Stan Geiger

Floyd V. Beaver: Sailor, Author

On this day, 68 years ago, the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy attacked a U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. There are few people still walking and talking that were alive on that day. My uncle, Floyd V. Beaver, is one of them. Not only was he alive on that day, he was in the Navy and stationed at Pearl Harbor on that day.

Back in 1986, or thereabouts, Uncle Floyd gave me a copy of a manuscript he had written about his time in the Navy. I was fascinated by it. He tried many times, in vain, to get that manuscript published. It finally happened this year.

So, you want to be an author? Well, unless you are some dumbass celebrity that can slap your name on a book somebody else wrote, you’d better be prepared to eat a lot of rejection.

I haven’t yet read the finished product. But, as noted, I read the manuscript many years ago. I thought this might be a good day to recommend Uncle Floyd’s book to anyone that would like to get the story of what it was like to serve in the United States Navy during the biggest war in world history.

Below is a bit of information he sent me via email:

Title: SAILOR FROM OKLAHOMA,
One Man's Two-Ocean War

Publisher: Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402
(410) 295-1030

Available: Bookstores and online sources

This book picks up where a memoir of Uncle Floyd’s childhood ended. I read that one, too. It was excellent, too. Sadly, it has never been published.

Uncle Floyd was born in 1920. He was the eldest child---and the only natural son---in the Beaver clan that resulted in my becoming a human in 1958. As his young life continued, he picked up two younger sisters: Aunt Flo and me sainted mum. A little later in life, he acquired a step-brother, Leonard, by virtue of my grandfather’s second marriage. My grandfather’s second marriage came about due to the death of his love, my grandmother, Alta Jane, at a very young age. If I have this right, she fell to cancer at the age of 36.

Life for the Beaver clan was good in the ‘20s, according to Uncle Floyd. Grandpa was a house painter, and work was plentiful in the booming Tulsa of those days. The clan lived on a little homestead in the Osage Hills. Grandpa used any extra money he acquired to improve the homestead. They had chickens and hogs and a kitchen crop. They ate well; things were going along nicely. Then came the 1930s.

Grandpa lost his wife; the siblings lost their mother. The Great Depression set in; there was no work for a painter. And if that wasn’t enough, the ‘30s brought unbearable heat (absent air conditioning) and the horrible extended drought that created the Dust Bowl.

Uncle Floyd wrote of the sad day when his father slaughtered the brood sow. There would be no more fresh pork. Putting food on the table became a function of finding it in the woods. Uncle recalls being handed a .22 and two cartridges and being told to come home with two rabbits. Hey, bullets cost money. Mom recalls eating possum.

As the Great Depression wore on, the government provided a little free food here and there. According to Uncle Floyd, if the clan got a hold of some, grandpa would bury the containers rather than putting them in the trash. He didn’t want anyone to know.

What a change has taken place in America over the decades. Back in the day, people were ashamed, embarrassed, if they were forced into taking help from the government. Today, people line up for public assistance and scream for more.

Just the other day, I saw a report on KOTV about Giles’ Coats for Kids. That’s a campaign KOTV has been running for years. It provides coats for the supposed needy. A woman fishing around for free coats for her kids was featured in the interview. She was fat---very fat. She was nicely dressed. She was wearing jewelry. She had her hair done---and colored. This woman can afford food---lots of food---clothes, hairdos and jewelry for herself, but, she claims, she needs free coats for her kids. And she was more than proud to show her face on TV saying so.

Educators, though they are paid more than they should be paid, though they are covered with insurance, though they are given lifelong pay through taxpayer-guaranteed pensions, though many get benefits that go beyond that, such as free cars, free houses and free vacation trips, whine. They whine.

I apologize for my digression, but some things just need to be said.

Uncle Floyd, in the late ‘30s, was desperate to get out. He just wanted out of Oklahoma, out of his circumstances. The Navy wasn’t hiring in the midst of the Great Depression, but as the world environment heated things loosened up. He was accepted.

He barely had time to get used to the uniform when news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland broke. Japan was already engaged in a ground war in Asia. WWII was on; it was just a matter of time for the U.S.

Uncle Floyd wrote of his time in Hawaii when it was truly an island paradise---as opposed to the tourist attraction it has become since. That stuff is interesting in and of itself. But I found myself more drawn to his recounts of combat experiences---warts and all.

My uncle missed the attack on Pearl Harbor---by luck of the draw. His first ship was the USS Indianapolis. She was a cruiser. You might notice the name. The Indianapolis was sunk toward the end of the war. She ferried the Hiroshima bomb to a forward base. She was torpedoed on the way home. The order to abandon ship was given. The mission was so secret help was slow to come. I think the numbers, roughly speaking, had 1,200 men going into the water. About half of them were killed by sharks while they waited for rescue.

Indy was out to sea when the Pearl Harbor attack came. She was ferrying planes to a forward base. The two carriers stationed at Pearl, Enterprise and Lexington, were out to sea as well. This was, most certainly, a fortunate happenstance. All three of the ships mentioned would have been prime targets for the Japanese. Enterprise, I have read, was only a hundred miles out from Pearl. If the Japanese had known that, they would have made it a priority to sink her before heading home.

There was an argument, in naval circles, between WWI and WWII. Progressive thinkers in the Navy were arguing airpower was the most important tool in the navies of the day. The old-timers clung to the dreadnaught. They liked their big guns and big battleships. They were dubbed the “Gun Club.” Pearl Harbor put an end to the argument. There were eight battleships anchored at Pearl on the fateful day. Post attack, none were seaworthy.

Carriers became the flagships. Uncle Floyd, a signalman, was transferred to the Lexington.

In May of 1942, Lex found herself in the midst of an historic battle. It was the Battle of the Coral Sea. Coral Sea marked the first time navy ships engaged in battle without ever seeing each other. In other words, it was the first naval battle fought with planes in the open sea. Nobody had any experience in such an endeavor. Japanese planes headed for the American fleet and American planes headed for the Japanese fleet actually saw each other as they passed on their respective paths.

Lex was hit. As it turned out, Lex was mortally hit. Lex, in her death, provided lessons.

See, Lex wasn’t originally designed as an aircraft carrier. She, along with her sister carrier, Saratoga, was under construction as a cruiser when an arms treaty limiting warships was signed. Cruisers were counted in the treaty, and we already had our limit of cruisers. Aircraft carriers weren’t counted. So a couple of hulls that were supposed to become cruisers were redesigned and became carriers.

Poor design, relative to fuel lines, was part of the problem for the Lex. Peacetime activity was another, according to Uncle Floyd. When sailors had little to do, they were put to cleaning and painting. Coats and coats of fresh paint were applied to inner walls of a ship. When Lex was hit, fires started. Those fires burned hot. They burned so hot a closed compartment on the ship started a fire on the other side, as those many coats of paint on the walls ignited.

The order to abandon came, according to Uncle Floyd, around dusk. He says the fires were burning so hot at that point Lex’s hull was glowing. A U.S. destroyer put a couple of torpedoes into Lex---just to make sure she went to the bottom so the Japs would have no chance at saving her, changing her name and sending her back at us.

My uncle has never learned to swim. But there he was floating in an ocean waiting to get fished out by another ship.

In another side note, showing the impact the Great Depression had on the generation that endured it, Uncle Floyd, some 40 years after the incident, put an exact number on the amount of money he had saved and stashed that went to the bottom with Lex. I don’t recall the exact number; I think it was a little over a hundred bucks. That was his life-savings at the time.

The sinking of the Lex, odd as it may seem, might have provided another lucky break for my uncle. He had no ship when Midway rolled around a month later.

Subsequently, uncle did a brief stint serving in the Hornet and was then assigned to the Enterprise. His serving in the Enterprise led to more heavy combat around a piece of real estate both sides considered very important: Guadalcanal.

If I have the sequence correct, he then went on detachment to the New Zealand Navy for a time, then on for a tour in the Med, then on to a tour making supply runs across the north Atlantic.

Uncle Floyd ended the war in a hospital bed, suffering from an idiopathic ailment. He wanted to stay with the Navy as a career. But he was kicked out.

I hope I don’t reveal too much, but my uncle has suffered with hand tremors since he left the Navy. He has written much over those years. I am left in wonder as to how he has managed to do so. I’ve seen him have trouble raising a glass of iced tea to his mouth.

The Navy, having no answer, called his ailment “battle fatigue.” Such was the Navy’s excuse for getting rid of him. That is a charge my uncle has vehemently denied throughout his life. I side with my uncle. He was in the Navy for the duration. He did whatever he was ordered to do; he went wherever he was ordered to go. He put his life on the line on a daily basis---for years. Yet, in the end, the Navy screwed him.

The Navy may suck my balls. That is, the guys and gals that wear the fancy ornaments on their collars and shoulders may do so.

Uncle Floyd still has the tremors in his hands. No doctor has ever been able to diagnose his ailment. What do I think? Well, I think being in the war for the duration is his problem. He endured more stress than any human should ever endure; he has witnessed things no human should ever see. That’s what I think.

After being ousted from the Navy, Uncle Floyd came home and went to school at TU. Sometime around 1950, he got his degree, got married and moved to a little town in the San Francisco area called Mill Valley. He had a house built. Today, he’s 89 years old. He still lives in the house he had built. He’s still married to the same woman. He has four “youngsters” he calls children hanging around him. He’s still, after all that has happened to him, a good man. And he has done good things.

I promised my uncle, months ago, I would write this piece. I kept delaying and delaying because I knew this piece would be hard; I knew it would drain me emotionally. It has. I have written all afternoon. I have stopped more than once to wipe tears and blow my nose. I know a macho man shouldn’t admit to weeping, but I will in this writing.

I wept, I suppose, for my nation and what it has become. I wept for what my familial predecessors have endured, because I love them. I wept out of pride, because of what my familial predecessors have accomplished. In the face of whatever, they have triumphed. I wept in shame. I wept in shame because I have been unable to meet the bar my familial predecessors set. I have come up short.

Maybe the last part of the previous paragraph has more to do with the real reason I wanted to write this piece in the first place. Maybe, maybe not. Hell, I don't know.

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