INTERVIEW OF DAVE CARNELL
Transcript Number 018

INTERVIEWER: I'm Thor Ronningen with World War II Remembered and I'd like to introduce Dave Carnell.

MR. CARNELL: I'm Dave Carnell. I was an officer on a destroyer in the Pacific in WWII. I'll tell you about a couple of my adventures. I went into the Navy pretty late. I had been deferred as a chemical engineer, working for Dupont. Then, I applied for a commission in the Navy, and when I got the commission, the company told me they could get me a deferment for a project they had, called TNX. Well, we didn't know what TNX was, but it was out in Hanford, Washington and it was a plutonium plant for the A-bomb. I said, "Heck no, I want to go in the Navy." I went in the Navy and went to Princeton for indoctrination school B there were three indoctrinational schools. The Navy had 90-day wonders where they took three months to make sailors out of civilians. We were called the 60-day blunders, because they converted us from civilians to Navy officers in 8 weeks. Well, I got into radar, or more accurately, I got into CIC, which is the combat information center. Some of our friends used to say it meant Christ unconfused. But anyway, our section misbehaved. We confronted one of the 20-year old "90-day Wonders" who was in charge of counting cadence when we went by him, so, we lost a week-end's liberty from noon to Sunday. On that particular Saturday afternoon, they were giving an exam for tactical radar school. I didn't have any else to do, since I didn't have liberty, so I went and took it. It was made just for an engineer. You had to read lots of dials, circular dials, vertical dials, all kinds of scales, read numbers fast, read what they were, and that's a lot of what CIC was. It was a sort of a human computer. You're in a compartment, as we called it, aboard a ship in which there were two radars, a half dozen radios, intercom from the bridge, and you may have had a set of headphones. We even had an old-fashioned voice tube from the bridge down to the CIC for when all else failed, the Captain could scream at you. So you were kind of a walking talking computer and the top job at general quarters was called evaluator. Normally, the executive officer of the ship got that job, but our exec didn't hear very well, so he was not suited for listening to 4 or 5 radios at once and everybody else that was talking, sorting it all out, and telling the bridge what he thought they ought to do. So he bucked the job to the communications officer who was my immediate superior, and he bucked the job to me because I had two months of special training in this area at radar school in Hollywood Beach, Florida. So, here I was, at general quarters and I was the evaluator in charge of the CIC. I was certainly the only ensign evaluator in our squadron of seven destroyers. It was a great job from the standpoint of responsibility. 
Let me show you a couple of pictures. Here I am at 23 years old in charge of CIC and this is a picture they took to send back to the hometown newspapers in early to mid 1945. That's the voice tube, that little funnel sticking down from the bridge. 
This is my ship, the USS John Rodgers DD. DD stood for destroyer, or a battleship like the North Carolina, down on the river, was BB. In Navy lingo, they were Baker, Baker and Dog, Dog. This was DD574, which John Rogers built in 1943 in Orange, Texas. She'd been out in the forward area for quite along time, came back, and had a complete rebuild and got a brand new CIC. They snatched me out of a temporary station at San Diego to be their CIC officer. She was also the flagship of Desron Destroyer Squadron #25 and so we had a bunch of staff officers on board in addition to the regular ship's officers. 
This is a Fetcher class destroyer and it was a class they started building early in the war. They built 175 of them and the John Rodgers is the last of those 175 still in active commission in the Mexican Navy. Now we headed out from San Pedro and went to Pearl. We went onY

INTERVIEWER: Excuse me, when was this?


MR. CARNELL: This is January of 1945 when I came on board. I'd been in the Navy just about 6 months. We steamed out to Pearl Harbor and we went on to Ulithi Atoll which was a little atoll out in the Carolina Islands. It was way out in the Pacific and we used it as a floating base. Everything was in concrete storage barges. When we steamed into Ulithi, we saw the rest of the fast carrier task force at anchor and that was quite a sight. The fast carrier task force, which was sometimes referred to as Task Force 38, and other times Task Force 58; which may have given some people at home the impression that we had two task forces. All we had was two sets of Admirals. When we changed Admirals, we went from being 38 to 58, or vice-versa. Thirty-eight was Bill Halsey and 58 was William Spruance, who most of us regarded as a far more capable commander. But anyway, here was all the new ships of the U.S. Navy at that time. This was 1945 and we'd been building a heck of a lot of ships. There were about ten new battleships -- all the big carriers the Navy had. There was a smaller class of carriers on cruiser hulls called CVL, or light carriers. CV stands for carrier and V is flight, in the Navy. The ships were all anchored on the horizon and it was some sight. Well, we went in and in early January, we took off for Tokyo. About January 20th, we bombed Tokyo the first time with carrier planes. This was the first time Tokyo had been bombed by US forces since Jimmy Doolittle's one-way raid in 1945 off the decks of the Hornet. This was in preparation for the Iwo Jima invasion. The carrier planes kept hammering the Japanese air bases and, at first, they were finding lots of planes to shoot down. But, after they made a regular habit of knocking Japanese planes out of the air, the Japanese started hiding the planes. Then, we went to Iwo Jima and provided air support there. After Iwo Jima was secured, it became a base for B-29's that were bombing Japan and going back to their bases at Guam and Saipan. Some of them got damaged and had to have an emergency field to land and Iwo Jima was just perfect. A B-29's pretty big to land on an aircraft carrier. At night, the B-29s would light up our whole radar screen when they were going -- first we'd see them going up to Japan and then we'd see them coming back from Japan. On the other hand, our carrier operations were all daylight stuff and we were hammering Japan and Iwo Jima. After Iwo Jima was secured, the next operation was Okinawa. The landing day of Okinawa was April 1st, Easter Sunday, and it was Love Day in the operation plan. We were not as close in, as so many destroyers were, that took the brunt of the kamikaze attacks. The suicide pilot attacks were very damaging to the destroyers at Okinawa. Okinawa was secured by the 30th of June in1945. We stayed at sea continually and there were supply forces, that we met with on a regular basis. They brought us mail, that wasn't more than a week out of the States; fuel; food; bombs; and ammo for the ships, planes, and the carriers. There was a tremendous floating supply force called com-servron 10; which was a group of supply ships. They brought new planes to the carriers and took back planes that needed repairs. If the planes didn't fly, they threw them overboard. This operation went on all the time, so we could stay at sea almost indefinitely with this supply force. In early June, we went through a typhoon. Halsey took the fleet through the second typhoon of his career. He'd done it down in the Philippines. We went smack dab through the typhoon on June 5th or 6th of 1945. It got pretty hairy and the ships were rolling. The battleship Admiral came on the radio and said, "My boys are rolling 28 degrees." Well, our commodore went on the radio and said, "My boys -- the destroyers are rolling at 70 degrees." We weren't rolling quite that much, but the inclinometer device that measures the roll, the pointer gets a little bit of inertia and it goes up to a higher reading which was actually wrong. We would literally, be over on one side and I was lying against the bulk- head -- that's the wall in a Navy ship on one side. Then, the next moment, I'd roll the other way and was hanging on to that bulk- head to keep from falling across the compartment to the other side. After the typhoon, there were 5 task groups in our task force. Each task group had two or three big carriers, one or two small carriers, a couple of battleships, 4 or 5 cruisers, and anywhere from 16 to 20 destroyers. They steamed in a circular formation. On one particular night, we had about 6 extra battleships. I think this was the night that the battleships went in and bombarded some steel mills on the east coast of Honshu in March of 1945. When they got through, we provided screen for them. When they got through bombarding, instead of going back to their individual groups at night, which was a little hairy maneuvering, they came and parked in our group. This group had about 8 battleships in it, which was most unusual. There were about 4, and later 5, of these groups in the fast carrier task force. It was the largest assemblage of Naval power that there had ever been in the world. When we got to July of 1945, the carrier operations were directed against the Japanese Islands and we were trying to smoke out every conceivable plane they had. The next step in the operation, in October, was the invasion of Kyushu, the most southwestern island of the home islands of Japan. It was to provide an airfield base for further invasion, the following January, on the main island of Japan. Honshu Island is the island on which Tokyo is based. The Admirals were trying to figure out what strength the Japanese had to resist this invasion. Toward the end of July, they sent the other squadron of destroyers, of our group, headed toward Tokyo Bay - Sagami Won. Now, on the map of Japan, here is Tokyo at the head of this quite large bay, and this is Sagami Won. The Desron 61 destroyer squadron had orders to seek out shipping, if they could find any. If they couldn't, they were to go into the Bay and do some shore bombardment. They were lucky and found some and sank them. A couple of nights later, July 30th to 31st, we got a similar detail to go into Sarugawa, in the Tokyo Bay. Mt. Fuji is right on the little peninsula. Our orders were similar, to seek out ships and sink them, and otherwise perform shore bombardment on the town of Shimizu. It had a number of military objectives of an aluminum plant, a small ship- yard, and a vegetable oil plant. As a CIC officer on the squadron flagship, I had to draw up a plot of where we proposed to go and then perform the navigation to get us in there. Since the radars of that day could not seek out targets on land, I had to provide ranges and bearings to our target. On each of the ships, the CIC officer had to provide his gunnery officer down in main plot with the ranges and bearings to the target, as we steamed along, so that the ship's guns could be fired on target. Our gunnery officer, by the way, his nick- name was trigger hall. We called our sonar officer Ping. Sonar is sound navigation and range and it's the way you detect submarines. It pings out into the water. 

Well here is where we were about to go. The task force was down here maybe a hundred miles of so. We left them about 4:30 in the afternoon, 16:30 in Navy time, and headed to come up here. We were about 50 or 60 miles out, from these two capes which define Sarugawan, which is this bay. There was a Japanese radar station here and there. We had gear that could pick up their signals, so we watched them. They were sitting up there happily spinning their radar antennas around, not expecting to see much. All of a sudden, one of them, I don't remember which one it was, he stopped, locked his radar beam on us, and picked us up. Ten minutes later, this other one, probably from a telephone call from over here---his radar antenna stopped swinging around and he locked onto to us. So, they started tracking us coming in and we knew that they knew we were coming. Now, this was the only time that I ever went to GQ, general quarters, and had my 45 and my lifebelt -- we didn't even take our lifebelts up to GQ most of the time or emergency rations. I had my pockets full of candy bars in case we got sunk and managed to make our way to shore. We didn't know what was going to happen and we were a little bit apprehensive. So, about 10:45 that evening, we crossed the line between these two points. We entered Sarugawan. This straight line was the proposed track. We were going to go in, go up here, make a turn, come across here, turn down here and here was the town of Sumisho, which, we were going to perform a shore bombardment. Well, we had a couple of deviations, but more or less we pretty much followed that track. We were going about 18 knots which is about 20 miles an hour. We steamed up here in line and the Rogers was leading the squadron -- the other six ships were following. We steamed up here and I didn't see it, but they tell me that Fuji was a pretty sight that night. Of course, I was inside doing my job. We made this turn, came across here, and they said the phosphorus that was churned up in the water was bright. They felt it was like day up on topside. We came across here, made this turn, and came down here. This is an enlarged portion of this chart. Here were the seven ships in a line at about a quarter to one in the morning. We opened fire at this point and our target was this light metals plant. Each ship had a different target. There was another light metals plant here, a vegetable oil factory somewhere on here, and a little shipyard, here. One of the ships fired a couple of torpedoes at a ship that was tied up there. Well our orders were to expend 150 rounds of 5" and we had five 5" guns on board, so, that was thirty rounds per barrel. We were to get them out as rapidly as we could. We got them out that night as fast as we could and it took four minutes to fire 150 rounds, which is about 32-33 rounds per minute and they're manually loaded. The 5" gun had a separate projectile and then a brass case with the powder in it. So, there were two pieces that had to go into the gun barrel to make a round. We went up to 32 knots, which is just about top speed for that class of destroyer. Arleigh Burke was fudging it a little when he claimed he was doing 36 knots with the same class of ships. That's where he got his nick name. We came out of there at about 1:30 in the morning, and we passed between these two points and concluded our sweep. Some of the people on the bridge thought they saw a patrol craft of some kind on the way out. It wasn't on either the fire control radar or the surface search radar. We opened fire on the target, whatever it was, and the target disappeared visually. It never was on radar and when we wrote up the action report, I wrote on the chart, "Point sited, possible contact was fired on." The Commodore made me change it to, "Patrol craft sited and sunk by gun fire." So, when the Commodore tells you, you do what he says. When they got it on the bridge of the Rodgers, it looked like a heavy cruiser. We came on out the rest of the way. The thing that is significant about this particular operation, was that we didn't encounter anybody firing on us. This was the deepest penetration of US Navy surface ships into Japanese waters before the end of the war. We were at this point, almost thirty miles inside these two headlands into the bay. Submarines had gone in further than that, but no surface ships. We got back to the task force and we were fueling off one of the ships the next morning, and somebody on the other ship said to one of our guys over telephone, "Hey, did you hear about those destroyers that went up last night?" The guy on our ship was real tickled and said, "Well, that was us." That was our big adventure of the war. Of course, a few days after that, the first and the second atom bomb were dropped and ended the war. We had all these plans that we figured we would have to execute. We expected to be out there for at least another year before the war was over, but as Paul Fussell, noted essayist said, "Thank God for the atom bomb." It took the Japanese a little while to realize it, but they got the message. They didn't realize we only had two bombs, at that point. On the 14 or 15th of August, they agreed to surrender. Actually the night before that happened, our ship and another ship from the squadron were out on picket duty about 40 miles from the task force. We were examining the flights of carrier planes as they came back in and looking for the Japanese that would hide, so they wouldn't be detected by radar. The planes had gone in and we had four of our planes overhead as combat air patrol. They were under my direction and we sighted a Japanese coming from the other direction. The senior pilot was saying that we were running out of gas and we had better get back home. The night fighters were on their way out from the carrier, but they weren't yet, so I said, "OK, thanks buddy. Go head." The night fighters came out and the Japanese went in. The Japanese got there slightly before the night fighters did. We were steaming a couple hundred yards apart, our ship and the sister ship. Fortunately, he wasn't a kamikaze, he was a bomber. He dropped a big bomb, but he dropped it between us instead of on either of us. When it went off, the ship jumped six inches out of the water. We were thinking that the war was going to end the next day and we were going to catch it the night before. We were lucky and the war ended. We stayed out there patrolling and sending armed planes over Japan just in case any monkey business would happen before the surrender on September 2, in Tokyo Harbor on the deck of the Missouri. 

About the 6th of September, we got orders to head into Tokyo Bay. We were steaming into Tokyo Bay, figuring we were going to be part of the occupation force. Before we even tied up at the fuel dock, we got orders sending us back to the United States for the Navy Day celebration, as part of the Victory fleet. We never even put foot on Japan. We went alongside the oil tanker and got fuel. We didn't get any food because they were saving it all for the people who were going to be staying on board. We did get some mail and we got orders to head to Okinawa to pick up 150 Seabees, which is a mighty load of people to add to a destroyer. We already had about 300 people on aboard and we were darn crowded at that. So we went to Okinawa and picked up the 150 Seabees and transported them to Pearl Harbor. We put them ashore and got a couple days liberty in Pearl Harbor. Then, we formed up a unit of the Victory fleet that was headed for New York. The ships in the Victory fleet went to all the east coast and west coast ports. The ships in this particular group were the Battleship North Carolina, one of the big carriers; the Enterprise, the light cruiser; and the Concord, which was an old four stack cruiser. She and her sister ship, the Richmond, had been kept up in the Aleutians because they looked so much like Japanese cruisers that they couldn't put them in waters where there were any U.S. planes, because they'd get bombed There were three destroyers from our squadron. We brought the North Carolina back to the states and we steamed along, leisurely. This photo was actually taken while we were crossing the Pacific between Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal. When we got to the Panama Canal, our orders were changed to go to Boston instead of New York. A high proportion of our crew were deep southerners -- Alabamians, Georgians, Mississippians -- and they said, "Oh, God, we gotta go to Yankee land instead of getting to the big apple and having a great time." We went through the Canal and went swimming in Gatun Lake, where the water temperature was almost 90 degrees. We had a couple of days liberty on the Atlantic side in Cologne. Then, we steamed up between the various Caribbean Islands. The first landfall was Cape Cod. Now, I'm a Connecticut Yankee, so seeing Cape Cod was really home. We sited Monamoy Point on the elbow of Cape Cod. We steamed up alongside the Cape and then we altered course to cross Cape Cod Bay to go to Boston. As we came steaming into Boston, out came a big excursion steamer. They must have had 500 WAVES and a couple of bands on board. There were tugs and fire boats with the water shooting up in the air. It was quite a welcome we got in Boston. The North Carolina went into Boston first, followed by the carrier, the cruiser, and we were the first of the three destroyers to enter port. All the ships were tied up in various piers in Boston. There were people by the thousands and they swarmed aboard to see us. The crew had a night of liberty in Boston, which was always was a good liberty port for the Navy. We got such a welcome. 
In those days, each service had its own day. Navy Day was October 27th and that was what our celebration centered around. We got to Boston around the 25th of October and Navy Day was also, Theodore Roosevelt's Birthday. It was selected as Navy Day because he was the person who as Secretary of the Navy and later as President, really built the modern Navy. From Boston, we took the ship to Charleston and decommissioned her there. I was separated from the Navy in April of 1946 and by that time, the ship was decommissioned and moored up in the Wando River with everything preserved. In those days, the Wando River was really out in the wilderness of Charleston. It's a great big court area now, all developed. We were up there with the alligators and a tug to keep us from drifting too far when our anchor dragged. There was no heat on those ships in the middle of the winter. That looked like that was the end of the road for the Rogers, but she was re-commissioned, modernized, and saw service later with the Navy. Then she went to Mexico, where she's still in commission. That's my story of my adventures on the John Rodgers. 

INTERVIEWER: Very good.

(CONCLUSION OF INTERVIEW WITH DAVE CARNELL)