“The bulge… bulkhead just gave way… the compartment is flooding! very… fast… to our necks… here… die… God…”
Then silence.
I took off the headset, dropped it on the deck, and went back to my chair and stared out into the darkness.
The Surrender: Part Two
Most of the last months of the war went by with the Buffalo in drydock at Pearl Harbor. The trip back to Pearl was the roughest trip of my career. The ship was beat up pretty bad, and rest was hard to come by, but the worst part of it was the smell of decay from the bodies of the men who could not be retrieved, and there was not a single place in the ship you could go to get away from it. Most of the crew took to resting above decks, which both I and the calmness of the sea allowed for.
The damage report from Lieutenant Commander Schuller after he had a chance to look the ship over in drydock was, from the standpoint of the crew, very disheartening. The bulkhead that failed and killed the twenty-one trapped crewmen was apparently only held solid while the weight of the area of the ship which had lost buoyancy was on the beams behind it. So as the crew transferred the stores and pumped the water out of the area to raise the bow higher out of the water, thus bringing the Buffalo back from the brink of doom, the weight was shifted away from that area and caused a damaged support beam to fail. That left only the bulged bulkhead to support the entire weight of the ship against the Pacific Ocean. So every step we took to save them and the ship brought them closer to their deaths.
Most of the wreckage in Pearl had been cleaned up by then, which made it seem to me we were well on the way to healing from the attack, but the dead hulk of the Arizona was still right where she sank. The overturned Utah was rolled just far enough to get her out of the navigation channel and left to rust. Both of those ships remain there to this day.
My old ship, Oklahoma, had been refloated since November of ’43 and pushed aside in the Navy Yard as a dead hulk. My original assessment, that she would not be restored to combat status, was correct.
The former crew members of the Okie were allowed to board her and reclaim any personal possessions that were still salvageable, and after a short time thinking about it, I decided to take my chance to visit my old lost battlewagon.
I could see her from across the harbor where the Buffalo was in drydock, and it was shocking, really, to see our once proud ship in that condition. Most of the superstructure had been stripped off. The guns had all been removed as well to lighten her up for a long towing, which evidently still had not occurred. Every part of her was covered in rust, dirt, and debris of every mentionable kind and permanently stained with oil. I held out little hope that anything I had kept on board had survived in a usable condition, but still, visiting her was something I just had to do.
After getting the proper clearance from the yard workers, an escort was assigned to me for safety reasons. An old chief who worked in the repair yard carrying a large tool box met me at the plank and greeted me with a sharp salute. He handed me a hardhat, a flashlight, and coveralls, and warned me, “Be careful, sir; the Oklahoma is not in the best condition and is not the safest place to be.”
I smiled back at the chief and told him, “Thanks for your concern, chief, but I think it is a lot safer now than it was the last time I was on her.”
Kindly returning the smile, the chief replied, “I understand sir. I only mean to say it’s not going to be what you expect it to be.”
I turned around, crossed the plank, and stepped onto my old ship.
The teak deck was beginning to decay from neglect and having been submerged in warm salt water for the period of time she had lain upside-down on the floor of Pearl Harbor. Parts of it were missing entirely. All around was evidence of the yard crews with their cutting torches spattered on the deck with careless disregard for the condition of the ship. The tripod mast towers and superstructure, which had once so gracefully distinguished this once-proud ship, were gone entirely. Most of the topside hatches had either been removed or left open to expose the interior of the hull to the elements. Even as I surveyed the damage, I began to feel myself sinking into a state of reverie as I began to remember this ship as she was only a few short years ago. Almost unaware of it, I had stopped moving.
“Where was it you wanted to go, captain?” the chief gently asked.
Even in spite of the gentleness of his question, I jumped, startled by his question. “To the officer’s berthing quarters,” I quietly replied.
The chief led me forward to where the hatches that led to the interior of the ship used to be. Down the ladder we went, into the darkness below.
An eerie silence pervaded the ship, which seemed to press in all around me. It was strange, as if the ghosts of my departed crewmates were following me as I moved from compartment to compartment and through the passageways that connected them. I could see with my eyes the depth of the destruction inflicted by the Japanese in the attack, but with my mind, I saw the ship as she was when she was alive. I could hear the boilers, generators, and ventilation blowers, which you become so used to living on a ship, and yet my ears and nose perceived nothing but the stale, dead air, filled with the stench of death, war, and silence.
Normally, any other person would not have gone past that point, being overwhelmed by it, but I was driven almost by some invisible force to continue on.
We took the short passageway aft and entered the officer’s wardroom. It was in this room where I was eating bacon and scrambled eggs and drinking coffee served to me by our young Ensign Flaherty. Francis, who died in the attack, was later awarded the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of so many of the crew.
I realized I had been so busy fighting the Japs since then that I had almost forgotten him.
The officer’s wardroom always had an air of elegance about it. China plates as opposed to the metal trays the enlisted crew ate off of. The sturdy tables were always covered with decorated tablecloths. Pictures of the ship and the exotic places she had been adorned the walls and mess attendants—like waiters—were always there to serve your every need. It was a lot like going to a restaurant.
There was neither coffee now, nor bacon or eggs. And any pretense of the once-glamorous—for a battleship, anyway—nature of the compartment was gone. Broken dishes, utensils, chairs, and tables were sloppily thrown out of the way in the corner. Everything was covered with oil. Nothing was spared because nothing was sacred.
We proceeded aft down the very same passageway I ran through after the first torpedoes struck the ship. I wondered again what it was I hit my head on in the darkness during the attack and began to rub my aching head. “Maybe it’s the smell of the fuel oil making my head hurt,” I said to the chief.
“Maybe,” he replied.
We moved on aft around the turrets and came to the ladder that led both up to the main deck and down to the officer’s quarters where I was berthed. It was the same ladder where I had helped the injured crewman up out of the ship before. This time, we went down and found ourselves in the compartment where I used to live as a member of this ship’s crew.
The compartment had been pumped out, and any linen was removed to prevent mold but otherwise had been left alone. Everything was in disarray, but the lockers, being bolted to the floor, were still intact. Several of the lockers had been cut open, possibly by some of the officers I used to share this room with. I found mine, and the chief produced a set of bolt cutters from the toolbox he carried with him and snapped the rusted lock off of it.