Bill Wright, who is now eighty-two years old, has spoken very freely about his experience on the Belleau Wood during the decade I have known him, but he recently told me that he only started opening up about it when he was in his sixties. He didn’t talk about the attack on his ship for more than forty years. When I asked him why, his response was a simple, “I just didn’t.”
On October 13, 1944, Bill, a Seaman First Class and Aviation Metal Smith Striker, was on board the Belleau Wood when a Japanese fighter plane slammed into the deck of the U.S.S. Franklin, which was sailing alongside the Belleau Wood en route to Okinawa. The crew of the Belleau Wood swiftly launched six fighters of its own when another Japanese plane appeared. Seconds later it slammed into the after end of the Belleau Wood. There were 245 casualties by the time the inferno was extinguished, many of them severely burned. Ninety-seven men died.
Bill and one of his fellow seamen were at their stations in a small room below deck that housed controls for the ship’s sprinkler system, which happened to be very near the point of impact. Their petty officer had been killed when the plane hit. As the room began filling with smoke, the door opened and two officers appeared with a wounded seventeen-year-old seaman. Amid the chaos and the carnage, Bill was ordered to tend to the injured young man. He was eighteen-years-old at the time and had no medical training.
At first, Bill couldn’t tell where the younger man had been injured. Upon closer inspection, he realized that the “kid” (as Bill now refers to him) had an enormous hole in his side.
Here’s a part of the story that I have not been able to shake since I first heard it, many years ago. As the injured young man lay on the floor crying out for his mother, Bill looked into the wound and saw what appeared to be “two hard-boiled eggs” inside his body. He later learned those were the man’s adrenal glands.
.gif){kind=icon}
