BattleFire!: Combat Stories from World War II

Introduction

A 20-millimeter round crashed through the fuselage and exploded beside Bernell Heaton’s right leg. Blood ran down into his boot. Collecting himself from a stupor, the young Kentuckian squeezed through the narrow door of the B-17 bomber and jumped. But a strap on his parachute caught on the door handle, and wind from the propellers banged him against the fuselage in a rhythm like a beating heart. Above him a crew member worked desperately to free him.

Soon Heaton was falling feet first into the empty blue. Thousands of feet below him, a white cloud blanketed the earth. The lack of sensation surprised him: he felt nothing and heard nothing, could not even sense that he was falling. The contrast between the noises he had just left—voices cracking on his intercom, machine guns chattering, engines roaring, and earsplitting explosions—baffled him. The sensation of being suspended in the blue sky in complete silence gave him an eerie feeling. He had to force himself to concentrate. He worried about when to pull the rip cord. If his parachute opened too soon, a German fighter might attack him. Without waiting, he pulled it. But the chute did not open.

World War II, one of the most tragic events in human history, plucked millions of ordinary American men like Heaton out of their communities, trained them for war, and hurled them into the strange reality of combat thousands of miles from home. This book records the experiences of a dozen Kentuckians among the millions of young American men who fought, suffered, and spilled their blood around the globe and who struggled daily just to stay alive in the midst of violence, chaos, and fear. These stories do not focus on world leaders, generals, tactics and strategies, or major battles. Rather they recount each individual’s combat experiences from his first action to his last. All twelve lived to tell their own stories, stories of human kindness and courage, of people at their best in the worst of times.

These accounts are based on my interviews with World War II veterans from Kentucky. More than a hundred such interviews were recorded, and the audio tapes have been deposited in the Special Collections Department, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky. Selecting among them was difficult, but I tried to choose the stories that best represent the breadth and depth of the combat experience. The next question was how to present those memories to the reader. Although powerful in the simple starkness of the words on tape, verbatim interviews sometimes left gaps or lessened the impact of what was occurring. I decided therefore to use the interviews as key sources for written narratives that could use secondary sources to verify details and supply the context needed for full understanding. Works such as the United States Army in World War II series and Thomas Parrish’s Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of World War II (see the list of sources for these and others) depicted the larger actions swirling around the combatant, often out of his sight or focus. The stories in and of themselves are so dramatic and powerful that no invention on my part was necessary; therefore, my own voice can be heard only in supplying information that the combatant could not have known at the time. My task was to capture the essence of what the combatants experienced.

I conducted follow-up interviews with the protagonists when it was possible. Six long sessions with Ben Butler—plus recourse to books, maps, and phone calls to other veterans who served with him in Italy—made a difference. For example, my mental image of Butler’s rescue of Elbert Gourley altered after I interviewed Gourley himself and then discussed it again with Butler. Unfortunately, however, Field Reed found it too painful after the initial interview to rehash the Bataan Death March and his suffering in the prison camps. His personal validation of my version of his experience would have helped; lacking it, I removed from Reed’s story a horrific episode that I wanted to include but could not verify.

Long-term or archival memory is crucial to this book. Despite popular skepticism about the validity of old memories, noted psychologists Alice and Howard Hoffman confirmed the value of long-term recollection in their 1990 work Archives of Memory, based on a study of Howard’s own memory of his World War II experiences: There is a subset of autobiographical longterm memory which is so permanent and largely immutable that it is best described as archival. From this perspective archival memory consists of recollections that are rehearsed, readily available for recall, and selected for preservation over a lifetime of the individual. They are memories selected much as one makes a scrapbook of photographs. Like Howard Hoffman, the men I interviewed often had trouble remembering exact places, dates, and names. Usually, I was able to fix dates by reference to independent sources. Many names, however, remain nearly impossible to recover; consequently, characters are often identified only by rank or last name.

The demographics of the Great Depression and World War II era dictated that many men, like several in this book, came from rural areas. Some had never crossed a big river, much less a mighty ocean. From newspapers, radio broadcasts, and newsreels, they learned of the dark war clouds gathering before the storm, and most sensed the infamy of forces at work in Germany and Japan. Yet not until they discovered the horror of Hitler’s concentration camps, the brutal Death March, and the Japanese mistreatment of American POWs did they understand the scale of the evils that had been perpetrated on humankind.

World War II was the most destructive global episode in human history. More than fifty million people died of war-related deaths. It wounded hundreds of millions more, left major cities in Europe and parts of Asia in charred ruins, displaced millions to refugee camps, and—with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—ushered in the nuclear age. Although the United States was spared the destruction of its cities and the killing of its women and children, the conflict still cost the nation some 400,000 young lives, and 600,000 more returned to America’s shores wearing purple hearts awarded to them for spilling their blood in other parts of the world. Many were also affected—physically or mentally—for the rest of their lives. Nearly every American family grieved over the loss or debilitation of a son, brother, loved one, or friend. Of the 300,000 Kentuckians who put on their uniforms and went off to war, 7,900 died in the armed services, and 5,100 of those were killed in action.

Such statistics are overwhelming enough but help little in understanding the depth of suffering wrought by the war. Union Civil War veteran and United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said in an address to fellow veterans: We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire. Those who have not been in combat cannot fully understand the incommunicable experience; readers of this book can share it only within the limits of the power of words to recreate the actions, passions, and emotions of men in battle. Nevertheless, the powerful stories of these combatants may help all of us to better comprehend the ugly face of war and all that American combat veterans endured.

I chose to collect World War II stories and write this book out of appreciation for what these men did for our present and future generations. We as a nation owe our deepest gratitude to the generation that endured the Great Depression, won World War II, and created and sustained a postwar era of great economic growth. Their extraordinary war experiences ought to be shared and preserved for posterity. They have earned the nation’s gratitude and a space in its public memory.

ONE

Pearl Harbor, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa

Signalman First Class Lee Ebner U.S. Navy

High on the signal bridge of the battleship USS West Virginia, twenty-one-year-old Lee Ebner, a native of Pineville, Kentucky, and three other signalmen looked out over Pearl Harbor packed with U.S. Navy ships. In five minutes his 4:00 to 8:00 A.M. watch would be completed, and he was looking forward to breakfast. After a hard week of serious training at sea and the tension of feeling that a war with Japan was coming, the fleet was enjoying a lazy Sunday morning while moored in the womb of the harbor. The band was setting up on the USS Nevada behind him. A few of Ebner’s 1,541 fellow crew members were ashore attending church services, some were sleeping off a Saturday night hangover; those on duty were going about their business.

Suddenly, two planes zooming in from his left at a hundred feet above water grabbed his full attention. Surely the Army Air Force was not making mock attacks on the ships anchored in battleship row, he thought. Then, as the roaring planes bored in toward his ship, the rising sun emblem glared at him and he knew. He saw the pilots’ faces and head-fitting leather caps when the planes crossed the West Virginia’s bow only fifty feet above him and less than a hundred yards to his front. But it didn’t dawn on him that torpedoes were snaking their way through the water behind the planes.

The passing planes drew Ebner’s eyes to his right front onto two dive-bombers diving for the navy airfield on Ford Island. He saw two bombs released, and followed them down. Just as the shock and sound waves arrived from their explosion, the squawk box barked, General Quarters, General Quarters. This is no drill. Although things were breaking so fast that he could not take it all in, he knew this meant war. Someone said, Get inside, and they darted into the silo-shaped superstructure that supported the signal bridge and the conning tower bridge and slammed the steel door shut.

Signalman First Class Lee Ebner was on the West Virginia when it was attacked at Pearl Harbor, but his worst experience of the war awaited him at Okinawa. Courtesy of Lee Ebner.

High above the main deck, his heart pounding, Ebner tried to figure out what was going on outside and wondered what he should do to stay alive. The signalmen didn’t have a gun station to man during general quarters, so he stayed put. Then the torpedoes with half-ton warheads smashed into the port side of his ship. The first salvo buckled the 16-inch armor belt well below the waterline and knocked out the ship’s power. Standing in the dark, Ebner could not separate the noise of torpedo explosions from the other battle sounds, nor could he feel the West Virginia rolling to the left (fortunately, the order to counterflood the starboard side brought the ship upright), but he did feel the vibrations ripple through the ship’s 680-foot steel body. The next two torpedoes ripped a hole almost 200 feet long in the ship’s side. Ebner felt the ship shudder for what seemed like five minutes.

Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Courtesy of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

Ebner’s mind was racing: He wondered, How are my friends making out? Were they really Japanese planes? How did they get here? What is coming next? Are there troop ships out there getting ready to invade Hawaii? What are my parents in Louisville going to think when they get the news? and What should I be doing?

Suddenly, a lull settled over battleship row, and someone said, Let’s get out and see what we can do. What Ebner saw when he stepped out into the light on the signal bridge overwhelmed him. He could neither believe nor comprehend the degree of destruction and wreckage. Trying to focus on events all around him, he saw that his ship was sitting on the bottom of the harbor. He looked at the thick smoke billowing up from the burning oil slick on the water forward and aft, and from a raging fire on the front end of his ship. He noted the neat hole made in the signal bridge by an unexploded bomb. Another bomb had detonated and killed his captain, Mervin S. Bennion. To the rear on his ship he saw twisted metal and wreckage everywhere. A smokestack was missing; so was the ship’s seaplane on the fantail, and the other one, on top of the No. 3 turret, was mangled. About 200 yards to his ship’s right rear he could catch only glimpses of the Arizona through the thick smoke, but he knew she was in trouble and wondered how his friends on her were doing. He had no idea then that more than a thousand sailors were already entombed in her water-filled compartments with perhaps a few still alive in isolated air pockets. Immediately in front of the West Virginia he saw the Oklahoma do a slow roll to the left, rolling and rolling until she came to rest upside down. In the midst of this devastation, his best friend, Gene Merrill from Asheville, North Carolina, joined the men on the signal bridge, and the little group started moving toward the rescue boat. In this grim setting it was good to have his friend’s company.

They moved down flights of stairs to the main deck and forward along the port side toward the rescue boat, part of which was above the level of the main deck. Somehow, someone discovered that there were men still alive in the top compartment near the rescue boat. Standing on the steps in water and oil up to his ankles and only his upper body above the main deck, Ebner formed a link in the rescue chain. He would bend down and hoist a limp form up to someone standing on the deck. When Ebner hauled them up into the light, he noted their faraway stares and how the whites of their eyes stood out against their blackened faces. After gently loading the six oil-soaked sailors on one boat, Ebner and seven other sailors from the West Virginia boarded another rescue boat and headed for the nearby submarine base, where they offloaded and moved under a shade tree, hoping to be out of sight of the Japanese planes of the second wave. Gloom and anxiety engulfed the little group. They didn’t know the status of many friends; they had lost their home; of their personal things they only had what they wore on their backs. They didn’t think they were a worthy target for the enemy planes, but they thought that an invasion might be coming any time. A thoughtful and brave lady came out of an officer’s quarters and brought them a pan of sandwiches. The act of kindness in the midst of chaos was deeply appreciated.

At 10:00 A.M. the attack ended. Two waves totaling 363 planes from six Japanese aircraft carriers had done their damage. Except for the three American aircraft carriers and their escorts, which were at sea, many ships of the U.S. Pacific fleet either rested on the bottom of the harbor or were floating wrecks with raging fires burning out of control. As they walked to the assembly point for ship crews, Ebner saw smoke rising in patches throughout the harbor and on the airfields. He felt the enormity of the destruction and the sadness that hung over the island.

At the assembly point, they joined about forty others from the West Virginia and signed in. Here they tried to figure out what was coming next, where they were going to be assigned, and who had survived. It would be some time before Ebner would learn that more than 2,000 Americans had been killed in the attack, including 101 crew members and a few officers from his own ship. That afternoon when they asked for men to stand watch on the Tennessee, Ebner, thinking he might have a new home, readily volunteered.

The USS West Virginia on fire and resting on the bottom at Pearl Harbor. The Tennessee is in the background. The smoke at right is coming from the Arizona, which went down with about 1,000 men aboard. Altogether 2,000 were lost in the attack. U.S. Navy photo.

The West Virginia had pinned the Tennessee against Ford Island and protected it from the destructive power of the torpedoes. Ebner’s old ship, though, was still burning, and he helped fight the fire. On the waterline near the starboard side of the Tennessee, he saw a dead Japanese pilot lying face down with his parachute at his side. He didn’t dwell on it. He figured he would see more of them. As darkness approached, soldiers and sailors alike became nervous and so trigger-happy that when American planes came in, antiaircraft guns opened up all around.

The next day Ebner and a friend were assigned to a destroyer, the USS Mahan, and they went to sea, leaving the catastrophic Pearl Harbor scene behind physically—but it would never leave his mind.

It was after participating in naval battles around Guadalcanal and other actions in the Pacific that Ebner’s ship joined Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s invasion force in the Philippines.

On a dark night in Leyte Gulf, on October 24, 1944, lightly armored amphibious ships and boats of every kind moved about cautiously, carrying ammunition, supplies, and troops ashore. Since the Japanese had assumed that General MacArthur would keep his word and return to the Philippine Islands, they had a plan to destroy the amphibious ships. Following the American landing on Leyte on October 20, all available fighting ships in the Japanese navy moved at full speed toward the Philippines in three powerful groups. To protect the landing craft and supply ships from the Japanese naval force approaching Surigao Strait, the southern gateway to the gulf, Adm. Jesse Oldendorf had drawn his task force of fighting ships into formation at the northern mouth of the strait. One of the twenty-eight destroyers poised for battle in the task force was the USS Newcomb. One of its sailors was Lee Ebner.

On the conning tower bridge of the Newcomb, Signalman Ebner listened nervously to the crackling radio and heard the torpedo boats at the southern end of Surigao Strait reporting contact with the southern Japanese naval force. He had known for hours that the dreaded ship-versus-ship battle was coming, and in the darkness of the night the clanging battle alarm had jarred the tense sailors, already at battle stations, to their feet. Now Ebner knew the fighting had started, but he had no idea that he was about to participate in the greatest naval battle in history.

Glued to the radio, his duty station, he followed the action as Admiral Nishimura’s southern force of two battleships, one heavy cruiser, and four destroyers quickly pushed the American torpedo boats aside and pressed on up the narrow strait. Ebner’s eyes probed the darkness to no avail. Not knowing what lay ahead was what bothered him most.

Poised in the middle zone of the northern mouth of Surigao Strait, the Newcomb, leading two other destroyers, glided back and forth, awaiting orders to begin its torpedo run down the strait into the angry fury of the Japanese big guns. Other American destroyers maneuvering on both sides of and deep into the strait were also waiting. Ebner had no illusions as to the danger of what they were about to do. Anxiety hounded him. The torpedo run was a first for him; he wanted to get it started and get it over with.

Suddenly, Ebner’s full attention focused on the excited voices blaring over the radio. Orders and reports saturated the air waves as the destroyers down the strait started their torpedo runs in the darkness in groups of three and four; they delivered torpedoes, scored some hits, and hustled to clear the target area. Then, at 3:30 A.M., Ebner heard the order to the Newcomb to launch the attack. His heart pounded faster in his chest.

In response to the captain’s orders, the engine room rang up high speed, and down the strait Ebner’s ship raced, leading its three-destroyer pack. Fortunately, Ebner was not aware that in peacetime simulations of torpedo attacks the umpires would usually declare the lead destroyer sunk or out of action within minutes. He did know, however, that when the Japanese picked up the approaching U.S. destroyers on their radar, they would consider the ships life-threatening predators and aim their big guns at them. He knew the angel of death stalked them, and he felt the tension that shrouded the ship.

In what seemed like forever to him, they plowed straight down the middle channel, leaving a visible white foaming trail in their wake. The approaching danger focused Ebner’s mind like coming upon a rattlesnake in the darkness; he listened closely and watched with all the attention he could muster as the distance between his ship and the enemy’s big guns dwindled. Then, like a violent lightning storm, the big guns on six American battleships, which were crossing the T at the mouth of the strait to his rear, lit the sky in the distance with flashes, firing salvo after salvo down the strait. Ebner watched in awe as the big tracer shells, weighing over a ton, rose rapidly in bunches of twos and threes and streaked and roared overhead. The series of shells formed a glowing arch, matched by that of the Japanese counterbattery.

The Newcomb continued at full speed. The lightninglike flashes from the guns front and rear, the reflection of the tracers on the water, and the glow from a raging fire on a Japanese ship just over the horizon silhouetted the ship in ghostly light. The wait for the release point became more unbearable as the scope of the battle continued building and the gap continued shrinking. Ebner had to summon all his inner strength to beat off panic. Fortunately, he didn’t see or hear the enemy shells hitting to the left and right of the Newcomb.

Turning right to run nearly parallel to the foe’s new westward course, the Newcomb began firing its torpedoes—number one, number two—while the ship’s heavy-caliber guns pounded away at the target as well. According to the Newcomb’s fire controlman, both torpedoes and guns were aimed at the battleship Yamashiro; others said later that it was the Japanese destroyer Asagumo. Ebner knew only that flames were billowing up from the enemy ship hit by the Newcomb’s guns before she had finished firing her own spread of torpedoes. As enemy shells exploded near theNewcomb’s stern, it seemed to Ebner that the last torpedo would never splash down and snake its way toward the target.

Finally, the shout Torpedoes away! echoed throughout the ship and the Newcomb heeled over in response to the captain’s order Right full rudder. Ebner breathed a great sigh of relief; even though he knew he was still in mortal danger, the smoke screen made by Newcomb to cover her white wake as she zigzagged northward at full speed gave him some comfort. But the feeling didn’t last long.

At 4:07 A.M., just as the USS Bert W. Grant, the last destroyer following the Newcomb, started wheeling northward, shells exploded all around and on top of her and inside her compartments. Seeing the violence of the exploding shells and the raging fire that billowed up from the ship as she went dead in the water demoralized Ebner. He would have felt even worse had he known at the time that the Grant had been hit not only by seven Japanese 4.7-inch projectiles but also by eleven American 6-inch armor-piercing shells.

It was about 6:30 A.M. when the Newcomb, with the badly damaged Grant in tow, steamed out of Surigao Strait. Despite his near total exhaustion, Ebner took a moment to observe with pride his old ship, the West Virginia. Having been raised from the bottom of Pearl Harbor, she was one of the six Pearl Harbor avengers in the battleship line that fought with the Newcomb against the Japanese southern force.

By this time, Ebner had experienced a wide range of dangerous naval combat actions. He had participated in the critical battle of Santa Cruz in the dangerous waters off Guadalcanal. In different ships he had helped fight off air attacks and engage surface ships and a submarine. At Iwo Jima his ship had to weave its way out from under incoming rounds from a shore battery. But the most violent and life-threatening action still awaited him—at Okinawa.

On the morning of April 1,1945, while American army and marine divisions waded ashore on the beaches of Okinawa, uptight crewmen of the USS Newcomb stood watch offshore, ready to respond to whatever the Japanese might try. Ebner knew the Newcomb was getting dangerously close to the main islands of Japan, but he was not aware of the new peril in store for the 1,300-ship armada swarming off the west coast of the island in support of the invasion.

The Americans wanted the island for air bases and as a springboard for invading Japan. The Japanese, determined that the Americans would not get it, developed a new sort of offense. On a limited scale they had used suicide planes before, but now they marshaled more than 1,500 pilots and planes for suicide attacks on American ships. The kamikaze (divine wind) pilots were dedicated to flying planes loaded with high explosives directly into the ships of the invasion armada. There were also suicide boats and non-suicide planes allocated to the task. According to the plan, after the Allied ships were sunk or driven off, the Japanese army would leisurely destroy the ground forces on the island.

On April 6,1945, the Newcomb plowed the waters some fifty miles north of the invasion area to help form a shield for the aircraft carriers and other heavy ships and to give early warning of danger. Like stirring up a hornet’s nest, the early-warning ships drew the fury of the kamikazes.

At dusk, Ebner and the other crewmen manning the twin 40-mm antiaircraft guns starboard and forward on the Newcomb saw specks in the sky coming their way. He watched intently as American fighter planes engaged the approaching specks in a dogfight. In the distance they looked like bumblebees chasing bumblebees. He saw first one and then another burst into flame, then another and another, like someone flicking burning matches in the twilight. The burning specks blazed and left smoking trails streaking toward the sea. Knowing their lives were at stake, the nervous sailors intently watched the action and pulled for the American fighter planes. Although there must have been fifteen kamikazes knocked out of the sky, others came on, getting bigger as they approached. With pounding hearts, the gunners readied their weapons.

Ebner heard first the familiar boom, boom on the port side as the 5-inch guns opened up, then the shorter-range twin 40s began firing as the planes neared. Ebner thought, This is it, they’re going to get us. The flak gunners scored continuous hits, but still a plane continued its dive, louder and closer, until with only seconds to spare it burst into flames and, crossing over the back of the ship out of control, plunged into the water just twenty feet off the starboard side.

Within seconds another kamikaze lowered its nose and streaked for the ship, zooming through curtains of steel as the busy guns scored minor hits. At the last moment the ship executed a sharp turn, and the plane crashed and exploded in the Newcomb’s wake, sending up a huge geyser.

Skimming the waves while approaching from the port side, the next kamikaze aimed amidships. The port-side gunners lowered the sights of their 5-inch, 40-mm, and 20-mm guns and kicked up water all around the plane while it closed at full throttle. For a moment water and smoke obscured the target, and the gunners thought they had him—until he burst into view again. Still on course and narrowing the gap, the plane roared through exploding flak and spray, skipped off a gun mount, and slammed into the ship’s afterstack. The Newcomb, in the midst of a dodging maneuver, rolled heavily to one side. The blast threw some sailors into the sea and others against objects as fire engulfed the area and escaping steam hissed. Ebner felt the heat, felt the ship vibrate and lose speed. He continued to think the end was at hand but could not dwell on it, because the fourth kamikaze peeled off and started for the Newcomb’s starboard side in