A nearby sailor had an extra life jacket with a broken buckle and gave it to Cooper.
PRICE: The surviving sailors tried to fight the fire, but the order came quickly to abandon ship.ĬOOPER: And I had to hurry.
Below that were crew quarters where Cooper, a native of the North Carolina mountains, had just gone to take a shower.ĬOOPER: And so we just got down there, and boom, boom. One punched through the flight deck and ignited the fully fueled aircraft in the hangar deck. The pilot released two bombs an instant before crashing into the ship. The pilot dove straight out of the blinding sun, and the ship's gunners didn't have time to fire even once. So the Japanese pilots figured, if I'm going to most likely die, I might as well make it count. ship, its chances of survival were about 1 out of 10. SAM COX: By that time of the war, our anti-aircraft defenses had become so good that if a Japanese aircraft found a U.S. Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command. Retired Rear Admiral Sam Cox is director of the U.S. About a dozen lookouts were scanning the sky for kamikaze planes, which had become a major threat. PRICE: On January 4, 1945, Cooper, then 22 years old, was a gunner aboard the USS Ommaney Bay. JAY PRICE, BYLINE: After watching a brief video divers took of the wreckage, 101-year-old Joe Cooper said only one word would do. The discovery off the coast of the Philippines has special resonance for one man in North Carolina. ships sunk in a World War II kamikaze attack. The Navy has formally identified the wreckage of one of the largest U.S.
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