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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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