Firsthand Accounts from the Crew of USS Dale’s Escape From Pearl Harbor

By Michael Olson | MHQ  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

My job that night was to let the bridge know when the anchor was free of the bottom. The job quickly became a nightmare, because every time I turned on my flashlight to check on the anchor, some nervous guard on the beach would send a few rounds of .50-caliber tracer bullets over our head.

Gaddis: Ensign Radell had been in continual command of Dale from the first moments of the attack, and was plenty glad to see Captain Rorschach come aboard outside of Pearl that Monday afternoon. In appreciation, Captain Rorschach allowed Radell to keep the conn on the way back into Pearl that night with the task force.

I was standing watch up on the flying bridge when Captain Rorschach lit up a cigarette to calm his nerves. There was a lot of incredible maneuvering we had to do in the dark that night, so there was a lot for him to be nervous about. But when his match flared, we took a couple of rounds from one of the guards posted along the harbor. I quickly walked to the other side of the bridge, but the captain followed. He took a deep drag, his cigarette flared, and we took another few rounds. I walked to the other side of the bridge, the captain again followed, and several more rounds again smacked into steel behind us. “What the hell are those guys shooting at?” he exclaimed.

“I think they’re shooting at your cigarette, Sir!” I answered. He then flipped the cigarette over the side, which drew a few more rounds, and that was the end of Captain Rorschach’s cigarettes for the night.

Schnabel: Dawn brought a scene of unimaginable disaster. Fires smoldered and smoke rose everywhere you looked in the harbor. We tied up to the tender, which went right to work repairing our burned-out bearing. The crew was still very much on edge, and we went to General Quarters many times throughout the day.

Reichert: Looking up Battleship Row that morning, I couldn’t see a single mast standing tall and straight. All of them were cocked sideways, which meant our battleships were either sunk or sinking.

“Dutch” Smith: You know, if the big battleships like Nevada had their watertight integrity together, they would have been darn hard to sink. But it was Sunday morning, and all the hatchways were wide open. They just caught us with our pants down. There’s one thing the Japanese didn’t count on, though. By taking out all the old battleships, they increased the speed of the fleet from twenty-one knots to thirty knots!

Michael Olson interviewed 44 crewmen of USS Dale before writing Autobiography of a Tin Can (Zenith, 2007), from which this article is adapted. He writes for newspapers and magazines from Santa Cruz, California.

This article was written by Michael Olson and originally published in the Summer 2007 issue of MHQ Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ magazine today!

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Sea-Air Operations, World War II

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