Down to the Sea

by Bruce Henderson

  Burford was amazed to see through the smoke a small submarine moving toward them on the surface several hundred yards away. In the sub’s bow were two torpedo tubes, not side by side as usual, but one directly above the other like “an over and under shotgun barrel.”

  Monaghan headed for the submarine. As the destroyer closed, Burford saw through his binoculars the submarine turn sharply toward them and fire a torpedo. The torpedo porpoised twice, then settled on a straight course. It passed just wide of the destroyer’s starboard bow, ran up on a nearby beach, and exploded. Not intending to give the submarine a second chance, Burford ordered up flank speed. “Prepare to ram! Stand by the depth charges.”

  Passing over the midget submarine caused a slight vibration to be felt on the destroyer. Seconds later, the submarine’s stubby bow was observed close astern in Monaghan’s roiling wake, canted up crazily out of the water. Two 600-pound depth charges were released in rapid succession off the destroyer’s fantail. Burford knew that putting down depth charges in such shallow water risked blowing off his ship’s stern, but he felt he “had to depth charge close to my own ship under the circumstances if I were going to destroy that sub.” When the ashcans went off nearly simultaneously with violent concussive effect at a depth of 30 feet, the explosions lifted Monaghan’s stern clear out of the water and knocked down nearly everyone on deck. A cascade of blackish mud was thrown high into the air.

  The sub popped to the surface, floating on its side like a dead animal.*

  The destroyer sped on, going too fast to make the turn into the main channel leading to the sea. Burford at that instant realized they were about to collide with a derrick barge moored at the west side of the channel. “Full left rudder! All engines back emergency full!” Although his orders were carried out promptly, it was too late to check the ship’s headway. Monaghan struck the derrick a glancing blow on her starboard hull, sustaining damage that was later found to have caused minor leakage below and salt water contamination in one fuel tank.

  The destroyer came to a gradual halt as her bow struck bottom on the sandy shoal at Beckoning Point. Attempting to back clear, Monaghan became entangled in the derrick’s mooring lines. Changing directions, the destroyer pulled ahead slowly and cleared the lines but was still aground. On the bridge, Burford ordered the ship backed slowly again to try to regain deeper water.

  “Submarine!” hollered a lookout.

  Even while stuck rather ignobly in the mud, Monaghan answered the call—a deck gun firing accurately on what turned out to be a harbor buoy.

  Back in the channel a few minutes later, the destroyer turned her prow toward the entrance and stood out of the besieged harbor at 9:08 A.M.

  Visible through the billowing smoke as the men of Monaghan—some with tears filling their eyes—peered back toward Pearl Harbor was the plight of two once-mighty battleships at the south end of Battleship Row: California (BB-44), after taking torpedoes amidships, was afire and listing badly, and Oklahoma (BB-37), after five torpedo hits, had rolled over and lay capsized. The scene “could scarcely be grasped” even by eyewitnesses, most of whom would be left with a “smoldering lust for revenge in their hearts.” From such forceful feelings would soon emerge a wounded nation’s new rallying cry: “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

  As Monaghan proceeded on her way seaward, the torpedo bombers were finishing their work while dive-bombers continued to swoop down from the smoke-filled sky with their lethal loads, attacking any ships still afloat.

  The long morning and the sudden dying were not yet over.

  THE DESTROYER Hull (DD-350), undergoing an overhaul, was moored inboard in a nest of four other destroyers northeastward from Ford Island alongside the tender Dobbin (AD-3). There were no fires under Hull’s boilers. In fact, the interiors of the fireboxes were being rebricked with a 4-inch layer of fire-clay mortar that had to be hammered into place. All power for lights and equipment came via cables from the tender. Ship-fitter 1st Class Robert Hill was suspended over Hull’s side on a scaffold, welding steel plates over a row of portholes whose glass panes had been removed. With war looming, the portholes had been ordered sealed on all ships to help maintain watertight integrity, even though it resulted in less fresh-air ventilation to spaces below deck. As the torpedoes and bombs fell, Hill, realizing the work had to be completed before Hull could go to sea, kept welding, only faster.

  The third Farragut-class destroyer to be launched, Hull had slid down the ways at the New York Navy Yard in January 1934. The vessel was named after Commodore Isaac Hull (1773–1834), one of the most famous ship captains in Navy history. Although he had previously fought against Barbary pirates and the French, Hull distinguished himself in particular during the War of 1812. While in command of the frigate Constitution, he won one of the classic sea battles of all time, for which his ship earned the nickname “Old Ironsides” after British cannonballs bounced off her hull without causing severe damage.

  Sister ships Hull and Monaghan, among the newer vessels in the Navy, had been sent to the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair to serve as public exhibits. While mooring at the historic Embarcadero, Monaghan hit the pier and wiped out about 50 feet of it. As a result, the two destroyers were kept anchored a hundred feet off the main exhibits at Treasure Island, and for three weeks motorboats ran visitors back and forth. After that, Hull was ordered to perform the same ceremonial duties at the New York World’s Fair, and had steamed two-thirds of the way to the Panama Canal before receiving a change of orders to Hawaii, which since then had served as the destroyer’s home port.

  About an hour before the Japanese struck on that December date “which will live in infamy,” Hull received on board from the Dairymen’s Association of Honolulu 7 gallons of ice cream and 15 gallons of milk. Officer of the Deck (OOD) Ensign Maury M. Strauss confirmed receipt as to proper quantity, and Pharmacist’s Mate 3rd Class T. E. Decker, with trusty spoon in hand, “inspected as to quality.” No sooner were the dairy products refrigerated below than the routine of the peacetime Navy, as all hands knew it, ended for good.

  Asleep in his bunk after a rambunctious Saturday night ashore, Seaman 1st Class John R. “Ray” Schultz, a devil-may-care, twenty-one-year-old Kentuckian with a shock of wavy brown hair and a winning smile, had been trying his darnedest for some time to get kicked out of the Navy.

  Schultz had joined up at seventeen. His coal miner father was killed in a mining accident when Schultz was two years old. After his mother suffered a nervous breakdown, the youngster was sent to a large orphanage with his two older brothers and sister. Following years of verbal and physical abuse from a sadistic headmaster, Schultz, black and blue from his neck to his knees as a result of the latest beating, ran away shortly before his thirteenth birthday. He did farm work for an uncle, then caught a bus to Arizona, where his mother had relocated. He enrolled in school but dropped out after the ninth grade and went to work as a carpenter’s apprentice at Horse Mesa and later Bartlett dams. After being laid off, Schultz hitchhiked to California’s Central Valley, where he found seasonal work in the canneries until enlisting in the Navy. Following boot camp in San Diego,* he was assigned to Hull in 1938. Although Schultz soon demonstrated a competency in completing tasks assigned to him—and as a result earned regular promotions—he eventually grew disillusioned with the peacetime Navy’s rules and regulations. Not that Schultz habitually followed them, of course, which earned him regular demotions, too. In fact, he had “quite a few times” made Seaman 1st Class (E-3), two ranks below what he had been four months earlier—before he and a shipmate took from its mooring the Pan American Clipper’s high-speed crash boat so they could get back to Hull after an unauthorized absence and night on the town. Brought before their unamused commanding officer the next morning, the other sailor pleaded not guilty and was ordered to stand court-martial. Recognizing an opportunity, Schultz, who had been at the wheel of the crash boat as they were chased by harbor police, pleaded guilty. In the morning, the other sailor was kicked out o
f the Navy, but not Schultz, much to his dismay. Only later, Schultz figured out why. Captain of a 5-inch gun crew, he was the “only man aboard trained in night illumination” for nighttime fighting, which involved firing a pattern of flare-like star shells behind enemy ships so they could be seen.* That Sunday, Schultz was awakened by a “goofy guy” running through the compartment yelling, “The Japs are sinking the battleships!” It seemed like a bad joke, and besides, it was too early to be making such a racket. Schultz’s shoes were hanging on the railing alongside his bunk. He grabbed them and hit the loudmouth on the back of the head as he passed by. Just then, Schultz heard a loud explosion, and knew the guy “wasn’t off his rocker.”

  Dressing quickly, Schultz went topside to his deck gun station. Dobbin, in an effort to get under way, had disconnected the cables that gave power to the destroyers in the nest. That meant Hull’s 5-inch deck guns—loaded for each shot with a powder charge in a brass casing and a separate 55-pound projectile—had to be aimed and fired manually. Schultz’s crew began doing so as ammo was hauled up by hand from a below-deck magazine, firing into a wave of torpedo planes that had made for their side of Ford Island.

  As other ships joined in, the sky soon became pockmarked with bursting shells. The noise was deafening. For Schultz, the maelstrom of sound was like “one solid blast all the time.” With torpedoes and bombs exploding, guns firing, ships blowing up, and planes crashing, “something was always going up.” After expending about eighty rounds, Schultz realized the futility in trying to hit at close range fast-moving targets with a deck gun designed for longer ranges. Worse yet, he knew that some shells must be raining down on the streets of Honolulu.*

  Following the first wave, which had been mostly “take and no give” for the U.S. fleet, there was a short lull in the attack around 8:30 A.M. Throughout the harbor, stunned sailors and their ships had time to replenish ammunition, organize defenses, and be ready to give something back in the next round. In the defense of Pearl Harbor, however, the battleships would play an almost insignificant role through no fault of their own. Most of them had been put “out of action or rendered incapable of retaliation” during the first fifteen minutes of the attack. Thereafter, all efforts aboard the largest ships in the harbor that morning were “directed toward saving lives, fighting the raging fires on board, and keeping them afloat.” The destroyers unleashed most of the return fire.

  Schultz secured the 5-inch gun and ran back to the .50-caliber machine gun mounted starboard amidships. Other men assisted by loading ammunition drums. Schultz snapped in place a full drum and cocked the weapon. He was a boatswain’s mate—a jack-of-all-trades when it came to general seamanship—not a gunner’s mate, but given his gun-crew duties Schultz had done his share of target practice with weapons of varying sizes.

  When a second wave of 170 attacking planes—launched from the Japanese carriers an hour after the first wave—appeared overhead at 8:45 A.M., Schultz opened up in short bursts, as he had been trained. To his surprise, the drum had been loaded with all tracer ammo. Normally, there was a tracer—a shell packed with white phosphorus, which burns brightly, making its flight visible to the naked eye—every fifth round to help the gunner’s aim. Schultz found shooting all-tracer rounds to be like “squirting a garden hose.”

  Off Hull’s stern a motor launch with three men aboard was heading for the Farragut-class destroyer Wordan (DD-352) in the same nest. The next instant, the small boat and its occupants were gone—vaporized in a fiery explosion from a bomb that landed in the boat’s engine compartment. As the low-flying aircraft that had released the bomb flew past, Schultz aimed the spray of his .50-caliber garden hose. Multiple hits tore into the bottom of the fuselage. The plane careened out of control and crashed in the harbor. A minute later, Schultz’s machine gun tore off part of a wing of another attacking plane. A Hull gunner on the bow saw a plane he was firing at ignite and crash in a sugarcane field. When another aircraft—carrying a full load of bombs—crossed Hull’s bow, it was hit by fire from multiple guns before going down.

  After that, the Japanese pilots seemed to avoid the hornet’s nest of destroyers off the end of Ford Island that unleashed such withering fire.

  AT FIRST word that the attack was “no drill” but “the real McCoy,” civilian worker Thomas A. Stealey Jr., of Stockton, California, who had been waiting in Honolulu for a ship to take him to Wake Island for a construction job, climbed in the back of a truck rounding up Navy personnel to see if he could help out.

  At the entrance to Pearl Harbor, they passed an empty guard gate. After they had gone as far as they could in the truck, Stealey, twenty-two, a muscular former high school football and baseball player, ran for the docks. The scene before him was “just a mess,” with hordes of men—some burned or bleeding—running in all directions, and clouds of black smoke filling the sky.

  Born in San Francisco and raised in northern California’s Delta region, Stealey had hired on as a sheet-metal worker the day after he graduated from high school. In 1941, when the chance came to go to Wake Island for nine months and build airplane hangars and buildings while getting paid for a full year—with all his expenses paid for and his earnings held in a Honolulu bank until he returned—Stealey talked it over with his parents and his fiancée, Ida May Bryant. All agreed it was a good opportunity for him to save some money. On November 11, 1941, Stealey boarded a ship in San Francisco with other workers. After arriving in Hawaii, they settled into a barracks and waited. On December 5, they were told to pack their belongings and were taken to a docked transport ship. After loading guns, ammo, and other matériel, there was not enough room for all the construction workers. Those men whose last names started with A to M were boarded, and the rest were told to return to the barracks and await the next ship to Wake, which, given events, never did come.*

  Stealey came upon a Marine urgently setting up a .50-caliber machine gun on a tripod. The leatherneck yelled that he needed ammo from a nearby warehouse. As attacking planes swooped overhead strafing anything in their gun sights, Stealey, his adrenaline pumping, ran back and forth several times carrying large canisters of ammunition—metal containers so heavy that when he tried to lift them later he could barely get them off the ground.

  When Stealey reached the docks, he found more horror and confusion. Across the channel, the battleship Oklahoma (BB-37) had already rolled over at her mooring. The battleship Pennsylvania (BB-38), the flagship of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, in the dry dock next to Stealey, had been hit by at least one bomb and was afire. Two destroyers, Downes and Cassin, occupying the space at the head of the dock, were in worse shape. Downes had been literally blown in two by an explosion in an ammunition magazine, and Cassin, which lay alongside Downes, had also caught fire. Stealey joined a firefighting party working to bring under control the fires on the two destroyers, ablaze from stem to stern.

  Shortly after 9:30 A.M., a thunderous explosion rocked the destroyer Shaw, about a quarter mile away. With the fires on Downes and Cassin mostly contained, Stealey and several others took off running to help with Shaw. When they got there, they realized that the destroyer was situated 100 feet offshore in a floating dry dock.

  “I can swim,” Stealey announced. “Anyone else?”

  Another civilian worker came forward. They found a long line and Stealey tied one end around his waist, then dove into the water, which in spots was thickly coated with heavy oil from damaged ships. They swam out to Shaw, whose bow was engulfed in flames. Finding the dry dock submerged and Shaw afloat, they swam to the ship’s stern and climbed up netting that had been thrown over the fantail.

  Shaw seemed deserted. They inched their way closer to the fire, then waved to the men ashore, who had tied the opposite end of the line to a 3-inch fire hose. The two workers began pulling on the line. When they had enough hose hauled aboard, they signaled to shore for the water to be turned on. It took some time, and in the meanwhile Stealey dropped down a ladder to below deck. He was not prepared for what h
e found: bodies “all over the place.” He checked pulses and tried shaking others that seemed lifelike, but the men were all dead, apparently killed by concussion. Some had lost blood from their ears, nose, and mouth. There were twenty-five to thirty bodies in all—some lying in their bunks where they had obviously been asleep when the morning was still peaceful, others in a compartment or passageway where they had fallen.

  What Stealey did not know was that Shaw had taken three hits in the first wave: two bombs through the forward machine gun platform and another through the port wing of the bridge. As fire spread, the dry dock was flooded to try to contain the blaze. The order to abandon ship was given at 9:25 A.M. Five minutes later, the forward ammunition magazine had gone up in a thunderous explosion.

  Stealey also did not know until later that after they got water flowing to the hose and began working the fire, he and the other civilian worker were standing amidships atop a full ammunition magazine, which could have blown sky-high had they had not succeeded in extinguishing the flames.*

  BY 10:00 A.M. the aerial attack was over, with the last of the surviving Japanese planes rendezvousing north of Oahu for the return flight to their carriers.

  Never in the course of modern warfare had a war begun with “so smashing a victory for one side,” and never had the victor paid for it so dearly in the end. That day, 21 ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged and 188 military aircraft were destroyed. Personnel casualties were 2,403 killed and 1,178 wounded. Japanese losses in the Pearl Harbor attack were 29 aircraft and 55 airmen, along with 9 crewmen (and 1 taken prisoner) from the five midget submarines. In this one treacherous attack, the U.S. Navy lost 2,008 men, three times as many men as it had lost in enemy actions in the two previous wars: Spanish-American and World War I.† When the first torpedoes and bombs fell, the aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6) was steaming for Pearl Harbor after delivering a squadron of Marine fighter aircraft to reinforce Wake Island. The carrier was still 200 miles out because of a delay fueling her escorting destroyers in heavy seas. The time lag proved to be fortuitous: Enterprise had originally been scheduled to enter the harbor entrance at 7:30 A.M. on December 7, 1941.