Vengeance: Hatred and Honor

by Brett Ashton

  “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 t
ry 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.