WW II veteran recalls sinking of USS Lexington

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Leon Baccus joined the U.S. Navy in 1940 because he figured sooner or later America would get caught up in the war Hitler was raging in Europe, and the Navy seemed the best way to stay safe.

SEAN SPERRY/CHRONICLE Leon Baccus, 87, recalls his days as an aviation mechanic for the Navy in World War II. His strategy was not entirely successful.

Instead, Baccus ended up surviving the sinking of the USS Lexington, and later diving into a muddy foxhole in Guadalcanal.

Just before Memorial Day, Baccus sat in the comfortable living room of his Bozeman condo and shared his memories of what many have called “the good war.”

At age 87, he walks a little slowly on artificial knees. Yet his blue eyes and his memory are still sharp.

Baccus had just graduated from high school in Cheyenne, Wyo., when he and a buddy signed up with the Navy, hoping to be sent to the West Coast, far from bloody Europe.

“I didn’t like the idea of sleeping in a trench somewhere in France,” Baccus said.

His dad had been an airline mechanic, so he signed up for training as an aviation mechanic. His job in the Navy would be to keep bombers flying and fighting.

Baccus kept a small notebook in his pocket as a diary. He was in San Diego on Dec. 7, 1941, waiting to ship out on the USS Saratoga, sitting atop baggage and listening to the radio, when the broadcast broke in with the news of the Pearl Harbor attack.

“It was exciting because we knew we were going to be involved,” Baccus recalled. At the same time, he said, “It was kind of a shaky thing. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Five days later the Saratoga arrived at Pearl Harbor, and he saw first-hand the burned and sunken hulks of U.S. battleships.

The war in the Pacific did not start well. One night aboard the Saratoga, Baccus and the sailors were watching the stars and the moon, when the ship was torpedoed by a submarine. It threw water up the side and got them all wet. The wounded ship made it back to Hawaii.

The 20-year-old Baccus was transferred to the USS Lexington, one of the largest U.S. aircraft carriers. It quickly saw action in New Guinea, just north of Australia.

On Feb. 20, 1942, the Lexington was attacked by Japanese bombers. Fighter pilot Butch O’Hare, for whom Chicago’s airport would later be named, shot down five Japanese bombers by himself. That won him the Congressional Medal of Honor and gave America a badly needed hero. Baccus was proud to be part of the squad that kept O’Hare and other pilots in the air.

Baccus’s worst moments of the war came during the Battle of Coral Sea on May 7 and 8, 1942. The USS Lexington and Yorktown battled Japanese carriers in the first naval battle in history in which neither ship sighted or fired directly on the other.

The Lexington’s entire force of 70 planes attacked the Japanese ships, dropping 500 and 1,000 pound bombs, sinking a carrier and all aboard. Baccus stayed up until 2 a.m. installing a new starter in a plane.

The next day, the battle raged again. Just before noon, Japanese torpedo planes and bombers attacked the Lexington.

“It was the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed,” Baccus wrote in his diary. The sky was full of planes, dive bombers heading straight down on the Lexington.

“I can’t remember what I felt like except I was scared to death,” he said.

Baccus sought shelter in a large coil of rope on the ship’s deck and watched the attack. The roar of the ship’s guns firing 5-inch shells was deafening. A 500 pound bomb wiped out an entire crew of Marines. The Lexington’s magazine exploded and soon the entire ship was on fire.

The Lexington managed to travel 200 miles, until its aviation fuel exploded. When it was clear the ship couldn’t be saved, the captain had it scuttled, so the Japanese wouldn’t know of its loss.

“I told my buddy, when the captain said, ‘Abandon ship,’ by the time he got ‘ship’ out, I was down on the other ship.” He climbed down a rope to the USS Morris, alongside the burning Lexington. Other sailors jumped into the ocean, but every one was picked up. About 250 to 300 men who died in the battle went down with the ship.

“That was their burial site,” he said.

“It’s hell seeing a real fighting ship like the ‘Lady’ Lexington go down,” he wrote in his diary, five days before his 21st birthday. “I will never, never forget it, or the men that died on it. They were a real credit to their country.”

Losing the Lexington was a blow to the U.S. Navy, but the Battle of Coral Sea gave America a morale boost, because it showed the Japanese could be beaten. It cost the Japanese two crucial carriers just one month before the Battle of Midway Island, which proved a turning point of the war. And it prevented the Japanese from taking Port Moresby in New Guinea, on Australia’s front door.

Some 60 years later, Baccus was living in California when he happened to meet an Australian man, who was excited to learn he had been in the Battle of Coral Sea.

“He said, ‘You guys saved Australia,’” Baccus recalled. The man gave him a souvenir silver spoon commemorating the battle.

During a second key battle of the Pacific, Baccus was stationed at Guadalcanal Island, where the Marines captured an air field and kept the Japanese from retaking it. He remembered vividly sleeping four guys to a tent, and every night at 2 a.m., a Japanese bomber would drop one bomb. The men would all dive into a muddy foxhole. This went on for six months.

“We called him Washing Machine Charlie,” Baccus recalled. “Everything was mud and mosquitoes.”

Baccus contracted malaria and was sent away from the front lines to recover. While stationed near Long Beach, he visited an aunt and met the girl next door, Marjorie.

A black and white photo shows them together, him smoking a pipe and wearing his jaunty white sailor cap, and she looking like actress Gene Tierney. She took a troop train to Chicago to marry him on Feb. 26, 1944.

“I met her at the depot, and we got married that afternoon,” he said. They eventually had two sons and a daughter.

Marjorie died in 1997. Baccus moved to Bozeman a couple years ago to be near his son, Richard, and grandson, Troy, and enjoy the mountains and fishing. He now has four grandchildren and one great-grandchild on the way.

Baccus has five service medals on his wall. He’s glad he signed up for the Navy, glad he didn’t go to a trench in France, and proud of what they did in World War II.

Still, he said, “There are no good wars.”

“I think I was lucky,” Baccus said. “I’m still alive, and I can remember all that. I’m going to reach 100. I’m working on that.”

Gail Schontzler is at gails@dailychronicle.com or 582-2633.

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