|
By Luther Dorr
 Deep in the bowels of the USS Sangamon, 19-year-old machinist’s mate Evertt Snetsinger of Minneapolis felt the escort carrier shudder as a Japanese kamikaze pilot, and the bomb he dropped first, made a direct hit in the middle of the ship about 7:30 p.m.
The date was May 4, 1945, and the Sangamon was in the South Pacific south of Okinawa.
The explosion rocked the 550-foot escort carrier and Snetsinger, working in the pump room, said it shook the whole ship.
Sailors stand on the flight deck on the USS Sangamon the morning after the ship was hit by a kamikaze pilot on May 4, 1945.
“I was talking on the phone to one of my buddies from Minneapolis who ran the elevator and all of a sudden the line went dead,” the 84-year-old Snetsinger recalled. “And he was dead, too, of course.”
The Japanese plane had hit the Sangamon amidship, blown the 28-ton elevator from the hangar deck into the air, and turned it upside down.
“We couldn’t leave our station because we were trying to get every pump on the fire line,” Snetsinger recalls. “But we didn’t know all the pipes were broken.
“For five hours we didn’t know if we were going to sink or swim.”
As it turned out two other U.S. ships – one on each side – put out the fire on the Sangamon, one sustaining extensive damage because it bumped into the Sangamon during the effort that lasted until nearly midnight.
There were 11 sailors killed, 25 missing and 21 seriously wounded. As usual in a time of war, the dead were buried at sea.
“It was a small number compared to what it could have been,” Snetsinger said.
Japanese kamikaze pilots were taught to hit American ships in the middle because that’s where the engine room usually was, Snetsinger said.
But the Sangamon was a converted Standard Oil tanker and the engine room was in the rear of the ship where Snetsinger was working.
Another kamikaze pilot had crashed into the water about 25 feet off the starboard side of the Sangamon a half hour before the one that did the damage.
When the smoke had cleared the next morning and the extent of the damage was assessed, the Sangamon had to head home for repairs.
Both the flight and hangar decks had been buckled as a result of the kamikaze attack.
The ship first went to Pearl Harbor and then headed home through the Panama Canal where the gun tubs had to be cut off so the Sangamon was narrow enough to get through the canal.
The 12,000-mile voyage ended at the Portsmouth, Va., navy yard on June 12, 39 days after the attack, and repairs began.
The war ended two months later, repairs were suspended, and in September the Sangamon was deactivated.
Snetsinger was transferred to the USS Midway, the first aircraft carrier commissioned after World War II, and was on the shakedown cruise for a carrier that was later deployed in the Vietnam War and Desert Storm.
“We went to the Bermuda Triangle [an area east of Miami where more than 2,000 ships and 75 planes have disappeared],”Snetsinger recalled with a laugh. “But everything went OK.”
A short while after he was on the Midway, Snetsinger had enough points to be discharged and told that to the ship’s commander, he said.
“He said if I could swim home I could leave,” Snetsinger recalled.
The shakedown cruise ended in January, Snetsinger boarded a train headed for Minneapolis, and was discharged when he returned.
Draft board picked the navy for Snetsinger
Snetsinger, who had spent some summers farming with his uncle near Braham during his teen years in Minneapolis, was working on a farm with a farm deferment after graduating from Minneapolis Vocational High School in 1943 because a friend talked him into it.
But he decided to quit working on the farm and went to his draft board to tell them he was available.
“They had a lineup and every other man went to the army and every other man to the navy,” he remembers. “They picked the navy for me.”
He went to the Great Lakes training facility for what was supposed to be 10 weeks of training but it was cut to five.
It was determined that he not only had bad eye sight but that he was color blind. So, after boot camp was done, he was sent home on leave and then to the University of Minnesota’s farm campus for five months to be trained as a machinist’s mate.
His next stop was California and then he joined the Sangamon in April 1944 from an island in the South Pacific.
“When I got on the ship they said you, you and you go on the machine gun,” Snetsinger said, even though he was a machinist’s mate and couldn’t see well. “The officer said to aim for the low-flying planes.”
There was a General Quarters alarm almost immediately and Snetsinger, who was sleeping on a canvas on the deck, had his glasses stepped on and crushed.
He was then switched from a machine gun to a five-inch gun where he had to take out the hot shells, with asbestos gloves on, and stack them in a crate.
Snetsinger lost much of his hearing when cotton fell out of his ears while Japanese planes were being shot at with the five-inch gun and was only given aspirin, he said.
The time on the five-inch gun didn’t last long. “Our division officer came by and said, ‘You don’t belong there,’” Snetsinger recalls.
After that he worked as a machinist’s mate in the pump room at the bottom of the ship near the engine room.
“When we got suicided [kamikaze attack] we had to bring up the fire hose and there was ammo going off and shell casings stuck to my dungarees,” Snetsinger said.
Corpsmen cut his jeans off and “smeared a little gook on there,” he said, “but they never wrote nothing down.”
It was one of three times he could have earned a Purple Heart, Snetsinger said.
“But I never got one,” he said with a smile at his Princeton home. “I fell through the cracks.”
Back home in Minnesota
After he was discharged Snetsinger got a job at Sunshine Biscuits where his father worked.
He and his wife Helen, also from Minneapolis, had gotten married in August 1945 before the shakedown cruise of the Midway and they first lived in Minneapolis after he was discharged.
Then they bought a small farm southeast of Zimmerman in 1951 and lived there for about 30 years.
“We raised some alfalfa and had a big garden,” Snetsinger said. “It was a nice place.”
After Sunshine Biscuits he worked at a filling station in Minneapolis for awhile and then worked on the railroad for 11 years.
His next job was at Hoffman Engineering in Anoka and Snetsinger worked there almost 25 years before retiring.
Evertt and Helen moved to Arizona and lived there for 23 years until returning to the area in 2007 and deciding on a home in Princeton.
War effort “was worth it”
Snetsinger displayed some mementoes from World War II as he talked about the attack on the Sangamon.
There was a five-cent ticket from Honolulu for a movie, a yellowed newspaper clipping about a dog that lived on the Sangamon, a liquor card from the state of Virginia that allowed him to consume liquor even though he was under age, and Japanese money that he figures came from the billfold of the kamikaze pilot.
He fingered a piece of the Japanese plane that hit the Sangamon, a piece of metal he has carried with him wherever he has lived.
“We really took a pounding that day,” he said, his mood turning somber for a few seconds. “My face was solid with blisters.”
But the war, for him, was an inescapable one.
“The way I figure it, we didn’t start it,” he said. “We had no choice.”
While saying he admires the military men and women of today, he feels differently about Iraq and Afghanistan.
“These other wars – the Bush wars I call them – I don’t like them,” he said.
Snetsinger said he and his buddies in the U.S. Navy had a system figured out how to decide World War II.
“We always figured it would’ve been easier if we could’ve put Roosevelt and Churchill and Hitler and Emperor Hirohito in a boxing ring and see who came out,” he said with a smile.
Snetsinger said he thinks about that day on the Sangamon occasionally, although not as much as he once did.
He’s been to six escort carrier conventions through the years but now, as the years pass and the memories fade, he has only two friends he personally knows who attend.
Snetsinger wished his visitor well, chuckled and said, “We’re at an age where we don’t buy any green bananas.”
Evertt Snetsinger, one of the hundreds of thousands of stories from World War II, turned and began to put his treasured pieces of memorabilia from more than 60 years ago back in their places.
 |
