Charles
achieved his mother’s dream,
graduating from Geneva High in 1940
before enlisting in the Navy. After
basic training, his class was
divided into two equal groups of 55
each; the first group was assigned
to the USS Arizona. Sehe, number 56,
and the rest of his class were sent
to Bremerton, Washington, where the
USS Nevada was undergoing repairs
while in drydock.
Sehe’s initial battle station was
one of the ship’s 5-inch guns, but
after the slight-framed kid from
Geneva dropped a couple of 5-inch
rounds during a drill, he was
reassigned. As fate would have it,
his new station was high up on the
Nevada’s mast, manning one of the
ship’s searchlights.
A few months later, on a lazy Sunday
morning in December, 1941, both the
Arizona and Nevada were moored along
battleship row in Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, as were several other
battleships and most of the Pacific
fleet. Sehe’s plan for the weekend
had been to take liberty on Saturday
and see the town with a buddy
assigned to the USS Arizona, then
spend the night on that battleship.
But once again fate intervened. Sehe
was caught drying out his laundry in
front of an exhaust fan, and drew
three days kitchen duty for the
minor infraction.
So it was that he was pulling
kitchen duty on the USS Nevada on
the morning of December 7th. “Seven
o’clock, I got breakfast.
Seven-thirty, I went to the head,”
recounted Sehe during a recent oral
history interview. “After the head,
[I] washed up, getting ready for
meals, you know? … Then the four or
five of us in the head were sitting
around, and all of a sudden, it
jarred [us], boom! And I said, ‘Oh,
they’re practicing fire. I ran to my
battle station and oh my God, it was
just unbelievable.”
What Sehe had felt was a Japanese
torpedo slamming into the side of
the Nevada. What he saw from his
battle station was a harbor in
chaos, with wave after wave of
Japanese aircraft coming at them
from all directions.
Here is how Sehe described what he
saw that day from the ship’s mast in
a letter to family members written
50 years later:
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“The Nevada, with some of its
boilers already lit on standby, got
up enough steam pressure to get
underway. As the ship slowly eased
its way into the channel, passing
the Arizona, a tremendous fiery
explosion ripped the Arizona apart,
showering the open deck crews of the
Nevada with hot, searing, metallic
debris, burning many of them to
death.”
“I watched a second
wave of high-level dive bombers now
concentrating their efforts on the
Nevada as we slowly proceeded up the
channel, and heard cheers coming
from crews of other ships,
encouraging us onward,” his letter
continued. “Although there were many
near misses, as indicated by
numerous waterspouts, numerous bombs
made their mark and severely damaged
the forecastle bridge and the boat
deck area. The Nevada was given
orders to beach itself so as to
avoid blocking the channel to
prevent other ships from entering or
leaving.”
Sehe stayed with the Nevada for the
rest of the war. After it was
rebuilt and up-gunned, the venerable
old battleship and the young man
from Geneva saw plenty more action,
including at the Aleutians, Utah
Beach, the invasion of southern
France, plus Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Charles Sehe, now 92 and living in
Minnesota, still finds it difficult
to share his memories of the Pearl
Harbor attack. Writing about his
experiences has been cathartic, but
never easy. One thing he does know,
something that is universal in human
affairs: It’s the politicians and
statesmen who create the dilemmas
that lead to wars, but it’s always
the young men who have to fight
them.
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Mark DePue is the Director of Oral
History at the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum. You
can listen to Sehe’s entire story,
and those of many other veterans, at
www.oralhistory.illinois.gov.
[Submitted by Chris Wills, Abraham
Lincoln Presidential Library and
Museum]
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