The dirty Duce

[Seascamp]

Here is something that may be of interest. This is the saga of my home ship the USS Canberra and one of our Sailors. The Canberra is the only USN Cruiser to be named after a foreign city. Actually, it was named after the Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra that was sunk at the battle of Savo Island during WWII. As things seem to go around and around, my first home ship was the USS Chicago and it?s namesake ship was also sunk at the battle of Savo Island. So both originals lie at the bottom of Iron bottom sound, probably reasonably close to one another and not all that far away from where JFK?s PT 109 was found. Legacy and names aside, Canberra was known to us as the ?Dirty Duce? or sometimes as the Rue Maru. All in all, a real no BS pirate ship and I really don?t know if that ship was cursed or blessed but there was never a dull moment, ever. She has a web site with interesting pics and all. Search USS Canberra.

Enjoy the article,
Scamp



By J. David Galland
His North Vietnamese captors called him "the incredibly stupid one." To the U.S. Navy, his ship and its crew, he was just known as Seaman Apprentice Douglas Brent Hegdahl III.
But the young enlisted man from South Dakota turned out to be a true hero of many American POWs held captive by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Like many of us in the mid 1960s, Hegdahl was unsure of his future, so upon graduating from high school in the summer of 1966, he entered the Navy recruiting office in Clark, S.D., where a recruiter was pleased to process a motivated high school graduate with a spotless record. Hegdahl entered the Naval Training Center at San Diego, Calif., and upon graduation from boot camp received orders to the USS Canberra, a 23-year-old heavy guided missile cruiser assigned to the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Commissioned in 1943 in time to see action in the Pacific during the last two years of World War II, the Canberra by the mid-1960s had been heavily modified, now carrying a combination of six 8-inch guns forward and two twin Terrier surface-to-air guided missile launchers on the aft deck, as well as five twin 5-inch gun turrets.
Deploying to Vietnam in October 1966, the Canberra joined what was then known as the "Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club" patrolling the South China Sea in the waters contiguous to North Vietnam, a six-month deployment that would see the cruiser fire over 25,000 rounds of gunfire support ashore. (The Canberra would also become one of the few U.S. Navy warships to be struck by enemy gunfire, receiving two hits amidships on March 2, 1967 while shelling a North Vietnamese artillery blockhouse.)
For Doug Hegdahl, the cruise would become memorable for an entirely different reason: In the early morning hours of Apr. 6, 1967, he was knocked overboard by the shock of the cruiser's guns going off, and became the only enlisted man to become a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
Hegdahl's duties were in the aft ammunition handling room in the bowels of the ship. On that fateful day, he rolled out of his bunk at 0330 hours because he had to go on watch beginning at 0400 hours. The Canberra was steaming down the coast of North Vietnam firing its guns against targets of opportunity. Hegdahl decided to go up on deck for a little fresh air before manning his battle station.

When he arrived on deck the big guns were firing. What happened next is unclear, but apparently the shock waves of the guns going off caused Hegdahl to lose his balance. Several minutes later, the young sailor came to floating in the South China Sea, three miles from an enemy shore. He later recalled watching the Canberra steam off into the horizon as it continued to fire at the coastline.
By the time Hegdahl's shipmates discovered that he was missing, it was too late for a rescue. When the dawn broke, he started swimming in the opposite direction of the sun towards the coastline, recalling later that he could just make out a blurred haze of land ahead of him. After a long day of treading water and swimming, a North Vietnamese fishing boat came along at about 1800 hours and hauled him out of the drink.

Brought to shore, Hegdahl found himself in the same military prison system as the hundreds of Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps pilots who had been shot down in the previous three years. His captors quickly showed the young sailor confessions allegedly written by the "Yankee Air Pirates" in captivity.
Hegdahl guessed recognized that something was wrong but thought, they're officers; they must know what they are doing. He decided that his best strategy was to pretend to be stupid, and that falling off his ship in the middle of the night gave him a good foundation to convince his captors of his gross lack of intellect.
The communist cadres told him that he would have to write an anti-war statement for them. Hegdahl gladly agreed to do so, and his interrogators were dumbstruck over a POW relenting without being tortured. Out came the paper, ink and pens - then Hedgahl confessed that he was just a poor peasant, a farm boy who could neither read nor write.
Since Vietnamese peasants themselves were largely illiterate, his captors found this explanation quite plausible. So they assigned a Vietnamese teacher to instruct Hegdahl on spelling, penmanship, grammar and sentence structure. However, they soon gave up, concluding that he was truly an idiot incapable of learning to read or write.
Then the interrogators simply wrote a confession for Hegdahl and had him affix his signature. In the young seaman's declaration, he admitted to the war crime of shelling the presidential birthplace of Ho Chi Minh (quite a feat for a junior enlisted sailor). As later recounted by former POW Lt. Cmdr. Dick Stratton, who shared a cell with Hegdahl for two years, he signed the document as, "Seaman Apprentice Douglas Brent Hegdahl III, United States Navy Reserve, Commanding Officer, USS Canberra." (This piece of paper has never been released or viewed by the masses - Vietnamese or American).
For the next few weeks, Hegdahl was shuffled around from here to there as his captors tried to determine how he would fit into their propaganda strategy. Finally, they sent him to a POW camp where scores of American pilots were imprisoned. It was a serious mistake.
Hegdahl found himself a POW cellmate with Air Force 1st Lt. Joe Crecca, an F-4 Phantom II pilot who had been shot down on Nov. 22, 1966. Crecca himself had developed a method for creating an incredibly organized memory bank to record the names of pilots shot down and imprisoned in Vietnam.
Crecca quickly learned that Hegdahl was far from a dimwitted illiterate and meticulously helped the sailor memorize the names, Social Security numbers and other identifying information for 256 known POWs, including a technique for cross-referencing and retrieving the names. (The mental regime involved memorizing them to the tune of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm.")
Stratton, Hegdahl's later cellmate (whose A-4 from the USS Ticonderoga had been shot down exactly two months before Hegdahl had fallen overboard), would later recall that one day Hegdahl asked him if he could recite Lincoln's Gettysburg Address backwards. Stratton could not and he wondered why anyone would want to recapitulate the speech in that manner. Hegdahl stunned the officer by rapidly reciting the Gettysburg Address from last word to first.
This unique talent would eventually prove to be incredibly valuable for U.S. military intelligence, which at that time had only a spotty and incomplete roster of American fliers who had survived being shot down. Having been determined to have virtually no propaganda value, the North Vietnamese decided to offer Hegdahl an early release from the Hanoi Hilton as part of a propaganda ploy against the United States. Hegdahl initially refused, even attempting to provoke his guard's ire by giving the finger to Tom Hayden during a prison visit by the anti-war activist.
However, Stratton and other senior POWs decided that Hegdahl was more valuable as a courier of the POW roster as well as confirmation of North Vietnamese torture practices, so they ordered him to accept the release, assuring him that he was helping rather than betraying his fellow prisoners.
On Aug. 5, 1969, the North Vietnamese literally threw Doug Hegdahl out of their country.
He brought home the 256 names he had memorized containing many names of POWs unknown to the U.S. government at that time. Eventually, he traveled to Paris at the behest of Texas philanthropist Ross Perot to confront the North Vietnamese delegation to the peace talks about the fate of servicemen still missing in action.
After leaving the Navy, Hegdahl entered the federal Civil Service and became a survival school instructor for the U.S. Navy at the James B. Stockdale Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape Center [SERE] at Naval Air Station North Island, Calif. Today, he still can recite those 256 names.
As Stratton later wrote, Hegdahl was "my personal hero ? the archetype of the innovative, resourceful and courageous American sailor."
J. David Galland, Deputy Editor of DefenseWatch, is a retired veteran of over thirty years of service in military intelligence who resides in Germany. He can be reached at defensewatch02@yahoo.com.

[Arrow]

Scamp what a wonderful story. I have never heard this before. Really, really appreciate you bringing it to us. It blew me out of the water. I'm completely at a loss for words. God Bless him. God Bless them all. sis

[Seascamp]

Thanks Sis, I appreciate the support. As an odyssey, we never knew what happened to this guy and held a memorial service, felt bad for him, etc. We figured there was absolutely no way to survive under that set of circumstances given the great abundance of sharks and the hostile nature of those waters. That wasn?t the official position just Sailors scuttlebutt but seemed realistic for the time and place. Some months later and much to our surprise this fellow shows up on the cover of Life Magazine raking the prison yard. ?I?ll be damned? was the majority expression. The Sailor reply to this expression was the usual ?I shit thee dearly not?. Gezz, that all seems just like yesterday.

By all rights the muzzle blast should have been fatal, once overboard the screws should have sucked him under and chopped him to bits. If not one of those two than the sharks should have got him. If none of all that than the locals should have taken him out, as I?m quite sure we?d managed to piss them off by shooting up the place. So I?d say he had his share of Sailors luck and then some and then a bit more for added measure. Maybe we were all lucky because not only did we manage to get shot up by firld arty and get away with it, we had a Destroyer ram us and suffered little damage. I mean like it?s a big ocean and one would think a destroyer wouldn?t go about hitting cruisers. Oh, that was a USN Destroyer. The saga was that they blew out the rudder hydraulics? and lost steering. Never a dull moment as I said.

Scamp