Escaping the USS Arizona: GM3 Donald Gay Stratton

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from GM3 Donald Gay Stratton. Stratton was on the USS Arizona directing 5-inch guns during the attack on Pearl Harbor. When a bomb hit his ship, he suffered serious burns on nearly 60% of his body. After an escape into the water couldn’t be found, crew from another vessel tossed a rope to Stratton and his allies. They tied it to the Arizona and for 60ft, swung hand-over-hand to reach safety.

Donald Gay Stratton:

My name is Donald Gay Stratton, S-T-R-A-T-T-O-N.

Well, at the time of December 7th, I was a seaman first class, which was a pretty hard rate to come by at that time. There was only about five or six rates that came out for four battleships. After the war started, there was a lot of rates.

There was a lot of dock workers on board and cables and lights and everything. The first thing I'd done was stand fire watch for the welders and everything was so scrambled you didn't know what to do. But the chaplain came around and said, "Well, boys, Sailors, when we go to sea, it'll look a lot different than this," in which it did. But we went right into dry dock and of course we had to go down over the side on stages and scrape the sides and the bottom of the ship and then repaint it and refloat it and we got out of there.

As far as the shipmates was concerned was a lot of them were with me when I was in bootcamp and were pretty well acquainted and the ship was pretty harmonious. We had a lot of complaints about, at that time you had to enlist for six years and they kept saying, "Can I stand this for another six years?" Everything worked out all right. We'd done a lot of holy stoning and a lot of worse down, a lot of painting and a lot of scrubbing paint work and just regular seaman stuff. I was a seaman, of course, on the boat deck, sixth division, and we launched and picked up boats, stationary or underway at sea also.

I was 19 at the time of the attack. There was few older gentlemen there, but they'd been in the service. We had one seaman on board there that had 12 years and he was still just a seaman first class, but that's the way he wanted it.

Oh yea I had quite a few good friends, but none of them made it. The one especially that I worked on either had to be a mess cook for three months or the incinerator or some other detail of the young seamen aboard. And I was working on the incinerator with a friend of mine, Harl Nelson from Arkansas, and he had a little jaundice and he went to sick bay and of course had big bomb went right down to the starboard side and that sick bay, gone.

Well, it was just same ordinary morning, 5:30 Reveille, get up and scrub down a little bit or sweep down a little bit, clean sweep down fore and aft And of course everybody, then they have quarters for flag raising, posting colors, but they were back there trying to do that when the attack started. And I'd seen some articles that we were asleep that morning, but that's falsehood because everybody was up at 5:30. And the only people that had overnight liberty were men crewmen with their wives that were in Hawaii and they were ashore with their wives, but everybody else had to be back aboard by 0100 in the morning. And so everybody was aboard, as far as I know, that was supposed to be, outside of the overnight liberty people.

Right after the clean sweep down and whatever, then we chow call and we go. Tables were set up in number six case mate, where that was my casemate and where I bunked. And that's where we ate chow and we finished breakfast and I picked up some loose oranges on the tables, was going to take it down to my buddy in the sick bay and I just... I don't know. They're still there I guess. But anyway, walked out of number six case, made it into number four and then into number two, and heard some Sailors yelling and pointing toward Ford Island, up on the bow of the ship on the folk's hull. So I stepped out of the casemate and looked up there and they were jumping up and down and pointing. And I looked over toward Ford Island and I seen the planes bombing the Ford Island and all the smoke and the bombs. I swear I seen the water tower go over, but everybody tells me it was a training tower for divers or something.

But anyway, it seemed like everybody knew who it was right away, so I headed for my battle station, which was a site setter in the port anti-aircraft director. And that was on sky control platform and that's one deck above the bridge on the main mast. So up a few ladders, quite a few to get to my battle station. Takes 9, 10 men to man that the director, sight setter. And the fire control, two fire controlmen, the pointer and the trainer and the radioman. Anson Lomax was our officer in charge. All of our anti-aircraft guns had a ready box ammunition behind each gun and they were locked up. Of course, they broke the locks and we were firing at the planes as they came in. And I had a very good vantage point because I could fold back a hatch on the overhead of the director and stick my head out or look out a hatch on the side. And I seen the West Virginia get hit and I seen the Oklahoma capsized and I seen the planes coming in from IE landing, the torpedo planes, and the wakes of the torpedoes head right for us. And of course the vessel was tied off outside of us, but they claim we didn't get any torpedoes, but I still say two of them had our name on it. I guess they've investigated that, but I don't know how they would decipher whether you got hit by a torpedo or that bomb or simultaneously. I don't know how they would determine that.

But anyway, a very good view of that. And we were firing at the high altitude bombers because we figured they were doing us more damage than anything because they were dropping bombs from... And every shell has a fuse on it that's cranked on to try to get some height, and we were very short. We weren't reaching the planes at all. And of course the dive bombers were coming in. My position there, I could very near reach out and touch them as they went by and I could see them. And of course the torpedo planes came in right at us and then drop their torpedo and then they had to come up to get over Battleship Row and over Ford Island.

I don't think you really have time to be scared, but I think if somebody tell you they weren't scared by it, they were lying to you because when it comes to something like that, you're scared, and the rest of it's self-preservation.

So anyway, we were firing at them and all at once would get a big thump and that ship weighed 33,600 ton and it just shook it like an earthquake had hit it. And shortly after that, the big bomb, it hit aft of the number two turned on the starboard side and went down into the fuel and the ammunition and the aviation gas and exploded. And there was a fire and fireball and smoke, and the fire going about 4 or 500 feet in the air, I guess, and just engulfed the whole foremast. Very few people escaped from the bow of the ship back to aft of the foremast. From the stack on aft, well, there was quite a few people got off that weren't hurt. Some of them were blown over the side, some of them were just... Of course after the big explosion they had to abandon ship, so they got off over the side and up over to Ford Island.

See, the captain and the admiral and the chaplain were all killed just on the bridge, just below our station there. And of course the sailors, you could see them down there just trying to... It was self-preservation, trying to get aft, trying to get over the side, trying to pull their clothes off that were afire. Terrible.

I could look out from my station up there and look down at the deck and see them, the sailors scrambling around some of the guns there. Terrible, terrible mess. Lost a lot of friends, a lot of good Sailors, I'll tell you. And we had a marine detachment aboard Daryl, so they manned the broadside guns. And that's probably another story that I don't know whether history will record it or not, but the broadside guns are five inch, 51 bag ammunition guns, and they're for surface targets. But I think some of the boys, some of the Sailors and the Marines were firing at the torpedo planes, and some of those shells, about eight mile range, were landing in Honolulu. That's where they got some of their damage.

We were kind of stymied up there where we couldn't go up or down. Inside this director and a little fire patrolman next to me jumped out, opened the hatch and jumped out and I never did see him again. And Anson Lomax went to get some more ammunition and never did see him again. But I reached out to close the hatch and that's where I got most of my burns on my left side. Anyhow, we were kind of squatting down behind some of the bulkheads there and trying to keep out of the fire and do the best we could. And we know we were just getting burned something terrible, and our hairs burned and the skin on our arms just come off like big socks. We just pulled it off and throw it down. It was in the way.

Of course, we were trying to figure out a way how we could get down the ladder, get on deck or get off this sky control platform. There's a starboard side also that had probably as many men as we did up there. It must be 40, 50 men or so that man that station, port and starboard both. And actually there's only six of us who went across this. The vessel, like I said, was tied up alongside and we gave a holler to a seaman on board after deck on the vessel, they were tied their bow to our stern. And he threw us a heaving line. I guess you know what that is. That's just a smaller line with a heavy monkey's fist on the end, to get it in the air and get it across. So we catch this and then he ties on the heavier line and we pull that across and we tie it onto the Arizona on the wing there, where the director was. And we crawl hand over hand across that line to the vessel, which was probably 60, 70 feet across and about 45 feet in the air. We were probably from Midships to the Arizona, that was 108 feet wide. So they were that far and then across the water and then up on the vessel. Our hands were just raw. And of course in the meantime, after a while, my fingernails all come off, everything else. But anyway, when you get down to the middle of the line going down way, it's fairly easy. But then when you wait and then to come back up, that's a chore. I just about give up on that a couple times, but they kept urging me on and, "Oh, you can make it. You can do that." So anyway, I'm here. And I had a lot of help from up above, I'm sure.

All the ships and the stuff and the machine guns and everything was still firing at the planes. They were still coming in, the dive bombers and everything. And we even had a couple bombs. We got on a shore boat to take us as shore and we had to dodge a couple of bombs that hit in the water. We seen after, just aft of us, after we were going to the beach. We got to the beach there and the pier and had to crawl up on the pier, which was on Oahu. And we had to crawl up on the pier in which we had to grab ahold to crawl up there because the tide seemed like it was low tide at that time, far as I remember. Anyway, they put us in an open air truck and took us to the hospital there at Pearl Harbor and the US Naval Hospital. And they come out there with stretchers and were going to carry us all in there. And I said, "No." I did sit down on the edge of the stretcher and they carried me in there, but we were there. Of course, they had no way of knowing and no way of doing a lot of things at that time because giving everybody a shot of morphine for the pain and no way to keep track of it. So one of the nurses, they got a lipstick and they marked on your face or wherever there was some open skin area that how you got a shot or whatever.

So then after there for a while, my back was burnt, they turned me over and I had to lay on my stomach for a couple days, which has really tore me up. I couldn't hardly stand that. I couldn't breathe very well. And they finally turned me back over and they said they were going to send some troops back, some Sailors back to the states. And I said, "Okay, I'm ready." Said, "No, we don't think you can make it. We'll wait another trip." And I said, "Well, I think I can make it." They said, "Well, if you stand up while we make up the bed, why, we'll see about it." So I stood up while they made up the bed, and then when I laid back down, I didn't get up for a long time.

We came back to the United States and got to the United States Christmas Day, 1941 at Mare Island. At the US Naval Hospital, Mare Island, Vallejo, California. We had a burn ward there and doctors and nurses there really took care of us. I'll tell you, that was great.

To go into the service the second time, I was classified 1C, I had two people in my hometown that were on the draft board and I talked them into sending me to Omaha. And then they had to get permission from the Navy to get me back in the service with my same service number, which I was smart enough to do at that time because with two separate records, right now it'd be a devastating thing as far as getting stuff done as far through the government programs and stuff.

You got to stop and think about how these wonderful Sailors and Marines' devotion to their country, dedicated their lives to, and didn't even know what it was for. I mean, they had no idea who was bombing them. They had no idea to this day, probably. Some of them do, some of them don't. Most of them don't. Sad thing. And it should be immortalized, not in that aspect, but it should be taught in school or it should be kept in front of our younger generation. We sure don't want this to happen again.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was GM3 Donald Gay Stratton.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.