Claude V. Cooper, a WWII Navy veteran, talks about his ship, the USS Bush, a model of which sits on the chest next to him. (Meredith Spencer The Vicksburg Post)

[12/7/04]Fresh after rescue from the East China Sea, U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Claude V. Cooper was on his way back to Pearl Harbor when he and his shipmates learned Japan had surrendered.

“I remember we were sitting there playing cards on the hold cover,” on Sept. 2, 1945, Cooper said. “When they said the war was over, and (we) had unconditional surrender, the all the cards went up in the air.”

The struggle that ended that day had begun at Pearl on Dec. 7, 1941, while here in Vicksburg, his hometown, Cooper was celebrating his birthday. He turns 80 today with keen memories of volunteering after the Japanese attack and spending nearly three years at war.

Cooper was among the 223 sailors rescued from the Pacific off Okinawa on April 6, 1945, after the USS Bush was bombed and sunk. Of the 310 aboard that day, 87 died.

Cooper, who attended school at Jett and Carr Central, was operating an antiaircraft gun on the right side of the ship about 3 p.m. when he saw the first of three Japanese kamikaze planes that struck the 377-foot ship coming from her left.

“I was trained forward to pick up planes coming across, see, and I could see it coming,” he said of the first suicide bomber.

The Bush, a destroyer, was on picket duty, there to protect U.S. ground troops as they invaded Okinawa, which guarded a key Imperial Japanese supply lane of the East China Sea.

He knew many of the 300 or so Japanese fighter planes blipping on radar were on suicide missions. The heaviest concentration of kamikaze attacks during the war occurred off Okinawa, and the Bush was among 36 U.S. ships of destroyer or smaller size that were sunk.

“It was last-ditch doings,” Cooper said of the attacks, which had been especially heavy against the ships off Okinawa beginning about three days earlier. “They had taken planes, they were old planes and they patched them up and put enough fuel on there to get to the fleet with bombs on it, and if you didn’t kill the pilot or blow it up, it would almost just about get you.”

The Bush had arrived at Okinawa from the Philippines and the island of Iwo Jima, where it also screened for the Allied invasion, and “had run into (kamikaze attacks) all the way,” Cooper said.

From his gun’s position on the Bush, Cooper couldn’t fire at the first plane that struck the ship, he said.

“I wasn’t firing on it because I was on the starboard side,” he said. “It was on fire when it hit. It had a 500-pound bomb under the belly of it.”

The bomb exploded on impact and a several-ton metal plate on the ship was blown about 20 feet into the air, Cooper said.

“After it hit we lost all power and then I went down and got me a rifle and the planes came close enough we shot at them with rifles along with we didn’t have any power to fire a gun except for manual and so the second one came in, the second suicide plane came in on the starboard side.”

“The captain told us we could leave the ship any time we wanted to; there wasn’t anything we could do,” Cooper said. “He didn’t want us to be aboard if another one hit, in a group, were we’d lose a lot of men.

“I went over the side in between the second and the third” impacts, Cooper said. “The third hit on the port side and set off some 40-millimeter ammunition in one of the ammunition lockers up there and started a fire.”

Cooper said he went into the water with a life jacket for flotation, and that he and about 11 others formed a group inside a rope they tied to the front and back of a capsized, three-person wooden boat that had been on the destroyer.

“The only thing bad about them, those kapok jackets, they didn’t have any straps going in-between your legs, and whenever you were in the water they had a tendency to slip up over your head,” Cooper said. “Being in the water and getting hypothermia and all that, you’d get numb. We lost a lot of them that way. They got numb and couldn’t hold onto their jacket.”

The group was rescued about midnight, after about six hours in the water, Cooper said.

“There was a fifth of whiskey everybody remembers that,” Cooper said of the rescue. “They give you that, let you drink as much as you wanted. And then they cut your clothes off. They didn’t take them off; they cut them off, give you a blanket and then send you below decks to get warm and everything because it was about a 65-degree temperature and the water was real cold after staying in the water so long.”

The Battle of Okinawa, in which over 250,000 people died, resulted in the cutoff of the key Japanese supply lanes, the isolation of all southern possessions still in Japanese hands and the clearing of the last obstacle in the path to the Japanese home islands.

Cooper said the ship’s crew was taken to San Diego, given a 30-day shore leave and then sent back toward Pearl Harbor when word of the Japanese surrender arrived by radio.

For his service in World War II, Cooper was awarded the Navy’s Asiatic-Pacific campaign ribbon with six Bronze Stars and the Philippines Liberation ribbon with two bronze stars.

He re-entered the Navy during the Korean war and served on another destroyer, the USS Lorfberg, leaving the Navy as a petty officer third class.

The sinking of the Bush wasn’t his only close call, and his several war wounds include “a little shrapnel in my leg not enough to even go to the doctor with” and a brown spot on his chest where he was accidentally struck with a gun-fired pellet attached to one end of a rope and used to fire it from one ship to another.

Cooper and his wife of 58 years, Bobbie, live south of Vicksburg off Fisher Ferry Road. He is retired from a 37-year career with Cooper Lighting.

For many years after his discharge from the Navy he didn’t talk about his experience, until a phone call from a Southaven resident who wanted to learn more about her brother who was lost aboard the Bush led to his getting back in touch with some of the men he served with on that ship. Since then, he and his wife have driven to reunions as far away as Idaho.

“A lot of us, we knew each other but we weren’t really close, you know,” he said of himself and the ship’s other crew members. “You take the engine crew down there you didn’t get close to them like you would with the torpedomen or the gunnery crew, which was in a sense in the same kind of work.”