Ladies and gentlemen of the JCs, the last time
I was here with you, I told you my story about
Pearl Harbor and how I was trapped aboard the
USS Oklahoma.
And I recognize several of the quite a few of
the faces here tonight.
And on the other hand, there are some new faces
here too.
And if you don't mind, I'm just going to run
down through a thumbnail sketch of what I told
you the last time.
Now, those of you that heard it before,
you can look at the literature
and do what you want to in the meantime.
But my story basically was that I went into the Navy
in January of 1941,
and I ended up on December 7th in 1941
over Pearl Harbor on the battleship Oklahoma
when the Japanese attacked.
As they attacked the ship,
one of the first ships hit with torpedoes
was the USS Oklahoma, and she took a list to port
almost immediately, and I was down
in the after-steering station, the ship's way down,
lower than about the fourth deck of the ship,
way under the water, and the torpedoes hit the ship,
and we didn't know what was going on,
and I had just come out of a pump that morning.
The next thing you know, the ship turned over,
and there we were, fighting for our lives,
trapped in a compartment to go next.
And for a day and a half, we struggled down there,
trying to keep alive while the water was coming up,
the air was getting stale, and everybody was,
we were just hoping that they'd get to us in time.
We heard guys about a day after we started,
we had no idea of the length of time ourselves,
but we found out later that the next morning,
this was after December 7th at 8:00
when the Japanese attacked, the ship turned over,
and the next morning at about 8:00,
they started playing around with the bottom of
the ship,
trying to get those percent to crack down.
And they managed to do that.
They cut out a total of 32 of us
that were found in the road banks.
And obviously, if you take into consideration
that there were 451 of us killed in the Oklahoma,
and there were only 32 of us cut out,
you realize how lucky I am to be here
talking to you tonight.
So that part of my story is easy to tell
because I've gone through it so many times.
Over the years, I'd say,
you know, for the past two years,
I have given that story at least several
hundred times, I think, so I think that's a
good reason for that talk.
But then, what followed after I talked to you
the last time, I think I threw out something
about, well,
I started to tell the story about Bonnie
Connell, I said, good riddance, that's another story.
You invited me to hear the magic story about
Pearl Harbor, and as a result, you finally
invited me back to finish my story.
So I'm going to give you the rest of my dating
career now, and it runs into quite a few chapters,
because my dating life covered all the way from
Pearl Harbor on December 7th,
and I went all the way through the war, through
the peace, and because I was regularly dating,
and signed up for six years, after the war
ended, I couldn't get discharged,
because all the rest of the fellows said we
have points,
points for things that you earned in the course
of the war
that you were able to get discharged early.
In other words, they were reserved.
Being a regular Navy man, they wouldn't let me out.
So every time I shipped up back to Pearl Harbor,
they'd send me back out of the Pacific again.
And I ended up at Bikini for the A-bomb test.
So my career spans all the way,
all the way from Pearl Harbor to Bikini for the
A-bomb test.
Always in the Pacific Harbor.
but the story that I'm trying to tell tonight
is based on the battle of Guadalcanal.
Now the reason I gave you the literature and
everything is because I suppose that if I would
have told this story back in
probably 1950 or sometime like that, almost
everybody would have remembered where
Guadalcanal was.
Guadalcanal was one of the places out in the
Pacific where the war changed.
It was at that point that the tide turned.
But the basic paper that I have given you here
will tell you the areas in the Pacific
that the Japanese had bombed.
And the story that I'm getting at is
basically over here under the item Pacific Blueprint.
And I'm going to run through that quickly
If you look at the key to the map, the black
areas were the Japanese conquest up until
December 7th.
Now, in the course of this time, I'm going to
be giving you not only the history of it,
but the geography of it, because if you don't
have that, you won't understand the importance
history of it, but the geography of it. Because
if you don't have that, you won't understand
the importance of the Battle of the Bonne Canal.
The key to this whole thing was that the
Japanese, immediately after the attack on Pearl
Harbor, went all the way across the southern Pacific.
There was nothing to stop them. At that time,
they had pretty well wrecked the Pacific Fleet
at Pearl Harbor.
And even though we re-salvaged those ships and
we managed to get them back in the war later on,
in those early months of 1942, we had no
victories at all in the Pacific.
Everything, all of this blackened area, the
whole blackened area was what the Japanese had
conquered before they attacked Pearl Harbor.
Then the hatched areas are the areas that they
conquered after that.
Now, this became very, very important, because
the areas with the hatch marks, the black and
white stripes, if you'll notice, they went all
the way down to not only past China, down into
China, they went down through the Dutch East Indies,
The Netherlands, East Indies, I have it on the
map here,
and went all the way through all these islands
and everything.
Anywhere they went, they'd simply defeat everybody.
They went through Singapore and the British
and everyone able to stop them.
They went to Hong Kong, any place that they went,
they conquered.
So at the particular time that I'm talking about,
the Japanese are now the total victors
and we are always losers.
And there had been no challenge to that up
until this time.
So the key to the whole thing there is to see,
in other words, if you look at this,
all the way over until just before you get to
Pearl Harbor,
the line, that big black line encloses the
entire area
that the Japanese had conquered.
Now, the key to this whole thing was
that we were fighting a war in two fronts at
the same time.
We were fighting a war in the Pacific against
the Japanese.
We were fighting a war in the Atlantic against
the Germans
and later more people got into it.
But by and large, the decision had been made
long before the attack of Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt had gotten together
and decided that if war came,
the war in Europe took priority.
They would not do much about the Pacific.
At that time, they didn't even think in terms
of the Pacific,
because the Japanese were not necessarily at war.
The Germans were.
And while we were not at war, the English were.
They were fighting the Battle of Britain
and all that sort of thing.
So that finally, when the Japanese attacked us,
they gave the Americans a reason why
they should join the British in the fight
against Germany,
which was really what they wanted anyway.
And on the other hand, the Japanese were now
an enemy on the other coast from us.
The question came up then among the Joint
Chiefs of Staff
and the president and all those people
who had to make these decisions.
Well, how are we going to divide our forces?
Where are we going to send our ships?
Where are we going to send our armies, our marines,
our air force?
The air force, by the way, at that time
was not a separate unit.
It was a part of the army.
they had the Army Air Corps, but it was not a
separate part,
as we have it today.
So the battle thing became between the Army and
the Navy.
Who gets what, and where do we send it?
Well, of course, those of us that were out in
the Pacific
at the time kept thinking, well,
we ought to fight this Pacific War at the same time
we fight the other one.
I mean, we understood that they had to fight
that one
in Germany, but after all, we were in these
ships out here.
Unfortunately, the Japanese had us outnumbered.
They had more ships, they had more aircraft tires,
they had more ground troops,
they had armies all over this part of the world.
And in Germany, on the other hand,
the Nazis were running all over the continent
and they were doing a lot of damage to Britain
at the time.
And so with the limited forces,
and before we had gotten to the point
where we were producing like we later did,
you can see that we only had a limited number
of ships,
planes, men, and trained men, that is.
And I mention that trained men because, unfortunately,
what happened was that in the long between wars,
in the long between the Second World,
the First World War and the Second World War,
military powers all tended to decrease.
I mean, we've got the barracks soldier
that has been in 20 years of service
but has never seen a battle,
has never been a cost to buy an enemy or
anything like that,
he will chance to slump off a bit.
And the truth of the matter is, on the day
that they attacked us at Pearl Harbor,
if you remember those who visited the first time,
one of the first things I did when I heard the folks'
made how, oh, hey, it's manned air battle stations.
Set the watertight conditions throughout the ship.
I said, why don't they want to have you on there
Sunday morning?
And it was Sunday morning in December the 7th.
And my reaction was lovely.
I went out on a drill on a Sunday morning flight
until I heard the first explosion, the second explosion,
and the third explosion,
and the ship started to turn over,
and I realized there was something more
than a drill going on.
And that was the first time that I had.
So what happened to us at Pearl Harbor
didn't necessarily happen to all the servicemen
that were in the service at the time.
My father was out in the Philippines,
and he heard about Pearl Harbor,
and he said, you better be ready.
They're coming out there.
The truth of the matter is, we always planned
everything in the Pacific
based on whether they would attack the Philippines.
We never thought they'd attack Pearl Harbor.
Nobody ever expected that.
But now, a day after the attack of Pearl Harbor,
the barracks soldiers that MacArthur was
bragging about,
the Philippine soldiers and the American
soldiers that were on the Philippines
that were so great, all of a sudden we find out
that he sits in his room
and decides what shall I do and can't hang up
his line
when he has some airplanes there, some at the airport
that we would have loved to have at Pearl Harbor
but they didn't have available.
But he sat too long.
And the Japanese, after a day,
a day after they attacked us,
attacked the Philippines and caught all these
planes on the ground
and they got him too.
You know, they surrounded the Philippines
and they started landing.
And the next thing you know, he's pressed
and the best they can do is get him off the island.
the rest of the people became prisoners,
which is exactly what happened to the Philippines.
And you'll see, you'll notice on the map there
that the Philippines is definitely included
in the hash barrier, the Japanese have taken
the war.
So at that point, I'll turn you off the date now
on exactly what we were doing at that time.
We went out there and Admiral Nimitz,
who was the commander, who was the chief of the Navy,
And General MacArthur was given a section,
another section out there, but they weren't
always getting along too well together because
the Army wanted to have their way and the
Navy wanted to have their way.
And some people weren't alone in that.
The Japanese were doing the same thing.
The Japanese had a problem because they had
certain of their war-longers, as we called
them in those days, that wanted to expand more.
And then there were others that said, no, we
don't want to fight the Americans, we might as
well fight the Russians.
Actually, we want to get China, we want to take
China as we had planned earlier.
But then there was a guy named Yang Bochun who
decided that he was, by the way, the guy that
planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Now, before he planned that attack, he didn't
want to attack Pearl Harbor.
It was a good idea until they decided that they
were going to attack America and they were
going to do it now.
And then he said, well, the truth of the matter
is, by the way, he was very well educated.
He was a bright student of the Dalai Lama.
And he had been trained at Harvard, for
instance, and he would have been an attaché in
the United States.
So he knew, he knew the sentiment of the
American people, but many of the Japanese did
the same, in the same way we didn't understand
the Japanese, we thought that it was a little
yellow man that we could whip any time we
wanted to.
At Pearl Harbor, we weren't ready for a
Japanese attack. As a matter of fact, some of
the people thought that when these planes came
in and were diving, the Germans were attacking
us because we didn't think the Japanese could
do that.
Well, the truth of the matter was they were
much better than that, even though they had
broken the trees of what we once had, the 5-5-3
division of ships that everybody could have.
In other words, the British were supposed to
have five ships, and the Americans were
supposed to have five ships, and the Japanese
were supposed to have three ships.
And that's what we agreed to one time, as a way
of keeping peace by reducing our movements
after World War I.
And, of course, the Japanese weren't too happy
with that.
And, by the way, we kind of fought our own war ourselves
in the fact that we were selling them scrap
iron and steel,
and we were selling them oil and everything else.
And as long as they could build up their army
and attack China, then they were happy.
And they didn't want to bother us.
But when we started saying, let's cut them off
to stop them from killing the Chinese,
then all of a sudden we realized that if they
didn't attack now,
if they would sit tight, that they would eventually
deteriorate as an international power.
Primarily because they needed all the raw materials.
They're an island.
Almost like England had to have their colonies.
Japan had to have their raw materials brought
to them.
And they didn't have the oil.
They didn't have the steel.
And so their problem was, what do we do now?
The Americans are cutting off the land to top
it off.
after they attacked China when we didn't want
them to,
they went a step further and sent off Americans,
said, we're going to cut off your assets here
in this country.
Now we're going to take their money away from
them, too,
anything that they had in America.
Well, at that point, the Japanese said,
we don't have much of a choice.
We have to do it.
Well, we sort of knew that this was their thinking.
The only thing we miscalculated at the moment
is where are they going to strike.
Because by that time, Ford Elko, who
was the Secretary of State and others, had a
good feeling.
they had already announced this means war with Japan,
when we cut them off from their assets.
So at that point, the attack was a natural
thing to follow.
The one thing that the Japanese didn't get that
they wanted
was the air attack.
When they attacked Pearl Harbor,
they got the battleships, they got the
battleship row,
they wiped it out temporarily.
They wiped out my other ship,
my other ship got a torpedo hit,
and I was down there in the Oklahoma,
they finally put us out.
They took me up off side
and we went over to the hospital ship for one night,
but there was nothing wrong with it,
just after eight and a half.
It only had an hour or two to live
and we didn't have very much longer.
The air was going stale and everything else.
We finally got off the ship and they
transferred us,
the first thing they did was transfer us
to another ship that was going to fly us back
to the Pacific.
So it felt well, at least these guys
are some experienced sailors.
I was 13 years old and I had one battle under
my belt and I don't even know what happened there.
I was down in the dark the whole time.
So it turned out that they decided that all the
ships that had men that had been, as you say, blood,
this was the beginning of the fighting, then
you go off into the new ships that are going
out there.
So we went out to the Pacific to fight the war
out there.
And that's when we got involved with the
material that you have here.
We were caught in that group of people who were
supposed to be expendable because we didn't
have enough material to fight the Japanese, but
we had to stop them anyway.
And that was the problem that they had.
Our command was down in New Mea, in New
Caledonia. You'll find that on the chart there
just below that line.
There's New Caledonia and that's where our
central command was.
They would issue the orders there as to what we
should do in the upper part, in other words, up
from there.
And as they got up into, in other words, we
started getting a little bolder.
Even though we didn't have the ships or the men
or anything to take on the Japanese,
we decided finally that unless we did
something, the Japanese were going to overrun
New Guinea,
they were going to overrun Australia, they were
going to overrun New Zealand,
And they would take everything, and eventually
they had already planned to take Midway.
And before that, they sent their ships up into
the Coral Sea where they were running rampant.
And as Yamamoto had said, he was the admiral
that had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and he had said then, I can run wild for the
first half year or year, and anywhere I want to.
But after that, unless we forced the Americans
into consuming their victory, the Japanese
victory, in other words, unless we surrendered,
unless the Americans surrendered, after the
first year, from that point on, he would never
be able to come back again.
He was wise. He understood America. He
understood that if they had a release, had
unleashed the sneaking Japanese.
We were not prepared for war, that is true, but
we were able to fight one because we had the
productive capacity back in our country.
And if only we had stopped the Japanese long
enough to get our people working to start
delivering the machine,
The Japanese could not, could not make the same
materials immediately.
They could not replace their ships.
They only ever put one major ship into
commission after the attack on Pearl Harbor
because they had used up everything they had
for that.
Although, for the moment being, they had ten
carriers running around the Pacific.
We were lucky when we had two or three at a
time because half the time
ours were damaged, back at Pearl Harbor being repaired.
So at the time that this battle took place in
Prada Canal,
we had decided that we're going to stop them
there, period.
We have to stop them.
And of course, the guys down at Admiral Thornley,
who was down in Noumea, he said, look,
we don't have enough to do it.
But the guys back in Washington had decided
we're going to stop them there.
And MacArthur said, well, in order
to go up along New Guinea, we're going
to have some of these island bases taken and
everything else, but he didn't want to give
up any of his ships or planes or men, and the
Pacific Force didn't have very many, and
so finally they got together and decided, okay,
let's take a stand at Guadalcanal.
Now, Guadalcanal, and now I'm getting over here
to the end of the other map, this one
right here, where you'll see the Guadalcanal
area is this one where it's in the Solomon Chain.
And the Japanese had been running wild just
above Guadalcanal, and you can see it there
as the swath.
That adds how far they had come down, and
finally they decided, just about the time
we decided, that we're going to try to put a
little airstrip on Guadalcanal so that we
We found out just about the time we were ready
to start that they were doing the same thing.
They had made the same plans because they had a
peak base up at Ravoul.
Ravoul was way up north, and that doesn't show
up in the chart, but it was north of
the Solomons, and it was up in, I guess it was
New Britain.
The base there could send planes, but the limit
of their planes was the area down on Guadalcanal.
So if we were going to have ships operating
freely there, then we had to have something to
stop their planes.
Well, we didn't have that, but now they were
going to put an airport there,
then they were going to be able to control Port
Morrisby, which was down on the southern coast
of New Guinea.
we were going to be able to threaten Australia
and New Zealand, we would threaten our base at
Nouvea in New Caledonia. All those places were
not going to be threatened because the Japanese
were going to get an airstrip on Guadalcanal.
Well, at that point, the admirals and generals
and everybody else agreed, well we can't let
that happen. So they sent a force up there,
a force of marines, and you might have heard
about the famous Marine Corps that went there
Well, the story, my story is the ships that
took the Marines to Guadalcanal.
And then we had to stand there, we had to go
into the area to hold off the Japanese from
attacking the Marines that were on Guadalcanal.
Then the problem was we didn't have enough
ships to do it, we didn't have enough planes to
do it.
The only thing we had was enough to get them in
there, and even then it was debatable whether
or not we could defend them, because once we
dropped them off, all of a sudden, the Navy
guys and the carriers said, well, we can't risk
any more carriers after they had fought the
battle of Carl Sea, they had fought the battle
of Big Lake, lost most of our carriers, and now
there's no way that we risk our last two
carriers fighting this.
So they ran away. We dropped the machines, the
marines on the island, and only half of them
appeared because by that time we got word
through the coast watchers, and the coast
watchers become very important in this story.
The coast watchers were Australians and British
mostly, that would tell us, they were
islanders, they were plantational before that.
And then, when the ships and planes were coming
down from the north, from Reboult,
and they'd come down from that area called the
spot, and then they'd attack down there.
And any of our ships that were in there, if we
were trying to get ammunition and stores and supplies,
and fresh men on the Guadalcanal, they would
attack us.
And we did the same to them, because they got started.
All of a sudden, they already had the guys
there when the Marines landed.
But the Marines were now outnumbering them, but
they couldn't do much because the planes that
came over were always Japanese, the ships that
were firing at them were always Japanese.
So it was a land-sea-air operation, and we were
only one part of it.
So when I tell you about the fame of our
battles, you must remember that many, many
other people were doing their share on the
island itself.
At this point, we went up there and we got into
battles, obviously.
We were trying to supply the island with men,
and we did that.
We took the Marines, went over there, took the
airstrip away from the Japanese,
but the Japanese were in a perimeter right
around that area.
And now the fighting started and it all settled
down in the mud and the horrible conditions of Guadalcanal.
This guy, more people, more Japanese and
Americans died in Guadalcanal from malaria than
they were killed by the action.
It was one of those things. So we had disease,
we had the slaughter was atrocious in some cases.
And then we would stand outside and we would
coast outside and fire shells into the Japanese.
And the Japanese would do the same to our Marines.
And that went on for a month or two, and then
all of a sudden we found out that they're
planning now, they've given up trying to do it
with a little bit of resupply.
They have a great big supply train coming down there.
They're going to send all the ships they have,
the battleships and the cruisers and destroyers,
and send them down followed by transports with
soldier replacements, with all kinds of
materiel, with ammunition,
and they were going to finally take over the place.
In the meantime, we were trying to do the same
thing, but ours was neater compared to theirs.
We had to come all the way up from the lower end.
So we're always coming up from the south,
they're coming down from the north,
and we're always meeting there and then
fighting at each other at that point.
The night that I remember, I'll just describe
two of the battles to you very quickly,
that we fought over this island as a result of
this meeting at that point.
And whenever you see, I went out just recently
on a 50-year anniversary cruise, and when you
see this island, you think,
well, I don't know what fighting over this is
for, you know.
It's one of those places where you can't
picture why you should be fighting over it.
Circumstance brought this about.
But what actually happened was there was one
major battle, but there were many, many minor battles.
Many battles where they sank only two or three
ships. Well, that's an awful lot to us. It was
a lot to the Japanese. It was more to the
Japanese than it was to us because by this
time, we're beginning to be able to construct
more ships.
ships. Now we have those with the riveter back
and helping make ships and planes back in the
United States while the fighting men are going off.
And we're beginning to get some replacements
and reinforcements. But by and large, they're
all going over to make the second landing in Europe.
The idea was that to win the war in Germany
first, win the war in Europe first, and then
come out and fight the war in the Pacific.
so that our shoestring operations were still
going on and that's what that's what we're
caught in the middle of which meant that we
were almost always outnumbered when we caught them
and we were always outmanned outgunned and so
forth but these particular nights that I'm talking
about uh the battle of cape espress was one
that I fought and I fought in about six or
seven of the
battles out there and that the the one that I
described first of all is cape espress cape
was right at the end of Guadalcanal, and on the
Guadalcanal map I think it shows it there,
Cape Esperance is right there next to Cebu
Island. If you look at the northwest tip of
Guadalcanal, you'll see Cape Esperance. Well,
the battle took place between Cebu Island
And that was the key to this battle. It was
simple. They were coming down with transports
behind their fighting ships, and they didn't
know we were there.
Ah, this ship was nice. But we knew they were
coming. The only trouble was, we didn't trust radar.
radar, and in those days our ships had radar.
And one of the destroyers had a search radar.
There were radars of other types, but the
search radars, it could tell you where the
enemy ships were,
but we only had two ships to defeat that guy,
you could do that. And the Admiral, just to
show you how
the barracks and how they had gotten through
the Navy, the Admiral, because he was sentimental
about the ship he was going to be on, in other
words, the Admiral's flagship,
is supposed to be the one that can give you the
best information, the best sources, and so forth.
Instead of that, he said, no, I used to be the
captain of the San Francisco,
and I'd like to be on her, she was one of the
older ships, but I had a cruiser,
and he took his flag on the San Francisco.
And the other Admiral took his flag on Atlanta.
Well, I'm getting ahead of my story. That's the
second battle. The first battle, Mr. Thornley
had instructed the admiral to organize what he
could, go in there and fight the battle of Cape Vespers.
So we got in there and we actually have to have
caused the admiral to make so many mistakes.
that he accidentally crossed the T on a
Japanese ship.
Now crossing the T, for those of you
that aren't concerned with military tactics,
a ship would come out and go
and have all of its guns broadside
for the fleet that's coming forward.
If you can cross the T over,
in other words, all your ships are in line here,
and they're in line here,
and they're coming down toward you,
you can swing all your guns up.
If you have 15 major guns in your battery,
you can shoot at all of them, not their torpedoes.
And you can fire at the whole row of ships.
On the other hand, they're coming towards you,
they can only fire their forward guns
and only the forward ships,
because otherwise the ships back there
might hit their own ships.
In trying to get to the,
so that the reason it happened, actually,
the guy made a mistake.
Admiral Scott didn't notice.
He took his cow up, and then all of a sudden,
For no reason, we were trying to get word to him
that we had spotted them on the radar,
and he didn't know it.
The Admiral was on the ship,
and there was only one line of communication,
what we call a TBS, transmission between ships.
And the transmission, the radio language was crude,
I should say.
They started out, Admiral, I think I see
someone out there.
You know, something like that.
And the next thing you know, the Admiral said,
After a while, we knew exactly who the Japanese
were, but we never could get the word of the
admiral because too many guys were trying to
talk to him at the same time.
So our ships went up, and as a matter of
chance, he decided to turn because he had been at
an inkling that they were up there somewhere.
He turned and turned around, and when he did,
he looked at his quarters up ahead, you know,
and they swung off to the side, and then after
a while, they were out of position, and he
And he had taken the column and was coming back
the other way, and the destroyers were saying,
he was asking the destroyers, what are you doing?
Well, we're trying to come along to get in the
formation again, because they just let them.
As a matter of fact, what he actually did, he
accidentally crossed the T. He was the luckiest
guy alive.
He had a lot of TV, he had a lovely program,
because in the meantime, the Japanese are sound
asleep on their ships.
They didn't know. They were hunting down, and
the Air Force bookouts were reporting,
hey, we think we see some ships down there. But
I thought, of course, maybe I'd go to them from
their standpoint.
I'd go to them and say, well, I kind of left a
couple of degrees.
And, you know, it was a real easy life, because
he wasn't prepared.
When we opened fire on them, by the way, their
guns were still trained floor and aft.
They had no knowledge of exactly where we were.
And so we opened fire and when we did, a real
battle took place and luckily we sank a cruiser
and a destroyer and we finally battered up
several of their other ships.
And the end of the story was that we ended up
getting one of ours. One of those destroyers
that swung off accidentally went off in his own
attack against the whole fleet.
And he ended up there and he got sunk, and that
was in Duncan, the U.S. in Duncan.
But he was free, but don't mind, he was foolish.
I mean, one of the stories that I have to tell
about it, too,
is the little incidents that happened to us.
Some of the survivors were picked up from the Duncan.
Now, the Duncan had lost, I think, something
like 70 men, and they rescued 140 or something.
But some of those who were rescued, now these
waters around Japan had sharks.
Now normally sharks don't attack humans too much.
You know, we argue about it on the beach here
and there.
But they're not noted for that.
But out there, they were a different species then,
their reason being that the Polynese,
and frequently on many of these islands around there,
whenever they buried their dead,
they, in other words, they didn't want to bury
them on the island
because of the pollution and so forth,
And as a result, the sharks that swim around
these islands became a low human flesh.
So, after a while, they didn't care whether it
was swimmy or not.
So, this one guy would pick him up, and he's bleeding.
And he said, what happened to you?
And he took him down to the Sink Bay, and it
wasn't too serious.
It was straight marks on his backside.
And he said, well, I got back to the ship's
sunk, I was swimming away from the ship, and
this darn little shark came up, and after a
while, it's punching at me.
And every time it would grab him, he'd turn
around and he'd hit it on the nose.
And then he'd swim away again, and he'd hit it
on the nose, and he said, finally, this other
destroyer came over and picked us up.
He said, pull it back right here, it's going to
be pulled out of the water, the shark is still
going to choke you.
And he had spotted the shark, and finally got
rid of it.
So they got him over to our ship, and we were
all down on top of Kermit in the next day, and
we didn't have to worry about it.
But that battle was a prelude to the big one.
The big one was the battle of November the
13th, and it went on for three days.
But that night, that was the night the Japanese
decided, now they're really going to take over.
They came down there, they had two battleships,
they had a cruiser in the front, they had nine
destroyers, and we had about four or five
cruisers and about a dozen destroyers.
And in other words, we were fairly well matched
if you consider a battleship about equal to a cruiser.
But when you start measuring the gun power of
the battleship against the cruiser, then of
course they had us off guard.
and they came down through the area right there
in the same, we're talking about the same area
roughly, they came around the corner and they came,
and then we get into that other map that I gave
you there where you can see the ships coming.
In other words, I'm talking about this chart here.
Now this battle, the thing that was most
interesting about this was the fact that it was
put together hastily.
Our task force, many of the ships had never
operated together.
And now you talk about it being a green outfit.
We had two Admirals. One was on the Atlanta and
the other was on the San Francisco.
And again, neither one of those ships had the
type of radar we had.
The Helena and the Fletcher. Now the Fletcher
was a destroyer.
If you look at the tail end of the column, that
ship should have been right up front.
And the Admiral's flagship should have been the Helena.
I mean, looking back at it, it's one more than
Quarterbacking to a degree.
But it just goes to show you how little we knew
about what was going to come in future months.
The fact that the Admiral didn't trust radar.
He turned off because he was afraid that the
Japanese might have a receiving thing
that would give the signal to the Japanese
before it bounced back from us.
Well, it was far from the case.
But they didn't understand, and so these old
battleship sailors, and that's what most of
them were,
they were even debating whether air-fed
carriers are better than battleships at that time.
And that's a horrible argument, because by this
time the Japanese were already proving that air
attacks against battleships,
that battleships lose. And this is where the
old Navy, it took them months before they
finally found out.
This night, 4 a.m. on the lesson, however, the
Japanese were just as stupid.
They were anything worse than we were.
That's really a indictment, if there ever was one.
Because they came down in this column again.
Now, they were planning to take over
Guadalcanal that night.
All our Marines on Guadalcanal have been
telling the story.
Have you ever been down there?
They'll tell you.
That night, if we wouldn't have stopped the
Japanese, they would have been dead in the morning.
It was that simple, baby.
The Japanese, inside all these ships that they
had here, behind them,
with great big columns of these transports and
cargo ships and everything else,
so that we had the only choice that we had.
Now, we didn't have any battleships, and they
had two of them there.
We came up, and the Admiral said, well, get as
many ships together as you can,
and then he gave the command, attack.
So we go up there, and in the meantime, the
Japanese are coming down here at full speed,
never knowing we're there.
They were even worse on radar than we were.
But they were better on my lookouts.
Their lookouts could spot our ship before me
because they had learned how to use night vision
in their discipline and training, and we never
really needed it after this time
because they finally found out how good radar is.
They could do all the work that any lookout
could do, and it's much better.
So these ships were coming down through there,
and all of a sudden, our admiral, not knowing
exactly where they were, and we found out that
the two leading destroyers that we had,
and you notice how they turned to the left
there as they're coming up, and there are
two Japanese destroyers coming down the other
way, they got so close together, they almost
These are ships now that are capable of firing
over the horizon, and yet not a person, no
shot has been fired.
So all of a sudden, the leading destroyers were
saying, maybe open fire, maybe fire torpedoes.
And they had their torpedoes.
They turned around and the Admiral wouldn't
give the order.
He wasn't sure.
He didn't know whether he wanted to fire or not.
And finally, after the ships were passed, after
this turn was made, and the two lead destroyers
were passed, all of a sudden, the rest of our
column is coming up there now, in order to
avoid hitting this destroyer that turned off to
the left, the ships behind it were beginning to
pile up, and if they wouldn't turn out of the
way, they'd ram our own ships.
Well, the admiral didn't know what was going
on, so he said,
what are you doing?
He said, we're turning to avoid hitting our own ships.
That was coming over the TBS, the communications.
And finally, they finally got around, and then,
all of a sudden,
we're going right up between all these Japanese ships.
Right up past the township.
And nobody's fucked or shocked.
So at this point, we look around, and somebody says,
And somebody says, hey, there's a battleship up there.
Hey, why don't you come over here?
Hey, there's a cruise line up there.
And all these guys are reporting it.
And finally, the guy sitting at the angle says,
prepare to commence firing.
When it finally gets to work, all of a sudden,
the Japanese, by the way, but they're
doing it in the meantime, they're
coming down there with ammunition
to bombard the island, bombard the aquatic canal.
And they're going to wipe out all the marines
in the Pai Canal, and they're going to prowl
the airstrip.
And they needed incendiary bombs, and they
needed shells, and they needed fragmentation shells.
They didn't need armor-piercing shells for that.
And so they come down there and went into Vidos
in battle, and what did they have in their guns?
Shotgun shells.
All of a sudden, they get into a battle, the admiral,
this is all, I had to read this stuff recently
just to make sure I knew what I was talking about.
The admiral on the Japanese ship got into an argument
with his demanding officers,
do you think we have time to change to hard shells,
to armor-piercing shells?
And they finally decided yes.
So they started taking all the ammunition out
of the rugs and out of the car, and in the
meantime went off there letting them get away
with it.
Then they opened fire. When they opened fire,
what they did, they turned on the search lights.
In the background, the Japanese ships are
coming down through there, and all of a sudden,
the Admiral, he's in even worse shape than
Admiral Callahan and Admiral Scott.
And he says, OK, turn on the searchlights.
He wanted to see who he was shooting at.
And then, by the way, they turned them on.
And different historians make the statement
that they turned them on the Atlanta.
But I happen to know that he turned them on the Helena.
Now, it might be that he turned them on both
on the same time.
But the reason I know that, I buy the fact, too.
And I'm sweating this thing out.
And all of a sudden, I see the searchlight come on.
Now, I thought the whole Japanese Navy was
getting just
I didn't think they were going to shoot at
anybody else, and they weren't even going to
hit me in the head or the toe.
They were going to hit me right in the belly button.
I was so sure they were aiming for me, and all
of a sudden, within seconds after that light
went off,
there was a word in the corner, I'm
transferring, and Bang!
They looked as though we took a shell and threw
it right at that light.
Within seconds, we knocked it out.
Now, whether we did it or the other ships, when
you're a colonel like that, and all the ships
start firing, you don't know exactly who did do
the shooting.
We claimed so many that we sank them. They
claimed so many that they sank them.
Only years later, when the Japanese told us the
truth, they said, well, those hits we got were
six-inch shells.
Well, that was either the Helen or the Boise men.
In other words, we could determine later what
they were, but it was so believable that we
could go on fighting wars like that and having
so many.
By this time now, you must remember that our
ships are sinking, their ships are sinking, and
they're right there in what we call Iron Bottom
Bay, Iron Bottom Sound.
It's right there off Guadalcanal, you see,
we're between Tel Aviv and Guadalcanal.
It says Iron Bottom Sound.
At this point, all these ships, the reason they
got that name, there are so many ships
in there, there are no concentration of sunken
ships like there is there.
I mean, we have Japanese ships, American ships,
and Australian ships there.
Japanese ships, American ships, and Australian
ships, they're all there, and many of them came
from these two battles that I'm talking about.
There were others around the islands there, but
by and large, what we did that night, and I'll
summarize this as much as I can,
but when the battle was over, we had stopped
the Japanese from getting in there, from
finding their troops.
Furthermore, they were so scattered themselves,
and don't forget, we had one battleship
crippled so badly that the planes could ball
for quite an hour and got back the next day.
They got another one the next day, and the
other one, the I, the Karishima, which was in
that column there, I showed you.
We eventually sank both those battleships, and
the battle went on for three days.
But at that time, we stopped them from landing
their supplies and their troops and everything
else on Prado Canal.
And so the Marines were sitting over there
cheering, you know, our Marines had been
fighting these guys and their guys on the
airstrip and everything else.
They're delighted with us.
So Admiral Vandergrift, who was the head of the
marines on Guadalcanal, sent us a message a few
days later.
He said, we, the marines of Guadalcanal, take
off our battered helmets to you.
We heard it because we didn't find my name
continuously day after day, but we were right
in the middle of all this activity.
What actually happened then?
The next day, one battleship is crippled in the
middle of the water there, and our planes take
off and run up and down and get back to this
Finder sinker to reduce our heat.
And then they go after the other one the next day.
And by that time, Admiral Halsey had sent a
battleship and an aircraft carrier, two
battleships and an aircraft carrier coming towards,
and it meant that the carrier, I think, got
there first and was able to attack the other ship.
And by the time the other battleship tried to
come around and start attacking Guadalcanal
again, our battleship was there.
It was the South Dakota and the Washington. We
had two of them there.
And we blasted that battleship out of the ocean.
So the end result was the battle went on for
three days.
But if we had not stopped them that night, we
would never have taken back Guadalcanal.
The whole thing was that they would have taken
over that island, they would have had their
planes landing the next morning.
The airstrip would have been repaired, and the
next day we wouldn't have had a chance because
we wouldn't have been able to bring our airs or
our thousands in there.
If you look back, that first trip on
Guadalcanal, then all was lost when we came
back from Andes.
That's not where it started from.
But we stopped it from doing that that night,
and then went on to Ike, and the other thing
But the other thing that's become very central
then is that the battle went on for months
after that by February the 9th of 1,943.
February the 9th of 1943, the last Japanese was
evacuated from Wakayama.
In other words, we killed most of them.
We killed them.
By and large, the neighbors, they kept flooding
in more and more all the time.
They had what they called the communal expression.
They'd come down every night.
They'd come down to the slot and put more of
their soldiers on there and more of their supplies.
And then all of a sudden, we found out how to tell.
We used a couple of good people to lie to God.
And then we put our destroyers in there and
we'd see them every once in a while.
And then we bombard them, instead of having
them bombard the air force.
But by and large, once this battle was fought,
we closed the back of the Japanese Navy.
In fact, it would be now clear to them that
they could be defeated.
Up until that time, this whole picture that you
have here, where they took what they had never
tasted defeat,
never tasted defeat, the very first time, and
now we gave it to them really good.
And the end result is that we ended up holding
them long enough so that now they were worried
about us attacking them, not their attacking us.
So, I'm sorry I took so long to get through the
story, but it's rather complex and I just want
to leave it with the question and answer.
Do we have time for Q&A? Yes.
You sure?
How about, any questions?
Do you have any questions that he normally says
that he doesn't?
I'm pretty sure he's done it only a couple of times.
Well, I've asked him a lot of questions a
couple of times.
Actually, you've covered it pretty well. The
ones I want to ask,
I'll give you a moment.
Did you ever have any R&R?
I'll tell you what we did.
battle we went back down, now we had a couple
of pets going, but I'll give you a little
detail on it, I'll let everyone know.
In the battle, that night, when the ships were
shooting all over the place, when the
searchlight was turned on and everything else,
I was in what they call back two, which was a
station behind the bridge. The bridge was up
forward, and then at the same level,
We had an engine order telegraph, we had the
controls so that we could control the ship, and
the executive officer, who was the
second-in-command, which was there, and up on
the bridge, in case the bridge got shut off,
back to take over to coast.
So really, we did nothing to kill the bridge
that was damaged.
Well, the bridge was never damaged, but in the
course of the battle, one of these Japanese
ships fired a 5-inch shell that came right
through and killed a guy in a searchlight.
I broke 25 feet away from him.
But in the middle of the night, while the
battle was going on, I felt something hit my
AIPAC life jacket.
The next morning, I was standing by the engine
order telegraph, and we looked up, and there
was a great big hole right in the middle of my
battle station where a 5-inch shell, the
base of a 5-inch shell had come through.
It came right up to the engine order telegraph
that I'm standing behind.
It hit that and fell in the thing, and it was
one foot away from my left foot.
A base of a five-inch shell.
The shell exploded, but the base was still intact.
The base weighed about 4 or £5.
That piece of metal came through the
searchlight platform, and then it went through
the stack.
It exploded, and when it did, that piece came
right through my battle station, and I survived
another one.
There's a star that goes above me all the time.
There's good in the Fiji about the R&R.
He has a very good story.
I've been witnesses, but it's a story.
I don't want to be remembers of that.
We used to get on these islands where there'd
be people that were accustomed to roaming free,
it wasn't that they didn't have clothes on,
sometimes they had to warm up, even the women,
you know, so this one captain said,
before we let these guys go ashore, he says
they've been away for a long time, let's leave
them here
and he said why don't we put some clothing on them
and they said okay, so he took skinny shirts,
you know the regular skinny shirts that the
sailors wear
and he sent them ashore in boxes of skinny
shirts and he said would you mind asking me
do we need to put these skinny shirts on
You know, you didn't know why, because they
were comfortable as they were, but they were
trying to keep the guys under control, you know.
Well, the next morning, the guys headed Shore
and what do you think?
They had the ski-shirts on alright, but during
the night they took the scissors and put them
to their faces.
Now, by the way, I didn't witness this, did I?
I did end up down in Australia for a trip, we
went down to repair a little bit of damage
we had, and by the way there's another story
that I'd like to tell you, and it has to do
the USS Juneau. The Juneau was a cruiser that
the 5 Sullivan Brothers rowed. You might have
heard of the 5 Sullivan Brothers.
Well, the Juneau was a ship that was in the
battle. I believe she was right near us. I
remember right there.
Anyway, in the course of the battle, she was
torpedoed and she was hurt. And the San
Francisco got all beat up.
She tangled with the battleship and we did too,
but for some reason or other our star was there
in the normal ship.
I think we had five hits on the ship and they
were small, five-inch.
I heard shells that were much bigger than that
going over my head.
They were going up over there and they were
from the battleship high and I could hear them.
They had a different sound than the small ones.
The next day we were skiing out of there. By
that time, out of all these ships that you see
there, there were only five of us left.
Now, some of them were still afloat, but they
got them and they were taking them in tow over
to Malaga.
They were trying to salvage the ones that were
still afloat, but by and large, we had lost all
of them.
We had lost all the capital ships. We had lost
two of the cruisers. We had lost six of the destroyers.
And while they, again, the Japanese troops,
when they did this, they would win a tactical
victory, but they'd lose, rather, a strategic one.
In other words, we stopped them from landing
their surprise. That was the goal. That was our goal.
And their strategic goal was to bombard the
island and land their troops, and they never
did, either.
They never bombarded. They were fighting us in
Stanford. They finally got their ammunition chain.
So we ended up winning the night strategically,
but we lost, if you measure all the ships
we lost that are in Ironbottom Bay and the rest
of us, when we steamed out of there we
had the San Francisco, the Helena, and the Juno.
There were only three cruisers left.
And then we had the Fletcher and one other destroyer.
I can't remember what it was.
So we only had five ships out of the whole
column that ever got out of Water Canal at that.
So we're steaming back to our base, which was
in Esprit de Santos,
which is an island that is south of there, and
that was our main base.
And we're steaming out of there, and I welcome
the wheel.
By this time, we've secured from the ghetto
quarters. The battle is over.
And we're taking the wounded ships back, and
we're the only cruiser that's in pretty good shape,
Even though we acquired most of our ammunition
and the destroyers, the Fletcher was in better
condition than we were.
He had never been hit, and yet she was right in
the middle of the action, just like we were.
For some reason or other, they just never
picked us as targets.
The Fletcher and the Helena.
All the rest of the ships were either fired or
the San Francisco was really fired, and so was
the Juno.
The Juno was down by the bow. Maybe she was
just getting along.
So our captain by that time was the senior
officer of president. In other words, they had
lost Admiral Callaghan, Admiral Scott, and the
captain of the San Francisco.
And our captain going in was the fourth officer
in command and he was now the senior officer.
We lost the Admirals, we lost the captain. And
he decided, well let's get out of here now,
that's the end of it, we can't do any more fighting.
And by that time, the San Francisco was just
about ready to sink, so was the Juneau.
So we started back at Desmond Santos.
The next morning, we secured from General
Porters and went into condition two, where you
stay in one watch on and one watch off.
Now, my watch on in those conditions was to be
up on the bridge, steering the ship.
And I'm up there steering the ship, and I
looked out through the port door, and I said,
I said, boy, that San Francisco doesn't look
too healthy anymore.
And Loretta was like, you know, yeah, she looks
all right. She'll make it back.
I guessed that San Francisco would never make
it back, and that the Juneau would.
Just about that time, the officers, they call out,
run, run, run, DeLong, and I spun the rudder
over hard right,
and the ship starts to turn over this way.
Just about that, I hear, oh, it's hard left, DeLong,
and I thought, okay, so I can spin it back again.
Well I found out later what happened, he was
out in the port wing of the bridge and he saw a
torpedo coming towards us.
And then when I swung the ship, the torpedo
went across the bow and when he sent a hard
left rudder, all of a sudden the ship is
shuddering like that and it starts back again
and a torpedo goes across our stern and another
is up.
So we ducked both of them, unfortunately.
But we ducked it. The Juno was on the other
side. The San Francisco also ducked it. In
other words, she happened to be turning at the
right time and so did we.
And the torpedoes went right past us and one of
them ducked the Juno. The Juno was an
anti-aircraft cruiser with five-inch magazines.
She was just loaded with ammunition. She wasn't
much good in the battle the night before
because she didn't have a lot of piercing shells.
She gets out of the side of the ship, but she
couldn't do it in the sink one, and we would
have been better off with another destroyer or
two than the Atlanta and the Juno, but the Juno
did her part, she fought as hard as she could,
but couldn't do much damage, and then, all of a
sudden, a big explosion took place.
And that got me to hit that, you know, one big
explosion, and nothing more was ever seen.
The biggest piece of earth that was ever seen
was one of her five-inch gun mounts sailing
over on me like that.
And that, a big cloud was up there, so I turned
her wheel over, and by that time, you know, I said,
they had gone out the window of the bridge, and
I asked her, I was hollering,
where is she? I didn't want to ram her, I mean,
I had swung the ship back,
And I was coming back like that, and all of a
sudden I couldn't see, there was not even a cloud.
And all these big pieces of metal were dropping
on all the ships around me.
The last thing that I'd ever seen was that kind
of thing.
Now, unfortunately, we found out later that
there were some guys who survived that.
We didn't think they could at that time.
But they ended up, there were some of them, one
of the Sullivan brothers was on one of those wrecks.
And we left because, my gosh, there'd be
submarines there and only one good destroyer up front.
You couldn't go out on a patrol looking for submarines.
And so we got out of there, and when we did, we
signaled a plane that was up above us
and asked them to relay the message that they
knew there was something
to send somebody to see if there was any survivors.
But we didn't have time. In fact, it would have
been dangerous.
We would have risked all the other ships.
So we took off from there, and unfortunately
there was a hundred people, but in a few days
they were down to ten.
And again, those malicious sharks were around,
and every time a guy dropped off the raft, if
he wandered too far away, they'd shot him.
And then the others were kind of hallucinating,
and it was a very sad story.
story, but it inspired some of his brothers, of
course, to keep it famous as they tried to
shoot him, and their parents were later
acknowledged by being the destroyer of Athens
and all that sort of thing.
Okay, I'm going to stop here.
Okay, any announcements?