Days of Steel Rain

Austin, Texas
Fall 2006

The old man thumbed slowly through the photographs, both he and the images showing the ravages of time. For my grandfather, age brought weathered flesh and atrophied muscle, one hand covered in intravenous tubing and bandage tape. The photos he hadn’t seen in decades showed age in their own way—black-and-white contrast faded into mottled shades of brown. He studied each image but said nothing; the only sounds in the room were rasps of breath punctuated by the rhythmic beeps of medical equipment and the IV drip.

Perhaps he has forgotten all of it. I felt myself slump on the inside. Oh, Paw-paw…

Image after image of youthful men—boys, really—all crisp uniforms and smiles surrounded by military trucks, government-issue tents, and palm trees…men of a different era, their thoughts and dreams only hinted at by snapshots in time. Paw-paw standing on his head in ocean surf, surrounded by his buddies, vibrant with their lives ahead of them.

So many years had passed. The old man finally paused at one photo, fixated on a face…and he began to chuckle. “I could write you a book about this guy!” he pointed. Memories unlocked and poured in. My grandfather spent the next hour relating vignettes from his time in the Pacific Theater during World War II. His stories always centered on humor, perhaps because that was the type of tale most accessible for those of us who hadn’t been there.

As we walked through the parking garage on our way out of the hospital, Dad validated the decision to bring the stack of old photos to lift Paw-paw’s spirits. “That was probably the best medicine he could have had.” My grandfather hung on for a while longer, but his cancer ultimately took him from us. I secured his Good Conduct Medal lapel pin to his coat when I said goodbye to him; it felt right to bury him with it. And sadness aside, I was proud to see the American flag draped over his casket at the service.

His best friend had been one of the first American casualties of the war, killed in action aboard USS West Virginia in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Weeks later Paw-paw learned my grandmother was pregnant with their first child, and the following fall he had to leave her and his newborn son behind in Austin when his draft number was called. He didn’t see his son again for more than three years.

When he stepped off the train just before Thanksgiving in 1945, wearing his Army dress uniform with a “ruptured duck” Honorable Discharge patch, a little boy at the Third Street depot recognized him from photos mailed back home and came up to hug his legs. “Hi Daddy,” were the first words my grandfather ever heard his son speak.

That little boy, my father, stood next to me some sixty years later at Paw-paw’s graveside service. He pointed out the nearby VA marker for Lawrence Jones, my grandfather’s older brother. “Uncle Lawrence—now he was the one who saw real action in the war…But he never talked about it.”

He never talked about it. Those words resonated, filled me with intrigue and yet sadness. Where my grandfather Sonny Jones reveled in sharing his stories from the war, Lawrence Jones found ways to talk about anything else. Lawrence never had children, yet was always so grandfatherly to me. He was the oldest brother, married long before the war…How was he the one who ended up in combat? I never knew anything of his US Navy service and now could never ask. Dad knew very little beyond a ship name—USS Astoria. Something about them seeing Kamikaze attacks, but nothing to elaborate on that; Uncle Lawrence never talked about it. He did, however, tend to grow faint at the sight of blood. There was a story there somewhere.

Perhaps if I had found a book or website chronicling the wartime experiences of USS Astoria, that would have been the end of that. I set to work to learn more, and what began as a search about a dear family member’s World War II experience quickly grew. I tracked down a reunion association muster roll and started making phone calls, interviewing shipmates. A few men even remembered Uncle Lawrence, “Jonesy” to them. Families and other surviving shipmates found me online and reached out to contribute; some sent money to help fund a modest web page I built. Stories poured in, along with photographs and original documents—artifacts tucked away in dresser drawers, in shoe boxes under beds, hidden from sight, long forgotten and neglected.

New contact with families each year picked up around the holidays, driven by gatherings where a grandfather or granduncle’s name came up and someone started searching online. Emails also spiked around Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Most of these men had passed on, but the one thing most common in my correspondence with family members was the Silence. “Dad never spoke about his time in the Navy…,” “We don’t know much, would love to learn more…,” and so on.

He never talked about it.

This book is intended to help break the Silence. Not just regarding the officers and men of the USS Astoria, but the hundreds of thousands of sailors and Marines who served in the late Pacific War. A number of them did talk about it in later years and agreed to be interviewed for this project. I was fortunate to record the vivid recollections of some scattered throughout the United States who served side by side. Many remained razor-sharp in their knowledge of important details, their memories prompted by photos, film, and reviews of primary documents.

Many depictions of the Pacific War conjure images of sailors suffering steaming tropical heat supporting jungle warfare. For the men in this narrative, there is a kernel of truth beneath the mythos. Yet the late war Navy in the western Pacific also endured a very different experience—often cold, usually wet (“It was always raining”), and typhoon after typhoon. They were closing on the enemy at his doorstep, an enemy determined to preserve his way of life against the largest military force ever assembled, equally determined to assert that of America and its allies.

For the Okinawa Campaign of 1945, the final major offensive operation of the war, the Navy again suffered ratios of men killed in action at sea versus Marines fighting on land as had occurred at Guadalcanal three years prior. The difference was the enemy threat no longer came from the surface, but instead from the sky. Young Japanese men and boys were tapped to fly to their deaths by crashing into the American ships bringing destruction to their shores. Neither side understood the mindset and values of the other, resulting in a prolonged and cataclysmic final year of warfare.

The fathers and grandfathers, brothers and uncles who never talked about it knew things; they had seen things. They knew the boredom of routine punctuated by moments of terror—days of nothing much to mention shattered by events where every second mattered. These men knew the smell of burning flesh mixed with fuel oil and melting steel. They often witnessed it up close and personal. Many knew the screams of desperate men spilling over the rail from another ship to their own via any available lifeline. They knew the sharp crack of .30-caliber rounds over a vast expanse of water as lifeless shapes were turned out overboard under American flags.

But such things were rarely discussed, even among one another. Perhaps the most deafening sound from reunions I attended came in the silences between stories. Men looked down at their drinks and they remembered. They would scoff at any attempt to label them heroes. The other guy always had it rougher, and the heroes were the ones who didn’t come home.

Much of what follows came from private collections and family holdings. Crafting this story could not have been possible without the efforts of many dozens of sailors, Marines, and their families. Individually their contributions might be limited in scope, but as this sprawling jigsaw puzzle was assembled a remarkably clear picture began to emerge. Their artifacts and recollections came together to breathe life into a perspective on the Pacific War that has been largely obscured by time, a story of regular people living through extraordinary events.

I will never know the full nature of my granduncle’s experience, nor will so many others whose family members adhered to the Silence and have left us. But in every possible way, this account has been written from the perspective of its participants who served with them in the final year of the Pacific War—the year of the Kamikaze.