Salute

December 7. The day will forever live in infamy.

Today, my paper had a story that makes me both proud and amazed.

TIME TO REMEMBER

USS Nevada's Pearl Harbor ordeal recalled

Sixty-five years ago today, Woody Derby was sitting on his bunk aboard the USS Nevada finishing breakfast and reading a newspaper when a call blared from loudspeakers to man the battle stations.

"I said, 'What the hell do they want to do that on Sunday for?'" the 88-year-old former sailor recalled Wednesday about the historic Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Nevada.

In minutes, "the hell" would happen when the first torpedo and bombs slammed the ship, the first of many more that the 27,500-ton battleship would endure. The ship later survived a pair of nuclear tests in 1946.

Derby, one of about 20 remaining survivors from the attack on the Nevada at Pearl Harbor, spent seven years and two months aboard the ship.

In a telephone interview from Honolulu, he said he will place a wreathe [oh, for heaven's sake, can't you people spellcheck? - s.] today to commemorate the day. He is proud to note that the Nevada is the only ship in the Navy that was present for both the Pearl Harbor attack and D-Day, June 6, 1944, off Utah Beach, for the Normandy invasion.

But it was Pearl Harbor, the ship's home port, that became Derby's yardstick for measuring death and destruction.

"There was tremendous damage," he said about a torpedo that struck near his turret. "We had water up to our waists, and it was still rising."

His battle station was below deck of a magazine that shot 5-inch shells, not ones designed for knocking out Japanese warplanes. Nevertheless, "they said send up ammunition. They wanted live ammunition, and we started gunning it up."

"We were hit by seven bombs and many near-misses from all the planes coming in," he said. "It was a desperate time."

In a heroic effort to avoid sinking in the harbor and becoming an obstacle, the Nevada steamed to beach itself in shallow water.

Derby, who at the time was a 23-year-old from Wapello, Iowa, spent much of the day on the third deck helping fight fires. That was not what he had expected he'd be doing when he joined the Navy on Dec. 7, 1938.

"Three years later was a bad day," he said.

"We moved right past the Arizona, which had blown up," he said. "The fire was so hot that when we went by, guys had to put their bodies on the ammunition and the shells that we were getting ready to fire to keep them from exploding." [emphasis mine]

Derby, who has stayed in shape over the years by running marathons -- 21 after age 58 -- said during much of the attack he was below deck and couldn't see what was happening.

Despite all the explosions, he said, "I wasn't scared because I didn't have time to be. The fire in the forward part of the ship was a very bad thing."

The Nevada, with the help of tugs, managed to make it to shallow water off Waipio Point.

"We beached it right next to the USS Shaw, which was hit by two bombs. .... (The Nevada) settled to the bottom," Derby said.

"That afternoon, about 4:30, they removed 57 bodies -- 50 sailors and seven Marines -- and 100 seriously wounded," he said.

Derby stayed with the ship while it endured salvage work and temporary repairs and steamed to the West Coast in April 1942. After a year in dry dock, the vintage-1916 Nevada, equipped with a new anti-aircraft gun battery, was off to combat again during the Attu landings in May 1943, according to the Naval Historical Center.

Derby said the ship's crew size grew from 1,350 sailors to 2,500. After the Attu landings the Nevada sailed to the mid-Atlantic where her guns pounded Normandy during the invasion in June 1944 and southern France two months later.

The ship returned to the Pacific to help with the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions in 1945. It endured a kamikaze attack on March 27, 1945 and an artillery shell on April 5, 1945.

After World War II, the Nevada was painted red, Derby said, and put at center stage among other dilapidated ships used in a pair of nuclear bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Though damaged and heavily tainted with fallout, it survived both the airdrop Able detonation on June 30, 1946 and the underwater Baker blast on July 24, 1946. A month later it was decommissioned.

"It sat radioactive hot for two years at Kwajalein," he said.

The USS Nevada was later towed to the deep waters southwest of Oahu and purposely sunk by gunfire and torpedoes on July 31, 1948.

All those boys. All that chaos. No matter how many accounts of the day I read, no matter how many times I read them, my amazement and respect are never diminished. What on earth compels a human being to throw his own fragile body over live ammunition to keep it from exploding in the heat? How would you even know to do such a thing?

Every day of that war saw acts of heroism. Some days inspired more than others. To salute every last one would take the rest of my life.

So today, I simply thank Woody Derby. And I thank all those who served with the Nevada. You helped make this world, imperfect as it may be, one that I am grateful for.