Fleet Hamby US Navy USS Maryland |
It was early on a beautiful Sunday morning, perfect time for a little rowing exercise. Fleet Hamby and eight shipmates climbed aboard a Navy whale boat, the kind battleship crews used for recreational rowing competitions. It was tied up next to their battleship, USS Maryland. They were just settling in when the Japanese planes were spotted. "The first planes we saw came right over the ship, and they looked like dive bombers," he said. "I saw them as plain as I can see you sitting there. But it didn't come to me. Probably the youngest boy of our group finally said, 'I don't think those are our planes.' " Hamby and his shipmates saw a black bomb drop, headed for seaplane hangars. Still, they thought it might be a water bomb, the kind often used in training exercises. "Then we saw the explosion and the fire, and we thought, 'Oh hell!' " Hamby said. At the same time a Japanese torpedo plane flew over the channel, attacking Battleship Row, and then the strafing started. Had the attack come a few minutes later, the whale boat crew would already have pulled into the harbor and likely been shot to pieces. But the sailors hadn't even had time to untie the boat from the quay. They leapt out of the whale boat and raced up the Jacobs Ladder, two abreast, to the Maryland, Hamby said. He headed for his battle station in turret number two, one of the 16-inch turrets. "Habit is a strong thing," he said. "I raced across the port side, instead of the starboard side where I'd have been sheltered behind turret one and turret two. There were splinters flying and bullets hitting the armor." Hamby ran into turret two, waking some sailors who had been trying to sleep late on the loading platform. "I was falling over some of them, hollering, getting them up," he said. A sailor writing a letter up in the superstructure, next to a 50-caliber machine gun, immediately threw down his pencil, grabbed some ammo and began firing, Hamby recalled. "He got a plane, but whether or not it was the first one, nobody knows," he said. It was chaos, Hamby said. He was in his battle station, as he was supposed to be, but the 16-inch guns were of no use in such an attack. "We couldn't do anything," he said. "We just heard wild reports." Hamby and another sailor were sent out to remove canvas from the guns. "I got out there, and I couldn't believe it," Hamby said. "It was all just fire and black smoke everywhere." Ultimately the crew managed to fire all its anti-aircraft batteries. The battleship USS Oklahoma, moored next to the Maryland, had been badly hit and turned over; sailors had to cut ropes tying the two ships together so the Maryland wouldn't be turned over, as well. During the attack, "I wasn't as scared as I was later," Hamby said. "That night, we were in such a state of confusion and at about 10 p.m. we heard some planes coming in. I thought, 'Man, this is it.' I was thinking, 'Boy, if I could just get a rifle and get to a beach somewhere and do what I could.' But they turned out to be our planes." The next day, Hamby was assigned to help fight fires on the USS West Virginia, which was sunk in the attack but later raised and repaired. He's still haunted by what happened to sailors on the Oklahoma, trapped inside when the ship turned over. "The Oklahoma was sticking up, oh, 8 or 10 feet, and they couldn't use torches so they used air guns to cut into the bottom of the ship," he said. "They heard this 'tap, tap,' and it seems like it was three or four days later, managed to get some of them out alive." The Maryland itself was hit by two bombs, suffering moderate damage. Hamby remained aboard the battleship for the duration of the war, and the Pearl Harbor bombing was only a taste of what was to come. The "Fighting Mary" participated in several key battles, including assaults on Tarawa in November 1943 and Saipan in June 1944, the initial landings in the Philippines and the battle for Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Between 1944 and 1945, the Maryland was twice hit by Kamikaze suicide attacks, something Hamby said was more terrifying than the Pearl Harbor attack itself. "They killed a lot of people," he said. Among them, a friend of Hamby's who had helped him remove canvas from the Maryland guns while the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. The Maryland earned seven battle stars during the war. _________________________________________________ It is with deep sadness that we share the news of Mr. Fleet Hamby's passing on June 17, 2002. The following is the obituary that was published in the June26th edition of "The Sun" newspaper. Pearl Harbor survivor Fleet Hamby, 82, of Port Orchard died June 17, 2002, at Harrison Hospital. He was born May 20, 1920, in Burns-ville, N.C., to Zachariah Spencer and Anne Elizabeth (Gibbs) Hamby. He graduated from Burnsville High School in 1939. Mr. Hamby served in the Navy from 1940 to 1961, achieving the rank of senior chief gunner's mate. He was awarded the Good Conduct Medal, the Navy Occupation Medal, the American Defense Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the National Defense Medal, the China Service Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal and the Philippine Liberation Medal. He later worked at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for 14 years, retiring as a planner-estimator in 1975. Mr. Hamby was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. He also was a Mason. Survivors include a son, Curtis Hamby of Clallam Bay; a daughter, Nadine Hamby of Seattle; a sister, Edith Boone of Burnsville; and one granddaughter, Lyndzie Hamby. He was preceded in death by a brother, Jim Hamby, and a sister, Connie Morgan. A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. Friday at Pendleton-Gilchrist Funeral Home at Rill Chapel. An online memorial can be seen at : www.rill.com (Click on flag to link to memorial site) |
