All The Gallant Men

All the Gallant Men, An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor, by Donald Stratton, with Ken Gire, William Morrow 2017

When Donald Stratton, a kid from Red Cloud, Nebraska signed up for the Navy in 1940, he had never seen the ocean, knew nothing of the size of battleships and destroyers, but he needed work.  The Great Depression was still holding on to US jobs, and many people were hungry.  In Red Cloud, Stratton remembers that his family "had a garden, a few chickens, some pigs, "  but they never owned their own home.or even had indoor plumbing.

When Stratton graduated from high school in May, 1940, there were few, if any, full time jobs, and farm work was hard.  But a Navy recruiter came to town, a chief petty officer who set up his booth in the post office, handing out literature.  "It didn't look so bad.   They paid your way to see the world, giving you free room and board.  And to top it off, a paycheck of twenty-one dollars a month.  A steady paycheck."  Sounded like an easy decision for the nineteen-year-old who soon found himself on the way to Omaha, then Illinois for training,.... and the Pacific.

Stratton became one of the 1511 men on the USS Arizona, a battleship made of 33,000 tons of tempered steel.  "Quite a sight for a flatlander like me..., one of the two largest battleships in the Navy's fleet, ... two football fields long and 97 feet wide... four turrets, each featuring three .45-caliber, 14-inch guns that weighed 93 tons.  And she had twenty-two .51-caliber, 5-inch antiaircraft guns and four .50-caliber, 3-inch guns.  I never saw anything like it in my life."  The ship carried 1.5M gallons of fuel.

Stratton fell into the shipboard routine - work, sleep, the mess hall, football games, occasional concerts from the ship's band, a group of musicians whose duty assignments were to work in the munitions storage area,  and even movies on the fantail.  Stratton loved the ocean, loved his new buddies, and probably felt, despite rumors of Japanese subs and other naval movement, that it would go on forever.

But in the early morning of December 7 the world learned that the rumors of Japanese naval movements were true.  Between 6:10 and 6:20 a.m Japanese carriers launched 181 planes - the first wave - including 51 dive bombers, 40 torpedo bombers, 49 horizontal bombers, and 43 fighters.  The Arizona and her sister ships. some 185 anchored in the harbor that morning - 8 battleships, 12 heavy cruisers, 9 light cruisers, 53 destroyers, along with some auxiliary vessels - tankers, repair ships, and a hospital ship -   didn't have a chance.  

At 7 am. two spotters noted a large blip on their radar screen in Opana Point Radar Station.  One was convinced that it was a formation of planes approaching Oahu.  But by 7 am the Japanese had launched their second wave of attack planes.  Although the spotter reported the blip on his radar screen, he was told that a squadron of B-17s was scheduled to arrive from the West Coast, and that's what he was seeing.  He turned off the screen and went to breakfast.  

But by then the US fleet was indefensible.  Despite brave crewmen's attempts to shoot down planes, the Japanese had prepared well and long for this attack, and even their torpedoes were adjusted to strike the ships in exactly their most vulnerable spots.  In a matter of minutes the harbor was exploding as oil, burned metal, bodies and aircraft turned what had been a quiet Sunday morning into hell on earth.  Of Arizona's 1511 member crew, 300+ survived, and now Donald Stratton,  some 77 years later, stands as one of only five Arizona survivors.

Burned over sixty-five percent of his body, Stratton was saved and found the medics.  Despite refusing his doctor's recommendation to amputate his legs, Stratton soldiered on through multiple surgeries and long rehabs, making his way back home to Nebraska where he realized that although much had changed, he needed to be back on board ship.  Stratton managed to re-enlist, endured another round of basic training, and saw action on a destroyer in Admiral Haley's fleet.

All the Gallant Men is more than a well-written, powerful survivor's personal memoir.  It is, in the post 9/11 era, an opportunity to think and remember, to reflect on what went wrong, how the US responded, and the nature of the oil embargo and expansion drive that analysts believed fueled Japan's short-sighted campaign.  Could the entire Pacific war have been averted?  Were the two atomic bomb strikes absolutely necessary given what had preceded them?  Stratton covers these questions well at the conclusion of his book.  

Readers will be struck by the horror of the Pearl Harbor attack.  Hearing the words that only a survivor could speak, we come to understand just a bit of the terrible loss of life, of family dreams, of unfinished lives, that these World War II veterans experienced.

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, https://sites.google.com/site/blueheronjournal/, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, pemoody@aol.com