Les Coe US Navy USS Nevada |
War was the last thing on Les Coe's mind as he stood at a mirror freshening up. It was five minutes before eight on a quiet, balmy Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. In another hour, Coe and many of his shipmates aboard the battleship USS Nevada were to go ashore at Pearl Harbor for a day on the town. Coe was feeling good. "I heard some racket outside," he remembers. "I looked outside." In another few minutes, Coe and 1,100 others aboard the Nevada were scrambling for their lives. A hundred crewmen would never see loved ones again, another 200 would be wounded or burned, and all who survived would forever retain a horrid, vivid memory of the day World War II began. The Nevada a 30,000-ton warship would sink along with the rest of the Pride of the Pacific Fleet, "Battleship Row." But historians would note it was the Nevada that put up the noblest fight of any ship in Pearl Harbor the day of the infamous sneak attack. Later, when the Nevada was raised, reconditioned and recommissioned in 1942, she went on to compile a distinguished battle record, serving both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Coe proved to be the only sailor out of the Nevada's eventual wartime crew of 2,100 who was with the ship both on Pearl Harbor Day and the day the war ended in 1945. "Amazement, more than anything," Coe describes the way he felt as he looked outside the washroom at a scene of Japanese fighter planes, machine gun fire, smoke, screaming and yelling. "But we weren't completely surprised," he added. "We knew we were going to war the war was on in Europe. But we had no idea it was going to start like this." Japanese planes were strafing the decks of all the ships along Battleship Row, trying to keep sailors from manning the guns. "We manned them anyway, under fire," Coe said. "That's where the casualties were. "The ship functioned perfectly. We manned the guns immediately and started fighting back. Everybody was mad as hell and ready to go." Tied up at Battleship Row, the Nevada was last in line right behind the USS Arizona. When the Arizona blew up, the crew of the Nevada cast off to try to make it to open water. The man who unleashed the lines died doing so, and his family later received the Congressional Medal of Honor in his name. Before the Nevada could get away, she took a torpedo in her side and five direct bomb hits. "I was blown down a passageway, head over heels," said Coe, whose job was damage control fighting fires and preserving the watertight integrity of the ship. Bruised and scorched, but not seriously wounded, he got back up and went back at it. Japanese pilots, seeing this one battleship head for the channel, feared it might reach sea and come back to haunt Japan. In droves, ferociously, the dive-bombers zeroed in on the Nevada. Coe figures the ship took "probably 50 near misses" in the channel, but no direct hits. It didn't matter. The ship was sinking. All the crew could do was steer for shore, so as not to block Pearl Harbor's vital channel when she sank. Notwithstanding the best efforts of the Japanese dive-bombers, the Nevada was able to beach herself. For three days the ship, half submerged in about 30 feet of water, continued to burn. Surviving crewmen continued to work, extinguishing fires and undertaking a massive cleanup operation. In the confusion of battle, Les Coe was listed as "Missing in Action." His parents were notified by telegram, and they thought he was dead until the January 5, 1942 issue of Life Magazine hit the newsstands. Looking healthy as could be was their son Les, in a post-battle picture of Nevada crewmen cleaning up the decks of the mired battleship. Not until March of 1942 was the Navy able to raise the Nevada. In April the battered battleship originally commissioned in 1916 began an intensive reconditioning and modernization. When she returned to sea in December she boasted the most modern weaponry and technology, and a wartime crew of 2,100. Some 1,500 of them were raw recruits. Coe helped train them. After seeing action in the Aleutian Islands, the Nevada was transferred to the Atlantic in July 1943. She ran three North Atlantic convoys, moving US troops to Europe while evading German submarines. The ship took part in the D-Day invasion of France in June 1944, and then returned to the Pacific in January 1945. Could any war experience be worse than Pearl Harbor? Yes, Coe remembers: The US landing at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. "Okinawa was the worst," he said. "We had 19 straight days of continual, constant air attack. It was pure hell." In a daily journal, Coe recorded his thoughts, his fears, the near misses, the death and destruction around him, the sleepless nights and the nerve-wracking existence he lived. Day and night the Nevada got plastered by heavy Japanese shore batteries while lending fire support to beleaguered US troops on shore. A shipmate standing next to Coe was nicked by shrapnel. Kamikaze suicide planes were "falling down out of the sky like flies," he wrote. "These God dam air raids are giving everyone the screaming willies," Coe wrote at one point. "They are really hell, and we have lost a lot of men and ships in the deal. The largest percentage of them are suiciders, and they are hard to stop. "So far, we've had 82 ships hit by suicide planes in this operation, including four battleships. Not a few of them have sunk. Kerama Retto (the battle staging area) is filled with beat up destroyers. "We are not in such good shape ourselves. So far we have had 102 casualties on this ship." Coe came within inches of being one of them. He could see the suicide plane coming in from quite a distance, headed toward him in a beeline as he stood at the air defense command post. "I had already given up," Coe wrote, "when we blew one of his wings off, which threw him off his course just enough to miss my station." The plane 600 feet away from Coe when the wing was hit veered slightly over Coe's head, missing him by about 15 feet, and smashed into the main afterdeck. "Seven killed, eight walking wounded and 20 seriously wounded," Coe wrote. "That's as close as I ever want to see another, and a helluva lot closer." Eventually the Nevada was so badly battered that Coe wrote, "if we get hit much more, we'll fall apart. "I'm punchy," he wrote another day. "Still flinch when shells go overhead, but who the hell doesn't?" And another day: "If this doesn't make Mary Jane a widow, nothing will." But the Nevada survived, and so did Coe, a nervous wreck. The ship returned to Pearl Harbor for repairs, then helped secure the Marshall and Caroline Islands for US forces until the war ended in August. "I lost 30 pounds that last year," Coe said. "I came back like a skeleton." Returning to peacetime Southern California after shuttling US troops back from Guam aboard the Nevada, Coe was reunited with his wife Mary Jane, who almost didn't recognize him. "He was just a bundle of nerves," she said. "He couldn't stand and light a cigarette. But he straightened himself out." Mr. And Mrs. Coe, who had met on a blind date in 1941 and were married in 1943 between the Nevada's Pacific and Atlantic tours of duty, went on to raise two daughters. Les Coe served for 27 years with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, retiring as a captain in 1973 and moved to San Clemente. An avid golfer and member of the San Clemente Exchange Club, he was a past president of the USS Nevada Reunion Association. The Nevada? Two weeks after Coe was transferred off the ship in San Pedro in 1945, the battlewagon returned to the South Pacific for one last mission. Bikini Atoll. Target ship for the first-ever testing of the atomic bomb. "The bomb didn't sink her," Coe said. "But she was so radioactive that they used her for torpedo and bombing practice and sank her." The Nevada was Coe's first and only ship during his six years in the Navy, from 1940 1946. "You can never forget it," he said. "You just think about the guys you knew. You remember the good, more than the bad. "I had a lot of buddies killed on the ship." Clearly, Les Coe believed he was very lucky to be alive. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Les passed away from lung cancer on December 5, 1995 at the age of 78. |
Information provided by Mary Jane Coe |
