I joined the Navy in 1939, and I was on the USS Ramsey in Pearl Harbor. It was one of the old four-piper destroyers launched in 1918, an old four-piper tin can. But it had become a mine layer by the time I got on it. I wasn’t an electrician yet, but I was striking for it. At that time I was mess cooking, when the December 7 attack started. I had just taken a load of food to the aft quarters, back where they ate below deck, and this was about 8:00 A.M. I was working out of the galley, which was on the main deck right amidships. I’d just gone down carrying a load, and I was yelling at the guys, “Here it is. Come and get it or I’ll throw it out.”
About the time I got down below, there was a bunch of explosions. The guys who already had gotten out of the sack were saying “Oh, God, somebody’s sure practicing awful early this morning.” We knew there was something going on, but we didn’t know yet what it was. So then I went on up to get another load of food, and I looked over and there’s the old battleship Utah rolling over. So I turned around and yelled down the hatch, “BOMBING.” And then I started to run. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, and I didn’t look up in the air right then. You know this is maybe two minutes after the first bomb. About that time the General Quarters siren went off.
The first ones the Japs dropped over on our side of Ford Island were torpedoes, and those Jap torpedo bombers came in real low, right over the top of us. We were all lined up there, a whole row of mine layers tied up one to another, and those planes came right over us.
And I’m looking across at the Utah, and there wasn’t any smoke or fire, it was just rolling over at her berth. So I’m running forward on the open deck and I look up and there’s a Jap plane coming right over the top or our mast, just as low as he can get and still clear it, and he’s looking for Del Aldrich! He sees me running and he opens up, and, well, he was a little late because his machine gun bullets landed out in the water behind us. But there I was, just twenty years old, and he’s shooting at me and I’m running!
So as we realized that the Japs were attacking us, we started to open up with every gun we had. We had lost our sights in rough seas for this old 3-inch antiaircraft gun on the foc’sle, when a deck locker had washed right over the side with the sights for this gun in it. It never got replaced because it was a real old gun anyway, and nobody thought much about using it. And this friend of mine was a gunners mate, and he was real excited and ran up there and decided he was going to shoot this gun. So he was throwing those 3-inch shells into the breech, closing it, and running around and pulling the lanyard, and away it’d go. Well, he didn’t set the fuse or anything, and those shells would just go up in the air and come down somewhere and explode when they hit the ground. If you don’t set the fuse for a certain altitude, that’s what they do. And that’s how we shelled Honolulu!
Everybody got to their battle stations, and we had one boiler under steam because we had ready duty, and we were the second ship out of the harbor that morning. We just dropped the lines and started to head out. And as we were maneuvering, that’s when we saw one of those Japanese two-man subs in the harbor. The Curtis was trying to depress that 4-inch gun that she had aft, and she could only go so low, but she was shooting at it anyway. Then the Monahan tried to ram it, and went right over the top of it. Everything in the harbor on that side of Ford Island was shooting at that sub. All you could see was just a little bit of the conning tower. You could see that it was a sub and you knew it had no business there.
So, anyway, we were the second ship out of the harbor. We must have gotten out of there in fifteen minutes. We went right out in front of the harbor and started patrolling for submarines with sound gear. A bunch of us were sitting on the deck handling .50-caliber ammunition. I saw a forty-year-old man, one of our most experienced guys, he was sitting on the deck and his hands were shaking so bad he couldn’t move the clips of .50-caliber ammunition. And I’ll tell you what, he wasn’t shaking any worse than me—it was mutual! We were so wound up we would just shake. And I also know I was scared as hell!
After that we were standing off Pearl Harbor and just patrolled back and forth for a solid week. The next Sunday we went back into Pearl Harbor, and we hadn’t really gotten a good idea of how bad it was because we had left so fast. But what I really remember was all the smoke, and this was one week later. So we came in and got provisions and fueled up and got a load of mines. We came right back over to where we were berthed on December 7, and of course there was the Utah, belly up. Some of us got to go ashore briefly, and I went over to Aiea for something. They had this big desk made of planks, and that’s where they were trying to keep track of how many had been killed. It was a body count station, and this was where they were running the bodies through. We noticed that on their list it was up to 2,000 dead, and I said, “Jesus Christ, can that be right?” I didn’t think that many could have been killed, but they were.
So we got back on the Ramsey and headed for the South Pacific. We were out for about two months. We had quite a cruise down there in the South Seas. We started out in Samoa, first to American Samoa, to Pago Pago, and then to British Samoa. Then we went over to Fiji, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia, and we were laying mines in all those harbors.
When we got back to Pearl Harbor after our two-month South Seas tour, I was transferred temporarily off the Ramsey to a BOQ on shore, and they sent us over to help out on the damaged ships. So I got assigned to the Maryland. I walked on board, and it was sitting very low in the water. I think she was touching bottom, and they were trying to raise her and had us doing work to help out. They had a lot of guys they pulled off other ships to help out with the salvage.
We have a little organization called the Naval Mine Worker Association. We have reunions and stuff, and we have a newsletter. It was an offshoot of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, which was formed in 1958, and it’s really a going proposition. They have a darned good newsletter, so I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of the guys over the years. The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association is a lot easier to explain to people than the Naval Mine Worker Association. Most people don’t know anything about what we did out there in the Pacific during the war.