As he appeared in
1941, the young sailor William McKinley looked forward to sea duty
on the U.S.S. Nautilus, following the attack on Pearl Harbor. |
60
Years Later:
McKinley
Remembers Pearl Harbor
By John Hubbard
BROOKSVILLE—Standing on the deck of his Harborside home
overlooking Penobscot Bay, William “Mac” McKinley still looks like
a Navy commander.
On Dec. 7, 1941,
Mac was in Pearl Harbor. He recalls standing at the flagpole at 8
in the morning, looking toward Ford Island Naval Air Station and
seeing a plane diving from out of the clouds.
“I didn’t think
all that much about it,” he said. “Our Navy and Army Air Corps
pilots used to do practice runs out of those clouds. But then
there was an explosion and I thought, ‘Gee, some poor pilot didn’t
pull out of his dive.’
“Then there was
another explosion and I thought some other pilot just had followed
the leader. But then all hell broke loose.”
One explosion
followed another and it was soon clear it was no practice run.
McKinley, on his
second-story deck overlooking Penobscot Bay from Cape Rosier,
recalls his experience in Pearl Harbor as a young seaman fresh
from his Venice, Calif., home.
STAFF PHOTO BY
JOHN HUBBARD |
“One old
four-stack cruiser fired point-blank at a plane. The projectile
went right through it without exploding. The plane looked like it
stopped dead—then rotated 90 degrees and I could see the
‘meatballs’ on the wings. Yeah, we were at war.
“I was 19 at the
time and thought I was indestructible. I got through without a
scratch,” McKinley said of that first battle.
“The guys with me
in Fleet School,
all waiting around the flagpole, ran toward the finger piers where
there was an armory. We broke in and got some World War I-era
bolt-action rifles and bandoleers and began shooting at the
planes. We must have looked like Pancho Villa’s gang,” he said.
In the middle of
the attack, McKinley saw his former ship, the Nevada, steaming out
toward the channel.
“I never cared
for the Nevada
but at that moment I was really proud of her.”
As the Nevada
escaped being sunk at her berth, the front two-thirds of the
Arizona—hit by a torpedo, its munitions ignited—blew away.
“There was the
smell of gasoline, oil and burned flesh for two miles around the
harbor. In the hospital, guys would call my name from their beds
and I’d turn to see but couldn’t recognize them.”
Following Dec. 7,
McKinley entered torpedo school. “I studied hard for the first
time in my life and was first graduate, so had my choice of
assignments—anything I wanted. There were openings on destroyers,
aircraft, cruisers and one on a submarine—I took it. I made
torpedoman third class and when I came on board I had broken all
sorts of rules: I was not 21, didn’t have two years’ sea duty.
There were a variety of requirements none of which I met.” The sub
commander took him anyway.
Duty in the
Pacific included encounters with the Japanese fleet aboard the
U.S.S. Nautilus, which sank four carriers and many destroyers.
McKinley has one photograph of the destroyer Tamiguchi sinking in
Tokyo Harbor, the work of his sub.
After World War
II, McKinley served as a Navy pilot and ship commander. He
commanded the U.S.S. Fiske off the Vietnam coast supporting ground
troops, and was on an icebreaker on Arctic duty. In all, he spent
27 years in uniform.
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