World War II Remembered

Journey to Tokyo Bay

112 Journey to Tokyo Bay • Alan Horton U.S. Navy Prologue My first real acquaintance with World War II was in 1938–39 when, at age 17 in Strasbourg, France, I was living with a French family. We would occasionally take walks, family style, along the banks of the nearby Rhine. From across the river on the German side there often came the chatter of machine guns. This was said to be target practice. But on the faces of my French family, especially those of two 18-year-olds, a son and nephew, it was not difficult to see an awareness that their pleasant lives were about to be replaced by something else. I left for the United States just before the War broke out. The Navy Years—First Plunge On July 20, 1942, I set off for Newport, Rhode Island, to join the Navy. Boot camp seemed routine, somehow expectable. Toward the end I put in for quartermaster school; I explained to civilian friends that, in the Navy, quartermasters were the enlisted persons on the bridges of ships Journey to Tokyo Bay: Alan Horton 113 (steering, keeping the log, sometimes signaling), nothing to do with supplies and warehouses. I had spent a short time working in the Navy library and had been given a “ship’s company pass,” which permitted an easy exit from and re-entry into the naval base. A bureaucratic mix-up that I never fully understood resulted not only in my keeping the pass but also using it whenever bored by quartermaster training. When the training period was over, one of the sailors mimeographed a “class report” and sought to mention everyone. He carefully described me in less than a sentence as “nocturnal Alan Horton.” And after the short graduation ceremony, the Chief Petty Officer who had been in charge of the course drew me aside with a smile and said: “Horton, I’d like to see that ship’s company pass you’ve been using.” Astonished, I reached for my wallet and handed it over. “Aha,” he said, “thanks and good luck.” He continued to smile. I did not push my luck again. To get to San Francisco, we all inhabited a railroad car for a week or so. Pulled and pushed across the country, we passed the time playing cheap poker and sleeping. From Goat Island in San Francisco Bay two of us were directed to the USS Nevada, a tub-like World War I battleship crammed with 2,000 men and bristling with big guns. I was assigned hammock space (nighttime only) on the main deck and put to work as a lookout. Within two days the ship started north, and after several days at sea we were told we were headed toward the Aleutians. In a few weeks, thanks in part to an assistant navigation officer I had known vaguely at Princeton, I was transferred to the N division, the small group of quartermasters who manned the bridge. Our sleeping quarters were in the bowels of the ship, exclusive and with real bunks, across from the space occupied by the ship’s band. My quartermaster colleagues welcomed me and became close friends. I began as a helmsman and in several months became a quartermaster of the watch. I liked the responsibility. Soon I was promoted to QM 3/c, the petty officer status which I had not achieved at quartermaster school because of my nocturnal habits. In retrospect, I think I was growing up. For several months the Nevada and a couple of destroyers patrolled the seas between the outer Aleutians and mainland Japan. Bleak saltwater scenery, back and forth and back again, long hours along designated parallels, occasional savage weather. We feared submarines, but 114 World War II Remembered ran across traces of them only a few times. When off duty I occasionally played chess with a bassoon player from the other side of our quarters, but usually it was checkers or rummy or cribbage with other quartermasters . The monotony was broken when, for several days, at battle stations or watch-on-watch-off, we stood off Attu at 5,000 yards, firing 16-inch guns in support of the landing of U.S. ski troops. We could see the shells hit the island’s rocky slopes. Then, after more unexciting patrolling, the Nevada headed south. Rumors flew. We stopped in San Francisco, then on to the Canal...