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SIERRA VISTA — Floyd Turner hadn’t been in his rack too long before he was awakened by the call to “man your battle stations.”
Having just gotten off midwatch from midnight to 4 a.m., Turner had made his way down to his tight sleeping quarters on the USS St. Louis, expecting a quiet Sunday in the pleasant warmth of a Hawaiian harbor.
But the Japanese had other plans for him and thousands of other sailors the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. The naval might of the Japanese empire struck Pearl Harbor and other American military installations on the island of Oahu in the then territory of Hawaii, an act that officially brought the United States into World War II.
The soon-to-be 89-year-old remembers the surreal and shattering early morning general quarters call to head for his battle station in one of the light cruiser’s 6-inch gun turrets.
  
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“I picked up my pillow and blanket and headed top side through the galley, stopping for a quick drink of water,” Turner said.
As far as he knew, the call to battle station could have been another drill. If he had the time, he was going to make himself comfortable in the gun turret until the exercise was over.
But it was no drill. Turner realized that as he came out onto the deck and saw Japanese planes flying overhead, heard explosions going off near the St. Louis and smelled burning bunker fuel flaming on the harbor’s water.
The cruiser, one of the more modern Navy ships, having been commissioned in May 1939, had been tied up for minor repair work near battleship row.
Not far from the St. Louis was the USS Arizona, which soon exploded, sinking in less than 10 minutes after a bomb hit the ship’s forward ammunition magazine, killing more than 1,100 of the ship’s crew of sailors and Marines.
At one time, Turner said, two enemy aircraft flew over the St. Louis heading for the Arizona “and I thought they were so low I could have lit a match on the bottom of one of those planes.”
Leaving the harbor under fire
Many movies made about the attack on Pearl Harbor have scenes of mass confusion involving crews of American ships. Turner said he does not remember that being the case, at least on the St. Louis.
Although the ship was undergoing maintenance, the crew was able to get the boilers going and back the ship out of where it was tied up so the captain could take her out of the harbor, Turner said.
Using the 6-inch guns to shoot down attacking Japanese aircraft was out of the question because the weapons were designed for bombardment. Besides, Turner said, he and other crew members manned fire hoses to force flames on the water away from their ship.
As the light cruiser moved to escape the tight confinement of Pearl Harbor, numerous American ships were being bombed and torpedoed. Ahead of the St. Louis, the battleship USS Nevada also was trying to escape the conflagration. But that ship was a main target of the Japanese. Turner believes it is because the USS Nevada still had wooden planks on her deck, making the ship look like an aircraft carrier.
The Japanese wanted to hit the American aircraft carriers, but they were out to sea on the day of the attack.
Prior to the day of the attack, the Nevada and other ships had been out of the harbor on training maneuvers, and the Nevada became an aircraft carrier for the exercise to give Navy pilots the opportunity to attack the ship, Turner said.
“The old Nevada was at sea for 17 days and was hit by a number of flour bombs,” he said.
Little did he or any other American sailor know that about a half year after the attack on Pearl Harbor the American and Japanese navies would fight a major and war-changing aircraft carrier battle near Midway.
A concern for the St. Louis’ crew was that the Nevada may have been so badly hit by the Japanese that it would have gone down, blockading the exit from the harbor. The Nevada’s captain beached his ship to keep the channel opened, allowing the St. Louis to get out of the harbor.
“We were the only major ship to get out of Pearl that day,” Turner said.
But getting out of the harbor wasn’t easy.
As the St. Louis approached the area separating the harbor from the ocean, a Japanese midget submarine was spotted.
Fortunately, the two torpedoes it launched toward the ship exploded on the reef, Turner said.
One of the 5-inch mounts fired on the submarine. To this day, it is a matter of dispute if the submarine was hit as stated in the USS St. Louis’ captain’s official reports, which also noted apparently at least three Japanese airplanes were also shot down by the ship’s gunners.
Once out of the harbor, the light cruiser and some destroyers, as well as other ships that were out at sea during the attack, became a small task force hunting the Japanese.
When Turner’s ship returned to Pearl Harbor, the sight that greeted him and the others aboard CL-49, the St. Louis’ number, was utter destruction.
“It was unbelievable,” Turner said.
Soon, he and other shipmates would experience the destruction up close.
Like many, he was assigned to a work detail, one that was gruesomely grotesque. He and others worked from small boats to pull remains from the water.
“We could only do it for two or three hours at a time,” Turner noted.
The smell of death was overpowering, and the work was horrific, he remember.
“One time I reached for a hand, expecting to pull a body out of the water,” Turner said. “All there was, was the hand.”
Turner in the Navy
Little did he know when he enlisted in the Navy in 1940 that he would find himself part of a world war.
Turner was born on Jan. 27, 1920, in Morrison, Tenn. A boy of the Depression, Turner grew up in farm family, leaving school when he was 14.
The Great Depression was hard on people, and families had to struggle to make money, he remembered.
“I worked any place I could make a dollar,” Turner said.
In 1940, a friend came home on Navy furlough and asked him to join the sea service. There wasn’t much binding him to Tennessee, except family, as jobs were not plentiful.
After boot camp, Turner shipped out on the USS St. Louis. He spent a little time on the ship as she plied the Atlantic and Caribbean before heading to Hawaii.
Even before its official entry into World War II, the United States provided escort help to convoys heading to Great Britain and other areas. Once in the Pacific, the USS St. Louis took part in providing support to convoys in that ocean as the United States built up some of its far-flung possessions.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, the cruiser took part in protecting convoys between the West Coast and Hawaii, as well as providing protection for material delivered to Midway and other islands, including to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska.
The cruiser eventually went to Vallejo, Calif., for repairs. While there, Turner and a few other gunners from the ship were sent back east to become crew members of the USS Essex, CV-9, a new aircraft carrier being readied at the Newport News Shipyard and Dry Dock in Virginia.
After its shakedown cruise, the aircraft carrier went through the Panama Canal and took part in most of the major engagements in the Pacific, as the United States slowly pushed the Japanese back from their earlier conquests.
His shipboard duties on the Essex was on 40 mm guns.
During the many battles Turner took part in, a kamikaze once crashed into some 20 mm gun mounts, killing a number of gunners.
The Essex saw combat off Tarawa, the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Island, the Philippines, Okinawa, Formosa, China and eventually the Japanese home islands.
After the war, the ship sailed to Bremerton, Wash. While there performing shore guard duty, Turner heard about the opportunity to volunteer to be a member of an underwater demolition team.
“I became a frogman,” he said.
His new duty eventually saw him take part in action in Inchon harbor during the Korean War to destroy some obstacles before the United States made an amphibious landing.
After that mission that, he came down with double pneumonia, leading to a stint in naval hospitals in Guam, Hawaii and California. It also was discovered he was suffering from a slight case of tuberculosis and asthma.
His Navy career was over. Turner was medically discharged as a petty officer first class.
Life after the Navy
Turner headed back to Tennessee, where he reacquainted himself with “my childhood sweetheart.” On Dec. 6, 1952, he and Gertuha married and remained so until her death a couple of months after their 50th wedding anniversary.
In 1956, he and his wife moved to Arizona because the doctors told him Tennessee’s climate wasn’t good for his health. Arizona has been his home since then, and “Arizona has been good to me,” he said.
He first lived near Benson. After a couple of years of doing aircraft maintenance, he got a job on Fort Huachuca as a civil service automotive mechanic. He eventually moved to the Sierra Vista area.
Today, he keeps himself busy making small wagons out of wood and clocks. One of his clocks has a photo of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and is part of the Sierra Vista Hank Hauser Museum collection concerning World War II.
For Turner, that war is but a fleeting memory of his life.
Saying he doesn’t dwell on those days, Turner said the only movie he has seen that came close to capturing Dec. 6, 1941, was “Tora, Tora, Tora.” But then even that film was too Hollywood, with liberties taken about that historical time.
His memories are of that day are limited.
“I just remember short flashes. I don’t remember a big picture,” he said.
His military service is what is important to him, as well as how he and others who fought in World War II kept America free.
If it wasn’t for him becoming serious ill and having to leave the Navy for medical reasons, Turner said, “You know, I probably would have made it a career.”
Herald/Review senior reporter Bill Hess can be reached at 515-4615 or by e-mail at bill.hess@svherald.com.
Michael wrote on Dec 11, 2008 11:10 AM: