Brett Ashton - Vengeance - Hatred and Honor

Any cutting was out of the question because of all of the oil and explosives. The only way they could be rescued was to pump out the compartment to the aft of them, but they were having some major difficulties finding the leaks. And although nobody was telling the crew trapped inside, the bulged bulkhead could give way at any time, and they had nothing to shore it up with.

As he filled me in, my mind went back over the men who were trapped inside the hull of the Oklahoma , and I reached a decision.

“Does the phone line to that compartment connect to my circuit here on the bridge?” I asked.

“No, sir, but with minimal effort and about fifteen minutes we could rig one up,” he replied.

“Very well, do so.” And he immediately set off to work.

If those men were going to die they would not do so thinking they were alone.

Before I knew it, the lieutenant commander was handing me a sound-powered phone set and telling me Ensign Gomez was waiting on the other end of the line.

“Ensign Gomez, how are you men holding up down there?” I asked.

“Well, sir,” a slightly nervous voice replied, “we’ve got some minor cuts and bruises, sir, but we are basically okay. We could use a deck of cards, some sandwiches, and some of the men have expressed the desire to have a cold beer as well.”

I laughed a little bit to lighten the atmosphere and replied, “I want you men to know we are doing everything we can to get you out of there and get you some sandwiches as well as some of the beer in the recreational stores.”

“We know that, sir,” he said. “The XO talked to us earlier and told me the admiral ordered the ship abandoned, and you are risking court-martial as well as your own lives to try to save us.”

I paused for a moment, unprepared, I didn’t know Commander Thompson had talked to them, and in the flurry of handling the emergency I hadn’t really had time to think about what I had actually done. The doing of it was just a sort of second nature to me.

“That’s right,” I said, shoving the sudden lump I felt in my throat back down, “but the ship is safe enough for now and don’t worry about my career. It’s the right decision and just part of being in command of a ship during war.”

“Sir, we appreciate that,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, ensign?” I asked.

“I just want to see my wife and little boy again, sir.”

“We all will, ensign, we all will,” I said, making a promise I knew I was powerless to keep as there were already several of my crew who, thanks to the Japs, would never see their families again. “But I want a promise from you, ensign.”

“Yes, sir.”

“As an officer, you are responsible for the men under your command, and as such, you are their leader. If you remain strong, they will remain strong and lend their strength back to you in return. No matter what happens, you must not lose your nerve. Do you understand me, ensign?”

“Yes, sir,” the voice on the other end of the phone replied with a little more vigor.

“Very well, ensign, that’s it for now. I’ll check in from time to time to see how you are doing. I’m going to put a listener on this circuit here on the bridge just in case you need something from me. Okay?”

“Okay, sir. Goodbye.”

I took off the sound powered phones and with a sudden feeling of anger and frustration turned to Lieutenant Commander Schuller and said, “You have twelve hours to get those men out of there, or I’ll relieve you and find someone who will.”

As I turned to walk away, I realized what I had just said and turned back.

“Alex,” I said putting my hand on his shoulder, “I’m sorry. Just do the best you can, alright?”

He held his hand up toward me and said “I understand, captain. I’ll get those men out.”

“And when you do,” I said, “make sure they have plenty of beer from the recreational supplies. And make sure it’s cold.”

About two hours later, I was sitting in the dark on the bridge, unable to sleep. It got kind of quiet up there since we were under tow and the aft engines were still offline.

Out of the quiet, I heard the ship groan, somewhat like the Oklahoma did when it rolled over, and then I felt, rather than heard, a pop, rather faintly and from far below. The talker I assigned to watch that phone line sat up suddenly and shouted at me.

“ Captain! There’s something going on down there! ”

I grabbed the phone set away from him and put it on.

“… us! God help us! ”

“ Gomez, what’s happening? ” I shouted into the mouthpiece.

“ 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.

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.”