Navy Honors Wwii’s ‘Forgotten Fleet’ Months After Pearl Harbor Were Deadly For Ignored Heroes Of Asiatic Fleet

After 55 years, the men of World War II’s forgotten fleet finally are getting their due.

“Out-numbered, out-gunned, out-everything, we fought like hell,” recalls 75-year-old Charles Ankerberg, part of the Asiatic Fleet thrust to the front lines of World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. “We’ve been waiting 55 years for recognition.”

Based at Manila Bay in the Philippines when America joined the war, the fleet of aging ships with obsolete equipment and inadequate supplies battled the Japanese in the western Pacific for three months, outnumbered 10 to 1, in a combined force with Australian, Dutch and British allies.

The cost to the Americans: 22 ships, 1,826 men killed and 519 taken prisoner, many of whom did not survive Japanese forced labor camps.

On Friday, the survivors, many slowed by advancing years, gathered on the sunny plaza of the U.S. Navy Memorial to remember fallen comrades and celebrate the opening of an “Asiatic Fleet” room in the adjacent Navy Heritage Center.

“Nobody ever knew about these ships,” said 85-year-old John Bracken of Philadelphia, who served as signal officer on one of the fleet’s cruisers. Bracken, a retired Navy captain, donated $25,000 to create the memorial.

“We felt it was about time,” he said.

Admiral Harold Gehman, vice chief of naval operations, told the veterans that “the tally sheet, while it records very few wins for our side or our allies in the six months (after) Dec. 7, 1941, it does record the courage and the fortitude shown by those men of the Asiatic Fleet.”

“Due to the heroism of the allied Asiatic Fleet, final Japanese victory in the Western Pacific was destined to delay, and delay was the one thing the Japanese could not tolerate. Delay proved fatal.”

Clarence Wills, 76, of Chicago, echoed the thoughts of many in speculating that the fleet’s plight was overlooked at the time because President Roosevelt didn’t think the American people could handle news of more devastating losses so soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“We were a forgotten fleet,” he said.

“We gave ‘em everything we had,” said Al Haas, 75, of Virginia Beach, Va. He spent 3-1/2 years in forced labor for the Japanese after his destroyer was disabled in the Java Sea. “Everybody I ask, they never heard of us.”