| AS I REMEMBER... |
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My name is Duke. I served in the US Navy aboard the USS Drexler DD-741. This was a �Sumpter Class� ship with a 48 ft beam, and 348 ft length over all. I served as a Gunners mate on a quad 40mm station. From stern to bow, armament was: 3 twin 5�, torpedo tubes, 2-quad 40�s, depth charges 6- twin 40�s 12 20mm There was no central magazine on our ship. Each mount had its own magazine. Shells were in clips of 5 rounds: 2 armor piercing, 2 exploding, and 1 tracer. With heavy action, we changed barrels about every 3 weeks. I was raised in Mississippi. While we had money, we couldn�t go anywhere. After the War started, I joined the Navy. From that point on your life takes a 360: You have no control over where you go or why. Only after you left port would they tell you where you were going. Even then, they did not tell us why. Joining the Navy was part patriotism, part wanderlust; a desire to see the world. I reported to Memphis, TN then rode a bus to boot camp in Perry, VA. You didn�t ask questions, you just did what you were told. I joined the Navy at 17 years old, and had my 18th birthday on ship. Some were older with families. Our ship was built in Maine, and commissioned in Nov 1944. It was the newest model destroyer at that time. Larger than older Destroyers with different guns. We sailed to Bermuda on our shakedown. From there, we joined the aircraft carrier Bonhomme Richard and sailed to Trinidad. We went through the Panama Canal, then on to San Diego. Entered the Pacific campaign from Pearl Harbor, to Guadalcanal, to Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. We invaded Okinawa Easter Sunday, April 1, 45. We had a huge task force. As I walked out on the fantail, the ships were as far as you could see. We had ships for everything, even a ship that did nothing but make ice cream! Our first duty during invasion of Okinawa was carrier support. We provided protection with sonar and radar, but spent a lot of time retrieving pilots form water. This went on non-stop for about 2 weeks. Many converted ships became carriers, and were small and moved a lot. On station at Okinawa they did �picket duty�. We traveled in pairs of destroyers. While on picket duty, we had almost daily attacks by Kamikazes at dawn and dusk. The planes would come in waves of 20 to 50 in a group. The greatest pilots flew Corsairs. They attacked kamikazes and followed them straight toward ship, �right down my gunsights�. They were crazy! They would follow a Kamikaze as far as they could and break off at the last second, as they passed they would wave and point at the insignia on the side of the plane, sort of like telling us they were Americans, and don�t shoot. I think the Corsairs shot down more than we did, but we never really knew. Picket duty was nerve wracking. We would pick up incoming on radar, then hear: �Bogeys at 50 miles�. We went to General Quarters. (I often slept at my gun) Then they would call every 10 miles. �Bogeys at 40 miles�, �Bogeys at 30 miles�, etc. It was very tense waiting as you knew what was coming. When the planes came in range, we all opened up. There was so much firepower that you never knew what you shot down. We finally gave up trying to keep count. We used so much ammo we had to get re-supplied from a munitions ship every 3 days. Combat was scary. When the heat was on and you were going into battle, you were scared. Then you would realize that s.o.b. is trying to kill me, and you �d get mad. Then the adrenaline was flowing and you didn�t think about it. After the action, you�d get scared again, and you�d throw up. You didn�t want to talk to anyone, you just tried to find a quiet corner and sit there and shake. Then the first think you knew, you had to get up and do it again. On May 17, 1945, 8 planes got through our fire screen. All but 2 were shot down. 1 hit our port gun mount, 1 hit beneath my gun mount. The ship broke in 2 pieces and sunk in 49 seconds! Of the 350-man crew, only about 140 survived. Just about everyone below decks died, as they had no time to get out. I believe I was saved because of the design of the gun mount. I sat on a metal seat much like a tractor seat. In front of me was a metal plate. When the plane hit beneath me, I think the seat and the plate protected me, as did the goggles. I was in water around 1 hour. I had to swim away from ship to avoid burning oil. I had no life jacket on, as they were too cumbersome to wear in battle. I was picked up by transports. When I picked myself up, I was the only one alive out of our 11-man gun crew. I heard someone yell to jump overboard, so I walked down the side of the ship and jumped in. When I surfaced, I thought I was blind. My face stung and I thought my eyes were gone. I yelled I couldn�t see, I think I got shrapnel in my eyes. Someone close to me said� You dumb sob, take your goggles off!� Then I could see! Truthfully, the goggles probably protected my eyes. Our gun crew was 4 loaders in the magazine, 4 loaders on the mount, director, point, and gun captain. Another reason I think I was not injured worse was the goggles we wore. We had goggles with a knob on the bridge so you could adjust to the sunlight. You could shoot directly into the sun, or turn to yellow for night shooting. Inflatable belts did not work! All I had on were cut off jeans. While waiting to be picked up, we had no problems with sharks. I received minor wounds but did not tell anyone. I wanted to go home, not get sent to a hospital on Guam. We lost 13 destroyers in the Okinawa campaign. Someone complained to Halsey about the losses, and he said �We got more destroyers than they got planes, so keep �em out there.� So they did, and honestly it was necessary. The Kamikazes dove on anything in sight so the protection we gave was essential. After the ship sunk, I came home on survivors leave. I was assigned to the FD Roosevelt carrier. When the war ended and I came back to the states for good. On the train ride home, one of my buddies went with me from San Francisco to Memphis. No food was served on train so we made restaurant stops. We didn�t have ice so we were drinking hot beer. We stopped in New MX, and had lunch. By now, my buddy was pretty well boozed up. He saw an Indian sitting under a tree and he swapped his uniform for the clothes the Indian had on, including a big hat with a rounded top just like you imagined. He then wore those clothes all the way to Memphis. When I see him at our reunions, I start to remind him of this and he says, �Shut up. I know what you are going to say!� When you are in war time and face death, it makes you realize how important life is. That is one reason so many W.W.II veterans are still married. You appreciate life and every minute of every day you are thinking of getting home. You really appreciate home and family. Do you remember the last scene in �Saving Private Ryan�? The background was the family: think about that. By one small mishap, the family wouldn�t be here. After the war I did not go back to MS. They had a 52/20 club; you got $20/week for 52 weeks, if you were turned down from a job interview. So Kinney Shoes interviewed me. I told them I did not want to work. But they hired me! And I was with them 47 years! I moved 21 times, around the country. Back then it was not like today. Most people stayed at one job their whole career. I loved it. Being raised in rural MS, I couldn�t understand how you could make a living dressing up and being cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It was a good life. I had two kids, a boy and a girl. Some things I think about from time to time are mind boggling, It is hard to imagine how many millions died in the war. Also, from the time war was declared in 1941, to 1944, we went from a peacetime economy to full time military production. Everybody was involved around the country. The mass of equipment was so tremendous that we had more than we could use. As an example, when we started, we had to save brass shell casings and turn them in when our ship was re-loaded with ammunition. Later, it stopped as we had more than enough. We usually loaded off munitions ships, about every 3 days. To this day, we still have annual reunions on the anniversary of the sinking of our ship. We have 42 living survivors from our ship. About 100 attend the reunions which includes descendants of the crew. They are real family affairs that occur every May on the anniversary of the sinking. We still �pitch Liberty� at reunions. One of the sad parts of the reunions is meeting the descendants of the KIA�s. One time, I met the daughter of a man who was on a quad 40-gun crew. She wanted to know about her dad and asked if I knew him. I did as he was on my gun crew. When I told her she started crying which was sad. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is a story unrelated to my service. I knew a man with a brother, both of whom were in the Navy. Their dad wanted to join, but he was 52 and they wouldn�t take him into active duty. Finally, he joined the Seabees and helped to design the electrical system for a floating dry-dock that was shipped to Manila. Can you imagine how much this helped the war effort? Before this, heavily damaged ships were sent either to Pearl Harbor or to the West Coast. |
| Thank you for your service Duke! |
| The following story is excerpted from the book, An Essay On Healing by Vic Bull. It is used with permission from the author. [� 2000 by Victor Bull. All rights reserved.] Anyone desiring to read the entire story of Vic�s wounding and his eventual healing may order the book directly from Victor R. Bull, 514 Westwood, San Antonio, Texas, 78212. The price of the book, including shipping and Handling is $12.00. Trauma �.LATE SUMMER, 1945�. He was rehabilitating from war wounds caused by a German land mine in Normandy, France. He could walk without crutches or a cane; perform most tasks with his right hand; was adapting to blindness in his right eye for most functions except those requiring depth perception, most notably driving an automobile. Much of his trauma was unresolved; buried deep inside his mind was the unbearable pain he�d experienced. Twice, after he returned home, he awoke from a brutal nightmare. What awakened him was his mother, Ariola, standing beside his bed. He was sitting erect, his legs in front of him on the surface of the bed. He was gripping with both hands the leg that had been nearly torn off six inches above the ankle. The leg was fiercely painful and he was screaming. Slowly he gained awareness, that he was sitting on the bed shouting, as Ariola brought him gently awake. He had no true memory of the scene after the land mine had exploded. Yet his mental images were vivid from witnesses� graphic descriptions, His true memory stopped just before the mine detonated. He had stood up in the rear of the Army weapons carrier, a large stake body truck, to relieve the jolting discomfort of sitting on a bench above a rear wheel as the truck moved slowly along a path, not really a road, but two ruts in the earth made by passage of prior vehicles transporting supplies to forward units. By standing up he had gained relief from the jolting of the truck and he turned toward his buddy, Joe Fay, still seated on the bench above the other rear wheel opposite the one he, Al, had just vacated. Joe was gripping the edge of his bench, presenting a compacted mass, attempting to speak but failing to formulate words due to the constant jolting of the truck which turned his intended words into garbled sounds. At that instant, just before the land mine exploded, Al�s personal memory ended. He could not recall noise or pain, just a lucid -1- picture of himself standing above Joe Fay. Al�s arms were spread wide to grip light, wooden laths which formed a frame for a canvas covering during inclement weather. He was formulating speech to advise Joe Fay to stand up also. There, Al�s true memory ended and he reconstructed the scene from the descriptions by witnesses. The explosion occurred, a great, shattering noise of a powerful bomb designed to destroy tanks. Joe Fay in his compacted position was disemboweled and died instantly lying face down in his own blood and shit, while he, Alan, was propelled through the top of the truck high into the air, then fell to the ground through the limbs of a huge tree. The leg he gripped in the nightmare had been nearly torn off and the foot dangled by attachments of skin, blood vessels, torn flesh, and ligaments, with leg bones severed and broken ends clearly visible in the leg and in the dangling foot. The pain of that injury, Alan believed, had blocked out his memory of the explosion and subsequent incidents of himself begging to be killed to stop the pain while being administered first aid and morphine which preceded the coma that lasted the next three days and nights in the field hospital. * In the hospital he had experienced pain negatively: bydenying it. There, for eleven months he endured pain stoically. He underwent seven operations to insert first wires, then pins, then bone grafts to repair shattered bones in his right leg and forearm, and plastic surgery to reduce scar tissue on his temple next to his blind eye. Throughout, he repressed all expressions of pain, verbal or body language. Then when he returned home, and was in his parents� house again, he experienced The nightmare flashbacks that re-enacted all the pain he had either forgotten, or ignored, or repressed. In the middle of the night during sleep he screamed with unbearable pain his mind had recreated in his leg, which in sleep he clutched and implored someone to shoot him, to end the torment. He awoke from the seizure with his mother, Ariola, holding him as she had done when he was a child, comforting him as she�d done back then, saying, �There, there, Hon, you�ll be all right. I�m here, everything�s all right,� And gradually he relaxed and without shame regressed to childhood, comforted by Ariola, weeping softly as he -2- returned to sleep. The flashbacks left him weak and distracted with realization the land mine incident had not been painless, as his short circuited memory had implied. In fact, it had been so painful, his mind had blocked consciousness and later recall. But it was there, hidden, with potential to recur at any time as a nightmare. * BAD VIBES The eye was his worst injury. It was worse than blind: it no longer focused where he directed his vision. Instead, it drifted to the side, When he refocused his good eye, the bad one also moved into focus, but quickly drifted away again. He attempted exercises to rehabilitate the damaged eye, standing in front of a mirror, consciously moving it into balance with the good eye. Each time, it drifted away, out of balance. He felt anger and self-pity over this condition at first, later replaced by self-consciousness, timidity, and aversion to meeting strangers. That was when the body of J. J., his brother who was six years older, and killed in the Pacific War, had been recovered and buried in the Punch Bowl National Cemetery in Oahu, Hawaii. He remembered not being able to cope with his grief for J. J. He was troubled by fragments of an old memory which had been pleasant. But J. J.�s death, and his own inability to express grief, had distorted the memory into a recur- ring nightmare�. In the dream, just as in the true memory, he was very small, before he knew speech. He was learning to walk. To maintain bal- ance, he stood with feet spread wide, planted, his body trembling with the effort to stay erect. Next moment, someone holding his hand, sup- porting him, moving him forward, gently, gently, step by step, encour- aging progress, speaking in a soothing manner. After a number of steps, sustained by the person holding his hand to guide him, he was lifted high into the air, to the shoulders of J. J. But in the dream when he looked closely, J. J. had a death skull face and threw him down and he tumbled, screaming, into black, bottomless space�. And he would awake terrified, heart pounding, mouth dry, furious at J. J., until he reconnected with reality: J. J. was dead. And, he, Alan, was secretly angry at J. J. for being unavailable in his time of greatest need. And it was guilt over his anger that prevented him from grieving. -3- |
| Merle's Comment Vic Bull found it extremely difficult to write about his wartime experiences in the first person. And so he invented his alter ego, in the guise of Alan Brockton to represent himself. His is a compelling story and his book, An Essay On Healing, tells his story in prose and verse. Vic Bull, thank you for serving and thank you for allowing us to share your Memories. |
| BALLAD: FOR A WW II SHIPMATE AND HIS UNANSWERED PRAYER (Forgive Us, Joe, We Ain�t There Yet) (for: Joe Fay) Joe Fay, our new ship�s cook, listened well. He had a round, open face, long, sturdy limbs, And eyes which were mirrors for what he was told; excitement, wonder, happy news, sad news. Sad news? Forget sad news. Joe Fay, our cook, had a way, While feeding us, of listening our sadnesses away. Older than most of us on our ship, Joe was a husband and father of two sons. Also, unlike us, he�d had a job back home. Joe became the shipmate we told about ourselves, Our adventures, and our distant, post-war dreams. Joe had delivered milk, in Boston, Before the draft brought him to our ship. It was a ship which worked. It opened and closed anti-sub nets at a harbor mouth, To permit passage to the heroic ships, the war sluggers, the champs. Joe cooked our meals, listened, spoke his all-purpose word. His tongue was Bostonese. His word was, �Jeez.� Excitement? �Jeez.� Wonderment? �Jeez.� Puzzlement? �Jeez.� Recamouflage our ship for Atlantic duty? �Jeez.� Install two new guns, for going overseas? �Jeez.� Would we become a slugger, too? �Jeez.� In convoy, we went. We did not slug. We worked. Throughout that bright, mild summer, with long, pure days, we toiled. We cleaned the first port into France, Removed the mines and other obstacles to The horny sluggers, trained To war and win. Until one Sunday, in the fall of �44, our starboard watch was allowed ashore. On the beach, for something neat to do, Joe Fay and I hitched a ride in an Army truck, with a load of supplies for a radar post a few miles up the coast. Joe and I sat face to face on benches in the back of the truck. The day was supreme. The sky was tall, the sun alive. The air held a brilliance like glints of fire in a diamond. The road along the coast was two ruts worn by prior trunks. In the rear of the bumpy truck, I arose, as Milk Man Joe, through clenched jaws, groaned, �Jeez,� gripping the edge of his bench. After standing awhile and calibrating my knees to absorb the bumps, while drinking in that day, I turned towards Joe Fay to say, �Stand up, It�s better this way.� I never spoke. The land mine intervened. I awoke in casts, half blind, after an unknown sum of days had passed. What had happened was then described to me. My question now to you, Joe Fay, Milk Man is: when I was propelled through the top of that truck and into those trees, and your body ripped open, and you clutched at the blood and the life that was leaving you, Old Friend, tell me, please, weren�t you praying for peace with that final scream, �Jeez?� Our thanks to Vic Bull for this very moving and fitting tribute to his friend and fellow sailor, Joe Fay. And our thanks to both of them for their service and their sacrifice. |
| Our special thanks to Vic Bull for this very moving and fitting tribute to his friend and fellow sailor, Joe Fay. And our thanks to both of them for their service and their sacrifice. |
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