On December 7, 1941, the battleship USS West Virginia was moored outboard of the Tennessee at Pearl Harbor. To the Japanese torpedo planes sweeping low across the harbor, her port side hung fully exposed. Six, seven, or by another count, eight torpedoes struck her, along with two bombs. She settled onto the harbor floor with a slight list to port, and oil fires burned on and around her for roughly thirty hours.
She was not lost, but she was trapped in shallow water, and when salvage crews finally reached her deepest forward compartments, they found three firemen who had survived the attack and then lived for days inside the sunken ship. Their names were Clifford Olds, twenty, from Stanton, North Dakota; Ronald Endicott, eighteen, from Aberdeen, Washington; and Louis Costin, known as Buddy, twenty-one, from southern Indiana. Their battle station was in the freshwater pump room far forward, with a storeroom opening off it. When the water poured in, it flooded the spaces around them but left air trapped inside.
Roughly forty feet of water sat above them. They were not alone for long in the sense that anyone heard them. Marines on sentry duty on Ford Island began picking up sounds from the sunken ship. A bugler from the West Virginia’s own Marine detachment, Dick Fisk, was standing guard and heard a persistent banging in pairs, with pauses between, coming from deep in the forward end.
At first, men assumed it was loose gear knocking against steel. Then they understood that someone down there was signaling. No one went in. The reasoning given by survivors was simple and brutal.
Cutting a hole to reach the men would let the water rush in and drown the space. Using a torch risked an explosion in a ship soaked in fuel oil. So the Navy did nothing for the men it could hear. When salvage crews finally reached the storeroom, they found the evidence of how the three had lived.
The emergency rations at that station were gone. A manhole to the freshwater tanks had been removed, so they had drinking water. Flashlight batteries lay on the floor. And there was a calendar.
Every date from December 7 through December 23 had an X marked through it, seventeen squares by one count, sixteen by another. The gap is likely the difference between counting marks and counting days lived. The last mark was the 23rd. The official salvage report, dated June 15, 1942, gives that calendar one sentence before returning to pump sizes and tonnages.
It does not say which of the three held the pencil. It does not say what their families were told. The Navy knew how to cut men out of a sunken ship. That same December, civilian yard workers on Ford Island cut thirty-two men out of the capsized Oklahoma, whose upturned bottom stood clear of the water.
It was brutal work. Their torches ignited cork insulation and paint, and every time they broke through, air rushed out and water rose behind it. They switched to pneumatic chipping guns and kept going. The West Virginia was different.
She sat upright on the bottom, sunk deepest at the bow, where the storeroom lay. Her forward draft was fifty and a half feet against under forty-one feet aft. There was no bare hull above the compartment to cut through. The men who heard the knocking could not send anything back down.
To reach the storeroom at all, the Navy first had to raise a battleship. The salvage report describes the work in the flat language of engineers. Crews built patches for the holes in her side, walls of steel, wood, and concrete, each section about thirteen and a half feet long and fifty feet high. The forward patch took three sections, the after patch eleven.
Along the bottom, they poured roughly 650 tons of concrete, four feet deep. They skimmed about 40,000 gallons of loose oil from the water inside her and later pumped 800,000 gallons from her tanks. Pumping began on May 12, 1942. On May 17, the West Virginia came afloat.
On June 9, she entered dry dock number one. Working compartment by compartment as the water went down, the crews made their way forward to the freshwater pump room and the storeroom beside it. There they found the three firemen, dressed in their blues and jerseys, lying on the lower shelf. The calendar came out with them.
In all, sixty-six bodies were recovered from the ship. The report adds one sentence that reaches far beyond the storeroom: there was evidence that some of the men had lived for a considerable period and finally succumbed due to lack of oxygen. In the after engine room, bodies lay on top of the steam pipes, up in the air bubble of that flooded space. The West Virginia lost 106 enlisted men and two officers in the attack, among them her captain, Mervyn Bennion.
The official death date for every man was December 7, 1941. The calendar went to the Chief of Naval Personnel in Washington. That was the last anyone officially heard of it. By 1995, no one could find it.
Then there were the families. Several days after the attack, a Navy official told the Costin family that Buddy had died at his battle station. That was true as far as it went. Buddy’s younger brother, Harlan, joined the Navy in October 1942 at seventeen and served on the cruiser Tuscaloosa.
Somewhere along the way, a friend told him how his brother had actually died. He did not pass it on. He told a reporter more than fifty years later, “I just wanted to spare them the grief. ”
Clifford Olds’ brother, Duke, heard the truth from a cousin who was a sailor at the shipyards in Bremerton, Washington.
He did not tell his parents either. Their mother died in 1956; their father fifteen years after her. Neither of them ever knew. “I’ve never even told it to my wife,” Duke said in 1995.
In Aberdeen, the local paper ran Ronald Endicott’s obituary on December 17, 1941, under the words “Died for US. ” By the calendar in the storeroom, someone down there was still marking days. What his parents were ever told is not in any source that has come to light. Buddy Costin’s sister, Edna Haile, found out in December 1995 from a reporter.
“It is so sad. It just breaks you up,” she said. It cannot be proved that the Navy deliberately kept the families in the dark. No such letter has ever been published.
The account that they were told nothing rests on what these relatives said in 1995. What they said was consistent. The official notices gave the date of death as December 7. Anyone who knew more had heard it from shipmates and cousins and kept it to themselves.
The ship itself went on. She stayed in dry dock until September 1942, then sailed for the Puget Sound Navy Yard in April 1943, where she was rebuilt and modernized. She rejoined the fleet in July or October 1944, depending on the account. On October 25, 1944, at Surigao Strait in the Philippines, she was among the battleships that opened fire on the Japanese battleship Yamashiro in the last engagement in history between battleships.
On September 2, 1945, she was anchored in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender. Dick Fisk fought on Iwo Jima. From 1982, he volunteered at the Arizona Memorial, where once a month he laid two roses on behalf of a former Japanese pilot from the attack. In later retellings, Fisk is quoted as saying the tapping from the West Virginia went on until Christmas Eve.
The calendar stops on the 23rd. The two accounts may describe the same last night, or a memory may have shifted over fifty years. There is no way now to settle it. Clifford Olds was sent home and buried in Stanton, North Dakota.
Ronald Endicott and Buddy Costin lie in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in the crater above Honolulu called the Punchbowl. All three headstones give the date of death as December 7, 1941. The Navy sent Buddy Costin’s wristwatch home, waterlogged. It was the Christmas gift he had bought for his mother, Effie.
She had it fixed and wore it until she died in December 1985, at ninety-two.