There is a photograph in Bill Kelly’s room in the Claremont Center nursing home. It’s of him, wearing a Manasquan High School football uniform, on Thanksgiving 1942.

“I left high school the next day,” he said. “I went New York that Friday and enlisted in the Navy.”

South Belmar native Bill Kelly, a World War II hero who survived a kamikaze attack, recently was presented with a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol.(Photo: Peter Ackerman)

There is another photo, taken a few years later, of Kelly holding a tattered American flag. It’s the flag that flew from the USS Laffey during the Battle of Okinawa. On April 16, 1945, the 376-foot destroyer endured one of history’s most vicious kamikaze assaults.

He’s 94 now, wheelchair-bound but still sharp. Some of what happened on the Laffey that day eludes him, between the fog of war and the passage of time, but the story of his heroism on the ship’s deck has been chronicled by eyewitnesses. Last month, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith came here to present him with a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol.

Kelly cradled that folded flag in his lap Tuesday, as he recounted “one of the worst days in the history of the Navy.”

'Kelly, Kelly, please help me'

Kelly was a signalman, an expert in Morse code, stationed on the ship’s starboard side when the assault began.

“A Japanese plane hit the mast and knocked the American flag down,” said ship historian Sonny Walker, past president of the USS Laffey Association. “Bill went out onto the main deck and gathered the flag up. He was going to take it back to the signal bridge.”

On Kelly’s way there, Walker said, he encountered “a sailor laying on the deck with his leg blown off.”

It was Fred Burgess, a good friend.

As Kelly and others spirited Burgess to sick bay, the wounded man asked Kelly for the flag he had rescued from the deck.

“Bill gave him the flag, and the guy was holding the flag to his chest when he died,” Walker said. “He bled to death right there, waiting to see the doctor.”

The horror of war

A total of 22 Japanese planes attacked the Laffey that day. Six kamikazes crashed into the ship, which also got rocked by four 400-pound bombs. A falling two-ton antenna narrowly missed Kelly. One of the explosions, he said, blasted him “probably at least 15 feet in the air.”

At one point a shipmate rigged up a new flag to replace the fallen one – “so the Japanese knew who they were fighting,” Walker said. That’s the tattered flag in the photo on Kelly’s wall.

All told, the Laffey lost 32 men killed and 71 wounded among its 320-man crew.

“There should have been nobody walking away from that,” Kelly said. “It was horrible, horrible.”

Like many in the Greatest Generation, Kelly rarely discussed the war as he went on to raise five children, work as a milkman and found a cleaning service. Daughter Margie Moore said she learned of his flag rescue only five or six years ago.

“They just didn’t live in the past,” she said, “although they clearly were affected by it.”

Moore said her dad couldn’t stomach a movie about the USS Indianapolis, which was torpedoed by the Japanese in 1945 and lost most of its crew to shark attacks.

“He told me he saw men jumping off the (Laffey) and he saw sharks following the ship,” Moore said. “He was going to watch (the movie), but he turned it off. He said it was too real, too close to the things he saw. He just couldn’t go back there.”

A legacy preserved

There are four surviving members of the Laffey, which became known as “the ship that would not die.” It's now a museum docked off the South Carolina coast.

“You listen to their stories and it curls your hair,” he said. “This is why I tell kids, if you ever see somebody doing anything (disrespectful) to the flag, don’t holler at them; just ask them, why are you doing that?”

Bill Kelly was 20 years old the day of the attack, but the noise and the terror remain fresh, “like it was yesterday,” he said. The walls of his room tell the story. A photo of the post-battle Laffey, charred and mangled, hangs opposite his bed. So does a frame filled with medals, including a Purple Heart.

“I take this for my shipmates, not me,” he said. “Not me.”

Carino’s Corner appears Mondays in the Asbury Park Press.

This article was originally published in the Asbury Park Press on Feb. 12, 2018 and can be found online at:
https://www.app.com/story/news/military/veterans/2018/02/08/world-war-ii-hero-honored-amid-kamikaze-attack-he-saved-his-battleships-flag/306942002/