Father O'Callahan of the Carrier Franklin

Lieutenant Commander Joseph T. O'Callahan, USNR(ChC) gives "Last Rites" to an injured crewman aboard USS Franklin (CV-13), after the ship was set afire by a Japanese air attack, 19 March 1945. The crewman is reportedly Robert C. Blanchard, who survived his injuries.

by Michael D. Hull

Tucked away in a manuscript file in the Dinand Library at Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts, is a fading parchment. Above the signature of President Harry S. Truman, the fading paper bears the two names that are permanently inscribed in a special niche in the history of the U.S. Navy. The names are O'Callahan and Franklin.

The parchment is the official citation of the Medal of Honor that was presented to Lieutenant Commander Joseph T. O'Callahan for his "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity" while serving as chaplain aboard the carrier USS Franklin when she was crippled by Japanese bombs off Kobe, Japan, on 19 March 1945.

Chaplain O'Callahan, faculty member at Holy Cross College before and after the war and a scholar who loved both mathematics and poetry, was the first Roman Catholic chaplain in American history to be awarded the nation's highest decoration for gallantry.

His actions aboard Franklin—comforting the wounded, directing fire-fighting operations and leading rescue parties—when the flattop was stricken, inspired a flood of newspaper and magazine articles, an official Navy training film to teach recruits the qualities of duty and survival, and a Hollywood motion picture, "Battle Stations."

The Franklin herself and her 13,000-mile journey back to the United States is a classic saga of survival, unsurpassed in naval history. As her skipper, Captain Leslie E. Gehres, said, "A ship that will not be sunk cannot be sunk."

She refused to sink, and her crew refused to allow her to sink. When she eventually arrived back at Brooklyn Navy Yard in the spring of 1945, no less than 388 decorations were bestowed on the crew of the Franklin.

It was the greatest number of decorations ever bestowed on the personnel on a single ship in Navy history.

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Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on 14 May 1905, Joseph Timothy O'Callahan was educated at St. Mary's parochial school in Cambridge and Boston College High School. He was a solid student in the college preparatory course. He wrote for the class magazine, acted in the dramatic society, and ran on the relay team.

He entered the Society of Jesus at the St. Andrew-on-the-Hudson novitiate, Poughkeepsie, New York, on 30 July 1922. Two years later he pronounced his first vows as a Jesuit. After completing philosophical studies at Weston College, Joseph O'Callahan joined the Boston College physics department as a teaching member in 1929.

Then it was back to Weston College in 1931 to begin formal theology studies. He was ordained a priest on 20 June 1934.

After tertianship at St. Robert's Hall in Pomfret Center, Connecticut, and a year of special studies at Georgetown University, Father O'Callahan was appointed to teach cosmology to his brother Jesuits at Weston College. The following year, in 1938, he was transferred to Holy Cross College to teach mathematics and physics.

By 1940, the brilliant priest-scholar was head of the mathematics department and had founded a mathematics library.

He loved what he was doing, and his students loved the energetic, friendly and, at times, fiery instructor. But much of the world was at war, and Father O'Callahan began to grow restless.

He applied for a commission as a Navy chaplain. Many of his friends and colleagues tried to convince him to stay. They felt his talents in physics and mathematics could serve the war effort best at Holy Cross, soon to be one of the leading Naval ROTC units in the country.

But logical argument was no match for the determination of Father O'Callahan. His triumph came on 7 August 1940, when he was com­mis­sioned a lieutenant, junior grade, in the Navy Chaplain Corps.

Paradoxically, O'Callahan's first naval assign­ment was teaching calculus at the Pensacola, Florida, Naval Air Station.

But this was not what he had joined the Navy for. He yearned for sea duty, particularly aboard a carrier.

After eighteen months of shore duty, Lieutenant O'Callahan reported in April 1942 to his first ship, the carrier Ranger. At last, Chaplain O'Callahan was going to sea.

The Ranger made few headlines but she saw plenty of action, from the Arctic to the Equator. She played a leading part in the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942 and in the October 1943 raid on German shipping in Norwegian waters. Her fighters made many strikes against German installations in Norway.

Father O'Callahan, promoted by now to lieutenant commander, did his work thoroughly as the Ranger's chief morale officer, and made many friends. At his funeral in Worcester twenty years later, officers and men of the Ranger presented a beautiful crucifix in appreciation of their beloved padre.

After two and a half years aboard the Ranger, Father O'Callahan was reassigned to shore duty—at the naval air stations at Alameda, California, and Ford Island, Pearl Harbor.

This was a cushion assignment for the energetic chaplain after the turmoil and tension of combat. It gave him time to relax and reorient himself. His Pearl Harbor roommate recalls that Father O'Callahan used to spend his free evenings reading poetry.

But the shore duty gave him time to worry. His youngest sister Alice, now Sister Rose Marie, a Maryknoll nun, was imprisoned in a Japanese detention camp in the Philippines. For three years, the O'Callahan family had not heard a word about her.

Father O'Callahan prayed that he would be assigned to the Philippines so that he might discover at first hand the fate of his sister. But his quiet spell ashore was a brief one, and fate had something special in store for the chaplain.

On 2 March 1945, he received peremptory orders to report for duty aboard another ship, the carrier USS Franklin (CV-13). At 3:35 that afternoon, amid piles of potatoes and ammunition, Chaplain O'Callahan went aboard the Franklin to keep his date with destiny.

The Franklin, known affectionately by her crew as "Big Ben," was the fifth U.S. Navy ship to bear the name Franklin. The 27,000-ton Essex-class flattop was named after Admiral Farragut's flagship in the Civil War.

The carrier's keel was laid at Newport News, Virginia, on 7 December 1942, the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. Ten months later, on 14 October 1943, she was launched under the sponsorship of Captain Mildred A. McAfee, director of the WAVES.

The nation needed more carriers, which had proved their fighting capabilities in combat since Midway, and the Franklin was speedily fitted out. Hauled by tugs, she eased into Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, on the morning of 31 January 1944. That afternoon she was commissioned by her first skipper, Captain James M. Shoemaker.

After more fitting out, trial runs, gunnery practice, and landing tests for her air group pilots, the Big Ben was ready for her shakedown cruise. On 20 March, she lifted her 15-ton anchors and put out from Norfolk.

For almost a month, the big flattop underwent more drills and gunnery tests in the warm waters off Trinidad in the British West Indies. After voyage repairs and loading with fuel and war cargo, the Franklin headed for San Diego, California.

Finally, on 31 May 1944, the carrier was ready to shove off for the action in the vast Pacific. Shepherded by the cruiser Denver and a trio of new destroyers, Twiggs, Leary and Cushing, the Franklin turned her big bow westward and churned toward Pearl Harbor at a nimble 23 knots.

After brief exercises off Hawaii, Franklin lifted anchor on 15 June for the open sea—and action.

She stood in reserve while the mighty Fifth and Seventh Fleets assaulted Saipan and on 29 June moved out of Eniwetok to join Task Group 58.2. Her sister ships were the carriers Wasp, Cabot and Monterey, the cruisers Boston, Canberra and San Juan, and a clutch of destroyers.

The force steamed north to strike at the enemy-held Bonin Islands, only 600 miles south of Tokyo. The airfields there were stepping stones for the Japanese squadrons which might still be flung into the desperate battle raging on Saipan.

On the afternoon of 3 July 1944, twenty fighters from the Wasp swept in over the Bonins and hammered enemy airfields and planes. The task group held a fitting July Fourth celebration the following day, with the four carriers dispatching planes all day long to blast gun positions, airfields and barracks on Iwo Jima, Chichi Jima and Ha Ha Jima.

That night the American force withdrew, and steamed south for strikes on Guam in the Marianas. The Franklin's planes struck again and again at shore installations in the Marianas, and helped clear the skies of enemy aircraft.

Now Task Group 58.2 and the other two groups which had assisted in the Marianas operation merged into Task Group 58. After action in the Palau Islands group, the Big Ben joined Task Group 58.1, heading for another strike at the Bonins. Her fighters played havoc with a Japanese convoy of cargo ships and destroyers. Only one of some twenty vessels escaped the fury of Franklin and her sister ships.

After raids on Iwo Jima and Yap in the Carolines, Franklin planes assaulted Peleliu Island in support of the Marine landings on 15 September 1944.

During action off Luzon, in which the cruisers Canberra and Houston were crippled by Japanese torpedo bombers, the Franklin had several near escapes. With skilled seamanship, her commanding officer, Captain Shoemaker, averted disaster when a torpedo from a downed enemy plane headed directly for the flattop.

Shoemaker ordered "Right full rudder!" and rang up "Back full" on the starboard engines. The carrier slowed her motion and pulled to the right, the onrushing torpedo passing within a few feet of the Big Ben's bow.

Planes from the Franklin and the other carriers pounded Luzon airfields and shipping in choked Manila Bay. In one day-long battle with enemy planes, pilots from the Franklin accounted for twenty-nine Japanese aircraft.

The Big Ben was by now the flagship of Task Group 38.4. She was there with the Seventh Fleet on 21 October 1944 when troops of the Sixth Army poured ashore on Leyte. The re-invasion of the Philippines had commenced, and General MacArthur had finally returned.

Three big Japanese fleets were threatening the Americans at Leyte, and Task Group 38.4 wheeled westward to engage the enemy. One hundred and fifty miles from San Bernardino, the carrier planes spotted main units of the Japanese Second Fleet, and hurtled down through heavy flak to attack.

The battleships Musashi and Yamato staggered beneath Franklin bombs. Two cruisers were hard hit, one was left dead in the water, and another exploded. Off the entrance to Leyte Gulf, Franklin planes sank the large Japanese carrier Zuihō.

Early on the afternoon of 29 October, Big Ben launched a flight of planes to aid a fleet tanker force that was under air attack 50 miles away. Hardly had they left the flight deck when a small group of well-camouflaged Japanese suicide planes approached the Franklin's force. Cruisers and destroyers closed in tightly around Franklin and the carriers Enterprise, Belleau Wood and San Jacinto, and every five-inch gun in the formation opened up.

But the tenacious Japanese pilots peeled off and dived. Plunging through the murderous flak, a suicide plane crashed into the after end of the Big Ben's island. A terrific explosion rocked the flattop, and flames and smoke smothered the hangar and flight decks.

Two dozen men died in the explosion, and many gunners at their stations were scorched by flames and blinded by fumes. Twenty minutes later, while large fires were being furiously fought by damage control parties, another great blast ripped the Big Ben. She listed to starboard.

She lost fifty-seven men and sustained severe damage. A 30-foot hole gaped in her flight deck, the after elevator was warped, and large areas of Franklin's second and third decks amidships were twisted and shattered. But she stayed afloat.

The Big Ben gained an even keel after many hours of tireless effort by her crew, and retired to Ulithi. There, on 7 November 1944, Captain Shoemaker was relieved by Captain Leslie E. Gehres as skipper. After brief repairs at Pearl Harbor, the Big Ben was ordered to the Bremerton, Washington, Navy Yard for overhaul.

On arrival at Bremerton, Air Group 13 left the ship for a well-earned leave. Since the first operation less than six months before, the group had destroyed at least 338 enemy planes and had sunk fifteen warships and sixty merchantmen.

Repairs were completed on 28 January 1945 and after a stop at Alameda to take on her new air group, Air Group 5, Franklin headed for Pearl Harbor with her escorts. There, she underwent three weeks' refresher training.

On 3 March, the day after her new chaplain had come aboard, the Big Ben churned out of Pearl Harbor, westward bound for the war zone. She was accompanied by the cruiser Guam.

At Ulithi, her Task Group 58.2 merged with three other forces to form Task Force 58. The mission: to launch the first carrier strike of the war against the Japanese home islands.

The armada steamed north, stretching for 50 miles across the ocean. On the night of 17 March, the fleet closed to a mere 100 miles of the Japanese coast. An hour before dawn the following morning, the carriers launched their fighters to strike at airfields and planes on Kyushu.

The raids continued all day long, and the Big Ben's group alone downed eighteen Japanese aircraft and destroyed many others on the ground. The enemy reacted with characteristic fanaticism, and a dozen suicide planes were shot down almost within sight of the American task force.

March 19th, St. Joseph's Day, dawned coolly as the carrier Franklin swung round into the wind and lofted her first flight of the day—a fighter group armed with special heavy rockets to attack enemy naval units at Kure.

At 6:55 a.m. another flight swept off the flight deck bound for a strike at Kobe. A thousand yards away, the carrier Hancock was launching her first planes of the day. Astern of Franklin was the light carrier Bataan, and ahead was the San Jacinto.

Thirty more Helldivers were warming up on the Franklin flight deck, and in the wardroom Chaplain O'Callahan was eating breakfast with a handful of officers.

Suddenly, at 7:07 a.m., a Japanese Judy suicide bomber flashed out of a cloud bank and hurtled down toward the Franklin at 360 miles per hour. The carrier's five-inch and 40-mm guns opened up on the plane as it loosed two 500-pound armor-piercing bombs and pulled up and turned away only 50 feet above the deck.

The first bomb slammed into the forward hangar deck, ripping a great hole in the three-inch armor plate and setting fire to the fueled and armed planes. The second bomb smashed through two decks aft and exploded on the third deck near the petty officers' quarters.

The Big Ben reeled as a column of black smoke poured from the forward elevator well and a sheet of flame shot up from the forward starboard edge of the hangar deck. Smoke and more flames engulfed the fighters on the flight and hangar decks, and a violent series of explosions began to quake the carrier.

Ready ammunition lockers filled with rockets and shells detonated, and smoke billowed into the engine rooms below. Scores of men perished on the flight, hangar and gallery decks.

The proud Big Ben was an inferno.

Chaplain O'Callahan had hastily left his unfinished breakfast, and made his way through the chaos to do what he could to comfort the wounded and organize the able-bodied. He seemed to be everywhere; helping, cajoling, encouraging, inspiring. His courage inspired all who came in contact with him, and the white cross on his helmet became a beacon of hope for the stricken ship and her crew.

"Look at the old man up there [Captain Gehres on the bridge]," he would tell the sailors. "Don't let him down!"

During his few days aboard the Big Ben, Chaplain O'Callahan had made many friends among crewmen of all faiths. To the Jewish sailors he was "Rabbi Tim." To the Protestants he was their "Padre Joe."

Meanwhile, the fury of the inferno aboard Big Ben increased as 40,000 gallons of aviation gasoline on the aft hangar deck fed the fires. Flames a hundred feet high shot up past the carrier's island, and a column of smoke rose a mile above the clouds.

Heedless of danger, the destroyer Miller eased alongside the flattop and brought her hoses to bear on the fires. At 8:30 a.m. only the two after firerooms and the after engine room were still operative, but the heat and smoke became unbearable and these had to be abandoned.

Dozens of men had been blown overboard by the force of the blasts; others were forced to jump into the sea when trapped by flames. Many men below decks were trapped, and struggled to make their way topside.

Everyone in the Franklin's hospital ward—doctors, corpsmen and patients—perished after a brave, futile struggle against fire and suffocation.

Although wounded by shrapnel, Chaplain O'Callahan dashed about the exposed, slanting flight deck, administering last rites to the dying and comforting the wounded. He led officers and men into the flames, carrying live bombs and shells to the edge of the deck for jettisoning.

He personally recruited a damage control party and led it into one of the main ammunition magazines to wet it down and prevent its exploding. Back on deck, he grabbed a hose to wet down live, armed bombs that were rolling about dangerously on the heavily listing deck.

Skipper Gehres later called the chaplain "the bravest man I ever saw." The gallant man of God was to modestly retort, "Any priest in like circumstances should do and would do what I did." The publicity he later received for his part in saving the Franklin was dismissed by him as "exaggerated."

The cruiser Santa Fe moved alongside, all hoses pouring water on the Franklin's flaming decks as the carrier listed lower and lower into the water. Steam ceased to flow from the boilers, and the ship lost steering control at 9:30 a.m. She lay dead in the water only 50 to 60 miles from Japan, the closest any American surface ship had approached so far in the war.

The Santa Fe took off the Franklin's wounded, and destroyers circled the chilly waters picking up survivors. After one abortive try, the cruiser Pittsburgh managed to connect her tow line to the stricken Franklin and pull her underway southward at three and a half knots.

Fire fighters slowly worked their way back to the engineering spaces, and by 7 p.m. on 19 March most of the fires below decks were under control. That night the Japanese were out in force, dropping flares on the horizon in their search for the Franklin. But they encountered, instead, other task groups and a furious battle was fought all night just ten miles away from the limping carrier.

Shortly after dawn on 20 March, the engineers labored over their engines, trying to find a way to get up more steam. Still under tow, the carrier was moving at a mere 6 knots and was still only 85 miles from Japan.

Yankee ingenuity won out, and by ten that morning the battered Big Ben was churning forward, under her own power, at 14 knots. Her escorts were the cruisers Guam and Alaska and a pair of destroyers.

The ships steamed slowly south, but the Japanese had not given up in their determination to finish off the Franklin. That afternoon, a group of enemy planes approached the little force.

The cruisers drew in close to shield the Big Ben, for another hit could send her to the bottom. One enemy bomber swept in close to loose a missile at the Franklin, but the carrier's few remaining anti-aircraft mounts opened fire with such speed and accuracy that the astonished pilot was forced to swerve so drastically that his bomb fell harmlessly into the sea, just over a hundred feet from the ship.

Repeatedly, the Japanese hurled bombers out in a desperate effort to reach the Franklin, but each time they were chased off by fighters from the task group 30 miles from the Franklin.

Meanwhile, Chaplain O'Callahan stayed at his post for three wearying days and nights. Strafing Japanese fighters failed to shake him. When his skipper yelled, "Why don't you duck?," the padre shouted back with a grin, "God won't let me go until He's ready."

The carrier was constantly picking up speed, and by sunset on 20 March she was steaming at more than 20 knots. By dawn the following day she was 300 miles from Japan. That evening, she joined Task Group 58.2 which was retiring to Ulithi.

On 24 March, the Big Ben dismissed the screening destroyers Miller, Marshall and Hunt to take her place in the column of warships steaming into Ulithi Lagoon. Two days later, accompanied by a pair of destroyer escorts, the Franklin and Santa Fe set course for Pearl Harbor. They arrived on 3 April 1945.

It was an emotional moment when the battered, blackened Big Ben eased into Pearl Harbor. Hardened Navy veterans wept at the sight. But there was a touch of wry humor, too, as a nondescript band made up mostly of tin pans, an accordion and two horns, and organized by Father O'Callahan, played and sang, "Oh, the old Big Ben, she ain't what she used to be."

During a five-day stay at Pearl, the chaplain set about organizing a "most exclusive club," the 704 Club. This comprised the 704 survivors of 19 March who stayed aboard Franklin and brought her home.

On 9 April, the flattop started her engines, lifted her anchors, and got underway eastward from Pearl Harbor. A week later she passed through the Panama Canal and on 28 April 1945 she arrived off Gravesend Bay, New York. Two days later she eased into Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she was to undergo extensive repairs.

After a merciless battering by bombs and fires and explosions, and an incredible 13,000-mile journey that was a remarkable testament to seamanship and fortitude, the old Big Ben was home.

Her crew went ashore to barracks and then on to rehabilitation leave. Navy Yard crews went right to work on the gallant hulk, toiling day and night to cut away entire sections of blasted decks. She was still undergoing repairs when the war ended.

On 30 June 1945, Captain Gehres was relieved as skipper by Commander Clarence E. Dickinson.

On Navy Day that year, thousands of visitors swarmed over the carrier to see at first hand the ship they read so much about in the newspapers.

Meanwhile, her chaplain was assigned briefly to the Office of Public Information at the Navy Department and then at the Newport, Rhode Island, Naval Training Station.

On 17 June, Father O'Callahan returned to his old alma mater, Georgetown University, as commencement speaker. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree, and in a terse address he told the graduates, "Take life seriously, which means for your happiness that you live your life as God would have you lead it."

That October, Chaplain O'Callahan reported for pre-commissioning duty aboard a brave new carrier, the 45,000-ton Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But his hour of triumph came on 23 January 1946 at the White House when his mother watched as President Truman placed the blue ribbon of the Medal of Honor around Chaplain O'Callahan's neck. The student who had been literally scared stiff before his final examination, now wore the nation's highest honor.

That night he returned to his new ship, the carrier Roosevelt.

In June 1946 he was appointed escort chaplain to the body of the late President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines and accompanied the body aboard the USS Princeton to Manila. He was detached from the Princeton in September, and that 12 November was released from the service with the rank of captain.

In addition to the Medal of Honor, Chaplain O'Callahan had been awarded the Purple Heart and five campaign medals.

The Franklin, placed out of commission on 17 February 1947, had earned four battle stars on the Asiatic-Pacific Area service ribbon.

Father O'Callahan went back to Holy Cross on his release to teach philosophy. His Medal of Honor was locked away in the library safe, and he went to work with new vigor.

But the wartime experiences had taken a lot out of him, and his yearnings surpassed his physical strength. He would never again enjoy adequate health.

In December 1949, he suffered his first stroke. His right arm was paralyzed, but patiently and with quiet determination he exercised it daily to restore it to efficient usefulness.

It was a hard, lonely battle for the heroic chaplain of the Franklin. But each summer he would prepare meticulously for the fall classes, trusting that by September he would be strong enough to return to the classroom. Now he started work on his best-selling book, I Was Chaplain on the Franklin.

There were consolations. A personal letter from President Truman spurred him on, and in 1956 the film depicting his heroism on the Franklin, Columbia's "Battle Stations" starring William Bendix, was shown in American theaters. On 21 September 1956, a helicopter touched down on Holy Cross College's Fitton Field, and Captain P. C. Needham, commanding officer of the Quonset Naval Air Station, presented the invalid hero with a copy of the color film, "Saga of the Franklin."

But perhaps Father O'Callahan's greatest source of strength was his daily mass. He received permission to offer his mass sitting down, for some days he had to literally drag himself to the altar.

His health continued to fail, despite a deceptive plateau of peace. On some days he was able only to compose a short paragraph for his book.

Transferred to a room in St. Vincent's Hospital, Worcester, Father O'Callahan took a turn for the worse on the afternoon of Wednesday, 18 March 1964. At 10:40 that night, while five Jesuit brother priests and two Sisters of Providence prayed, Chaplain O'Callahan of the Franklin died.

Three days later in the little churchyard at Holy Cross, Father O'Callahan was laid to rest in a simple Jesuit ceremony. Navy Chief of Chaplains Admiral Dreith, three Catholic bishops and Father O'Callahan's 90-year-old mother listened as a Navy bugler sounded Taps over the grave.

With the Franklin, Chaplain O'Callahan was now part of U.S. naval history.

Lieutenant Commander Joseph T. O'Callahan, USNR(ChC) gives "Last Rites" to an injured crewman aboard USS Franklin (CV-13), after the ship was set afire by a Japanese air attack, 19 March 1945. The crewman is reportedly Robert C. Blanchard, who survived his injuries. For his heroism on board Franklin, Lieutenant Commander O'Callahan was awarded the Medal of Honor. The escort ship USS O'Callahan (DE-1051, later FF-1051) was named after him. (Naval Historical Center)

LCDR. Joseph O'Callahan (CRC), USNR, adminsters to injured crewman. (US Navy photo at Naval History and Heritage Command K-14528)

Father Joseph O'Callahan, chaplain on the Franklin.

 

Navy Chaplain (Lt. Commdr.) Joseph T. O’Callahan, Medal of Honor recipient.