Editor’s note: Bill Schmeling of Elizabeth, now 85, was a gunner in the U.S. Navy’s Squadron VB-84 during World War II. Here he recalls a period of six months during the war that included a kamikaze attack on his ship, the USS Bunker Hill. For his service, Schmeling was awarded several air medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
It was January 1945. After two years of schools, training and flying all over Jacksonville, Fla., San Diego and Santa Rosa, Calif., in both SBD Dauntless and SB2C Helldiver dive bombers, I was finally heading out for sea duty.
We left San Francisco harbor on Jan. 24 and slowly made our way under the Golden Gate Bridge on the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill. We were filled with pride but also apprehension as to what might lie ahead.
It is about 2,600 miles to Hawaii, so at 33 knots (38 mph) it took us just under three days to travel there. We had a short liberty in Honolulu, and the next morning headed west for an unknown destination.
As a squadron, we had no special duties aboard the ship. So until it was our time to go on a mission, we had nothing to do but sit and wait. Yet, needless to say, there were not many ship hands who would have traded places with us.
We played a lot of cards (pinochle), chess, poker, etc. At one point, I was plunking on a mandolin that someone had brought aboard and it made me miss the piano, terribly. There was one on board, in a cubicle on side of the hanger deck, but it was locked up. On occasion, a jazz band played up there.
Eventually we rendezvoused with other carriers and smaller vessels off the island of Ulithi in the Pacific. It was very hot and muggy and we were offered two bottles of tepid beer. I drank part of one and got sick, so threw the rest out.
After about six hours, we headed out. Next stop: Japan!
Several days later, we rendezvoused again with the rest of the fleet about 200 miles off the coast of Japan. It was “show time.” We were about to drop bombs on military installations, ships and factories.
The first flight left early the next morning. Their mission was to bomb the shipyards of Kyushu. I guess I didn’t fully realize the gravity of the situation until later, when the mates came back to the ready room and two were missing. They were shot down over the target. Immediately, the whole situation seemed surreal to me. They were not my closest buddies but they certainly were friends of mine. For the first time, I realized we were really in a war.
I was scheduled to go out at dawn the next morning, Feb. 24, 1945. Our mission was to bomb the Nakajima Tama engine plant, 12 miles from the emperor’s palace. To me, it seemed like we were going to drop bombs on the center of Tokyo. We had an extensive briefing the afternoon before the mission and after listening to the skipper, I was convinced that I wasn’t coming back from this mission. But I didn’t freak out, refuse to go, cry or anything. I thought, “Let’s do this thing; that’s what we’re here for.”
The next morning, we slowly climbed up to 15,000 feet in our SB2C Helldiver, a mono-wing two-man aircraft similar to its predecessor, the SBD Dauntless. My primary job in the second seat was to man a pair of 30-caliber machine guns and protect our rear and sides from enemy aircraft.
We headed directly for Mount Fuji, Japan. Soon we turned to the north and headed for the heart of Tokyo. “This is it,” I thought, and breathed a little prayer. We arrived over our target and went into a dive. Our wing flaps were opened somewhat to keep the plane from going too fast (it could never pull out of the dive otherwise). About halfway in the dive, I noticed black smoke streaming from beneath the wings. I alerted my pilot, Lt. Charles Stafford. Calmly, he replied: “Oh, I’m just firing my guns.” Finally, he dropped the bomb, pulled out about 400 feet above the target and started making his way out of there. I remember sighing in relief — but we weren’t out of the woods yet.
Stafford was a good, cool pilot. He descended to about 300 feet and zig-zagged across the rice fields. There was some shooting at us but they could not use big guns because of our low altitude.
The plane had been shaking somewhat ever since we started our run out. When we started for the water, it was shaking worse. Stafford told me later that we were hit in the “rocker box” and were losing oil. The shaking was from the engine’s lack of lubricant, causing it to run rough. It was only a matter of time and we would be forced to land.
Stafford babied the plane to the ocean, and the shaking was terrible. He told me to throw everything overboard that I could. Adrenalin kicked in. I threw out the guns, the ammunition cans and anything else I could find — except for the life raft. The plane was almost shaking apart by this time and Stafford was making a glide into the wind.
About 23 miles from the mainland, Stafford made a perfect water landing and sent out a distress signal. I got the life raft out and inflated it, and we stepped in without getting wet. American combat air patrol planes flew overhead and we were glad to see them. We were soon at a nearby destroyer’s side and climbed aboard.
On my second mission, we flew over Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Stafford flew to a scheduled target, dropped his bombs and flew back to the ship. I had nothing to do, no enemy planes to shoot at. After my second hop of this type, I thought I ought to do something, so I took a camera along and took pictures.
One day we had a very scary carrier landing. Our hook, used to stop the forward progress of the plane, jumped over all of the retaining cables and we crashed into the wire barrier. Up we went on the nose of the plane, almost over but not quite. Then we went crashing back down.
One day in May, we were all sitting around the ready room, some playing cards, some half dozing, others writing letters. Uncharacteristically, I went to lay down in my bunk at the front end (focile) of the ship. Suddenly, there was a loud boom. I ran up to the flight deck. “My God,” I thought, “we’ve been bombed!” Black smoke was billowing out from the base of the island; sailors were scurrying around in all directions. I was in utter shock. A chief finally yelled at me to get down to the hanger deck and try to help. I gave a black sailor CPR for at least a half an hour but could not save him.
A Japanese suicide bomber (kamikaze) had crashed into the base of the superstructure with 1,100 pounds of bombs. Thirty seconds later, a second plane exploded into the side of the carrier, leaving a huge hole. They came in low, under the radar, and no warning was sounded. There was no time to close hatches to prevent the circulation of deadly smoke; everyone was taken by surprise. Our ready room (where I would normally have been) was located very close to where the plane hit.
The force of the explosion jammed all of the escape hatches. All the men in our squadron were trapped in a furnace full of acrid, black smoke. But the worst was yet to come. We had to pry the hatch open and retrieve the bodies. They were all bunched up right below the hatch cover; black, charred corpses with barely perceptible terrified expressions frozen on their faces.
I helped in this operation without emotion. I had buried everything deep inside me . . . and it remained there for most of my life.
We learned later that six men managed to escape through a port hole and my pilot and others located in a different ready room managed to escape. But 373 men died on the Bunker Hill on that fateful day in May 1945, many of them from smoke inhalation on the lower decks.
We managed to limp back to port in Seattle. I can’t begin to express how lucky and thankful I felt that I was saved just because I decided to take a little nap in my bunk.
