“Roland Haase’s Colorado”

(“He Served in the Pacific”):

Interview published on November 10, 2005 in the Door County Advocate, a Gannett publication)

(1,000 Words)

On a late October afternoon, a chill hangs in the air outside Roland Haase’s Southern Door home, but it doesn’t dampen the warm memories that stir inside of him. His eyes are bright and a tender smile tugs at his mouth as he sits at his kitchen table, thumbing through a book about the USS Colorado. With a crew of over 2,000 men, “it was just like a floating city,” he said. “Anything you wanted, you could have.”

Haase was twenty years old, in 1940, when he enlisted in the Navy and trained at Great Lakes Naval Recruit Training Command, in Illinois. Upon his enlistment, the Navy informed him that he would be shipping out to a battlefield location. “I didn’t think much of it—I just went along with it,” Haase said, but admitted that the idea of traveling overseas excited him. He subsequently served on the USS Colorado, between 1940 and 1945, and experienced frontline action off the shores of many islands surrounding Pearl Harbor.

He has lived most of his life in Door County and met his future wife, Verna, while on leave from the Colorado. Together, they share seven children, fourteen grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.

After his graduation from Great Lakes NRTC, Haase achieved a rank he described as similar to an Army staff sergeant, explaining that naval rank designations have changed since his enlistment. “I enjoyed the service,” Haase said, and he approached his duties like any other civilian occupation.

He served as a deckhand during the war and helped manage the ship’s guns when they engaged the enemy in battle. For each confrontation, the crew loaded over 5,000 shells, each shell containing five 100-pound bags of powder that erupted into red fireballs across the sky. “The hardest thing I had to get used to was going into combat,” Haase observed. The crew was not only forced to fend off the Japanese—they also endured constant target drills with the ship’s guns.

After ten days of battle on Tarawa, Haase’s tour of duty extended to Kwajalein and Eniwetok, then fifty-one days of conflict on the Mariana islands of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian; and finally, Leyte—all islands lying west of Pearl Harbor. The Colorado’s crew bombarded each island with disciplined efficiency, returning from each campaign to train anew on Pearl Harbor for the next battle.

Lady Luck may have smiled down on the Colorado crew, at least twice, since fate dictated that the ship should be in other areas during the December 7^th strike by the Japanese and also during the Iwo Jima battle, when the ship had to return to Pearl Harbor for repairs. “When they attacked Pearl Harbor, the battleship Maryland took our place . . . She was sunk and the West Virginia was sunk,” Haase said.

While he never personally encountered the enemy who lost their lives as a result of the Colorado’s bombardments, Haase and his crewmembers felt their wrath. “We were hit badly on the ship,” he continued. He vividly remembers the battle of Tinian, during which the Colorado suffered twenty-two hits from a Japanese shore battery. Tinian was their largest island campaign with the highest concentration of Japanese that confronted the crew. “We bombarded them all day and all night,” Haase recalled. That day, the crew suffered ninety-four casualties, including sixty of their gunmen. “We lost all those men, that day, and we couldn’t find them. What we did see, we had to sweep up and put in the garbage can.”

Despite the crew’s losses, Haase said that he never hated the Japanese. “I never thought they were bad because it was all propaganda that they put out. Tokyo Rose was always lying—you could never believe her,” he said. “They were the ones losing the war—we weren’t.”

When the Colorado arrived in Saipan, in 1944, “the Japs were so thick that when we got done bombarding them, they took bulldozers and scraped them up on piles. When the piles got big enough, the Marines dug a trench, pushed them in and covered them up.”

Meanwhile, the Colorado sustained its worst damage from kamikaze raids hitting the deck in Leyte. “They kept shooting at us, but we couldn’t knock them down. Trying to knock a kamikaze down was just like trying to shoot a terrorist,” Haase said. During one of those raids, a kamikaze sheared off one of their guns, dove through several decks, and exploded. Positioned deep inside of #3 turret, Haase knew that the enemy’s 5” guns were no match for the 16” cannons on the Colorado. “If you don’t see it, you don’t notice it,” he said

As part of the Colorado’s crew, Haase fought in eight separate battles on eight different islands, and the Navy awarded him eight medals for his participation in those campaigns. Throughout his tour of duty in the Pacific, he was never wounded and said he was never afraid.

The action he experienced in Okinawa may have changed his opinion about fear. Between March and May of 1945, the Colorado’s crew battled the Japanese for sixty days and nights. “It was pretty scary,” he said, “because every third day, we had to load ammunition and the Japanese were air raiding us. One bomb would’ve knocked us clean out of the water. We were lucky that we never got hit.” Haase credited their safety to the excellent anti-aircraft coverage they received from surrounding U.S. battleships.

In 1946, the Colorado’s crew transferred to a shore station so that they could “put her in mothballs.” Despite her fabled history, the Colorado was sold for the scrap price of $611,777.77 on June 23, 1959. “But, the ship will live on forever in the hearts and minds of the crew.”

Haase believes that his Navy experiences made him “a better guy. I wasn’t depressed or downhearted. When I got out, I was satisfied that I had served my country and never got hurt. I knew a lot more because I saw a lot more.”