WWII hero honored for saving dozens

He said he was working on the hangar deck — just below the flight deck of the USS Bunker Hill — when he heard the first loud explosion up above.

Some 30 seconds later came another, far more powerful blast. It hurled him against a plane as flames and smoke spread everywhere.

“I didn’t know what happened, but I scrambled up to the deck and everything was burning like hell,” said Frank Anello. “We’d been hit by two of those (Japanese) suicide planes. There were explosions and guys were dying ... It was something awful.”

The USS Bunker Hill — an aircraft carrier the length of nearly three football fields and one of the most celebrated in all of World War II — was hit by two kamikaze strikes on May 11, 1945.

The first Zero fighter, flown by young Japanese pilot Yasunori Seizo, dived on the Bunker Hill with guns blazing. According to Maxwell Taylor Kennedy — in his book “Danger’s Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her” — Yasunori first dropped the 550-pound bomb he was carrying.

It careened across the flight deck, shattered a hole through the ship’s port side and tumbled to the water, detonating before it hit.

At the same time, Yasunori crashed his plane into the deck. It skidded into many of the 34 planes waiting to take off, spewing burning fuel that set all of them — and their pilots trapped inside — ablaze. The Zero then dragged one of the planes overboard, along with a section of catwalk filled with sailors.

Within seconds, the second kamikaze pilot — Kiyoshi Ogawa — dropped his bomb on the ship, ripping a hole 50 feet in diameter and three decks deep, killing all the pilots in the ready room.

Kiyoshi’s burning plane then crashed at the base of the ship’s massive control island.

Tuesday will be the 65th anniversary of the deadly attack, and though the 87-year-old Anello’s short-term memory has now faded, he remembers that fateful day as though it were yesterday.

His son Jim brought him to Dayton from his Waynesville-area farm the other afternoon to visit his nephew Rick Condi, who is the family historian. It’s a role he inherited from his late mother, Babe Condi, who was Frank’s older sister.

Condi not only had put together a scrapbook of Frank’s three years on the USS Bunker Hill — and especially of that deadly day during the Battle of Okinawa when 393 men on the ship were killed and another 264 were injured — but he had a far, far bigger surprise waiting for his uncle.

Frank — wearing his USS Bunker Hill cap and a T-shirt he got when he visited the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. — saw the scrapbook first and immediately focused on the famed Navy photo Rick had mounted on the cover.

It showed sailors hustling across the damaged flight deck, the mayhem behind them, the thick black smoke billowing up above.

“That’s me right there,” Anello said, pointing to a sailor, head down, about to step over a fire hose.

Jim nodded: “He says that’s what a photographer at one of the reunions told him.”

Frank stared at the photo in silence and finally shook his head: “Not to be bragging, but an experience like that is something you don’t forget.”

‘Everything started exploding’

Anello grew up on Chapel Street in Old North Dayton, the son of Italian immigrant parents. He graduated from Kiser High School and enrolled in the Navy.

“They sent me to advanced welding school at a submarine base in San Diego, then firefighter school,” he said. “I got on board the Bunker Hill when she left Boston.”

The ship — which could carry 104 aircraft and was over capacity with 3,500 men on board — reported to the Pacific in the fall of 1943. Over the next year and a half, few naval craft had a war record like hers.

The Bunker Hill participated in 13 major naval engagements — including Iowa Jima — and, according to a UPI report, sank over 253,975 tons of enemy vessels and shot down 475 Japanese planes.

As the war situation became dire for the Japanese, they resorted more and more to kamikaze attacks. In the scrapbook he prepared, Condi included a copy of a letter written by 23-year-old kamikaze pilot Isao Matsua to his parents:

“Please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. ... I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree. ... May my death be as sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal.”

Yet, nothing about the Bunker Hill attack was blossom-like or clean. The flight deck was engulfed in flames. Aircraft on the hangar deck melted and the molten metal spread out, scalding anyone in its path. Toxic smoke was sucked through the ship’s huge blowers and men trapped below either suffocated or died from the intense heat.

“We lost all our pilots,” said Anello. “Their planes were full of fuel and bombs and everything started exploding. It was terrible.”

One of the casualties was Fireman First Class Carson R. Fuls, who had graduated from Dayton’s Roosevelt High and had run a barbershop on Wilfred Avenue. Another Dayton sailor, Seaman Second Class Joseph Sito, was wounded. Five other Dayton men on the ship were not hurt.

Anello, a Shipfitter Second Class, cut away some hatches that enabled several dozen men to crawl to safety, an effort that drew commendation by Bunker Hill commanding officer Capt. G.A. Seitz.

Though Bunker Hill gunners shot down six other kamikaze planes that appeared after the initial strikes, the listing, burning ship appeared in grave danger until Seitz orchestrated a daring move.

He ordered a 70-degree turn that, according to a Navy release, “literally sumped the heart of the roaring inferno over the edge of the ship and into the sea.

“Men with lips too burned to cheer rushed forward with their hoses. Fresh air whipped across the deck forcing the nearby smoke or burning oil and gasoline away ... New life breathed into the ship.”

The next day, the men who had perished were buried at sea.

An overdue honor

After the war, Anello returned to Dayton and married Dolly Worthington, who had come from North Carolina to work at Wright Field. They had three children. Frank worked 32 years at Delphi, and along the way he bought a 106-acre farm and raised corn and soybeans.

“He never really talked much about the war,” Jim said. “He never went into detail.”

According to Kennedy, a lot of the men who survived on the Bunker Hill were that way. And yet, with most, it remained the seminal event in their lives.

After his wife of 51 years died in 1997 — “she was a good ol’ gal,” he said over and over — Frank was going through her belongings and found two misplaced, still-sealed letters from 1945. One was a letter of commendation from President Harry S. Truman, the other was from Seitz.

With that discovery, Condi wondered what else his uncle was missing out on. That’s when he discovered Anello had never received any service medals.

“I wanted to make that right,” said Condi, who runs Paisano’s Pizza Pub on Brandt Street. “And after a while it kind of became an obsession.”

He contacted various Navy offices around the nation and after scores of phone calls and years of waiting, he received five medals last month.

He had them mounted in a special case along with Anello’s Third Fleet bar, various campaign ribbons and button lapels, a photo of Frank as a young sailor and that picture of the smoking ship.

He had planned to give them to Anello at a special outing today, but when he saw how his uncle was so moved by the scrapbook the other day, he handed him the medals as well.

Anello studied them for several seconds and finally said quietly:

“It’s been a long, long time. This is great Rick, really great. It’s just wonderful. It is something I’ll never forget.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2156 or tarchdeacon@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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