Glen Radder: Gunner's Mate 3/c

You know how it is in the service. You are trained for a certain job and are delegated to an area to save your ship in case of an attack.

When the G.Q. (general quarters) sounds, you go to your station. There's never any doubt about what you are going to do.
This may all sound routine. But when you go below deck and can't see anything, the only thing you can do is the crew to pass the powder and shells up to the handling room as fast as possible and have a lot of faith in your gun mount crew's accuracy.

As we started taking hits, it was pretty scary because we could feel the ship shake but didn't know how bad it was.

After several hits, the power cut out. We started turning the cranks to run the hoists up manually. Pretty soon the emergency power came on. That was a relief. It wasn't too long until we took a couple more hits and the power was out again. There was no more emergency power, so we started cranking again.

In a little while, I got the word to secure the station and send the crew topside. No one argued with that. I secured the hatches as we went. When we got topside, there were still some Japs flying around. I got up to the forecastle just in time to see a plane drop a bomb. The plane, with 20mm shells all around it, bounced off the sides until it landed right at Jack Ondracek's feet
and blew open the ward room. The plane passed along the ship and crashed off the port side. That was the last one that came in, but it got several of our shipmates (including Ondracek, Torpedoman 3/c).

After that, it was a case of just trying to keep her from going down. By the fantail, I was in the after compartment trying to keep the pump intakes clear of clothing and debris so we could pump the water out.

It sure wasn't a pretty sight when I finally got a chance to look around. The amazing thing was that our whaleboat, which was right next to a 40mm mount that had exploding ammunition and fires, wasn't hurt at all. There were many other things that I saw, like that Jap that crashed into the rear head, was sitting on his motor fried to a crisp. It was a real gory sight. As I looked
around, I started thinking that maybe you don't know what's going on when you're below deck but at times it may be the lesser of two evils.