MOUNT VERNON — Navy seaman Paul Wells was on his way to the ship’s supply room on the USS Honolulu, a World War II cruiser, when a Japanese torpedo blew a huge hole in the side of the ship. The blow inflicted over 100 casualties and unleashed pandemonium on board.
“When the torpedo hit, I ran topside,” he said. “I was standing at the stern of the ship, ready to jump overboard. ... You’re just so scared you don’t know what to do.”
Wells still lives in Fredericktown, where he grew up, worked and raised a family. He said the USS Honolulu had spent a week bombarding a beach on Leyte Island in the Philippines before Gen. Douglass MacArthur’s arrival on Oct. 20, 1944.
“There was not so much as a tree left standing on that beach,” he said.
The USS Honolulu was one of over 700 ships that took part in the Leyte invasion, the allies’ largest amphibious campaign in the Pacific. The Battle of Leyte followed MacArthur’s arrival and ultimately led to the reconquest of the Philippines from the Empire of Japan.
Wells said the USS Honolulu was the first large ship in the harbor at Leyte Island. A small mine-sweeping vessel had cleared the way. He said he was one of a number of seamen whose job it was to operate the range-finder, a device used to help direct the firing of the ship’s large guns.
The Japanese bomber’s torpedo struck the USS Honolulu on the same day as MacArthur’s return, according to Wells. The crew had been on the lookout for the bomber for some time, and had fired smaller guns at it. Wells said that several of his comrades were taking a shower. He was going to take a shower, too, but first went to the supply room at the stern of the ship to get some shaving cream. The torpedo struck about 4 p.m., and left a 40-by-50-foot hole in the ship’s port side, hitting near the ammunition locker, just below the bunks where many seamen were quartered.
The ship began to sink on to the side it had been hit. At their commander’s orders, men hurriedly moved what equipment they could to the starboard side. Wells said that about a half an hour later, the ship leveled out, and the captain recinded an earlier order to abandon ship.
Later that night, a British ship that had been shelling the beach accidently hit the USS Honolulu’s superstructure. But that wasn’t the end of it.
“We had Chinese boys that were mess boys for the officers,” he said. “One went out of his mind. He cut up a sailor with a butcher knife. He was running loose on the ship all night long, and they couldn’t find him. None of us could sleep. The next day they found him ... sleeping on the anchor in the anchor locker.”
The cruiser sailed for the base in Papua New Guinea the next day, Wells said. A Navy crew went underwater and welded a large plate over the hole, and the cruiser was put into a dry dock. According to Wells, some of the dead eventually were buried in Manila, the capital of the Philippines; others were buried at sea.
“They couldn’t get the men out who were down below deck, where it was flooded,” he said. “Most of them I knew were in that part of the ship. They tried to get me to go in and help get the bodies out, and I could not do it.”
Wells said he had never seen anybody buried at sea. Crewmen laid the body on a stretcher, put a canvass sleeping bag down, then laid the body on the sleeping bag and tied a heavy projectile between the legs with belts. He said they then put another sleeping bag on top and tied it along the sides with rope.
“I didn’t know the body doesn’t go all the way to the bottom. For each body that was buried, they wrote down the longitude and the latitude, so when the information was sent back home, [family members] knew just where the body was in the ocean,” Wells said.
On Oct. 29, 1944, the USS Honolulu departed for Norfolk, Va. It stopped at Pearl Harbor and San Diego along the way and, from there, travelled to and through the Panama Canal before reaching its east coast destination in October 1945. According to Wells, the ship was decommissioned in Philadelphia on Jan. 8, 1946, and later sold for scrap.
It was in Philadelphia that Wells met his future wife, Peggy. The couple recently celebrated its 60th wedding anniversary.
When Wells first laid eyes on the ship in Thanksgiving 1943, he said he asked himself, “What have I gotten myself into?” He said he was drafted straight out of high school, around 1942.
The USS Honolulu had sustained considerable damage during the attack on Pearl Harbor but had been repaired.
The cruiser was a speedy ship of 32.7 knots, the newspaper The Honolulu Advertiser reported during the war. It was launched in 1937 and commissioned the following year.
“The Honolulu became one of the proud names of the furious sea and air battles of the Pacific war,” wrote Advertiser reporter Earl Albert Selle. He also wrote that the ship sunk an enemy cruiser, four destroyers and four Japanese aircraft in its career.
Wells participated in nine campaigns on the USS Honolulu, bombarding islands like Saipan and Guam to prepare for land invasion. One of about 1,300 seamen on board, he said he could never forget the sight of a sunken cruiser in the south Pacific they passed on the way to the naval base in Papua New Guinea. Wells said the water was so clear one could see the sunken ship.
“It didn’t give you a very good feeling to see that ship laying at the bottom of the ocean,” he said.
Well said his faith in God helped him through those difficult times. He said he doesn’t think much about how a chance trip to the supply room saved his life.
“I know it was was meant to be,” he said. “I was always under the impression that when your time comes to go, no matter where you are, the Lord’s going to take you if it’s your time.”