We warn you this is a most graphic piece, written by an eye-witness. we havent edited, amended or abridged it- this is just as David sent it to us.
When I was fifteen years old, I joined the U.S. Marine Corps, telling them that I was eighteen years old. I went through the complete Marine boot-camp training. It was very harsh and difficult training. A number of men died because the training was so harsh and hard..Later, because of these training deaths, they lightened up on the training somewhat. My mother found out where I was. She wrote a letter to the Marine Base Commander, telling them that I was only fifteen years old. The Colonel called me into his office and explained that I had completed all of the training satisfactorily and was ready to be shipped out to the war zone that week, but he had to let me go and that I was welcome to rejoin when I became seventeen if I had my guardian's permission. My mother probably saved my life, because I was attached to the 1st Marine Division that hit Iwo Jima and all the other islands, Guadalcanall, etc. I'm telling you this because the extremely harsh training that I received in the Marines probably prepared me to do as well as I did during the Mt. Hood disaster, as a number of the crew members on our ship went crazy or insane due to the sheer horror of the deaths of many of our crew members (and all of my friends) and the hundreds of human body parts and dead and dying men littering our entire upper decks. When I became sixteen, I got my mother to agree to not write any more letters so that I could join the navy, because I knew that I could not get back in the Marines bcause they knew my real age.. After the navy training, I was assigned to a brand new ship, not yet completed., the USS Mindanao, a large ship approximately 500 feet long, with a crew of approximately 500 men. It was officially a repair ship, but was rather heavily armed, as our responsibility was to follow the warships and maintain and repair damage that they may receive from the Japanese warships and Kamikaze aircraft. Eventually, we went through most of the South Pacific Islands, Guadacanal, Iwo Jima, etc.,following the Navy warships and submarines as we advanced toward Japan. Our last anchorage was Seeadler Harbour in the Admiralty Islands, not too far from New Guinea. This was one of the world,s largest natural harbors. I once counted 400 large ships, cruisers, battleships, freighters, troopships, etc. that were anchored briefly in the harbor, preparing for the invasion of Japan. The harbor was relatively empty when the Mt. Hood blew up. If it had blown up while the harbor was crowded, the death toll could have been ten or twenty thousand or more. Many times, my buddies and I would look over at the Mt. Hood, and we could discern that it flew the ammunition ship flag with the E on it. In fact, we called it the E-11. We often remarked to each other that that ship was illegally parked, according to navy regulations, because an ammunition ship is supposed to be anchored thousands of yards away from other ships. We often felt very uneasy because it was there week after week. On the morning of the explosion, I had started to work early with a new helper who had been assigned to me. His name was Italo Skortachini, an Italian kid, from New York, I think. There were six minesweepers tied alongside our ship for routine maintenance and repairs, and I was on the outermost of these minesweepers, and Italo was holding a heavy piece of metal for me to weld on a damaged railing of this minesweeper. When the blast happened, I was temporarily knocked unconscious for a second or two. I know that it was very brief because debris hadn,t started falling from the sky yet. The blast was so strong that it blew off most of my clothes except my underwear, including my shoes. The first thing that I saw was half of Italo's body on one side of the deck and the other half on the other side. It could have been the sheet of metal that he was holding for me that cut him in half. When I got to my feet, the captain of the minesweeper came out of his cabin and was looking toward my ship, and a flying piece of steel came through the air and impaled him like a spear to the cabin wall, It was in the center of his chest., and he gasped a little bit and then seemed to die. Debris began to fall from the sky at this time. A large artillery shell fell on the deck, right at my feet, just as a crew member of the minesweeper came up from below. All of the minesweepers were made of wood, so as not to attract magnetic mines as the ship went about its work clearing minefields. The shell did not penetrate the heavy wooden deck of the minesweeper, and just lay there at our feet. I looked at him, and he looked at me. He asked, "Should we run?" I said, "Nobody can run that fast if it blows up. Let's throw it overboard." And that's exactly what we did, expecting to be blown to bits at any second. Meanwhile, he said that there were dead men below, the ship had split open, and we were starting to sink. There were dead and dying and drowning people all around us at this point. He went below to see if he could help any of his crew members. I started pulling people that I could reach onto the sinking ship. One man was hanging on with a stricken look on his face, and I reached down and pulled him onto the deck, and he had no legs. I noticed that the ship was sinking rapidly, and it was tied to the other three minesweepers next to it, which were also sinking, but more slowly. So as I stepped off of the ship that I was on, it went down and started to tug the other ships next to it down. As I stepped from one sinking ship on to the other, over the debris and some dead bodies, I was able to pull some men out of the water up onto the decks of these sinking ships. Meanwhile some of the crewmembers of these sinking minesweepers were climbing up onto the decks, helping out and trying to save themselves from drowning. My objective was to get to my ship and climb the rope ladder to our main deck, which was about 30 feet high. When I had the rope ladder in my grasp, I noticed a man at the stern of the last minesweeper trying to wrap a cable around a large iron stanchion that was attached directly to my ship, in an effort to save his ship from sinking. I screamed at him as loud as I could to stop what he was doing and follow me up to the relative safety of my big ship. I shouted that that cable could not possibly save that ship and that it could break at any minute. He refused to stop working. I got a fourth of the way up the ladder and looked back and saw that the cable had snapped, cutting off the man's head as he worked. He was one of the many unsung heroes of that day. As I pulled myself over the railling of my ship, the horrors that I had witnessed were mild compared to what I saw on the deck of our ship. There were human heads and bodies and pieces of bodies and hands, arms, legs, and feet everywhere, and an enormous amount of blood flowing back and forth across the steel deck. I quickly found that it was almost impossible to stand up , and I kept falling down as though I were walking on a sheet of slick ice. The ship's scuppers were starting to clog up from the gallons of blood flow sloshing slowly across the deck as the anchored ship slowly bobbed back and forth. Later in the day I remember the blood starting to congeal on the deck, and it was like a very thick red jello, in some places ankle deep. We had no water or tools to get rid of the blood, as everything loose in the way of cleaning equipment and buckets and much other equipment was blown off the decks and into the water. So when the doctor eventually came on board from the small base hospital that was on land, it was really a horrible mess. Actually, the weather was very good, a typical tropical paradise day. I somehow remember that I became skilled at walking around on the slippery deck and was not constantly falling, as I had been. There were dead and dying men everywhere you looked. I was thinking of my friends that I worked with every day, and I went down below deck to the compartment where we normally worked together. It looked like a slaughterhouse. Heads and body parts were littering this huge compartment, the largest working area that was on the ship. I went to where my friend Elroy Elkins worked. He was the ship's blacksmith. Elroy was working at his forge when the blast went off, and something had blown a huge hole in the side of the ship where our compartment was located. Near Elroy's forge was the opening of a very large hatchway where we kept heavy steel and other supplies that we needed for our work. One man who was not badly injured told me that Elroy had fallen down this hatchway, because flames from his forge had flared back in his face. and he heard Elroy screaming that he was blind and could not see. And in the excitement, Elroy had fallen down the hatch onto the steel below, and that had killed him. There was no electricity on the ship at this time, and the only way that we could see to get around below decks was from the many holes in the side of the ship that let in some daylight. We did not have any electricity for several days, and the few emergency flashlights and batteries that we had were quickly exhausted. An entire engine, a huge diesel engine, from one of the ships anchored next to the E-11, had flown through the air and punctured a huge hole in our compartment and landed inside our ship. This type of damage I later found had raked our ship from stem to stern, as can be seen by the photographs of our damaged ship. Failing to find any of my friends alive, I realized that many of them were out of their compartment working above deck, doing their regular jobs just as I had been doing when the E-11 blew up. So I quickly went back up on the main deck to see what I could do to help the many injured and mutilated people that I had seen when I first climbed over that rail. On the way up, their screams reminded me that throughout our ship, we had emergency medical supplies that you had to break the glass to get to them, and that they had morphine syrettes, little tubes of morphine with the needles attached to the tubes where you could give pain-killing injections by squirting the entire tube into an area near the wound. We had had no training to do any of this stuff. But I soon found out that the little tiny tubes of morphine were absolutlely wonderful to stop the pain and the screaming of the wounded and dying men that were all over the place. As I grabbed handfuls of these morphine tubes and carried them up on deck, I started shooting the morphine into everyone that was screaming or moaning in pain, and some died before I could get to the next one. Many had lost legs and arms and were at the point of death anyway from loss of blood. I had nothing handy to make a tourniquet with. I'd already looked over the deck to find shoes, because shoelaces made the best tourniquet to tie off the blood flow. I remember quite often that I had to remove the human foot that was still in the shoe, but the shoestrings were very valuable, and I could never find enough of them. Several men, as I was working on them, giving them the morphine shots, begged me to kill them. One I remember was screaming in pain, having lost his left leg and his right arm. I remember him so well, although I did not know him personally. As I kept going back and forth, attending to the wounded the best I could, I kept noticing him, as he had become quite happy, and it was then that I realized what a wonderful pain-killer these morphine shots were. He was waving the stub of his arm around at me as I would go by, seemingly comfortable, and everytime I would pass him, he would tell me that he couldn't go home like this, and that his girlfriend wouldn't want him anymore with an arm and a leg missing. He started to give me instructions about what I could do to go about killing him. He kept saying, "Dave, you can do it!" Although I was busy, I kept trying to encourage him as I passed by, telling him that they had wonderful artificial arms and legs., that noboby would even know that they were not real. It seemed that once I had given him a couple of morphine shots and had tied off the blood flow, he acted quite normal and businesslike. He told me, "Dave, you know where we keep the baseball equipment." I did--it was in a locker closeby. He said, "All you have to do is get a baseball bat, and wait till nobody is looking and hit me in the head with it like you were trying to knock a homerun. I probably won't feel a thing." I kept passing this guy, whose name I never did know, although he knew mine. I kept trying to encourage him, telling him that he was going to be all right, that I couldn't do what he was asking me to do because it wouldn't be right. Several hours later, after several other conversations about the same thing, him begging me to kill him, I remember that they were carrying him down the gangway to take him ashore to the base hospital, and he said rather loudly, "Remember, Dave, what we were talking about and come to see me." I did try to look him up several days later at the base hospital, but I could not find him, and they told me that he had been transferred out, possibly to Australia or to a hospital ship. While I was applying a tourniquet, a man walked up to me, carrying a huge bag with a Red Cross on it. I looked up and saw that he had a colonel's insignia on his collar. He told me that he had just come on board and that he was a doctor. He asked me if I would help him. I told him that I didn't know anything, that I didn't know what to do. He said that he would show me everything that I needed to know, but that he really did need someone to help him, and that he had a lot of medical supplies in his bag. He opened the bag, and I noticed that he had what looked like hundreds of those wonderful morphine syrettes, and I told him that I had just run out of them. So I became his helper, or nurse, or assistant, or whatever, for the rest of the day until it got dark. It was not yet noon. The doctor did extensive surgeries, mostly amputations, as a number of men had legs and arms that were just hanging in shreds and could not be saved under the circumstances. When the doctor first came, I was attending to our ship's Chief Steward's Mate, Sully Mason, an old man at least forty years old! He was a former chef in a famous hotel in New York City and seemed to know everything about food and supplies, and he was a master at scrounging for supplies for our ship. While Sully was alive, we had unusually good food, compared to most of the ships in that part of the world. He was lying on his back, with one arm missing, and half of one leg missing, and he was gasping for air as the doctor first walked up to ask me to help him. I said, "I'm worried about Sully here. He doesn't seem to be able to breathe." The doctor quickly reached in his bag and pulled out an enormous safety pin and handed it to me. He said, "He is strangling on his own tongue. Reach down and pull up his tongue and pin it to his upper lip." I did, and immediately his breathing became rather normal. When Sully was taken off the ship near the end of the day, he was still alive, but I never saw him again, although I later searched the hospital for him and for others I knew. I don't know whether he survived or not. I remember him so well, because I had often volunteered to work for him when he would go ashore for supplies. Sometimes, I would work all day for him, and I was able to borrow a large truck from the Marine base to use to transport the tons of supplies to take to the dock to load on small craft to transport out to the ship. I was known to be a hard worker, and was probably in the best physical condition that I have ever been in my life. I was a very strong young man at the age of seventeen, and I worked out regularly in a home-made gym with some of my buddies on the ship. It took several hours for us to get more help from shore, because all of the small boats had been destroyed, probably hundreds of them, with a number of large work barges, and it was difficult to get back-and-forth transportation to shore for any reason. We were the only large ship left afloat in the harbor after the blast. Fortunately, the weather was perfect. After the explosion, the ocean and the harbor were as calm and wave free as a placid lake, or we would have sunk like a stone, because many of the giant holes in the ship were only inches from the waterline. If even a slightly heavy sea had come up, we would have sunk, because most of the watertight doors between the compartments below had been sprung or otherwise damaged where they were useless. The officers' quarters were right at the main deck level of our ship. They were especially vulnerable to the effects of the blast, as the hull of our ship was approximately one inch thick steel. The walls of the upper deck qaurter were about half that thick, and had been penetrated by various objects flying through the air. The officers who were uninjured came out to the deck to such a shocking scene of carnage as human heads , arms and legs, feet and hands, and complete torsos fell from the sky to the surfaces of the open decks. Many of the heads' skulls split open when they hit the hard steel deck, scattering large chunks of complete brains all over the decks. Several of the officers seemed to go crazy. Several others I noticed seemed to be paralyzed and in shock, with their eyes wide open, standing or sitting completely motionless and useless. And there was so much to be done to help the injured men that were scattered all over the deck. I then noticed my friend, Clyde (Blackjack) Haney, one of the strongest and one of the toughest men that I have ever known before or since, and certainly the best looking. (Blackjack was so handsome and manly looking that he put all of the famous movie stars to shame). Oftentimes when we were in strange ports, such as Panama City, and would go ashore, I would tag along with my buddies and Blackjack. We would go into some of the toughest waterfront bars in the world, even though I did not drink. All of my buddies did drink, and I would use any excuse to get off the ship after weeks at sea. We all felt safe when Blackjack was in our group, becasue if we would run into some drunk neighborhood thugs, Blackjack was an accomplished boxer, and usually with one punch, he would deck the toughest guy in the opposing group. That's how he got the nickname "Blackjack." Drunk or sober, I never saw him lose a fight. Well, what was a shock to me was that I saw Blackjack leaning against the bulkhead next to the officers' quarters, apparently totally uninjured, and neat and sartorally perfect, as he always seemed to be, except for the expression on his face. He was obviously in complete shock, with his eyes wide open and an expression of horror on his face. I went up to him and shouted right in his face, "Blackjack, wake up! We have a lot of work to do!" He did not respond at all, as if I was not even there. I grabbed him by the lapels of his uniform and shook him as hard as I could., screaming and yelling right in his face, "Blackjack, we've got work to do!" He seemed not to hear me. I was shocked at this, because here was the toughest guy on our ship, respected by all of the men, and considered the manliest of all men, and he had become totally useless from the horror that he was exposed to. I remember thinking to myself that I was not going to let this happen to me, that I was not going to go crazy..There were just too many horribly injured and dying people that needed help. Later in the day, I saw Blackjack and several of the officers being carried off the ship in straitjackets. I never saw any of them again. (I often wondered where they had gotten those straitjackets.) As the day wore on, I was asked to do several other things, some of them very gruesome, but I volunteered anyway. We had many human heads scattered all over the ship, inside and out. One of my jobs was stacking in a pile on the deck the heads that I recognized as possible crew members . There were many more other human heads that I would carry around one at a time, holding the head up and walking the length of the ship and showing it to everyone and asking them if they recognized this person. If they did not, that head went into a separate pile. So within a couple of hours, we ended up with a couple of heaps of human heads. Next I managed to get a couple of helpers to volunteer to carry the many, many arms and legs and other body parts to an area we had cleared off to stack the arms and legs and feet, etc. that seemed to match each other. Any loose containers on the deck or anything not anchored down solidly had been blown overboard by the force of the blast. Normally, we had coils of rope and utility buckets and cleanup equipment in various places on our huge main deck. Someone said, "We need a bucket to put all of these feet in." I said, "I know where there is a very large bucket. I'll go get it." I went to where I knew the bucket was usually kept behind the door of the radio shack. I looked behind the door and saw my best friend 's head looking up at me from the bucket. His eyes were still clear and not glazed over, I remember, looking straight up at me, wide open., as if they were asking me, "Where in the hell were you when I needed you?" I somehow felt guilty. I had looked all over for him an hour or so previously and assumed that he had been one of the many crew members that were blown over by the blast, because he usually worked up on the main deck. I removed his head from the bucket and put it on the pile of heads that were on the main deck, heads that we had identified as members of the ship's crew. There was a much larger pile of heads that had fallen out of the sky onto the main deck. heads that we could not identify. These were obviously from the hundreds of people who were working loading and unloading the Mount Hood at the time that the Japanese torpedo hit the ship, causing the huge explosion. It was about at that time that I looked over the rail and saw a man in the water, frantically treading water, trying to avoid being crushed between two ships, the Mindanao and another ship (a destroyer or a destroyer-escort, or perhaps a small freighter). He was screaming. I recognized him. His name was Mahana. I yelled at him that I would help him, that I would find a rope and pull him up. I ran frantically up and down the ship's deck, trying to find a piece of rope, but could not find any. I looked over the rail, and he was no longer there. Then as I looked more closely, his head popped up. As the two ships came together back and forth, he had been diving down so as not to be crushed between them. I again yelled at him that I was still looking for the rope and that I would be back. I came back again to tell him to try and swim away from the two ships, that I could not find any way to help him, but he was no longer there. I assumed that he had drowned. (Two years later I saw him walking down the street in Charleston, West Virginia. It was Mohana! I went up to him. He said that he remembered me very well, and he was angry because I never helped him get out of the water. He told me that he had worked his way to the rear of our ship and that he had sat on the ship's propellor shaft until a small boat came along and took him to shore.) I noticed several other men during the day that seemed to freak out and become totally useless, and then gradually a few more small craft came to our ship, bringing sorely needed help and some medical supplies to our ship that was strangely sitting out in this vast Seeadler Harbour, now all alone, by itself, surrounded by a huge oil slick, with no other ships within miles, because they had all sunk. Our lifeboats on our ship might has well have become kindlewood. They were all unseaworthy., as were our liferafts. Hundreds of small craft, such as the one shown in the photo of my ship, were destroyed and sunk by the blast or by the giant 40-foot wave that swept the area and sank just about everything that was afloat. I don't know how many other ships there were in the harbor when the blast occurred, but there were very many. For example, we had at least eight fully-crewed and battle-ready ocean-going minesweepers tied to our ship, plus another warship, possibly a destroyer escort, tied alongside the relatively undamaged side of the Mindenao.. The minesweepers sank to the bottom of the harbor , with many of their crewmembers still on board. We were for several hours literally marooned in the middle of this huge harbor, with no boats of any kind to come to our aid, because again all of the small craft had been destroyed for miles around by the tremendous blast. A few days later, an admiral came on board our ship briefly, and I heard him say , "This is the most damaged ship of the U.S.S. Navy that did not sink." I remember that the admiral did not go far from the gangway of our ship, or the safety of the admiral's gig, because the Mindenao looked as if it could sink at any moment, any time of the day or night. I was at that time standing near the gangway when the admiral came onboard and I remember the admiral and a newly-assigned Lt. Commander got into an argument on the fate of our ship. The commander was some kind of an engineering officer, new to our ship. His opinion was to tow the Mindenao out of the harbor and scuttle it, as it was not worth repairing, as the slightest waves from a heavy sea could sink the Mindenao in a matter of minutes, with all hands on board. The admiral objected, with words to the effect that it may could be saved if we worked fast and welded up the holes that were inches from the wqterline. I testified briefly to Lt. Stivers , our Damage Control Officer, that most of our watertight doors belowdecks were sprung or otherwise damaged and could not be closed fully in many cases, making them virtually useless. So if a heavy sea or storm should come up, we would probably sink like a stone. (A commander does not get into an argument with an admiral. I never saw this commander again.) The admiral's views prevailed, and after several months several hundred Sea Bees and other welders and metalworkers came onboard, and after several months of constant work, the Mindenao became seaworthy again. (I was a Metalsmith 2nd Class and became one of those workers.) The next morning I awoke and was feeling of my arms and legs to see if they were still there. I was only half awake and was of course exhausted from all the work that I had done the previous day. I awoke at dawn due to the giant hole that was shining light into our sleeping compartment. I remember vividly my first thoughts were "Here I am, ten thousand miles from home and I don't know anybody because all of my buddies are dead." I felt like I should be dead also, and I kept thinking that it was not right that they were dead and I was still alive. I went up on the main deck, and it was still a mess, because we had no means to clean it up. Blood and gore and body parts were still everywhere. All of the brooms and mops and buckets and loose items had been blown overboard, and we also had no water and no buckets even handy to even bring up sea water so that we could wash some of the gore away. The previous day, the day of the explosion, I had noticed that the main mast of the ship was broken and bent about 3/4 of the way up. The radar apparatus had been snapped off and was hanging about thirty feet above the deck by nothing but its electrical supply cord. And as the ship slowly bobbed back and forth, as ships do while at anchor, this very large radar detector swung in a big arc that covered our entire work space on the main deck. Our repair officer, Lt. Stivers, lined us all up for roll call, those of us that were left. And then he said that he was requesting a volunteer to climb the bent and broken main mast to tie off and secure the menacing radar dectector that was circling the entire work area like the sword of Democles. Nobody volunteered to climb this mast, because it looked like the upper half of the mast itself could break off any minute and probably would not support the weight of anyone trying to climb it. He said that it was too dangerous to order any of his men to try to repair it, so he was asking for a volunteer to do it. We all looked at each other. Nobody volunteered. Stivers then said, "We must unload all of our ammunition and explosives from the ammunition locker, because it is deemed unsafe and dangerous and if it explodes, it will most certainly cause the ship to sink." The giant circling radar circled constantly over this hatchway where the ammo magazine was. So nobody volunteered to remove the ammo either. It was a dilemma. I thought that with all of my friends dead anyway, and the threats of death all around us, that I might not live more than a day or two longer in any event. I finally offered to climb the mast and tie off the radar detector so that it could not fall. As I was walking down the line of men, to tie off the radar, when I passed the last man, whom I hardly knew, he muttered, "What are you trying to do? Commit suicide?" I said," Maybe so. We'll find out." I was not upset that nobody else wanted to do it, because it did look extremely dangerous. After I had finished tying off the radar antenna, Stivers said that he was going to recommend me for a Silver Star. I told him that I did not want any medals, because none of my buddies had even been given the chance to earn any medals, and I was sure that they would have done the same things that I had done. Now that the radar menace was cleared, it immediately opened the way for another job that we could now do, which was to offload all of the ammunition that was stored nearby our largest gun on the ship, a six-inch cannon, and thousands of rounds of forty millimeter and twenty millimeter anti-aircraft cannon shells plus hundreds of pounds of various other kinds of ammunition and explosives, that now were deemed to be very risky and unreliable to have on any ship. Needless to say, nobody wanted to be handling this risky ammunition. We needed at least twenty men to form a human chain to manually one carton at a time lift this magazine out of the hatch and pass it to the next man and then to the next man, etc. to the railing so that it could be put on a barge and hauled out to the sea to be dumped out of the harbor. A couple of other men and I were the only volunteers. It was not enough to form the human chain that we needed. So we sent out word throughout the ship for volunteers to offload these dangerous explosives. While we waited, we discussed the fact that we might as well do the job, because if it blew up, we would probably get killed anyway. After we got enough men to form the work party that we needed, we began bringing the stuff up and passing it from man to man. The man nearest the hatch and next to me sometimes would grab the lighter boxes and literally throw them at me to catch. I could tell that there was something wrong with him. He was acting crazy. I told him to be more careful of throwing those boxes of explosives around. If one of them had exploded, it would have killed us all. He seemed to ignore me. So I stopped the line of workers, said, "Take a break for a few minutes." Then I went to find Lt. Stivers and told him that we had a crazy guy whom I couldn't control throwing the ammunition boxes around carelessly. Stivers came over with a couple of other officers and talked to the guy and had him removed from the workline. Later he was taken off the ship in a straight jacket. We continued removing all the the ammunition without incident. We now had the largest space on the ship cleared to where we could safely work from dawn to dusk. We continued to discover bodies and body parts down below, and they could be brought up and identified. We also spent considerable time throughout the day trying to match up body parts to the different torsos that were brought up from down below. It being that we had no electric power for several days, we could only work from dawn to dusk, and down below decks, we had little or no light in the various deck levels and compartments, except that which filtered through the big holes that had blown through the ship's holds. This went on for days, while we worked stumbling across hands and feet and human heads that we had overlooked because of the darkness. The Mount Hood explosion was so huge that it devastated all of the small boats that were needed for communication and transporting supplies of the ships to the shore. So even though there was equipment, such as electric generators, that were onshore in warehouses that we could have used, we had little means to get them a mile or two out to our anchored ship. For several days and nights on end, we worked to get the ship more safely anchored by tilting it slightly, by moving heavy objects all to one side, as can be seen in the photo, so that the huge holes near the waterline, some only inches from the waterline, would be lifted out of the water, and of course, those were the ones that we welded up so that if some large waves would come up like in a heavy sea, we would not take on water that could easily sink us, as all of our watertight compartments throughout the ship were no longer watertight.. So we slept with our lifejackets on, in the event that the ship started sinking while we were asleep in our bunks. Later, many of us carried our thin mattresses up to the main deck and slept on the open deck, so we wouldn't be caught below decks if the ship suddenly sank in the night without any warning. After a few days (maybe four or five) hundreds and hundreds ( maybe even thousands) of bodies began to rise to the surface of the harbour, mostly without heads, arms, or legs, crowded so close together that it was like a solid carpet of human bodies for as far as the eye could see from our ship. None of these bodies had heads. We could see many sharks feeding on these bodies which were all around our ship. Later, small boats and a few work-barges began showing up in the harbor, probably from the other side of the islands. And word came down that volunteers were needed to pull these bodies from the water, so that they could be taken to shore to be identified and buried.This was the only volunteer job that I declined to do. I felt that I was not helping anybody and that it would be virtually impossible to identify most of them. So at the graveyard, when you see the thousands of white crosses with the names on them, the chances are that the names are probably wrong, and someone else is buried there. But whoever goes to the Admiralty Islands to visit a loved one's grave? Practically nobody, I'm sure. Most of the people that I have talked to over the years since then have never even heard of the Admiralty Islands. After a few days went by, and more and more small craft were brought around from other areas and other active-duty ships showed up, I took some time off to go to the base hospital. I was surprised to see several men, some who were up and walking around, whom I had nursed and attended to with the doctor. The doctor and I had given up on many of these men. We had not expected them to survive. I saw one man whose life I had saved walking around, with his head looking like a patchwork quilt. It startled me so that I exclaimed excitedly, "You're alive!" I acted so startled that he appeared angry at me. He said,"Of course, I"m alive! What's wrong with you?" I wished him good luck and he walked on. I did not tell him that the last time that I had seen him, he was drowning in his own blood, and that the entire top of his skull was completely missing, and his brain was exposed to the bright sunlight,and that I had brought the doctor to his side, and we had put him on a stretcher. There were dying people all around, and the doctor had said,"Don't waste any time with him. He can't survive anyway." So I remember finding a torn shirt and putting it over his brain so that the sunlight would not be on it, and moving his head because the blood was forming a puddle in the stretcher, and he was breathing it in his nose. So I checked on him several times during the day before he was carried off the ship. He survived! Later that day, I went over to the beach, where there was a Japanese torpedo that had missed the E-11 and had kept traveling across the harbor and had slid up on the beach, without striking anything. It was just lying there, in perfect condition. I know that it was Japanese, because I saw the Japanese markings on the torpedo. I had many,many photographs of all of these things. Later, I discarded two seabags full of souvenirs and hundreds of Japanese photographs and weapons, swords, pistols, etc., that I had bartered and traded for with marines, soldiers, and sailors, as souvenirs. (They would probably be worth a fortune today, had I kept them.) I didn't want reminders of all the gruesome stuff that I had seen day in, day out, week after week, month after month. Several days after the explosion, we received a mail delivery from the United States. In this delivery, there were at least two "Dear John" letters. One was from my girlfriend at home, and one was to another crew member of our ship, a man that I hardly knew. After reading his letter, this man committed suicide. After reading my letter, I was heartbroken, but still thinking rationally, and decided that it was for the best. Later I wrote her a brief letter congratulating her on finding someone else, because the chances were slim that I would survive the war anyway. We were getting closer and closer to invading Japan, and our invasion fleet was being assembled at this time. I had seen hundreds of ships assembled in our harbor that were to be part of the invasion fleet. Later we received some portable and larger electric generators and we got our electrical system pretty much back to normal, so that we could see to get around below decks. The port seemed to gradually return to normalcy. All of us went to work repairing our ship and begging and borrowing pieces of equipment here and there and supplies from other ships. What I remember so vividly is waking up one morning, realizing that I was ten-thousand miles from home and didn't really know anyone, as all of my friends were dead, and most of the familiar faces of the other crew members were gone. After a number of weeks, it just became a blur of getting up in the morning and going to work, working hard all day repairing our ship and then going to bed exhausted at night. I did not realize that I had apparently not been eating enough, because since my friend Sully Mason, our chief procurement officer in charge of provisioning the ship, was gone, the food on our ship had deteriated from good to bad, and we seemed to be getting all of our food supplies now from Australia. The opinion was that the Aussies were ripping off Uncle Sam, bigtime. Much of the food was inedible, and I remember helping load on food supplies, and cases of canned goods would jump around when the cans exploded inside the cases, from the badly processed food inside. Lt. Stivers, I heard, was in the base hospital, and one Sunday I went to visit him. He had some kind of a medical problem. I heard that it was the flue, but I don't know for sure. He was there for about two weeks. When he saw me, he asked me how I was doing. I told him I was okay. Stivers said, "It looks to me that you should be in this hospital instead of me. Have you looked in a mirror lately?" I said, "Yeah, I shave every morning." He said, "I want you to go down to the end of the hall where there is a full-length mirror on the door, as I know that we do not have one on the ship. I want you to strip down to your shorts and look at yourself and come back and talk to me." Well, I did as Lt Stivers ordered me to do, as usual. And I was really shocked at what I saw. I had lost a lot of weight (I don't know how much). I looked like a starving Buchanwald war prisoner, with large knobs for knees, and ribs showing. I remember being in great physical condition before the Mt. Hood explosion. I was not fat, and was very muscular. I put on my clothes and went back to Stiver's bedside and told him that I did not realize that I had gotten so skinny, and the food had been so bad on the ship that I probably half of the time didn't eat breakfast or lunch. I said, "Chief Sully Mason has disappeared, and I don't know whether he is alive or dead. I helped tend to him with the doctor the day of the explosion, and he was in very bad shape with the loss of an arm and a leg, and other possible injuries. You remember all the good food that we used to have on the ship. He was the one responsible for all of the good food." Stivers agreed and said that he didn't know anything about Sully either, but he would check into what happened to him. Stivers made me promise that I would start eating regular meals, and I promised him that I would. In retrospect, I realize that for two reasons, I had not been eating enough. First, the food was terrible after we lost Sully Mason as our chief steward's mate, sometimes so bad that we would joke about it: chicken legs that you could not penetrate with your teeth, for example, and other canned foods that were really inedible. Almost all of our food began to come from Australia, which was not that far away now. The second reason was that I was grieving and in a state of mourning for all of my friends that were either dead or missing, or gone from the ship. And I somehow felt guilty at times that I was still alive and they were all gone. It was very sad, and I remember that I immersed myself in work, and there was plenty of work to do, as I had acquired a good skill as a precision welder, and they put me to work actually manufacturing desks made of unusually thin metal. With the complication of their doors and hinges for the doors, most of the desks in the officers' staterooms were either badly damaged or ruined . When they discovered that I could do such a professionally looking job making metal desks, they insisted that I do them all. This was lightweight work compared to what I had been accustomed to, and I was kept busy doing this work all day, every day, for weeks on end. This made me not notice how weak and skinny that I had become.. I got so engrossed in this time-consuming work that I probably forgot to eat meals regularly . During this period, one of our original crew members whom I barely knew had gotten a letter from home that his wife was very ill, and he had requested from the ship's executive officer, Lt. Commander Evans, I believe, that he could get a leave of absence to go back home to be with his wife. Evans refused to allow him to leave the ship., even though I and at least six other men had agreed in writing that we would do all of his work while he was gone, and to make sure that he would not even be missed if he should be gone for a month or two. Cmdr. Evans still refused to let him go home, even though all of us knew that at this time, planes (especially big bombers) were ferrying cargo back and forth to the United States, often virtually empty on the return trip to the U.S. As word spread, the executive officer, became much disliked, because of his decision not to allow this common practice to send a man home on emergency leave. for a few days. We persisted with our efforts, to no avail. After a few weeks went by, the man was informed that his wife had died. When he got this information, he committed suicide. Shortly after this, I got into a fistfight and got a small knife stab wound in my chest (nothing serious, I thought. and also I believed it to be an accident, as the fight happened in the kitchen, and various knives were all over the kitchen). Several CPO's heard of the fight in the kitchen and reported it. So Commander Evans called me into his office with Lt. Stivers, who I believe at that time had just been promoted to Lt. Commander Stivers. Commander Evans started pressuring me to bring charges against the man that I had been fighting with, because he used a knife to stab me.. I would not complain about the guy. I said that it was nothing serious. It was just an argument. I did not want to get this guy in serious trouble. Commander Evans threatened me with insubordination if I did not tell him the truth about the fight. I was, in my opinion, telling him the truth, because the man told me it was an accident, and I think that it very well could have been an accident. Commander Evans seemed to get very angry and came on very strong to me. I came back strong to Commander Evans. I did not want this man to be sent to prison. I knew that if he were to be convicted of stabbing a fellow crewmember that he could be sent to naval prison, and that it would be on his record forever. I remember Evans pressuring me so strongly that maybe I raised my voice, and he shouted, "You can't talk to an officer like that." And then I said, "Everybody knows you're not fit to be an officer." I noticed that Lt. Commander Stivers looked startled and put his finger up to his lips to shush me. Cmdr. Evans then threatened to throw me in the brig. I looked at him and said, "Go ahead! Everybody on the ship knows that's where you store all of the beer and the booze.! I'll have a good time there!" Evans was almost purple with rage at this time. And there were several other junior officers in the room. Cmdr. Stivers bent over and whispered in Evans' ear something about the mast and the radar incident and I heard the words "Silver Star," and he was apparently telling Evans that I had climbed the mast to secure the radar. Evans calmed down, and he and Cmdr. Stivers left the room. It was about three or four weeks later that I was transferred off the ship. I was sent to a hospital in Guadalcanal. The Marines several months previously had captured Guadalcanal, and there were only a few Japanese holdouts left in the jungles of this rather large island at the time that I was there. I had noticed on my sea bag on the identification tag that it said that the reason for transfer was "Combat Fatigue," which was apparently a common diagnosis in World War !!. I stayed at Guadalcanal approximately a month. It was an interesting place, but otherwise uneventful, and I continued my practice that I had been doing ever since being sent out to the Pacific of giving my monthly pint of blood to the Red Cross, as fresh blood was always in need if you were anywhere near the combat zone. Later I found myself on a huge troop ship that had thousands of men on it, returning to the states. We were packed like sardines. I heard that there were five thousand men on this ship, and it seemed that all we had to eat for breakfast, lunch, or dinner was cabbage and potatoes. Noboby got fat, and the voyage took weeks until we got to the East Coast, somewhere in Virginia, I think. I don't really remember much about the trip, except that it was mostly extremely boring. I vaguely remember a place called Fort Eustace (Sp.?). I believe that there was a hospital there and a prison camp next to it full of German war prisoners. It seems that I stayed there with nothing to do for several weeks. I entertained myself somtimes by talking to the German war prisoners through the chain-link fence.. Many were very brazen and insulting as we would walk by the fence. But I got friendly with a couple of them, and would take them cigarettes and other goodies that they could not get enough of. A couple of the men could speak fluent English, and I talked to them about the war in the Pacific, that they were curious about. In conclusion, there are many other memories that come to mind that I suppressed for 30-40-50-60 years: the two seabags full of war souvenirs (jewel-encrusted Japanese officers' swords, caps, pistols, etc. that I had traded and bought from Marines who had conquered wo Jims, Guadalcanal and numerous other islands as we moved toward Japan). my relationship or affinity to the Marines was always good and it helped several times when we went ashore to re-supply our ship with food and other supplies, from supply warehouses or various islands, etc. etc., etc. (I, the only seventeen year old -everyone thought that I was older--would go with Sully Mason, our Chief Stewards's Mate, to negotiate with the Marines who were usually in charge of the warehouses on shore. Sully deserves the credit for doing such a great job, but he noticed that I could talk to the Marines and borrow their biggest trucks and landing craft to get the supplies out to our big ship, sometimes anchored a mile or more out in the harbor. Sully would ask Lt. Stivers (my boss) if he could borrow me for the day. Stivers would always let me go. Our ship was lucky to have Sullly as our Chief Steward's Mate, because he was a real "scrounger". Our lowly repair ship had the best food availaable: fresh (frozen) milk, vegetables, eggs, etc., that usually only went to battleships and destroyers, etc. Sully was taken off the "Mindy" without one arm and one leg and other injuries. I never found out if he lived or not, but he was a good man who was good at his job.) The food became so bad when Sully left that I'm sure that is the reason why I almost starved to death without realizing it, that and the day-after-day of horror that I lived with seemingly alone, as all of the crew members who were not killed or injured were replaced by strangers that I never got to know. One of the last ghastly things that I remember happened a few days before I was transferred off the ship. A group of about ten other oldtime crew members and I were sitting in one of our ship's largest compartment on the edge of a big work table. The ship was being tilted to raise one side out of the water for repairs, and all of a sudden, there was a large thump where a human head became dislodged from the ceiling and hit the deck and started rolling slowly, with a thumpity-thumpity-thump sound across the entire room. We just stared at it, and I remember one man said, "Who is that?"(Not, "What is that?"), but "Who is that?" I didn''t want to look at it, as it could have been one of my friends. While I was in Guadalcanal, I had noticed that the diagnosis on my chart had been changed from "Combat Fatigue" to "Operational Fatigue," which today would probably be called "Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome." As far as I can recall, I never received any treatment or medication for anything, and I probably never requested any. I never discussed my experiences with my family when I got home, and I had several cousins slightly older than I who were also in the war, in the European theater, but we never really talked about the war, that I recall. And before I left the war zone, we had been told over and over again never to discuss or write about the Mount Hood disaster. And I was only too happy to try to forget about it, as best I could. The only reason that I have written this story is that there are so many contradictions and lies about the explosion of the huge ammunition ship, USS Mt. Hood-E11, and the thousands of men killed, more than at Pearl Harbor,, and the thousands of tons of ships sunk, more than at Pearl Harbor. It was not an accident at all, but the result of enemy action by the Japanese Navy. I am one of the few eyewitnesses left, because I was only seventeen years old when the explosion occurred, and I actually saw one Japanese torpedo that missed its target and slid up on the beach undamaged. I talked to some of the men who actually saw the submarine. It was no accident. It was actually a great victory for the Japanese. That's why we were told to keep it a secret, and so we did. After the explosion, rumors circulated around the ship . We heard that the harbormaster was going to be court-martialled because he allowed an ammunition ship to be illegally parked too close to other ships. Later we heard that the court-martial was called off, because he was going to say that he had permission or was ordered to anchor the Mount Hood where it was so that it would be convenient to offload ammo and also receive new supplies of ammo from other ships coming from the United States. The Mount Hood was being used like a land-based ammunition supply dump. etc. etc., all against naval regulations. Also, there was supposed to be an anti-submarine net protecting the harbor, so that no enemy submarines could sneak into the harbor undetected. If the harbor-master's court-martial was called off and no charges were filed, that could only have come from the admiral in charge of the Pacific Fleet at that time. If no charges of negligence were ever filed, and if nobody was court-martialled, who was resposible for this gross negligence of enforcing naval regulations? This negligence caused the deaths of thousands of men. Who was in charge of this part of our Pacific Fleet at this time at Seeadler Harbor? Was it one of our "hero" admirals? Was it Admiral Chester Nimitz or Admiral Bull Halsey? Was it kept quiet because these men were considered war heroes by the American public? Need we embarrass these great men who were leading our Pacific Fleet into victory after victory and winning the war at that time? Why was this kept from the American public for so long a time? There is nobody to embarrass now. They are all dead. I may be , for all I know, the only living eyewitness to the slaughter of 3000 young men who were literally charged with negligence of carelessly mishandling ammunition that was being loaded and unloaded from the ammunition ship, when all of their deaths were due to enemy action. We were even told that the government did not want the Japanese to know what a great victory they had had. Then the government told the public that the explosion was due to some stupid accident or to carelessness. Somebody is lying somewhere, and it is the government's (or the navy's) version of the story that is wrong. I know what happened because I was there. The story needs to be told. The Mount Hood disaster may have been the greatest naval disaster in all history, and the truth about it needs to be told to the American public, the British and the Australians who were our allies, and yes, also the Japanese, who at the time were being pushed back and being conditioned for an invasion of their homeland. and being told to arm themselves with sticks and stones. And the women and children and remnants of the Japanese Army were told to fight to the death and to charge our tanks and our artillery and flame throwers, with no real weapons of their own because they had run out of raw materials to even manufacture any more of the very effective Kamakazi suicide planes that at this time were starting to demoralize much of our Pacific Fleet, that was getting close to the islands of Japan. Due to the law of "unintended consequences," the sucesssful atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed over a hundred thousand Japanese people later was estimated to have saved at least ten million or more Japanese people (!) and probably two million or more of the Allied Military Forces who were getting ready to invade Japan. Yes, the dropping of these two "horrible" bombs actually saved millions of lives, both Japanese and American, because it ended the war with Japan without an invasion of Japan! This should be taught in our public schools! David George Greenroos, Jr. 160 E. Middleton Dr. Henderson, Nevada 89015 (702)564-7402