I was from Wisconsin, but I was working in Texas when I enlisted in the Navy’s V-7 Officer’s Candidate program. I was gonna be drafted, but I preferred to be in the Navy. I liked boats. However, the real reason I joined the program was that I thought I was smart enough to get a commission. They put me in the V-7 class at Northwestern University starting September 15, 1941.
On December 7, I was home on a seventy-two-hour pass, and my future wife Peg and I were out riding in the beautiful Wisconsin countryside. We had planned to be married in July, but once I went into the Navy program we realized we would have to wait until I was commissioned. It was about three o’clock when we heard the news from Pearl Harbor, and we were just stunned.
The V-7 cadets all had to be back at eight o’clock that Sunday evening, and when we were called to assembly, Captain Wygant, who had been brought back from retirement to head the school, gave us about a fifteen-minute talk. It was packed with emotion about what we had to prepare ourselves for, and that the war wasn’t going to be over in a hurry. He concluded with a prayer for those who had died at Pearl Harbor, saying, “No greater love hath any man!” That’s how he ended, and I’ll never forget it!
I don’t think I was afraid. The war was a helluva long distance away, and with all the necessary training in between there wasn’t time to be afraid. We knew that war was grim. Still, we’d been jolted from relatively mundane lives into a kind of adventure, and we were regarded by people as heroes just by being in uniform.
When I finished Midshipman’s School I stood fairly high in my class and had some choice in the type of duty I would have. Destroyers sounded good, sounded macho, the fighting fleet, a ship of the line, and all that, and so I asked for and got destroyers. But they didn’t yet have enough to go around, and I had to wait for new construction. In the meantime they sent me to torpedo school in Rhode Island. The day after graduation Peg and I were married. I had my ensign’s stripe, and in the dead of winter we reported to Newport, Rhode Island, on our honeymoon.
I reported to the USS Gherardi, DD637, a brand-new 1,630-ton Bristol Class destroyer commissioned in September 1942. The skipper, a man by the name of Captain J. W. Schmidt, was one of the finest men I’ve ever known. He took a liking to me and taught me ship handling, and to me ship handling was the compensation for being at sea!
This was probably the fastest destroyer ever built. Our chief engineer was a Scotsman, John McGinnis MacKenzie, who had been chief engineer of the liner America—which later became the West Point. And Mac was a marvelous engineer! With the result that on our full-time trials, we made 42 3 turns per minute in that destroyer, which is the equivalent of 42.3 knots (over 48 miles per hour)! We ran those trials on the way from the Philadelphia Navy Yard to Boston. We had a fairly smooth sea, but I was seasick as a dog. I wanted to crawl off that ship at Boston and die!
I was torpedo officer and assistant gunnery officer. And one time the captain looked at me and said, “Oz, you go down to your bunk. You’re so God-damned green, you’re makin’ me sick!” After a week or so I was able to function, but I was still God-damned sick! And so were most all of the landlubbers on the ship!
For our first war service the Gherardi was assigned to the North Atlantic Patrol. I don’t think I ever got as scared in combat as I did in some of those storms where the waves were higher than the ship. We also took part in the North African and Sicilian campaigns, and the landings in Italy.
We arrived back in August 1943, and I was ordered to new construction on the West Coast, the USS Cassin. This was a reconstruction of the destroyer Cassin that was so heavily damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact it was so damaged that about the only thing left of the original was the nameplate. They should have abandoned it and not built another 1,500-tonner. They were impractical, and as a result, we got all the crappy jobs in the Pacific that nobody else wanted.
The ship wasn’t gonna be ready right away, so they sent me to fire control school, where I was going to become a gunnery officer. I went to the school for a month and then returned to put the Cassin in commission— as gunnery officer! The executive officer was supposed to have done this, but he had come down with mumps and was out of things almost throughout the shakedown. All this, and I was still a lieutenant junior grade! Later on I was promoted to full lieutenant. But, you know, Navy promotions were based on time-in-grade with virtually no merit promotions. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t have the responsibility. And serving in two jobs wasn’t bad for me. I was a good gunnery officer. In fact, I was good enough with a rifle that on every ship I served on I was the mine-killer. We always sank mines with an M-1 Gar and rifle, and when they saw one they would call, “Leverenz, report to the bridge with your rifle!”
We put the ship into commission out at Mare Island.
We shook-down at San Diego and got out to Hawaii in April 1944, and then we were heading west. We were to escort the battleship California from Pearl out to Eniwetok, and while we were waiting for her to get ready they sent us out for a couple of nights of full radar practice shoots. Commodore Roland Smoot, for whom we had a lot of respect, came along to observe. They’d have a seagoing tug tow a radar target, which was a screen about fifteen feet high and maybe twenty feet long. They’d tow it along at a good speed, and we’d shoot it full at night by radar alone. The tow vessel is only 1,500 feet ahead of the target and at a distance of 10,000 yards, or about six land miles. And, well, our radar wasn’t working right. The image was jiggling all around, and we couldn’t tell the tow vessel from the target vessel. When we came in on the firing round the captain said to me, over the phone, “Commence firing.”
I said, “Captain, we can’t fire right now, we’re having difficulty with our fire control radar.”
He said, “God damn it, I said commence firing!”
I said, “Captain, we are endangering lives on the tow vessel if we commence firing!”
He said, “That’s an order!”
I stuck my head out of the gun director, and he was right down about ten feet below me. I said, “All right, if you want to kill twenty-two men like happened just last week on this same kind of exercise, you can come up here and do it yourself! I ain’t a-gonna do it!” And I climbed out of the director and came down from the bridge.
Commodore Smoot looked at me and never said a word, and I knew I was within my rights. But the captain said, “Report to your quarters! You’re under suspension!” So, I went, and I don’t know just what transpired then, but I was told that the commodore recommended to the captain that we abort the exercise.
Well, I rode all the way out to Eniwetok reading Navy Regulations and some novels, catching up on my sleep and this sort of thing. The captain never talked to me, and I assumed I was gonna get a General Court for disobeying orders. But those sailors killed only a week before in the same kind of situation told me what I’d done was right.
When we got out to Eniwetok we were gonna sortie with a fast-carrier task force that had thirty-six destroyers in its screen. And, what do you know, our captain was the senior destroyer skipper and, under the screen commander, would be in command of it. By that time, I was a full lieutenant, and I heard him over the ship’s address system, “Lieutenant Leverenz, report to the bridge!”
I came up to the bridge and the captain said, “Oz, take the conn. I’ve got responsibilities in addition to our ship, and I need a good ship handler.”
I said, “Captain, I can’t do that.”
“What the hell do you mean, you can’t do that?”
I said, “Well, under Naval Regulations, I’m suspended from all duties!” He said, “We’ll talk about that some other time!”
I said, “I’m under suspension, under your orders, and I’m putting myself in a bad position if I do anything wrong.”
“All right!” he said. “Suspension is lifted! Take the conn!”
I was just tickled to death, and I never heard about it again.
Then came the Saipan campaign. We didn’t do much there, but we did at Tinian, which followed right after Saipan was secured. The Marines landed there on August 24 and ran into trouble with enemy soldiers hidden in caves. The Cassin was given the job of helping them out with artillery. Some Marine gunnery officers who knew the territory came aboard to help me pick the caves to shoot into.
We were only about 1,000 yards offshore, and so first, before we would shoot into a cave, our Japanese interpreter would call out in Japanese over a bullhorn, “Come out, and you won’t be hurt. You’ll be treated under the Geneva Convention.” But it didn’t faze ‘em a damn bit! The Japanese soldiers would not come out, nor would they let any civilians out either. But with those soldiers slipping out every night to kill Marines, we had no choice but to shoot into the caves.
In early October we were sent with three heavy cruisers, the Salt Lake City, Chester, and Pensacola, and seven other destroyers to make a raid on Marcus Island. This operation was a little scary. Marcus was only some 500 miles from Japan, and we were given no air cover. Instead they gave us a bunch of balloons to release. We got up there at night and were to release these balloons, so if they had radar on the island the Japanese would think we had aircraft! I don’t know who thought that one up or who they thought they were fooling, but we released them over the island. We got back counter-battery fire, and a helluva lot of it! That island was just covered with guns! They had guns, I’d estimate, up to 6-inch, but they were not that accurate. And so we bombarded them quite a bit, but how much damage we did I don’t know.
The captain of the destroyer Downes was going in to clean out the boat basin. Going in to 6,000 yards—that’s three miles—and that was pretty God damn close under those big guns! I was up in my seat in the Fire Director looking into the boat basin through the range finder. And I called down to the captain and said, “Captain, there isn’t a God damn thing in that boat basin! I can’t even see anything as big as a rowboat!” The captain called the Downes and said, “Commander, our range finder can’t see anything in the boat basin!”
He answered, “We’re goin’ in to clean out the boat basin!” So we both went in with our guns blazing. Every time I looked over at the Downes she was just a sheet of fire, and we must’ve looked the same way! We were shooting at every flash we saw of counter-battery fire. We got in to 6,000 yards, and there wasn’t anything in the boat basin. Then as we started going out, a shell hit about 300 or 400 yards outboard of us. Then a shell hit about 300 or 400 yards inboard of us. I said, “Captain, you’d better start zigzagging, because they’ve got us straddled!” He started, and the next shell hit right where we had been!
When the invasion of Leyte and the Battle of Leyte Gulf came along we weren’t much involved in it. We were off to the south with Admiral McCain’s Task Force 38 screening his aircraft carriers while they attacked a Japanese fleet in Sulu and Sibuyan seas moving toward Leyte.
We bombarded Iwo Jima in early December, several months before it was invaded, and we never had a shot fired back at us. However, some planes did take off from Iwo. A couple of torpedo bombers and a couple of fighters came at the task force. I don’t know who shot ‘em down, but with everybody shooting at ‘em, they just disappeared.
Then we went down to Guam and were tied up beside the destroyer Ellet when orders came through naming me her executive officer. The Ellet was an old destroyer, and quite a famous one. She had been one of the escorts of the Hornet when they took off for the Doolittle Raid. We put the Ellet in good shape, but still we were an old ship and junior in the squadron, so we got all the shitty jobs, like being on harbor patrols when everybody else had liberty, and all that kind of stuff. Then because the Ellet had been out there all during the war, we were sent back to the States. I’d understood I was to be given command of the Ellet, and I had always wanted my own command, but on the very day we arrived at Mare Island the first atom bomb was dropped. Then when they were repairing the engines they accidentally dropped one on the concrete dock, and I knew then that the Ellet would never go to sea again.
So I told the captain I wanted to get out, and he said, “Have you seen your new orders? I am commander of the squadron of Fleet Minesweepers, and I have asked for you to be Division commander. How does that strike you?”
And I said, “I still want out.”
So, I went to Great Lakes and was released. I then went to work for the Arthur Andersen Company and stayed with them until I retired.
I am proud of my service, and proud of what I did. Aside from occasional bouts of fear, I think the worst of it was being away from home so long, and the boredom. Someone once said life in the Navy in wartime consists of alternately being scared to death and bored to death. I think that is a good description, but I wouldn’t take anything for having been a part of it all.