Pearl Harbor: Fr. Aloysius Schmitt & John Austin aboard the sinking USS Oklahoma
Old Men in their 30's Saved Young Men in their 20's, Squeezing for Survival Through Underwater 11-inch Portholes
The Pearl Harbor attack was 81 years ago.
Yet there are still things happening in the past few years relative to the event.
Just six years ago, a military effort to identify remains has allowed a Pearl Harbor mass grave to become individual graves, sorting through the remains from the USS Oklahoma. Instead of families looking to a collective tomb, they can now settle the remains of their individual ancestor.
Fr. Schmitt’s remains came home to Iowa on October 5, 2016, 74 years, 9 months and 28 days after he died at Pearl Harbor.
When the USS Oklahoma capsized, it entombed 429 sailors onboard. Those remains, over time, became difficult to identify individually after spending almost two years underwater. They were exhumed in 1943 when the ship was salvaged, and later buried in a mass graves.
Only recently, the Navy started DNA testing to identify individual remains.
The first chaplain to die in World War 2 was Father Aloysius Schmitt. He was aboard the USS Oklahoma when it was attacked.
The Oklahoma was hit by at least four torpedoes and capsized in 12 minutes. Some claim that up to nine torpedoes hit the Nevada-class battleship. The ‘torpedo nets’ that were supposed to protect against this very situation were not deployed, some claim that Adm. Kimmel was begging Washington for the nets and was denied.
It should have taken longer for the Oklahoma to sink, but the Pacific Fleet was in harbor to conduct a quarterly inspection by fleet admiral Kimmel and all of the portholes were open so that they could be cleaned and prepared for the inspection the next day, Monday morning.
The Oklahoma would still have sunk from the damage, but in the shallow Hawaiian bay its hull would have rested on the surface with much of the ship’s masting still above the waterline. The open portholes sped up the ship’s roll, turning over in just 12 minutes, and took away critical time necessary for 429 men to escape. Only 32 would be rescued from the ship once it turned over.
The men had been called to general quarters but were never given the official order to abandon ship. Word travelled to abandon ship by word of mouth at best.
The men inside, some of whom were able to escape or who were rescued by men cutting through the hull, describe a surreal moment where everything around them turns around and then quietly and quickly the power goes out and they are in total darkness with water rushing in all around them.
From that moment they had to figure out how to get out, and for most of the survivors it seems as though they got out by squeezing through the incredibly small portholes. The portholes that tipped the ship quicker than it should have rolled, were also the only way out to survive the sinking.
Fr. Schmitt had just recently finished saying a mass for the servicemen when the attack started. He saw an open porthole and tried to squeeze through. He couldn’t fit through the 11 inch hole.
The 32 year old had trouble and got stuck. He was pulled back inside and instead of trying to help himself, he helped a reported 12 others escape the sinking hulk.
Oklahoma survivor Adolph Mortensen claims to be the last person to see Fr. Schmitt alive, helping others get out.
We scrambled up to the second deck to D Division compartment and there were 3 or 4 man lined up feeding men through the port holes. I think I was about the last man to see Chaplain Schmidt. [sic] He tried to get through a port hole and he was just too big. It is very difficult to get through an 11 inch port hole when you are dry with your clothes on.
In a way that’s what you expect a priest to do, but it’s not what you expect any man in that situation to do. Grace under fire. Selflessness. Courage. Resilience. Faith. Charity. Mercy.
The Washington Post referred to Fr. Schmitt as a ‘hero priest’ in their headline. I suspect that, if he were here to talk to us, he would just clarify that he was a mere priest.
There were other men making the same sacrifices that day, ensuring that others got out even as they were trapped in the sinking hulk of the ship. Here’s Adolph Mortensen again:
Most of the air had been used up by this time and only John Austin and me were left in the air pocket. He weighed about 200 pounds and there was no way he was going to fit through the port hole. He didn’t say a word but came over and took the glass cover and told me to go. I took a deep breath of the air that was left and knew John was going to die. I put one arm through the port hole then the other and squeezed out. I had my pajamas on and they came off when I went out the porthole and I think I left a little skin on that porthole. I was a good swimmer and looked up but the sky wasn’t blue, it was a golden brown and I knew something was not right. I swam a lot in the ocean and when I was coming up the sky was always blue. It never occurred to me that the water would be covered with fuel oil.
John Austin was 36 years old, from Warrior, Alabama when he died on December 7th. My Alabama-raised wife says Warrior today is a backwoods town with lots of trailer homes, ‘rough customers’ and people who love to catch catfish in the Black Warrior river. Austin is credited with helping 15 men escape from the sinking Oklahoma. Austin was one of five children. He was married to Florence. He left behind a 12 year old son, John Jr., who died at age 70 in 1999. John Sr.’s remains were only properly identified and re-interred in 2018. A Destroyer Escort was named after Austin, the U.S.S. Austin, in service from 1942-1946.
Fr. Schmitt was from a big Iowa farm family. One of ten, he was raised with a set of Christian values and beliefs that led him to the priesthood, but also in a moment of tragedy and carnage, he had the clarity of mind to be in service to other souls.
That day, a day alive in infamy but also filled with acts of charity, looms large not only in their memories but in the history of the United States.
In Michael Bay’s widely-panned 2001 “Pearl Harbor” movie, a scene features the sinking of the Oklahoma and the drowning deaths of those unfortunate enough to be stuck inside, like Fr. Schmitt and John Austin.
There’s not a lot that has survived about the substance of these men’s lives. The typical tombstone tells you so little about who they were as people, as men. It gives you the dates of the two things totally out of their control: the date they were born and the date they died.
But there was something essential about these two men’s characters that is reflected on the day they died. They did not panic, which would be understandable. They did not think only of themselves, which would be natural. They calmed saved others, they met their fate with honor.
Fr. Schmitt studied in Rome. I know a seminarian who did the same, and it’s a mark of a promising student who will no doubt do great things for the rest of their lives, however long or in Schmitt’s case, short.
Coming back from education in Rome, there is a record of Fr. Schmitt coming back to the shores of America on the SS Washington on April 30, 1936. That day he was 5 years, 7 months, and 7 days away from the day he would die.
One wonders if you could go back in time and tell him that, and the circumstances of his death and the lives he could save, would he have done anything differently?
For years the survivors of the USS Oklahoma met and shared their stories. Several became alcoholics, one blacked everything from the day out in his memory. One described the memory from that day of eating breakfast with his friends one moment, and then the next moment they were all dead.
Living is better than dying, but many carried burdens with them for decades. The most basic burden is ‘survivor’s guilt.’
The survivors autographed copies of the Oklahoma noting where they escaped from the burning hulk that Sunday morning, even where some of them managed to squeeze out of 11 inch wide portholes.
These old men from the Oklahoma were given the chance to live, whereas others of their friends fell on the other side of that coin and paid with their lives. Where they were at on the boat mattered more than their rank, their preparation, their worthiness. Some lived, and some died.
The Oklahoma was perhaps the most unfortunately positioned ship in Pearl Harbor. It was in a perfect position to entice Jap bombers to target it, and it was at the end of ‘Battleship Row’ so it made an especially appealing target for the initial waves. Their modified torpedoes needed both the distance across the water, but also the clear approach to avoid turbulence, that were both evident for targeting the Oklahoma.
The ship was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And 429 out of a crew of 1,400, 31%, were in the wrong place on the wrong ship at the wrong time. Forces bigger than any single sailor were at work to force a war and were willing to kill all of them in order to do it.
Fr. Schmitt’s worn chalice and waterlogged prayer book were found the next year, and now sit as artifacts at his alma mater in Dubuque, Iowa: Loras College. His remains were later re-interred there after being identified through DNA analysis.
His prayer book was marked for the day on Psalm 8:
1 For the leader; “upon the gittith.” A psalm of David.
2 O LORD, our Lord,
how awesome is your name through all the earth!
I will sing of your majesty above the heavens
3 with the mouths of babes and infants.
You have established a bulwark against your foes,
to silence enemy and avenger.
4 When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place—
5 What is man that you are mindful of him,
and a son of man that you care for him?
6 Yet you have made him little less than a god,
crowned him with glory and honor.
7 You have given him rule over the works of your hands,
put all things at his feet:
8 All sheep and oxen,
even the beasts of the field,
9 The birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
and whatever swims the paths of the seas.
10 O LORD, our Lord,
how awesome is your name through all the earth!
Politica | PEARL HARBOR SERIES:
Pt 9 - Weak Leads-- Pearl Military Judge Drafts Martial Law Before Attack
Pt 8 - Reporter Tells US Japs Will Attack After Midnight on Dec. 6th
Pt 7 - Toward a Taxonomy of Claims about “Advance Knowledge” of the Attack
Pt 6 - Japs Were Trying to Escape Panama on Dec. 2nd
Pt 5 - Yes, there was Warning of the Pearl Harbor Attack
Pt 4 - ‘Very Bitter’ Housewife in ‘45 Notes Flaws in the Official Story
Pt 3 - Lloyd’s of London Cancelled Insurance Policies in August 1941
Pt 2 - Tips About The Pearl Harbor Attack 77 Years Late
Pt 1 - Pearl Harbor Revisionism