Navy man shot down kamikaze pilot
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| Quartermaster Second Class Ronald Johnson sits in the gunner’s seat of a 40 mm cannon aboard a Navy LST at a Clinton, Iowa, reunion 4 years ago. The gun and ship are the same class Johnson served on when he shot down a kamikaze pilot in World War II’s Pacific theater, where the incident saved about 300 lives between two U.S. warships. (Submitted photo) |
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Note to readers: This is the 12th in a series of Sauk Valley Newspapers articles on some of the World War II veterans who went to Washington, D.C., Tuesday on the Whiteside County Honor Flight.
STERLING – A shell casing as big as a wine bottle clanked onto the steel deck of LST-454, and a Japanese kamikaze splashed into the turquoise Pacific water.
That scene from World War II’s Pacific Theater left a lasting impression on Navy Quartermaster 2nd Class Ronald Johnson, who pulled the trigger on a 40 mm anti-aircraft cannon and saved about 300 lives on two American warships.
“The guy wanted to bomb the ship behind us, then crash into us,” Johnson recalled 65 years later from the dining table in his cozy retirement apartment in Coventry Living Center.
The 86-year-old Sterling resident was one of 37 Whiteside County World War II veterans who took the Honor Flight of the Quad Cities on Tuesday, which flew about 100 area veterans to Washington, D.C., for a tour of the war’s memorial.
“It was great all the way around,” Johnson said of the Honor Flight. “The crowd of people lined up there to meet us. ... It was a very, very emotional thing for most of them.”
In the South Pacific, Johnson’s chief responsibility aboard the LST was navigation. Before the advent of global positioning systems and satellite phones, quartermasters like Johnson charted a ship’s movement by the stars and facilitated communication by Morse code.
Landing a quartermaster’s job required passing a math and geometry test that Johnson, then a 22-year-old farm boy from Prophetstown who only reluctantly went to high school, thought he could never pass.
“The captain told me, ‘You got one week.’ I never thought I’d pass it, and that was OK, but it turned out I had kind of a knack for it,” Johnson said. “It got so I didn’t even have to think about it.”
Landing ship tanks earned a reputation in Work War II as tough, versatile vessels that could hold their own in gunfights. They shouldered the noble burden of ferrying troops and supplies onto the shore of battle.
But the sluggish flat-bottom boats also had the unenviable chore of shuttling bulldozers that would dig mass graves for the scores of dead families in island villages decimated by the deadliest war in history.
“You couldn’t leave a body out for long in that South Pacific sun,” Johnson said. “The worst thing was seeing civilians killed.”
Johnson’s naval story reads like a Hollywood fall from innocence.
In just 3 years, the young man left his family farm in Prophetstown for a naval training base in Farragut, Idaho, where he learned to drink with lumberjacks twice his size.
From there, he shipped off to the South Pacific, where the smell of death and gunfire would roll off the beaches toward the moored transport fleet.
While wandering a recently conquered island, a despondent headhunter even offered to swap Johnson a shrunken head for a pack of smokes.
“That’s a lot for a dumb old Midwestern farm boy,” Johnson would joke in the run-up to Honor Flight.
Essentially, LSTs were hastily engineered shuttle boats that rarely stayed in the same place for long.
When the slow boats did stop, they did so in complete darkness to avoid detection from Japanese aerial patrol.
On a full-moon night, in a sea as still as glass, with every light extinguished as a matter of self-preservation, Johnson penned a letter to the woman he would marry while on emergency leave to attend his father’s funeral.
“It was the first thing I did when I got back,” he said, pointing to a black-and-white photograph with a young Johnson in navy blue and his wife, Delores Johnson, now deceased, in a white tea-length dress.
He recently found that same letter in a shoebox of Delores’ belongings.
As Johnson held a stack of envelopes with the red-and-blue air-mail border, his voice started to crack when he confided that she secretly held onto every letter he had sent from the Pacific.
“I never knew she kept them,” he said. “No one will ever read these. ... They mean too much. ...
“I’m going to ask that these be buried with me.”
The Honor Flight file
Ronald Johnson
Age: 86
City: Sterling
Branch: U.S. Navy’s Landing Ship Tank (LST) fleet
Rank: Quartermaster Second Class
Theater: Asiatic-Pacific
Medals: Five Bronze Stars, 2 for Asiatic-Pacific service, 2 for Philippine liberation, 1 for general service.
Employment: Worked for 30 years at Northwestern Steel and Wire, where he retired as payroll manager. In retirement, worked part time in the Rock Falls Wal-Mart’s garden center.
