A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (8 page)

Binder's shoulders shook violently as he opened up with his fifties. The NVA soldiers stood up in the sampans to return fire with their rifles. Williams had merely a split second to think: there was little room to turn around, there were no alternative routes to either side, and they were damned near among the enemy craft already. As he later said in an interview: “Ya'll got to understand. There weren't no exit ramp.” He pressed on.

The banks erupted in heavy fire. The unmistakable
thoonk
of mortar rounds could be heard in the midst of the chattering of automatic weapons and the cracking of rifles. Williams swerved left a little, then right, as much as the narrow canal would permit, trying to give his after gunner's grenade
launcher a clear shot. The enemy mortar rounds were not up to the PBRs' speed and missed both boats; the small-arms fire was equally unsuccessful. In another few seconds, the 105 had reached the first of the enemy sampans. Although they were already at full power, Williams leaned on the throttles and ran right over the first boat—then another, and another. The enemy was reduced to chaos as soldiers spilled into the canal from the stricken sampans and still others were rolled into the water by the PBRs' wakes. Soldiers along both banks fired at the boats as they streaked by, not realizing in the confusion that they were hitting their own men on the opposite banks.

The waterway narrowed even more, but still the PBRs roared on. Two 57-mm recoilless rifle rounds lashed out from the right-hand bank, hitting the 105 in the bow on the starboard side, but passing completely through, emerging from the port side and exploding among the NVA troops on the opposite bank. Throughout, Binder and his fellow crew members—Castlebury, Alderson, and Spatt—were firing for all they were worth. Brass shell casings rained onto the fiberglass decks as hundreds of rounds spewed out in every direction. The 99 was likewise spraying metal at a phenomenal rate as she followed close behind. The North Vietnamese were suffering staggering losses.

The two PBRs emerged from the gauntlet practically unscathed. The boats were pockmarked and holed, but miraculously no men were injured, all weapons were still working, and the engines were intact. Williams called on the radio for assistance from Navy Seawolf helicopters. Among the myriad troop-carrying sampans behind him, he had spotted several good-sized junks he suspected were carrying ammunition and supplies. Those and the troops remaining would make good hunting for the helicopter gunships.

Clear of the havoc, Williams slowed the patrol, intending to move on down the canal a safe distance and wait for the Seawolves before taking on that armada again. The PBRs cruised on for about 150 yards. The men on the boats were just beginning to relax when, after a right turn, they found themselves confronted by yet another imposing concentration of junks, sampans, and troops, even larger than the first. Prudence might have dictated that the PBRs should back off and wait for the Seawolves, but Williams never hesitated. He jammed on full power and headed in for an encore.

With the roar of the engines resonating off the banks of the canal, guns hammering relentlessly, and wakes boiling up behind them, the PBRs charged into battle. As in their previous encounter, they caught the NVA unprepared. The canal erupted in shooting, shouting, and explosions. Bullets
slapped the water on both sides of the 105, and fragments of fiberglass flew in every direction. Death was poised everywhere. But the Americans roared on through, their weapons chewing up sampans and felling enemy soldiers.

PBRs 105 and 99 emerged from the battle area, once again essentially intact, leaving a swath of destruction in their wake. But the battle had not yet ended. The radio came alive, announcing the arrival of the Seawolves. The pilots had made a pass over the two enemy staging areas that Williams's PBRs had passed through, and the lead pilot told Williams that the NVA was still there and that there were plenty of them left.

Williams replied, “I want y'all to go in there and hold a field day on them guys.”

“Wilco,” agreed the helicopter commander, adding, “What are
your
intentions?”

Williams hollered, “Well, I damn sure ain't goin' to stay here! I'm goin' back through.” And once again the 105 and 99 tore through the North Vietnamese regiments, this time with Seawolf support.

The helicopters swooped over the area again and again, 7.62-mm ammunition cascading from their M-60s. Rockets leaped from their side-mounted pods into the troop-infested jungle. Williams took full advantage of the PBRs' extraordinary maneuverability as he ran his craft among the enemy like a skier on an Olympic slalom. He had guessed right about the junks: the secondary explosions that erupted from the four that the PBRs and the helicopters nailed sent debris rocketing one thousand feet into the air. Williams pressed the attack relentlessly, undeterred by the maze of bullets and rockets and mortar rounds. As darkness came, the battle raged on, and Williams ordered the PBRs' searchlights turned on. When the water was finally devoid of targets, Williams drove in close to the shore seeking the enemy.

The whole battle had lasted more than three hours. The final assessment revealed that the NVA had lost hundreds of men. Sixty-five enemy vessels had been destroyed, and many prisoners were taken. Williams discovered a small piece of shrapnel in his side after the battle was over. Binder had taken a bullet through the wrist, which passed cleanly through the flesh and had not broken any bones. These were the only American casualties.

On 13 May 1968, in ceremonies held at the Pentagon, President Lyndon Johnson was having difficulty fastening the snaps at the back of the cravat of the Medal of Honor as he attempted to place it around the neck of James Elliott Williams. The struggling president said into Williams's ear, “Damn, Williams, you've got a big neck.” It's a wonder that Williams did not have a big head as well, for that Medal of Honor was placed in good company: along with his previously earned Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, the Navy
and Marine Corps Medal, three Bronze Stars, the Navy Commendation Medal, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry (with Palm and Gold Star), and three Purple Hearts.

Long before the carrier-centered fleets and amphibious task forces marched across the Pacific during World War II, U.S. submarines took the war to the Japanese by operating well behind enemy lines, even in the home waters of Japan. The courageous crews of these tiny, incredibly cramped warships took on the Japanese navy when they could and relentlessly attacked logistical shipping, slowly but surely depriving the enemy of fuel, food, and other necessities of war. It was a campaign that required a special kind of Sailor who was able to endure hardships for long periods of time, to face the dangers of the sea and the violence of the enemy on a regular basis, and to be ever adaptable and resourceful. Indeed, early in the war, the submarine
Seadragon
barely escaped from her base in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded, yet she returned time and again to the island of Corregidor, leaving her torpedoes behind to make room for food and other supplies desperately needed by the Allied forces trapped there.

USS
Seadragon.
One of the many American submarines that lurked behind enemy lines many hundreds of miles from their home bases during World War II.
U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

On 11 September 1942, she was patrolling well behind enemy lines in the southwest Pacific when Seaman First Class Darrell Dean Rector fell to the deck unconscious. Submarines did not often have the luxury of a doctor on board, so the matter fell to twenty-three-year-old Pharmacist's Mate Wheeler Lipes to diagnose the problem. Under the arduous conditions presented by life in a submarine, a collapsing Sailor was not all that unusual; men often succumbed to the gradually worsening atmosphere in a submerged sub or were brought down by simple exhaustion in the demanding environment.

But there was something about Rector's appearance that concerned Lipes. He kept the young Sailor under observation for a time and noted a rising temperature, increasing rigidity of the abdominal muscles, and a tendency for the patient to flex his right leg up toward his abdomen for relief from the increasing discomfort he felt. Lipes went to see the skipper, Lieutenant Commander William Ferrall, and told him that he was certain Rector had appendicitis and that it was a severe case, requiring surgery sooner rather than later.

The captain asked, “What can we do for him?”

The pharmacist's mate answered, “Without a surgeon, nothing.”

Ferrall looked at Lipes for a long moment, then asked, “Can you do it?”

Forerunners to those miracle workers we call hospital corpsmen today, Navy pharmacist's mates in World War II were very capable people. They routinely saw to a wide variety of medical needs and treated many different kinds of ailments aboard naval vessels. But major surgery was not among their practical factors for advancement. Lipes was understandably reluctant to take on such a responsibility.

Ferrall pressed, “I fire torpedoes every day and miss.”

Lipes responded, “But
I
only get one shot.”

Yet Rector was certainly going to die unless something drastic could be done.
Seadragon
was hundreds of miles from the nearest friendly doctor. Lipes seemed the only hope. He told his captain he would do it.

Rector was told of the situation and the plan. Frightened as he was, the suffering Rector said, “Whatever Lipes wants to do is okay with me.”

The skipper ordered
Seadragon
to submerge to a quiet depth, and Lipes selected a team of assistants from among the crew. Surgical implements were as scarce as surgeons on the submarine, so Lipes had to improvise. Shipmates rigged a searchlight over the wardroom table, bent spoons to serve as muscle retractors, and converted a tea strainer into an ether mask. They sterilized the instruments by boiling them in torpedo alcohol and water. While these preparations were going on, Lipes carefully studied the medical books in sick bay.

When all was ready, they carried the patient into the wardroom and stretched him out on the table where the officers ate their meals. With his shipmates at the controls of the submarine holding the vessel as steady as they possibly could, Darrell Rector went under the knife held by Wheeler Lipes. After a clean incision, with one of the assistants holding back the layers of muscle with the bent spoons, Lipes went in.

To his consternation, he could not find the appendix at first. “Oh, my God!” he thought. “Is this guy reversed?” He knew that a very small percentage of people had their appendix on the opposite side. But after some careful probing beneath the cecum—the so-called blind gut—he discovered the elusive organ. Lipes later described the procedure: “I turned the cecum over. The appendix, which was five inches long, was adhered, buried at the distal tip, and looked gangrenous two-thirds of the way. What luck, I thought. My first one couldn't be easy. I detached the appendix, tied it off in two places, and then removed it after which I cauterized the stump with phenol. I then neutralized the phenol with torpedo alcohol. There was no penicillin in those days.”

Lipes then sewed up the incision with catgut and applied an antiseptic powder he had made by grinding up sulfa tablets, and
Seadragon
went back to war, her complement intact.

A later official report, written by the Submarine Squadron Two medical officer, summed up that doctor's assessment of the operation: “It is by no means desirable to encourage major surgical procedures on naval personnel by other than qualified surgeons, yet in this particular instance, it appears that deliberation and cautious restraint preceded the operation; the operation was performed under difficult circumstances and with pioneering fortitude and resourcefulness; and the result was entirely satisfactory.”

Like most professionals, submariners have a language all their own. During the war, it was common practice for submariners to refer to a radioman as a “brass pounder” (because he spent much of his time operating a brass Morse-code key), a sonar man as a “ping jockey” (because of the sound emitted by an active sonar), and a pharmacist's mate as a “quack.” After 11 September 1942, the crew of
Seadragon
referred to Wheeler Lipes only as “Doctor.”

As darkness gave way to morning light on 25 October 1944, the wind barely whispered across the calm surface of the Philippine Sea. Intermittent rain squalls occasionally disturbed the otherwise tranquil scene but provided the six small escort aircraft carriers (CVEs), three destroyers, and four destroyer
escorts of Taffy 3 with “fresh-water wash-downs” that rinsed some of the glistening salt from their weather decks. This northernmost of three Seventh Fleet escort carrier task groups (with designated radio call signs “Taffy 1,” “Taffy 2,” and “Taffy 3”) had been steaming all night east of the island of Samar, waiting for daybreak so that flight operations could be resumed in support of the amphibious landing on Leyte Island.