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The Navy decorated Horace A. Bass Jr. for "extraordinary heroism" during the Battle of Midway. After his death, the Navy named a high-speed transport ship for him. The USS Horace A. Bass was launched in 1944 in Quincy, Mass., and commissioned later that year.
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Connected history
The History Museum of the Roanoke Valley brings to light the heroics of Roanoker Horace A. Bass Jr. and the ship the Navy named after him.
By MIKE HUDSON
THE ROANOKE TIMES, 6/2/902
Horace A. Bass Jr. was an art teacher who went off to war.
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| Horace A. Bass |
He was a son of Roanoke who won the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart for his tenacity in the cockpit of a bullet-ridden Wildcat fighter plane. He never knew about the medals - by the time the Navy got around to presenting them, he was designated missing in action in the vast Pacific. Eventually, he was declared dead, one of 534 Roanoke Valley servicemen killed in action during World War II.
His name lived on, however, far beyond his death, and far beyond his hometown.
The Navy named a high-speed transport ship after the fallen Roanoker. The USS Horace A. Bass was commissioned in 1944 and spent a decade and a half of service in war and peacetime, surviving a suicide plane attack and joining in the occupation of post-defeat Japan, evacuating civilians during the convulsions of the Chinese civil war, putting Marines ashore during the tide-turning Inchon landing in the first year of the Korean War.
The Navy decommissioned the USS Horace A. Bass in 1959, finally selling it for scrap in 1975. It was mostly forgotten, except for Bass' family and those who served on the ship.
Now a new exhibit at Center in the Square's History Museum of the Roanoke Valley aims to preserve the story of both the man and the ship. The five-month-long exhibit, titled "What Victory May Mean," will open to the public at 10 a.m. on Tuesday , which marks the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the decisive naval and air showdown in which Bass earned his medals for "extraordinary heroism."
The idea for the Bass exhibit sprang from the museum's "Ships and Shipmates" exhibit. Roy Baugher III, an administrative assistant at the museum, was thumbing through a scrapbook of Roanoke newspaper clippings about World War II and spotted articles about Bass and the ship named after him. He was surprised. No one involved in the "Ships and Shipmates" exhibit knew Bass' story.
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The crew of the USS Horace A. Bass was photographed in Hong Kong in early 1950. Soon they would be thrown into the early stages of the Korean War.
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Baugher decided to curate an exhibit to correct this historical amnesia. Over the past two years, he has collected a treasure trove of photos, written materials, artifacts and remembrances of people who knew Bass or served on the USS Bass.
"It's really something to have a citizen have a ship named after him, and for the ship to have such a distinguished career," Baugher says. "To have that history go by the wayside - I thought it would be a shame for that to happen."
Most of preserved history focuses on the thoughts and deeds of people at the top of society: generals, admirals, captains of industry, presidents and governors. But more and more historians and historical institutions have begun to resist that tradition of top-down history. They have begun to dig into the everyday lives and heroics of average folks.
"What Victory May Mean" falls into that newer tradition of historic recollection.
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History Museum exhibit includes pieces of a Japanese plane and shrapnel. A Japanese suicide plane crashed into the ship on July 30, 1945.
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Horace A. Bass Jr. was born in Roanoke in 1915, the son of Horace and Minnie Bass. His father worked as a draftsman in the engineering department of Norfolk & Western Railway.
His sister, Minnie Bass Thomas of Roanoke, recalls that Horace Jr. was a sickly child and spent some time confined to bed, but, "I don't think his mind was ever at rest that much." He was talkative, and as he got older, "he was always doing something with his hands. He would pick up things and draw on them."
She thinks he may have gotten through Latin in school by supplementing his class work with a Roman centurion carved out of balsa wood.
Horace Jr. graduated from Jefferson High School in 1933 and spent two years at Roanoke College, then two more at Richmond Professional Institute (the forerunner of Virginia Commonwealth University). He earned his fine arts degree at RPI in 1937 and took a job teaching art at Jefferson High, where he served as a faculty adviser for drama productions and the school's yearbook, the Acorn.
He enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve in early 1941, received flight training and was appointed as an ensign one month before the bombing at Pearl Harbor brought the United States into war. He married Sarah Sue Milley in March 1942 and then shipped out with a fighter squadron assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. He and the other fliers piloted new F-4 Gruman single-seat fighter planes known as Wildcats.
He was quickly thrown into the action in the Pacific and soon distinguished himself during the Battle of Midway. He was on combat air patrol on June 4 when his squadron intercepted a large group of enemy dive bombers heading to attack American ships. Bass and his section leader came under concentrated fire from a Japanese dive bomber and a Zero fighter plane.
According to Navy accounts, his Wildcat was raked with machine-gun fire, but Bass "stubbornly" maintained his position in order to protect his leader from the rear. Bass shot down the bomber and the Zero.
The Navy would later praise his "superb airmanship and unyielding devotion to duty, maintained at great risk against tremendous odds."
The Yorktown was sunk during the battle, and Bass and his Wildcat were reassigned to the USS Saratoga. On Aug. 24, 1942, during the battle of the Eastern Solomon Islands, the Saratoga was targeted for attack by Japanese planes. American fighters inflicted heavy losses on the attackers, who diverted their assault toward the USS Enterprise.
Bass joined the fight to protect the second aircraft carrier. Sometime in the battle, Bass and his plane disappeared. It was presumed that his Wildcat was shot down by a Zero and crashed into the ocean. Neither his body nor his plane was ever recovered.
On Sept. 12, 1944, his mother and father and widow attended the launching of the USS Horace A. Bass at Bethlehem Steel's Fore River shipyard in Quincy, Mass. The 1,725-ton ship was commissioned Dec. 21, 1944, under the command of Lt. Cmdr. F.W. Kuhn.
Colin M. Kosack, an electrician's mate on the ship from 1944 to 1946, recalls his first impression: The ship "looked small, but fast, seaworthy and like she would be get some interesting duty.
"I liked her speed, gunnery, looks, flexibility and how she defended herself."
The Bass crossed the Panama Canal and steamed to San Diego in March 1945. By April 6 it was in the middle of the desperate fighting off Okinawa, winning credit for shooting down an enemy plane. Later she sank a submarine with a depth charge as she provided anti-aircraft and anti-submarine protection to countless ships off Okinawa.
On July 30, the Bass faced its deadliest threat - a Japanese suicide bomber came in low, crashed through the ship's superstructure and fell alongside. The resulting explosion killed one and wounded nine others.
Bert Sikowitz, an electrician's mate, recalls being awakened by the explosion and running to the No.2 engine room, jumping over a body on the way. The engine room was empty, so he took over No.2 engine throttle. The ship took on some water, but it didn't affect its seaworthiness.
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Bass' Navy Cross
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He later learned that the body he had jumped over was that of Bill Foley, a radio operator and a close buddy.
After the Japanese capitulated on Aug. 15, 1945, the Bass joined the American ships that entered Tokyo Bay, taking part in the occupation of the sprawling Yokosuka naval base and taking possession of the battleship Nagato.
In 1948, as the Chinese Communists began to overrun the Chinese Nationalists, the Bass was sent to Nanking to evacuate American civilians.
The ship was thrown into combat in 1950 with the start of the Korean War. Raiding parties from the Bass helped reconnoiter possible landing sites around Inchon. When the main assault on Inchon began, landing vehicles off the Bass put Marines ashore in the first wave that hit the island of Wolmi-Do.
In all, the Bass would serve three tours of duty in Korea, winning the Navy Unit Commendation for its role in commando raids. During the next few years, she supported a number of Cold War-era operations, including the transportation of civilians from North to South Vietnam.
By February 1959, the Navy had decided the Bass had outlived its usefulness. It was decommissioned and "mothballed" as part of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet at Orange, Texas.
Finally, on July 1, 1975, it was sold for scrap. It was moved to Brownsville, Texas, and torn apart.
Almost all the dates in the life and death of Horace A. Bass Jr. and the USS Horace A. Bass are stuck in the head of the history museum's Baugher. He's spent so much time digging into their connected histories he can summon most dates and facts without referring to a piece of paper.
"When people ask me about this stuff, I just spout out and I don't shut up," Baugher says. "I just felt that the story of Bass - and the story of the guys that served on the ship - really needed to be preserved and remembered."
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Horace Bass' sketchbook and drawings are on loan from his sister, Minnie Thomas of Roanoke.
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