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

by Neal Thompson

  “You have started me on my way as a Shepard—a way that is exacting in its requirements, a path that is difficult to follow but one that is certainly worth the while and effort. I only hope that I can follow your examples and live my life in such a way that will make both of you proud of me and that will make me worthy of being a Shepard.”

  In late February 1945, five months after Shepard had joined the ship, the Cogswell returned to California for a much-needed overhaul. Her hull was rusted, dented, and bullet-pocked. Shepard and his fellow sailors—filthy and exhausted, edgy and sleep-deprived—were given three weeks of welcome liberty. He sent word to Louise that they should make the most of his brief hiatus from war: he wanted to get married, right away. He flew to Longwood, where he and Louise broke the news to her parents on a Sunday morning. Louise’s parents had known the couple was serious, but the urgency of their desire to wed just one week later surprised the Brewers. Still, bold times led to bold decisions, and many of Alan and Louise’s friends were also leaping into marriage, near strangers choosing each other for lives built on the foundations of a brief courtship. Despite some heavy scowling from Phil Brewer, he and his wife consented.

  Shepard called his parents with the news, then hopped on the next train to Boston. When he didn’t see his parents at the station, Shepard assumed they had had car trouble and hitch-hiked the 40 miles to East Derry. When he found no one at home, he climbed onto the roof and forced open his bedroom window to get into the house. The next morning his parents called from their Boston hotel room, a bit frustrated that their son hadn’t waited for them at the train station.

  The Shepards all drove back down to Longwood Gardens later that week. Alan and Louise married on March 3, 1945, at Stephens Lutheran Church in nearby Wilmington, Delaware.

  Alan’s father, Bart, was the best man. Father and son both wore their uniforms, Alan in dark blue and Bart in brown and tan. Back in 1941 Bart had come back from reserve status and rejoined the Army as a full-time officer. He wanted to do what he could for the war and worked as a recruiter in Manchester, convincing young New England men to serve their country.

  Louise, age twenty-two, wore a satin gown with a long white train and antique lace; as a corsage, she wore one of Longwood’s rare and delicate orchids. Alan looked older than his twenty-one years—in the twenty months since cavorting on the streets of San Francisco, he had matured from a teen into a full-grown man. The couple traveled north, back to East Derry with Bart and Renza, then drove up into the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire for a brief honeymoon.

  Their honeymoon was the first time they had spent more than a day or two together, and never had they been truly alone. There was just a small window of time to get reacquainted, to make plans—how many children? what should their names be? where should we live?—and then to watch each other undress, to taste each other, to make love and pretend for a few days that the war, the Navy, and Alan’s death-defying career were not about to swallow them both up.

  In late March Alan and Louise traveled west to southern California—the first of many cross-country treks in the nomadic life to come—and the clock ticked down toward Alan’s scheduled April 5 reunion with the Cogswell. Enjoying cocktails, dinners, movies, and sunset walks along the pier, they were briefly, blissfully, carefree young newlyweds. Then, after a final night together, a final taste of each other, Louise drove Alan to the docks at the Long Beach Navy Yard. She waved from the pier as Alan sailed toward God knew what brutalities of battle. Without knowing when or if he’d return, Louise aggressively set about creating a life of her own. She drove to San Francisco, found an apartment to share with a college friend, took a job at Gump’s department store, and began attending occasional parties with other Navy wives.

  Bob Williams’ mother hosted one such party, for Louise and few other wives, at the Sausalito home where Alan had stayed. Louise flipped through the guestbook there to find her husband’s strong, neat signature from a year earlier and then signed the book herself.

  A reporter from the Sausalito News mingled at the party, where the wives all signed a round-robin letter to send to their husbands. In her article, the reporter described how the women reminisced about watching their men graduate the previous summer, about feeling proud to send their brave lovers off to the good and righteous war.

  Louise befriended some of the Navy wives, and Mrs. Williams occasionally stopped by the apartment to see if she needed anything. But her real friends, and her real source of strength, were those in the congregation of the Christian Science Church. Wherever Alan’s career took them, the Christian Science Church would become Louise’s surrogate family.

  Alan wrote to her often and asked Bob Williams to check up on her the next time he returned home.

  One day, Louise met another of the store clerks at Gump’s, a girl named Peggy Duff, and as they got talking they realized they both knew a cute Naval Academy grad named Alan. It might have been the first time that Louise came in contact with one of her husband’s flings, but it wouldn’t be the last. Peggy Duff—“the rump,” Alan once called her—had been one of those attracted to his uniform during what Alan called his “good times” in Sausalito. Alan wrote to Bob that Louise’s chance encounter with Duff was “too close for comfort! The old ‘rump’ certainly gets around.”

  As the Cogswell steamed back toward the South Pacific, Shepard received word that a former classmate had abandoned his crippled ship and wound up in shark-infested waters, where he met his doom. Meanwhile, another classmate, a year behind Shepard at the academy, was still exploiting the midshipman’s life but was expelled for bringing a date into Bancroft Hall and showering with her. “Wholesale debauchery!” Shepard said in a letter.

  Shepard, steaming west in early April 1945, was suspended between those two worlds—the academy life behind him, kamikaze pilots ahead. While in transit from California to Pearl Harbor, the Cogswell learned of Japan’s increasingly desperate use of suicide planes against U.S. ships. Upon arrival at Pearl Harbor, Shepard was told that he would be one of the Cogswell’s primary defenders against such kamikaze attacks—he was being relieved of his telephone duties and promoted to deck officer, helping oversee a cluster of 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns on the ship’s bow. A half dozen such clusters ringed the football-field-sized destroyer, which complemented an array of larger and more menacing five-inch guns. The Cogswell cruised off the Hawaiian coast for more than a week, conducting training exercises to give Shepard and the others time to get acquainted with their weaponry and prepare for the fighting ahead.

  Pearl Harbor also gave Shepard a chance to firm up his plans for a future that had little to do with ships at sea.

  When Shepard had climbed aboard the Cogswell back at Long Beach, a new commanding officer was running the show. The Cogswell’s beloved first skipper, Commander Harold “Dutch” Deuterman, had been replaced by a man who lasted just a few weeks before breaking his leg, which then opened the door for the gruff and reviled Lieutenant Commander Reuben Perley to take command of the ship.

  Tall and slim, Perley was an authoritative and foul-mouthed skipper who seemed to take joy in yelling salty-tongued put-downs into his sailors’ faces. One day Shepard was cracking up at another young officer’s perfect impression of their scrappy skipper when Perley appeared out of nowhere and strode silently up behind the unwitting performer. Shepard had no time to warn his friend. Perley’s mustachioed lips curled into a sneer and he barked into the man’s ear before sending him to his cabin for a few days of red-faced punishment. More than once Perley sent Shepard himself to his room as punishment for one of his practical jokes, or for ignoring his duty station to watch planes take off from a nearby aircraft carrier.

  Whenever an aircraft carrier cruised nearby or a cluster of planes flew overhead, Shepard seemed to be running for the Cogswell’s railing, straining for a better view. Shepard did little to conceal his distaste for the sailor’s life. He took his new job seriously and respected the enlisted men i
n his charge. But at the end of the day he believed there was only one Navy ship worth his while: the aircraft carrier.

  “That was very obvious, and he didn’t hide it,” said John Huber III, who stood many nightly watches by Shepard’s side, during which Shepard talked mostly about planes. “He did his job well, but he didn’t want to be there. He was basically a free spirit. He wanted to be in the air.”

  But junior officers such as Shepard were required to serve at least a year at sea before the Navy would consider teaching them to fly its planes. Shepard was more than halfway there, and Huber and other shipmates recalled how obsessively he counted down the days to the end of his first year.

  At Pearl Harbor Shepard submitted his request for flight school. He passed the required physical, then waited, checking off each twenty-four-hour step toward his first naval anniversary. “One of these days . . . ,” Shepard told a shipmate one night while they both stood watch. “One of these days—if I don’t get killed— I’m going to learn to fly.”

  “Shepard always had his eyes on the planes,” shipmate Andrew Atwell recalled. “He was on the wrong ship. His mind was on the carrier.”

  Somewhere in the Pacific, in mid-April, the Cogswell received bad news, then good. First, President Roosevelt—the man who had dragged the country out of the Great Depression and then led it into and through the war—had died. Four weeks later, while still en route to the tropical atoll of Ulithi, the Cogswell received word that Germany had surrendered. The fighting in Europe was over. But up ahead in the western Pacific, war raged on, more ghastly than ever.

  The Japanese, by April and May of 1945, were becoming almost desperately aggressive. In the fight to retain the volcanic island of Iwo Jima, they had adopted a no-survivors strategy: fight until you die. The same strategy applied to the kamikaze pilots who, in the samurai tradition, wrapped hachimaki headbands around their heads, then aimed themselves at U.S. ships. A few of Shepard’s old academy classmates were among the victims; their body bags were draped with American flags, then slid overboard for a somber burial at sea.

  “Sorry to hear about McBride and Day,” Shepard said in a letter to Bob Williams. “We have lost a lot of classmates.”

  He would soon lose many more.

  In late May Shepard and the enlisted men he now commanded at his battle station sighted the bombed-out shores of Okinawa, an island 340 miles south of Japan and a crucial stepping-stone toward the expected all-out assault on Japanese soil. Marines had already swarmed onto the north end of the island, spooked by the surprising lack of Japanese opposition.

  To help protect those Marines, the Cogswell had received orders for radar picket duty. They could have more accurately called it sitting duck duty. It worked like this: To create a buffer zone of ships around Okinawa, the Cogswell and scores of other destroyers (and a few battleships) lined up in rows, like slats on a picket fence. The purpose of the radar picket was to intercept approaching Japanese planes and shoot them down before they could reach Okinawa’s shores.

  These picket ships made tempting targets for the waves of enemy fighter planes that Japanese admirals sent screaming down from the mainland up north. A force of more than two thousand Japanese planes, most of them kamikazes, sat ready to attack the picket ships. That assault began in early April, when seven hundred planes swarmed down upon the U.S. fleet in a two-day span, giving the sea lane north of Okinawa its nickname, “Kamikaze Alley.” One Navy report estimated that the average amount of time it took before a picket duty ship was hit by the enemy was eighteen hours. The Cogswell’s first picket duty was scheduled for seventy-two hours.

  “If we last that long,” one sailor quipped.

  Another sailor told his diary: “We have a slim chance of coming out without getting hit . . . I will have to admit, I am a little bit nervous.”

  As the Cogswell sailed to her position north of Okinawa on June 1, the crew witnessed charred and mangled warnings of the dangers ahead—damaged destroyers, ravaged by kamikazes and unable to propel themselves, being towed to the nearest safe port. “The smell of burned flesh and cries of pain were overwhelming,” a sailor on one such destroyer later recalled. “Many of the wounded men were burned severely when the fuel tank exploded and one man was killed from jumping over the side to avoid the flames and being run over by the ship.”

  More than thirteen hundred U.S. ships were ordered to support the Marines’ invasion of Okinawa, dubbed Operation Iceberg, which had begun April 1, nearly two months before Shepard and the Cogswell arrived. The Okinawa invasion— fought on land, at sea, and in the air—would last nearly three months, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of World War II and involving one of the greatest wartime armadas in U.S. history. Although thousands of Marines would die during bitter fighting against a hundred thousand Japanese soldiers entrenched and hidden in caves on Okinawa, radar picket duty was considered one of the most dangerous and terrifying jobs of the campaign.

  In addition to facing the menacing kamikazes, picket ships had to confront rockets, bombs, and—hanging beneath some Japanese planes—stocky little glider bombs called baka, which were guided toward U.S. ships by a suicide pilot crammed inside.

  The Cogswell stationed itself in Kamikaze Alley, and it took less than twenty-four hours for the first kamikaze planes to appear from the clouds. One night, with bombs and planes exploding on either side of the Cogswell, many of the crew members shook hands, believing they’d not survive until morning.

  The Cogswell’s prime defenses against such attacks (since her five-inch guns were often too big for close combat) were the 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns that Shepard and his men operated. When the Cogswell nailed its first kamikaze, Shepard’s supervising officer—gunnery officer Charles Evans Hughes III, the grandson of the famous Supreme Court chief justice—began screaming, “We got ’em, we got ’em, we got ’em.” Surly Captain Perley yelled back, “The war’s not over yet!”

  Shepard spent his days (and most nights) anxiously scanning the horizon for approaching kamikazes. On the rare nights when he was allowed to sleep, he had to fight back images of Japanese soldiers who sometimes swam from the nearest shore or from a small boat, pushing mines into U.S. ships’ paths or climbing aboard to slit the first throat they could find. One night it was the throat of an officer on a ship directly behind Cogswell. After that, Shepard began taking turns on night watch, a recently issued pistol clipped to his belt, firing his handgun or his 20 mm guns at anything potentially human bobbing in the water.

  Shepard had received only a few days of practice firing his guns during training exercises back at Pearl Harbor. But now, like most World War II warriors, he quickly learned the harsh lesson of kill or be killed. When a kamikaze drew near, he’d stand behind his guns, screaming at his men—some older than himself— to fire and keep firing and bring the bastards down. The noise of his guns, and the occasional report from the nearby five-inchers, was painful and physical. It racked the body and punished the eardrums; very few men at the time wore earplugs.

  One morning early in June, shortly after midnight, the Cogswell and a few other nearby destroyers helped blast apart twenty-eight Japanese planes that had swarmed around them “like a flock of blackbirds,” as one Navy officer described it. One Japanese plane dove straight down onto the nearby USS Caperton but missed the deck by just a few feet. Another, flying just forty feet above the water, sped directly between the Caperton and the Cogswell—which prevented both ships from shooting, for fear of hitting each other—then inexplicably fell harmlessly into the drink. Yet another plane, already damaged by gunfire, came straight at the Cogswell, which shot off its wings before it could reach the ship. Shrapnel from the exploding planes washed over the Cogswell’s decks. Such nights sparkled with the glitter of bullets and rockets flying, the air roaring with the bursts of exploding planes, the boof-boof and rat-a-tat-tat of guns, the metallic pinging of fragments bouncing off hulls.

  “The kamikazes raised hell last night,” one Cogswell
sailor said.

  Shepard chomped at the bit to be up in the air, to be inside one of the mean-looking American F4Us that were gaining a reputation as effective kamikaze-killing machines. Each day brought him closer to flying—if only, he sometimes hoped, the war would last long enough for him to get his Navy pilot’s wings.

  In the year since graduation he had matured in countless, unexpected ways. He may not have been a pilot or a hero, but he was also no longer just another man in uniform. Shepard was now, at twenty-one years old, a fighter, an officer, a killer—an American warrior. And his diligent efforts, along with the others blasting Cogswell’s guns at the enemy, prevented his destroyer from joining ships such as the USS Porter and the USS Pringle on the ocean floor.

  On June 7 the USS Porter had relieved the USS Caperton as the Cogswell’s partner on picket duty. Just two hours later a kamikaze plane broke through U.S. air defenses and dive-bombed straight at the Cogswell. Shepard and the other gunners had the plane in their sights, ready to start firing, when it twitched left, then right, and twirled drunkenly down upon the Porter. The Japanese plane ticked the Porter’s radar tower and splashed into the water beside the ship.

  The kamikaze’s bombs exploded, which ignited the plane’s own fuel tanks, punching a fist of flame into the Porter’s hull. The Porter gulped up the East China Sea and began to sink, fast. The Cogswell ’s crew watched as the Porter swallowed water, leaned to one side, then went away. All aboard Porter were rescued by the Cogswell and other nearby ships—one sailor scrambled aboard the Cogswell crying like a baby because he’d had to leave $7,000 in poker winnings down below in his locker—but the sailors on the Pringle weren’t so lucky. A kamikaze strike blew a hole in her side and knocked out the power. The men who jumped into the shark-infested waters were the lucky ones. Many others were trapped in the darkness below deck when, just five minutes after the attack, the ship’s bow rose to the sky and the vessel slid backward beneath the sea. “I heard screams as she slipped under the water and disappeared,” one of Pringle’s survivors said.