Lenz, Carl

Lenz, Carl

My name is Carl Lenz Jr. I served aboard USS FRANK E. EVANS from 1950-1953.

While in Wonsan harbor, we fired at targets of opportunity. On one session, we fired a 5″ round every 11 minutes, day and night. Of course, they used to mount 53, where most of us engineers bunked. It’s hard to believe, but we did manage to sleep with that mount firing. Here was the sequence you would hear: opening the breech, loading the powder case and projectile, closing the breech and BOOM! Then the powder case came out the rear of the mount, hit the deck with a clang, and rolled around, until quiet. After 11 minutes, the forgoing would be repeated. Every time they fired mount 53, spun glass insulation would sprinkle down and you could hear shower shoes hit the deck. A lot of us with wooden shower shoes stored them overhead, which is what made the noise when they hit the deck.

Between the 11 min ordeal, and some of the battles from ship to shore, the projectiles burned the paint off the gun barrels.(see photo).

We had a fire control man by the name of Zorro He was extremely accurate. I always felt that is why we were assigned to shore bombardment, so often. We were very lucky to have not taken more hits from shore batteries. Quite often, they had us pretty well bracketed.

It wasn’t battle stations 24-7, so checkers, chess and card playing made for good pastimes (see photo). The lid off somebody’s foot locker improvised for a table.

We lost one of our chess boards and the chess men when shore batteries opened up on us one afternoon. The chess board was blown over the side from explosions, probably our own 5″ guns. One gun was manned 24-7 while we were in the combat zone. I found out what it was like being forward of a 5″ gun when it was fired; it almost blew me over the side. BJ Davis was directly in front of a 5″ when it was fired. I heard it knocked him silly. Speaking of BJ, the poor guy suffered from chronic sea sickness. I felt sorry for him when he came back aboard, just out of the hospital. I don’t know if he ever got over it.

On our second trip overseas, we experimented in how to blow up a Chinese junk and all its occupants. Planes fired rockets at them and we fired 5″ projectiles. We inspected the junks after each demonstration, with the damage being minimal. Then we tried the coup-de-gras, a depth charge set to go off very shallow. The results were fantastic. There are dummies in these crafts and you can barely make them out after the depth charge did its dastardly deed.

Fast forward to 2008… B. J.’s activities have been cut down after a heart attack before the first Missouri reunion. He hasn’t been able to travel much since then. He is the shipmate who cut out all the little wooden animals we have had in the Ship Store. BJ enjoyed working in his workshop for hours-on-end before his health problems.

MM2 Dietz and MM2 Tokar, were two WWII reservists called into service during the Korean conflict. None of the guys called back into service was happy about it; however, they were the men who taught us the ropes, so to speak.