Thursday, October 1, 2026
With the passing last week of US Marine Jim Dillon, a World War II veteran, it brought back memories of my father-in-law, Don Dantona, a Navy man in World War II, who passed away this past May. Let’s remember all our veterans on Veterans Day.
Steve Grogan, Army Veteran
He was a 17-year-old skinny kid out of Canarsie, Brooklyn, when his mother signed the permission ship to allow him to join the Navy during World War II.
After basic training, Dominic J. Dantona, weighing only 126 pounds at the time, was assigned in 1944 to the USS Lexington, CV-16, a new Essex class aircraft carrier that had been commissioned in 1943, replacing another USS Lexington, CV-2, which was sunk in 1942 at the Battle of the Coral Sea. This new carrier was so big that three football games could be played on its deck at the same time.
The young Dominic served on the Lexington, also known as the Blue Ghost, for its painted blue hull, until1946. In its two and one half years in combat the newest Lexington received 11 battle stars. Dominic, who worked in the fire/boiler room way below deck, was on board in December 1944 when a Japanese torpedo plane dropped a torpedo that struck the carrier’s starboard rear quarter. He was also on the ship when a Japanese kamikaze pilot crashed his plane into the super-structure on the starboard side killing forty-seven sailors and injuring another 127. The dead were buried at sea. Through both of these enemy attacks the ship maintained flight operations and continued to fight.
By February 1945, Lexington’s planes were striking airfields near Tokyo in support of Marine landings on Iwo Jima. On August 15, 1945, six days after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Lexington planes flying to Tokyo on another bombing mission were ordered to jettison their bombs and return to the carrier. The war was over. The USS Lexington was the first foreign carrier to steam into Tokyo Bay and was present for the signing of the Japanese surrender.
Dantona was one of over 5000 men who served aboard the USS Lexington, CV-16, during World War II. He returned home safe and sound, but 245 others made the ultimate sacrifice.
