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In the hellfire at Cavite Navy Yard, the Pigeon, with her Mustang at the helm, was transformed into an angel of mercy for the helpless Sealion and Seadragon.
When World War II began for the United States with the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the USS Pigeon (ASR-6) was in Cavite Navy Yard, Manila Bay, tied up for repairs for extensive damage caused by a typhoon a few days before. The Pigeon, a submarine rescue ship that had seen service as a minesweeper (AM-47) and as a Yangtze River Patrol gunboat, was a ship with a solid reputation for readiness, etfi
ciency, and excellence. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant Richard Ellington Hawes, nicknamed “Spittin' Dick” by his crew for his tobacco-chewing habits, had been in command since January 1940 and had carefully built a crew based on his special requirements. An up-from-the- ranks “Mustang,” Hawes had enlisted in the Navy 23 years before.
Anyone serving under Lieutenant Hawes had to be a sailor first. The understanding between captain and crew was that when you served under Hawes, “you hung your rate on a hook.” A second understanding was that “liberty commences when the work is done," so upon learning that the war had started, Lieutenant Hawes called his crew to stations and sent out word for the liberty party to return to the ship immediately. By 0700 on 8 December, the crew was back on board and hard at work.
As a result of the encounter with the typhoon, the Pigeon's steering cable had parted in the diving locker and was fouled. Two of the ship’s four salvage anchors had carried away, one knocking off an oil vent cap and letting sea water into the oil tank. The ship’s anchor engine was dislodged; oxygen bottles had been ripped off by the waves; the diving equipment was ruined; and the bridge, engine rooms, and fire rooms were in disarray. Other damage may possibly have been caused by the boom which had broken loose and had required a monumental effort to secure.
After the Pigeon was tied up, other repairs were begun, including fixing generators and drive shaft main bearings. The anchor engine and part of the quadrant and fairlead rollers were removed to the yard for repair. Anticipating the outbreak of war. Lieutenant Hawes had begun welding boiler plate as armor in appropriate places on the ship. He mounted additional weapons to supplement the Pigeon's two 30-caliber machine guns, two 50-caliber machine guns, and small arms with which she had been outfitted. (He was later to install two three-inch/50-caliber naval guns, about a dozen 50-caliber machine guns, and the same number of 30-caliber machine guns.)
After their return to the ship, most of the crew members stayed at their stations for 72 hours without a break, working until bombs began to fall on Cavite. Between 0400 and 0900, the crew prepared the decks for action, hoisted ammunition, set up guns, faked out hoses, rigged tackle for hand steering, stopped off anchors and chains, reassembled the main engine, shifted fuel oil, took on board fresh water, struck lubricating oil below, and lighted fires under dead boilers. Everyone, including Lieutenant Hawes, turned to and worked furiously. At 0900, Lieutenant Hawes received the word: “Main engines tested, ready to get under way in all respects.”
For the next two days, she remained ready while repairs and preparations continued apace.
At noon on 10 December, when the Cavite air raid alarm sounded, the Pigeon was moored at Machina Wharf in a five-ship nest in the following order from the dock: the Seadragon (SS-194), Sealion (SS-195), Bittern (AM- 36), Pigeon, and Quail (AM-15). The Pigeon's engines were warmed up and steam was at the throttle, but her steering had not yet been repaired by the Navy Yard.
Knowing that the Quail had steering but no steam. Lieutenant Hawes offered to provide the Pigeon's power with the Quail's steering so the two ships tied together could help each other out of danger. The Quail's captain responded that she would stay and fight it out with her three- inch guns. Lieutenant Hawes ordered his lines cut preparatory to backing out alone with hand steering. When it became immediately apparent that three-inch guns would be ineffective against the high-flying bombers, the Quail signalled that she would steer them both.
Upon clearing the dock, the two ships maneuvered to avoid bombs which fell about 200 feet astern and others about 200 yards to port. When they reached the channel, lines were cut, and the two ships parted. Seeing the Navy Yard in flames, Lieutenant Hawes first thought to use the Pigeon's five-inch hoses to fight the fires, but because of the extent of the blaze and the high winds, he rejected this idea. Seeing the Sealion and Seadragon being bombed while still moored and without power, Lieutenant Hawes ordered the Pigeon to their assistance. By this time, the bombing had not only caused direct damage to the wharf and Navy Yard but had started violent fires which were exploding torpedo warheads and acetylene and oxygen flasks, sending fiery missiles flying in all directions. One crewman said that the roof of the torpedo workshop went up and wafted down like paper in a whirlwind, and that large pieces of corrugated metal were falling from clouds of smoke like snowflakes.
As the Pigeon began maneuvering into position on the two submarines, the Sealion lay mortally wounded by the bombing attack, her stern sinking, and four of her crew dead. Shrapnel and flying splinters had pierced the conning tower of the Seadragon, killing one man, seriously injuring two, and causing minor injury to three others. The Bittern, without engines, boilers, or three-inch/50-caliber naval guns, was unable to move or fight. When she was set afire and holed by bombs and shrapnel, she was effectively finished. Two of her men died as a result of the bombing.
Machina Wharf was an inferno of flame and explosions, which Lieutenant Hawes described as “deafening.” Several Pigeon sailors have described the entire scene as terrifying beyond imagination. Lieutenant Hawes later said that he did not believe any crew would ever face more terrifying conditions than the Pigeon did that day. One survivor said that he will never wonder what hellfire is like because he was in it at Cavite Navy Yard.
The men on the Pigeon's deck could see the condition of the yard into which they were going. They watched sheets of flame rolling at them and saw men trying to leave the flaming dock to which the ship was heading. The men below decks had the even more terrifying experience of not seeing. They could hear and feel the explosions, smell the smoke, and feel the heat, but they knew only what they were told, and that was little. Lieutenant Hawes paid his crew the highest compliment when he said that during the entire operation not a single man flinched or hesitated in carrying out the ship’s mission, in spite of the terror.
Unhesitatingly, Lieutenant Hawes took the Pigeon back into the firestorm and from the bridge directed the stem of
December 1941.
Lieutenant Hawes wrote his highest praise for his crew in these words: “The courage, spirit, and efficiency of the Pigeon crew is believed unsurpassed by past, present, or any future crews of any vessel of any nation.” In language more characteristic of Lieutenant Hawes, he also said the Pigeon crew was “The goddamnedest crew that ever walked the deck—minesweeper or battleship.” He never characterized his own conduct in those days, giving all of the credit to his crew; but in his recommendation to the Secretary of the Navy for the Gold Star to the Navy Cross, Admiral H. F. Leary, Commander, Southwestern Pacific, described Lieutenant Hawes’s action as “courageous, timely and strenuous.”
Lieutenant Hawes left command of the Pigeon on 31 December 1941 and went on to a distinguished career in World War II, commanding the USS Chanticleer (ASR-7) and Anthedon (AS-24) in the Pacific. He had entered the Navy as a fireman second class in 1917 and retired as a rear admiral in 1953. The USS Hawes (FFG-53), which will be commissioned this month, is named in his honor.
his ship to be placed across the end of a piling about 20 feet from the crippled Seadragon and had a line run across. Crewmen from the Seadragon, the sinking Sealion, and the Bittern were on the deck of the Seadragon helping the men from the Pigeon with the operation. The heat and flames were so intense that when the Pigeon crewmen returned, their clothing was smoking and their body hair was singed off. Meanwhile, gun watches and lookouts were maintained because of the expected return of the bombers. When the lines were secured, the Pigeon began hauling the Seadragon clear until, because of the wind and tide and the Pigeon's hand steering, it became difficult to turn the Seadragon. As a result, the submarine became temporarily stuck in a mud bank. While the Pigeon's crew worked to free her, an oil tank in the yard exploded, and a horizontal sheet of flame rolled out toward them. The intense heat burned body hair off of the men on deck and scorched and blistered the paint on the Pigeon. It was so hot that the brim of Lieutenant Hawes’s cap melted. Just when the heat had become unbearable, the flames dissolved, dying down to the intensity at which they had burned before the oil tank exploded, and the operation continued.
One of the crewmen remembers those moments well. Working on deck when the flames had reached their most intense heat and the very surface of the water was on fire, he felt panic rising almost uncontrollably within him. He looked around and saw Lieutenant Hawes on the bridge. When he saw Lieutenant Hawes standing there puffing on his pipe, apparently calm and working quietly, he felt his panic subside and went on with his job.
By shifting lines on the Pigeon, and with some timely help from the Tanager, Lieutenant Hawes successfully turned the Seadragon and kept towing back straight. When they were about halfway out of the channel, the Seadragon signalled that she had her engines running, and the Pigeon cut loose to go on with her work. Part of that work was done by two men from the Pigeon in her motor whaleboat. At Machina Wharf, there was a lighter just astern of the Bittern, and on the port bow of the Seadragon there was a barge filled with aviation fuel. The two men took the motor whaleboat twice into the inferno, first to pull out the burning lighter, and then to haul out the gasoline barge and moor her to a buoy. They returned a third time to help haul the disabled Bittern to a buoy just off the dock. They went in yet a fourth time to go ashore to the burning Navy Yard to try to get parts for the Pigeon's steering gear at the shipfitter shop, which was not yet burning.
Although the Bittern was still afloat, she was burning fiercely, so the Pigeon's crew put out her fires and went aboard to secure her. Next, Lieutenant Hawes returned the Pigeon to the docks to rescue men in boats or swimming through the burning water. The Pigeon's medical corps- men spent most of the day tending the injured men. Because the fire in the yard was still burning and exploding furiously and night was falling, there appeared to be nothing more that could be done there. Lieutenant Hawes anchored out next to the Bittern in order to protect her. He also began salvaging her and regrouping his own forces.
The next morning, 11 December, the fire was still burning too fiercely for them to go back into the yard, so Lieutenant Hawes went about making his ship into a “combatant,” mounting two three-inch naval guns (one from the Bittern and one from the Sealion) and many 50-caliber machine guns and stocking up ammunition and the other supplies he needed to fight. He also continued salvage operations on barges and small boats. The next few days were spent salvaging the Bittern and Sealion, helping to repair the Seadragon's bomb damage, pulling ammunition from the magazine which was close to being engulfed by the flames in the yard, moving torpedoes, warheads, supplies, and oil barges to safer locations, replacing an antiaircraft gun on the Tanager, and repairing and servicing submarines. The Pigeon also fed twice her normal complement daily, salvaged torpedoes from the yard, and serviced torpedo boats. While performing all of these tasks, she fought off enemy bombers and strafers. She continued working and fighting until she was eventually sunk off Corregidor by enemy dive bombers on 4 May 1942, just before the Philippines fell to the Japanese. The Seadragon, on the other hand, was saved by the Pigeon and repaired and serviced by the Pigeon and Canopus (AS-9). She went on to distinguished service, earning 1 * battle stars before the war ended.
For his service on 10 December, Lieutenant Hawes won his second Navy Cross (he had won his first in 1926 in the salvage of the S-51). The Pigeon won her first Presidential Unit Citation, which was the first awarded to a U. S. Navy ship in World War II. For her heroic work during the remainder of December 1941, she won her second, with three confirmed bombers shot down by her makeshift antiaircraft battery. The Pigeon was the only surface ship of the Navy to win two Presidential Unit Citations in World War II; she was the only ship to be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation in the Luzon area before the fall of the Philippines. With a complement of fewer than 70 men, her crew earned three Navy Crosses, eight Silver Stars, and numerous other personal decorations in three weeks of