David Flynn was born in November 1919 in Collegeville, Minnesota, where his father was the athletic director at St. John's University. He lived in a nearby settlement called Flynnville, named for his dad. He had a pleasant childhood in the area, which included a lake and a river, and he liked water activities, especially swimming. He often hitchhiked to school with the Navy recruiters, and had seen the literature. Flynn was just out of high school in 1938, during the Great Depression, and couldn't get a good job. He and a couple of buddies thought the Navy might solve all their problems, and enlisted together. But the Navy didn't keep them together. Flynn went alone to Great Lakes Naval Training Station for boot camp, after which he was assigned to the Houston [Annotator's Note: USS Houston (CA-30)]. Initially, he was on the deck force, but knew that wasn't a job he wanted. During high school he had been an amateur radioman, and was already accomplished at copying code, so he tried out for and got work as a radio operator.

David Flynn describes life on the Houston [Annotator's Note: USS Houston (CA-30)] as very busy; he never had a chance to get bored. He shipped out from Long Beach, California and went right to the Adriatic Sea via Pearl Harbor. The radio teams worked eight hour shifts, and each person had to be good. Before the war, the Houston was underway every day, on maneuvers from Manila. Most of the time they held radio silence, so as not to reveal their position. There was scuttlebutt about the likelihood of war. Flynn said Admiral Hart [Annotator's Note: US Navy Admiral Thomas C. Hart commanded the American Asiatic Fleet from 1939 to 1942] knew everything that was going on with the Japanese, and Flynn thought what happened at Pearl Harbor incomprehensible. As a radioman, he got word of the 7 December [Annotator's Note: 7 December 1941] attack as soon as it happened. Flynn said the message he received began "Japan has commenced hostilities, govern yourselves accordingly." Immediately after he handed the message off, the bugle sounded general quarters, which meant all hands were to man battle stations.

David Flynn has written an account of the events of 7 December 1941. He recorded receiving the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor and giving it to his superiors. His ship [Annotator's Note: the USS Houston (CA-30)] got underway immediately, and spent the next several months bolstering the defenses of Australia and the Netherlands East Indies. If Flynn wasn't on the radio when general quarters was sounded, he reported to the plotting room, to collect and analyze data. Flynn said the worst part was the air raids, which went on for several hours at a time. The ship was always dodging bombs. In one raid, the Houston lost a turret and everyone in it, and Flynn lost any respect he had for armor plating. On 27 February 1942, while the Dutch admiral, Doorman [Annotator's Note: Dutch Admiral Karel Willem Frederik Marie Doorman], was in charge of the fleet, the Houston was involved in the Battle of Java Sea. Flynn was always below decks in a steel compartment, and didn't usually see anything. The odd thing, he said, was that when they got hit, he didn't even notice it. It was the near misses that would shake him up. Flynn said that there were ships from every nation in the Battle of Java Sea, but in the end the only Allied ships left were the Perth [Annotator's Note: HMAS Perth (D-29)] and the Houston.

The USS Houston (CA-30)'s last battle, David Flynn said, was the Battle of Sunda Straits. [Annotator's Note: The Battle of Sunda Strait occurred between the islands of Java and Sumatra on the night of 28 February 1942.] The HMAS Perth (D-29) went down first, just after midnight; then at about 25 minutes after midnight, the USS Houston (CA-30) took its fourth torpedo, and abandon ship was ordered. Flynn said that gave him a sinking feeling, because he was down at the bottom of the ship, and all the compartments above him were dogged down. He was numb for a second or two, then saw a guy in the plotting room motioning for him to come along. Flynn climbed up the rungs of the mainmast, never knowing which level he was on until he found a place to get out. He said he was scared, but kept on going. He got off on the communications platform, a couple of levels above the main deck, and dropped face down, because shells were still hitting the ship. He spied his dead captain on the quarter deck. Flynn said it felt like someone was slapping him in the seat of his pants; shrapnel was hitting him from his buttocks to the bottom of his feet. He didn't know he was pretty badly hit in the leg. The ship was listing to starboard, and he realized it would roll over him if he abandoned ship on that side. So he found his way to port side, main deck aft, and jumped in. Flynn said he held his breath, went several feet down below the water and eventually came back up, without a life preserver, into water the temperature of a bathtub. Flynn spotted a raft full of sailors, but decided to stay away from objects that were easy to spot. The Japanese were still firing machine guns and shelling, and every shell that hit nearby made his insides feel like they were being torn out. Flynn was treading and swimming, hoping to make it to a shore. He met one other guy during the night, and they talked, but agreed to split, and Flynn never saw him again. After he had been in the water for about 12 hours, he was spotted by the Japanese, and taken aboard some kind of repair ship, with four or five other prisoners.

While David Flynn was in the water, he was only concerned with staying alive, not with thoughts of what would happen if he was captured. When the Japanese approached, he was too exhausted to care. Flynn said the Japanese navy treated the prisoners reasonably well; he was taken to a sick bay where they pulled the shrapnel out of his body. When the Japanese captain learned Flynn was a radioman, he tried to bribe him with condensed milk to find out the locations of other ships in the area, but Flynn said he didn't have any information. He was on that Japanese ship for about a day when it was torpedoed, and he went over the side again. This time he was pulled aboard a Japanese army destroyer, where he was questioned a little more forcefully in the bowels of the ship. Flynn didn't reveal anything he knew, and was finally put ashore on Java, the only American prisoner among Australians and British captives. He remembers being held in a jammed native theater, and when they were taken out after several weeks, having to stand at attention for hours. The prisoners were taken by truck to a prison camp surrounded by barbed wire where mosquitoes tormented them on the nights they spent on a cement slab floor. He lived among the American 131st Field Artillery. The guards liked to slap the prisoners across the face. Because he was in bad shape, Flynn could not go out on the work details, and eventually ended up typing prison records. Prisoner's rations consisted primarily of rice and tea; the Japanese ate all the cats on the island. He kept reassuring himself that he was going to get out, but was held prisoner for three and a half years.

David Flynn lost almost half his weight while a prisoner, and was at about 80 pounds when he got out. Some of his fellow prisoners stole equipment and made a radio, so they had news of current events on CW, consecutive wave. The Japanese never found the radio. Flynn had become conversant in Japanese, Malay and Dutch, and could keep everyone informed from broadcasts in any of those languages. Flynn said the prisoners probably knew more about the status of the war than most Americans, because they were getting news from several viewpoints. One day the guards came in an attempted to describe a huge explosion, which turned out to be the atomic bombs. Soon, the Japanese and most of their Korean guards vanished and food was air dropped, but few were able to eat. Lord Louis Mountbatten came to the camp, but got less than a warm reception. The prisoners were trucked to an airport and Flynn was flown to Singapore, then Calcutta where he stayed in the army hospital for a few weeks.

It was several weeks before David Flynn got back to the United States. He ended up at St. Albans Hospital in New York where it took months for him to recover. Flynn's cousin was a reporter in New York City, and got him released from the hospital and into a relative's apartment downtown. His mother joined him for a few weeks, then he went back to Minnesota and, with the help of the G.I. Bill, took night classes, preparing for the college entrance exam. Flynn married, had a son, and went on to graduate in engineering. He never discussed his war experiences, and when he reflects on it now, he finds the story hard to believe. When asked, he would speak about his war years to various organizations, including the Houston's [Annotator's Note: USS Houston (CA-30)] survivors' group. He joins them in Houston, Texas for a reunion every March.

David Flynn feels it is important to study and teach the war, especially through facilities like The National WWII Museum. He would like people to think of his experiences in terms of what freedom means and the people who fought to maintain it. He would like the world to remember that no one from the USS Houston (CA-30) turned traitor. Now it is only infrequently, but for a long while Flynn had dreams of bad experiences, and when he woke, he was thankful it was only a dream. His opinion of the Japanese is that there were some good and some horrible people during the war. Amazingly, when he went to work for IBM, they sent him to Japan.