Remembering a veteran
BALLSTON SPA, N.Y. » U. S. Navy veteran Stephen Dennis of Mechanicville, who radioed news of the Japanese surrender back to the United States at the conclusion of World War II, passed away on Sunday, April 8 at 95.
Dennis regularly attended Saratoga County Honoring Our Deceased Veterans program ceremonies, which are held each month at county offices in Ballston Spa.
“He was a great friend to all of us,” said Frank McClement, Saratoga County Veterans Service Agency director. “He will be missed, that’s for sure.”
Dennis joined the navy shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, which marked the United States’ entry into the war.
In a December 2016 interview, on the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, Dennis told where he was at the time -- working at a local paper mill.
“I quit my job that day,” he said. “They wouldn’t give us a raise so we quit and said we were going in the service. Four days later I was in Newport, R.I., and 14 days after that I was on a ship, the USS Atlanta, a light cruiser with 16 five-inch guns and a lot of small guns.”
He was 19 years old.
In April 1942, four months after the Japanese attack, Dennis surveyed the wreckage at Pearl Harbor as his ship stopped in Hawaii before heading out to engage the enemy in some of the war’s most famous battles — Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.
It was at Guadalcanal, on the afternoon of Nov. 13, 1942, that Dennis and his fellow sailors were evacuated from the USS Atlanta after the ship suffered major damage during an intense surface engagement the night before. The cruiser was sunk on captain’s orders.
From the USS Atlanta, he was assigned to PT boats and became a radio man.
“I said, ‘I don’t even know how to turn on a radio,’” Dennis recalled. “We had crystal sets at the time. The man in charge said, ‘Shut up and do what you’re told!’”
At base headquarters, he met future Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, a naval intelligence officer who wrote the report about the sinking of future President John F. Kennedy’s boat, PT-109.
“JFK would come in to get orders,” Dennis said. “We talked all the time when he came in.”
On Aug. 6, 1945, Dennis was at Okinawa, anticipating an invasion of mainland Japan, when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by Nagasaki three days later, forcing the Japanese surrender.
“When they dropped the atomic bomb we picked up a lot of reporters and headed for Japan,” Dennis said. “When we got there we anchored next to the USS Missouri.”
On Sept. 2, 1945, he witnessed the formal Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri and as a radio operator, he had the responsibility of radioing this monumental news back to the U.S.
Dennis was buried at Saratoga National Cemetery on April 11.