Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  Until his senior year, Shepard recalled later in life, he felt he “never really hit my stride.” He was always a little behind, a little smaller, a little younger. At first, instead of working harder, Shepard realized that he let himself become a victim of what he called his “insidious complacency.”

  “I was only twenty when I graduated from the academy,” he said decades later in an unpublished interview. “I just really hadn’t matured, I guess, until that last year there.”

  But once he shunned his complacency and began throwing himself at his academic and athletic goals, classmates saw the maturity, too. “Schimpf’s big smile and easy laugh made an impression on the class,” the Class of ’45 yearbook said beneath Shepard’s grinning mug shot. “With his personality and ability, he should go far.”

  Other notable students would make deeper impressions on the school. Jimmy Carter, a freshman when Shepard graduated, would rise to become one of the top-ranking midshipmen. Future millionaire and presidential candidate Ross Perot would, in 1951, help pen the school’s new code of honor—“midshipmen do not lie, cheat, or steal.”

  Shepard wasn’t quite at the bottom of the class, which is where a similarly rambunctious midshipman (and future U.S. senator), John McCain, would find himself fourteen years later. Shepard ranked among the academy’s mediocrity—463rd out of 915. But he had emerged with Louise Brewer as perhaps his proudest collegiate achievement. Louise came to his Letterman’s Ball that spring and stood with Shepard’s parents two days later to watch him graduate, on June 6, 1944, just hours after troops had begun scrambling onto the bloody, valorous shores of Normandy. At the precise moment of America’s deadliest World War II battle to date—which was being supported by seventeen naval aviators strafing and bombing German strongholds above Normandy’s beaches—Shepard and his classmates flung their midshipman caps in the air, an explosion of fluttering white forms, like an ascending flock of doves, signifying the transition from student to officer.

  A month later Alan and Louise were secretly engaged to be married.

  3

  “The kamikazes raised hell last night”

  The Williams home in the too-cute town of Sausalito bustled like an overstuffed boardinghouse that summer, with loud and anxious men in uniform coming and going at all hours. Margaret Williams even put out a guest book to keep track of her son Bob’s academy classmates, all of them bound for transport ships departing from nearby San Francisco. “Never even noticed the fog,” Shepard wrote in the guest book when he arrived, August 9, 1944.

  After graduating from the academy, Shepard had spent a month of aviation indoctrination in Florida before heading to San Francisco, where he was to catch a transport ship that would deliver him to his first assignment: a yearlong tour aboard the Navy destroyer USS Cogswell.

  Each day for the next two weeks Shepard and his former Annapolis roommate, Bob Williams, drove out from Bob’s parents’ place to the San Francisco Navy Yard, where they searched for their names on the roster of junior officers scheduled on the next transport. Williams was assigned to the USS Cleveland, a light cruiser that, like Shepard’s Cogswell, was island-hopping from battle to battle throughout the South Pacific. But day after day their names appeared nowhere on the roster, and they were told to come back the next day. Shepard and Williams were then free to ply the Bay Area. By day they hit golf balls; by night they stalked the town, unencumbered, uniformed studs. They’d yet to dip a big toe into World War II and already they had the swagger and chin-up strut of young American heroes. One weekend they drove north to drink and dance—“more than I could report,” Williams recalled—with young ladies at the Russian River Resort, a rustic hotel-restaurant-nightclub set among northern California’s redwoods. Shepard even found time for a few dates with a friend of Williams’, even though he’d slipped an engagement ring on Louise’s finger a few weeks earlier and had begun calling her “my fiancée.”

  San Francisco, more than any other city, churned and pulsed with the business of war. As a major port of embarkation for sailors and soldiers, the steep streets and trolley cars sparkled with the crisp blue-and-white or khaki-and-white of uniformed men, so much so that writers called it “War City.” Civic groups urged residents to comfort men headed to or from war with the slogan “Make a serviceman happy.” Residents planted victory gardens to raise food for the war effort, bought $18.75 war bonds, and dumped their pennies into collection bowls, which raised money to buy cigarettes, gum, books, magazines, playing cards, and soap for their men at war.

  No expectation was spared—San Franciscans donated blood that was sent to the front lines, and the San Francisco Examiner conducted a “Save a Life with a Knife” campaign, urging readers to donate knives (four inches or longer) to be delivered to soldiers in the Pacific. Recruitment posters with brawny, shirtless men hung in shop windows: “Man the Guns—Join the Navy.” By the time Shepard arrived, the nagging threat of Japanese attack had abated, nighttime dim-out restrictions had been lifted, and the city’s thirty air-raid sirens wailed less frequently. Still, people kept their shades drawn at night, listening to Jack Benny or Fred Allen and sometimes picking up snippets of Tokyo Rose’s propaganda program The Zero Hour.

  Shepard’s few weeks in San Francisco were both heady and invigorating. Savvy San Franciscans knew the difference between a mere sailor and an officer, and as a newly commissioned ensign, Shepard was treated with deference and respect. Restaurants, nightclubs, and movie theaters showered him with military discounts, and everywhere he went people clapped him on the back, offered encouraging words, and called him “sir.”

  But, at the same time, a subtle pall of sadness mixed with the wind and fog of the city.

  John Dos Passos, in a Harper’s magazine story entitled “San Francisco Faces West; The City in Wartime,” described how men counted the foggy, drizzly days to their inevitable departure from War City to war. Young men—often mere teenagers—sat quietly in restaurants eating a final meal with family, friends, or girlfriends. “No wonder they keep their lips pressed tight when they stare out toward the western horizon,” Dos Passos wrote.

  Shepard was never one to let depressive thoughts intrude on a good time, and he enjoyed his days and nights in San Francisco, slurping noodles in Chinatown, watching the seals on Seal Rocks from the Cliff House restaurant, hiking the crooked streets of Nob Hill. But he had to know what all departing Navy men knew: These could be his last days on American soil.

  Finally, in late August, he and Williams found their names on the roster. Navy veterans must have chuckled when Shepard asked about the transport ship posted beside his name. Though he’d one day command the most intricate and costly machines ever built by man, Shepard’s introduction to military life was aboard a stinking, decades-old rust bucket.

  The USS Willard A. Holbrook began life in 1921 as a luxury passenger ship, but in middle age it was demoted to freighter, regularly crisscrossing the Pacific, its holds stuffed with coconut meat, jute grass, burlap, and other exports from Asia. At the start of World War II, the U.S. Army took command of the rust-splotched ship to deliver troops to and from Pacific islands. The pungent stench of coconut, spices, and rotting grasses had seeped into the Holbrook’s steel frame, and Shepard and the others called her “Stinkin’ Old Holbrook.”

  As they steamed slowly toward the South Pacific, Shepard shared a tiny room with four other men. Inside those steel walls, it felt as if he was being roasted alive. Many men, sick of sleeping in puddles of sweat, slept up on deck beneath the stars with just a bedsheet—and, if they were lucky, accompanied by one of the thirty-one Army nurses aboard. For weeks they saw nothing but open water. They played marathon games of bridge and joked about how another classmate’s enormous penis should earn him an immediate promotion. As they crossed the equator, Shepard and other naval virgins ran half clad through a “belt line,” the Navy’s ceremonial ass-whooping for those crossing the earth’s midsection for the first time.

  One night, as the Holbrook
neared an archipelago of Japanese-held islands, an edgy officer on watch shouted into his radio, “Submarine on our port side!” The captain gave orders to douse all lights, even cigarettes, and for all aboard to keep quiet. Finally, as tensions rose on the unarmed Holbrook, the submarine broke the surface, and all aboard sighed with relief upon realizing it wasn’t a submarine at all. It was a whale. It took Shepard six weeks to reach the island of Biak, a jagged scrap of paradise off the New Guinea coast that had been recently wrenched from Japanese hands to become a midsea staging area for American ships and troops.

  Army and National Guard infantrymen had battled Japanese forces for months before gaining control of the island. Evidence of those battles gave Shepard his first whiff of death. Japanese soldiers’ bodies, some burned or beheaded, littered the small island, filling the sweltering air with their putrid odors of decay.

  Shepard’s arrival at Biak almost gave him the chance to meet his hero, Charles Lindbergh. The famous ocean-hopping flyer had spent a few months as a civilian “tech rep” at Biak, showing Navy aviators there how to conserve fuel. Lindbergh, who had initially argued against America’s involvement in the war (earning him much scorn), even flew a few bombing missions in the South Pacific and, despite the fact that he was a civilian and no longer an active duty colonel, shot down a Japanese Zero. The sailors and soldiers stationed there enthusiastically told Shepard and his friends about Lindbergh’s exploits, although Lindbergh would remember Biak most for the sorrowful smell of dead bodies.

  Shepard would one day get his chance to meet the lanky, mercurial Colonel Lindbergh, to stand by his side on one of the most historic days in history. But that was twenty-five hard-fought years away.

  Meanwhile, Shepard’s efforts to reach the USS Cogswell were delayed when the “Stinkin’ Holbrook” was unexpectedly smashed by one of its own. Another ship coming into port lost control and slammed into the Holbrook, to the cheers of those watching the slow-motion collision from shore. While waiting for another transport ship, Shepard loitered on the beach, drank beer—“he could really put it away,” one shipmate said—and more than likely sipped some of the bitter home-brewed moonshine some Army soldiers had concocted.

  One day the crew of a B-25 bomber invited Shepard to join them on a practice bombing run. B-25 “Mitchell” bombers had been used—most notably by flying ace Jimmy Doolittle in 1942—to pummel Tokyo with bombs. Shepard jumped at the offer and was allowed to ride with the nose gunner, who sat in a glass bubble in front of and below the pilot. The gunner let Shepard take his machine gun and drill a few holes into an abandoned target ship. As the B-25 banked and turned back toward Biak, the pilot spotted a few straggling Japanese ships. The nose gunner grabbed the machine gun back from Shepard and strafed them. It was Shepard’s one and only airborne adventure of the war, and it marked the start of a yearlong and agonizing worship from afar of the Navy’s heroic aviators and their aircraft.

  Two months after leaving San Francisco Shepard finally caught up with the Cogswell in late October. As he tramped up her gangplank his eyes took in her horrid condition. The destroyer had been at sea for eight months, island-hopping and making war around the Philippines, New Guinea, and Indonesia. Rust-streaked and waterlogged, the ship looked like the hell it had been through. Cogswell had plunged into some of the more impressive skirmishes in naval history and pounded exotic, palm-fringed islands with tongue-twister names like Chichi Jima, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, the Marianas, Palau, Mindanao, and Yap. Most recently, she had lent her guns to the destruction of Japanese ships at the critical Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was hard to believe the battle-scarred destroyer was little more than a year old. And as soon as Shepard joined the crew, Cogswell wasted no time in restocking and returning to the heat of battle.

  In recent months, the Japanese navy had begun to crumble, and the United States realized that an all-out assault on Japan itself was finally possible. The Cogswell was needed for the next phase of the Pacific war: establishing military bases on some of the volcanic islands south of Japan, which would become staging grounds for the full-scale attack.

  The Cogswell, built at the famous Bath Iron Works in Maine, was a two-thousand-ton workhorse of a destroyer, capable of reaching nearly forty miles an hour. Her duties were to provide artillery support to ground troops, to find and destroy submarines, and to escort and rescue other ships. She carried more than three hundred men, including up to twenty officers at any given time.

  As junior officer of the deck, Shepard’s first job was to man the ship’s internal telephone circuits. The secretarylike job bored him, and he immediately requested a transfer to the gunnery division, which he considered “a promising prospect.” Still, he was so junior—“the junior J.O.,” he called himself—and the ship so full, he was forced to sleep in a hammock stretched across another officer’s cabin. At first his primary concern was to “get my own bunk.”

  Japan soon gave him more to worry about.

  After two days at sea, a Japanese torpedo ripped into the hull of the USS Reno, a cruiser traveling directly behind the Cogswell. Men sleeping on Reno’s top deck were blown overboard, and the rest of the crew jumped from the fast-sinking ship into the sea. The Cogswell U-turned and began plucking sailors from the oily waters as the Reno struggled to stay afloat. Shepard recognized two of the exhausted men as academy classmates.

  “Have been running into all kinds of people that I know that are in our class,” he reported, somewhat nonchalantly, in a letter to a friend. “Why, only a few days ago we picked Joe Schwager up out of the oil-covered waters.”

  Cogswell pulled 172 of Reno’s sailors and officers aboard, then slowly escorted the damaged cruiser away from submarine-infested waters toward safety. Three days later, a vicious typhoon struck the Cogswell and its convoy, tossing the ships around like bath toys for two days. That was followed by occasional but thwarted attacks by Japanese suicide planes. When she finally reached the apparent safety of the U.S.-occupied port on the atoll of Ulithi, the Cogswell was hit with reports of Japanese mini-submarines prowling the lagoon, and Shepard and the crew stayed at their battle stations through the night. Just before daylight, one of the enemy subs fired on a Navy tanker, and dawn bloomed with the exploding tanker’s demise. The crew was killed, but Cogswell helped hunt the Japanese submarines, four of which were sunk by U.S. ships. At the end of his first month as a seaman, Shepard’s ship was awarded a unit citation for rescuing the Reno’s crew and then escorting and protecting the wounded ship.

  Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, the belligerent, blood-thirsty commander of the Third Fleet, praised the entire Cogswell crew for “a brilliant and courageous piece of fighting.”

  The war in the Pacific was the Navy’s war. Its ships, its planes, and its Marines (which were and still are part of the Navy) wrenched Pacific islands from Japanese hands, one by bloody one. Far from home and seemingly overmatched by enormous and well-trained Japanese forces, the Navy made surprising progress in its efforts to establish military bases on the islands south of Japan, in preparation for an expected assault on the enemy’s homeland. Cogswell and the hundreds of other ships in the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet, leapfrogging from fight to fight, island to island, were proving to be one of the greatest fighting units in the history of warfare.

  But sometimes opposition came from unexpected fronts. After assisting in assaults on and around the Philippines, in mid-December of 1944 the Cogswell was slammed without warning by another violent and unexpected typhoon, this one far worse than the first. She was running low on fuel, which made the top-heavy ship rock violently from side to side. Attaching refueling lines to a nearby storm-tossed tanker become impossible, so Shepard’s crewmates held tight to their bunks below as 120-mile-an-hour-winds and thirty-foot waves battered the helpless vessel. The ship ascended wave mountains, then surfed down the other side, one after the other. For two days sleep was impossible—men were slammed from wall to wall and thrown to the steel floors. Cooking was also impossible, s
o they ate little during the forty-eight hours of hell.

  “This is the worst storm we have been in,” one sailor wrote in his diary. “We can’t steer our course, the seas are too big.”

  Although personal diaries were strictly forbidden—the Navy didn’t want information falling into enemy hands—a few aboard the Cogswell secretly kept written accounts of their day-to-day travails. “Several men have been lost over the side,” the ship’s cook wrote in his diary.

  Three other Navy destroyers were capsized and sunk by the typhoon. For days afterward the Cogswell pulled near-dead and waterlogged sailors from the calming seas. Nearly 790 young men who had survived Japanese torpedoes and kamikazes lost their lives to the furious Philippine Sea.

  “In the light of hindsight it is easy to see how any of several measures might have prevented this catastrophe,” Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Navy’s optimistic fleet admiral in the Pacific (and, like Shepard, a onetime Naval Academy oarsman), said in a follow-up report a few months later. “The important thing is for it never to happen again.”

  But it would happen again. And again.

  When the seas finally relaxed and Cogswell finished searching for survivors, she limped back into the lagoon off Ulithi atoll on the morning of Christmas Eve, and the shell-shocked crew began to smell the simmerings of a huge Christmas turkey dinner the galley was planning.

  Late in the day, forty-five overstuffed mailbags were lugged aboard from a mail boat. One of the bags contained a letter from Shepard’s mother, Renza. Bad news from home: His beloved grandmother Nanzie, the woman who had hatched his chicken operation and in whose basement Shepard had spent half his boyhood, was dead.

  She was eighty-three but had been in perfect health. Three weeks before Christmas she slipped on an icy sidewalk in Boston, hit her head, and died three days later. Shepard was not allowed to return home for the funeral. That night, he wrote his parents “to tell you how proud I was and am of Nanzie.” Curled up in his cabin, exhausted and frazzled from the recent battles with enemy subs and enemy seas, he wrote: