UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT WILMINGTON

INTERVIEWER:   Welcome.  Today is November 12, 2002.  We’re interviewing Captain Calhoun.  This is the third tape in the series and interviewing him is Paul Zarbock and Sherman Hayes from UNCW’s Randall Library.

INTERVIEWER:   Captain Calhoun, we left the last time and you were in the middle of this naval battle at Guadalcanal against the Japanese, you called it the Tokyo Express, and we had in essence left you up on the top of the ship, wounded with your colleagues and we ran out of tape so if you want to continue with what happened from that point. 

CALHOUN:   We had been hit in the mast just above our heads.  Actually I wasn’t wounded, but the people on either side of me were wounded and the rangefinder operator who was in the front of the director was wounded.  I sensed that some were wounded.  In the first place, I had been aware that we were sprinkled with shrapnel because I was wearing a talker’s helmet.  You probably know what they are.  They are the big things that extend out from your cranium by about four inches and the interior is padded with foam.  So you have a helmet that comes out to about there.

INTERVIEWER:   And you called it a what?

CALHOUN:   A talker’s helmet.  I had earphones inside.  I was also wearing a ____ life jacket which had a huge wide collar.  So when the hit occurred, I could both feel and hear the shrapnel striking my helmet and not until the next morning when I examined my life jacket did I find that were holes in the collar so I dug out from the collar about two dozen slugs the size of a 22-caliber that had gone into the collar, but fortunately not into me.

Anyway when the hit occurred, I asked if any of my colleagues were hit and three of them responded that they were. Those were the three I mentioned.  I asked if any of them needed immediate first aid.  All of them said no.  One of them, Byers, who was the director trainer and sat next to me only an inch away had told me that he was hit in the neck and that bothered me because I thought that could be very serious.  So I reached behind him with my hand to see if I could feel any arterial bleeding and I didn't.  So I concluded he wasn’t going to die right away. 

So anyhow we got through that little episode and the next thing we knew we were encountering a friendly destroyer.  We hadn’t identified it and my skipper on the bridge and I could hear most of the skipper’s orders without having them relayed through the telephone, said “Commence firing”.  And when he said that, the rangefinder operator who was a real crackerjack, excellent with identifications, called out, he was looking at the target through his rangefinder so he was seeing it much better than we were, he sung out, “Sir, that’s a friendly ship”.

So I grabbed the cease fire gun handle and pulled it and the director pointer immediately elevated our sights so that if any guns fired, they would fire over the target.  The guns were in automatic control, hooked up in unison to the director.  We controlled the direction of the fire.  Anyway we did not fire and the ship slid past and turned out later to be the Aaron Ward, one of the eight destroyers. 

After the Aaron Ward slipped by, had I already talked about firing at the cruiser, I think I had.

INTERVIEWER:   Yes, yes.

CALHOUN:   The next thing we saw was a Kongo class battleship on our port bow.

INTERVIEWER:   Now what is a Kongo class?

CALHOUN:   Well the Japanese classified these things with names and I couldn't tell you why they called the Kongo class, but it happened that it was one of those typical massive superstructures, we called them pagoda like.  I yelled out to the trainer, “Get on that G-D pagoda”.

INTERVIEWER 2:   Now that Kongo is spelled with a K, is that right?

CALHOUN:   That’s right.  So we opened fire with our 5-inch guns knowing very well they weren’t going to do much material damage to this battleship, but we were now only 2000 yards away from them, closing, getting closer every minute.  And 2000 yards at sea with modern gunnery was like having somebody stand next to you with a pistol at your head.

We fired nine salvos of 5-inch shells, that was 36 rounds, into his bridge structure.  I could see four or five Japanese sailors with their clothes on fire dive overboard from the starboard side of the battleship.  Then I was aware that the torpedo officer had fired four fish, 21-inch torpedoes at this target.  Shortly thereafter I saw two underwater explosions in the vicinity of the engineering space.  I thought at the time that they were the explosions from the torpedoes.  It later turned out they were not.

Anyway we had now closed to a range of about 500 yards and we turned hard right and gave the order the all ahead emergency full to try to get ourselves out of there.  We turned under his bow and scooted away from him.  We were so close, he could not depress his turret guns low enough to shoot at us.  We had only gone probably 4 or 5 minutes when I, who happened to be the highest eyes in the ship, spotted the Fubuki, Japanese destroyer.  These were heavy destroyers that had two twin mounts aft.  So if you were behind one of these things, it could fire four guns at you while you were chasing it.

Anyway this ship was headed on a course about almost opposite ours.  If you know what the term target angle means, it means the number of degrees measured from the bow of the ship around to the right.  In that case, his target angle was 150 which means we were on his starboard quarter.

INTERVIEWER:   The front or the back?

CALHOUN:   Starboard quarter, the quarter is the rear of the ship.  So we moved with the speed of light to turn the director on him and we fired one salvo into his bridge.  We were only 1100 yards away from him when we first saw him.  So the first salvo struck the bridge.  They all exploded.  The second salvo we fired into his after gun mounts.  Now the Japanese didn't have the flame control that we did with our guns. 

We had scuttles and shutters that closed off the apertures between the gun mount and the ammunition handling space and the magazines so that if an explosion occurred in the gun, it couldn't flash down into the ammunition.  The Japanese did not have that and as a result, that salvo into their after-gun mounts resulted in a secondary explosion which was undoubtedly their ammunition.  It was a terrific explosion, shattered the stern of the ship.  The whole stern seemed to turn cherry red.  Whether it did or not, that’s the way that it looked.

It made hissing noises from the heat and raised out of the water several feet.  The incandescent light from this inferno that was going on, we were so lit that the battleship we had encountered now saw us right ahead of him and he just turned one 14-inch turret around and now let go with one salvo, boom.  Three 14-inch shells hit us in our number three upper handling room.  The upper handling room would be where the ammunition was passed from handling room to gun mount, came up from the magazine to the handling room.

These shells were set with instantaneous fuses because they had anticipated that they were going to be bombarding Henderson Field, not encountering the surface force.  So when they struck, they exploded and thousands of shrapnel fragments penetrated the hulk heads and overhead handling room, killed most of the gun crew and most of the handling room crew and started raging fires, penetrated some of our ready service ammunition tanks.

Some of those things cooked off.  These were 5-inch powder cans about so long, 5 inches in diameter.  It just caused one hell of a lot of problems.

INTERVIEWER:   Now you’re still at this point up in your …

CALHOUN:   I was still in the gun directory, yeah.  Then I began hearing confused noises on the telephone circuits from the torpedo mounts, from both the after-gun mounts.  All I could gather from these snatches of conversation that we were having serious fires and that there were a number of people wounded or killed.  Well I was sitting with my head out of the gun directory hatch so I was able to look aft.

Of course I could see the blaze and it was flaring up right under our colors which were flurrying in the wind.  So number one, we were the only one stack destroyer in the action so there could be no mistake as to whether we were US.  Number two, our stars and stripes were illuminated so there was no question as to who we were.  That enabled the battleship immediately to identify us as enemies and fire at us.

Well now there was a slight pause in the activity, at least in the gunfire.  There were as many as a dozen ships on fire all around us.  I couldn't tell friend from foe.  I didn't know whether they were friendly or enemy.  I seize that opportunity to send the three wounded down to the battle dressing station, which was in the wardroom.  They were only gone five minutes and they came back with very serious faces.  I said, “You didn't get fixed up in that short time?”  “No sir, we don’t think we should go down there now because the doctor has got too many guys who are really badly hurt.”

INTERVIEWER 2:   Did you have a physician on board or was it a corpsman?

CALHOUN:   We did.  He happened to be my roommate.  He was a Godsend for us really.  Harry Nice was a Philadelphian.  He trained at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia and he had had over a thousand major surgeries under his belt.  He was overwhelmed when the mayhem occurred.  We had 32 dead.

INTERVIEWER:   Immediately?

CALHOUN:   Immediately, lost four.  Later we found that they were recovered by other ships and 18 critically wounded.

INTERVIEWER:   Tell us again what the total complement of the destroyer would have been.

CALHOUN:   We had about 250, we had 22 officers and about 250 enlisted.  That report came to me from the doctor to let us know what the situation was down below.  Now there’s still no shooting going on so I called down to the captain and said “I’m sitting up here with nothing to do.  Can I be of any help”.  So he told me to come to the bridge which I did.

When I got down there, he said, “Cal, we don’t know how badly hit we are.  I want you to go back and inspect the damage.  Don’t stay down there.  I want you back up here to tell me what I have to do to save the ship”.  So I left him there and went below.  I don’t know whether you want this story of the trip below.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s fine, yes.

CALHOUN:   Let me just say it was a trip into hell.  I found the chief torpedo man dead.  I found the youngest sailor on the ship who was a torpedo man striker next to him dead.  That was a touching story because Jackson, the chief, had gone out from the torpedo shack which was hardly any shelter from this kind of gunfire, to see if he could be of assistance to those torpedo men who were out exposed on the torpedo tubes.  Little Willy, who was his protégée, said, “I’m going to go out and see if I can help the chief”.  Well too bad he went out when he did because apparently the same blast that killed the chief also killed him.

There were a number of other wounded people.  The crew who were able bodied were trying to assist and I proceeded aft to the upper handling room where they fired.  I found the second class torpedo man named Kenan and the chief gun mate, Hiram Hodge.  These shells had made holes that measured 22 inches in diameter and Hodge had climbed through one of those holes into the burning upper handling room.  He could have gone through a door in the washroom which was adjacent to that, but he was in a hurry so he went through the hole.

Kenan had a hose and he was standing outside the hole shooting or squirting the water on Hodge and Hodge was picking up the ready service ammunition like this, four or five of these cans at a time and then walking out through the washroom door and throwing them overboard.  Two or three of them actually had low water detonation when they were in the air.  I mean in a matter of seconds difference, he might have been dead. 

INTERVIEWER:   Was he squirting him the whole time to keep…

CALHOUN:   No, after he got out of the range of the upper handling room, there was no way he could put the hose on him. 

INTERVIEWER 2:   But you still have engine power, you’ve got electricity.

CALHOUN:   We had engine power, we had electricity although we had an awful lot of electrical damage in the wiring.  Also close to the location of that upper handling room where the shells struck were a couple of valves that were very critical.  One of them was the magazine sprinkling lever and I directed Kenan to operate the…to throw it which he did.  We knew then that we were sprinkling water on the ammunition and magazine. 

I did it because I realized that these things I was seeing could be occurring back in gun four which I hadn’t gotten to yet.  If they were, that’s very close to the magazine and I could foresee that, you know, sparks from these electrically could cause an explosion.  Anyhow later I told him to flood it, something that you would never normally do without the captain’s permission, but I figured the captain would have damn well wanted me to do that and I told him about it when I got back to the bridge.  So we flooded the magazines.

INTERVIEWER:   Which meant that you no longer could…

CALHOUN:   Couldn't use any of the ammunition in the after-two guns, but that was irrelevant because the guns were both out of commission.

INTERVIEWER:   So your magazines were always tied to different guns so they weren’t all one magazine?

CALHOUN:   There was an after magazine and a forward magazine.  The after magazine served the two after-guns.

INTERVIEWER:   And those were disabled completely?

CALHOUN:   Absolutely, those guns were in shambles.  The gun housing on gun three was just a wreck.  Then gun three incidentally, the gun captain was a sailor named Martin, 2nd class gunman, one shell had amputated both of his legs and when they tried to carry him out of the gun housing, he said, “Don’t bother with me fellas.  Get the guys that you can still save”.  They left him there and of course he died a few minutes later.

Anyway I took Hodge with me after he had emptied the bin of powder and went with him down the hatch to the upper handling room of gun four which had also been hit with a smaller caliber, about 6-inch.  There we found fires in all of the living spaces and in the upper handling room.  One young ensign who had only come aboard a few months earlier named Perry Hall who was down there all by himself, he had a fire hose going and he was fighting the fires.  I said, “Perry, do you need any help?”  “No sir.”  In the meantime, I don’t think that there were any wounded, they were all dead down there.  There was a good deal of water now accumulating in these compartments.  So we had bodies floating around, parts of bodies floating around.

The doctor who was doing surgery was on the starboard side just a few feet forward of these two upper rooms so a lot of all this mayhem going on was apparent to him while he was operating.  He could hear it and see the water.  He had no anesthetist.  He utilized the torpedo officer who happened to come back there just to see if he could help.  Tom turned out to be an anesthetist shooting sodium pentathal into these poor guys.

Anyway I didn't see anymore that I could do.  I got back up to the bridge and told the captain that we had a lot of damage and a lot of people wounded or killed, but that there was no damage to interfere with our wartime integrity.  So I said, “All you’ve got to do Captain is get us the hell out of here.”  He had already made up his mind that he was going to do that because he had asked the torpedo officer if he could fire two more.  He said that he couldn't because they were trapped in the tubes and the tubes had both been hit with shrapnel.  He couldn't fire them.

INTERVIEWER:   All you had then, you had some front guns.

CALHOUN:   We had two guns, two 5-inch guns, that’s all.

INTERVIEWER:   And small arms.

CALHOUN:   And small ones, yeah, and the small ones of course had gun crews and there was one amusing story about Red Hammick, a sailor from Texas, who was standing, I think I told you this before, he was standing on the portside mid-ship’s 20mm gun.  That was his gun station.  The gun captain was a guy named Peter Grimm.  There was a third sailor, I don’t remember his name.

The three of them were standing there watching all of this and of course observing the fact that we were being hit.  Fortunately none of them had been hit.  He told me afterwards that when they saw us shooting at the battleship, he said “Man, we were looking right down those damn 14-inch barrels and they turned around at us”.  Peter Grimm said, “Red, you better duck”.  He said that at about that time, they fired. 

Well I don’t know what they fired at that time, whether that was the time when they fired the three that hit us, but in any case shrapnel did go up, perhaps from some other source.  After that had subsided for a minute, Grimm asked Red whether or not he’d been hit.  No, he said, “Red, are you okay”.  Red said, “Hell no, those bastards shot me in the ass”.  He had turned his back when Grimm told him to duck (laughter) and then Grimm wanted to take him down to sick bay which was the ward room.

First he refused to go and finally Grimm insisted.  He went with him and all the way down there, he was telling him he couldn't go down there and let the doctor see him because if he did, the doctor was going to make an official record of it and it would be apparent that he got shot in the ass.  “When my granpappy finds out that I got shot in the ass, he’ll think I was running away”.  (Laughter)  He went into the ward room and Grimm told the doctor where he’d been shot and the doctor said drop your pants.  Red said, “Oh hell no, I’m not going drop my pants.  I’m going to go back aft and help those guys with the fires”.

The doctor said, “No, you’re not Red.  You’re going to stay right here and help me”.  It happened that Harry Nice, the doctor, had been training 12 sailors for six months or so in advanced first aid and of course he was overwhelmed as it was.  You’re going to stay here and help.  So Red stayed to help with the wounded in the ward room which was a terrible, terrible mess.

At one point, Red said the doctor was pointing to first one sailor and then another, saying to him, “Red, now take him out on deck”.  Then he recognized this other guy who was still conscious and had been talking to Red about the fact that the doctor was sending all these guys out.  “I guess he’s not sending me out because he knows I’m probably going to be taken care of next because I’m not as badly wounded as they are”.  Of course he was wounded worse than they were. 

Pretty  soon he told him to take Robbie out and he knew Robinson.  Robinson was also from Texas.  With that he carried him out in a stretcher and laid him down on the deck adjacent to the ward room.  He was able to look at the fires and so on and Robinson died in a matter of a couple of minutes after he took him out there and Red cried.  Then he said he looked back and saw the Stars and Stripes and shouted out to the open air, “You bastards, we’re going to get even with you”.  I said to myself, Francis Scott Key, you ain’t got nothing on us. 

Okay I got back up to the bridge and made my report to the captain and he proceeded to try to get us out of there.  There was, of course, no way to determine where you were. 

INTERVIEWER:   Now this is pitch dark?

CALHOUN:   Pitch black.

INTERVIEWER:   All you had were the burning ships to know where you were…how close were you to land?  Was that going to be an issue?  Were you in a slot where you …

CALHOUN:   Yeah, we were in what we called Iron Bottom Sound between Guadalcanal and Palegi so you had limited … and initially the captain headed north, I suppose just guessing that he’d be getting away from what had occurred.  There was no way to navigate except with the depth finder and the sonar.  So we had a very smart exec and navigator and he picked his way using the sonar and the depth finder and checking that on the chart.

He could tell approximately where we were.  So we wound our way first north and then south.  When he came south toward Guadalcanal, he just turned east at that point when we were about 100 yards away from the island.  Of course he could get the island on the sonar.  So we turned east.  We at that point wondered if we were the only US ship still afloat because we had not seen another American ship.

INTERVIEWER:   For the people listening to this for a perspective again, tell us the size again of the two forces that came together.  In other words, you later determined that this was…so how many were on each side just so we have a sense of that.

CALHOUN:   First I should say that we had an idea as to what would be involved because these forces had been coming down repeatedly over the past several months.  In October after Halsey had relieved Gormley of command of the South Pacific force, Halsey made a visit to Guadalcanal to talk to General Vandergrift who was the commanding officer of the 2nd Marine division.  Vandergrift was just literally hanging on by a toenail because practically every night they were being bombarded by these battleships and no one was stopping them.

So he told Halsey that he thought he could hang on if he could get some naval support to stop these night bombardments.  Halsey said “You got it, we’ll give you the support”.  Well of course Halsey knew what the composition of these had been in the past.  They usually consisted of two battleships, one or two cruisers and 12-14 destroyers.  So when we were told that we were going to go back in to try to intercept, we had an idea that’s probably what we were going to run into.

It turned out there were two battleships, the Kiroshima and the Hiei, and a cruiser, the Nagara, 11 destroyers the names of which I don’t recall.

INTERVIEWER:   So 15 major ships there, 3 major ships.

CALHOUN:   The two battleships should have been able to sit there and take all we had to throw at it and still sink all of us.

INTERVIEWER:   What was our side coming in?

CALHOUN:   We had a total of 13 ships, 8 of which were destroyers, four destroyers in the van, we were in column formation.  The Sterret ship I was on was number 3 in column, Cushing, Laffey, Sterret and Obannon were the four ships in the van.  They were followed by the Atlanta, that was an antiaircraft cruiser, just an overgrown destroyer, 5-inch guns, the San Francisco, heavy cruiser, Portland, another heavy cruiser with 8-inch guns, Helena, light cruiser 6-inch guns, Juneau, another 5-inch antiaircraft cruiser and then four more destroyers, Barton, Munssen, Aaron Ward and Fletcher.

INTERVIEWER:   So about the same number of ships per se.

CALHOUN:   13 ships versus 15.

INTERVIEWER:   But the fact that they had the battleships should have made all the difference in the world.

CALHOUN:   Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER:   So back to your ship.  You’re now 100 yards off of Guadalcanal.

CALHOUN:   And it was now after 4:00 in the morning, I don’t remember exactly what time, but I had the duty, the deck.  I had been relieved at a quarter to four.  So I was on the bridge to see if we could sight any other ships and while we were still going along before daylight we heard the Helena broadcasting sort of a roundup message telling us that he was the officer in tactical command which immediately said to us, where is Admiral Callaghan, Admiral Scott.  Well they were both dead.

INTERVIEWER:   Wow and they were on some ships that were sunk?

CALHOUN:   Callaghan was on the San Francisco and Scott had been on the Atlanta and the Atlanta, Cushing, Laffey, Barton and Munssen had all been sunk.  The Portland and Aaron Ward had been so severely damaged that they were being towed by a tug into Tulegi where it was hoped they could get a repair tender in a day or two to patch them up.  At dusk or early morning twilight, we saw our ships ahead of us. 

We had been the last US ship to leave and we joined up with the Helena, San Francisco and Juneau, three cruisers and the Obannon and Fletcher.  As we approached them from the stern, we of course were going about 25 knots to catch up with them, they were going about 20, I stood on the wing of the bridge and looked at the San Francisco’s wing.  We were only about 500 yards off the beam and I counted 26 shell holes in her portside and it later developed she had about 250 critically wounded.  It made our 18 look kind of puny. 

In any case, we took station on the port bow.  The Obannon was in the lead and the Fletcher was on the right flank and we proceeded to go en route to Espiritu Santo.  You could imagine what was going on in the Sterret all this time.  We were trying to get things repaired and take care of the wounded.  We moved all the wounded into the officers’ bunks.  I was relieved at about quarter to eight that night, stayed on the bridge purposely to get reports of the whereabouts and conditions of several people that I was particularly interested in.

One in particular was from William and Mary where he’d been a varsity tackle.  His name was Tiny Hanna.  I knew from my visit during the night that Hanna had been right in the middle of the worst mayhem of all.  His gun station and 1st lieutenant and damage control officer was just forward of #3 gun mount and when the wounded were handed down from the level of the gun mount to the main deck, Tiny Hanna stood down there and took the stretchers alone with his arms up like this and lowered them to the deck.  I don’t know many people who could have done that.

Well I was concerned because I hadn’t seen him since my visit and I didn't really want to ask anybody.  We had been very close.  Our wives were very good friends.  We had had quite a nice relationship so I didn't ask anybody about Tiny.  At about quarter to nine, I heard him coming up the ladder to the bridge and turned around and saw him.  Of course he apparently had had the same kind of misgivings about me and said, “Cal, I’m glad you made it”.  He was a mess. 

Anyway so we continued to try to clean house.  The dead were prepared for burial.  That’s another thing.  Harry Nice, the doctor, came to me and said, “Cal, you’ve been on this ship since it was commissioned and I don’t think there’s anybody else that knows the crew as well as you do so I want you to come with me.  We’re going to have to identify all these dead”.  I said, “Oh Harry, I don’t want to do that”.  He said, “I know you don’t, but you’re going to do it anyhow”.  So we went through that.  It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. 

Anyway we prepared all these guys, soaked them into shrouds, put a 5” shell at the foot of each and that was what was going on at around a quarter to eleven when we received word that the Helena had identified an unidentified aircraft.  That really didn't sit very well because we knew that there had been two Japanese carriers further up the slot that were available to them if they brought them down to cover what was going to be a big reinforcement.

So the first thought occurred to me.  We went to general quarters right away.  I’m back up on the gun directory.  All three of my wounded are there.  It turned out we had only been at our battle stations a couple of minutes when someone identified it as a B-17.  So we relaxed.  We secured general quarters and went back to condition two where we had half the gun battery, half at that time was one gun. 

So I’m still sitting at the gun director.  I climbed out of the hatch and I could scramble on top which was a favorite perch in the daytime when it was sunny and I was looking at the ships we were accompanying to see if I could determine how much damage there was and I had gotten through the whole formation back to the Juneau.  I was watching the Juneau with my binoculars admiring the fact that she appeared to be intact and yet I knew from radio messages that she had taken one torpedo the night before.

I was looking for evidence of that damage.  I couldn't see any.  She was making 21 knots.  So I’m thinking what a beautiful ship, just a big overgrown destroyer making 21 knots in broad daylight, sun, the calm sea and I took the binoculars down from my eyes and I’m still looking at it and she simply disintegrated.  One huge explosion and whole 5” gun mounts flying hundreds of feet in the air, pieces of the ship, boats, huge hunks of stuff being thrown up, a big cloud of black and gray smoke that went thousands of feet into the air.

Then this pour of smoke hung there.  There was hardly any breeze and it just gradually started to lift off the surface.  So I took the binoculars again and looked over to see what was left and there wasn’t anything.  I couldn't see a thing.  I especially looked to see if there were people, could not see anything.  I mean I couldn't see a piece of wood, anything.  Of course in retrospect, we were probably 3000 yards away from her.  It may have been extremely difficult to spot a head at that distance. 

In any case, I didn't think there were any survivors, neither did any of us.  When this occurred, I didn't know why she had exploded, but all I knew was that she had been torpedoed the night before and that wherever the damage was, it was below deck cause I couldn't see anything.  I began thinking about our own damage and then I wondered, well maybe they had electrical damage from the torpedo head and what has happened is the electrical damage has sparked the magazines and blown up the magazine.

So I immediately had our magazine flooded again.  In the meantime, we had pumped them out.  Then a few minutes later, we saw an explosion on the horizon on the starboard side and we deduced that that probably was a self-destruct explosion on the second torpedo that had missed and that what had happened is she had been torpedoed by a submarine.

INTERVIEWER:   Right then, at that point?

CALHOUN:   Yeah, which would mean that we, since we were on the port bow at that point, had probably passed right over it.  By that time, we realized that our sonar was not functioning as it should.  We had gotten a contact with sonar about an hour earlier, but it was inconclusive.  Sonar was not in those days very effective at speeds above 8 knots at most and we were making 25 knots. 

It was a sub that had gotten the Juneau and no ship went back to explore as to whether there were survivors.  The Fletcher had turned without any directive to do so and was starting to go back when the skipper of the Helena who was the boss at the time directed him to return to his screening station and Halsey later relieved the skipper of the Helena for not having sent someone back, an action which I felt was entirely inappropriate because all of us believed that that sub was still there and whoever came back to investigate survivors was going to catch another torpedo.

INTERVIEWER:   Because they would have to slow down and be a sitting duck really.

CALHOUN:   Sure, absolutely.  As it later turned out, the Japanese records became available.  The torpedo that hit the Juneau was his last fish.  Of course, there’s no way we could have known that.

So then we stopped at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides and there was a sea plane tender there that provided us with some patch up work that helped plug holes in the side and so on.  We had shell holes above the water line.  Those had to be plugged and plated over and helped us extricate and remove some of the tangle of wreckage that surrounded the after-two guns.

INTERVIEWER:   Let me ask you, I know at the time you don’t know this, but later you’ve done research.  How did the Japanese come out of this conflict?  What was their damage?  I mean that’s important.

CALHOUN:   Ship wise it was not nearly as bad as ours.  It’s hard to evaluate that because they lost the battleship we fired at.

INTERVIEWER:   And you said later the plane sunk it the next day.  So that was a major accomplishment.

CALHOUN:   That was and it did blunt the attempt to reinforce.  They were not able to do the bombardment they had been attached to do.  The small ships, mostly destroyers, that were following behind them with fresh troops were without any support so the planes and one or two destroyers that were in the area worked them over.  What got ashore was only a fraction of what had been intended.

INTERVIEWER:   You said the other battleship turned around and went back.

CALHOUN:   Kirishima turned and departed.  He lived to fight another day.

INTERVIEWER:   And did that Tokyo run continue then?

CALHOUN:   No.

INTERVIEWER:   See that’s the key, right? 

CALHOUN:   No, they never came back like that again.  Of course by the next night, Halsey had managed to get two of our battleships up there.  See they couldn't make it in time for the night action we engaged in, but they got there the next day.  So the South Dakota and I can’t remember which other destroyer, came in the next night under Admiral Lee and they really had a good successful night action.  I think the Kirishima was in that action and was damaged.  Our action knocked out the Nagara, the cruiser, and one or two destroyers. 

INTERVIEWER:   At a tremendous cost.

CALHOUN:   Their destroyer offensive was far superior to ours.  We fired these fish accurately and they ran beautifully, straight line right where they were aimed, but they didn't explode.  We had depended on these new magnetic exploders that would go off when they triggered by the magnetic field of the ship if they passed under the ship.  So they were set to run below the ship and they did.  They ran below the ship, they ran right under it and kept on going. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did they ever get that fixed later in the war?

CALHOUN:   Yes, later. 

INTERVIEWER:   Too late.

CALHOUN:   Yeah, too late for our purposes.  There was an angle to this that I have not surfaced before in any publication that had to do with the two torpedoes that we fired at the destroyer.  At the time that the destroyer was sighted, we opened fire immediately and the captain gave the order to commence fire practically as we fired the first salvo.  The torpedo officer was on the bridge with the captain and he fired the torpedoes at the same time that the captain said commence fire.

Well the torpedoes never got there obviously.  The ship exploded when it was struck by the second salvo of 5-inch shells.  Well at that point, the torpedoes had been underway for 10 seconds.  I don’t know where they were.  They were probably no more than 50 feet or 100 feet away.  I had never brought it up because I did not want to do anything to make the poor torpedo men who were so devastated by this business feel that they hadn’t accomplished something.

The exec who was an ordinance specialist had argued with me that no 5-inch shells would ever have caused this much damage.  I argued with him and later he became a skipper.  I became the exec.  I got a letter from him after I was hospitalized.  I was actually back home in Santa Cruz, California, when the letter arrived and he communicated to me in his truncated code English that they had had an action report that the guns had caused the damage and that he’d been decorated with a Navy Cross and had been promoted to the rank of captain.  He managed to get all that in without ever saying sorry.

INTERVIEWER:   Okay, so your ship is back in pretty damaged shape.  What’s the next destination?

CALHOUN:   The next step was to get away from the New Hebrides and go down to Noumea where Admiral Halsey wanted to have his staff inspect our damage.  When we got to Noumea, Admiral Halsey’s staff did come aboard and tour around making a careful inspection of the damage.  Then he, himself, came to visit the ship.  The captain was kind enough to ask me to accompany them as we went through the ship where he pointed out what had occurred at each of these shell hits and so on.

INTERVIEWER 2:   What was your impression of Admiral Halsey?

CALHOUN:   To sum it up, a rugged, tough fighter who nevertheless had a soft spot, very emotionally moved by the story that I told him about the gunner’s mate who had told them that he didn't want him to take him to sick bay.  Tears rolled down his cheeks when I told him that. 

He didn't have much to say in the time that we toured the ship.  He actually left the ship and walked off on a small brow that we had that went over to the dock and as he walked over, he stopped and turned facing us and stood on this little brow.  It was only about 3’ wide and about 12’ long and he talked to us for probably two or three minutes.  I can’t begin to tell you what he said exactly, but he was proud of the performance of all of the ships that had participated.  He was proud and amazed that a destroyer could absorb 11 shell hits, three of which were 14” and still manage to conduct itself as this one did.  He told us how moved he was by the stories of courage and bravery and how deeply saddened he was by the knowledge that we had lost so many good men.

He saluted us.  I said to Tiny, my friend, “I’d follow that guy to hell and back”.  That’s the way he impressed me.  I think he made some mistakes.  He also provided a spirit which was absolutely essential.  You can’t win if you don’t have that spirit and he had it and he communicated it to everyone who came in contact with him.

I think I may have mentioned earlier when he first took command from Admiral Gormley, he sent a message.  It was his first message and the message said, “Strike, repeat, strike, Halsey”.  That’s all it said, but that got the mood across.  So anyway Halsey said “Well, I’m going to send you back to Pearl Harbor and they can determine there whether or not they are capable of repairing your damage”.

So we left very shortly thereafter and we proceeded back to Pearl Harbor.  When we arrived at Pearl Harbor, again I had the deck, I was the perennial OD, as we were coming in to Pearl Harbor, of course we hadn’t been there since before the attack, and I was looking over at the damage I could see still visible.  I noticed that there were an awful lot of sailors topside on these ships that were there.  There were a number of major combatants, cruisers, maybe a dozen of them.

I thought it was unusual to see this many sailors on the deck of these ships.  They were all in uniform, white uniforms.  So I commented to the captain, “Captain, do you happen to know if the president is coming”.  He said, “No, I never heard anything about it, why?”  I said it looked to me as though these ships are getting ready to man the rail.  Somebody must be coming.  He looked over with his binoculars and said yeah, maybe the president was coming.

So we proceeded, there were just two of us, the Sterret and the San Francisco, and we were in the lead.  As we drew abreast of the first cruiser, we heard the bugle go for attention and then salute and they all saluted and Hip Hip Hooray and they gave three cheers and offed their hats when they did.  This standing at the rail was for these two ships returning from this action and that was their way of telling us that they were pleased with what we had done.  That was a big high for those of us on those two ships.

Anyhow Nimitz then came down to see us and he also toured just as Halsey did.  When we came back in from the tour, he came into the ward room and all of the officers were there.  He said to the skipper, “Well Captain, what would you say if I told you that you may be going back to the United States”.  The captain said, “We’re ready Admiral”.  (Laughter).  So that’s where he said we were going, we were going back to San Francisco for repairs.  Of course we were absolutely delighted.

INTERVIEWER 2:   Now the year and the month is what?

CALHOUN:   This is December.  When we came into Pearl Harbor, it seems to be it was about the 4th, 5th, 6th somewhere in there in ’42.

INTERVIEWER:   This was really one of the first major naval battles where you had a chance to strike back at the Japanese.

CALHOUN:   It was the surface action.  Admiral King later termed it the most furiously fought surface action of the war.  Of course we couldn't wait to get back to San Francisco.  When we arrived, we arrived in a pea soup fog.  The media had been at work advertising the fact that the San Francisco was returning to San Francisco and of course it had been a hero ship in this action.  Admiral Callaghan had made it his flagship for the action.  He was killed, so he was a hero and the skipper of that ship was killed in that same action.

So when we came in, the San Francisco was directed to steam back and forth off the piers so the frond of well wishers could see it.  The sailors on the San Francisco took a dim view of that.

INTERVIEWER:   They wanted to get home, yeah? (laughter)

CALHOUN:   Yeah and then they had to go up alongside the pier and have open house to allow visitors.  The Sterret was quietly sped along (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER 2:  With muffled oars (laughter).

CALHOUN:   Yeah (laughter), with muffled oars, good term.  Then we were in the yard for about a little over two months and in February there had been major changes in the personnel of the Sterret.  Of course we had to have replacements for all the people that were wounded or killed.  The captain was promoted out of there to take command of a squadron and the exec became the captain and I became the exec.

INTERVIEWER:   Nor for our listeners, the exec is the number two officer and responsible for?

CALHOUN:   Carrying out the routine of the day and putting into effect the captain’s policies and decisions whatever they may be and also being the navigator which came at me with some trepidation because I had not done well with navigating (laughter).  I wondered whether or not I was going to manage to get across to where we were supposed to go.  I never communicated this to the skipper who kept asking me every day, “Where are we”.  (Laughter)  This was really wonderful.

We went to Tongatapu, that was to be our first stop.  He asked me the day before, “What time are we going to make landfall tomorrow?”  I told him we ought to get there about 6:30.  Fine.  We saw land at exactly 6:30 (laughter) .

INTERVIEWER 2:   (Laughter) Sometimes you win.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh that’s funny, nobody was more surprised.

CALHOUN:   So anyway we then spent all of the rest of February, all of March in the Guadalcanal area resupplying convoy business, taking new troops supplies and ammunition and fuel to Guadalcanal.

INTERVIEWER:   Now when you say taking new troops, how many could you get on that small destroyer?

CALHOUN:   We didn't embark, we were escorting troop ships and supply ships.

INTERVIEWER:   And these were ships specifically designed for troops.

CALHOUN:   So we had been in there on 7th, 8th, 9th, I think we probably got there on the 6th of April with a convoy of resupply vessels.  One afternoon at about 1:00 or so, we had warning that there would be a dive bombing attack consisting of about 100 attacking aircraft.  So we got the heavy ships underway and the few destroyers, the Aaron Ward being one of them, still having been repaired from the battle and the Sterret.  We were on opposite bows of the formation.

We herded this group of ships out heading east to get clear of the objective area when the planes arrived.  They targeted all these transports of course.  We were shooting at them.  Now when this all started, I was on the bridge.  We had a public address system so for the first few minutes I described what was happening over the PA system so the crew would know what was going on.

Then it began to look as though some of these aircraft that had already dropped their bombs were headed in our direction and when I saw that that was happening, I hung up my microphone and proceeded down the ladder aft to go to the secondary conning station which was my battleship in the event we were wounded or hit.  The idea was that the exec would be at the secondary con and would be able to carry on.

Well I never got past the midship 20mm guns.  By that time, these Japanese guide bombers, which had already dropped a bomb, were trying to divert our fire from shooting at the flames that were attacking shooting at them.  Very courageous thing for them to do.  They were flying up past us at a range of maybe no more than 100 yards. 

INTERVIEWER:   Were they trying to strafe you?

CALHOUN:   And trying to attract our fire.  So I stopped at the midship point 20mm gun to direct the gun man, who incidentally was Red Hammock, to get on the planes that were still attacking.  They were shooting at a plane that was in his dive so that the arch or stream of tracers was descending coming from us.  At that point, I became aware of another stream of tracers coming from behind me.  It was also descending and I didn't stop to think about where that was coming from.  I just knew if I didn't get the hell out of there, I was going to get hit.

So I ducked down to the left and as I did, I was struck by three pieces of shrapnel which hit me in the arm.  Had I not ducked, it would have hit me in the back.  It hit my arm and I went down like that and it hit my arm under my upper arm and it knocked me down.  It was like getting hit with a line drive in baseball.  That’s exactly what it felt like.  It really knocked me off my feet.

INTERVIEWER 2:   But this is a lot more heroic wound that getting shot in the rear end, isn’t it?

CALHOUN:   (Laughter) I don’t know.

INTERVIEWER:   Well where did the shrapnel come from?

CALHOUN:   It came from our own 20mm.  The yard, the Navy yard, had installed pipe stops.  They had configured one inch pipe in such a trajectory that it would interfere with the muzzle of the gun, the barrel of the gun as it depressed so that beyond a certain point, it couldn't go any further.  It would hit this pipe.  Well apparently when the yard put that in, they didn't allow for the recoil so this gun would have hit the stop, but it recoiled and the next shot hit the pipe.  That’s my analysis of it.  Nobody else was giving me any and I think that’s as good as any.

INTERVIEWER:   And then it spread that pipe out as shrapnel.

CALHOUN:   Yeah and I still have the shrapnel.  I don’t know where it is now, but I never tried to get it out.  They told me it would do more harm than it was worth.  But it struck my right radial nerve.  Incidentally the captain’s righter was one of the machine gunners at that gun and he came over and put a tourniquet on my arm.  Shortly thereafter, my friend Harry, the doctor, came out from the ward room which was his battle dressing station and examined me.

He hauled me back, I walked of course, to the ward room where he plunked me down on the ward room sofa on the starboard side of the ward room and poured me a glass of whiskey and said, “Nurse this until I get back”.  He had five or six people wounded.

INTERVIEWER 2:   Sir, am I correct, this is medicinal whiskey?

CALHOUN:   Of course, they didn't have any other kind (laughter).

INTERVIEWER 2:   It would be a violation of their military code to be drinking whiskey.

CALHOUN:   So by the time he got back, I had managed to consume the whiskey and I wasn’t in any great distress.  My arm didn't feel bad, I didn't have any feeling at all.  So he came back and now he began to examine the thing more closely and said, “I think I better take you back and try to get these fragments out”.  So we went back to sick bay and he opened up my arm and probed around and after about 15 minutes, he said, “Cal, I can’t find these damn things and I’m doing more harm than good to go looking for them.  I’m just going to sew it up”.

So now I’m back to the ward room with him and he said, “I want to look at this arm more closely”.  So he got out a pin and he started punching me with the pin, “Do you feel that”.  I said no.  Well he went all up my arm and I couldn't feel anything.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my goodness.

CALHOUN:   He said, “Well, how would you like to go home?”  I said, “Come on Harry.  You don’t send people home for something like that”.  He said, “Yeah, we send people home for something like this because what you’ve got is a severed radial nerve.  You need the services of a neurosurgeon and there is one at Espiritu Santo who happens to be a good one and he’ll do the surgery, but you’ll have to be sent back to the States because the nerves regenerate at a very slow rate.  It’ll be at least a year until you can use your arm again”.

INTERVIEWER:   You were so fortunate to have a doctor.

CALHOUN:   I couldn’t believe it.  I said, “How big is the hole”.  He said it was about the size of a 45.  I said, “Harry, I can’t go back home (laughter) with this pinprick and say I was wounded”.  He said I had to go back.  So on the 10th of April, I was discharged from the Sterret to MOB 3, Mobile Hospital 3 in Espiritu Santo and that’s a whole story in itself.  That would take up a whole tape (laughter). 

I got into the hospital with my sea bag which contained everything I owned and that’s the last time I saw it.  I never saw my sea bag again.  I was dressed in khakis and I had my arm in a sling so the khaki shirt was open of course because it wouldn’t fit over my arm.  When I first got in, I was taken to surgery where several other casualties were being brought in. 

One of them, a guy who was in a stretcher who was obviously very critically wounded, he had over 100 shrapnel wounds and they were from head to toe, one that had pierced his cheeks, went in one side and out the other, holes about the size of a quarter, and he was trying to smoke, but had no cigarettes and no way to get one because his arms were both in casts and they were out like that.  Both his legs were in casts and it turned out he had been wounded when the Kanoa, a tanker, which was in that formation where we were providing escort, was sunk.

His name was Blackwell and he was so dazed and affected by the explosion, he couldn't speak, but he could hear.  He heard these two guys who were apparently chiefs going around before the ship went down commenting on who’s this and what are we going to do with him and they got to him and asked who the hell was this.  The other guy said I don’t know, but it looks like old Blackwell.  The other guy said, “What are we going to do with him”.  The guy said he didn't know, “Let’s throw him overboard.  At least he’s got a chance”.

So they threw him overboard.  He had both arms broken.  He said he reached a young lieutenant who was in the water holding on to a spar and he said, “I grabbed his hand.  Man, there wasn’t nothin’ was going to get me to let go of that hand”.  He held on to him until he was picked up which was several hours later.  He had shrapnel in his lungs, in his legs, his feet, in the joints of his toes.

When he was brought into the surgical ward, he and I had bunks opposite each other and for the next several days, he was critical.  Another patient who was a doctor, the doctor from the Aaron Ward which was sunk in the action, was in the bed next to me.  His name was Sullivan.  He was from Laramie, Wyoming.  I asked the doctor about this guy whose name was Blackwell.  He said, “He’s not going to make it”.  I said, “Well, you’re the doctor.  You know, but he doesn’t sound like somebody that’s going to die”. 

He was very vocal and he left no stone unturned in getting what he wanted, told them what was wrong with him and told them what he had to have.  So for the next several days, I observed them squirting melted paraffin on him which had been laced with sulfur powder to prevent infection in the wounds on his face.  So he was unrecognizable for several days.  About four or five days later, they came around with a couple of basins of hot water to remove the paraffin from his face.

As they did this, he was only from here across this room away from me, I looked at him and I finally got out of my bunk and I went over and said, “I think I know you”.  He said, “Of course you know me Mr. Calhoun.  Don’t you remember me, old Blackwell.  I was on the Claxton.”  We had been on second class destroyer crews when we were midshipmen on this old four piper, the Claxton.  He had been machine’s mate and he remembered me.  I don’t know what I’d done to make him remember (laughter) whatever.

This started a very nice friendship.  He underwent some surgery there and then they moved all of us to the hospital ship, Solace, which was in Noumea.  We went there on the hospital transport ship, Pinkney.  They weren’t sure that they could send Blackwell on the Pinkney only had limited medical facilities.  Sulley, the doctor, and I agreed that if they would let Blackwell go on the Pinkney, we’d look after him. 

So we got Blackwell down to the Solace and incidentally the Solace was manned by the University of Pennsylvania hospital staff intact.  All the doctors and nurses used to work together and they were wonderful.  One of the nurses attached herself to Blackwell.  She was absolutely wonderful with him.  She told him she was going to make him pretty again.  He was not a very handsome man (laughter), but he had a wonderful attitude.

Anyhow, I’m going to shorten this.  I could go on and on.  We stayed on the hospital ship for about a month and then we were embarked in the Learling, an old passenger ship which had been converted by the Navy or taken over.  They hadn’t really done much to convert it.  We went down from Noumea to Melbourne, were there overnight.  We took aboard 2500  Marine ambulatory patients.  Then we headed for San Diego without any escort, 22 knots all the way.

INTERVIEWER:   Did your surgery start to make a difference?  Could you start to tell that you were getting better at that point or not?

CALHOUN:   No, I couldn't tell anything.  I went to have my wound dressed a day or two out of Melbourne and he doctor said, “Hell, I don’t know what to do about it.  I’m a pediatrician”.  (Laughter)

INTERVIEWER 2:   That’s a little better connected than an obstetrician (laughter).

CALHOUN:   Yeah (laughter).  So anyway we got back to San Diego and when we arrived, we were taken to the San Diego Naval Hospital and when we arrived, there was a big entourage waiting for us.  Among that group of waiting nurses and doctors was one that I recognized, a four striper who had been a reserve passenger on the shakedown crews of the Sterret.  I knew he was a plastic surgeon.

So I waltzed over him and asked if he remembered me, that I was on the Sterret.  Yes, he remembered me.  I said, “If I remember correctly, you’re a plastic surgeon”.  Yes.  I told him I had a friend I’d like him to take a look at.  Okay, so the next thing you know, Blackwell is in his bunk in the hospital and here I bring in this plastic surgeon.  He looked him and said it didn't look too serious.  He said, “Your name Blackwell.”  Blackwell said, “Yes sir.”  He said, “Well who do you want to look like, Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power?”  (Laughter). 

Blackwell said, “No doc, I just want to look like old Blackwell”.  So I left him there in the hospital with badly wounded feet and he was a bleeder.  They had to be very careful when they did any surgery with him because he could bleed to death.  The doctor told me, his surgeon told me as I left to go north, I was going to go to Oak Knoll Hospital in Oakland because my family was in Santa Cruz, California, and I had asked about Blackwell’s prognosis.  He said, “Well he’s going to recover of course, but he will never walk again without a cane or a crutch and he’s certainly going to be out of the Navy.”  So I said goodbye to Blackwell.

I went to Oak Knoll and then I went to home while this thing healed itself.  I reported in once a week the rest of the time I was there.  That lasted from June when we got to San Diego until about February.  Then I was released from the hospital to be sent to command a high-speed mine sweep, the Lamberton DMSII, an old converted four piper.

I went from command of it in San Diego where I took it to Pearl Harbor where we towed targets for the fleet as it was getting ready to go out to Marianas and other operations around Guam and so on.  I went to the officers’ club in Pearl Harbor probably a week or so after we got there.  I went to the bar to get a drink and standing in front of me was the guy bungling a whole batch of beers in his arm.  I mean like this and I didn't see how he was going to carry them.  When I turned around, it was Blackwell (laughter).  I said, “Good God, what the hell are you doing here”.

INTERVIEWER 2:   This is like Kilroy, he’s everywhere (laughter).

CALHOUN:   He said, “I’m the navigator on a new tanker” (laughter).  He’d been promoted.  He was an ensign.  We had a reunion.  I asked him how he managed this because when I looked down at his feet, he had the toes of his shoes cut away.  He had no toes in his shoes (laughter).  He said he couldn't wear shoes because they were never able to take the fragments out from between my joints so the fragments are still there but without the toe in the shoe to bother it, he was okay.  So his shoes were simply cut away.

I said, “How did you get sprung out of the hospital” cause I had trouble getting out with my little thing.  They didn't want to send me to active duty.  He said, “Well I was in the hospital in San Diego and this old Swede who was a reserve captain came to see me.  He was a tanker skipper in the merchant service.  He got commissioned in the Navy and we were good friends so he came to pay a call on me.  He told me when he left that he was getting command of a new tanker.”  So Blackwell told him that was great.

The skipper said if he could get himself out of the hospital, he would take him as his navigator.  So Blackwell said that Saturday when the captain came around for captain’s inspection, he got out of bed, put his crutches under the bunk and leaned against the bottom of the bunk and stood there waiting for him.  When he came to Blackwell, he said, “Well Blackwell, up and about, huh?”  “Yes sir”.  He said, “How are you feeling”.  He said, “I’m feeling fine Captain”. 

He said, “Well what can we do for you”.  He said, “You can send me back to active duty Captain”.  “Make a note, put Blackwell down for active duty”.  (Laughter).  So he went to be the navigator of a tanker.  That had lots of repercussions for me because every time I came in company with the tanker from then on, I got a message from him, come on side.  This went through the rest of the Lamberton until it got to _____ and then _____ was called alongside so we became fast friends with this tanker.

Well I’m getting ahead of myself.  Anyhow I’m at the point where I got…

INTERVIEWER:   You’re doing kind of tug, well not tug, but work in Hawaii. 

CALHOUN:   No, I’m in Santa Cruz and then from there up to Oak Knoll and so on and lots of stories about that including the fact that I was living at home in an apartment building that had among other people, four wives from the Sterret.  So they had a coffee group every day.  For the first two weeks I was home, I was an oddity.  A curiosity.  After that, I just became one of the girls.  Very educational. (laughter)

I had nothing to do so one day I was at a cocktail party and the director of the Spa which was the local health center, said “How are you getting along”.  I said I was bored to death.  He said, “Would you like something to do”.  I said sure.  “How would you like to be the lifeguard”.  I said, “A one arm lifeguard?”  He said yeah, “You don’t have to get in touch with anybody when they’re in trouble.  Just take this little buoy out and toss it to them and you wear it around your shoulder and all you have to do is let them have the buoy, hang on to it and you swim and tow them in.”  So I became the Santa Cruz city lifeguard (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   You know we’re in trouble when we’ve got wounded soldiers…(laughter).

CALHOUN:   My wife objected to the uniform.  It was a purple sweat suit.  It had the City of Santa Cruz Police on the back (laughter).  I said I can’t afford not to wear it.  It’s my only legitimate badge of authority in case I have to haul someone out of the water.  Well anyway, I stayed there as the lifeguard all that summer.  The first couple of weeks my wife wouldn’t have anything to do with me for wearing this outfit on the street to get to the lifeguard stand.

Finally after about two weeks she decided she was going to come down to the beach.  So she came down, but there were very few men in Santa Cruz at the time and loads of females.  She looked around and said, “Is it always like this”.  I said, “Yep”.  She said she was going to be there every day (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   So you got a boat back and you’re now doing some work on that ship,

you jumped, when you went back on active duty …

CALHOUN:   Yeah, went back and took the Lamberton to Pearl Harbor, did the towing of targets and then one day I was steaming out from Pearl Harbor with a target in tow and here came a brand new squadron of destroyers over the horizon.  I noticed it 10 miles away.  I thought I really wanted to be back on one of those things instead of this DMS-2 towing the target.  As it got closer, I could look at it with binoculars and see that the lead ship was the Remy ship.

Well I knew that my former skipper had become squadron commander of Desron-54 and the flagship of Desron-54 was the Remy.  So I assumed that Captain Coward was on the Remy.  I waited until they got within visual range and I sent him a message.  I said, “Greetings Commodore.  That’s a beautiful squadron.  Please get me the hell out of here and back on destroyers”.  (Laughter)  He got that message as we passed each other and I had no response from him.

I came back in a week later after having been out hauling targets and he’s on his way out now with the same squadron.  He blinked over and asked if I had gotten a copy of his letter to Commander Destroyer of the Pacific Fleet.  No.  He said I should check with the flag lieutenant.  That’s all he said and he’s gone and I wished him luck.  I went over to the flag lieutenant’s office.  I said have you got a letter from Captain Coward about Lieutenant Commander Calhoun?  He said he did.  I asked where it was and he said it was in the bottom of a pile.  I said, “How bout taking it out of the bottom and putting it on the top”.  He said okay.

The next day I had dispatch orders relieving me from command of the Lamberton and sending me back to the States to take command of the Dewey.  My friend Captain Coward had interceded and had wired the bureau.  So I went back and I got back in August and picked up my wife.  We had a little boy then.  We went up to Puget Sound which is where the Dewey was being overhauled and I took command of it from…as a matter of fact, I think I was still a lieutenant.  I may have been a lieutenant commander, but I relieved him at that point.

We finished the overhaul in about a week and then we deployed to Pearl Harbor with destroyer squadron I and the squadron commander was Preston Mercer who had been on Admiral Nimitz’ staff twice in previous tours so he knew a lot of people, a lot of flag officers.  So I had an education from Preston Mercer because he had every time we were in Pearl Harbor, we were there about a month before we deployed, he had all kinds of people down on the Dewey to have lunch so I got to meet Admiral Calhoun among other people who insisted that we were related.

INTERVIEWER 2:   You agreed.

CALHOUN:   No, I didn't agree.  I knew of course all about John C. Calhoun and I had lived in Charleston during the time that the Sterret was being commissioned.  I did not think I was a descendant of John C. Calhoun.  He insisted that he thought I was.  He initiated a correspondence with me which didn't end until well after the war.  He wrote to me finally and said, “We’re not from the same tree, but we’re from the same carton”, whatever that meant (laughter).

I took the Dewey into Ulethe and we operated with a logistic support force which consisted of tankers and ammunition ships, supply ships, hospital ships, jeep carriers carrying replacement aircraft.

INTERVIEWER:   This is late ’44 then?

CALHOUN:   This was in September of ’44.  We learned to operate with this logistic support force as a part of its screen and Deseron-1 was in essence its screen.  So we had our eight and probably another four to six destroyers.  We had a screen of about close to 20 destroyers around that force. Well the force consisted of probably 40 ships.  It was a big outfit so we just made a circle around them and accompanied them everywhere they went.  We got to know their routine pretty well.

We left there several times to replenish the fleet when they would come back from strikes from wherever it was they were then operating.  By December, the focus of activity was up in the Philippines and MacArthur had landed on Mindoro and was getting ready to land on Luzon and in fact landed on Luzon and we were there to provide both air support with the carriers.  When I saw we, I mean the fleet.  The fast carrier task force was operating probably within about 200 miles of the island of Luzon.  The logistic task force would go off maybe 100 miles away and mark time for two or three days and then come back.  We would rendezvous, replenish them and then go up.

On the 17th of December, we had a rendezvous with them east of Luzon and when they began to try to fuel, it got kind of hairy because the weather deteriorated rapidly and no one was able to fuel fully.  There were a few ships that got maybe 5000 or 6000 gallons of black oil which is nothing.  Well several of the destroyers that had come back from the fast carrier task force to refuel were extremely low.  One of those was the Spence, a Fletcher class World War II destroyer.

The Spence was a big concern because he had less than 10,000 gallons left in his tanks.  Doctrine in the Pacific destroyer force was that if you got below 70% of your capacity, you were to fill your tanks with sea water to keep it constantly up to at least 70% full.  That was in order to maintain your stability.  Of course 10,000 gallons was like, it wasn’t even 10% of his total capacity.  I think it carried close to 200,000. 

So they were very worried about him and there were a few others that were low, not that low, but low.  Then there were the _____ class which was what the Dewey was and we had had words with the bureau of ships about our stability in August when I took the Dewey to sea for prepare trials.  I had never ridden the ship before.  I took her out on a full power run and didn't like the way it felt when we turned.  So I came back in to Puget Sound that afternoon and called my squadron commander who was going to ride the Dewey as his flagship and he had never been out on it before either.

I said that I thought he better come to sea with me to see how his new home rides.  There were some things about the way she behaved that I didn't like and I thought I needed his guidance about what to do about it.  So I took him out the next day and did all kinds of turns and maneuvers at various speeds.