Vengeance: Hatred and Honor

by Brett Ashton

  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 u
s 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.