
DATE: Saturday, November 15, 1997           TAG: 9711140040

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

                                            LENGTH:  100 lines

FOR THE LOVE OF WHISKEY: THE U.S.S. WISCONSIN

THEY CALLED her Whiskey.

That was the nickname crew members attached to the battleship Wisconsin. Apparently, duty aboard the mammoth dreadnaught was intoxicating.

That's the view, anyway, of more than 100 former crew members in Hampton Roads who phoned when the newspaper solicited calls from those who had served aboard the Iowa-class vessel.

The old and young salts who phoned all have a place in their hearts for the Wisconsin - which takes a lot of room, since this particular love object weighs 45,000 tons.

And they are excited that she may be berthed here, natch.

I just talked to a few folks who phoned. It was unusual to hear grown men speak so affectionately about something so big. As an Army vet, I have much smaller memories: a Quonset hut, a bar, a tent.

But deep and abiding affection for something three football fields long, packing nine 16-inch guns isn't easily comprehended. You had to be there when those guns roared or missiles flashed from her deck at night, lighting up the darkness as though splinters from the sun were shooting into the black sky overhead.

Marshall Pearson of Valhalla Drive in Portsmouth was one of the battleship's original crew members. He boarded the vessel when she was commissioned in Philadelphia in 1944.

On the wall of his home is a square of teak from the original deck of the famous ship.

``I was a seaman in the first division turret No. 1,'' he recalled. Pearson was a ``rammerman'' who operated a device that pushed shell and powder into a 16-inch gun, which fired shells weighing as much as small Volkswagens at targets more than 20 miles away.

He was on board for the invasions of Pacific Islands, when the Wisconsin provided covering fire for the landing troops. And when she under attack by Japanese suicide planes off Okinawa.

``I missed seeing a lot of what was going on because I was in the turret,'' he said.

His proudest moment during World War II was when the Wisconsin was anchored near the Missouri in Tokyo Bay while the Japanese surrendered aboard that sister ship.

Pearson still has many photographs he took while aboard the Whiskey. One shows seaplanes on the ship. After being launched from a catapult, Pearson said, ``the planes would go ahead of us and spot where the shells were hitting when we bombarded something.''

When the seaplanes returned, the vessel would increase her speed and do a hard turn to smooth the water for landing. The seaplanes then would be hoisted onto the ship by a crane.

Everything about the Wisconsin was big, Pearson said. Each link of the anchor chains weighed 120 pounds. The two anchors weighed 15 tons each.

Sue Crommelin of Virginia Beach phoned to say that the Wisconsin had been the flagship of her father, then Rear Adm. Henry Crommelin. He was on board the vessel when she collided with the escort destroyer Eaton in fog off the Virginia Capes in 1955. At the time, her father, now deceased, said that only ``an act of God'' had prevented loss of life.

And Dr. Eugene Kanter, then a young Navy officer, joined the Whiskey crew when she was getting a new bow after that collision.

``They cut the bow off the Kentucky and put it on the Wisconsin,'' Kanter said. ``And in doing that made it a foot longer than any other battleship in the world.''

He spoke artfully of the vessel, saying:

``There's nothing as beautiful in a foreign harbor as a battleship. An aircraft carrier seems to have been carved by a guillotine. But a battleship like the Wisconsin has an awesome beauty with its massive weight of steel. Its imposing superstructure is visually interesting for a vessel with such power of destruction and death.''

Kanter said he watched as the Wisconsin was about to come into view when the heavyweight was towed to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth about a year ago. He was standing beside other men who had served aboard her.

``One of the salts turned to us and said, `If you've never seen a grown man cry, just wait a minute,' '' he recalled.

And, down at Kill Devil Hills, N.C., Thomas Marshall, a retired warrant officer, said he had been the last ship's boatswain on the Wisconsin. He was among the last to leave her when she was decommissioned in September 1991, after the Persian Gulf deployment.

On Jan. 19, 1991, the Wisconsin led the Navy's surface attack on Iraq with the first-ever use of cruise missiles in battle.

Marshall watched from the deck as that first missile was fired.

``When the missile flared out of the silo, everybody cheered,'' he recalled. ``It just lit up everything around us like a comet taking off.''

The thought that the Wisconsin might be berthed on the Norfolk waterfront has lit up the hopes of just about everyone who answered our request for calls. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

U.S.S. Wisconsin

Photo courtesy Marshall Pearson

Raymond Ferris, left, and Marshall Pearson were shipboard buddies

aboard the Wisconsin

The Milwaukee Journal photo

Seaplanes on the Wisconsin during World War II...

Photo

BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot

Marshall Pearson of Portsmouth was a sailor aboard the battleship

Wisconsin during World War II.