Brett Ashton - Vengeance - Hatred and Honor

Then I looked up past the conning tower to the forward mast at the gunnery station on top and saw it was already leaning over about fifteen degrees. That’s when I knew the Oklahoma was in very serious trouble. Five torpedo hits, and it couldn’t have been longer than a minute and a half. The flooding below was obviously very serious and getting worse by the second.

My thoughts of the ship were suddenly interrupted by a popping noise in the air. The sound of bullets ricocheting off of the ship surrounded me. Everyone near cover rapidly took cover, but I was just a little too late. A bullet, or at least a fragment of one, hit on the right side of my body, putting a cut about five or six inches long on my chest. It was only a glancing hit, but it stung, to say the very least. Had I not begun to duck when I did, it would have been much worse, but it still needed at least a few stitches.

It was then I got my first look into the face of one of our attackers. An airplane flew by very low, very fast, with those large red circles that we called “meatballs” on the sides and wings. It’s the God-damned Japs, a Kate torpedo plane by the looks of it. If I only had been at my battle station on top of the forward mast and had my Colt forty-five, I could have shot the pilot right between his eyes, no problem. They were that close. I swore that if I survived this, I would never be caught in combat without my sidearm again.

Suddenly realizing the ramifications of the torpedo plane that had just flown over, I looked off the port side and saw exactly what I feared would be there. A torpedo was inbound fast and was going to strike the ship just below me. “ Heads up! Take cover! ” I shouted to anybody who might be close enough to hear me over the sounds of the battle raging around us as I ducked back to the hatch I had moments before come out of.

Boom! The torpedo struck the side of the ship, throwing a geyser of fuel, oil, and water at least a hundred feet in the air above the ship. I got more bruises on my arm and back as the shock threw me against the bulkhead again. My feet felt as if they had been struck straight up from the bottom. Metal splinters from the hull rained down on the deck, along with more oily water. That was the sixth hit, and I could tell those Jap torpedoes were tearing up the side of the Okie like a jackhammer on a beer can. The ship listed further over and more rapidly. I knew she wouldn’t last much longer.

I quickly did the thought process in my head of what we were discussing just minutes before about flooding and counter flooding. It’s surprising how fast you can think when you have to. There was no power, so pumps would be useless. The bilges were open anyway, so any counter flooding would just run over to the sinking port side and make it worse.

The only hope of her not rolling over at this point depended on the depth of the harbor beneath the keel. She has a thirty-one-foot draft and maybe twenty feet of water under the keel. If she bottomed out in the harbor soon enough, she may sink upright if we were lucky. But it would have to happen before the center of balance shifted further to the port side than the bottom edge of the sinking side of the ship. There is not much chance of counter flooding the starboard side that quickly under the best of conditions, let alone without power.

If the harbor is shallow enough, and she sinks fast enough, it might prevent her from rolling all of the way over, but still, large portions of the crew could be trapped below by the flooding going on above them. Okie has sixteen- to eighteen-foot freeboard aft, and about thirty forward; she would sink to the aft part of the main deck just under the water and the forward 01 level just above the water if she could just stay upright. Either way, the battleship Oklahoma was not the place for the crew to be.

Standard procedure was to call general quarters, as was done, but there was no way for us to know at the time that by doing so, we were condemning most of the crew whose battle stations were below decks to their deaths. And that’s the thought that made up my mind more than anything else. The Okie had to be abandoned. And fast.

There was not enough time to give the order to abandon ship by word of mouth, and the power was out, so I could not use the 1MC. And maybe I couldn’t save everybody below decks, but I had to try to save as many of the crew as possible. There was only one thing to do: move everybody to the starboard side of the ship and if it rolled over, they would be able to walk around the hull instead of being trapped under it.

As I started down the port side, I began shouting, “ Abandon ship! Everybody to the starboard side! Abandon ship! Pass the word! Abandon ship starboard! ” into every hatch and to everyone I passed along the way. Every time I came to somebody who was hurt, I grabbed somebody who wasn’t and ordered them to help the injured over to the starboard side. Not that it took a lot of ordering; the crew was pulling together and doing everything to help that they could. There was just a lot to do and not nearly enough time. Oil covered everything, making progress much more difficult.

As I went, I could see the crew leaving the port side, taking all of the injured they could carry.

“ Damn it! No! ” I shouted as several of the crew began jumping over the side. “ You can’t go over here, not over the torpedo holes for Christ sake! Don’t jump! ” I was too late. Four were already in the water. In the next several seconds, I watched in helpless horror as all four of the crew who jumped were sucked under and back into the hull of the ship by the water rushing in through the holes the torpedoes made.

One of the crewmen shouted at me in panic pointing at the water “ Sir! My brother! My brother! ”

“ There’s nothing you can do, he’s gone! ” I shouted back, recognizing this guy would jump if I let him. I grabbed him and held him back.

“ You! ” I shouted and I grabbed another crewman “ Get this man over to the starboard side; knock him out and carry him if you have to; just get him there! ”

“ Yes sir! ”

“ Starboard side, goddamn it! Go! ” I shouted to the rest of them and turned away. Not enough time. Not nearly enough time. A lot of people were already dying, and a lot more were going to die; I was sure of it.

Another Kate flew overhead, this time climbing to avoid the aft mast.

I was screaming at the passing aircraft, “Dear God Stop! We’re dead! ” when a remarkable feeling of ambivalence came over me. The more torpedoes they wasted on an already dead ship like the Oklahoma , the less they would have for some of the others that may have stood a better chance. She was one of the oldest ships in the fleet, and with the old style reciprocating engines, the navy was looking for a good reason to decommission her anyway. On the other side of it was the realization that I was still on the Oklahoma and, along with the rest of the crew, fighting for my life. “Torpedo it if you like; just let us off first!” I said, more quietly to myself than to anyone else.

Boom! The seventh torpedo struck pretty far aft and very high up on the side of the ship due to its increasing list. I could see a crewman was down as a result of the explosion and needed help. There was nobody else around by then, so I slid down the ladder to the aft main deck, just above where the seventh torpedo had struck. The teak wood covering on the deck was splintered and uneven, with several shards of broken metal sticking up through it. The steel deck below had obviously been warped by the explosion of the seventh torpedo, which had struck right below where we were.