(Wasel Zwizinski's story of going down with the carrier Wasp, re-counted
in The Register in July 1994, brought back some memories to another old
Navyman, Jose Fonseca, of Fairway Drive.)
(Wasel Zwizinski's story of going down with the carrier Wasp, re-counted
in The Register in July 1994, brought back some memories to another old
Navyman, Jose Fonseca, of Fairway Drive.)
I didn't know him. He was from Lakeview or one of those other streets over there on the other side of the tracks. But we were there that day (Sept. 15, 1942) giving support off Guadalcanal. I was on the North Carolina. It was the first battleship in the new Navy, the first battleship built since the first World War. We could keep up with the aircraft carriers. The old battleships were too slow to keep up. We were the gun protection, the anti-aircraft protection, for the carriers.
I was up on deck. We were maneuvering very slowly, about eight knots. I looked over maybe 3,000 yards, 4,000 yards, and I saw these explosions on the Wasp. Three torpedo hits from a Japanese submarine. She went down that night. It was not too many seconds later we got torpedoed on our port bow. . .It made a 30-foot by 30-foot hole. We felt sorry for the guys on the Wasp — we'd come with her through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to Pearl Harbor and now to the Solomons — but we didn't have time to think about it. We were too busy with our own problem. Another torpedo was going to hit us in the stern. A destroyer came up and took that torpedo for us.
They maneuvered us out of the area. They assigned two destroyers with us. We were leaking fuel oil. It also started a fire in the forward 16-inch powder magazine. For a while it looked like the front end of the ship was going to blow up, but they got that under control. They locked all the watertight compartments. The sailors in that forward area all drowned — seven or eight of them. They secured everything, maintained the watertight integrity of the rest of the ship. Then they opened up sea valves on the starboard side to even up the ship so it could get good speed. With the destroyers sniffing out and dropping depth charges, they brought us over to Suva in the Fijis. They put a temporary plate on there, then they took us to Pearl Harbor into drydock to get it repaired.
(Joe Fonseca, Ludlow High Class of 1939, had enlisted in February 1941 and became part of the original crew of the North Carolina, commissioned at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on April 9. Fonseca remembered, "They called us 'The Showboat' because of all the publicity we got in the New York papers. We had Walter Winchell aboard. I guess the rest of the Navy resented that." At the time of Pearl Harbor, the North Carolina was in the North Atlantic poised to defend against German surface raiders which never appeared. Seven months later she and the Wasp sailed together to join the Pacific Fleet.
The North Carolina's baptism of fire came in the first battle of the Eastern Solomond on Aug. 24, 1942. The ship came under Japanese aerial attack. Joe Fonseca was with a dual-purpose battery of 5 inch 38's — "dual purpose" because the guns, with their 38-inch barrels, could be elevated or depressed to fire at either aerial or surface targets. But the ship's armament also included obsolete .50-caliber water-cooled machine guns and British-made 1.1 "pom poms," which according to Fonseca were "very ineffective.")
We had 90 Marines aboard ship. Pre-war. Six footers with the gunnery sergeants, the officers with swagger sticks. During the attacks, some of the sergeants were lying on deck. We'd say, "What are you, sleeping?" They were watching the dive bombers come in and directing the guys that were on the .50 calibers where to fire.
We also had Marines on the main deck on 5-inch-38's. We trained them on two batteries. During the eight-minute attack, the Marines got out more ammunition than our sailors. Three-second loads!
It seemed like it was land-based planes — 80 to 100. Very well coordinated. Zeroes, dive bombers, torpedo bombers — all coming in at the same time. . .After that first battle, we said, "I guess they can't call us 'The Showboat' any more. We showed 'em". . .One man got killed on the fantail. Japanese Zeroes came down. They were strafing. We got a lot of near misses. The (carrier) Enterprise took three bomb hits, and our skipper started making a circle around the Enterprise to save her. We were very fortunate. Over the task force, you have air-to-air combat air patrol. They were fending off a lot of the planes that were coming in. The Japanese lost a lot of planes that day, front-line pilots.
(The North Carolina claimed seven attacking planes shot down and a score more "probables." The ship received only superficial damage. During repairs at Pearl Harbor following the September torpedoing, the ship got new deck guns to replace the .50 calibers and the pom-poms. Fonseca eventually became gun crew captain for a 5-inch-38 battery.)
We fired a 54-pound projectile — 28 pounds of powder. On each side of the ship we had five gun mounts — 10 barrels, 10 guns, 10 men in each gun mount. Even during the first battle of the Eastern Solomons — I was still handling room captain then — they shot down quite a few planes. They (the Japanese) concentrated on us (the North Carolina). They hadn't seen that kind of ship in the Pacific. . .We were the only battleship in the Pacific after the old Navy got wiped out at Pearl Harbor. . .Despite the pounding, our morale was very, very good. Very dedicated, disciplined. It was unbelievable. We just stuck it out.
Guadalcanal, the Japanese pilots were very good. Very well coordinated attacks. They must've been some of the ones they were still using from Pearl Harbor.
There were a lot of actions with cruisers and that. The Japan-ese were very good at night attacks. They had what they called the Long Lance torpedo, long range. They really did a job on our ships.
After our repairs at Pearl Harbor, we rejoined the fleet in the Southern Solo-mons. We took part in the capture and occupation of New Georgia, Rendova. . . After that we went over to Makin and Tarawa. Tarawa was bad. We were part of the bombarding there. . .The landing craft got hung up on the reefs and couldn't make it to the beach. They were getting really chopped up there. The Japanese were really dug in. The only thing that made it to the beach were the water buffaloes (tracked amphibious vehicles). . .That was a bad one.
(As part of Task Force 58, the North Carolina took part in a raid on Truk in the spring of 1944.)
Truk was the Gibraltar of the Japanese in the South Pacific. They had 40,000 men on there. All their supplies came through there . . .Our carrier planes sank all kinds of transport ships. A lot of our pilots were shot down. They were in a lagoon. We sent our Kingfisher OS2U's (the North Carolina's catapult launched float planes) into the lagoon under fire to pick up our pilots out of the water, ferried them back to a submarine, then the submarine took them back to the aircraft carrier. Rescued about nine or ten pilots. (Dur-ing the last week of the war in August 1945, the North Carolina's Kingfish-er pilots made a similar dramatic rescue of a downed fighter pilot from an inland bay on the main Japanese island of Honshu.)
Then we were in the Marianas. That was where our planes shot down — they call it "the Marianas turkey shoot" — 400-something planes in one day. We were going to land on Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. Our combat air patrols were shooting everything down that day (June 19, 1944). As they were retiring, it was coming toward night. . .a lot of our planes weren't going to make it (back to the carriers). It was extreme range, 200 miles back. The torpedo planes, some of them could make it. But the fighters, they ran out of fuel. They were ditching all over the ocean. The first time that we turned searchlights on in the war zone, and we'd throw out rafts to the pilots.
Saipan, we bombarded. We used a differ ent type of bombardment. The Marianas, we started walking the 16 inch shells, like plowing a field. They walked them back and forth so the Marines wouldn't have so much trouble going in.
(The North Carolina wore camouflage paint to disguise the lines of the big battleship to look like those of a light cruiser. She took part in the assault on the Philippines, supporting the landing on Luzon, and was part of the task force whose planes on April 17, 1945, knocked out the Japanese battleship Yamato, which at 18 inches had the war's biggest naval guns. The North Carolina also took part in raids on Japanese-occupied French Indo-China and Formosa.)
Then there was Iwo Jima. Really bad. Three (Marine) divisions went in, three divisions in reserve — they had to commit everybody. The only place they could land was under Mt. Suribachi. Mt. Suribachi, the extinct volcano, was honeycombed. They had the whole landing zone under fire. The Marines trying to dig in — that volcanic ash, they couldn't dig a foxhole — it just kept filling up. . .They lost about 8,000 killed, 15,000 wounded, just that one little island. . .They of course had 20 years to fortify it. We (the North Carolina) were the artillery for the Marines. . .All night long we placed star shells to light up the Japanese when they came up from underground to make banzai attacks to try to go through the Marine lines. We were there four days supporting them. I think we used about 800 rounds of 16-inch air bursts with white phosphorus — to explode above the ground, the white phosphorus to burn everything.
(Kamikaze air attacks on American ships reached their peak in the spring of 1945. More than 10 ships were hit by the suicide pilots within sight of the North Carolina. The North Carolina herself, despite steaming 307,000 wartime miles to participate in engagement after engagement, suffered only nine men killed and 40 wounded during three years of warfare.)
Tokyo Rose reported us sunk six times — the most sunk ship in the Navy.
Around Japan, we were on a task group with the Franklin. The Franklin, aircraft carrier. . .was about 60 miles from the main Japanese islands. She got hit up on the flight deck. She was really burning, exploding all over the place. The planes and the .50's were going off. All the rear end — I was watching from my ship — just the concussions there. They lost 1,100 men on the Franklin.
Okinawa, we bombarded Okinawa. I don't remember how many days we were at Okinawa. . .Of course we were getting ready for the invasion of Japan. . .We were bombarding (the coast of Japan) with 16-inch. The British were there also with battleships . . .Even after we dropped the atomic bomb, they (Japanese planes) were still coming over, suicide planes and that. The word came over the loudspeaker, "Shoot 'em down in a friendly fashion."
(Jose Fonseca took part in 50 engagements, earned 15 battle stars, and came out of the war as a chief gunner's mate. After the war he worked at Stevens Arms, H.L. Handy, American Bosch, Titeflex, the Springfield Armory, and Monsanto. He also immersed himself in the history of the Civil War as well as World War II.)