UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT WILMINGTON

INTERVIEWER:   How did you and when did you learn of Pearl Harbor?

CALHOUN:   Well of course Pearl Harbor was on a Sunday.  We were at anchor in Bermuda at Hamilton.  We received a message from Pearl Harbor, air raid Pearl Harbor.  This is no drill.  And then we began to get elaborating messages in which more details followed.  We still had the commodore aboard.  He went into orbit demanding messages that we had no business breaking and in many cases didn't have the key to the code to break it (laughter).  He didn't think there was any reason why he should not be getting the same messages that the fleet commanders got.  We accommodated him with as many as we could translate.

INTERVIEWER:   These were your friends back there.  I mean you must have known many of those people that were under attack.

CALHOUN:   I did, I did.  Not long after that, I went to gunnery school aboard the USS Wyoming, an old battleship that had been used for training missions for years.  I made three cruises on it, midshipman crews.  They converted it to a training ship after the war had started.  One of my fellow students was Bill Ingram, a classmate, who was a star halfback at Navy and son of Adolph Ingram who at that time as I remember was a four star admiral and who was given some south Atlantic command.

Anyhow Bill had been aboard the Oklahoma.  And that’s when we received our first eyewitness account of what it had been like at Pearl Harbor.

INTERVIEWER:   He survived.

CALHOUN:   He survived and told us about it and a very astute observer who made comments.  He briefed the senior officers of the Wyoming and of the gunnery school which were attending and said in essence, “I know that you want to do your best, but this is a young man’s war and you had better let the young men take it because you’re not going to be up to it”.

INTERVIEWER:   Interesting.  What do you think he was driving at?

CALHOUN:   I think he had probably observed habits in terms of readiness and some of the habits were more dependent on their attitude toward standing in the fleet competition than in the actual readiness and that this attitude had left, or had at least had something to do with our being caught flat-footed at Pearl Harbor.  I didn't mean to digress that much.

INTERVIEWER:   No, that’s fine, that’s very interesting.  So now the war has been declared.

CALHOUN:   The war has been declared.  We’re in Bermuda and we’re thrashing around trying to find out what’s going on and keep the commodore informed and the next thing we knew we were ordered to get underway and form up with a task force that was dispatched to Martinique because there were French warships on Martinique. 

They were afraid they were going to make a dash for it and turn themselves over to the Germans.  So we went down to Martinique and we blockaded these ships for about a week while negotiations took place.

INTERVIEWER:   And what were the results of the negotiations?

CALHOUN:   The results were that the French agreed that they would demilitarize the ships and they did.

INTERVIEWER:   And how many were you talking about?

CALHOUN:   There were two cruisers and there may have been an aircraft carrier, but I don’t think so.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s a lot of fire power to take out of the war then.

CALHOUN:   So Martinique is over and we return to the United States.  We went into Charleston on Christmas eve, Godsend.  I got to see my wife, was with her on Christmas and we left on the 27th.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my goodness.  She was able to come down to Charleston?

CALHOUN:   She was living in Charleston.

INTERVIEWER:   Along with a lot of wives I guess.

CALHOUN:   All the wives of the Sterret were there in Charleston.

INTERVIEWER:   Now what was the name of your group so we can get that down?  In other words, you were in a unit.  What was your unit number, were you the 5th unit of the 8th Army, that kind of thing.

CALHOUN:   Well we were of course units of the Atlantic fleet and then we were broken up into squadrons and divisions.

INTERVIEWER:   There were two fleets, that’s how they would address it?  You were either in the Atlantic fleet or the Pacific fleet?

CALHOUN:   Yes and with the advent of the war what had been operational entities like divisions and squadrons were more or less done away with.  They retained them for administrative purposes.  So you still considered yourself a member of a division, but the division was, for the most part, dispersed into various task groups which were comprised of all varieties of ships depending on what task the group has been assigned. 

So most of our task group assignments were carrier task groups.  We therefore made a couple of trips to the UK where we were met 300 miles or so west of England by the British where we had two battleships with us, the Washington and the North Carolina and the Wasp, the carrier, probably four or five cruisers and 15 destroyers or so.

INTERVIEWER:   And you didn't run into U-boats on that particular trip then?

CALHOUN:   None.  We never were sure whether that was because they simply had been diverted to other theaters where they were being afforded the opportunity to sink more shipping.  I’m sure that any U-boat skipper would have given his right arm to trap one of those big ones because we were carrying troops.

INTERVIEWER:   Now you’re still the communications officer at this point in your career?  You said you’d gone to the gunnery school.

CALHOUN:   Until we went to Capa Flow in ’42.

INTERVIEWER:   Tell us were Capa Flow is.

CALHOUN:   It’s in the Orkney Islands above Scotland in the North Sea more or less.

INTERVIEWER:   Major naval base.

CALHOUN:   It was at that time the home base of the British home fleet.  We operated as a unit of the home fleet.  We were actually assigned ten British sailors to be our signal because they were familiar of course with all the British signal system.

INTERVIEWER:   So you were a joint operation.  The group was a mixture of American and British ships.

CALHOUN:   And Canadian. 

INTERVIEWER:   So what became your job at that point?

CALHOUN:   I then became the gunnery officer because the former gunnery officer was dispatched to take over as the executive officer of another destroyer, a new destroyer.

INTERVIEWER:   Did your captain and exec stay the same through this time period?

CALHOUN:   No, we had lost the first captain before we moved from Pearl Harbor back into the Atlantic.

INTERVIEWER:   And yet did you still have a sense that your camaraderie is fine or did you start to see…

CALHOUN:   We did have the complication of the division commander and that was a problem because while it didn't bother people of my level, of course I didn't want to be chastised, but he didn't worry me.  He did worry the skipper because he was right on top of him all the time.  He was on the bridge most of the time.

INTERVIEWER:   And he was a high ranking officer.

CALHOUN:   And he was much senior to my skipper and he was very critical.  He was critical of everyone.  It didn't matter who it was (laughter).

INTERVIEWER:   (Laughter) He was an equal opportunity criticizer (laughter).

CALHOUN:   He didn't discriminate (laughter).  And that was interesting because I observed a complete change in attitude on the part of our commanding officer when we left the Atlantic and left the division commander.  Overnight he was different person.  In the Atlantic, he had been a martinet, lived by the book. 

We had a lot of fascinating experiences with the British home fleet.  They were great ship handlers and I was envious of the way they handled their destroyers.  Destroyers are supposed to be handled with speed, dash, verve.  Our skippers, who were remember now a generation or so earlier, they had grown up during a period when the United States Congress was very stingy in its allocation of funds to the Navy and it had become politically damaging for any officer to damage his ship because it cost money to fix it.

So there was no way to have a mishap with a destroyer and not have it be your fault.  They lived with this.  The result of which was that they handled their ships as though they were, and they were, afraid of bumping into something.  So they wouldn’t go close when they were supposed to.  I observed the British skippers completely different.  They were free spirits.  I attributed that to the fact that they gave them the latitude to handle their ships the way they should be handled.

An example of that was during our first at sea period with units of the British home fleet, we returned to Capa Flow.  We’d been out for about a week and there was of course an anti-submarine net guarding the harbor.  Incidentally a U-boat had penetrated that net a year or so earlier and the British warship that was sunk by that submarine was still on the bottom with its mast visible above water, the Ark Royal I think was the name of it. 

Anyhow they opened the net to let us come in and at that point the British flagship hoisted the signal and I’m the officer of the deck at this point and I’m on the bridge and in inquired of the British sailor what does the hoist mean.  He said, “It means scatter, sir”.  I said “What”.  He said, “Scatter.  You know, sir, scatter”.  I said “Well what the hell are we supposed to do”.  He said, “You’re supposed to scatter.  You’re supposed to head for the hole”. 

I looked around.  There were 20 destroyers going full flat out for this hole.  It was only wide enough for two ships.  (Laughter) I looked at the captain.  I thought he was going to jump overboard.  We didn't try to win that bet (lots of laughter).  Anyway a few days later, we had the opportunity to go aboard a British destroyer for a party.  The party itself is another story.  It would take an hour to tell about it. 

But in the course of that evening with them, I got to talking to the skipper of one of these ships.  I told him I was real interested to know what happens in the Royal Navy after having executed the signal “Scatter” two of these destroyers get to the hole at the same time and there’s a collision.  He said that nothing happens, it’s an operational matter.  “We just repair it and go on our way”.  I asked him if he knew what would happen in the United States Navy.  Both skippers would be court-martialed.  “Oh no”, he said, “No, you have to do it that way”.  And he’s right.  You did have to do it that way.

INTERVIEWER:   With style.

CALHOUN:   And as the time went on, I could see that we were beginning to take that same attitude.  By the time I got to be a skipper, that was the attitude. 

INTERVIEWER:   So you’re doing duty in the north Atlantic.  Are you looking for submarines?  Are you doing escort?  What is your main…

CALHOUN:   No, I’d say our main thrust at that point was to ready ourselves for surface action because of course the reason they kept that home fleet up there was in order to intercept any sortie by the British battleships.

INTERVIEWER:   Which were stationed in France?  There were some in Norway, weren’t there?

CALHOUN:   Well there were some up in Norway.  I should mention the fact that we had the flag lieutenant from the Warspite on the Sterret while we were on Honolulu, Pearl Harbor, as an observer.  He was lieutenant commander.

INTERVIEWER:   From the British HMS Warspite?

CALHOUN:   Yes, Warspite, which was in Norway and was bombed in Norway and took a hit down their stack.  This officer’s name was Lieutenant Commander Carnes, a laid back individual.  One day at the ward room table I said, “Commander, I understand you were on the Warspite”. 

He said he was.  I said, “Were you aboard when she was bombed in Norway”.  He said, “Yes I was”.  I said, “Well what happened.  I understand you took a 500 pound bomb down the stack.  That must have been terrible”.  He said, “Well (in British accent), it was rather nasty”.  (Laughter).  Anyhow he later became a four star admiral in the Royal Navy and had duty in Buckingham Palace as the head of protocol.  Often missed him.  He and Watso, our exec, hit it off beautifully. 

We always had great respect for Watso because he was able to hold his liquor.  I never saw Watso drunk.  But Lieutenant Commander Carnes, took him ashore one night and had to help him back aboard.  We were really very much in awe of Lieutenant Commander Carnes (laughter).  After that, he was something.

INTERVIEWER:   So you’re in the north Atlantic.  How long was that duty?

CALHOUN:   We stayed there until April of ’42 at which time we made a dash from Capa Flow down to the Mediterranean and the Wasp, which we were escorting, carried a deck load of Spitfire aircraft to deliver to Malta so we went into the Mediterranean.  It was a British carrier with us, the HMS Eagle.

INTERVIEWER:   Now was this just prior to the African campaign or during the campaign?

CALHOUN:   Well April of ’42, I’m not sure of the advent of the African campaign.

INTERVIEWER:   Not yet, it was later than that.

CALHOUN:   But anyway, but Malta was being pummeled every day, daily, by German bombers.  In fact, did you know that the whole island of Malta, the entire population of Malta, was awarded the Victoria Cross as a result of the way they behaved.  It went on for months and months.  So they had lost a number of Spitfires and needed to have the fighter complement reinforced and we went down there with the Wasp.  The Wasp carried, as I remember, about 60 Spitfires.

INTERVIEWER:   So they were just delivering them?  They were going to leave them there?

CALHOUN:   We took them within flying distance which was about 300 miles west of Malta and we had fully expected to be greeted with German aircraft, but apparently the Germans had not gotten wind of our presence and they did not bother us.  Those fighters incidentally arrived at Malta during an air attack and shot down several German bombers.  I had great respect and admiration for the Spitfire pilots who had never flown from an aircraft carrier before and weren’t sure at all that they would get off the carrier safely and then didn't have tail hooks so had they had to be recovered, they would have to go into the barrier.  That happened to one of the aircraft that were launched that day.  He returned and he landed safely.

I had great admiration for them.  There they were a couple of thousand miles away from home flying these land fighters off of a carrier, a foreign carrier, one they’d never seen before and arriving over Malta in the midst of an air raid having to fight their way in and then landing to fuel because they were almost out of fuel when they got there. 

Okay we came back from there, went up to the Orkney Islands again to Capa Flow.  We were then relieved except for our commodore who volunteered to become the squadron commander of a squadron that was going to remain there.  He volunteered their services to go into the Murmansk run.  My roommate was the gunnery officer on his flagship.

INTERVIEWER:   That’s the one up in Russia?

CALHOUN:   Around the north Cape.  And they were having terrible experiences on that run.  So when I saw my roommate, we went alongside of his ship in order to transfer to him all of our 5-inch ammunition because we were leaving.  We would go back to the States where we would replenish.  They were anticipating lots of air action so we had to transfer all this.  

First thing I said was “Hey Ozzie, looks as though you’re going to become a hero” on the Mer-Man’s Run”.  He said, “Yeah, a dead hero”.  (Laughter).  Then I told him that we were transferring all of our projectiles and all of our powder to him.  Incidentally in the last inventory, we had three projectiles for which we had no powder and there was a day when that would have been a serious problem in the US Navy.  At this point, nobody paid any attention.  I don’t know what had happened to the three cans of powder.  He said, “Don’t worry about it.  If it gets that bad, we’ll throw those last three at them”.  (laughter)

INTERVIEWER:   Did he survive that run?

CALHOUN:   Oh yeah, he ended up being a captain, had command of a cruiser, the Canberra I think it was and retired and went to work in Chicago as Mayor Daley’s port director.  He  hired him because they were losing millions of dollars worth of cargo at the port which was being pilfered and called him and told him he wanted him to do this job. 

He said that it wouldn’t be the safest job in the world.  Somebody may decide that he was in the way.  He took the job and the first year he was there, this pilfering went down by something like 80% less than they had the year before.  I visited up there shortly after he’d gone there and I took a cab from O’Hare to the hotel where we were having a conference. 

I said to the cab driver, “I have a friend up here in Chicago.  Used to be in the Navy with him”.  He wanted to know who that was.  I said, “His name is Vern Saballi”.  He said “Captain Saballi, hell, he’s doing a great job.  He’s the new port director you know” (laughter).  Even the cab driver knew about it (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   So you head back to the United States.  That must have been great.

CALHOUN:   Yeah, we came into New York.  There’s still a division commander aboard named Warlick.  As we came into New York harbor, great scene you know, to come back to New York, Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, it was in the morning.  We were patrolling station which means that we were exceeding the formation speed by a knot or two and sort of zigzagging which kept us in the same relative position, but covered a wider front for submarines.

The commodore and the captain were on the bridge and I was the officer of the day.  I became aware of the fact that the commodore was unhappy about something.  I didn't know what.  The skipper with whom I had a really good relationship looked over at me and said something to the commodore.  He came over to me looking real mad. 

He said, “Mr. Officer of the Deck”, he normally said Cal, “Mr. Officer of the Deck, patrol station”.  I said, “Sir, I am patrolling station”.  He said, “God damn it, I said patrol station” which said for me for God’s sake do something so he’ll think that you’re doing something (laughter).  I said, “Oh, aye aye sir”.  So we began patrolling and that satisfied the commodore.  Of course, it absolutely squelched our sonar gear cause above that given speed of about 16 knots, it got so noisy that you couldn't hear an echo. 

But there again when he left the ship and we went through the canal, the captain, who incidentally his name was Coward and of all the names, that was not the name for this guy.  He became an absolutely wonderful skipper.  He was very solicitous of the welfare of the crew and the officers. He was always thinking about us and this manifested itself in many ways.

I remember one time before we went into the Pacific he had sent for me when I was at that gunnery school on the Wyoming, I was out in the Chesapeake Bay.  My wife was pregnant and she was having difficulty with the pregnancy.  They had told me that in the event that she hemorrhaged, they would have to hospitalize her and they would try to get me in if that happened.  Well one day after our gunnery practice, the Wyoming came in and anchored in Chesapeake Bay and out came an amphibious plane, twin engine patrol plane.

It landed on the water.  Guy called up and wanted to know of Lieutenant Calhoun was aboard.  Word came down to me because I was in the ward room.  So I ran up and he asked if I was Lieutenant Calhoun.  I said I was.  He said, “You’re supposed to get in this plane and go back into Norfolk with us”.  Of course I immediately thought something was wrong with my wife.  I went to the exec and told him where I was going.  He said, “Shove off, get off and do what you have to do”.

So I ran out and got down the Jacob’s ladder, got on this aircraft and took off.  Came back into the Norfolk air station and I went over to the duty officer and said, “I’m Lieutenant Calhoun.  I was brought back by that patrol plane.  What’s the story”.  He said, “Well you’re supposed to call this number”.  So I looked at the number and called the number and it was my wife.  She was at some hotel there. 

The captain had called her.  The Sterret had come in the night before.  Of course I didn't know that because we were out in the Chesapeake somewhere.  He had asked her whether I was back in town from the gunnery school and she told him no.  He said he was going to get me back there and sent the plane out for me.

INTERVIEWER:   Isn’t that great.

CALHOUN:   So I had another two days with her that I wouldn’t have had otherwise and then we left again, this time to go to the Pacific for the Guadalcanal.

INTERVIEWER:   So that’s the next stage.  Okay, let’s keep going.

CALHOUN:   So we went to Charleston from New York with the Sterret.  Now we’re back having just gotten back to New York from Capa Flow.  Came down to Charleston and they threw radar aboard.  We had never seen radar before, didn't know anything about it, not how to operate it, nothing.  We went through the canal and on the way, we learned how to use the radar. 

We went up to San Diego.  There we came in company with, it seems to me there were probably three or four president line liners and we were aware that they were embarking Marines.  We didn't go ashore.  We anchored and waited.  I guess we waited about a day and a half while they continued to embark.  It was the first Marine division, picked up the whole division, artillery and everything.  We took off and the Wasp again was with us.  I don’t remember the composition of the rest of the force, several cruisers.

INTERVIEWER:   A big force.

CALHOUN:   A big force.  We set sail and we didn't stop until we got to Tonga-taboo.  There we met additional large forces.  A day or two after that we were at sea on our way to a gunfire rehearsal.  We were standing on deck an afternoon after we had left Tonga-taboo and we were on our way to this gunfire exercise and we joined up with another task force.  This one had battleships with it.

Our chief torpedo man who was a World War I veteran, his name was Jackson, was standing at the rail at the lifeline looking.  So I walked over, stood next to him, leaned on the lifeline and I said, “What do you think of that, Jackson.  Isn’t that beautiful”.  He said, “Yeah”.  I said, “Have you ever seen to much naval power in one ocean at one time?”  He said, “No sir, I haven’t and I’ll tell you that I really hope we run into a couple of Japs on a raft”.  (Laughter)

INTERVIEWER:   He didn't want to go into the fight that much, huh?  So you had thousands and thousands of ships then that were just converging.

CALHOUN:   Yeah, a big force.  Of course we went back in for a critique of the gunfire exercise.  I met another classmate, the same one who was in that gunnery school with me, Bill Ingram.  He was now the gunnery officer of a cruiser.  That was the Tuscaloosa.  In fact, Bill Ingram was a character and he had one proclivity which was he had a tremendous voice.  You could hear him all over.  He was also quite profane.  I suppose he learned this from his admiral father.

Anyway when I went over to the Tuscaloosa for this critique, he was up on the forecastle (pronounced fok’sel) and saw the boat approaching and recognized me in the boat.  He called to me and you could hear him all over, “Calhoun, you old son of a bitch, pull on up here.”  (Laughter)  So we had a small reunion and listened to the critique of the exercise and went back to our ship.  Then we got underway and went to Guadalcanal.

INTERVIEWER:   And what was your role at Guadalcanal?

CALHOUN:   We escorted the Wasp while she conducted flight operations providing close air support to the Marines as they landed. 

INTERVIEWER:   Were the Japanese not present at all?

CALHOUN:   Oh yeah. 

INTERVIEWER:   So were you shooting at the same time?

CALHOUN:   No, we were not attacked at all during that first couple of days.  There was a flight of 20 some bombers that came down looking for us.  Fortunately there was a rainsquall and the OTC whose name was Reeves, ran into a rain squall and they never found us.  So we came through that all right. 

We were on the radio frequency with the pilots of the Wasp so we could hear all that was going on in the objective area and they had encountered air resistance.  There were Japanese planes there and they talked about what they were doing, who they were fighting and who was going after what, whether they were going to get this one over here and so on.  They were exulting in their comments about the damage they were doing with their bomb divers.  So we had the impression that they were going ashore with little if any resistance on the ground, but some resistance in the air.  That’s the way it did happen.

INTERVIEWER:   But I think the commander, the Japanese commander withdrew further into the hills.

CALHOUN:   He got away from the beaches and then they had their hands full with him.

INTERVIEWER:   How long were you at that station, through the whole conflict?

CALHOUN:   We stayed with the Wasp for about two or three weeks I think operating close to Guadalcanal, south of the island.  In fact, we were, our main job then was to alternate between giving any submarine warfare protection and plane guarding when they were flying off their planes.  Occasionally these people would go into the water and we would have to pick them up.  We did that many times.

INTERVIEWER:   You were still the gunnery officer at this point?

CALHOUN:   Gunnery officer.  About three weeks after the landings, we were talking on the Sterret about the fact that we were maintaining a pattern of operation that would enable any up and coming sub skipper to determine that we were operating in a geographical area without varying our location every day.  I remember saying that all he had to do was come there at 4:00 in the afternoon, wait until tomorrow afternoon and we’ll back here.

Well we were detached to go to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides to pick up resupply convoys, troops and ammunition and whatnot.  While we were gone, two days or so after we left, the Wasp was sunk by a submarine.  Of course we all felt if we had been there, it wouldn’t have happened. 

INTERVIEWER:   But there were destroyers there?  It wasn’t unprotected.

CALHOUN:   Oh yes, it was a new squadron and we complained that they weren’t going to know how the Wasp operated and they therefore would be caught with their pants down when she changed course to conduct flight operations and they wouldn’t get in position in time, so on and so on.  Probably just pure BS. 

Anyhow we continued to do that resupply business through September and October and that got very hairy in that time because the situation ashore became critical.  The whole strategic situation around Guadalcanal was such that the Japs had practically free access at night to come in, any night, bombard the airfield and land fresh troops.

INTERVIEWER:   I know they kept coming from behind.

CALHOUN:   They were always accompanied by two battleships, probably two cruisers, a dozen or so destroyers and then they would be followed by 10 or 20 destroyers with troops aboard.  The first gang would come in and do the bombarding and while they were doing that, the other troop convoy would come in and land. 

Well during those months, we encountered several shore bombardment missions which we did a couple of times with the San Francisco, a couple of times alone.  One night we undertook gunfire missions for the Marines.  They were calling for fire for these specific positions.  We could see them by their gun flashes.  We simply walked our fire back and forth about 100 yards inland and 100 yards back out.  We fired 400 5-inch shells over there that night.

The next morning, the Marines went down to that artillery position.  There were 200 dead Japanese there.  Most of them were casualties of our gunfire.  That really impressed us.  We fired at air attacks when they came into bomb Henderson Field, but in most of those cases, they were too high for us, 25,000 feet or so.  There were a couple of attacks by float planes and we shot one of those down, the Sterret did.  That was our first air kill.  It was a fluke.  We never should have hit him at that range, but we did. 

Anyhow that took us through a couple of nasty surface battles.  Of course on the 9th of August, there was a terrible action where the Japanese came in and caught us flatfooted.  Some four cruisers, Quincy, Vincennes, Astoria and the Australia cruiser Canberra, all sunk in one night.  Inexcusable.  Then there were a couple of others that were more inconclusive, but neither of them were very positive from our standpoint.  We lost ships in each.

By the 12th of November, we found ourselves in there at a time when General Vandergrift had appealed to Halsey who had relieved Gormley in October telling him I can hang on here if I get the kind of naval support that we have not gotten up to now.  Halsey committed himself to do it, we’ll do it, we’ll hang on, we’ll manage to get you the support you need.  That’s where we were on the 12th of November when we got wind that first of all there was Jap air raid on the way. 

That arrived at about mid afternoon about 2:00 or 3:00.  Transports had all gotten underway from the beach because we had advance warning of this.  We formed up our protective screen around us with cruisers in closer and we were out on the periphery.  We were actually on the starboard flank of this convoy, this formation.  That is where the Japanese torpedo plane came from. 

They went up and circled around Florida Island and came in from the east.  We were headed north and the Sterret was the first ship they came to.  Twenty-one of them, Betty’s, twin engine bombers.  We shot down four of them and they all went over our heads, all 21 of them. 

Joe Foss, the Marine ace and then a major, flew into our antiaircraft fire when we were firing at one of those planes.  I don’t know how he ever kept from being shot down himself and it looked to us that the very weight of the stuff that was going into this plane must knock it down because he was just loading it with bullets. You could see the tracers and we were hitting it.  It went over our heads and landed about 50 yards on our port beam.  We shot down another one and then we had an assist with two others where there were other people shooting at them.

All 21 planes launched their torpedoes and not a single one of them hit.  Some were dropped from too high up in altitude.  They were all about 100 feet high when they came in, too high.  One plane hit the San Francisco, their gunfire control station and killed 30 sailors and one of the officers.  I forget what his job was, commander I think. 

INTERVIEWER:   So your gunnery training finally paid off there with four planes.

CALHOUN:   Yeah!

INTERVIEWER:   You felt good about what your crew did?

CALHOUN:   Oh, we felt wonderful.  But that night, we were warned that the Tokyo Express as they called it was on its way down again.  Well of course we didn't have anything like battleships.  So they formed us up and we took the convoy, supply ships and transports out to the east of the island and left them there to go back to Espiritu Santo. 

We came back in looking for this Tokyo Express, 13 ships, 8 destroyers, 5 cruisers, two of them were heavy, San Francisco and the Portland.  One of them was light, that was the Helena.  Two of them were antiaircraft cruisers which were really nothing but overgrown destroyers, 5-inch guns, the Atlanta and the Juneau.  The destroyers were the Cushing, Laffey, Obannon in that order.  The Munssen, Aaron Ward and Fletcher bringing up the rear. 

We were in single column probably just after midnight going back in passing the rest of where Henderson Field was and maybe a half hour past that, the Helena picked up the first contact by radar, contact at 27,000 yards.  Then he reported that there were two columns.  Of course we didn't have the surface search radar, nor did the flagship.  The flagship was the San Francisco where the Rear Admiral Dan Callaghan had command, another rear admiral on the Atlanta.

When these things began to come into view, we were able to pick up with our fire control radar which we had gotten after we left New York and still didn't know how to operate very well, but Shelton, a young fire controlman, had worked on that thing every day.  He lived up there and he was good.  Anyway he got the contact and he could tell from his fire control radar, which didn't show a picture, but gave tips that there were two large ships.

He commented, “Two large ships in formation, look like battleships”.  When he said that, I was convinced they were probably battleships.  In the meantime, we’re continuing to head directly at them.  Their course and speed was 107 and 23 knots.  They were heading toward us.  We were headed north toward them at 21 knots.  Very rapid closing of the range.  Pretty soon I could see one of the battleships 3000 yards away.  That’s only a mile and a half.  At sea, that’s like a spud’s throw away.

INTERVIEWER:   Really! Now were your guns able to go that far or not?

CALHOUN:   Oh our guns fired 16,000 yards, 8 miles.

INTERVIEWER:   So you were already firing or not firing?

CALHOUN:   We were not firing.  We had not been given the order to fire from the officer in tactical command.  We were going right down the middle between two columns of Jap ships.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh my God, was this a suicide mission?

CALHOUN:   And the OTC had not given us any signal.  He had no plan that he put out, no advance warning about what he was going to do.  Not until we were actually 2,000 yards away from this battleship did he indicate odd number of ships fire to starboard.  Well we were in the meantime tracking that battleship on our port and bow, but we were an even-number ship.  So we couldn't fire cause he told us fire to starboard.

Even number ships fire to port, commence firing.  So we had to stop tracking that guy, turn around and here now it’s pitch dark.  We can’t see a thing.  Shelton picked up a target.  Well I didn't know what it was, neither did he.  I just said, “Commence fire” cause I knew whatever it was, it was enemy.  Well our guns were loaded with star shells because that was doctrine at that time. 

Fire the first to illuminate the target.  Of course we didn't just want to illuminate him, we wanted to hit him before he hit us.  The stars broke up on the fok’sel of this cruiser, the Nagara was the name of it, they illuminated so we fired nine 4-gun salvos at him and hit him with every one of them.  At that point, the Obannon which was at the stern of us, came up into our line of fire on our starboard quarter and we had to stop, check fire, because we didn't want to shoot the Obannon.

We turned our director around for the next target.  The next target was the battleship again.  So we started shooting at him.  We fired another 36 five-inch shells into his bridge.

INTERVIEWER:   And you survived this?

CALHOUN:   Yes indeed.

INTERVIEWER:   How many of the ships survived this exercise?

CALHOUN:   There were 13 ships that went in.  Five them were sunk, the Atlanta, that was one of the AA cruisers and four destroyers, Cushing, Laffey, those were the two ahead of us, and the Barton and Monssen behind the formation.  The Portland, one of the heavy cruisers and the Aaron Ward, another destroyer, were so badly damaged that they had to be towed to Tulagi that night.

INTERVIEWER:   And how many Japanese ships?

CALHOUN:   The battleship that we were firing at was sunk the next day.  She was disabled while we were there.  She was worked over by planes from Henderson Field the next day.  She was unable to retire.  The other battleship turned and ran which was most unusual.

INTERVIEWER:   And the other ship that you hit was sunk or not?

CALHOUN:   No, that ship was not sunk.  He was damaged badly, but we sunk a destroyer after the battleship.  We almost collided with the battleship and we had to turn to get under  her bow so we wouldn’t collide with her.  We were so close to her, 500 yards, that he couldn't depress his turret gun low enough to hit us.  We then proceeded to get away from him and that’s when we saw this Fubuki class destroyer.  The dream shot.  If you could have set this up, it couldn't have been any better.

He was on a course almost opposite ours.  He was on our starboard bow.  We were headed this way, he was headed that way.  His target angle which means the relative bearing of us from him, was 150.  So if you started his bow at came around 150 degrees, that’s where we were.  But his guns were trained fore and aft.  He hadn’t seen us.  We moved with the speed of light in the gun director and took him under fire in about five seconds.  We fired four rounds into his bridge where they hit and the next four rounds after gun mounts where they also hit. 

His whole stern exploded.  It was such a spectacular sight that I called down to the guns captains and told them to send their powder monkeys, meaning the ammunition handlers, up to the fok’sel hatch to look at what they had just done and I could hear them shouting when they saw this.  Unfortunately that silhouetted us for the battleship.  We were the only one stack destroyer in the action.  Our colors were illuminated by the fires in our number 3 gun mount which was flaring up so you could see stars and stripes up there plain as day.

He just turned around, one turret went boom and hit us with three 14-inch shells which really wreaked havoc with our crew, killed 32 and critically wounded another 18.  The doctor, who was my roommate, had his hands full.  He amputated three legs, sewed up I don’t know how many gun wounds.  Everyone of those 18 guys survived.