Warrior's Ordeal

One of our ships was seriously damaged and is returning to port under her own power -- Pacific Fleet Communique 305, March 21, 1945.

Last week the Navy let the rest of the story be told:

It was March 19. Fifty miles off the coast of Japan, Task Force 58 was launching an air assault against Shikoku and Kyushu when a Jap bomber dropped out of the low overcast, rocketed in over the bow of the 27,000-ton carrier Franklin ("Big Ben") and swept the length of her flight deck. Not until too late did antiaircraft crews get their guns on the raider. From the Jap's belly two 500-lb. bombs plummeted down.

Afterward men remembered their moments of preoccupation just before the disaster. The first of the Franklin's planes had taken off; on her flight deck were Hellcats, Helldivers and Corsairs, weighed down with full loads of bombs and rockets, engines thunderously turning over. On the hangar deck more armed and laden planes were warming up, awaiting their turn on the elevators. Below, a crowd of enlisted men were lined up for morning chow. On the fantail a little group of men had just turned away from burying a sailor who had died, of illness, the day before. On the bridge, men conned the skies with glasses. It was 7 minutes past 7 in the dull dawn.

The first bomb hit near the bridge. The second smashed through the flight deck amidst the parked planes. The explosions rolled into one tremendous detonation.

The Holocaust. Commander Robert Downes, damage control officer, had just left his cabin. Concussion hurled him back through the closed door and up against the outer bulkhead. The forward elevator, weighing 32 tons, popped up from the flight deck, its plungers blown from their sockets. In a control room in the towering island structure Lieut. William Simon was flung against the overhead. He came to and managed to crawl through a door. Simon was one of three men to escape; 30 died inside. On the gallery deck men were trapped inside jammed doors and baked to death by the breath of fire which reached 900DEG F. in their sealed compartments.

Fire engulfed the planes, shot up and swept the fantail, from which men jumped or were flicked overboard. On the hangar deck, now a roaring furnace, pilots blundered into still-whirling plane propellers, climbed frantically up the folded wings. Later some were found hanging like black, charred monkeys, caught in the overhead structure. The sailors lined up for breakfast died with empty bellies.

All the Franklin's volatile cargo--40,000 gallons of aviation fuel, .50-caliber, 20-mm. and 40-mm. ammunition, armor-piercing and incendiary bombs--began to explode. Rockets whooshed through the air. Livid white flashes tore the smoke. Gasoline gushing from open lines flowed across the decks, carried fire four decks below, cascaded over the side and set the sea ablaze.

Captain's Decision. Smoke enveloped the bridge, but there men had at least moments for decisions. From the screen of cruisers and destroyers spread across the sea, ships were rushing to the Franklin's aid. One of them was the destroyer Miller, which nosed in recklessly, turning her inadequate hoses on the fires. Rear Admiral Ralph E. Davison, commander of the Franklin's division, decided to transfer his flag and get on with the war. With Rear Admiral Gerald F. Bogan, aboard as an observer, he climbed down to the Miller. But the Big Ben's Captain Leslie Gehres decided that his ship might be saved.

To stay meant risking the lives of those who could still get off; to abandon her meant that many men, trapped below, would surely die. Gehres, a stubborn man, 49 years old and the only carrier skipper in the U.S. Navy who had come up through the ranks, determined to stay.

It looked bad. All inner communications were gone. Only 29 of Downes's 118-man damage-control crew were still alive. Volunteers were dazedly fighting fire. As soon as streams of water were turned away, the glowing planes again burst ablaze. The best men could do was try to hold the fire. The engine room was still working but rapidly growing too hot for the crew. Gehres ordered the engines set at eight knots and told the men to come topside.

Panic & Heroism. Above and below decks men stood transfixed with fear and scattered in panic at each new explosion. There were also many who did their jobs with quiet heroism. One of them was Lieut, (j.g.) Donald A. Gary, a veteran of 20 years in the Navy who, like his skipper, had come up from the ranks. Four times Gary went down through a ventilating shaft to lead 300 men to safety.

Bespectacled Lieut. Commander Joseph Timothy O'Callahan, Jesuit priest and senior chaplain, ministered to the dying, manned fire hoses, helped jettison ammunition, even led rescue parties below.

Another strong man, that afternoon, was not aboard the Franklin. He was Captain Harold C. Fitz of the cruiser Santa Fe, who came alongside and asked one question: "Are your magazines flooded?" When the answer came back "yes," he brought his ship in close enough to put lines across. Actually the Franklin's magazines were not flooded; the valves had been opened but the water mains had ruptured. Gehres did not know that.

The wounded and the men of the Air Group--those who were left--were being transferred when an after 5-in. magazine let go. Flame and smoke shot 7,000 feet in the air, human bodies pinwheeled through the air. Chunks of armor plate were tossed aloft like leaves, airplane engines hurtled heavenward.

The Franklin's untended engines failed, leaving her dead in the water and unmanageable. Fitz pulled away, circled, and with magnificent seamanship brought his ship hard up against the carrier's smoking hulk, so they could grapple and control her until they finished the job. More than the wounded scrambled over the side. In the confusion some men thought the order to abandon ship had been given; a few were too terrified to care. Tough Gehres finally told Fitz to stand clear; he wanted to keep his crew aboard.

South from Kyushu. Jap planes buzzed out of the overcast. Escorting warships, deployed around the dead Franklin, fought them off and fought the Franklin's fires. It was now past noon. The Franklin was still belching smoke and beginning to list heavily when the cruiser Pittsburgh finally succeeded in taking her in tow. At three knots the convoy started crawling away from the shores of Japan, the Franklin yawing and staggering in her agony. Men went to work to correct her 13DEG list. Hydraulic controls for counter-flooding were out, but Downes and his men put on rescue breathers and groped their way below to the hand valves. Gradually Big Ben regained an even keel.

Trapped men were still being hauled out. At the first muster that evening only 250 fit men and 75 officers had turned up. Two days later more than 600 men and 100 officers were able to answer the roll. In the chief petty officers' quarters, rescuers found a mess cook who, with half of one foot severed, in water up to his armpits had managed to stay alive for three days.

The fires slowly burned themselves out. About 9 o'clock the first night men were able to get into the engine room and light one boiler. As the hours went by, the other vital functions were restored--water pumps, communications, ventilation, power. By noon of March 20, four boilers were lighted and the Pittsburgh cast off. The cripple was able to make 14 knots under her own power. By the second day, still convoyed by cruisers and destroyers, which again & again had to fight off Jap planes, she was making a steady 20 knots.

Stench of Death. Men began to come out of the numbed state in which, by instinct, they had performed their deeds, heroic or unheroic. The implacable Gehres gave them no rest. The hangar deck, where the worst fires had raged, was a nightmare of crushed planes, ruptured bulkheads, melted debris, burned and shattered bodies. Men had died by burning, by drowning in flooded compartments, by concussion, by electrocution, by hanging, by asphyxiation. Their shipmates cut away the wreckage to get at hundreds of bodies, hauled them out and consigned them to the sea. The stench of death pervaded the passageways. Weeks later parts of men were still being discovered. From sunup to sundown, to save them from insanity, Gehres drove his crew.

On March 24, the proud and shattered ship steamed into a fleet base in the Western Pacific, rested briefly in that haven and headed for Pearl Harbor and the long voyage home.

The 704 men who had stayed with her --out of an original total complement of more than 3,000--still manned her. Gehres would allow no one else aboard. He issued beer. An octette of Negro mess-men and other talent, with a band of pots & pans, an accordion and a cornet, put on a pathetic and courageous show--"The Franklin Frolics." For four days they rested in Pearl Harbor, then sailed on for Panama. On April 26--after 38 days and 13,400 miles--they dropped anchor at last in New York's Gravesend Bay.

Last week the charred hulk of the Franklin lay in Brooklyn Navy Yard. Whole sections of her were gone; it would be a long time before she fought again. By official count, 832 of her men were dead or missing, 270 had been wounded. In all naval history, few warships had taken such punishment; perhaps none had ever suffered so and come home.

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