USC resident recalls World War II service in Pacific
Chuck Hauth, still at home in Upper St. Clair
The USS Randolph was an Essex Class carrier, the largest military ship to fight in World War II.
The aftermath of a Japanese kamikaze attack on the USS Randolph on March 11, 1945
From left are Charles Robert Hauth, 93; Charles Drew Hauth, 66; Charles Patrick Hauth, 39; and Charles Robert Hauth, 8 weeks.
Think back to your 21st birthday and the corresponding celebration, surrounded by friends and/or family members welcoming you to chronological adulthood.
When Chuck Hauth turned one score plus one, he probably had a few shipmates acknowledge such. But everyone aboard the aircraft carrier USS Randolph had far more pressing concerns at the time, most notably defeating Hirohito’s military.
Hauth, an Ebensburg native who eventually settled in Upper St. Clair, was aboard the Randolph in early 1945 as a U.S. Navy pilot, getting ready for bombing missions in a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver. Today, he has a framed sketch of the famed aircraft hanging in his Friendship Village of South Hills apartment, labeled with its not-so-complimentary nickname, The Beast.
His flying experience began when he was 19 and enlisted in the Navy’s V-7 program, which in effect was a crash course for officers to bolster their numbers as the United States anticipated and then entered World War II. V-7 applicants had to meet the same rigid physical requirements as midshipmen in the U.S. Naval Academy.
“I had no idea I was going to be able to make it,” Hauth, now 93, recalled. “It was supposed to be so tough. But I made it and got my wings.”
The Navy subsequently assigned him to train at the Tongue Point air station in Astoria, Ore., a base that had just been completed after numerous construction delays around the time of Hauth’s arrival.
“We practiced quite a bit up there,” he said. “And then we got into field carrier landings, actually going out and landing on a carrier.”
Thusly prepared, he reported for duty on the Randolph in San Francisco, and the ship shoved off westward.
“At the time, the anchorage was Ulithi,” Hauth said about the Caroline Islands atoll where the ship made its temporary home. “We launched from there to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.”
Iwo Jima, an island nearly 400 miles north of Ulithi and about midway to Tokyo, contained a series of Japanese airfields that U.S. forces captured during action from Feb. 19 to March 27, 1945. Five days later came the invasion of Okinawa, part of the Ryukyu Islands archipelago that had been part of Japan proper since 1879.
“We were in the first group,” Hauth said about the Randolph’s relative position. “There were five groups of carriers, but we were the first group that flew in, bombed Japan and returned to the carrier.”
His carrier already had experienced some close calls.
“We were ‘kamikazed’ twice, once by the Japanese and the second time by the United States Army,” he said, the latter actually referring to a Feb. 17 accident involving a Helldiver. “The guy came down flat-hatting – you know, showing off – and he came in about five feet too low. We were loading ammunition. If he’d have been 10 feet the other way, he’d have blown the ship up.”
The true kamikaze attack took place on March 11, while the Randolph was anchored at Ulithi. A Yokosuka P1Y1 hit the ship on its starboard side, causing 27 deaths and 105 injuries.
“They came in at the same altitude as we were. They were just above the water. And they went in underneath the deck, and they blew it up,” Hauth recalled.
Although he flew numerous raids in the Pacific, dropping bombs before beating a quick retreat, Hauth said he generally took his airborne duties in stride.
“Probably the most I was ever worried was when we were first up on a search, and we dropped down below the horizon,” he recalled. Meanwhile, about the Randolph: “They announced that instead of going due north, they were going to go due south. So when I came back to where the carrier should be, they were 175 miles away. It’s sort of lonely when you get up there and you can’t find the ships that are supposed to be there.”
His World War II service ended abruptly following a pair of history’s most pivotal events.
“I came home on R&R, and I was home when they dropped the bombs on Japan,” he said about the early August deployment of atomic weaponry. “So I didn’t have to go back to the Pacific. But our group was all set up for the landing on Japan.”
The planned Operation Downfall, the invasion of the mainland, might have caused an estimated 500,000 to 1 million fatalities, according to a memorandum that former President Herbert Hoover sent at the time to then-President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
At war’s end, Hauth completed his college education – he’d put in two years prior to enlisting – at Penn State on the GI Bill. He then worked as a ceramics engineer, and in 1948 he married Jane, who passed away in 2011. They have two sons, Drew and David.
Chuck has lived in Upper St. Clair since the late 1950s, back when the community “was almost all farmland.”
“It’s a nice, clean township,” he said. “They developed a good school system, as far as the kids are concerned. I think it’s still pretty good.”
Also as far as kids are concerned, there now are four generations of Charles Hauths – that’s actually the first name of Drew, also an Upper St. Clair resident – with Chuck able to call his great-grandson Chuck.
Considering his forebear’s service to his country, that’s quite an honor for the youngest Hauth.