First American Shooter of World War II Dies

[Rain Man]

I guess you could argue about what was the first shot of World War II. The article notes conflicts with German U-Boats in the North Atlantic, but they were part of the prelude to war.

And this guy didn't actually fire the first shots after war was declared, but he fired during the battle that caused war to be declared.

And as a footnote, maybe he wasn't the actual first shooter, but it appears that he was on the gun crew of the first gun that shot.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/gunner-whose-crew-fired-first-wwii-shot-for-u-s-is-buried-158790

First to Fire: U.S. Gunner at Pearl Harbor Is Laid to Rest
Alan Sanford was on Navy ship that fired at a Japanese submarine about an hour before attack

Alan Sanford, whose Naval crew fired the first American shot of World War II, was interred Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

At 6:37 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, Seaman First Class Sanford, an 18-year-old gunner from St. Paul, Minn., was aboard the USS Ward, which was guarding the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Just over an hour before the Japanese aerial attack began, crewmen on the destroyer spotted a Japanese mini-submarine trying to sneak into port on the trail of another U.S. ship.

“We thought it might have been a toy or who knows,” Mr. Sanford recalled in a National Park Service oral-history interview in 1991. “We never heard of or seen anything like a two-man submarine before.” The sailors described it as cylindrical, about 80 feet long, with an oval-shaped conning tower.

The Ward’s captain, who had been in his bunk, appeared on the bridge wearing a life vest over his pajamas and bathrobe. “All ahead flank, stand by to ram,” he ordered, according to Mr. Sanford. “Commence firing.”

Mr. Sanford and the other crewmen on the bow gun fired at a range of about 100 yards. He watched the round leave the barrel and barely miss the conning tower. “I thought if it had another coat of paint on the sub, it might have activated the graze fuze,” which detonates when a shell suddenly slows down, Mr. Sanford said in the park service interview. “That’s how close I think we came.”

A second gun crew on the Ward fired next, punching a four-inch hole in the starboard side of the conning tower as the destroyer steamed past the sub at a range of about 50 yards. The destroyer followed up with four depth charges. Seawater poured in through the shell hole, and the submarine rolled to starboard, and sank in 1,200 feet of water, according to the captain’s report and historians.

“We have attacked, fired upon, and dropped depth charges on a submarine operating in defensive sea areas,” the captain, Lt. W.W. Outerbridge, radioed to his commander, according to his report in the naval archives.

His radio communication, however, failed to prompt an alert that might have left the Navy better prepared for the air attack that followed 75 minutes later.

For decades, the Navy doubted the Ward’s report of having sunk the mini-sub, a snub that irked Mr. Sanford. “That bothered dad because he worshiped the commanding officer,” Mr. Sanford’s eldest son, retired Navy Capt. James Sanford, said in an interview Wednesday at the interment.

In 2002, however, the Ward was vindicated when a team from the Hawai’i Undersea Research Laboratory discovered the sub’s wreckage on the ocean floor. The vessel still had two torpedoes aboard. The Japanese had launched five such mini-subs from larger submersibles the day before Pearl Harbor attack, historians say.

While the Navy had encounters with German U-boats in the Atlantic before the Pearl Harbor attack, the Ward’s action constituted the first American shot fired on the day Japan declared war on the U.S., bringing America into the conflict.

Mr. Sanford had joined the Minnesota Naval Militia with two friends when he was 17 and still in high school. He liked the uniforms and the drills, and said he thought it a “nice social activity that was a little more mature than some of the high-school activities that we had participated in.”

In 1940, however, with tensions rising in the Pacific, the Navy activated the unit and ordered the young sailors to San Diego to put the Ward, a mothballed World War I destroyer, back into service. The crew sailed her through a hurricane on the way to Hawaii.

On the day of the Japanese attack, Mr. Sanford was a “hot-shell man” on Gun No. 1, charged with using heat-resistant mittens to hoist scalding shells from the gun after they had been fired.

After the engagement with the mini-sub, Mr. Sanford saw swarms of Japanese warplanes appear over Pearl Harbor. “I saw those red balls on those planes,” he recalled in the 1991 interview. “I figured they had no other target in the world but me. I can’t say I was afraid. I was terrified.”

He saw Japanese planes strafing American sailors in the water. He saw the capsized hull of the battleship Oklahoma, and felt devastated by the thought of the men trapped inside.

“It was very disheartening,” he said.

The Ward itself went down in 1944 after being rammed by a Japanese plane in the Philippines.

Mr. Sanford didn’t tell his eldest son, Capt. Sanford, about his Pearl Harbor experience until decades after the war ended. But later in life he became active in a Pearl Harbor survivors group.

After leaving the service, Mr. Sanford studied mechanical engineering and worked in the space program. In 1970, he helped bring the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft back to Earth safely after an explosion aboard forced it to abort a moon landing.

Mr. Sanford died in January at a hospice in Pennsylvania, at age 91. In keeping with his wishes, the family interred his ashes at Arlington with those of his first wife, Betty Sanford. Sailors fired 21 rifle shots in his honor, and a lone bugler played taps.