Long before he served as senior naval member on a UN Security Council committee; years before he became Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Mediterranean; decades prior to his World War II service on the staff of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King, the future Vice Admiral Bernhard H. Bieri (1889–1971) served in the legendary battleship USS Texas (BB-35) during World War I. In this excerpt from his U.S. Naval Institute oral history, Bieri describes gunnery training in the Chesapeake in the months leading up to the U.S. declaration of war, as well as a particularly rough Atlantic crossing on the way to wartime service with the British:I was ordered to the Texas, which I joined in April 1916, at the New York Navy Yard. I served in the Texas from that date until June 1919. During the First World War, the Texas was a brand-new ship, just having gone in commission, and had an excellent bunch of officers on board. The Navy was at that time, I think, manning guns on merchant ships. One of the jobs of ships in the fleet was to train crews for these merchant ships. I was given the job on the Texas of supervising the training of the enlisted men who were going on as these crews, particularly in training them how to spot their gunfire.They took the whole fleet into the York River, behind the submarine nets, in early 1917. We spent the winter of 1917 in the York River and the Chesapeake Bay. The Germans were prowling in the Atlantic and sinking ships all over. So we had nets up, and they put us back of these barriers in the Chesapeake Bay, where we carried out our target practices. The river and the bay froze up very hard. We had some of the old battleships that were used as icebreakers.We stayed there all the next summer carrying out target practices, training men. It was in April 1917 that we had declared war on Germany. Our destroyers started to go to Europe. The fleet, toward the end of the summer, rendezvoused at Port Washington in Long Island Sound, which got closed off with mines and some nets around the harbor.The Texas went to the New York Navy Yard for overhaul. We were there in the fall, when it was decided to send a division of coal-burning battleships to Europe under Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman. This was the New York, Texas, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Florida—five ships. They were coal burners, because there weren’t sufficient oil supplies in Britain.We went to Europe in February of ’18. We had a rather rough passage up in the rolling 40s. We had one escort at that point—a destroyer; she was a converted yacht. She was going to join the destroyer force. Then we went on our own. We got in this storm, pretty heavy weather, and we had to slow down. [Lieutenant] Harry Hill [a Naval Academy classmate of Bieri] had joined the ship during the year. I was relieving him as officer of the deck on this morning at 0400. He had had the midwatch. I came up on the bridge, and Harry was very happy to see me.He said, “We’ve lost the two topmasts. The boats on the port side are all stove in. We’ve lost one of the lifeboats. The gasoline cargo which we had on deck, lashed to the barbettes of the turrets, is adrift. The drums are rolling all around the deck, and the ship is full of gasoline fumes. The smoking lamp is out. The deck is yours.”We finally got rid of the gasoline on the topside, got squared away, and ran out of the storm. We arrived off the northwest coast of Scotland, where we were picked up by some British destroyers as escorts into Scapa Flow. We spent from February 1918 to early December 1918 as part of the Grand Fleet.Institute Launches Memoir ProgramThe U.S. Naval Institute is announcing the launch of its new Memoir Program, which will serve as a significant enhancement to the Institute’s all-important heritage mission. Many are those who have served in uniform, and for a great number of them, those military years—whether on the front lines of combat or down in the trenches of the great Pentagon policy debates—stand out as the most vital and unforgettable parts of their lives. The Naval Institute Memoir Program will provide veterans and their families with a trusted place to archive electronically their autobiographical accounts, their letters, their vignettes—all the elements embodying the treasure trove of their experiences. This ever-growing online collection will provide historians and researchers with a priceless bounty of primary-source material, recounted by those who were there. For future generations, a crucial perspective on military history will be preserved. For more information, contact Oral History Program Manager Eric Mills at emills@usni.org.
By Vice Admiral Bernhard H. Bieri, U.S. Navy (Ret.)
James Leamon Forbis enlisted in the Navy in 1939. When war came on 7 December 1941, he was on the front line of history, serving as a coxswain on board the USS Arizona (BB-39) when the bombs started dropping. He survived the attack and went on to serve through World War II on board the destroyers Craven (DD-382), Kalk (DD-611), and De Haven (DD-727). He retired from the Navy as a chief boatswain’s mate in 1961. In the following excerpt from his U.S. Naval Institute interview, he vividly recounts the fateful events of the Day of Infamy from Ground Zero.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, I was aboard the battleship Arizona. The bugler went on the fantail for morning colors. He had already sounded first call, which was scheduled for five minutes to eight. He was standing there awaiting eight o’clock when some planes came out of the east. They were coming right out of the early morning sun and it was real bright. He couldn’t see anything but he said, “Boy, I wish I was up there in one of them planes flying around this morning.” I glanced up but couldn’t see anything because of the blinding sun, and I said, “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty nice up there.” Then other planes started coming in over Hickam Field and the naval shipyard. They were dropping bombs as they came. Then they veered sharply to the left.
Now, we were expecting the big carrier Enterprise [CV-6] to come in the day before and she hadn’t come, so we thought, maybe those are Enterprise planes. They were always playing war games out there, the Army against the Navy, in surprise attacks. So we thought, maybe it’s the crazy Army Air Forces. They don’t know when to quit. They even have to get after us on a Sunday morning. They probably had sandbags with flares that’d make smoke.
But then the bombs were dropping and you could hear them exploding and bang!—one of them hit the bow of the ship. I told somebody with me, “Boy somebody’s going to catch hell now. They hit the ship.” I still thought it was practice, but it was awful heavy for practice, because it jarred that battleship.
Very shortly we knew they were Japanese planes. Our battle stations were in number four gun turret, which was on the after part of the ship. So we went down to the third deck and aft to the powder-handling room and then started climbing up the ladder to the gun turret. I was on the ladder when a bomb hit the top of the turret. It ricocheted off and knocked me down to the lower handling room. There was a kind of flash and we got smoked out. You couldn’t breathe that old stink in there, that smell. I got burned, but not bad. We all got scorched. Then we went over into number three lower handling room. The compressed air lines had broken there, and the compressed air was blowing the smoke out so you could breathe and live.
The last word that come over the public-address system was, “Fire on the quarterdeck.”
The ship was down by the bow and sitting on the bottom. Everything was really in a sad shape. It was torn up. There was bombing, burning, and people were in the water. Some boats were retrieving them. Everyone was leaving the ship. There were about a half-dozen of us getting some life rafts over the side to the men in the water. Some of them had been blown into the water and some of them had jumped.
A few of us remained on board ship. We had briefly discussed the powder magazines. The 14-inch powder was directly below us. Once in a while somebody would say something about it. We knew the magazines were overdue. They were going to go. And we knew that if they did go, that deck would blow us awful high. So we got all the rafts over, and because there was nothing left for us to do we jumped into the water.
The old boat boom on the starboard side had been blown or knocked loose from its anchoring. It was still attached but it was in the water under the oil and you couldn’t see it. I jumped in and hit it. I was almost knocked out, just about unconscious. One of the guys had helped me recover and encouraged me until I finally could swim on my own. I started out half cuckoo from hitting that boat boom. He stayed with me. We swam over to the boat landing through the oil. I don’t know how I made it. The good Lord was looking out for us.
When I got in that boat and looked back I got the full impact of what had happened in the harbor. I’ll tell you, I couldn’t believe I was alive.
Forbis’ Pearl Harbor reminiscences are excerpted from Naval Institute oral historian John T. Mason Jr.’s 1981 interview, which appeared in the anthology The Pacific War Remembered: An Oral History Collection (Naval Institute Press, 1986).
The U.S. Naval Institute’s Oral History Program has collected, organized, and indexed the recollections of prominent naval servicemen and servicewomen since 1969. To learn more about Naval Institute oral histories, visit the program’s web page at www.usni.org/heritage/oral-history.
