FREDERIKA - Orville Duecker was unsinkable. He never gave up.

Not when he went over a Wapsipinicon River dam as a teenager. Not when he was blown off the USS Franklin into the Sea of Japan on March 19, 1945.

"I said, 'I'll never drown,'" Duecker, now 84, declared at his home two blocks from the Wapsi.

He fought more than the waves on the Sea of Japan, though. He and his shipmates also faced the might of the Japanese Empire.

Duecker, a retired pharmacist, learned to swim on local streams and rivers as a boy. He was plucked out of roiling water beneath the Wapsi dam by people fishing there when he was 15 or 16, he recalled, along with a friend also caught beneath the river trying to aid him.

A few years later, as a U.S. Navy pharmacist's mate during World War II, he was rescued from a floating life net in the Sea of Japan after seven or eight hours in freezing water after being blown off the Franklin during a Japanese kamikaze attack. He sustained shrapnel wounds and burns and was awarded the Purple Heart.

Born in Tripoli and raised in Frederika, Duecker, wanted to enlist in the Navy not long after he graduated from high school. But he was still underage, and his parents refused. He worked at the Rath Packing Co. in Waterloo until he was old enough to enlist at age 18. He was assigned to the Franklin after basic training.

The Franklin was a full-sized Essex-class carrier. The service ribbons in a display case in Duecker's home are adorned with battle stars marking the Franklin's many engagements. The carrier saw service in places like Guam, Leyte Gulf, Peliliu, Tinian, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and elsewhere - many hard-fought bloody battles with considerable loss of life, as U.S. forces "island hopped" their way to the Japanese home islands.

The Franklin was just 50 miles off the Japanese mainland on March 19, 1945 - closer than any other U.S. carrier during the war up to that time, according to historical accounts. It had begun to launch an air bombardment of the mainland when the carrier itself was attacked by Japanese planes. The carrier and many of its planes, fully loaded with bombs and ready for battle on the flight deck, were set afire.

A chief petty officer led Duecker and some other sailors, unable to reach their battle stations due to the blaze, back to the relative safety of the ship's fantail, but the fire was sending suffocating smoke aft to where they were located.

The Franklin was cruising in a zigzag pattern to evade enemy submarines, Duecker said, and the smoke from the fire amidships would stream back and forth across the fantail decks. Duecker said sailors would rush from one side of the ship to the other to avoid being suffocated by the smoke, and some were trampled to death in the process.

The carrier was littered with dead and wounded from the attack, Duecker said. A kamikaze crashed through the flight and hangar decks of the carrier. He was hanging on a rope looped between the flight and hangar decks. A subsequent fire spread to a ship magazine, where munitions were stored, and it exploded.

"That magazine blew up, and it blew me at least 30 feet, which was a good thing because the screws of the ship were right there. It would have chewed me up," Duecker said.

Someone threw Duecker and the other overboard sailors a floating mesh life net off the flight deck. Duecker tried and tried to swim his way to the net, only to be separated from it by the ocean waves.

"These waves were about 10 to 12 feet high. I swam toward that, but every time I'd get close, the wave would break and take me back down and I'd come back up. And I hollered at the guy on the net, 'The next time we come up you dig (swim) like hell,' and I finally got hold of the net."

About 15 to 20 sailors managed to work their way to the life net. He pulled one back on the net who had slipped off. "I was right beside him and I pulled him back on, and I don't know if he ever lived or not," Duecker said.

The Pacific waters were normally blue, but the Sea of Japan was "so cold it was green," Duecker said. "I haven't warmed up yet."

He hung on for seven or eight hours in the open sea as the fires on the Franklin continued to rage, and its remaining crew members on board struggled to save the listing ship. When the destroyer USS Tingey approached to rescue the sailors in the water, Duecker had lost consciousness. Nevertheless, his hands were clenched so tightly to the life net, they were locked in place.

"I passed out, and the destroyer had to cut the rope on either side of my hands to get me loose," he said.

Duecker was comparatively fortunate. More than 700 of his shipmates died and another 300 were wounded, The remaining sailors on board - about 600 according to historical accounts - eventually won their battle to save the ship.

After recuperation, Duecker, also a corpsman, was reassigned to a transport ship, where he worked 16-20 hours a day helping treat Marines wounded at Iwo Jima, where he received a letter of commendation for his service.

After the war, Duecker received a pharmacy degree from the University of Iowa and owned and operated a pharmacy in Anthon in Woodbury County, where he had interned. After 20 years there, he and wife Clara and their family returned to Waterloo to be near Duecker's ailing parents. He worked at Evansdale Pharmacy and Miller Drug in Waterloo. They eventually settled back in Frederika. They have two grown children, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Asked if the suffering he and his shipmates endured was worth the sacrifice. Duecker said, "I'd like to think it must have helped. We're still free."