I was on North Atlantic patrol before the war started, in Battleship Division Three, onboard the USS New Mexico. I think we were about 300 miles off the coast of England when the officer of the deck got on the horn and shouted down, “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” I was sitting next to a chief petty officer who said, “Boy, that guy is in real, real trouble.” The impregnable Pearl Harbor? He really thought the guy was kidding. He said, “The Japanese couldn’t attack Pearl Harbor.” And then all of a sudden, on comes the skipper, and he told us all about it. So we immediately turned around and headed back.
Shortly after that, I went around to the Pacific and was assigned to a beautiful ship, the submarine tender USS Sperry. Right after Pearl Harbor, about the only fighting ships in the Pacific were the submarines, and the Sperry would have to service them to keep them out there.
When the guys got off patrol, we’d have ice cream and fruit and apples and everything else down there for them. We would have extra submarine crews and everything else that went onboard submarines. We’d keep those long periscopes in crates on deck. We had a torpedo shop and also a huge machine shop below decks. They did everything on that ship. It was absolutely incredible. But those damn torpedoes never worked very well. They discovered later that the torpedoes were running too deep.
I got to the Pacific in June of 1942. We got to Hawaii, and the contrasts I saw were incredible. The first thing in my mind about Hawaii was all the advertising I’d seen, hula girls and palm trees and beautiful things like that. There was no question about it, the hills of Hawaii looked beautiful as we came in. And then you started getting into the channel that goes into Pearl, and all of a sudden you saw the overturned Oklahoma. It just made me sick, because there were still guys trapped in there. It just made me feel that this is what I’m here for. This is what the real game is. And it made me mad as hell. Man’s inhumanity to man. I could never understand that. And I still don’t to this day. And no matter how many times I’d go ashore, I would just have that lousy feeling.
And I can remember that when I got to Pearl we were put on some detail, because the harbor wasn’t very well cleaned up yet. This was April or May of 1942, and I can remember working by the Shaw. I remember that terrible odor. It was the first time I ever smelled dead human beings, and it was awful, absolutely terrible. I said to myself, “My God. Those were people.”
So the first chance I got after we hit Pearl, I took a bus tour around the island, and I took photos out the bus window. God, I liked Hawaii. I thought that it was pretty sharp. When Artie Shaw was in Pearl Harbor, I used to sing with the Shaw Band. I had played in a trio with Louie Armstrong many years ago, with Louie’s first wife, Lil. I was a drummer. She was a pianist. I knew Gene Krupa. I knew all those great musicians.
So we left Hawaii and headed farther out into the Pacific, and I fell in love with the Pacific. I thought this was an absolutely tremendous place. I used to watch that water, and the flying fish. And at nighttime I’d look out at the sky. You can’t believe that the sky is so gorgeous, the stars and everything. Then when you’d look at your wake, you’d see the phosphorescence, all these little lights in the water glowing behind you. This was a contrast to those giant black North Atlantic waves that could just consume you. I liked those Pacific nights on deck. They were incredible. I’ve seen the Southern Lights, and I’ve seen the Southern Cross. I’ve been “Down Under.” When I was in Majuro I would go swimming in that warm water, and I would put those goggles on and look down at that coral and couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It was just a whole new world for a guy who grew up living in the city of Chicago.
So we’re cruising along out in the middle of the damn ocean, and they decide they’re going to have this great big “crossing the ‘Line’ ceremony,” you know, an equator-crossing ceremony, a Neptune party. And I’ll never forget standing next to the rail with the engineering officer, and he said to me, “Can you believe they’re stopping the ship for that ceremony? There could be a million Japanese submarines out there.” We were all alone you know. We never traveled anywhere but all alone. We never did go with an escort. So I said, “That’s scary as hell.” He said, “You bet it is.”
So they put a swat line together, and I had to go through that line. And, let me tell you something, they had taken those damn canvas sleeves and filled them with sand and soaked them in saltwater and gotten them hard as everything, and they hit you with them. And I said to myself: Will I ever get to that fo’c’sle? I know what I’ll do. I’ll run as fast as I can damn near run, and, boy, they wouldn’t let you do that. So I had to go all the way through again, with those guys beating me. But there was a guy who didn’t want to go through the ceremony, so we hid him. They found out later, and the crew held a kangaroo court and charged him with violation of Naval tradition. Verdict: Guilty. So they shaved his hair, and he had to wear a sign that acknowledged his guilt for five days. They were tough.
So we finally got to Noumea in New Caledonia, and then to Brisbane, Australia. A fellow there stopped us and said, “Why don’t you two guys come home. We’ll fix you something to eat and get to know you.” We said, “Geez, that’d be super.” So we did. And this family took us in, which was just super. They were wonderful people, wonderful people. We had a New Year’s Eve dance there, and I set that sucker up. I got the hall; I got the band; I got the girls; I got the whole ballgame. Just set that baby up. It was great!
We ended up back at Midway. We were servicing submarines at Midway. A buddy of mine and I set up a little business there. We called it Thoma-Epstein Enterprise, Inc. Our motto was, “We’ll do anything that is legal.” We wrote letters for the guys. They’d come to us and say, “I feel like I don’t know that girl back home anymore, and I gotta send her a letter and tell her about that.” And I’d sit down and write a letter for him. I think our fee was a buck or some dumb thing like that.
Then there was the time we put on the “Sperry Scandals” in 1944. Lyle Epstein and I said, hey, let’s write a show, let’s do something great, and boy did we put a show on! There was a whole program we called “Sperry Scandals,” and we had skits and we had the whole ballgame. We put out an ad in the little newspaper there, the Midway Mirror: “Help Wanted: Actors Comedians Dancers Singers with the Sperry Scandals. Dates for tryouts will be announced later.” We put that in there and we got everybody—every guitar, every ukulele came out. We had the show right onboard ship, back on the fan tail where we had the movies. Here’s a review from the Midway Mirror: “Sperry Scandals: A Big Hit. The Sperry Scandals and Lyle Epstein and George Thoma deserve the highest praise for their organizing and writing the entire show.” Then we had guys come from other ships, and we put it on a couple of times.
I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a lot of super feelings about the Sperry. It was absolutely incredible. I just loved it. When one of those subs came in off a patrol she’d come up to the Sperry. They’d just tie right up to the Sperry. Remember we could put one alongside another. First thing that happens is that we’ve got a little ship’s band onboard, and we have that band out there to play for those fellows. Then we had ice cream ready, and we had fresh fruit ready for that crew when they got off that submarine. And those guys’d come onboard and they’d eat that ice cream. And they’d eat those apples and eat those oranges, and it was just absolutely incredible. And the skipper would get off that submarine with a list of all the things that were wrong or needed fixing. And then the relief crew and the water mechanics and the machinists and everybody else’d pile onboard that submarine and repair her. And they’d put her back into service.
The crew would live aboard the Sperry, or on Midway, where they’d go to a part of the island called “Gooneyville.” When that relief crew repaired that submarine they’d take it out. They’d take it back out on a shakedown cruise to be sure everything was all right. And then they would bring her back in, and then it’d be ready to go out on the next patrol.
So we had gone from California to Pearl and out to Midway and over to Brisbane and back to Midway, maybe a couple of times, and to Majuro for a while, and when I left that ship to come back to the States, we were in Majuro. I flew back. The first time I was ever on an airplane in my life. I was recommended for shore duty.
And I tell you, when I got to California I met the woman’s editor from the San Francisco Chronicle, and did she show me San Francisco. It was just an incredible experience. It really was. She was an absolutely marvelous person, and I went to every author’s cocktail party. We used to go to the Top of the Mark, and everything was on the house.
Wars are nasty things and are absolutely wasteful and absolutely insane, but for us, as the kids we were, there are certain aspects of them that were life’s great adventure. We never dreamed that we would be in those places doing those things, and you really learned how to get along with other people.