Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9505300106
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Carroll Downing's voice took on an edge like the steel of a warship's prow. He looked piercingly into his listener's eyes as if trying to rivet each word to the back of the man's brain.
"The real heroes in war," Downing said, "are the men who died."
Downing, a retired Roanoke insurance salesman who lives at Smith Mountain Lake, knows something about men dying in war.
During World War II, he had three aircraft carriers blown out from under him. Two of them were abandoned; the other burned for many hours, eventually limping back to the United States.
A lot of men died.
Downing's last ship was the USS Bunker Hill, which was struck by two kamikaze planes off the coast of Okinawa 50 years ago this month. The suicide attack cost the lives of 392 of the ship's company. Downing remembered it took two full days to bury them all at sea.
Fred Deans of Roanoke was with Downing on the Bunker Hill, though the men weren't acquainted at the time. Deans supervised a crew that tended a boiler in the deepest reaches of the ship's belly. He, too, knows the horrible ways men can die in war.
Downing and Deans are just two of thousands of living memorials to the nation's war dead.
Downing grew up in the small town of Fort Atkinson, Wis. After a year and a half of college, the 20-year-old decided to give pilot training with the Army Air Corps a try, but he washed out and returned to school. A letter from his draft board sent him to a Navy recruiter. After training, he was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in the months before the start of World War II.
He was with the Yorktown during the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway, when she was ordered abandoned after being heavily damaged by Japanese bombs and torpedoes. The Yorktown sailors were plucked from the water by the destroyer USS Benham.
It was the first of two times Downing was rescued from the sea by a destroyer crew. Both times, the rescuers promptly opened their own locker doors to give survivors anything they needed. "Some of the nicest things happened during wartime," he recalled.
The other rescue came during the battle for Guadalcanal, when Downing was the rear gunner on a plane from the USS Hornet. As they flew alone back to the carrier after a mission, his pilot told him the Hornet had been sunk and they had nowhere to go. They landed in the sea near a U.S. ship.
After serving on a series of eight "jeep" carriers that supplied larger carriers with planes, followed by a stint at a bombing range in the Mojave Desert, Downing - valuable because of his carrier experience - agreed in the fall of 1944 to supervise an aircraft maintenance group on the Bunker Hill. The Essex-class carrier, the largest in the Navy, took part in the battle for Iwo Jima, attacks on Honshu island and lesser engagements.
On May 11, 1945, three days after the end of the war in Europe, the Bunker Hill was off Okinawa, south of Japan. U.S. commanders wanted to use Okinawa as a base for an invasion of Japan. A vicious land battle had been raging on the island for more than a month.
The sky was full of puffy white clouds. The sailors called it a kamikaze sky, because the suicide planes would use the the clouds to hide in as they approached their targets.
About 10 that morning, Downing was standing near a gun mount just aft of the ship's "island," or bridge area. The carrier had just recovered a group of aircraft from a strike on Okinawa. The rear portion of the 900-foot flight deck was covered with the 60 planes that had been refueled and reloaded with ammunition.
The ship's crew, which had been under battle conditions for two months, had been released from its highest level of readiness. "We were just loafing along," Downing recalled. "I looked up and saw an airplane coming and knew it wasn't one of ours."
Downing hollered at the gun crew and ran to the middle of the ship. The plane hit the deck 15 feet from where he had been standing. The bomb it dropped went through the deck and exploded over the water beside the ship.
Ten seconds later, Downing looked up and saw another Japanese plane coming from the opposite direction. Again he ran forward, and again the plane hit only a few feet from where he had been standing. This time the bomb went off below decks, and a fire started among the parked planes on the flight deck. The pilots were still in them.
Fred Deans, then 24, had just finished his watch in the No.4 boiler room and taken a shower when the planes hit the ship. He rushed to his battle station in the boiler room, seven decks below the flight deck at the bottom of the ship.
When he got there, all communications and the lights were out. The battle lights were working, but they were good only for a few hours. The watertight doors were "dogged." Deans and his crew couldn't leave if they wanted to.
In any case, they were needed where they were if the ship was to survive. It was their job to keep up steam, to keep the ship moving. "It never was dead in the water; we kept it going," Deans said.
Deans had grown up in Roanoke and had finished high school in Dublin, where he worked on his uncle's dairy farm. He joined the Navy and was with the Bunker Hill from the day she was commissioned.
The problem for Deans and his men was that all the deck-top air ducts for the boiler rooms were aft, where a hellacious fire was turning the parked warplanes into melted metal and thick black smoke. But the air was needed, because the boilers turned out a tremendous amount of heat, with steam temperatures rising to 850 degrees.
"It was a matter of whether you wanted to die from heat or carbon monoxide," Deans said.
It was smoky and dark, and Deans couldn't see the other men in the big room. All he could do was call for them.
Deans and the others had gas masks. When the cannister on Deans' mask ran out, he took a mask from a dead man. Some of the sailors had forgotten to remove the piece of tape that allowed the masks to work.
"I know there were a couple of times I felt, to heck with it," Deans said. "I felt so sleepy."
Finally, Deans and the others got word that the fires were under control and it was OK for them to come up for air. They had been in the boiler room for eight hours.
When they climbed toward the upper decks, three feet of water covered one hatch. They couldn't get out. Several hours later, enough water was pumped out to open the hatch. A body floating in six inches of water knocked Deans' feet from under him.
It was June 29 before the Bunker Hill steamed into Puget Sound for repairs at the Bremerton, Wash., Navy Yard. Of the 21 men who had worked under Carroll Downing's supervision, 13 had been killed. Of the 18 who manned the boiler room with Deans during the ship's crucial hours, only seven crawled out alive.
Downing stayed in the Navy and was an aviation chief when he retired in 1960. He then finished his degree at Roanoke College and worked as a salesman for John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co. in Roanoke for 30 years before his retirement.
Deans was given a 30-day leave after the ship reached Washington. When he reported back to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, he was discharged from the Navy. He spent his working life after that selling Chevrolets and is now retired and living in Southwest Roanoke County.
"I didn't have any idea whether I was going to make it or not when we were hit," Deans said. "I just didn't give up."
by CNB