Lady Luck accompanied Seaman Bramble into the water. He was standing only feet from Orvill Raines when the plane hit, tumbling Raines over the side and setting Bramble’s clothes on fire. “I couldn’t get out through the gangway,” said Bramble, “because it was all on fire, so I jumped over the port side while the ship was doing about thirty knots. I hit head first in the water, and could have broken my neck because I was still wearing my helmet.”38
Bramble removed his shoes, helmet, and binoculars, then looked around to see if anybody else from the ship, already hastening from the area, was nearby. “Radar, Radar, help me, help me!” he heard someone cry from not far away. When he spotted Raines struggling in the water without a life jacket, Bramble swam over to his shipmate and put his arms around him to help Raines keep his head above the surface. Bramble needed only a quick glance to see that Raines was badly burned, but he hoped he could help his buddy survive until a ship picked them up. “I held him up as long as I could,” said Bramble, “but I could see he was in bad shape. Raines threw up, jerked a couple of times, and muttered through clenched teeth, ‘This is a hell of a way to die.’” Moments later Raines’s head slumped, and the letter writer succumbed. “I had to let him go,” explained Bramble, upset that he had to part with his shipmate.39 He had no choice, though, but to let Raines’s body float away so he could focus on saving himself.
A minesweeper soon plucked Bramble, suffering from burns on both hands and his legs, from the water. After a week of treatment aboard ship, plus a few days in a Guam hospital, Bramble, still listed as missing in action, got word to his ship that he had survived.
Kamikazes sank six ships and damaged another fifteen during their April 6 kikusui onslaught. Repair parties aboard Howorth quickly extinguished the fires, and with steering restored, Burns took the destroyer to Hagushi Harbor for temporary repairs before leaving three days later for Saipan. On April 15, the crew gathered to conduct a nondenominational service to honor the memory of their fallen shipmates as well as that of President Roosevelt, who had died three days earlier from a cerebral hemorrhage. One day later the ship departed for Pearl Harbor, where the surviving crew enjoyed the good news: “Proceeding independently to Navy Yard, Mare Island, California, U.S.A.”40
The ship arrived at Mare Island six days later to great acclaim. A Navy press release called her the “Haughty Howorth” and described her as a ship that “has plowed through thousands of miles of the western Pacific during the past nine months, and has participated in virtually every type duty assigned to destroyers. She has escorted convoys, covered landing assaults, bombarded shore installations and briefly traveled with fast carrier task forces.”41
For Howorth and her crew, the war was over. For Ray Ellen, though, it continued. She figured that Orvill was all right and that she would soon receive another of his letters, but newspaper accounts describing the recent fighting off Okinawa as having “attained an intensity seldom rivaled before in the Pacific war” could not have eased her concerns.42
Ray Ellen learned nothing until Commander Burns’s letter of sympathy arrived. Because of the heavy number of Okinawa casualties swamping the Navy Department, she had not yet received an official telegram stating that Orvill was missing, but Burns provided some information. He wrote Ray Ellen that her husband was missing “following an enemy air attack upon this ship” on April 6. He informed her that several men, including Orvill, either had been blown overboard or jumped into the sea, and that “it is possible that one of the several ships close by picked him up.”43 On June 1, 1945, the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Ray Ellen received official word from the Navy Department that Orvill was listed as killed in action.
Russell Bramble contacted Ray Ellen to inform her that her husband had not died alone. In a May 27 letter, which Bramble said “was a very hard letter for me to write,” he admitted that he had debated sending the note but felt that she would want to know about Orvill’s final moments. He explained that after he went overboard during the action, he swam to help Orvill, but that her husband was so badly burned that there was little he could do. “I’m sorry to say that James passed away in my arms,” he told her, and wanted Ray Ellen to know “that I stayed with him until the very last.”44
The most wrenching letter Ray Ellen received came from Orvill himself. The year before, he had written a letter for his wife, mailed it to her father, and asked him to deliver it to Ray Ellen if something happened to him. In that letter, dated July 30, 1944, Orvill told Ray Ellen, “I hope that you never read this letter. I have asked Pop to give it to you only in the event of my death.” He mentioned that leaving her in San Francisco to go to the Pacific “was the hardest job I ever undertook, Baby. Just walking away from you, maybe forever.” He said that he had cried so hard that men and women in the hotel lobby noticed it. “I haven’t cried since but my soul has been disintegrating within me. I live only to get back to you. You will know by this letter that I’ll never be back. That my life span has been completed, however brief, and our four wonderful years together will have to do us.”
He wrote, “However I get it My Darling, remember that my last breath was drawn in an effort to get back to you.” He told her to remarry. “These are the hardest words I could ever write or say to you,” he acknowledged, but “somewhere there IS a man who can make you happy and cause you to forget.” Even in such an emotional letter, Orvill inserted a touch of humor: “I just ask that you be SURE I am gone before taking any steps.” Before signing, “Your devoted husband, Orvill,” he included a final farewell: “Good bye, My Darling Baby. As I’ve said before, you gave me enough happiness during our four years together to justify any one man’s lifetime.”45
The correspondence of Orvill Raines conveys the emotions not only of Raines but of thousands of other sailors in the Pacific. Most never wrote such powerful letters, but they lived through the same tribulations and heartbreak as their gifted colleague. Desron 21 had one Orvill Raines, but the squadron contained hundreds of young men who left family and homes to fight for their nation. Many failed to return, and they and their families shed the same tears and felt the same pain of separation Raines so movingly described.
The crews of O’Bannon, Nicholas, and Taylor had far less tumultuous times off Okinawa, where they escorted a task group of escort carriers conducting air strikes from eighty-five miles out. The three saw no signs of kamikazes, and besides Taylor rescuing a downed Navy aviator, nothing unusual marked their ten days near Okinawa. Tarakan provided more of a challenge.
“Persuasion Is in the Form of a Tommy Gun”
The crews of the Fletcher, O’Bannon, Nicholas, Jenkins, and Taylor were not as worried about kamikazes for their next operation. The planned seizure of Tarakan, an island off Borneo’s eastern coast, took them southwest of the Philippines instead of northward toward the kamikaze hunting grounds. Few if any of the suicide planes were expected to show up at Tarakan, an island that would give the Allies airfields to support subsequent landings and oil for their ships.
The five destroyers left Subic Bay on April 24 to provide the usual bombardment and fire support for the assault troops ordered to take that oil-rich island from the Japanese. Two days out, the unit came upon a group of rafts containing Japanese soldiers who were apparently attempting to flee the southern Philippines and reach friendly forces in Borneo. When Nicholas pulled closer to a pair of rafts holding two Japanese each, hoping to pick up and interrogate some of the prisoners, they were instead greeted with puffs of smoke from the hand grenades the soldiers used to commit suicide.
Taylor enjoyed better luck, capturing five Japanese who surrendered after a show of force by the ship’s new skipper, Commander Henry H. DeLaureal. Although DeLaureal found nothing of significance, he wrote in his action report that they grabbed the five “after receiving encouragement by means of the Bull Horn and a rifle shot over their heads. In spite of leaving five rifles and at least two dozen hand grenades in their raft, the prisoners very reluctantly but most
assuredly swam one by one away from their armory to the side of the ship. None of the five appeared to have the stomach for even as much as a display of fight.” DeLaureal added, with much satisfaction, that “with persuasion, the enemy will surrender without qualms, particularly when the persuasion is in the form of a tommy gun.”46
On the final day of April the Desron 21 destroyers followed the pattern that had often been repeated in the Philippines. They screened for minesweepers, conducted a pre-invasion bombardment of the beaches, and remained offshore to lend fire support for the infantry ashore. When the landing troops encountered no opposition, Commander Philip D. Gallery, the ship’s skipper, took Jenkins from the bombardment area, but struck a mine as he exited. Men in the mess hall had just begun eating their sandwiches when the explosion rent the destroyer’s port side. With the waters rushing in, the final man exited only moments before the compartment was flooded.
One man was killed and two wounded in the mishap, and Jenkins absorbed significant damage to her port side. All electrical power forward of the forward engine room was lost, the sonar gear no longer operated, and five compartments were flooded. Gallery noted that three of the compartments flooded after men failed to close hatches in their haste to reach the main deck and safety, and he urged the Navy to more strongly emphasize the matter during training and in drills.
The crew pumped water out of the flooded compartments to help keep the destroyer afloat, and the next morning the cruiser Phoenix came alongside to take some of the men aboard, give them the opportunity to shower to remove the oil clotting their skin, and provide them with fresh clothes.
After receiving temporary repairs at Subic Bay, the Jenkins started for the United States for more repairs. “When we tied up at the pier in Long Beach [California],” recalled Torpedoman’s Mate 3/c Paul E. Mahan of their July arrival, “several men jumped off the Jenkins and kissed the ground.”47
When on May 13 Fletcher left for the United States and an overhaul, only three Desron 21 destroyers—O’Bannon, Nicholas, and Taylor—remained in the Pacific. Those ships would take the fight directly into Tokyo Bay.
CHAPTER 11
EYEWITNESS TO VICTORY
A unit that had originated almost three years earlier with the trio of O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas again stood at three, with Taylor joining the old stalwarts O’Bannon and Nicholas to finish the war. The three operated off the Japanese coast screening for the units that had replaced them as the Navy’s main tool—the fast carrier task forces. Destroyers had borne the load in the South Pacific when Nimitz and Halsey had few other surface vessels with which to check the Japanese, but in 1944 powerful carrier forces, sent to the Pacific by the home-front factories, assumed that mantle. O’Bannon and Nicholas had been in the Pacific since the beginning of their nation’s comeback. It was apt that those two were now present at the end, reunited with Admiral Halsey to enjoy the fruits of their efforts.
Not that the crew wanted to be there. “Since we fully realized the menace and damaging effectiveness of the suicide plane tactics, this operation seemed to promise more excitement and danger than any of us really wanted,” wrote O’Bannon Seaman 1/c George R. Thompson to his parents at the time.1 Their sister ship Howorth had experienced the fury of kamikazes off Okinawa, and most military commanders expected that to be a pale preview of what Japan would unleash to protect the homeland. The apocalyptic battle to reach Japanese soil would overshadow in blood and destructiveness those earlier desperate encounters in the Solomons.
“Was the Killing Really Over?”
For most of July and into early August, the three screened for the fast carriers as they launched air strikes against Honshu and Hokkaido. Steaming anywhere from fifty to three hundred miles out, three carrier task groups operated at will off Japan’s coast, strafing and bombing airfields and industrial targets. “Our planes would strike inland; our big guns would bombard coastal targets,” stated Halsey, and “together they would literally bring the war home to the average Japanese citizen.”2 Each bomb became payback for what the Japanese had done, not just to their nation at places such as Pearl Harbor and Bataan but also to their Desron 21 ships and crews that were not present at the end, especially those of the sunken De Haven, Strong, and Chevalier. The only part Halsey could not understand was Nimitz’s stern order to avoid bombing certain cities, including one named Hiroshima, but with a multitude of targets at hand, the ban seemed a minor issue.
Halsey selected Japan’s most important centers for his first raids. From July 13 to July 15 Halsey’s Third Fleet carriers, with O’Bannon screening, veered north to attack a major concentration of kamikaze aircraft, as well as airfields, shipping, and transportation in Hokkaido and northern Honshu, areas that until then had been beyond range of the Army’s B-29 bombers and so had escaped American attack. While his aviators centered on the kamikazes, fourteen ships moved close to the Japanese shore to conduct a bombardment against a steel plant on Honshu. Halsey called the event “a magnificent spectacle,” one he had wanted to observe since the Japanese attacked his United States Navy at Pearl Harbor.3 With American ships operating so freely offshore and the carrier aircraft blasting inland targets, the Japanese Empire would soon be in ashes.
Desron 21 crews hoped that the war would soon end, as the frequent operations taxed their energy and consumed their food supply. Nicholas had been at sea for more than fifty days, a stretch requiring the crew to rely on dry stores such as flour, beans, rice, coffee, and canned meat. “For two weeks,” said Sonarman 3/c Douglas Starr, “we had been eating nothing but weevily bread, beans, and rice, and moldy beef.”4
The home front welcomed news that destroyers such as Nicholas and carrier aircraft were bringing the war directly to the enemy’s shores, led again, as Nicholas had been in the Solomons, by Halsey. “The Third Fleet that swung up & down the east coast of Japan was the mightiest the world had ever seen,” boasted Time magazine, led by “the tough, stubby seadog whom the Japanese mortally hate & fear. ‘Bull’ Halsey was on the prowl.” Calling Halsey “the Annapolis-trained Dead End Kid” and “the calculating, chance-taking seaman,” the magazine stated that the raids proved the end of the war was near.5
Listeners on the home front enjoyed Halsey’s comments about the raids when the Navy broadcast his remarks in an effort to raise support for war bonds. Halsey’s blunt assessment promised that the devastating raids would be repeated until Japan lay in ruins. “What is left of the Japanese Navy is helpless, but just for luck we’re going to hunt them out of their holes,” he vowed. “The Third Fleet’s job is to hit the Empire hard and often. We are doing just that, and my only regret is that our ships don’t have wheels, so that when we drive the Japs from the coast, we can chase them inland.”6
One matter Sonarman Starr preferred to avoid was the invasion of the Home Islands. Monitoring the seas while carriers launched aircraft carried risks, but nothing like those that awaited once American forces landed on Japanese soil. While the Fifth Fleet under Spruance supported the landings on Kyushu, Halsey’s Third Fleet, including the three Desron 21 destroyers, would operate with the United States Eighth Army in its assault on the Tokyo plains.
Every crew awaited the final call to assault Japan, which Starr wrote was “an operation the 300 officers and crew knew would be their toughest fight of the Pacific war.” Starr heard that “the Japanese people would repel to the death any invasion of their sacred soil,” and that Nimitz and Halsey predicted American casualties would approach one million. “All in all, we were a salty crew who had been through sixteen battles and invasions and countless convoy runs from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. None of us was eager about it, but we figured we could handle the Japanese home island, too.”
Starr’s hopes of survival rose dramatically on August 6, when word arrived that an American bomber had, with a single weapon, devastated Hiroshima. When a second bomber followed with a similar attack against Nagasaki three days later, it seemed that peace might any day be proclaimed. “
Nobody cheered,” wrote Starr, “but we all knew that, for all practical purposes, the Pacific war was over.”7
Crews operated in a limbo between full-scale war and prospects for peace. They had to follow orders, but with war’s end in sight, no one wanted to take unnecessary risks. “During the five days of negotiation, which terminated in the war’s end, the atmosphere seemed charged with tense expectancy and suppressed excitement,” George Thompson wrote his parents. “Moods alternated from soaring optimism to impatient pessimism as all hands eagerly awaited developments.” When Halsey continued the air strikes on August 13–14, “our spirits sagged.”8
In the early morning of August 15 carriers launched their strike groups for another round of attacks against airfields and factories in the Tokyo plains. Shortly after planes in the first two waves reached their targets, however, Halsey abruptly canceled the operation when President Harry Truman announced that Japan had accepted peace terms. Ensign John C. McCarthy, aboard Taylor ninety miles off the coast, heard a fellow officer shout, “The war is over!” Aboard O’Bannon “there was a little cheering, backslapping, and handclasping,” wrote Thompson, “but most of the men received the news with a sense of calm relief, sober and undemonstrative. The war was over, a job had been well done.”9
Men gathered around radios to listen to Halsey’s fifteen-minute announcement to the Third Fleet about the termination of hostilities. “You have brought an implacable, treacherous, and barbaric foe to his knees in abject surrender. This is the first time in the recorded history of the misbegotten Japanese race that they as a nation have been forced to submit to this humiliation.” Then, thinking of all the officers and enlisted who had served under him, including Desron 21, he continued, “Your names are writ in golden letters on the pages of history—your fame is and shall be immortal.… Whether in the early days, when fighting with a very frayed shoestring, or at the finish, when fighting with the mightiest combined fleet the world has ever seen, the results have been the same—victory has crowned your efforts. The forces of righteousness and decency have triumphed.”10
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