THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 7, 1994 TAG: 9412060409
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: MY TURN
SOURCE: BY ROBERT H. WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
A popular song written by Frank Loesser appearing early in World War II was ``Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.'' Its lyrics went like this:
``Down went the gunner, a bullet was his fate. Down went the gunner, and then the gunner's mate; Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look, and manned the gun himself as he laid aside The Book. Shouting:
``Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we'll all stay free.
``Yes, the sky pilot said it; you've got to give him credit, for a son of a gun of a gunner was he, shouting:
Praise the Lord, we're on a mighty mission! All aboard! We're not a going fishin', Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we'll all stay free.''
When a nation goes to war, as this country did in December 1941, myths spring up that remain in the footnotes of history as facts. An example is this song.
Scuttlebutt had it that the gunner in the song was a chaplain who manned a gun on one of the battleships attacked at Pearl Harbor. Life magazine, on the cover of its Nov. 2, 1942, issue published the picture of Navy Chaplain W.A. Maguire and attributed the saying to him. Maguire, who had been the Pacific Fleet chaplain on Dec. 7, 1941, denied making the statement.
What really happened was quite different. The phrase was coined by Chaplain Howell M. Forgy aboard the heavy cruiser New Orleans on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack.
On Dec. 7, the New Orleans was tied up at Pearl Harbor undergoing repairs. The padre was preparing a sermon.
Suddenly, the tranquility of the morning was broken by the sound of sporadic gunfire, followed by the deafening general quarters alarm and the wail of the bosun's pipe calling all hands to battle stations. The five-inch anti-aircraft guns from other ships in the harbor began a growing crescendo of explosions.
To find out what was happening, the chaplain ran up to the well deck, which provided a good view of the harbor. Five hundred yards off the starboard quarter along Battleship Row, the Arizona had exploded, sending a huge cloud of black smoke thousands of feet into the air. The West Virginia, hit by bombs and torpedoes, was sagging amidships. In front of the West Virginia, the Oklahoma was rolling over, her sailors jumping into the water. A bomber began a run toward the New Orleans. Her gunners, supported by anti-aircraft fire from nearby ships, hit the plane, which crashed near the Naval Hospital.
Forgy headed below, groping through the darkness, and made his way to his battle station in the sick bay to tell the medical officer what he had seen.
Outside sick bay, the voice of one of the gunner's mates boomed out to his men to get lines down a hatch into the magazines. A junior officer could be heard rounding up a working party around the ammunition hoist to begin moving the shells up to the guns by hand. When the attack began, the shore lines were cut to enable the ship to get under way. In the confusion of the attack, the cable providing shore power to the ship had also been cut, leaving the ammunition hoists powerless. To keep the guns firing, fresh ammunition had to be moved by hand.
Ropes were dropped into the magazine and tied around the shells weighing nearly a hundred pounds. The shells were pulled up by hand, untied, and then boosted onto the backs of sailors, who carried them up two flights of ladders to the waiting guns. The heat and fatigue began to grind the men down.
As a noncombatant, Forgy could not take part in the fighting, but he felt that if the men were encouraged, they could overcome their exhaustion. He walked along the line of sailors shouting, ``Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!''
Shortly after the attack, the song became famous. On the New Orleans, the chaplai Robert H. Warren is a retired Navy chaplain. by CNB