William “Bill” Edmonds didn’t want to die.

And he especially didn’t want to take his last breath on Nov. 25, 1944.

It was his mother’s birthday, and Edmonds, then 20, was fighting to stay alive as Japanese war planes relentlessly attacked the USS Intrepid (CV 11).

“I remember praying to the Lord during the battle, ‘Please don’t let me die today because it is my mother’s birthday,’” recalls the 101 year-old World War II Navy veteran. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you kill me in some other battle? Don’t kill me today because that would kill her’.”

Edmonds was spared but 69 of his Intrepid crew mates lost their lives during that battle.

“It was horrible. You live moment by moment and of course the Lord still seen fit for me to live,” he said.

Serving on the most attacked carrier

Edmonds became all too familiar with war shortly after becoming part of the vessel’s first crew.

“It was the most often attacked aircraft carrier in World War II,” said Edmonds, a Tamaqua native. “We were torpedoed once and we had a minimum of five kamikaze attacks.”

The Nov. 25 battle off the coast of the Philippines has been called the Intrepid’s “darkest day.”

It didn’t start that way.

“It was a beautiful day like today,” Edmonds remembered. “In the South Pacific Ocean, the weather is so beautiful it is beyond description.”

Water was crystal clear, and skies were bright, he recalled.

But around 12:30 p.m., Japanese forces invaded. An estimated 300 enemy planes — including kamikaze pilots on suicide missions — descended on Allied ships.

“By 3 o’clock there was that much what we call flack — or guns shooting in the sky at all the ships around us — that it became dark like midnight,” Edmonds said.

Three kamikaze planes hit the Intrepid, Edmonds said. Each carried multiple bombs. Fires broke out and men were trapped in smoke-filled compartments.

“They pretty near sunk us,” Edmonds said.

The Intrepid was leaning hard to the port side, and Edmonds had heard that its captain wanted the crew to abandon ship.

“But the whistle wouldn’t sound,” he said. “That might be true and it may not but be that at it is, it was horrible. I can’t explain the destruction and the dead that were there to be buried.”

Between 46 and 66 Allied ships were sunk or damaged beyond repair, and 250-400 were damaged, according to reports from the Intrepid Museum. The human toll was estimated at 6,190 Allied servicemen.

“As a little boy I used to visit a farmer’s barn in the fall and they picked the potatoes, and they threw them and stacked them in the barn,” Edmonds explained. “That’s the way we had bodies stacked up so we could bury them.”

Three days after the attack, Edmonds learned through a Red Cross radiogram that his father, William, had died on Nov. 13, 1944.

“He was already dead and buried but that is how long it took for the best way to send a message at that time,” Edmonds said.

Choosing to serve

Edmonds graduated from Tamaqua High School in 1940. He joined the Navy in 1942 as the war raged.

He volunteered to serve at sea, he said, because he didn’t want to get drafted by the Army.

Edmonds was an aviation ordnanceman first class, a position that saw him in charge of servicing and handling of all types of weapons and ammunition carried on the Intrepid.

He remembered being home before he was called to duty.

“The only time I saw my daddy cry was the night before I left for the Navy. He said, ‘Why do they take you babies? Why don’t they take us men?,” Edmonds recalled.

At basic training, he said, he found the answer: men would never be able to do what the younger set could.

As a plank member, or first member of the crew, Edmonds first laid eyes on the Intrepid in Norfolk, Virginia.

“It was brand-new. We were the first people who ever went on it,” Edmonds said.

He’d spend the next 22 months as part of the Pacific Theater of Operations.

The first attack

The Intrepid would get her first major hit in February 1944, during a raid on the Japanese naval base of Truk Island.

The assault had lasted all day, and just before 11:30 p.m., Edmonds went to a storeroom for a machine gun part.

That’s when a torpedo struck and blew a hole into the side of the carrier.

“It flooded approximately five compartments but we stayed afloat,” he said.

The strike jammed the shop’s rudder, and there was no way to steer the vessel.

According to reports, the crew improvised a steering method to limp the ship along.

But as a typhoon with whipping winds approached, Edmunds said a better solution was needed — and fast.

Crew members were told to bring their sea bags, or Navy-issued duffel bags, to the sail locker, he said. He wasn’t even sure where the sail locker was on the Intrepid, whose flight deck was the length of three football fields.

“They sewed all these sea bags together and they made a big sail,” he said. “They put it up on the flight deck so we could navigate.”

The Intrepid was eventually towed to Pearl Harbor for temporary repairs.

“That was my initial introduction to war,” he said. “It was work, work, work, work, work — work hard, and keep working.”

Life on the Intrepid

The Intrepid would suffer major damages at least five more times while Edmonds was on board.

He was on hand for the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest battle of Navy history, along with battles in Iwo Jima.

“Well, with 22 months of night and day fighting, you know a lot of stuff,” he said.

The Intrepid needed repairs “again” in July 1945 after another kamikaze attack, he said.

“Then the captain said, ‘All the original crew, get off this ship,’” Edmonds said.

Surviving the war

He was stationed in the San Fransisco. Upon hearing the war had ended, Edmonds remembered thinking, “I’m still alive. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Edmonds would find employment at the former Atlas Powder Company in the village of Reynolds near Tamaqua. The facility manufactured dynamite and blasting supplies.

“That’s all I ever played with my entire life. That was my job in the Navy — bombs, torpedoes and rockets — that’s all I ever knew in my life … explosives,” he said.

Edmonds raised a family. Among those who still call the area home are his daughter, Jessica Zeigler, Tamaqua, and her children, Nathan, of Andreas, and Nolan, Alex and Alexis, all of Tamaqua.

He also has grandchildren Lisa Woods, Tamaqua; Denise Sauers, Leesport; Elizabeth Garris, Orwigsburg, and Thomas Edmonds, Tamaqua. He has great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.

“I never saw my grandparents and now there are five generations,” he said.

He will celebrate his 102nd birthday on July 19 with a gathering of family and friends.

“My family said my next big party will be for when I turn 105 years-old,” he said.

Edmunds admits that he feels well, but no longer lives up to his nickname of “Sparky.”

“They called me that because I ran everywhere,” he said of his World War II days.

Nowadays, he enjoys relaxing.

“I fell in love with my new mattress,” he laughed.

He also loves taking in the scenery around his St. Petersburg area home.

“I can sit on my little balcony and watch the dolphins swimming,” he said. “Sometimes I think I am in the South Pacific.”

He said he is blessed.

“My life is so beautiful I feel like I have gone to heaven without dying,” Edmonds said.