A Deadly Sunday Morning

Almost immediately, a torpedo hit the ship and general quarters sounded. I rushed to my battle station in the transmitter room–no shoes on, nothing. I didn’t have time to get to my locker. Or to think. We tried to get the communications going and the radar turned on. It was brand new. Torpedoes were hitting the ship, and paint chips were spraying off the bulkheads. A radioman kept sweeping up the chips after each explosion. The ship began listing to port. Then the lights went out. All this only took about 30 minutes. The order came to abandon ship. I helped a couple of injured engineers up the companionway.

The Arizona blew up just as I got on deck. The explosion knocked me flat under the aft turret. There was oil and fire everywhere. I just sort of slid down the port deck and into the water. An empty motor launch drifted by. I climbed in and got the engine going. I picked up a couple of guys, a coxswain and an engineer. They took the helm and the engine. We began fishing survivors from the water. We took them ashore and came back for more. Japanese torpedo planes were flying right over us, strafing and dropping more torpedoes. One pilot was so close I could see the big smile on his face. Boy, was I angry! I switched to a whaleboat, and we picked up more survivors.

I went ashore, trying to get back to the Wee Vee. Capt. Mervyn Bennion had been killed, but Lt. Claude Ricketts–he later became an admiral–had counterflooded the starboard compartments on the ship. So it had settled into the mud, decks above water but still burning. The Oklahoma didn’t counterflood, and it capsized. Somewhere, somebody gave me a pair of shoes and undershorts. When I got to the Pearl Harbor receiving station, civilian women were there making up bandages. That’s when I realized I was almost naked, and had been naked most of the day. The thing that impressed me most about the whole thing was that in the midst of all that surprise and confusion and destruction, everybody was just doing their jobs, what they’d been trained to do. Me too. I sure didn’t like what I saw. But I didn’t have time to be afraid. There was too much to be done.

title: “A Deadly Sunday Morning” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-05” author: “Douglas Wade”

Almost immediately, a torpedo hit the ship and general quarters sounded. I rushed to my battle station in the transmitter room–no shoes on, nothing. I didn’t have time to get to my locker. Or to think. We tried to get the communications going and the radar turned on. It was brand new. Torpedoes were hitting the ship, and paint chips were spraying off the bulkheads. A radioman kept sweeping up the chips after each explosion. The ship began listing to port. Then the lights went out. All this only took about 30 minutes. The order came to abandon ship. I helped a couple of injured engineers up the companionway.

The Arizona blew up just as I got on deck. The explosion knocked me flat under the aft turret. There was oil and fire everywhere. I just sort of slid down the port deck and into the water. An empty motor launch drifted by. I climbed in and got the engine going. I picked up a couple of guys, a coxswain and an engineer. They took the helm and the engine. We began fishing survivors from the water. We took them ashore and came back for more. Japanese torpedo planes were flying right over us, strafing and dropping more torpedoes. One pilot was so close I could see the big smile on his face. Boy, was I angry! I switched to a whaleboat, and we picked up more survivors.

I went ashore, trying to get back to the Wee Vee. Capt. Mervyn Bennion had been killed, but Lt. Claude Ricketts–he later became an admiral–had counterflooded the starboard compartments on the ship. So it had settled into the mud, decks above water but still burning. The Oklahoma didn’t counterflood, and it capsized. Somewhere, somebody gave me a pair of shoes and undershorts. When I got to the Pearl Harbor receiving station, civilian women were there making up bandages. That’s when I realized I was almost naked, and had been naked most of the day. The thing that impressed me most about the whole thing was that in the midst of all that surprise and confusion and destruction, everybody was just doing their jobs, what they’d been trained to do. Me too. I sure didn’t like what I saw. But I didn’t have time to be afraid. There was too much to be done.