Retired Leesville sailor Midkiff recalls attack on naval base
Published 11:12 am Sunday, December 7, 2014
LEESVILLE — The attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, left then-22-year-old Hoye Midkiff crouched under racks of ammunition awaiting orders from his captain to abandon the battleship.
Just before 8 a.m., Japanese planes began their attack on the naval base. Seven aerial torpedoes hit his ship, but the USS West Virginia was mostly damaged by an oil fire started by another ship.
American casualties that day totaled 2,403 dead and 1,178 wounded. But Midkiff lived to tell his story.
“It was a day I will never forget,” Midkiff recalled safely from the recliner in his Leesville home. “I never thought that day that I would live to be 93 years old.”
Midkiff, who had been in the Navy eight months, said he thought it was friendly fire at first.
“It was hard to tell what was going on,” he said. “They came in, and they hit us.”
Midkiff, who is recovering from pneumonia, let his wife of 59 years, Bertha, do most of the talking. She remembered reading journals that he had written about the airstrikes.
“He was on there for three hours before they got him off the ship,” she said. The ship was sinking and capsizing. “They had to close off a lot of the hatches to save most of the men,” she said. “Naturally, the men were screaming and begging to be let out.”
Midkiff could hear them while he was waiting to get orders. “He was very fortunate he wasn’t in a compartment they had closed off,” she said. “But if those shells he was crouched under fell, he would have been completely destroyed.”
He happily recounted the good times he had on the 624-foot-long ship.
“They kept us busy,” he said. “There was something to do all the time.”
Midkiff spent nearly six years in the Navy before re-entering civilian life.
Roddy Johnson