At approximately eight o’clock on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Jesse Reynolds, the chief cook aboard the U.S.S. Macdonough, had just walked out of the galley where he had been cutting up steak for dinner. The Macdonough was tied up to a destroyer tender at berth in Pearl Harbor. The vessel was undergoing a scheduled overhaul and all of its machinery was disabled.
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"I saw three torpedo planes come by," Jesse recalls. "I thought they were ours. They looked like ours. Then I got to thinking, why would they drill on a Sunday?"
No sooner did he have that thought than the attack on Pearl Harbor began. Jesse, now 94, of Gallatin, clearly recalls that ‘day of infamy.’
"They dropped a couple of bombs," he said. "They hit the Utah. It turned over. The guys on her looked like a bunch of ants. I looked at the gun officer on watch. His mouth was open. He was as surprised as I was. After they dropped the torpedoes, I could see the rising sun on a wing and it dawned on me I ought to pass the alarm. I hollered down in the hole: ‘You drunks better get out. The Japs is attacking and it’s no foolishness.’ They’d been tanked up from Saturday night, but they sobered up fast."
About then the General Alarm sounded, and the word passed "Man your battle stations." Jesse’s station was on top of the bridge at the five-inch gun. There was no power throughout the ship because of the overhaul. The guns had to be loaded, trained and elevated by hand.
"When I got up there and turned on the juice there was no lights or nothing," Jesse said. "I got down in the magazine and belted up the machine guns. We passed ammo by hand through the hatches."
The attacking planes came in two waves: the first hit its target at 7:53 a.m., the second at 8:55.
"By then we’d got organized and started knocking down their planes," Jesse said. "Three of ours took off the ground and shot down several Jap planes. But it was no good after they’d done all that shooting. All the guns were locked up, we couldn’t shoot back."
The gun crews of the Macdonough were responsible for the destruction of at least two enemy planes, one by the main battery, and one by machine gun fire.
"I was stunned, scared and mad," said Jesse. "But I wasn’t too scared to fight. You get in them battles, you’re scared, but not terrified. You’re fighting for your life. The truth is, I never thought I’d come home. I saw others get sunk. My time might come up next."
The performance of the crew of the Macdonough throughout the entire attack was highly commendable, according to a report by Ensign R.W. Clark, USN, the only officer on board at the time of the attack.
"I have the greatest pride and admiration for every member of the crew," Ensign Clark wrote in his report. "All hands were calm, and determined to maintain a rapid rate of fire even though enemy planes came close aboard."
When the attack was over 10 minutes later, Jesse looked to see 2,403 dead or missing, including 68 civilians; 188 destroyed planes and a crippled Pacific Fleet that included five sunken ships and eight damaged or destroyed battleships. There were 1,178 service men wounded in the hospital, many never able to return to service.
"The Arizona was blown to pieces," Jesse said.
A bomb crashed through the Arizona’s two armored decks. Within minutes she sank to the bottom taking 1,300 lives with her. The sunken ship remains as a memorial at Pearl Harbor to those who sacrificed their lives during the attack.
"The Utah was a battle wagon," Jesse said. "She was old."
One of the first vessels attacked by the Japanese was the Utah. Planners of the Japanese attack had ordered their pilots to ignore the training ship, which was a non-combat ship. But young and inexperienced Japanese pilots dropped torpedoes on the Utah anyway. The USS Utah is also a national memorial at Pearl Harbor.
Ship’s boats darted in under the constant strafing of gunfire and picked men out of the water and ferried them to the beach, Jesse said. On the beach, those men found protection in a pipe line trench. The men in the water struggled to swim ashore. Others sought shelter alongside the mooring quay.
The injured and wounded were everywhere.
The next day Jesse would talk with one of the survivors pulled out of the water: "There was oil all over everyplace. He told me he was off a battleship out there swimming in the oil on fire. He said he thought he was done for. He was wore out and couldn’t go any further. He started to sink and somebody got him by the hair of his head and pulled him back up and saved him."
Jesse said things were so chaotic at the time of the attack, that he learned more later from reading a newspaper report than from actually being there.
"A guy brought back a copy and I read it and found out we’d knocked down 29 planes."
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has generated much controversy. There has been ongoing debate as to how and why the United States had been caught by surprise. There is also much discussion about whether American officials had advanced knowledge of the attack.
Jesse is amongst those for whom the mystery remains unsolved.
"The strangest thing happened," Jesse recalled. "On Thursday [before Sunday’s attack] they did fleet maneuvers. They sounded battle stations at two in the morning. A Jap task force was sighted somewhere. They stayed on their battled stations until 6 or 7 a.m. The whole fleet came to port. All the officers were on the beach, except one left on the ship. The Enterprise was anchored on the north end. The Enterprise got underway and left."
According to historical accounts, the two aircraft carriers then operating with the Pacific Fleet and normally based at Pearl Harbor, Enterprise and Lexington, were on missions to deliver fighters to Wake and Midway Islands. Escorted by heavy cruisers and destroyers, the Enterprise left Pearl Harbor on Nov. 28. The Enterprise delivered the pilots and planes on Dec. 2. The carrier was delayed coming back by bad weather. At the time of the attack, Enterprise was about 200 miles west of Pearl Harbor.
"I still can’t figure out why we got slipped up on like that," said Jesse. "It was so strange. It crossed my mind that somebody knew. There was an aircraft carrier and six destroyers. Where were they at when the Japanese attacked? They were gone. I don’t know if they were hiding or what. I thought they might have sent the fighter planes out to knock the Japs off as they came in, but they didn’t. I could never figure out how it happened like that."
Jesse had been in the navy since1938. He was 22 when he went in. Knowing that he only had a few more months left to serve, he married Maxine in September, 1941. He was expecting to get out in March. But then the war started. He would not see his wife again for eight months and then only for 48 hours. After Pearl Harbor, Jesse knew he wouldn’t get out of the Navy until the war was over.
The Macdonough went back to stateside to redo its guns which had become obsolete. It was then that Jesse got transferred to the Radford, a destroyer.
One of the Radford’s missions was to "Capture and defend Guadalcanal." It was during the New Georgia Group Operations in the South Pacific that Jesse would see the most fighting. The Radford was part of a small task force which destroyed a superior Japanese surface force at the night Battle of Kula Gulf, July 5-6, 1943. Three cruisers and four destroyers composed the group.
"The Marines were pounding the heck out of the Japs," Jesse recalls. "We got there around midnight. Our radar was a little better than theirs. We were firing at 13,000 yards. We had five of their ships on fire before they even returned fire. I remember the tracers stretching from us to them overhead. It looked like you could walk on them. A shell landed in the wake behind us. Water flew 100 feet in the air."
The USS Helena CL50 was hit and sunk by a torpedo. The Radford and the Nicholas remained behind to pick up over 800 survivors. Three times they broke off their operations to take on approaching enemy destroyers. The Radford and the Nicholas sank or damaged an enemy light cruiser and two destroyers with deadly torpedo and gunfire, returning to the area after each onslaught to complete the heroic rescue.
As Jesse recalls: "Two torpedoes hit the Helena. Blew it in two. We ran on them. Fired torpedoes at them. They left us and the Nicholas to pick up survivors from the Helena. We each got about 400 each. We saw three Jap ships sneaking out of the canal. We took them on. Sank two. One got away."
It was getting on daylight and the Radford was out of ammo, Jesse said. They had picked up all but about 275 of the survivors. To those who remained they left four boats manned by volunteers from the destroyers’ crews.
The ship delivered its load of survivors and wounded to Tulagi Harbor.
"We hadn’t got any sleep that night or all the next day so we were a really tired bunch," said Jesse. "We got a supply ship for more ammo. Enough for 12 or 13 rounds for each gun. They sent us right back up there."
One group of remaining survivors from the Helena had been rescued the next morning. The other group of survivors, about 200 men, had a torturous time of it and were carried into enemy waters. About 165 men made it to the island of Vella Lavella and took to the jungle to evade enemy patrols. Surface vessels were chosen for the final rescue, Nicholas and Radford, augmented by Jenkins and O’Bannon set off July 15, 1943, to sail further up the Slot than ever before. During the night of July 16, the rescue force brought out the 165 Helena men, along with 16 Chinese who had been in hiding on the island. Of Helena’s nearly 900 men, 168 had perished.
The Radford and Nicholas both received Presidential Unit Citation for the rescue.
The Radford was also responsible for sinking the Japanese submarine I-19, known by the allies as the "Tokyo Express."
Jesse went stateside, then he was transferred again. He did a 13 month shore duty at San Juan. It was a base that built ships and was also a mine sweep base. He was there for assignment and got on as a cook for 14 months. He made chief. Then he went to the Haynsworth. He was there until the war ended.
For five years after the attack Jesse said he had nightmares and bad dreams about his war time experiences until he finally got over it.
"I was fighting them Japs pretty often," he said. "It was hard to believe all that happened, all that destruction."
All together he was in the navy seven-and-a-half years.
"When I came out I was the chief commissary. I had all the navy I wanted."