On April 1, 1945, while bombarding Okinawa, the USS West Virginia was hit by a kamikaze. A bomb from it penetrated to the second deck but fortunately didn't explode. Said Joseph Variot: "They rolled it onto a stretcher and carried it up to the deck, where it was disarmed and cast overboard."
Four sailors died and 77 were wounded in the crash. West Virginia veteran Herbert Crask of Arizona related that one of those killed then was the telephone operator where he would have been had he not had his knees messed up at Iwo Jima which had landed him in a hospital ashore.
--GreGen
The USS North Carolina (BB-55) My all-time favorite warship. As an elementary school student in North Carolina, I donated nickels and dimes to save this ship back in the early sixties.
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