Down to the Sea (2 page)

“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.

 

T
HE 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 of 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.

 

A
T 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.