Gene Brick remembers -

Through the gun sight, I could see the first plane hit us, coming at us about 15 to 20 feet above the water on our starboard beam. All of our guns were firing at it and I could see the tracer bullets ricocheting off the front part of the kamikaze which was identified later as a twin-engine attack bomber of the "Frances" type. Our 5-inch projectiles could not catch up with it. As I remember, our proximity-activated bursts were getting strung out behind the suicide plane like a string of black pearls. The kamikaze kept coming as we kept firing until the gun mount reached its limit of train to starboard. A split second after that, we couldn't see any longer and it crashed with a thunderous bang which knocked out all our electricity.