Willy

Captain Dixie Kiefer in battle dress on the command bridge of USS Ticonderoga during the launching of aircraft against Luzon, Philippines, November 6, 1944. He shattered an ankle and a kneecap playing football at the Naval Academy. A few years later, a pilot buzzing him as a joke shattered his elbow. Most men would have taken the hint. Dixie Kiefer kept going. In 1924 he became the first pilot catapulted off a battleship at night, launching from USS California in San Diego harbor. In 1942 he was executive officer of USS Yorktown at Coral Sea and Midway. When Yorktown was abandoned at Midway, he burned his hands so badly lowering a wounded sailor into a raft that he couldn't hold the line when he went over the side himself. He fell and shattered his right leg and ankle. He recovered and was given command of the new carrier USS Ticonderoga. On January 21, 1945, off Formosa, two kamikazes hit her. 144 men were killed. Kiefer took 65 pieces of shrapnel and a broken arm, and he stayed on the bridge for nearly twelve hours. To fight the fires, he flooded compartments to list the ship so burning wreckage slid off the flight deck into the sea. His crew said he had so much metal in him that the ship's compass followed him across the deck. Navy Secretary James Forrestal called him "The Indestructible Man." Ten months later, on Armistice Day, November 11, 1945, the war was over. Commodore Kiefer was a passenger on a routine Navy flight home to Quonset Point when the plane flew into Mount Beacon, New York, in fog. All six men aboard were killed. Searchers identified him partly by the cast still on his arm from Ticonderoga. Forrestal, the man who named him indestructible, was born in Beacon. Dixie Kiefer is buried at Arlington.