AndyStory

THE REMARKABLE STORY OF ANDY O'DONNELL:
The Real Life Jonah of World War Two

Sailors are by nature a superstitious lot, and one of the oldest superstitions is related to the Old Testament figure of Jonah. Jonah, as you'll recall, was a disenchanted prophet sent by God to preach to the hated Ninevites, but he refused to do so and was subsequently swallowed by a whale (a "large fish" according to scripture, which makes more sense as whales are not native to the Mediterranean). After spending three days and nights in the "belly of the whale" he was coughed up and, apparently deciding to take that as a sign, preached to the Ninevites as originally assigned. Although one might argue that surviving being swallowed by a whale might constitute good rather than bad fortune, for some reason, the name Jonah has become associated with bad luck and is a term for any sailor whose presence onboard a ship carries with it ill fortune. As such, anyone assigned the title was to be put ashore as soon as possible, making the poor chap unwanted and, probably, incapable of making a living.

Of course, in this day and age we are much less superstitious, though once in a while a remarkable string of coincidences will come together in such a way that we might be willing to reconsider the idea. One such case comes from the annals of World War Two in the form of a young Kansas man named Andrew "Andy" O'Donnell, who many believe to have been the modern living embodiment of a bad luck-at least for others if not for himself.

The story starts in 1936, when young Andrew, a seventeen-year-old farm boy from Olathe, Kansas, decided to help out his parents and two older brothers make ends meet on their dust bowl ravaged farm by joining the U.S. Navy and sending home a portion of his meager paycheck each month. Not only would his check help supplement the families' meager resources but his absence would reduce the number of mouths to feed by one, and since Andy had always wanted to see the world, it made his decision to join the Navy a logical one.

Andy was a strapping young man so he naturally had no problems passing the physical, and in June of 1936 he found himself at Great Lakes Training Center for basic training. Upon completion, he received orders to his first command, the battleship U.S.S. Arizona, which he boarded for the first time as a young seaman apprentice in October of 1936. Immediately assigned to the deck force, it wasn't long before he picked a vocation and in the spring of 1937 he was trained as a radioman, which would be his "rating" for the balance of his life in the Navy.

Now the battleship Arizona has come to be a symbol of tragedy since it was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, but for Andy his four years onboard the vessel were largely uneventful and he left the ship in May of 1940 upon the completion of his enlistment. A week later he found himself discharged and heading home to Olathe, having done his duty to his country and now with some life experiences under his belt. Such would seem to be the end of the story except for two things: war was raging in Europe that was soon to engulf America and Andy, like all enlisted men, was still under contract to the Navy for another two years. In effect, he enlisted for six years rather than four, with the last two years being served in the inactive reserves. As such, the Navy could call Andy back to active duty at any time until June of 1942, after which he would be truly a "free" man.

Of course, we all know what happened next: on December 7th, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the next day the United States was at war. Two weeks after that, Andy, who had been marking time working at a small town filling station while saving for college (the G.I. Bill not having come into existence yet) was called back up, forcing him to put his future on hold.

Being reactivated is not the same as enlisting in the military, so Andy didn't have to go through basic training again, and he was allowed to return to duty with the rank, Radioman Third Class, he had before leaving the Navy. Therefore it was simply a matter of sending the 23-year old man to the nearest naval facility-in this case, San Francisco, California, for "reoutfitting" and some refresher classes as his radioman skills were a bit rusty after eighteen months of non-use. Finally back in uniform, he received orders in January of 1942 to report to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington, then on patrol somewhere in the vast Pacific looking for the Japanese. Since there was no readily available transportation available to take him to Hawaii-the Lexington's home port-he was forced to hitch a ride on whatever available ship he could find that was headed towards Hawaii. In this case, it was the destroyer U.S.S. Hammann that was to be his ticket, which left San Francisco in late February bound for Hawaii with radioman third class Andrew O'Donnell onboard.

Entering the confined waters of a still battle-scarred Pearl Harbor five days later, Andy was naturally distressed at the sight of the Arizona—his old ship—lying broken and burned off Ford Island, the bodies of many of his friends from earlier still onboard. The ship had exploded when a Japanese bomb set off her forward magazine, killing two thirds of those onboard that morning. He didn't know it then, but the "O'Donnell curse" had claimed its first victim.

Three weeks later the carrier Lexington arrived at Pearl Harbor to take on supplies before heading back out to the South Pacific, which was when Andy finally got onboard her. A few weeks later she was underway again, never to see Hawaii again, with Andy quickly being integrated into her nearly 3,000 man crew.

His new "home" was short-lived, however, as in May of 1942 the Lexington was part of a taskforce given the mission of stopping a Japanese task force from attacking Port Moresby, New Guinea—an Australian possession whose loss would be a great blow to allied efforts to beat back the Japanese tide then rolling over the entire Pacific. Known as the Battle of the Coral Sea, on May 8th, 1942 the Japanese found the Lexington and put a bomb and a pair of torpedoes into her, sending her to the bottom. Fortunately, Andy survived unscathed and was plucked out of the water within a few minutes of the ship's sinking by one of the task force's escorts, the light cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes. A week later he was back at Pearl Harbor, shaken but unhurt, and awaiting orders to his next command.

While he waited, a second battle for control of the Pacific broke out in June just a few hundred miles west of Hawaii. Known as the Battle of Midway, the three day ruckus between three American and four Japanese aircraft carriers ended in a resounding victory for the U.S. Navy, with all four of the Japanese aircraft carriers being sunk to the loss of one American carrier. The carrier wasn't the only loss the U.S. Navy suffered in that battle, however: the destroyer Hammann—the very vessel Andy had ridden to Hawaii three month earlier—had also fallen victim, this time to a Japanese submarine as she was rendering assistance to the badly damaged carrier Yorktown. 80 of her crew died when depth charges onboard the sinking destroyer detonated underwater, making the Hammann the third ship O'Donnell had been associated with to be sunk.

Of course, due to wartime censorship, Andy didn't even know about the Hammann when he received orders to his next command, the light cruiser U.S.S. Quincy, and he went to his new command unaware that his "curse" was still at work. What he was soon to discover, however, was just how much worse his bad luck was going to get. In August of 1942, the Quincy was dispatched to cover a Marine landing at Guadalcanal and the start of what was to be a nearly five month long battle to wrestle control of the Solomon Islands from Japan. While the landings met with little resistance, it was what happened later that evening that was to really earn Andy his moniker: during the pre-dawn hours of August 9, 1942, a Japanese taskforce snuck to within a few miles of the landing beaches and sank no less than four allied warships in a few minutes, killing over 1,000 sailors and almost spelling defeat for the allies. Among the ships sunk in that melee—considered to be the worst defeat for the American Navy in its history—was the Quincy, which went down with half of her crew, along with the cruiser Vincennes—the same ship that had pulled Andy out of the water earlier that year and had transported him back to Pearl Harbor.

Andy, however, was not one who went down with the ship. Though seriously injured by shrapnel, he made it into the water and was rescued the next morning by the American destroyer Wilson, which promptly put him ashore to be treated for his injuries. A few days later he was flown out onboard a C-47 transport to a naval hospital in New Caledonia, where he would spend the next three months recovering from his injuries. In December he was flown back to Hawaii for further rehabilitation and to await orders to his next command.

This was when good fortune finally smiled on Andy. Apparently someone noticed that O'Donnell had had two ships sunk from beneath him in three months, plus had been associate—however briefly—with three other ill-fated vessels, leading some to begin entertaining the notion that the man truly was a modern day Jonah. Apparently deciding that O'Donnell had gone through enough—and perhaps in an effort to not test fate any further—it was decided to assign him to more land-locked duties at the communications center at FleetPac on Ford Island. There, it was decided radioman Second Class O'Donnell (Andy having earned a promotion in the interim) could do little harm as he was tasked with handling the huge volume of radio traffic that came through the center each day.

This remained Andy's situation for the next eighteen months until the communications center saw a change in command in the summer of 1944. The new commanding officer, a crusty old salt who had spent the last thirty months at sea, promptly decided that the land-based sailors had it too easy and promptly ordered them all returned to sea duty to make way from "more deserving" sea-bound radiomen who had seen little dry land since the start of the war. Apparently having anticipated such an eventuality, Andy applied for submarine training and was immediately sent to submarine school in New London, Connecticut. After completing the six-week course in October of 1944, he was promptly assigned to his next-and what would turn out to be his last-command, the brand new submarine U.S.S. Bullhead, then just a month away from her commissioning. Upon being commissioned that December, the Bullhead immediately left for the South Pacific to begin the first of three war patrols.

It would be easy to imagine that with the end of the war in August of 1945 Andy's "curse" would finally be lifted, but it was not to be. After having been associated with five ill-fated warships-the Arizona, the Lexington, the Vincennes, the Quincy, and the Hammann, he was to claim his sixth and final victim: his own beloved Bullhead. One of the last ships sunk in World War Two, the Bullhead was on patrol in the Java Sea off Bali when, on August 6th, 1945, it was attacked by a lone Japanese patrol plane, which dropped two depth charges on the ship, sending her to the bottom with all hands—including, unfortunately, radioman First Class O'Donnell (Andy having earned his final promotion just three months earlier). He, along with his crewmates, it turns out, were among the last men to die in the conflict.

So what is the verdict? Was Andy really bad luck or was it all just a series of coincidences? Consider that every ship the man spent an evening aboard was sunk, even though in three cases he wasn't onboard when it happened. (Some point out that the vessel that fished him out of the water off Guadalcanal in August of 1942, the destroyer Wilson, survived the war unscathed, suggesting that the "curse" was not all encompassing, but the man did not spend the evening on the ship, having been put ashore just a few hours after being picked up. Do curses have time limits, one wonders?) The odds of such a thing happening are astronomically low, especially when one considers how unlikely it was that an American submarine could be sunk at a point in the war when the Japanese were practically incapable of fighting. Further, it becomes especially spooky when one realizes that the Bullhead was the last major American warship sunk to enemy action in World War Two while the Arizona was the first to be sunk. What are the chances of a man having been associated with both the first and the last ships to be sunk in the conflict?

On the other hand, some might argue that other than the Bullhead, the "curse" proved to be anything but that for Andy, as he managed to survive two sinkings in three months—a feat few other sailors could claim. If anything, he was bad luck for others, but not himself—at least, that was the case until August of 1945. In the end, we can only wonder about the farm boy from Olathe, Kansas, and how the stars and planets all managed to line up in his life to make his biography so peculiar. Whether he was a real-life Jonah as some contend will always be open to debate, but that he served his country long and honorably cannot be doubted, and we would be remiss not to thank him for his sacrifice.

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