Simon Peter "Pete" Limp US Navy USS Whitney |
Simon "Pete" Limp was born on December 4, 1922 in Washington County Indiana. Of his three older brothers and two older sisters, he still has two brothers living today. His family lived on a farm just outside of Salem, a small country town that had a population of 3,000 to 4,000 people. On the farm, the family grew corn, wheat, oats, and hay. Simon Limp attended Washington County schools, but he only made it to the ninth grade. Simon Limp was the only boy in his family to enlist in the military. He enlisted into the United States Navy on February 19, 1940 at the NRS (Naval Reserves Station) in Louisville, Kentucky. For training, Pete went to Great Lakes Training Camp in Chicago Illinois. He was stationed there for three months. During training he got up at 6:00 a.m. and ate breakfast. After breakfast, recruits marched, drilled and exercised. Then they ate lunch and preformed more drills and more exercises. After they ate supper at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m., they had free time. Before Pete was sent aboard his ship to head to Pearl Harbor he was sent to a hospital in California for a hernia operation,. From California he boarded a ship at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu Hawaii where he was assigned to the USS Whitney, which was a destroyer repair ship. On December 7, 1941, Pete experienced the surprise attack by the Japanese first hand. Pete was asleep in his bunk. He had been out celebrating his birthday the night before. He heard someone coming down the steps of the ship to his room hollering that either the "Japs" or Germans were bombing the heck out of them. Pete jumped out of his bunk and ran up to the topside, still in his shorts. As he reached the top he saw the USS Arizona blow up and the USS California begin to roll over. He ran back down to get dressed, not remembering if he put his dungarees on. He ran back up to his battle station, which was a search light. Everyone was running around in confusion. That night after dusk, two US planes were misidentified and they were shot out of the sky by US gunmen. This is when the magnitude of the attack really hit Pete. "I looked out and saw the ships blown up, turned over on their sides and floating bodies in the water. It was sad." "There was no major damage done to the USS Whitney because the Japanese just grazed it with machine gun fire", Pete stated. During the bombing of Pearl Harbor, men did not have time to be clam and think about what needed to be done. It was all confusion for everyone. This was Pete's first battle experience. Pete was discharged fromt eh Navy on February 23, 1946, and his rank was an Aviation Electrician First Class, which was right below the rank of Chief Electrician. Information taken from a paper written by Sarah Belles which was provided by Simon Peter "Pete" Limp |
