World War II Remembered

From Nashville to Nagasaki

130 From Nashville to Nagasaki • William K. Tate, Jr. U.S. Navy On December 7, 1941, I was seventeen and a senior in a college preparatory school in Nashville, Tennessee. Several of us boys in an automobile were trying to decide which of our girl friends we were going to visit that Sunday afternoon. When we heard the news about Pearl Harbor, we did not fully comprehend what it meant until getting home and listening to our parents. At the time nothing changed much for me. I graduated from high school, enrolled in Vanderbilt University, and did not turn 18 until November 1942. My dad had been in WW I and knew what war was all about; he convinced me to get into V12, an intensive program designed to transform college students into commissioned Navy officers. I am sure he was trying to protect his only son, rationalizing that I would spend the next three years getting an education and perhaps by then it would all be over. In May 1943 I entered Georgia Tech in the V12 program but soon became concerned that the War was going to pass me by and my only From Nashville to Nagasaki: William K. Tate, Jr. 131 contribution to it would be getting an education. I asked my dad how I could hold my head high when in later years my future son would ask me what I did in the Great War and all I could tell him was that I went to school. This problem was soon resolved: I flunked out of Georgia Tech. I was transferred to boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland, after which I was sent across the country on a troop train to San Francisco and put on a troop ship with 5,000 others. I wound up in a Navy staging area in Milne Bay, New Guinea, getting yellow from Atabrine tablets, meeting the natives , and finding out how indescribable a tropical rain forest really is. A month later I was assigned to the USS Regal in Hollandia, New Guinea, as a seaman deck hand but also as a crew member on the Captain ’s Gig (small boat). The ship’s function was to repair troop landing craft damaged in the island invasions. My introduction to the devastation of war came when I first saw landing craft that had been in battle: I learned how damaged a ship could get and still float, and what a bomb can do in distributing body residue throughout a ship’s interior. After a few months the Regal sailed for Sydney, Australia, where we spent a month getting overhauled. After this we were ordered to the Philippines and I was assigned as a helmsman. We were in the middle of a large convoy protected by destroyers and destroyer escorts, and I was at the helm. One moment everything was OK and the next all hell broke loose when we lost the ability to steer the ship: apparently the hydraulic system failed and we were unable to get the auxiliary steering to operate. The Regal was a very large and slow ship. Before we recovered we had made a 360-degree turn, barely missing a dozen ships, and wound up out of and well behind the convoy. It took a day and a half to catch up, and during this time we were on our own. The USS Flusser As we approached Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, I requested and was granted permission to transfer to a destroyer, the USS Flusser DD368, part of the Seventh Fleet. When the United States entered the War this was the latest design. It had two smokestacks, four five-inch guns, an arsenal of 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft hardware, and a top speed of 35 knots. The ship had on board a full Captain Squadron Commander who had seven destroyers under his command. During my time aboard the Flusser, our area of operations was 132 World War II Remembered throughout the Philippines and Borneo. The ship was awarded eight battle stars in the Pacific and I was on board for the last two. It was known as the luckiest ship in the Navy because it survived the War without much damage. That was not the case for several of our sister ships. My duties included being the Captain’s talker, a function I will describe below and, at battle station, a team...