“It’s a funny thing how the mind works. I took time at that moment to notice that all those searchlights were turning the sea about us to a beautiful phosphorescent green.
“Our guns blew up two of the searchlights, but we were being hit hard. A. W. Brunelle reported from the engine room that the boat was badly holed at the waterline. I found out later that he took off his kapok life jacket and stuffed it into the hole as the only cork he could find right at hand.
“A blinding flash and terrific concussion threw me out of the cockpit. Stunned, I reeled forward to find that most of the chartroom had been blown away.
“I told Nick to head the Carole Baby for the Island of Panaon, and we limped off with the Jap cans chasing us. When we were out of torpedo range of the capital ships, they turned back but kept throwing shells at us to be sure we didn’t return to attack.
“Return to attack! We weren’t even sure we could stay afloat. The engines were almost completely underwater and though they were still working, they couldn’t chug along forever with water steadily rising in the hold.
“The last destroyer left us just as the bow of the Carole Baby scraped on a coral reef one hundred yards off the beach at Panaon.
“When the shooting stopped, a weird silence settled over us. I went over the boat to see what condition we were in. We were in bad condition. The Carole Baby had been hit by five shells. Two of them had passed clean through us without exploding, but the one that had exploded in the charthouse had killed two and wounded nine of my crew.
“And that isn’t all. We were high on a reef, within rock-throwing distance of an enemy shore. I had to know if those lights we could see came from a Japanese camp, so I armed ten of us with machine guns and grenades and we slipped over the side.
“We found a little village. Somebody had been there, but had run off as we approached, so we decided to search farther. This type of warfare was different from the one the crew was used to, and everybody was ill at ease.”
It is interesting to note that by inference the sailors were not “ill at ease” in the type of warfare they had just been subjected to.