward part of the ship, but there was still a good chance this was going to hurt. The ship was rolled over far enough that the torpedoes were going to hit well above the normal waterline as well as any of the ship’s torpedo armor or blisters.

Boom! Boom! The eighth and ninth torpedoes struck the ship only seconds apart. Fortunately, by then, I was a safe distance from the ship.

“Damn, that’s going to be a bad one,” I said to myself, thinking about how the flooding water would be pouring into the ship from high above the lower decks. In my mind, any chance the Okie had of remaining upright ended at that point.

There were several Zeros running the length of Battleship Row with their guns blazing strafing anything that moved in or out of the water. “Animals,” I thought. “What kind of cowards shoot at defenseless people in the water?”

Remembering from the sting of the salt water that I was wounded, I decided I needed some sort of flotation device. There had not been any time before leaving the ship. And I had actually hoped to be on the starboard side so I could climb over as she rolled, so the thought came too late anyway.

Not knowing how long I was going to be in the water, and remembering my survival training, I quickly removed my shoes and tied them to a belt loop. Then I removed my pants and tied the ankles into individual knots. I held them leg-up and waist-down in the water, splashing until the wet legs filled with air and slipped them under my arms. These would hold me for about twenty minutes at a time, if I remembered the survival instructor correctly.

I could both hear, and physically feel in the water around me, the vibrations of the last painful screams of the Oklahoma, when the pressure on the structure of the ship increased as she flooded. The mangled plates of the hull, loosened by the torpedoes, were scraping and bending against each other. Groans from the dying ship filled both the air and the water.

I could actually feel the damaged port side being crushed on the bottom of the harbor as the weight of the ship rolled over on it. And with the weight of the masts, superstructure, and guns, along with the water now flooding in through the open hatches and torpedo holes on the port side, her center of balance far past the point of no return, she began to roll on the harbor floor toward me.

As she rolled further, I could see past the masts and superstructure to see a large gathering of the crew on the starboard side climbing over onto the ship’s bottom and walking around the ship as if it were some sort of large log rolling in the water.

The forward and aft masts with their gunnery-spotting platforms struck the water with significant force. The aft one struck so close and with enough force to throw a wave of oily water over me, filling my nose and mouth. Almost instantly, I began to feel sick. Coughing and sputtering as I resurfaced, I struggled to regain my breath, the cut and bump on my head really beginning to pound. I could hear the masts and superstructure of the ship pushing into the harbor floor and breaking off as twenty-seven thousand tons of hull rolled over onto them. As the ship rolled, the starboard propeller came up out of the water, exposed to the air for the first time ever out of dry dock.

It was then an actual shock of tremendous force ripped through the harbor, like nothing I had ever felt before, and nothing I could imagine. For maybe only a couple of hundredths of a second, my body was compressed, as if in some large pressure chamber, and the air was knocked out of my lungs, causing me to swallow some more oily water. Then, just like that, it subsided again. I felt the heat burning on my face as a huge ball of fire rose above one of the ships at the other end of Battleship Row. It towered huge, orange and black, hundreds of feet above the struggling American ships. Carrying along with it large and small chunks of steel and debris, along with the human body parts of the crew of the USS Arizona, which rained down all over Pearl Harbor and Ford Island.

That’s the first time during the attack I actually thought about any ship other than my own. I looked down Battleship Row. The West Virginia was on fire and listing but not very dangerously. It looked like it was going to settle upright on the bottom. Apparently, they had achieved what I had hoped for on the Oklahoma.

The Maryland and Tennessee were protected from torpedo attack by the Oklahoma and West Virginia, but I could tell through the smoke that they were on fire as well.

I could only barely make out the Arizona’s masts through the dense black smoke and fire which was being blown off of her by the westerly wind. Her forward mast was lying over at about forty-five degrees. Obviously, there was no longer any structure left underneath to support it.

At that time, I didn’t know much about the total damage done to the other ships or what their futures held. But one thing I could tell from right there in the water: in a war that was little more than ten minutes old, for the battleship Oklahoma, BB-37 and hundreds of her crew, the war was already over.

Pearl Harbor: Part Two

Fortunately, rescue from the oily waters of Pearl Harbor came quickly for me. The harbor began to fill with small boats even before the end of the first wave of the attack. I was trying to make my way back through the oily water to the hull of the overturned Oklahoma when one of them picked me up out of the water.

Not that I wanted to go back on the Okie. I just kind of thought at this point that anything to stand on would be better than nothing, and that was the shortest way to get out of the water from where I was. Swimming defenseless and injured in oily salt water was not something I wanted to do any longer than I had to.

The worst problem for me at the time was the total lack of cover in the water. The Japs were still attacking. Zeros were making strafing runs up and down Battleship Row, shooting through the smoke and fire at anything that moved. They were even making deliberate strafing runs at the larger groups of people in the water.

This really didn’t surprise me much at the time because I had seen numbers of reports on how the Japanese conducted their war in China. Rape and torture were common practice right out in the streets, frequently with the victim’s family right there, forced to watch.

They would make games of beheading people who just happened to be there at the time. I’d even seen pictures of them with prisoners tied to poles, using them for bayonet practice.

I kind of expected them to do what they were doing. They were an empire in the glee of an apparently unstoppable campaign to mercilessly control a large portion of the world. The consequences of defeat, or even the slightest thought of the possibility of defeat, had not entered their minds in the least, and they were behaving more as animals than men because of it. So they shot at us in the water wherever they could find the most of us. It worked out relatively well for me because I just happened to be mostly alone.

Bombs were falling and exploding faster than I could count.

I knew I wasn’t bleeding badly enough to be in immediate danger, but still, I thought some stitches and pressure were in order. The cut on my head as well as my side had bled considerably, and I was beginning to feel cold and faint. The oil and water I had inadvertently swallowed were making me quite sick, and I vomited up the eggs, bacon, and coffee that were served to me by an ensign who may not even be alive anymore.

The pain of the cut on my side, agitated by the salt water and vomiting, was rapidly becoming unbearable.

As I was pulled from the water, I looked at the overturned hull of my ship and wondered how many of the crew, some of them close friends of mine, were still trapped inside. I couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like for them. Being trapped in an overturned ship, in the dark, and wondering if rescue would ever come, or if escape was even possible, was something I was glad I was able to avoid.

It was that line of thinking that started me down the path of, “I’m going to kill every Jap I get the chance to, without exception.”

Once inside the boat, struggling against the almost continuous urge to vomit, I untied the ankles of my trousers and put them and my shoes back on. Then I turned my attention to the cut on my side. As expected, it was mostly a superficial cut, but it still needed some attention. I removed the belt from my pants and my T-shirt and used them as a makeshift compress for the cut on my side.

I asked one of the crewmen in the boat to look at the cut on my forehead. He said it was about two inches long and right to the bone. I used my pocket knife, which fortunately had not fallen out of my pocket, to cut a slice off of my khaki shirt and tied it tightly around my head to hold back the bleeding. The oily salt water sure did hurt directly against my wounds, but hopefully my temporary first aid would keep me from losing much more blood.

The boat that picked me up was almost full at that point. A few of us in it were injured, none severely, so we started to make our way around the bow of the Oklahoma and Maryland to put down on Ford Island. We pulled two more sailors out of the water on the way but passed several who were obviously dead. We left them, preferring to rescue anybody who was still living.

The harbor water was already littered with debris of every sort, including human body parts, the memory of which still haunts me to this day. My desire to pay back the Japanese for the death and destruction was growing at such an incredible rate that I could feel the emotion, the sheer anger, pounding in my chest. Yet I felt totally helpless, like a victim, with absolutely no way to return fire of any kind.

A large number of the Oklahoma crew were on the overturned hull as we passed but not anywhere near all of them. I guessed most went off of the starboard side to the Maryland or into the water on the starboard side of the ship. Some were certainly dead or still trapped inside of the ship. My anger could no longer be contained, so with nothing else I could do, I just kept saying out loud over and over again, “Goddamned Japs. I’m going to kill them all when I get the chance.” And that became my purpose, which I used to fuel my grim determination to survive the attack.

Just as we rounded the bow of the Okie a Zero swooped low over Battleship Row, strafing everything in its path—especially the sailors who were in the water. The pilot was aiming directly at us, but the strafing stopped just short of the boat. “Goddamn bastards!” I thought, “Shooting at defenseless people.”

We weren’t nearly as defenseless as the pilot would have hoped because the Maryland gunners were returning fire long before the Jap’s fire even came close to reaching us. That Jap plane burst into flames and flew almost straight over my head as I watched and shouted with glee, “Go straight to hell you yellow, slant-eyed son-of-a-bitch!” It trailed smoke and fire; barely hanging onto the air, it flew across Pearl Harbor toward Hospital Point beyond my view and crashed. A black cloud of smoke rose from behind the ships and buildings that obscured my view of the hospital.

“My God, Susan and James are at the hospital, and that plane might have just crashed into it!” I thought as fear began to rise in me like never before. “Not my wife and son!” The thought of ordering the driver of the boat over to hospital briefly crossed my mind, but my sense of duty intervened. The dispensary on Ford Island was closer and I couldn’t tie up this boat for personal reasons when so many others were in need of its help. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that Susan and James were most likely okay and would have to wait, and I would just have to hope. I’ll try to get a message over to them as soon as I can.

Susan, in addition to being a patient in the maternity ward at the time, was also a nurse at the hospital. If I knew my wife, she would be doing everything she could, not only to take care of herself and James, but to take care of every other patient she could, in spite of the fact that she had delivered a baby just several days earlier. “They’re alright,” I told myself as I tried to push them to the back of my mind.

The small boat rounded the bow of the Maryland and the smell of burning oil was heavy in the air. The wind was blowing the smoke off to the west, which meant we would have to pass through it to get to the dispensary once we got on the island.

Looking around, I saw smoke and fire everywhere, but still I couldn’t take my eyes off of the direction of the hospital. And the Japs were still coming. One dive bomber planted a bomb right on the destroyer in the floating dry dock near Hospital Point. And then another, and another. Several others dropped bombs on the Pennsylvania and other ships in dry dock with her.

The boat I was on landed, and I proceeded to try to help unload the injured, almost forgetting I was one of them. There was a chief on the beach with a small truck, which was no doubt intended for use as a makeshift ambulance. I helped him load the injured and told him to go ahead and take them to the dispensary. As I turned to look back across the harbor toward the hospital, I felt a tug on my arm as the chief said, “With all due respect sir, don’t you think you should come with us?”

I noticed the side mirror of the truck was pointing in my direction and was shocked at the reflection that I saw. I was almost unrecognizable, even to myself. That was when I got the first look at my whole self since the attack began. I was covered with blood, some of it my own, and oil. It wasn’t twenty minutes before that I was eating breakfast in the wardroom with my fellow officers in a clean-pressed uniform, laughing and talking about Babe Ruth. Things had become so suddenly and drastically different that it seemed ages ago.

From that reflection, I don’t know how he even knew I was an officer, but somehow I sensed, lieutenant commander or not, respect or not, this chief wasn’t going to take no for an answer. And he was probably right anyhow, so I got onto the truck.

We were among the earliest wounded to arrive at the dispensary, so we got treated pretty quickly. The medical crew was obviously preparing for an influx of injured patients as we arrived. I got my wounds cleaned and stitched in no time. The doctor wanted to put a unit of blood in me and give me something for pain. I asked him if I would live without them. He said yes, so I declined, telling him to save them for somebody who needed them more. He ordered me to stay off my feet as much as possible and not to leave the dispensary grounds until I was released because I was low on blood and could potentially pass out.

A little bit later, I was on the ground floor of the dispensary near the center courtyard. A nurse was yelling at me to “stop trying to help move other injured patients because I would rip out the stitches in my side, and they weren’t going to bother sewing me up again,” when I heard more level bombers flying overhead. These were close. I looked out the window up at the sky and saw a plane release a bomb.

For the second time in the same day, time changed for me. In almost slow motion, the bomb glided down from the plane that released it, straight toward us in the dispensary. Without thinking, I quickly grabbed the nurse and shoved her to the floor and away from the window while shouting “Everybody down! Incoming!”

There was a dull thud and the sound of small debris pelting the window as the bomb hit the ground just outside. “This is it,” I thought. “I’m going to die.”

Most bombs for naval applications have a trigger device that keeps them from going off on impact so they penetrate to the inside of their target and blow them apart from within. They do more damage that way. “It’s a timed device,” I thought, “Any second now.”

I looked at the face of the nurse lying on the floor next to me. She was very pretty, maybe five to ten years younger than me, light brown shoulder-length hair and obviously scared to death. As the seconds ticked by, I watched the expression on her face change from fear to wonderment, as I’m sure mine did, when we gradually realized we were still alive, and likely to remain that way for at least awhile.

Slowly we got up and went over to the window and looked out. In the courtyard, embedded right there in the pavement, little more than ten feet from the window was a bomb. It was a dud.

I looked at the nurse, and she looked back at me. Before I knew what was happening she grabbed me and gave me a hug and said to me with a smile as she released me, “Okay sailor, I’ll fix your stitches this time, but never again.” I looked down at my side and saw blood seeping through the bandages. Sure enough, some of them had come undone.

As she put more stitches in my side, I overheard somebody say “Hey, one of the battleships is underway and making a run for it!” Even being low on blood with stitches in my head and side, I still had to go out to see the ship that was attempting to escape. As soon as the nurse finished putting the bandages back on, I got up and began making my way to the exit.

Stepping over and around the injured that were rapidly beginning to pile up everywhere, I went out onto the lawn of the dispensary. “They probably could use a little extra space in here anyway,” I thought as I stepped around the wounded and dodged racing medical personnel. I couldn’t help but think how lucky I was, relatively speaking, of course. There were a lot of burns, very bad ones. The skin would just peel right off of them as the doctors and nurses tried to pick them up and move them. The sound of moaning and screaming filled the air, right along with the smell of burnt flesh and acrid smoke from the fires which surrounded Ford Island.

Most of the injured were covered in fuel oil in addition to the injuries they had sustained. I recognized some of them as being from the crew of my own ship, but instead of trying to talk to them, I decided maybe it was best to stay out of the way.

Still feeling the pain in my head and in my side, I was nonetheless glad to have turned down the doctor’s painkillers and blood transfusions. These men needed them more than I did, and I knew I had made the right choice. Although I was weak, at least I could still walk.

And walk I did, right out the door of the dispensary and onto the lawn to look for the battleship that was underway.

From where I was, I could only catch brief glimpses of the escaping battleship through the smoke of the burning California. I couldn’t tell at first which one it was, but then she came out from behind the smoke of Battleship Row. All anti-aircraft guns were skyward and blazing as Jap plane after Jap plane dove on her, strafing and dropping bombs. It was the Okie’s sister, Nevada, making her run to get free of the hell Pearl Harbor had become. And by the looks of it, she was as determined to make it as the Japs were determined to stop her.

As I stood there, riveted and watching, I realized more guns were shooting back at the planes diving on Nevada than just hers. Every gun in range was firing up at the Japs to defend the Nevada with all of the aggressiveness they could muster. People who could not find guns to shoot back at the Japs were cheering her on as they could between tending the wounded, fighting fires, and running for cover because of the attacking planes. It was as if the whole of Ford Island and Pearl Harbor itself was cheering her on. Everybody wanted that ship to make it.

One of the ships firing her anti-aircraft guns in support of the Nevada was the California. She was paying dearly for it as well. I watched as several bombs dropped from altitude rained down around her, scoring a number of hits. Fires had broken out all over her, and she was sitting low in the water and listing. I remembered she was the other ship that was due for inspection that day and knew the basic material condition X-Ray was not set as the attack began. Keeping her afloat with fires above and flooding below would be difficult at best.

Nevada was smoking badly and down by the bow. The Japs concentrated their attack on her. Then a bomb struck her forward again; then another, and another. And still, she fought on, even as she sank lower into the water. Sadly, she wasn’t going to make it, and it was becoming more obvious to me that if she sank in the channel, she would block up the harbor for months. Even as I was thinking this, she began a turn, and before reaching the south channel, headed for the beach. She was going to ground herself off of Hospital Point. The Japanese had won again as the Nevada had finally succumbed to her wounds and sank into the muddy water.

“Goddamned Japs, I’m going to kill all of them if I get a chance,” I said to myself over and over again, as I sat and watched the battle rage on, frustrated that there was no way for me to participate.

Once again, I was reminded of my wife and son as the Nevada beached herself near where they were. I hoped they were alright as I sat peering through the smoke rising from the beached battleship and tried to find out if the hospital was still even there.

Looking at the heavy smoke that was pouring from the California, I began to get interested in her struggle. I watched as the spot plane was pushed off into the water, obviously to reduce the chance of a gasoline fire on the aft deck.

After a period of time watching the crew of California struggle to keep their ship afloat, I noticed the attack begin to lighten up. Then, all of a sudden, the Japs just disappeared from the sky, almost as quickly as they came, leaving behind them the terrible destruction, along with the unmistakable stench of warfare.

I don’t know what time it was; my watch was full of water from Pearl Harbor and stopped, evidently I left the capsizing Oklahoma at about five after eight.

“Jake, is that you?” I heard a familiar voice behind me as I sat on the small piece of dispensary lawn watching the burning oil from the Okie, West Virginia, and Arizona advancing on California. I turned to see Lieutenant Lewis, black from head to toe with oil and his arm in a sling. “Chuck!” I responded “Glad to see you! You’re looking as well as anybody else here. Are you alright?”

His face was grim at first but brightened when he realized it really was me. It seemed like ages since I’d seen him, and our condition really added to the effect.

“I’ll be alright,” he said. “As the ship rolled over, I was trying to get over the starboard side and slipped and broke my arm. What about you?”

“I hit my head on something in the dark when the fifth torpedo hit the ship and then got hit by a bullet fragment or splinter or something topside. It’s just a nick though, but both needed stitches.”

Then I asked him the hard question, which I’m sure was on both of our minds. “Who made it off of the ship?”

“Well,” he said with a very long pause “Commander Kenworthy and Lieutenant Commander Hobby did, I think, because I met them on deck as they were discussing whether to abandon or not.”

“XO and damage control,” I said. “That’s good. So they did decide to abandon, huh?” I didn’t tell Lewis I had independently decided to abandon ship, but I was relieved to know my own decision was the correct one.

“Yes, sir, they did,” he replied. “They ordered abandonment to starboard by word of mouth, so I ran down the starboard side to my turret to order the crew out. As I looked in, crewmen were already struggling to get out. The ship was rolling pretty hard by then. A flashlight was shining up toward the hatch from down below. Ensign Flaherty was down there using the light to guide the other crew members out.”

“Good, so Flaherty and most of the crew from number three made it,” I said.

“No, sir.” Lewis said. “Flaherty was on the lower deck of the mezzanine. As fast as the ship was rolling at that point, I don’t see any way he could have made it. Some of the other crew who did make it out told me that he just stayed there, holding the flashlight on the exit as the compartment flooded, and guided as many other people as he could out of the turret. There is no chance he made it.”

“Joe Fitzgerald didn’t make it either,” I told him, noting the sudden expression of shock on his face.

“Chief Fitzgerald?”

“Yes.”

“He passed by me on the way out of the turret when I shouted in to tell them to abandon ship,” he said. “What happened?”

Then I told Lewis my part of the story where I had come across Joe and tried to help him get over the side. I decided not to give him the specifics of what happened when he got hit by the twenty-millimeter round. I just told him that he had been shot and died. It was true enough.

After I finished telling my story, we sat silent for a while, watching the California in her struggle to stay afloat (which she eventually lost). She was beginning to be engulfed in burning fuel oil from the other ships when I noticed the crew going over the side in boats wherever they could. At least she was on an even keel. Evidently, they decided to abandon. They had time, whereas we didn’t.

The injured and dead were beginning to really pile up around the dispensary by then, and the helplessness of not being able to do anything about it was really beginning to wear on us. The smell of burning oil and burnt flesh was everywhere, and nothing could be done to escape from it.

Suddenly, across the harbor, the destroyer that was burning in the floating dry dock exploded. The fireball was huge and kind of reminded me of the Arizona explosion earlier. It literally rocked the island again. My attention was once more drawn to Hospital Point, where I last knew my family to be.

“My wife and son are over there,” I said to the Lieutenant as I watched the flaming debris from the ship rain down over Hospital Point.

“I know that, sir.”

“Chuck,” I said after a brief pause “from here to the ends of Hell itself, I swear I am going to kill as many of those slant-eyed bastards as I can.” And with that, the purpose I used to survive the attack grew into the purpose I used to fight a war.

The Day of Infamy

I still remember the first time I heard the “Day of Infamy” speech the president gave to Congress, asking for war. It was almost required listening at the time for anybody not on an immediate life-saving rescue operation. Since I was still on light duty from my injuries sustained the day before, it was easy enough to be near a radio when it happened. News was the big occupier of time for those of us in good enough condition to listen to it, and the medics were willing to provide us with a radio to keep us “less wounded” busy and out of their hair. We were starving for information about what was going on and would stop at nothing to get it.

By then, the big flood of casualties had tapered off quite a bit, but the medical personnel were still going strong on the ones who were there. There was plenty enough misery, pain, and death to go around. The dead were piled up and covered with blankets outside to make room inside for the living who still needed treatment. The sound of patients moaning or occasionally screaming in pain was all around us, which had an emotional, amplifying effect on those of us who were listening to the speech. It’s one thing to listen to that speech in a nice quiet place like home, fifty or sixty years after the fact, but another thing entirely when you are surrounded by the products of the war the president was speaking of.

The room was full of people I didn’t know, as well as some of the other officers and crew of the Oklahoma. But we were all bound by the same experience and the same purpose. We were all in it together and knew it, which gave us a unity in spite of the fact we didn’t personally know each other.

Everybody had a good idea of what was going to happen when the president began to speak. Nobody in the room made a sound. We were as one, bound to the radio, silent and waiting for the words we knew were coming to finally arrive.

Most people these days remember the “A date which will live in infamy” line but know very little else of what he said. Thus, history has decided to title it “The Day of Infamy” speech.

Not that he said a lot in addition to that; he didn’t need to. This was plain. The whole thing was little more than six minutes long. But man, I tell you, he hit this one right out of the park in a way the Babe never could.

The parts which really stood out to us the most were toward the end. “I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the People when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” There was a loud round of applause from Congress, but we remained silent.

“No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Applause again from Congress, and we still remained silent.

“With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.” Applause once more from Congress, and some of us began to nod in approval. I began to feel myself smile a little bit in spite of it all.

“I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

The applause again echoed through the halls of Congress, but the dispensary at Ford Island was still fairly silent except for the moans from the wounded. We all exchanged looks at each other, each man singularly weighing the ramifications of what the Commander in Chief had just said and coming to the same conclusions. All of us were in bandages or casts, some of us still in tattered uniforms covered in oil. And we remained silent for almost a minute until one of us broke the silence and said softly, “That’s it, boys; we’re at war.” We all knew what it meant. The days of practice and drilling were over; the days of ass-kicking had begun. The president of the United States had just given us the license to kill.

And kill we did.

The Enterprise and its escorts were in Pearl Harbor the day after the attack. The admiral in charge of the task force, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who later became somewhat famous, saw the destruction and said, “Before we’re done with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell.” And once that quote started to get around, people began to come out of their shocked stupor to rally to the cause. And just as if to set an example, his ships were resupplied, refueled, and back out to sea in pursuit of the Japanese fleet within eight hours.

It took me quite awhile after the attack to get a message to Susan to let her know I was alright. It’s a funny thing because the whole time she was wondering if I was okay, I was wondering the same about her. We were not very unique in that. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of families across the country were wondering the same thing about their family members. The communication lines over the islands were very chaotic and confused. I tried to force myself to believe she would be okay because the hospital didn’t seem to be a target to the Japanese. On the other hand, there was that Jap airplane crash, not to mention stray bullets, bombs, and our own anti-aircraft shells raining down everywhere. You just couldn’t be sure because nobody was completely safe, whether they were a target or not.

She was greatly relieved to hear I had survived with only slight injuries, but didn’t bother to mention that she had got some stitches in her left forearm herself. One of the explosions sent a piece of shrapnel through the window she was near while she was helping one of the many burn victims, and the glass cut her arm.

I can’t imagine what it was like for her during that time. I mean, I could see the hospital was intact and relatively undamaged, but from the hospital, she could look across the harbor and see the overturned hull of the Oklahoma surrounded by burning fuel oil. I could well afford to speculate that she was alright, but there was no possible way she could do the same about me.

It turned out she was doing just what I thought she would be doing, helping other patients who came in during and after the attack. I knew she just couldn’t stay down.

One of the more difficult decisions I had to make was what to do with my wife and kids after the attack. Seeing that we were at war and Pearl Harbor had already been attacked once, we decided it would be best if she went stateside with the kids to stay with her parents on their farm in Ohio. And so a month later, they were gone.

We missed each other terribly over the next four years, but that is just one of the parts of being at war. A lot of people stayed in Hawaii—far more than I expected. Different situations I suppose, and a lot of people were spoiling for another showdown with the Japs. But for me, I fully expected, accurately as it turned out, that I would be spending almost all of it at sea anyway and couldn’t see the need to keep them in a place that might be attacked again.

A lot of the displaced officers and crews of the ships that were sunk during the attack suddenly found themselves working cleanup and salvage operations until they got reassigned. It was dirty, hard, and disgusting work. There was plenty of evidence of the struggle of some of the people who didn’t survive the attack.

Ships that were refloated for salvage operations had plenty of dead bodies on board which had to be removed and buried. Oil covered everything. The ships were full of tons and tons of rotten stores that stank to high heaven and had to be disposed of. Dead bodies and parts of bodies kept turning up around the harbor for months. The smell was everywhere and unbelievably foul. Wreckage accumulated in piles around the harbor from ships that had to be salvaged in a hurry. Tons of it had been cut from the tops of ships to help lighten them for refloating. The Arizona, Utah, and Okie were not going anywhere anytime soon, if at all.

If there was any doubt of the determination of the workers and survivors to continue in spite of it all, it died during that time. Sure, there was shock, plenty of it to be sure. Spirits were at an all-time low in some ways. How could this have happened to the great and mighty United States Pacific Fleet? But in spite of it all, everything that could be done was being done at an unbelievable pace.

By February of ’42, the Nevada had been refloated. The Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Maryland were all stateside, being rebuilt. By March, the California was refloated and soon rebuilt. And by May, the West Virginia was refloated and being rebuilt. Most of the destroyers and cruisers damaged or destroyed in the attack had long been gone and getting overhauled as well. And none of them were being rebuilt to peace-time treaty specifications. I had the feeling the Japs would someday regret not sinking those ships while they were at sea where we wouldn’t have been able to salvage them, because they were being rearmed to the teeth.

The only holdouts were the Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah, which remained right where they sank. The Utah and Oklahoma were still upside down, and the whole ship forward of the number two turret on the Arizona was, for all intents and purposes, no longer part of the ship.

The Utah was too old to worry about salvaging, but it had rolled out into the navigation lane and had to be moved. The Arizona was too damaged to worry about. And it didn’t look good that the Okie would be salvaged and returned to operation.

My thoughts any time I saw her as I worked around the harbor always turned to the four hundred plus members of the crew who were still inside her overturned hull, Ensign Flaherty being among them.

I knew a lot of them. The turrets were not easy to get out of in a hurry during an emergency, so a large portion of the crew who didn’t survive were those who worked on the lower decks of the turrets in the powder magazines. As a result, most of the Oklahoma’s dead were under my command. And every time I saw the overturned hull of the Oklahoma, the anger I already felt just became that much more solid in me.

There was evidence that some of the crew trapped in the West Virginia had survived for as many as seventeen days after the attack. I thought of my own crew trapped, starving, and suffocating in the dark, wondering if anybody knew they were alive in there, wondering if they would be rescued, not knowing that any attempt to cut into the overturned hull would kill them anyway. Oil was inside and outside everywhere. Any cutting torch would have reignited the fires which took us days to put out.

There was nothing that could be done except to nurse our hatred for the Japanese and do everything we could do to hasten the day we would be able to pay them back. All you could really do was to stay busy and try not to think of the trapped and dying men you could not help.

The next few months flew by so fast for me that they seemed a blur. There was so much work to be done that even the most extreme effort seemed to yield only the smallest gain over the damage until you looked back on what you had done when you finished.

Then in April, the incredible happened. An aircraft carrier, the Hornet, left port with a most unusual cargo. B-25 bombers lined the flight deck. It was thought that they were just being moved to some forward island base or something, but that turned out not to be the case. It was the first strike back against the Japanese homeland. Doolittle’s Raid caused a celebration on the islands, which provided a fundamental change in attitude. All of a sudden, we knew we could hit them back.

For as low as our spirits were, we began to feel the absolute certainty that the Japs would pay for what they did, and our hatred for them began to propel us forward in ways that nobody would have thought possible a few months earlier.

Interview with Fort

It took weeks for the excitement of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo to die down, but the attitude change we had experienced never shifted back. There was hope growing amidst the destruction now, and it could not be contained. Every sign of progress in the harbor began to stick to the hope that we would pay back the Japs in spades for what they did to us.

Then in July of ’42 something else happened that history doesn’t account for very well, at least not nearly as well as the raid over Tokyo. But nonetheless, it had a huge impact on the islands, not to mention my own personal life and career. There had been a great number of ships coming and going in the proceeding several months, some of them were beat up pretty bad. All of them were older ships that were the result of treaty limitations in the decades prior to the war: obsolete, under-powered, and under-armed. And while a lot of noticeable progress had been made in the cleanup, there was still a lot of destruction in the harbor.

I was working down at the hull of the overturned Utah with Commander Kenworthy, the Oklahoma’s XO, when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey Jake, take a look at this.” A huge tower foremast like none we had ever seen appeared in the channel. Slowly, it circled Ford Island as we watched it. I still remember seeing it as the bow appeared around the buildings and other ships that blocked it from full view. Then gradually I saw the whole ship as it rounded the corner.

It had a gracefully swept deck, a heavily armored tower, and guns, guns, and more guns! Six sixteen-inch guns forward, followed by twenty five-inch guns mounted on ten double turrets, followed again by three more sixteen-inch guns. And every available other place on the deck was covered with one point one’s and fifty-caliber automatic weapons. She was huge compared to any other ship I’d ever seen except, of course, the carriers. And she was shiny and brand new, a stark contrast to the old oil- and rust-covered hodge podge patchwork of ships that were in the harbor at the time.

People these days talk about the Iowa class battleships in World War II, and understandably so, but the significant thing about this event is that they didn’t exist yet. There were no such things as nuclear submarines and super-carriers with jets or atom bombs or missiles or anything like that. So what you have to understand is what we were looking at in the Battleship North Carolina was, at the time, considered to be the most powerful weapon on Earth. And she was ours. She was quite a contrast there, amidst the destruction of Pearl Harbor,

She was Pearl Harbor’s beacon of hope, shining the light at the end of the tunnel just as the Tokyo Raid was a beacon of hope for the United States. She represented, more than ever, hope that we would come out of this war victorious.

I couldn’t help but notice a large number of personnel were gathering around the edge of Ford Island as well as on the mainland to get a view of this new behemoth battleship as she passed by. A surge of emotion swelled up among us in the harbor that was so strong people actually began to cheer and didn’t go back to work until she was parked at Pier 12.

I couldn’t help saying to Commander Kenworthy “Wouldn’t you just love to serve on a ship like that?”

The commander turned and looked at me and said, “It would be a lot better than fighting against her!” I couldn’t help but notice that he seemed a little more excited, like he knew something I didn’t. And in a few days, I found out why.

I was still working the area down by the hull of the overturned Utah. We were preparing the area for the eventual salvation of the ship, or at least an effort to roll it out of the way. It was very dirty work. Now there were some officers who didn’t like to get their hands in the dirt and oil, but I wasn’t one of them. It seemed to help the crew that was assigned to me to know the officer in charge didn’t mind getting some dirt under his nails. I was almost startled to hear the familiar voice of Commander Kenworthy close behind me. “Good Lieutenant Commander Williams, you are still in a clean uniform,” the XO said. Fortunately, it was still early.

“Come with me,” he said. “We have an important meeting.” I couldn’t help feeling there was something unusual about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it other than to say he seemed very formal and very serious, even for a military officer.

We got in the staff car that he had arrived in and drove around to the other side of the island. We stopped at a small building that is usually used as a meeting place and temporary office for higher-ranking officers of task forces and ships when they are in port. Whoever we were going to see was sure to be at least a captain and probably an admiral.

My curiosity then getting the best of me, I couldn’t resist asking him, “What’s going on, sir?”

“I’ve been ordered not to tell you, Jake. All I can say to you about it is to just be yourself, the officer I know you to be, and everything will work out. Don’t ask me anymore, and that is an order.”

Having asked and heard his answer, I began to wish I hadn’t. This sounded like I had to prepare myself to be on the defensive, like I was being investigated for something.

We went inside the building, down the hall, and into an office on the left. A lieutenant junior grade was sitting at the small desk and asked Commander Kenworthy if he could help us.

The XO replied “Yes, I am Commander Kenworthy, and this is Lieutenant Commander Williams. I was here earlier, and the admiral and captain wanted to see him as soon as possible.”

The lieutenant got up from the desk, went over to the other door in the room, and opened it. He stuck his head inside, and I heard him tell someone that we had arrived. “Send them in,” said a voice from the other side of the door.

We entered the small room, which had a table with a few chairs around it. Only one of them was occupied by a captain. There were papers and a briefcase spread out on the table. To the left side of the room, there was a large window that was open just enough to let the morning breeze in. Outside the window was the battleship North Carolina. On the right side of the room was a small couch and an end table with a lamp on it. The couch was occupied by an older vice admiral wearing a cap with an unusually long bill. He was sitting with his legs crossed, leaning with his right arm on the end table. Both of them looked at me when we entered. I followed the XO’s lead and remained at attention in front of the captain at the table with my hat under my left arm.

“Commander,” the captain said to the XO, “this is Williams?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lieutenant Commander Williams, I was reading your Executive Officer’s reports of the attack on December 7th of 1941, on the battleship Oklahoma and, to tell the truth, I’m quite alarmed,” he said as he fixed his gaze on me.

“Sir?” I replied not knowing what else to say.

“I want to know what made you think, that as an assistant gunnery officer, a mere lieutenant commander, you had the authority to order an abandon ship?”

The captain and admiral, unflinching, were both looking at me. Commander Kenworthy had for all intents and purposes become a statue.

“Sir, I don’t understand. What’s—?”

“I’ll ask the questions here, Lieutenant Commander Williams,” the captain said, interrupting me. “It says here you went around passing by word of mouth the order to abandon ship. Why?”

“I believed Oklahoma was going to capsize, sir, so—”

“How did you know that?” the captain asked cutting me off again.

“At the time I arrived topside, she had already been struck by five torpedoes on the port side and was listing over fifteen to twenty deg—”

“It says here you had no communication with Captain Bode, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why not?”

“He was not aboard at the time of the attack, sir.”

“How about Commander Kenworthy here, did you have any communication with him?”

“No, sir.”

“How about damage control? Did you talk to Lieutenant Commander Hobby?”

“No, sir.”

“A fifteen to twenty degree list could be corrected under combat conditions assuming the crew stays on board to fight the flooding; are you aware of that, Lieutenant Commander Williams?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, thinking in horror to myself, “My God, they can’t be setting up to blame me for the loss of the Oklahoma, could they?”

In the chaos that followed the attack, several of the higher-ranking officers in charge found themselves in a lot of trouble for not being prepared. So in my mind at the time, it was entirely possible that I might wrongly become one of them.

“I see,” the Captain said. “Then why on God’s green Earth would you think it was appropriate to abandon ship, let alone think you had the authority to do it?”

“We were not under normal combat conditions, sir,” I answered, believing that I was beginning to get a fix on what this was really about and setting myself up for a defense.

“In what way?”

“The bilges were all open, sir, in addition to condition X-Ray being relaxed for Admiral Kimmel’s inspection t—”

“Damn it, Commander!” the Captain said, obviously losing his patience a little bit. “You just told me you had not communicated to Lieutenant Commander Hobby prior to your decision to abandon ship. Now, how would you know about the material condition of the bilges, let alone the rest of the ship?”

“I make it a point to always know the condition of the—”

“I’m not here to listen to you brag, Williams; I’m here to find out why you gave an unauthorized order to abandon Oklahoma.”

Any ideas I had about what this line of questioning had to do with disappeared by this point. And my own patience was wearing thin. I was becoming convinced that this man was on a crusade of some sort, but to what end, I had no idea.

“Captain, if I may explain, the only chance the Oklahoma had of surviving was if she settled on the harbor bottom before rolling over. Either way, the safest—”

“So you just saw the Oklahoma listing and decided it was time to leave?”

“Sir, the priority at the time was to save as much of the crew as—”

“Who the hell are you to be setting priorities for a ship that you are not in command of?”

About then, I had had enough of the way this was going, and with all caution abandoned and no place else to go, I decided it was time to “turn into the wind” and confront this captain. I was tired of being cut off in my answers, and I was either going to have my say or be court-martialed in the attempt, but I wouldn’t tolerate the possibility that the Oklahoma’s loss was going to be blamed on me.

“With all due respect, sir, if you are not going to listen to my full answer, why are you even bothering to ask me the questions?”

The admiral’s eyebrows rose at this question and Commander Kenworthy stiffened even more. The captain glared at me intently, apparently unshaken by my question. And even, to my surprise, as if he expected it at some point.

“What I want to know, Lieutenant Commander,” he said unrelenting, “was it intelligent decision making or cowardice that led you to so grossly overstep your authority?”

I had been running the experience over and over in my mind for the months since the attack, looking for any detail I may have missed that would suggest I could have done any better. I had studied the damage assessments and personally talked to the dive team working on the ship. Was there any way to save the Oklahoma or more of her crew? The answer was always no. After months of investigation and soul searching, I was absolutely certain of every step of my decisions and was not going to remain passive about being questioned by this man. Above all, whether he was a captain or not, I was not going to be called a coward. I’d had enough.

“With all due respect, sir,” I said almost shouting at him, “I went down the port side of the ship, the side that was under attack, to try to get as many of the crew as I could over to the starboard side for their safety. I was strafed multiple times. I nearly got killed by two of the torpedoes. Chief Fitzgerald got blasted right out of my arms as I tried to save him.”

The captain tried to interrupt at this point but I just wouldn’t have it and continued right over top of his objections.

“I shouted into every hatch I passed along the way to pass the word that the ship needed to be abandoned and stayed with the Oklahoma until I could no longer do anything for her or the crew, let alone even walk on her slanted decks. I stayed with the ship until she almost rolled over on me as I swam away because I stayed with her for so long. It was no longer even possible to climb to the starboard side, which would have been the safest way to get off of her.”

“For all I knew, Commander Kenworthy was dead, as well as Lieutenant Commander Hobby, and there was no time to waste running around looking for them. The crew was in danger, and fast action was the only thing that was going to save any of them. If you or history judges my actions as cowardice, so be it. You can both be damned for all I care!”

The captain, unusually relaxed considering what I had just said to him, turned and looked at the vice admiral and nodded. Without any other sign, some decision seemed to have been made. Commander Kenworthy relaxed as if some magic button had been switched off.

The vice admiral got up and walked toward the door behind me. As he passed, he gave me a warm, hearty smile that looked just short of a laugh and said, “That took guts, son; congratulations.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked out, closing the door behind him.

Puzzled, I looked at Commander Kenworthy who, at this time, was wearing a big smile. Then I looked at the captain behind the table. The captain’s expression had lightened considerably as well.

“Jacob, have a seat,” he said to me, motioning toward one of the chairs.

“Sir?” I said startled by the sudden informality and casualness.

“Please sit down,” he repeated.

The XO had already reached for a chair for himself, so I grabbed one of the other ones, more mystified than ever. This was a completely unexpected turn of events.

“My name is George Fort. I’m the commanding officer of the North Carolina,” he said, gesturing toward the window. “Commander Kenworthy tells me you want a transfer.”

Understanding dawned on me like a flash. It was a setup through and through. I had just been tested!

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry to have had to put you through the questioning like that, Jacob. Commander Kenworthy gave us a full report of your actions in combat, as well as otherwise. He couldn’t have given you a higher recommendation. But Vice Admiral Halsey and I wanted to be absolutely sure of you before we took any further action. I wanted to test your resolve under pressure and see if you would hold your position.”

“I understand, sir. There is no other position to hold.”

“Very good, then.” He paused for a moment, as if thinking. “The navy believes air defense is going to have an increasing importance over the coming years. The battleships are going to be undergoing extensive modifications to add as many anti-aircraft guns as possible.”

“I’ve seen evidence to support that assessment, sir,” I replied, taking into account what had happened right where we were a number of months before, and still feeling a little bit miffed about the wringer that he had just put me through.

“The thing is,” he continued, undaunted, “I need an air defense officer, and owing to the fact that we are at war, we don’t have a lot of time to train. The admiral and I wanted to be sure we got somebody in that position who is knowledgeable and quick at making good combat decisions under pressure. We are going to be doing a lot of anti-aircraft screening for the Enterprise and Admiral Halsey’s task group in the near future and probably the same for other ships in the more distant future. Do you want the position?”

There was really only one answer to that question I could give him. This would not only be a very high-profile job that would advance my career but would give me plenty of chances to pay the Japs back in spades for what they did to the Oklahoma.

In addition to that, I was a sailor who loved the ships I served on. I wanted to feel the motion of a pitching deck beneath my feet in the open sea again. Being surrounded by the destruction at Pearl Harbor was beginning to wear on me.

“Yes, sir,” I said, without any hesitation.

“Very well, Jacob. Welcome to the crew of the battleship North Carolina. You are on a very short learning curve. I expect you to understand your part of the ship’s systems and procedures within the week. You will be my eyes and defense above the ship, and I trust you to not let me down. I expect your input on recommended modifications to your systems on my desk within a week. Keep in mind that the navy is going to be adding as many guns as possible to the ship.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Very well then, Lieutenant Commander Williams; the sky above the Showboat is yours. Is there anything you need from me?”

“One thing, sir.”

“What would that be?”

“Since the attack, I prefer to go armed at all times when I’m in a potential combat area, just in case,” I said, indicating the forty-five on my chest, “Is that going to present any problem on your ship?”

“What good would a handgun do in Sky Control?” he asked.

“Truthfully, sir, probably none. But when the Oklahoma was under attack, the Japs were flying very low to release their torpedoes. There was a point when I was sure that I could have shot one of the Japs right out of his cockpit if I would have been armed, especially if I had been at my battle station on spot one. They were close enough that I could see the whites of their eyes. And their faces continue to haunt me. It wouldn’t have saved the Okie but who knows where that plane and pilot are going to attack next? I’d like to have another chance if the situation ever presents itself.”

Captain Fort paused as if thinking.

“George,” Commander Kenworthy said, “I’ve seen Jake shoot before. He’s the champion of the Oklahoma’s shooting club, far above the rest. And would be competitive with anybody you care to put him up against. In fact, I’d be willing to bet you twenty dollars that if you threw an empty soup can in the air, he could hit it at least twice before it hit the ground. If he says he could hit a Jap from Sky Control with a handgun, I’d tend to believe him.”

“Okay, I’ll allow it,” Captain Fort answered as he wrote on a piece of paper and signed it. “Give this to the lieutenant outside, and he will inform the master at arms that I am granting you permission to remain armed. Is there anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. The lieutenant outside has your orders. And once again, welcome aboard,” he said, getting up and offering a handshake.

“Thank you, sir,” I replied, shaking his hand and getting up myself.

“That will be all,” he said, dismissing us.

The commander and I turned and exited the room to find the lieutenant, back behind his desk.

“Jake,” the commander said after I asked the lieutenant for my orders, “Admiral Halsey wanted me to give you this as my last official act as your XO,” he said, pulling an envelope out of his uniform jacket and handing it to me.

I opened it and unfolded the paper inside. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Citation: Lieutenant Commander Jacob S. Williams is hereby awarded the Navy Cross for heroism in combat. LtCdr Williams was cited for his early recognition of the battleship Oklahoma’s critical condition and quick response in his efforts to save the crew of the doomed ship. In a bold independent action, while under extreme combat conditions, even after sustaining injuries to himself, he continued to risk his own life by proceeding down the portside of the Oklahoma while it was under attack. On his own initiative, while evading strafing fire and torpedoes from the Japanese planes, he ordered the abandonment of the ship by word of mouth, thus saving many of the lives of the crew, whose battle stations were below decks, by giving them time to escape from the rapid flooding. His bravery, quick thinking and comprehensive knowledge of the ship’s systems, which were not even under his command, led him to take the decisive action that saved, at the very least, dozens of his crew’s lives. His courage, knowledge, and leadership while under fire, far exceed the normal expectations of his duties as an officer and reflect the finest traditions of the United States Navy.

Signed, Admiral Chester Nimitz.

“Very well done,” he said. “It has been an honor to serve with you, Jake. Admiral Nimitz will be aboard the North Carolina to pin the medal on you the day after tomorrow. Here is a twenty-four hour liberty pass. I suggest you put your family’s affairs in order.”

Between the Eyes

Shortly after the Showboat (the crew’s nickname for the North Carolina) pulled out of Pearl, and after the obligatory man overboard drill, I decided to set myself back to the task of learning the ship’s systems. In the time that passed since Captain Fort’s accepting me into the crew and the ship’s pulling out, I had been working hard on learning the ship’s anti-aircraft systems. It wasn’t conceptually that much different than that of the Oklahoma, so it wasn’t as steep of a gradient as I expected. Still, the more you go over something you study, the better it sticks, and since the lives of everybody on the Showboat rested on my knowledge of these systems, I put myself hard to the task.

There were a lot more guns on this ship, though. Coordinating between them and the four five-inch directors and ten turrets was going to be interesting. Not even to mention the many machine guns which were being added to the ship, which had an officer under my command to coordinate them.

The CO was very interested in getting his hands on a lot more larger-caliber automatic weapons than we had on board at the time. There was a lot of that going on in the fleet at the time.

There was a new twenty-millimeter gun called the “Oerlikon” appearing in quantity on the decks of every ship in the fleet. And the Swedes had even designed a quadruple forty-millimeter gun called “Bofors” that looked very promising as a replacement for the one point one-inch guns. The fleet seemed to be gearing up to use battlewagons and cruisers for screening aircraft carriers against air attack. It seemed doubtful even then, considering the attack on Pearl, that this war was going to involve battleships slugging it out with each other on the open seas very much, if at all.

This was going to be a carrier war, with other large capital ships filling a support function. The United States literally had dozens of carriers, in several different sizes, under construction at the time. I had to make sure I was ready for anything that could happen in the air above the task force we would be in and make sure the Showboat would be able to rise to the task. A lot of drilling was going to happen over the next couple of weeks in preparation, and we all had a lot to learn if we were going to avoid a repeat of what happened to the Okie.

I was studying at the desk in my state room when I heard a knock at the door.

“Come in!” I shouted, annoyed a little bit by the interruption.

The door opened to a marine sergeant in dress uniform. He was one of the captain’s orderlies.

“Sir, Captain Fort and Commander Crocker would like to meet you on the fantail,” he said.

“Do you have any idea what this is about?” I asked.

“No, sir, but they said to be sure you brought your handgun and some ammunition.”

“I’m never without it,” I told him, “so that’s not a problem.”

I followed the sergeant to the main deck and to the fantail where the CO, XO, and another marine were waiting for me. The CO had an empty soup can and said, as I walked up to them, “Good morning, Lieutenant Commander.”

“Good morning, Captain.”

“Of course, you remember your former executive officer advising me to let you carry your sidearm while on board, don’t you?”

“Yes I do,” I replied.

I had been expecting something like this ever since the interview with the captain and had been looking forward to showing off my skills to someone else. It was an easy guess that there was a friendly wager between the two senior officers of this ship riding on top of this as well.

“Now, I trusted my good friend Jesse Kenworthy’s word that you could shoot a can tossed up in the air with that thing as a major part of my decision. Am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I really don’t like having my decisions end up being wrong because of a personal friend’s exaggerated sea story. Understood?”

“I understand, Captain,” I said, undaunted by his hint.

“The XO seems to think you wouldn’t be able to hit this can if I were to throw it up in the air. What do you have to say about that?”

“I’d say, with all due respect to the XO”—I calmly unsnapped the holster with a smile growing on my face—“he doesn’t know what he is talking about, sir.”

The two marine orderlies exchanged glances and grins.

“Very well, then, let’s see how many times you can shoot this before it hits the deck. And don’t put any holes in my ship! Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, pulling out my trusted Colt. “Throw it up that direction so it doesn’t go over the side so we can count the holes. Throw it kind of high, any time you are ready,” I told him switching the safety off.

“Okay, here goes,” he said, tossing the can into the air.

The first time he tossed the can the wind blew the can straight up over my head and I let it fall back to the deck because I didn’t want to chance having the bullets come back down and hit the ship or crew. I explained why I didn’t shoot and told him to toss it just a little further outward the next time.

The second time he tossed the can almost straight up but out just far enough that I didn’t have to worry about where the bullets were going to come down, so I took aim and pulled the trigger.

Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow! The gun went off rapidly eight times then went empty, with the slide locking open. The can danced in the air and fell to the deck. I slapped the next magazine into the gun, closed the slide, put the safety on, and holstered my weapon. When I picked up the can and showed it to them, it had eight distinctly different holes in it, four entrance holes, and four exit holes. I held it up for the captain and the XO and said, “There you go, gentlemen.” The jaws of the two marines and the XO went slack. The captain was grinning from ear to ear.

“There you go,” he said to the XO. “Pay up.”

The XO handed him a twenty and stood there, shaking his head, still in disbelief. “That is the most incredible damned thing I have ever seen!” he said.

The captain said to me, “You have no idea how disappointed I would have been in my old friend Commander Kenworthy if you had missed. I really think you might be able to shoot a Jap pilot right out of the sky with that thing someday.”

“I’ll get him right between the eyes, sir,” I replied as the two marines began to laugh.

Over the next couple of days, the rumor of what happened spread throughout the ship. By the time it made it back to me, I had earned a nickname amongst the crew. I was thereafter called “Lieutenant Commander ‘Between the Eyes.’”

Enterprise

On the 24th of August, 1942, the fortunes of war found us screening for the Enterprise in the area of the Eastern Solomons. The carrier Saratoga was there as well. Just as I had predicted would happen, the battleships were serving as large anti-aircraft gun platforms to defend the carriers from air attack. I wondered if the Showboat would ever have a chance to duke it out on the open seas with a Japanese big-gun battleship as she was designed to do, or if these big battlewagons were going obsolete altogether.

We had been at sea for quite some time, and the crew was becoming tired of the continuous training and drilling. They were spoiling for an actual fight, but none had yet materialized. Days turned to weeks, which turned to months, without a single engagement.

The crew was becoming very frustrated by the total lack of action thus far, and some were even expressing that somehow the war might be over before they actually had a chance to fight. It was as though they were thinking that somehow there would be a shortage of Japs to kill, and they wanted to get in there and do their share while they still had the chance. There was too much of a feeling of invulnerability on board for me. The North Carolina was considered to be the most powerful weapon on Earth at the time, and “nobody could touch us,” they said.

While I was optimistic because of the enthusiasm they displayed in their training, I did not share their feelings in general. In spite of the intensive drilling, this was still an untested crew, and nobody knew how they would respond in actual combat. I was one of the very few onboard who had actually experienced combat, and that experience was still an open wound to me. The recruiters’ posters and newsreels that started coming out at the time made it all look and sound like it was some kind of glorious thing to be in combat. But the reality of it, once you have been there, is quite different.

Sure I wanted to kill Japs. I wanted to shoot at them with everything the Showboat had to offer. But my mind was full of the desire to retaliate for the attack on Pearl in a way most of the rest of the crew could not yet relate to. Hopefully, they would never have to. It is a hard thing to survive the loss of a ship you served on. My mind was still full of the images of the men I knew who died on board the Oklahoma. And those images burned in my soul. However, I was not afraid to be there in the least bit. I was too angry for fear.

The difference, I suppose, was that I had been in combat and lost. I had one of these battleships shot right out from under me, and we, the crew of the Oklahoma, along with all the rest of the crews of the ships in Pearl Harbor during the attack, thought we were invulnerable, too. But the Okie was still upside-down in Pearl Harbor with a third of her crew still entombed within, and my battle scars were still very visible.

Some of the younger officers and crew asked me what combat was like, almost with a bit of a gleam of admiration in their eyes. I tried to tell them in a way that would make them ready without evoking too much fear in them. But without that fear, how could somebody ever really understand?

There is a certain intangibility of thought that goes with an experience like war that seems to defy explanation. How do you describe to somebody that depth of horror that you can’t even reach after the fact yourself? And how do you train somebody to continue in a firefight with that kind of horror pressing in all around them? The average man on this crew was just nineteen years old. Just a few short months ago, these men were digging around on the farm in the States or going to high school. How do you relate to them the experience of somebody getting blown apart or burned to a crisp right before your very eyes?

In the long run, I thought it would work out better just to drill them on their respective tasks so their attention would stay on their jobs, no matter what happened. Then wait for them to have some actual experience and let them sort it out on their own.

On the plus side, there was a slow trickle of news coming in about the rest of the war. We had won the Battle of Midway, largely because of being smiled upon by Lady Luck, and that tended to boost morale. On the other hand, once again because of luck, the United States Navy had just suffered a most humiliating defeat at the Battle of Savo Island. You never can predict the outcome of a battle because of the extreme variables that play into the situation. On one hand, we knew we could put up a good fight. And on the other hand, we also knew, in a glib sort of way, that we could lose. But I was one of the very few men on board who felt the sting of the latter.

I always got a kind of kick out of the recruiting posters. You know the ones—“Fight for your country! And defeat those cowardly Japs!” There was something the recruiting posters didn’t really mention very much. That one thing, which the crew in their enthusiasm wasn’t really thinking about, was the one thing that bothered me to no end. The Japs would be shooting back, and they were very, very good at it. The Empire of Japan had been at war for decades, and the United States had not been at war for decades.

They knew what they were doing. Did we?

Radar on the carriers, for some reason, was not working well that day. Ours was picking up targets at its ultimate maximum distance more as ghosts. Sometimes, we would see them and then they would be gone, just like that. The Japs were looking for us for sure, and there would be no doubt about it when they finally found us. There was just a feeling in the air that on that day we would be bound for combat, and it was going to be intense.

Early in the afternoon, reports started coming in about a Jap carrier that was spotted and attacked. Reports also came in about attacks on Henderson Field on Guadalcanal carried out by carrier-based aircraft. With the strategic importance of the base at Guadalcanal, I was sure we were going to run into a major force of Japanese whose only purpose for being there was to kill us. We were on high alert and about to head into the thick of things. General quarters sounded, and the ship rapidly prepared for battle, only to wait for hours until anything materialized.

At about 1600, Combat Information Center (CIC) called up to my station in Sky Control and reported a large wave of incoming aircraft. I looked over to the Enterprise and saw that they had started launching planes at a very rapid pace. I told the machine gun officer and other crew up there with me to “look sharp; the enemy has found us.”

A call went out over the ship’s communication systems for all stations to report that they were still ready for combat. The ship began to accelerate in the water, adding to the exaggerated motion you normally feel at the top of the tower in Sky Control as the ship hits the swells. We began to turn in closer to Enterprise. Our mission was to protect her.

Right on cue, the various stations under my command began reporting in. “Sky One, ready. Secondary Three, ready. Sky Four, ready.” My talker marked each one off on his check sheet as they all reported in. The machine gun officer reported, “All automatic weapons ready, sir.”

I took one last quick look around the deck to make sure we were ready. From my position in Sky Control, I could see most of the ship below me and could quickly assess the status of the various guns and directors. Everything was manned and ready, and a very large portion of the guns were beginning to turn toward the sky over Enterprise. It was assumed the carriers would be the primary target of the Jap attack.

For the first time since the sinking of the Oklahoma, I had the chance to fulfill the promise I had made to myself. I would never, during the course of the war, be caught unarmed again. I could still see in my mind the look on the faces of the aircrew of the Kate, which dropped the torpedo on the Oklahoma as it zoomed overhead, close enough that I could have shot it.

I unsnapped the holster that held my trusty new Colt forty-five (the old one was still on the Oklahoma) and pulled it out and checked it. A round was in the chamber, and it was cocked with the safety on. “Cocked and locked,” as they say. I slid it back into the holster and nervously began tapping the handgrip as I waited.

About a minute later, my sound-powered phone cracked to life with the voice of the talker for the bridge: “All stations report.” The tone of his voice struck me as being rather tense. I gave the order to my talker to report all air defense readiness to the gunnery officer, who relayed the message to the bridge.

The Showboat was ready for a fight, and, hopefully, the crew was as well.

The carrier’s radar, for some reason, didn’t detect the Japs at the range we would have wanted, but there was still a fair cap operating above us. It didn’t take long for the Enterprise and Saratoga to get the rest of the planes into the air, but even still, there were only fifty-four Wildcats to meet the 160 Japanese coming in.

The battle lingered for a time in the air above us as the American pilots desperately tried to protect the fleet. This gave the rest of the fighters on the carriers a little extra time to get airborne. You could see planes dropping from the sky, trailing smoke in the distance as the battle developed. They were a little too far off to tell whose they were.

The radar operators in CIC began to give continuous updates on range and numbers of enemy aircraft. It looked for a short time like the battle was going toward the Saratoga, but then it turned back toward the Enterprise. It was only a short matter of time until the Japs would be able to break through the air defenses and begin to attack the ships. And it didn’t look like they would be breaking through in small numbers.

The target designator operators focused in on several aircraft which suddenly moved in closer at a very rapid pace. “Concentrate fire on the bombers; the fighters have second priority. Here they come,” I said to the crew, thinking it would be easier to survive a strafing attack than a bomb or torpedo.

At 2000 yards maximum, the twenty-millimeter guns didn’t have the kind of range I would have liked. I found myself wishing, not for the last time, for a longer range, higher caliber, automatic weapon. And the remaining one point ones and fifty-caliber guns were considered to be a last-ditch effort against the modern Jap planes we were facing. The only real long-distance weapons on board usable against aircraft were the ship’s twenty five-inch dual purpose guns, and we were going to use them as much as we could. So when we did finally decide to open fire, the five-inch guns would open first, then the automatic weapons as the Japs got closer.

Just about then, several puffs of flak smoke appeared above Enterprise from her own guns, along with the delayed sound of the explosions.

Several seconds later, the order came from the gunnery officer. “Commence firing!”

“Commence firing!” I repeated.

The reaction was almost immediate. Boom, the first gun fired. A few seconds later, boom, boom: several more opened up. Then, for the first time, I witnessed the whole port side of five-inch guns on the North Carolina erupt in continuous gunfire. The entire ship shook beneath me, as if the ocean itself was shaking from the violence of it. The noise was deafening. It was almost impossible to communicate with each other in Sky, let alone on the phones to the other stations of the ship. Most of the communication in Sky was given by hand signals. I would slap one of the target designator operators on the shoulder and point at the Jap plane I wanted him to shoot at.

The Japanese aircraft continued to press the attack closer, and it wasn’t long until we were surrounded. The starboard guns opened up, doubling the noise level. Thick black puffs of smoke filled the sky above us as the guns continued to fire.

Still, the Japs kept coming closer and started making actual runs on the Enterprise.

The Showboat’s twenty-millimeter and one point one-inch guns lit up all at once, not adding so much to the volume of the noise but the intensity. Rather than being able to hear individual gunfire, it was just an intense roar of total deafening noise. Giant cyclones of tracer rounds streamed forward from the guns of the ships around us, following the pattern of attack of the oncoming enemy.

Time after time, enemy planes kept being knocked down, but for how long? How long could they press the attack? How long could we defend against a determined onslaught of this magnitude?

I didn’t have to wait long for my answer. One broke through and dropped a bomb aimed at the Enterprise. A puff of smoke and water billowed up next to the starboard side; it was a very near miss. We knew we weren’t the main target of the attack; the carriers were, but that didn’t slow our gunfire a bit. We were all in the same fleet, and it was our fate to live or die together. We needed them for air cover as much as they needed us for anti-aircraft fire support. Without one or the other, we would all be vulnerable.

And soon enough, my observations proved out. There were plenty enough Japs in the air to attack all of the larger ships in the formation. And they began to break through the fleet’s defenses more rapidly than I could count. Bombs began to rain down all around us; several of them splashing large amounts of water over the Showboat’s main deck and several close enough that the blast knocked some of the crewmen off their feet. But we were very lucky to have a skilled navigator, who kept the ship turning to dodge the dive-bombers, and none of them struck us.

I became aware of a voice that I could barely hear on the sound powered phones: “Sky, bridge; are we on fire?” I looked down for the first time since the battle started. The entire superstructure was covered in thick smoke from the guns being blown aft by the winds over the deck. It was a little bit shocking. My attention until then had been toward the sky, and in Sky Control, we were well above the smoke. It took a couple of seconds to look around and see that there was no fire; it was just the guns. “No we are not on fire, repeat, we are not on fire!” I shouted back through my phones, turning my attention back skyward toward the real threat.

Apparently, one of the other ships saw all of the smoke coming from our guns and thought we had been hit.

Where I was, I had a clear view of what was going on, and it wasn’t pretty. All the anti-aircraft guns were blazing at their full fury, trying to fight off the attack. I had never seen anything like it before. Indeed, the Showboat was proving her worth in combat, but the question still remained: “Would it be enough?”

Several more Jap planes slipped through. One made a dive on the Enterprise and released a bomb. I watched as it sailed down and struck the ship on the aft part of the flight deck. Several seconds later, boom, an orange fireball and black smoke rose into the sky above her.

I continued to watch the damaged carrier in brief glimpses as I frantically worked to do my job. “Bridge, Enterprise has been hit!” I shouted into the phones. A large column of black smoke begin to pour out of the big E; I didn’t have to imagine what was going on over there. I knew all too well, and while I was sympathetic to their plight, all I could do is hope we wouldn’t be next.

Just then, a Zero broke through and began a strafing run towards us. I would have to guess he was coming down as an attempt to identify us, being that the Japs had never seen a battleship like the North Carolina in the American fleet before. It seemed to me he had to be pretty suicidal to even attempt to get as close to us as he was getting.

“Get that Nip out of my sky!” I shouted at the machine gun officer as I reached for my own forty-five, drawing it out of its holster and flipping the safety off. He was coming in very fast and low, with a stream of tracer fire erupting from the guns of his aircraft. Below me on the main deck, a dozen smaller fifty-caliber and twenty-millimeter machine guns spun around and sent a stream of tracers back to greet him. I could see the expression on his face as he approached over the forward part of the ship and below my position in Sky Control.

It was now or never, so I decided to take my shot. I leveled the sights of my Colt at the canopy and pulled the trigger over and over until it went empty. Any sound my gun made was insignificant next to those of the Showboat, and the only way I knew it fired at all was because of the way it jumped in my hands from the recoil.

Now you may think me a little bit touched in the head by my old age or something. Or maybe I’m just an “old salt” telling sea stories. And that’s alright. But exactly when I fired the sixth round, several things happened. A bullet hole appeared in the Zero’s canopy, blood splattered on the glass, and the Jap pilot convulsed and slumped forward.

About a half a second later, large chunks of the structure of the aircraft began getting blown off from the Showboat’s guns, striking the plane. Smoke streamed from the engine and then flames until it hit the water off of the starboard side. Now, I know the gunners of the North Carolina shot that plane down, and I can understand how you could think I’m just an old man telling sea stories, but I also know I killed that pilot.

We only had to wait about thirty seconds for the next hit on Enterprise. This explosion was bigger, as if it hit a powder magazine or something, followed by several secondary explosions. The fireball was tremendous. I could tell she was beginning to pick up a list. It’s very easy to see on a carrier at any angle because of the large flat top.

Again, we didn’t have to wait long for another hit on Enterprise. Maybe two minutes. The third hit was amidships by the island structure. Even more smoke poured out of the ship.

Then, without warning or any obvious reason, the Enterprise turned hard to starboard. Several smaller ships had to evade to keep from being run over. She was hard over and running at full speed, out of control. She began to list so far that aircraft just started falling over the side. She had obviously lost her rudder controls, and they slammed into the full starboard position.

It wasn’t much longer when the Japanese attack ended, and they began to withdraw. The order was given to cease fire. As rapidly as the overwhelming noise from the Showboat began, it ended, and the following relative quiet was as stark as the noise had seemed. I looked at my watch and noticed the entire attack only took seven minutes.

Some forty minutes passed with the Enterprise still turning circles before their steering problems were corrected. Most of the fires were put out fairly soon as well, but it was still easy to tell she was having some difficulty. We stood by, doing circles right along with her, guarding against the possibility of another air attack. We did expect another wave of Japs.

There was only light damage from enemy strafing and one casualty, but it was pretty obvious the Enterprise would not survive another attack. She was beat up pretty bad, and we expected the second wave within a few hours.

Later on, our radar did pick up another large wave of enemy planes to the southwest of us. It was right about where we would have been had the Enterprise’s steering not failed. Evidently the Japanese did not spot us again because a second attack never materialized.

By the end of the battle, the Japs had lost a small aircraft carrier and at least seventy planes with experienced crews, which I was sure they could not afford to lose. The North Carolina was credited with seven kills and assisted with many more. And just as importantly to the overall strategy of the war, Guadalcanal remained in American hands.

After the battle, everything about the performance of the crew changed. They understood a lot more of what they were up against and pulled together in a way I had never seen on any other ship I had served on before.

A lot of us got tattoos of that date on our forearm. You can still see mine right here. It’s become a little fuzzy over the years, but I had never before been more proud to serve on a ship than I had on that day.

Later on, I was giving my report to the XO about my observations of the battle. Things went generally well, actually remarkably well, considering the relatively weak compliment of automatic weapons the ship had at that time.

Later on in the war, the North Carolina’s host of anti-aircraft weapons would be expanded considerably, as it would be for the rest of the ships of the fleet. The primary improvement would be the replacement of the one point one-inch guns with forty-millimeter guns, which would better cover the range between the five-inch guns and the twenty-millimeter guns.

The gun directors and weapons all performed magnificently. The shooting by the actual operators of the guns was deadly accurate, and the radar in CIC gave us plenty of advance notice of approaching targets. The only criticism that was significant was the positioning of some of the smaller automatic weapons next to the five-inch turrets, causing ear injuries to the crews that were manning them. Communications in general were difficult because of the excessive noise caused by the guns being in play. Other stations on board could hear us fairly well, but it was almost impossible for us to hear them. I recommended to the XO that we should test several different methods of communicating, different microphone systems, and so on, under live full-fire conditions at the next opportunity.

After I gave my full report to Commander Crocker, he asked me, “Is there anything else, Lieutenant Commander Williams?”

“Yes, sir. I put in the official record that the North Carolina gunners shot down the Zeke that did the strafing run that killed George Conlon.”

“Yes?” he replied.

“But just between you and me, sir, I think I shot the pilot just before the twenty-millimeters took the plane apart.”

“Let me guess, Jake; you got him right between the eyes, huh?”

“Well, very close to that, sir; he was turned the wrong way,” I answered with a grin, which I think the XO took as a joke.

“Very well then, maybe someday you can have one all to yourself so you can take the bragging rights.” There was a little bit of a tone in his voice which told me the commander wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not.

“I hope so, sir, but more to the point, I wish to convey my thanks to you and Captain Fort for letting me have the opportunity to shoot back at the Nips. In the big picture, it doesn’t make a difference because the ship’s gunners tore that plane up, but I just feel better knowing I killed a Nip today myself.”

“Very well, Jake, I know what this means to you, and I’ll be sure to convey your thanks to the Old Man.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Just one more thing, Commander,” he said.

“What would that be, sir?”

“I appreciate your passion for your work, Jake, but in the future could you do me a favor?”

“Anything, sir.”

Then he said with a big grin “Please try to keep your empty brass from falling on me in Batt 2 while you are shooting at the Japs,” and he rolled two spent rounds of forty-five caliber brass across his desk to me.

Torpedo Junction

The crew of the North Carolina had their trial by fire and passed it with flying colors. However, we weren’t unscathed: one of us had died, and the rest of us counted ourselves lucky. The men had realized that the war was for real and not some weekend game. This was not some petty endeavor that could easily be passed off. And what they had witnessed while watching Enterprise struggle for her life impressed upon them that the next time, we might not be as lucky.

The Japanese, once they knew we were in the area, came out to greet us on a far more regular basis. The crew became more alert and began to take the continuous drilling more seriously. Different sections of the anti-aircraft gunnery crew began to beat their old records for rate and readiness of fire on a regular basis and even began to compete against each other. It was not only a matter of pride then, but a matter of life and death.

It wasn’t too long after the Battle of the Eastern Solomons that we had another close call. A submarine was spotted by an aircraft from the Hornet. They were able to drop a bomb in the path of the first torpedo and cause it to detonate, but another was still inbound. The skillful maneuvering of the ship kept us from being struck by it, but it passed the port side a little too close for my comfort. The Saratoga wasn’t as lucky; she had been hit several days before and had to be towed home for repairs.

With all of the drilling on a regular basis and the Japanese taking pot shots at us from submarines, I took to hanging out at my battle station in Sky Control. It had the advantage of giving me the ability to see what was going on around us at all times.

I had set myself to the business of trying to figure out where to move the smaller caliber automatic guns that were located between the five-inch turrets. There were some fairly severe injuries to the crews of those guns from the noise of the five-inchers going off during the attack on the Enterprise. Several of the crews reported bleeding from the ears and nose, so the guns had to be moved. Apparently the “mortal frame” was not designed to have a five-inch gun going off several feet from it.

I was also working on suggestions about where to place the new forty-millimeter guns when we got those. I wasn’t sure when the Showboat would get her next upgrades, but I wanted them fairly bad. The twenty-millimeter and fifty-caliber guns didn’t have nearly enough range to make me happy, but the specifications on the new forties showed some real promise.

We were in formation, screening for the Hornet. Several miles off was the Wasp and her formation. Together, we were providing cover for some transports filled with marines to reinforce Guadalcanal. That particular area of ocean was appropriately nicknamed “Torpedo Junction.”

The first inkling something was wrong came when one of the watches reported to me that there was smoke coming from the Wasp. This was not extremely unusual for an aircraft carrier in those days, as they had occasional crashes on the flight deck that resulted in fires. I dutifully reported it to the bridge because it was something to keep an eye on, even though it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.

We continued to watch for a short time when we noticed the crew of the Wasp begin to push aircraft over the side. That, as well, was still typical procedure for a flight deck fire, but the amount of smoke rising from the ship was beginning to grow rather rapidly. Once the volume of smoke got past a certain point, the crew of the Showboat began to sense this was no ordinary fire. Many of the crew began to report to their battle stations.

The several explosions over the next minute or two reinforced our suspicions. Some of the explosions looked, even given the distance between the ships, to be quite bad.

I listened in on my sound-powered phones to the “chatter” from the bridge and radio room. There was a lot of questioning about what was going on because it was unusual to not receive communication from a ship that was obviously in distress for this long of a time. They were obviously busy fighting something far more dangerous than any ordinary flight deck fire.

I noticed the expressions change on the faces of the crew that were up there in Sky Control with me as I pulled out my forty-five and checked it to be sure it was ready. They had come to learn that when I checked my gun, it was a signal to prepare for a fight.

As I put my Colt back in its holster I heard the word “torpedo” on my phones, then “Right full rudder – emergency flank speed!”

“Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Battle stations! All hands to your battle stations!”

“All watches, torpedo alert” the bridge talker’s voice said, followed by “Sky do you see anything?” Because of our being up so high above the ship, we could see everything; we had become used to being asked questions like this first.

The ocean that day was pretty rough; it would be difficult to spot anything in the water. “Negative,” I replied while keeping my eyes on the water between us and the Wasp, which by then had become a raging inferno.

All of a sudden, one of the small destroyers on the outside perimeter of our own formation exploded. The suddenness as well as the relative closeness of the sound startled those of us in Sky as well as, I’m sure, the rest of the ship. The impact of the explosion even over the distance was stunning. The Japs had obviously been working on beefing up their torpedoes.

It’s difficult to describe the emotion when you realize you are in unfriendly water and ships in your fleet begin to explode and burst into flames around you, especially after you’ve had a ship blown right out from under you. The two distressed ships were pretty far apart, and it would have been long odds indeed to expect only one submarine had fired both torpedoes that struck the Wasp and the O’Brien. Suddenly, in my mind, the entire ocean was suspect of being filled with Jap submarines using the “Wolf Pack” tactics, which the Germans were using in the Atlantic.

“Heads up, men,” I said. “We are definitely a prize target to the Nips, and it will be hard to see anything coming in these waves.”

Unfortunately, I was right. One of the watches on the port side suddenly pointed down and shouted, “Torpedo, port side, forward!”

I looked down and barely saw it through the rough water. The North Carolina was hard into her turn so the armor belt, which was supposed to protect us from this sort of thing, was pretty far up out of the water. The torpedo was very close, and it was far too late to do anything about it.

“Cover! Everybody down!” I shouted, as I remembered the splinters from the shattered hull of the Oklahoma shooting off around me in the attack at Pearl Harbor and the stitches they had put in my side.

Boom!

The whole ship shook violently, but those of us in Sky Control were thrown around worse than most. I was slammed up against the rail to my left and very badly bruised my shoulder and elbow. The impact was so strong that I was sure anybody standing up would have been thrown right out of our perch high above the ship and fallen to their death on the decks below. Fortunately, everybody was well braced, so it didn’t happen, but there were plenty of bruises to go around, as well as a crewman with a broken wrist.

“Jesus Christ!” one of the crewmen exclaimed.

The smell of fuel oil and explosives once again filled the air. And a few seconds later, the plume of water that had sprayed up above the Showboat began to shower down over the ship, coating the decks with oily saltwater.

“Stay alert, men; there may be more of them,” I said as I got back up, holding my shoulder and wondering, a little bit, if it might have been broken. The men instantly responded to my order and once again began to scan the water around us.

The ship came out of its turn and immediately went into a five degree port list. Palpable fear began to grow in me, almost to the point that all I could see in my mind’s eye was the overturned hull of the Oklahoma as its Sky Control tower came crashing down in the water next to me, except this time, I was in that tower.

What if North Carolina capsized? How would the crew get out of the tower in time to get away from the ship? It was a long way down from here to the water, and the thought of jumping was inconceivable. It struck me then that I had never thought of how I would get off of the ship from the top of the tower if we had to quickly abandon. I was always worried about how the men in the engine rooms would get out of the ship if they had to, so the thought of getting down from Sky Control had never crossed my mind before.

My attention was suddenly brought back to the situation at hand when the “man overboard” alarm sounded. One of the crew had been washed overboard during the wave caused by the explosion. It’s hard to believe how much water a blast like that can throw up into the air. Some parts of the deck reported having as much as two feet of water suddenly rush across it.

In less than ten minutes, the listing of the ship began to level out, and my worst fears at the time were not realized. The Showboat would apparently live to fight another day, but five more of her crew had fought their last battle, one being washed over the side and never recovered; the other four either killed instantly when the torpedo detonated or trapped in the flooding in the forward part of the hull. The unsettling part of it being, for the one trapped by flooding, several of the crew reported hearing tapping coming from the forward part of the ship for almost a day. Weeks later, when his body was recovered, it was revealed he had drowned, trapped alone and alive in a flooded compartment for quite some time, where no one could reach him.

Over the next few hours, the crew kept their eyes sharply focused on the water around us as we stayed in formation with the Hornet. It’s a testament to the dedication of the crew of the North Carolina that we were able to stay in formation after being damaged to the degree that we were.

The Wasp was not so lucky. She continued to burn out of control for several hours, with frequent explosions from her own ordnance making a bad situation even worse. A little bit after 1500, she was ordered abandoned with almost two hundred of her crew killed and almost four hundred wounded.

Later on that evening, the admiral of the task force ordered the Wasp to be scuttled and several torpedoes from one of the destroyers in the task force finished her off.

The attacking submarines apparently went deep and got away unscathed.

The war in the Pacific became just that much more difficult with the loss of another carrier. At that point, and for some period following, the Hornet was the only active carrier in the Pacific Ocean capable of facing the many carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

To make matters worse, the Showboat had to return to Pearl Harbor for repairs to her hull from the torpedo damage we had sustained in the attack, leaving only one battleship in the Pacific, the South Dakota, to cover the whole ocean.

With one carrier and one battleship versus the Empire of Japan, the chances of winning the war never looked so slim.

To me, it was all the more reason to kill more Japs as quickly as possible. And, with our trip to Pearl Harbor, I would finally get my forty-millimeter anti-aircraft guns to do it with.

The Divine Wind

The next couple of years went by with the North Carolina being fairly involved in the business of prosecuting the war. We were everywhere doing everything from the Solomons Campaign through the Gilbert Islands, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein Atoll, the Marianas Campaign, Saipan, and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. There were many hours of dull boredom followed by brief moments of intense activity, which is how wars usually go.

The real joy for me was in knowing that everywhere we went, we left plenty of dead Japs in our wake. I never got tired of shooting them down out of the sky or watching the shells from the ship’s mighty sixteen-inch guns in combination with my twenty five-inch guns come crashing down on an enemy stronghold on some God-forsaken Pacific island.

In July of ’44, the Showboat received good news. She was going stateside to Bremerton, Washington for a badly needed overhaul and upgrade of the weapons systems.

“This is great!” I thought. The crew would be allowed to take some badly needed leave and would have the chance to get caught up with their families. I could get Susan to bring the kids out to Washington when it came my turn to take leave. It would be the first chance to see them since January of ’42, when we said goodbye as they left Hawaii.

Or I thought it was good when I first heard the news.

Several days later, I was passing the time, as I usually did, in Sky Control, keeping an eye on things, studying the ship’s engine systems, and writing a letter to Susan to tell her the news when one of the XO’s marine orderlies stepped through the hatch.

“Commander Williams,” he said, greeting me.

“Yes, Corporal,” I replied.

“The XO would like to see you in his office right away, sir.”

“Understood. Tell him I’m on my way,” I said as I began to stow my letter and study materials.

“Very well, sir.” He turned and stepped back through the hatch.

“Right away?” I thought to myself. It’s not often when Commander Stryker wants to see somebody “right away,” and usually, it’s not for the kind of reason you would end up liking. My instincts began a revolt, which was soon validated in actuality.

Arriving at his office, I was greeted by the same corporal I had just spoken to in Sky. He opened the door, letting me in, saying only “The XO is waiting for you, sir.”

“Come in and have a seat, Jake,” the XO said upon seeing me.

“Thanks, Joe,” I replied. “How can I help you?”

“I’ll spare you the time and get to the point right away, knowing how busy you are but also knowing how busy you are about to become.”

His last words “how busy you are about to become” hung on my mind for a moment. What could that possibly mean, other than I was about to be reassigned? But where, and what would that mean? I didn’t have long to wait to find out.

“What do you know about Cleveland-class cruisers, Jake?”

That’s it; I was being reassigned to another ship and that most likely meant no trip to the United States for Commander Jacob Scott Williams.

“Well, they have a lot of guns for a small cruiser; a dozen sixes, a dozen fives, and a large host of forties, twenties and sometimes fifty cals. They are very maneuverable, fast, and lightly armored. Also, their damage control systems are fairly good, so they can take a punch and keep hitting back,” I said.

“Great, Jake; you’re hired,” he replied.

“Hired? For what, exactly?”

“There is going to be a ship waiting for us in Pearl Harbor called the USS Buffalo; she is a new ship on her way to support the campaign in the Philippines, from what I understand. Her skipper, Captain Albert Beck, is getting a promotion and going to work in the navy yard in Washington. The North Carolina is the taxi that is going to take him there.”

“What exactly does that have to do with me?” I asked, having some idea but still not completely expecting or understanding what was about to happen.

“You,” he said with a dramatic pause, which almost drove me crazy, “are going to take his place as the commanding officer of the Buffalo.”

I’m sure my jaw dropped at that point. I stared at him in disbelief, not knowing what to say. It wasn’t the first time I commanded a ship. Prior to my service on the Oklahoma, I had commanded a small “tin can” destroyer and a submarine. Normally, command of a ship the likes of a cruiser would be reserved for an officer holding the rank of captain, or at least someone who had been a commander for more than two years. But this was wartime, and things like this happen very rapidly.

“As CO?” I finally repeated, still not believing it fully.

“Yep.”

“Shouldn’t that post require a captain?”

“Normally, yes,” he replied, “but this is war and the navy, the captain, Admiral Halsey, and I all think you are capable enough to do it. Apparently, Bull Halsey pushed for this himself and convinced Vice Admiral Kinkaid of the Seventh Fleet you could do this, so the job is yours if you want it.”

Now, when you are a lifetime officer in the navy, and an admiral named “Halsey” is pulling for you, there really is only one answer to a question like that. You either accept the job offered and eventually get promoted to admiral or learn to become content, never getting promoted past your current rank and being stationed somewhere in Alaska for the rest of your life.

But goddamn it, there was still Susan and the kids! When would be the next time I would get to see them? I was really beginning to hate this war and what it was doing to my family. I felt it was just not fair to be so close to seeing them and yet not really having the chance to.

I was sure the orders for me to take command of the Buffalo were already written, and normally, I would have been very honored by the offer to command a new cruiser. Still, the urge to say no weighed heavily on my mind. Because of the war, I was trapped with no way out. Because of the Japanese, I couldn’t go home to see my wife and children, and I hated the Japs so very much more because of it.

“Damn, Joe,” I said shaking my head. “We both know I have to accept. But still, I wish our ships were heading in the other directions.”

“Family?”

“Yeah, I haven’t seen them since a month after the attack on Pearl.”

“Hmm… I understand Jake, and I wish I could help you.”

“You can, Joe,” I said.

“How?” he asked.

“Kill as many Nips as you can so we can all go home.”

“You got it, Jake. Happy hunting.”

So as the next several days passed, the Showboat turned east and steered a course toward home via Pearl Harbor. I began to gather together the very few things I kept on the ship with me and changed from studying the ship I was on to teaching the machine gun officer to replace me at air defense.

As we pulled into Pearl Harbor, I immediately noticed how well the area had been cleaned up. There was still the hulk of the Arizona, stripped of most of her superstructure, and the Utah had been rolled out of the navigation channel. All the rest of the destroyed ships were gone completely except for the Oklahoma, which had been refloated and pushed aside to one of the piers close to where we moored up.

I tried not to look at my old ship too much, but at the same time, for some reason, I couldn’t resist looking at the place where the war had started for me. Yard workers covered the main deck, evidently stripping off any excess weight they could remove. Haphazard patchwork had been installed over the torpedo damage along the port side to keep her afloat. I could tell she was being fixed up for a long tow to somewhere; the only reason I could guess was to cut her up for scrap.

I would have liked to go aboard to see if anything was left of my possessions, but time would not allow it. I had to spend all of my time in port transferring off of the North Carolina and taking command of the Buffalo.

The Buffalo was a brand-new ship. She was clean; everything was freshly painted and modern. The crew was new as well, and not unlike the crew of the North Carolina several years before—eager to fight yet untested by combat.

Captain Beck assured me all that could be done to ready the ship for combat had been done, but at nearly the same time he told me that, he also told me he had not been in combat himself. I had to guess this was the reason he was being moved to the shipyards in Bremerton, and I was being put in command of this ship. Not that he was an incompetent officer, just that he was accustomed to doing things by the navy’s book. The book has a tendency to mean less when people are shooting at you or trying to blow you up. Not because the rules are bad; it’s just that the one thing in combat you can count on is it won’t go the way you think it will. The rules in the book are written around what the engineers think will happen. One of the primary factors in combat is to bring about the unexpected; thus, the rules can rather quickly become obsolete. And I was relatively sure the Japanese didn’t check with the engineers who designed the ship to find out where and where not to shoot.

The change of command went smoothly and quite quickly because of the rapid departure of Captain Beck. My executive officer, recently promoted Commander Ward Thompson, had been well prepared to brief me on the operations of the ship. It was a pleasant surprise to find one of my old shipmates from the Oklahoma, Chuck Lewis, who had been promoted to Lieutenant Commander and was the air defense officer. Also I had a marine detachment on board, which was being commanded by a Guadalcanal veteran, Major Alex Johnson. It was a good thing to know at least several of my key officers had prior combat experience. And the major came with an extra bonus. He was an expert in the Japanese language and culture.

Normally, I would have been happy and proud to assume command of a vessel like this. As a career officer, it was a wonderful opportunity to prove myself, but I could not help resenting her somewhat. Finally, I assumed the attitude that it wasn’t the ship itself; it was simply pointed in the wrong direction. I wanted to go home, even for a short time, to my wife and kids. This ship, pointed west toward the Japanese, and standing in Pearl Harbor, where it all began, brought the sting of it to me more than anything else. And I thought to myself it was the Japanese that brought all of this to me, and I hated them even more for it as I looked across the harbor to the dead and rusted hulk of the Oklahoma. The only thing I could do about it was kill all of them as fast as I could in the hope that eventually I would be able to go home.

After a few days of filling the ship to capacity with ammunition, supplies, and fuel, we pulled out and set course, along with the rest of the ships in our task force, for the Philippine islands. The Japanese were about to be run over by an angry Buffalo.

Along the way, I got permission from the admiral to do a kind of mini-shakedown on the Buffalo. How fast would she go from full speed to full stop or from full stop to full speed? How quickly would she turn at different speeds? How far would she roll in sharp turns at different speeds? And for the crew: how quickly could we get to battle stations, and how would they perform when they got there? I would give the orders when the crew least expected it. I needed to see what she and the crew could do.

When people talk of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, they often bring up the special significance of the battleships that were at Pearl Harbor. History often mentions five of the six battleships that participated in the action at Surigao Straight were either damaged or sunk at Pearl, and now those ships had a chance to pay the Japs back in spades. The same meaning applied to me, the commanding officer of the light cruiser Buffalo. And pay them back we did.

We knew they were coming. We knew there would be a big fight there. We didn’t know exactly when, but a large force of the Japs had to come through Surigao Straight if they wanted to disrupt the landings at Leyte Gulf. We had time to set up, so nothing could possibly get through and live to tell about it.

On one end of the narrow straight was the moderate force of Japanese battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, pretty much in single file. On the other end was the almost-perfect death trap set by the Seventh Fleet waiting for them: six battleships, nine cruisers, twenty-eight destroyers and several torpedo-equipped PT boat squadrons.

It should have been, and in a lot of ways was, a classic battle-line surface-to-surface engagement, at least as far as the actual naval battle was concerned. But the Japanese had a new trick up their sleeve.

The battle happened on the night of the twenty-fifth of October of ’44. We were part of a large formation of ships in the battle line just aft of the Shropshire and on the side of the battleships closest to the Japanese.

Messages of contacts with the enemy had begun coming in from the patrol boat squadrons earlier in the evening and increased as the night wore on. The PT boats and destroyers continued to do their jobs, harassing the enemy until the enemy got within firing range of the American cruisers and battleships. Then all hell broke loose.

We picked a target in the Japanese formation, using our radar, and I gave the order to commence firing after the obligatory check to make sure my forty-five was ready. At about the same time, the battleships began to fire as well. Flashes of fire lit up the horizon all around us as large shells from the battle wagons whistled in the air directly above our heads and landed on the enemy formation.

They could only fire half as much back at us because they were on the approach and could only use their forward guns, whereas we were almost stationary and could deliver full broadsides from all of our guns.

And it was, for me, an awesome sight to see, remembering a morning several years earlier being in the water of Pearl Harbor, watching five of these very same battleships sinking or in flames around me. And I knew a lot of Japs were dying. I could just feel in my mind their horror as their lives slipped away into the darkness of the night in the waters of Surigao Straight.

It was great, as far as I was concerned, and I reveled in it.

After the attack, the fleet that ambushed the Japanese at Surigao Straight began to break up into smaller units. We still had to be sure the marines of the invasion force were covered, as well as be sure the Japanese didn’t have some other unknown force for us to deal with, but a lot of the smaller ships were sweeping for mines, submarines, and aircraft and picking up survivors of the ships that got sunk.

When you are picking up survivors from an enemy ship, you are basically on an intelligence-gathering mission. Sometimes, you might even get a Japanese captain or admiral; you never know.

The man put in charge of our particular task force, which consisted of two cruisers and three screening destroyers, was Rear Admiral Kriston, who put his flag on the Buffalo.

One of the things nobody expected was what happened the day after the battle when we started picking up the survivors from the ships we sunk.

“Sir,” the major said, “we’ve gotten several out of the water but most are refusing rescue and trying to swim away.”

Just then, there was a small explosion near where the rescue operation was happening. I turned to the bridge phone talker and said, “Report!”

“Repeat your last?” he said into the phone then listened to the answer.

After a few seconds, he turned to me and told me, “Sir, it seems one of the Nips they just pulled out of the water was rigged with a grenade and blew himself up.” There were five men down, not counting the one that just blew himself up. Medics were already on the scene to patch up the injured Japs that were being pulled out of the water, so help for the injured marines was right there.

It seemed like a waste of perfectly good medical supplies to take care of injured Japanese, but orders are orders.

“How badly are they hurt?” I asked, noticing the major’s concerned expression.

“Two marines dead, three injured and being taken to medical,” was the report.

“Fine,” I said to the major. “If they don’t want to experience the excellent hospitality of the Buffalo, then screw them. Shoot them in the water and let the sharks clean up the mess. It’s better than having them fight us again later or kill more of us trying to save them.”

“Shoot them in the water, sir?” he asked.

“You heard me, major. Those are your men that just got killed trying to rescue those slant-eyed bastards. If they are enemy combatants refusing to surrender, we are going to treat them as such and shoot them.”

I walked out onto the open bridge on the port side, pulling out my forty-five, recalling how the Japs had strafed me while I was swimming away from the Oklahoma during the Pearl Harbor attack and started to shoot at some of the Japs in the water. I’m sure I had hit at least one of the closer ones (mostly because of the screaming) before the first magazine went empty. I reloaded and put my gun in its holster and turned to the major. “Tell any of the Nips we come to, if they want to be rescued, they are to strip off all of their clothes. From here on out, if they try to swim away or if they approach this ship with anything big or small, shoot them without a second chance. If they want to try to smuggle another grenade on board, they’ll have to hide it by putting it up their ass.”

The major smiled a little bit and said, “Yes, sir!” as he turned around to walk away.

Another thing that worried me was the slowness of the rescue. The longer we took to pick these sons of bitches up, the less we were moving, and the more of a target we became for more air attacks or, even worse, submarine attacks. I kind of suspected, rightly or wrongly, the Japs in the water knew that and were swimming away from us as a stalling tactic to keep us here and moving slow while a submarine maneuvered into position for the kill.

“CIC,” I said to the talker, “I want to know everything that shows on the radar the second you see it. Tell all lookouts to be sharp. Radio, I want all action reports on enemy submarines from the fleet sent to me via Lieutenant Disalle in CIC immediately. Also, send a report of this incident to Admiral Oldendorf and Rear Admiral Kriston. Priority urgent.” The talker went about his business as I went out to watch the sky and the water myself.

As the day progressed, we would come across more Japanese in the water. Some stripped as requested and were brought aboard, but many got shot trying to swim away.

“It serves them right after Pearl,” I thought to myself as I watched from the open bridge. “It was me they were trying to shoot as I was defenseless in the water just a few years ago. If that’s the way they want to play it, that’s the way we will play it. I don’t care if I have to personally shoot every single Nip in the Japanese navy myself; I am not losing another of my crew to these suicidal freaks if I can help it.”

And at that point, I still could never have guessed what was going to happen next. Nobody could have.

“Sir,” the bridge talker said “CIC is reporting incoming bogies.”

“Battle stations,” I replied. And for the third time that day, the Buffalo prepared for an air attack.

I think sometimes they would do this kind of thing on purpose to try to wear us out. I personally called it “Crying Wolf.” They would let us spot them while they were far out so we would brace ourselves, and then they would turn the other way. Sometimes they would appear and disappear on our radar like ghosts. It was kind of nerve-wracking because you could never really tell which one was going to be the real attack. And if you were in an area of sparse air cover like we were that afternoon, it was outright maddening.

We changed course to get the most of the ship’s guns pointed toward the oncoming aircraft and accelerated to flank speed.

There was a formation of aircraft at an extremely high altitude coming in straight and fast. I had the talker give off the ranges as they came in and instructed the gun boss to open fire as soon as they came within range. There were a lot of them, so I decided to engage them with the ship’s six-inch guns as well.

I began to see the guns turn toward the targets as the ship prepared for battle. I pulled out my forty-five and checked it again. It was loaded and ready, as was the Buffalo.

I grabbed my binoculars to try and spot the incoming formation, and when I couldn’t see them, I asked the talker what altitude they were at. Something felt wrong. They were staying very high, whereas normally, they would have dropped down to a more adequate level for a dive-bomb attack with a simultaneous torpedo attack.

I passed the word for the watches and CIC to watch for another formation of aircraft, suspecting this one was going to be a distraction.

A very short time later, several things happened almost all at once.

The talker shouted, “Bogies bearing one eight zero, closing fast!” Just about then, the aft starboard side five-inch gun opened fire, seeing incoming aircraft and not waiting for any other order to open fire. And realization occurred about what the Japs were doing. They were keeping our attention up high to the port side where most of our guns were currently pointed, and they also had some aircraft coming in low, under the radar, so we couldn’t see them. And by spreading the attack out over ninety degrees, either way I turned the ship, I would have to divide the ship’s guns between the two formations. It was a very well executed attack.

I had to make a call quickly, so I ordered “Hard starboard rudder!”

The ship rapidly turned to meet the two formations of attackers and the appropriate guns swung around to greet them as well. Tracer fire rapidly began to erupt from the starboard guns as the ship came about, but something still wasn’t right. These Japs were coming in low, two of them almost right on the water, and very, very fast, much too fast and low for a torpedo attack. “What are they doing?” I said out loud, my senses telling me something was dreadfully wrong.

Several of the guns on the port side opened fire on the high altitude formation. Two of them had begun a diving attack of some kind, but the angle wasn’t nearly steep enough for a dive-bomb run, and they were still too far away to get the right angle to release a bomb on target.

One of the aircraft in the formation to the aft erupted into a ball of flame, skipped across the water, and exploded. The other started trailing smoke, the normal point where a damaged aircraft would turn back, but this one kept coming with all of its guns blazing and a bomb on the bottom of it.

The two attacks were being timed out, high and low, so the attack was continuous and keeping the guns of the ship pointed in different directions; that was obvious. But they were not lining themselves up for any normal use of weapons that I could see. There would be no chance of hitting a ship with a bomb from either of those altitudes, angles, and speeds, and have the aircraft which dropped it still survive the blast.

The two high-approaching aircraft were coming in closer and pushed over into a steeper dive that was still too shallow to drop a bomb. They were moving extremely fast.

Wild cyclones of automatic weapons fire spun up from the ship as the Buffalo reached its maximum potential of firepower.

The gunners on the starboard side converged their fire on the remaining aircraft as it sped toward us. A wing ripped loose from it, rolling over violently and splashing into the sea, just off of the starboard side of the ship. Its bomb exploded, raining shrapnel down over the open decks.

“It should have turned back long before that,” I said to myself. “And why was an aircraft attacking so low loaded with a bomb?”

Just then, one of our guns must have hit a bomb on one of the high altitude attackers because it blew up and showered debris down into the sea several hundred feet from the ship. The other one spun out of control and hit the water about fifty feet from the fantail.

Several more from the high altitude formation broke loose in a pattern that looked like a typical dive-bomb attack. So I put the ship in another starboard turn to lower our profile toward them, but just as that happened, several more low altitude aircraft sped toward us from the aft side of the ship.

These were Val dive bombers; why would they be coming in low like this?

The two high altitude bombers, both Judys, missed the ship by a pretty wide margin, evidently because of inexperienced pilots. But the Vals, apparently loaded with bombs, kept coming straight on.

Once again, the Buffalo’s guns cut them to ribbons, this time at a safer distance out, but it was still very disturbing. “What on God’s Earth are they doing?” I said to myself.

The attack continued like this several more times at a very rapid but even pace. The Japanese would sometimes actually drop their bombs but we were lucky to be missed each time. This was either because of the poor skill of the Japanese pilots or the superb skill of the Buffalo’s crew.

But mixed into the shifting formations of attacking aircraft, there were always several coming in either at angles much too steep to drop their bombs or much too low. And those ones always came in very straight and very fast, and would keep coming even after you hit them, until you completely destroyed them. Those were the ones that absolutely scared the ever-living daylights out of me.

Sometime during the fourth or fifth wave of these attacks, my attention turned toward one of the escorting destroyers. They were under furious attack as well, and I thought maybe I could figure out what the Japs were doing if I watched them from a different point of view.

A Val dive bomber broke loose from the high altitude formation and began a shallow dive. There was, as before, no way to release a bomb from that angle and hit a target. At an altitude of about five thousand feet, he pushed his aircraft over into a very steep dive. The anti-aircraft guns on the destroyer had hit him several times by then, and the aircraft was trailing smoke. There was no way to release a bomb at that angle and speed and expect it to land on target, let alone pull out of a dive like that without the pilot losing consciousness.

As the aircraft continued on, there was no bomb release. “Maybe they hit the pilot?” I thought to myself. But I quickly disregarded that because it still didn’t explain the attack angle.

Then, with no apparent attempt to pull out, or veer away, that airplane crashed straight down into the center of the superstructure of the destroyer and exploded into a huge fireball.

Because I remembered the Japanese sailor who blew himself up on the deck of my ship that very morning, I figured out what they were doing. And when I realized this, had I not been busily engaged in directing my own ship in combat, I would have surely been sick.

“Admiral, something is different,” I said.

The attack had been over for almost two hours. I had consulted the major before deciding to invite the admiral to the bridge to give him the report on my observations of the battle.

“How so?” the admiral responded.

“The attack pattern has changed. Some dive bombers aren’t releasing their bombs. The dive pattern has shifted from a straight run from a high altitude, to a slight dive until they reach a lower altitude and higher speed, followed by a dive which would be too steep to use a bomb effectively.”

“Why couldn’t these just be unskilled pilots?” the admiral asked.

“It’s like they don’t intend to pull out, sir. Usually you can hit a Nip’s plane once or twice with anti-aircraft fire, and they turn away, but some of these are not turning back, even when obviously damaged. And then there are the low level bombers that come in right down almost on the water.”

“What would be the purpose of such an approach?” he asked me, looking a little puzzled.

“That’s just it. They could never release their bombs without getting caught and killed in the blast themselves,” I answered.

“So just what is it you think they’re trying to do?”

“Well, the Japs are a different culture where honor is everything and to lose a fight brings an ultimate dishonor. My marine division officer, an expert in Nip culture, reminded me of the passage from Sun Tzu’s Art of War: ‘On desperate ground, I would proclaim to my soldiers the hopelessness of saving their lives. For it is the soldier’s disposition to offer an obstinate resistance when surrounded, to fight hard when he cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into danger.’”

“What exactly are you saying, Commander Williams?”

“Sir, I think we are winning the war much more than the Japs can face up to. Look at all the territory they had at their peak and where they are now. And with us taking back the Philippines, there seems little hope for them maintaining their empire for much more than a few years.

I continued, “It may seem crazy to you or me, but I think they are deliberately crashing their aircraft into us, because they are fighting as Sun Tzu would say, ‘on desperate ground.’”

“That’s insane!” he said. “What kind of a nut job would do something like that?”

“Is it really, though?” I asked. “Look, sir; if you completely set aside the abhorrent principles of killing yourself like that and look at it from the tactical viewpoint,” I added as he began to look at me like I was one of those “nut jobs.”

“But Commander Williams, all through the war, there have been examples of injured Nips crashing their aircraft into our ships,” the admiral said, apparently still not willing to believe it.

“I understand, sir, but think about it: for the price of two or three planes, bombs, and pilots, they might be getting hits that would sink an aircraft carrier or battleship. Whereas before, we would shoot down twenty or thirty of them, and some of the time, they still wouldn’t even get any hits at all.

“It is an act of desperation, for sure,” I continued. “And the pilots themselves would have to be insane to do it. But I think if that’s what they’re doing, insane or not, they are going to get some very terrifying results from it. Because how do you defend yourself against a man who knows he’s already dead?”

“I see your point, Commander Williams,” the admiral said. “Do you have anything else to report?”

“Just the observation that the enemy has to be very desperate to do something like this, sir. I think we have them on the run in the worst possible way, and from here on out, they are going to fight like cornered rabid dogs.”

And rabid dogs are all that they were in my mind. To me, they were nothing but the most utterly soulless and depraved animals to ever live, and I became frustrated that I could not think of enough to do to eliminate this blight from the face of God’s Earth.

Wounded Buffalo

Now, when you are the commanding officer of a ship during wartime, there are your good days, like the flag raising at Iwo Jima; your bad days, like the events following the bombing of the Franklin; and then there are your outright terrible days. There was a time when the Buffalo experienced several really bad days in a row, which then stretched out to weeks in a row.

During a war, you learn to expect that bad things are going to happen, but you never know just what will happen, when it will happen, or how bad it will be. No matter how prepared you are, it is never quite accurate to say you are ready. When something finally does happen, you suddenly experience the cumulative effects of the decisions you make on a daily basis. After being in command for only a short time, you realize not many decisions are unimportant, so you always have to think them through, try to predict what the outcome of them will be, then hope for the best.

It’s really not that much different than daily life, except if you make the wrong call as the skipper of a Cleveland-class cruiser while the Japanese are shooting at you, almost thirteen hundred people could end up dead in a hurry.

We were out patrolling, mostly for submarines, as part of a destroyer/cruiser task force. The idea at the time was to keep the Japs from threatening the supply lines to the forward bases, of which Iwo Jima was one. We were essentially escorting three destroyers, providing additional air support for them in case of attack while they hunted for submarines.

As the flag ship for the group we had the “fortune” of having an admiral and his staff on board. I never liked being the flagship of a group of ships because sometimes the admirals like to think they are in command of the ship rather than the task force, and that really can get in the way.

If you have ever seen the Pacific Ocean, you would know it is really something to behold. It can get very rough at times, but for some long periods of time, it can become very smooth and peaceful, like glass. It is almost like the ship is floating on a very large mirror where everything in the sky is almost perfectly reflected in the water.

This day was one of the smooth days, the kind you really like because you can see everything coming for miles around the ship. Things like periscopes and torpedo wakes really stand out when the ocean is like that, and in combat, that can really make a huge difference. It couldn’t be counted on to always protect you, but it did tend to relax you a bit.

I was on the bridge with my old friend from the Oklahoma, Chuck Lewis. We were reviewing the procedures for air combat and training, not that I wanted to make any changes; that would be the executive officer’s job. I just always felt as captain, I needed to know what the department heads were thinking and how the crews were trained in case of a crisis, as well as knowing how the ship’s systems operate. That was the kind of thinking that won me the Navy Cross at Pearl.

As well, it is a sign of a good officer to know precisely where his authority ends, and not to step on the authority of those above and below you, as well as not allow them to step on yours. As captain, you do have the trump card of the ship, but you really have to know how and when to use it, or you could end up in big trouble from the admirals in a hurry.

Chuck was in the middle of telling me about some of the improvements in the optics on the directors for the secondary batteries when I noticed one of the watches on the starboard side sit up and grab his binoculars. It is interesting how you get “in tune” with the crew and recognize exactly when one of them notices something wrong.

I held up my hand to signal Lewis to stop talking and looked off in the direction the watch was looking, and with my other hand, reached for my own binoculars. For several seconds, I scanned the water between the horizon and the starboard bow.

The escorting destroyers were pretty far out, so the sound of the Buffalo going through the water didn’t mess with their sonar. The water was perfectly smooth except for a series of tiny ripples, almost undetectable by the human eye, maybe several hundred yards out, and proceeding at a rapid pace directly across the course of my ship.

“Damn!” I said to Lewis, just as the watch turned around and shouted, “Torpedoes starboard bow! Range six hundred yards!”

“Battle stations now!” I responded as I began the mental calculations on exactly how to defend my ship for the attack that had just begun.

We weren’t totally unprepared, but we weren’t exactly expecting an attack on a day like this, either, which is probably exactly what the captain of the Japanese sub was thinking, and why he decided to attack. In some ways, it was just like Pearl. It was a surprise attack.

“Sneaky Jap bastards are good at that,” I thought.

It still amazes me how fast the human mind, even when caught by surprise, can look at a set of variables and come up with the best possible solution for the situation. I could see four distinctly different wakes coming toward us, fanned out over several degrees from the firing point, and right away, I could tell the captain of the Jap sub that fired them was a good shot. His turn in the game was well played, and now, what should I do about it?

If the Buffalo would accelerate quickly enough on a straight course, we could have one pass aft, but we would still be hit by at least two, probably three. If we maintained current course and speed, we would have one pass forward and still be hit by three. If we could turn quickly enough, with enough acceleration, maybe we could have one pass forward and one aft, but still be most likely hit by two, and if extremely lucky, maybe one or even none. A turn to port would leave the ship’s propellers toward the torpedoes, resulting in the possible loss of propulsion. A starboard turn would protect the propellers but would sacrifice some ship’s stores and forward battery powder magazines.

However, if a torpedo hits the engineering spaces in a turn either direction, particularly below the armor belt, propulsion could still be lost. And a hard starboard turn causes the ship to roll to port, leaving the armor protection well above the normal level in the water. A port turn would push the ship’s armor deeper into the water on the starboard side and minimize the damage done to the internal systems. It all depended on how fast the Buffalo could accelerate and how quickly she could turn.

On top of all of that, the crew wouldn’t reach their battle stations until well after the torpedoes hit. A good portion of the watertight doors and hatches would not be closed, so there would be a lot of additional flooding to deal with.

All of these thoughts, and more, flooded my mind as I worked out the different scenarios. In the blink of an eye, my mind turned out a hundred different pictures of what could happen next. The lives of all on board depended on getting the best possible answer, and maybe even that wouldn’t be good enough. And in another blink of an eye, I selected the one on which all of our hopes and prayers would shortly come to rest.

“Hard to starboard, emergency flank speed! Now, goddamn it!” I shouted to the helmsman, who no doubt was prepared for my orders and began spinning the wheel in his hands as quickly as I spoke. And slowly, too slowly for comfort, the twelve-thousand tons of steel named Buffalo began to accelerate and turn to face the oncoming torpedoes.

As the seconds passed, the ship began its predicted roll toward the port side, thus raising the starboard armor belt high up out of the water. I stared unblinking at the oncoming torpedo wakes as they sped toward the unprotected underbelly of the Buffalo. Timing was everything, and this had to be timed just right, or the best possible outcome could quickly become the worst.

I turned my attention to the closest of the torpedoes, the forward one. It began to look like it would miss by a long shot, evaded by the quickness of the Buffalo’s starboard turn. I looked at the aft one and knew it would be close but would most likely miss. The ship, as I predicted, would not be agile enough to avoid all of the torpedoes. By then, the other two were getting very close, so I decided it was time to put the armor belts back into the water to protect the ship, as they may, from the inevitable explosions. No way around it; some of us were going to die.

“Hard to port!” I shouted at the helm. And, much more quickly, the Buffalo responded, having accelerated to attack speed. The ship rapidly began a starboard roll, shoving the armor belt deep down into the water.

I quickly checked my forty-five as I watched the oncoming torpedoes.

Several twenty-millimeter guns opened fire in a last-ditch attempt to detonate the torpedoes before they contacted the ship. Sometimes, if you are lucky, it works, but most of the time it doesn’t.

The forward one sped by some distance from the ship. The second one was going to hit the bow section of the Buffalo; it was inevitable. The third was going to hit amidships. The fourth was going to be close, maybe feet or inches between hit or miss; it was hard to tell. All I could do to protect the ship had been done at that point, so I ducked and waited the last few seconds for the explosions, resigning the Buffalo and her crew to their fate.

Boom! The first torpedo hit forward, sending a plume of water and small debris high above the ship that showered down over all of the forward weather decks. The Buffalo convulsed violently as the smell of the chemicals in the explosives mixed with fuel oil filled the air.

Boom! The second torpedo hit amidships, and once again, the Buffalo, in the thrashing violence of agony, tried to leap out of the water. “That’s the one that is going to hurt,” I thought to myself as more oily salt water showered down over the bridge.

I got up and looked aft, deciding to look at the fourth torpedo wake to see if it would miss. The forward smokestack began to belch out steam, which was usually symptomatic of a boiler in the fire room flooding, which blocked my view of the aft parts of the ship. I couldn’t follow the track of the torpedo all the way, but it looked like it had passed very near the ship and, thank God, missed.

Now, I have to say that any torpedo is more powerful than you would want to be around when it goes off, but these ones seemed milder than the one that struck the North Carolina earlier in the war. I thought at the time maybe the Japanese were using up stocks of older, less powerful torpedoes than they had been using earlier on. The Japanese supply lines had been disrupted very badly at that time, and maybe they had been having troubles building newer models and were forced to use older prewar versions. After the Japanese surrendered, it was discovered from their records this was exactly what had occurred. And that fact alone may have saved the Buffalo.

The next thing in the order of combat I had to do was to try and present as small of a target to the enemy as possible while at the same time, widening the distance. “Continue port turn to heading one zero five,” I told the helm. This would leave our propellers toward them but would widen the distance and lower our profile to them, leaving less of a target.

“All stations report!” I said to the talker on the bridge. Most of the ship would be at battle stations by then, and I needed to know how badly we had been hit.

“Signal, alert the rest of the task force that the torpedoes came from bearing two eight five relative to our current position,” I told the signalman, hoping the destroyers would be able to find the submarine and at least keep it busy, if not sink it. We were turning to the exact correct heading for them to fire another shot at us and destroy our propulsion systems, but we needed to open the distance between us as fast as we could. And I was betting the sub that fired those torpedoes was going to go deep and silent and try to slip away rather than fight three destroyers.

As the Buffalo continued its turn, I began to notice she was slowing slightly. “Were we losing propulsion?” I wondered to myself.

As the ship came out of her port turn, she didn’t settle back to an even keel. There was definitely a starboard list, only a few degrees but probably increasing. I could already tell my ship was wounded, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. I got out the list of stations that I used to mark off as they reported “ready” for general quarters. Then I got out a diagram I hoped I would never have to use; it was an inboard profile of the ship that I would use to keep track of the damaged systems and areas of the ship. I listened as the bridge talker told me the stations that were reporting.

The reports came in slowly at first, not at all with the “snap and pop” that would be normal for the crew. I could tell large portions of them were disoriented, which again gave me some hints on the condition of the ship.

The areas above decks reported first, then below decks aft. No reports came in from forward below decks, damage control central, the forward main guns, or any of the engine rooms. I began to count the systems in those areas of the ship as being off line in my mind at that point. Even though we were still moving, and thus did have some engine power, I didn’t know how long it would last. If I can’t communicate with them, I can’t use them effectively.

The one that bothered me the most was damage control central. It was going to take a coordinated effort to keep the Buffalo swimming, and on a damaged ship, they are the nerve center that makes that effort work. In a life-and-death situation, information is everything, and that’s where it was supposed to come from.

Just then, Rear Admiral Parkhurst appeared on the bridge. Everybody, myself included, was so busy at their stations doing their jobs that nobody noticed him come in.

“Captain, report,” I heard his voice say behind me.

Glancing up quickly, I saw him standing next to me in battle gear, life preserver, and everything. He looked a little nervous, and I could tell right away this was his first combat.

“Nothing to report yet, sir, except two torpedo hits, which I’m sure you heard; other than that, we are very busy trying to figure out what is going on.” I didn’t want to deal with him at that moment; the captain’s duty is to his ship, and at that time, the admiral seemed to be in relatively good condition.

I very badly needed a damage report. The starboard list was increasing rapidly.

“Runners to the bridge,” I said to the talker. I had prepared for the possibility that, during combat, some parts of the ship might not have communications. Our situation didn’t look good, and reports were coming in much slower. A lot of the areas from the forward part of the ship had not reported yet, and I should have heard from the engine areas and damage control by then.

“Captain, I want a report of what is going on,” the admiral said.

“I don’t have anything more to report to you at this time, sir; we are assessing the situation as rapidly as we can,” I told him as the first of my trained runners reported. “I need a report from damage control central. Anything you can tell me. Go!”

I looked out at the ocean. We were going much slower, and the list to starboard was still increasing. “Damn!” I thought. “I need more information to act on.” The second runner reported in. “Find out what’s going on in the forward fire room and engine room. Go!” I told him.

The admiral continued to fidget.

The third runner reported in. “Find out what is going on in the aft fire and engine room. Go!” I told him.

“Sir,” I said turning toward the admiral, “we have three destroyers with us in the task force. I propose that we have the two closest to where the torpedoes came from continue to hunt the Nip submarine and the third to pull in close to us and prepare for possible towing if we lose propulsion, or rescue if we have to abandon ship.”

“Do you think we will have to abandon, captain?” the admiral asked. I couldn’t help but notice the trembling in his voice.

Then I knew for sure he was going to lose his nerve to some larger degree. He was as white as a ghost.

“I don’t know that yet, sir,” I replied. “I still haven’t gotten reports from damage control or engineering.”

Just then, the talker notified me that the aft engineering had reported in. There were several injuries because one of the high pressure steam lines ruptured and was leaking. It would have to be shut down for at least several hours for repair soon, but for now, they could still maintain some power.

That explained why the ship was still moving, albeit much slower, but there was still nothing from the forward engine room. I began to guess at that time that the forward engine room was gone.

“Captain,” the admiral said again, “do you think we will have to abandon?”

“I really don’t know at this time, admiral, but what I do need to know is, can we order the destroyers to cover us as I proposed?”

“Yes, proceed,” he replied.

“Signal, radio the destroyer Lawe; tell them to pull alongside and prepare for possible tow or rescue operations. Contact the Fletcher and the Barton and tell them to continue with the hunt for the Jap sub. Admiral’s orders.”

I turned to the bridge talker at that point and told him, “Tell the gun boss I want all watches to look for periscopes and not to hesitate opening fire on any submarine that surfaces. If they stick their heads up, blow them off.”

“Yes sir!” he replied.

“And get the pilots of the Kingfishers up here on the double,” I added.

Several minutes had gone by when the talker told me the forward main guns had reported in. The upper parts of the guns were manned and ready, but the lower decks of the turrets and mezzanines were slowly flooding. There were also reports of fuel oil leaking into the forward magazines.

“Flood the power rooms and ammunition areas of the number one and number two main guns on the starboard side now!” I told him. “And after that, evacuate the forward main guns and reassign any crew to damage control.” We did not want a fire down there. If something touched off the powder in the magazines, it would blow the ship in half.

About then, the first runner returned to the bridge. He had the rest of the badly needed reports from the missing areas all at once from the damage control officer.

Damage control central was flooding, and Lieutenant Commander Schuller was injured by a piece of debris from one of the explosions. The injury was not very bad, so he was still on duty. That was why damage control was so slow reporting. They had begun to set up operations in a compartment on the next deck above their normal compartment and had to recoordinate all of their efforts from there.

The forward fire room was a total loss and flooded within seconds of the second torpedo hit, which struck the ship at about frame sixty-two. Only two of the crew got out alive, and they were badly burned. The forward engine room was flooding by a ruptured bulkhead at frame sixty-nine, separating it from the flooded fire room. Efforts were continuing to stop the flooding, but the chances didn’t look good. The forward engine room compartment could be expected to be flooded within about twenty minutes.

Several of the superheated steam lines were ruptured in the aft fire room and would need to be shut down within the next three hours, at best guess, to repair. Estimated repair time was about six hours.

The first torpedo struck the ship at frame thirty-two. The ship’s list at the time was about fifteen degrees starboard and counter flooding had begun aft and port to try to correct the list. The ship was riding down by the bow with about eight feet of freeboard left (normally, it was about twice that much) on the starboard side.

The lower decks of turrets one and two were flooding. The ammunition magazines were being deliberately flooded, as ordered, to prevent the possibility of fires from fuel oil touching off the powder in the magazines.

The only problem was that twenty-one crewmen were trapped forward of the number one mezzanine by the flooding to prevent fire in the ammunition rooms. The sound-powered phone circuit to the compartment they were trapped in was still operational, and they were in no immediate danger, but they were trapped. Damage control was attempting to pump out the compartments around them and rescue them, but several leaks from damaged pipes and fittings, as well as hatches, still needed to be found and plugged before the compartments could be dewatered.

Large areas of the forward half of the ship were losing buoyancy, and damage control was still trying to slow the flooding. Several critical hatches had not been closed when the torpedoes struck, and to make matters worse, several had been damaged by the explosion and were leaking because they no longer fit properly. “At best case, we can expect the ship to settle to within several feet of freeboard forward on the starboard side, if we can keep the bow above the water at all,” he reported.

Operational systems included electrical power, aft propulsion at about eighty percent and decreasing as time went on, most ship’s communications on line, although damage control was still being rerouted, and all secondary batteries on line as well as all anti-aircraft guns. The fire mains were fully functional, steering was normal, and the aft main batteries were still on line.

So the rapid assessment was that we still had most of our teeth but would soon not be able to move. All of that would be okay, relatively speaking, as long as we were able to remain above the water. The forward part of the ship was sinking fast, with twenty-one of the crew trapped forward because of my order to flood the powder rooms. And the enemy submarine was still out there, and for all I knew, with some of his friends.

I told two of the runners to set up a rotation between them. They were to shadow the damage control officer and give me updates every ten minutes. I told the first runner to tell Lieutenant Commander Schuller I wanted the best case he just gave me to happen as an order. We were not going to let the Buffalo sink under any circumstances.

“Report, captain,” the admiral said, reminding me he was still there.

I handed the admiral the report and watched his expression as he read it. When you watch people closely enough, you can tell what they are going to do. This man was nervous. He had never seen combat. He had never lost a ship or crewmates. And he was afraid. I saw it in his eyes: he was going to run.

I turned to the talker and ordered him to “Get Major Johnson and the XO up here now.”

About the time the admiral finished the report, the two float plane pilots appeared on the bridge.

“Captain, we have to abandon ship.” The admiral had said exactly what I had predicted.

Being unwilling to give up my new ship to the Japs as well as needing to stall for time, I ignored him and turned to the pilots.

“I want you two to work out a rotational schedule to keep this ship covered from the air. There may be more submarines in the area, and you need to keep an eye out for them as well, but your primary mission is to help the destroyers find the submarine that attacked us. We can’t get up enough speed to use the catapults, so you will have to have the crane operators put your aircraft down in the water, and you can take off from there.”

We spent another minute or two working out the details when the admiral decided he had had enough.

“Captain, you will not ignore me anymore. I order you to abandon ship now.”

The major arrived just in time to hear what the admiral said. If he was shocked by it his expression didn’t show.

“Yes, captain,” he said.

“Standby, major,” I replied, knowing full well he would listen to the discussion between the admiral and me.

“Admiral, we are not going to abandon this ship,” I said, looking him dead in the eye.

“Maybe you didn’t understand my order, captain,” he replied more firmly.

“I understand you perfectly, sir, but I maintain the Buffalo will not be abandoned until all hope is gone.”

“Damn it, captain!” he said “You’ve seen the damage report. This ship may be sinking, and an enemy submarine could be stalking us right now. This is not safe water to be in with a damaged ship. Navy policy is to scuttle the ship and get the crew off and leave the area.”

“Admiral, we have men trapped below decks, and I will not abandon them, as a minimum, until we have tried everything we can to save them and keep this ship afloat.”

“Those men are acceptable losses, captain!”

I was not at all ready to hear that. I raised my voice high above the rest of the noise on the bridge and shouted, “They are not acceptable losses to their families or the rest of this crew sir, and neither would you be!”

The admiral recoiled slightly and paused, thinking for a moment. I could see he was going to back down if I gave him a way out.

Commander Thompson appeared on the bridge at this time and quickly perceived something was not going well between me and the admiral.

“Are you waiting for the enemy sub to come around and finish us off?” the admiral shouted back.

“God damn it, admiral! I am not going to lose another ship to those slant-eyed sons of bitches!”

“This is a career decision, captain! The regulations state that during circumstances like this, a ship may be ordered abandoned.”

“According to the regulations, the safety of this ship and its crew are my responsibility alone!” I told him, giving him, the opening I hoped he would take.

“Damn, Williams,” the admiral said with a look of resignation on his face, “Halsey was right about you. You do have guts.”

He paused for a moment, pointed his finger at me, then continued. “Very well, captain. You try to save your ship if you can. But know this: if this ship sinks, you better go down with it, or I am going to personally hang your ass from the highest mast I can find.”

“XO,” I said, “the admiral and his staff will be transferring to the Lawe at the soonest possible time. I also want you to prepare a list of personnel that may not be needed, given our current circumstances, in case we need to offload them as well. Damage control, gunners for the guns that are still functioning in case we run into a fight, medical personnel, and a skeleton crew for engineering must remain on board.”

“Yes, sir,” the commander said and was off, with the admiral trailing him.

I noticed at that time the entire crew of the bridge had stopped their work and were silently staring at me. The major was looking at me, smiling slightly (which was rare for him), and nodding.

“Thank you major; your services are not required at this time,” I said, turning to him.

“Very well, sir,” the major replied, and was gone.

“Alright men, come on, we have a lot of work to do,” I said and sat back down in my chair.

One of the runners returned at that time and reported to me the bow was down to three feet of freeboard on the starboard side. The flooding was slowing, but the bow was still sinking, and the list was now passing twenty five degrees. All voids usable for counter flooding, aft and port, were filled to capacity. It didn’t look like it would be possible to keep the starboard bow above water using any conventional methods.

“Tell him he has permission to flood other non-combat related compartments aft and port if needed to stabilize the ship. He can even flood the hangar area if he has to, but only as a last resort because we don’t want to take on too much free water in case of heavy seas.”

“Also tell him,” I continued, “I am going to give the engine room the chance to make their repairs on the engines starting now. Be prepared to rig for tow as soon as the Lawe is along side of us.”

I told the talker to inform the engine room that it was time for them to start their repairs, and I wanted to know when we would be able to have propulsion again.

The sun would be setting in about four hours, and it was dangerous to sit still in the water for that time, so we would have to be prepared to have the Lawe tow us for awhile.

“All stop,” I ordered the helm. And soon after that, the Buffalo was dead in the water.

That was a hard set of orders to give. Taking on more water would set the ship lower in the ocean than we wanted to be. There was no chance we could survive another torpedo or maneuver effectively in case of an air attack with all of that water on board and only our aft engines. All of the unrestrained water we were taking on would seriously affect the stability of the ship, even for a potential tow, and would have to be pumped out before we could hope to sustain even moderate seas. But most of all, I hoped the planes and destroyers would keep the Jap sub from coming up to attack us again.

About half an hour later, the Lawe was alongside, and the admiral, his staff, and most of the injured that were able to be moved were transferred off. The tow was rigged at what seemed like a record pace, and soon, we were making a creeping three to four knots. Not nearly fast enough to evade attack, but at least our position was changing, so hopefully we would not be as easily found by other Japs.

One of the two float planes was lowered into the water by crane and took off to help with the hunt for the submarine that fired on us. I didn’t really have any hope it would be found, but I couldn’t leave the ship exposed any more than I had to. They were probably very deep and silent and creeping away by then. That’s what I would have done. Hopefully, the planes would be able to give us early warning of further attack and keep us covered until nightfall.

A short time later, the Fletcher and the Barton began dropping depth charges, which were most likely more ceremonial than effective. After awhile, they moved into formation with us in a flanking position.

As the remainder of the afternoon passed, Lieutenant Commander Schuller continued to send runners with damage reports on a regular basis.

The counter flooding eventually stopped the ship from listing further, but the bow continued to sink slowly for awhile. It finally stopped with a thirty-one degree list and a very meager eighteen inches between the main deck on the starboard side and Davy Jones’s locker.

Keeping up with the continuous damage reports made the rest of the day fly by at an extremely quick pace. Plans were put in action to move as much of the ship’s stores to the port side aft to act as a counterbalance to the extreme amount of water which now flooded the forward starboard part of the ship. At the same time, as many pumps as possible were working on removing spilled fuel oil and water from the flooded compartments.

The engine repairs were proceeding at a very rapid pace, and soon, the ship’s aft propulsion system would be back online, operating at nearly one hundred percent.

I have never seen a ship’s crew operate in such a united and single-minded fashion before. It soon became apparent we would be able to save our ship.

The major factor in the damage control efforts, besides the effectiveness of the crew, was that we never lost electrical power.

But there was one thing about the whole situation which really tore me up inside and that was the twenty-one trapped crewmen. It’s not only that they were trapped, but it was my order to flood those spaces that trapped them. I tried to tell myself it was the only way to save the ship. If the fuel in the ammunition magazines would have caught fire, the bow would have been blown right off and those men would surely have died anyway. But that didn’t help me. The simple fact was, it was my order to secure and flood those areas that trapped them.

For the last several years, I had tried over and over to come to terms with the loss of the Oklahoma’s crew. Ensign Flaherty, who won the Medal of Honor and served directly under my command, stung me the most. The loss of such a bright and talented officer, who was properly honored as one of America’s greatest heroes, still hurts me to this day.

For most of the crew that was lost on the Okie, death came very slowly. The idea of being trapped inside the hull of a sinking ship filled me with the most acute terror. Let alone the fact of no food, water, or even light. They went to their deaths slowly, starved and thirsty, not knowing if there was ever a hope of rescue. For the most part, they didn’t even know who had attacked them.

While the latter didn’t apply to the men who were trapped several decks below me, most of the former certainly did.

The basic problems in getting them out were they were surrounded by either very thick armored bulkheads or a flammable mixture of seawater and fuel, not to mention several tons of high explosives.

The compartment above them was flooded to about five feet. The compartment to the starboard was exposed to the ocean. Forward and port were thick armored bulkheads. If we tried to cut through them using torches, we would have created a huge fire hazard, and they were in a room full of explosives. And it was probable that the fumes of cutting through something that thick would have killed them anyway, which was what happened to several of the crew from the Oklahoma when rescue attempts were made there.

The normal direction to exit that compartment was aft, and it was completely flooded. The efforts to pump it out were slow because there were still some major leaks around it that needed to be plugged.

Two things really added urgency. One was the total lack of ventilation to them. The other was the condition of the bulkhead. The one officer inside that compartment, Ensign Gomez, reported that the starboard bulkhead was bulged when the torpedo hit. It had some stress cracks and groaned from time to time but so far remained watertight. How long could they be able to hold out without fresh air? And how long would that bulkhead hold?

Just before sunset, Lieutenant Commander Schuller showed up on the bridge to give the report in person and get authority to reorganize the crew into different working parties to better cover periods of rest and work between the crew. The efforts to transfer solid weight inside the ship as a counterbalance to the floodwater had begun in earnest as well as the removal of flood water. The ship had leveled out to about twenty-seven degrees, and the freeboard on the starboard side had increased to about two and a half feet.

When he had finished his report, I asked him how the trapped crew was doing. The grim expression on his face told me he was expending every effort he could to get those men out, but he didn’t have a lot of hope. He said our first priority was to pump out the compartment above them and drill a hole through to provide some fresh air.

Any cutting was out of the question because of all of the oil and explosives. The only way they could be rescued was to pump out the compartment to the aft of them, but they were having some major difficulties finding the leaks. And although nobody was telling the crew trapped inside, the bulged bulkhead could give way at any time, and they had nothing to shore it up with.

As he filled me in, my mind went back over the men who were trapped inside the hull of the Oklahoma, and I reached a decision.

“Does the phone line to that compartment connect to my circuit here on the bridge?” I asked.

“No, sir, but with minimal effort and about fifteen minutes we could rig one up,” he replied.

“Very well, do so.” And he immediately set off to work.

If those men were going to die they would not do so thinking they were alone.

Before I knew it, the lieutenant commander was handing me a sound-powered phone set and telling me Ensign Gomez was waiting on the other end of the line.

“Ensign Gomez, how are you men holding up down there?” I asked.

“Well, sir,” a slightly nervous voice replied, “we’ve got some minor cuts and bruises, sir, but we are basically okay. We could use a deck of cards, some sandwiches, and some of the men have expressed the desire to have a cold beer as well.”

I laughed a little bit to lighten the atmosphere and replied, “I want you men to know we are doing everything we can to get you out of there and get you some sandwiches as well as some of the beer in the recreational stores.”

“We know that, sir,” he said. “The XO talked to us earlier and told me the admiral ordered the ship abandoned, and you are risking court-martial as well as your own lives to try to save us.”

I paused for a moment, unprepared, I didn’t know Commander Thompson had talked to them, and in the flurry of handling the emergency I hadn’t really had time to think about what I had actually done. The doing of it was just a sort of second nature to me.

“That’s right,” I said, shoving the sudden lump I felt in my throat back down, “but the ship is safe enough for now and don’t worry about my career. It’s the right decision and just part of being in command of a ship during war.”

“Sir, we appreciate that,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, ensign?” I asked.

“I just want to see my wife and little boy again, sir.”

“We all will, ensign, we all will,” I said, making a promise I knew I was powerless to keep as there were already several of my crew who, thanks to the Japs, would never see their families again. “But I want a promise from you, ensign.”

“Yes, sir.”

“As an officer, you are responsible for the men under your command, and as such, you are their leader. If you remain strong, they will remain strong and lend their strength back to you in return. No matter what happens, you must not lose your nerve. Do you understand me, ensign?”

“Yes, sir,” the voice on the other end of the phone replied with a little more vigor.

“Very well, ensign, that’s it for now. I’ll check in from time to time to see how you are doing. I’m going to put a listener on this circuit here on the bridge just in case you need something from me. Okay?”

“Okay, sir. Goodbye.”

I took off the sound powered phones and with a sudden feeling of anger and frustration turned to Lieutenant Commander Schuller and said, “You have twelve hours to get those men out of there, or I’ll relieve you and find someone who will.”

As I turned to walk away, I realized what I had just said and turned back.

“Alex,” I said putting my hand on his shoulder, “I’m sorry. Just do the best you can, alright?”

He held his hand up toward me and said “I understand, captain. I’ll get those men out.”

“And when you do,” I said, “make sure they have plenty of beer from the recreational supplies. And make sure it’s cold.”

About two hours later, I was sitting in the dark on the bridge, unable to sleep. It got kind of quiet up there since we were under tow and the aft engines were still offline.

Out of the quiet, I heard the ship groan, somewhat like the Oklahoma did when it rolled over, and then I felt, rather than heard, a pop, rather faintly and from far below. The talker I assigned to watch that phone line sat up suddenly and shouted at me.

“Captain! There’s something going on down there!”

I grabbed the phone set away from him and put it on.

“…us! God help us!”

“Gomez, what’s happening?” I shouted into the mouthpiece.

“The bulge… bulkhead just gave way… the compartment is flooding! very… fast… to our necks… here… die… God…”

Then silence.

I took off the headset, dropped it on the deck, and went back to my chair and stared out into the darkness.

The Surrender: Part Two

Most of the last months of the war went by with the Buffalo in drydock at Pearl Harbor. The trip back to Pearl was the roughest trip of my career. The ship was beat up pretty bad, and rest was hard to come by, but the worst part of it was the smell of decay from the bodies of the men who could not be retrieved, and there was not a single place in the ship you could go to get away from it. Most of the crew took to resting above decks, which both I and the calmness of the sea allowed for.

The damage report from Lieutenant Commander Schuller after he had a chance to look the ship over in drydock was, from the standpoint of the crew, very disheartening. The bulkhead that failed and killed the twenty-one trapped crewmen was apparently only held solid while the weight of the area of the ship which had lost buoyancy was on the beams behind it. So as the crew transferred the stores and pumped the water out of the area to raise the bow higher out of the water, thus bringing the Buffalo back from the brink of doom, the weight was shifted away from that area and caused a damaged support beam to fail. That left only the bulged bulkhead to support the entire weight of the ship against the Pacific Ocean. So every step we took to save them and the ship brought them closer to their deaths.

Most of the wreckage in Pearl had been cleaned up by then, which made it seem to me we were well on the way to healing from the attack, but the dead hulk of the Arizona was still right where she sank. The overturned Utah was rolled just far enough to get her out of the navigation channel and left to rust. Both of those ships remain there to this day.

My old ship, Oklahoma, had been refloated since November of ’43 and pushed aside in the Navy Yard as a dead hulk. My original assessment, that she would not be restored to combat status, was correct.

The former crew members of the Okie were allowed to board her and reclaim any personal possessions that were still salvageable, and after a short time thinking about it, I decided to take my chance to visit my old lost battlewagon.

I could see her from across the harbor where the Buffalo was in drydock, and it was shocking, really, to see our once proud ship in that condition. Most of the superstructure had been stripped off. The guns had all been removed as well to lighten her up for a long towing, which evidently still had not occurred. Every part of her was covered in rust, dirt, and debris of every mentionable kind and permanently stained with oil. I held out little hope that anything I had kept on board had survived in a usable condition, but still, visiting her was something I just had to do.

After getting the proper clearance from the yard workers, an escort was assigned to me for safety reasons. An old chief who worked in the repair yard carrying a large tool box met me at the plank and greeted me with a sharp salute. He handed me a hardhat, a flashlight, and coveralls, and warned me, “Be careful, sir; the Oklahoma is not in the best condition and is not the safest place to be.”

I smiled back at the chief and told him, “Thanks for your concern, chief, but I think it is a lot safer now than it was the last time I was on her.”

Kindly returning the smile, the chief replied, “I understand sir. I only mean to say it’s not going to be what you expect it to be.”

I turned around, crossed the plank, and stepped onto my old ship.

The teak deck was beginning to decay from neglect and having been submerged in warm salt water for the period of time she had lain upside-down on the floor of Pearl Harbor. Parts of it were missing entirely. All around was evidence of the yard crews with their cutting torches spattered on the deck with careless disregard for the condition of the ship. The tripod mast towers and superstructure, which had once so gracefully distinguished this once-proud ship, were gone entirely. Most of the topside hatches had either been removed or left open to expose the interior of the hull to the elements. Even as I surveyed the damage, I began to feel myself sinking into a state of reverie as I began to remember this ship as she was only a few short years ago. Almost unaware of it, I had stopped moving.

“Where was it you wanted to go, captain?” the chief gently asked.

Even in spite of the gentleness of his question, I jumped, startled by his question. “To the officer’s berthing quarters,” I quietly replied.

The chief led me forward to where the hatches that led to the interior of the ship used to be. Down the ladder we went, into the darkness below.

An eerie silence pervaded the ship, which seemed to press in all around me. It was strange, as if the ghosts of my departed crewmates were following me as I moved from compartment to compartment and through the passageways that connected them. I could see with my eyes the depth of the destruction inflicted by the Japanese in the attack, but with my mind, I saw the ship as she was when she was alive. I could hear the boilers, generators, and ventilation blowers, which you become so used to living on a ship, and yet my ears and nose perceived nothing but the stale, dead air, filled with the stench of death, war, and silence.

Normally, any other person would not have gone past that point, being overwhelmed by it, but I was driven almost by some invisible force to continue on.

We took the short passageway aft and entered the officer’s wardroom. It was in this room where I was eating bacon and scrambled eggs and drinking coffee served to me by our young Ensign Flaherty. Francis, who died in the attack, was later awarded the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of so many of the crew.

I realized I had been so busy fighting the Japs since then that I had almost forgotten him.

The officer’s wardroom always had an air of elegance about it. China plates as opposed to the metal trays the enlisted crew ate off of. The sturdy tables were always covered with decorated tablecloths. Pictures of the ship and the exotic places she had been adorned the walls and mess attendants—like waiters—were always there to serve your every need. It was a lot like going to a restaurant.

There was neither coffee now, nor bacon or eggs. And any pretense of the once-glamorous—for a battleship, anyway—nature of the compartment was gone. Broken dishes, utensils, chairs, and tables were sloppily thrown out of the way in the corner. Everything was covered with oil. Nothing was spared because nothing was sacred.

We proceeded aft down the very same passageway I ran through after the first torpedoes struck the ship. I wondered again what it was I hit my head on in the darkness during the attack and began to rub my aching head. “Maybe it’s the smell of the fuel oil making my head hurt,” I said to the chief.

“Maybe,” he replied.

We moved on aft around the turrets and came to the ladder that led both up to the main deck and down to the officer’s quarters where I was berthed. It was the same ladder where I had helped the injured crewman up out of the ship before. This time, we went down and found ourselves in the compartment where I used to live as a member of this ship’s crew.

The compartment had been pumped out, and any linen was removed to prevent mold but otherwise had been left alone. Everything was in disarray, but the lockers, being bolted to the floor, were still intact. Several of the lockers had been cut open, possibly by some of the officers I used to share this room with. I found mine, and the chief produced a set of bolt cutters from the toolbox he carried with him and snapped the rusted lock off of it.

I opened it up, prying the door with some force to break the rusty hinges. Inside were my old uniforms in total disarray and covered with oil. Letters from my wife in a box were covered with mold, and the ink no longer was legible from being submerged in salt water for so long. My rank insignia, medals, the last trophy I had won in the ship’s shooting team, and most of the very few trinkets we were allowed to bring aboard ship were right where I had left them, except they had been carelessly flipped over, then flipped back.

I spent the better part of an hour going through my old things, trying to find something to salvage, but there was nothing that was worth anything to me except for the medals and the trophy. Most of the contents were barely recognizable, let alone usable. On cue, the chief produced a bag from his tool box to put my effects in and asked if there was anything else I wanted to see while I was there.

“Yes there is, chief. I need to go to the armory.”

And so we wound our way through the darkened passages of the dead ship up and down several decks in a way I wouldn’t have gone before. The chief explained that, due to the damage to the ship, several passageways were no longer accessible the way they used to be. Some of the bulkheads and hatches were moved to facilitate the installation of the patches that were keeping the ship afloat, particularly on the port side.

I couldn’t help but think of the attack, when I made my run down the port side of the ship, ordering as many of the crew as I could to abandon ship.

On the way, we passed the turret where Ensign Flaherty was last seen by Lieutenant Lewis. I stopped briefly to look in but did not enter it.

Eventually we arrived in the armory. The heavy security door had been removed and was nowhere to be found. Back in the aft part of the room, I found what I was looking for: another small locker used for storing the officer’s sidearms. Captain Bode didn’t allow me to carry my sidearm in those days, and I had no reason to. We were at peace. The sidearm I currently carried was a replacement issued to me after the attack. With patience and practice, I had fine tuned it to shoot nearly as well as the one I was currently looking for.

The chief had a little more trouble with the door to this locker than he did with my own locker, but soon enough, we were inside. The handguns inside had all been spilled off of their racks when the ship rolled over and were in a pile in the bottom of the locker. I kept mine separate in its own box, which I found after a brief search. I wiped the nameplate off with the sleeve of my coveralls and read “LCDR Jacob Williams.”

“Lieutenant commander to captain in this time? That’s a pretty good advancement, sir,” the chief said. I just simply nodded in reply and opened the box.

I knew from the condition of the other guns in the locker what I would find. My prize-winning Colt forty-five had rusted solid. Only the pearl grips remained intact, and with a little bit of effort, they began to shine through the grime. My name, which had been engraved in the slide, along with the designs that had surrounded it, had all but rusted off.

Susan had been so very furious when she found out how much money I had spent having this gun engraved like that. And parts of it were even plated with gold. I’d spent nearly a whole paycheck as a lieutenant junior grade on it, even during the great depression. She didn’t talk to me for nearly a week.

But then I sat there in the darkness under a flashlight held by the chief, turning it over and over in my hand while it cast an eerie shadow on the floor. I was thinking of my wife and kids at home, of the way this ship used to be, and her crew members, both dead and alive. When was the last time I walked with Susan in the park where I asked her to marry me? When was the last time I rocked one of my children to sleep? When was the last time I actually enjoyed a sunset from the deck of a ship at sea? When was the last time I actually enjoyed just being an officer in the navy?

As my attention finally turned back to the Oklahoma, I realized everything there was a mere shadow of what it used to be, almost as if stuck passing half of the way between existence in this world into some sort of ghostly nonexistence. And the shadows of the way the ship currently was began to grow in my mind, while the images in my mind of what the Oklahoma used to be dimmed and became engulfed totally by the shadows and were no more.

The ghosts of the crew had left.

I put my rusted gun in the bag provided by the chief, breathed a heavy sigh, and said to him “Let’s go.” We worked our way upwards until we came out of a hatch on the main deck, very near where I was when Chief Fitzgerald got killed. When I reached the top deck, I stood there and paused for awhile, looking back and forth across the deck, feeling somehow dazed and empty.

“What are you looking for, captain?” the chief suddenly asked.

“What am I looking for?” I said out loud, having been startled by the suddenness of his question. “What do you mean?”

“What are you looking for, captain?” he repeated, looking straight back at me.

A little bit startled again by the unexpectedness of the question, plus feeling a very deep stinging sensation stirring in my soul from the question, I replied, “Why do you ask, chief?”

“Well, I’ve seen hundreds of crewmembers from the Oklahoma come back to this ship, and with an almost desperate expression, look around here for something, but none of them ever leave with anything more than what you have in that bag. And yet somehow, after telling me their story, they seem to feel better. It kind of makes me wonder if what you really came here looking for isn’t here on the Oklahoma but instead has been following you all along.”

“Explain yourself, chief,” I said, losing a little patience with him. In those days it was rare, if not outright unacceptable, for an enlisted man to question any officer in this fashion, let alone a captain. Yet, there was something about him; I found I could not resist this old sailor’s questioning. And the question itself seemed to be burning deep within me.

“Well, captain, you had to know what the oil and warm salt water would do to this ship and all of its contents. And you also had to have known there is nothing here of any tangible value to anyone anymore. There is nothing here on board except large piles of junk, and even the ship itself is nothing but scrap metal. So there is no sensible reason why you should have come back here, and yet, here you are, sir. Like so many of your shipmates before you.”

I gave the chief a long, questioning look.

Unflinching, he continued, “There is no more explanation for it, sir. Except to ask you, what are you looking for, captain?”

I had plenty of duties as the skipper of the Buffalo, which were no doubt falling behind as I spent more time there. But somehow, standing there between the third and fourth turret of the Oklahoma, I felt I had to tell the chief about the attack. I went through the whole thing, exactly as I remembered, and told him every little detail. As I told him, we walked again through the same parts of the ship I had gone through during the attack. I held nothing back from the time of the meeting in the wardroom until I stepped off the ship into the harbor and showed him exactly where everything happened, including where and how Joe Fitzgerald died.

Then I told him everything about being in the water and getting picked up by the boat while the attack still raged on around us. I also told him about the dispensary and the wounded coming in, the bomb in the courtyard, and the pretty nurse who was kind enough to put my stitches back in. And then there was the heroic run the Nevada made, and failed at, and the plight of the crew of the California as she sank, still tied to her berth and engulfed in burning fuel oil from the other battleships in the row.

Something in my mind began to shift at that point, and I felt myself relax in a way I had not been able to since December of ‘41. The only way I can describe it is a huge weight which had been pressing unseen upon my spirit had lifted and disappeared.

When I was done telling my story, we crossed the plank back to the dock and, being finished with our task, I handed him the hardhat, flashlight, and coveralls and put my own hat back on.

“If you ever feel you need to visit the Oklahoma again or want to see anything else, just feel free to come back,” the chief said to me.

“Thank you, chief, but I think I’m finished here.”

“Thank you for your story, sir,” he replied with another sharp salute. Returning his salute I turned and walked away leaving the shadows of the battleship Oklahoma forever behind me.

Later that evening, when I returned to the Buffalo, I decided to go down to the ship’s machine shop and work on my handgun. Such visits by the skipper might have been out of the ordinary on most ships, but the metal working tools on board were sufficient for the type of gunsmith work I was frequently doing to my Colt to keep it shooting the way I wanted it to. The crew had even set aside a tool box for me for the finer work on the triggers and such that I was continuously adjusting.

On the radio in the background was a USO show featuring Bob Hope doing an “interview” with a “Japanese Ensign Hari Kari Isasyko, a veteran kamikaze pilot of forty seven missions…”

As I worked at getting the pearl handgrips off of my old gun, I couldn’t help thinking about my visit to the Oklahoma earlier and that old chief. I wondered if he was a wise old man who probably knew I had a story to tell, and I had to tell it. How many of my other Oklahoma shipmates had told their stories to him?

One thing I knew he was right about; it wasn’t nearly what I expected it to be.

My chain of thoughts wandered back to that day in the wardroom before the Japs first attacked, and I found myself thinking of how our meeting went that morning. That kind of light-hearted joking around seemed to be a lot more frequent then, as compared to now. Maybe it was partly because of my promotion to captain, but even before that, there was a lot more seriousness because of the war. A lot of the men were willing enough to fight for their country, but many of them sorely wished to return home as well. “It’s a hard thing to miss your family,” I thought, “but we do still need to do what must be done.”

While I was working to get the rusted screws off of the grips of my old gun, I thought back when I had first found it on the wreck of the Oklahoma. For a moment, I had dared to hope it would still be salvageable with the right tools. But the barrel and slide had become so pitted that the etching could no longer be read, and the barrel would most likely not be able to withstand the pressure of being fired. I knew there was nothing I could do but to clean and polish the grips and put them on my newer gun.

I again recalled how angry Susan was when I had it engraved.

God, I missed her and the kids. It suddenly struck me that James was now three and a half years old. “What had I missed?” I wondered. June was nine. Robert was seven. James was walking, I knew, because I had seen the pictures Susan had been sending. Potty trained? I didn’t know. Talking? I didn’t know that either. I wouldn’t even recognize the sound of his voice. How would he even know who I was?

I had been so busy with the war that taking pictures to send home was rare and he was only a month old when I had sent them home to Ohio. I knew about things like June and Robert being in school and getting good grades from letters that Susan sent me, but other than that, who were my children really becoming? And when would I finally get to see them again?

As I was finishing polishing the handgrips, the chief from the machinist crew came in and greeted me.

“Captain, how are you tonight? Working on the Colt again?”

Chief Jackson was on the Buffalo’s shooting team, which was urged on by me, even though the responsibilities of my rank no longer allowed me to participate. He was a good enough shot who really knew his way around the mechanics of the sport. He was also from the South and had somewhat of an accent to back it up. The crew called him “Stonewall,” supposedly because he was a direct descendent of the legendary Civil War general.

“Yes,” I replied. “I visited my old ship, the Oklahoma, earlier today and managed to retrieve my old sidearm.”

“Really? Does it still work?”

“Not a chance,” I said, handing the rusted old Colt over to him to look at, “but I think the handgrips have cleaned up nicely.” As we continued talking, I unloaded my new forty-five and began to remove the stock wooden grips and replace them with the pearl ones.

The chief whistled and said, “It sure looks like it was a nice one. It’s a shame. Are those grips pearl?”

“Yes. I’m putting them on my new gun.”

“It’s too bad about the rest of this old one,” he said, laying it on the workbench next to us.

“Well, it’s in better shape than the ship I got it off of earlier today, or her crew for that matter. And I’m wondering about the former assistant gunnery officer.”

“You were on board during the attack, sir?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Bad, was it?”

“Yes.”

After an awkward pause, he said, “Don’t worry, captain; I’m sure we’ll get the Japs back plenty enough by the end of this war.”

“At this point in the war, I’m sure we will, Stonewall, but will it be worth it?”

“This war is necessary, sir. What do you mean?” he said, with a cross between protest and surprise in his voice that was unusual for an enlisted man to use on his commanding officer.

“I’m sure it is necessary for the United States, chief. And I’m sure for some reason, which we have yet to understand, when they attacked us, the Japs thought so as well. But I wonder, for the sake of all of us on both sides, if it’s worth it.

“I have a wife and three kids, and one is a son who is three who I haven’t seen since he was a month old. Sure, it looks like we are winning the war right now, but it could still drag on for many more months, and a lot of men, even some more that we know, or even us for that matter, may never see our families again.”

“To defend the freedom of those who are left, I suppose, it is worth it, captain,” he said.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right, Stonewall,” and as I slid my new Colt into my shoulder holster with its replaced grips, I said, “but there are some things from the past that are valuable that we need to hold on to. And maybe it’s just that I’m tired of being on ships that keep getting hit by torpedoes, but I also wonder if maybe we are still carrying some things that we should let go of.” I picked up the rusty Colt forty-five the chief had laid on the workbench and dropped it in the trash can.

“It’s been a pleasure talking to you tonight, chief.”

“And you too, sir,” he said as I left the room.

As a crew, we tried our best to keep up with what was going on in the war, but healing the Buffalo’s wounds was a full-time task, and being out of action prevented us from being in a position of “needing to know.” Most of our information came in the form of the typical officially approved news reports and press releases.

News of the continuing Kamikaze attacks and the progress of the Okinawa invasion dominated the news until that battle was eventually won. The fate of the feared battleship Yamato was greatly celebrated when the news made it back to us.

There was a lot of traffic through the harbor as the United States made preparations for the inevitable invasion of mainland Japan. Or so we thought. But as you know, that never came to pass.

By late July of ’45 we had been out of drydock for several weeks and were heavily involved in post-repair shakedowns and training. A lot of the crew had been replaced and was being brought up to speed. The order came for us to deploy to the Okinawa area and join the fleet in preparations to support the invasion of the Japanese mainland.

While in route, the news came in about the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the impending Japanese surrender. During the time after the announcement and before the formal surrender, we were told to be on the lookout for renegade Japs who did not wish to surrender. Orders came in from Admiral Halsey that because of the sensitive nature of the surrender, and newly found peace between our nations, if we came upon any Japs not laying down their arms, to “kill them in a friendly fashion.” This was for political reasons, I guess.

It was a few days after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki when I received the orders to proceed to a latitude and longitude that was somewhere to the southeast of Okinawa, to “find, rescue, and accept surrender from” a Jap submarine.

The Buffalo and the destroyer assigned to escort us found them right where they were supposed to be. I checked my forty-five, just to be sure. This smelled of a time that I might have to use it.

With extreme caution (to make sure this wasn’t some kind of ambush by a renegade sub captain), we approached them without incident. No sign of ships other than ours, no sonar contacts, and even better, no torpedo wakes.

As we came around to tie up next to them I turned to Major Johnson and addressed him. Right at this time, most of his unit was placed at strategic points all over the port side of the Buffalo, armed with as many thirty- and fifty-caliber automatic weapons as they could hold. And several of the twenty-millimeter guns were trained on the sub as well.

“Yes, sir?” The major asked.

“You know the Jap customs?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I want this to be perfectly clear, if just one of those Jap bastards even blinks wrong, I want you to cut that ship to ribbons. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” he said without hesitation or emotion of any kind that I could detect.

I looked over my shoulder for the destroyer that was escorting us. It was right where it belonged.

At least the sea was calm that day, not that it would do us any good, but maybe we could see any torpedo wakes in time to take some action.

The order to lower the liberty ladder to the deck of the Japanese submarine was given. Her crew was still immobile and resolute on her deck. I could see the expressions on their faces from my place on the bridge and could tell they obviously were not taking the circumstances lightly.

The major’s crew was crossing the liberty ladder to the Japanese sub. As expected, they executed their task with the brave professionalism and due diligence I had come to expect from the corps.

From my vantage point, I could see the major take several marines below, providing each other cover while numerous other marines stayed above deck guarding the sub’s crew. It would take awhile for the major to secure the sub and make sure it wasn’t somehow rigged.

The major gave no signals indicating a trap. Meanwhile, most of the sub’s crew was still in their place, at attention, on the deck of their ship. Several Japanese officers had been asked by the major to go below decks with him.

I tried to avoid tapping nervously on the pearl grips of my Colt forty-five as I rested my hand on it and waited for the signal from the major that either all was well, or it was time to fight. As the captain in a potential combat situation, you don’t have the luxury of letting the crew know how nervous you really are.

The seconds turned to minutes, and I waited.

After awhile, the major came back above deck and gave a hand signal that everything was well. I watched another marine come out of the hatch on the conning tower behind the major and climb down the ladder, cross the deck and head for the liberty ladder back to my ship. A few seconds later, I was facing a slightly out-of-breath marine sergeant who handed me a hand written note.

Thanking the sergeant and dismissing him, I read the note:

Have secured enemy sub. Fuel supply extremely low. Batteries the same. No detectable hidden purpose yet but still involved in searching the sub. Japanese captain and officers cooperating in every way. Captain speaks English well, attended University of Chicago. Expect ten more minutes to finish.

University of Chicago? I just couldn’t believe my eyes. Apparently everything good the Japs ever learned came from America. And those slant-eyed sons-of-bitches turned around and used it to bomb us. “Isn’t that about right?” I said out loud, no longer able to contain myself.

“Sir?” the officer of the deck replied.

“Major Johnson tells me the Jap bastard captain of that sub went to the University of Chicago.”

“Really?” replied the lieutenant.

“Yes, apparently so. We should have just shot him when we had him the first time, don’t you think, Lieutenant?”

“Would have been a good idea, sir,” he said with a grin. “We could have saved all of those American war bond holders a lot of money on perfectly good ammunition since.”

“No doubt,” I replied, ending the conversation.

And the seconds once again turned into minutes. I gently tapped the grip of my holstered Colt forty-five.

After a short time, the marine sergeant returned to the bridge bearing another note from the major. I took it from him and told him to stand by while I read it.

Enemy sub secured. All weapons disabled and inert. The Japanese captain respectfully requests to come aboard and formally surrender.

“Sergeant,” I said, “run ahead and inform the major I will be on the quarter deck at the top of the liberty ladder in two minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the marine; then, he departed the bridge.

I picked up the sound-powered phones that connected the bridge to the executive officer’s battle station, put them on, and keyed the microphone. “XO,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” came the usual acknowledgement of Commander Thompson’s voice.

“I’m leaving the bridge to go accept the sub captain’s surrender. You have the conn. Look sharp and keep your eyes peeled. I don’t trust these bastards.”

“Understood,” the executive officer said.

“Officer of the deck, XO has the conn. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir. The captain’s off the bridge.”

I turned, stepped through the hatch, then down the ladder and for the first time in weeks left the bridge area of my ship.

I arrived at the top of the ladder down to the sub just before the major and a Japanese officer with a samurai sword stepped onto it and began to climb up the steps.

Then they were at the top of the ladder. Ten feet in front of me. Five. Then three.

The Japanese officer reached for his sword. I shot a quick glance at Major Johnson as I felt the snap on the strap of the holster that held my Colt forty-five pop loose against my index finger. Ever so slightly, the major shook his head at me, his eyes slightly widening, as if reading my mind.

The Japanese captain unhooked the sword from his belt, still sheathed, bowed and holding it horizontally, offered it to me.

This was the first time in more than four years I had seen a Jap surrender without shooting at him first.

So as my sworn enemy stood in front of me, defeated and offering his sword, and me with my hand still on my forty-five, I began to feel I was missing something, something vague yet very important. I had planned and hoped for this day for some time now, and yet when the moment finally arrived, it seemed hollow somehow.

A nebulous idea began to form in my thoughts, small at first but growing, very rapidly, gaining energy like an avalanche, until it totally wiped out any concept of the things I had previously assumed were true. I found my mind suddenly racing backwards across time, looking through all of the events of the war that had led me to this point…

Until finally, in my mind, I found the old chief from the day I visited the dead hulk of the battleship Oklahoma. For a moment, it was almost as if he was standing there with us, looking at me, asking the question which had unexpectedly burned to the very core of my soul. “What are you looking for, captain?” And like a flash, the answer to his question finally came to me: “Peace, chief. I’m looking for peace.”

And as I took the sword from the Japanese captain’s outstretched hands, I began to wonder if maybe it was as much me shooting at them which made me hate them, as it was them shooting at me.

All Things Considered

About seventy to seventy-five years ago, I was in the prime of my life. I was a United States naval officer. I was a young and handsome man chasing the pretty skirts around Hawaii. Your American tax dollars hard at work! (The admiral added a wink and a grin at this point.) It was a lot of fun being a sailor in paradise in the thirties. I almost got into a bit of trouble from time to time, but overall, I kept my nose clean and my mind was mostly on my career, then later my family. But I was also brash and arrogant, which was normal enough for a young sailor of those days. It was in every way an unspoiled paradise for me.

And then came the Japanese.

I was on three ships during the war and commanded one of them.

All three of those ships combined got struck by no less than twelve torpedoes, one which sank with a third of the crew still on board.

Torpedoes were among the most incredibly violent devices you could possibly imagine at the time. Most smaller ships that were hit by them amidships blew right in half. Even the smaller aerial-launched ones could almost lift a ten thousand-ton cruiser like the Buffalo out of the water. Each one sprays thousands of sharp jagged pieces of metal everywhere that will cut through the human body like a bullet through butter. It doesn’t take that many torpedoes to get your attention and set you to wondering how this could keep happening to you.

The tricky thing about it is if you’re not careful enough to keep your wits about you, your life will change for the worse, and you won’t even notice until it’s too late. You will be too busy thinking that you’re right, they’re wrong, and won’t see the truth, even when it bites you in the ass.

As a part of military life, you are trained to be ready for anything at any time. You are always in preparation for some unseen enemy, just over the horizon, just out of your reach, waiting for the chance to attack you and kill you if possible. “What would you do if we were attacked right now?” is the total mode of operation and way of life.

You think about it and drill for it, all the time. And at the same time, you don’t think about it because somehow it just seems too terrible and unreal of a thing to do to other human beings. But you continue doing it because they are the enemy and orders are orders. They are different than you, and sooner or later, they will attack you.

Their beliefs are different, their customs are different, and they think differently. They are aggressive. Their skin is yellow, their eyes are slanted. Even “they are all myopic and thus cannot be good fighter or bomber pilots.” What a load of crap that one turned out to be!

So you keep drilling and thinking about how to prepare for an attack by the aggressors or how you are possibly going to attack them before they have the chance to attack you.

The concept really comes into play in an old Hindu philosophical doctrine that basically states, “As you think, so shall it be.” And I wonder. I wonder if you keep thinking that way long and hard enough and you keep preparing for it, if sooner or later, you will actually find somebody to do it. Then sometimes, if they don’t attack, you go ahead and attack them to prevent you from being attacked by them.

And sometimes they do attack you first, probably thinking you were going to attack them if they didn’t, and they want the strategic advantage of striking the first blow. And so it goes, round and round.

Many times you hear of the greatness and glory of battle. I never saw any glory in it—just misery and death. George Patton, for example, really was a great general. He fought in many so-called glorious battles against the Germans.

As a man who has been in combat more times than I can count, I can personally tell you most of the people who glorify combat have never been in it and have some twisted reason to try to convince others that they need to keep fighting.

Greatness doesn’t come from fighting; it comes from knowing when not to fight.

And when you are in combat and fighting for your life, it’s easy to kill someone. The hard part, for most people, is living with yourself afterwards.

During the war, I met a most interesting person. We were in Pearl for repairs, and I had some time off, so I ended up at the officer’s club for a beer. This guy kind of stood out among the rest of us, not only for his wits, which he had plenty of, but he had the reddest hair that you ever saw. He said he was the skipper on one of the smaller escorts or sub hunters, or something like that.

There was a certain indefinable quality about him that made him hard to forget, even to this day. The other officers around were making a case against him that some day time would heal all of the damage done to us in this war. He was holding his own against several others and forwarding the concept that time “is a great charlatan” and cures nothing.

I don’t know; to this day, I can still see the image of Joe Fitzgerald’s mangled body in my mind like it was yesterday. There just has to be a better way to be able to move on.

The venerable Rush Limbaugh says in one of his “undeniable truths of life” that “Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.” It postulates that people have to be aggressive and forceful to rule a country or world, or to handle a country or people who have gone insane. The problem is that with the right propaganda machines in place, who would be able to tell the difference between Hirohito, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, or Churchill? For example, if you look at the history of Germany during the time that Hitler was on the rise, a large part of the population thought he was a savior of some sort. Statement after statement can be found that he was “enlightened” and “brilliant” and would lead the world into a brighter future.

As long as this is true for this world, we will end up blindly slinging bombs at each other, both sides thinking that they are right and the other side wrong, and neither knowing the truth. I guess I would just rather sit and watch Sponge Bob Square Pants with my great-great-grandchildren on my knees than have another battleship shot out from under me.

I don’t deny this datum is true. When you look at it, you have to admit the arguments for it are undeniable. The evidence is all around us. I just wonder if it has to be true, because if you take the time to look at it a little closer, you begin to see a faint glimmer of hope for something else.

About twenty years ago, I heard the story of a man who had one of these Japanese samurai swords like the one on the wall behind me. He had gotten it as a souvenir after the surrender. After all of those years, he decided to see if the officer he had gotten it from was still alive. After an extensive search, he found him and went all of the way to Japan to return the sword.

Shortly afterwards, I decided maybe I should do the same for the officer who had surrendered his ship to me. I didn’t even bother to get his name at the time he surrendered, but it wasn’t hard for a retired admiral to pull in some favors and find the name of the officer in command of the I-57 at the end of the war. After a couple of months searching, I discovered that he had died shortly after the war.

From what I could find, after we towed his sub in to the base on Okinawa, he was released from the Japanese navy and went to find his family. He was from Hiroshima. His wife, his family, and his home were all gone in the first of the two blasts that ended the war. Nothing was left for him. Not even his honor. Shortly after that, he died, just as surely as if I had put my own Colt against his head and pulled the trigger.

In 1986, four of the former crewmen of the Japanese I-19 met with some of the former crewmen of the North Carolina to solve one of the war’s great mysteries. The United States Navy never found out who torpedoed the Showboat in 1942. The I-19 was the only Japanese submarine in the area that fired torpedoes that day but it was thought the Showboat was too far from the I-19 when the attack was launched. And the crew of the submarine never claimed to have attacked the North Carolina or the O’Brien.

After forty-four years, these men from both sides of the war sat down with each other and retraced their steps to find out that their attack, which sank the Wasp, also yielded the sinking of a destroyer and the damaging of a battleship. This was something they didn’t even know before. All from a single spread of six torpedoes, three of which missed their intended targets, only to be lucky enough to find two more targets by pure accident.

After all of those years, these men got together and found a way to become friends. The North Carolina crew members even presented a framed fragment of the torpedo that the I-19 had fired, which was retrieved from the hull of the Showboat, “with apologies for damage done to it when we hit it.”

My former crewmates and those of the I-19 are and should be an inspiration to all of us to be more human to each other.

In a war, people tend to have their attention hung up on the hardware, the ships, the torpedoes, the bombs, airplanes, generals, admirals, emperors, presidents, soldiers, sailors, and marines, whether they are ours or theirs. Just think of the victories, defeats, glory, heroism, rubble, fire and destruction, victims, deaths, refugees, genocides, starvation, cruelty, death marches, pestilence, and all of those brilliant big explosions created by brilliant men fighting for their country. As if all the world’s problems could be solved with a suitable application of high explosives. If we can only make a big enough boom, well, then things would be okay. All I’ve ever seen it do is scatter the very same problems over a larger area.

And these things are important. Believe me, nothing, and I do mean nothing, is more demanding of your attention than when a volley of torpedoes strikes the hull of the ship you happen to be eating your breakfast on. But these things only serve to draw your attention off of the more important subtleties, which seem to hide so well among the chaos of war, from humanity’s attention.

The real trick of it is to realize that none of these things are the real enemy.

The moment my hands took the sword from that Japanese officer surrendering his ship to me, I began to realize I was missing something. Some basic consideration hiding just below my level of attention was, for the first time, beginning to show itself.

For years, I could not get my attention off of that man whom, just a few short minutes before, I had wanted to kill in the most brutal fashion I could conceive. And with all of the grace and dignity that could possibly be instilled into an officer, this man, on the deck of my own ship, handed me the sword that you see hung on the wall behind me, thus surrendering his ship and his honor and placing himself at my mercy. This was an officer. This was a captain. This was an equal. This was a human being.

And my life changed.

All I wanted to believe during the war was the Japs were something different. They were animals. They were cruel. They were the aggressors. Killers, every one of them. They were something very separate and different from us and below us. And history shows it’s true in many ways. The Japanese, in every measurable way, were just as brutal over their conquered territories as the Nazis were in Europe. And they bombed Pearl Harbor.

In return we firebombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were incinerated, just like that. Old, young, women, children, sick, well, innocent, or guilty—it didn’t matter who they were. They all died horrible deaths at our hands. That’s the problem in handling things with anger; it doesn’t discriminate. So what does that make us?

Just like Ahab and the great white whale tied together, revenge has a way of taking you down along with the subject of your anger.

Now it’s true that, from time to time, people, for whatever reason, go insane. And for whatever reason, that insanity sometimes seems to spread into a society to the degree that the whole culture or country goes insane. Then you have war. You have to understand when this happens people are going to act very badly.

And occasionally, you have to fight. You do have to put a stop to it, to preserve as much life as possible. Sometimes that does involve lopping off a few heads to save the greater number of people from the insanities of a country that has obviously gone mad. But you don’t have to hate them.

The minute you succumb to the urge to take revenge, to kill just to get even or to hate them, you have given in to the one thing that, left to run unchecked, will keep mankind locked in a state of war, to a greater or lesser degree, for all of time.

It’s the most dangerous enemy mankind will ever face. It isn’t the Japanese or the Germans or anybody else. And it isn’t the bombs or ships or planes. The real enemy is vengeance.

Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

One might consider it would be counterintuitive for a fiction author to destroy his own illusions at the end of his own work. In this case, I think the actions of the real men involved in the actual historic events noted in this book are important enough to justify the risk to my own work and be brought to light. Very often the History Channel will do a “History versus Hollywood” for a movie that covers actual historic events. You could think of it as me just saving them the trouble of research if you like, but that’s not the real point.

This, as I said at the outset, is a work of fiction. But in order to put my character in where I wanted him to be, I had to bump several real people out of the way. This, I assure you, was not intended to be disrespectful but instead to tell a story of how these men lived and fought for all of the free people of the world and at the same time try to avoid “putting words in the mouths” of the real men in those situations. It was a hard line for me to walk between writing a fictional story that would both honor these men for their service and sacrifice, and, at the same time, restrain myself from putting actual people into situations that they never actually faced; or more importantly, taking them out of the events they really did participate in. In the end, I had to do a little bit of both to make my storyline work. So in order to keep from pulling any regret in on myself, as a result of stepping on these men’s toes, I decided to write this to set the record straight.

First off, Jacob Scott Williams is a fictional character; however, there is an officer who escaped from the battleship Oklahoma, pretty much in the manner I described. How I came on this man’s story I can’t disclose here. Part of the problem being I don’t know what his real name was. But I’m sure he existed, I’m sure he has long since passed away, and I’m sure the Pearl Harbor story is basically real. I believe he was transferred to the North Carolina at some point, then subsequently to a light cruiser, most likely the Houston. So if you read this and recognize the story and are a friend or family member of this man’s, I would sincerely be interested in hearing from you so he may be properly identified.

Ensign Francis Flaherty and another man not mentioned in the book, James Richard Ward, were real people and did hold flashlights on the exits to allow other shipmates to escape the flooding waters in one of the turrets of the Oklahoma. They did this in obvious disregard for their own safety and posthumously were awarded the Medal of Honor for it. I don’t particularly know if Ensign Flaherty ever served coffee during meetings. I have, however, observed officers in the squadron I was in during my time in the navy behaving as such, and so added it to my story.

Commander Jesse L. Kenworthy, Jr. and Captain H.D. Bode were the executive and commanding officers of the Oklahoma at the time of the attack. I don’t know if Commander Kenworthy acted or responded in reality the way he did in this book, so I tried my best to portray him as a decent man. Also mentioned, Lieutenant Commander William H. Hobby, Jr. was the damage control officer on the Oklahoma at the time of the attack and was killed later in the war.

Lieutenant Commander John Kirkpatrick was the North Carolina’s real air defense officer at the time of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. By all accounts, he did a spectacular job in that battle. As a result, I had to think long and hard before bumping him out of his rightful place in history to replace him by a fictitious character. He is the primary reason for me writing this chapter. I don’t know him personally, but if he should ever read this I have to say, “I’m sorry, sir, for stepping on your toes, and I most sincerely hope this squares us up.” Larry Resen was John Kirkpatrick’s assistant during this attack.

Commander J. A. Crocker was really the Showboat’s executive officer at the time of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. I don’t know if he actually had any brass fall on him from Sky Control. Most likely not.

Captain George Fort was the commanding officer of the North Carolina during part of the war. I don’t know if he ever “grilled” any of the officers serving under him the way he did in this book. From what I can find about him, I’m sure he was a decent man and a very thorough and competent officer.

Commander Lyman A. Thackrey was one of the Showboat’s executive officers. It was all I could do to find his name, let alone anything else about him, so I tried to minimize his part in the story.

Commander Joseph Warren Stryker was the North Carolina’s navigation officer during the early part of the war, after which he became the executive officer. Sir, if you are out there somewhere, next time I go to see the ship, I’ll look for seagulls and bring fish.

The crew of the North Carolina really did meet with the survivors of the I-19 and return a torpedo fragment to them as described. There really was a man who flew to Japan thirty-nine years after the surrender, to return the sword of a former Japanese officer. His name is Walter Shackelford. The man he returned it to was Takuya Seno. All of these men either remained friends to this day, or for some of them, for the rest of their lives.

Last, but certainly not least, is Admiral William F. Halsey. Yes, he was real. Although sometimes I’m sure the Japanese didn’t think so. Enough said.

Oh! I almost forgot Bob Hope, but I think the Japanese probably didn’t believe in him much, either.

Regarding the ships, all of them mentioned in the story were real, except the Buffalo (and possibly the I-57, which I could find no history for). I tried to put them in actual context with history. The battleship North Carolina is still quite real and is now a museum in Wilmington, North Carolina. It is a fabulous place to visit, and there are several books you can read that will tell you of the Showboat’s real adventures. They provided me with the factual information that, in part, is what the story in this book is based on. My favorites are Boys of the Battleship North Carolina by Cindy Horrell Ramsey and North Carolina by Captain Ben W. Blee, USN (Ret)—who, incidentally, was the ship’s intelligence officer during the war.

The exception to the above paragraph is the USS William C. Lawe (DD-763), which was still under construction at the end of the war. The only reason this ship is in this book is because before I joined the navy, I toured this ship when it visited a town close to my hometown.

The Buffalo (CL-84) never existed. There were plans to build this ship, but construction was cancelled at the end of the war. It gave me a wonderful opportunity as an author to take a ship and do with it anything I wanted to with only minimal damage to actual history. The story of its torpedoing is loosely based on the story of what would have been one of her sister ships, the light cruiser Houston (CL-81). Most of the technical facts concerning the Wounded Buffalo chapter came from a book called The Battle to Save the Houston—October 1944 to March 1945 by John Grider Miller. To the actual men of the Houston, I have to say, “Very well done. You’ve inspired me.”

Finis. (Which, I think, is French for “I surrender,” but I’m not very sure about that.)

Special Thanks

This book is dedicated to all the men who, during what hopefully will be the last of the world wars, left their homes and families to defend the free people of the world. It is a work of fiction and is only to be taken as such, but it does include several people who were very real and very heroic in situations they actually had to endure on our behalf. Some information regarding the real people who were involved in this story can be found in the notes and acknowledgments at the end of the book.

While the backdrop of this book is obviously military in nature, it is still basically a story of the internal struggles of a man dealing with the violence of war. As such, I have tried to write it in a way that makes it easy for the civilians as well as the soldiers to understand. But for some of the technical terms that could not be avoided, I recommend a good dictionary.

Special thanks also go to my wonderful wife, Janet, and my daughter, Rachel, for their support, as well as to my other daughter, Gwen, for finally taking a nap and giving me a little extra time to work on this!

Thanks also goes to my very dear friends: Nikki, without whose help parts of this story would have vanished in the mist of time; Jeff, whose offhand comment made me decide to rewrite half my story line; and My Favorite Bob for his support in general and eagerness to read it when finished. Without your help, support, and gentle push, I would have never finished this.

I recall the first day that I was on a ship. My squadron was deployed to the USS Kitty Hawk for a Western Pacific cruise. Now, if you have ever seen an aircraft carrier, you realize how easy it is to get lost. After searching for almost forty-five minutes, I finally found the squadron’s personnel office. Everybody was busy unpacking and stowing their gear because we had just arrived at the ship, and seemed to have no time for this young, lost, and very confused airman apprentice who was just trying to take care of the paperwork necessary to get another stripe added to his uniform. The door that led to the officer’s ready room opened and in stepped a commander. He surveyed the compartment to see what was going on, and his eyes very quickly landed on me. He walked over to where I was and with a kind and gentle smile asked, “Can I help you, sir?” I would like to thank USN Commander Robert E. Baratko, my commanding officer in VAQ-130, for teaching me what it really means to be a leader.

Last, but certainly not least, my brother, Dusty, whom I thank not only for his service to our great country but his very valuable input on military matters, as well as his rditing—I mean, editing—tips.

“A big point many people don’t quite understand is—generally speaking, military people are the most peace-loving people around. We have the most to lose. It’s never about glory or wanting to kill and destroy for most of us; it’s about wanting peace. But we have a job to do and will keep doing it until told otherwise, or the job is actually complete.”

—USAF Lieutenant Colonel Dustin Ashton

About the Author

^{The author in 1984 aboard the USS Kitty Hawk overlooking Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor. Brett enjoys hearing from his readers. He can be contacted at bashton-author@bex.net.}

Brett Ashton is a United States Navy veteran who served as an aviation electronics technician aboard the USS Kitty Hawk during the last years of the Cold War. He became a World War II enthusiast following his first visit to Pearl Harbor. Currently, he is an electronics technician and musician. He has also extensively studied practical philosophy, which he became interested in during his travels around the world.

Also by Brett Ashton

Lucifer’s Pocket

Copyright

Vengeance: Hatred and Honor

Brett Ashton

Copyright © 2010 Brett Ashton. All rights reserved.

Printed Edition published by Wheatmark

610 East Delano Street, Suite 104, Tucson, Arizona 85705 U.S.A.

www.wheatmark.com

ISBN: 978-1-60494-459-4

LCCN: 2010926075