BILL POND
NAVY

I was on the USS Tulagi, an escort aircraft carrier, and when we left the States we headed out to Pearl Harbor. Five days and four nights with that ol’ carrier thumping along at flank speed—twenty-two knots—and carrying twenty-four new F6F Hellcat fighter planes. That sea was just as smooth as a table top, and yet I was the sickest son-of-a-gun you ever seen. There’s just something about that long, slow, rolling motion that’ll get to you.

We got to Pearl Harbor in late November 1943. There was a lot of oil still on the water, and they were still working at sweeping it up. They were using boats that looked like small skiffs with some sort of a paddle deal attached, and they were continually going around the harbor sweeping off that oil as it came up.

I saw the sunken Arizona and thought about the men who went down with her. Hope nobody would try to salvage it, I thought. “As it is, it’s like a shrine to those people down there, and there ain’t no sense in disturbing them. Leave ‘em down there.” And I believe in that!

I went ashore in Pearl Harbor, and that is where I got my tattoo. I might add, I don’t think that I was stone cold sober when I had it done!

When the Americans returned to the Philippines, we supported the landings in Lingayen Gulf. That’s where the Japs first began hitting the fleet with those Kamikaze suicide planes.

There was a couple of cruisers in with us, the Minneapolis and the Louisville. And I was looking right at the Louisville when she got hit.

Scared?—I was the scaredest rascal you’ve ever seen in your life. But when those Kamikazes come in and people were hollering, “Dive for cover,” I said, “Hell, I can’t see nuthing that way, and I want to see what’s going on.” The old guys who had been through it before, man, they was hunkered down in there. But I’d only just turned eighteen and didn’t have any better sense, so I stood up and saw them Japanese planes coming in like flies. And when one of ‘em would get hit, it’d go all to pieces like it was made of balsa wood.

Then one hit the Louisville’s bridge. God! I was looking right at it when it happened. I seen that. He come in from the right-hand side and made a swing around. I don’t know what his idea was. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just want to come straight in. But, he had that bridge in mind, and he was boring in to hit it, and he did. It turned the Louisville’s bridge into a great ball of fire, and I think it killed about twenty-two or twenty-three men, but the Louisville didn’t even slow down. Like most all Navy ships she had an alternate steering system, and so even though there was probably nobody left alive in the bridge she was able to keep right on going.

That scared the hell out of me, but what made me think about it more than anything else was their wounded. Evidently their sick bay wasn’t near as big as ours, so later in the day they transferred some of them over to us by breeches buoy. They’d sling them on those lines strapped in those wire-basket stretcher things.

They was burned. God! They was cooked. Looked like their clothes was cooked into ‘em, and they just looked like fried meat. I don’t know how in the world any of them ever come out of it.

I didn’t remember much about the rest of it after that. But if I remember right, the Kamikazes finally broke off from us about three o’clock in the afternoon. They were tenacious little devils. They didn’t yet know how to live, for as we learned later, they were just kids, too young to be flying them planes. Young as sixteen years old, and all juiced up with glory propaganda.

Didn’t any of ‘em come too close to us, and we was told not to shoot unless we seen something to shoot at. It was a matter of saving ammunition. We used to say, “We have ammunition to burn,” but the officers would say, “Don’t shoot unless you’ve got a target in sight.”

I can’t understand why the Kamikazes wasn’t paying much attention to us. I think there was three or four made a pass at us, but that was all. They was mostly going for the outlying vessels. They probably thought they could knock them out and then take us over. But we had a good bunch of men on them outlying ships.

I think the thing I loved most was when I was transferred into the “A” Division! I loved that. I was put in charge of refrigeration and steam heat.

When you was out at sea they didn’t allow anyone but the officers to shower with fresh water. The rest of us had only brackish or saltwater showers, and that ol’ saltwater was rough on the skin! So was the saltwater soap. But, in the “A” Division, now that’s where we had it made. Those ships had the finest water-distilling systems, and we operated a lot of that stuff! We knew how to tie into the lines, and so, tucked in behind some supply racks down there, we had ourselves a freshwater shower!

I think there were seventy-two in our division. Our quarters were several decks down, all of us in the same compartment. We slept in pipe-stand bunks stacked five bunks high. All we had was the island. All our ventilation came down through ducts from the island up above. The place was hot, and to say it smelled like a goat pen would be putting it mildly!

I washed my clothes in the sea like so many other men did. We’d tie ‘em up in a secure bundle at the end of a long line and hang them over the side and let them drag through the sea for a while. It was a pretty good system, and it did get them clean.

Man, I’ll tell you, I used to go out and sit on the flight deck at night and just watch the sea go by. I’ve done that so many times! It’d turn phosphorescent where the screws had stirred it up and leave a long, glowing trail of our wake behind us.

And the flying fish: I used to wonder how they could sail through the air and hit through just the top of a wave and fly out of the other side and sail on to go through the top of the next one.

As for how I look back on it now, I remember it as rather uneventful for the most part. They used to say that in the Navy you’re either bored to death or scared to death! And you were bored to death a lot more than scared to death, because we didn’t have that much going on! We was in that one major action. I got three or four stars for that… just that one battle. The rest of it was all patrol duty. As far as the experience is concerned, it was a great experience. I wouldn’t have missed what I saw for a million dollars. Like so many other guys, it helped me to grow up. And if able, and they needed me, would I go back in there again? Hell, yes!