Aaron A "Buster" Blackwelder
United States Navy USS Boise CL-47
from:Rock Hill, SC
My grandfather was Buster Blackwelder and along with two of his brothers, Brent and Otto, served on the USS Boise from mid-1941 before the war through 1942 when the Boise returned to Philadelphia Navy Yard for repairs after the Battle of Cape Esperance. "Buster" was my grandfather's nickname, but when he enlisted that was the name he gave. Years later when he joined the Reserves he updated his records to show his "real" name which is Aaron A. Blackwelder. The Boise took my grandfather all over the world before and during the war with stops in many exotic locales. He had a large world coin collection that he put together that eventually made its way into my hands. Many countries from his travels are represented in these coins!
During the war the men were not supposed to keep diaries in the event that Japanese got their hands on them and learned something from the information. Somehow my grandfather found a way to keep a journal which is now in my possession. His first entry was a few weeks before the war, dated 18 November 1941, and he wrote that the Boise was escorting merchant ships to Manila in the Philippines. This was almost 3 weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl. It appears that he wasn't keeping the diary every day and probably went back to add or edit information days after it really happened because some of the dates and events don't line up exactly with the official records of the Boise. Regardless, his short entries, when he decided to note something, are to me an interesting view of how a typical seaman saw world changing events happening around him. He notes things like spotting Japanese subs at night, meeting up with other ships to patrol, spotting and chasing enemy ships, Christmas dinner while stuck aboard ship and docked at Surabaya, and the fall of Corregidor, Many other entries repeated several times the boredom of waiting to leave port or simply steaming to another assignment. Most entries are a terse 2 or 3 lines in length. The importance of the Battle of Cape Esperance in comparison to all other events prior to October 1942 are revealed in the page and a half he gives the afternoon of Oct. 10 leading up to the battle and the battle itself which happened just after midnight on Oct. 11.
For days after the battle he wrote that they kept finding and removing bodies and parts of bodies from the turrets that had been blown up in the battle. My grandfather loved talking about the Navy (he stayed in the Reserves until 1979), but I don't recall him ever talking about that experience although my grandmother told me once that he had told her of the overpowering smell of those bodies as they slowly rotted in the tropical heat before they could be removed from the damaged areas. He lost his best friend in one of those turrets so I can't imagine that made the labor of repair and body retrieval any easier. The last entry of my grandfather's journal was the day the Boise finally arrived in Philadelphia --19 Nov 1942-- which was a year and a day after he started his diary. While his brothers Brent and Otto stayed aboard the Boise for the duration of the war my grandfather was transferred to another ship. His future wife, my grandmother, traveled to Philadelphia and they spent some time sightseeing there and in Boston before my grandfather was eventually transferred to his new ship that patrolled the North Atlantic based out of Canada. Later, he would be transferred to another ship before the war ended.
It wasn't until after his death in 1989 that I even knew my grandfather had served on a ship other than the Boise because the Boise was all he ever talked about. He loved that ship and attended a number of reunions (if not all of them) before his death in 1989 in Rock Hill, SC.
