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Erickson relives days of war
Rick Steigmeyer/Wenatchee World
Erick Erickson, left, speaks with other veterans after his talk at the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center last month.
Erick Erickson was raised in a houseboat in the Duwamish River, where commercial ships would pass to and from Seattle’s Elliott Bay. It’s no wonder he grew up wanting to be a sailor.
And a sailor he became, first with the U.S. Merchant Marine and then the U.S. Navy. His Navy experiences aboard the USS Saratoga during World War II soured his taste for the sea, however. When the war ended, he became a dairy farmer, sticking to dry land and eventually ending up in Quincy, where he lives today.
Erickson and war veteran friend Karl Bates of Yakima talked about their combat experiences one Tuesday last month at the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center. The two were shipmates briefly when the Saratoga was brought to the Bremerton Navy Yard for repairs after surviving multiple bombings and direct hits by Japanese kamikaze planes. Except for the gruesome memories of war, Erickson, now 84, came back unscathed from three-and-a-half years of active duty on the veteran aircraft carrier that helped bring the Pacific War with Japan to its end.
Bates, now 82, hadn’t seen action on the ship, but became a 17-year-old gunner at the war’s end in 1945 when the ship was still under repair. With cruel irony, he was severely injured when a cannon misfired during practice in Puget Sound.
“My time was short,” said Bates, who never regained full use of his legs.
Erickson got his mother to write him a letter allowing him to join the Merchant Marine in 1941. He was 16 years old. He joined the Navy a year later, after Pearl Harbor was attacked.
“Our training was short. I didn’t have any rifle training. They didn’t care if I could swim or not,” Erickson said. He was put to work as a water tender, working on boilers of the Saratoga, a huge aircraft carrier that had been converted from a battle cruiser originally built in 1920.
“It was an old ship, but it was well built,” he said. The ship would do 36 knots, twice as fast as the much smaller freighters Erickson had worked on while in the Merchant Marine. “It could outrun anything out there,” he said. The ship was 900 feet long and 120 feet wide.
It toured the South Pacific for 18 months, providing fighter planes that aided the attack on dozens of islands between Guadalcanal to Tokyo, and transporting thousands of troops. It withstood two torpedo attacks that forced it back for repairs in Bremerton and Pearl Harbor. In spring of 1944, the Saratoga was sent around Australia to the Indian Ocean, where it staged an aircraft attack of Japanese oil reserves in Sumatra and Ceylon.
“That was a huge victory for us and shortened the war, because Japan had no other place to get oil,” he said.
The Saratoga joined Task Force 58 in early 1945 for the attack on Iwo Jima. It was one of 14 aircraft carriers in the fleet and one of only three that allowed night airplane takeoff and landing, Erickson said. The island had to be won because it defended Japan with heavy artillary that was bringing down U.S. B-29 bombers as well as a major radar station, he said.
The tiny island had been riddled with tunnels used to mine sulfur. About 20,000 Japanese troops staged a fierce defense in the tunnels for over a month. The Saratoga was there to provide the night attack from a point about 10 miles offshore.
Erickson recalled standing in a chow line when sirens sounded an alert. Minutes later, three kamikaze fighter planes plowed into the front of the ship. A Japanese twin-engine bomber crashed into the Saratoga’s mid-ship hangar deck. Bombs tore gaping holes in the side of the ship, close to the waterline.
“You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We were on fire from stem to stern,” Erickson said.
The ship was under attack for three and a half hours. It was hit by five kamikaze planes and seven bombs. The ship survived, but 123 men were killed and hundreds more were wounded.
Erickson’s voice cracked with emotion as he recalled the sailors buried at sea. Artillary shells were put in the bags with each body to carry them down to the bottom. When the bodies hit the water, the shells went right through the bags.
“The bodies came right up and we left a trail of them floating in the sea behind us,” he said.
Watertender First Class Erick Erickson was honorably discharged Feb. 21, 1946, exactly one year after the bombing.
The Saratoga brought home more than 29,000 Pacific war veterans, more than any other ship. After the war, the ship was assigned to Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll, where it was used to test atomic bomb blasts. It survived the first blast with little damage on July 1, 1946. A second atomic blast July 25 caused the ship to finally slip beneath the surface of the water.
