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A MEMOIRE - THE DECADE A father’s day gift of Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation Speaks” contained a frontispiece that invited the members of that generation as well as their offspring to record things like “I Remember”. I accepted the author’s invitation and so I looked at the most memorable years of my life. I REMEMBER It started at Jamestown College in 1941. Returning to the dorm from a Sunday morning breakfast we encountered wild-eyed Tom Stein, the college’s dean of men and proctor of Watson Hall. “The Japs have bombed at Pearl Harbor,” he screamed. Assembling in the second floor lounge we listened with growing anger as a radio broadcaster from Hawaii described the carnage. War! We all had known it would be coming. The following day in the same lounge we listened to FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech. We all remember where we were and what we were doing on December 7th. We each needed five dollars. This would cover a round trip to Minneapolis and food for the two-day trip to the nearest Navy Recruiting Station. Ten of us in the Watson hall crowd had decided we wanted to fight the Nips rather than the Nazis. There was a growing hysteria of hate over Pearl Harbor and it was beginning to stain the Americans of Japanese ancestry. I remember thinking that their treatment would be a lot better than “they” had treated the hapless citizens of Nanking and well their pals the Nazis, look what they were doing to the Jews in the concentration camps. When the war was over they would be safe and alive and well fed. So we would be sailors instead of dogfaces. In Minneapolis the officer who swore us in said: “We need volunteers for sub duty.” No one stepped forward at that time but we started to think about it. The subs were hitting the evil enemy where it hurt. In the huge convocation hall on the Chicago campus of Northwestern the ten of us from Jamestown college who had decided to become naval officers listened to a Commander Schilling, resplendent in Navy Dress Whites and wearing gold dolphins, implore us to volunteer for submarine training at New London. “When you are dismissed here today I want you to come down here and join me on the stage and be screened for the toughest duty there is?” I looked down the row at my companions. John Reeves cocked his head at me and mouthed, “Are you going?” I nodded. Little did we realize at that time that the two of us would serve on the same boat and be in on the finish of the Japanese Empire. Only eight of us out of a thousand had answered the call and here we were in Mare Island looking at our first American submarine, the USS Tang being fitted out to fight the enemy under the command of Barney O’Kane said to be the best of the best. He had been the Exec of the USS Wahoo when she sank six ships on the patrol just before O’Kane was ordered to command Tang. On her next patrol Wahoo was lost with all hands. We all heard that story a hundred times. We started our qualification notebooks on the Tang. We wondered if we would be as lucky as O’Kane. Winter in New London seemed like spring to those of us who came from the Siberian steppes of North Dakota. A woolly sub jacket was all you needed to go submarining on Long Island Sound. It was a little chilly getting into the water in the weird looking tower they called the Escape Training Tank but heck we were tough and the water was a balmy 60 degrees. We trained to make escapes in oxygen charged Momsen lungs. First from ten feet, then twenty-five, then fifty, and finally a hundred followed by a free escape from one hundred feet without the lungs. We learned not to fear but respect the water. It could be your friend but it could kill you with awesome suddenness. New London was an ancient New England fishing village that was slowly adapting to the 20th Century. There was time off for drinks at the Mohican and Crocker House hotels with the girls from the Connecticut College for Women located on a hill overlooking Long Island Sound. There were free tickets for Broadway shows that were just an hour away on the New York, New Haven and Hartford. The train disgorged its passengers at a wondrous place called Grand Central Station. From there it was a short walk to 42nd Street and it’s theaters and bars. I remember the first plane flight of my life. They really did need submarine volunteers badly. No more trains. My travel vouchers took me to La Guardia Field and put me on a DC3 where a Nurse, flight attendant with a Red Cross band on her sleeve, served me coffee in bone china service and a sandwich on the flight to Chicago. There were more sandwiches and coffee on the flight to Salt Lake City. A Captain in the Army Nurse Corp bumped me off the flight just at the point of boarding for San Francisco. She held a higher priority. “Sorry, Ensign,” she said. “I guess they have a lot of patients waiting for me out on Pelileu.” At length I connected with the USS Pogy that was to be my home from June of 1944 until February of 1946. Out of that decade, those months on the Pogy were the great adventure of my life. There were good moments and there were bad. Among best of times was the exhilaration of qualifying and standing top watches. Even better was serving as Torpedo and Gunnery Officer and operating the Torpedo Data Computer, assisting my skipper in sinking and damaging several enemy ships. Then the escape from a hunter-killer group of three enemy destroyers bent on our destruction. It was a three day cat and mouse game that saw Pogy lying quietly on the bottom listening to the hunters cruise up and down. The bad moments were fraught with tension and terror. Surviving several depth charge attacks and watching in slow motion a B-24 coming in low, it’s bomb bays dropping open and its flashing machine guns and cannons howling around my head. A battle surface gun action with near misses splashing water onto me and my gun crew and smaller rounds popping in air overhead. These were only a prelude to the hours spent in transiting three minefields in Tsushima Strait. That was the worst day of all. It was only a few weeks later after the second plutonium bomb had obliterated Nagasaki that I realized that I would not be out there another five years and that we had won and that I had contributed to that victory. There were thrills along with that Victory. Returning to Pearl Harbor with the rest of the greatest fleet ever assembled. The big aircraft carriers, cruisers, battleships and destroyers all saluting each other with their horns blasting and the Navy band at the end of the finger piers, serenading our own return with our battle flags flying. Then piping Admiral Nimitz aboard, who, representing the Secretary of Navy, awarded our skipper the Navy Cross. One last party at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and we were on our way home. I remember that the cruise home was maddeningly slow taking from August until October. Pogy had to rejoin the Atlantic Submarine Force to which it belonged and had to await its turn to pass through the Panama Canal. I remember the pride I felt in viewing Lady Liberty as Pogy paused to let the most deserving of us go on leave. I remember the supreme elation of being back in America and realizing how much I love this country and how much I still owed her. Now the door was open to Law School at Ann Arbor and a successful career. That I would ever return to the deep blue sea was at that moment most improbable. But by the end of that decade I had graduated law school, married, conceived two lovely daughters and established a law firm in Tacoma. And by the end of that decade I had indeed returned to Submarines. Submarining by then had infected my soul and spirit and given me a life long passion. |