Down to the Sea by Bruce Henderson Read Free Book Online Page B

from the cold. Guys who joked about going to the North Pole were closer to the truth than they knew.
    Most members of Douhan’s October 1942 boot camp company in San Diego went directly to the fleet to help ease the Navy’s shipboard manpower shortage. Tall and thin, Douhan, who showed the world the twinkling eyes of an Irishman with the gift of good humor, was one of only a few in his company to be sent to two advanced schools before receiving a fleet assignment. A review of his records showed that Douhan, who had attended Salinas Junior College for two years, was working on a seismographic crew for Shell Oil when he enlisted. “You’re going to soundschool,” he was told. During fifteen weeks of training, he had learned how to operate and maintain shipboard sonar. *
    The retaking of Attu and Kiska (less than 200 miles apart)—anticipated since the day in June 1942 when the Japanese invaded the sparsely populated Aleutians, where there had been no U.S. military presence—was finally at hand after giving way to higher-priority operations elsewhere in the sprawling Pacific. Attu would come first, it was decided, because it lay on the westward side of the Aleutians and would put U.S. forces in position to block any reinforcements from Japan headed for Kiska. As March “thawed into April” (1943), the attack fleet assembled in aptly named Cold Bay at the tip of the Alaskan Peninsula—three battleships, an escort carrier, five minesweepers, four transports carrying 3,000 troops of the Army’s Seventh Infantry Division (which, incomprehensibly, had trained in the Nevada desert and on sandy stretches of California coastline under conditions “as unlike those at Attu as could well be”), and twelve destroyers, including Hull and Monaghan . There the task force waited out inclement subarctic weather; mountainous seas, and high surf that made amphibious landings impossible. By nightfall on May 10, the ships had groped their way into position a short distance off Attu “in a fog as opaque as cotton batting.”
    Hull was assigned to antisubmarine screening duty for the battleship Nevada (BB-36), which would be providing bombardment support with her ten 14-inch deck guns, as directed by Army Rangers ashore.
    As the landings got under way—much like Guadalcanal, there was little opposition at the beachhead, with Japanese defenders dug in farther inland, where they waited to make a defensive stand— Hull received an urgent “man overboard” flashing-light (blinker) signal from Nevada . Lookouts on Hull , which had been following Nevada , soon spotted a man bobbing in the water.
    The destroyer came around to make the rescue but in the choppyseas missed on the first pass. By the time Hull was in position for another try, the man in the water was unable to grab hold of the lifeline thrown to him. A boatswain’s mate tied a line around his waist and jumped into the freezing sea. Both men were hauled aboard, but for Nevada ’s crewman it was too late. He was already “frozen stiff” and not breathing. Extensive artificial respiration elicited no response. The body of the sailor, “about twenty-one and redheaded,” was stored in Hull ’s meat locker until given an at-sea burial the next day.
    For a week after the invasion, Hull stood by Nevada as the battleship provided devastating fire support. At one point, when U.S. troops were stalled by stiff opposition from an entrenched enemy on higher ground, the Rangers ashore radioed quadrants to Nevada, whose big guns soon found the range and “wiped out an entire mountainside” filled with Japanese troops.
    After intense fighting during which the Japanese attacked in one of the largest banzai charges of the Pacific campaign—ultimately it became necessary to land 12,000 U.S. troops—Attu was secured by the first of June. With the exception of twenty-eight prisoners, the entire