Sixteen-year-old James Graham and a handful of his tenth-grade classmates decided it was time to fight for their country. Six months had passed since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and these teenagers were determined to do something about it. Climbing into a bus in Lake City, South Carolina, passengers cast wary glances at the kids, and although there were plenty of unoccupied seats up front, the driver waited until they walked to the back of the bus to be seated before continuing on his route. It was 1942, after all, and the African American students knew where they had to sit if they ever hoped to get to the Army recruiter in Charleston.
A rude surprise was waiting for these patriotic boys—all of whom wanted to be pilots—once they arrived. “We don’t take colored boys in the Army Air Corps,” the recruiter told Graham and his classmates. Heads bowed in despair, the dejected students started to leave but were stopped by a Navy recruiter, who called them over and invited them to join up. Graham was hesitant because he knew that the Navy only allowed African Americans to work as mess attendants or shore laborers loading and unloading ships. “I won’t cook or clean up behind anyone,” Graham told the recruiter. “My sister does that for me.” But things had changed in the Navy, the recruiter said, and now they were accepting African Americans in the seaman branch, “same as the white guys.” With that assurance Graham lied about his age and signed the papers on the spot enlisting in the U.S. Navy, where he and his fellow African Americans would be destined to make history in spite of the antiblack sentiment among many of their fellow sailors and officers, a sentiment that reached all the way to Washington, D.C. Eventually Graham would join a complement of other African American sailors to step on board the USS Mason, a destroyer escort and the first warship in American history to be manned by a black crew.
During World War II, James Graham’s story was repeated in cities, towns, and villages all across America. Young men of all races—many of whom had not even started to shave—heeded the call to serve their country, running away from home, fibbing about their ages, and devising all sorts of schemes to enlist in the military. These young men were determined to fight for their country and would do whatever it took to put on a uniform. Many would never return home.
Walter Roberge, a spindly sixteen year old, boarded a bus leaving his small hometown of Lansing, Illinois, bound for the big city. He was slight for his age and height—129 pounds fully clothed on a skinny five-foot, eleven-inch frame. As the bus slowly inched away from the curb on that spring day in 1943, Roberge’s eyes widened with excitement as he anticipated his big plans once he arrived in Chicago. But those plans were quickly dashed when the government recruiter got a look at him.
“You could count my ribs at five yards,” Roberge said. The recruiter told him, “Come back in six months when you put on some weight.” Roberge had hoped to join the Navy. “I wanted to enlist when I was fourteen,” he said, but that was a little young in the eyes of his parents, especially his mother, who wanted him to finish high school. Now that he was sixteen years old, he considered himself a man and was determined to go to war.
Not about to wait six months, he started formulating plans for his next visit as he rode the bus back home. Young Roberge had heard that if you ate a lot of bananas and drank plenty of water, you could put on weight very quickly. And that’s just what he did for the next six weeks. He then headed back to Chicago for a second try. As extra insurance he took along his birth certificate, which had been “doctored” to show that he was born in 1926, making his age seventeen, old enough to enlist without parental consent. “My mother marked up the birth certificate,” he said. In those days birth certificates were filled out in ink, and Roberge’s mother didn’t have the right color ink to match the original ink on the document. “It was a miserable job, the ink didn’t even come close to matching,” he recalled.
At the Chicago recruiting office, Roberge handed the document to an official, who peered suspiciously at it through a heavy paperweight-type magnifier. After studying it for what seemed an eternity to the teenager, the recruiter barked, “I don’t like this birth certificate. Get a new one.” But Roberge knew that if he asked for a new document it might be typed, making it impossible for his mother to alter it since the family did not own a typewriter. So he asked the recruiter if it would suffice for his father to testify that he really was seventeen years old. The recruiter said it would.
So on 5 July he and his father, a veteran of World War I, stood before a notary public and swore that the teenager was seventeen. Even though the banana and water diet had not resulted in much, if any, weight gain, that no longer seemed to matter to the recruiter, and the sixteen year old was sworn into the U.S. Navy. By this time the government was in desperate need of troops and “they would take you as long as you were upright and warm,” Roberge said.
“I just felt it was the right thing to do,” he recalled. “I could have avoided the war completely if I had just stayed in school. But I wanted to go. I was the adventuresome type. I started fighting for my independence when I was three years old.”
When the war broke out his father, who was an ironworker, wanted to join, but a couple of his false teeth were missing. “They told him he would have to get a new set, but he couldn’t afford it,” Roberge said. “So I went instead.” Even though his mother had forged his birth certificate to allow entry into the military, Roberge recalled, she really would have preferred that he stay in school. “But I threatened to run away from home if she didn’t do it,” he said.
After nine weeks in boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center along the banks of Lake Michigan in Illinois and five weeks of specialized training in Key West, Florida, Roberge was assigned to the destroyer escort USS Swearer, a new type of warship designed to protect convoys from the U-boat menace in the North Atlantic. So in November 1943, a little more than four months after that July day back in Chicago when he and his father swore he was old enough to enlist, the skinny teenager from Lansing was earning seventy-eight dollars a month as Petty Officer Third Class Roberge— and he was at sea.1
Like so many others, Roberge was too young to enlist in the armed forces. But during the height of World War II, many young men—fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old, caught up in the patriotic wave sweeping the nation—volunteered for service in the Navy in spite of their age and complete lack of experience with anything to do with the sea. In fact, the majority of crew members on board destroyer escorts in World War II were teenagers or just barely out of their teens, most of whose experience on the water, if any, consisted of little more than fishing in a rowboat or paddling a canoe.
Sixteen-year-old Terry Thomas and his family had just walked the two miles home from St. Brigid’s Church after mass on a cold and blustery Sunday, 7 December 1941. Terry and his father were reading the Sunday newspapers while his mother and sisters, Vera and Rita, were listening to music on the radio in the living room of their tiny house in Detroit, Michigan. “All of a sudden the music stopped,” Thomas said. “Special bulletin—our naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii has been attacked by Japanese aircraft.” Thomas’ father, a tool and die maker who had immigrated from Wales, said, “This means war.” The next day Thomas and his classmates started talking about joining the military, although they all were too young to enlist.
Two years later, Thomas decided to join the U.S. Coast Guard after listening to the uncle of a friend who said he should ask for beach patrol on the Great Lakes. That sounded appealing to him and his buddy, so they decided to quit school and sign up. But Thomas will always remember the day he climbed on board an old steam train at the Michigan Railroad Station on his way to boot camp. “As I left with the other enlistees, I heard my mother crying and saying, ‘They’re so young, like lambs being led to the slaughter,’” Thomas, who stood only five feet, four inches tall, said. “I’ll never forget that moment.” The old train chugged out of the station carrying Thomas and a motley collection of teenage recruits on their way to Manhattan Beach, the Coast Guard boot camp in Brooklyn, New York. Loneliness and homesickness soon would overtake these kids, most away from their homes and families for the first time in their young lives. But there was no turning back.2
Offers to join the military poured into Washington from patriotic citizens in every part of the nation, observed President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he signed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. Finally approved after one of the most tumultuous and bitterly divided sessions in the history of Congress, the law required all male citizens between twenty-one and thirty-six years old to visit one of the nearly 6,500 new registration boards set up throughout the nation. But America’s first peacetime military conscription did not come about without a great deal of angry debate by antidraft activists, who declared that “American conscription is American fascism.”3
Women wearing widows’ veils took up vigil in the U.S. Senate gallery. Florida senator Claude Pepper, who supported the Selective Service legislation, was hanged in effigy on the Capitol grounds, and fistfights among members of Congress developed before the legislation, commonly referred to as “the draft,” could be approved and sent to President Roosevelt, who signed the measure without delay.4
William Riemer, who grew up in the small town of Janesville, Wisconsin, was just starting his senior year in high school when the seventeen year old dropped out to join the Navy. He had wanted to join the Marine Corps as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor but was only sixteen years old. His uncle, a World War I veteran, assured him that the war would last long enough so he could enlist once he was of age. Several of his friends in the close-knit community of eight hundred were joining the Navy, so when the time came to enlist, Riemer chose the Navy instead of the Marines.5
“All I knew was that the pointed end of the boat went first,” Riemer recalled, noting that, like so many Navy recruits, his experience with boats and the sea was limited to what he read in books. Although he knew how to swim, that was just about his only experience with water. Like Walter Roberge, he went to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Later he was assigned to the USS Frederick C. Davis, one of only a handful of the 563 destroyer escorts sunk by enemy action and the last American combat ship torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat during World War II. By the time the war was over, Riemer had learned a lot more than simply which end of a boat went first.
Another novice to the sea who wanted to do his part for the nation, John “Bo” Keally, enlisted in the Navy in 1944 after quitting high school. “It seemed like the patriotic thing to do at the time,” Keally said. After his father died, he and his mother moved around the Pittsburgh area frequently, with young Bo attending four different grade schools and four different high schools before finally finding stability in the Navy. Because he was underage, his mother had to sign so he could join.6 Following a brief stint at boot camp at Great Lakes and specialized training for a gunner’s mate, he was assigned to the USS Johnnie Huchins.
Keally, like many of the DE recruits, had no experience on the water but felt that joining the Navy would be a good way to see the world. Excited at the prospect of the adventures that lay ahead, he never could have imagined that, within a short time, he would be struggling to survive a major hurricane, which sunk an American destroyer off North Carolina, clinging to a life raft after being thrown overboard off the coast of New Guinea, or engaging in a fierce fight with Japanese suicide midget submarines near the Philippines in what would be the last major surface battle of World War II.
A year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy continued to recruit rather than draw inductees from the Selective Service system. Trying to lure the “cream of the crop” with slogans such as “Choose while you can,” the Navy was able to induct 35,000 men who already had received their Army draft notices. As the war progressed Army officers became alarmed that their service seemed to be getting those the Navy did not want.7
To skim off the best potential inductees, the Navy would sign them up early, before they legally could join. Some 120,000 young men were signed up in the Navy’s V-12 program, and many of them were sent to college, rendering them “draft proof” under the rules of the Selective Service system: They already were in the service, although not officially on the sea or in the air. Trained at government expense, they would be ready when the Navy called.8
Navy service was more attractive to many young men who felt life on board a warship would be superior to fighting the enemy in muddy trenches. The “Choose while you can” campaign resonated with many potential recruits, such as Donald Kruse, who signed up within a few months of graduation from LaSalle School in Troy, New York. His quick action deprived the Army of a GI—the very day he was packing to leave for the naval training facility in Sampson, New York, Kruse received his draft notice. Standing at the door with his bags packed, Kruse told the mailman to return the draft notice and marked the envelope “U.S. Navy.”
“I knew they would give me a free meal and a clean sack,” Kruse said. Born in Saugerties, New York, Kruse later moved to Catskill, New York, before eventually settling in Troy. His cousins all were drafted into the Army, and wallowing in muddy trenches was not the life he wanted.9 Sent to the naval training facility in Sampson, along Seneca Lake in upstate New York, Kruse and more than 411,000 sailors would receive their basic training there over the course of the war. One of seven naval training centers in the nation, Sampson, along with facilities in Bainbridge, Maryland, and Farragut, Idaho, was opened within a year of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Four other Navy training facilities were operating at the start of the war, including facilities in Norfolk, Virginia; Newport, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; and the biggest of them all, the Great Lakes Naval Training Center along the shores of Lake Michigan. That is where many of the recruits who eventually would find themselves on board destroyer escorts learned how to swim, tie knots, march, and identify the parts of a ship.10
Stepping off the train and taking a bewildered look at their new home, the recruits’ eyes widened as they gazed at a compound that certainly was much larger than many of the communities where they had grown up. Great Lakes, the sprawling 1,440-acre facility forty miles north of Chicago boasted a population of more than 100,000 and had all the features of a large city, including a hospital, barber shop, tailor, post office, and laundries. It was about as self-sufficient as a military facility could be and even included recreational and reception centers where recruits could relax and unwind after a week of training and classes.11
Construction of what was also the largest naval training facility in World War I was first approved by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, despite some concerns about locating a naval facility one thousand miles from the nearest saltwater.12 By Armistice Day in November 1918, the base had been substantially enlarged from the prewar days to include 775 buildings on 1,200 acres with a peak naval population of more than 47,000 men. More than 125,000 men passed through the facility by the end of the war, a mere fraction of the number that would be trained there for World War II.13
Fast forward to 7 December 1941. Within two hours of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, plans hurriedly were put in place to expand the Great Lakes facility in preparation for America’s entry into a new war. With American ships still smouldering in ruins at Pearl Harbor, Capt. Ralph D. Spalding, public works officer at the Great Lakes facility, met with the base’s commandant and described his plans to expand the compound. Neither man had the authority to authorize the expansion; however, with chaos rampant in Washington there was no time to seek proper authorization from Navy brass. Work began the very next day, even though formal approval for the project would not come for two weeks.14
A herculean effort, construction continued seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and involved some twenty-six architectural firms, fourteen general contractors, and 13,000 workers. The final cost for the two-year project exceeded $120 million. As it had in World War I, Great Lakes would again serve as the largest naval training facility in World War II, training more than a million sailors or about a third of all Navy men fighting in the war. But Washington could not wait for the work to be finished before sending recruits, who arrived daily, to the facility, cramming barracks with young men and forcing others to sleep on cots in drill halls. There was no time to delay—the United States needed trained sailors and it needed them now.15
Moving ahead without authorization was a bold but wise move because plans for other naval training bases were still on the drawing board. “The speed of construction at Great Lakes was doubly fortunate because delays at Bainbridge, Farragut, and Sampson (new stations authorized in March 1942) made it necessary for Great Lakes to take many recruits who should have gone to the new stations in September and October 1942,” observed Lt. T. A. Larson in his official history of the Great Lakes center.16
As thousands of so-called boots streamed into the naval training facilities, now commonly referred to as “boot camps,” they would soon learn a new way of life—regimented, structured, and strenuous—as they were schooled in the classroom and field training necessary to become a seaman on one of America’s warships.17 “The first day at boot camp was a shock,” Robert Holman said. “First off, we took off all of our clothes and stood there buck naked while a corpsman painted a number across our naked chests with methiolate, which is an orange liquid, a mild iodine.” The skinny seventeen-year-old kid from Calhoun County, South Carolina, recalled his time at the Bainbridge, Maryland, facility as a “degrading experience,” as the naked recruits were poked, prodded, examined, and questioned by Navy doctors.
Over time Holman, who eventually would be assigned to the USS Frost, said the recruits became accustomed to the routine of boot camp: “We spent many hours in boot camp tying knots, reading the Bluejackets’ Manual, learning the Navy language, learning the semaphore, washing clothes, preparing for inspection, keeping our bunks neat. The sheets had to be so tight that a half dollar would bounce on them. We were not allowed to sit on our bunks until after supper. There were benches in the middle of the barracks for sitting.”
Young boots also had to learn an entirely new vocabulary, Holman recalled: Floors became decks, walls became bulkheads, ceilings became overheads, halls became passageways, doors became hatches, ropes became lines, ahead was forward and behind was aft, toilets were heads, canteen was the ship’s store, the deck force were called swab jockeys, the electricians were sparks, signalmen were flags, afternoon and evening ashore was liberty, and days ashore were leave.18
“The officers were a little rough,” said Manuel Maroukis, who boasted of being born “with a silver spoon in my mouth” until his father, who owned restaurants and car dealerships, lost everything in the Great Depression and had to go to work as a stripper in a leather factory. Maroukis joined the Navy after talking to both Army and Navy men and realizing that “if you want to be clean, you go in the Navy. If you want to wind up kind of muddy, you go to the Army.” Maroukis added, “I decided to stay clean. If I was going to die, I’d die clean anyway.”19
“My reason for joining the Navy was I wanted to eat three square meals a day, and I didn’t want to live in dirt. So I didn’t want to go into the Army,” said Jersey City native Leonard Bulwicz, who joined right out of high school and served as quartermaster on board the destroyer escort USS Moore. Bulwicz also recalled that he felt a sense of patriotism. “I had a duty,” he said, especially after Pearl Harbor.20
But in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Great Lakes facility was filled to the brim with recruits who would have gone to other facilities had they been ready. As a result early recruits at the station suffered through a great many discomforts while construction was under way, including very long chow lines, no heat in their barracks, no hot water, and, sometimes, insufficient clothing to provide a full issue to each recruit.21
The lack of basic needs such as drinking water and waste disposal continued to plague the station well into 1944. In both cases demand overloaded available facilities, resulting in restrictions on water use in the barracks. Round-the-clock guards were posted in barracks to ensure that each recruit used no more than ten gallons of water per day. Water was pumped from Lake Michigan and in 1942 was cut off completely when the intake valve froze. A diver had to go down into the frigid waters to remove ice from the intake.22
Following 7 December 1941 and through 19 March 1944, the number of recruits showing up at the station varied from 10,000 to 40,000 per month, requiring an adjustment in the length of time recruits would be at the base. A six-week training period was in effect at the start of the war; however, this was shortened to four weeks and then to three weeks in order to accommodate the influx of recruits. All told, a boot’s stay at Great Lakes changed twenty-eight times over the course of the war.23 Because the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor left much of the United States’ military unprepared, early training materials at some of the service schools had not even arrived. One instructor at the electrician’s mate school was given nothing but scratch pads, pencils, a box of chalk, and two erasers and told to teach the recruits all they would need to know about being an electrician’s mate on board a ship—without the benefit of any written training manual.24
The Bluejackets’ Manual was one training manual in good supply. Given to each recruit upon arrival, the 1,145-page 1943 edition contained everything a recruit would need to know about the Navy and would be his “Bible” for his entire tour of duty. First produced in 1902, the manual has seen many revisions and is considered a “Navy primer” to this day. An important chapter for Navy men was titled “Learning to Swim,” which began, “If you can perform the physical training exercises used in the Navy you can learn to swim. All human beings other than the most decrepit, the crippled or the deformed possess all of the qualities needed to permit them to stay on the surface.”25
In theory it seems like every sailor should be able to swim, but only about half of the recruits arriving at boot camps knew how. By 1944 there were twelve swimming pools at the Great Lakes facility, one said to be the largest indoor swimming pool in the world, holding 587,000 gallons of water and stretching 165 feet long and 75 feet wide. “We had to throw away all of the books when we started to give lessons to thousands,” said Chief M. J. Howlett, who was in charge of the Great Lakes swimming program. “We had to develop a system of mass instruction which would teach nonswimmers to swim in the shortest possible time.” Nearly a million sailors were taught to swim at the facility, with 98 percent of them graduating as competent swimmers.26
For Jarvis Baillargeon of Keeseville, a tiny village in upstate New York about fifty miles from the Canadian border, being on water was second nature. Although he never had experienced the ocean, he had paddled a number of rowboats and canoes growing up in the Adirondack Mountains. Baillargeon, whose grandfather was a Civil War veteran and whose father operated a small grocery store in Keeseville, graduated from high school at sixteen and enrolled in Plattsburgh State Teachers College until he decided to join the Navy in November 1943.
“I decided to be a sailor rather than a soldier,” Baillargeon said, explaining that he would have been eligible for the draft when he turned eighteen in two months so decided he’d better sign up for the Navy before his Army “Greetings” letter arrived. “I raised my hand and swore allegiance to the United States Naval Reserve in Albany, New York, on November 17, 1943,” Baillargeon said. Within a few days he was shipped off on a steam train to the Navy’s training facility in Sampson, New York. Having experienced the snow and cold of Adirondack winters, he had hoped to be assigned to a warmer training facility in Florida. But the Navy had other ideas.
Sampson was a “flimsy operation,” obviously constructed with great haste following Pearl Harbor, Baillargeon said. “The barracks were just shells with a coal stove for heat,” he recalled. “Getting uniforms, shots and lots of lectures plus physical training filled our days, with occasional guard duty at night.” After boot camp and sonar school, Baillargeon was assigned to the USS Rudderow.27
Arriving at Sampson at about three in the morning, Brooklyn, New York, native John Acer and his fellow recruits were given the traditional “first meal” consisting of a bologna sandwich and an apple and then told to get a little sleep before reveille at 5:30 AM. Upon awakening, the recruits again were sworn into the U.S. Navy and then they began the hurried pace of abandoning all aspects of civilian life for their new life in the military.
“The first thing they did to you is they gave you a big pillowcase, a big sheet. You had to put all your clothes in it,” nineteen-year-old John Acer said. “They kept throwing all these things at you—underwear, pants, suits, jackets, sweaters, hats. They all kept coming at you.” Acer, who had just graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, grew up in a big family in the Parkville section of Brooklyn, but as he gazed at the camp, he realized he would be living with a much larger “family” now.
The young Brooklynite recalled that those early days in Sampson were “go, go, go, go from the time you get up until the time you go to bed. It never stopped.” After receiving his first military haircut, a battery of examinations, and tests, Acer and his fellow recruits started training for the day when they would be assigned to their first warship. “Everything was done by running, or walking very, very fast,” he said. “You do basic things. They would have knot classes, have classes where they take you out in a whaleboat and show you how to use oars and how to use the engine. They take you out to the rifle range and show you how to shoot, how to shoot a rifle and how to use a submachine gun.”
Cleaning the barracks and washing your own clothes came as a rude awakening for some recruits who grew up with their mother and others handling those everyday chores. “The chief boatswain’s mate would come down in a nice clean, brand-new white uniform and get down on the floor and roll over a couple of times,” Acer said, “and if he picked up any dirt or any mess on the floor on the clean whites, you’d be down there scrubbing it up again until you got it cleaned up.”
“I never had to do any of this work because my mother and father had maids,” one recruit said to the chief in charge of the barracks. “From now on,” the chief barked, “you will be my maid.”28
The young age of the recruits did cause some concern among officers, most of whom were relatively young themselves. Eleanor Roosevelt recalled her twenty-nine-year-old son, FDR Jr., visiting her after being installed as the skipper of the Ulvert M. Moore, a destroyer escort commissioned in July 1944: “I remember so well when that little ship of his was getting into commission in Brooklyn and he came over one day, looking rather weary, and announced that it was quite a problem having a crew whose average age was seventeen and a half, most of whom came from country areas or small towns and were seeing New York City for the first time in their lives.”29
Jerry Hammon was one of those teenage country boys who had never seen the big city. The nineteen-year-old son of a clothing store merchant in the small town of Logan, Ohio, was in his first year at Ohio State University when he decided he had better join the Navy before he received his Army draft notice. Hammon recalled that he had two ambitions in life: to be a naval officer and to become a physician. In those days, Hammon said, it was not common to become a naval officer and a physician unless you were fortunate enough to be chosen for the United States Naval Academy. Being from a relatively poor family with no political connections, Hammon instead applied and was admitted into the V-12 program. He was sent to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, before assignment to midshipmen school at Notre Dame. Commissioned an ensign in the fall of 1944, one of America’s “90-day wonders,” he was sent to sub-chaser school in Miami, Florida, where he learned to handle small ships. Hammon was assigned to the USS Otter.
Unfortunately it would take an unusually long time—full of false starts, frustration, and disappointments—before this newly minted ensign would actually step on board his ship. In fact, at times it seemed to Hammon like he was never going to go to sea as days stretched into weeks and then into almost two months—a full fifty-four days—until he finally boarded the destroyer escort. His saga begins following graduation from sub-chaser school, when Hammon was flown by a Navy air transport plane to New York City to pick up his ship. When he arrived the Otter already had set sail.
So the Navy put up the young ensign in a fancy Manhattan hotel for the next ten days in what turned out to be an exciting time for a poor country boy from Logan, Ohio. While staying in New York City, Hammon said, he painted the town and dated a girl who came from a wealthy family. One evening the girl’s father arranged for the young couple to have dinner in the Persian Room at the Plaza, where they were seated at a table alongside Irving Berlin, who was celebrating his fiftieth birthday, a remarkable eye-opener for a small-town country boy.
By this time the Otter had returned from sea and was docked in Boston. So the Navy told Hammon to pack his seabag and head to Boston to pick up his ship. But because of bad weather his airplane trip was delayed a couple of days and by the time he arrived in Bean Town, the Otter again had left. So the Navy put Hammon up at the Copely Plaza in Boston, where once again he sampled the city’s high life—again at government expense—until the Navy notified him that the Otter had returned to port and this time was waiting for him in Portland, Maine.
Climbing on board another Navy transport plane, Hammon made the relatively brief flight to Portland, where, again, he discovered his ship had sailed. But he wouldn’t be as lucky in Portland as he was in New York City and Boston. “It’s time you did something for the Navy,” an officer told Hammon, who was assigned to radio school on an island in Casco Bay, where he learned Morse code for about two weeks. Hammon was flown to an air base in Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, where he was to pick up the Otter. But when he arrived, just like the other three times, his ship was gone.
In Newfoundland without a ship, Hammon was assigned to the staff of an admiral of the North Atlantic Fleet, but there was simply no work for the young ensign. “Do you like to fish?” the admiral asked Hammon. He assigned the sailor a car and driver and outfitted him with fishing equipment and foulweather gear and sent him up in the mountains to go trout fishing. “I went trout fishing one day in the mountains and slipped on a log and fell in because there was still ice along the edges,” Hammon said. “I darned near got pneumonia and died, but I had a great time, caught all kinds of wonderful trout, and brought them back and the mess boys fixed them for chow.” Hammon also recalled the mess boys having lobster pots in the bay, and every Wednesday they had all the fresh lobsters they wanted for lunch.
But Hammon’s two-month odyssey lounging in fancy hotels, rubbing elbows with celebrities in five-star restaurants, trout fishing in the icy mountain waters of Newfoundland, and dining on all the lobster he could eat was about to come to an end. The USS Otter finally arrived in Argentia Bay and young Ens. Jerry Hammon was there to meet it and go on board as the ship’s sole ensign. Out to sea they went, and before long they encountered one of the worst storms Hammon had ever experienced, a storm so severe it cracked the hull of the destroyer escort and the tiny ship started to take on water. “I was on the flying bridge, tied on and looking up at the next wave coming right at me—and the flying bridge was forty-two feet above the sea level,” said Hammon, who had the midnight watch that day. “We cracked our hull like the old Liberty ships, which would go down when they cracked like that. But we didn’t, and took the ship into dry dock for repairs.”30
Despite their young age and inexperience these men were determined to serve, and many, such as young Martin Davis, who grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, went to great lengths in order to enlist. Growing up during the Great Depression, Davis remembers when “a penny would buy something, and three pennies would buy a lot.” Young Martin would watch workmen trudge past his house each morning, black lunch pails in hand, on their way to their jobs at the Singer Sewing Machine Company. They were lucky to have work. Many of the workmen smoked, but they could not afford a whole pack of cigarettes. “They would buy two or three or four cigarettes at a time,” Davis said.
Life was about to change for everyone, including Davis, on 7 December 1941. The fourteen-year-old boy was skating at the roller rink in Newark, listening to the organ music and enjoying a carefree Sunday afternoon, when suddenly, the Pearl Harbor announcement came over the public address system. Although most his friends did not know where Pearl Harbor was located, bright young Davis did, and he figured that if the Japanese were attacking there, it would not be long before they would be attacking other parts of the United States.
“I wanted to enlist,” Davis said, but of course he was too young. “I couldn’t wait to enlist. I dreamt of it every day.” Davis, whose brother was a Navy seaman captured and imprisoned by the Japanese, would have to wait a while longer before he would be at sea. But the New Jersey kid had more than his age to overcome before he would be able to enlist in any branch of the service. Davis had bad eyes.
Under the regulations in effect at the time for the Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, a recruit had to have 20/20 uncorrected vision. Davis’ vision was 20/70, unacceptable to all three branches. But bad eyesight was not going to keep Davis from joining, so the enterprising young man went to the recruiting offices and watched how recruits were examined. “I saw that they examined your eyes and they asked you to read the chart,” something he would not be able to do. An avid reader, Davis recalled an article in Popular Science about “invisible eyeglasses,” which turned out to be an early version of contact lenses. “I arranged to get a set of primitive contact lenses as part of an experimental patient,” Davis said. One day he took the train into New York City and asked to be included in the program. Plaster casts of his eyes were made, from which they crafted the lenses. “It brought my vision to 20/20, even though I ended up looking goggle-eyed, like Peter Lory.”
Davis chose to enlist in the Coast Guard because he believed he could better fool the recruiter after observing the method they were using to check recruits’ eyes. First they examined the eyes in one line, and then they told the prospective recruit to go into another line and read the eye chart. That gave Davis just enough time to slip in his contact lenses, which could be kept in the eyes for no more than three hours, without being noticed.
“Read the bottom line,” the recruiter barked. “How far down?” Davis asked. “As far down as you can go,” the recruiter said. “P-A-T,” Davis read, to which the recruiter exclaimed, “What are you reading?” Davis told him he was reading the bottom line. “You’re reading patent pending. You have a vision of 20/10, like a hawk.”
So young Martin Davis, who a few months earlier had been listening to the Shadow and Jack Benny on the radio with his family and had never been away from home, now suddenly was grown up. Seaman Second Class Davis was on board the USS Pettit, one of thirty DEs manned by the Coast Guard, and was on watch for prowling U-boats as the ship escorted convoys through the very dangerous waters between New York City and Londonderry, Ireland.31
Fellow Coast Guardsman Terry Thomas, the seventeen-year-old Detroit boy who had left his mother crying at the train station the day he left for boot camp, finished his training in Manhattan Beach, and on Christmas Eve 1943 he and his buddy Joe Smith boarded a cold, dirty train bound for the Norfolk Naval Base. “All of us were very quiet,” Thomas said. “We didn’t know at that time where we were going or why.” He added, “We heard that we were going to landing barge training. None of us wanted this,” noting that landing barges were being steered by Coast Guardsmen with little protection. “This was a heavy fatality job.”
That night on the train, Thomas sadly recalled, while the old steam train chugged through the lonely darkness, he thought of his family “and remembered all the wonderful Christmas Eves I had spent at home. They played Christmas music on the radio for us. I had never been, and have never been since, so lonely and homesick.”Three days later he and his pal Joe Smith would board a brand-new American warship, the destroyer escort USS Rhodes. As his ship pulled away from the dock and headed out into the vast open ocean, Thomas could not help but remember the words of his crying mother only a few weeks earlier as he climbed on board that old steam train and headed to boot camp “like lambs being led to the slaughter.”32