ABOVE: Wartime photo of Clarence Cook, USN.
I was in the Navy, in the armed guard, assigned to man the guns on civilian Merchant Marine cargo ships. A lot of people don’t know that Navy gun crews were on Merchant Marine ships all during the war. I was in a 5-inch gun crew on the Hastings, a Victory ship, which was a cargo ship. They made hundreds of Liberty and Victory ships during the war, and these ships kept the war going. They were hauling cargo all over the world.
I made two trips across the Pacific on the Hastings. The Merchant Marine crew was a rough bunch, but the captain and the officers were good. Those of us in the armed guard kept to ourselves on the ship. We had our own quarters near the back of the ship, and we ate by ourselves also. We had an unfortunate incident on the Hastings where one of the cooks tried to molest a little guy, an oiler in the engine room. The captain was really angry and said this just couldn’t happen on his ship. So, we got to Eniwetok and the captain wanted to get rid of this cook, offload him. The Navy officers there on the island said that if they took him he would probably be killed. They said that they only had one palm tree left after the invasion, but that it would probably fit him. So the captain told this cook that if he bothered anyone he would be shot, and the cook didn’t cause any more trouble!
On our first trip across the Pacific, we loaded in San Francisco a mixed cargo of some ammunition and some beer, but they didn’t tell us which hold the beer was in! They also loaded some cots and a lot of vehicles, Jeeps and trucks. They loaded them with ramps up onto the deck. Of course, that made us very top heavy, but that didn’t seem to stop them. We went across the Pacific and stopped just briefly in Hawaii. We anchored right across from the old Arizona, and a lot of her superstructure was still sticking out above the water. I got shore leave and took a bus out to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki. I got a Coke at the Red Cross tent out there and had a look at the hotel. What a place! The Navy was in there, and the submarine guys had taken a lot of it over. I tried to get into the bar but it was full and I couldn’t get in.
Then we continued on to the Philippines and stopped somewhere near Leyte. They brought barges out to start unloading the vehicles with a big crane. When the first Jeep they unloaded got down to the barge, an Army guy there unbolted the windshield and just pitched it into the water! I guess they didn’t like windshields on their Jeeps.
On our second trip we loaded ammunition and had a straight run to Okinawa, no stops, and we were zigzagging all the way. We were joking that all the zigzagging was in case we blew up we wouldn’t take any other ships with us. We were really a floating bomb. We didn’t actually go to Okinawa but to a little island nearby. We unloaded on this island, but there was no dock. There was an airstrip though, and they said this was the island where Ernie Pyle was killed. I found out later it was Ie Shima. Barges came out and unloaded the ammo. We had to watch for scrap and floating boxes in the water, and every morning we’d shoot anything like that we saw. Otherwise the Japanese would hide themselves and come floating out on that scrap and climb up the anchor chains. It took us ten days to unload all that ammo, and LSMS made smoke to hide us from Jap airplanes. We had trained on our guns to defend the ship, but we were under orders not to shoot at any planes because they could follow the tracers down to the Hastings under the smoke screen.
One day a Zero was snooping around and one of the smoke-making LSMS opened fire with a 20mm machine gun. Well, hell, the plane could easily avoid the fire from one machine gun, and it came swooping in low under the smoke and saw us. The captain of the 3-inch gun crew couldn’t resist and had his crew open fire. They made a clean hit and blew the Zero out of the sky. It was like it was there one minute and then—poof—gone in a big explosion. It was quite a shot! We thought for sure they would catch hell for breaking orders about not shooting, but the commanding officer of the Navy armed guard didn’t say anything about it.
After that, parts of the plane came floating by the ship. There was part of a wing, a piece of canvas like from a seat belt, and, can you believe it, a parachute—from a suicide plane! There were also these little antipersonnel bomblets. Some of our Navy guys went over the side and got the stuff out of the water to keep the sides of the ship clear of debris, so the bombs wouldn’t go off. Then they put the bombs on the barges to be taken ashore. We never did get over to Okinawa itself, but we could hear firing in the distance and see the light of flamethrowers at night.
On our way back from Okinawa we headed for Samoa, and that involved crossing the equator, which meant the famous Neptune Party to mark the crossing of the equator. If you had never been across the equator before, you were a Pollywog, and you had to be initiated into King Neptune’s Realm of the Bounding Main. Everyone on the ship who had already been across the equator and initiated, they were called Shellbacks. So, the way this worked was that the Shellbacks made life miserable for the Pollywogs. I was a Pollywog, and they were going to make me miserable!
The first thing was that the Pollywogs were smeared with thick, sticky bunker oil. Then they cursed at us and read our violations that we deserved punishment for. One of my main violations was that I was from Texas, and this really made me a target. The Shellbacks decided I needed to be punished for this, and they ruled I was to be thrown overboard. I was blindfolded, and they hauled me up some ladders to what seemed like a high point on the ship. All this time I figured they were just trying to scare me so I went along with it. But then they made me stand on the edge of something and pushed me off—I flew right into the air and hit the water! I couldn’t believe they had actually pitched me over the side! I ripped off the blindfold and realized they had rigged a float cover filled with seawater on the deck below a gun tub. They had pushed me off the edge of the gun tub and into this thing on the deck filled with water. It scared the shit out of me since I thought they had really pushed me overboard. There was a lot of laughing, of course, but I didn’t find it very funny. So, after this, all of us Pollywogs got a diploma stating that we were now Shellbacks. On later trips I got to do the initiating, especially when we took some Army guys back later in the war.
So, then we pulled into Samoa. It had been quite a while since we had seen females of any type, so we were looking forward to seeing some real island beauties when we got to Samoa. We pulled into Pago harbor and it looked like a tropical paradise. There were huge green mountains all around the bay, palm trees along the shore, and some white beaches. There was a naval hospital there, and the governor’s house was on a hill overlooking the bay. The docks were up along one side of the bay, and as we got close to the docks we could see people on the pier. We saw what looked to be topless island women in wraparound skirts, and they seemed to be waving their skirts at us. We all started cheering. It was like a dream come true. But then as we got closer to the dock, what we thought were topless Samoan maidens turned out to be Samoan men! They weren’t wearing shirts, but they were wearing wraparound skirts all right. It turns out both men and women wear these types of skirts they call lava-lavas on Samoa. The men were actually in a band playing tunes to welcome us. I guess that shows you how long we had been at sea without women, to mistake a bunch of Samoan men in a band for topless women!
The water in Pago harbor was crystal clear and beautiful. I could look over the side and see way down deep into the water where these big fish were swimming around. We got shore leave, and the first thing that happened was that I was almost killed on the dock. A Jeep-load of Marines, drunk on something the locals called “tuba,” were racing around like idiots and just about ran me down. I had to jump out of the way at the last minute or I would have been a casualty right there in Samoa!
From Samoa we went on to Panama City. But then they reassigned me from the Hastings to an old merchant marine oiler, and back out across the Pacific I went, still a member of the Navy armed guard and still on a civilian ship. Our captain on that oiler was a real alcoholic. Nobody ever saw him until we docked at San Pedro, and two of the Merchant Marine officers had to help him down off the ship.
After that I was assigned to a Navy ship—finally. In all my time in the Navy I had never been on a Navy ship! It was an LSM and it had a Navy crew. We were supposed to take it up to San Francisco for decommissioning. Just after we left San Pedro and got into open water, a seam opened up right near the rudder, and the ship started taking on water. All hands had to muster that night to man the pumps, and we pumped water out of that ship all the way to San Francisco. We finally got it there where it was decommissioned, and that was the end of the war for me.