A Sailor's Story:
Kamikaze Attacks on the U.S.S. Sandoval

It has been 55 years since that happened, but Eddie told it to me as if it just happened yesterday. That day has been imprinted in his memory forever. He sat there quietly for a few seconds, took a deep breath and went on with his story, “My battle station was up the steps and we all ran to our stations. When we had been standing there watching those planes flying around earlier, we didn’t know they were enemy planes. You couldn’t tell. There had been no gunfire or bombs going off or anything”.

Eddie Wauson, my husband, was just a young skinny 19-year-old kid, barely 120 lbs, who had joined the Navy in 1943, to fight for his country. As he told the story, he was reliving that whole scene again, “At my gun station, my job was to pass the ammunition. Suddenly another plane went past the island, turned around and came right back at us, and the officer on the 350 mm gun said, ‘We’re going to throw up one salvo, and if it misses, everyone be ready to jump’. We ran to the rail, the salvo went up either right in front of the Japanese plane, or maybe it hit it…it was too quick to tell, but that plane did a loop and then crashed into a merchant marine ship that wasn’t far from us. They had the hold open because they were unloading supplies. That plane went right into the hold! There weren’t as many men on that ship as ours, so not as many got killed”.

Eddie went on talking about that day, “Our ship was burning up there on the bridge. There was gasoline and fire everywhere. The plane had hit where all the people were that ran the ship. Most of them were my friends, and the captain was my boss. I was his Yeoman and that means I was his secretary. Most of the people that were in that area were killed, including the captain. And if they weren’t killed, they were burned real bad. You could smell the flesh for a long time. It was horrible. One of my friends that died was a really nice guy from Oklahoma and he had a family. He was older than me. If that plane would have hit at any other time, I would have been in that area and I’d probably be dead too, because that is where I usually worked”.

“It was really sad”, Eddie said as tears slid down his face and his lips trembled, “We had to bury them all at sea. They just put them in a canvas bag and wrapped an American Flag around them, and one by one, we slid them into the water. That was the hardest part of all. Seeing all my friends go like that. It really made me sad, to think about all their families back home, too”.

I asked what happened to the ship after that. He said, “Well, we sailed back to San Francisco, with our ship just like it was. It made it. So did the merchant marine ship. When they got back, they discovered there was a still a bomb in the hold of that ship, where the Japanese plane had hit! It made all the news then. It was amazing that it never went off”!

”You know”, he said, “After that a lot of men got a whole lot closer to God. There was a lot of praying going on. I was only 19 years old, but I did a lot of praying and thanking God I was still alive.”


© Lois Wauson April 20, 2013 columns

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