Posted on 12/07/2006 5:45:29 PM PST by loreldan
Around this time every year, Joe Fenton’s mind wanders back to the preview he had of the destruction that would be unleashed on Pearl Harbor.
Just 17 years old and six months removed from boot camp, Fenton was an oiler on the USS Boise as it escorted five merchant ships carrying air base construction materials across the Pacific to the Philippines. After midnight on the morning of Nov. 28, 1941, the light cruiser’s loudspeakers blared with orders for crew members to man their battle stations.
Fenton scrambled to the deck and saw two dozen ships of unknown origin about 3 miles away on the horizon, heading east. They were
silhouetted by moonlight that would have blinded the fleet to the Boise’s presence.
Greatly outnumbered and under orders to maintain radio silence, the Boise did not fire and did not alert anyone for days to what it had seen.
When the Boise reached Manila, officers alerted members of Gen. Douglas Mac-Arthur’s staff of their find, Fenton said. Their reaction, as he recalled, was: “They’ve got as much right to be in the water as we do.”
It was only when word came down Dec. 7 about the Pearl Harbor attack that Fenton and his shipmates realized they had seen the fleet that brought America into World War II. While the Boise hid by a remote Pacific island after the attack and awaited orders, talk buzzed about what its crew could have done.
That conversation has dimmed today; most crew members have passed away. But Fenton, a retired Colorado Springs plumbing company owner, replays the talk to himself.
“I always think that perhaps we could have prevented the whole thing . . . if we had got the alarm off,” the 82-year-old said last week in his kitchen. “I always think: ‘Maybe I could have prevented this.’ I get real sad about it.”
But he said that thought is followed quickly by the realization that if the Boise had made any move that could have alerted the Japanese it had seen them, the fleet would bombarded it into the pages of history.
“I think the whole picture of World War II would have changed if we had just gotten a radio off,” he added. “But it would have cost my life.”
Memorial events across the country will mark the 65th anniversary today of the early morning raid that killed about 2,500 Americans. Some people will head to Hawaii to honor the occasion; others will gather at local monuments.
Fenton will be in Colorado Springs, surrounded by newspaper clips and medals that mark his Navy service and, later, the Army. His thoughts, though, will be on what he saw in the middle of the ocean.
No one present forgot that moment, which has been little recorded in history. Melvin Howard, a former crewman and current Philadelphia resident who once chaired reunions for the Boise, remembered that everyone on the ship was ready to fire if ordered.
“We never got the word to fire,” Howard said. “And it’s a good thing we didn’t, because they would have blown us out of the water.”
Once America entered the war, the Boise made 14 landings in the Pacific and in Europe, fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal and served as a scout vessel before the famed Doolittle Raid on Tokyo.
The Boise earned its greatest accolades by sinking six Japanese ships in 27 minutes off Cape Esperance in 1942. Despite a shell crashing through a part of the ship in which he was working, Fenton, who fed oil into boilers and later was a ship engineer, remembers staying calm.
His mother, who raised him in Denver, saved newspaper articles about the ship and gave them to him in a scrapbook when he returned. Fenton also kept a diary during his service, and he typed it up in recent years to preserve it.
“Did not know what was going on, we were not at war, the ships all stopped and our gun turrets all trained to our port side,” he wrote of the November 1941 sighting. “That makes you wish you had gone to the bathroom a little earlier.”
After being transferred to the Army and serving a short stint in Asia during the Korean War, Fenton started a business in Colorado Springs. He ran Fenton Plumbing and Heating until retirement in 1982, when he passed the company on to his son.
He stops there for coffee every once in a while, and he carves wood figures for his family and friends. Twice widowed, the decorated veteran spends every Friday night dining and dancing at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post with his girlfriend.
Late 1941 is not that far away, though. Any mention of Pearl Harbor sparks thoughts of that day, and any thought about what he saw leads him to think even more about what could have occurred.
“They made no hostile moves to us,” Fenton said. “It was like two strangers passing in the night. We weren’t going to initiate the firing. There was no way we could have survived that.”
[b) would have been the right answer in long run but real tough in the short term.]
PS: thanks!
Derelicts? Eight battleships were in port at the time, tho the 3 carriers assigned to Pearl Harbor were not. 6 of the battleships returned to service, I believe.
Nailed it.
From the article: "Greatly outnumbered and under orders to maintain radio silence, the Boise did not fire and did not alert anyone for days to what it had seen." If we weren't at war yet, what possible reason did they wait "days" to alert their command? Naval contacts with other nation's fleets are always noteworthy, especial large ones headed toward your home country. Why the radio silence?
WTF? There were only two Japanese ships sunk at the Battle of Cape Esperance and the Boise was only one of many American ships at the battle. Like to know where that non-factoid came from.
Oh, c'mon... really now. I think it's OK to just put to bed this nonsense.
FWIW, I think your analysis is most likely accurate.
Seems to me, the outline even back then of what the puppet masters were up to . . . was quite clear enough from a number of perspectives.
I think the Adm in Hawaii was a scapegoat to keep inquiries searching further. But plenty has come out since then.
I agree.. We were not at War with the Japanese at that time..
The proper response by higher ups would have been (and was) SO WHAT...
Supply barges maybe?
It's interesting to see how much our minds have changed since then. At the time, this attack was seen as a brutal, monstrous, "terrorist" type act if you will. People were shocked.
Today, it would simply be classified in military terms. How much will the world change in the future? Seeing how the left classifies what terrorists do, one day an act like the WTC attack will been seen simply in military terms. What sort of monstrous activities will the evil-doers have to concoct?
It is possible that we have no conception of how vile the world might become in the future.
Thanks, Ramius. That was another fascinating story.
Yep, that just occured to me that whatever this sailor saw, it's physically impossible that it was the Pearl Harbor Strike force - good catch. The Kido Butai sailed from far north of Japan, and, and made the run in to PH from due N - the Boise would never have been within hundreds, or even possibly over a thousand miles, of the PH strike force.
I'd have to pull out a map and check some books but if he in fact saw a Japanese force, it could possibly have been some of the invasion forces for, say, Singapore, Guam, etc.
His ship would have had to take a very unusual route to be in sighting distance.
Just checked and none of the Japanese invasion forces sailed until Dec. 4.
This whole story is exceedingly fishy. Compounded by the fact I've never heard of it before and I can't find any immediate Google references to the Boise sighting anything of interest.
Yah know what... I think you might be right about that...
She remained in service with the Argentine Navy until 1978, when she was decommissioned and towed to Japan for scrapping.
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