Eugene Burns' descent to the USS Oklahoma
Editor’s note: We’re changing things up today with our first-ever guest post. This story comes courtesy of former Associated Press reporter Chris Carola. Thanks to Chris for sending it our way!
Not long after last month’s 80th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, I got around to reading Descent Into Darkness, a book that was recommended to me several years ago by a World War II researcher who specializes in MIA cases. The book includes an encounter the author had with an Associated Press reporter who had a storied career during WWII only to die years afterward when he was attacked by a street mob during a military coup in the Middle East.
Descent Into Darkness is the late Navy Cmdr. Edward C. Raymer’s 1996 memoir of his wartime duties as a salvage diver working on American warships sunk or damaged in Pearl Harbor during the Dec. 7 attack. He was the first to conduct a salvage dive on the USS Arizona just weeks after it sunk with more than 1,100 crewmembers aboard. Later, he and his fellow divers moved on to other ships, including the USS Oklahoma, which had capsized, entombing the bodies of more than 300 crewmembers.
Soon after the Oklahoma was righted and drydocked in late 1943, Raymer was ordered by his commander to give Honolulu-based AP correspondent Eugene Burns a tour of the battered battleship. Two years earlier, Burns was the first eyewitness to report the Dec. 7 bombing while it was still underway when, using a drug store’s telephone, he got through to AP’s San Francisco bureau on three separate calls before U.S. military authorities cut off all civilian communication between Hawaii and the U.S. mainland.
Later, Burns spent five months aboard the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier whose planes played a key role in defeating the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway in early June 1942.
In his book, Raymer recounted taking Burns below deck aboard the Oklahoma, where the reporter stumbled upon human bones that hadn’t been recovered yet by military personnel tasked with that grisly duty. During the tour, the power cut out, leaving them momentarily without light and ventilation. Soon after, Burns said he had seen enough. Back on deck, Burns thanked Raymer for “a grim but informative tour.”
“‘It’s something we’re all interested in on the mainland, and I’ll write it the way you’ve explained it today,’” Raymer said Burns told him.
Raymer wrote that Burns kept his word. The resulting two-part story that moved on the AP wires in February 1944 “was carried in every major newspaper in the nation,” Raymer recalled, resulting in the sailor’s mother in California getting calls about it from friends as far away as Maine.
The second story told of Burns’ brief yet harrowing tour below deck with Raymer serving as his guide. Burns spared few details about what he saw, including a skull and other bones stuck in an overhead hatch. He imagined the doomed sailor, like so many others on Dec. 7, rushing to his battle station upon hearing the first explosions that Sunday morning, only to die in a failed attempt to get topside.
“So hundreds must have died during Pearl Harbor,” Burns wrote.
MORE: ‘Father Al’ stood aside to save shipmates as the USS Oklahoma met its fate
Burns had covered the fighting in the Aleutian Islands earlier in 1943 as well as the Marshall Islands campaign and the Allied assault on Sumatra in early 1944. Afterward he headed to AP headquarters in New York, traveling west from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). According to an item in the AP World for May 1944, Burns was back in the U.S. when he learned that his wife, who remained in Honolulu, had given birth to twins on the ninth of that month. He also learned that his book about the Enterprise’s first year at war – Then There Was One -- had just been published.
Burns remained with the AP until WWII formally ended on Sept. 2, 1945. His resignation from the company was reported in the AP World for September-October of that year. Afterward Burns returned to his home in Sausalito, California and went on to write several books on wildlife and fishing as well as a syndicated nature column.
Burns, who was born in Moscow, Russia on Jan. 28, 1906, founded an organization dedicated to boosting tourism in Jordan and Iraq. In mid-July 1958, he was staying at a newly opened hotel in Baghdad when the military launched a coup and took control of the country. According to a story filed a week later by AP correspondent Stan Carter, the 53-year-old Burns, two other American men and a man from Germany were beaten to death by a mob after soldiers had removed the men and several other guests from the hotel.
Burns was survived by his wife and then-14-year-old twin daughters.
Many thanks to Francesca Pitaro at AP Archives for providing Eugene Burns’ background information for this story.
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