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OLD
CAPTAIN THOMAS LEIGH GATCH, U.S.N.
jrtrtriHrtrtrfrfc^^
OLD NAMELESS
THE EPIC
OF A U. S. BATTLEWAGON
By SIDNEY SHALETT
D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
INCORPORATED
NEW YORK 1943 LONDON
^nihVsin^^
i 9 43> BY
SIDNEY SHALETT
All rights reserved. This book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission of the publisher.
This book has been manufactured in
accordance with the regulations of the
War Production Board
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
AT-JIT-A. AND HVTICHLA "F.T .
AUTHOR'S NOTE
IT IS the hope of the author that this book may serve
as an humble mirror to reflect a bit of the glory that
a great ship, a fighting crew and a purposeful Captain
contributed to the immortal history of their country's
Navy.
The author wishes to express his appreciation to the
Navy Department for making it possible for him to
gather the material for the story of Old Nameless. He is
particularly indebted to Yeoman Robert L. Schwartz,
newspaperman and now Navy correspondent on the staff
of Yank, for assistance in interviewing several of the men
whose stories are included in the account of the second
battle.
S. S.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAOfi
1. THE SHIP i
2. THE SKIPPER 8
3. THE MAKING OF A NAVAL OFFICER . . 13
4. LOOKING FOR TROUBLE 23
5. INSIDE A FLOATING CITY 32
6. "To KILL JAPS" 37
7. "BLOODY 'GUAD' " 46
8. BATTLE STATIONS! 54
9. "SCARED AS HELL, HAVING WONDERFUL
TIME!" 61
10. "So SORRY, PLEASE!" 67
11. THE THIRD ATTACK 73
12* THE MARK OF A HERO 77
13. THE SKIPPER GETS A MEDAL .... 84
14. "VIRTUALLY ANNIHILATED" (TOKYO
STYLE) 92
15. THE STAGE Is SET 99
16. "BEAR" IN A Fox TRAP 106
17. THE BIG GUNS SPEAK 113
18. SHIP AGAINST SHIP 120
19. REACTION TO DANGER 124
ix
x* Contents
PAGE
20. "GnjE.'EREV-ER-Y-THING!" . ... 130
* !*!
21. t&ttxzteN OTHELLO PATRICK . . . . 136
22. THE STORY OF BATT II ..... . 141
23. A LOST SHOE AND AN "ENDLESS HOSE" . 147
24. MORE PUNISHMENT ....... 153
25. "THE CAPTAIN Is A GOOD EGG" . . . 159
26. THREE LAME DUCKS ...... 165
27. JAPAN'S JUTLAND ........ 170
28. THE CAPTAIN GOES ASHORE . . . . 175
OLD JVA.MELESS
I
THE SHIP
THERE is no telling when you will be permitted
to learn her name. It may be months, or a year
or more hence, when reasons of naval security no
longer require the strict secrecy that now is necessary.
Or it may not be until the end of the war, when the
last Jap ship lies at the bottom of the receptive Pacific
or has sneaked back to whatever may be left of the
place called Tokyo.
The Navy, in its official reports on her gallant and
glorious deeds, calls her merely "a United States
battleship." That's a cold appellation for such a fight-
ing, slugging, sharpshooting, indestructible battle-
wagon. Perhaps, for the time being, until her rightful
and honorable name can be posted on the Roll of
Honor of the United States Navy, along with such
other immortals as Old Ironsides, the Decatur, and the
Bonhomme Richard, you might prefer to think of her
as Old Nameless.
She's not really old, of course that term is used
affectionately. Actually, she is one of the newest bat-
tleships Uncle Sam has in service, and she and her
sister ships of her class are just about the toughest,
2 Old Nameless
fightingest things that any nation has afloat on any
sea. Old Nameless and her sisters can both hurl iron
and take it: they can blast an enemy battleship (when
they can find one) out of the water; they can hurl ten
tons of metal at a target twenty miles away, and they
can absorb punishment like a killer whale shrugging
off the nip of a sardine. With their modern and multi-
tudinous anti-aircraft guns and the "Chicago pianos"
the American version of the British pom-poms
they are as well protected as a porcupine, and their
aim is as deadly as that of a Tennessee turkey-shooter.
About the only satisfaction the Japs can get out of
Old Nameless and her sister sea-going Amazons is to
sink them, which they frequently do on paper, and
over the Tokyo radio.
Old Nameless Old Incredible would be an equally
appropriate name for her has a very real and very
glowing claim to glory. She was a brand-new ship, and
she'd never had time even for a proper shakedown
cruise when the Navy sent her out to sea looking for
trouble. More than 60 per cent of her crew was made
up of green boys, who had joined the Navy since
Pearl Harbor. Back in their own home towns they
had been excellent salesmen or mechanics or account-
ants or soda fountain clerks, but they just hadn't been
sailors until they met a man named Gatch. Many of
her junior officers were freshly appointed Naval Re-
.servists, the crease hardly out of their new blue pants,
and the ink hardly dry on their new commissions.
The Ship 3
But Old Nameless went out to sea under command
of a hard-boiled, methodical skipper, who was some-
thing of a wizard at training men. Thomas Leigh
Gatch was his name, and to be under his command
was about as good a break as a green crew could get.
He was a black-browed, broad-shouldered, unflustered
fighter, whose only gripe in life was that he hadn't
seen enough action in the First World War and whose
principal current ambition was to relieve an old
grudge he bore against the Japanese Empire by re-
ducing the numerical quantities of its ships and sub-
jects.
Old Nameless hadn't been out long before the
crucial period of America's Southwest Pacific cam-
paign developed. She found herself in the middle of
those black days when the Japanese were pressing
dangerously on the beleaguered marines and soldiers
on Guadalcanal; it was at the time when Japan still
had a decided numerical superiority in ships in that
area; it was the time when the American people,
mirroring the doubt that even some of the highest
officials felt, wondered gloomily just why in the hell
we had stuck out our neck in the Solomons if we
weren't going to be able to keep it on our shoulders.
Old Nameless was part of the Pacific fleet which,
under the revitalizing command of Admiral William
F. Halsey, helped keep the American neck on its
shoulders and which administered to the anguished
and thoroughly bewildered Japanese a crushing naval
4 Old Nameless
defeat that will go down in history with the Battle of
Jutland. In her first engagement, her first taste of
blood and fire, Old Nameless performed what for a
battleship was an incredible feat. She was assigned the
task of protecting an aircraft carrier, which, by all
conventional rules of naval warfare, is supposed to
protect the battleship. She steamed into action, and,
surviving three unbelievably murderous attacks by
waves of at least eighty-four Japanese torpedo planes
and dive-bombers, she shot down thirty-two Jap
planes with her anti-aircraft batteries.
This was part of the general engagement, later
identified as the Battle of Santa Cruz, that Secretary
of the Navy Frank Knox described as the American
victory in "Round One" of the major Japanese effort
to oust the leathernecks and doughboys from Guadal-
canal.
In her second engagement, less than three weeks
later, with minor damage to the ship patched up and
with Captain Catch's left arm still in a sling from
injuries he had received because he refused to duck
when a Japanese bomb came his way, Old Nameless
sailed into battle again as part of a heavy-punching
U. S. naval task force. When she and her sisters ceased
firing, there were five less of the Emperor's warships
on the surface of the seas (as well as three others badly
damaged), and the Navy gives Old Nameless credit
for the major part of the sinkings.
That engagement was part of the renowned Battle
The Ship 5.
of Guadalcanal, in which the Japanese had twenty-
eight warships sunk, ten damaged, and a vast number
of men estimated at a minimum of 25,000 and pos-
sibly as many as 40,000 killed by shellfire, bombs,
and drowning. That was Secretary Knox's "Round
Two," which so knocked the wind out of the Japs that
(for a long time, at least) they stayed in their corner
and did most of their fighting on paper.
That was the battle which swayed the balance of
power and led to the American victory in that particu-
lar distant and turbulent theater of the Solomons.
History undoubtedly will show that it exerted a pro-
found influence upon the eventual outcome of the
entire Pacific war.
It also wrote a new rebuttal to the hotly running
debate on Airpower-versus-Seapower, for the exploits
of Old Nameless in the Battle of Santa Cruz posed an
answer embarrassing, at least, to those critics who in-
sist that the battleship is "dead" and that no capital
ship, without overwhelming air protection, can reckon
as anything except a clay pigeon against determined
air attack.
The debate isn't over yet. It may never be com-
pletely resolved, for there probably is no clear-cut
answer that ever will rule out the usefulness or estab-
lish the supremacy of either the battleship or the
bomber. It certainly is not the intention of this book
to suggest that the record of Old Nameless in her first
baptism of fire settled this controversial issue for all
6 Old Nameless
time. But an accredited score of thirty-two planes out
of some eighty-four attackers, made while protecting
the carrier which traditionally is supposed to protect
her, is a pretty good total for any battlewagon in any-
body's navy, and certainly would seem to indicate that
the United States battlewagons have come a long way
from the stage where the air enthusiasts were ready to
inter all battleships (without flowers!) as relics of a
"vanished" era.
On this issue, it is pertinent to hear what Captain
Gatch, who is recognized by his colleagues as a
thoughtful and temperate student of naval tactics, has
to say. The skipper of Old Nameless makes the fol-
lowing statement:
"Following Pearl Harbor, the battleship had been
pretty generally condemned as an obsolete and useless
ship. But, it should be remembered, the battleships at
Pearl Harbor were built in 1922, and, basically, there
is more difference between a 1942 battleship and a
1922 battleship than there is between a 1942 and
1922 automobile.
"Therefore, it is obvious that the battleships sunk
at Pearl Harbor were obsolete by the mere passage of
time. But the modern 1942 battleship is unquestion-
ably the most powerful fighting machine afloat, and
it is my opinion that the most vulnerable aircraft
carrier can not hope to survive any long and deter-
mined attack by any force unless it is protected by a
modern battleship.
The Ship 7
"It also seems entirely obvious that the two ships
can be used to best advantage when they mutually
support each other, since the fighters from the carrier
to a great extent can break up an air attack, and the
battleship, with its tremendous anti-aircraft batteries,
can finish the job. This merely exemplifies the old
story that war is fundamentally a problem of co-
operation between different arms."
2
THE SKIPPER
riTlHERE is but one way to describe Captain Tom
JL Gatch, the fifty-one-year-old skipper of Old
Nameless. He is "Navy" from the top of his head, on
which a gold-braided, captain's cap perches at a to-
hell-with-you angle over gray-black hair, to the bot-
tom of his substantial feet, which never feel so much
at home as when they are planted on the bridge of
some fighting ship.
Oddly enough for a sea-going lawyer there were
three years in the Captain's life when the Navy had
him going to law school and four years when he
worked for the Judge Advocate General and some-
what lamentably for the purpose of this narrative, the
Captain is just about the world's worst sailor when it
comes to sounding off about himself.
Tom Gatch knows how to sail a ship, how to train
a green crew to follow the commandment of his tough
boss, Admiral Halsey: "Hit hard, hit fast, hit often,"
how to spit at danger and keep a ship fighting when
the sheik and bombs are coming at you thick and the
main deck is running red with the blood of your o%vn
wounded. But-he doesn't know how to tell you about
8
The Skipper 9
it. Until you can break him down, until you can jog
him with leading questions based on clues supplied
by his admiring associates or the attractive and ani-
mated Mrs. Gatch, the Captain's comments on how it
feels to stand on the bridge when the whole sky above
you is a flaming, smoking blanket of death, or when
the mighty, i6-inch guns of your .ship are slugging it
out with the enemy, are quite likely to have all the
full, rich flavor of a legal report on the purchase of
one gross of life preservers by the Navy's Supply De-
partment.
The Captain is a big man, and his broad shoulders
make him seem even taller than his six feet. The
thing you notice first about his face is the blackness of
his bushy eyebrows, which give him a deceptively
shaggy appearance. In contrast with his graying hair,
they are so black and so prominent that they shadow
his eyes: unless you see him in a bright light (or un-
less you ask Mrs. Gatch), you can not tell their color,
which is gray. They are snapping, piercing eyes,
though, with faint creases at the corners, and they
seem to be perpetually staring into the distance, as if
they were keeping company with his mind, which
often these days is 10,000 miles away at Guadalcanal.
His small, neat mustache is blacker than his hair,
though not as black as his eyebrows, and his jaw looks
as tough as iron. His sharply defined mouth is set in a
way that gives the impression that the Captain is
io Old Nameless
scowling, although actually he is anything but a scowl-
ing type of man.
The Captain is no professional hero. Indeed, he and
Mrs. Gatch have a good-natured, perpetual feud over
the way he continually minimizes and discounts any
adventure or accomplishment in which he may have
been involved. The Captain can go off to some far
corner of the earth on some diplomatic or official mis-
sion for the Government, then come back and tell his
wife that "we sailed there, we got there, we did our
business and came back," while Mrs. Gatch can hear
from her more communicative friends in high Navy
circles that he really did a brilliant job and made a
highly favorable impression on the president of some
South American republic. In mock exasperation she
will chide him for it, whereupon he will grin and hide
another yard or two behind his black eyebrows.
Or, as in the case of the recent epic Battle of Gua-
dalcanal, Mrs. Gatch, who calls her husband "Tim-
mie" (a nickname no one else, particularly aboard
ship, had better dare use), can hear from Navy offi-
cials who should know just how much damage the
Skipper really did. Then, when she tries to get him
to tell it to her, he will scale it down and down and
down until she throws up her hands and exclaims:
"Oh, listen to you! Everybody in the country has
read the communiques, and Admiral Halsey gave you
the Navy Cross for what you did, but, to hear you tell
it, any one would think the Japs won the fight! It's a
The Skipper n
wonder you don't say that they sank you instead of
you sinking them!"
Occasionally, though, as often is the case with real
heroes who are fighters instead of poseurs and atti-
tude-strikers, the Captain, speaking in the stark and
unvarnished language of a man who has cut a swath
through Death's pasture and come back again, will say
something that you can never forget. In telling of the
part he personally played in the great ship-versus-air
battle off Santa Cruz Island, he replied to one question
with a phrase fit to be remembered along with "Don't
fire until you see the whites of their eyes" and "Don't
give up the ship!" It even has a bit of the same ring as
Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death."
The phrase stems from that first encounter, in
which Captain Gatch was wounded. While out on the
catwalk "where I had no business to be," he was
struck by a fragment of a 5OO-pound bomb, the only
one that landed on Old Nameless during the whole
violent engagement. It severed his jugular vein, a
wound which almost killed him; then the concussion
hurled him against the conning tower with a force
that knocked him unconscious. His left arm still re-
mains virtually paralyzed from the injury. Two officers
on either side of him escaped injury by hurling them-
selves to the deck of the catwalk, but Captain Gatch
stood up there and took it.
When a visitor to his home asked him why he didn't
duck and save himself, Captain Gatch stared into an
12 Old Nameless
open fireplace, and prodded a log with a poker held
in his good right hand. Then he twisted his head
around, and, although his eyes were turned on the
questioner, they were focused 10,000 miles away as he
answered:
"The Captain of a United States battleship con-
sidered it beneath his dignity to flop for a damned
Japanese bomb!"
3
THE MAKING OF A NAVAL OFFICER
ripHOMAS LEIGH GATCH was born in Salem,
JL Oregon, the pleasant, medium-sized capital city
of the state, on August 9, 1 89 1 . His father was a banker.
His mother always had wanted him to be a lawyer,
and she was rather dubious when he announced his
intention of making the Navy his life's career. His
father gave his consent immediately, however, and it
was not too hard to win Mrs. Gatch around.
An Admiral named Dewey might be said to have
been the source of young Tom Gatch's inspiration to
join the Navy. "My most impressionable childhood
years," says Captain Gatch, when asked why he de-
cided on a Naval career, "were during the Spanish-
American war, when everybody was talking and think-
ing about Admiral Dewey and the Navy. It wasn't
much wonder that I grew up with one idea in my
head to get an appointment to Annapolis/'
Representative Hawley of Oregon was a friend of
Tom's father, but that wasn't enough to get the sea-
struck youth into the United States Naval Academy.
Tom Gatch wasn't the only Oregon youth who had a
chromo of Admiral Dewey tacked on his bedroom
13
14. Old Nameless
wall, and there were other lads after the appointment.
However, he did get a chance to enter a competitive
examination for Representative Hawley's appoint-
ment, and he won it hands down. In 1908, when he
was still sixteen (cadets were admitted at sixteen in
those days, though the age minimum now is seven-
teen), he entered Annapolis. Dick Byrd of Virginia-
now better known as Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd
of polar exploration famewas one of his classmates
in the class of 1912.
Captain Gatch himself is inclined to growl that he
wasn't a very outstanding member of the class, and
that he was always getting demerits. He says he was
best at Navigation, mathematics, and the sciences and
pretty poor at languages, though, of course, he "had
to pass them" in order to graduate. Mrs. Gatch she
was Nancy Weems Dashiell, an Annapolis belle, whose
father, Lieutenant Robert Dashiell, was a distin-
guished Naval officer and inventor after whom a
United States destroyer recently was named backs him
up on the "plenty of demerits," but contradicts him
otherwise with the declaration that "he was always
considered pretty bright even by his wife." She
triumphantly cites the fact that he graduated twenty-
fifth in a class of one hundred and fifty at the age of
twenty, which was the youngest possible legal age.
Captain Gatch has no rejoinder to this, except an-
other retreat behind the massive eyebrows.
As Ensign Gatch, his first berth was aboard the old
The Making of a Naval Officer 15
U.S.S. Maryland, an armored cruiser. The single
stripe he wore on his sleeve then was pretty incon-
spicuous compared with the four stripes he now wears
as a captain, but Ensign Gatch thought at the time
that it was a mighty handsome marking. The Mary-
land went on a cruise all around the Pacific, which
was the first glimpse Tom Gatch had of the territory
where he later was to become famous.
On the same cruise that year (1912), they put in
at Japan to pay this country's respects at the funeral
of the Emperor Mutsuhito, otherwise known as Meiji,
who was the grandfather of the present Hirohito.
"It was a very spectacular and inspiring sight," the
Captain comments. "I hope to be privileged to attend
the funeral of another Japanese Emperor some day,
which, I am sure, I will find even more inspiring."
He didn't care for the Japs then: he thought they
were "officious, obnoxious and greatly over-impressed
with their own importance." He cares even less for
them now.
As far as Gatch then a lieutenant (junior grade)
was concerned, World War I was pretty much of a
flop. It was much too tame; he never got to shoot a
gun. He spent most of the war convoying ships from
Queenstown, Ireland, into English ports. "We had
some tough battles against the weather and the sea,
but the Germans never stuck their damned heads up,"
he says disgustedly.
Some relatively tame land assignments, including
i6 Old Nameless
the stretch with the Judge Advocate General in
Washington, followed for the Captain in the post-
World War days. In 1923 he was detached from his
law duties and became Aide and Flag Secretary on the
staff of the Commander of a Battleship Division of the
Battle Fleet. It was salt water, at least, but, of course,
no real action.
In the meantime, the Gatch family had grown.
Three children were born all in Mrs. Gatch's family
home at Annapolis, where her mother still lives.
Both the Navy and the Army tradition are being
carried on by the Gatch children. The older daugh-
ter, Nancy Weems Gatch, is on duty with the Red
Cross somewhere in North Africa near the battlefront.
The second child, Eleanor Dashiell Gatch, now is the
wife of Lieutenant John Parkhurst Armstrong of the
United States Navy Air Corps. The son, Thomas
Leigh Gatch, Jr., seventeen years old, who looks as if
he is going to grow up to be as tall and as broad-
shouldered as the Captain, is going to join his father's
partner-service. He won a competitive examination in
Oregon, and received from Senator McNary an ap-
pointment to the United States Military Academy at
West Point.
The Captain goes on to tell you about other mile-
stones in his career sea duty again; a good- will cruise
to Ecuador; three years as an instructor at Annapolis;
his promotion to a captaincy on July i, 1939.
"Oh, yes/ 1 Captain Gatch gruffly acknowledges
The Making of a Naval Officer 17
when you look at his Service Record and remind him
he's forgotten something, namely, three medals. "I got
the Nicaraguan Campaign Medal in 1912 while I was
in the Maryland. Very exciting. We ran up and down
the coast making faces at the Nicaraguans, and we
never fired a shot.
"Then there's that Mexican Service Medal I was
on the Maryland and Chattanooga during that cam-
paign. We observed several fights between the Mexi-
cans, but we never got into any ourselves."
"Timmie," Mrs. Gatch interrupts severely, "do
you have to make it sound so dull?"
Ignoring the reprimand, he continues: "Then
there's this Victory Medal with the Destroyer Clasp
for the World War. Convoy duty/'
It's a pretty safe bet, however, to predict that not
even a retiring man such as Captain Gatch, nor his
children, nor their children, will ever speak so lightly
about the Navy Cross which the Skipper has won for
his heroism at Guadalcanal.
When the war broke out, Old Nameless and
Captain Gatch were ready for each other. They
were the perfect team: he, the tough, coldly logical
skipper; she, the tough battlewagon, maneuverable as
a soldier's jeep, a regular sea-going super-blockbuster.
It was as if he had grown up and trained solely for the
day he could walk the bridge of Old Nameless; it was
as if the men in the Bureau of Ships had designed her
i8 Old Nameless
solely for his command. In a broad sense, they had
for the Navy counts on having skippers such as Tom
Gatch to command its battlewagons.
Tom Gatch had earned himself the reputation of
being a fair and square captain, and a "safe" skipper
to be under when trouble broke out. He made it his
business to know as many of his men by name as he
could, down to the lowliest apprentice seaman or mess
boy. He didn't coddle the members of his crew, but
he treated them like men. He had the reputation of
being a stern disciplinarian, but discipline to him
meant learning how to get to your battle station in
one hell of a hurry, and how to pass the ammunition
and shoot the guns, rather than having a fresh haircut
or mirror-surfaced shoes on inspection day. He was
never known to slap a man into the brig because his
cap wasn't on straight, but let a man bungle some
detail at a gun station and the Captain would scorch
his hair for him.
"My ideas about discipline, particularly since the
war," Captain Gatch says, "are a little different from
the accepted ones. I go on the assumption, which the
sequels at Santa Cruz and Guadalcanal proved to be
sound, that my men, many of whom enlisted since
Pearl Harbor, are strongly patriotic and came in
solely for the purpose of winning the war for the
United States as quick as they could.
"Consequently, I devoted my energies, and the
energies of my officers aboard ship, exclusively to the
The Making of a Naval Officer 19
problem of whipping the men into shape so they could
lick Japs and Germans. The peacetime idea of im-
maculate uniforms, up-to-the-minute haircuts and
keeping the ship's brass pretty didn't appeal too much
to me. I thought in time of war those things were of
secondary importance."
You can tell something about a man by what his
colleagues, both high and low, say of him. Probably
the truest tribute ever accorded Tom Gatch was a
remark made by one of his junior officers. After the
battle of November isth, the young officer, in talking
about the skipper, exclaimed: "Hell, if the Old Man
told us to take the ship right to Yokohama, we'd
do it!"
Perhaps the best qualified man in the whole Navy
to talk about Tom Gatch is Vice Admiral William
Lowndes Calhoun, who has known him since 1912,
when Ensign Gatch, fresh out of Annapolis, took his
first cruise on the Maryland. Admiral (then Lieu-
tenant) Calhoun was gunnery officer of the Maryland.
"Gatch was marked even then as a young man bound
to succeed," the Admiral declares.
The Admiral recalls Ensign Gatch as "a rough,
tough and ready young naval officer, who played hard
but worked harder.
"He must have been a born leader of men," he
says, "because I don't believe anybody could have his
ability unless he came by it naturally."
Admiral Calhoun also points out that Captain
20 Old Nameless
Gatch is an extremely devoted family man, and that
"to see him with his children you never would recog-
nize him as the hard-boiled fighter he is on the
bridge."
Summing up, he says:
"There is no question of his courage, and there is
equally no question of his ability. But what marks
him as one of the finest naval officers I've ever known
is his fairness.
"His principal distinction as an officer is his ability
to think quickly, to estimate a difficult situation cor-
rectly and to act accordingly.
"He is a fine, clean American, whose heart and soul
are wrapped up in being a naval officer. I've heard
him say many times that the only thing the Navy and
the Nation owe him is an opportunity to serve them.
"He is proud to acknowledge that he owes the
Navy and the Nation everything. In short, Tom Gatch
is just a helluva fine, two-fisted guy/'
Adding to this tribute, Commander James Clay-
poole, who was chaplain aboard Old Nameless, and
whose first-hand narrative of some of the episodes of
heroism he observed will appear later in this story,
wrote in a report sent to Washington:
"The crew has an almost fanatical attachment for
Captain Gatch. Like the ancient kings, they believe
that he can do no wrong, that his judgment is infal-
lible, that his movement of the ship in battle is flaw-
less, and that his decisions are omniscient.
The Making of a Naval Officer 21
"The existence of this attitude is one of the strange
phenomena of the ship. No officers or men have ever
known so strong a tie between crew and captain on
any other ship on which they have served. It is all the
more remarkable because the captain has never lifted
his little finger to curry favor with any one, nor has he
ever done one thing which could be interpreted as an
attempt to make himself popular. In fact, his steel-
gray countenance would seem to indicate the absence
of a single nerve or emotion an indication which, of
course, is false. He is a thinker cold, calculating, im-
passive. ..."
Admiral Halsey, in presenting Captain Gatch the
Navy Cross, which ranks next to the Congressional
Medal of Honor as an action medal and is considered
the highest purely naval honor that can be bestowed,
had the following citation read off:
"For distinguished service and for gallant and in-
trepid action in the line of his profession as com-
manding officer of a United States battleship during
the battle of Santa Cruz Islands, October 26, 1942.
While the task force to which his ship was attached
was under heavy and sustained air attack, Captain
Gatch boldly maneuvered his ship dose to a United
States aircraft carrier in order to carry out more effec-
tively his mission to assist in the defense of the car-
rier; and so continued until he was so seriously
wounded from the explosion of an enemy bomb as
to turn over his command."
22 Old Nameless
All this praise, needless to say, is completely wasted
on Captain Gatch. When any one tries to tell him how
much his crew thinks of him, he just looks rather
embarrassed and replies:
"Oh, seventy-five per cent of the men were new in
the Navy and they'd never had another Captain."
That remark is typical of Tom Gatch, for his mod-
esty is genuine and not a pose.
4
LOOKING FOR TROUBLE
OLD NAMELESS got her guns in the spring of
1942 and went out looking for trouble.
It is impossible to overemphasize the intensity of
feeling that the men aboard her had about their task
in hand. There is something about donning the Navy
blue that makes a change in a man. It is a solemn ini-
tiation into a new life to stand on the deck of a massive
floating fortress, to look up from a landing boat at her
rhinoceros sides, tailored with huge, thick slabs of
case-hardened armor-plate, to see her long, sleek,
tremendous 1 6-inch rifles weave in unison as if they
were enchanted giant cobras under the spell of some
unseen Brobdingnagian snake-charmer, and to know
that you are a part of this great fighting machine.
Even the rare civilian who can get permission to
step aboard a battlewagon, a privilege seldom accorded
in time of war, instantly gets the surge of feeling that
the great ship inspires; the strongest cynic hardly
could resist the spell. But the feeling is scarcely a rip-
ple compared with the tremendous emotional effect
that the combination of the Navy blue and the thrill
23
24 Old Nameless
of the battleship exerts upon the men who serve
aboard her.
In short, the anger which civilians felt toward the
Japs for what they did at Pearl Harbor, great as it
was, was barely more than a feeling of detached re-
sentment compared with the cold, vengeful hatred
that the men on Old Nameless felt when they went
plowing out to sea. They may have been fresh from
the soda fountain in Keokuk, the pants-cutting table
in New York, or the farm in Emporia, but, once they
melted into the complement of nearly 2,000 men that
manned Old Nameless, they were as mean and bitter
and anxious for blood as any gray-headed tar who
stood up and took it on Pearl Harbor Day.
The phrase, "Kill Japs/' may sound a little slick
and heroic to some of the people back home who never
have had their eardrums shattered by the brain-split-
ting roar of a battery of i6-inchers or who never have
had their nostrils choked with the acrid, anesthetic
smell of smokeless powder. But, to the men in blue,
serving on the Pacific run, "Kill Japs'* is not just a
phrase. It is a way of life. Every creak and groan of the
ship as she slips through the seaway whispers it. The
muffled splash of the whitecaps as they tap on the
armored sides of the ship repeat it in a refrain, "Kill-
a-Jap-kill-a-Jap-kill-a-Jap." The throb of the ship's
engines hoarsely pounds home the message, and the
mighty roar of the ship's blowers picks it up anci
Looking for Trouble 25
shouts it into the ears of every one from the boiler-
rooms to the fire control tower.
The men of Old Nameless had this spirit drilled
into them. They were not fighting because some man
with a funny mustache or some Emperor with buck
teeth and a divine grant straight from Heaven told
them to get aboard a ship and go out to sea. They
were fighting because they were mad and because they
wanted to keep their country exactly the way it is.
They had lived aboard Old Nameless, and they
loved her from keel to topmast. They had been rigor-
ously trained by Captain Gatch and his staff, so rigor-
ously trained that, when night came, those of them
who did not have to stand watch at the battle stations
which are perpetually manned in time of war were
glad enough to flop exhausted into their bunks.
They were superbly trained, and they were ready-
ready in mind, in body, and in spirit for their mis-
sion, which was to ''Kill Japs."
The modern battleship has been called "the most
complex fighting machine ever devised." While the
Navy is not disclosing the identity of Old Nameless,
because it does not want the Japs to know what ships
we are using in the Pacific theater of war, it is per-
missible to review some of the known published facts
about Uncle Sam's latest battleships.
The modern battleship is estimated to be 95 per
cent steel. It is heavily armored on the water-line. The
26 Old Nameless
barbettes supporting the turrets, the turrets them-
selves, the tubes that lead to the fire control and the
conning towers also are thickly plated. Extra pro-
tection is accorded to certain parts of the hull that
cover the vital sections of the ship. Specially-devised
steel plate covers the exposed decks.
These super-battlewagons carry a tremendous
amount of weight, and concessions have to be made
to gain the speed they need. Accordingly, their bellies
are not armor-plated but are equipped with double,
triple, and sometimes quadruple bottoms, which are
divided into numerous watertight compartments. If a
torpedo or, say, a coral reef ripped through the
outermost of these bottoms, the ship still would sur-
vive.
The hulls of the newer ships are fitted with bulges,
or "blisters," which serve the same purpose as the
extra bottoms.
No ship can be considered absolutely torpedo-
proof. This was pretty well demonstrated both by the
German Bismarck, which, despite her honeycomb of
extra bottoms, "blisters," and air-tight compartments,
now rests at the bottom of the Atlantic, and by
Britain's mighty Prince of Wales, torpedoed by Jap
planes off Singapore last December. But, as Critchell
Rimington points out in his Fighting Fleets, a modern
battlewagon can take an awful lot of punishment.
Germany's Seydlitz, absorbed twenty-one shell hits
and stayed afloat in the Battle of Jutland. Great Brit-
Looking for Trouble 27
ain's Marlborough was torpedoed and remained in
action. The H.M.S. Tiger took sixteen hits, and that
grand old British ship, the g5,ooo-ton Warspite, de-
spite her twenty-six years, took thirteen hits and still
lived to fight in this war at Narvik, and also at Cape
Matapan, where she was a holy terror to the skittish
Italian fleet.
The United States has two classes of new battle-
ships. The newer is the Iowa class, of which the Iowa
and New Jersey were launched in 1943. These are
45,ooo-tonners, with a reputed speed of 35 knots,
and there is good reason to believe that they outclass
anything afloat. The Navy originally had announced
that four other ships of this class the Missouri, Wis-
'consin, Illinois and Kentucky were to be built. The
Navy had also announced that several super-battle-
ships of the Montana class 60,000 tons or more-
were to be constructed.
The combination of the fact that, in order to meet
certain emergency needs, the Navy's shipbuilding pro-
gram was revised, and the necessity for secrecy about
the future strength of the Navy, makes it impossible
to give an exact report on the status of the remainder
of the ships of the Iowa class. The Montana class
battleships were not built.
Immediately preceding the Iowa and the New
Jersey is the North Carolina class. This class includes
the North Carolina, Washington, Indiana, Massachu*
setts, Alabama, and South Dakota every one a sweet
2 8 Old Nameless
fighting ship. The first of the lot, the North Carolina
and the Washington, were reported to have cost a cool
$70,000,000 each; costs on the others, once the con-
struction lessons were learned and the patterns set,
were reportedly cut down to around $50,000,000.
It is a safe assumption, and one to which the Navy
does not object, to "guess" that Old Nameless is one
of the North Carolina class.
The beauty of these warships is that the costly les-
sons of the effect that airpower can have on a sea
fortress have not been overlooked in their design.
Not only do they have as much armor as can be piled
with practical results on a ship, but their decks and
towers are almost as littered as a junk heap with the
heavy machine-guns, "Chicago pianos," and cannon
necessary to knock the attacking planes out of the
air. They bristle. When Captain Gatch is asked if it
isn't true that Old Nameless (and her sisters) have
ack-ack batteries of every description piled on wher-
ever space can be found, he replies with grim satis-
faction:
"Exactly!
"I get this from observers on other ships," he adds.
"In the battle of October 26th, when we took on the
planes, we put up such a hell of a volume of fire that
they had to look twice to make sure that we weren't
ablaze."
The standard displacement of the North Carolina
and her sisters is 35,000 tons. They are 704 feet at the
Looking for Trouble 39
water-line, and their maximum beam is 108 feet.
They are credited with having sixteen-inch belt armor
amidships; the upper deck armor is six inches, and the
lower deck plate is four inches.
These ships carry three observation planes to serve
as their "eyes." They are catapulted from the main
deck a graceful sight which usually makes a sailor
want to cheer, particularly in the tense, nerve-
needling hours when the big battlewagons are seeking
out the foe.
The principal armament of the North Carolina
class is composed of nine 1 6-inch, 45-caliber guns.
There are three massive turrets two forward and one
aft each housing three of the big guns.
Have you ever seen a 1 6-inch gun? If you are a
civilian and a landlubber, you probably haven't.
Don't let that term "i6-inch" fool you. That's a purely
technical ordnance term, so don't get the idea that
the loud-speakers of Old Nameless and her sisters are
anything you can size up with a ruler. Actually, a
1 6-inch gun is an awesome sight that, by comparison,
makes the average telephone pole appear to be a sap-
ling. A good-sized anti-aircraft gun is a mere toothpick
beside it.
These i6-inchers gulp up 5,400 pounds of smokeless
powder every time the full battery speaks, and each
will hurl a 2,4oo-pound armor-piercing shell some
35,000 yards, or about twenty miles. That means
21,600 pounds of hot, screaming, shattering metal
30 Old Nameless
every time a broadside is fired. That means you could
anchor Old Nameless off the Battery in New York
City and clip off the top of the Cloisters in Fort Tryon
Park, with several miles to spare.
Every one of the three turrets weighs as much as an
average destroyer. The rhinoceros-toughness of their
armor is best illustrated by the fact that the Japanese
bomb which landed squarely on the forward turret of
Old Nameless merely messed up the smoothness of
the armor's finish without doing any real damage.
These turrets, and the other secondary batteries,
are operated automatically almost magically, it seems
to the landlubberby a million dollars' worth of
ingenious machinery. The 1 6-inch guns of the North
Carolina class outrange and outnumber the eight
15-inch guns of the Tirpitz, sister to the late Bismarck.
The three turrets of the American men-of-war can
pump out 200 tons of metal in a minute, and can
completely destroy at fifteen or more miles some of
the more heavily armored Japanese battleships.
In addition to the main batteries, die North Caro-
lina class battleships carry twenty 5-inch, 38-caliber
guns and, for sky protection, its "porcupine quill"
batteries of anti-aircraft guns.
The 5-inch guns, which throw 5o-pound shells, are
dual purpose weapons. Hanson W. Baldwin, the dis-
tinguished military analyst of the New York Times,
who was present on the shakedown cruise of the
mighty North Carolina, described them beautifully
Looking for Trouble 31
when he painted a word picture of how their "muz-
zles pointing high toward the sky, or reaching out
toward the horizon for use against either air or sur-
face craft, spoke sharply and quickly, the mounts
pivoting about almost as rapidly as a shotgun could
be swung around."
5
INSIDE A FLOATING CITY
OLD NAMELESS is like a grand old painting that
has improved with age. She was a handsome
enough thing when she first came out of the ship-
yards, glistening, spotless, and unscarred. But to-day
she's a real beauty. She's as different from what she
was as a fine, lived-in, old home is different from a
modern new apartment. Her dark gray warpaint has
a dull sea-beaten finish; the shine is scuffed from her
well-worn decks. Her keen prow has the cocky, deadly
lilt of a bush-fighter's machete; she has pointed her
nose at the enemy and has come out on top. Best of
all are the "service stripes" painted on her conning
tower the thirty-two marks opposite the silhouette
of an exploding Jap plane, and the little Jap flags
ironically painted alongside the outline of a Jap
warship. She wears these medals proudly.
If you'd seen Old Nameless the day the builders
handed her over to Uncle Sam, you'd hardly recognize
her now. The paint which was lovingly lavished on
her innards has been chipped off to prevent fire haz-
ard, and you see a bit of honorable rust here and
there. The engine rooms no longer are something out
3*
Inside a Floating City 33
of a World's Fair exhibit hall: you can tell they've
been working and working hard. The tiers of folding
bunks four and five rows high deep in the iron belly
of the ship, show the outlines of tough, tired bodies,
and even the powerful ventilators have not wafted
away completely the honest smell of men who have
worked and fought and sweated. But, to her skipper,
Tom Gatch, and to all fighting men, she's a prettier
and warmer and cozier ship if you can call a battle-
wagon cozy than she ever was in her virgin days.
The physical organization of a modern battleship is
something at which to marvel. It is, first of all, a
miracle of efficiency. Also, Americans being Ameri-
cans, a modern United States battleship is as comfort-
able a place in which to live as can be devised in
keeping with the circumstances and with the purpose
of the ship. In this respect, perhaps, an American
battleship sacrifices possibly a shade of a fraction of a
minute percentage in theoretical efficiency to, say, a
German battleship. But, being a ' 'decadent democ-
racy" and hopelessly addicted to a standard of living
above the animal level, America is just backward
enough to want her men, who are fighting to preserve
that standard, to share in a little decent living, too.
The boys like it, and they do O.K. in battle, so maybe
the democratic idea of treating a warrior not as an
animal but as a human being is not such a bad one.
The big turrets of a battleship are mounted on the
main deck. Dominating this deck is the fire control
34 Old Nameless
tower. Picture a small skyscraper, some eleven stories
high, made of steel and bristling with machine-guns,
and you have the fire control tower* Inside are quar-
ters for the Admiral and the Captain, and small state-
rooms and wardrooms for the officers. The Captain's
bridge is several stories up, behind the conning tower.
Atop the tower is a level for the sky control officer,
and a station for the main battery director, hooked up
by cables with the plotting-room deep down in one
of the interior cells of the ship.
The five-inch guns are mounted on the first super-
structure deck above the main deck. Aft of the fire
control tower is another smaller tower. Firing of the
turrets may be controlled from several places on the
ship.
A "cutaway" diagram of a big battleship is a fasci-
nating thing to see. In a way, it gives you a better
idea of what a battleship is like than a Cook's tour
through a floating fortress, for the latter, unless you
have a lot of time to spare (and there is little time to
spare for the infrequent visitors to battleships these
days) is more bewildering than illuminating.
Slice a battleship down its side and you will see an
unbelievable honeycomb or ant-hill of compartments
in which nearly two thousand men live and work and
fight.
There are the lower decks; the vast machinery
spaces rearing for a height of several decks, strong-
holds of turbines and pumps and gages; the capacious
Inside a Floating City 35
powder and shell magazines, where a spark might
mean your life; the cavernous storage rooms, as lib-
erally packed as an A. & P. store window in peace-
time, where the vast quantities of supplies needed to
sustain two thousand men on a cruise of several
months are kept. All these places are connected by
hatches and passageways, and, to retard the passage of
water from one compartment to another in case of
trouble, the passageways have high coamings, or sills.
The men must become expert at running through
these narrow passages, at leaping over the high coam-
ings without cracking their shins. They must learn
to dash up and down ladder-like "stairs" and to do
it nimbly and with faces forward, like sailors, not
cautiously and with out-stuck rumps, like timid land-
lubbers. It also must become automatic with them
as automatic as getting up in the morning and going
to bed when their work is done to dog down the
hatches when the call to general quarters is sounded,
and to reconcile themselves, without thought of fear,
to the prospect of staying at their stations in time of
battle. They stay if they can't escape without endan-
gering the lives of those in other compartments even
if their stations are below and are hit and flooded.
Peel back another portion of your battleship and
you'll see the magnificently equipped sick bays for
regular use; the well-stocked medical libraries; the
X-ray rooms and the operating chambers, with their
four separate lighting systems so they can keep going
36 Old Nameless
even if enemy shells do their damnedest, and the den-
tal department, where a sea-going dentist can fill or
pull your aching molar. This, though not exactly
popular, is a highly important place, for a sailor with
a toothache is not exactly the most efficient fighting
man in the world.
Then there are the crew's quarters, the barber
chairs and soda fountains (yes, an American sailor
can have a chocolate ice-cream soda if the notion
strikes him); the cafeterias, located at convenient
points inside the huge, floating city, numerous and
big enough to serve all hands in a hurry; the mess-
rooms, where the men eat on metal, composition-
topped tables. These tables are ordinarily spotless, but
not always so. In time of battle, for instance, the
officers' wardroom, being conveniently located to the
main deck, becomes Emergency Sick Bay. Then the
tables are resting places for the wounded, and morgue
slabs for the dead. Then the polished floors run thick
and slippery with blood.
This is a fraction of the picture of a modern battle-
ship. This was the world in which the men of Old
Nameless lived.
6
"TO KILL JAPS"
O Old Nameless, in the spring of 1942, slipped out
to sea on what was to be a combination shake-
down and duty cruise. In the old days, a ship got a real
shakedown cruise. They took her out to sea, banged
away with all her batteries at once to see if she could
stand the terrific, earthquake-like strain; put her
through every wearing, tearing maneuver imaginable
to find out if there were any weak spots. Her men, too,
got intensive, painstaking drill in the weapons they
were to handle and the battle stations they were to
man.
Old Nameless got no such luxury. She was a post-
Pearl Harbor baby, and her job was to go out on the
faraway sea lanes, where she was so sorely needed, and
raise hell. "To kill Japs/' as Captain Gatch reiterated.
She got her shakedown cruise, all right, but it was
in the war zone. Her men got their training, all right,
but it was just their lucky break that action didn't
pop up before they were ready for it. It could have
happened. In an earlier epic of the war, one American
warship had gone out in the North Atlantic on what
was to have been a shakedown cruise, and, in less than
37
38 Old Nameless
a month, her crew, so green that some of the young-
sters were violently seasick more than half the time,
had found themselves sighting sub and sinking same.
So there was no telling whether Old Nameless was
going to be blooded on her first week out, her first
month, or when.
Indeed, green crew or not, Captain Gatch was ach-
ing for a surface engagement in which he might get
a chance to unlimber his big guns against the enemy.
He yearned for that to happen probably more than
he ever had yearned for anything in his life.
It is a fact that may surprise most civilians, but not
since the Spanish-American war had any United
States battleship fired its big guns in action. In the
First World War, our battleships just couldn't find
any Germans to slug it out with, and there hadn't been
occasions for the loud-talkers of the fighting leviathans
to speak up.
So, if Captain Gatch only could have found himself
a Kongo or a Mogami on which to draw a bead, and
could have been the first skipper in forty-four years
to fire the main batteries of a United States battleship
in action, he would have counted himself the luckiest
man in the world.
(As it happened, the big battleships that made his-
tory in the Solomons were technically nosed out of
that honor by another American battlewagon which,
about a week earlier, pounded the French Jean Bart
in the attack on Casablanca. However, the battle off
"To Kill Japs" 39
Savo Island on the night of November i5th was the
first time in forty-four years that an American bat-
tleship's big guns spoke in a running naval action
between ships at sea, and, in this action, Captain
Gatch missed by ninety seconds the honor of firing
the first big gun a story that will be told in a later
chapter.)
"I want to make one thing clear," Captain Gatch
says in telling the story of how he trained his crew.
"The highest credit in the world belongs to those
young men who went out with me and soon became
as grand a fighting crew as any man ever was privi-
leged to command.
4 'Sixty per cent or more of the crew had enlisted in
January or February of 1942. They were, I suppose, as
fair a cross-section of fighting young Americans as
you could hope to find.
"But they were not seamen. And it is impossible
to make a seaman in less than two or three years' hard
work.
"Well we didn't have the two or three years. So I
did the only thing I could do. I devoted all my energy,
and the energy of my officers, to making gunners out
of them.
"I bore in mind that these were young men who
had joined the Navy with a very laudable ambition
to get themselves a mess of Japs and Germans. ,
"I worked along those lines. I still find it almost
impossible to believe, but, in a few months, we had
40 Old Nameless
succeeded in getting a ship's crew that I do not believe
has been equaled."
In telling it, the Captain pauses a minute and smiles
to himself; then he adds:
"When the test came, those men were entirely heed-
less of themselves or of personal danger. They went
into the fight intent on simply one thing getting Japsl
They got 'eml"
There is a beautiful ring, a sort of a grim but happy
bite, in the Captain's voice as he rolls out that phrase,
"getting Japsl" He snaps it out in the tone of voice
that other men might use in talking about making
money, writing a fine book, meeting a beautiful girl,
or winning on a long shot in the fourth race at
Pimlico.
Captain Gatch was on desk duty in Washington
when the war broke out, but he soon got away. Old
Nameless was his first command after December 7th.
He was lucky, too, in getting a second-in-command
after his own heart Commander Archibald Emil
Uehlinger. Uehlinger, a Kalispell (Montana) boy,
Annapolis, '22, was an old friend of the Captain's.
Back when Captain Gatch had command of the Per-
rival, Uehlinger was on another destroyer, the Zeilin,
and they used to be gunnery rivals for the division
championship. "Uehly won," the Captain says.
Commander Uehlinger was anchored to a desk in
the Bureau of Ordnance when the Japs made their
sneak raid on Pearl Harbor. It took him only a little
"To Kill Japs 9 ' 41
more than a month to manage to shove off and get
back on sea duty. He became Captain Catch's gunnery
officer, and, between them, they sweated out the crew
of superb gunners who were to give the Japanese such
a pasting. Later, Uehlinger became Executive Officer
of Old Nameless, next in command to the Captain.
The training of the crew was a saga in itself. "We
considered it a wasted day," the Captain relates,
"when we didn't have one or more target practices."
The Captain brought Old Nameless into Pearl
Harbor, and right away he started getting his ship
covered with anti-aircraft guns in every spot where
space could be found. As Admiral Calhoun, who was
there and saw him do it, says, "He increased the anti-
aircraft batteries of his ship two- or three-fold. He
stripped his ship; he got all the combustibles and in-
flammable materials off her; he worked his automatic
gun crews at the fleet anti-aircraft school until they
were the admiration of Pearl Harbor, and he actually
taught every man aboard his ship to grab the nearest
gun and start shooting. It showed that the man had
vision of what was to come/'
In the beginning, there was the job of teaching the
men how to use the anti-aircraft batteries. They had
to learn how to sight and shoot the guns, how to keep
the belts and clips of ammunition flowing and the
guns barking in an endless chatter of death until the
barrels were smoking hot, until their own nostrils
choked from the stink of powder. Old Nameless sent
42 Old Nameless
her observation planes up to tow "sleeve" targets
across the sky; she released red, gas-filled balloons, just
about the size Sally Rand used to dance with in
America's daffier days. The men got so they could
write their names in bullets on the sleeve targets, and
a "Sally Rand" didn't last a minute in the sky.
They learned the lessons of how to man and fire
the 5-inch rifles. You don't sight those; you estimate
the speed of an oncoming plane and shoot in front of
it so your shell will burst exactly where the plane is
going to be a few seconds later. If you try to "aim" a
5-incher at a moving plane, as a green gunner might
do, you would have the sinking feeling of watching
your shells pound the air where the plane had been,
while the plane itself roared down to lay its lethal eggs
on your head.
Targets were floated out to sea, and splintered.
Shells timed to "blow out" in the air in umbrella
fashion were lobbed up into the sky, and the gunners
shot at these bursts.
Firing practice with the main batteries was more
difficult, because the mammoth shells are too costly
and too precious for prodigal use. A lot of this prac-
tice was in loading and priming the guns, and sighting
the batteries on other ships in the task force. But
Captain Gatch, who realized how important it was
that his crew know what it was like to cling to a deck
when a main battery was fired, saw to it that the
i6-inchers were fired, too.
"To Kill Japs" 43
It is an awful thing to stand in the open when a
full battery of the big fellows speaks. Sometimes it
will shatter a man's eardrums, even when cotton is
stuffed in his ears. It will bend a steel door, and pul-
verize electric light bulbs and radio tubes in the
farthest corner of the ship. One young officer on Old
Nameless, during practice firing one day, pulled his
cap too tight on his head, creating a vacuum; the con-
cussion lifted the top of the cap right off and sent it
sailing into the air like an animated flapjack. An-
other, standing in the wrong place, turned his back on
the blast, and it split his pants right up the middle of
the seat. The Captain, observing these things, smiled
grimly, for they were lessons that had to be learned.
Coolness was another thing that had to be drilled
into the menthough that really couldn't be learned
fully until they had their baptism of fire and blood.
A young officer or a green man, seeing the enemy
planes overhead, will sometimes lose his head and
stand out in the open, cursing and futilely firing at
the aerial attackers with entirely inadequate rifle or
tommy-gun. Captain Gatch and his officers told the
men of these things, warned them to keep their heads
and not try to fight sky-dragons with pea-shooters.
They must have learned their lessons well, for, when
the day came and they had to stand up to as vicious
a dose of hell as any man on a battleship ever took,
they fought like veterans.
It wasn't only the regular seamen who did their
44 Old Nameless
duty. One day, while the Captain was working hard
with his crew, the mess attendants Negro and Fili-
pino boys sent him a petition through the Executive
Officer,
"We want to learn to shoot the guns," they said.
So the mess boys were issued helmets and hoods to
protect their necks and ears from the sparks, and they
learned to handle the smaller guns.
"And, by the Lord," the Captain says, "when the
time came for these colored boys and Filipinos to
stand out in the open and take the Jap strafing, they
stood up and took it. They suffered heavy casualties,
but they accounted for their share of Japs. They were
good men."
There was another little incident concerning the
crew. It is an astounding story, but astounding stories
seem to spring naturally from Old Nameless. It in-
volves what the ship's officers call a "rather youngish"
seaman. The Navy isn't telling his name or where he
is now, because it prefers to regard it as a "closed
incident." But here's the story.
He was a sturdy lad, and he came aboard the ship
just a few weeks before the battle. "Johnny" (which
isn't his name) had no beard, and he did look a little
young, but his parents had signed his enlistment
papers, so it wasn't the business of anybody aboard
ship to go snooping around. He was supposed to have
been assigned to duty as a hospital apprentice, but
they didn't need any hospital apprentices at the mo-
"To Kill Japs" 45
ment, so they made him a machine-gunner. That was
O.K. with Johnny.
Came the big battle of October s6th, and Johnny
fought like hell. To the officer in charge of his "quad"
or battery of 20 mms. it looked as if Johnny had
accounted for at least his share. After it was all over,
he had a few words with him and, obeying an impulse
of idle curiosity, said to him: "Johnny, just how old
are you?"
The boy reddened and said: "You want the truth,
sir?"
"Certainly," said the officer.
"Sir," said Johnny, "I'll be thirteen next April."
They were tough months, those of the wedding of
Gatch and Old Nameless and the green men. It was
like trying to crowd four years of Annapolis into six
months, or trying to build Boulder Dam on a summer
vacation. But Gatch did it. When Old Nameless fi-
nally went out to sea in earnest, the ex-clerks and
soda fountain boys and farmers and lawyers were
tough, tanned and wiry guys. They didn't use high-
flown words such as "morale" and "courage" and "gal-
lantry," but they had plenty of each; they were spoil-
ing for a fight, and they were able to give one. The
forecast was bad for any Jap who might fly or steam
their way.
"BLOODY 'GUAD' "
BOTH major actions in which Old Nameless took
part the air battle off Santa Cruz on October
26th, and the final chapter of the great naval Battle
of Guadalcanal on November 1 5th had an important
bearing on the over-all picture of the crucial fighting
in the Solomons. It was a desperate, gouging, kill-or-
be-killed battle from the day the United States Ma-
rines landed on Guadalcanal and wrested from the
enemy a brand-new airfield on which the Japs had
lavished much hard labor. For several months the
scales were balanced so delicately that the slightest
extra weight one way or the other might decide the
battle. Old Nameless, on both occasions, did her part
in adding the weight that kept Guadalcanal American.
It was August 7, 1942, when the Marines, under
command of Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift,
made three landings on Jap-held territory in die
Tulagi-Guadalcanal area. Storming in from the ocean
by landing boats and plummeting out of the sky by
parachutes, they hit the Japs hard. They literally
caught the enemy with his pants down, for it was re-
ported that some of the Japanese officers were lei-
46
''Bloody 'Guad' " 47
surely taking scalding baths when the Americans
dropped in, and they jumped from their tubs and
fled to the hills, presumably losing something more
than "face."
The biggest plum captured by the Americans, of
course, was the new airfield on Guadalcanal. The Japs
had done a good job on it and had it almost ready for
use. The leathernecks appropriated it, finished the
job with the tractors and other tools the Japs had left
behind, and christened it Henderson Field.
It was a great day for American morale when the
stories began coming back about how the Marines had
cleaned up the Japs, driven the remnants of the
enemy force into the hills of the once sleepy copra
island, and were enjoying themselves making flap-
jacks on a stove improvised from the captured safe of
a Japanese general.
But the Japs are stubborn fighters, and they came
back. Anxiety back home began to mount as the
Japanese opened a terrific push to recapture the air-
field. They pounded our boys with bombers and by
naval shelling.
The Marines, sagaciously and tenaciously, did not
attempt to take over the whole island, which is about
ninety miles long and thirty miles wide, because of
their limited numbers and the nature of the terrain.
Instead, they clung to a defense area some six miles
along the coast and extending about four miles inland
just enough to protect the airport. Though the
48 Old Nameless
War Department had originally announced that "this
is a naval show," Army troops, under command of
Major General Alexander M. Patch, were moved in
to reinforce the desperately outnumbered leather-
necks. General Douglas MacArthur's Flying Fortresses
helped out by bombing Jap bases and convoys.
Still the Nipponese came on.
The fighting was bloody business. One night soon
after the Marines' surprise landing, the numerically
superior enemy strove to slash through the Tenaru
River line under cover of the tropical darkness; they
withdrew the next day, leaving eight hundred dead.
They stormed Marine positions on Lunga Ridge in
another night attack, but, as the Navy reported later
in its official announcement on the conquest of Gua-
dalcanal, the Japs "fell by the scores in bloody hand-
to-hand struggle and fled in disorder.
"With hardly a breather," the Navy's report con-
tinues, "the Marines crossed the Matanikau and took
the offensive. From that time, they slushed at the
Japanese without let-up. Army Flying Fortresses and
Marine planes bombed and strafed enemy troops
while Marines chopped them down group by group,
pocket by pocket, in savage land fighting. Sharp skir-
mishes and patrol clashes deep in the jungle were
almost daily fare.
"The Marines were steeled to endure the terrific
tempo of their record siege by training which prepares
them for any fighting conditions. In their main
"Bloody 'Guad'" 49
bivouac area, many lived under tiny pup tents, some
in caves, and a few in shamble tin-roofed houses. All
had fox-holes into which they burrowed while bombs
and shells poured down. At the front they lived in
slit trenches.
"By day, when it wasn't raining, the sun was so hot
that the Marines sweltered as they drew bead on
the enemy. By night, seepy tropical rains chilled the
men and left them lying in water and mud. Mos-
quitoes were inescapable. 'You almost needed a blood
transfusion when one got through with you/ some
Marines said. They slept fully clothed, rifles at hand."
Such was life on bloody "Guad," as the Marines
came to call it. Even in the midst of all the hell, the
men found time for some worship and relaxation
and humor, too. The chaplains conducted regular
religious services, and the Marines, with slung rifles,
would sing hymns and kneel in prayer on newly
cleared fields in range of enemy artillery. They swam
in treacherous streams, and fished for "critters"
they'd never even heard of back home. They played
acey-deucey, listened to the short-wave radio broad-
casts from the U.S.A., wrote letters to the folks back
home, and read their mail over and over again when
the mail got through. Best of all, they collected sou-
venirsJap souvenirs.
They showed that life on "Guad" hadn't got them
down by erecting rough signboards for every path.
"Shangri-La," "Lover's Lane," "Hogan's Bluff," and
50 Old Nameless
"Hollywood Boulevard/' they called some of them.
Their tent areas were dubbed everything from "Mo-
Skeet-O-Flats" to "Edgewater Beach Hotel." If they
couldn't think up anything else to hang up a sign
about, some wags would fix up one that announced:
"Big Dance To-night at USO Headquarters All
Marine and Navy Personnel Welcome." That kind
always got a big laugh.
The Jap lunges in that first phase of the fighting
went on for a week. Finally, they withdrew, staggered
by heavy losses. But they didn't go away. They dug in
and began rebuilding their strength.
By mid-October, the Japanese had considerable
artillery, tanks, and reinforcements on the island, and
the folks at home began to wonder if it were going to
be another Norway. "There is a good stiff fight going
on," Navy Secretary Knox said. News of the original
losses, early in the operation, of the United States
heavy cruisers Astoria, Quincy, and Vinccnnes, and
of Australia's io,ooo-ton Canberra, had come out. The
Tokyo Radio, after one particularly violent renewed
drive on Lunga Ridge, had announced triumphantly
that a Japanese force of six thousand men had taken
Henderson Field back from the Yankees. The truth
of the matter, however, was that the Americans had
given the Japs a smashing defeat; the Japanese "six
thousand" were ruined as a fighting unit, and the
"Bloody 'Guad'" 51
Stars and Stripes still flew over the flying field in the
jungle.
Still the Japs, utterly disregarding losses of planes,
ships, or men, kept pouring a yellow tide at the be-
leaguered American bridgehead; they were an un-
scrupulous but resourceful enemy mean jungle
fighters, who taught their men to try to confuse
Americans by humming the Marine Hymn in the
dark and by issuing orders in English. When they
attacked, they yelled "Banzai" and "Marine, you
diel"; they exploded firecrackers for misleading sound
effects, hurled calcium flares to illuminate the posi-
tion of our troops, and charged straight into the points
of our bayonets. They laid "booby traps" that killed
American men who touched them. They played "pos-
sum" by simulating injury and then jumping up to
kill the Americans who came to their aid; that trick
strained the mercy of the Americans pretty thin. It
was hellish, kill-or-die business; the flapjacks cooked
on the General's safe, and the Japanese officers jump-
ing out of their steaming tubs to scurry to the hills,
didn't seem so funny now at least, not to the grimy,
fatigued, bug-bitten men living in the fox-holes.
On October i4th, the Japanese, already repulsed
time and time again, opened another strong push.
Heavy Japanese naval units tried to force open the
way for a large convoy. They lost one heavy cruiser,
four destroyers, and a transport. They retaliated with
52 Old Nameless
a daytime bombing of Henderson Field, but Mac-
Arthur's Flying Fortresses, scouring the skies where
equatorial squalls played tag with sunshine, further
punished their assembling convoys. By October i6th,
it was estimated the Japs had lost at least 265 planes,
and that forty of their warships had been sunk or
severely damaged.
On October i7th, fourteen bombers and eight
fighters raided Henderson Field again. Our fliers and
ack-ack batteries were getting pretty good by this time.
Of the twenty-two planes, only six Jap fighters went
back.
And still the Japs came.
On the i8th, Army, Navy, and Marine planes hit
Japanese troop concentrations and munitions dumps.
Then we lost two destroyers, the Meredith and the
O'Brien. On the stoth, the enemy started a tremendous
land push.
On October 23rd, the American public got a slight
lift when the Navy announced that Admiral Bill
Halsey, the grizzled fighting hero of the hit-and-run
raids on the Gilbert and Marshall islands, had re-
placed Vice Admiral Ghormley in charge of opera-
tions in the Southwest Pacific area. Halsey, a
thoroughly hard-boiled scrapper, who loves to wear
his carpet slippers on the bridge and who frowns on
any member of his staff who comes to a war con-
ference wearing a tie, was known to be a resourceful,
bulldog fighter in the dashing Nelson tradition, but
"Bloody 'Guad'" 5S
it was wondered whether the change was in time to
do any good.
Five grim, bloody land thrusts were made by the
now greatly reinforced Japanese on October 2401.
Twenty-one of thirty-six Japanese raiders were shot
down, but, on October 25th, a massive, all-out land,
sea and air assault was in full swing. The Marines had
their hands full, and the Army troops, guarding the;
south side of the airfield, were having a desperate
time holding back the Japs who managed temporarily
to pierce their lines.
On October 26th, the public read in the papers that
Secretary Knox in Washington again was calling it
"a darn, tough, stiff fight." "Our men are putting up
a splendid, game fight/' the Secretary said. "I am not
foreshadowing the results and certainly I am not fore-
shadowing defeat."
To the arm-chair strategists at home, it looked as
if the public was being prepared for another "gallant
retreat." The public mood was frankly gloomy, and
things looked black for the forces in Guadalcanal.
It was on this very daythough the news was not
released until some days after, and the full story was
not told until months later that Old Nameless was
slugging it out with the Japanese planes and helping
to win the victory in what Secretary Knox later de-
scribed as "Round One/'
8
BATTLE STATIONS!
OLD NAMELESS was well into what Captain
Gatch called "Indian Country" on October
25th, the day before the first battle. It was Sunday,
and Navy Day was two days hence, so a special service
was held aboard the ship. Chaplain Claypoole took
his sermon text from Isaiah, 'Tight the good fight to
let the oppressed go free." In the afternoon, when
every one knew battle was closer, he preached again
on "Let Your Loins Be Girded and Your Lamps Lit."
The men of Old Nameless had their loins girded, and
their lamps of courage were lit, but the only lights
that showed aboard the ship that night were the dim
red battle lights.
Captain Gatch himself read the scripture service.
That was an unshakable rule of his. Every Sunday, he
would read the Bible lesson to his men. "That's sup-
posed to be an old Navy custom," Captain Catch's
friend, Vice Admiral Calhoun comments, "but, in
my forty-one years in the Navy, Gatch is the only man
I ever saw follow it so faithfully."
The mission of Old Nameless was to protect one of
-a group of carriers. That in itself was a Halseyian
54
Battle Stations! 55
departure from the strictly conventional. Usually, a
battleship is regarded as the lumbering, heavy slugger
who can dish out the punishment but who has to be
screened by a bodyguard of smaller, faster boats. The
planes from a carrier are supposed to help look out for
the battleship, while the "flat-top" itself, of course, is
protected by warships, usually destroyers and cruisers.
Here, however, the tactics, stemming from Admiral
Halsey, called for the battlewagon to protect the flat-
top, receiving, of course, the customary aid from the
carrier's planes.
"It was a new wrinkle, and it was nervy," Captain
Gatch says. "But Halsey is like that."
Old Nameless had warning in plenty of time that
she was going to meet the Japs.
"We were on the offensive, and we were hunting
trouble," Captain Gatch relates. "We had received
reports that three or more Jap carriers were coming
in the direction in which we were moving. We knew
they were bound to attack us. We did not expect such
a long and determined attack as developed, but we
were ready for anything. We knew that with our
armament, our preparations, and our constant state
of readiness, there could not possibly be any repeti-
tion of the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the
Repulse-."
The general plan of action was for Old Nameless,
with her long guns, to take care of any surface ships
that might be unwary enough to come within range,
56 Old Nameless
if not within sight (for a battlewagon such as Old
Nameless, if her gunners are good enough, can sink a
ship that isn't even visible to the eye), and for her
hedgehog of armament to knock down any planes that
got through the screen of protective planes the car-
rier would send up. Although the Japs kept their
carriers well out of range and Old Nameless didn't
get a chance to unlimber her big guns on any war-
ships, the latter part of the protective strategy, as
Captain Gatch grimly relates, "worked out almost
exactly as foreseen."
With her super-audio detectors, Old Nameless
sniffed the oncoming Mitsubishis when they were
thirty miles or more away.
Aboard Old Nameless, the bos'n's pipe shrilled over
the loud-speaker system, and "General Quarters," the
call to battle stations, was sounded.
The men, clad in blue dungarees, raced to their
posts. If you had been transplanted straight out of a
drawing-room or cocktail lounge to the decks of Old
Nameless, you would have blinked to see them. They
looked like men from another planet. Gray-steel "coal-
scuttle" helmets protected the heads of those who
were to operate in exposed stations; when you speak
with one of these helmets on, it sounds as if you are
talking into a bucket. Bluish anti-flash hoods hugged
their necks and ears underneath the helmets. The
"talkers" men who use the telephone equipment that
keeps open communication between remote stations
Battle Stations! 57
on the great ship had special leather helmets and
over-sized steel "buckets" on their heads; they looked
like super-men from Mars. What little of the face es-
caped the hood was further masked by a nose filter, so
the men could breathe through the stink of gunfire,
and by huge, non-shatterable goggles, either white or
orange, to protect their eyes. Long gloves of anti-
flash material covered the hands of the exposed
fighters, and a life-preserver was or should have been
strapped to every man's chest. Even their trouser
legs were lashed down at the ankles. All these precau-
tions were extremely necessary, for, as one officer
explained it, the intense heat of an exploding bomb
4 'will burn a man's skin black, even if the fragments
miss him."
Many of the men aboard had taken showers and
put on clean underwear. Some did this as a precaution
against infection in case they were wounded; others
did it as a sort of "what-the-hell" gesture on the theory
that it might be their last shower. Others, acting on
this same impulse, ate big meals and enjoyed a cup of
coffee just before going into battle, though this latter
gesture is a practice frowned on by the hard-boiled
Navy doctors, who bluntly and non-squeamishly
there's nothing squeamish about life on a battlewagon
tell the men that it's harder to do an emergency
operation on a guy with a full stomach.
The officers, all in battle-khaki, also grotesque in
gray-steel helmets and anti-flash clothing, took their
58 Old Nameless
stations. Mighty steel doors, some weighing as much
as three tons, clanged shut, enclosing the men in tiny
pillboxes scattered all over the vast floating fortress.
Below deck, hundreds of water-tight hatches were
dogged down. All telephone circuits were checked and
found in order. On deck, a bos'n's mate lay flat on his
back, peering at the skies through powerftfl binocu-
lars. All over the ship, a thousand eyes watched.. Old
Nameless was on guard, :< "'
"Ask the ship's company if it is ready for action,"
Captain Gatch directed in a voice so flinty you could
have struck sparks from it. The question was purely
rhetorical. It was the Captain's way of telling his men
that here it was here was what they had come to sea
for, and soon it would be up to them.
The communications officer nodded. He signaled
for attention on the ship's public address system, and
read the message.
There was a thrilling response. From one end of
the ship to the other, from the blistering engine-room
to the wind-whipped towers, the men cheered and
roared back: "Aye, AYE, Sir!" Here was the moment
for which they had trained and waited. Once before,
Old Nameless had steamed to the brink of trouble,
but, at the last minute, the Japs turned away and there
had been no fight. There had been an awful let-down
on the ship after that experience, but this was the real
thing; this time there was to be no disappointment.
"Aye, AYE, Sir!" Down in the mammoth main
Battle Stations! 59
engine-room, the Chief Engineer stood at the great
master board, watching the myriad gages that told
him what every turbine and every boiler in each of
the four engine-rooms was doing; the throttleman
stood at the wheel, ready to carry out the Chief Engi-
neer's commands. The engineers and water-tenders
grinned and spat on their calloused hands. They
peered through the little blue-glass peepholes at their
fires and made their boilers ready. It's a little weird
to be down there below the water line, hearing the
far-off sound of guns and the quiver of the ship when
the big batteries are fired. It's even a little scary,
particularly if the lights flicker out for a second (as
they did during one of Old Nameless's fights) and you
say to yourself, "Uh-oh, Ocean, here I come!" As Jack
Quate, burly Water Tender Second Class from
Greensboro, North Carolina, puts it in his Tarheel
drawl: "You sorta wonduh at fuhst if you're gonna
get kill't. But then they tell yuh to keep the goddam
steam up, an' yuh open her up wide an' sort of re-lax."
"Aye, AYE, Sir!" Up on deck, the gunners Joe
Doakes from Main Street, little twelve-year-old
Johnny, and the Negro and Filipino boys who
wouldn't stay in the kitchen when there were Japs
overhead tilted back their helmets a trifle and lov-
ingly caressed the grips of their anti-aircraft guns
which soon were to chatter death to the Japs. "I ven-
ture to say/' Captain Gatch declares, "that in the heart
60 Old Nameless
of every gunner was a silent prayer, 'Please, God, let
me get the first one/ "
The bos'n's mate was still flat on his back, and he
let out a mighty yell, "Here come the bastards!" when
he saw the first speck in the sky. His warning was
merely a gilding of the lily, for, except to those who
stood near him, his words were drowned out by the
yammering of the already-speaking guns.
9
"SCARED AS HELL, HAVING WONDERFUL
TIME!"
r | 1HE first attack lasted from 11:12 to 11:20 on
JL. October 26th," Captain Gatch wrote tersely in
his official report. "There were twenty dive-bombers.
All were shot down/'
The shock of the reception must have been a ghastly
surprise to the twenty Japanese pilots, in the few
seconds or minutes of life that were left them to think
about it. On they came in their single-engined Mitsu-
bishi g6's and 97's the dive-bombers and torpedo
planes with the red ball of the Rising Sun winking
evilly at Old Nameless from the wing of each one.
Down came the dive-bombers at sharp angle and dizzy
speed, their motors roaring and the wind screaming
past their taut wings. The torpedo planes came in at
low level, hoping to loose their missiles and pull out
in time to make a getaway and return to their carriers.
All the little men must have had great hopes: cocky
visions, perhaps, of another Prince of Wales or Re-
pulse killing; dreams, maybe, of the honors that be-
spectacled Tojo or the Emperor would give them
6s Old Nameless
when they winged back home with an American bat-
tleship to their credit.
Then they met the awful volcanic blast of fire and
metal that Old Nameless spewed up, and soon they
were no more.
The action was short but sweet. Old Nameless her-
self "was cutting circles and figure-eights and other
maneuvers without names," Captain Gatch wrote in
his report. "I was more afraid," he added, "of ram-
ming the carrier we were protecting than of the
attacking planes."
From below the decks of the American "flat-tops,"
the lethal, stubby Grumman Wildcats rode up on
elevators. Their folded wings were clicked open, their
props were wound, and, with engines roaring and
5O-caliber machine-guns barking death, they rose from
the carrier decks to help sting the enemy.
On Old Nameless, the men white men, black men,
brown men were superb under their baptism of
enemy fire. They kept their guns shooting, and shoot-
ing straight, although many of them, not realizing it,
were chattering nervously to themselves about how
"scared" they were. That was no reflection on them;
even the bravest veteran will talk that way under fire,
though half the time he may not even know what he's
saying. One young Ensign, Commander Uehlinger re-
calls, stood firmly at his post, doing his duty quickly
and efficiently, but keeping up a running fire of gabble:
"Scared as Hell, Wonderful Time! 9 ' 63
"I'm scared as hell, scared as hell, having a wonderful
time." The Commander told him about it afterward,
and the Ensign turned both white and red and swore
he didn't remember a thing about it.
Commander Uehlinger had his station in "Batt II."
(Batt II is code name for the auxiliary control room,
the small-scale, less heavily protected replica of the
main control room. In battle, if the control room is
knocked out, Batt II takes over.) Uehlinger is a wizard
gunnery man and a quick-thinking commanding offi-
cer. A small, tanned man with a full, black mustache,
he doesn't look his forty-four years.
"I was watching the maneuvers of the ships so I
could take over if necessary," he relates, "so I missed
a lot of the action. It was a hell of a note. I hardly
could keep my mind on what I was supposed to do for
wanting to watch the show. It was a pure case of not
being able to see the forest for the trees!"
The visibility was "pretty poor," and the ceiling
was low, so it was impossible to see any planes at a
great distance, except the torpedo bombers, which had
to come in low to release their "tin fish." When the
torpedo planes came in later, the gunners on Old
Nameless were able to pick them off at considerable
distance. However, the dive-bombers, ugly, blue-gray
birds of prey which made the first attack, were able to
get in quite close before the gunners could sight them.
Captain Gatch had issued standing orders to the
64 Old Nameless
sky control officer that, the instant he sighted a plane
and made sure it was the enemy, he should open fire
and "consider that I had given the order."
"Consequently," he relates, "my first positive in-
formation that we'd sighted the Japs was when our
guns cut loose, a procedure which saved valuable
seconds."
Captain Gatch saw planes exploding and falling
"within a few seconds after we opened fire.
"It was a grand sight, 1 ' he says.
First they would begin spouting flames "a white,
gasoline flame" and then they would immediately hit
the water. Sometimes, if they were up high enough
and an explosion occurred, the planes would seem to
"dissolve." As Captain Gatch viewed it, the first
twenty were picked off more or less one by one, but
the action was so fast that "they were falling all
around."
As is usual in that part of the world, the weather
was peculiar a combination of sunshine and equa-
torial squalls. That added to the spectacular nature of
the fight.
"There was sunshine and blue sky in some places,
and rain in other patches," Captain Gatch describes
it. "I saw one plane trying to get away by heading for
a local squall. It had just barely entered the rain when
we got her, and she hit the water.
"The Japs," he adds, "make what we call a co-
ordinated attack. They come in from different direc-
"Scared as Hell, Wonderful Timer' 65
tions and try to hit you simultaneously in different
spots. They're good at it, too, so, when they come in,
you've got to be able to fire in two or more directions
at the same time.
"They're also good at coordinating attacks of dive-
bombers and torpedo planes, which hit at you from
different levels. Thus, it is fatal to become so en-
grossed in firing at one type that you lose sight of the
other.
"I'll say this, too: they are persistent devils."
The hacking of the guns also was Commander
Uehlinger's first notice that the Japs actually were
overhead.
"I heard the shooting from the machine-guns on
portside," he says, "I looked up just in time to see a
Jap plane three or four hundred feet above us burst
into flames. It winged over and hit the water one
hundred yards from the ship. That was the first thing
I saw. It was a very pretty sight."
In Batt II with Commander Uehlinger was Com-
mander Independent Whipple Gorton, the ship's
supply officer, nicknamed "Pay" Gorton by his fellow
officers because he functions as ship's paymaster. "Pay"
Gorton, fifty-six years old, is a Providence, Rhode
Island, man who joined the Navy in the last war and
worked his way up through the ranks to his present
high commission. He was broadcasting the progress
of the battle over the ship's communication system so
the men below, who were passing the ammunition,
66 Old Nameless
keeping up the steam, and standing by to take care of
any wounded, would know what was going on.
" Tay' Gorton was wonderful," Uehlinger relates.
"The action was so fast that he couldn't quite keep
up with it, and he was sort of like the radio sports
announcer at a Navy-Army football game, with the
score tied, one minute to play, and Navy's ball on
Army's one-yard line!
" 'A torpedo just went astern!' he would yell. 'And
another one! And another one! Here's a dive-bomber
coming in no, they got him! Here's another tor-
pedo. . . !'
"We heard later that the boys below decks got so
accustomed to hearing about those torpedoes that one
of them growled back on the phone, 'Yes, we knowa
torpedo just went tearing through here and we painted
"No. i" on its nose.' Then, from the other end of the
ship, where the boys had been hearing about the tor-
pedoes, too, came another message: 'Sorry, we didn't
know you'd painted that "No. i" on it just came by
here and we wiped it off!' "
10
"SO SORRY, PLEASE!"
riTlHERE was an awful lot of Jap yapping going on
JL over the air/' Captain Gatch growls in telling
about the action of October 26th. "I remember wish-
ing we'd had a Japanese-speaking person aboard the
ship to tell us what it was all about/'
There was about a thirty-minute interval between
the first and second attacks. Everybody did a lot of
talking just to let off steam, but they also did a lot of
preparing for the next attack they knew was certain
to come. Somewhere on the ship a seaman drawled,
"I guess I was the only scared man on the ship/' and
a mighty laugh went up from every one who heard
him.
Ammunition was brought up, and the guns were
readied. The few woundedcasualties had been ex-
tremely light already were being given attention.
Commander Uehlinger remembers slapping Cap
tain William Henry Harrell, the chief doctor aboard
Old Nameless, on the back, and telling him what a
grand job he'd done. Captain Harrell, a North Caro-
linian from Williamston, had heard some one was
67
68 Old Nameless
wounded on deck, and, in the thick of everything, he
came up looking for him.
"The man was absolutely fearless," Uehlinger says.
"He didn't seem to know the guns were firing/'
Then the second attack came.
Forty torpedo planes and dive-bombers came in,
escorted by some of the wicked, fast Jap fighters, which
were going to try to beat off the American Wildcats
from the carriers. Like crazy hornets, they darted at
Old Nameless from all directions and levels.
They came in waves about five miles apart, which
meant a lag of sixty to ninety seconds between attacks.
"They maneuvered into position to strike together,
the bombers a moment before the torpedo planes
swept down to release their charges/' the Navy's offi-
cial report on the battle says. "A curving wall of
glowing steel from the great ship met them/'
The gunners on Old Nameless, though a lot of
them still kept up their unconscious obbligato of
cursing or patter about how "scared" they were, were
veterans now. They had tasted battle and they liked it.
There was an exultant, surging emotion within them
as they kept a wild funeral march playing on the
"Chicago pianos/' the heavy Oerlikon guns, and the
smaller caliber automatic weapons. Not a bomb or
torpedo had yet struck Old Nameless, and only a
comparative handful of her men had been nicked by
Jap strafing.
The automatk guns at several "quads," or stations,
"So Sorry, Please!" 69
were manned partly by the Filipino and Negro mess
attendants "a good lot," the Captain says. His own
cook, Walter Davis from Bessemer, Alabama, was
there. "A good cook and a good machine-gunner,"
says the Skipper. "One of the Jap strafers riddled him
through and through; he looked like one of his own
kitchen colanders. But they couldn't kill him."
The Captain's mess-boy, twenty-year-old Harry
Thomas Woody of Philadelphia, was there, too. He
passed the ammunition. So was the captain's steward,
Primitivo Neyra, a neat little Filipino, affectionately
nicknamed "the Headhunter." Primitivo, born in
Alcala, Tangasiman, in the Philippines, in 1899, was
one of the oldest enlisted men aboard Old Nameless.
He knew what the Japs had done to his relatives and
friends. So when he took a whack at the Japs it was
with a vengeance and to the accompaniment of a
bloodcurdling war cry all his own. It was really amaz-
ing to watch the ordinarily quiet little Filipino in
action.
One torpedo plane in particular screamed stub-
bornly through the hellish spray of flak. It was off the
starboard quarter, and it was apparent that its pilot,
actually displaying the suicidal tendency which our
fighting men say is too generously attributed to the
Jap, had made up his mind to crash the ship. He was
two hundred feet in the air and not far from Old
Nameless when Lieutenant Frank Campbell, in
charge of the after-quads in that section, shouted for
70 Old Nameless
his men to bring him down. As if by magic, a firehose
stream of metal caught him; a wing was chopped off,
and he fell into the sea on the portside.
Still another Japanese, this one with an undeniably
genuine suicide complex, crashed starboard. The
plane remained afloat, and an amazing thing hap-
pened. Lieutenant William Wister he is the son of
Owen Wister, the famous novelist, and until 1940 he
had worked in a New York City brokerage office,
where nothing more disastrous than the stock market
ceiling ever fell on him tells the story.
"The Jap aviator crawled up on the wing of the
plane, took out his pistol and started shooting at the
battleship," Lieutenant Wister relates. "Almost in-
stantly fifty muzzles were trained on him. They swung
on him from every direction, and it was one of the
most terrific bursts of concentrated fire I've ever seen.
I yelled, 'Cease firing!' By that time, the Japanese was
cut in two, his wing had been blasted into little bits,
and there was almost nothing left to see."
Primitivo Neyra was in one of the crews that caught
the Jap who aimed his pistol at Old Nameless. The
incident was champagne to him. All the feelings he
had kept to himself since the butchery in the Philip-
pines exploded, and for a few minutes thereafter he
shouted a lot of wild talk in some very mixed-up
English about what he would like to do to all Japa-
nese. After he quieted down and regained his stew-
ard's calm, he smiled a little sheepishly, and all he
"So Sorry, Please!" 71
would say when questioned was: "The Japs, they not
so hot. All Filipinos, they can handle machine-gun
good. I hope I shoot some more Japs."
Most of the forty planes that hurled themselves in
the second wave at Old Nameless had been shot down
or turned back by the ship and her protecting planes.
Then, toward the end of the attack, one torpedo
plane, which the gunners couldn't seem to hit im-
mediately, got through.
"It came at the stern of the ship," Captain Gatch
wrote in his Navy report. "It appeared that millions
of tracer shells went right past that plane without hit-
ting it, but some did strike it, and at the right time.
"They struck just before the pilot released his tor-
pedo. The plane was jarred out of its line of flight
and its torpedo was released well up in the air."
There was an agonizing moment as the Captain
watched to see whether the torpedo would drop on
the ship. It seemed certain that it would. Then, at the
last moment, it passed over the fantail and fell into
the soa on the other side aft. The Captain released his
breath, and it was like the pent-up air leaking out of
a blown-out tire.
"It was like having a nightmare in slow motion
about a torture chamber," one of the ship's young
officers adds to the description of the incident. "The
plane before our guns found it seemed near enough
to reach out and grab.
72 Old Nameless
"If our fire had caught it as much as five seconds
later, it is highly probable that, instead of passing
over our fantail, the torpedo would have walloped our
stern, and there would have been hell to pay."
Almost simultaneously, as the torpedo was missing
the ship, the guns of Old Nameless spoke with a
vengeance. They blazed out an obituary, and the
wings of the torpedo bomber were sheared off as
neatly as a Navy barber's clippers operating on the
sideburns of some luckless boot. The olane struck the
water and promptly disappeared.
In Batt II, Commander Uehlinger, who by now
was sparkling with high glee over the slaughter of the
Japanese, was witnessing the destruction.
"I saw this damned torpedo plane coming in," he
relates. "It was coming in right among the ships at a
low level. It dropped its fish, and it looked like it had
our number written on it. For a second there, my
throat just wouldn't work.
"Then the torpedo missed us and, at the same time,
our guns got him, and the plane seemed to dissolve
completely all at once, just like the wonderful one*
hoss shay. It was positively weird: one moment it was
a plane coming at us; the next moment it was just a
mass of torn fabric, exploding into rags and splinters.
"It was close enough so I could see the pilot, though,
of course, I couldn't make out the look on his face. I
saluted him with my helmet and said:
"'So sorry, please!'"
II
THE THIRD ATTACK
nriHE ordeal of Old Nameless was not over.
JL There was another interval a shorter one
this timeafter the second wave of bombers had been
beaten back* Again the men caught their breath. Some
of them were pretty tired and dirty now. More of
them had been wounded (though casualties, consider-
ing the nature of the engagement, were unbelievably
low). The looks on the faces of the men of Old Name-
less when they saw their buddies riddled by Jap
strafing was not pleasant.
But their fighting spirit had, if anything, increased.
If any boost to morale was needed, the men of Old
Nameless got it out of a message that an Admiral on
the carrier had radioed to all his planes in the air as
they were returning from their mission. The Ad-
miral's message, which Old Nameless picked up and
relayed to her own men, was:
"Stay away from that big bastard he's shooting
down everything in sight. If he runs out of Japs, hell
shoot you down for target practice!"
At 12:19 P.M., fifty-nine minutes after the first at-
tack had ended, the third attack began. It lasted
73
74 Old Nameless
eleven minutes a longer period than either of the
others.
This time twenty-four dive-bombers and torpedo
planes came at the battleship. They met the same
withering fire. But this time Old Nameless and her
gallant Captain were destined to take some punish-
ment.
"I was out on the catwalk in front of the bridge,"
the Captain's official report stated, "where I had no
business to be."
Actually, his presence on the catwalk "where I had
no business to be" was an additional part of his per-
sonal heroism. The battleship's bridge, where the
Captain is stationed, is armored. The battleship and
the carrier she was protecting were swerving and
zig-zagging so crazily to dodge the Jap bombs that
Captain Gatch was afraid Old Nameless might ram
her charge. So he strode out on the open catwalk
where he could get a better view both of what the
carrier was doing, and of what the Jap planes directly
overhead, which could not be seen from the bridge,
were up to. While he watched, either Captain Gatch
or one of the officers with him tried to keep track of
the falling Jap planes by making chalk marks on the
conning tower. Twenty-eight chalk marks later were
discovered on the steel wall near where the Captain
fell and the score wasn't complete.
This time a dive-bomber got through the curtain
of fire.
The Third Attack 75
"I saw it coming out of the muck overhead," the
Captain relates. "It wasn't more than one hundred
feet over the forward part of the ship when it released
its bomb. It was a good-sized bomb, probably a five-
hundred-pounder. I knew in an instant it was going
to hit the ship."
The automatic guns commanding the direction
from which the plane approached were manned in
part by the Filipino and Negro mess attendants. They
had stopped firing momentarily because there was
no target in sight. Then they saw the bomb coming,
and immediately started firing. They never stopped
for a second, although they were in grave danger.
Their faces were contorted, their muscles strained,
and, if only they could have hurled themselves in the
path of the bomb and stopped it with their flesh and
sinews, the missile never would have touched the ship.
"Yes," the Captain repeats, "those men are good."
In the eternity of seconds between the moment the
bomb left the rack and the moment it struck the ship,
a prayer raced through Captain Catch's heart and
mind. He prayed that it would hit one of the thickly
armored turrets, rather than the deck. Though the
turret was nearer to him and a hit there was almost
certain to injure him, he knew that if the big bomb
struck the deck it might blow a hole through the
surface and kill many persons underneath, as well as
many in the gun crews Davis, Woody, Primitive
Neyra, and a lot of others.
76 Old Nameless
The Captain's prayer was answered. The bomb did
hit the turret. It was the only hit the ship took. It
almost killed him.
"It hit just about one foot from the edge of the
turret," he relates. His voice becomes slow, and he
doesn't even seem to be in the same room with you
when he tells it. "I could see the bomb start to
detonate. It's almost weird how you can see so much
in so little time.
"You can see it starting to get red, then there is a
flash and you don't see anything. The next thing I
remember was lying on a very bloody deck, trying to
get up.
"The funny part about it is that none of it seemed
to hurt. I think" . , . and here the Captain stares into
space, a million miles away as he tells it ... "a man
can be killed and never feel it."
12
THE MARK OF A HERO
ACTUALLY, a great deal was happening during
the time Captain Gatch was unconscious. The
bomb exploded into what the Captain later described
as "a veritable hail of fragments" he could see that
much in the split-second before he was knocked out.
Some of the fragments were so small as to be almost
invisible; others, he recalls, were "a pretty good size."
Ensign Warren Calhoun of Albert Lea, Minnesota,
fresh out of Annapolis, was on duty in Turret 2 when
the bomb struck. Lieutenant Stephen O'Rourke
(Annapolis, '39), Bronx-born New Yorker, was con-
trol officer in a secondary battery director. "It ex-
ploded upward like an umbrella or opening blossom,"
Ensign Calhoun relates. Lieutenant O'Rourke says:
"Hell's fire, I couldn't take my eyes off it until it ex-
ploded; then I ducked."
Lieutenant (j.g.) Gerald Sanford Norton (Annapo-
lis, '39) of Minneapolis, was watching through a
periscope from one of the turrets, which the young
officers scornfully call "air raid shelters" because
they're supposed to be so safe. He kept looking until
a fragment scored a bull's-eye on the periscope. The
77
78 Old Nameless
fragment traveled right on down the periscope, and
cut him on the head. "He picked himself up/' fellow
officers relate, "with most of the periscope in his lap."
Way up in the topmost part of the ship the sky
control tower Lieutenant Commander Milton Frank
Pavlic was watching the explosion. The force was so
terrific that a large fragment came sailing his way and
took off a piece of the bulwark shield one second after
he had ducked. "Gee," he said later, "I'm living on
borrowed time." There was macabre prophecy in this
remark, for Lieutenant Commander Pavlic was to
lose his life in the second engagement.
One man was killed the only man killed during
the entire action of October 2 6th. His was one of the
most inspiring stories of the battle. He was Hubert
Paul Chatelain, born February 11, 1917, at Monsura,
Louisiana. "Chat," as his fellow seamen called him,
was a Gunner's Mate, First Class. He had been in the
Navy since 1935, and had received the Good Conduct
Medal and the American Defense Service Medal.
Lieutenant Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr., who was in
charge of the gun crew where Chatelain was working,
tells the story of Chatelain's death:
"It was at a quad on the first superstructure deck.
A few men had already been wounded by strafing and
had been replaced. Chatelain, who was acting as a gun
captain, worked right on through.
"His job was to keep the ammunition moving on a
human chain to the guns. Move it he did. 'Pass the
The Mark of a Hero 79
ammunition. . . . Keep passing the ammunition. . . .
Pass the ammunition/ he kept repeating like an
automaton. The men didn't let up as long as they
could stand, and they could stand as long as they
weren't wounded: some stood even after they were hit.
" 'Pass the ammunition. . . . Keep passing the am-
munition. . . / The man kept it up until he was
hoarse. I might point out, incidentally, that we had
been at sea quite a while and hadn't been hearing any
songs about 'Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammuni-
tion/ so Chatelain wasn't borrowing a phrase from
any song. He was telling them what he wanted them
to do.
"Then a chunk of the same bomb that hit the Cap-
tain got him. It tore him up pretty badly. He was
mortally wounded, but he didn't die at once. He
recovered consciousness as they started carrying him
to the wardroom, and I heard him gasping through the
blood in his throat, 'Pass the ammunition Keep
passing the ammunition. . . . Pass the ammunition.'
"He lost consciousness again, but regained it for
a while in the wardroom after the doctors had worked
on him. He was pretty much out of his head, but he
kept on saying, 'Pass the ammunition. . . .'
" 'Pass the ammunition/ they told me, were his last
words."
In addition to the Captain, three men were
wounded seriously, and about fifty men in all were
injured during the entire battle. Two others might
8o Old Nameless
have been killed. They were the Officer of the Deck
and the Senior Aviator. They were standing on either
side of the Captain when the bomb exploded. They
flopped, and neither was hurt. The Skipper (who
later made his famous explanation: "The Captain of
a United States battleship considered it beneath his
dignity to flop for a damned Japanese bombl") didn't
duck, and it almost cost him his life.
A fragment a big chunk struck him in the neck,
severing his jugular vein. At the same time, the force
of the blast lifted him off his feet and hurled him
against the conning tower, knocking him unconscious.
The muscles of his left shoulder were torn, and his left
arm hung limp.
"My life, the Captain says, "was saved by two of
the Quartermasters. They ran to me immediately and
stemmed the flow of blood by putting pressure on my
severed vein with their fingers. They saved my life
with their fingers. If it were not for them, I unques-
tionably would have bled to death."
The two men were Chief Quartermaster Kenneth
F. Ziegler and Quartermaster First Class Edward
Joseph Nowak. Ziegler is a Kenton, Ohio, man and
Nowak hails from Chicago, and both were pre-Pearl
Harbor enlistees. If the Navy taught them anything,
it taught them to think quick. When they saw their
Skipper lying there with a hole "almost big enough
to put your fist in," and no doctor was in sight, they
knew something had to be done. So, like the little
The Mark of a Hero 81
Dutch boy who saved his town by plugging a hole in
the dike with his finger until help came, they knelt
down and, with their hands, they took turns at grimly
stanching the flow of blood from the Captain's jugular
vein until a doctor arrived.
In the meantime, Commander Uehlinger, the next-
in-command, was going into action. He, too, had left
his armored Batt II station and was out on the forward
catwalk when the bomb struck.
"The mass of attacking planes had been either shot
down or driven off, and it seemed that the attack was
over/' he tells the story. "The guns had ceased firing
because there was nothing in sight for them to shoot
at, when this one Jap plane dove out of the scud, nine
hundred feet ahead of us.
"Some of the 20 mms. forward started plugging at
him, but he dropped his bomb. I watched the thing
drop, and I didn't duck, either.
"That was the one that hit It seemed as if the
whole world was filled with black smoke and the dust
of debris. It left a taste in your throat as if you had
been drinking wine drawn through a corroded brass
spigot. You couldn't drink enough water to wash the
taste out.
"The noise was not particularly impressive. It was
a sort of crackling roar hard to describe."
The fate of the plane that scored the single hit is
one of the undetermined questions of the battle. Some
say it got away; others say it was shot down. Captain
8s Old Nameless
Gatch, who was knocked out, and Commander
Uehlinger, whose attention naturally was diverted
immediately after the explosion, were unable to tell.
"Immediately afterward/' Commander Uehlinger
picks up the story, "my chief yeoman reported to me
that Batt II had control.
"I took a quick look around and ordered a hard
left rudder. Soon the ship started swinging. I ordered
rudder amidships.
"Then word came through, 'Executive Officer re-
port to the navigation bridge immediately Execu-
tive Officer report to the navigation bridge immedi-
ately/
"I still didn't know just what was wrong, but I could
guess. I practically dove down the ladder and made
my way to the bridge.
"I saw a man lying there. He was more red than
white. It was Captain Gatch. You could hardly recog-
nize him for the blood. The navigator, Commander
Bob Wadell, was standing there, too, a bandage twisted
around his hand, which was dripping blood. Chief
Quartermaster Ziegler was leaning over the Skipper
at the time, and the other man was standing by."
Commander Uehlinger's stomach turned to stone
as he saw the Skipper lying there, but he didn't even
pause to ask if he were alive or dead. Old Nameless
had to be brought under control.
"I practically stepped over the Captain on my way
The Mark of a Hero 83
to the catwalk," he continues. "God, it was brutal-
brutal as hell but it had to be that way."
As Commander Uehlinger went by, Captain Gatch
opened his eyes and, exerting great effort, summoned
enough strength to speak. He asked one question. It
was: "Is the ship hurt?"
That question alone i nothing else had distin-
guished Tom Gatch during the great battle was the
mark of a hero.
*3
THE SKIPPER GETS A MEDAL
IN the next fifteen minutes," Commander Uehlinger
continues the story, "I think I twisted the ship's
tail getting into formation more than the Captain did
during the entire battle.
"You read a lot about heroics, about how men act
in the face of death or danger. But you don't really
know what it's all about until you've seen it happen.
As long as I live, I never shall forget some of the
things I witnessed on October 26th: the Captain's
asking, when he was literally more dead than alive,
'Is the ship hurt?'; the Doctor moving calmly through
the bombing; the heedlessness to danger that the en-
listed men at the gun stations displayed.
"They got so they'd even break all the rules and
argue with you if you tried to relieve them. Just after
I took over command of the ship, I sent for the turret
officer to come and relieve the deck officer, who was
pretty badly shaken. Young Lieutenant Norton, the
turret officer, came right up, and his head was drip-
ping blood. He had an ugly wound where he had been
hit by the fragment that had gone down the periscope.
84
The Skipper Gets a Medal 85
" 'Good Lord, man!' I told him. 'Get down to sick
bay/
" 'No, Sir!' he answered me. Tm going to stay here,
Sir/
"And he did for three hours/'
The attack was over, and Old Nameless headed for
port. The bomb that struck her turret, killing the
gunner's mate and wounding Captain Gatch and the
others, made little impression as far as physical dam-
age to the ship was concerned. The damage was
superficial, and required very little repair work.
It had been a great victory for Old Nameless. The
carrier which she was specifically protecting was safe,
although, in another phase of the same action, a
second carrier, the Hornet, was so seriously damaged
that United States warships later had to sink her to
prevent the possibility of her falling into enemy hands.
But Old Nameless had made history. Eighty-four
planes had come out against her. Forty did not go
back, and the official account credits her with shooting
down thirty-two of them with her own guns. If this
record of plane destruction by a battleship in a single
engagement ever has been exceeded, it does not ap-
pear in the known naval records.
She was blooded now; she was a damn fine ship, and
her men, who formerly had looked upon her as a swell
piece of fighting machinery, now began to love her as
if she were human. If Old Nameless could only talk,
86 Old Nameless
you could imagine her grinning as she headed home
after the battle, and saying to herself: "Nice job, old
girl, if I do say so myself. So I got a black eye so
what? You should see the other fellow all thirty-two
of him!"
Down in sick bay, the wounded, some of them
seventeen-year-old youngsters, were as game a lot as
you could ask for. Chaplain Claypoole, whose station
is in sick bay, wrote in his official report:
"There was no screaming, no hysterics; the
wounded merely moaned, never shouted. In age
groups seventeen to forty and in racial stock, the
men were a cross-section of America. There were
Negroes, Filipinos, and white men of all racial types.
They all were inspiring."
Even the more badly wounded were proud. They
were proud of their ship, proud of their crew, and,
above all, proud as hell of their Captain. Later, when
the ship had reached port and the worst cases were
taken to a hospital ship, the men, Chaplain Claypoole
wrote further, were more concerned about Captain
Gatch than they were about themselves, and they
begged "to be returned aboard if Captain Gatch was
to retain command."
Primitivo Neyra was a case. The steward burst in
on Captain Gatch before they reached port. The Cap-
tain was just conscious enough to remember Primitivo
The Skipper Gets a Medal 87
wildly imploring him not to go to the hospital ship;
he was afraid that, if the Captain left Old Nameless,
they might not let him come back, and he also was
sure that he, Primitive, could do as good a nursing job
for the Skipper as anybody they'd have on the hospital
ship! When they ran him out of the room, Primitivo,
who had faced the Japs' machine-gun fire without
flinching, burst into tears outside the Captain's door.
An incident that sticks in Captain Catch's memory
illustrating the irrelevant tricks a man's mind can
play even in time of great stress is a flash of concern
he had, at the height of danger, over the "Captain's
boy," Harry Woody.
"I thought he had been in a spot that was com-
pletely wiped out," he says, "and I remember saying
to myself, 'Poor Harry.' Some time after I was
wounded I looked up and there was Harry."
At eight o'clock on the evening of the 26th, they
paused briefly with the clean-up work aboard Old
Nameless to bury Hubert Paul Chatelain, who had
died while exhorting the men to pass the ammunition.
They wrapped him in weighted canvas, and his body
rested for a moment on the deck of the ship he loved,
while Chaplain Claypoole read the funeral service and
a group of officers, including the Executive Officer,
who represented the wounded Captain, stood at at-
tention. The flag of the United States for which he
had died covered him while the chaplain prayed for
88 Old Nameless
his soul. Then it was lifted, and Hubert Paul Chate-
lain was buried at sea the burial of a sailor and a
fighting man.
Old Nameless reached a port in the South Pacific
a few days after the battle. Some of the details of the
battle in retrospect are best obtained from Vice
Admiral Calhoun, who, as a member of Admiral
Halsey's staff, saw her immediately.
"I read all the reports, and I was one of the first
officers to board the ship/' Vice Admiral Calhoun says.
"The bomb had struck her turret, but, except where
a fragment had caused slight damage to one of her
heavy guns, it had inflicted no more harm than a flea
would on an elephant. Major de Seversky please take
note!
"Regarding that particular fight, the report of the
task force commander a rather senior and experi-
enced admiral said that the personal conduct of
Gatch and his brilliant tactical handling of the ship
unquestionably had saved the carrier he was protect-
ing. This is a matter of fact not conjecture."
Vice Admiral Calhoun went to church the follow-
ing Sunday on the quarter-deck of Old Nameless.
Because of his long and close friendship with Captain
Gatch, the Admiral was asked by Chaplain Claypoole
to tell the crew of the Captain's condition. The public
address system, instead of being hooked up merely
for the quarter-deck, was connected so every one on
The Skipper Gets a Medal 89
the ship, down in the belly and up in the towers, could
hear.
"The cheers, the continued cheers, and the con-
tinuing cheers that came from every part of the ship
when I told them that their Captain was going to get
well, and when I brought them an absolute promise
from Admiral Halsey that Captain Gatch would not
be relieved and would keep command of his ship, told
the world how that hard-boiled, hard-fighting outfit
loved him," Admiral Calhoun relates.
"There in front of me that morning I saw the rule
proved that the bravest are often the most tender.
There were tears in the eyes of many of the men who
stood on the quarter-deck at church service that morn-
ing."
The Admiral's own eyes were damp, too.
For a man who had been so gravely wounded, Cap-
tain Gatch got well with almost miraculous speed,
although he complained that "the ship got patched
up before I did." Blood transfusions given him by his
men (they would have throttled any doctor who might
have suggested giving the Skipper a transfusion from
a blood bank built up by anonymous donors) helped
him regain his strength, and the rest was pretty much
a matter of sheer will-power. His neck was operated
on, and the wound started healing with unbelievable
rapidity. His left arm remained in a sling (the neck
injury apparently had affected the nerves controlling
go Old Nameless
the arm, and months later it still was disabled), but
Captain Gatch was up and ready for more.
"I can't stay in bed," he told the doctors. 'I'm afraid
there's going to be a fight, and I do not intend to
miss it."
There was one scene one day that no one aboard
Old Nameless who witnessed it ever will forget. It was
the day the Captain left the ship to go aboard the
San Francisco and get the Navy Cross from Admiral
Halsey.
The word was passed throughout the ship that the
Old Man had left to get the Navy Cross from the
Admiral, and that he would be back aboard at a cer-
tain time. Every man aboard wanted to see him come
back with the medal, but they knew they couldn't
leave their posts without permission. An announce-
ment was made that those who could be spared for a
few minutes could leave their stations at the time of
his return.
When the signal was given, the men and officers
started streaming out of every hatch. Up from the
shaft alleys and engine-rooms they came, their faces
streaked with dirt and dust and sweat; some of them
shirtless; some of them still bandaged; every mother's
son among them wearing a smile you could hang the
moon on.
A bos'n started a formal cheer, "Hip, hip, hooray!"
But it didn't get very far before it broke into wild
yelling, whistling, and hat-tossing. On and on it went;
The Skipper Gets a Medal 91
it just wouldn't stop. It frightened the seagulls on the
near-by shore, and they flapped through the air like
feathery bits of tropical confetti.
An old-time officer on deck said to young Lieuten-
ant Shriver: "I'd give my right arm if I could live long
enough to earn half of that reception."
The Captain stopped on the quarter-deck. The
coveted medal was on his chest. He hadn't been up
long, and his knees were none too Steady. His left arm
hung in its black sling, but he wore that sling as a
badge of honor. His shoulders were straight, and his
eyes moved slowly from one end of the cheering crowd
to the other. When the pandemonium finally died
down, he made a speech. It was a one-sentence speech.
In his gruffest voice, he said:
"Well, they pinned this medal on me because I'm
the Captain, but you're the people who really earned
it."
14
"VIRTUALLY ANNIHILATED"-
(TOKYO STYLE)
TIT THEN Captain Gatch had said he was afraid
V V there was going to be a fight and he did not
intend to miss it, he was entirely right. Old Nameless,
who already had proved her worth against air attack,
was destined less than three weeks later to enter a night
naval action that was to make the earlier engagement,
harrowing as it had been, seem a pleasant picnic by
comparison. The great ship was destined to take ter-
rific blows this time, though again she was to hand put
punishment in a crushingly greater proportion than
she had to absorb. Many brave men were to be maimed
and killed in this coming action, among them two
heroic officers Lieutenant Commander John Edward
Burke and Lieutenant Commander Pavlic, who, in
the words of Captain Gatch, "were the ones most
immediately responsible for beating off the air attack
in the first engagement."
Lieutenant Commander Burke was the sky control
officer, and Lieutenant Commander Pavlic was the
machine-gun officer on Old Nameless. There were no
words that Captain Gatch and his fellow-officers could
9*
"Virtually Annihilated" -{Tokyo Style) 93
offer that were in too great praise of their coolness and
ability in the first fight and in the second battle up to
the time they were killed.
Burke, thirty-seven years old at the time of his
death, was a native of Bismarck, North Dakota, and
an Annapolis graduate of 1928. Among his various
duties, which included flying service, he once served
aboard the U.S.S. Wasp, the aircraft carrier which had
played a heroic part in the relief of Malta and which,
like the Hornet, sent her share of Japs to the bottom
of the sea before she finally was lost in action in the
Solomons.
Pavlic was born in Trieste, Italy, thirty-three years
ago. He was just one of thousands of Americans of
Italian birth who are fighting bravely for their
adopted country against the Fascism that has betrayed
their motherland. He was brought up in Rittman,
Ohio, and was educated there and in Cleveland, be-
fore entering the Naval Academy in 1928 and gradu-
ating in 1932.
Whatever Captain Gatch thought about the fight
to come, there was no minimizing the net importance
of the fight that had been. It was a tremendous thrill
to the folks back home when, on November sgth,
Secretary Knox announced that the Japanese fleet had
withdrawn; that the "First Round" was over and the
decision was ours, and that our forces were still occu-
pying "every inch of ground" they ever held, while
"waiting for the second round to start."
94 Old Nameless
When the score for October 26th was added up
later, it was revealed that the Japanese on that day
had suffered damage to two aircraft carriers (one a
Zuikaku, meaning "Lucky Stork/* which in this case
was not a very prophetic name), one battleship, be-
lieved to be of the Kongo class, and five cruisers, and
that more than one hundred planes had been de-
stroyed and fifty others damaged.
At the same time, corrected losses for a previous
action of October nth and 12th near Savo revealed
the sinking of four enemy cruisers, five destroyers and
a loaded transport, and the damaging of two other
cruisers.
The Japanese could not hold up under punishment
such as this and had to withdraw for a regrouping of
their battered naval forces. In fact, it was such a crush-
ing defeat that one Yoji Hirota, a Japanese embassy
spokesman in Shanghai, took to the air and announced
to the world that "a well-prepared American counter-
offensive in the Solomons was beaten back by the
Japanese Navy." He added that the United States
Pacific fleet really was just "a tin-plated Navy/' and
assured all the Sons of the Rising Sun that "no mat-
ter how intensive the United States efforts are to
rebuild her Navy, her seapower never will be ade-
quate to fight the Japanese Navy/'
Just how this news was received by Japanese radio
listeners, who already had gloomily heard on their
"Virtually Annihilated' 9 -{Tokyo Style) 95
regimented receivers how Major Jimmy Doolittle's
boys really hadn't done any important military dam-
age over Tokyo but had just shot up a few houses and
shrines and so forth, is, of course, a matter for con-
jecture. For its part, the "tin-plated" Pacific fleet
didn't mind it a bit, for it already had been "virtually
annihilated" or "completely annihilated" two or three
times by the Japanese radio, and it was getting used
to it.
The Americans didn't waste their hard-earned
breathing spell on Guadalcanal. "Flying box cars"
came in over the disorderly, jungled mass of moun-
tains, and ships braved Jap submarines to bring in
supplies and reinforcements. The Marines and dough-
boys labored under the palm trees, whose abused
fronds had been chewed ragged by Jap bombs and
shellfire. They patched up the craters in Henderson
Field, and they became even more adept at diving for
their fox-holes and slit trenches when Joe Jap flew
over.
The Japs kept landing reinforcements at frightful
costs and the Marines and doughboys kept pushing
them back. It wasn't all gravy on the American side,
by any means, for the Navy took some serious losses,
as was subsequently disclosed, and the fighting men
on land were mercilessly pounded by night and day.
But they refused to be licked, and, whenever the
enemy would push forward a bloody inch, the Ameri-
96 Old Nameless
cans would rally to push him back an inch and one*
eighth.
On November 7th, American troops protecting the
east approach to Henderson Field counter-attacked
against the Japanese and won some valuable territory.
Interesting statistics began to come out. By this date,
a "minimum" of 5,188 Jap bodies had been counted
by the Americans, a figure which did not include the
considerable Japanese casualties behind their own
lines. Indeed, the smell of the Japanese dead, decaying
in the underbrush of the lush jungle, hung constantly
over the fighting zones.
American losses for the same period were about
one thousand, which would seem to indicate that
there's some sense to that adage about one American
soldier being the equal of quite a few Japs. Compara-
tively few Jap prisoners were taken, for, as Major
General Vandegrift said later, "You can't take a man
prisoner who won't surrender."
Some of the Japanese plane losses were astounding.
In three days between September 35th-s>8th, forty-two
Jap planes were shot down without a single United
States loss; that set some kind of record. At least 529
Japanese planes had been destroyed up to Novem-
ber 7th.
On November 8th, the Japanese got a little bold
with their ships, and American fliers pounced on
them. A cruiser and two destroyers were hit, and two
were believed sunk.
"Virtually Annihilated" (Tokyo Style) 97
On November nth, just by way of celebrating
Armistice Day, General MacArthur sent over some
Flying Fortresses to visit the bomb-battered Buin-
Faisi naval anchorage at the southern tip of Bougain-
ville Island, where the Japs would make their
persistent efforts to assemble armadas and to get things
going. Result: they blew hell out of four Japanese
transports 37,000 tons loaded with troops and
equipment.
On the igth, a United States naval task force went
into action and walloped Japanese positions near
Tassafronga, twelve and one-half miles west of Hen-
derson Field. This sortie was a lulu. The Jap shore
batteries were silenced, and thirty large landing boats
were destroyed. Thirty-one Japanese planes twenty-
three torpedo bombers and eight escorting Zeros-
roared in to stop our Naval bombardment, but the
Grumman Wildcats from our carriers were ready for
them. The Wildcats clawed down sixteen torpedo
bombers and five Zeros; our ships shot down nine
more, and, in all, only one Jap plane got away.
When our ships pulled away, Buin-Faisi was a
blazing mess, with exploded supply and munition
dumps crackling in a manner our boys described as
"merrily." Our Ijoys were pounding each other on
the back and yelling, "So sollyl" all over the place.
The blackest note from our side was the fact that one
of the Japanese planes had fallen in flames on the
deck of the San Francisco, a heavy cruiser which was
g8 Old Nameless
to distinguish herself brilliantly in the big sea battle
that was to follow, "Slight damage" to the ship was
reported, but thirty of the crew members were killed.
Against this background, the Japanese had to do
something desperate and do it quick else they were
in danger of getting kicked entirely off the map in this
battle area. So, ignoring their staggering losses, they
made a final, all-out effort to land large reinforce-
ments on Guadalcanal. They supported it with all
the ships they could muster. They didn't know it at
the time, but they were building up to the greatest
disaster any naval power had suffered since Jutland.
THE STAGE IS SET
ON November 10, 1942, the stage was set for the
grand climax of the Battle of Guadalcanal.
The hungry Pacific, licking at the once obscure,
now important, little islands and atolls, fondly patting
the treacherous coral reefs that had provided its
capacious belly with so many morsels of wrecked ships,
was ready, too. It was to be well fed before the action
was over, and the diet was to be mainly Japanese.
The story of the great naval battle that led to the
ultimate smashing of the Japanese menace to Guadal-
canal is as complex as a difficult symphony. There are
so many movements, so many intricate contrapuntal
passages, so many players, that it is difficult to draw
it all out.
It is a great symphony and a complete one. There
is the broad dominant theme, played by full orchestra:
the destruction of the Japanese threat to the crucial
bastion in the Pacific. There are the wistful and
whimsical overtones, to be picked up by the reeds and
strings: the smell of gardenias that floated out to sea
from the troubled tropical islands to haunt the men
on Old Nameless until the smell of gunpowder and
99
ioo Old Nameless
blood and fire the brass came to drive it away. There
are the comic themes for bassoon: the story of the
"endless hose" and the rollicking picture of brave
men unwittingly scrambling underneath one another
to seek cover from shells, then laughing about it.
There are the brief flashes of sickening, brutal ugli-
ness: the shock to men on coming in contact with the
severed limbs of their comrades, or on being tripped
up by the unraveled intestines of some dead friend.
And, above it all, is the ever dominant theme of nobil-
ity and bravery: men continuing to stand up and fight
though cruelly maimed by enemy fire, or in the face
of almost certain death.
But it is not an easy symphony to follow. The score
does not unfold itself in one playing. To comprehend
it is something like listening to snatches of it played
on different records by different conductors and trying
to piece it all together. The records have to be syn-
chronized, and passages have to be repeated, before
the full significance of the score sinks in.
To begin with, there is the Navy's bare, factual state-
ment as to what actually happened: First, there was
the discovery by our air reconnaissance that the Japa-
nese warships, transports, and cargo vessels were
concentrating in the New Britain-Northwestern Solo-
mons region. It was quite clear that there was going
to be a massive attempt to recapture the positions held
by the Americans in the Guadalcanal-Tulagi area of
the Southeastern Solomons. General MacArthur's
The Stage Is Set 101
bombers dealt out the severe punishment earlier de-
scribed, but still the spearhead of the Japanese attack
a naval force composed of two battleships of the
Kongo class and a number of other vessels, believed to
have included two heavy cruisers, four light cruisers,
and about ten destroyers reached the Guadalcanal
area shortly after midnight on the morning of No-
vember i3th.
They intended to bombard the American shore
positions and then, when the United States forces were
pulverized, to cover landing operations by troops
huddled on a waiting armada of transports. But
American fleet units moved in, engaged the Japanese
in a furious short-range battle, and the Japanese war*
ships what was left of them withdrew.
That was the Navy outline of the first phase. To it
should be added some word of the hopeless confusion
in which the addled Japanese admirals found them-
selves at one stage of their hot reception. Apparently
they hadn't expected what they stumbled into, and,
during the latter part of the battle, two of the three
attacking groups got so mixed up they actually were
firing at each other. Shortly after, the enemy fire
ceased and the battered Japanese armada withdrew.
To it also should be added something of the heroic
story of Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan and the
San Francisco. "Uncle Dan" Callaghan, as President
Roosevelt used to call him when the Admiral was the
President's naval aide, was the 52-year-old com-
102 Old Nameless
mander of a United States task force, and the San
Francisco was the heavy cruiser that had distinguished
herself just previously in the raid on Buin-Faisi, when
the Japanese plane fell on her deck and killed thirty
of the crew. "Uncle Dan" sailed into a Japanese force
that was attempting to screen a group of transports.
His cruiser sank an enemy cruiser and destroyer with
lightning salvos. Then he courageously took his hope-
lessly out-gunned io,ooo-ton cruiser into a slugging
match with a 25,ooo-ton battleship. He engaged her
at 2,000 yards and peppered her with eighteen hits
until a shell from a 14-inch gun hit the bridge and
killed him.
The Japanese ship was left a battered hulk and was
later sunk, while the San Francisco, though severely
punished, lived to fight again. Captain Cassin Young,
commander of Admiral Callaghan's flagship, was
killed at the same time. A thirty-one-year-old officer,
Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless, was on
the bridge with the Admiral and the Captain, and was
knocked unconscious by the same blast. He came to
shortly after, however, and, although groggy, he kept
the San Francisco in battle at the head of her column.
He led this particular American column right through
lines of enemy warships.. This was the audacious
maneuver that so surprised the Japs that they began
firing at each other.
The damaged Japanese ships were unrelentingly
pounded by United States aircraft during the day of
The Stage Is Set 103
November i3th, but, by later afternoon, a large forma-
tion of at least twelve enemy transports, under heavy
naval escort, again headed toward Guadalcanal from
the Bougainville area. At midnight, the enemy surface
force bombarded American positions on Guadalcanal
as a preliminary to the attempted landing. Our air
force struck back hard, and at least eight of the trans-
ports were sunk. The remaining transports and their
escort continued toward the island.
Shortly after midnight on the morning of Novem-
ber i5th, the task force of which Old Nameless was a
part caught up with the Japs. More disaster for the
Japanese ensued, and, when the battle was over, the
current menace to the island was definitely ended.
While the naval fight was on, American land forces
on the island were busy killing half of a Japanese force
of fifteen hundred which was threatening our posi-
tions to the east of the airfield. They ran the remain-
ing seyen hundred and fifty off into the jungle.
When the score for the three-day action was
counted, it appeared that the Japanese had lost
twenty-eight ships sunk and ten damaged, with a total
loss of life estimated at a minimum of twenty-five
thousand to a maximum of forty thousand men.
This, then, is the bare outline of the epic battle. It
was fought by American sailors against great numeri-
cal odds (the Japs, for instance, had four battleships
participating in the engagement, against our two).
They had come up against the rice-eating, Emperor-
104 Old Nameless
worshiping fanatics, and had shown clearly who were
the best men.
The attitude of the United States officers and men
was an interesting chapter in itself. The officers, as
will be shown repeatedly by incidents related in later
chapters, were almost coolly contemptuous of danger.
That jeering phrase, "So sorry, please!" became their
battle-cry. (When the battle was all over, one of them
said: "All of us agree that the Japs die beautifully
so sorry!") Their feeling about their men might be
summed up best in a letter which Rear Admiral Nor-
man Scott, fifty-three years old and leader of another
American task force, who was killed in the battle,
wrote to his wife. Telling her of a visit he made to a
hospital ship in the early days of the Solomons cam-
paign, Admiral Scott it was one of his last letters-
wrote:
"Not once during the entire visit was I answered
with a grumble or a bellyache or a whine, but in-
variably with a grin or at least with an attempt at
one.
"Sometimes the answer would be low, and I would
lean well over to make the conversation easier going.
It might take a few seconds, and then I would hear,
Tm doing pretty well, thank you, Sir/ One like that,
and your heart goes right out to him.
"It is the custom in the Navy to remove one's cap
in the sick bay. Mine will always be off to those men."
As for the enlisted men, they showed their unswerv-
The Stage Is Set 105
ing loyalty to duty and to their officers but this
loyalty was demonstrated to be based on respect and
genuine liking, not servility. Time and time again
during the battle, incidents came up where enlisted
men and officers risked their lives for one another, and
the enlisted men working near the Captain or the
"Exec" were not afraid to ask questions, yell bits of
information, or even, when it was all over, refer to
the Skipper as "a good egg/'
It was an admirable spirit, and it produced ad-
mirable results. Now let the individual men the con-
ductors and the players of the orchestra of Old Name-
lesscome in and tell in their own phrases how the
Jap fleet went down.
ib
BEAR" IN A FOX TRAP
GATCH takes up the story. As Chap-
lain Claypoole would say, it begins as a "law-
yer's" story "cold, calculating, impassive." But it
doesn't stay that way for long, for the recollection of
the heroic events that took place out there on the
Pacific that morning, the memory of the deeds per-
formed by the men he had trained, forms too vivid a
picture to be submerged in monosyllables and statis-
tics. Not even Tom Gatch, the modest Skipper and
the master of understatement, can keep it entirely
cold.
"It was the morning of November the 15th, at ten
minutes past midnight, when the action started," the
Captain begins. "The night was remarkably clear,
although there was only a quarter-moon. . , ."
The Captain, it may be remarked, was feeling cocky
as all hell. He had a hard time keeping the grin from
his purposeful, hard-set face as he walked his own
bridge, in command of his own ship and his own
crew. For ten days he had hollered that he wanted to
get up and back into the fight, but he never was
exactly sure that they would permit him up so soon,
106
"Beat" in a Fox Trap 107
and, being a Navy man, he knew that i his superiors
said, "No," it would have to be that way.
But the battle was heavy, and they needed Tom
Gatch. He could stand and he could command, so
they decided to send him back in. His left arm still
hung useless in a black sling, but, as Rear Admiral
Willis Augustus Lee, the weather-beaten Kentuckian
who communicated to Gatch his orders to get back
into the fight, dryly told him: "Go ahead and take
her out I don't expect you'll have to strangle the
Japs." Gatch kept a straight face when the Admiral
gave him his blessing, but inside of him his feelings
were dancing a jig.
"For several days," Captain Gatch continues, "the
Japs had made attempts to throw reinforcements into
Guadalcanal. We had information from our fliers that
another large convoy was steaming in that direction.
Admiral Halsey decided to put some o our new
battleships in their way.
"That, of course, was a very nervy thing" and here
it was the poker-faced "lawyer" summing up again
"but I am not aware of any victory of any conse-
quence ever being won without chances being taken.*'
It was an odd and incongruous night for a great
battle. It was drowsily warm and peaceful, and the
quarter-moon of which the Captain spoke reminded
many of the young seamen of romantic nights back
home.. Indeed, there was so much moonlight that some
io8 Old Nameless
of the boys, in talking about it now, remember that
"there was a big moon," although the methodical Cap-
tain was very specific in his recollection of the quarter-
moon.
Then there was the smell of gardenias, powerful,
almost cloying, coming to the ship miles out to sea.
It was wafted on the balmy breeze from Florida Island,
several miles off the port beam. "The night was very
calm and the whole scene was hushed," muses slender,
slight Tom Page, a Greensburg, Pennsylvania, lad who
was a First Class Seaman aboard Old Nameless, in
telling about it. "The association of gardenias with
the action that followed five minutes later is so vivid
that I never want to smell another gardenia as long as
I live."
John P. Buck, Chaplain's Yeoman, of Athens, Ohio,
remembers those gardenias, too. Buck, a quiet fellow,
ordinarily was assigned to duty in the library, but,
when there was a fight on, he stood watch at the sta-
tion known to sea-faring men as the "shout" lookout
(the surface, horizon and lower sky lookout station,
below the after main battery direction finder). "It
was very, very quiet," the Chaplain's Yeoman recalls.
"The gardenia smell came in so strong that I thought
it was a gas attack [some poison gases smell like cer-
tain flowers] and started to put on my gas mask!"
Old Nameless and her flotilla bore down from the
north, circled the pinpoint isle of Savo, and steamed
into a treacherous strait between Savo and Guadal-
no Old Nameless
canal. This was the strait which the sailors called
"Windy Gulch" or "Windy Corner" because it was
the hot spot the "Hellfire Pass" of the Solomons.
"We got into a far corner, where they could not
evade us, and we slowed down," the Captain relates.
"We found no Japs, although we knew they were
somewhere about, waiting for us.
"You see, they had set a trap. But instead of trying
to keep out of it, we were trying to find it. We wanted
to get into it and get 'caught/ because we knew the
Japs weren't expecting any big game like us.
"They had set their trap for foxes. We knew we
were bear, and we didn't think their damned little
trap would hold bear."
So, southeast of Savo, Old Nameless and her sisters
paced the strait, waiting for the Japs to start in. Their
steam was up, the dim battle lights were on, and every
man was at his station, keyed up and tense as the
full-wound spring of a fine Swiss watch.
Then they saw the Japs.
From far-off, the lookouts of Old Nameless spotted
them through the cloudless night. They came along
like stupid ducks in a park pond first a heavy cruiser
of the Mogami type (so large that, in heat of battle,
it is often mistaken for a battleship), and two other
somewhat smaller cruisers. The Mogami if the Japs
had been honest about following the terms of the
London naval treaty would be a io,ooo-tonner, but
United Nations naval men have reason to believe it is
"Bear" in a Fox Trap 111
at least 50 per cent heavier. The other "ducks" were
regular io,oooton cruisers.
It was such a perfect set-up for a killing that it was
almost unsportsmanlike. The Japs weren't even in
battle formation.
"Evidently, they weren't expecting anything to
happen," Captain Gatch relates. "They were in a
column movement as if they were parading for the
Emperor. It was not a fighting formation at all."
Thus the grimly waiting American battlewagons
were able to execute that cherished naval maneuver
known as "crossing the TV " This is a beautiful
maneuver on paper, but the enemy doesn't often give
you a chance to employ it. The easiest way to under-
stand it is this. Imagine a vast blackboard: that was
the ocean. Imagine the vertical line of a "T": that
was the Jap column. Imagine the crossing of a "T":
that was a line of withering, accurate fire from the
American warships. It was as simple as that.
"We ["we" meaning Old Nameless] spotted them
first, or thought we had," Captain Gatch relates. He
is a bit rueful about it; he'd had his heart set on
capturing the honor of firing the first big gun an
American battlewagon had used in a purely naval
engagement since the Spanish-American War.
"It's traditional to let the Admiral's flagship fire the
first shot, so we flashed word to Admiral Lee that
we'd seen enemy ships. 'Go ahead and fire when you're
ready,' he answered us."
112 Old Nameless
Praise be, the Captain thought to himself! He was
going to get to fire the first shot after all. But the
Admiral's message had hardly come through and the
order to fire was just on Captain Catch's lips when
the guns of the flagship spoke, nosing out Old Name-
less by about ninety seconds!
"A dry fellow, Admiral Lee!" Captain Gatch wryly
comments.
'7
THE BIG GUNS SPEAK
fTTlHE 1 6-inch guns of Old Nameless swung to drop
JL. their monstrous projectiles at the enemy. They
were "on the beam." When the big guns spoke, Cap-
tain Gatch relates, the Japs "never knew just what
sank 'em!"
Two of the ships were hit by the very first shots
fired from the American batteries. The third was hit
immediately after. The big leading cruiser burst into
flames and illuminated the scene. The Captain could
see one of the others "seem to break in two."
In a desperate effort to see just what was hitting
them, the Japanese ships fired a salvo of "star shells"
calcium flares on parachutes. They burned fiercely
with an intense white flame for a minute or two, but
they were hopelessly out of range, and fell thousands
of yards short. The Jap guns also popped off.
"Ineffectual," the Captain says. "Nowhere near us."
The Captain hastens to add that he does not under-
estimate the Japanese as fighters.
"They are very skilful in many respects in handling
their ships and aircraft," he says. "But I have an idea
that when something goes haywire with the carrying
"3
ii4 Old Nameless
out of their preconceived plans, they get all flustered.
"They certainly were thrown off their stride in the
action off Savo that night. While they fought hard
and inflicted damage in the remainder of the battle,
their tactics seemed to be more desperate than aggres-
sive. The same thing has been demonstrated in other
battles of the war."
Chaplain's Yeoman Buck, standing duty at the sur-
face, horizon and lower sky lookout station, had seen
the enemy ships coming on. He reported them. He
then stood there to see what was going to happen. He
was about sixty-five feet from the muzzle of the big
guns.
"The turrets were trained around to starboard," he
related. "I stood there relaxed.
"All of a sudden, those big i6-inchers went off.
I flew clear inside the compartment and lit flat on my
back. My helmet popped off my head and flew about
thirty feet. It hit a bulkhead. I got up. I couldn't see.
'My God, I'm blind!' I said to myself.
"In about fifteen minutes, I guess it was, I began
to see again. During this time I had been groping
around for my steel helmet. I finally found it and put
it on. Way after the battle was over, I found I hadn't
picked up my own at all. It was some other guy's.
Where it came from I don't know."
Twenty-three-year-old Melvin McSpadden, Seaman
First Class, from Sioux City, Iowa, stood near Captain
Gatch on the bridge. The Captain was inside the con-
The Big Guns Speak 115
ning tower this time; the "brass hats" had warned him
he'd better not get himself shot up on the catwalk
again.
Melvin McSpadden fastened the speaking system on
his head and silently cursed himself for being afraid.
"I wish I was home," he kept saying to himself, and he
couldn't get the notion out of his head. He watched
Captain Gatch talking to the Navigator, Commander
Wadell, as they walked calmly back and forth in the
vault-like steel room. They might have been made of
ice for all the excitement they displayed. "One thing,"
McSpadden said to himself, "I'll sure know what the
hell is going on."
As the bridge "talker," McSpadden took the reports
from all areas of the ship, relayed them directly to the
Captain, then reported back the Captain's orders to
each station. When he got a second's breather, which
wasn't often, he would jump to the tiny slits in the
sixteen-inch armor a good-sized package wouldn't go
through the openings and take a peek at what was
cooking outside. Once in a while, if the Skipper or
the Navigator weren't using the periscope, he'd press
his eye against the sponge rubber rim. Through the
moon-drenched night he could get a glimpse of a big
bulk ahead, which he knew was the Admiral's battle-
ship. Somewhere up in front, he knew, three fast
American destroyers were leading the way.
Almost three hours had gone by since Old Nameless
and her flotilla had set out. The ship's clock had come
n6 Old Nameless
to 2400 midnight and ten minutes more had passed.
Suddenly over the circuit, piercing into McSpadden's
ears like a splinter from an iceberg, came a nerveless
voice from the plotting-room:
"Three ships, bearing 330 degrees, target 18,300,
bearing 330 degrees. . . ."
Slowly . . . slowly ... the target came closer. "Wish
I was home, wish I was home/' said Melvin McSpad-
den. There was more talk between the conning tower
and plotting-room, between Catch's and the Admiral's
ship. Then from the other ship came Admiral Lee's
"Fire when you're ready." "Target 19,000 yards, bear-
ing 245," came the voice from "plotting/' McSpadden
thought the voice sounded a shade less nerveless now.
The Captain jerked his head toward McSpadden and
said: "Tell them they can fire now."
Almost as he relayed the command, McSpadden
could hear a great hissing sound. The gun crews were
blowing compressed air through the barrels of the
1 6-inch guns to clear them before loading. Seconds
later there was a mighty roar. The ship, as a junior
officer later put it,, "leaped as if she'd been goosed."
Captain Catch and the Navigator were jarred away
from their positions at the periscope. It didn't seem
to make the Captain mad; quite to the contrary, he
seemed grimly happy. No one in the control room
could tell for a moment just what had happened.
Then the voices started rushing in over the phone.
"Right on!"
The Big Guns Speak 117
"My God, the damn thing has dissolved!"
"Looked like a cruiser."
"That was a battleship."
More time passed. Things were happening so fast
that Melvin McSpadden couldn't keep track of all the
things he did do. He'd been too busy to think about
wishing he were home when all at once there was an
ear-splitting, pulverizing explosion. The bottom
seemed to drop out of the world and out of Melvin
McSpadden's stomach. "Lord, let me out and I'll
change my ways!" McSpadden said it out loud.
He dashed to a slit and looked out. The battleship
ahead seemed to be in flames. "Lord . . . Lord . . .
Lord!" McSpadden groaned. Then a voice came over
the earphones, reporting that it wasn't the battleship
but one of the destroyers. The Japs had managed to
score a direct hit, and flames from the destroyer were
leaping skyward. It was the reflection of the flames on
the great sides of the dreadnaught ahead that made
McSpadden and hundreds of others aboard Old
Nameless think for a few moments that the big ship
herself had been hit.
In the conning tower, Captain Gatch called for a
statimeter reading to determine the distance to Ad-
miral Lee's battleship. A lieutenant tried to take a
reading through the narrow slit in the armor. It
would have been hard enough by day, but it was vir-
tually impossible at night.
"What the hell kind of crew have we got when I
n8 Old Nameless
can't even get a statimeter reading?" the Captain
growled. He wasn't sore at the lieutenant; he was just
expressing his irritation at the circumstances. McSpad-
den knew this, but, as he peered silently out into the
night, he couldn't help feeling sorry for the poor
lieutenant*
Over the phone came the warning from the look-
out: "Destroyer sinking on our starboard bow." The
Captain ordered right rudder, and the helmsman
swung the wheel. Old Nameless skirted the sinking
vessel and swung back on her course. "Increase speed
to 23 knots," the Captain ordered. McSpadden stepped
away from the periscope and peered over the lee
helmsman's shoulder as the speed climbed higher.
In Batt II, Seaman First Class Bernard ("Winky")
Wenke stood at the wheel. Winky, a little bit of a
fellow, was the auxiliary helmsman. His gas mask was
at his feet, and his life jacket, strapped to his chest,
made him look absurdly swollen. He, too, saw the
destroyer "split in half, with both ends sticking out
of the water." "Something off our starboard," he
shouted, and McSpadden heard this call on the
bridge.
As Old Nameless plowed past the stricken vessel,
her crew could hear the men still aboard her shouting
for help. Some had flashlights. The flames that had
seared the destroyer had died down by now, and the
men on Old Nameless could see these tiny points of
light winking at them like fireflies. Others had been
The Big Guns Speak 119
thrown into the water, and were clustered around the
bow of the dying vessel. Some good men lost their
lives that night. But Old Nameless couldn't stop to
help them. She had been dangerously illuminated by
the fire, which had given away her position to the
enemy. Besides, she was vengeance-bound and the
enemy wouldn't wait for errands of mercy.
i8
SHIP AGAINST SHIP
score was now three heavy warships (not to
JL mention the unspecified number of transports)
to one light destroyer, and the battle was warming
up. Dead astern, a fourth enemy warship was sighted.
It was either a destroyer or a light cruiser; Captain
Gatch is inclined to think it was the latter.
"I called her the 'mystery ship* because I didn't
know where she came from," he relates. "When we
first saw her, she was seven thousand yards astern, and
she was getting out of those parts as fast as she could.
"Our after-turret took her in hand. On the third
salvo, the Jap cruiser ceased to be. She burst into
flames, her bow rose to forty-five degrees, and she
went down stern first."
There was a wild feeling of exultation aboard Old
Nameless now. Here was action, hot and heavy. The
air battle had been tough, but this was ship against
ship, slugging it out in a real Navy fight. It was danger-
ous, and death and disaster hung above every man and
above the ship herself every minute of the engage-
ment. But the men pursued their work with almost
savage zeal and intensity, and there were few aboard
120
Ship against Ship 121
who really would have let themselves be transplanted
ashore if such a miracle were possible. As for Captain
Gatch, who had lived in the Navy thirty years for just
such a moment as this, who, as a young blood, had
cursed the tameness of his World War service, to him
the dull red that hung close to the water's surface as
the Jap cruiser burned, the heaps of smoke that bil-
lowed up like hell's whipped cream above the flames,
were more beautiful than any Old Master ever
painted.
His guns had spoken, and again the enemy had paid
the price. The Japs were now down four warships.
With audacious boldness, Old Nameless and her
sisters steamed north of Savo and turned south into a
narrow passage west of that island. These were bad
waters for battleships. The channels were narrow, and
the course was pitted with numerous treacherous
shoals. Jagged coral daggers protruded upward from
the black waters. They were sharp and tough; they
would rip even a battleship's belly open if she ran
aground. As Captain Gatch says, it was pretty much
a matter of trusting "to God and your surveys" and
the surveys were "none too good!"
There was no question of maneuvering the chan-
nel was too narrow. There was no more question of
casual speed, either, for, if any Japanese capital ships
were in the area, they knew now what was happening.
It was full speed ahead the remaining destroyers out
122 Old Nameless
ahead, the big men o' war in column. Old Nameless
was astern.
Thirty minutes later, a formidable Japanese battle
force was encountered. This was the "trap" that was
supposed to have been sprung on the American naval
units. If it had worked, and if the first four cruisers
that had gone down under the American guns were
still afloat, it would have been dangerous. But the
Yankee "bears" already had broken the spring of the
Jap fox trap.
It was at a point where the funnel-like channel
narrows down to a ten-mile width a bad spot for a
fight to start. At this point, near the southern end of
Savo, Japanese cruisers and destroyers had been lurk-
ing in ambush near the cliffs, where they were safe
from detection. They dashed out of their hole and
launched a torpedo attack on the American destroyers.
Then a Japanese battleship and two cruisers lum-
bered around from the west end of Savo and joined
the fight. All hell broke loose now.
Four searchlights from one of the enemy cruisers
stabbed through the darkness and splashed their
beams square on Old Nameless. Shells including big
ones from the Japanese battleship's 14-inch guns
began screaming her way.
Captain Gatch, the sweat pouring from under his
hood and helmet, dripping into his eyes and salting
the corners of his mouth, barked an order to "get
those lights!" Down in the bowels of his ship, the
Ship against Ship 123
powder and projectiles, zooming along on their over-
head trolleys like so many wire-basket carriers in an
old-fashioned department store, rode the automatic
hoists up to the gun turrets. Bos'n's mates in every
munitions storeroom sweated like road-gang foremen,
exhorting their men to snap into it and keep it mov-
ing. The ammunition moved all right, and soon Old
Nameless's secondary batteries were spewing hot
metal at the searchlights. The searchlights quickly
went out.
Thirty seconds later the terrible boom of the main
batteries opened up.
"We were fighting the cruisers," the Captain relates.
"The battleship up ahead took on the Jap battleship,
but every now and then the Jap battleship would turn
one our way. It was damned annoying, but we didn't
have to put up with it for too long, because pretty soon
the battleship which was taking care of her had
knocked her into a cocked hat."
This was the grimmest kind of close range fighting.
Old Nameless as will be related in detail later took
a number of hits, as the enemy fire had been concen-
trated on her. Her upper works were "shot up," the
Captain relates, but "no vital damage had been done."
"The Japanese fire was silenced in a short time," he
says, "and we have reason to believe that their three
ships were destroyed or damaged so seriously that
they were no longer effective."
'9
REACTION TO DANGER
IN the midst of the hideous din and heat and agony
of battle, hundreds upon hundreds of little side
dramas were being played. Indeed, if it were possible
to interview each of the nearly two thousand men
aboard Old Nameless those of them who survived
the same number of stories worthy of retelling would
be gleaned. No man aboard that gallant ship went
through that ordeal of fire and glory in that first hour
of the morning of November 15th without having
some experience worth telling.
There is the story of the Jap shell that opened the
Admiral's safe. There is a stateroom in the fire control
tower of Old Nameless reserved for the Admiral,
should he choose to make her his flagship. It has a safe
in it. Something had gone wrong with the combina-
tion, and for weeks it had been out of order. In the
heat of battle, a Jap shell came whizzing through the
stateroom; it was a dud.
By sheer weight, it knocked out a piece of the
armored door, caromed against the knob of the Ad-
miral's safe, knocking it open, went on to take out a
piece of the opposite wall, hit against a bulwark out-
184
Reaction to Danger 125
side and bounced back into the stateroom. It never
did explode,
"By heaven/ 1 Captain Gatch laughs, "it opened the
safe for us- even if we did have to get a new one after-
ward."
There were the little incidents of how every one
tried to help. Some of the young ensigns were as-
signed to machine-gun stations, and, in this battle,
had nothing to do. They scurried all over the ship,
dodging shells and fragments, making themselves use-
ful in a hundred different ways. Their conduct was a
source of great satisfaction to the older officers.
There was the episode of an unidentified seaman
on the main deck, just about the time one of the first
of the Jap shells scored a hit. The blast knocked him
down, and sent him skidding on his rump for a dozen
feet or so. He got up rubbing his backside, shook his
fist in the direction of the Jap warship that had lobbed
over the shell, and screamed in high indignation: "Ya
dirty sonovabitches them was my clean pants!"
There was the repeated punishment taken by men
at responsible posts, who doggedly refused to be
knocked out. Young Lieutenant Wister, the imperturb-
able ex-brokerage-house employee, was one of them.
He was standing at a sky aft station. Every time the aft
batteries went off, the concussion would knock him
off his feet and smack him sharply against the armor-
plate behind him. He would get up and stand there
again until the next discharge knocked him down.
Old Nameless
John Daniel Hagenbuch, twenty-four-year-old Phil-
adelphian, was another hero. Back in private life,
before he rushed to enlist in the Navy after Pearl
Harbor, John Hagenbuch, lithe and wiry, had been
fencing champion at Rollins College. He was a
Machinists Mate Second Class on November 15th,
though two days after the battle they commissioned
him an Ensign.
Hagenbuch was nozzle man on a fire control party.
Grimy-faced and weary, he was holding a fire hose
against a stubborn blaze at a spot near Turret 3 when
a gunner came out and yelled:
"Move along, you guys! We're going to fire a salvo
in a couple o' seconds."
Everybody ran except Hagenbuch, who'd been so
busy he never heard the word passed. He stood there
holding the hose all by himself and wondering why
he was having so much trouble controlling it. The
monster rifles lowered directly over his head and went
off with a flash that for an instant swallowed his body
in flames.
"The guy hit the deck so hard he almost bounced/'
says a buddy who saw it happen.
Trembling and dazed, Hagenbuch raised himself to
hands and knees. He was temporarily blinded and
deafened. Being engulfed in the "backfire" of three
1 6-inch guns is the nearest thing to being blown up
by a mine that a man can go through and live. Slowly,
he got to his feet. Just as he stood up, not knowing
Reaction to Danger 127
where he was or what had happened to him, the guns
went off again, and he was swallowed up once more.
This time somebody crawled up to him and led him
away between salvos.
Thirty minutes later, John Daniel Hagenbuch was
climbing to the top of the stack to put out another
fire.
There was the story of the "sleepy" searchlight
man. It is ship's legend that the men who operate the
searchlights are always sleepy, for, in ordinary times,
there isn't a lot to do and the job is rather boring. On
the night of the big fight, hair-raising reports began
coming in to the conning tower from the searchlight
man. He told of explosions he saw, men he saw in the
water, shells that almost hit him. Finally, they heard
a lot of shouting and confusion from his direction,
and after a while he got back on the wire and, in a
peculiarly matter-of-fact voice, as if he were telling
of the arrival of a special delivery letter, announced:
"Well, a 5-inch shell just went through my search-
light."
Next morning, officers making the rounds of the
ship, found him fast asleep by his shattered search-
light, thus bearing out for naval eternity the legend
of the "sleepy searchlight man."
Lieutenant "Sarge" Shriver had a story to tell about
how well his machine-gunners carried out their in-
structions to "seek cover" when not in action. Lieu-
tenant Shriver, born in Westminster, Maryland, had
Old Nameless
lived in New York and had just graduated from law
school in the summer of 1940, when he felt it his duty
to join the services. He is a tall, black-haired, ex-
tremely intelligent young officer, with extremely defi-
nite ideas about the job that has to be done.
"Our machine-gun crew was not in action in this
phase of the night action," he tells. "We had nothing
to do, so I told the crew to lie down and hug the deck
and try to keep out of the way of any shells.
"After a while, I got curious, so I got up on my
haunches to see what was going on. Then I tried to
"seek cover 9 again, but I couldn't get back down. Some
one was 'seeking cover' underneath me!"
All through the saga of Old Nameless appear the
stories of how brave men reacted to danger. How do
men act under circumstances where it is touch-and-go
with death? You have heard how some of them chat-
tered about "how scared I am!" while going ahead
with their duties in the face of gravest danger, and
you have heard how others simply refused to be
knocked out. Yeoman Second Class Martin H.
Schuette of Amboy, Illinois, displayed still another
kind of reaction he was cynically, callously indiffer-
ent to danger, and he refused to worry about it or
to have any sympathy with any one who did.
After General Quarters sounded early that evening,
Schuette waited around at his station in the 1.1 clip-
ping room, where fuzes are clipped onto anti-aircraft
shells. When, after an hour, nothing happened,
Reaction to Danger 129
Schuette said, "The hell with it," lay down on the
deck, and went to sleep. He didn't wake up until the
big guns went off. Before the evening was over, every
one in that room had been killed or injured except
Schuette.
Lieutenant Shriver, who was in the thick of a lot
of action in both battles and who talked with other
young officers on the same subject, sums up the general
reaction of men to danger:
"When the attack comes, you forget everything
except the job you have to do. Occasionally an ir-
relevant thought darts through your mind, but you
hardly have time to recognize it, for your only real
concern and it's an automatic concern is to do that
for which you have been drilled. You don't say to
yourself, 'Oh, my God, I'm going to be killed, I'm
going to be blinded, I'll never live, Til never see
again, isn't this terrible . . .' for you're in there func-
tioning like a machine and if you get hit it's just
too bad.
"There were many men on the ship who in the
height of battle suddenly realized they'd been hit.
Unless they were completely knocked out, they just
tested their arm or leg to see if it would move, and if
it would move they went right on with what they
were doing, and that was that. After it was all over,
you looked back on the whole thing as if you'd seen
it in a kaleidoscope.
"And then you realized that you'd never forget it*'
20
"GIVE 'ER EV-ER-Y-THING1"
IN the control room, the battle education of Melvin
McSpadden, the boy from Sioux City, was pro-
gressing as the Jap shells began finding their range on
Old Nameless. He heard a "loud crash, a rolling ex-
plosion/' and then "the sizzling sound that metal
fragments make when they crash into cables, guns,
and the superstructure/' The ship shuddered a little
as the 6-inch and 8-inch shells began raking through
her after control tower* Her i6-inchers roared again,
but this time, McSpadden remembers, "it was not so
comforting."
"Already I was getting reports of damage over the
phone/ 9 he tells.
"Bridge, bridgel This is Batt II!" An insistent,
excited voice came through. "We've been hit. Fires
breaking out. Send repair party."
"Bridge this is port lookout. Fires burning around
base of superstructure. Part of top shot away."
"Bridge this is radio room. Big fire here and
among life preservers along passageway."
Melvin McSpadden now wished he were twins so
he could shoot out orders twice as fast. He informed
130
"Give 'Er EV-ER-Y-THING!" 131
damage control parties the battleship's trouble-
shooters of the calls for aid. Then he called plot-
room. ... No answer Direction finder. ... No an-
swer. . . . The reports kept flooding in, telling of
damage to aiming devices and radio, telling of the
fires leaping through the compartments enclosed in
the great control tower.
The greatest fear of the Captain's "talker" was for
Batt II, where Commander Uehlinger and others
were stationed. He knew the place must be a furnace
or a shambles. He hadn't heard from them since they
first called for help. His guess was nearly correct, for
Commander Uehlinger and the men in Batt II were
undergoing a terrible ordeal. As Captain Gatch says,
"Uehly escaped only by the grace of God.''
Melvin McSpadden didn't have much time to specu-
late on the fate of Batt II, however, for suddenly
another call came in:
"Torpedo off the port bow!"
"Hard right rudder 1" ordered the Captain. He
almost yelled.
The great vessel swung over quickly. It was an
amazing performance; it was as if an elephant had
suddenly out-raced a whippet on a sharp turn of a
track, but Old Nameless could do it, for she is nearly
as agile as a destroyer. Every one braced himself, listen-
ing for the sound of a torpedo exploding above the
punching-bag retorts of the crashing surface shells
132 Old Nameless
and the scream of the sailing fragments. But it never
came. The torpedo had missed Old Nameless.
Then another yell came over the phone:
"We've lost the other battleship!"
It was true. In dodging the torpedo, Old Nameless
had strayed from her sister. Captain Gatch sent a call
through to the charthouse, requesting directions. The
charthouse snapped back:
"If you swing to port you can back out the way
you came in but the water's shallow off that way.
If you turn to starboard you have to go all the way
around the island."
"Starboard/' said Captain Gatch without a mo-
ment's hesitation. And then, as "a pleasant after-
thought" (as McSpadden describes it), he added:
"Full speed ahead."
McSpadden pushed down the button on his head-
set. "Engine control engine control this is bridge.
Give 'er everything. EV-ER-Y-THING!" McSpadden
repeated the last word in his loudest voice, very slowly,
letting it almost drool out.
After the battle was over, every one talked about
the way McSpadden said it. Every phone on the cir-
cuit heard his voice, and some of the men claimed it
sounded as if he were down on his knees, praying for
the engine-room to produce more speed. All over the
ship, men laughed. It was a tonic for them; it broke
the nervous tension a little for them to know they
were getting the hell out of there-but fast.
"Give 'Er EV-ER-Y-THING!" 133
McSpadden, a little sheepish, moved back over be-
hind the lee helmsman. "Well, I'm still here," he
thought to himself as he braced himself against the
target designator. His eyes moved to the speed gage,
and he whistled as he watched the needle climb up-
ward in nervous jumps. Old Nameless was churning
up the water faster than she ever had before.
Captain Gatch told McSpadden to check with sky
forward. McSpadden did so. Finally he got the voice
of Yeoman Patrick from the highest lookout on the
ship. Patrick's voice sounded strained, but he got his
words out carefully. "We're really hitting 'em/' said
Patrick.
"How're the other guys up there?" McSpadden
asked. He knew that nearly a dozen of his close bud-
dies were with Patrick on the platform. "We've had
reports of lots of hits in that section."
"Everything's under control up here," Patrick
answered. "You couldn't get help up anyway. Whole
base of the tower's on fire, and there's a bunch of fires
on different levels on the way up."
All of a sudden the conversation ended as McSpad-
den went sailing back against a bulkhead. A huge
shell had smashed into the hull just forward of the
bridge. As he picked himself up, a little stunned, a
report came dimly through the ringing in his ears:
"Looks like a i4-incher hit us." The voice surpris-
ingly was as nonchalant as that of a butler, announc-
ing that Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sykes had just dropped in
134 Old Nameless
for tea. "Struck about four feet below the level of the
deck," the voice continued, "Well above the water-
line. Hull damage very slight. Turrets unharmed.
Damage control under way."
Shaking his head violently to get the ringing out
of his ears, McSpadden got on with his duties. Frag-
ments from the 6-inch and 8-inch shells were still
peppering the bridge and superstructure. It was like
being in a tin can in the middle of the worst sort of
hail storm. McSpadden knew the chunks of steel
couldn't get through the sixteen inches of solid steel
around the conning tower, but he heard it whistling
through the air all around them, and he didn't like
the tune.
Some of the fragments struck the charthouse. Then
directions for course and bearing stopped coming in.
McSpadden called the charthouse frantically.
"I was more scared then," he says, "than any time
during the battle. I thought the charthouse was gone,
and I didn't know how we'd get out without direc-
tions."
Finally it seemed hours later, though actually it
wasn't so long McSpadden heard one of the officers
in the charthouse calling:
"My God, this man's bleeding to death! Send help.
Hurry. Please hurry."
"Sick bay is on this circuit and they'll send a doc-
tor," McSpadden choked. "Give us some bearings."
"This poor guy is bleeding to death," the officer
"Give >Er EV-ER-Y-THING!" 135
answered. "Have you got any bandages? I can't leave
him like this."
Melvin McSpadden looked around, a little desper-
ately. His eye lighted on the blackout curtain hanging
over one of the slots. With only the shaded red battle
lights on, no light would go outside .the damned slot,
anyway. He looked at the Captain and the Captain
nodded. McSpadden ripped the curtain off, stuffed
it through a slot by the catwalk and, putting his mouth
to the opening, yelled to a seaman outside: "Take
this to the charthouse-QUICK!"
The seaman grabbed it and ran. He got to the
charthouse just ahead of the pharmacist's mate answer-
ing the original call for help.
Then, like a suddenly blessed voice out of hell,
came the voice over the amplifier from the chartroom.
McSpadden recognized it this time as the voice of
Lieutenant William Moody, the assistant navigator.
"Keep her steady," the Lieutenant said. "Keep her
steady as she is."
21
HODGEN OTHELLO PATRICK
T T THEN McSpadden had talked with sky control,
V V he was not fully aware of the heroic drama
that was being played on that uppermost, exposed
portion of the ship. Yeoman Patrick the full name
is Hodgen Othello Patrick, the middle name having
been bestowed upon him by his grandfather, a Mis-
souri farmer who had a passion for Shakespeare was
displaying a bravery worthy of the finest traditions of
the American Navy. For this bravery, Patrick was
recommended for the Navy Cross. He was the only
enlisted man so honored.
Hodgen Othello Patrick was born in the little town
of Duenweg, Missouri. His thirtieth birthday was five
weeks off on the early morning of the big battle, and,
the way things were going, he thought he'd never live
to see it. He went to high school in Joplin, Missouri,
and later moved to Santa Monica, California, where
he became a telephone linesman. He is married.
A friend describes Patrick as "one of those strange
men who never stop reading and studying, with the
net result that he had positive and accurate opinions
Hodgen Othello Patrick 137
on everything from politics to ancient Greek history.
. . . He is very modest, very plain, very normal," the
friend adds.
When the battle broke out, Patrick was stationed
with about twelve other men and two officers, Lieuten-
ant Commander Burke and Lieutenant Commander
Pavlic, on sky control. It was a far cry from the Mis-
souri farm of his Shakespeare-reading grandfather.
Soon after the battle started, sky control was hit. None
of the circuits could get through.
Down on the bridge, no one was more anxious
about sky control than Rufus Wellington Matthew-
son, Jr., Yeoman Second Class and graduate of Har-
vard University. "Matty," who would be twenty-five
years old in exactly six days, was the son of Captain
Rufus W. Matthewson, Sr., of the Philadelphia Navy
Yard. On the fourth day after Pearl Harbor, "Matty"
enlisted in the Navy.
The morning of the battle, Matthewson had his
own hands full. He was a bridge talker, serving with
McSpadden but having a phone of his own. Once
during the action, he sniffed fuel oil, and his face-
that is, the exposed portion of it felt funny. He got
his glove off for a second and reached up to discover
that his face was coated with oil. A near miss had
sprayed oil from one of the sunken United States
destroyers through the slots in the conning tower
armor and all over Matthewson's face. "I had the
feeling that my helmet was the only safe place on the
138 Old Nameless
ship, and I wanted to crawl up inside of it," he re-
marks.
Matthewson kept trying and trying to reach sky
control, and finally he got through. "I've got sky con-
trolit's Patrick!" he told Captain Gatch. He was so
excited he sort of expected the Captain to be as
happy about Patrick's being alive as he was. The
Captain told Matthewson to get a report.
"Lieutenant Commander Burke and Lieutenant
Commander Pavlic are dead," Patrick answered.
"Every one else is dead or wounded. Need medical
assistance badly."
"Are you O.K.?" Matthewson asked anxiously. Pat-
rick paused a moment, then answered:
"My knee cap's shot off, and I think my hip is
. smashed."
Matthewson swore to himself, and immediately
asked for permission to leave his station and go aloft
to relieve Patrick. Permission was denied; it was im-
possible for Matthewson to leave. (All during the rest
of the action, Matthewson kept asking at intervals if
he could go up and see about Patrick now, but he
couldn't be spared.)
Patrick, however, was ordered to leave his phones.
"Lie down and take care of yourself," he was told.*
Patrick got the order, but he just ignored it. He re-
mained at his phones for six and one-half hours,
reporting every hour.
Hodgen Othello Patrick 139
When the shell had struck sky control, Patrick was
smashed up against a bulkhead. When he got control
of his senses, he found himself at the bottom of a
heap. A few of the men atop him were still living. He
knew that from the groans and curses. Most of them
were dead. Some of the things on him weren't even
bodies they were loose arms and legs.
'Tm dead," thought Patrick. "Here I am dead.
This is what it's like to be dead."
Then he felt himself. There were chunks of shell
in his leg, his hip was all bloody and numb, his
trouser leg was shot away and he didn't seem to have
a knee cap.
"Maybe I'm not dead," he decided.
He unscrambled himself from the gruesome heap
and began to investigate the situation. There were
only four men left who could walk and talk. Two of
them he sent below. That was the last he heard of
them that night. They were too dazed to know what
to do, and it was a miracle that they made their way
below safely. Automatic impulse must have guided
them down, Patrick thinks.
Patrick propped up the other two men. Both had
received arm wounds, which were gushing blood.
Painfully, for his own leg was giving him hell, Patrick
took off their belts and made tourniquets. Then he
took off his own belt and fastened it around his leg.
Groggy as he was, he remembered every fifteen min-
uteshe was guessing roughly at the time to loosen
140 Old Nameless
all three tourniquets, just as he had been told to do
in first aid.
Patrick and the other two looked around for mor-
phine syrettes. They finally found some. Then Pat-
rick discovered that a few more of the men in the heap
of bodies were still alive barely alive and they
needed the morphine badly. Patrick divided it up the
best he could. There wasn't enough to go around, so
Patrick didn't take any.
Though his knee cap was gone, and it gave him a
feeling of nausea that he couldn't control every time
he thought about it, Patrick stood up and went about
his duties. He cared faithfully for the wounded; he
got his reports through, and he looked after his sta-
tion the best he could.
"There were many brave men aboard that night,"
Captain Gatch says, "but none was braver than Yeo-
man Patrick."
22
THE STORY OF BATT II
COMMANDER UEHLINGER and the other men
V^ in Batt II still are not sure to this day just why
they are alive. Batt II is not exactly a roomy place.
The helm, a great metal wheel, takes up a lot of
space. A big tube, or shaft, behind the helm, carrying
cables to vital parts of the ship, further circum-
scribes elbow room. At all times during the action,
there were at least six men crowded into the steel
cubicle, and at some points even more had to pile in.
Six men and their bulky life-preservers will fill the
small enclosure like a convention hall.
Except for the dim light on the gage, which casts
up a ghostly glow on the faces of the men, it is almost
totally black in Batt II. Six men in the darkness,
enveloped by escaping steam, pounded by shells com-
ing at them from unseen directions how they escaped
they do not know.
The Captain's "talker" in Main Control got the
first inkling any one got outside Batt II itself that
something terrible was happening. He'd son of for-
gotten about Batt II after his decision earlier in the
battle that the auxiliary control station must have
141
142 Old Nameless
been knocked out. The shells still were screaming
through the air, smashing, caroming, hurting, killing.
Suddenly, over the hodge-podge of communications
over the P.A. system, a new voice broke in. McSpad-
den hardly could make it out because a loud whistling
noise like a giant's peanut stand kept wailing above
it.
Then he got the words: "Turn off that God damn
steam, for Christ's sake, engine control, ENGINE
CONTROL, shut off the steaml"
McSpadden said to himself: "Jesus Christ, it's Tom
Page! I thought he was dead."
Page, with agony in his voice, kept yelling for en-
gine control to cut off the steam. Engine control gave
him an acknowledgment, but Page evidently couldn't
hear them, for he kept up his cries. McSpadden cut in
on the circuit: "They hear you, Page."
"Is that you, bridge?" Page shouted.
"This is bridge. Go ahead, Batt II."
"The auxiliary steam line is broken and the steam
is awful. The fires are getting worse. We may have to
leave."
Cold sweat popped out on McSpadden's forehead
underneath his leather helmet. Page was a particular
buddy of his. McSpadden looked at Captain Gatch
with sick eyes and blurted out:
"Captain, can Page get out of Batt II? It's full of
steam and on fire. I don't think there are many left
there."
The Story of Batt II 143
Captain Gatch turned and looked full at McSpad-
den. The Captain knew, and McSpadden knew, that
the "talker" had no right to ask that question. The
Captain turned, walked over and said a few words to
the Navigator. Then he looked back at McSpadden
and told him in a low, even voice:
"Tell Page to secure and abandon if there's nothing
further he can do/'
"This is bridge, Batt II. Page, secure and abandon
if there's nothing further you can do." McSpadden
fairly shouted it.
Tom Page, the slender, slight lad who remembered
that the smell of gardenias was so strong that "I never
want to smell another gardenia as long as I live,"
takes up the story. He goes back to the beginning of
the battle.
"There were no lights, and no one had any idea
what was coming. The confidence we felt from our
victory in the air battle was completely lacking here.
For all of us it would be our first surface action and
we were scared because of what we couldn't see and
didn't know. We all trembled and stood tense, waiting
for anything, expecting to get hit any minute.
"Over the amplifier came a voice, 'We now have
Guadalcanal on our starboard hand/" (Bernard
Wenke, the little auxiliary helmsman, particularly
remembers that moment, too. "Guadalcanal looked
144 Old Nameless
awfully weird as we passed it," says Winky. "Like a
silhouette.")
"Big, vivid flashes lit the sky," Page continues.
"Some of it was gunfire in the distance; some of it was
lightning. 'Watch along the cove/ the order came to
us. 'Jap ships are hiding there in the shadows.'
"It was 12: 10 A.M. Up ahead our sister ship opened
fire. We all stood waiting for our own big guns to go
off. It was the tensest moment I have ever known.
Then our guns finally went off. I guess it was about
five minutes later." (Actually, according to the log,
it was ninety seconds.)
"Everybody's confidence came back and we all
perked up. We could watch the shells from the other
ship leaving the guns and streaking like three red
globes high into the air. We could see Japs running
back and forth on the beach with flashlights.
"Then all of a sudden I guess it really was some
time later a big searchlight beam fell on our tower.
One of the men outside on the catwalk ran inside ahd
shut the metal door. It was really very funny the way
he ran and slammed the door shut, but none of us
laughed. If a shell caught us, it was curtains and we
knew it.
"The situation was such that you got a crazy hanker-
ing for any protection you could get. I remember mov-
ing over behind a little partition, not that it would
have done me any good, but it made me feel better.
The lights were coming through the slits in the con-
The Story of Batt II 145
trol tower and making jagged dashes all over the wall.
Then our secondary batteries opened up and the light
went out very quickly.
"Our big guns opened up. We had no idea what
they were aiming at, but we knew it was a big one.
No definite orders had come along, but it had been
understood that we were to pick out the biggest thing
we could see and open fire. Every one had expected a
pushover, but we sure didn't get it."
Page says he "was sitting in the corner keeping
quiet/'
"I was sitting on a bucket turned upside down/'
he relates. "I was feeling very comfortable now that
our big guns were booming. The Commander, usually
a nervous man, was very calm. A shell hit us, and I
thought I'd been slapped in the face. It knocked me
off my bucket but I got right up. I wasn't afraid,
but I was mad.
"The molten metal from the shell was like lava
running across the floor and we all stepped out of the
way. I know now it was a stupid thing to do, but I
took the flash gear off my head. The place was a mess.
Steam pipes were broken, electrical fires were sputter-
ing all over the place and there was so much noise I
couldn't hear over the phone. The noise and heat
from the steam were becoming unbearable.
"I screamed over the phone to Engine Control to
shut off the auxiliary steam line that went right
through our compartment to the whistle. The pipe,
146 Old Nameless
which carried 150 pounds of pressure, had been
broken, and the steam was coming out and scalding us
alive. I kept screaming and screaming it until some-
body on the bridge finally said, 'They heard you,
Page/ Finally the guy says to me to secure and get
out if there's nothing else I can do.
"The 'Exec' kept telling us to 'keep calm, keep
calm/ but the steam kept whistling for about ten
minutes I guess it was, and we were all confused and
afraid. We decided to step outside the compartment
to get out of the steam, and we walked right out into
the face of three big fires.
"There wasn't anything to do but get back inside.
It was so steamy in there we could hardly see or hear,
and the deck was getting so hot we couldn't stand
on it without jumping around. But we went on
back in."
2 3
A LOST SHOE AND AN "ENDLESS HOSE"
WHEN the Jap searchlight landed on us," Com-
mander Uehlinger says, "our ship started
shooting at the light. I made the remark that the more
we fired the more terrific the blast of the guns seemed.
I didn't realize at the time that it was the pounding
of their shells I was hearing. I didn't realize we were
getting hit as much as we were.
"The final one that did the damage tore me away
from the slit which I was looking through and almost
threw me across Batt II. There was a tremendous,
blinding shower of sparks outside. It was like fire-
works almost. Then came the noise of this hissing,
roaring steam. 'My God/ I remember saying to my-
selfand I was very disgusted about it. 'Getting
scalded to death sure is a hell of a way to die in a
war!'
"There were quite a number of men in the station,
and I was trying to get to the other side. I shoved one
of them away, and my hand came away dripping blood.
I knew then I had a bunctfi of wounded up there.
148 Old Nameless
"The steam was too hot for anybody to stand it,
and we started to go out the door. Then we ran into
fire. Everybody in the place began to get excited and
started yelling, 'Get the steam off! Get the steam off!'
" 'Shut up!' I yelled as loud as I could. 'Nobody
does any talking. I'm the only one who talks.'
"I finally found my Captain's circuit 'talker/
crouched down by the forward bulkhead. He'd been
knocked down by the concussion. I picked him up.
I reported to the bridge, and I reported also to Dam-
age Control. Years later it was about a minute or two,
I guess they shut off the steam."
Uehlinger and his men couldn't fully realize it at
the time, but, in a way, luck was with them. Else-
where in the fire control tower, terrible and fateful
things were happening. On one level men were being
scalded to death; two levels down, others were being
shelled to death, while, sandwiched in between these
two stations, men on a middle level were miraculously
escaping casualties. One party of machine-gunners,
having no part in the long-range slugging match, ran
inside to a passageway to seek shelter; a shell found
them and most of them were killed. They would have
been safer out in the open. "Bringing the bodies of
those boys out of that passageway," an officer said
later, "was one of the hardest things we had to do."
Commander Uehlinger had yelled to every one who
wasn't wearing his life jacket to put it on and get some
protection against the steam. The fires outside began
A Lost Shoe and an "Endless Hose" 149
to spread, and, to add to the difficulty of the situation,
the ladders leading to the Batt II level were shot
away, and for a while no one could reach them.
Lying flat on the floor was Bernard Wenke. When
the first 8-inch shell had struck, the little helmsman
had been knocked off his feet and wedged in between
the bulkhead and the deck, still holding on to the
bottom of the wheel. Winky, as he proved later, was
a brave man, who did more than his share of work,
but, as he lay there, Commander Uehlinger heard him
whispering to himself: "How SCARED I AM! I've
never been so SCARED! How could any man BE so
scared?" As Winky mildly explained later: "I had
orders not to leave the wheel, so I just stayed there.
Anyhow, I felt inconspicuous/'
Then the deck plate began to get blistering from
the fire below. It was so hot that it set fire to a kapok
life jacket some one had dropped on the deck. The
smoke coming up from the burning kapok made it
even more difficult to breathe.
"One young lad/' Commander Uehlinger relates,
"asked me, 'Shall I put my gas mask on?' I had my
mind on a million other things, and I grunted, 'Yeah.'
Hours later, he tapped my elbow and mumbled, 'Sir,
can I take the gas mask off now?' I'd forgotten all
about him."
As the deck got hotter, Bernard Wenke, lying on
the floor, began to fidget. It became harder and harder
to remain "inconspicuous." Finally, he relates, "the
150 Old Nameless
seat of my pants almost caught on fire and I jumped
up."
Then came the famous incident of the lost shoe.
Henry Matthews Robertson, Quartermaster Third
Class, a Summit, New Jersey, boy, had jumped inside
Batt II to get out of the fire. Almost immediately he
started shouting: 'Tve lost my shoe, help me find my
shoe!"
"I wondered why the shoe was so damned important
to him," Commander Uehlinger says. "A few minutes
later, when the deck began to get so fiery that, even
with our shoes on, it was giving all of us the hot foot,
I understood."
Tom Page remembers the hunt for Hank Robert-
son's shoe.
"He stood there on one foot and tried to grope
around," Page tells it, "and we all helped him. It
seems funny when you think about it, but at the time
it seemed the logical thing to do. Commander
Uehlinger, the second-in-command of the whole ship,
was there with us, feeling around in the dafk for
Robertson's shoe! Commander Gorton was there, too,
and this whole area, one of the most vital parts of the
ship, was doing nothing but looking for a shoe!"
The two Commanders dropped out of the shoe hunt
shortly, but, whenever they could pause for a breather,
they would stoop down and have another go at finding
the Quartermaster's shoe. The search kept up, on and
off, for six hours, but poor Robertson never did find
A Lost Shoe and an "Endless Hose 9 ' 151
his shoe (Incidentally, it would be a considerable
strain on the imagination to picture a Jap or Nazi
naval commander who would give much of a hang
what happened to the foot of a Quartermaster Third
Class, much less stoop down and join in the hunt for
a lost shoe!)
As the hours dragged on, things got worse instead
of better, but the scrappy little seamen and their
officers actually found things to laugh at while they
were battling to keep from being roasted alive. To
this day, Commander Uehlinger thinks one of the
incidents that happened is the funniest thing he's
ever seen.
"A damage control party finally broke through with
a hose," he relates, "One of the men got up on our
level and began tugging away at the hose. He pulled
and he pulled, and the more he would pull, it seemed,
the more hose would come up. 'Come on, come onl'
I shouted to him. 'Let's get some water up here I*
Finally, we discovered that the two ends of the hose
were coupled together, and it was an endless hose
he was pullingl
"In the heat of everything/' Uehlinger recalls, "I
remember issuing a lot of unnecessary orders to my
men. I did it deliberately, just to be talking to them.
I tried to keep them calm and cool if that word 'cool'
can be used in connection with the inferno through
which we struggled."
"I remember the Commander doing that," says
152 Old Nameless
Bernard Wenke. (Wenke, by the way, had taken over
Page's phone while the latter was helping the injured
and reporting to the bridge; the little helmsman was
doing a great job, even though his life jacket kept
catching on fire and smoldering spasmodically the
rest of the night.) "The Commander, he talked to us
about everything, except the battle. I think he men-
tioned the battle only once; that's when he told us
how he'd spent four years at the Academy, twenty-
five years in the Navy, and had studied hard all his
life, just to be ready for that action we'd gone through.
"He talked to us about the ship's party we were
going to have, and how we were all going to have a
nice drink of liquor, when we got back to where they
had liquor again. We all wanted cigarettes, and the
Commander would say, 'Only two more hours and
we can have a smoke. . . . Only an hour and a half more
now and we can have a smoke. . . . Just about an hour
more now, men.'
"The time moved pretty slow, and the Commander,
trying to buck us up, said, 1 don't know which I'd
rather have, a shot of Scotch or a cup of hot coffee/
Just then the damage control party below sent up a
pot of coffee to us. The Commander passed it around
from man to man, and we all took a swig out of the
muzzle. We weren't very lively. I guess we were all
wondering which of our friends were killed.
"When the dawn finally came, it was the most
beautiful sunrise I think I ever saw."
24
MORE PUNISHMENT
BEFORE Bernard Wenke's "beautiful sunrise"
dawned, however, a lot more was to happen.
Commander Uehlinger takes up the thread of events
in Batt II:
"There seemed to be fires all around us in the
compartment outside. I reported to the bridge, 'If the
fires aren't got under control, we'll have to abandon
the place/
"Commander Gorton beat his way in through the
fire and smoke. 'If you don't abandon in the next two
minutes, you'll be cut off/ he told me. 'Fires below
are getting to the ladder/
"I thought to myself, 'If we leave this station and
anything happens to the ship's control, we couldn't
take over. The ship would be in a bad spot/
" 'We stay here/ I told him. It didn't make a bit of
difference to me. Frankly, I thought it was curtains for
me, anyhow.
"Well, 'Pay' Gorton's shoulders drooped for just a
second. Then he pulled them back, and the most
magnificent grin I've ever seen came over his face. I
sent him out to take care of the dead and the wounded,
154 Old Nameless
and he did the most marvelous and courageous job a
man could do."
The hours that followed were long ones. Uehlinger
dimly remembers "feeling grateful when they finally
put the fire out from under our feet/' Once he started
to go out, but Commander Gorton shoved him back
in, saying, "You can't come out here, Uehly. There
are dead men lying all over the place, two deep."
"He was trying to protect me from any distraction,"
Uehlinger says.
Commander Uehlinger recalls wanting some water
"worse than a man would want a snowball in hell,"
but almost all the ship's water had been used up in
fighting fires, and, until they reached shore, there was
virtually none to drink.
"I remember seeing our last salvo," he also recalls.
"I was looking out through my binoculars. I couldn't
see any Jap ships anywhere, and I thought it must
be getting hazy. I found out the next morning my
binoculars were covered with blood."
Tom Page takes up the story again:
"The damage control parties from the main deck
were working their way up the after control tower.
We could see the flames around us slowly lowering.
Over my phone I got a voice which sounded awfully
anxious: Tm trying to reach my buddy in RDF II
[auxiliary radio direction finder] and I can't raise him.
Please tell me if the guy is all right.' "
Page told the man to stand by. He walked out on
More Punishment 155
the catwalk and looked into the compartment below.
Now he knew why the deck was such a furnace. The
compartment immediately below was one roaring,
leaping mass of flame. Even through his goggles, it
hurt his eyes to look into it. He stepped back and said
into the phone: "RDFs a complete casualty. I don't
know what happened to your friend. If he got out
before it got hit, he might be O.K. But if he's in there
now, he's not alive."
Not knowing what else to do for the moment, Page
went back to his bucket and sat down in the corner.
The ship made a sudden sharp turn to port, and Page
slid off his bucket and landed on the hot deck. He
jumped up just as Commander Uehlinger and several
of the men were rushing to slits in the armor. Some
one yelled:
"We're heading right for the beach!"
"Don't get excited, men," Commander Uehlinger
said soothingly, but it was pretty obvious that he was
worried, too. The thought flashed through his mind
that main control had been disabled. "Call down,
Page, and ask why we've turned to port," the Execu-
tive Officer ordered.
Back came the answer to Page's query: "The Cap-
tain is conning [controlling] the ship!"
Up in Main Control, they'd been pretty glad to get
that word from Batt II. Melvin McSpadden had been
wondering how they were faring. It was McSpadden
who had reported a lookout's warning that an uniden-
156 Old Nameless
tified object was approaching the bow, and then had
braced himself like a nervous youth on a roller-coaster
as Captain Gatch ordered the ship swung sharply to
port. It was McSpadden who passed on word to Page
that the Skipper was conning the ship*
Whatever the unidentified object was torpedo or
wreckage Old Nameless avoided it, and Captain
Gatch quickly directed the ship swung back to the
course* The big dreadnaught churned up a giant "S"
in frothy water. Some of the waves astern were nearly
twenty feet high.
Melvin McSpadden had been a busy man. The re-
quests for damage control and casualty parties had
poured in on him, and he had done his best to des-
patch them. Three separate parties were sent to cope
with the mean fires blazing half-way up the control
tower aft.
He also had kept in touch with the stubborn
Hodgen Othello Patrick on sky control. It reassured
him to hear from Patrick, because he reasoned that if
the top was there the whole structure should be more
or less whole. Patrick told him hits had been heavy but
there were no fires. The main aiming apparatus,
directly over his head, had been disabled by the shell
that killed Burke, Pavlic, and the others. McSpadden
kept urging Patrick to lie down and take care of him-
self, but Patrick kept answering: "I'm all right."
Then above the noise of the screaming and ex-
ploding shells came a super-noise, much louder than
More Punishment 157
anything that had been heard for some time. The
after-battery lookout came through on the circuit:
"Bridge a big shell just hit No. 3 turret right on the
face plate, just above the deck. Section of deck ripped
out. Don't think turret can fire any more."
In another thirty seconds, McSpadden heard an-
other loud retort from aft. He didn't know, however,
whether it was Old Nameless hitting out or being hit.
The 5-inch guns now were shattering the air so re-
peatedly that McSpadden couldn't tell just what was
going on.
Some one came into the control room, and the solid
steel door was open for a second just as a shell whistled
by. McSpadden jumped, then ducked. He could hear
it coming over port side. The explosion knocked him
off his feet as the shell ripped through a 5-inch gun
director just above and abaft the control room.
McSpadden tried to get the chartroom. No one
answered. Once again he had the confused feeling of
panic and helplessness that had seized him when the
charthouse had been riddled earlier. He called and
called, but no reassuring voice came back with direc-
tions in response to his queries for course and bear-
ings. Again his imagination got to work, and he
painted himself a horrible picture of a mess of twisted
metal that once had been a chartroom.
When the repeated calls drew no reply, the Bridge
Navigator decided to work out a course the best he
could. The gyro compass still was working from port
158 Old Nameless
steering aft, and, with the aid of that, Commander
Wadell jotted down a course. In one last, forlorn
hope, he sang out over the circuit to chartroom, "Let's
take course 145." Astoundingly, that "woke the dead."
A voice the voice of Lieutenant Moody again
screamed back: "God, no! You'll never get out that
way. Take course 201!"
Old Nameless straightened herself, and headed for
open sea. She was wounded, but she was traveling
under her own steam, licking her own wounds as she
went. She had dished out better far better than she
took, and she had participated gloriously in one of
the greatest battleship victories in American naval
history.
"THE CAPTAIN IS A GOOD EGG"
was plenty yet to be done fires to be
controlled, wounded to be aided, dying men to
be comforted. In Batt II, Tom Page listened to the
groans of the injured and dying until he couldn't
stand it any longer, then he asked Commander
Uehlinger for permission to secure his phone and go
out and help the injured, piled up on the catwalk
around the tower. "Go ahead," the Executive Officer
said. Page turned over his phone to Wenke and went
out. By the dancing light of the hellish fire, he saw a
poor devil lying on the catwalk, giving himself a
syrette of morphine to kill the pain in his shattered leg.
(Later that morning, the same man was found on the
main deck, four levels below. Racked and bleeding as
he was, he had managed to crawl there somehow to get
away from the fire. Attempts were made to save his
leg, but it was futile, and the leg had to be amputated
several days later.)
Page groped around through the heaps of dead and
wounded, helping out the best he could. He came
across Commander Gorton, who, with the aid of an
enlisted man, was administering the syrettes of mor-
159
160 Old Nameless
phine in glass-sealed, single-shot containers which all
officers carry.
The ship's doctors were carrying on magnificently.
Once again Captain Harrell was making the rounds,
scouring the decks for the wounded and exposing him-
self to the greatest danger, utterly oblivious to the
shells bursting around him.
Down in the ship's hospital, young Dr. Joseph
Albert Syslo of Chicago, a thirty-three-year-old lieu-
tenant, performed the phenomenal feat of operating
on the wounded for thirty hours straight. (Dr. Syslo
was the surgeon who had performed the emergency
operation on Captain Gatch after the first action.) At
his side was Lieutenant Paul Frederick Dickens, Jr.,
twenty-eight years old, of Vallejo, California. Dr.
Dickens administered the anesthetics during the
thirty-hour stretch.
The ship's dentists took charge of the dressing
stations, and likewise labored manfully. Emergency
cases were piled up on the mess tables in the officers'
wardroom, and the place actually ran thick with blood.
"Yes, there were a lot of good men on the ship that
night," Captain Gatch declares.
'There was a young lieutenant Martin J. Mul-
derrig, Jr., a New York boy, twenty-six years old. He
was just out of Annapolis. He was gravely wounded,
but he kept insisting he was not hurt. When Com-
mander Gorton tried to give him morphine, he told
"The Captain Is a Good Egg" 161
him to save it for others who needed it worse. Actu-
ally, there were few who needed it more than he.
"There was a pharmacist's mate named Cantrell
(James Edgar Cantrell, twenty-two years old, of Old-
field, Georgia). He was one of the bravest men I know.
"He was stationed on a lookout platform atop the
tower forward when a Japanese shell detonated and
seriously wounded every man and officer up there.
This man, Cantrell, was wounded himself in about
twelve places. He looked like a pincushion. But the
ladder was shot away and no help could get to them
for some time, so Pharmacist's Mate Cantrell took
charge.
"He dragged himself from one wounded man to
another, ministering to their hurts and giving them
syrettes. His fortitude was nothing short of a miracle.
"Later I visited him several times in sick bay. His
condition was so critical that the doctors didn't dare
move him to hospital ashore because they feared he
couldn't survive the moving. He remained cheerful
and convinced that he would recover, and his will-
power and determination pulled him through."
The Captain can't forget one of the wounded men
he saw in the charthouse.
"The poor devil was grievously hurt/' he relates.
"Instead of lying down, he had himself propped for-
ward in a peculiar position. Every time I passed this
was well after the battle was over and we were on our
162 Old Nameless
way back to base-he was still sitting that way. I
stopped and asked him why he didn't lie down. 'Hurts
less this way,' he gasped."
When Tom Page saw that the wounded men were
being well cared for and that there was not much
he could do, he went back to Batt II. Commander
Uehlinger ordered him to try to make his way to the
bridge and report to Captain Gatch.
Page started down the interior passageway of the
control tower, but his way was blocked by fire, hot,
twisted metal, and grotesquely sprawling bodies.
Jagged tears in the armor reached out to snag at his
dungarees. He retraced his steps, returned to the cat-
walk, and scrambled down an outside ladder. Flames
darted from each of two radio rooms to meet him.
"I had no time to stay and fight the fires," he says.
"I took two fire extinguishers off the wall, turned
them on, and threw one in each room."
Then he pushed on. Something fell and hit him on
the head. He stared at it incredulously. It was a leg.
It had been balanced neatly, like a child's see-saw,
atop a 5-inch gun turret but had tumbled off as he
passed by. Page felt a sudden desire either to scream
or to vomit, but he did neither. He stepped over the
leg and walked on.
The massive door to Main Control was ajar and
Page went in.
"I walked over to the Captain and told him who I
"The Captain Is a Good Egg" 163
was and where I was from," Page says. "And then, all
of a sudden, it dawned on me that I had no reason
for coming. I just stood there. The Captain looked
at me, and I looked at the Captain. I couldn't remem-
ber having been sent for anything.
"But the Captain is a good egg, and I stayed there
and told him what was going on back in Batt II.
'Let's get those flames out/ was all he said.
"The Captain was awfully blue about all the in-
jured men and sort of cussed out the Japs under his
breath."
Page left word with McSpadden to send along any
casualty parties he could spare. He felt his way back
through the flame and smoke toward Batt II. Some-
where along the way, he had presence of mind enough
to break a fire hose out of a locker. He carried it along
with him. Connecting it to a hydrant on the main
deck and turning on the water, he struggled up the
ladder to the tower, the hose bucking under his arm
like an angry serpent. It was hard work. He almost
minced his way up the ladder, treading carefully to
make sure he didn't put his foot where any rungs
weren't for a lot of them had been shot away.
When he reached the Batt II level with the heavy
nozzle clutched under his arm, he was too tired even
to drag it into the compartment. A figure loomed
through the smoke and started inside the compart-
ment. It was too much for Page, and he yelped: "Lend
a hand, youfooll"
164 Old Nameless
"Shut up, Page," a voice said from another direc-
tion. "That's Commander Gorton!"
"That's all right, all right/' said the Commander.
"I'm just one of the boys."
They all went to work with the hose and got the
flames in the immediate area under control. Then
Page and his buddy settled back in the weird half*
darkness to wait for something else to happen. The
steel under their feet still was so hot that they had to
shuffle around. Outside on the catwalk a kapok life
jacket on one of the numerous bodies stubbornly
smoldered. Every now and then it would light up
into a little fire. When this would happen, Page and
his buddy would grab off their steel helmets, bail up
some water from the bottom of the compartment and
pour it on the body and the lifejacket. They kept this
up intermittently all through the night.
26
THREE LAME DUCKS
JOHN BUCK, the Chaplain's Yeoman who, just
before the battle, had mistaken the smell of gar-
lias for a gas attack and had started to put on his
gas mask, was standing at his lookout station without
too much to do when the shells began whistling over.
He heard the bridge ask for the pharmacist's mate at
his station to go to the signal bridge and aid the
wounded, and Buck asked the man if he could use
some help. "All I can get!" the pharmacist's mate
replied. "O.K., go ahead, Buck," the supervisor
nodded.
Then the after-battery started belching out its giant
slugs again, and new enemy shells began falling, so
Buck stayed put. Suddenly a 1 4-inch shell from a Japa-
nese battleship it was one of the first bits of definite
proof that a battlewagon had entered the lists against
Old Nameless whanged against the face plate of the
aft turret. It was a .crazy sort of shot. It hit almost
flush with the deck, and, in coming over, as was dis-
covered later, took off a piece of the hatch coaming
dose to the deck. The low angle of the hit indicated
165
166 Old Nameless
that the Japanese battleship was firing at very close
range.
"When she hit," Buck relates, "it was fire, flash and
roar. Chunks of metal rained down like handfuls of
. gravel on the deck, bulkheads, and searchlights. I
thought to myself that old No. 3 turret was knocked
dean out of commission now."
A Japanese cruiser was spotted by Buck. He re-
ported it "coming up fast over 35 knots!" on star-
board quarter. (This was the "mystery ship" of which
Captain Gatch told earlier.) The Jap turned a search-
light on Old Nameless, but the 5-inch guns put that
out quick. "The 5-inchers," Buck says, "were popping
off so fast they sounded like machine-guns."
Meanwhile, the three observation planes, attached
to the catapults aboard Old Nameless in the vicinity
of No. 3 turret, had caught fire. Their fabric burned
fiercely and made Old Nameless a perfect target for
the enemy. Up in sky control, Lieutenant Commander
Pavlic, who, with Lieutenant Commander Burke,
was directing the 5-inch gunfire, sent an order down
to Lieutenant Wister to get that fire out. (It was one
of the last orders Pavlic gave before he and Burke
were killed.) Wister started with a damage control
party for the perilous task of getting the burning
planes overboard a mission that, because of the
illumination, the inherent danger of the job itself,
and the oncoming Jap cruiser, would have meant
almost certain death to every man who went along.
Three Lame Ducks 167
Then the "knocked out" No. 3 turret went into
action.
"We didn't think she could fire, but she did,"
Buck relates. "She turned very slowly, lowered her
position to the lowest bearing I've ever seen, and
then let go with all three guns.
"The salvo hit amidships of the Jap cruiser. There
was a tremendous explosion. Fire and hot steel flew
in all directions. One turret of the Jap ship flew clean
off. The ship seemed to split in the middle, and it
sank almost instantly."
The salvo also accomplished Lieutenant Wister's
suicidal clean-up job for him. Because of the low
bearing, it blew the three burning planes right off
their catapults, clean off the fantail, and into the
ocean. After the battle was over, there was great glee
among the younger officers of Old Nameless over this
feat. They all swore it was "miracle shooting," and
that it was the first time in the history of the world
that the 1 6-inch guns of a battleship had "downed"
three planes even if they were her own planes.
There was even a little ceremony it was good to
have a little horseplay in the days after the battle, to
relieve the tension of the hell they all had been
through around the turret of No. 3. They solemnly
painted three "lame ducks" on the big base of No. 3,
and christened them in honor of Lieutenant Lemuel
D. ("Lem") Cooke (the former Annapolis football
star), Lieutenant Walter J. Frazier, and Lieutenant
i68 Old Nameless
(j.g.) Edward N. Roberts, the three aviators of Old
Nameless, who were now wingless.
With the action at No. 3 turret over, Chaplain's
Yeoman Buck again started out to help the wounded.
He went to the wardroom, in use as a sick bay, and
they told him help was desperately needed up on sky
control. A doctor said he was going up there, and
asked Buck to come along. Together they sloshed
through the blood and water several inches deep on
the floor of the wardroom and started out.
They made the perilous ascent via the outside lad-
ders, because the inside stairway had been shot away
in places. When they got there, they found only one
man left that was the heroic Yeoman Patrick, still
hanging on to his post and phoning in his reports,
despite the pain of his splintered, bloody kneecap.
Even the doctor was startled. Exclaiming at the man's
fortitude, he went right to work on Patrick's wounds.
When he had done all he could on the sky control
tower, Buck left the doctor with Patrick and made his
way back down the superstructure. This time, he
traveled part of the way down the interior.
"I found a man lying there with one leg shot away
and bleeding," he relates. "Using my knife, I cut
down a piece of loose telephone wire and wrapped it
around his leg. Then I found the rung of a ladder
that had been shot away and twisted it through the
wire to make a tourniquet.
Three Lame Ducks 169
"Then I went down to the house-top [the top of
the conning tower]. The water was four or five inches
deep. It was very dark. I got tangled up in something.
I didn't know what it was, but an officer came along
with a flashlight and we looked.
"I almost wished I hadn't looked. A man's insides
were floating all over the surface of the water and I
had them wrapped around both legs. I sure did a lot
of kicking to get untangled.
"Then I went down to the next level and saw a
guy just sitting there against a bulkhead. I said, 'Hey,
Mac, are you O.K.?' He didn't answer and I asked
him again, but still no answer. I took hold of his wrist.
He was cold. I went on down.
"The next day I helped to identify and bury the
dead."
27
JAPAN'S JUTLAND
A FTER the battle was over, the stories of many
/JL miraculous escapes from death began to pour in.
Some of them were uncanny and almost unbelievable.
A whole book could be written about these escapes
alone. More than one man aboard Old Nameless was
living on borrowed time.
There was the escape of Commander Gorton. He
was standing in a passageway, helping the wounded,
when two shells went through. He was the only man
left there who was not killed or wounded. Why?
Commander Uehlinger explains it:
"The concussion of the first shell knocked him
down. So the second one missed him."
There was the case of young Lieutenant Stephen
O'Rourke, the officer who, in the previous fight
against the airplanes, had seen the bomb that
wounded Captain Gatch and "couldn't take my eyes
off it until it exploded/' In the early morning action
of November isth, he was again at his post in sec-
ondary battery control when an 8-inch shell, which is
a big fellow, came in and knocked out his director.
170
Japan's Jutland
"The shell went right through the base of the
director where I was standing/' says O'Rourke. "I
thought it surely had my number written on it. If it
had exploded, I wouldn't be here to tell you about it.
But, thank God, it was another Jap dud, and I'm
alive."
Lieutenant Commander Joseph B. Berkley of Mil-
waukee (Annapolis, '29), was the ship's communica-
tions officer. At one point during the battle, he had
reason to go to a certain station. He started to leave
the conning tower, when Captain Gatch looked at
him and said: "Stay here with me, Berkley." Berkley
stayed. Five minutes later just about enough time
for him to have reached the other post a shell hit the
other station and every man there was killed.
Ensign William Perry Carmichael, twenty-three
years old, of Norman, Oklahoma, was one of the popu-
lar younger officers aboard the ship. He had entered
the Naval Academy in June, 1939, and was a member
of the war-time class of '43, which graduated in June,
1942. He was assigned immediately to sea duty aboard
Old Nameless.
Ensign Carmichael was standing duty with Com-
mander Uehlinger. Two men were on either side of
him. As Carmichael tells it: "Suddenly I just had a
hunch that it was a good time to squunch down/'
He "squunched" just about one second ahead of
a Jap shell. He got a piece of metal in his shoulder,
but the two men on either side of him were killed.
172 Old Nameless
The battle was over, and Old Nameless was heading
for home. Wounded, yes, but she had meted out ar
worse punishment than she had taken. She was travel-
ing under her own steam and she could still fight, but
several of the enemy warships who had sought to take
her on were now burning at the water-line or were
settling toward the bottom of the Pacific.
The Battle of November 15th had inflicted upon
the Japanese the following losses:
One battleship (or heavy cruiser) sunk
Three large cruisers sunk
One destroyer sunk
One battleship damaged
One cruiser damaged
One destroyer damaged
The entire naval "Battle of Guadalcanal/' fought
on November isth, i4th, and isth, had cost the
Japanese, according to the official communiques of
the United States Navy, the following losses:
One battleship sunk
One battleship (or heavy cruiser) sunk
Two battleships damaged
Six heavy cruisers sunk
Two light cruisers sunk
One cruiser damaged
Six destroyers sunk
Seven destroyers damaged
Eight transports sunk
Four cargo transports destroyed
Japan's Jutland 173
The total is: twenty-eight warships and transports
sunk; ten damaged. Add to this the Japanese loss of
life, estimated at from 25,000 to 40,000.
The United States losses for the entire action of
November igth, i4th, and 151*1 were reported as: two
light cruisers (the Juneau and Atlanta), and seven
destroyers (the Gushing, Preston, Benham, Walke,
Monssen, Laffey and Barton). Nine United States
ships sunk in all nine against twenty-eight.
It was the greatest disaster any naval power had
suffered since the Battle of Jutland. In a way, it was
a greater disaster than Jutland, in which the Germans
had lost eleven ships and the British fourteen though,
of course, many more ships had been involved in the
Battle of Jutland, which made it a much larger-scale
naval clash. Just as Jutland proved a decisive defeat
to the German High Seas fleet, however, history may
show that the Battle of Guadalcanal had a similarly
decisive effect on the Japanese campaign. Certainly it
presaged the immediate Japanese setback in that cru-
cial phase of the campaign, and thus led to the even-
tual withdrawal, early in February, 1943, of all
Japanese forces from that bloody island.
As Old Nameless steamed away, there was a fire
on her conning tower, where an enemy shell had
struck, and Captain Gatch had come out of the steel
compartment to catch a breath of air on the catwalk.
"I'd been dying for a cigarette, and, while I was
looking around me to survey the scene, I thought I
174 Old Nameless
could have one," the Captain tells it. "I drew out my
lighter."
One of the bluejackets nearby took a look at the
tiny pinpoint of fire from the Captain's lighter and
yelled: "Cap'n, sirl You'll give away our position!"
Captain Gatch just looked at him, cast an eye at
the flames near the top of the mast, and finished his
cigarette.
28
THE CAPTAIN GOES ASHORE
rTP*HAT is pretty much the epic of Old Nameless
JL and her "green" crew. Some day, when her
identity can be disclosed, it all will be in the history
books, and yau will read about her and long remem-
ber her name as that of one of the proudest of U.S.
battlewagons.
The battle over, Captain Gatch sat himself down
to write his report to the Navy. He put in the tech-
nical details, and all the things that the Navy Boards
must know, such as what happened when the 14-inch
shell from the Jap battleship cracked up against Old
Nameless's tough epidermis. Then it seemed to him
he should close his battle report with some sort of
tribute to his men. He thought a bit over what Old
Nameless and her "green" crew had done, then wrote:
"Not one of the ship's company flinched from his
post or showed the least disaffection."
His neck wound bandaged and his left arm still in
a sling, Captain Gatch sailed Old Nameless 10,000
miles back to an east coast port. That much may be
told now, for Old Nameless has been refitted and is
back at sea. She is stronger than ever, for she carries
175
17 6 Old Nameless
even more guns. Wherever her orders may carry her,
to Pacific or Atlantic waters, she is sailing, ruthlessly
hunting out the enemy, her crew no longer green and
her big guns anxious to speak again. Before the war
is over, if Old Nameless and her men can do any-
thing about it, there will be other tallies and other
little flags painted on her conning tower-perhaps
more Rising Suns; perhaps this time a Swastika to
mark the end of some Nazi warship.
There isn't much else to tell, except, perhaps, the
story of the day Captain Gatch left his ship.
The Officer of the Deck, who was in charge of get-
ting the honors ready for the Captain, saw to it that
the buglers were ready, and that the side boys, who
stand at the head of the gangway when a Captain
leaves his ship, were at their posts. Then, at 1:25 P.M.,
he passed the word over the public address system:
"Captain Gatch is expected to leave the ship at
1:30. All hands not actually on watch are requested
to come topside and man the weatherdecks in honor
of his departure."
It didn't take a minute before they were streaming
out of every hatch. Again the bos'n's mate stepped
out to lead the men in a cheer for the Captain, and
again the cheering broke away from the formal "Hip-
hip-hooray" and became a roaring, surging, uncon-
trollable, prolonged ovation. But it was a different
sort of ovation from the one the men gave the Captain
when he came back from the San Francisco with his
The Captain Goes Ashore 177
Navy Cross. It didn't have the same kind of wildness
and jubilation in it, for the men knew the Old Man
was going to be away for a while, until he could get
his neck and his bum wing patched up. Some of them
didn't yell so loud, because, frankly, they were a little
damp-eyed, just as they had been at church services
on the quarter-deck that Sunday morning, when Ad-
miral Calhoun told them the Captain was going to get
better.
Captain Gatch, straight and rigid as the flagstaff
from which Old Nameless's colors flew, walked down
the gangway and about ten yards up the dock. He
stopped, looked at his men, who had stopped their
cheering, let his eyes travel slowly from one end of
the ship's superstructure to the other. He looked as if
he wanted to say something to the men, but he didn't.
He just saluted. The only words he said were addressed
to Captain Lynde D. McCormack, who was taking
over while he was ashore.
"Captain," he said, "I envy you tremendously."
