Heroes Beneath the Waves by Mary Nida Smith

Author:Mary Nida Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

USS Tullibee (SS-284) portside view, under way off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, April 2, 1943. USN photo #2235-43, courtesy of Darryl L. Baker.

Kuykendall said he could hear voices for about ten minutes after he regained consciousness. Then nothing.

He floated for several hours alone, except for an empty Sunkist orange crate that bumped into him.

He credited his shipmate Louis Joseph Hieronimus for saving his life. Hieronimus had forced him to take a lifebelt before going on lookout. The partially inflated life belt kept him afloat long enough to be spotted.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t by Americans.

About 1000 hours, he saw a destroyer coming in his direction, flying the rising sun flag. “They made a circle around me, to my starboard, and opened up with the machine gun, firing at me,” he said. “Fortunately, they never got a lethal shot in, but bullets were flying all over the place.”

The Japanese brought him aboard, pulling him up with a fish net because he was too weak to climb aboard. That’s when he had his third brush with death in less than twenty-four hours.

A Japanese officer holding a sword called him a coward for not drowning himself rather than being captured. The officer swung the sword over Kuykendall’s head four times, missing each time.

“Each time he swung it—there were two Japanese sailors on either side of me holding me up—I collapsed and fell to the deck and the sword passed over my head,” he said. “I did that intentionally because I knew if that sword hit my neck it would chop my head off.”

A short time later, Kuykendall heard something in Japanese over the PA system and the harassment stopped—for the time being.

He was dragged into a deck house and tossed onto a mat.

“Another Japanese sailor came in who was carrying a small cup of sweet tea in his hand,” he said. “He lifted my head and was giving me this sweet tea. He said in English, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be all right.’ I said, ‘Well, they’re not all alike.’”

He was taken to a small seaplane base among the Palau Islands. Eventually, he was tied to a tree atop a hill while Americans bombed the island as part of Operation Desecrate. After three days of abuse tied to the tree, he was put into a foxhole behind a Japanese navy commander’s house.

“Two days later, the owner of the house came up and got me and they took me back to the dock. I could see all of these hangars had been leveled and it made me feel good. He could speak English. Well, he saved my life. I know he did. They would have killed me if it hadn’t been for him,” Kuykendall said, re-enacting several captors punching him while he was tied up. “He took me out on the dock. A Japanese navy plane landed and he told me, ‘There you go. Good luck.’ Just like that. I looked at him and said, ‘Sir, good luck to you. I hope you make it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.