Roy Capps US Marine USS Pennsylvania |
Like many young Marines, Roy Capps wouldn't make guard duty aboard ship his first choice of duty. But ultimately, his name fell at the top of the list and the 18-year-old private first class couldn't refuse. So on Dec. 4, 1941, he was transferred from a Pearl Harbor guard unit to duty aboard the nearby USS Pennsylvania. Capps figured he didn't know a soul aboard the huge, 3,300-crew battleship, which also served as flagship for the U.S. Pacific Fleet and was sister ship to the USS Arizona. But on the night of Dec. 6, he found Harold Comstock, a high- school classmate and fellow footballer from Pasco, a sailor aboard the Penn. The two went to a movie together that Saturday night. The next morning, Dec. 7, Capps stood his first guard duty aboard the 33,000-ton Pennsylvania, which was in Dry Dock 1 for routine alignment of its propellers and shafts. He stood on the gangway when the first planes showed up. "I couldn't believe what I saw, to begin with, because I knew we had no planes like that," Capps said. "And of course when they started dropping bombs, I was damned certain they weren't ours. Then you could see the rising sun on the aircraft and you knew who it was." The crew was called to general quarters, but Capps was never relieved on the gangway. It turned out to be a lucky thing, because his battle station was on a 5-inch broadside gun. "One of the bombs crashed through the boat deck and burst on the base of that gun, right where I would have been," he said. "So I got by that one easy enough." Two sailors were manning a boiler alongside the ship while it was in dry dock. One of them got hit and Capps and the other sailor carried him to medical care on the quarterdeck. "About that time the ship got hit again and we both went around and underneath this big pile of 12-by-12s they used to brace the ship up in dry dock," he said. They came out on the other side, in front of the destroyer Shaw, in floating dry dock more than a hundred yards away. The Shaw was hit by three bombs. "It blew up in our face, so we went back around the other way again," he said. "It was just all confusion. We couldn't do anything." Harold Comstock, Capp's high school friend, was on a radio repair crew that was called to the quarter deck. He was killed in a bomb blast. Capps had a rifle and the usual five rounds of ammo given Marine guards, but he knew that was no use against the planes. "I could see the whole fleet get hit, practically," he said. "The only battleship I didn't see get hit was the Utah, which was on the other side of Ford Island. The rest of them were torpedoed at anchor." Fifteen members of the Pennsylvania crew were killed and 38 were wounded. The Pennsylvania was repaired and returned to service by Dec. 20. For Capps, the Pearl Harbor attack was just the first action he saw in a 26-1/2-year Marine career. He was aboard the Pennsylvania during fighting in the Aleutian Islands, then he joined the 5th and 6th Marine divisions and was with the latter for the bloody invasion of Okinawa in 1945. Capps also served in the Vietnam War. He was awarded the Purple Heart when he was wounded during an attack by the Vietcong, using captured U.S. mortars. He retired in March 1968 as a master gunnery sergeant at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, the same duty station where he began his career as a private 26-1/2 years earlier. The Pearl Harbor attack, he remembers, was far different from anything else he experienced in his career. "The main thing was the surprise," he said. "Most of the other times we went into combat, we knew we were going into combat and we knew we were going to get action. "But to just see everything being destroyed right in front of your eyes that was the biggest thing," he said. "It was a good thing the aircraft carriers weren't there; they'd gone to sea about three days before. That would have really been hectic if they'd gotten those." And as it turned out, the carriers' survival forced the U.S. to shift from reliance on battleships to aircraft carriers, the strategy many credit with winning the war in the Pacific. |
Information provided by Roy Capps. |
