An Interview with Jack M. Williams

This begins an interview with Mr. Jack M. Williams on November 10, 1995 in Stillwater, Oklahoma

I went out after ... VT-1 finally got organized and they got ready for the big, you know, battle back in the Pacific. ... After the battle of Midway, ... they were very short on carriers. And so they were waiting for some Essex class carriers to come out and one of them was the Yorktown. See the original Yorktown was sunk, the CV-5, at the Battle of Midway. Then ... there was another one that was on the ways. It was an Essex class carrier that they decided to rename. ... I think it was the Bon Homme Richard originally; they named it the Yorktown, CV-10. And, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt, you know, ... dedicated it when it was launched. ... You've ... either seen the movie or heard, called The Fighting Lady, which ... was narrated by Robert Taylor. But anyway, that's the Yorktown, that's the ship I was on. So I actually served on the Yorktown for about three months in combat.

And the Yorktown formed an association in 1948 so they could continue to meet the people who were on it. And ... that was the year that I just got out of Rutgers, and I happened to be in New York City. I was working for AT&T and saw this notice that Yorktown was having an organizational group, alumni association, and they couldn't find--I found out later--they couldn't find a place that they could afford to, where they could drink beer. So Rupert's Brewery made it available to them. So I just went to it and recently we've had, you know, they have a big picture and all and everybody in it, that was at the original one, they gave us plaques because we attended the first reunion, and I've been a member ever since 1948.

Question: And you have been going to the reunions.

Jack Williams: Of the Yorktown, itself. And, you see, the Yorktown--most of them were scrapped--the Yorktown is in the water, in the mud, really, but it's in the water, at Charleston, South Carolina. The state of South Carolina bought it for a dollar, ... twenty years ago, moved it down there. And it's a national shrine; it's a museum. It has memorials to all the other carriers that have already been destroyed. It lists all the people that were killed in all those different carriers; it's a fantastic program. They have over a million people a year that go to it, and, if you ever get a chance, ever, you must go to it. ... We go there about every other year in October, when we have our reunions. And ... there's pictures of our squadron in there, of course. In fact, ... one of the chairs has been bought in my honor ... in the theater that they have, where they show the Fighting Lady movie. And ... we ... took almost our whole family; we took nine of us last year.

Question: Let me ask you some questions about the Yorktown.

Jack Williams: Yeah, this is the key. ..,

Question: This is what you have been trained to do. I have some basic questions about the ship and your relationship with the ship's crew. I have been to the Intrepid in New York Harbor.

Jack Williams: Right, it's the same class.

Question: One of the things that is most striking about the Intrepid is that the hangars are huge, and very impressive, but the rest of the ship is very cramped.

Jack Williams: Yeah, [there's] not a lot of space.

Question: Not a lot of space, even for the officers.

Jack Williams: No there wasn't. ... It was ... basically designed to get 'em in and get 'em out. I mean it wasn't a ... plush living area. I brought some things along which you may be interested in. Even though you can't see them on the tape we can talk about them. This is the ... cruise book of the Yorktown, the whole thing. This is Jacko Clark, who was our skipper, who was born in Oklahoma and what not. ... I've been giving these things to the kids lately. ... Let me just put those over here.

Question: I don't want those to blow away.

Jack Williams: Yeah, it will. But what I want to show you, because ... these are all the people who were on the ship, the executive officers, Jacko Clark, who was an admiral, one of the outstanding carrier admirals in the whole country. ... Different ones. This was Arthur Radford; he was the admiral in charge of the Task Force, which was 58. Then, this was one of the other ones; then, this was Jacko Clark who was mostly part Indian. And, I just finished reading his book called Carrier Admiral, and my son's reading it now. This was our skipper when I was on board.

Question: Captain Ralph Edwards Jennings was your skipper.

Jack Williams: Yeah, he was our skipper. You see, the ship ... was out there for quite a while, but the air groups had such high losses that they had to replace them about every two or three months, even less than that, in our case. So we were only out there ... from June until the end of August.

Question: And then they took you off.

Jack Williams: They ... took us off and put ... another group on there. We were Torpedo Squadron One. And we were in the first battle of the Philippines Sea against the Japanese fleet, the Marianas Turkey Shoot.

Question: You were in the great air battles of the later part of the war. The Marianas Turkey Shoot was one of the crucial battles of the war.

Jack Williams: Right. That was more for fighters than anything else. I mean, but we were on the ship; we were operating off the ship. And we were-- our squadron and our air group really--we supported the invasions of Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Palau, Peleliu, ... all of those things. ... Once again, now, the way I tell this, is I'm on that surf board, see; somebody shoved it, and I just went along with it. I mean, ... this is the story, ... I didn't oppose it, I was just there. Had I opposed it, I probably wouldn't be here so, you know, who knows? Anyway these are just some of the different people that we've known. And that, of course, is a picture of the ship. And you see that ship ... on the Fighting Navy movie.

Question: One of the questions regarding aviation and about ships is that they are very cramped, and they is also a need for a lot of discipline and order.

Jack Williams: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I agree, yeah. ... We had a marine detachment on board to maintain discipline because, you know, if, if somebody really acted up, you don't have time to sentence him. What are you going to do with him? I mean the brig just gets so full. So, ... I can't say exactly what they did to him, but they usually didn't come home from the cruise.

Question: In terms of the ship, a lot of people in the navy said that it's much more comfortable, at least in terms of the food and some of the other necessities.

Jack Williams: Oh, yeah.

Question: What do you remember about your meals on board?

Jack Williams: Well, how lucky can you be, you know, with the other guys eating out of ... ration cans on the beach? And we're having, of course, we had too many ... powdered eggs, we had too much ham. We had ham, I guess, for 102 days, I think one time. But it seemed like it. But we ate very well. We were very well served. I mean we were the elite really as far as ... treatment goes.

Question: Would your food be better? As an officer you are eating in the officer's ...

Jack Williams: See we had what's called the officer's mess, and then you have the enlisted men's mess.

Question: Now, is your mess separate from the regular ward room?

Jack Williams: Yes. Well, no. The ward room was the officer's ward room. You'd have your ships officers would eat there; your pilots would eat there. Then you had your enlisted ... men's mess in which our crews would be part of, and the ship's crew as well.

Question: So you would eat with the sea officers? They didn't separate the pilots and have the pilots eating separately?

Jack Williams: No, no, no, no. We were, the officers were all together. These are pictures on the ship itself, actually. ... Air Group Five was aboard before we were. And then, these are some combat shots taken, you know, during the ship's operation. You see that one? ... If you've seen the movie, the one that is coming in very, very low, just barely crosses the stern of the ship. And over here is my group. See Air Group One, that was our group, that was what I was in. And that was what we did, that was the number of planes shot down, number of ships sunk, bombs dropped, thing like that. And I think I got an Air Medal, you know, for sinking a ... bombing freighter at Chichi Jima. And it was burning when we left it. Might tell you something about that later on. But this just shows you when we were aboard it, some of the activities you asked about, what they did. That's my squadron, that's the ship, you know, just different type of activities that they had aboard the ship.

Question: Now were these the ship's stewards, these group of black sailors?

Jack Williams: It's possible. They probably were, I would think they were. You know that ... was a normal type thing to happen. They could have ... even been marines, some of them could have been marines. But when ... we would go down south to replenish or go to Majuro or somewhere like that.

Question: Is this one of the beer parties? Did you have any beer parties while you were on the Yorktown?

Jack Williams: We never had any beer parties, particularly on the Yorktown. When you come down from a strike, it was sort of automatic ... for the doctor to give you a little three-ounce thing of bourbon, and I would collect them. So when we had a break in action we could have a party or something.

Question: Some of the fondest memories of sailors is their beer parties. The pilots are this separate class that got to drink.

Jack Williams: See it's different. You don't have an officer's club on a ship. Now when it comes to getting at shore, then beer parties, sure, that's what everybody goes to [at] the officer's club. When I was in VT-21, ... that's where I was the night I called Margaret, in the officer's club at the bar. I mean, that was just sort of normal, but on the ship you don't have that at all. ... See, earlier, we always made pre-dawn strikes, so we'd be up at 4:00 in the morning and we'd take off at 5:30 when it was dark. The reason is you wanted to hit your target coming in out of the dark; they couldn't see you. So, ... and you learn a lot of habits and discipline and that, too. I mean, I can get up. I don't like to get up, but I'm an earlier starter. I mean, I can get up and start running, I may fall in an hour, but Margaret ... she can't get up and get started for two or three hours, but then she may be up all night long. And these are just more pictures of the ship itself. It's kind of interesting what happened.

Question: You mentioned that you would get this bourbon and, even occasionally, have a party on board. What did you do when you were not flying, or you were not being briefed for a mission?

Jack Williams: Well, you usually, when you're on the ship, if you're in combat areas, ... you know, you're usually doing something. You're either in the ready room, that may be a time ... to rest.

Question: But if you're in a combat area, you're really spending most of your time in the ready room if you're not sleeping.

Jack Williams: Yeah, I think so; there's not much [to do]. Oh, you may go to the ward room or something like that, have coffee or read. They had a library there. They had a piano. I'd play the piano from time to time, you know, just for fun. But you've got to visualize that the reason those guys are there is just to fight a war. I mean, they're there to take down an objective so that somebody else can go; they're there to shoot down a Japanese plane; there to ... sink ships; there to destroy anti-aircraft guns, bomb runways, and, you know, you could be making a couple strikes a day. So by the time that ... you get up, and you make a strike, come back and you were debriefed, I mean, you report what you did, what you saw, [and] all that sort of thing in your ready room, and then you have lunch, and then you have more briefings about the next one if you're going to go out, you go out again. Well, you know, by the time that's all over, you come back and debrief, you're all ready, after dinner probably, to hit the sack because you're going to have another early start tomorrow. Now they may ... pull out of that area, and you may not be flying. If your squadron is flying, you're flying. If they were not to be flying on one particular day, then you know, you're free; they probably have volleyball games. ... They may have movies, they were usually not good movies. But they were old movies, you know, and it was the typical type of thing that you had.

Question: Of course, you do not have a lot of recreational options, too.

Jack Williams: No, there's no recreational options. This is interesting and I'll tell you more about that later-- prisoner of war camps.

Question: Did you ever go to services aboard the ship?

Jack Williams: Yeah, we had services every Sunday morning. We had a Catholic chaplain on board and we had a ... Protestant chaplain on board.

Question: And how many pilots, pilots--and air crew--would go to services? Would you see the whole squadron, or a whole chunk of the squadron, or more?

Jack Williams: You probably saw a good many of them, I guess. ... The memories I have most clearly, probably, are of burials at sea. Now, you normally would have your ... simple services on Sunday. Or you would find that there would be services the night before an operation. In other words, if we were going to, say, make any strikes on Guam, before the invasion, before we actually got up close enough to make our strikes, the chaplains would have services for people. And he would pray for the safety of the pilots and crew and the ship's company and all that sort of thing. It was ... a pretty nice thing, but when ... we lost some of our planes, and we lost quite a few of them. ... Some of them were lost in the water; we never did recover them. But if they crashed on deck or something like that, then watching them do the service, standing there, ... I was kind of moved by that, you might say. Especially when the weighted sack goes over the side.

Question: How did you feel about that? I mean, you lose a lot of people you know.

Jack Williams: Yeah, ... you see, fortunately, once again, I wasn't close to the squadron when we started. So it wasn't the same as if you lost a guy that you grew up with and practiced with and drank with every night or something like that. When I first went out on the Yorktown, naturally I was an ensign, so I was one of the junior officers. So they had what they called "junior officers country," which is up in the ... the forward part of the ship. See, the JGs and above, the lieutenant JGs ... shared a room, which is fine. But the ensigns all ended up, and they were kind of like, you've seen the enlisted men's quarters, I think, and they are really snug and tight. ... The "junior officers country" was the same way. They were a little better mattresses, a little better, but they were still hung, like maybe 5 or 6 high. So you'd have to climb up to get on the sixth one. And we had a plane on the ship which was called a SB2C, for a while. That was a Curtis Hell Diver, it was a dive bomber. We had a lot of problems with it. The dive brakes weren't working properly. I think it was in five or six weeks, there were five or six guys over my head who went straight in in those things. I mean, they were there one morning, and they weren't there that night. I mean, it was just that way, week after week after week. They finally withdrew the planes, put the SBD's back on board. I can remember that in officer's country. I didn't know the guys, but I just knew that they weren't there anymore.

... We had some ... interesting experiences, ... the crew reminded me of it-- one of the guys that flew with me, last week. We had taken off the Yorktown, we'd made a strike on the Bonin Islands, you have ... Iwo Jima here, Chichi Jima up north; it's called the Bonin Island group. The Bonin Islands were ... owned by Japan. ... We knew nothing about what they had. ... I started to make a run on Chichi Jima, and our job was to go in. Well, if you can picture; ... this is water here, a neck of water, and here you've got an air field, and here you've got military installations. You have freighters tied up, unloading, and they were using it as a staging base so that they could resist the invasion of Guam, okay. So our job was to go up there and knock out the freighters and whatever else that was around there. But we didn't know anything about the islands. ... Normally, you know, you would have a chart, a map that would tell you what the island looked like, where your targets were. Mine set on the lower left hand corner of just the outline of the islands from the National Geographic Magazine, 1936, can you believe? That's all we had to go on, they didn't know anything about it. ... So anyway ... all of us pushed over, and in the navy, you know, you hear of the army air corps will go in at 15,000 feet and drop their bombs. The navy goes in and they dive down, and they'll either go in as a dive bomber, they'll go 90 degrees straight down, or they'll glide bomb. Well, the torpedo bombers were glide bombers, we didn't drop torpedoes as much as we dropped bombs. So we'd glide bomb. We'd go down in a glide, maybe 45 degrees or something like that.

Question: So you really got close to you target.

Jack Williams: Oh, yeah, we were right on top of them. See, as a matter of fact, ... our job was to skip bomb these bombs into these freighters. Well, you've got to skip bomb from 50 feet, or as low as you can get. And the skipper, ...he died last year, but he was a fantastically fine guy. ...

Question: Walter Henry was your squadron skipper.

Jack Williams: He was our skipper, this is our executive officer and this is the air group commander. ...

Question: Dean Peters was your ...

Jack Williams: Yeah, ... I thought he was air group commander, but he may have been ... Fighting Ones' commander that they shipped over. But this guy was here last year in Reno, nice guy. But anyway, ... the skipper weighed a lot. He weighed probably 280-300 pounds, and I don't weigh that much. But we went down together, and the only reason I figured he beat me down was that he weighed more than I did. Those planes were redlined; they had like about ... 280, 260, and mine was about way past the redline, and I don't have any idea how fast we were going. But, anyway, we got down there. We got down there with about 100 or 200 feet off the ground and dropped the bombs, and they skipped right off the docks, practically, into the freighter, and then they would blow up inside the freighter. But what we didn't realize, what we didn't know was out there was the anti-aircraft fire. These things were all out there like a shooting gallery, and they all started to shoot at us, and we had about 80 planes, all in a coordinated attack. And we were all within 200 feet of each other going out here with these people shooting at us. And I didn't realize until I got out there, and I even knew better, but I didn't think about it, but I kept seeing these red, little red balls, you know. ... Afterwards I realized that there was just one of those for every five. So there was five times as much as we actually saw. Well, going out, this guy reminded me last week, he told ... my sons this last year in Charleston, because I hadn't told him about it. And he said, he was ... flying radioman, and he said, "Everytime there was a burst, a black burst of anti-aircraft fire, I would turn into the burst, just automatically." I guess subconsciously I figured, hell, they weren't going to shoot the same place twice. So if they hit one here I'd go here, if they shoot there I'd go there. And it worked.

Question: And you did it automatically?

Jack Williams: I did it automatically.

Question: Because that is something that ...

Jack Williams: Yeah, I was, it was a challenge to me. I thought what the hell, I'm not going to get-- anyway, and this is an interesting story, because it fits in with George Bush's story; all of this, is tied in together. We go out of that thing, and we get out of there. And one of our planes gets shot down in there. So the other, I'm glad I didn't know this at the time. Everybody else went back, except one other plane and myself, and we stayed around because we had the section leader, probably, and myself. We stayed around to ... to call for submarine and rescue sub to come and get a dumbo in there, a flying boat, because the Japanese were coming off the beach, coming out to get Keeler and his two crewmen. And they were all right. ... In fact, we dropped them another life raft that we had in the bomb bay. And we stayed around, and we stayed around and stayed around and, finally, we were getting low on gas, and we still had 200 miles to get back to the ship. And so, finally, we had to leave them. When we got back to the ship, it was getting dark, and they picked us up, and we landed. And they told me to ...

Question: So you ran out of gas.

Jack Williams: Well, they told me to move up on the flight deck, and as soon as I hit the throttle, why, it stopped, which meant that there wasn't any gas left, so we were pretty lucky after about a four or five hour flight to do that. Anyway in the meantime, ... Keeler is back there, ... and he gets captured, and the crew too, by the Japanese. And we found out, about seven years ago, that the Japanese cut their heads off and ate them; they cannibalized. ... And that was brought out in Bush's book because he was shot down at the same place. He was shot down in ... September of 1944 at Chichi Jima Harbor, same strikes that we were in. His were in September, and he was rescued by a submarine.

Question: If you were shot down and you survived the crash into the water, how much assurance did you have, how much hope did you have that you would be rescued by a submarine or by airplane?

Jack Williams: Well, you hoped you would, but probably not very much. And the reason is, you see, at that time, we didn't have helicopters for rescue. You had to get somebody that was on, either on a station, you know, like a lifeguard station they called it, on a submarine ...

Question: So they did have patrol perimeters for submarines.

Jack Williams: Well, yeah, they were developing, you know, rescue systems. And they had what they called the "lifeguard system," and that consisted of a designated submarine, and you knew where the submarine was located, and you knew where the dumbos were supposed to be, the flying boats, and ... you could call them. You had a certain channel that you called them on, which we did, of course. But, the chances of ... them being in any more than one spot are not good. You could have demands for their services all over, ... not just in that area. But ... that was a real serious problem. If you went down, you know, if you got ashore, maybe you could save yourself, protect yourself, but you didn't have much chance, unless you went in making a landing or something of that nature, or if you, maybe, got hit and came back and had to make a landing in the water you could get rescued. Yeah, I saw a real close friend ... go in off the bow. I was about to take off right after him, and he lost power and went right in. ... Both of his crew got out and I watched him try and get out, and he couldn't get out, and he sank right there [with me] looking at him from the ship.

Question: And there is nothing you could do.

Jack Williams: There's nothing you can do, no ... And this is the reason why you can't prey on this kind of thing, people who do, you know, get in trouble. I can remember, ... once again, ... that I'm doing the job of the place that I was put to be there. So anyway, the Yorktown had a fantastic reputation. It ... it was the finest carrier probably ever in the Pacific, had the best reputation. It got, of course, the presidential unit citation for its operations. It was better maintained and it just is a fantastic ship. And ... I have a lot of videos, I have a lot of books on it and things of that nature.

Question: Two questions regarding combat. How scared were you when you were actually under fire-- your first mission when you actually made contact with the enemy?

Jack Williams: Well ... that's a good question. Let me just show you right here. Here I am right here. ... This was our squadron, and here's some more; there may be some more ... pictures. ... I made copies of this recently for both our boys because I knew that they'd probably want them. ... This is where the guys had their wives with them, that we were involved with. That's why I say we were stepchildren, or foster children, whatever you want to call it.

Question: Their wives were with them in Hawaii?

Jack Williams: ... I think the ones you saw in Hawaii probably were local girls. These were probably taken on the east coast because they were trained in Florida. And that's the skipper; he was there and she was there. ... Anyway, you were asking that question about combat.

Question: Although you had a lot of training, and you can crash, but you do not have a lot of people shooting at you.

Jack Williams: ... I can honestly say this, that the first strike we made, on Guam, which was the first island that we went after, our job was to go in there and drop bombs on the air strip, knock out anti-aircraft positions, things like that. ... I can remember, just in the group, just flying parallel to the island, at about, oh, maybe 10,000 feet, the whole group had been going to get ready to make our run. And I can remember looking over there and wanting to throw up something awful. I mean, and I had the dry heaves. I literally could not; I had breakfast, but ... it was a nervous thing, and I thought, "My God, I'm going to get killed!" That real[ly] went through my mind; that was the one thing I didn't want to have happen. Whatever my life held, I sure didn't want to get it there. But as soon as we turned, and they gave the signal, everybody pushed over, and they started to pick up the anti-aircraft fire, I forgot all about that. And I suddenly found myself in competition with the guy that was shooting at me. And it was a whole different world. That's why I say I can, once I get started, I'm all right. ...

Question: It was more the thought of it than ...

Jack Williams: Oh yeah. I just think it runs in our family. We have sensitive stomachs, I guess.

Question: Another question. One person I just interviewed recalls how he was told in training that he would be mesmerized by flack for, like, the first minute or two until they really realized what this was. When you first experienced flack, what was your impressions of it?

Jack Williams: Well, see, the difference between us and the air force was that the air force had to fly through it; we could fly around it or under it or over it. In other words, individually, I never thought about the fact that it would kill you, I mean ... the thought never occurred to me. I knew what it was ... if somebody shoots at me and there's burst here, and I go for it, then I'm not worried about what's in it; I'm worried about the next damn thing coming up.

Question: It sounds like in some ways you had much more control than the Flying Fortress.

Jack Williams: We had more independence; we had more flexibility. We could literally fly ourselves out of situations and often did. Whereas we weren't dropping, you know, a mass of bombs, we were dropping individual bombs on selected targets from very low altitudes. Yeah, that's a very good point. ... I had a new gunner come out, one time; he ... couldn't have been more than seventeen years old--[his] first combat mission--and he said, "What do I do?" ... I said, "Well if you see somebody shoot at them." But I said, ... "I'll tell you what, if you see ... anything unusual out there, just let out a yell, so at least I'll know and ... maybe I can take some evasive action, if that's what it is." Well, we got pushed over in a dive at about 12,000 feet, and that kid started to scream, and he screamed all the way down until we dropped our bombs and went on out. After we got back to the ship I said, "What in the hell was going on? What were you screaming about?" And he didn't know what he was saying, he said, "Well there were these little black bursts up behind the plane. ... They were right by our tail about 20 feet behind. They went (-------------?) all the way down." And I told him, I said, "Well that was anti-aircraft fire." And he requested to be transferred, and he was; they let him out of there. ...

Question: He really could not take it?

Jack Williams: And plus the fact that had I been a half a second slower-- see, that Jap didn't have me on radar; he had me on manual and he was just trying to follow me down--but he was just a half a second behind, otherwise we wouldn't be here today. So that's ...

Question: You had a lot of close calls.

Jack Williams: Probably, but I didn't think about it as close calls at the time. I was more interested in the objective. I learned flying off a carrier, especially landing [on] a carrier, you've got seven wires. And I don't care what wire I get as long as I get a wire. So, if I clear the stern of the ship and get a wire, that's great, and that's the way I feel even today. As long as I can survive a situation, that's fine; it doesn't bother me. The fact that I went through it is not as important as where I ended up.

Question: You had a gunner and a radioman.

Jack Williams: Right, I have not been able to keep up with the gunner, who was up in New York State. We did for a while, but then we lost track of him. But the radioman I still keep in touch with. He didn't come to our meeting. He's up in Portland ... in Oregon, has a farm, a red-headed kid, or was a red headed kid.

Question: You got to know them fairly well.

Jack Williams: Yeah, ... he I knew--he and his family. As a matter of fact, it's a very unusual family. After we came back off the Yorktown--this kind of gets intermixed now-- ... those of us that were the so-called step kids, the replacements, we organized the new squadron. So now we were, I was a JG, you know, we were the guys with experience. So now we were the leaders of the squadron, and so we reorganized the squadron, but we had to train. ... I didn't know this until, I've been reading a lot of stuff lately. We were really training for the invasion of Japan, ... so we had winter flight training.

We were training in Alameda, California, which is right next to San Francisco, between San Francisco and Oakland. And we went out to Fallon, Nevada for winter flight training. While we were out there, it was Thanksgiving, and my wife was living in Alameda, I guess, at that time. But this radioman of mine and his wife were out there living in a shack. I told somebody about this at dinner the other night, ... they wanted to be together, so they had this little ol' shack. They had a pot stove in the shack, and that's the only way they kept warm. And so she said that ... "She was going to be fixing Thanksgiving dinner; would I come and have dinner with them?" Which I did. And she had cooked a turkey on this pot stove out in the middle of a desert in Fallon, Nevada. And I was their guest for dinner. So it was kind of interesting. And, of course, he came with me all the way through the second tour and came out of it okay.

Question: So you in a sense, were on the ship, your squadron got taken off.

Jack Williams: Yeah.

Question: And you were reassigned to start a new squadron.

Jack Williams: Right. So we organized a new squadron with the same number, VT-1. See, when ... the Yorktown came back because it had taken a bomb and ... we needed new aircraft and some new personnel and things. So they went back to Bremerton, Washington, which is where they do a lot of shipbuilding. That was its home port. So they wanted to redo that. And we came in there, and then we all left from there, climbed down the side of the ship actually on ... these rope ladders they got, like the marines use, ... went on over to Sand Point Naval Air Station and picked up some planes.

Question: You mention your ship had taken a bomb. Were you on the ship when the bomb hit?

Jack Williams: ... Let's see, I don't believe that I was on it ... when it took the bomb. It was a 500-pound bomb, but I think it was when somebody else was on it before, ... and they needed to do some repair on it or something like that.

Question: Where you ever aboard the ship when you were attacked by Japanese aircraft?

Jack Williams: Well, yeah, of course, we were on the ship. ... You'd see that all the time.

Question: Yeah, but sometimes you could be in the air and the ship would be attacked.

Jack Williams: Oh yeah. No.

Question: What was it like to be taking ...

Jack Williams: ... It's ... pretty treacherous really, it's scary. But ... I had more of that on the next ship that I was on, rather than on the Yorktown. See, the guys, most of the guys on the Yorktown didn't go out again, except for the five or six of us who reorganized the squadron. We got new fellahs and went out. But ... we went out on the Bennington the second time, which is an Essex class carrier also. And we operated, actually, the last three months of the war in '45. We operated over Japan every day. I was making strikes on Kure Harbor, shipping, air fields; we'd make strikes up on Hokkaido, ... I mean, the China side of Hokkaido. But our job was to go in and destroy airplanes, and we were really taking them out on that. But they had this group of planes that were doing the kamikaze attacks, and they were coming off Okinawa, which is why they were wanting to invade Okinawa. So ... they were coming in, and we had a lot of those; we'd see them come in. And ... they'd dive on your ships; you could see them coming down on other ships. ... This happened more off the Bennington. That was Task Force 38.1, whereas, the one we were on, the Yorktown, was 58.1. At that time, they would have fighter cover. They'd keep fighters up, ... fighter patrols around to try to pick up enemy planes when they were coming in, ... and that was a tough job. But then, in '45, they had developed a system of the destroyer guard. They put them out 50 miles out around the fleet. ...




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