Old Kitsap Sailors Discover Wartime Connection — 64 Years Later


Carl Moff shot down a Japanese bomber that crashed into and sank Eric Kegley's ship, but the lifelong Kitsap men didn't meet and discover their connection until 63 years later.

Sixty-four years ago today, Moff was a coxswain on the battleship USS West Virginia in the Sulu Sea off The Philippines; Kegley a plane handler on the escort carrier USS Ommaney Bay. Both had joined the Navy two years earlier, at age 17. At about dinnertime on Jan. 4, 1945, Japanese pilots attacked.

Moff manned one of the battleship's 5-inch, 38-caliber guns and began firing — two 54-pound shells every 5 seconds. He and his partner took aim at a twin-engine bomber.

"Somebody hit the plane," Moff said. "We had no idea whether we hit it or not, but it was the only one we were firing at."

Planes would normally catch fire when they were hit, Moff said, but this one just trailed smoke for about 3 miles. Moff watched through his gun sight as the "Betty bomber" smashed with a huge explosion into the Ommaney Bay, blowing several men overboard.

At 5:12 p.m., Kegley was on the wing of a torpedo bomber, talking to the pilot when sparks started flying as bullets hit the flight deck. He looked up and watched the Betty bomber crash into the ship's bridge and flight deck.

It released two bombs. One went through the flight deck and blew up below, setting off explosions among the gassed-up planes on the hangar deck. The second bomb passed through the hangar deck, ruptured the main water pipe on the second deck and exploded, according to accounts.

Kegley said the pilot he was talking to was hit in the head and suffered a broken arm. He helped him to safety and found a spot to hide under the flight deck. A friend named Thompson went crazy, Kegley said, running back into the loft and locking a heavy iron door. Kegley couldn't get him to come out, and he was one of 93 men who died out of the crew of 860.

With the water main ruptured, men struggling to put out the blazes soon gave up because of the heavy black smoke from the burning planes and ricocheting .50-caliber ammunition. By 5:50 p.m., the order to abandon ship was given because stored torpedo warheads could go off at any time.

Kegley waited until the ship was listing heavily, then was one of the last to jump.

"I didn't exactly want to do it, but I had to," he said.

At 7:45 p.m., the "baby flattop" was scuttled by a torpedo from the destroyer USS Burns. The Americans sank their ship so it wouldn't fall into enemy hands.

Kegley, wearing a leaky blow-up life vest that lasted about a half-hour between refills, spent the night in the sea with eight crewmates holding onto one another. They could see Japanese campfires on shore. They tried to reach land, where they hoped to hide in the woods and get away from the sharks, but the tide took them the opposite direction. When morning came, they couldn't see the shore.

The nine were practically run over in the dark by a Japanese heavy cruiser, and Kegley saw one shark that didn't seem hungry, he said. The group was rescued by the destroyer USS McCall in the morning and treated to peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, he remembered. By then, Moff and the West Virginia had taken off for another battle in the South China Sea.

The rescued men were moved to the light cruiser USS Columbia, though Kegley has no recollection of it. It, too, was hit by kamikazes and had to be beached, said Kegley, who suffered a concussion and hearing loss. The attacks killed the eight men with whom Kegley spent the long night in the water.

Kegley and Mott both left the Navy in 1946 after four years of service. They were 21. Since then, they have lived a half-hour apart in the areas where they had grown up — Central Kitsap's Clear Creek Valley and North Kitsap's Miller Bay, respectively.

Moff, who wears a USS West Virgina BB-48 ball cap, began to sit in with an informal group of veterans and shipyard workers that meets at the All Star Lanes restaurant in Silverdale. The white-haired Kegley showed up "through osmosis," said group ringleader Adrian Zorrozua. Kegley noticed Moff's cap, they started chatting and soon — 64 years later — found their connection.

"We were always only a few thousand feet away (in The Philippines), and all these years later we met," Kegley said.