chapter 4 | to love and serve
In Their Own Words
the bravest man i ever knew today is three days before the 14th anniversary of pearl harbor, which reminds me that some day soon i’ll be staring at a movie screen and reliving another naval tragedy – the most unforgettable day of my life. There, in the midst of a seaborne holocaust, I will see a wide grin topped by a helmet with a white cross. That will be someone acting like Joseph Timothy O’Callahan, and he may do it well, but he’ll never match the original.
F
ather O’Callahan was the bravest man I ever knew. A Jesuit and an instructor in mathematics and philosophy, he was a Lieutenant Commander and Senior Chaplain on the USS Franklin, a big aircraft carrier that I was commanding on March 19, 1945, about 50 Miles off the coast of Japan. Not long after dawn that morning, while we were launching aircraft, the Franklin was hit with two heavy bombs by a skilled Japanese dive bomber. Both bombs penetrated to the hangar deck, killing everyone inside. The planes on the flight deck were bounced into the air and came down in a pile, their churning propellers chopping into gas tanks and spilling about 17,000 gallons of fuel. The gasoline vapor went off with a tremendous blast and we were on fire from stem to stern on three decks. For four interminable hours blast after blast rocked the ship. All interior communications were destroyed, fire mains were cut, all power was lost. From my position on the bridge, it seemed that wherever I looked I could see a familiar battle helmet with a white cross painted on it. My navigator, Commander Stephen Jurika, didn’t overstate the case when he wrote in his log: “O’Callahan was everywhere, leading men, officiating at last rites, manning hoses and doing the work of 10 men.”
40 | in their own words
Thousand-pound bombs kept going off like firecrackers at a festival. The men would scurry away, only to meet the padre charging in after more of the wounded. Time and again they followed him. There are twin turrets fore and aft of the Franklin’s bridge – ammunition-handling rooms for five-inch anti-aircraft guns. In mid-morning the aft one blew up in the worst blast yet. I looked at the forward turret. Visible heat fumes were coming out of the top hatch, indicating it might be next to blow. I called to a group of men on deck to take a hose inside and cool it down. They didn’t understand but O’Callahan did. He recruited two other officers and the three of them went down into that oven-hot hole with a small emergency hose, knowing that it might blow sky-high any instant. A few minutes later O’Callahan’s smoke-grimed face grinned up at me from the hatch as he made the OK sign with his fingers. Then he and the other two officers passed out the ammo, still blistering hot, to a waiting line of men who tossed it overboard. I breathed a sigh of relief. If that turret had gone like the other one, the ship probably would have been abandoned and lost. I recommended Chaplain O’Callahan for the Congressional Medal of Honor, and it was
