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Last sailor of WWII ship ‘USS Juneau’

Last sailor of WWII ship ‘USS Juneau’
Eatontown man was on crew of ship that carried the five Sullivan brothers
By Sherry conohan
Staff Writer

PHOTO BY VERONICA YANKOWSKI Frank Holmgren holds a photo of the USS Juneau which was sunk in 1942. The Eatontown resident was one of only 10 to survive the attack on the ship in the Pacific Theater.

Frank Holmgren will never forget the roar of the water when his Navy ship sank beneath him in the early days of World War II. He won’t forget the sharks circling around his raft as he waited nearly seven days for rescue either.

Holmgren, 79, was just a 19-year-old captain’s orderly, not quite eight months into active duty on the USS Juneau, when it was hit and sunk by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine in the Pacific Ocean 59 years ago this week.

He said the torpedo was fired at another ship in their group, the San Francisco, but slipped passed its bow. The San Francisco had all its communications knocked out in a battle both ships had been in with the Japanese earlier that morning, and could not message the Juneau that a torpedo was on a trajectory toward it. Holmgren was on deck on the fantail when the torpedo hit.

"We went down in a minute," the resident of Byrnes Lane said.

"I went up in the air, and when I came down my hand hit a life jacket," he said. He quickly put it on, he recalled. "I heard the roar of the water and I thought I was going to die. I did go down with the ship — I don’t know how far — but the next thing I knew, I came back up. That life jacket saved my life."

Holmgren also kept his mouth closed when he went under and didn’t swallow much salt water, which he feels helped him survive. He also did not drink any salt water while drifting in his raft, relying instead on rain for sustenance.

"Once you drink that salt water, you are finished," he said.

Holmgren is the last remaining survivor from the sinking of the Juneau, which is best known for having been the graveyard of the five Sullivan brothers of Iowa. He said there were 10 survivors from the crew of approximately 725, five of whom were from the life raft he called home for a week.

With the exception of his military service, Holmgren has lived his entire life in Eatontown, beginning on what is now Throckmorton Avenue, formerly Railroad Avenue. He went into the Navy in March 1942, after graduation from Long Branch High School.

Holmgren went through boot camp at Newport, R.I., and was assigned with his buddy from Eatontown, Charlie Hayes, to the Juneau, a fairly new ship.

Hayes survived the sinking of the Juneau but was not among those finally rescued, he said.

Holmgren said he and Hayes boarded the Juneau together in New York City after completing basic training, and initially worked the Atlantic Ocean side of the war, escorting ships to Africa.

Eventually, he said, they were called to the Pacific Theater of the war and went to Guadalcanal to supply the Marines there. While in the area, he saw the Wasp, an aircraft carrier, get hit by torpedoes and sink, and he became engaged in the battle of Santa Cruz, in which the Hornet, another aircraft carrier was hit.

His ship returned to Guadalcanal to take troops to land.

"While there, we got the word there were some Jap ships that were going to come in to land some troops too," he said. "We were to intercept them, which we did."

That battle was early on the morning of Friday the 13th of 1942, about 1 a.m. Within 15 minutes, he said, the Juneau was hit by a torpedo and had to leave the area of battle. There were 15 U.S. ships when that battle began; when they regrouped after dawn, there were only four, he recalled. He said the Juneau was slated to go back to Pearl Harbor for repairs.

At about 11 a.m., according to Holmgren, a Japanese submarine — I-26 — shot a torpedo at the San Francisco, a heavy cruiser. The shot missed its target, but hit the Juneau, an anti-aircraft cruiser, loaded with guns and ammunition instead.

An official Navy history of the demise of the ship, which Holm-gren has, describes its sinking this way: "The Juneau literally disintegrated in one mighty column of smoke and flames which rose easily a thousand feet into the air."

Three rafts from the Juneau were freed before the ship went down, along with some cork nets, Holmgren said, and he made his way onto one of the boats. He said it rode low in the ocean, so he was nearly to his waist in water for a week. He still has the scars of salt water sores on his legs to show for it.

Holmgren said about 100 crew members from the Juneau survived the sinking, but many were badly hurt and died from their wounds. He said others "went out of their heads" while adrift at sea and, thinking they saw land, dove into the ocean to swim to shore only to be devoured by sharks.

"If you got off the raft, they got you," he said.

He said there initially were eight men on his raft, but an officer and two others jumped off "thinking they saw something out there."

The thought of swimming for shore never occurred to Holmgren for the simple reason that he did not know how to swim. He still doesn’t.

He said once the sharks got a taste of flesh, they kept circling around the rafts. "It didn’t take them long," he said. "After the explosion, they were there soon."

While seven days adrift at sea would seem to be increasingly difficult, it is the earliest part of the ordeal that was the toughest for Holmgren.

"The hard part was seeing the damn ships leaving," he said, after the battle in which the Juneau was sunk. "They never came back… . They didn’t think anybody would have gotten off the ship.

"We lost a lot of lives because of it," he added.

Two days after his ship went down, Holmgren said, an Army plane flew overhead, swooped down over them, clearly seeing the survivors in their rafts, and dropped a rubber boat into the ocean for them.

But it wasn’t until almost five days later, Nov. 19, 1942, he said, that a PPY, a plane that can land on water, came down and picked them up and returned them to Guadalcanal.

By then, Holmgren said, there were only 10 men left — the five on his raft, one each on the two other original rafts, and three on the rubber boat that had been dropped in their midst.

Holmgren said the survivors were helped by being covered with dark black oil from the ship when it sank. The oil protected them from the sun — and the sharks. As the oil wore off, and their skin was revealed, the sharks took a greater interest in them, he said.

Holmgren kept up with only one of the survivors over the years, exchanging Christmas cards with George Manteres of Washington state. But he did go back to two reunions — the first one in 1987 in Juneau, Alaska, for which his ship was named, and which five survivors attended along with the captain’s son, the governor of Alaska, and the pilot of the plane who rescued him.

"That’s the one I wanted to meet," he said of the pilot.

The second was a 50th reunion in 1992, in Iowa, to remember the Sullivan brothers.

Holmgren said many people don’t know that there was another family of four brothers on the Juneau — the Rogers family — but two of them transferred off the ship just before it was sunk. The two brothers who remained were among the dead when the ship went down.

Holmgren recalled being sent to a hospital in the Fiji Islands to recover from the trauma, and when he was in New Zealand soon afterward, he ran into one of the Rogers, who asked about his brothers. He said he told him he didn’t think they made it; they were not among the 10 survivors that he knew.

The Rogers brother then told him he had run into someone there who knew him and took Holmgren to meet the man. It turned out to be his cousin from Long Branch, Earl Martin, who now lives in New York.

"You can’t go nowhere without running into somebody," Holmgren laughed.

After he recovered, Holmgren was assigned to the USS Oakland, another anti-aircraft cruiser like the Juneau and, when given his choice of assignments, insisted his battle station be topside on the deck. He was a "plank owner," one of the first crew assigned to the ship when it was commissioned.

Holmgren went through many other Pacific battles on the Oakland — the capture of Tarawa, raids on the Marshall Islands, the capture of Kwajalein Atoll, a strike on Truk, and on to Saipan.

Holmgren said at Saipan he took the Navy up on its offer to reassign him anytime he wanted, because he was getting headaches and having other health problems. He got off the ship in June 1944 and was sent to Earle Naval Weapons Station, Colts Neck, right back home in Monmouth County.

When the war ended in 1945, he had to wait until the married men were discharged, and finally was released from the Navy in December of that year. But he signed right back up again as a civilian employee of Earle, a job which lasted for a career of 35 years until he retired in 1980.

Once back home, Holmgren noticed a lovely lass walking by his house on her way to the bus to go to work every day. He said he would whistle at her and eventually was introduced to her. Her name was Teresa, and she had moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey for a job and was living with her aunt in Eatontown. They got married April 3, 1948, and have two children — Frank Jr. and Jean Louise Esposito, who both live in Neptune — and five grandchildren.

Asked if he had any hobbies, Holmgren said he had none. But, he admitted, he enjoys following the ponies, and said with a twinkle in his eye that Monmouth Park Racetrack is a little too close to home.

Saga Continues

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