John E. Russak US Navy USS Argonne |
I was a lad of fifteen when we moved from Trenton, New Jersey to Redondo Beach, California in 1939. There was my mother, a Polish immigrant, my two brothers and me. My father had died when I was four. My mother spoke broken English and work was hard to come by in New Jersey. Her sister's family had moved to California and she wrote telling Mom she could probably get work in California. This did not prove to be true but my older brother who was nineteen got a job. I worked as an apprentice carpenter for an ex-sailor named George Kessler on weekends and after school. While we worked, George would regale me with stories about his time in the Navy and it sounded like an adventurous life to me. One day while working on a job on Pier Avenue, I saw a sailor come walking along. He had a nice looking uniform, a beautiful blond on his arm and obviously had money to spend. They were laughing and singing. I decided right then and there that this was the life for me. I was 16, so I persuaded my mother to sign for me and joined up. A week later, I was in boot camp in San Diego. It was totally different than I thought it would be. I found out it was not all beautiful girls and good times, but was a lot of hard work and discipline. Besides that, I was homesick. I had never been away from home before. There were a lot of other kids there, mostly southerners, who were as homesick as I was. They had joined because jobs were hard to find and they were all from poor families, but they were a unique bunch of guys. They really loved and respected the flag and had great pride in where they were from, especially the Texans. I met some brothers from Redondo Beach. I hadn't known them at home, but we became good friends. It turned out that the Russell brothers and myself were the only survivors of our entire company after the war was over. After graduation from boot camp, I was transferred to the San Pedro Naval Base and from there went on board the fleet flagship at that time, the USS Argonne. Most of the rest of the company was split up between the Arizona, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Maryland, and the Pennsylvania. We left shortly for the Hawaiian Islands. It was my first trip to sea and I was seasick the entire trip. I felt sorry for the men in the bunks below me. I'm sure they wished I had not been assigned an upper bunk. The Boatswain Mate, whose name was O'Brien, was a tough old salt. He had been in the Navy a long time. He changed us from diapers to long pants in no time. It wasn't long, under his training, that we knew how to handle our weapons, mops and chipping hammers like experts. Hawaii was a beautiful place. The beaches were wonderful and I spent a lot of time tanning in the sun when off duty. We went from there to Canton, China and back where we "swung around the buoy" in Honolulu. We were pulled in to 10-10 dock at Pearl Harbor. In November of 1941 the aircraft carriers, Saratoga and Enterprise pulled in on the opposite side from where we were. If they had remained there, I probably wouldn't be telling this story because the Japs would have gone after them first. Around the first of December they left for sea. We heard they were going home for the holidays and that we would be going home, too. On December 6, 1941, O'Brien took a bunch of us green kids to Canal Street in Honolulu to the nearest bar and got us drunk. From there he took us to a tattoo parlor. He said every sailor should have a tattoo. I had a naked girl tattooed on my left arm. Later the Captain made me have some clothes tattooed on her. We heard that while most of the ship's crew were on liberty in Honolulu, the Japanese were giving a big party for the US fleet's officers. On the morning of December 7th, I awoke with a hangover and a sore arm. I was getting dressed so I could catch the shore launch to go to church when I heard some loud explosions and the ship rocked violently. At first I thought it was gunnery practice but I wondered why they were doing it on Sunday morning. Then men began running down the passages shouting that we were being attacked. I threw on the pants to my whites and ran in my stocking feet to the nearest hatch. When I looked out I was horrified to see Ford Island, across the harbor from us, in flames. I saw half a dozen planes with what we called meatballs painted on the side flying over and I knew this was no drill. All of a sudden, I was scared to death. I ran back and threw on my dungarees and shoes and headed for the armory. The gunners mate handed me a BAR rifle and a dozen 30 round clips of ammo and told me to shoot at any of those planes I saw coming at us. I headed for topside. As I crossed the main deck, I saw the Admiral standing there shaking his first at the Japanese planes. Machine gun bullets from the planes began spattering the deck and I grabbed his arm and pulled him back from the center of the deck. He was so mad, he just stood there and swore at the Japs. In fact, he appeared to be in shock. I left him and continued on to the bridge. I began shooting at the planes flying over that were dropping bomb after bomb and torpedoes on the battleships. I exhausted my ammo supply and found a nearby machine gun empty. It was a 50-caliber water-cooled gun. In my haste, I forgot to turn the water on, but I'm sure I shot down two Jap planes before the gun was disabled. After that, there was little I could do, but I had a ringside seat to what was going on. The sky looked like a giant 4th of July celebration. I watched the USS Shaw blow up, the USS California sink, and the USS Oklahoma rolled over. I could see thousands of men struggling in the water, which was covered with oil. I watched in horror as a Jap plane flew over the USS Arizona and dropped a bomb right down her stack. A few minutes later, as if some giant hand had lifted her out of the water, the Arizona rose and blew up. Fire spread quickly over the oil covered water engulfing the men trying to swim to safety. I shall never forget the screams of my mates in the water. It is forever imprinted in my mind. Gun crews kept firing until their ammunition was gone. A Jap plane crashed about 60 feet from our ship. We pulled the pilot out but he was dead. He had Honolulu theater tickets in his pocket from a few weeks before. When the Saratoga and Enterprise vacated the space next to us, the Helena and Oglala pulled in. They both took torpedoes. We were protected from torpedoes by being on the inside of the dock. The Nevada tried to get underway during the attack to get out of the harbor and on to the open sea, but wave after wave of bombers and torpedo planes attacked her. She was sinking in the middle of the harbor. If she had sunk, the channel would have been blocked for months. There was a lot of confusion but every man did his job the best he could. When the bombing stopped, we began pulling men from the water. The ones who were alive were taken for immediate medical attention. The dead were stacked on the docks. I had taken a piece of shrapnel in my leg, but didn't realize it for four days until it became infected and painful. The piece of steel removed from my leg had US Steel stamped on it. I drilled a hole in it and wore it around my neck for a long time. I later lost it in 1942 while diving off the Canton Islands as we attempted salvage of the steamer, President Taylor. The Argonne ship fitters cut a hole in the Oklahoma, which was upside down, and took out some men trapped below decks. There was no way we could do this with some of the other ships because they were below the water, about 80 feet of it. We could hear men banging on the bulkheads letting us know they were still alive. It was bad, especially at night. No one could sleep listing to our buddies, guys we had gone to boot camp and liberty with, trapped with no hope of getting them out. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who shed tears of frustration into my pillow every night. Everyone was filled with fear for days wondering if or when another attack would come. Rumors spread like wild fire that the Japs were preparing to invade the island with ground troops. When the Enterprise sent aircraft over the island, some of them were shot down with our own guns and when the island Japanese fishing fleet came in a day or so later, they were gunned down on the docks. Hysteria and fear reigned and the feeling was that the fishermen had knowledge of the coming attack and had gone to sea to avoid it. These are things we should not be proud of, but they did happen. Our divers from the USS Argonne brought up a Japanese plane from the harbor. The pilot taken from the plane was not Japanese. He was blond and we suspected he was German. President Roosevelt declared we were at war with the Japanese empire and we left port, but not to go home. We went to French New Caledonia where Admiral Halsey was headquartered. He had replaced Admiral Gormley as Commander of the Pacific Fleet. From then on we were in constant war zones and I was not to see the United States until 1944. I was transferred to the USS Fuller and she sailed for home in the spring of 1944. After a few months at home, during which time I met the girl I would later marry, I was assigned to a newly commissioned troop ship, the USS Cape Johnson (APA 172) and again headed for the South Pacific. Both my brothers had joined the Navy and I knew they were in the Pacific theater. One this trip, we stopped in Honolulu and while I was on liberty, I ran into my youngest brother, Cass. We were both on liberty and walking down the same street. We hugged each other in joy and then went on a good drunk together. We sailed in the same convoy and were in a number of sea battles. During one of these battles in Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines, a Jap kamikaze plane crashed into the USS Monrovia, my brother's ship, killing hundreds of troops. My brother worked in the engine room and I was worried about him. There were men swimming in the water and I requested permission to go on one of the rescue launches. While we were pulling men from the water, I reached out to one of them, covered with oil. He looked up and said, "Hi Bub, I'm sure glad to see you." It was my brother! We hugged each other despite the oil. All three of us came through the war in one piece. My older brother, Steve, had his ship go down in a typhoon off Okinawa, but he was rescued. We knew our safety was due to our mother's daily prayers for us. We came home again in the spring of 1945. My girl and I had just nine days to arrange a wedding, but we did it. We were married at the end of April and I left again in June leaving my new bride in Redwood City with one of my navy buddies family. She wrote telling me she had gotten a job with the Navy Department in San Francisco and was commuting into the city and back by train every day. She worked in a department where orders were received on ships coming into port for repairs or supplies. I was surprised to get a letter from her that an order had been received on my ship and that we would be home in August. I made bets with some of the guys who told me I was crazy and won them when we actually headed for home the end of July. We took troops into some of the worst battles of the war, Leyte, Saipan, Guam, Corregidor, Tinian, Eniwetok and Iwo Jima to name a few. We returned in August bringing wounded home from Iwo Jima. It was a sad time. There were burials at sea every day of men whose only thought was that they were going home. President Truman approved dropping the atom bomb on Japan and the war ended a few days after we arrived in San Francisco. VJ Day was one huge celebration. I remember calling Millie at work and saying to meet me at the train. Then all was chaos. As I came out of the phone booth, I was grabbed, put on the back of a truck along with other service men and driven through the streets to cheers of the public. Girls kept climbing up and kissing us. We were plied with all kinds of drinks and by the time I escaped and made my way to the train station I was feeling no pain. Millie laughed when she saw all the lipstick and said she understood. She had kissed a few servicemen on the way to the train. It is now 60 years later. Millie and I have celebrated our 56th wedding anniversary. Our son, Wayne, has taken over Big Foot Construction, which I started in Redding in 1968. Our two grandsons, Justin and Jared, are now 22 and 18. Justin is now serving in the medical corps at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. He may go on to medical school in Maryland, but says he would rather come home and study somewhere closer to home. He wants to go into respiratory therapy. I sincerely hope his tour of duty is not as eventful as mine. Jared is studying computer science and working at Home Depot. I got out of the service in October of 1945. I think I may have made the Navy my career if it had not been for that terrible war, but I had had enough of it at that time. Later, I joined the Naval Reserve and served at Long Beach as an instructor during the Korean War. |
Information provided by John E. Russak. |
