Battleship Cove is home to an official memorial dedicated by the crew of the aircraft carrier Franklin (CV-13). In one of the worst naval tragedies of the World War II, Franklin was hit by Japanese bombs and began to burn. Flames bathed her decks, igniting fires that smoked like pipes from the barrels of five-inch mounts. As her magazines erupted and she began to list, nearby sailors from nearby ships raced to her side to rescue survivors. Carlton McMorrow (at left), USS Pittsburgh, was among them.

McMorrow recalls the heroics of Father Joe O’Callahan during the evacuation. The Navy's first clergyman to receive the Medal of Honor, this Boston native went on to serve at the Naval Training Station in Newport (RI) before retiring as a professor of philosophy at Holy Cross College.

“Father Joe O’Callahan, quite a guy … I walked back on the fantail, and he had a white cross with tape on his battle helmet, and, of course, those guys were pretty shook up, and they were more or less traumatized at the time. And he got them organized, and he got the guys so that they could pull the tow line over. She was burning. She was listing quite heavily, and those guys really went through hell.”

Although she was saved by the heroics of Callahan and others, the Franklin lost 724 sailors to the attack that day. A permanent honor roll hangs in memory of their sacrifice in the USS Massachusetts Memorial Room.

WITNESS TO THE INFERNO: Seventeen-year-old Carlton McMorrow was there on Monday, March 19, 1945, when a Japanese plane vanished into the clouds above the carrier Franklin: “They said, ‘No, no, that’s one of ours coming in.’ And that was it. Nobody really realized. All of a sudden – [it dived] out of the cloud formation and the officer on the Franklin realized, ‘Hey that’s one of theirs.’” The Franklin’s crew frantically commenced firing. “The plane came in and, of course, it was kind of late, but [the crew was] trying to open up with their machine guns, their 20 millimeters, I guess, because we heard some popping noises. And then the next thing – Boom, Boom - and [a bomb] went down the forward elevator, and one sheet of flame started – went right back … It was quite a deal.”

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