U.S. Navy

Clifford Carter

Clifford Carter’s U.S. Navy training as a Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class never prepared him for deciding if wounded soldiers were likely to live or die.

While serving in the South Pacific during the final bloody battles of World War II aboard the U.S.S. Stembel, the Fletcher-class destroyer was ordered to come alongside the U.S.S. Bunker Hill, an aircraft carrier.

“They sluiced over 385 wounded and badly burned men, and we kept them on board until we could move them to a bigger ship,” said Carter, now 81 and living in Lamoine near the farmstead that was home in 1943, when he was drafted at age 18.

“The doctors taught us how to give them morphine with these injectors. They said, ‘If it looks like they’ll live, give them half; if it looks like they’re going to die, give them all of it.’ We had to make the judgments of who would live and who would die.

“Almost all of them died,” he said. “They were put overboard, buried at sea.”

Built at the Bath Iron Works in Maine and commissioned in July of 1943, the U.S.S. Stembel seemed to Carter and the other 384 sailors on board to lead a charmed existence.

“We were involved in the island-hopping that eventually took us right into Tokyo Bay,” he said. “We were involved in 11 major engagements, and there were only 15 in the whole Pacific Ocean.

“I don’t think I got one full night’s sleep, and there was one stretch where we didn’t leave our battle station for eight days and nights,” he said. “It seemed like every day we were shooting down kamikaze suicide planes that would dive on us two or three times a day. But we never got hit, not even at Okinawa, where most of the other ships got hit. We took some mortar fire at Iwo Jima because we were so close to shore, but we never had a casualty.

“God was with us, I guess, because we never got hit.”

During the push to take the Philippines, the U.S.S. Stembel was among five destroyers grouped as a “wolfpack” to hunt down and sink the Japanese fleet.

“At one point, we picked up 44 blips on our radar, and, when we radioed back we had spotted 44 ships, we were to told to go after them,” he said. “There were two Japanese destroyers as escorts for the others, which were merchant ships but armed with three-inch guns. We went after the destroyers first and then sank all 44 of those ships.

“Our group had been nicknamed the ‘Black Sheep’ because we seemed to get every dirt detail there was,” he said. “After we sunk those 44 ships, we were nicknamed ‘The Bloody 5.’

As the first ship into Tokyo Bay, Carter was aboard the U.S.S. Stembel when he witnessed the mushroom cloud that rose above Hiroshima after the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city on Aug. 6, 1945.

“There was this big cloud that just kept going up and up,” he said. “They told us it was an atomic bomb, but we didn’t know what in the hell that was. Later, we were right alongside of the battleship Missouri when they signed the peace treaty.”

Among his souvenirs of the war is a red, white and blue “We Surrender” leaflet dropped from a Japanese plane.

“They flew over in a white plane and dropped these leaflets,” he said. “I was able to grab one.”

For his service Carter earned nine battle stars on his Asiatic-Pacific battle ribbon and two on his Philippine Liberation battle ribbon. He also was awarded the World War II Victory Medal.

When he was discharged in San Diego in February of 1946, Carter was only 20.

“I remember it made us so mad that a lot of us weren’t old enough to have a bottle of beer, but we were old enough to fight and die,” he said. “We all sputtered about that.”

After returning home to Lamoine, Carter cut wood and dug clams. Re-entry to civilian life wasn’t easy, physically or mentally.

“Things were tight,” he remembers. “There was a real depression on. Being in the service was a bed of roses compared to what I found back here.

“They should have had some de-programming for us, or something. I had nightmares every night for probably a year that the Japanese were after me.”

— Tom Walsh