Chief Bos'n Edwin Hill

ED HILL – PART II


“He that outlives this day and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named.” Shakespeare, Henry V.


“Ed Hill was the Senior Warrant Officer and Chief Bos’n’s Mate on the USS Nevada when I came aboard on 18, November 1940,” recalls Captain Donald Ross, of Port Orchid, Washington, who survived two hours of Hell in Paradise, then lived another 50 years as testimony to those who died at Pearl Harbor.

Hill and Ross were warrant officers on the USS Nevada, a top-of-the-line battleship, then in port at Pearl Harbor, on the Island of Oahu, Hawii. Both men would find themselves at the crossroads of history, at a choice assignment in paradise, then be suddenly thrust into combat without any advance warning. And in the first hours of World War II, they would take action above and beyond the call of duty, help initiate the fist offensive action against the enemy and save their ship.

“I was a Warrant Machinist, in charge of what they called ‘junk’ – the machine shops, metal smiths, hydraulics, generators, electricity, that sort of thing,” Ross explained, “while Hill was the Senior Warrant Officer and Chief Bos’n, with many years of service. He was also the Advancement Officer and in charge of training, all through the deck divisions. And he knew more about damage control than any 1st Lieutenant.”

“Hill was also a wonderful leader,” remembers Ross, “not only for the men, but for the other officers, who respected him. He was the most outstanding man on the ship, in fact any ship I’ve ever been on.”

“On the morning of December 7, I saw him walking on deck when I first came up from below,” Ross recalls. “He had his breakfast and was getting things ship-shape for church service on the aftdeck. He had a junior officer on his first watch and whenever he had a junior ensign on duty always gave him the best bos’n mate. That would be Mister Solar, a good man who also had 18 or 19 years in the Navy.”

The junior ensign on his first watch was Joseph Taussig, Jr., son of Vice Admiral Joseph Taussign, Sr. The elder Taussig, in April 1940, had testified before Congress that if trends continued war with Japan was inevitable.

Young Taussig, then 21 years old, was fresh out of the U.S. Navy Academy at Annapolis. Today, at 71, he is the last Pearl Harbor survivor on active duty, with the title of Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy for Safety, appointed by President Reagan.

“I remember Ed Hill very well,” Taussig said from his Annapolis, Maryland home. “He was a big, bald headed man who we thought was older than God. He was very concerned about training young officers on the ship, and we all admired him. He won about every sailing award in the Navy and he loved to teach us how to sail.”

“I was an admiral’s son,” relates Taussig, “and Mr. Hill took pains to make sure that I didn’t get into any trouble. When I was on watch he would always be standing behind me looking over my shoulder.”

“I don’t know much about his personal background,” Taussig said, “except that I do known that no man makes chief warrant officer without being totally outstanding.”

Taussig remembers that, “On December 7th I was on my first deck watch. I didn’t see Mr. Hill, but I knew where he was. He was standing behind the number 3 turret. I knew because bos’n mate Adolofo Solar told me. Mr. Solar always kept me posted to where Mr. Hill was because I knew he was somewhere in the vicinity, keeping tabs on me.”

On assuming duty as watch officer of the deck that morning Taussig ordered a second boiler engine fired up. Although he didn’t know it at the time, that order, which seemed so insignificant at the time, would assume monumental importance later in the day.

One book speculates that Taussig was merely looking for something to do, while another reports that he wanted to give the hot engine a break since it had been supplying the ship with power for four days.

Today Taussig remembers differently. “I had the second boiler fired up for two reasons,” he said. “I wanted it up because I didn’t like to be a ship that couldn’t get underway. I had been in the California earthquake in 1933, which made me conscious of a threat, so I tried, at all times, to be prepared. So whenever I took over the deck, I always fired up another engine.”

“The second reason,” he said, “is that when I was at Annapolis, the mechanical drawing instructor, E. J. “Gus” Fee, predicated that I wouldn’t graduate. But I did graduate, and he was the engineering officer on the Nevada. So ordered the other engine fired up just to make him mad, and let him know I was the officer on deck. So in my 21 year old mind, that was one of the reasons – to make Gus mad.”

Taussig’s biggest problem that morning was rather trivial. “We were getting ready for morning colors, and my big problem at the time was the flag. I didn’t know what size flag to fly.”

Early that morning, 19 year old 3rd class bos’n mate Kenneth Herndon emerged into the morning light from below the freshly painted gunmetal gray hull of the Nevada. The Nevada was the last of a row of battleships. Tied up in front were five other battleships – the Arizona, Maryland, Tennessee, Oklahoma and West Virginia. The Admiral’s flagship, the California, was set off by itself further up the channel. Together they were referred to as Battleship Row.

On the other side of Ford Island was the training and gunning practice ship Utah, while the Pennsylvania was in dry dock. Around Ford Island was the rest of the Pacific Fleet, except for the carrier task force, one day’s sail away, returning from Wake Island.

Without air support from the carriers, the Admiral didn’t want the battleships to leave the safety of the harbor. The skipper of the Nevada was ashore, as were the Captains of five of the other six battleships. The Nevada wasn’t scheduled to go anywhere, and all was quiet, except for the sounds of the ship’s orchestra, which was tuning up on deck, waiting to play the national anthem during the 8 a.m. flag raising ceremony.

“I was making arrangements to play football with 3 division, recalls Herndon, now 70 years old and living in Clayton, New Jersey. “We had this inter-division football leagues and we were tied for the championship. We were going ashore and were waiting for this launch just before morning colors when the attack started.”

“Sure I knew Mister Hill,” recalls Herndon. “He was my boss. He was chief warrant bos’n, and all the people on the deck force came under his direction. He was very strict, just and very knowledgeable. He had over 20 years in the navy at the time of the attack. Hill was a leader, its just that simple. He was respected by everybody, up and down the ranks. The admirals had just as much respect for him as I had. That’s the kind of gentleman he was. He ran a tight ship.”

Not knowing what size flag to fly, and too embarrassed to ask the veteran Mister Hill, Taussig quietly sent a man forward to see what they were going to do on the Arizona. A single bugler stood ready on most ships in the harbor, but on the larger ships, like the Nevada and Arizona, whole ship’s orchestras were assembling to perform the national anthem as the flag was being raised.

On the Nevada, bandleader Oden McMIllan and his 23 musicians waited patiently. The band’s intermittent offbeat sounds rang out briefly as they tuned up, then stopped. A bird’s squawk broke the silence, church bells chimed in the distance.

The serenity of the moment, overseen by Chief Bos’n Edwin Hill from gun turret number 3, would bely the fact, he would die in the next hour and a half, but not before taking his ship on the shortest, most memorial, historic and unscheduled sortie in the annals of the US Navy.

At 0755, military time, five minutes to eight, blue flags were hoisted, signaling the official routine would commence in five minutes. As those assembled on the aftdeck waited patiently, they were distracted by some specks that appeared in the sky to the southwest.

The swarm of plane that appeared like insects or a flock of birds to the naked eye, were first picked up on radar a half-hour earlier. They were reported by the young soldiers who thought them suspicious, but the superior officers believed them to be either an expected group of B-17 bombers or advance planes from the carrier task force at sea.

McMillan and his musicians saw the planes bearing down on the other side of Ford Island. They heard muffled explosions and saw clouds of dirt and dust rise in the distance. At first they thought it was merely target practice, or perhaps some hot shot army pilots showing off.

At precisely 0800 the blue flag came down, McMillan tapped his baton to strike up the band and the first notes of the “Star Spangled Banner” rang out across the harbor. As the first notes sounded a plane came in low over the water and dropped a single torpedo aimed at the nearby Arizona. The band continued playing as the plane zoomed in, up and over the Nevada’s fantail, spraying the deck with machine gun bursts as it pealed off. But the machine gunner managed to miss the entire band and marine guard standing at attention in two stiff rows. The flag however, half-way up the mast, was shredded with holes.

McMillan kept conducting however, and the band didn’t miss a beat. According to Walter Lord, in his book “Day of Infamy,” “It never occurred to him that once he had begun playing the National Anthem he could possibly stop. Another plane flashed by. This time McMillian unconsciously paused as the wood teak deck splintered around him, but he quickly picked up the beat again.”

“The entire band stopped and started with him,” wrote Lord, “as though they had rehearsed for weeks. Not a man broke formation until the final note died. Then everyone ran wildly for cover.”

The ship’s bugler looked at Taussig, then began to blow general quarters on his own initiative before an order was issued, but the sounds of the explosions and madness muffled the music. Taussig grabbed the horn out of the enlisted man’s mouth and pulled the alarm bell. Then he repeatedly shouted into the PA system, “All hands general quarters, air raid, this is no drill!”

As the men scampered around the ship, some of the musicians carefully placed their instruments in their cases before putting on their helmets and running to their battle stations.

According to reports, one of the first things that Edwin Hill did was to grab a machete and cut the ropes holding up awnings that covered the guns along the deck, which permitted them to return fire almost immediately. In the course of the battle the Nevada gunners were credited with downing six Japanese planes.

“I had just finished breakfast when the alarm sounded,” recalls Francis Ritter, now 78 years old and living in Wenonah, Deptford Township in Gloucester County, New Jersey.

Originally from Southeast Philadelphia, Ritter was a radioman 3rd class aboard the Nevada. “I was getting ready to go to the church service, mass, which was to be said on the aftdeck, just after morning colors. I didn’t hear the PA system, so when the alarm sounded I ran up on the bridge. I assumed it was a fire drill, but an officer nearly knocked me down. “Don’t you realized they’re Japs,” he said. I almost got shot and didn’t know it. Then went to my battle station.”

Also up the mast was a sailor in the Nevada’s crow’s nest with a .30 caliber machine gun. He was the first man to return fire and winged a torpedo bomber as it headed directly for the ship, giving the Nevada a brief reprieve. “Here and there other guns joined in,” noted Lord, “but at first there were pitifully few.”

Another plane flew in low over the harbor towards the Nevada and was hit by blazing guns, veered off smoking and crashed into the water to the cheers of the crew. But the plane wasn’t hit until after it had dropped its torpedo, which they could see as it silently swept towards the ship. It’s explosion rocked the Nevada, sheared a whole the size of a small house in its side, and forced a list to port, which was quickly corrected by counter flooding maneuvers.

Then two bombs exploded on the bridge, one severely wounding Taussig, who lost a leg. He would spend the rest of the war in the hospital but he refused to be relived of his duty as gun control officer and directed the rest of the battle from a stretcher.

“I was below deck when the attack began,” remembers 73 year old John Gornick, of Lakehurst, New Jersey. “I was a signalman 3rd class, and my battle station was on the signal bridge, but when I arrived we took a bomb that went right through the bridge and exploded in the Captain’s quarters below. Flames came up and eventually we had to leave the bridge.”

A gigantic explosion in the forward magazine of the Arizona then knocked a dozen men off the deck f the Nevada, some of whom were picked out of the water by a small motor launch delivering Lieut. Commander Lawrence E. Ruff back to his ship.

Ruff had left the Nevada at 0630 that morning with the ship’s priest, who heard confessions and said mass aboard the hospital ship. The mass was quickly concluded when the attack began and Ruff commandeered the launch to take him back to the Nevada. The little boat was strafed by a Japanese Zero as it made its way across the harbor, but Ruff was truly horrified by what he saw on the short trip.

Before the smoke cleared he could see the Oklahoma capsized, the West Virginia a tangled, burning mass of steel, the California listing to port, the Maryland and Tennessee trapped by burning vessels, the Utah overturned and the Pennsylvania helpless at dry dock, all under attack. The Arizona, completely engulfed in flames, was sinking rapidly.

In the ten minutes it took Ruff to cross the harbor, by 0810, the backbone of the Pacific fleet was destroyed, five of the Navy’s best battleships were sunk or sinking, and the rest of the fleet was in jeopardy. Of all the battleships in the harbor, only Ruff’s ship, the Nevada, remained seaworthy, with damage from one torpedo and two bombs.

“When I came down from the mast I fought fires,” recalls Ritter, “and I helped out with injured and made myself available until I took over a field radio, one of our only means of communication at the time.”

Since the torpedo that hit the Nevada had knocked out the electric elevators on the port side, Chief Bos’n Edwin Hill organized a line of sailors that passed ammunition up from below deck by hand. “I went down from the signal bridge and gave them a hand passing the ammunition. You must of heard that song, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” well that’s what we did,” said Gornick.

Kenneth Herndon, whose football game was called on account of war, first went to his battle station, a turret gun. “But we didn’t have any ammunition,” he said, “so there was no use staying there. The torpedo had taken out our power, so I went down to the magazines to get .50 caliber ammunition.”

The ammunition elevator on the other side continued functioning however because Warren Machinist Donald Ross did everything he could to keep it going. Down below, he earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism. His citation reads: “When his station in the forward dynamo room of the USS Nevada became almost untenable due to smoke, steam and heat, Machinist Ross forced his men to leave that station and performed all of the duties himself until blinded and unconscious. Upon being rescued and resuscitated, he returned to his station, again and again, until directed to abandon it.”

Up above, in charge of the deck, Chief Bos’n Edwin J. Hill would also earn the Medal of Honor that day, while Ensign Taussig, directing the return fire, would earn the Navy Cross. Herndon recalls that, “Tausig put on quite a show that day. He refused to leave the guns up there on the foredeck.”

Taussig however, discounts his own heroism, saying, “I lost a leg and received the Navy Cross because my sailors took care of me. I got all the credit and they did all the work. But Hill earned his medal for personal heroism. He’s a true American hero.”

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