Erie Daily Times staff writer (1991)Lt. Charles A. Curtze
was looking forward to a relaxing day of swimming and dancing on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941.
He had just had breakfast aboard the USS St. Louis, a heavy cruiser docked in Pearl Harbor. When he looked out the porthole to
see what the weather was like, a Japanese torpedo bomber blocked his view. A general alarm rang and all hands were ordered to battle stations.
Curtze, a damage control specialist, scrambled below to see if
he could help. He was not a regular part of the ship's company and had only stayed there because there was no room on his admiral's flagship, the USS Honolulu, which was moored alongside.
"I decided to go below
and take the job that I knew was vacant because the ship's officer hadn't got aboard," recalls Curtze, a retired rear admiral and native of Erie.
Curtze says he knew most of the damage control personnel on the
St. Louis because he had been on board earlier in the year. "So I fit right into the organization, having known them all almost by name beforehand," he explains.
When Curtze got below, the situation was relatively well organized.
Suddenly, the St. Louis rocked as if it had been hit. "A bomb came down and hit the dock, went underneath the Honolulu next to us and shook us
up," Curtze says. "(The bomb) damaged the Honolulu quite badly.
"Well, there wasn't anything to do because we didn't get damaged, but I didn't know that," he says. "I got to my telephone
talker and I (asked) him, 'Were we hit?'
"And I think the thing that made the biggest influence on me that morning and got me thinking straight was the fact that he said to me, 'Not to worry, Lieutenant. That
wasn't us. That was the Honolulu that got bopped next to us. We're OK.'
"That was the one that broke my tension," says Curtze. "From then on, I had no problem."
Soon after that, Curtze's boss for the day came on board.
"The first lieutenant and damage control officer," Curtze says, "name of Lt. Cmdr. Townshend as I remember, finally, by a long leap, came on
board from the quarterdeck of the Honolulu and clawed his way on board the St. Louis and came down below."
Curtze says Townshend told him to go topside "'and see if you can get the radar staging."'
Once Curtze got topside, he saw what was happening as the St. Louis headed out of the harbor for the open sea. "I had a grandstand seat from the time we got to the middle of the harbor, passing by the Arizona and
all the other battleships and by the Nevada."
The Nevada, already hit, was ahead of the St. Louis trying to get out of the harbor.
"The people on board," says Curtze, "must have realized their
chances (of getting out of the harbor) were zero and I think someone suddenly realized that if they sank in the channel, that's just exactly what the Japs would have liked to have happen. So I think they actually ran
aground to prevent this."
The captain of the St. Louis was trying to get by the Nevada and out of the harbor and, as Curtze remembers, he "really gave a tugboat hell that was roaming around picking up
survivors."
"He shouted over at the guy," Curtze says, "'For Christ's sake, get the Nevada out of our way so we can get out of here!"'
The tugboat helped the Nevada out of the way and the
St. Louis managed to get out of the harbor. But they were not out of danger.
Just outside the harbor, Curtze remembers, "I spotted a Japanese submarine lying on the coral reef, stationary, with its periscope
sticking out... So I shouted at the captain, 'There's a Jap sub!' and they (the gunners) brought guns to bear but they didn't hit her."
Curtze says the submarine, a two-man craft, tried to carry out its mission
to prevent ships from leaving the harbor. "She fired two torpedoes at us, but unfortunately, from the Japanese skipper's point of view, he had set the depth too deeply. One fish (torpedo) hit the coral reef and
blew up and countermined the second.
"It really shook us up quite a bit and started some leaks in our fuel tanks but we kept on a-going," Curtze says.
"The Japs missed that opportunity which had been planned," he explains.
"They had submarines there for that purpose. They could sink them (ships coming out of the harbor) in the channel.
Break 'em in half and sink 'em in the channel."
"We came out of the harbor," Curtze says, "and went along the five fathom curve past Waikiki Beach pushing half the Pacific ahead of us
and pulling half behind, which is a ship's characteristic in shallow water. It tends to bury itself."
Suddenly, Curtze recalls, "two more torpedoes were fired at us." He says it was probably the mother
submarine of the two-man submarine.
"I assume that this submarine was there to pick up the (first) one that shot at us... But she fired two torpedoes at us and the captain just turned the ship and one
went by each side (of the St. Louis). And we were off free," Curtze says.
Curtze, born in 1911, returned to Erie following his retirement from the Navy, living with his wife, Louise Vicary Curtze, whom he
married in 1935, at their home in Millcreek Township.
He graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1933, ready to dedicate his life to the U.S. Navy. He then spent two years at sea before beginning work on a
master's degree in naval architecture and shipbuilding at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his degree in 1938 and went to New Hampshire to build submarines for three years.
In January 1941, he
joined Adm. Husband Kimmel's staff in the Pacific Fleet. After World War II, Curtze continued to work for the Navy and eventually became the deputy chief of the Navy's Bureau of Ships. He retired from the Navy in
December 1965 as a rear admiral.
In the days before the Japanese attack, Curtze had been giving lectures to the damage control personnel on the St. Louis based on reports about similar British ships that had been hit
during the war. He says that the more a crew knows about what will happen to a ship when it is hit, the better chance they will have of saving it.
Curtze says it is important that memories of the bombing of Pearl
Harbor not stir up feelings of hatred toward the Japanese. He remembers several incidents during World War I in which his grade school classmates gave him a hard time because of his parents who were from Germany.
"Heck," he says, "I was as American as all the rest of them." Curtze says it is important to distinguish between duty to your country and personal feelings toward the citizens of another country or
persons of that nationality.
"You can be his enemy when it's a matter of national policy," he says, "but you don't have to hate him."
Despite his feelings that Americans should not
be prejudiced against the Japanese, Curtze is not willing to apologize for President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Curtze explained that an
attack on Japan would have been very difficult and would have cost more American lives.
