Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Between five and eight eighteen-inch torpedoes detonated against West Virginia’s port, while two armor-piercing bombs crashed through her deck. With an inclinometer marking list at fifteen degrees, Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter and Lieutenant Commander John Harper gave orders for counterflooding to keep her from turning turtle. She had lost so much power, that no one could hear their commands; however a team of shipfitters, led by senior gunnery officer Lieutenant Claude V. Ricketts and Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Garnett Billingsley, did it on their own. Saved by her men, West Virginia sank on an even keel.

  Of the 1,541 aboard West Virginia on December 7, 1941, 130 were killed and 52 wounded. Three of the dead were found, weeks later, in a sealed compartment, having lived in the dark without food or water until December 23, when the air ran out and they suffocated.

  • • •

  The USS Oklahoma had arrived at Pearl Harbor on December 5 after spending two weeks on maneuvers. With her crew of fifteen hundred, she was a true “city of the sea.” American engineers believed that her system of watertight bulkheads made her unsinkable, and they imagined that the thirteen inches of steel armoring her hull made her impenetrable.

  On the morning of December 7, Oklahoma’s Albert Ellis of Portland, Oregon, was in his bunk, playing “A String of Pearls” on his battle group’s communal record player. Nineteen-year-old apprentice seaman Garlen Eslick, an actual Oklahoman from Bristow, was assigned to KP. Ensign Adolph Mortensen had watch duty the night before; relieved at 0345, he took the spyglass to his room, which marked his status as junior officer on deck—JOD.

  Since senior officers lived ashore, most of those aboard that Sunday were junior in rank, and Admiral Kimmel had seen no reason to change this arrangement even in the wake of a series of alarming cables from Washington culminating in a war warning.

  Ensign Mortensen had slept maybe three hours when the alarms went off. He ran out of his cabin shirtless, in pajama bottoms, with slippers and his hat, to designate he was an officer: “I felt foolish, but didn’t have much of a choice.” He saw a sailor assigned to the forward boiler control running to his post: “As he opened the hatch and stepped into the air lock, I watched the spinner handle spin and lock the hatch. I wondered to myself, ‘What is he going to find down there? What are the others doing down there? Can they possibly light off the burners, and even if they could, what good would it do? How could this ship possibly get under way?’ ”

  Mortensen came across another sailor sitting where the bulkhead met the deck, “a good worker who usually came back from liberty with a split lip, bloody nose, black eye, or disheveled uniform with his friend from another division. They seemed inseparable. Here he was, sitting on the deck with his friend’s head in his lap, his body stretched out on the deck. I couldn’t see what was wrong, but he seemed to be unconscious. When our eyes met, I said, ‘You better get out of here.’ He gave me an anguished look as he answered, ‘No. I’m not going to leave my friend. He’s hurt.’ ”

  Quartermaster Herbert Kennedy, a nineteen-year-old from Seattle: “I heard this noise, a popping noise, and I looked up and there was a Japanese fighter plane, coming in ahead of the torpedo planes, strafing the decks. The boy that was directly across from me, it just tore him in half. Blood spattered all over me and I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” Ensign John Landreth worked in antiaircraft ops and summed up this strange feeling of shock: “What is this really? A dream, perhaps, or is it really me shooting at other men and they shooting at me? What is this really?”

  Senior Reserve Ensign Herb Rommel grabbed the PA system mike on his way to his battle station to holler, “Man your battle stations! This is no shit!” Commander Paul Backus explained, “Only under the most unusual circumstances would an officer personally make an announcement in those days of formal battleship routine, and the use of obscene language by anyone over the announcing system was just unheard of. [And] right after the last word of the announcement, the whole ship shuddered. It was the first torpedo hitting our port side.”

  Adolph Mortensen: “The ship was lifted rapidly straight up a considerable distance. On reaching the B Division quarters, I found an incredible mess. . . . Berths attached to the bulkhead had come loose and were swinging on their chains, making walking difficult. The remainder of breakfast food, coffee, pots, dirty dishes and food trays, platters of uneaten sliced baloney covered with the usual tomato sauce, had spilled and made an incredible slippery mess through which we had to walk.”

  No one could man the antiaircraft batteries since “the boxes containing the ready ammunition were padlocked, and there was no compressed air for the rammers,” Backus said. “The padlocks were broken and the ammunition was hand-rammed into the breeches. There were no firing locks on the breech blocks. They had been removed and were down in the armory being cleaned for a scheduled admiral’s inspection. . . . Not a shot was fired from these guns before the ship rolled over.” As part of that inspection, “some of our blisters [bulges of dead-air space that take the hit of a mine or torpedo without letting it penetrate] were open when the attack took place. The manhole covers had been removed in some instances so that the blisters could be aired out for a later cleaning. Obviously, our resistance to flooding was minimal when the torpedoes hit. When the blisters dipped under, flooding had to be massive. [Then] lines securing the Oklahoma to the Maryland had started to pop as the list on the ship increased rapidly.”

  Another torpedo slipped through the air and smashed into the bay. As marine Private Raymond Turpin of Waterloo, Alabama, and five others ran to their gun, the sound of a plane roared just over their heads; Ray looked up to see the Japanese pilot jerk her up to keep from colliding into one of the battleships’ superstructure. Just then the man running behind him yelled, “Were you hit?” Ray said, “No, why’d you ask?” And the man said, “He strafed us!”

  The bomber was Akagi squadron commander Lieutenant Jinichi Goto: “I was about twenty meters above the water . . . when I released my torpedo. As my plane climbed up after the torpedo was off, I saw that I was even lower than the crow’s nest of the great battleship. My observer reported a huge waterspout springing up from the ship’s location. Ararimashita! [It struck!] he cried. The other two planes in my group also attacked Oklahoma.”

  Sailor James Huston: “When a torpedo hits, that water goes up in the air way higher than the length of that ship! And that comes down on you—and you go onto your knees when that water comes down. You can’t stand up. Just tons of water. When the torpedoes hit, it just rolled over like that. I couldn’t walk across the deck. ’Cause the water and everything was over top of it—it was slippery. But they hung cargo nets up on this poop deck. I slid down those lines and swam over to the shoreline and crawled up and went on the Maryland.”

  “The first alarm came and I immediately ran up the ladder to the starboard side of the upper deck to go to the conning tower after calling for the crew to go to battle stations,” USS Oklahoma’s Commander Jesse Kenworthy Jr. said. “As I reached the upper deck, I felt a heavy shock and heard a loud explosion, and the ship immediately began to list to port. Oil and water descended on deck, and by the time I had reached the boat deck, the shock of two more explosions on the port side was felt. In the meanwhile, general quarters had sounded and the crew had gone to battle stations and started zed closures [the dogging down of doors, hatches, ports, and valves marked with a Z].”

  “I was five foot three and, at the age of seventeen, the youngest sailor on ship,” remembered Oklahoma crewman George Smith. “My battle station was a loader on a five-inch gun, and I was so small I couldn’t even pick up the shells. So they had me load the powder instead, because the powder bags didn’t weigh as much. Well, I was young, and I disobeyed some orders. The captain put me in the brig and told me to read The Bluejacket’s Manual, the navy’s book on how a sailor is supposed to behave. Now, on that Sunday I was out [on his fourth day after spending thirty days in the brig], and I wa
s getting ready for a day off the ship—liberty we call it. Then over the loudspeakers I heard, ‘All hands, man your battle stations.’ I was really scared. Then I heard, ‘Abandon ship.’ The ship was already rolling over on us. We jumped into the water. It was only about a five-foot jump. I saw the ship and the big gun turrets coming down on me, and I began to swim as fast as I could.”

  Robert West’s battle station was three decks below: “A torpedo hit, and then another one, and then another one. The ship listed a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and it got so bad you couldn’t walk over to the other side.”

  Now listing at forty-five degrees, the unsinkable, impenetrable Oklahoma took one more missile strike right at her deck line—the fatal blow. Eslick was in the middle of trying to help the injured when “the lights blackened out and the ship completed its roll. And that’s the last I remember ’cause I was rendered unconscious.”

  The commander gave the order to abandon ship. The crew running Turret 4 had pitched in to buy themselves a phonograph. A torpedo knocked the volume dial to full blast, and in another incongruous musical accompaniment, it played Gene Krupa’s “Let Me Off Uptown.”

  Five more torpedoes slammed into Oklahoma. Power systems failed, tanks exploded streaming oil across the floors, and seawater poured in. Sailor George DeLong: “The lights went out and water rushed in through the air vent. Furniture and equipment in the compartment started crashing around the deck. I realized my head was where my feet had been.”

  On Ford Island, Chief Albert Molter watched as she rolled completely over in the water, exposing her belly, “slowly and stately . . . as if she were tired and wanted to rest.” It was eight minutes after the first assault of torpedo planes, and now this once-great ship of the American fleet was completely overturned, her mast dug into the mud. In her roll, Oklahoma’s ammunition handling rooms’ fourteen-hundred-pound, fourteen-inch shells went into free fall, crushing to death several of the men, pinning one against a bulkhead and popping out his tongue and eyes.

  Of 1,353 men aboard, 461 were now trapped inside. Robert West: “The water came rushing in like a flood, coming up to your knees and then your hips, and all of a sudden it got to a point where you were treading water. And it stopped.” Garlen Eslick: “Evidently the cool water brought me to. I remembered hollering for help.” Albert Ellis: “We had four flashlights, which we used very sparingly until they all ran out of power. Thank God we knew the area as well as we did. We got to the highest point. And we were dogged in; we couldn’t get out. The hatch was armor plated and probably weighed in excess of two thousand pounds.” West: “There was some light coming from some place, I don’t know where, but we could see a ladder, and we could see the water was rising. So we went up to the top of the ladder and there was another door with a hatch on it, locked. So we just took the wrench and beat that lock until it broke. We opened the door. It was black in there, but it was dry.” They shoved clothes into the air vents, trying to plug the flood of water from coming in.

  George Smith: “There were a couple of other sailors still in the brig, which was set up in the carpenter shop. I found out later that when one of the torpedoes hit, it broke the carpenter’s workbench loose, pinned the guard against the wall—the bulkhead—and he could not release the men in the brig. Everyone drowned.”

  “I helped a partially incapacitated man [up] to the second deck and then joined in a line passing injured men along to the ladder by the dental office,” Assistant Pay Clerk Daniel Westfall remembered. “I lost all knowledge of time while here, but after some minutes, Ensign [Thomas] McClelland, who was beside me in the line, said he was feeling faint and then collapsed. I noticed other men dropping around me. I stooped over to pick up McClelland but when I stooped over, I got dizzy and fell. I seemed to be paralyzed from the waist down, had great difficulty breathing, but had enough strength in my arms to drag myself to the ladder and up a couple of steps [toward the main deck] before collapsing completely [likely from breathing oil fumes]. After passing out I had only flashes of consciousness until midafternoon.”

  Ensign Adolph Mortensen saw “Chaplain Schmitt pushing one person out [through a porthole]. Two more were beside him. I understand he tried to squeeze through but was unable to fit so came back inside and spent the last few minutes of his life helping others escape. I don’t think more than one more could have gotten out because shortly thereafter the ship rolled and he and the others were trapped in the rising waters.”

  Ray Turpin was one of those helping the trapped men struggle to escape through that fifteen-inch porthole. He helped get five out, but the sixth was in bad shape; he was just too big to fit though and got stuck. As Ray and some others pulled on the man’s arms and chest and rocked him back and forth, Father Al was pushing as hard as he could from below. The men could hear the man’s ribs pop as they manhandled him through and saw the black marks of bruises on his body, but even though he was suffering, he shouted, “Don’t stop! Keep pulling!” Finally, he was free, but so injured by the effort it looked as if he’d been beaten. “I was amazed at his composure and jovial attitude, despite his horrible and painful wounds,” his friend Adolph Kuhn remembered.

  Then came Ray Turpin’s worst memory of World War II as he had to watch through a porthole as a compartment flooded with water, and the man on the other side of that window, Oklahoma chaplain Lieutenant (jg) Father Aloysius Schmitt, refused his hand of help. “Someone tried earlier to pull me out and I couldn’t get through,” Schmitt insisted. “I’m going to see if there are others needing a way out.”

  Four weeks later, at a Protestant church in California, a Jewish sailor would testify that he was alive because a Catholic chaplain had pushed him through a porthole.

  Now it was time for Raymond Turpin to save himself. He slid into the harbor. The water around him was covered in three inches of oil. He found a mooring line from Oklahoma to Maryland and started shimmying up it to safety. But the force of Oklahoma’s sinking was pulling Maryland away from her quay, and just as Turpin neared the ship, he heard an officer aboard Maryland yell, “Cut the line!” A chief petty officer approached with a fire ax. He looked and shouted back, “But, sir, there are guys on the line!” The order came down: “Cut the goddamn line!” With four whacks of the ax Turpin fell fifteen feet into the murk, the rope’s coil landing on top of him. He came to the surface, sputtering for breath, and started swimming to the Maryland all over again. But he was exhausted, and failing, and then a big sailor pulled him forward to a line hanging near her bow and boosted him up so he could climb to the deck.

  There he found a crew attacking the Japanese with a new 1.1-inch, four-barrel antiaircraft machine gun, and he was thrilled to see that three of them were fellow marines he knew from Oklahoma. “Can I help?” he asked. “Yeah, grab some clips, load ’em, and drop ’em in the guns when the others empty!” It was thrilling to finally be able to fight back, to give those Japs just what they deserved.

  There was a tap on his shoulder. Maryland’s senior medical officer, Lieutenant Commander John Luten, had just come on deck since the attack’s start and asked, “What happened to you?”

  “Sir, I just came off the Oklahoma.”

  “Oklahoma? What happened to the Oklahoma?”

  Ray pointed. “It’s sunk.”

  “My God!” Luten insisted that Ray, covered in oil, go get checked at the primary aid station. There, Luten ordered a medic to examine Ray’s injuries, but the medic ignored him, so Ray went back to the deck and rejoined the gun crew. Dr. Luten found him again and again took him to the station and reprimanded the corpsman. He told Ray to take a good shower and throw his clothes into the trash.

  Ray said, “What am I going to wear?”

  “When you get out of the shower, I’ll give you a pair of pajamas.”

  George Smith: “I swam around the Oklahoma, heading for the Maryland, which was moored alongside. They threw cargo nets over the side we could climb aboard. But there were so many men from the Oklah
oma on the Maryland that they ordered us to get into the water again and swim to Ford Island.”

  Now safely ashore, Smith “couldn’t stand looking over there, seeing my ship upside down. I cried that night. I kept saying to myself, ‘What am I doing here? I could be home in Seattle going to high school with my buddies. I just quit high school to join the navy—for this.’ I was scared. But I knew I grew up that day.”

  Having warned others of danger, Ensign Mortensen now found himself trapped. “As I treaded water, the ship continued to roll and I was carried into the pharmacy. As the door rolled over me, the glass-faced doors of the medicine cabinets on the bulkhead opened, and I was showered with a deluge of medicine bottles both small and large. . . . The light disappeared almost, but not quite, to zero.”

  “It was scary,” Musician 1st Class Robert West said. “It scared the life out of me. And it knocked you around. And the water just kept rising up. We had to tread the water to keep your head above, and there was only about a foot, maybe a foot and a half, between your head and the water. But we knew we had to get out of that compartment because maybe the water would be coming up again. . . . One more hit and that would be it. So we decided to dive under the hatch. We followed each other into the other compartment. . . . There was so much that was going through your mind. If you were going to get out. And you thought of the good things that had happened to you before. I remember talking to this person next to me, you think about having a milk shake in Walgreens drugstore. . . . We used to talk about little things like that.”

  Now wearing only pajama bottoms and a hat—he’d lost his slippers—Mortensen was trapped in the pharmacy with about thirty men in all, and about forty cubic feet of air. For about an hour they assumed help was on the way and had no idea that the boat had turned over and that they were far below the water’s surface. The only one with a flashlight was carpenter John Austin, who discovered one way out: an underwater porthole. Finally Mortensen kicked it open. It was positioned the wrong way, and that’s when they realized the ship had upended, with the tiles on the ceiling being the dispensary’s floor.