by Brett Ashton
“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 po
rt 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 th
e 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.
