Published September 2006 as part of the HonorAir article
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20060923/NEWS/609230335/0/search

Vets Recall World War II

By Jennie Jones Giles
Dewey Hunnicutt, 82, left Henderson County before the war started to join the Navy. He was in boot camp when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
“We didn’t have any idea where Pearl Harbor was,” he said. “But we knew we were going to war.”
He was assigned to the Destroyer O’Brien and left for the Pacific. When the sailors arrived in Pearl Harbor, they saw the devastation.
“I knew then this was no place for a little country boy,” Hunnicutt said.
The sailors on the destroyer had one job: to protect the nation’s remaining aircraft carriers from a Japanese attack.
“We were down around the Solomon Islands,” he said. “We would go out and stay for days with the carriers. You knew nothing about where you were.”
He was a gunner.
“Unless you were there, you don’t know how close we came to losing it (the war),” he said. “The Japanese had the best torpedoes and we didn’t know it.”
Hunnicutt was on lookout one afternoon, manning the phones, when he heard the USS Wasp was hit.
“I jumped up, grabbed my life jacket,” he said. “The Wasp was burning. The task force did a 180 degree turn the other way. One boy was pointing in the water and couldn’t say anything.”
What the young sailor was pointing at was the wake of a torpedo about 35 to 40 yards from the destroyer.
“It didn’t hit,” Hunnicutt said. “It went under us and out the other side.”
About the time the sailors began to relax, the ship was hit at the bow.
“It broke the keel in three places,” he said.
The squadron commander sent a message, “Goodbye, good luck and God bless you,” Hunnicutt said.
The sailors managed, alone in enemy waters, to get the destroyer back to safety. Repairs were made and they started back to the United States.
“We hit rough water and it broke in two,” he said.
The fleet oiler Cimarron picked the sailors up.
The USS Bennett destroyer was commissioned Feb. 9, 1943, and Hunnicutt joined the crew, heading back to the Pacific.
They sailed the “slot” around the Guadacanal.
“We were doing convoy duty up the slot,” he said.
Once, Australian commandoes slipped off the destroyer onto an island.
“We took them off the next night,” he said. “They tore the whole place up.”
He was at the invasion of Saipan.
“The whole island was ringed with ships,” he said.
They were sent to Guam.
“We were bombarding there and protecting the ‘frogmen’ (Navy Seals),” Hunnicutt said. “They were blowing up reefs so the Higgins boats wouldn’t hit them.”
The Marines came by in the Higgins boats and we said “Go get ’em boys.”
One of the Marines he talked to in the Pacific was also from Henderson County, Spevines Jones, the brother of his future wife.
“That’s how I met Betty,” he said.
Hunnicutt played baseball with the county’s industrial leagues, retired from Berkeley Mills, and now is a starter at the Cliffs of Valley Golf Course.
Hunnicutt is going to pay his respects at the World War II Memorial in honor of others.
“I want to see the names of the guys I knew,” he said. “I’m going in honor of the guys I was raised with that didn’t make it. Isn’t that what it’s about? Those people who didn’t make it.
“There’s nothing to brag about killing somebody,” he said. “It’s the Marines and soldiers who had it worst, killing a person. We shot at objects. I’ve always been thankful for that.
“We practiced every day,” he said as his eyes misted with tears. “Load it and ram it. Load it and ram it.”