MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A Monongalia County man says all he could do was his job when the aircraft carrier he was on, the USS Franklin, was attacked near the Japanese mainland more than 70 years ago during World War II while he was serving in the U.S. Navy.
“We do what we have to do and we had a lot of training in the background and it finally came out,” Bob Spriggs, now 92 and a resident of Morgantown, said during a Veterans Day appearance on Wednesday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
“You use your training and make the best of everything you’ve got.”
The attack came on the morning of March 19, 1945 when the carrier was within 50 miles of Japan’s coast. Two bombs were dropped from a Japanese plane onto the carrier.
At the time, Spriggs — a navigator and electrician — was on the bridge doing electrical work. He used an extension cord to rappel off that bridge with 11 others, keeping them off the deck that had erupted in flames.
It was a devastating attack. More than 700 sailors were killed while upwards of 260 others were wounded. “I lost a lot of friends that day,” Spriggs said.
The carrier lost all radio communications and started listing.
The USS Pittsburgh later arrived to tow the USS Franklin while the wounded were loaded onto the USS Santa Fe.
“There were 704 of us left out of a crew of 3,218 men,” said Spriggs.
What followed was a trip back to the Brooklyn, New York Navy Yard via Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal. “We traveled 13,000 miles with that broken ship and we brought her home.”
In New York, “We had traffic tied up all through the city, we come onto the bridges. Everybody stopped and looked at us, wondering what happened to us,” Spriggs remembered.
The USS Franklin was decommissioned in 1947.
Spriggs returned home and went to work as an electrician and, later, as a railroad diesel supervisor where he stayed until his retirement.
His daughter, Sharon Stratton, said Spriggs rarely spoke about his WWII experiences.
“I knew he was a really resourceful guy and I knew he was in the Navy, but it wasn’t until just recently I heard the story about how they managed that morning in 1945,” Stratton said.
Spriggs is planning to attend a reunion next June in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for those who served on the USS Franklin. “It’ll be wheelchairs and crutches, I think,” Spriggs joked.