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Ed Wentzlaff knows where he will be buried – with his comrades.
Of the 335 men who survived the sinking of the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941, only about 20 remain
alive. Wentzlaff, 92, of Milaca, is one of them.
"I've already made the arrangements. My ashes will be interred on the Arizona. It only makes sense. I was on board for three years before she was
sunk. That's where all my friends are."
Edward Louis Wentzlaff was born in Nicollet, Minnesota, in November of 1917, the third of nine children. His father owned the hotel and saloon in
Nicollet.
Part of the family's income in the 1920s came from selling whiskey to the customers, despite the national Prohibition. "I remember saving my dad one time. I just happened to be out
collecting for my paper route, when I saw this new, big car coming into town. It had three guys in it. I raced home on my bike and told my dad, 'They're coming.' They were able to get rid of everything
they had behind the bar before the agents got there."
Wentzlaff graduated from high school in Nicollet in the spring of 1935 and the next day he was working for the Great Northern Railroad in Walker.
"I never had any trouble finding jobs because I always worked hard. I always believed in giving them their dollar's worth. The best job I had in those days was picking corn for $6 a day. That was big
money in the 1930s."
He did a variety of farm and labor jobs, but it was tough getting ahead during the Depression. "I got disgusted about always being poor. A friend of mine had joined the Navy
earlier that year, and then another friend joined up. For some reason, I decided I would too."
On December 8, 1938, Wentzlaff became an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy. He did his boot camp at Great
Lakes, and then was sent off to San Diego to ordnance school – learning about Navy weapons.
In school, he became interested in torpedoes. "I put in for submarines, but, of course, this was the
Navy, and they sent me to a battleship."
That ship was the USS Arizona, BB-39, built in 1916 and one of the largest ships in the fleet. Wentzlaff, like all new men on board, first worked as a cook and
pot scrubber on the mess decks for several months, and then became a gun striker — an apprentice in a black powder magazine below the ship's decks.
He got lucky in mid-1939 as there was an
opening for an ordnance man for the ship's three scout planes. "Everybody wanted to fly those planes." The float planes, OS2U Kingfishers, could be launched from the deck of the battleship on a short
catapault and then recovered by a crane after they landed at sea.
Wentzlaff soon made third class aviation ordnance mate with the help of an officer who had taken a liking to him. "When I was taking
the test, he told me maybe I should go back and look at problems nine and 11 again."
The USS Arizona shifted its home port to Pearl Harbor over the next couple of years, and the ship spent a lot of
time at sea, Wentzlaff recalls. In port, there was time for some fun and recreation. "I had a lot of friends. The Arizona had good baseball teams, football teams, wrestling, you name it. The crew spent
all of its time together."
Because it was a flagship, it also had a rear admiral on board, Isaac Kidd. "He was one of the orneriest admirals in the fleet. Everybody hated him. Our airplanes were on
the quarterdeck, and the admiral considered the quarterdeck his territory. He made us do all our work in dress whites. You tell me -- how you change the oil on an airplane in your dress
whites?"
Wentzlaff rose steadily through the ranks and had passed the test for first class in September of 1941, but he had to wait because there were no first class slots available at that time. His
job was mainly to oversee the armament on the Kingfishers, including the machine gun and bomb racks. He became an expert on synchronizing the machine guns so they wouldn't shoot off the plane's
propeller. Wentzlaff often flew as an air crewman in the planes, and he drew flight pay.
December 7th, 1941, began as a happy one for Wentzlaff. His three-year enlistment was scheduled to end the next
day. Two friends from Nicollet were coming over to visit him that day. He and one friend were planning on leaving the Navy and opening a resort in Wisconsin.
"It was a beautiful morning. As usual I
got up early to take a shower while there was still hot water, so I was probably up a half hour before reveille. Just before 8 o'clock I was up on the forecastle waiting for the service to begin. I was
Catholic, but they were having Lutheran service on our ship because our chaplain was Lutheran. They were just setting up the chairs. There were about 12 of us."
A couple of minutes before 8 a.m.,
Wentzlaff looked out toward Hospital Point in Pearl Harbor and saw an airplane coming in. "I could see the red ball on its side. It was coming right down the line of ships and strafing as it came. When
it got to us, the bullets were hitting the teak wood on deck, and the wood and splinters were flying all over.
"Someone told us to get below. There was kind of a rule in the Navy that a ship was
bombproof if you got down to the third deck."
On his way down, Wentzlaff stuck his head into a compartment where several of his shipmates were lolling around, recovering from their recreation in
Honolulu the night before. "I told them they should get below, but they said there wasn't really an attack, it was just the Army simulating an attack. The Army did that all the time. I told them to look
out the porthole, and they'd see it wasn't a simulation."
Wentzlaff continued to follow the other men below, but when he got to the ladder that would take him to what was thought to be the impregnable
part of the ship, he changed his mind. "I was the last one in the group, and they all went below and I didn't. Why I didn't follow them down there, I don't know. But my general quarters station was up on
the quarterdeck. Damn, don't you know, I just turned around and went back up."
The decision to stay on the quarterdeck probably saved Wentzlaff's life.
"There were some fires on deck already, and
the lieutenant commander told us to grab a fire hose. We got it out, and I told the other guy to stay at the valve until I was ready at the other end of the hose. When I had a good grip on it, I told him
to hit the water, but nothing happened. I thought he might have opened the wrong valve, so we changed places and I tried to open the valve. But there was no water. We had already been torpedoed at that
time."
As Wentzlaff was trying to open the valve, a Japanese plane dropped a bomb that sliced through the upper deck and set off a powder magazine in the forward part of the ship. History books would
later call what resulted as a cataclysmic explosion. Much of the forward part of the ship literally disappeared in the horrific blast.
"I was protected a little bit, but it burned off all my hair, my
eyebrows. I remember seeing the head of the Marine detail at that point. He was a huge man, and he had a chunk missing on his forehead, and another chunk missing on his cheek. He was yelling over and
over again, 'We're going to get those SOBs.' And then he died.
"Someone was yelling to abandon ship, but when I looked over the side and saw all that oil burning, I didn't know if I wanted to jump
into that. If I'd jumped, I don't think I would have made it to shore."
Instead, Wentzlaff and another sailor worked their way to the officer's gangway and down it to where the admiral's barge was
tied up. The Arizona was sinking, very slowly, but it was sinking and the line holding the barge was taut and the great ship was taking the barge down with it.
"I said to the other guy, 'If you can
get the engine going, I'll cut us loose.' I tried a knife on the three-inch rope, but that was useless. I went in the admiral's cabin and I found a flag staff the he used for official ceremonies. It had
a metal device on the top of it, and I brought that out and started hacking at the line. I finally got it parted."
The other sailor, who had never operated a boat before, got them underway. "We went
down the side of the ship, and there was a group of men, they were just black from head to foot. So many men were burned, and they were burned all over because all they had on when the ship exploded was
their shorts. We got them on board the barge, and brought them over to the hospital ship in the harbor, the USS Solace. If any of them lived, it had to be a miracle. They were just burned black."
The
two then brought the barge back to Ford Island, and they were ordered aboard a launch there and spent some time going in and out of the burning ships on Battleship Row trying to pull survivors aboard.
As one point, the launch brought a group of badly burned sailors to the Navy hospital at the harbor. "All those guys wanted were cigarettes. We hauled them over to the hospital, but there was no room
inside, and we just had to put them on the lawn. The doctors would come around, but if you looked in bad shape, you'd had it. If you didn't look like you were going to make it, they just didn't
bother."
Wentzlaff said a problem on the Arizona after the attack and for the rest of the day in Pearl Harbor was lack of leadership. On the Arizona, nearly all of the senior officers were killed in
the blast including Kidd and the ship's captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh. Throughout the harbor, the chain of command just broke down. "We were all orphans out there. It was organized confusion. In fact,
there was no command at all."
At one point during the long day, Wentzlaff was part of a group that went aboard the USS West Virginia, which had also been hit and was sinking. The Navy was trying
to get the ship upright before it sank, so that it would sink straight up and down and make its salvage possible. The ship was later rebuilt and rejoined the war.
"I remember talking to one guy who
served on the West Virginia. He was a friend of mine. He said that he had been ordered to flood some compartments, but he refused to do it because he knew some of his shipmates were in those
compartments. They made him do it. He had to kill them. A month later, he was dead. He never recovered from that."
Later in the day, Wentzlaff joined groups of sailors and soldiers who dug gun pits.
The Americans were apprehensive that the Japanese would either be coming back with another attack by air, or they would invade the island.
Wentzlaff and others were brought over to the shipyard to
spend the night. They were assigned to a recreation building. "They gave us a rifle, some ammunition, a blanket, soup and a sandwich. We painted all the windows black."
Near sunset, a group of planes
from an American aircraft carrier flew over the harbor. "We thought they were Japanese, and we were all firing at them with rifles and everything else we had. We shot five of them down. I was firing at
two of them. I don't know if I helped shoot them down. Two of the pilots were killed. We felt terrible. But that's just how it was that day. For a while I was carrying two .45s in my belt. I looked like
General Patton."
The next day, an officer saw Wentzlaff's ordnance man insignia on his sleeve and asked him if he could set fuses for a patrol boat's three-inch gun. Wentzlaff assured them that he
could. "That was pretty good, all we did was run around the harbor all day."
After that, Wentzlaff joined a working party doing whatever needed to be done. The Arizona had burned for 30 hours, setting
other ships afire, before the blaze was put out. Only the superstructure of the ship remained above the water. A total of 1,177 of Wentzlaff's shipmates had been killed.
"On the third day, they took
a bunch of us over to the post office. We were allowed to send a post card saying, 'I am okay, and I will write later.' There was an officer with us to make sure that's all we wrote. My parents were
first informed that I was missing in action, and that was the truth. Nobody knew where anybody was."
Not long afterwards, "They gathered up all us orphans and they made us into an anti-submarine
squadron."
Wentzlaff spent the rest of the war at a variety of assignments, including temporary duty early on aboard the USS Yorktown, which was sunk at the Battle of Midway. He rose steadily
through the ranks, and became a chief warrant officer by war's end. He had served eight and one-half years.
When the war was over, he came back to Minnesota. "For a year, I just relaxed and drank. We
were all single, and we traveled around a lot. I remember seeing my first onion rings in Philadelphia."
Wentzlaff was admitted to Law School at the University of Minnesota, but the large classes and
lack of personal help quickly turned him off to the institution. Instead, he went back to farming, a job he did for the next 38 years. "It was a great hobby until I ran out of money."
He lived in
Butterfield where he was elected mayor for four years, and he also served for four years as a Watowan County commissioner.
He has lived for several years in Milaca in senior housing, near several
members of his family. He had five children.
He likes to attend reunions of his shipmates, the few who are left. And he has done some traveling as part of an exhibition that included other World War
II veterans. "There was one guy who was on the Indianapolis. They billed us as being on the first ship that was sunk and the last ship that was sunk during the war."
Wentzlaff has seen all the movies
on Pearl Harbor, and he said "Tora, Tora, Tora" was very factual and realistic. The more recent movie with Ben Affleck "had all that romance in it."
He has been to the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor
eight times since the war. "I just look at all the names. There were so many good friends of mine."
"I can't explain why I've lived so long. It's like the good Lord is saying, 'I'm going to keep him
here until he gets it straightened out.' "
And, in the coming years, when Ed Wentzlaff finally gets it straightened out, he will be joining his 1,200 comrades in their place of immortality.
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