Page 126 - Anthology

I am from Paintsville, Kentucky. I was born in Keaton, Johnson County, Kentucky, in 1922. I was raised
on a hillside farm. My dad was a WWI veteran.

On my nineteenth birthday, the American Pacific fleet lay in ruins at Pearl Harbor following the Japanese
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attack on December 7 , 1941. President Franklin Roosevelt requested and was granted a declaration of
war against Japan. One year later, on my birthday I got my greetings from Uncle Sam.

I was drafted from Johnson County for WWII. They took about three or four bus-loads of us to
Huntington, West Virginia, for a physical. I went with a bunch of teenagers. They were the first teenagers
to ever be drafted. I had just turned twenty, but they were all eighteen. I was pretty little for my age, so I
kinda had an inferiority complex because everybody was bigger than me. In fact, nobody expected me to
pass the physical because I was so small. My dad told me: “Go on and get that physical over with. They
are looking for men, they ain’t looking for kids.”

The group of draftees I was in was given a choice of the branch of service they wanted to go into - if they
passed the physical for that branch of service. We were told that the Marine Corps physical was the
toughest and then the Navy, and if you have enough points you’ll go into the army. So, I was what they
called a selective volunteer. I was selected for the army but volunteered for the navy. Every doctor I’d go
by I would ask how I was doing. When I got to the end, here sat this guy that must have been in the Navy
for twenty years or more. He had a lot of hash marks on his sleeve. He looked up at me and said:
“Sonny, you are in the Navy now.” I asked if I had passed my physical. He said: “Hell yes, the Navy is
looking for thousands just like you. The only thing wrong with you is that you are under nourished, but I
believe the navy will take care of that.” I only weighed 117 pounds that day. In six months I went to 145
pounds.

After passing the physical, I come home, and my dad was always buying feed in sacks. He looked at me
and said: “The navy says you are a man, but you couldn’t carry one of those sacks of feed up that ladder
to save your life.” I said I bet I can, and I did. I only weighed seventeen pounds more than that sack of
feed.

I started my active duty training up at Great Lakes, Illinois. Boot camp started on February 19 , 1943. I
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finished boot camp in May of 1943. I remember it was spitting snow as we left Chicago on a troop train
headed for New Orleans, Louisiana. We did not know what we was going into, but when we got there, we
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were told we were going into something called the armed guards . We’d never heard of that before.
They told us it was called the suicide squad. What it amounted to was that the United States had passed
a law to arm all merchant ships by placing navy guns on each ship operated by the Merchant Marines.
The army had originally performed this duty, but they had a hard time getting along and they were not
familiar with navy guns. So, the navy formed the Armed Guards. The reason it was called the suicide
squad was that going south out of the Caribbean, there are these two big hills coming up out of the
ocean; the convoys had to get into single file to pass through that area.

The German subs would just wait for the convoys to come along and knock them off. So, if you survived
one of these trips, you got a sea bag full of new clothes and a thirty-day leave.

We usually had twenty-seven gunners and an officer aboard each vessel. The Germans were operating
from Martinique. They had taken over the area and put all the law enforcement people in jail. But they
made a big mistake; they forgot or just didn’t want to feed the people. The United States did and helped
them over throw the government. We were the second ship in there after they had over thrown the
government. The way I look at it is that people have to either be mad or hungry to fight. We’d box up our
leftovers, put it on a line and drop it over the side at the pier for them to eat. It was so bad that by the
time that food got over the edge and down to them, they would start fighting over it like a bunch of dogs.
If some of the food fell into the water, they’d dive in after it.