OPPOSITE: Wartime photo of Jim Spriggs.
I was with the Laffey from the time it was launched in 1944. I was drafted in 1943. I got my “greetings,” so I reported for induction and went to Huntington, West Virginia, another fellow and myself. And they gave us a choice, Army, Navy, Marines, or Air Corps. And this buddy of mine says, “What are we going to do?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to go into the Navy.” And he said, “Sounds good to me.”
I was on the commissioning crew of the Laffey, but I broke my leg and missed the shakedown cruise. So we were over on the Normandy invasion, but we were only over there for about twenty-nine days. Once they got far enough inland they didn’t need us anymore. So we hauled tail to the United States, got a new radar, and went through the Panama Canal and over to the Philippines.
Most of the time I spent in the after engine room as a machinist mate. My berth was one deck down from the top deck in the aft part of the ship. When you went down the ladder into the compartment, at the bottom of the ladder, on the right, the center bunk was mine. You can still go down to that compartment on the Laffey today and see where my berth was, but on the ship now they have it set up as a display area.
We had a real good ventilation system, so we were able to sleep down in our berth even in the tropics. It got warm, but it wasn’t unbearable. The vents were about 12 or 14 inches in diameter, and they put pressure in there and the air moved real good. They also had an exhaust fan so the turnover was pretty fast. We had freshwater showers almost all the time. Very seldom did we have saltwater showers, only when the evaporators were down for a short time.
Really and truly I enjoyed life aboard ship. Sometimes when we were out to sea, when things were quiet out there, there was nothing more peaceful than being out there and watching the sun go down, or watching the sun rise.
When we got up by Okinawa, we knew it would be grim, but we knew we had a job to do and that’s part of it. At 8 A.M. on April 16, 1945, I was waiting in chow line. The line was long, so to pass the time we were watching some very large fish that were swimming alongside of the ship. I think they were sharks. I thought to myself, I wouldn’t want to be in the water with that bunch, not realizing that in a very short time, it was probably the safest place to be!
When GQ went off, I went to my battle station in the after fire room. We didn’t have a working annunciator, so we made steam based on the sound of the guns firing. Now, if the 5 inch was firing the enemy planes were quite a distance out. If the 40 mm guns start firing, they’re a little closer, and if the 20 mm start firing, we better get our tail in gear, and that’s how we made steam. We knew from the sound of guns what was going on. The smaller caliber the guns firing, the faster we knew we had to go! Pretty soon we heard all the guns firing, and we knew we were under heavy attack. We got up as much steam as we could so the ship could do evasive action. But then bombs and planes started hitting the ship, and we knew things were bad.
Most of the Japanese planes had a 500-pound bomb on them, and when they’d hit the ship there was a “ka-wham,” and the ship would bounce up and down, and reverb through the ship. I wasn’t so concerned with my own safety as I was with the shipmates who were on deck. In fact, I was too busy to think about it other than to wonder who got hurt.
During all that was happening, I went across the shaft alley to put a bilge pump on the line to pump water. As I was going past the No. 3 boiler, the first class water tender said, “Kick that so-and-so.” It so happened that the fellow who was operating the burners had frozen with fear, and the water tender couldn’t get him to move. I gave him a good kick in the posterior. That did the job, because he was so mad that all he could think of was returning the favor.
The first Japanese plane that hit us caused our rudder to jam hard left. The only way we could maneuver to try to get the planes that were diving on us to miss was to change speeds or reverse direction to throw the pilots’ aim off. We also tried to make smoke from the boilers so the ship could get under it and the pilots couldn’t see us well enough to fire on the ship. With all the changes going on, it kept all the people in the No. 2 fire room very busy making sure we kept up the steam pressure for whatever was needed to save our ship.
While we were under attack, I had a set of powered phones on for part of the time. I could listen in on what was happening topside. I would then relay information to other people down there, and sometimes we could get a little jump on what we needed to do.
So the ship was hit again and again and took on water. We had water from the after engine room bulkhead on back to the stern, which was about a third of the ship. The fan tail was just about under water, and my berth was under water and I lost everything. I got out on deck about fifteen minutes after the attack finally ended. Others were taking care of the wounded and so on, so my main concern was keeping the ship afloat! You know, what could I do to keep it from sinking? So we used cutting torches to stabilize things. We welded plates on the inside and outside of the ship, whatever we could. I had a friend on the ship who grew up in the oil fields, and he was an excellent welder. So he and I worked mostly in our compartment. We’d cut out damaged material and weld new stuff back in and do all kinds of things.
After the attack, a ship came alongside to help us. I think they took our wounded off. I didn’t know how bad Jack Ballenger was wounded, so I sent him a pair of dungarees with a dollar in the pocket. That’s supposed to be a good omen for a stricken shipmate. Jack was wounded in the right leg and buttocks and his right hand was crippled.
As we had no steering, the other ship would try to keep the Laffey from turning while we went forward on the port screw and backed down on the other one to try to make forward progress. When the other ship bumped us, it felt as if the Laffey was going to capsize. We were waterlogged and the after compartments were flooded. It didn’t feel as if we were going to right ourselves. I think that was when I was the most scared.
This operation failed and we had to wait on a tug to tow us. Since my berth was under water, I strung a hammock from the No. 3 mount, that was all mangled up, over to a gun tub just to the side, and we “hot-sacked.” That means, when you get out it’s still warm and somebody else gets in. Sometimes it rained and I got wet a few times. It’d wake you up in a hurry.
It took twenty-four hours to get to Buckner Bay on Okinawa. By this time I’d been up about thirty-six hours straight, so I just went down into the engine room and fell asleep. So while I was down there they held a muster to see who was missing in action and so forth, and I didn’t attend the muster because I was asleep. So later on that day I woke up and went up on deck and there was this yeoman from Minneapolis named Vernon Straus, and Vernon, he and I were always good friends. You know on a ship you pick out some people you get along with, and he was a redheaded little guy and a great friend. So he says, “Where have you been?” I said, “Well, I went down to the engine room and fell asleep.” “Well,” he said, “we held a muster and you’re listed as missing in action.” And I said, “Hell, I’m here! “He tried to get it stopped but he couldn’t, so I was officially listed as missing in action.
Back in Okinawa, it had taken the better part of a week to patch the ship together so that we could get under way for home. I can’t remember the exact day we got under way. It was a somewhat sad occasion when we did set sail, because we were leaving so many shipmates and good buddies behind. I don’t think there were many of us who didn’t breathe a sigh of relief that we were leaving Okinawa.
On the way back to the States, somewhere between Ulithi and Pearl Harbor, one of the patches on the port side came loose. We started taking on water. Since we were by ourselves, we asked for assistance from a group of fleet tankers that were about twelve or fourteen miles away. They ignored us and kept on going west to where we had just come from. We managed to control the leak and made it to Pearl, where we went into dry dock for repairs. That was a good thing, because we hit a pretty bad storm before we got to Seattle. We’d have probably sunk then!
When we arrived in Seattle, I was on the first leave party for thirty days leave, so I didn’t have time to send a telegram to my folks. It was all I could do to get my tickets together and catch a train. When I got home and got off the train I looked my dad up. My dad was a bus driver, and he worked the afternoon shift and I knew where he was. He was very surprised to see me since the telegram from the Navy saying I was missing in action had just arrived a few days before I did! So when he got off his shift that night I went home with him since we lived out in the country. And when I walked into the house, my mom just looked at me and said, “Well, I got the telegram two days ago but of course I didn’t believe it.” So she wasn’t really shocked to see me because she just didn’t believe the telegram that I was missing in action. I almost beat the telegram home anyway!
After the ship was on display near Seattle, they fixed it up and I went back out on the Laffey. We went back to Pearl Harbor and did plane guard duty for carriers while they were training new pilots.
Just recently I got a call one day from a lady in New Hampshire, and she says to me, “Are you Oliver J. Spriggs?” And I says, “Yes.” “Were you aboard the USS Laffey?” “Yes.” So there was a dead silence at that point. And then she says, “Well, I had an uncle who was killed on the Laffey.” So I said, “What was his name?” And she says, “Laverne Hazen.” That’s one of the names on our roster, and he’d been killed. And so I said, “Why sure, I knew him.” And again there was a dead silence for a little while. And she said, “Well, you know my mother was his sister, and their mother, my grandmother, she never got over her son’s death; she never had closure because they never sent a body back. The only thing she had was the telegram from the Navy saying he’d been killed in action.” So we talked an hour or an hour and a half, a long time. And she said, “All these years we have been trying to find somebody who knew him, and we are going to be at your next reunion.” She must have seen it probably on our web page. So her mother came with her and she is eighty-four years old, and we met those people at the reunion. And this lady, the sister of the fellow who was killed, I talked to her probably an hour, but I didn’t tell her the whole story. But, really, the reason they never sent a body back was that there was no body left. It was a direct hit. There were two other good buddies of mine who were killed at the same time. They were on a 20 mm gun on the fantail. There were three 20 mm mounts on the fantail, and one of those Japanese planes just plowed right in there and blew up. There was nothing left.
Well, I knew Laverne Hazen real well. His bunk was probably ten feet from mine, and we stood watches together all the time. And really and truly, I have trouble even now dealing with that when I talk about it—or any of them for that matter. My shipmates during that time were closer than my own family. Because we went through a lot with each other in such a way. That may sound ridiculous, but it’s true.