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Published Sunday, September 07, 2008 in Local

Stitcher served on battleship

By Alex McRae

The Times-Herald

The men aboard the destroyer USS Bearss had been told the war was over. But as they approached the harbor in Hokkaido, in northern Japan, nerves grew tense when a Japanese battleship was sighted.

All Japanese warships were supposed to have left the harbor, but rumors of unauthorized enemy action abounded. So when the Bearss sighted the battleship, the General Quarters alarm was sounded and the men raced to their battle stations.

James Stitcher and the rest of the crew prepared for the worst.

Luckily, it never came.

The battleship wasn't there for hostile reasons. It had been badly damaged in the earlier fighting and was waiting for tugs to pull it from the harbor. The tugs finally showed up, and the Americans entered the harbor breathing a bit easier.

"It was troubling for awhile there," Stitcher says. "But once we saw it wasn't a problem, everybody settled down."

Stitcher was born and raised in Newnan. His father worked in the cotton mills, and when Stitcher was a boy he made deliveries for Lee-King Drugs on his bicycle.

As soon as he graduated from Newnan High School in 1943, he told his father he wanted to enlist -- even though he was still below draft age.

Stitcher will never forget what his father told him. "He said, 'Son, I'm glad,'" Stitcher says. "'I'm glad because our country and our people are worth fighting for -- if you live or die.'"

Stitcher went through basic at the Navy's Great Lakes Training Center in Chicago. Then in the spring of 1944, headed south for Chickasaw, Ala., to meet his new ship, the USS Bearss.

The Bearss had been officially launched in July 1943, but shipbuilders realized there was a problem when the ship started tipping sideways toward Mobile Bay. The superstructure was too heavy, putting the ship badly off-balance. Months of work was required to correct the problem before the ship was commissioned with Stitcher aboard in April 1944.

After a short spin near Mobile, the ship headed for a two-month shakedown cruise that ended in Bermuda. Just outside Bermuda, Stitcher came down with pneumonia and spent some time in the ship's hospital, but he was not taken off duty.

During the shakedown cruise, all the ship's systems checked out fine and Stitcher became proficient with the 40-mm gun that was used for antiaircraft fire and shore bombardment.

"That was the first time I've ever been on a big ship, but I really liked it," Stitcher says. "Everybody else seemed to like it, too. We had a real good skipper."

When the Bearss was declared fit for combat, it sailed through the Panama Canal and spent August 1944 on routine patrols in Hawaiian waters. Then the ship received orders to sail for Adak, in Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

"When we heard where we were going, nobody knew what to say because nobody knew where it was," Stitcher says.

The Bearss arrived in Adak in August 1944, and began anti-shipping sweeps and bombardments in the Aleutians and as far away as the Kuril Islands off the east coast of Japan.

Stitcher's most memorable days came during the bombardment of Attu, in the Aleutians. Stitcher says Japanese troops had been lodged there on American soil since the beginning of the war. Russian troops had failed to remove them. When America's Russian allies were in danger of being overrun, American ships headed to Attu to push the Japanese off the island.

Stitcher's ship pounded Attu for days. The ship drew close to the island during bombardments, then pulled back out of range of Japanese guns and waited for further orders.

After each bombardment, shore parties assessed the damage to Japanese targets. The ground intelligence, combined with aerial reconnaissance photos, gave the ships their next day's targets.

Stitcher says he was never worried about the outcome of the Bearss' battles.

"In training they had told us to expect the worst, to expect to be shelled and shot at by ships and planes," Stitcher says. "They warned us about bad weather, too, so we were ready for anything. You just trusted in the man above that you wouldn't get hit. That's all you could do."

Between bombardment runs the men did their best to replenish their meager personal supplies. The ship's store on the destroyer was small and men were always running out of cigarettes, candy and personal items. Sailors crowded the base commissary whenever they were in Adak and, when they could, tied up to one of the task force's aircraft carriers to shop at the much larger shipboard store.

"We'd get all the candy and cigarettes and things like that we could, then hide it so nobody could find it," Stitcher says. "It was a little game for us."

Whenever the ship was at sea, men kept deckside watch in all kinds of weather. Most sailors learned to stay near on-deck exhaust blowers to keep warm. But on one patrol, the weather was so bad and the seas so rough, the ship's exterior rigging became covered with ice.

"I didn't think salt water could freeze," Stitcher says. "But whatever we had out there froze everything, even my gun tub."

On one occasion, though, rough seas may have actually saved some lives. Stitcher can't confirm the story, but says he was told his ship was attacked by a Japanese submarine during a storm. According to the tale, the Bearss was lifted so high by rough seas the torpedo passed beneath the ship and missed.

"I don't know if it really happened," Stitcher says. "But I'm glad we didn't get hit."

Stitcher's ship was at sea when the war ended. Word was passed from ship to ship by flashing signal lights.

"I tell you, that was the most welcome signal we ever got," Stitcher says. "That was really some good news."

After the war the Bearss was the flagship of a task force that sailed to Hokkaido, Japan. Stitcher was present when the Japanese commander came aboard and formally surrendered his post to the Americans.

"It wasn't like the big surrender down in Tokyo," Stitcher says. "But it was still good and we enjoyed it."

Stitcher spent several months on occupation duty in Japan. He says the Americans were always treated well by Japanese civilians.

"We showed them respect and they gave it back," he says. "They were all polite and nice and we never had any trouble."

Stitcher visited many Japanese homes and says he was impressed by the family routine.

"The kids still went to school every day," he says. "When they got home they always did their lessons and did their chores before they got to play."

A large department store was still standing in Hokkaido, and Stitcher shopped there several times. He was surprised to find two American women working there who had been at the store since before the war started.

"They said all during the war the Japanese had left them alone and treated them fine," Stitcher says.

He was most surprised by the cars, trucks and buses, all of which were powered by charcoal.

"I'd never seen anything like that," Stitcher says. "They'd throw a bag of charcoal in there like you'd put wood in a train boiler and off they went. It made some smoke, though, I'll tell you."

After Hokkaido, Stitcher spent some time in the huge Japanese port in Yokohama, then came home and was discharged in January 1946.

He went to work at East Newnan Mill, but didn't stay long before he took a job with a local sheet metal business. He also found time to start courting Barbara June Harris. They were married in November 1946.

Stitcher soon realized he wasn't happy with the job or pay at the sheet metal company. He decided to go back to the military.

In 1949, Stitcher joined the Air Force and was assigned to the 4080th Reconnaissance Squadron. Stitcher was posted to Del Rio, Texas, and from there went on several overseas assignments, including lengthy stops in Formosa, Argentina, Japan, Puerto Rico and Thailand.

While in Phuket, Thailand, Stitcher lost an eye when he washed his face with water contaminated by the chemical called Agent Orange, which was used to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam war.

In 1971, Stitcher was told that because of several injuries and a loss of hearing suffered during his time in the Navy, he would have to take a desk job or retire.

By then, Stitcher had also been stationed at Orlando and Panama City. He chose to leave the military and stayed in Orlando, where he did horticultural and pest control work at Disney World until he retired in 1992. The next year he moved back to Coweta.

"I liked the service for a lot of reasons," Stitcher says. "Maybe most of all because of all the friends I made. The military is like a tight-knit family and the friends you make are for life. I still keep up with many of them today."