PART V - STANDING A TIPTOE - December 7, 1941
John Gornick was transferred to a large cruiser, the USS North Hampton, which was sunk at Guadacanal. “I prayed a lot,” said Gornick, who had no plans to celebrate his survival at Pearl Harbor 50th anniversary celebrations. “I’ll watch it on TV,” he said.
Francis Ritter went on to serve on two carriers, both of which were sunk from under him, the Lexington at the battle of Coral Sea and the Hornet at Santa Cruz, off Guadacanal. The former radioman became an amateur Ham radio operatior who occasionally talks with other Navy vets, including some former Nevada shipmates, via the Ham radio. “I had a buddy on the Arizona, radioman Wes Bishop, who is still down there buried with his ship,” said Ritter, who is still bitter about the battle. “We got campaign medals, but Pearl Harbor was a debacle that we shouldn’t be honored for. We were caught with our pants down even though radar picked them up coming in. But hat was just thrown to the wayside. We should have been warned.”
Ritter even has a letter, postmarked December 5, 1941 from Pearl Harbor, which he sent to his girlfriend, now his wife, telling her, “If the Japs are going to hit, they’re going to hit us now.”
William West resents the Japanese, but not for Pearl Harbor. “I don’t have any animosity for Pearl Harbor,” he says, ‘it’s time to forgive and forget. But I do hold it against them for not opening their markets to us like we opened ours to them.” West did not go to Hawaii, but did attend a local ceremony.
Kenneth Herndon stayed with the Nevada. He saw it overhauled at a shipyard near Seattle, Washington, and took her back into action, shelling the beaches at Normandy during the D-Day invasion of France in 1944. “Then we went back to the Pacific,” says Herndon, who has a book about the ship, “The Epic Story of the Ship that Wouldn’t Sink – the Battleship Nevada” (Valley Press, Fallon, Nevada), by Brig. General David C. Henley.
Since the Nevada was used as atomic bomb test ship, it couldn’t be used as scrap because of radioactivity. “The Japs couldn’t sink her, and the atom bomb didn’t sink her, and the men assigned to scuttle her in the Pacific had a hard time of it too,” says Herndon.
Retired after 20 years in the Navy, Herndon received his special Pearl Harbor campaign medal with a number of other veterans during special ceremonies at the half-time of the 1991 Army-Navy football game.
Captain Donald Ross and Joseph Taussig were special guests of honor and gave speeches at the official ceremonies at Pearl Harbor during the first week of December. There was some controversy however, over whether the Japanese should have been invited to participate.
It really didn’t matter, according to one veteran, who noted, “They weren’t invited the first time and showed up anyway.”
Besides, all of the major hotels on the island of Oahu, where the ceremonies were held, were owned by Japanese. What they couldn’t destroy with bombs a half century ago, they eventually bought with Yen.
According to Captain Ross, Chief Bos’n Edwin Hill’s body was recovered on the port side of the ship at Hospital Point by a 2nd class pharmacist mate. “When I picked up his body,” he later related to Ross, “there wasn’t a bone that wasn’t broken.”
Hill was buried nearby at Punchbowl cemetery. Captain Ross places flowers at the grave whenever he is in Hawaii, and Hill’s daughter, Mrs. Catherine Roggeveen, visited the grave and said, “At the end of the war my mother was given the choice of having my father’s grave moved to Washington D.C. or leaving it in Hawaii. Although she had never been there she heard it was beautiful and decided to leave him there. The Punchbowl cemetery is an inactive, shallow volcano, and is very beautiful, so I think she made the right choice.”
Hospital Point, where the Nevada was run aground at the end of its infamous sortie, and where Edwin Hill met his death, is now a national historic landmark known as Nevada Point.
On December 7, 1991 in Cape May, N.J., where Edwin Hill learned to sail and considered his home away from the sea, the local veterans held a small ceremony at the monument dedicated to him on the Washington Street Mall.
But as Hill’s old shipmate William West said, “I’m afraid that everyone is going to forget all about us on December 8th.”
MEDAL OF HONOR CITATION
HILL, EDWIN JOSEPH
Rank and organization; Chief Boatswain, U.S. Navy. Born: 4 October, 1894, Philadelphia, Pa. Accredited to: Pennsylvania. Citation: For distinguished conduct on the line of his profession, extraordinary courage, and disregard of his own safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on 7 December 1941. During the height of the strafing and bombing, Chief Boatswain Hill led his men of the line-handling details of the U.S.S. Nevada to the quays, cast off the lines and swam back to his ship. Later, while on the forecastle, attempting to let go the anchors, he was blown overboard and killed by the explosion of several bombs.
USS Nevada (BB-36), Acton Report 7 Dec. 1941
File//C/WINDOWS/Desktop/bb36-Pearl.html
TO COMMENT ON THIS STORY CONTACT Billkelly3@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment