The Navy and Navs

Here's a story I wrote for my journalism class. I figured since it doesn't get published anywhere, that I'd publish it somewhere myself. Anyways...enjoy.


Jim Downing awoke early in the morning like he always did and prepared to go on deck the battleship USS West Virginia. A 9-year Navy veteran, this was more than routine. It was mechanical.

But Dec. 7, 1941 was nothing he or anyone else was used to. Now etched into the mind of any American – historian or not, this was the day that the United States lost 2,388 servicemen, 188 of its finest aircraft, and much of its ship fleet at Pearl Harbor, including the West Virginia.

Having spent the night on land, Downing was just a few minutes from boarding the ship when the first wave of Japanese planes came. Had he been on board, he’d be dead.

For some reason, the ship’s radar had been turned off for the night and was not prepared to give any warning. The first time the crew knew the Japanese were coming was when they saw with their own eyes the eerily low-flying olive-red planes.

In total, 40 Japanese B5Ns armed with 330-pound, Type 91 torpedoes swarmed the eight “very unprepared” battleships. If the battleships were eliminated, the rest would be easy. The first wave knocked out the power on the West Virginia. There was not much left to defend. The 16 deck-level guns were incapable of producing enough flak to divert the attack.

“There was nothing I could do,” Downing said. Seventy sailors who could not escape went down with the West Virginia. It settled in the shallow water - just six feet of water separated the top of the ship from the sea level.


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Over 66 years later, the 94-year old Downing sits down at dinner in a Colorado Springs lodge to tell his story. His shiny, never-been-scratched, red Cadillac Deville is parked just outside. The car has a hand crank on the steering wheel to allow easier maneuvering with his aging limbs. Inside the lodge, the man appears to be in perfect health. If you didn’t know he was well into his 90s, you might guess he just turned 80. His memory is strong – he recites stats from the war that match perfectly with the history books.

Eating at a popular place for his friends and coworkers, he sees one longtime friend walk by. The man salutes Downing, they share a few words and he moves on. The whole place seems to share a genuine respect and friendship toward this hero of sorts.

He credits his longevity to a committed faith in a sovereign God. A long time ago, he said, he could have started a life of worrying – about the war, his life, and his calling. Without an inner peace that he developed during the war, he might still be suffering from the stress and physical toll on his body from his years in the military.

“That led me to reason that at the age of 94, I’ve got the outlook of a teenager,” he said. “I don’t worry. I know that if there’s real danger, I’ll experience it. That’s a great spiritual lesson that I learned.”


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For the two-and-a-half hours following the initial attack, Downing expected the next Japanese plane to be the one that would get him, but he never wavered from that complete peace he felt inside. Just a few weeks prior, he had read a magazine article about a Christian officer from the British army who organized a soccer tournament on the battle fields in France. If the war did not deter this officer, the eminent war could not deter Downing.

Downing did not die on Dec. 7. He simply went about his duties amidst tremendous pressure and chaos. He just happened to have never been hit by the enemy.

He spent the rest of the day taking care of the wounded, locating the dead and putting out fires. The parts of the West Virginia that were not yet submerged were ablaze in flame. One of his most vivid memories was walking through the burn ward at the hospital.

“I went down the line,” he said. “Most of them were in suspension, most of them would die that night, and I just asked each one for their name and their parents’ address, and I’d write it down and send a message to them. Most of them did die. And I wanted to at least let their parents know what happened.”

Amidst the disorder, one of the carriers at sea, the USS Enterprise tried to return to the harbor. Without a flight recognition signal, the Navy started firing at one of the carriers’ incoming planes. That night, the military was firing on its own airplanes. Chaos reigned.


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At dinner, Downing doesn’t touch his food. It is not that he isn’t hungry – he has too much to share in an hour to take the time to eat.

After a 24-year Navy career ended in 1956 – four years longer than the basic eligibility requirement for retirement, Downing began his second career with the Navigators, a worldwide Christian organization, including in the capacities of Deputy President and Chairman of the Board of Directors.

What he loves to talk about the most is his faith. He’d prefer to spend hours on that subject and spend fifteen minutes on Pearl Harbor and war stories. When he does talk about the war, his faith quickly finds its way into the narrative.


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Like most teenagers in the Great Depression, Downing joined the Navy because he had to. He wanted to go to college, go to law school and end up in Washington D.C. as a politician. Instead, he found himself on a boat in the Pacific Ocean.

“The Navy was an economic escape as far as I was concerned,” he said. “I’d get away from home, I’d be on my own. I’d been brought up in a church background, but I thought that if God had any plans for my life, that he’d have to postpone it for another four years, because he’d never find me.”

He ended up on the ship where the Navigators ministry began. Through a small supervising position, Downing met one of the founders, Lester Spencer. Spencer was excited about sharing his faith, and Downing figured anyone that excited must have been a fanatic.

A few weeks later, in Downing’s first Christmas back at home, his mother gave him a Bible.
“(It was) pretty much a good luck charm,” he said. “And I used it to keep spare money in because that’s the last place anybody would look.”

Spencer saw Downing use his Bible as a personal piggy bank and called him out. “That Bible is good for something other than keeping your money in,” he told him.

Spencer began meeting with Downing, and the rest is history. Or maybe “His story,” if Downing could describe it.

Not long after, Downing began leading Bible studies on the ship. He said there wasn’t a better place to evangelize and make disciples than in the Navy. There were 1,500 guys on a single battleship. Through the work of Spencer, Downing and others, over 100 men became Christians on the West Virginia.

“The Lord led me to stay in not because I had anybody, but because it was a place of ministry,” he said.

By 1941, Downing and his friends were well known across the Pacific for their Christian ministry.


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Downing said the most common question people ask him about Pearl Harbor is “how did you react?”

“Well, that was a day’s work, December 7th.” he said. “December 8th, that’s another day’s work. You’re in the military to do a day’s work.”


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From Dec. 8 through June 1942, Downing stayed at Pearl Harbor. While the war progressed, he was salvaging the sunken ships. He helped recover his own ship, the West Virginia.

The ship’s fires finally extinguished a few days later, and later inspection showed that it took six torpedo hits during the attack. With a patch over the damaged hull, the battleship was pumped out and refloated on May 17, 1942.

Using his experience, Downing served as a captain of a ship for three years in the Korean War before he retired from the military.


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Downing now spends his time traveling across the country, sharing at conferences, speaking on college campuses and training some of the nearly 5,000 staff of the Navigators organization that he helped establish in his military career.

He had just returned to the Navigator headquarters in Colorado Springs from a military conference in which he was the keynote speaker. At these conferences, he uses war time stories to develop deeper messages. He shares miraculous accounts of answered prayer and speaks of the inner peace that kept him from worry during the most stressful times of war.

He feels that if God’s on his side, then he’s on the winning side, and that is what keeps him motivated. He also sees an unmet goal that he can work toward with his remaining years.

“I want to be a winner, I don’t want to lose any battle, of any kind, any place. In my career, it helped a lot. There’s a human, ego satisfaction in that, but on the other side there’s a love of Christ. Basically I want to be ‘forgetting what’s behind and pressing toward the mark of the prize for the upward call of God in Christ Jesus’ (Philippians 3: 13-14). Everybody wants to be a winner, but not everyone’s willing to pay the price. But don’t you feel good when you win?”