CLARENCE “DUDE” STORLA
COAST GUARD

I learned how to be a machinist of sorts, and then I went out to the West Coast, where I was working at the Bremerton Navy Yard, across Puget Sound from Seattle. This was in the first part of 1942, and I was boarding at a place where the landlord was in the Coast Guard. I got to know about the Coast Guard from him and was told that it was tougher to get into than the Navy. But I didn’t want to go into the Navy. At that point I was deferred by working in a defense place, but I didn’t know how long I’d be deferred. And I didn’t want to be in the Army, particularly the Infantry. So one night, some of us were playing poker and drinking all night, and I don’t know what happened. We got patriotic or something, and we took the ferryboat across to Seattle and enlisted in the Coast Guard right then and there!

So I went to boot camp in a place called Port Townsend. And they had tough boot camps, tougher than the Navy from what I understand. You had to learn to do a little bit of everything. You had to learn to signal, both the semaphore and lights, and learn to handle small boats.

Then I was sent to Portland, Oregon, and assigned to what they call Captain of the Port, which is mostly guarding docks. We were big buddies with the Russians then, and a lot of Russian ships were coming in, particularly some of those that had been beat up in the Murmansk run, and I was guarding some of those. I carried a .38 and a big, long billy club. It was good duty, but I felt I wanted something else. So after a few months, someone advised me to go to school. I was just a seaman second by that time, but I wasn’t aboard a ship. I wanted sea duty, I guess. So I went to Seattle and took a bunch of tests. I remember the officer said to me, “You ever been to college?” I said, “No.” None of my people had ever been to college. He says, “Well, on this reading comprehension test you got the highest grade ever to go through the Thirteenth Naval District.” I said, “That’s good?” Well, I always had done a lot of reading. So he says, “Boy, you could go to any school you wanted to.” So, he named off some schools and said, “There’s one open in New York City: Water Tender.” “That’s for me,” I says. I didn’t know what a water tender was, but I knew what New York City was!

So, they sent me there. And it turned out it was for steam machinist. Well, I already knew some outside machine stuff. The Navy water tenders were the guys who ran the stills—the evaporators. And so I ended up getting the water tender rate and later first class fireman. I was always a good seaman, but I didn’t take any crap from anybody, and they didn’t like that insubordination. I threw an officer over the side once, or at least threatened to. You get a lot of smart asses in the service. They think that just because they got rank they can do anything, and I don’t take crap from anybody.

Then we were going to go over to Europe, and we went down to Pier 92. I don’t know what happened, but they changed the orders for a small group of us and sent us down to Algiers, Louisiana, right across from New Orleans, to a Naval repair base.

There was an LST that had been commissioned in Pittsburgh, and they’d taken her down the rivers there to New Orleans and to Algiers, and it was going out. I think I was scheduled to go out on a patrol frigate, but some other water tender got in a fight and was thrown in the brig, so they needed a water tender in a hurry. I volunteered and ended up on LST 831, an all-Coast Guard ship. And we took off for Theodore, Alabama, which was an ammo depot. We loaded that LST to the gunnels with ammo of various kinds, powder and shells, and you could barely crawl from one end of that ship to the other. It was a great big floating bathtub, and it was really loaded. They said, “Okay, you’re taking this out to the Caroline Islands.” And so we had nobody with us, no convoy, no nothing. If we get there, fine. If we don’t, they only lost one ship.

So we take off for the Panama Canal, and I don’t know if they knew what we were carrying. We went through the canal and came back up the West Coast to San Diego. Our skipper walked around with six-guns, and he thought he was kind of strong. He was a wiry fellow. When he got up in the morning—usually he slept up on the signal bridge on a little cot—he’d go up the mast to the crow’s nest and survey his little empire, and then he’d come down hand-over-hand on a cable, down to the signal bridge. So I got up there one night and greased the cable real good with a mix of this graphite grease stuff.

Well, the next morning the captain got up as usual, went up to the crow’s nest, looked around, and then swung over to go hand-over-hand down the cable. Well, he hit that cable, and he went down like greased lightning, and at the bottom he hit and bounced! But it helped to break the boredom and monotony, you see.

So, we’d do anything just to break the monotony. A lot of the people would sleep. Some of those guys got so they could sleep almost all the time they weren’t on duty or eating. I worked out. I had the machinist carve me out some weights. I also read a lot. And I’d write. I’d write these long letters home, and the officers would pass them around. I was a good writer, I guess, college material and didn’t even know it. And so they asked me if I wanted to be a correspondent. You know, just to write up lies to send home.

So, I’d take a photographer, and he’d take a picture of a guy at whatever island we pulled into, and I’d ask, What’s your name? What’s your hometown? And then you’d put words into his mouth: “Don’t worry about me, Mom,” and all that. One time I got carried away and wrote it up the way I saw it. Guys going over the side, scared, counting their rosary, officers having to force them over, crying some, you know, all about these kids. I wrote it all up. The skipper called me in and said, “Who do you think you are? Hemingway? “So I had to go back to what’s your name, what’s your hometown, and so on. That’s when we became publicity ship of the flotilla.

We were at Okinawa on D-Day. Then we’d go back to the Philippines, and to Saipan. During the first part of the war we hauled around Marines, but later soldiers, mostly. We took Marines in on D-Day at Okinawa. We had amtracs and stuff topside. Jeeps and trucks. Once we even had a little Piper Cub that a Marine sergeant flew. At Okinawa, it was Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day. First day of April 1945. And I knew we were going in the next morning because I overheard the officers. So I told this little Marine sergeant—he was a short, husky guy like I was and a weight lifter—and he flew this little reconnaissance artillery spotter plane, and so he says, “God, I got this bottle of rum in my plane box.” So, I went down to the galley and got some fruit juice, and we sat in a Jeep, which was chained topside, and I felt no pain that next morning when I went onshore driving an LCVP ! I’d drive that thing in to the beach, sometimes as cox’n and sometimes I was manning a little 30mm on it.

Sometimes our LST would go right up on the beach and open the doors and unload, but not always. You see, at Okinawa we laid offshore and opened the bow doors and ramp, and the amtracs went into the water out there and drove in. In fact, they laid down smoke, did a feint, and then people walked ashore. There was tough fighting later. We stayed a quarter-mile off the beach in our LST.

But, at any rate, here we were, beached up there at Okinawa. And we’d been unloading supplies and so on. This was at least our second time at Okinawa. And it was all secure, and there were all kinds of amphibious craft lined up and down. And I looked down the beach and I see a little LCI there, which was carried on a larger ship. I was up in the con with the skipper, and I says, “My God, there’s my brother.” And he says, “Are you sure?” I said, “I knew he was in the Navy, but I didn’t know he was here.” I mean, it was quite a coincidence, you know?

And so he says, “Take a photographer and go over there and get a picture, and we’ll have a nice story out of this.” So I went over, and it was hot as hell out on that beach. And I still have the picture that went back Stateside, my brother and me there on Saipan. What a coincidence that was.

We were under attack by Kamikaze planes a lot. I remember shooting at Kamikaze planes, because they’d usually come in the early morning when it was barely getting light, or at night when it was getting dark.

But what our people didn’t realize was that there were also Kamikaze swimmers and Kamikaze speedboats. We captured one of those speedboats, took the ammo out of it, and the skipper used it for a gig. Sometimes we’d station people at night around the edge of the ship with BARS with orders to shoot anything that moves. Of course, we laid down smoke a lot, too.

But there would still be raids coming over. I remember going to sleep topside after it got dark. We weren’t supposed to do that, but it was hot down below—so hot you couldn’t touch the bulkhead, sometimes. I’d sneak up and sleep in the gun tubs, and I’d see those planes come over and then the searchlights would catch them, you know, like spiders in a web, but I’d hunker down and go to sleep.

I didn’t like the service in terms of the bureaucracy and in terms of the stuff you had to put up with, which was so silly sometimes. Just someone showing off their power. When I was broken the last time, the skipper caught me reading on watch. There wasn’t anything to do. It was the middle of the night. He said, “What are you reading?” And I said, “I’m reading Caesar’s Commentaries in the Latin.” I’d had two years of Latin in my little old country town. “Ahh, dirty stories,” he says. And I guess they were, Caesar’s Commentaries in Latin. But he was impressed. He was educated, and most of the people onboard weren’t. I was self-educated, in a way, and I’d read more than almost anybody aboard.

And so he would order me to stand watch with him during the night, so he would have someone to talk to. But I didn’t want to talk to him, just because he ordered me. So he’d say, “Storla, would you mind standing watch with me tonight?” And then we’d finally get to talking. I remember one time during the day, it was kinda hot and we were standing there, and there were some seamen down there chipping paint, which was a never-ending task aboard ship. They were working just hard enough to be technically defined as working. And he says, “Look at those lazy Joes. They’ll never amount to anything.” I said, “Well, why should they? They have nothing to look forward to. Why should they knock themselves out?” And he said, “Awwww, that’s just the way they are.” I said, “Tell them that when they finish that section there, they can have the day off.” You know, they can’t get too many rewards at sea, except maybe sack time. Free time. Being on a ship is like being in prison, in a way. So he said, “Aw, it won’t work. They’ll just sleep.” But he sent the bo’sun down there, and the bo’sun told them the plan. Pretty soon we looked back down there and, “Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip.” The paint chips were flying! And those guys finished that section in record time! The skipper was so mad that I was right. And right there I learned something. Later on I taught Industrial Sociology for a long time, after I got my doctorate, and I did some consulting for companies. And this is a basic sociological truism, that you catch more flies with syrup.

We’d pick up this mutton—greasy mutton from Australia—and that was enough to make you sick. We didn’t get much fresh stuff. We looked forward to “Pogey bait,” which was candy, and “Gedunks,” which was ice cream made from powdered milk. And there was “Horse coffee” and “shit on a shingle.” I still like it. Most people don’t. Our food was so bad that we would steal K-rations and C rations from the Army as delicacies.

I remember sitting out on nice warm tropical nights when it was calm and the water would be fluorescent. We’d be blacked out most of the time because there were enemy around. But one time I was sitting there on the fantail talking with a few of the guys, and surprisingly not too much about women. We had some Army guys aboard, and this Army guy comes out while we’re talking. He’s naked and he’s got a Bible in his hand, and he looks over and says to us, “Good evening,” and then he steps over the rail and jumps right down into the ocean, just like that! We reported it right away, but we were in convoy and there was nothing we could do. They wouldn’t stop because we were in convoy, and if they tried to find him the next day he’d have been long gone. In addition to that guy, on another trip we had a couple of guys who went berserk and had to be carried down and tied to their bunks.

When we were anchored off Saipan I was real happy to see those B-29s taking off early in the morning. And they’d take off and get in formation, and much later we’d hear them straggling back. But I was glad to see them taking off to bomb Japan, because at least the war was getting closer to the end.

We used to listen to Tokyo Rose on the radio. She’d play some songs we hadn’t heard before. Often the first time I heard songs that really became popular was Tokyo Rose playing them. We got a kick out of her; we enjoyed her. She helped our morale.

We had movies on the ship. Sometimes the same one over and over! We’d get Tall in the Saddle. I saw that damned movie so many times I couldn’t believe it. We’d find another ship and go alongside and throw a line over and transfer movies.

I remember one time we were coming back from some island pretty empty, and the skipper now had his own Jeep—well, actually, we’d stolen it from the Army and had it down on the tank deck. Somehow it got loose. The ship was wallowing around, and that Jeep was running around on its own, and we were trying to run and grab it. It would come at you. It’s like it had eyes!

After the war we made it all the way back across the Pacific. We got back to the States, went to ‘Frisco, and later took the ship through the Canal and decommissioned her in Orange, Texas.

After the war this buddy of mine from the ship and I hung around together for awhile, and we were working in San Francisco. And I finally said, “I’m going to go to college, use the GI bill, and see what college is like.” He said, “I don’t want to go to college.” He says, “I’ll stick around and work and help you.” I said, “No, you better take off, Butch.” His name was Butcher. I’ve never heard from him since. Hell of a nice guy. We were really good buddies.

I went through five different majors. First I went into journalism. People were teaching me how to write for newspapers, and I never worked for a newspaper. Then I went into English. That was when the “new criticism” was on, and they didn’t want to talk about the milieu of the writer, just the internal work, and I thought that was dumb. I was interested in the social setting of literature, and literature is still one of my first loves. Sociology and literature are my hobbies. I really wanted to be a writer.

You develop a certain camaraderie with the people you serve with on the ship. You didn’t get along with everybody, necessarily, but you had to tolerate each other because it was a little world, you see? You were self-contained pretty much. And you swore that you would be buddies to the death and that you would look each other up, but it didn’t work out that way. I tried looking up a few people after the war, but the situation was too different. I went to Des Moines and looked up this guy—he was a water tender, too, and he was married. And I said, “Hey, Robbie, you remember that night in Copa Solo?” And he stopped me, “Shhhhh,” because his wife was there.

We weren’t like the guys in Europe who had it bad a lot of times. But still, they were in “civilization” and we were on one tropical island after another, and nothing looked even vaguely familiar. Sometimes we’d go ashore and have a couple of cans of warm beer, but there was nothing there. Even Manila wasn’t much, and Tokyo wasn’t much, so we didn’t even have a real liberty. But I did talk to some Chamorros in the Marianas, even though we weren’t supposed to fraternize. And I talked to quite a few Filipinos in Panay and Tacloban. I was curious about their way of life and so on. Most of the guys aboard ship just called them a bunch of “gooks,” you know?

And I often think this has had something to do with me going into sociology and anthropology. I ended up teaching anthropology in Wisconsin, and I was always curious about the different people and cultures I saw in the Pacific. You see, I was a green country kid from Minnesota, and out there on those islands were people with quite different ways of life, even though I didn’t have a chance to see too much of it. And if I hadn’t been in the Coast Guard during the war, that wouldn’t have happened to me. I mean, I wouldn’t have gone around the world. One reason I went back to LSU for my doctorate was because I’d been stationed at Algiers, Louisiana, and I used to go over to New Orleans. I wanted to get away from those cold winters, and besides, you see, I had the GI bill from being in the service. That GI bill was worth it alone.