No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

  Gordy continued to write home regularly.

  June 14, 1942

  I have a very nice girl friend over here. Her name is Linley Austin, Lin for short. She is a pretty blond. I go up and have supper with her and her parents almost every liberty and then go to the show or the dance. That’s about all I do.

  July 9, 1942

  I’d like to let you know where I am but that would be impossible.… I’m still going with Linley Austin. We are going to a high school ball on Friday. I can’t dance very good, but nobody knows the difference.… I’m sending some more money for you to stick in the bank. If you need any of it go ahead and take it.… I’ve been to a few pictures lately, but they are ones I’ve seen before. A person has to do something to keep from getting any battier. I haven’t been drunk yet but it’s a wonder. I’ve done almost everything else.… I’ve written to almost all of my old friends but never received any answers. I guess everyone has forgotten me.… If you remember please send me Readers Digest and an algebra book.

  July 13, 1942

  I still haven’t heard from anyone back there. You can’t realize how much I would like to get home right now. Guess there’s a lot of fellows feel the same way.

  Gordy celebrated his nineteenth birthday in Albany. In August, American forces invaded Guadalcanal, and after a ferocious battle, they secured the island in the first major land victory of the war. Word of the triumph slowly reached the submariners in Western Australia, but Gordy was more focused on his own situation. He wanted off the Holland and out of Albany, and if that meant getting reassigned to a submarine and going out on patrol again, that was fine by him. He soon got the transfer he wanted, not to a submarine but to another tender, the Pelius back in Fremantle. As it was with so many American sailors in Australia, he said good-bye to his girlfriend, Linley, both of them promising to stay in touch and keep the fire burning.

  On the Pelius, he was assigned to polishing brass. Each day he would sit on the forward deck and polish away for a couple of hours, then go hide and nap or write letters.

  October 20, 1942

  [to his brother Willie after their brother Larry had married] I hope you can keep a couple good looking babes from getting married back there. I’d hate to have to steal somebody’s wife when I get back.… Keep the old town in one piece and I’ll help you tear it up when I get back.

  October 24, 1942

  I have a friend who can sneak my letters past the censor so I can talk to you about the war. I’m now stationed in Fremantle, Australia. I was in Manila when the war started.… I’m completely out of danger now. I’m hoping to get transferred again, but I don’t know where I’ll go after that.… We were in Albany. That’s where Lin lives.… I’ve only heard from Lin once and it’s been almost two months since we left there so I have practically forgotten her.… I have figured out a way to tell you where I am and will use it in the future. In the p.s., take the capital letter at the beginning of each sentence and it will spell my location. The p.s. will have no meaning.… Do you realize I have half my enlistment completed? I hope the war is over when my time is up.

  November 20, 1942

  Well, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere in the Navy. My enlistment is half over and I’m still seaman. All the fellows I joined with are third or second-class petty officers. Well, maybe if I hang around here long enough they’ll realize I’m here and give me a rate. It hasn’t done any good to study.… Tell Donald as to joining the Marines that it is entirely up to him but if it were me I would try to stay out of the service and get a job in defense work.

  One morning just before he was to go on duty chipping paint, Gordy was sitting on a five-gallon can of paint thinner nursing a hangover and feeling sorry for himself. With his head in his hands, he heard a voice speaking in an Australian accent. “What’s the matter, mate?” He could see a pair of brown shoes and coveralls, and quickly learned that it was a lieutenant J.G. (junior grade) in the repair crew.

  Figuring he might as well tell the truth, Gordy unloaded his complaints. After listening to him, the officer issued a stern rebuke. Sensing he had nothing to lose, Gordy asked to see the commander.

  The next morning he got his wish, and after stating his case again, he was surprised by the commander’s response. “You’ll be at sea within a week,” he said, and assigned him to the Grenadier, which needed several men for her next patrol.

  A few days before heading out on patrol with the Grenadier, Gordy wrote his mom again:

  March 17, 1943

  I’m not the good little boy that left home as you have probably gathered. I’ve been having a good time the last couple weeks but it’s about over. I won’t be able to write for a while, but don’t let that stop you from writing.

  12

  Tim “Skeeter” McCoy

  USS Grenadier

  Tim got lucky. Punching an officer in a beer-fueled poker game was a remarkably dumb thing to do, but the fact that it was wartime and every hand was needed kept him from being severely punished. Instead, he was transferred off the Trout and assigned to the sub tender Pelius, which left Hawaii the next day bound for Fremantle, Australia. For the next several months Tim worked on relief crews getting subs ready to go back out into battle and trying to stay out of trouble.

  It had been several months since the first American ships had arrived on the west coast of Australia, and there were mounting complaints from the locals about the American presence. The initial goodwill and tolerance were starting to wear thin. The sight of drunken sailors staggering down the street, some of them with young Australian girls on their arms, was getting old. In the first few months of the Americans’ arrival, people had accepted the sexual flings and the loosening of morals, deeming it okay for local girls to have a frolic on the beach after the sun went down with a guy about to leave for war. For the most part, the warnings about the unrealistic hopes of falling in love and then galloping off to America went unheeded and now the reality of fickle lovers, unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases, broken hearts, and tear-jerking separations was beginning to take hold.

  Eventually, Tim got reassigned to the Grenadier, and he was on board as the ship headed out of Fremantle on its sixth patrol. Like his new crewmates Chuck Vervalin, Bob Palmer, and Gordy Cox, he had mixed emotions about this patrol. On the one hand, he was eager to get back in battle and feel he was contributing to the war effort. He had taken his work on the relief crew seriously, but he liked the danger and the rush of combat. He hated the Japanese. It wasn’t because of anything that had happened to him growing up in Texas; he’d never even seen one. This was a hatred born out of the destruction he’d seen at Pearl Harbor. To him, they were everything the propaganda had portrayed: “little bucktoothed, slant-eyed savages.”

  But while stationed in Fremantle, he, like Chuck, had found the love of his life, Valma Gray, a beautiful blue-eyed redhead who had recently been crowned Miss Perth. They’d met at a dance, and he’d wasted no time in letting her know how he felt, telling her he wanted to marry her after the war and take her back to Texas with him. For her part, Valma was enchanted by Tim’s courtly manners and enthusiasm. She also found his Texas accent endearing. From that night on, he’d spent every possible minute of leave with her. The night before leaving on this patrol, he’d proposed and given her an engagement ring. She’d accepted and promised she’d wait for him.

  The Grenadier left Fremantle on its sixth patrol on March 20, 1943. For the first seventeen days there were no sightings of enemy ships. Then, on the night of April 6, a small freighter of about 2,000 tons was sighted off Phuket Island. A surface torpedo was fired and there appeared to be an explosion, followed by the wounded freighter firing at the Grenadier, its shells zinging over the sub or landing in its wake. The Grenadier returned fire from its deck, but when the freighter moved into shallow waters near the beach, Captain Fitzgerald ordered the ship to submerge and move to the safety of deeper water.

  The next sixteen days were again uneventful, with no sign
of shipping in the area. Anxious to inflict damage on the enemy, Captain Fitzgerald sent a request to move to a more fruitful area. Then, on the moonlit evening of April 22, 1943, before the request to move was granted, the lookout spotted a worthy target: two large enemy freighters. Upon closer look, he saw they were unescorted. Relatively easy prey.

  Tim felt the rush of adrenaline when Captain Fitzgerald ordered the men “to man battle stations.” Fitzgerald was Tim’s kind of captain—tough, straightforward, a look-you-in-the-eyes kind of man. His decision to aggressively pursue the freighters was not second-guessed. If the tide of the war in the Pacific was going to turn in America’s favor, as it slowly had been since the battle of Midway, then the mentality of the new breed of submarine skippers was that they needed to spearhead the attack, to be aggressive.

  Fitzgerald had gained even more respect from his crew earlier in the patrol when he confronted Thomas Trigg, a muscular mess cook from Texas and the only black on the crew. He was easily the most disliked man on board; the crew thought he was sullen and disrespectful. At the time, America was still a Jim Crow, segregated country, and most of the men on board had never been around blacks. The Navy was still segregated, and on submarines a black could only be assigned as a mess cook, helping to serve the men and wait on the officers. It was not uncommon for someone to wake Trigg in his bunk and order him to bring coffee to the skipper. Most blacks in the Navy were compliant, but not Trigg. Built like a linebacker, he’d arrived on board with a chip on his broad shoulders (or at least that’s how the crew described it), a chip nobody on board was eager to try to dislodge. Earlier in the patrol, when someone allegedly witnessed him spitting into the officers’ soup, a livid Fitzgerald ordered him up to the bridge and challenged him to a fistfight, an invitation Trigg declined. Fitzgerald put him on notice that he had filled out court-martial papers and would file them when they returned to port. The incident had elevated Fitzgerald’s standing with the crew even higher.

  Dawn had broken over the Strait of Malacca on April 23, 1943, when the Grenadier surfaced. The bright sunlight gave the promise of a warm, tropical day. Hours earlier, after encountering the two freighters, Fitzgerald decided to do an end-around on the surface to intercept them. But after getting into position and submerging, all he could see through the periscope was the plume of smoke of the two ships zigzagging away. He gave the orders to surface. Never mind that standard submarine procedure was to always stay submerged while in enemy waters, or that he was disregarding the fact that the enemy knew a submarine was in the area.

  Shortly after the sub surfaced, the lookout on duty, George Stauber of New York, spotted a Japanese dive-bomber coming in their direction. “It’s coming in low out of the northwest,” he informed the skipper.

  Fitzgerald hesitated briefly, waiting to confirm the sighting. As soon as he saw the plane, he gave the order to dive. “All ahead emergency!” he commanded.

  The bow plunged underwater, heading down at a steep angle. At 120 feet, the executive officer turned to Fitzgerald. “We should be safe at this depth,” he said.

  In the engine room, Tim heard a turbulent swishing noise. A second later he heard a metallic click: the sickening sound of a firing mechanism activating. Then came the explosion, deafening, like “two trains colliding head-on at full speed.” It was an aerial torpedo, a weapon weighing 1,900 pounds with a warhead of 500 pounds of TNT. Dropped from a low-flying torpedo plane and capable of hitting a submarine up to 300 feet beneath the surface, it was a hallmark of Japanese tactical effectiveness.

  The Grenadier shook violently, listing hard to port, slamming Tim against the bulkhead and knocking other crew members off their feet. In an instant, the ship was going down, stern first, plunging toward the bottom of the ocean.

  The lights flickered and then went out. So did all electricity and power for propulsion.

  They were in total darkness, out of control, and plunging toward the ocean floor. Behind Tim, two men were sprawled on the deck, unconscious. Others struggled to their feet, groping for something to hang on to. Ceiling cork fell to the deck, lightbulbs shattered, locker doors flew open. Men were cut and bleeding. Groans echoed through the compartments.

  At 300 feet, the ship slammed into the ocean floor, quickly settling into the silt at a 20-degree angle, bow up. A quick assessment by the crew revealed massive damage.

  The propeller shafts were seized in a vise-like grip, pressed against a bulkhead. And with no propeller, the ship was dead.

  In the engine room, close to where the blast had occurred, tubes were bent, pipes ruptured, gauges and valves broken. In the radio room, somebody had forgotten to securely fasten the ship’s radio transmitter, and the explosion had sent it flying against a bulkhead, smashing it beyond repair and leaving them with no way to radio for help.

  But the biggest problem was the salt water pouring through the loading hatch and other openings. To Tim it sounded like Niagara Falls. If these hatches couldn’t hold under the pressure, he was about to die a horrible death. He thought about Valma.

  Surprisingly, nobody was seriously injured from the initial explosion and despite the massive damage the ship and outer hull were still in one piece. Working frantically, the electricians quickly activated the emergency lighting, casting everything in an eerie red glow.

  “Fire in the maneuvering room!” a voice cried out.

  The smell of smoke rapidly permeated the ship. An electrical fire spread swiftly, sparks and short circuits popping everywhere. Tim knew that if the maneuvering room was lost, getting back to the surface would be impossible.

  “Stay calm,” encouraged Fitzgerald.

  Stay calm? They were in a submarine that was on fire on the ocean floor, with salt water spraying into the engine room.

  “All available hands man the bucket brigade,” Fitzgerald ordered.

  Tim found comfort in Fitzgerald’s voice, trusting his leadership. The plan was to move the excess water from the engine room to the forward torpedo room, which would hopefully balance the boat, the first step in getting back to the surface.

  The heat from the fire was intense, a temperature gauge now showing 120 degrees. Tim stripped to his shorts and stood in the bucket line between the motor room and forward torpedo room, passing along the buckets. There was urgency to the crew’s efforts: if the water level reached the main propulsion motors, there was no chance of ever restarting the engines, and no chance of escape. Adding to the peril was that the ship had come to rest on a shelf, dangerously close to deeper water, with a strong current pushing it in that direction. If they went over the shelf, the pressure would tear the ship apart.

  Men began to pass out from the heat and exhaustion. The ship’s interior grew even hotter; the thermometer read 124 degrees.

  An hour passed. Then another. Fighting against time, the crew continued its efforts to control the fire and balance the water level. They worked nonstop through the morning and into late afternoon. Men continued to drop from exhaustion, choking and gagging from the smoke. Still, they remained calm, everyone too busy to panic, and everyone still trusting the skipper. But the situation grew grimmer: renewed efforts to free the propeller failed and the available oxygen supply continued to diminish.

  “If you’re not working on the line, just sit still and conserve oxygen,” ordered Fitzgerald.

  After fifteen hours on the ocean floor, and with all efforts to restart the engine and free the propeller unsuccessful, the captain devised a new plan to raise the boat back to the surface. His strategy was to blow the water from the main ballast tanks, which could make the ship buoyant enough to rise to the surface, where it would be easier to restore full power and fix the propeller.

  The necessary calculations were figured and refigured, but there were uncertainties. Maybe the ship was too embedded in the silt on the ocean floor to shake loose. Or maybe the crew had not bucketed enough water forward to balance the boat and allow it to rise on an even keel.

  Captain Fitzgerald waited unti
l 2100 to give the order to blow the ballast tanks; if they did make it back up, it would be under the cover of darkness. Finally, his voice boomed over the intercom. “Stand by to surface. Close all vents. Open all flood doors. Blow all ballast tanks.”

  Tim knew that if this plan didn’t work, they were doomed. And even if it did work, they could still be doomed. Most likely the Japanese were waiting on the surface, ready to finish the job and send them back down to a watery grave.

  As the ballast water was blown out, Tim felt the Grenadier shudder and then ever so slightly begin to lift. There was a momentary pause—she was either going to fall back to the ocean floor or rise to the top. The ship sank back to the floor.

  Fitzgerald wasted no time in repeating the procedure, but once again the ship failed to rise.

  With the air compressor failing, they were down to their last chance. Again, the ship shuddered, but this time it broke loose and started to rise, slowly, floating toward the top like a cork. The crew cheered.

  Captain Fitzgerald was at the number one periscope as the Grenadier neared the surface. A quick 360-degree revealed no enemy warships, just a few sampans in the distance. The ship broke on top. “Permission granted for all hands to come topside,” he announced.