Post #128282 by Tiki-bot on Wed, Dec 1, 2004 1:10 PM

A friend's dad was on a ship that sank near the end of the war. Here's his story:

Didn't see the first shark for about half an hour - a tiger - thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups...the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and he starts poundin' and hollerin' and screamin'. Sometimes the shark go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into ya, right into your eyes. Y'know, the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes after ya, he doesn't seem to be livin' until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white, and then - aww, then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin', the ocean turns red, and in spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and rip ya to pieces...in that first dawn, we lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand. I don't know how many men. They averaged six an hour...Noon the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He swung in low and he saw us...and he come in low and three hours later, a big fat PBY [seaplane] comes down and start to pick us up. You know, that was the time I was most frightened - waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a life jacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

But seriously, I have no connection to Pearl Harbor, but my great uncle was an artilleryman in WW2. Was practically deaf from it. Never talked about the war or where he was stationed, though I repeatedly asked.

On another unrelated note, I have a friend whose dad was a B-17 navigator stationed in England. He kept a detailed diary of his entire deployment and it's truely one of the most amazing things I've ever read. Great details about base life, the military, racism, the danger of the endless missions, the constant loss of comrades. He validated that old addage that war is long stretches of extreme boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. He had a knack for focusing on every tiny detail, which was probably why he went on to become a lawyer. Sadly, I never got to meet him as he died in a car crash in the 1970s.