War Ends 40 Years Late for Altadena Man : Navy Changes Mind, Upgrades Discharge

For Bill Haupt, World War II is over at last, four decades after the fighting stopped.

It ended for the 67-year-old Haupt only last week, when he received official notice that the U.S. Navy had finally changed its mind and issued him an honorable discharge.

It was exactly 40 years ago Sunday that Lt. (j.g.) William D. Haupt was officially separated from the service at Long Beach Naval Hospital, suffering from combat fatigue.

He had resigned his commission “for the good of the service” rather than face a general court-martial on charges that, in leaving a ship he believed was about to sink, he had been guilty of cowardice in battle and malingering.

Haupt, who later became a pioneer television announcer and producer in Los Angeles, had never viewed himself as either a coward or malingerer. But he has kept his resignation a secret from everyone but his family until now. He thought no one would understand.

“When I was the color announcer on the Roller Derby show with Dick Lane,” he said, “we were syndicated all across the country. My ship had a complement of 350 officers and men. And I got the feeling that every one of those people was out there watching me and saying, ‘That’s the guy that deserted our ship.’ . . . I’ve thought about that almost every day.”

Now, though, believing himself vindicated, he feels he can talk about what happened and why.

The date was Dec. 30, 1944. Haupt was 26, a flag communications officer on the U.S. destroyer Gansevoort. He had enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 24, 1941, just 17 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

By the end of 1944, he had served aboard the Gansevoort for 20 months and participated in some of the toughest actions of the Pacific war--Tarawa, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

According to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, an official publication of the U.S. Government Printing Office, the Gansevoort was part of a 99-ship convoy that fell under almost constant attack by Japanese bombers, torpedoes and kamikaze planes between Dec. 27 and 30, 1944, as it steamed through the Mindanao and Sulu Seas in the Philippines. During that period, the Gansevoort was credited with shooting down five enemy aircraft and helping to knock down 12 others.

It was, the official account reported, “nearly 72 hours of hell and hard work.”

Then, on the afternoon Dec. 30, the report said, “a suicide plane crashed into the Gansevoort. . . . A terrific explosion cut steering and electrical power and started fires.”

34 Killed or Hurt

Thirty-four of the crew were killed or wounded. Haupt remembers the day in more vivid detail.

“A torpedo plane came over the convoy in the afternoon,” he said in an interview in his Altadena home. “It wasn’t (technically) a suicide plane, because the kamikazes didn’t carry torpedoes. This guy came looking for the biggest ship, a transport ship on one side of the bay (off Mindoro), and he missed with his torpedo.

“It was like he just got pissed off, and he turned around and came straight across the harbor, right on the deck--right at us. He hit just below the (smoke) stacks, where the ammunition was stored.”

Haupt was on the bridge, just forward of the explosion. He’d given his life jacket to an enlisted man some time before.

‘Wasn’t a Thing Left’

“Keep in mind that three times in the last 72 hours I’d seen ships hit by kamikazes explode, go into flames and then just disintegrate--there wasn’t a thing left,” Haupt said. “I was on the port side, the side he hit on. And all I could think of at that instant was, ‘Well, this is it, we’re going to disintegrate.’ ”

He ran to the other side of the bridge and jumped overboard. Haupt said that 20 other members of the crew also abandoned ship or were blown overboard.

“It was a real stupid thing to do,” he admitted, “because I had no life preserver and really didn’t know how to swim, and our ship was still going, the screws still turning. . . . I was underwater and they just missed me.”

Somehow he survived, dog-paddling and floating for about 45 minutes.

‘Said All My Prayers’

“I said all my prayers, and all I could think was, ‘I hope my wife gets the $10,000 insurance,’ ” Haupt said.

Late in the afternoon, he was picked up by a small Army motor launch and taken ashore with two or three other members of the Gansevoort’s crew. As he stepped out of the boat, he collapsed and was taken to an Army Field Hospital at Mindoro. The Army doctor’s initial diagnosis, according to records, was severe chest contusions.

Although badly damaged, the Gansevoort was taken in tow by another destroyer. The ship was patched up well enough to eventually return to the United States, where it was decommissioned in 1946. It ended up as a target ship for Navy practice maneuvers and was sunk by bombs and gunfire on March 23, 1972. Three days after the 1944 suicide attack, the Gansevoort’s medical officer visited the Army Field Hospital.

“He saw me and said, ‘What are you doing here? You better get back to the ship,’ ” Haupt said. “And I said, ‘I can’t. They won’t release me. They said I was in no condition to go back.’ ”

Chain of Events

That conversation, Haupt believes, began the chain of events that led to his being asked to resign. “He (the ship’s medical officer) said there was nothing wrong with me,” Haupt said, “although he did not examine me. He just looked at me and told me to go back to the ship.”

Over the next few months, Haupt was transferred to half a dozen Army hospitals, then finally to a small Navy hospital, where he was diagnosed for the first time as suffering from combat fatigue. Since the Vietnam War, it has been called post-traumatic stress disorder.

Haupt said he lost 40 pounds, suffered from chest pains, nausea, vomiting, sleeplessness and “combat nightmares you just couldn’t believe.”

In March, 1945, Haupt was transferred to Long Beach Naval Hospital, where he underwent several medical surveys, which, according to Navy records, confirmed the diagnosis of combat fatigue.

Two Choices

Then, a few days before VJ Day, a Navy lawyer called Haupt in and told him that he had a choice: court-martial for cowardice and malingering or resignation from the Navy. The lawyer, Haupt said, told him that the punishment could range from 20 years at hard labor to execution.

“I was humiliated,” Haupt confessed, “but I signed.”

Haupt said he was given no counseling, legal or otherwise, and was not advised that in resigning and receiving a discharge “other than honorable,” he also was giving up all veterans’ benefits and the right to a military funeral.

Aided by his wife, Cecilia, whom he had married in 1942, Haupt made the first attempt to appeal the discharge in 1946. Time and time again, he was turned down. Meanwhile, he was building a career in television and raising six children, all now grown.

But although his professional life was successful, the stain on his record “was always within me.”

‘Always Gnawing at Me’

“I drank more than I should,” he said. “This thing was always gnawing at me. I never went on three-day binges or anything like that, but I was an alcoholic. I am an alcoholic. . . . But I haven’t had a drink now for 12 years.” Largely because of the persistence of his wife (“She’s a bulldog”), Haupt kept after the Navy. Finally, in October, 1983, he won a hearing from the Naval Discharge Review Board. He was represented before the board by Larry Tipton, a San Jose law student, who had been retained by San Jose GI Forum, a veterans’ rights group.

“I told them the whole story,” Haupt said. “I told them I would like to have that American flag on my coffin when the time comes.” A flag had draped the coffins of his brother and sister, also Navy veterans, who died after the war.

But the board could find no reason to change the Navy’s original stance.

Tipton appealed the decision to the Board for the Correction of Naval Records in Washington. On Aug. 6, the board officially upgraded the discharge to honorable.

Haupt and his wife got the word only last Thursday. “I felt 10 feet tall when I heard,” he said. “I felt like I had been carrying an anchor around in my chest all that time, and now it’s gone. . . . And now someday I’ll get that American flag, just like my brother and sister did.”