by Brett Ashton
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.
&n
bsp; “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.
