By Catherine Ellerton

Moapa Valley Progress

Joe Eckman

For 13 hours, the sailors formed a circle and clung together for support, treading water in the Pacific Ocean off Savo Island near Guadalcanal. They huddled together, waiting to be rescued. Local resident Joe Eckman and WWII veteran was a Fireman, 1st Class in the US Navy assigned to the Cruiser (CL51) USS Atlanta when it was sunk in the third battle of Savo Island on Friday, November 13, 1942.

Needing a job when he was 17 years old, Eckman enlisted in the Navy and served from 1940 to 1944. He then served in the Navy Air Force Reserves for another 15 years, retiring after a total of 20 years service to his country. The years in between is a story worth telling.

When Joe first enlisted he was living on the East Coast. He was assigned to the USS Atlanta and set off for the Pacific. The ship travelled through the Panama Canal, crossed the equator with all due ceremony (the “Pollywog” and the “Shellback” – popular Navy rituals) and finally ended up at Guadalcanal.

Guadalcanal is considered one of the decisive campaigns of the war in the Pacific. It was here that U.S. Troops halted the Japanese island hopping advance towards Australia.

Joe remembers the bombing of the base was horrific and constant. He commented that “your mental state is survival – sometimes anxiety – sometimes relief. But you know there is more coming – you just have to survive.”

The USS Atlanta was hit badly and Eckman and his fellow Firemen were caught down below decks in the Boiler Room when the boilers burst. Miraculously a Seaman was able to pry open the hatch. The Firemen below were able to make it topside, and ended up in the water.

After Joe was pulled from the Pacific with only his shorts and one shoe still intact, he was assigned to a Cub 1 (a Higgins Boat) on Guadalcanal. Admirals Knox, Nimitz and Halsey came by to meet with General Vandergriff and one of the Battles of Guadalcanal began. It was February 5, 1943. Again they were under heavy fire – which sometimes meant sleeping in fox-holes and eating fish heads and praying – a lot.

Following the war Eckman returned to San Francisco. He had the task of letting his parents know that he was still alive. They had been told several months previously that he had been killed.

Eckman then ended up in the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia as he came down with malaria and yellow jaundice which he contracted in Guadalcanal.

While in Pennsylvania he touched base again with a woman named Jane. He had met her before the war while serving in the CCC Camp in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, where he worked to build the Blue Ridge Parkway. He and Jane have now been married for 68 years.

Jane recalls when Eckman got out of the service, “he went to Washington D.C. in a Navy outfit and came home in a gunny sack!”

He had purchased a brown suit which she didn’t like and which she called a gunny sack. This has become a family joke.

Joe retired from Hill Air Force Base Civil Service in Utah after 27 years.

Eckman comes from a family of warriors. His father was a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba during the Spanish American War. One brother was in the Merchant Marines, the other a Marine. His sons have served in the Navy and the Army. One son paid the ultimate price and gave his life in Vietnam on July 10, 1968.

After he and his wife moved to Overton, Eckman attended a Guadalcanal reunion. It was there he met, for the first time since that fateful day in 1943, the very sailor who had rescued the Firemen trapped below decks during the bombing of the USS Atlanta.

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