The trip west held no great adventures for any of us, outside of a few flat tires. Gas seemed to be plentiful just as long as we had an ample supply of ration stamps. Getting a driver was the way one dealer got his stock moving from one used car lot on the East Coast over to a used car dealer on the West Coast where the sale of the car would bring double the price. The dealer paid nothing to the driver. He just loaned the car to the "reputable" driver, gave him a delivery address, a book of gas ration stamps, a handshake and a road map. The rest was up to the driver to read his map properly.
Chapter IX: The Ticket
Now that I was back in San Francisco, I had to come to a decision fast as to how I was to sail. Should I ship out in my old capacity as fireman-oiler-electrician, or should I use the years of knowledge of the engine and boiler rooms and sit for an examination to get my engineer's license and sail as an engineer? There was a big demand for engineers and I concluded that I could serve the country better by getting my engineer's ticket. I could go about obtaining my license in several ways. One was to sign up and attend the government training school across the Bay in Alameda. Here the government supplied you with all the necessary books, instructors, meals, dormitory, uniforms, doctors and other essentials. The only fly in the ointment was that first you had to spend a couple of months at the school and submit to camp life as one would in any military base. Another way was to go buy some books, go home and work like hell, and when you thought you had digested enough knowledge, go and sit for the exam. The third way was to take advantage of the "free enterprise system" by attending any of the half-dozen quickie schools which, for a small fee, prepared you for the exam.
The advantage of these schools was their ability to know the questions most likely to be asked by the examiners. You would be home in the evenings, minus all that discipline that your brothers at the government school were subject to. I opted for the quickie school, and for the next several weeks I was to think, drink, and consume short division, cube roots, square roots, fractions, logarithms, trigonometric functions, solutions of triangles, mensurations--all of which led me to manage so many formulas that they were coming out of my ears. I was taught the shortcut in arithmetic solutions, and for a fifth-grade grammar school dropout, this was a shock to the human system so great that I had to keep concentrating on the thought that if I made any mistakes the entire Nazi system, with Shicklegruber leading the pack, was going to laugh at me. That thought of not being able to add my weight to winning the war gave me lots of strength to stay awake for hours on end while I crammed knowledge into my think tank.
I was close to a nervous wreck when the day finally came--when I and ten other men sat down in the examiner's room at desks, poised with pen, pencils and paper and ready for that moment of truth. The examiner sat at a desk facing all the candidates. On his desk was a layer of pigeonhole compartments, one for each of us, with our names on them. Not all of us were seeking the same grade. I was trying for a third assistant's license, some others their second's, two were sitting for chief's tickets and two for their first assistant's tickets.
For the next two days we would approach his desk, and he would give us several cards with questions. Our job was to find the answers and include the methods we used to get the answers. Each card and worksheet was brought back to the examiner one at a time, and if all were correct and above board, he handed you the next set of questions. This went on for two days until he exhausted the packet of questions. With all questions and answers tied neatly in a bundle, he signed a document stating that you had passed and directed you to another office where your certificate was to be made out. What an accomplishment to have that certificate in my hand! I felt like a giant standing 20 feet high. Miss O'Rafferty, that dear old schoolteacher in Public School Number 5 in Hoboken, told me once that given half a break, I was the kind of boy that could accomplish anything I set my mind to. I wished she were alive to see this.
Two weeks before the examination, I had run into Walter Stich, an old buddy of mine. Walter had just made first assistant on a Liberty ship named John Paul Jones. He was elated that I was preparing for my ticket. "Look, Bill," he said, "we'll be going into the shipyard for a lot of patching up and to maybe get some bigger guns put on the ship. When we come put we'll be taking on a crew, including engineers. I'll keep the third's job open for you. It'll be nice to make your first trip out with friends. We'll make a good trip out of it. What do you say?"
I was not about to say no to this friendly gesture. And so it was that the John Paul Jones headed out the Golden Gate with me at the throttle, slightly shaken up and waiting for a disaster to happen. After a few watches with no breakdowns to contend with, confidence in my ability to handle the watch slowly mushroomed to a mere routine. We zigged and zagged our way across the Pacific Ocean alone, always thinking the enemy was out there just waiting till we crossed hairs in his sights. But the enemy must have had something more important to do than to chase after an old Liberty ship, especially one named John Paul Jones.
On a bright sunny morning almost 15 days after leaving the Golden Gate, we pulled into Milne Bay in New Guinea, passed through the anti-submarine nets, and dropped anchor among some 20 other ships. I appreciated the silence of the engine room and the stillness of the ship as it rode its anchor in the safety of our armed forces. What I could not understand after arriving was what the hell some 20 or more ships were doing there, anchored, when we were desperately in need of ships. Why weren't they being discharged and set free? I raised this question with a military officer who came aboard to receive the ship's manifest. "I don't make the rules on any of this," he told me, "but we don't have any place on land to properly store everything until it's ready to be used. So we pull in whatever ship has the cargo we need and unload. After all, it's better that goods stay aboard ship than lie out in the open. If the enemy decides to retake this island, it makes no sense to give him an island full of goodies as a bonus does it?"
I couldn't find any argument with that, but it boiled down to the fact that we were going to be here for a while. That "while" would be some 30 days. Then the anti-submarine nets were pulled open and we sailed out alone and headed to what we thought would be the Golden Gate, but soon we found our bow headed toward South America. The third day after our departure from Milne Bay we plowed head into a storm. With our vessel empty, we bounced and dove. As the vessel headed nose down into the sea, her stern would come up out of the water and her propeller, free of traction, would pick up speed. When the stern went back into the water, there would be a chugging and rattling and shaking of the ship from stem to stern. To keep the engine and other parts of the vessel from serious damage, we put into operation the "Butterfly" watch, or throttle watch as some called it. This was where the engineer stayed at the operating platform and pulled the Butterfly valve closed as the vessel's stern began its climb out of the water. This maneuver aborted the full blast of steam from going to the engine and slowed down the engine. As the propeller went back in the water, the valve was opened, a full blast of steam entered the engine, and the propeller once again resumed its required momentum. It was a tedious, time-consuming job, dull, but necessary.
What a joy it was when after 23 days of this arm-bending maneuvering the sun came out and there before us was the West Coast of South America. Another day and we pulled into a small town in Chile called Tocopilla. The little port, just big enough to handle one ship at a time, was crowded with people who greeted us with curiosity as we entered in our wartime colors with guns mounted fore and aft. This poverty-stricken town, where the tallest structure was the spire of the town church, was nestled against a backdrop of mountains. From a distance, you could make out what seemed to be primitive roads and paths cut into them. All these paths led into the town's only source of wealth, nitrate mines. We were there to pick up a cargo of nitrates. Now that the war was on, nitrate was a valuable cargo. We used it mostly in munitions production. Like most mariners, we were interested in what the town offered us. Was th
ere a restaurant where one could get a decent meal? A dance hall or nightclub? Some souvenir shops? Yes, there were a little of each, including some women who had some personal assets to sell.
The three days at Tocopilla were good. We stretched our legs, had a few drinks, and enjoyed the people in the town who seemed to enjoy our company as well as the little prosperity the war was bringing them.
With a cargo priority we passed through the Panama Canal, our destination being Jacksonville, Florida. Leaving the last lock of the canal on the Caribbean side, we saw 15 ships at anchor. We learned they were waiting for more ships to join them in a convoy into the Atlantic under an armed escort.
I had expected some sort of escort to Florida, since the Caribbean was a submarine captain's delight; they used that area as one would a shooting gallery. The loss of our merchant vessels, especially tankers, was running pretty high around there. Yet, they were having us make the trip solo. We hugged the shoreline as closely as safety permitted.
Chapter X: Cape Grieg
I had developed a minor leg infection from a varicose vein. It had bothered me most of the trip. After we were secured to the dock in Jacksonville, I decided to get a doctor's certificate from the skipper and take off for the coast. Within two weeks, after some medical attention and some visits with old friends, I was ready to ship out. I ran into another old friend, Joe Russell. Joe had joined a ship called the Cape Grieg as chief engineer. The vessel was of the C-1 class. Unlike the slow-speed Liberty ship, the Grieg was a turbine-propelled vessel with a bow as sharp as that of a destroyer. Her crew's and officer's quarters were considered super compared to that of the Liberty's. Joe Russell had been an old organizer for the National Maritime Union as well as one of its founders.
One of the hatches on the Grieg was filled with beer, wine, and whiskey. When someone made a remark about the number of cases of "liquid joy" being loaded when ammo would have been more meaningful, a military officer chimed in to tell us that it was for "medicinal purposes." However, we were convinced that it was part of MacArthur's private stock.
Again we followed the same pattern as the prior ship and zigzagged unescorted across the Pacific. We pulled into Antewetok, where we were to await a survey being made of the area by our planes to check for surface or underwater enemy craft. After 24 hours the area was declared safe and we steamed off, again alone. The next stop would be the Mariana Islands. After a week of discharging supplies there we were off for our next stop, the New Hebrides. Aside from most of our cargo being discharged here, at least half the "medicinal supplies" went ashore--which brought big smiles from a delegation of gold-braid officers who watched the unloading.
Being a fast ship, we never stayed in any one place for long. We loaded up with pieces and parts of at least 200 airplanes that had crashed or been shot down. Not only was this good ballast to take home, but it was all good metal which would be reduced again to liquid form, and new parts would be made from the aluminum, copper and other metals.
Off again, we sailed down along the Great Barrier Reef and into the port of Brisbane, Australia, where we got rid of the rest of the "medicinal supplies." We loaded some more defective military equipment to take home. In Brisbane I took a trip out to the Koala Bear farm. It was a lovely place to make contact with the bears and meet the caretakers who delighted in talking about their charges. A young man I became attached to because of his love of the animals picked one out of the cage and handed him to me. The bear, a lovely, warm creature, wrapped his little arms around my side and then started to nibble on one of my shirt buttons. The young keeper noticed that the bear and I seemed to be enjoying a mutual love affair. "If I knew there was some way you could take care of this young guy," he said to me, "and he could live in the States, I would be delighted to put him in your charge. Truth is, there are so many things this native character must have to survive, which you don't have in the States, it would be criminal to give you one."
A day or two later, I and two other members of the crew went out to a riding ranch, hired some horses, and spent the next few hours galloping through some of Brisbane's beautiful woods.
About 50 miles inland from the port of Brisbane is a little town called Toowoomba. I took a bus trip to the town and forgot about the time. In the late afternoon, I found myself at the bus station, eager to return to the ship. I was shocked to see a sign on the depot door: "Closed. Will open 7 a.m. tomorrow." The bus had stopped running at 4 p.m. Here it was 5:30. Now what would I do? The bus was the only transportation in and out of the town. In the course of searching for the local gendarmes with the hope that they would come up with some idea for getting me to my ship, I came across a small locomotive sitting lonesome on a spur track with the engineer inside, reading a paper. I got his attention and explained who I was and how important it was for me to get back to join my ship in Brisbane.
He smiled down at me. "Maybe you're just in luck, Yank," he said.
"Oh?" I replied sheepishly.
"Our shift is about over. In a few minutes we'll be on our way back to Brisbane for the night. You can hop aboard now and we'll take you with us. Will that suit you, Yank?"
I couldn't get aboard fast enough. His partner, the fireman, was just as friendly. "Of all the soldiers that come down here from many countries," the fireman said, "We like the Yanks the most. Many of them are a lot of fun to be around. Only trouble we can see with them is that all our women are nuts over them. I guess it's because they are big spenders and sweep the women off their feet, buying them anything they want. Our blokes can't do that. We don't have the money like you Yanks. But that's all right. After all, you come a long way, why not enjoy yourselves? So, you say you're an engineer in the merchant navy?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Your engine room anything like our little engine room?"
"Yes, like the one on my last ship, a Liberty ship. But not on my present ship, which is turbine-driven."
"In that case, how would you like to sit at the controls and take her into Brisbane?"
Something I had wanted to do all my life was to stand behind the throttle on a locomotive and blow that little steam whistle, chugging my way from town to town. Here it was happening at the other end of the earth, in "down under" Australia. The little engine I was now in command of was used as a little work horse to shunt freight cars in the Brisbane locale. Her top speed was about 35 miles an hour. She burned oil for fuel. My two new Australian friends seemed to be enjoying themselves, watching me play out my boyhood fantasy. It didn't take long to cover the 50 miles to Brisbane. I relinquished my "command" with a warm handshake and said goodbye.
The trip back to the States was uneventful, outside of a few submarine scares. We pulled into Long Beach, where the Cape Grieg and I parted company. I had made up my mind to make an appearance before the examiners to upgrade my license.
Chapter XI: The Big Ticket
Since the government needed more skilled men on the ships, they were willing to pay for those willing to better their standing to come to school. The Maritime Commission set up a class for upgrading certificates. All that was required was that you had put in some sailing time on the old license. I had already accumulated enough time as third assistant to have it upgraded to at least second assistant or higher. I was satisfied with one hop up to second.
The school ran from 8:30 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon. Unlike the commercial, "free enterprise" school which I attended to obtain my first license, this one cost me nothing. In fact, in addition to the free education, if you passed the test and got your license, the government would throw in your uniform and topcoat as a bonus. If you flunked the test, you got none of the goodies. It was a good incentive.
After two strenuous weeks, I took my examination, got the uniform and topcoat, and was ready for my next ship with a brand new license. I was now a member of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association (MEBA), and the dispatch hall was run the same way as the Firemen's hall: all the jobs were chalked on the board and th
e rotation system applied. I looked over the list of ships on the board. Of course, there was no way of knowing what part of the world they were heading for. While I was still looking, the dispatcher walked over to my side. "Hey, Bill, I have a brand new ship in the Richmond shipyard which will be commissioned for sea duty tomorrow. They need a first assistant to go aboard this afternoon and sort of take charge. The rest of the crew will follow in a day or two. How about grabbing her?"
"But I only have a second's ticket," I replied.
"That will make no difference," he said. "We'll make it on a waiver. You'll have no problem. I assure you."
"Okay," I said, if the company is willing to take me on that basis, I'll give it a try,"
My dispatch card had my name, ship and rank. The dispatcher directed me to the company office. There I met the port captain who would drive me to the ship. He was a nice, friendly old guy who made me feel comfortable as we rode across the Bay Bridge to Richmond. There she was, a brand new Liberty ship, the Samuel Gompers.
Old Sam Gompers was at one one time head of the American Federation of Labor, and like most of the top leadership of his period, he was a strong conservative. He was long gone, and now he had a Liberty ship named after him. The ship was teeming with men and women shipyard workers. Three other ships were being built there at the same time, but the Gompers was the only one that had a wisp of smoke coming out of her stack. Her propeller was slashing the water and all her mooring lines were taut and emitting squeaks for mercy, as if they were ready to break from the pressure.
Bill Bailey Page 50
