I joined a Naval Reserve division in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on October 21, 1940. I had turned seventeen on September 25 and had to be seventeen to get into the reserves. But then I decided to join the regular Navy, and I couldn’t get my dad to sign for me, he wasn’t too anxious for me to leave home and go into the regular Navy. Finally I said to him, “Now, Dad, look, if you don’t allow me to go into the Navy, I’m going to go someplace. I’m not staying here. If I go in the Navy you will know where I am. If I go someplace else, you won’t.” So he says, “Now you have me between a rock and a hard spot. Under those circumstances I will sign for you to go into the Navy.” I said, “Well, Dad, Mother can sign for me, but all I wanted was your permission.” So he says, “I don’t have much choice, do I?” I didn’t answer that question, figuring that since he said I could go it was fine. So I joined the Navy on January 31, 1941, and I went to Great Lakes for training.
When I got out of training at Great Lakes, I was to report to the West Coast, so they put me on a passenger train, the Chippewa, all the way to the West Coast. I ate in the dining car ordered off the menu, had a Pullman berth, and a black man made up my bunk. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. That was great. I was only seventeen years old, and for a seventeen-year-old kid to be going across the country in that fashion was really something. I got to Seattle, and they put me on the ferry boat over to Bremerton. When I get there here’s this great big piece of iron sitting in that dry dock. I had never seen so much iron stacked up in all my life. That big battlewagon had those great big 16-inch guns, and each gun was more than sixty feet in length, and I thought, “My God!” So that ship was the USS Maryland, and I boarded her on Easter Sunday, 1941.
They put me in the third division in the No. 3 Turret. There were four turrets with two 16-inch guns in each turret. We left the States after shakedown and went to Hawaii. They had moved the fleet out of the West Coast. Our home port had been Long Beach, and we sailed out of there in July of 1941. When we left the States there were about seven tankers laying in San Pedro Harbor there in Long Beach, waiting for the U.S. government to lift the oil embargo to Japan. So we as kids in the Navy knew that the U.S. was having some problems with the Japanese.
So we went into Pearl, and we got there in July 1941. You can’t believe what Hawaii was like then. It was like I’d gone to heaven. You’ve never seen such a beautiful place in your whole life. And here you are, on this great big $90 million yacht in Pearl Harbor with a place to sleep and places to go ashore. But we only got what they called “Cinderella Liberty” then. That’s a liberty that ends at midnight, because there weren’t enough accommodations in Honolulu to put up all the sailors in the fleet or all the Army or Marine Corps that was there. So we could only go ashore until they turned the lights out, and we had to be back aboard ship by midnight.
On Saturday, December 6, I had the duty and I was aboard ship. Most of the guys had headed in to the beach on Saturday after inspection at 9:30 or 10 A.M. That morning we had Admiral’s Inspection, and Admiral Kimmel came aboard and inspected us. We had what we called “AMI,” Annual Military Inspection, and the big fleet admiral came on board and looked everybody over in the fleet that day. That night all the big, high muckety-mucks went down to Waikiki to the Royal Hawaiian and drank a lot of booze and danced and all that kind of stuff, and that’s what they did on that Saturday night. But not me, I had the duty. But we didn’t set watch at night. We didn’t have anybody manning the antiaircraft guns or on patrol. All you did was you had to be there in case they needed you, and you didn’t have anything else to do but go to bed. Actually we slept in hammocks. There were no bunks for us. The only people who got to sleep in bunks were the officers.
You get up early in the morning when you’re in the Navy, about 5:30 A.M. Then you have breakfast about 7 or 7:30 A.M. Then after breakfast on December 7, a Sunday, it was time to go to mass. Being raised on the farm by my ma and pa, on Sunday you go to mass. There was no Catholic chaplain on the Maryland, so they had mass scheduled for 8:15 A.M. on the quarterdeck of the Oklahoma, which was tied up right next to us. Some of the guys had already gone over there, but I had to go into my gun compartment to change my shoes so I could go over on the gangplank to the Oklahoma. But I never made it. If I had been a couple of minutes faster I would have been over on the Oklahoma when the attack started.
So I had changed shoes, and while I was there a couple of other guys had come up and we were talking before I headed over to mass. I was standing right near my battle station, the No. 3 broadside gun, which was a 5-inch gun on the starboard side facing Ford Island. I was talking to these two guys, a first class cook by the name of Rocky Hallsted, and a first class gunners mate who was in charge of that secondary battery I was on, Joe Klimcack. And we were talking about if the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and sunk a ship in the channel, all the ships in the harbor would be trapped and couldn’t get out. And this was really spooky because exactly that almost happened just about an hour later. If they hadn’t beached the Nevada over by Hospital Point, it would have blocked the harbor just like we were talking about.
So we were just standing there having this discussion, and all of a sudden a Jap Val dive bomber came flying right by us, over the top of the Naval housing on Ford Island, right over the administration building, and went over to the sea plane hangar on the end of Ford Island and dropped a big bomb in there and blew it up. Then all hell broke loose. The plane was well-marked, so there was no mistaking it was Japanese. It had big round red circles on the wings and fuselage, and that pilot was smiling at us as he went by. He was so close we could see his teeth. All I could say to Rocky Hallsted was, “It’s the goddamned Japs!” Then we got the word over the loudspeaker, “All hands man your battle stations, and this is no shit!” and the guy blew the bugle for battle stations. I was right there outside my battle station, so I went into the gun compartment. But that gun couldn’t be fired inside the harbor. You couldn’t elevate those guns much above 15 degrees, because they were for surface bombardment and weren’t set up for antiaircraft. So the order came in to take cover since we couldn’t shoot our gun, but I thought that’s kind of stupid. You have no place to go and no place to hide, so I figured I might as well do something. So I went into the midship casemate and I saw a petty officer in there sitting on the deck with his knees under his chin and I said to him, “Dutch, what do we do now?” And he says, “I’m not going anywhere until somebody tells me where I’m supposed to be going.” So I sat down next to him, and I stayed there for just a few minutes, but I was antsy. So I said, “Dutch, I’m going to go up on the boat deck and see if I can give a hand to those guys on the antiaircraft battery.” So I took off, and I don’t know what Dutch did after that. I got up there to the No. 4 antiaircraft gun on the port side facing out to the harbor and overlooking the Oklahoma. This was a 5-inch gun set up for antiaircraft defense. We had eight of them on the boat deck. The next smaller gun we had after that was 1.1, and the next after that was .50-caliber machine guns. There were no 20mm or 40mm.
Now sometimes you hear that some Japanese bombs fell on Honolulu. Well, that’s the biggest crock in the world. You know as well as I do that the Japs didn’t come all the way over there to bomb Honolulu, not when you have all the military stuff to bomb. But what was hitting Honolulu were antiaircraft rounds shot from our ships that weren’t fused right. You’re supposed to put the shell in a fuse pot setter, which sets the fuse time on it so it goes up a couple of thousand feet in the air and explodes. Well, I saw some guys take those shells right out of the can and hand them right to the loader. When he puts a shell in the gun and kicks it out and it’s not fused, it’s not going to blow up until it hits something. So those shells went all the way over seven miles and hit Honolulu, and that’s who bombed Honolulu, the Navy did, and we did kill a few people that way.
Some of our guys had gone over early to the Oklahoma to visit friends they went through training with, so they could talk to them a while before mass, and some of those guys got caught over there. But we didn’t lose any; they all made it off the Oklahoma before it rolled over, and they got back to our ship. It was only fifteen or so minutes into the battle when the Okie took four or five torpedoes. She was tied up to us with those big ten-inch hawsers and they snapped like store string, and she just rolled right over. It turned out the Catholic chaplain on the Oklahoma was a portly little fellow. And he was below on the second deck of the Oklahoma getting ready to go up and conduct the mass. When the Oklahoma rolled over, he was too big to get out of the porthole. But he stayed there in that compartment and helped all the guys he could to get out of the porthole, and he stayed right there in that compartment and he drowned. He got a Medal of Honor for that.
Even though at that time I was handling ammunition for a gun on the port side, and we were looking right out at the Oklahoma tied up next to us, I didn’t actually see it roll over because it happened so fast. You see, I was on the boat deck handling ammunition for No. 4 antiaircraft gun, and I had to run forward underneath the barbette of No. 2 Turret of the big guns, where the ammunition hoist was located, to get more rounds. So on one of my trips toward the hoist, somebody hollered that the Okie was listing. By the time I got my round of ammunition off that hoist and came out from underneath there to bring it over to Gun 4, I looked out and the Okie had already rolled over. She rolled that fast. She was gone in a minute.
So I was running back and forth about sixty or eighty feet between the No. 4 Gun and the ammunition hoist. I’d get a round of ammunition and run it over to the gun, take it out of the can, and throw the can down through the sky port into the galley, where we threw all the empties to keep them out of our way. Then they’d put the round into the fuse pot to set the fuse, and shoot it about 2,500 or 3,000 feet into the air. The idea was to put a big iron umbrella over the ship so the Japs had to fly through that crap to get to us. So we were shooting as fast as we could.
On one of my trips there was a bunch of guys waiting their turn to get ammunition at the hoist when a bomb hit near the bow at the waterline, blowing out our forward air compressor and our forward switchboard, and the ammunition hoists stopped. No more ammunition came up because we lost our power and compressed air, which was used to ram the antiaircraft guns. There was a hydraulic cylinder on there, and you put a round on the loading tray and hit the lever and the air pressure took the projectile up into that gun, and the breech block came up and it fired, one after another. And we also lost two people down below decks when that bomb went in there, one guy on the switchboard and one on the air compressor. The bomb went in at the waterline and blew out about twenty frames of the bow inside. There was a great big hole in there, and you could probably drop my house in it, that’s how big a hole it was inside there.
So there was no power for the hoist. Well, we made a human chain down the ladders all the way down to third deck, and we handed that ammunition up, one man to another, in a chain all the way up to the deck, and that’s how we brought the ammunition up to the boat deck from the magazine. About this time the 1.1 antiaircraft guns needed help, and there were so many people there on that No. 4 Gun that we were stepping on each other. By that time we had people from the Oklahoma over there and others from the secondary batteries, so we had plenty of people to help.
On the 1.1s the ammunition came in a can, about five or six shells in a clip, and there were about six clips in each can. And you put one guy on one side on a handle and a guy on the other side on a handle to shoot that thing. But to get the ammunition cans to the guns, you ran up a vertical ladder in the superstructure to get to the flying bridge above the gun, and you had to drop the cans through a hatch in the deck down to the crew in the gun tub. So that’s what I was doing the rest of the attack after I got off the 5-inch gun. All this time things were blowing up, bombs were going off, and ships all over the harbor were shooting as fast as they could. There was so much stuff blowing up around there you couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The West Virginia behind us was burning from the waterline clear on to the foremast. The Tennessee was directly behind us and she was hammering away with everything she had. When the Okie coughed up and rolled over we put some cargo nets over the side so the guys in the water would have something to climb up on. It was about twelve to twenty feet from the waterline to the gallery deck, and ten to twelve feet from the waterline to the quarterdeck.
Japanese planes were strafing us from both sides of the ship. They would turn the machine guns on and wouldn’t stop shooting until they got on the other side of you.
So to get ammunition to the 1.1S, you had to get up there on the flying bridge, and that whole flying bridge was closed in with glass, and you had to get down on your hands and knees and put the ammunition down through that hole in the deck. There was a guy by the name of Paul Buck-man who was with me, and he was a kid who went through boot camp with me and was originally in the fifth division with me. We were paired up carrying these ammunition cans up there and putting them down through that hole for the gun. So he was there on his hands and knees putting that can in the hole. I had just turned and gone back into the superstructure to climb down to get another round, and I no more got inside the superstructure when I heard a tremendous loud sound of crashing and breaking glass and rattling noise. I turned around and went back out on the flying bridge, and the whole place was covered with broken glass. A plane had come in strafing from the starboard side and shot out all that glass. The shots went right over Paul Buckman’s head where he was kneeling down. If he had been standing up, or if I had still been standing there a second earlier, we’d have been cut in half by those bullets from that plane. At the time it didn’t really bother me, and I just immediately turned and went back into the superstructure and down the ladder. It wasn’t until I got down to the bottom of the ladder to pick up another round of ammunition that I started to realize what had happened, and I started to shake so bad I had to hang on to the ladder to catch my breath. Then I realized Buckman was still up there, so I climbed back up to see what happened to him. And there he was, still on his hands and knees with all that broken glass around, and he was finishing up loading that round into that hole in the deck. That’s the closest I came to getting killed on December 7.
My division officer Howard Crow got killed that morning. He was in the forward top on a gun director up there, which was his battle station, and he was up there with a guy by the name of Roberts, and Roberts saw the bomb hit the foc’sle and he hollered, “Duck!” Howard Crow ducked behind the director, but a piece of shrapnel came through that thin copper skin, hit the director, and glanced off and hit Crow right in the jugular vein. Roberts grabbed ahold of his jugular vein and tried to pinch it off, but each time his heart pumped, his life blood just went out of him. And Howard Crow died right in Roberts’s hands. Howard was a kid from Texas, a nice young ensign, a nice young kid. And I learned later that he was supposed to get married that following Saturday, December 13. He was going to marry a little girl who had come out to Hawaii to marry him.
So, I was running ammunition up to that 1.1 right up until the attack stopped. Then I went around and helped clean up the mess. We had so many empty ammunition cans that we had dumped down into the galley that we couldn’t get in there at all. It was filled right up to the brim, and we had to take all that out of there. They brought a barge up to the side, and we loaded that stuff off, and we loaded debris off. We put out some fires, we went and helped some of those guys on other ships, and we had fire and rescue working parties helping everybody we could, because the Maryland wasn’t damaged that badly. We didn’t have many casualties, and we only had five guys killed.
The only casualty I saw that day was Howard Crow. He was covered up with a mattress cover down in the laundry room. That’s where they put him after he was killed. They lowered him down off the main mast with a hand line down to the signal bridge, and from there they hauled him down and put him in the laundry. I went down to see him. And there he was, laying underneath that sheet with just his hand showing. His hand looked kind of gray, like an old piece of rug, and that really shook me up. I was sick to my stomach for about three days after seeing that fine kid, seeing him and also seeing all the destruction and all the dead people floating around in the water. They would pick the bodies up out of all that oil and muck that was floating around and put them in a motor launch, and they hauled them over to Ten Ten Dock and handled them just like cordwood. They would take them by the arms and legs and throw them up into a pickup truck they had parked on the dock and take them away. My God, that was some horrible stuff to see. So, we were trapped in our berth. We couldn’t get out because when the Okie rolled over it pushed us up against the mooring quay. We had to blow the quay with dynamite so we could get out of there, get the front of the ship around, get a tug on it, and tow it out from behind the Oklahoma. So when they got us out they did the same thing with the Tennessee, which was tied up behind us, and they dragged her out from behind there. They took us over to the Navy Yard across the harbor, and they flooded aft and brought the bow up out of the water so they could get the hole up above the water. And then they put a patch on that, pumped the water out, and using ten-by-ten and eight-by-eight shoring timbers inside they shored that bow up where the big hole was. The plating on a battleship was an inch thick, and they were welding that patch on there with that thick steel.
We stayed in Pearl Harbor until December 20. We got under way with the Pennsylvania and the Tennessee, but we were the first ones out.
We were in various operations, up to the Aleutians during the Midway battle, and down to Christmas Island during the battle of the Bismarck Sea. Then we fired shots in anger in the Tarawa invasion; we were the flagship for that invasion. Then we went to Abemama in the Gilbert Islands. After that we came back to the States. A while later we went to Maui to Lahaina Roads and picked up a big task force and went to the Marshalls to Kwajalein and bombarded Roi and Namur islands for the invasion there.
I stayed on the Maryland until 1944, just one week short of three years. Then I went home on leave, went back, and was teaching 20mm in a gun school in San Pedro and in San Diego. I ended up in Portland, Oregon, until April 15, 1945. I was assigned to a net tender, and we were supposed to go in on the invasion of Japan, but luckily we didn’t have to go. I don’t think I’d be here talking today if I’d have gone over there on that invasion. The net tenders were supposed to go in first and lay down a net and secure it, and the fleet would have pulled in behind it. My chances of surviving that would have been slim or none.
I went back to Pearl Harbor for the December 7 ceremony in 2003 and stood on the port gallery deck of the USS Missouri, which is docked now right where the Maryland was docked on December 7. The Missouri is facing the opposite direction to what we were on that day. The Missouri is in our old berth, Fox 5, the Maryland berth, and that’s where we were when the Japs hit us. I stood there and looked out over Ford Island, and I had the moment of my whole eternity right there, because that’s the spot where I was standing on the Maryland at 7:55 A.M. on December 7, 1941.