Andersen Recounts ‘Three Minutes Off Okinawa’

by Alan Pollock

            WEST CHATHAM — For Dr. Roy Andersen, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Clark University, talking about his stint in the U.S. Navy in World War II now comes easily.  But the experience—particularly what happened in three minutes’ time on the afternoon of April 12, 1945—was so traumatic that he kept it from friends and family for decades.  It was only recently that Andersen brought the story to light in a new book, “Three Minutes Off Okinawa.”

            Andersen was aboard the radar picket destroyer Mannert L. Abele when it was attacked and sunk by kamikaze pilots off Okinawa.  Eighty-four of his shipmates were lost in the attack, in carnage that Andersen witnessed in painful detail.  He kept the story secret for decades, even from his wife, Barbara, and his father, who was a sailor in World War I.  Twice his father asked Andersen to tell the story of what happened that day, and twice he declined.

            “And I never told him,” said Andersen, his characteristic smile fading away.  Though the term “post traumatic stress disorder” hadn’t yet been coined, Andersen knew he was afflicted.  Years later, chatting on the deck with his son, he spotted a single-engine plane on landing approach to the Chatham airport and instinctively tackled his son to the ground.  The silhouette of the plane looked just like a Japanese Zeke.

            Having just graduated from Clark University in Worcester, Andersen began a 39-month stint in the U.S. Navy.  His first 11 months involved a barrage of training at M.I.T., Harvard and Bell Laboratories, preparing him to be an electronics officer.  In fact, Andersen’s specialty was in the use of radar, but that technology—even that term—was a classified secret.

            The U.S.S. Mannert L. Abele was a radar picket destroyer, and in the spring of 1945, the one-year-old ship was on patrol off Okinawa when it came under attack by a swarm of Japanese aircraft.  Shortly after 2:30 p.m. on April 12, three of the planes closed in for the kill; two were shot down and the third found its mark, exploding in the aft engine room.  Now crippled, the Abele was an easy target for a second kamikaze, a “baka bomb,” or piloted, rocket-powered glider bomb, that struck on the same side near the forward fire room.  The 2,600-pound warhead buckled the ship, which broke in two and quickly went down.

            In that very short span of time, Andersen witnessed amazing acts of courage under fire, heroism and compassion, tragedy and perseverance.  Many of those who abandoned ship watched as one man, Seaman Lawrence Henkle, struggled in vain to free a shipmate, Gunners Mate Merle Bobbitt, from the wreck.  Unwilling to leave his friend, Henkle disappeared beneath the waves, and the two were never seen again.

            It was 1999 when Andersen found himself pawing through an issue of Naval History when he saw an advertisement for a reunion of Abele survivors.  He made the trip to Minneapolis, and met 10 of his shipmates.  It was there that Andersen broke his silence about the attack, and wished he could share the same catharsis with other survivors.  He began to organize reunions every other year, and eventually identified 60 Abele shipmates, poring through out-of-town phone books in the Worcester public library.   Andersen started collecting their accounts of the attack, with the goal of writing about it someday.

            The result is “Three Minutes Off Okinawa,” (Jana Press, 259 pages) a well-researched account of life aboard the Abele, its service in the Pacific, the attack and its aftermath.  Andersen will be signing copies of “Three Minutes Off Okinawa” at Yellow Umbrella Books from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday. 

            Andersen said there are many historians who opine about World War II, but the most credible are those who actually fought in the war.  He bristles at “revisionist historians” who question the U.S. use of the atomic bomb to end the war, saying it averted an allied invasion of the Japanese homeland which would have been very, very costly in human lives.

            Andersen credits the G.I. Bill for funding his education after the war, which included stints at Dartmouth, Duke, Stanford, the University of Maryland and Berkeley.  Having established himself as a preeminent physicist, Andersen was recruited by the president of his alma mater, Clark, to take over the university’s physics department.  He did so in 1960, and remained there until his retirement in 1992.  Andersen and his wife, Barbara, now split their time between Worcester and Chatham.

11/8/07