Navy "Boots" in WWII
An Oral History

At Sea, At War

by Everett Richardson
as told to Julie Olson North Bend, Oregon Irving, Texas

At Sea

We started the shakedown cruise upon return to New York. Everything and anything was tested to the limit during that time; from the Caribbean to Newfoundland we were testing, practicing our crafts and getting the ship ready for battle with the knowledge of what it was capable of performing - along with the crew, of course. Supposedly we all were ready for active duty.

My duties were primarily to be on the bridge sending and receiving messages as a signalman apprentice. My job at general quarters was to man the flag bags. The flag bag was a storage bin for 65 alphabet and numeral flags and pennants that were used whenever radio was not feasible and the admiral wanted to move the fleet one way or another. The flags were raised to the mast with signal halyards (oiled linen rope), and the whole fleet would turn at a given time in the same direction. When the flagship executed the maneuver by hauling down his flags, all the other ships would haul theirs down and we all would turn at the same time. There were also flags to help all the ships maintain the same speed, etc.

We were assigned, along with two other ships, to escort a new aircraft carrier named Bunker Hill to San Diego, Calif., and then to the battle of the Gilbert Islands. Of course we were active in the fighting at various times, and metal splinters would fly. Usually you weren't aware of them until much later at home – a sort of boil would come up and a splinter of metal would come out of it. Not really a wound of any consequence!

At Tarawa and Makin Atolls, the Kimberly got hung up on a buoy chain and damaged one of our propellers. After about two weeks at Makin, most of the fighting was over and we escorted nine LSTs (landing ship tanks) back to Pearl Harbor, which took 18 days at nine knots. Food was limited as our capacity was small, and we got pretty tired of rice and beans, Spam, etc.

Arriving at Pearl Harbor we found that, in order to trim the ship, we had to load surplus stores on the stern. There was a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables in the stores, and I'll never forget the dew drops on the green peppers we ate that day. Obviously we thought about food a good deal in those days!

After being pulled up on a marine rail and repaired, the Kimberly returned to the Marshall Islands for the next island hop. We fired enough shells bombarding the beach that we returned to San Francisco, where they replaced the five main guns. At that time I went to Reno and married my high school sweetheart during a 72-hour pass.

Back to the War

After the refitting in San Francisco we ran several trips in the Aleutian Islands, bombarding the northernmost Japanese Island of Paramushiro as part of a huge fleet of seven destroyers and two old WW1 four-stack cruisers, the Richmond and the Raleigh. This battle group struck at Japan's northernmost islands several times with shore bombardments, and the boys on those old cruisers were extremely accurate with their fire.

Quiet Times

We stood watches, four hours on and eight off, in safe waters. In other areas we stood four on and four off, and they "dogged" the watch from 4 to 6 and 6 to 8 every afternoon so that no one was on the same watch each day. Dogging the watch was done like this: if you had the 12 to 4 watch in the afternoon, you would only be off from 6 to 8, then you went back on watch from 8 to midnight.

You'd sleep from 12 to 4 a.m., be back on watch from 4 to 8, and so on — a real tiring routine to maintain for months at a time. To start with I stood gun watches on a five-inch gun and only went to the bridge at battle stations. It's very hard to explain the routine, but we had to learn it to survive.

In our free time we wrote letters home, washed our clothes, played cards, sang songs and tried to forget where we were. Some of the guys from the South had instruments and were pretty fair musicians. We learned the words to a lot of mountain music whether we wanted to or not.

A Lucky Assignment

After the trips in the Aleutians, I was transferred back to the states for "new construction" in the summer of 1944. I had visions of an upgrade in rate and a new "tin can," as we called our class of ship! I was sad to learn I was going on a CVE (carrier vessel escort, a small carrier) that was still under construction at Kaiser Shipyards in Astoria, Ore. - the USS Bougainville CVE 100. After about a month we went aboard, shook it down and headed for the South Central Pacific, where we ferried aircraft from Guam to the fleet off Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Things were happening so fast at that time that the large fleet carriers didn't even have time to give the planes a hundred-hour check and overhaul, so they threw them overboard and flew in new ones. We relayed pilots from the "big boys," and they flew the planes that replaced the ones dumped or shot down. Then we went back to Guam or Saipan for another load.

As the war progressed, more and more AA was added to each naval vessel .

We had many close calls but were not hit by any of the Japanese suicide planes. However, the Kimberly was damaged by one while on radar picket duty and lost 25 men, killed and missing. She was struck between guns 3 and 4, where I stood many, many watches! After all of the battles, typhoons, and other adversities, I cannot really explain how I felt when this happened. The real truth is that I was very lucky to be transferred to the second ship, and I have always felt a bit guilty that I wasn't killed on the Kimberly when my shipmates were. Even after all of these years and attendance at 13 out of 15 Kimberly ship reunions, it still brings tears to my eyes when I think of my dead friends.

Probably the worst thing I can remember was that, after so many actions, many of us were resigned to the fact that it was only a matter of time - we weren't going to survive the war. I was concerned that I would never see my son, conceived during the pass when my sweetheart and I were married... that and the feeling of guilt because I wasn't there when so many of my friends were killed. I don't know about the others, but when I got home, I couldn't stop thinking and dreaming about it; waking in the night and calling out to my friends will remain with me forever, I guess!

More Everett Richardson: WWII Oral History

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