by Brett Ashton
As I went, I could see the crew leaving the port side, taking all of the injured they could carry.
“Damn it! No!” I shouted as several of the crew began jumping over the side. “You can’t go over here, not over the torpedo holes for Christ sake! Don’t jump!” I was too late. Four were already in the water. In the next several seconds, I watched in helpless horror as all four of the crew who jumped were sucked under and back into the hull of the ship by the water rushing in through the holes the torpedoes made.
One of the crewmen shouted at me in panic pointing at the water “Sir! My brother! My brother!”
“There’s nothing you can do, he’s gone!” I shouted back, recognizing this guy would jump if I let him. I grabbed him and held him back.
“You!” I shouted and I grabbed another crewman “Get this man over to the starboard side; knock him out and carry him if you have to; just get him there!”
“Yes sir!”
“Starboard side, goddamn it! Go!” I shouted to the rest of them and turned away. Not enough time. Not nearly enough time. A lot of people were already dying, and a lot more were going to die; I was sure of it.
Another Kate flew overhead, this time climbing to avoid the aft mast.
I was screaming at the passing aircraft, “Dear God Stop! We’re dead!” when a remarkable feeling of ambivalence came over me. The more torpedoes they wasted on an already dead ship like the Oklahoma, the less they would have for some of the others that may have stood a better chance. She was one of the oldest ships in the fleet, and with the old style reciprocating engines, the navy was looking for a good reason to decommission her anyway. On the other side of it was the realization that I was still on the Oklahoma and, along with the rest of the crew, fighting for my life. “Torpedo it if you like; just let us off first!” I said, more quietly to myself than to anyone else.
Boom! The seventh torpedo struck pretty far aft and very high up on the side of the ship due to its increasing list. I could see a crewman was down as a result of the explosion and needed help. There was nobody else around by then, so I slid down the ladder to the aft main deck, just above where the seventh torpedo had struck. The teak wood covering on the deck was splintered and uneven, with several shards of broken metal sticking up through it. The steel deck below had obviously been warped by the explosion of the seventh torpedo, which had struck right below where we were.
I recognized the injured crewman as Chief Joe Fitzgerald, one of the men who worked in the mezzanine under turret three. His left foot was at a disturbingly odd angle, and he was obviously in a lot of pain. It was doubtful he could get off the ship on his own, let alone climb the increasingly slanted deck to the starboard side. There was just not enough time.
“How are you doing, Joe?” I shouted over the din of the attack while still trying to keep him calm.
“I’ve had better days, sir!” he shouted with a small bit of a smile. “But I do need some help!”
“I see that! Don’t worry we’ll get you out of here! Can you swim?” I asked him.
“Looks like I’m gonna have to!”
“Alright then, put your left arm around my shoulder,” I said as I helped him up. “We have to get away from this torpedo hole.”
I was just beginning to wonder how, or if, we were both going to be able to move on the slippery and increasingly slanted deck when the Japs, unfortunately, solved the problem for me.
It seemed almost like slow motion as I watched a Zero dive into a strafing run straight toward us. I could hear the distinctive sound of a pair of twenty-millimeter cannons opening fire and each one of probably several hundred rounds struck the ship with a sound like hundreds of sledge hammers on metal. I felt the chief yanked out of my arm. Not like he was pulling himself away from me, but like he was actually knocked away. The force of it spun me around, and I fell to the deck.
Regaining my bearings, I looked around for the chief, finding him lying up against the number three turret. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. It’s absolutely gruesome what a twenty-millimeter round does to the human body. The upper right side of his body was completely blown off. His right arm was gone. Liver, rib bones, parts of lung remaining, heart twitching. His head was lying over to one side, obviously no longer supported by a spinal column. Chunks of meat, blood, and bones were splattered everywhere on the deck and running down the side of the turret as well as all over me.
The absolute horror was indescribable; surreal, really. The image of Chief Fitzgerald’s mangled body lying there in the warm bright Hawaiian sunlight is something that may never go away in my mind. The full weight of the cruel brutality of modern warfare came crashing down on me all at once as I stared at it. I lay there frozen for a period of time that was most likely only a second or two, but felt like time immeasurable. Minutes, hours, days, or weeks, and anything that could happen in them became meaningless to me.
I suppose it is what is meant when someone says their life flashed before their eyes. But now I knew the reason why. I had reached my limit and was looking for someplace else to go. I saw the academy where I graduated, my parents, brothers and sisters playing in the snow, as well as friends from high school, all far, far away. My girlfriend Susie and I were walking hand in hand in the park when I asked her to marry me.
And then my thoughts strayed to another time and place, many long ages ago, it seemed, yet little more than a day gone by, when I was holding my newborn son, looking at his innocent little sleeping face as his head rested on my forearm.
I was drawn back just as Chief Fitzgerald’s body began to slide on the oily tipping deck, leaving a large streak of blood behind it as it went. It only stopped when it hit and got hung up on one of the poles for the lifelines. His left hand dangled past the pole over the side of the ship and touched the water, which was then about six inches below the aft main deck, as if to point out to me and say, “Sir, it’s time to go.” Then necessity drew my attention back to the increasing urgency of my situation. I had to get out of there, now.
I drew myself back to my feet and calmly took one last look around at my ship. I looked at her turrets, her anti-aircraft guns, then the gunnery towers and masts, which were looming sharply over me. I stood on the deck, which was tipped over at an angle too far to even guess. It was impossible to even think of climbing back up to the starboard side, which several other crewmen were still attempting. At that point I knew there was nothing else I could do except say goodbye to the Okie.
I climbed down the port side aft to where the ship really began to narrow. I could tell no torpedoes had struck here because the teak wood on the deck, which now had water climbing over the edge of it, was still intact. I stepped into the water, over the lifeline and then off of the ship into Pearl Harbor.
The Oklahoma was going to roll, and nothing on earth was going to change that. But I still had to get out of the way, so I began swimming as fast as I could to get clear of the ship and the crane, which was now towering above me.
I swam for my life, all the while thinking of nothing but wanting to see my wife and children again and holding them in my arms.
I’d guess about a minute and a half later, two more Kates dove down from across the harbor and began to make their run. They dropped their payload very low, very close to the water, then began to pull back to avoid colliding with the ship they were attacking. I wondered if I was far enough away to avoid being killed by the pressure of the blasts and began to swim even faster.
Fortunately the torpedoes were heading toward the forward part of the ship, but there was still a good chance this was going to hurt. The ship was rolled over far enough that the torpedoes were going to hit well above the normal waterline as well as any of the ship’s torpedo armor or blisters.
Boom! Boom! The eighth and ninth torpedoes struck the ship only seconds apart. Fortunately, by then, I was a safe distance from the ship.
“Damn, that’s going to be a bad one,” I said to myself, thinking about how the flooding
water would be pouring into the ship from high above the lower decks. In my mind, any chance the Okie had of remaining upright ended at that point.
There were several Zeros running the length of Battleship Row with their guns blazing strafing anything that moved in or out of the water. “Animals,” I thought. “What kind of cowards shoot at defenseless people in the water?”
Remembering from the sting of the salt water that I was wounded, I decided I needed some sort of flotation device. There had not been any time before leaving the ship. And I had actually hoped to be on the starboard side so I could climb over as she rolled, so the thought came too late anyway.
Not knowing how long I was going to be in the water, and remembering my survival training, I quickly removed my shoes and tied them to a belt loop. Then I removed my pants and tied the ankles into individual knots. I held them leg-up and waist-down in the water, splashing until the wet legs filled with air and slipped them under my arms. These would hold me for about twenty minutes at a time, if I remembered the survival instructor correctly.
I could both hear, and physically feel in the water around me, the vibrations of the last painful screams of the Oklahoma, when the pressure on the structure of the ship increased as she flooded. The mangled plates of the hull, loosened by the torpedoes, were scraping and bending against each other. Groans from the dying ship filled both the air and the water.
I could actually feel the damaged port side being crushed on the bottom of the harbor as the weight of the ship rolled over on it. And with the weight of the masts, superstructure, and guns, along with the water now flooding in through the open hatches and torpedo holes on the port side, her center of balance far past the point of no return, she began to roll on the harbor floor toward me.
As she rolled further, I could see past the masts and superstructure to see a large gathering of the crew on the starboard side climbing over onto the ship’s bottom and walking around the ship as if it were some sort of large log rolling in the water.
The forward and aft masts with their gunnery-spotting platforms struck the water with significant force. The aft one struck so close and with enough force to throw a wave of oily water over me, filling my nose and mouth. Almost instantly, I began to feel sick. Coughing and sputtering as I resurfaced, I struggled to regain my breath, the cut and bump on my head really beginning to pound. I could hear the masts and superstructure of the ship pushing into the harbor floor and breaking off as twenty-seven thousand tons of hull rolled over onto them. As the ship rolled, the starboard propeller came up out of the water, exposed to the air for the first time ever out of dry dock.
It was then an actual shock of tremendous force ripped through the harbor, like nothing I had ever felt before, and nothing I could imagine. For maybe only a couple of hundredths of a second, my body was compressed, as if in some large pressure chamber, and the air was knocked out of my lungs, causing me to swallow some more oily water. Then, just like that, it subsided again. I felt the heat burning on my face as a huge ball of fire rose above one of the ships at the other end of Battleship Row. It towered huge, orange and black, hundreds of feet above the struggling American ships. Carrying along with it large and small chunks of steel and debris, along with the human body parts of the crew of the USS Arizona, which rained down all over Pearl Harbor and Ford Island.
That’s the first time during the attack I actually thought about any ship other than my own. I looked down Battleship Row. The West Virginia was on fire and listing but not very dangerously. It looked like it was going to settle upright on the bottom. Apparently, they had achieved what I had hoped for on the Oklahoma.
The Maryland and Tennessee were protected from torpedo attack by the Oklahoma and West Virginia, but I could tell through the smoke that they were on fire as well.
I could only barely make out the Arizona’s masts through the dense black smoke and fire which was being blown off of her by the westerly wind. Her forward mast was lying over at about forty-five degrees. Obviously, there was no longer any structure left underneath to support it.
At that time, I didn’t know much about the total damage done to the other ships or what their futures held. But one thing I could tell from right there in the water: in a war that was little more than ten minutes old, for the battleship Oklahoma, BB-37 and hundreds of her crew, the war was already over.
Pearl Harbor: Part Two
Fortunately, rescue from the oily waters of Pearl Harbor came quickly for me. The harbor began to fill with small boats even before the end of the first wave of the attack. I was trying to make my way back through the oily water to the hull of the overturned Oklahoma when one of them picked me up out of the water.
Not that I wanted to go back on the Okie. I just kind of thought at this point that anything to stand on would be better than nothing, and that was the shortest way to get out of the water from where I was. Swimming defenseless and injured in oily salt water was not something I wanted to do any longer than I had to.
The worst problem for me at the time was the total lack of cover in the water. The Japs were still attacking. Zeros were making strafing runs up and down Battleship Row, shooting through the smoke and fire at anything that moved. They were even making deliberate strafing runs at the larger groups of people in the water.
This really didn’t surprise me much at the time because I had seen numbers of reports on how the Japanese conducted their war in China. Rape and torture were common practice right out in the streets, frequently with the victim’s family right there, forced to watch.
They would make games of beheading people who just happened to be there at the time. I’d even seen pictures of them with prisoners tied to poles, using them for bayonet practice.
I kind of expected them to do what they were doing. They were an empire in the glee of an apparently unstoppable campaign to mercilessly control a large portion of the world. The consequences of defeat, or even the slightest thought of the possibility of defeat, had not entered their minds in the least, and they were behaving more as animals than men because of it. So they shot at us in the water wherever they could find the most of us. It worked out relatively well for me because I just happened to be mostly alone.
Bombs were falling and exploding faster than I could count.
I knew I wasn’t bleeding badly enough to be in immediate danger, but still, I thought some stitches and pressure were in order. The cut on my head as well as my side had bled considerably, and I was beginning to feel cold and faint. The oil and water I had inadvertently swallowed were making me quite sick, and I vomited up the eggs, bacon, and coffee that were served to me by an ensign who may not even be alive anymore.
The pain of the cut on my side, agitated by the salt water and vomiting, was rapidly becoming unbearable.
As I was pulled from the water, I looked at the overturned hull of my ship and wondered how many of the crew, some of them close friends of mine, were still trapped inside. I couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like for them. Being trapped in an overturned ship, in the dark, and wondering if rescue would ever come, or if escape was even possible, was something I was glad I was able to avoid.
It was that line of thinking that started me down the path of, “I’m going to kill every Jap I get the chance to, without exception.”
Once inside the boat, struggling against the almost continuous urge to vomit, I untied the ankles of my trousers and put them and my shoes back on. Then I turned my attention to the cut on my side. As expected, it was mostly a superficial cut, but it still needed some attention. I removed the belt from my pants and my T-shirt and used them as a makeshift compress for the cut on my side.
I asked one of the crewmen in the boat to look at the cut on my forehead. He said it was about two inches long and right to the bone. I used my pocket knife, which fortunately had not fallen out of my pocket, to cut a slice off of my khaki shirt and tied it tightly around my head to hold back the bleeding. The oily salt water sure did hurt directly agains
t my wounds, but hopefully my temporary first aid would keep me from losing much more blood.
The boat that picked me up was almost full at that point. A few of us in it were injured, none severely, so we started to make our way around the bow of the Oklahoma and Maryland to put down on Ford Island. We pulled two more sailors out of the water on the way but passed several who were obviously dead. We left them, preferring to rescue anybody who was still living.
The harbor water was already littered with debris of every sort, including human body parts, the memory of which still haunts me to this day. My desire to pay back the Japanese for the death and destruction was growing at such an incredible rate that I could feel the emotion, the sheer anger, pounding in my chest. Yet I felt totally helpless, like a victim, with absolutely no way to return fire of any kind.
A large number of the Oklahoma crew were on the overturned hull as we passed but not anywhere near all of them. I guessed most went off of the starboard side to the Maryland or into the water on the starboard side of the ship. Some were certainly dead or still trapped inside of the ship. My anger could no longer be contained, so with nothing else I could do, I just kept saying out loud over and over again, “Goddamned Japs. I’m going to kill them all when I get the chance.” And that became my purpose, which I used to fuel my grim determination to survive the attack.
Just as we rounded the bow of the Okie a Zero swooped low over Battleship Row, strafing everything in its path—especially the sailors who were in the water. The pilot was aiming directly at us, but the strafing stopped just short of the boat. “Goddamn bastards!” I thought, “Shooting at defenseless people.”
We weren’t nearly as defenseless as the pilot would have hoped because the Maryland gunners were returning fire long before the Jap’s fire even came close to reaching us. That Jap plane burst into flames and flew almost straight over my head as I watched and shouted with glee, “Go straight to hell you yellow, slant-eyed son-of-a-bitch!” It trailed smoke and fire; barely hanging onto the air, it flew across Pearl Harbor toward Hospital Point beyond my view and crashed. A black cloud of smoke rose from behind the ships and buildings that obscured my view of the hospital.