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Saving the U.S.S. Iowa

The Battleship Iowa, called “The greatest ship ever launched by the American Nation,” when it was launched in August of 1942, now sits in Suisun Bay with other warships of the mothball fleet. But due to the efforts of many people over the past 14 years, in particular Merylin Wong and her husband Bill Stephens, co-directors of Historic Ships Memorial at Pacific Square, as well as many former crewmembers, the Iowa may soon have a permanent home at Mare Island as part of a museum and educational center. The Navy, which still owns the ship and retains the right to recommission her should her services again be required, has agreed to allow the relocation of the ship to Mare Island in Vallejo, as has the state of Iowa after whom the ship was named.

According to John Wolfinbarger, former crewmember and San Martin resident, “Stockton made a bid for the ship but it had to be placed at a site that would draw at least 400,000 people a year to raise enough money to keep it maintained to Navy standards. Mare Island is the ideal place for the ship. We have to raise between $16 and $20 million to get it over to Mare Island. The museum is going to be in an existing three story building next to the ship. The ship will be open for tours and for education. School kids can go on board and learn about the ship and the war. That was one of the Navy’s requirements, that it had to be used for educational purposes. The state of Iowa also had to give permission because it was named after Iowa. The state of Iowa is really working to help get the ship moved.”
“On the last Saturday and Sunday of every month I take people out on a yacht for $25 each to visit the U.S.S. Iowa. (Although you can’t actually board her yet.) All proceeds go to help give the Iowa a permanent home,” Wolfinbarger said. He thinks that they will be able to move the ship to Mare Island sometime in 2011.
Roosevelt had ordered that the Navy build four battleships capable of countering the threat posed by the German battleship Tirpitz that was operating in Norwegian waters. The Iowa was the first battleship of this class, a class that included the battleships U.S.S. New Jersey, Missouri and Wisconsin.
She was 889 feet long and 108 feet wide. Just narrow enough to fit through the 110 foot wide Panama Canal and fast enough to keep up with the carriers. Her mission was to protect the carriers, bombard enemy shore emplacements and engage enemy surface vessels and airplanes.
When I met with Wolfinbarger on a sunny spring day, he was busy making out invitations to former crewmembers to a memorial sunrise service in memory of the 47 crewman killed when turret 2 exploded in April of 1989. The turret has not been repaired and, except in the unlikely event that the Iowa is called back into action, it probably won’t be.
Wolfinbarger boarded the Iowa for the first time in the Marshall Islands in April of 1944 and served on board until the end of the war.

Serving on the Iowa in WWII
“When I was first in the service I volunteered for the submarine service. I had to pass a special mechanical and physical test (one requirement was that his vision had to be better than 20/20) in order to get into the submarines. They shipped me over to Pearl Harbor to the submarine base and put me on a repair crew. I was there for about 15 months when a buddy of mine came down and said that they were looking for volunteers for a surface ship, the battleship Washington. I said I didn’t believe any of that scuttlebutt but he said “Come on,” and so we both volunteered. We went to the Marshall Islands and he went aboard the Washington and I went aboard the Iowa. I never heard from him again.”
The Iowa was the flag ship of Task Force 58 of the Third Fleet.
“She had been given the honor of transporting President Roosevelt to a conference with Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek at Teheran in November 1943. A bathtub was installed in Roosevelt’s stateroom making the Iowa the only American warship with a bathtub.’’
“We had nine sixteen-inch, twenty five-inch guns and several forty-four and twenty mm guns. The sixteen-inch guns could be reloaded in 30 seconds. So when the aft turret was done firing the first turret was ready to fire again. There was an old saying that if they fired all nine guns at once the ship would be pushed six feet sideways. The sixteen-inch diameter projectile weighed more than a ton. The guns on the Iowa once hurled one 27 miles and hit the target.”
“My bunk was below deck under one of the turrets but I never slept there; it was too hot. I slept up on top deck. Every Sunday I would walk up to the bow, otherwise I was always at the back of the ship. There are actually parts of the ship I have never seen. There was no reason for me to go into much of the ship.”
“Actually life on the ship was pleasant. Everyone got along and we ate good. We had beans for breakfast some days. There were two guys in the fire room with me who used to complain about having beans for breakfast. But if you watched them you would see that they went through the chow line twice. The beans were actually pretty good. On Sunday evening you had cold cuts and you would see the guys go through the line twice because they had watch that night and they would have a sandwich. We were often out there for weeks at a time without seeing land. Tankers supplied us with food, fuel and mail.”
Wolfinbarger worked in the boiler room with the rank of Fireman First Class. “Everyone had a certain job in the boiler room. Mine was down in the feed pumps that fed the water to the boilers.” One of his duties was to clean the water tubes in the boilers when the boiler was not in use. “They had to be cooled down for at least 48 hours before you could work in one and even then it was hotter than Hell in there. You could work for about 15 minutes and then another crew would have to take over.”
“A couple times me and another kid volunteered to tear one of the air blowers down in the back of a boiler, which was one devil of a job and hot. The first time we volunteered and the next time the chief asked if anyone would volunteer and looked straight at us. But after that we never had to clean the water tubes in the boilers again.”
The Typhoon
“We were on our way out to take on fuel. The captain said we were going to hit a typhoon but that we would be on the edge of it. Well, we were right in the middle of it. You would be walking down the passage way and you would hit one wall and then the other. We lost three destroyers in that typhoon. And one of our screws was damaged so we had to go to the Admiralty Islands and put the ship in a dry dock to see how bad the damage was. That’s when we crossed the equator. The captain told us that we could have our initiation but not to cut any hair. Because there was a chance we might be getting liberty.”
“There was a commander on the ship who hadn’t been across the equator. You are a pollywog until you cross the equator and then you became a shellback. He had been an efficiency expert in civilian life. How he got to be a commander I don’t know. A warrant officer told us to go get this guy for the initiation. I was one of the group who went up there and got him. The reason we got him was that he had ordered us to clean the water tubes in a boiler one time before it had cooled down sufficiently. So they made him crawl into a boiler to clean it and as he was crawling in they hit him on the backside with strips of wet canvas.”

Under Attack
“I was on the smoke-watch way up on top of the ship during the air attack at Saipan. I watched the smoke stacks – you didn’t dare let the ship smoke because you could see it over the horizon. During the daylight hours they had a smoke-watch. The smoke stacks were divided into sections so you could tell exactly which boiler was putting out the smoke. So I would phone down to the boiler room and tell them that boiler number one was smoking. It was nice to be up there in the cool air and you could see everything. Well, I was up there when they had a big air attack at Saipan. There was this torpedo plane flying through what looked with the tracer bullets like a sea of fire. And this plane got through it. He flew right over the smoke stacks. If I had had a baseball I could have knocked it right out of the air myself. He went around and a little destroyer fired a three inch shell and got that plane. The torpedo it was carrying must have been stuck or he would have dropped it. It wouldn’t have hurt us though since the hull is 16-inches thick at the water line and even thicker below. After that I went and told the chief that I wanted to go back to my battle station.”
“We saved General MacArthur’s butt when he went back to the Philippines. We got word that the Japanese were sending a troop ship in to land troops behind MacArthur. They would have had him trapped. We sailed all night at full speed; the carriers couldn’t keep up with us. Two destroyers, a cruiser and the battleship Iowa got there in time, sank the troop ship and saved MacArthur.”
“The Marianas Turkey Shoot was a naval and air battle. We shot down nearly 500 Japanese airplanes breaking the back of the Japanese forces. But they were still hard to convince. We sat off shore and bombarded Hokkaido and Honshu on the mainland of Japan hitting their steel mills and stuff, getting ready to invade their homeland. Japan didn’t think we could ever take Okinawa. They thought Okinawa would save them but it didn’t.”
“Before we dropped the first bomb, we had retired out to sea to take on more fuel. The captain came on the PA and told us. “In a few hours we are going to be dropping a bomb on Japan that we think will end the war.”
“The only damage the ship suffered in the war was in the Marshall Islands when it was hit by two shells – but they didn’t do any real damage.”
“I went up topside one time; we were anchored off shore at Saipan, and I couldn’t stay there more than 10 minutes. The stench of death was just absolutely sickening. It was horrible. But then that happened on practically every island. The Japanese were taught that it was an honor to die for the Emperor. Most of them did.”

R&R
“I met Admiral Bull Halsey on a tiny island we got a couple hours of R&R on. We went swimming and stuff. We were given two cans of beer each. It tasted like they got it in a barnyard. I gave mine away. We were waiting for the boat to come and take us back to the ship when here came Admiral Bull Halsey, bow-legged, walking along the beach. He asked us if we enjoyed our R&R and shook hands with all of us. He was really a wonderful guy.“

The War’s Over
“When we were anchored in Tokyo Bay along with the Big Mo (for the surrender ceremony), there were three guys on a garbage scow getting it ready to take our garbage out to sea. Two of those guys were searching for food. The chief cook happened to see this and he told a couple of his cooks to open up some ham and make some sandwiches.”
“We went on shore on Yokosuka. Those people there were starving. We saw a Japanese lady walking toward us with two little kids. There were five of us each of us had a box of Hershey bars – we were going to trade them. The lady and those kids got completely off the street, completely out of our way. We stopped and saw that she was dressed in burlap. Those kids and the people we met – we couldn’t give that candy away fast enough.”
“When we saw the people in Japan, the way they were living you couldn’t help but feel sorry. It was horrible, of course, it was war.
“When President Roosevelt passed away Truman became president and that’s why the peace treaty was signed on the Missouri instead of the Iowa. But we were there by the Missouri when it was signed.”
“The chief of my fire room had been in the Navy for 21 years. He tried to talk me into shipping over. I looked him in the eye and said “If you are crazy enough to stay in for 21 years just to get a pension you do it, but I’m going home.”

Civilian Life
After the war Wolfinbarger worked as a hod carrier, got married and then went to Utah to work in a coal mine in order to get a house to live in. One Sunday he came home and his wife said, “Why don’t we go to California?” So the next day he quit his job at the coal mine. He had $113 dollars in his pocket and owned a ’37 Ford. He drove from Grand Junction Colorado to Sacramento. There he paid the outrageous sum of $4 for a room for the night.
He worked in Eureka in a mill where the crane he was operating collapsed but he emerged with only a bruised heel. He started a janitorial business in San Jose and in 1987 moved to San Martin. He is the president of the local chapter of the Retired Public Employees Association and the 2007 Senior of the Year in San Martin.
For more information on making Mare Island a permanent home for the U.S.S. Iowa, go to http://www.battleshipiowa.org