This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
On board the USS Maddox off Formosa, 21 January 1945 was a strangely tranquil day. I glanced at the USS Collett, off our stem, a mirror image of the Maddox, identical in every detail. The two destroyers were alone on picket duty. The world seemed to be ours.
Earlier, we had watched the blazing aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, smoke rising hundreds of feet after two kamikaze planes had streaked out of the sun and clouds t0 crash into her decks.
But the Ticonderoga'i agony was over now. She would survive. All was now well, on this balmy day.
The noon meal had been exceptional: soup, turkey, dessert, coffee, and cigarettes. One didn’t often have that kind of dinner on board a destroyer. I went into the radio shack to take over from the man copying the Eox” schedule (a steady stream of radio messages in fast morse code). I took the earphones off the copier’s head, quickly placed them on my own, and sat down to the task of uninterrupted typing. Despite the fast Messages, the atmosphere was relaxed, and I noted that my fellow petty officer, Smitty, was smiling.
About age 22, he was three years or so older than I, yet I never really understood some of his attitudes and actions. For one thing, he seemed totally oblivious to danger. I supposed this was because he had survived the sinking of his destroyer which had rammed a U- hoat in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.
But, why was he smiling so strangely? I asked him and he replied: "This ship is going to be hit this afternoon.”
The earphones on my head suddenly came alive with jnterference, so bad that the code characters could not c heard distinctly. I began to turn the fine-tuning knob and sought help in clearing the signal, but it s°°n degenerated into static. With no warning whatsoever> there was a tremendous noise, the kind of shatter- mg, clanking crescendo that only "tin-can” sailors will ever hear. It was as if we were inside a gigantic empty Cannister that had been dropped from a great height.
The GQ alarm sounded, and I could feel our ship
The uss Maddox (DD-731) stood by as the USS Ticonderoga (CU-14) burned, little knowing that later that day—2] January 1945—she too, would know her agony.
lunge like a frightened fawn as she accelerated to high speed. What had happened? Had an enemy plane been sighted, and had we fired a full salvo of the ship’s six 5-in./38 caliber guns?
Confused, I looked up to my right toward the chronometer. Capable of withstanding considerable shock, the glass had cracked and the clock was stopped. I heard shouts of men in pain. A flow of liquid come into the radio-shack. It smelled like gasoline mixed with an odor I had never experienced. It was fresh blood. Nearby, a young man, his lower leg severed, called out that we had been hit. There was the rush of stretchers and a kind of commotion rare even in a destroyer. Those little "toothpaste tubes” of morphine would be needed after all.
The very special meal and that beautiful day were the last that eight of the crew would enjoy. And, for 34 men who had been wounded, the event would leave permanent scars. This was the last day, of life, too, for the Japanese kamikaze pilot, who had dived his "Zeke” from out of the sun and manipulated his engine to avoid detection. The pilot’s tattered map of Formosa lay on the deck amid the wreckage of his plane, pieces of which had become death-dealing confetti. Metal fragments had slashed the head of a man cleaning food trays, still other shards and slivers had entered the wardroom to snuff out the life of a young officer. But, incredibly one of these lethal scraps had been stopped by the paperback edition of the Bible in one sailor’s breast pocket.
The next day was as bright and sunny as its black predecessor. We were steaming now with the crippled Ticonderoga as we and she paid our last respects to our respective dead.
Our very moving ceremony was shorter and simpler than the Ticonderoga's. Our gangway was lowered on the starboard side while the ship was underway—as it would have been in port—to allow the dead to debark on their long, last liberty. The body of each man was placed in his mattress cover, a flag was draped over him, and his body was slid down the gangway.
Our skipper, Commander J. S. Willis conducted the memorial ceremony. And, as he intoned the prayers, none of us could know that soon, following his promotion to squadron commander, he, too, would give his life, as his young men had given theirs, for their country.