RECOLLECTIONS OF WORLD WAR TWO

By: Chuck Herrin

In the Fall of 1941, I was a seventeen year old high school senior, living in Mount Vernon, Washington, sixty miles north of Seattle, in the heart of the Skagit River Valley.

Although I had an interest in radios and spent spare time tinkering with them, mine was the only radio in our home and it was Monday morning on December 8 that I learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor when all of us students were called to an assembly to hear a special announcement from President Franklin Roosevelt. Probably few of us even knew where Pearl Harbor was, but we learned in the next few minutes that we Americans had a new enemy to the west, Japan, and as of then, we were at war.

I had a sister eighteen years older and a brother eight years older than myself. My sister had a family of her own and my brother had been previously drafted into the peacetime army, so I was the only one left at home with my mom and dad. My parents had been born before the turn of the century. They grew up in the Midwest on farms and had not had the opportunity to experience more than five or six years of school. My mother was a full time homemaker and my dad learned the carpentry trade via whatever jobs he could find. By the time I came along, my dad felt “called” to the ministry and I was born in a church parsonage.

With such a limited education, my father was poorly prepared to fulfill his calling and this resulted in his always drawing a church in a rural or small town community where he painfully struggled with the preparation of each next Sunday sermon. He was conscientious to a fault and inevitably had to give up the ministry completely when I was in the seventh grade. From a financial standpoint, the timing was not great for there were virtually no jobs available and the church hadn’t got around to providing pensions for the well intended ‘brothers’ who couldn’t cut it. Dad took whatever job he could find and we lived in less than modest housing.

There were two radio repair shops in Mount Vernon and one of them was located in the local appliance store. I had become acquainted with the fellow who ran the shop and one afternoon I stopped in to see him. He was gone. The shop was empty. He had gone down to Seattle to work for Boeing where good men were in great demand. No one was available to repair radios and now that we were at war, everyone needed his radio to keep him up on the war news. I made a deal with the store manager to take over the radio shop and run it as an independent operator – in other words, no business, no money. I had enough school credits so I could spend most of each afternoon and evenings at the shop.

FM radios hadn’t come along yet, transistors hadn’t been invented, there was no such thing as television, no tape players, and no VCRs. There were a few automatic record players for the ten and twelve inch wax records that were available. The radios were full of tubes, which were not too different from small light bulbs. They used a lot of electricity and became very hot, so much so that they frequently burned out, or at least, malfunctioned, and the heat they generated cooked the life out of many of the other components around them, hence, the need for a repairman. The wholesale radio parts house supplied me with parts on consignment, so I paid for them as I used them, and things went pretty well. Some of the appliance salesmen in the store were also deputy sheriffs and we became good friends.

The Skagit valley is a rich farming area and several of the farmers were first generation non English speaking Japanese. After Pearl Harbor, people on the West coast became paranoid about the possibility of another Japanese attack, this time closer to home. They were sure that their Japanese neighbors were getting their instructions from Japan. In those days, it was almost the norm for every home to have a big console radio which had anywhere from six to ten short wave bands. Once in a while someone would listen to the short wave bands and hear broadcasts from all over the world - just the way for the Japanese farmers to get their instructions from Tokyo, perhaps. Well, the people had a way to take care of that. They made all of the Japanese in the county turn their radios in to the sheriff’s office. The poor Japanese farmers, all good people, had no idea what was going on and they wanted the news just as everyone else did. They appealed to the sheriff to let them have their radios so they could be informed. The guys in the sheriff’s office sympathized with them, but at the same time felt they had a security problem. My friends, the deputies, solved the problem. They told the people they could have their radios back if they would have all of the short wave bands (channels) permanently chopped out and they sent them all over to me to do the job. I made good money almost destroying perfectly good radios

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A few miles southwest of town was a little farm community – Conway. The people there, like everyone, now that we were in a war, wanted to be helpful. Now that everyone was a bit paranoid about another sneak attack, the people in Conway built a listening post for aircraft. It was a small building out in the middle of a field. They hired me to install an amplifier in the room with a microphone mounted on the roof. They would sit inside until they heard a plane, then go out to see if they could identify it and determine which direction it was traveling. They logged all aircraft activities and telephoned a Civil Defense office if they considered it suspect. I wasn’t around to know how long that service was performed.

One day at the radio shop, the postman dropped off a post card from the navy. It was part of a blanket mailing to all the radio shops in the area – or country. The message was an “invitation” to join the navy for special training in a very new and important electronic field, radar. They guaranteed entry into the navy at better than an Apprentice Seaman rating and a petty officer rating on completion of school. That sounded attractive to me, and my buddy Jim, who helped me in the shop was also interested.

I had turned eighteen in January of 1942. The school year was winding down in May and graduation was going to be on a Thursday. On the preceding Monday, Jim and I decided to go down to Seattle and talk to the navy about that radar deal. We found the navy recruiting office and started to ask some questions. By 3 PM that afternoon, I had been sworn into the navy, put on a ferry to Bremerton, and by dinnertime I was in the Recruit Training Facility at the Bremerton Navy Yard. Jim was turned down because he had sugar and albumen in his urine and he was headed back home. I had not told my parents I was leaving town that day and I did not get a chance to call them from Seattle. Jim let them know where I was.

“Boot Camp” was not exactly like high school. We were issued a sea bag and a hammock, dress and undress(work) uniforms, white hats and shoes. Then off to the barbershop for a fast pass haircut. Our civilian clothes were either sent home or dumped in the GI (garbage) can. A bunk was assigned in the barracks and we were introduced to four-hour fire watches. Being wakened out of a sound sleep at midnight to dress and roam through the barracks sleeping quarters for four hours was a bit different from what I was used to.

We were sent to the swimming pool to demonstrate our swimming ability. I didn’t happen to have any. When they told me to strip, jump into the pool, swim to the far end and back, I said I did not know how to swim. They said that was ok, jump in and show us how far you can swim. I told them I couldn’t swim at all and they insisted that I jump in and if I really had a problem they would fish me out. I was terrified but as they gave me no choice I jumped – and they had to fish me out. I was in shock, had a cold chill and could not stop my teeth from chattering. Finally, after a long session standing under a hot shower, things settled down. As of then I was sent to the pool for swimming instructions.

Daytime was largely spent on the drill field, learning to march, carry a rifle, and accept orders – quickly and without question. A miserable experience at the time, I look back on it now as a most valuable and lifelong gift.

Boot Camp was cut short when enough recruits who had signed up for the radar program had been accumulated to make a ‘draft,’ which in our case was enough men to fill a rail car. We were shipped to Oklahoma A&M College in Stillwater, Oklahoma where we were given the standard two year electronics course - in twelve weeks. At the end of that time, we were given our choice of whether we wanted to go to Surface Radar school at Treasure Island (San Francisco) or to Aviation Radar School at Corpus Christi, Texas. Since I had never made it home for a visit from the day I enlisted, I thought being stationed at TI might offer a better chance to get home. My interest, on the other hand was aviation, so I opted for Corpus.

Corpus Christi is located on the Gulf of Mexico, a hundred miles or so north of the Mexican border. A chain of small sand bars which they called islands ran from town out into the gulf. One of these was called Ward Island and that is where the navy had established its aviation radar school. Out at the end of the chain was a naval air station. It was a hot humid part of the world. Twice a day we would march from our barracks to the school, which was in a fenced-in “compound”, radar being a pretty high security item at that time. Marine guards at the gate checked our passes and ID every time we went in or out. The classes were tough and the course lasted for several months.

During that time we were advised that the navy was seeking candidates for officer training and Ward Island, having pretty high student standards, had a pretty good quota. This looked like a great opportunity to me because that meant a couple of years of college and I could not imagine how I would ever be able to pay for that kind of education. All interested parties were invited to show up at the theatre on a Saturday morning and take the entrance exam. It was a cool morning and the test seemed to go well and I had a feeling that this just might work out. A few days later my company commander told me that I had done very well and it looked like I was ‘in’. That conclusion was confirmed a few days later when I was sent to Sick Bay for a physical exam. It just happens that I have had a denture across the front of my mouth since I was in the eighth grade. Despite the plea of the examining dentist, the senior doctor on the base decided there were too many candidates available who had a mouth full of natural teeth. That was the end of my hopes for a career as a naval officer and it came as a big surprise and disappointment to learn how determined they were that their officers have uncompromised equipment to chew sailors out with. I told myself I would just have to work my way up to Chief (petty officer) and that would be my target.

After about a year of school, I was a 2^nd class Aviation Radio Technician and my first assignment was at the navy base in Pearl Harbor. Our Carrier Aircraft Service Unit (CASU1), provided repair and modification service to aircraft carrier planes, work that either could not be performed on the ship or which needed to be done before the planes were assigned to a ship. At that time, aircraft were pouring out of the factories as fast as the last rivet was driven, and had survived a test flight. Then the wings were removed and the engines preserved so they could be loaded onto freighters and carried to combat areas. When those shiploads of planes arrived at Pearl, they came to our CASU facility to be reassembled and to add any modifications and or improvements that had been developed since the planes had left the factories.

Our CASU radar and radio shops were manned by more sailors than we really needed and things would get a little dull when we ran out of work. What no one ever told us was that we constituted a pool of replacement manpower to support the needs of the carriers and air groups on the carriers. Somewhere along here I made ART1c. My solution to the boredom problem was to talk my boss into letting me start a night crew. He gave me a couple of guys and we didn’t show up around the hangar during the day. At night, on the other hand, we functioned well and ground out a lot of work. Big problem! The daytime shift had nothing to do and more bored sailors than before.

From my first day in boot camp, wherever I was, they sent me to the pool to learn how to swim. They made it clear that you could not leave the country until you swam, you couldn’t be assigned to a ship, and you darned well could not fly off of a ship. So far, they shipped me out of the country without becoming a swimmer. Next thing I new, I was transferred out of CASU1 to Torpedo Squadron Sixty, part of Air Group Sixty, aboard the USS Suwannee, CVE27. She was an escort carrier, one of four ships that had been converted from ESSO tankers, at that time the biggest, fastest tankers in the world. These four carriers operated together as a carrier division and, because they were faster than any other CVE’s, they drew the special assignment of providing surface and air protection for nearly all of the amphibious landings and ships that made up the convoy. We escorted nearly every army and marine landing that was made in the Pacific. Our extra five or six knots of speed enabled us to maneuver into the wind for landings and takeoffs while the convoy was chugging along as fast as they could go.

Once again the problem of redundant people raised its head. I was the only Aviation Radio Tech for the torpedo squadron (VT-60). However, the ship provided 2 ART’s to look after the same airplanes and their workshop was just large enough for two guys to turn around in. They jealously guarded their turf and made no bones about my staying out of their shop. On the other hand, we were all very vulnerable and the loss of any one or two of us would not have kept any aircraft from flying. In my case, I spent many hours sitting on the catwalk, watching flying fish and not understanding how I was helping the war effort. For me it was really frustrating, especially when the flight crews would land and talk about what they had just seen or done.

The time came when my boredom and frustration came to a halt. Once in a while and for any of several reasons, a plane would not make it back to the ship. With luck the crew would be rescued and transferred back to their carrier as quickly as possible. In the case of Avenger crews, all too often the radioman would not survive the crash landing. Exactly why he didn’t make it was never determined but it was clear that the radioman’s seat was near the bottom of the plane while the pilot and gunner were on the top. As a result of this problem, there became a shortage of radiomen. Not having anything else to do, I volunteered to fly – and was promptly accepted. I was an air-crewman! It didn’t matter that I had not been to radio school, hadn’t had any gunnery training, and still could not swim. One thing I could do well was operate the radar and that was really the most useful role of the guy in the bottom of the plane anyway.

Another function of the radioman was to fix any of the electronic equipment on board if possible should there be loss of communication, radar, or identification, all items that were inter-coupled by numerous cables which were prone to work loose. All those boxes were lined up on a shelf that ran from right behind the pilot back almost to the gunner’s turret. This was all above the bomb bay. The radioman sat behind the bomb bay and under the gunner who was sandwiched into his turret. It was possible for the radioman to climb up over the bomb bay to get up to the black boxes. It occurred to someone that they could have the radioman stand up there on takeoffs and landings, where his chances of getting out after a water landing would be on a par with his crewmates. I proved that idea to be a good one

Our convoy was making its way to the Mariana Islands for Marine landings on Saipan and Tinian. Between the four carriers in our group, we maintained a 4-plane sub patrol around the convoy during daylight hours. From the convoy, we divided the surrounding area into four 4-hour segments, like a pie cut into four pieces. While the TBM’s were looking for submarines or ships, the Hellcats were flying high Combat Air Patrols, looking for enemy aircraft. As we were nearing the Marianas there were reports that Japanese long range patrol planes had been sighted a few times. Because of this warning, and since torpedo bombers were not designed for dog fighting, a fighter was assigned to fly with each TBM on our patrol. Since we chugged along at less than 200 miles an hour, a speed much lower than fighters normally maintain, four hours at this pace was a particularly boring assignment for the fighters. Actually, it was pretty boring for us, too. So, as we reached the outer edge of our segment, we were doing a bit of dog fighting with the Hellcat. That lasted just a few minutes and as we were settling back down to routine flying, our gunner spotted an enemy plane below us and he immediately started firing. Our plane had a fixed.30 caliber machine gun in each wing, a .50 caliber gun in the gunner’s turret, and I had a .30 caliber machine gun which could only be pointed rearward, from side to side and down, as it was under the tail. The wing guns were aimed by pointing the aircraft and they were fired by the pilot. Once our pilot saw the target, he started chasing it and firing , which automatically prevented the turret gunner from seeing the other plane. We recognized the Japanese plane as a “Betty”, a twin engine bomber which carried a crew of six or seven and was much faster than we were.

The Hellcat had six .50 caliber machine guns in his wings and he was faster by far than either the Betty or us. The Betty, with two guns in a top turret and a tail turret, all of which were sending their tracer shots in our direction as its pilot was trying to dive close to the water to evade the Hellcat which was making gunnery runs on it. But, I must digress. As we were launched off the catapult that morning, we developed a serious hydraulic leak and there was hydraulic oil everywhere. Our pilot, who was the newest, youngest one in the squadron knew that he should abort the flight and request an immediate return to the ship. Being the lowest man on the totem pole, however, he was afraid they would simply call him ‘chicken’ and question his reliability, so he went on with the flight, noting that he had little hydraulic pressure to operate the bomb bay doors, the flaps, and the landing gear. When we encountered the Betty and firing started, he followed standard procedure and opened the bomb bay doors and jettisoned the four 500-pound General Purpose bomb/depth charges that we were carrying. There was only enough hydraulic pressure to half-way close the bomb bay doors

We were chasing a bigger, faster plane with our bomb bay doors half open, the ammo in the wing guns running out, and the turret gunner unable to point his gun at our foe. In the meantime, the Hellcat had made several runs on the Betty with six guns blazing, managing to knock out its tail gun and burning up all six of his own. Still, he saw the need to slow the Betty down. He made bow runs back and forth in front of it, forcing them to zigzag to avoid him. With our wing gun ammo expended, our pilot finally began to listen to the gunner as he called for maneuvers to bring him into firing position. About then, his ammo ran out and together, he and I swiftly swapped a full ammo can for the empty. As the tracers from the Betty’s turret arced up at us, I watched our tracers fly down towards it. Their tracers stopped. Next, our gunner put his tracers onto the Betty’s right wing tip and he walked them inboard on the wing. When they reached the engine, the entire plane exploded in a ball of fire. We were still alive! We were ecstatic! We were yelling and shouting!

This had to be reported back to the ship immediately. The pilot started calling the ship and there was no response. He screamed at me to fix the radio. I tell him we are too low, get some altitude and the radio will work. We climb, he calls, we climb, he keeps calling. Our radio call sign for the day was “83 Gizmo” and as we got a bit more altitude, a calm, quiet voice from the ship responded “ This is Gizmo Base.” Our nearly hysterical pilot screams “We just shot down a Betty! We just shot down a Betty!”

Back came that slow, quiet voice “83 Gizmo, slow down, take it easy. Do we understand that you shot down a Betty?” “Affirmative! Affirmative! Affirmative! Our driver shouts. No way did the ship buy this story so his next call is “8 Gizmo”, which was the Hellcat call sign, “Do we understand that 83 Gizmo shot down a Betty?” There is a long pause, then “8 Gizmo, Affirmative” in a very unhappy voice. Mr. Hotshot fighter pilot with his hotrod Hellcat and his six machine guns was already thinking what he was in for when he got back to the pilots’ ready-room.

So here we were – out of bombs, out of ammunition, and the bomb bay doors half open, three hysterical guys acting like excited little kids. We asked permission to return to the ship and were ok’d to do so. There wasn’t enough hydraulic pressure to lower the landing gear but the airplane designer had anticipated this kind of problem and included a one-shot air bottle that was supposed to drop the gear. No one had ever needed to try this feature so we all hoped it would work. Without an OK from the ship, we came roaring in over the flight deck and the pilot popped the Emergency Gear Release. Normally actuation of the landing gear lever resulted in an almost casual lowering of the wheels. That emergency dump was instantaneous, getting the attention of everyone on the Suwannee’s flight deck. As we turned downwind to start our landing approach, the ship called – and told us to go back and fly our sector until we were relieved. What a put down. Our landing gear was down and we couldn’t retract it, the bomb doors were half open, the bomb bay was empty, we were out of ammunition, so they sent us out to cool our heels until they could launch another flight. Nevertheless, the ship’s captain, Capt. W.D. Johnson, was absolutely delighted that one of his crews got an enemy plane before any of the other carriers in the division. He was so happy that he had us up to his stateroom where he told us how proud he was and that he had had his personal cook make a Betty Cake for us. He had the photogs come and take pictures of the cake and us and saw to it we each got pictures of this most unusual event. As an aside, our pilot got an Air Medal and the gunner, who spotted the Betty in the first place and then shot it down after our pilot and the fighter pilot both missed, got a green ribbon, which was some kind of a commendation.

The Suwannee had a flight deck 485 feet long, which is a pretty short airport by any standard. She had 9 TBM “Avenger” torpedo bombers and 20 F6F “Hellcat” fighters. The TBM carried a pilot, a turret gunner, and a radioman. The fighters carried one person. Because the flight deck was too short for safe takeoffs, there was a catapult, which normally was used for every launch. There was only one catapult. One at a time, each aircraft would taxi over the end of a 60-foot track which was aligned fore and aft with the deck. A cable with an eye in each end would be attached, one end under each wing, to open hooks located above the landing gear. The middle of the cable would loop around a sturdy post which fit in the aft end of the track. A breakaway device was attached to an anchor in the deck and the other end to the aircraft tail. For takeoff, the pilot would throttle the engine up to maximum power, at which time he would nod his head to a Signal officer who would stand near the forward end of the right wing tip. He, in turn, dropped his arm as a signal to the cat officer standing in the catwalk who activated the catapult, breaking the anchored connector at the tail, sending the cable- girded post up the track and accelerating the aircraft from 0 to 90 miles an hour in 60 feet – an exhilarating event, either to experience or to watch as more than nine tons is tossed into the air.

There came a day when things changed a little. We were ready to launch a four plane submarine patrol – and the catapult broke down. Since there was only one cat on the ship and the patrol was essential, the only alternative was to make ‘free run’ takeoffs. There being extremely limited space on the flight deck, the four TBMs were lined up nose-to-tail, with the tail of the fourth plane hanging out over the aft end of the flight deck and no more than a foot or two between the nose of one and the tail of the next. We were number one. With three planes behind us, we had 320 feet of runway. I was standing up in the greenhouse behind the pilot. He fire-walled his throttle until he couldn’t get another RPM, nodded to the signal officer, and our nine tone load started to waddle down the deck, slowly gathering speed as the forward end of the deck raced towards us. Guys on the flight deck sensed that we weren’t going to make it and started running forward to watch us go in the drink. We didn’t disappoint them. As we reached the end of the deck, the pilot started a liftoff and we became airborne, but with less than minimum flying speed. As the plane began to settle, he kept trying to keep it off the water but that ended in a total stall. The left wing dropped and hit the water, and we cart-wheeled around 180 degrees, staring at the carrier bearing down on us at eighteen knots. From our viewpoint, it looked like the whole city of San Francisco was bearing down on us. We seemed to be slightly to the left of the ship’s heading so we ran out to the tip of our right wing. The pilot jumped in the water, I jumped in the water, and as the ship hit our left wing tip it dumped the gunner off the right tip to join us in the water.

I have remarked of my inability to swim. Fortunately, part of a flight crew’s uniform was a “Mae West” life jacket’. Mine came in handy. I was also wearing heavy marine field shoes and a .38 revolver with a belt full of ammo. With all that weight, I decided it didn’t make much difference whether I could swim or not, the life jacket took over and saved the day. As the ship passed us, exactly the wingspan of the airplane (54 feet) away, bow waves and then the turbulence from the screws tossed us around pretty good and we swallowed some salt water, but we were ok. In a short while, we were fished out of the water by a destroyer, which was in the vicinity expressly to resolve situations like ours. I really had not become personally very well acquainted with the gunner or the pilot, so it came as a surprise for me when, as we were breaking the monotony of a day for the destroyer crew, they took us up on the bridge and the ship’s doctor allowed as how we must be “all shook up” and offered us some “spirits” from the medical locker. Each of the three of us said “No thanks, I don’t drink,” while the DD crewmen stood there with their tongues hanging out. Then someone said “Well, your cigarettes must be soaked, here try these.” Again, all three of us said, “No thanks, I don’t smoke.” The crew walked away – either in disbelief or in disgust.

Soon the destroyer pulled alongside the Suwannee to transfer us back aboard our ship. Even from the bridge of that DD, the carrier’s flight deck towered high above us. As the destroyer rolled from side to side in the swells, the water really boiled up between the ships. A heavy line was sent across from the flight deck and was secured at the destroyer bridge. On the flight deck, they rigged a pulley through which they threaded the line from the destroyer and then laid out more of that line across the deck. A number of sailors then took hold of the line and put on tension to keep it taut between the two ships as they rolled back and forth. A light-weight line was thrown over to the DD from the flight deck. At the carrier end of that line a pulley that would roll on the large hawser was set in place .It had another light line attached to it and this one fed out slack so the pulley could be pulled back and forth between the ships. A loop of rope dangled from the pulley. In the loop was a board, perhaps a 1 x 4 which was maybe 18 inches long and it was on that board that, one at a time, we sat and were pulled across the boiling ocean to the carrier. With the rolling of the DD and the pitching of the Suwannee, our feet at some point nearly dangled in the water and in the next few seconds we would be 60 feet in the air, with nothing but the loop of rope to hang onto. It was a thrill ride to remember; every theme park should have one. And wouldn’t you know? Our pilot was ruled responsible for loss of the aircraft and he never flew off the Suwannee again.

In the Fall of 1944 the war in the Pacific had steadily progressed closer and closer to Japan. The next big step was to support General MacArthur’s promise to the Philippine people that “he would return.” Again our carrier division shepherded the Task Force, which included the General and his entourage to a landing on the island of Leyte. We flew two or three missions over several cities to ‘deliver the mail’ from the General. I tossed out what seemed like tons of letters announcing his return, as he had promised, and reminding every citizen that, with help from them, they could drive the Japanese out of their homeland.

By now, my gunner, Leon Bingham, a proud Texan, and I had a new pilot, Ensign Timothy Casey, a big redheaded Irishman from New England. Casey was attending Duke University on a baseball scholarship when the war caught up with him. He was a good pilot and a gung ho guy. One morning we woke up to find ordinance-men loading torpedoes in our aircraft. I need to point out that our ship had nine torpedo bombers - and just nine torpedoes. Although we routinely carried four 500-pound bombs which the radioman could set to explode on contact or as depth charges set to explode at a preset depth, we had never carried a torpedo. With only nine of them on board, one could not but assume that he wasn’t expected to make it back for a second load.

It turned out that the elusive Japanese fleet had been sighted and was headed for Leyte Gulf. We had delivered an armada of troop ships, supply ships, tankers, hospital ships and landing craft to the Leyte area. Numerous ‘jeep’ carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts were in the group but our fast carriers, cruisers, and battle-wagons had been decoyed far away from the area. Every carrier launched as many fighters and bombers as they could. We joined up with planes from the other ships, creating the largest formation of aircraft I have ever seen, and off we went, looking for the fleet of the Rising Sun. No one knew for sure just where this fleet was and our fighter cover was setting a faster than normal fuel guzzling pace for us. Finally the enemy ships did come into view and the sky turned to technicolor as anti-aircraft and even big guns let loose with their mighty firepower. Each burst from a big gun exploded in a colored cloud, some red, some purple, some blue. Concussion from the bursts was vicious and we bounced around far more than we ever had experienced, even in the wildest typhoon. Our groups split up and dived down through the shell bursts and ack ack, each group selecting a target ship. Our target was a battleship, a huge one.

As I recall, the procedure for firing a torpedo was to fly at an altitude of 200 feet, speed 200 knots, release the torpedo at 2000 yards, and pull out straight ahead, right over the deck of the target. That is exactly what we did, passing over the middle of that battleship at an altitude which could not have been more than 300 or 400 feet and unbelievable fire power, even guys on the deck with rifles, firing at us. We were firing at them, too. Bingham and I could not fire forward so our shooting started as we went over the battleship’s deck, Bing with his .50 caliber and me with my .30. I kept shooting as long as I could see the ship, which soon disappeared from my sight as we climbed away. There was a problem. My gun had a 16 mm movie camera with an electric motor drive clamped to the barrel. You could not use the camera when you were firing the gun because the vibration destroyed any pictures you might get. We knew the ship wanted all of the pictures we could take. It was terrible to have to stop shooting and run the camera. I would turn it on for an instant, then shut it off and shoot. I would keep remembering that they wanted pictures, so I would quit shooting and turn the camera on again. Finally, I deserted the camera and fired as long as I could. Did our torpedo hit the ship? I could not tell, but Casey says without hesitation that we did indeed get a good hit. Did we get hit? The answer is - almost no. We did get a minor hit in the tail, which made the plane a bit hard to control, but not really a problem.

We climbed back up to altitude amidst a cacophony of radio chatter. Pilots were reporting being on fire, having an injured crewman, inability to control their damaged aircraft, some just saying “Goodbye” before they splashed into the water. I can still faintly hear that chatter. The surviving planes started joining up as soon as we were out of firing range, all of us anxious to get back to our carriers. In the long search for the enemy fleet and the excitement of the chase, no one had paid that much attention to where our ships were. All of the pilots were working their homing beacon radios, trying to get a navigational assist. We were very low on fuel and Casey told us he didn’t think we had enough to get back. He asked if we preferred to bail out or to ride it down should the engine quit. Bing and I, having survived a previous water landing, said we preferred to ride it down. Neither one of us rode in an area where we could wear a parachute. We did wear a harness and there were QAC, quick attach, chutes hanging in the radio compartment which you supposedly could grab and snap into the harness – a procedure we were a bit leery of. Casey said, “OK, If the engine quits, I will pick out one of those little islands down there and I’ll try to belly in on the beach. If ten Japs jump us, you guys take two each and I’ll take the other six.” Meanwhile, someone picked up his ship on the homing beacon so we headed in that direction and before long the carriers appeared ahead and below us. Our group singled out the Suwannee and headed for her. As we flew by, we noted that the ship was making no attempt to head into the wind and she was not flying the Foxes, the signal flags that said she was ready for flight operation. We proceeded to fly over the carrier, with Casey reporting we were down to seven gallons of fuel. Ideally, that meant we had seven minutes to fly. No margin for fuel gauge accuracy. Hearing that report, I scooted up into the greenhouse in preparation for the worst. We seemed to be shorter on fuel than the other guys, so when the ship finally turned and hoisted the Foxes, we cut out the rest of our group and started our approach. That damaged tail I mentioned entered the picture about then, making it hard to control steering as we approached the flight deck. Just as we were about to get the signal to chop power and drop onto the deck, the Landing Signal Officer who had been guiding us in with his paddles, gave us a wave-off, the signal to add full power and go around for another approach. We sucked up the landing gear and started to circle around for another try. As we were headed down wind, abreast of the ship, our engine quit without a sputter and as we had been flying at a speed just above stall, the instant it quit, the plane stalled, the nose went down like a bullet, and we hit the water – very hard.

In my standup takeoff and landing position in the greenhouse, I did have a safety belt around my waist. The landing impact broke my safety belt and I flew about three feet forward into some oxygen bottles. One of my pant-legs was torn and I was scratched a little, but that was all. I suppose I had my breath knocked out for a few seconds but that was it. The plane had settled back, upright, in a normal attitude. I stepped out on the right wing and turned to the cockpit. Casey sat there,unconscious, water already up to his lap, his shoulder straps broken, and he had gashed his nose on the instrument panel. I scooped up water from his lap and washed off his bloody nose, which promptly woke him up. He was ok. About then, Bingham released the escape hatch on his turret and came out, rubbing the back of his head. Normally riding backward facing in his contour fitting turret, our impact with the water had given him a short nap, too. We were all wearing life jackets and there was a 3-man life raft in a compartment just in front of the tail. This compartment could be accessed from either side of the aircraft. I went back to take the cover plate off and get the life raft. Bingham went down the other side and took that plate off. It turned out that an emergency ration kit was also in this compartment and the ration kit and life raft were tied together by a six-foot piece of rope. As I pulled the life raft out, Bing pulled the ration kit out and as they were tied together we started to play seesaw. Seeing the futility of this, Bing, who always flew with a sheath knife, pulled it out and sliced the connecting line. The ration kit drifted away. We got the raft opened up and inflated. By now the plane had disappeared under the water, giving us time to get out and get the life raft. We certainly didn’t time how long it floated, but it could have been anywhere from three to five minutes. Goodbye to my combat movies; I should have kept firing.

If you have never found yourself in the middle of the ocean with just a Mae West and a rubber life raft, I must tell you that the view is not what you might expect. Rows of small waves, all lined up one after the other, with ten or more feet between them, rock you gently up and down but you just cannot see very far in any direction. Then, about every tenth wave is bigger than the others and it lifts you, gives you time to look around, and then dumps you back in the smaller swells. As we bobbed up on the next large wave, we saw the emergency ration kit floating some distance away. Since we had no idea how long we might be at the mercy of this ocean, Bingham and I broke out the two little oars that came with the life raft and started to row toward the ration kit. Every time we popped up on the next big wave, there that ration kit would be, still bobbing along several waves away. We popped up on another one of the big waves and there was the pilot’s parachute floating along. We didn’t seem to be making much progress gaining on the ration kit, so we gave up on it and started an attempt to salvage the parachute. It was valuable, you know. After a few more of the big waves gave us evidence that we were making no progress whatsoever, we popped up on another big one and there was a Destroyer Escort (DE) bearing down on us. Well, forget the ration kit. Forget the parachute. Bingham and I started rowing like mad toward the DE. As we topped the next big wave, there was an officer standing on her bow with a megaphone. He shouted “I say. Are we going to rescue you? Or are you going to rescue us?”

What a wonderful sight that DE was! But as she eased closer to us, there on the topside was one of our squadron’s electricians. What could he possibly be doing on this DE? Soon we were hauled aboard the RICHARD S. BULL. As my dungaree leg was torn and a little blood was showing, they wanted their corpsman to look at. I was taken to the officers ward room, and there, strapped down to the dining table was one of our plane captains. I asked him what was happening and he told me that soon after we left the ship on our torpedo mission, the Suwannee had taken a Kamikazi. The plane, loaded with explosives and incendiaries, had punched a huge hole through the flight deck and went on through to the hangar deck, creating a tremendous fire ball and explosion. Every man on the hangar deck who had been near an opening was burned black by the fire ball and then blown over the side. The plane captain on the Bull’s wardroom table had been one of those guys. Those not near an opening were not that lucky. My battle station when we were not flying was near one of those openings. On the Suwannee, our landing had been delayed as crewmen had been desperately trying to patch the hole in the flight deck so that we could land.

The Bull had fished a lot of our guys out of the water. Most of them had been flash burned black on every exposed piece of skin. There were many serious additional injuries and the Bull did not have a doctor aboard. They did have a 2^nd class corpsman who in the real world had been an undertaker. I mention that only because the ship’s skipper seemed to belittle him and called him “Digger O’Dell.” If you are old enough, that name will be familiar to you. Anyway, because of the limited medical/surgical facilities on the DE, they found a big aircraft carrier and transferred all but the walking casualties onto that ship. As there were guys with minor problems still aboard, a doctor from the carrier was transferred to the Bull.

Our carrier division had two Escort Destroyers assigned to pick up downed airmen and move personnel from ship to ship while we were under way. A unique feature of our four carriers was that, due to their original tanker heritage, they had unprecedented fuel carrying capacity. Because of that, we routinely refueled our destroyer screen. On this historic day in October our carriers were not in a position to do any refueling. Both of the DE’s were running short of fuel. Lacking their normal source of fuel, they were both dispatched into Leyte Harbor where all of the MacArthur armada were riding at anchor, supplying support to the landing operation. On the Bull, we were going from supply ship to ship, looking for any place to find fuel. The other DE, whose name I do not recall, found a source and started refueling. The Bull was not having much luck. After considerable delay, she finally found a freighter who had fuel to spare and started pumping oil down to us. We had no more than a good start on the refueling when a radio command was issued, advising that Japanese aircraft headed our way had been sighted and we were to leave the area immediately. The other DE was topped off by this time, but we were just getting started and had a long way to go for a fill-up. It was decided that the other DE would immediately leave the harbor and head for Palau, the island where the task force had formed up which was about six or seven days away. We were to hang onto our fuel source as long as we could and then follow the other DE, with a plan to catch up with it at daybreak the next morning. Our fuel source was soon shut off as we were forced to leave the harbor without delay, our fuel tanks still nowhere near full. It was dusk as we left the harbor and night quickly closed in on us. We ‘guests’ aboard were assigned to available bunks, the one they found for me was right in the bow. There was a quarter inch of boilerplate between me and the ocean. Tired after a very eventful day, I was sleeping soundly when, somewhere around 3 AM, there was a very loud “Thump” and then silence. Something was just not right. I started to get dressed, and while I was tying my shoes, General Quarters sounded and then everything became very quiet. Ships at sea never stop, no matter what. We had stopped. In the dark, I felt my way down a corridor, thru the ward room, and out through light-tight curtains onto the deck. It was deathly still. The starless sky was inky black. Then I heard voices, voices floating in off the ocean, calling “Help, Help.” The Bull had stopped dead in the water. A strong smell of fuel oil permeated the air. Without showing a single light, the ship lowered its lifeboat and the motor launch. They quietly steered toward the voices and found men, men holding onto anything that would float, most of them in great pain. These fellows were floating in a sea of oil. They were hauled aboard on the fantail, that part of the afterdeck that sweeps down to within a few feet of the water. The oil on the men made the deck so slippery they had to sprinkle sand on it in order for anyone to stand up without slipping. The boat crews continued to find more men until by daybreak they had picked nearly two hundred survivors. What happened? The DE we were speeding to catch up with was cruising toward our morning meeting place when, without a sign of warning, took an enemy torpedo and sank immediately. The ship, without any warning, did not go to General Quarters. The crew, except for the duty watch, were in their bunks asleep. They had no chance to don life jackets or grab something that would float. Then, while they were in the water and their ship was sinking, her boilers exploded, sending violent shock waves through the water, exploding the guts of the helpless, unprotected men. Some of them were dying as they were fished aboard.

Nearly one hundred men were picked up. The ship that needed fuel got under way again, ironically, plowing through the very oil that she needed so badly. That night we had burial services on the fantail. The next night, more burial services. On the following day we ran into a typhoon. That ship did everything but stand on her tail. You couldn’t take a step without hanging onto something. We rode that typhoon for another day before we ran out of it. Now we are getting word from the chief engineer that our fuel level was dangerously low. Next he reported that he had changed the jets in the burners to the smallest ones he had on board. Latest comment I heard from him was that he had sailors scooping up oil with spoons to feed the burners.

Luck was on our side. With our fingers crossed, we finally coasted into the harbor. There were few ships there but we did see one aircraft carrier at anchor. She was dirty black, her superstructure looked deserted and there didn’t seem to be any activity on the topside. As soon as the Bull dropped anchor, the captain jumped in his motor launch and went looking for fuel. While we were sitting at anchor, doing nothing, I was on the bridge looking around through binoculars. I turned them on that cruddy looking carrier and my heart stopped when I read the big numbers, 27. That was the Suwannee! That was our carrier!

I shared my discovery with Casey and Bingham. Our immediate wish was to get back on our ship. Soon the DE skipper returned from his successful search for fuel. Seeing our excitement at ‘finding’ our carrier, he ordered his motor launch to take us ‘home.’ As we approached the Suwannee from her port side, we saw no activity, no planes on the flight deck – she truly looked like a ghost ship. We circled around to the starboard side where we expected to see a gangplank for boarding. There was no gangplank, just a rope ladder drooping down from the quarterdeck. I was the first one up the ladder. Standing there on the quarterdeck was the Air Group yeoman and his first remark was “Am I glad to see you! We thought you were dead!”

The ship was a mess. On the hangar deck, the forward elevator was hanging with the left end on the flight deck and the right end at hangar level. Fire had gutted everything forward of the hangar. The bridge and superstructure were burned out. There wasn’t an aircraft left on the ship. The entire steering system on the bridge was wiped out. They had navigated her back from Leyte Gulf by using an emergency steering wheel in the port catwalk. With no radar for protection, they had posted officers with binoculars at the four corners of the flight deck 24 hours a day. We just didn’t see a lot of men and we learned that a number of those remaining were so spooked that they were afraid to go below the flight deck, even to the mess hall for meals. Cooks had sent boxes of apples to the topside just to get the guys to eat something.

Our first question was “What happened?” We had learned while on the Richard S. Bull about the Kamikaze that had blasted a hole through the flight deck, causing us to run out of gas and end up on a destroyer instead of a carrier. What we had not heard was that the following day, the Suwannee took two more Kamikazes. They killed several hundred men and caused a devastating fire. Were it not for that sturdy old tanker hull, she would have sunk. The planes on board were either impacted by the Kamikaze or burned in the fire and had to be pushed over the side. Not one aircraft survived.

A dedicated crew got some communications equipment and a bridge steering system working and we headed out for Pearl Harbor, a two-week run, the next morning. We pulled into Pearl about four PM and as soon as the gangplank dropped in place, a swarm of photographers, marine architects, and engineers came aboard. They spent the balance of the afternoon doing a thorough analysis of the damaged ship. At daybreak the next morning we headed for the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington. We arrived in Bremerton about ten days later to find a drydock all ready for us. The materials needed to make all repairs were stacked on the dock. Although our Air group was detached from the Suwannee the day we arrived, it was astounding to later learn that the Bremerton Yard had set an all time record by completely rebuilding that ship and sending her back to the Pacific in twelve weeks.

The men of AG-60 were detached from CVE-27, given new duty orders, and sent home on 30 day leaves. Ensign Casey and I were reassigned, as were a few others, to report to Sand Point Naval Air Station (Seattle) to form a new Air Group Sixty. I went home for my first visit since the day I had skipped school to go to Seattle two and one half years before to check out a navy radar program. It was great to see my family and friends. At Sand Point NAS, eager pilots started to show up, along with fuzzy cheeked air-crewmen, all fresh out of their respective training schools. Wow, they were young! As soon as all of our new personnel had arrived, we moved the squadrons to Klamath Falls, Oregon and started training. A first class aviation ordinance man from the old torpedo squadron and I were promoted to Chief and discovered that our technical expertise went on a timeshare with being den mothers to the ‘kids’

From Klamouth Falls, we moved to NAS Whidbey Island for torpedo training, and from there to Fallon, Nevada for rocket training. Next was NAS Vernalis, California, and finally onto a ship which took us under the Golden Gate and on to Hilo, Hawaii where we continued our training in a more tropical environment. While we were at Hilo, the A bombs were dropped and soon after the Japanese capitulated. It was an exciting day and fun to share with that little town in celebrating such a big event.

With the surrender of Japan, it seemed logical to assume that we could all go home and get on with our lives. Not yet. While we had been training up and down the West Coast, The Suwannee and her Air Group had been taking a beating along the way to Japan. The Air Group needed, and had earned a rest. Even though the surrender had been signed, there was much policing and patrol work to be done. We were scheduled to do that work. Collectively, we had a lot of guys in the fighter and the torpedo squadrons combined, not to mention a mountain of personal baggage. The navy sent two aircraft down to Hilo to haul us back to Pearl Harbor. One plane was a navy version of a B24 bomber and the other was a gigantic flying boat, which landed in the Hilo harbor. The personnel were split up in two groups, one of which was hauled down to the harbor for loading onto the navy’s largest aircraft. The B24 equivalent, a PB4Y-2, I believe, was really never meant to be a personnel carrier. The cockpit had room for two pilots, a flight engineer, and a radioman. Behind that was a large bomb bay and farther aft was an area meant for use by two waist gunners. There was a hatch (doorway) between the flight deck and the bomb bay. I finagled the radioman seat on the flight deck. Air-crewmen were loading themselves and their bags into the waist gunner area. It was nowhere near large enough for all of the guys and there were no seats for any of them. Some had to move on forward into the bomb bay which had a very narrow walkway down the middle and bomb racks from top to bottom on both sides. The guys had to stand and hang on to whatever they could find. On the flight deck, no one was aware of the condition behind the hatch door. The pilots fired up the four engines, taxied out, lined up on the runway and poured on the power. As we were climbing out on a runway heading, the flight engineer got out of his seat and cranked up an auxiliary power unit that generated backup power for the electric instruments. He had just returned to his seat when the hatch door opened and one of the airmen, his face fiery red, shouted that there was a gas leak. The flight engineer casually started thru the hatch, stopped, then instantly shut down the APU and turned to the pilots shouting in the pilot’s ear and shutting off the engine switches. The pilot instantly responded, making a 180 degree turn and glided right back down to the runway we had just lifted off from. He let the plane roll to a dead stop in the middle of the runway and, without a word, got out of his seat and walked right off the ship.

All this over a little gas leak? There were four engines, each with one inch, perhaps even larger, rubber fuel lines that joined up in the bomb bay with lines of equal size coming from the fuel tanks. Some of the airmen, having no safety belts or anything else to stabilize them, were hanging on to the gas lines and one of them came off its coupling, leaving a 1 inch stream of 100 octane gasoline streaming out on the guys, and this within 6 feet of a putt-putt that was pouring out heat and sparks. The flying boat, which had already taken off, returned to Hilo so those of us from the bomber could crowd aboard. It carried us all with no problem.

At Pearl, we loaded onto an escort aircraft carrier, not as crewmen but as passengers. There were already 100 apprentice seamen aboard and the flight deck was loaded with the very latest night torpedo bombers. There was also a huge airport fire truck with a big boom on top. The ship must have been waiting for us, for it got under way soon as we came aboard. We were headed for Guam and then on to Saipan. The apprentice seamen were previously rated petty officers who had been serving brig time and now were being shanghaied to a far Pacific outpost. Each night they would set up 100 folding cots on the hangar deck for the men to sleep on. At each daybreak, the cots were folded and stacked in a pile. Things went well until the night before we reached Guam. We encountered a typhoon, a powerful one. Had we been on the Suwannee, she would have snuggled into the raging waters and cruised along without missing a beat. This quick build “Kaiser Coffin” was another story. She required expert handling in a situation like this and our skipper was not an expert. The rumor was that he had been an ‘arm-chair’ captain in Washington, D.C. and had been given this command as sort of a reward for all the good paper work he had processed. As the storm strengthened, the captain got us broadside into its fury and the ship began to list. She tilted farther and farther to starboard, accompanied by loud banging and thumping from the flight deck. This ship had watertight integrity to 48 degrees, which means that, beyond that, seawater will pour into her stacks and the boilers will be flooded and she will lose all power. The list reached 45 Degrees. The cots on the hangar deck had been scooting from one side to the other and eventually the guys folded them up and stacked them. Someone decided the weight of us passengers might help, so they lined us all up along the port side of the hangar deck. Eventually the list began to abate, the severe slant of the deck slowly diminished and before long, we were on an even keel. By daybreak the storm had moved on. I went up on the flight deck and beheld a catastrophe. There was not a single salvageable airplane on the deck. Planes had slipped their moorings and piled into each other, a propeller of one plane was poking all the way through the wing of another, and some were lying upside down, torn to shreds. The fire truck was the one item topside that was still ok. Scuttlebutt was that, when we were broadside into that typhoon, a seasoned old-timer officer risked his career by forcing the captain off the bridge and then very carefully quartering the ship into the storm.

Morning produced calm seas. We could see Guam on the horizon. The captain was not up to having people on shore see the mess on his flight deck. He put a crew together picking up each airplane, setting it on its feet, and lining them all up in neat rows. The ship went back and forth parallel to the coastline until everything was “shipshape”. Then we went into Apra Harbor, the Guam seaport. There were no docks or piers in the harbor. We anchored offshore and a very large barge with a flat top was floated out and tied up alongside. Each aircraft was gently lifted off onto the barge, which they towed back to shore. Then they took all the planes off the barge and piled them in a big heap. Last to come off the flight deck was the big fire truck. I will save you the sorry details and simply say that it was destroyed in the unloading process

We sailed from Guam on up to Saipan where we flew practice missions from a field our marines had taken away from the Japanese. Our air-crewmen were enjoying their first visit to a foreign country. It was a good place for us to await the arrival of the Suwannee. However, plans do change. A few weeks after our arrival on Saipan, the Chenango, sister ship to the Suwannee, came in and we went aboard to replace the tired Air Group that was already aboard.

Instead, the other guys did not leave the ship. Rather, with both Air Groups aboard, we headed for San Diego. Our war was over and we were anxious to return home and get on with our lives.

As I have been reviewing some of my wartime experiences, I am once again forcefully reminded of what a lucky guy I am. God must have something in mind for a man who has been saved from as many opportunities to die as I . I am humbly grateful for my survival and am still wondering where I fit in His master plan.

Chuck Herrin

October 2001

Note: Chuck died in the crash of his home built “Hornet” on June 26, 2003 during it’s trial flight

Eulogy from Sun Lakes Aero Club

This was taken from "A Parable of Immortality" by Henry Van Dyke
The original is about a Ship but was re-worded to fit Chuck

I am standing on the tarmac.  He boards
his plane, taxi's to the runway and with
a burst of power departs for the heavens
like a graceful bird.  He grows smaller
and smaller until he hangs like a speck
just where the sun and sky come down to
mingle with each other.  Then someone
at my side says, "There he goes!"

Gone where?  Gone from my sight . . .
that is all.  He is still the wonderful pilot,
husband, father and grandfather that he
has always been.

His diminished size is in me, not in him.
And just at the moment when someone
at my side says,  "There he goes!" there
are other eyes watching him coming and
other voices ready to take up the glad
shout,  "Here he comes!"