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by Ronald Russell
Note: the following is adapted from a video interview of Yorktown veteran Sam Laser, entitled “World War II Remembered: an Oral History of Arkansas Veterans,” Volume VIII.
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Sam
Laser was born on 22 December 1919 in Clarksville, Arkansas. The family later relocated to Little Rock,
and he finished high school and started college there in 1937. Four years later, and just prior to
graduating from the University of Arkansas law school, he was attracted to
service in the Navy. That was due in
part to one of those offers from a recruiter that seemed too good to be
true: since Sam could type, he would be
enlisted immediately as a Yeoman Second Class (Y2/c), the equivalent of an army
sergeant (E-5 in the modern enlisted rank structure).
Sam
had no problem accepting a great deal like that, although he was unprepared for
what came next: he was immediately sent
to the USS Yorktown (CV-5) for duty, with no basic training or other
training of any kind. It was a daunting
experience—Sam had never even seen a ship before, let alone set foot on one,
and suddenly he was a member of the giant carrier’s crew, with duties and
expectations that are normal for a seasoned petty officer with years of
service. That made things very rough at
first, but in time he learned the ropes through on-the-job training and
guidance from his shipmates.
Sam
reported aboard the Yorktown on the evening of 6 December 1941, and a
few hours later he was at war along with the rest of the nation. The Yorktown was transferred to the
Pacific Fleet, where it participated in some of the first carrier raids of the
war. Sam’s battle station was “Sky
Control,” the elevated structure high above the bridge. At 126 feet above the water line, he had a
commanding view of everything the ship did for the remainder of its brief but
violent wartime career. You can get a
good view of the Yorktown’s Sky Control from this photo of the ship at Midway, just after the dive bomber
attack. Sky Control is the highest structure
in the photo, just under the national flag.
Sam
has many gripping personal memories of service aboard the Yorktown. One of the bitterest concerns the
casualties suffered at the Battle of the Coral Sea. “After a lull in the fighting, the crew was permitted to go down
to the mess deck to get something to eat,” he said. “The bomb that hit us killed a lot of men below decks, and about
fifty-five of them had been temporarily laid out on the mess tables. They hadn’t been covered yet, and many of them
had horrible wounds—blood streaming from their eyes, missing limbs, and so
on. We had to walk past all that to get
into the chow line, and the only thing they had was crackers and salmon. For at least five years after that, I
couldn’t eat salmon. Every time I
tried, I’d see and smell those mangled bodies.”
At
the Battle of Midway, Sam told of firing his .50 caliber machine gun at
Japanese bombers from Sky Control. “It
was sort of futile—by the time they got in range of my gun, they’d already
dropped their bombs. I could see them
dropping toward us. One bomb, a
fragmentation type, hit just aft of the island, wiping out the after 1.1-inch
gun crew. I was in the Gunnery
Department aboard the ship, and those guys were my friends. I’ll never forget one of them, named
Corky. He was strapped to his seat in
the gun tub when the bomb went off, and it cut him clean in two. When I saw his body, still in his seat, it
looked like a surgeon has removed the upper half with a saw. Scenes like that were hard on some of the
men. Occasionally one would wake up
screaming in his bunk. We got used to
that sort of thing after a while.
“All
of the men I served with were very brave, with one exception. You had to do your duty in combat on a ship,
for if one guy fails to do so, havoc can be the result. It’s not like on a battlefield where Sgt.
York might show up to save you. You’ve
got to do your job for the sake of your buddies.
“The
one exception was an officer, a lieutenant who was in charge of Sky Forward,
the five inch gun director, just in front of Sky Control. He was a senior lieutenant, with maybe
twenty years in the service. When we
got into combat in the Coral Sea, he has arrived at the precise moment for
which he’d been training all those years.
And what did he do after all those years of training? He froze, dropped to the deck in a fetal
position, and stuck his thumb in his mouth!
A first class fire controlman kicked him out of the way and took over
direction of the guns.
“One
other guy was supposed to be court-martialed for failing to promptly unlock a
magazine [ammunition locker] when we were attacked—he’d been drinking. But his court martial never happened because
all records of the incident went down with the ship at Midway.
“When
the aerial torpedoes hit, the ship shook like a Terrier with a mouse in its
teeth. We listed about 30 degrees to
port, and the captain was afraid that we were going to capsize. All electrical power was lost; there wasn’t
much anyone could do. We abandoned
ship. I put on my kapok life jacket and
went in the water for the next three hours.
Funny thing about that kapok life jacket—it had a three-inch tag on the
side of it that said ‘Warning: not good for use over 24 hours.’ Now who the hell would want to put on a life
jacket if he knew he was going to sink in it in twenty-four hours?”
Sam
was eventually pulled out of the water by the destroyer USS Benham. He first transferred to a cruiser and
then to the USS Fulton, a sub tender dispatched from Pearl to retrieve Yorktown
survivors from the task force warships.
After a brief stopover in Hawaii, he was assigned to Carrier Aircraft
Service Unit 6 at NAS Alameda, where he encountered a familiar circumstance. The Navy decided to commission him in 1943,
making him a brand new ensign. But once
again he had absolutely no training as an officer. Barely familiar with his new uniform but not at all about being
an officer beyond what he’d observed as a yeoman, Sam went straight from taking
his commissioning oath to his new duties.
He likes to say that he was probably the only man in the Navy who had
both an enlisted and officer career without a single day of training of any
kind.
Released
from active duty at the end of 1945, Sam returned to the University of Arkansas
law school where he graduated in 1947, thanks in large measure to the G.I.
Bill. He remained in the Naval Reserve
as a JAG officer, retiring as a lieutenant commander. Now 87, he still actively operates his law practice in Little
Rock.
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