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chapter 4 to love and serve

In Their Own Words

the bravest man i ever knew

today is three days before the

14 th 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 ofa 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.

Father 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 offthe coast ofJapan.

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 offuel. The gasoline vapor went offwith 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 of10 men.”

Thousand-pound bombs kept going offlike firecrackers at a festival. The men would scurry away, only to meet the padre charging in after more ofthe wounded. Time and again they followed him.

There are twin turrets fore and aft ofthe 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 ofthe top hatch, indicating it might be next to blow. I called to a group ofmen 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 ofthem 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 ofmen who tossed it overboard. I breathed a sigh ofrelief. Ifthat 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 ofHonor, and it was

chapter 4 to love and serve

approved. The President himselfpresented the medal, the only similar award to a chaplain since the Navy’s Medal ofHonor was created in 1861.

I am not a Catholic. I have been asked why I recommended the Congressional Medal for O’Callahan and only Navy Crosses for the two officers who accompanied him into the jaws ofdeath. To a sea-going professional the answer is obvious. The other two men were line officers. It was not “above and beyond the call ofduty” for them to risk their lives to save the ship. But it was no part ofthe chaplain’s duty to help carry that hose into a dark, hot and explosive turret. He just went. In the afternoon another Jap plane sprayed us with bullets. The padre, on deck, didn’t even look up. “Why didn’t you duck? I shouted. He grinned and yelled back: “God won’t let me go until He’s ready.” Maybe that explained everything. We got a tow late in the day and managed to outlive the night. By morning we had part ofour power again and managed to limp back to Pearl Harbor, the worst-damaged Navy ship ever to reach port. With 432 dead and more than 1,000 wounded, ours was the greatest casualty list in Navy history. All the way back Chaplain O’Callahan was the life ofthe party. He helped organize a band with dish pans and tubs and he wrote parodies of familiar songs to keep the boys in humor. The Jewish lads aboard, who had no chaplain oftheir own faith, got tired ofhearing the Irish boast about their padre. “He’s our padre, too,” one ofthem declared. “To us he’s Rabbi Joe, you jerks.” The story got around. Years later, I received a note from O’Callahan signed, “Yours in Christ, Rabbi Joe.” Now, a decade after the disaster, Columbia Studios in Hollywood is working on a film, Battle Stations, based on the Franklin’s travail and on the heroism ofChaplain O’Callahan, who’ll have a fictitious name in the movie. He’s back at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he taught before the war. Three years ofgeneral combat service on carriers didn’t help his health any. I hear he has suffered a stroke and is now a semi-invalid although he hopes to teach again soon. His spirits are still high, I’m told. They would be. I pray God isn’t ready to let him go for a long time to come.

Rear Admiral Leslie E. Gehres, USN (Ret.) 11

11 Leslie E. Gehres, “…The Bravest Man I ever Knew,” The American Weekly. (December 1955).