Allen Houston and Jack Weidenfeller

photos by Thais Boise
Allen Houston (left) and Jack Weidenfeller served aboard the same aircraft carrier, which was attacked by Japanese kamikazes, in the Pacific during World War II. The two men didn't meet until 1990.

Memories of a single day
form deep bond

by Bennett Jacobs
Veterans History Project

Jack Weidenfeller and Allen Houston didn’t know each other, but their lives would intersect in World War II aboard the USS Bunker Hill, an aircraft carrier in the Pacific during World War II. For both men, the memories of May 11, 1945, have been with them every day since.
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The two men did not know each other aboard the ship, but now, connected by their past and their present — both live in the Missoula area — they meet once a week for lunch.

photo by Thais Boise

Jack Weidenfeller was burned on one leg and one arm in a kamikaze attack for which he received a Purple Heart.

Weidenfeller, 77, signed up for the Navy in January 1944, before he was even done with his senior year of high school in Deer Lodge, Mont., to avoid taking his chances with the draft. At the time, he thought of the Navy as being “a nice warm place to sleep and good food where no one’s going to shoot at you.”

He learned soon how big a fallacy that notion was.

Houston, also 77, volunteered for the Navy in October of 1943, before graduating high school, for similar reasons, after hearing the stories of mustard gas and sleeping in holes in World War I from his uncle around the dinner table in Houston’s home in Tama County, Iowa. Despite receiving “the best seat in the Navy” working signal lights atop the island structure of the ship, Houston cannot forget the death and destruction he witnessed aboard the Bunker Hill.

Houston learned of his assignment aboard the Bunker Hill before Weidenfeller and boarded the ship in the Marshall Islands. It wouldn’t take long for him to see action, as the Bunker Hill supplied fighter planes for every major Pacific operation in the last two years of the war. Houston spent most of his days working with the Admiral’s staff, using a 12-inch signal light to communicate between ships in the fleet.

When Weidenfeller arrived on the Bunker Hill, he spent his days below deck working in the radar room. Stress was a part of both men’s daily routine.

“Everything is stressful, you know, because they’re shooting at you,” said Weidenfeller.

A navy file photo of the USS Bunker Hill, its deck heavily laden with Corsair fighter planes.(photo courtesy of Allen Houston)

Smoke and fire consumed the island structure in the middle of the ship moments after the kamikaze attacks on the morning of May 11, 1945.(photo courtesy of Jack Weidenfeller)

At 8 a.m., on May 11, 1945, Weidenfeller began a four-hour shift watching the radar screens and plotting both American and Japanese planes during the battle for Okinawa.

At just after 10 that morning, the first of two Japanese kamikazes slipped past defenses and struck the Bunker Hill in the rear deck, followed by the second kamikaze less than a minute later, which hit near the ship’s island. Each of the planes dropped a 500-pound bomb before becoming a manned missile.

In the armor-plated radar room under the flight deck, Weidenfeller survived the two attacks but didn’t walk away unscathed. During his retreat from the radar room to the flight deck, he was burned on one arm and one leg. He would later receive the Purple Heart for his wounds.

Elsewhere on the ship that morning was Houston, a young signalman. He was below deck and thought after the first crash that the ship had collided with another. After the second vessel-shuddering collision, Houston’s worst fears were confirmed when alarms began to sound and an officer collected him and a handful of other men to man water hoses. Houston would spend the entire day fighting the intense fires, some of which were burning pilots who had been sitting in their Corsair fighters waiting to take off.

Houston and the rest of the hose teams struggled to put out the fires that were killing so many and threatened the entire ship.

“While fighting the fire, I saw a lot of death,” said Houston.

Houston would continue to be bombarded with death in the days to come. Despite injured feet, he helped bury at sea the 392 sailors who were not as lucky as he.

Weidenfeller and Houston didn’t know each other that day. The ship, with a crew of 3,448, was a small floating town. The two sailors would not meet until years later, in 1990, when they were introduced by the sister of a Missoula-area man who died aboard the Bunker Hill.

photo by Thais Boise

Today, the two men share a deep friendship, linked by the conflict they both took part in. And even though they prod and tease one another, the sadness of what they witnessed is always just beneath the surface.

At their weekly lunches, Weidenfeller wears his lone sailor and Purple Heart pins on his lapel. Houston wears a USS Bunker Hill hat. They wear those things because they are a part of them, not as trophies.

In the nearly 59 years that horrible day in 1945, they’ve witnessed four more major American conflicts; both men have developed critical views on war and America’s involvement in it. Though they maintain respect for the military, that criticism even extends to the war they fought in, a war that fewer people protested than any one since.

“We fought an honorable war,” said Houston. But, he added, “I believe wars don’t do a thing. We should have found another way.”

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