A Birthday

 

   Today is my father's birthday. Five years ago I posted this piece about his adventures in the Merchant Marine during WWII. Thanks to two leap years, I have the opportunity to post it again. My father was a great man and his family and friends continue to miss him.

From the Wannaskan Almanac, October 25, 2019

 Today is the birthday of my father, Joseph Francis McDonnell. He would have been 96. I thought I knew all about my father. I used to call my parents on Sundays and, after chatting with my mother, she'd put my father on. "I suppose your mother has told you all the news," he'd say. We'd talk of this and that, but very often the talk would drift to his time in the Merchant Marine during World War II. He worked on Standard Oil tankers and enjoyed reminiscing about his runs up and down the California coast. I think this had been an idyllic time for him.

   Recently though, I got a lot more insight into those days thanks an interview our son Joe recorded with him in 2005, four years before his death. I always knew he had been a mate, or officer, on his ship, and that he had been torpedoed in the South Pacific, but this 75 minute interview filled in a lot of gaps.

   Probably the most striking new fact was that when he left his home in Boston to go to sea he was just 17 years old. This was in 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor. He got some training in New York City and then in Florida. He said the training involved a lot of rowing, which he was already competent at, having been messing about in boats since he could crawl. There was no call for him on the east coast so he travelled by train to Los Angeles. I remember him saying that Texas seemed to go on for several days.

   He was an able bodied seaman at this time, heaving lines, hooking up fuel lines, and chipping paint. For the first several months, his ship was hauling fuel up and down the coast, but eventually the ship was sent to the South Pacific with fuel for the Navy. Several landing craft were loaded onto the deck of the tanker. These were the vessels used for assaulting beaches on islands held by the Japanese. Stenciled on these vessels was the word "COMSOPAC". My father and a friend went to the local department store and bought a world atlas. They scanned the map of the Pacific Ocean looking for an island called COMSOPAC without success.

   When they asked one of the officers, he said, "You knuckleheads! That's Navy lingo for  Commander South Pacific." When the captain heard this he was angry, because for security reasons, the crew was not supposed to have maps. During the initiation for sailors crossing the equator for the first time, Father Neptune accused them of being spies and they were nearly made to walk the plank.

   When they reached the Caroline Islands, their fuel was transferred to Navy tankers that would be going where the action was hot. The Navy tankers were bristling with guns and had a crew of two hundred to man them, while my father's tanker had a crew of fifty.

   Before his fourth trip to the South Pacific, the ship's boatswain (bo'sun), failed to show up. "He married a barstool in town ," was my father's explanation. My father was given the job of bo'sun at age 19. The bo'sun controls the work of the other seamen on the ship, an important job. The only bad thing was that Standard Oil listed him as "maintenance superintendent." "I wanted to be known as a bo'sun," he said.

   It was on the return to California on this trip that his ship was torpedoed. It was very early in the morning and my father had been sleeping. Joe asked his grandfather what went through his mind when he heard the explosion. "I was scared shitless," was his reply. When he saw the ship was not sinking immediately, he and his bunkmate got dressed and went on deck. The torpedo had hit the engine room and killed two men. Since it had no cargo aboard, the ship did not sink, and the captain hoped it could be towed somewhere for repairs. But the Japanese sub put another torpedo into the hull and now it was time to man the lifeboats.

   One of the four lifeboats had been wrecked by the explosion. The ship was sinking slowly and my father volunteered to go below and get more supplies in case they had a long wait for rescue. As bo'sun, he knew where everything was on the ship. He said it was weird hearing the creaking of the ship as it was sinking, and he and his companion wasted no time gathering supplies and getting back on deck.

   My father was in the lifeboat with the captain and other officers. "I was with the talent," he said. They got their boat safety launched and started rowing away, but the ship tipped toward their lifeboat. The ship's mast came down on the lifeboat and pinned my fathers arm against the rail of the lifeboat. "I thought I was going down with the ship," he said. But then the mast lifted away and released him, but now another part of the mast caught in the hand rope attached to the gunnel of the lifeboat. He said his hand was shaking badly as he cut the rope and freed the boat. (Whew! I almost wasn't here to write this story, or young Joe to record it.)

   Then to top things off, the sub surfaced. The crew kept a low profile in their lifeboats. The Japanese crew manned the gun on the bow of the sub and put a few more holes in the bow of the ship to hasten its sinking. Then the sub submerged. I have always been grateful to that crew for not sinking the lifeboats too.

   Fortunately, the radioman had gotten a message off with the ship's position. Soon a U.S. plane swooped overhead. All day planes flew over, searching for the sub and dropping food and water to the lifeboats. Around six p.m. a destroyer appeared on the horizon and eventually the crew was returned to California and was given time to return home. It was during this leave that my father met Joe's grandmother at a roller skating rink. Strangely enough, it was almost the same location where I met Joe's mother thirty years later.

   After this leave, my father returned to California to train as a mate. "I hadn't been a good student in high school, but now I made an effort in class, because I could see the subjects would have some use in my work." He finished out the war as a third mate without further incident. Back home, he and my mother got married and he spent his working days on the water, but close to home so he could provide a guiding hand to his five children.

   During the last year of my father's life he wasn't in good health, so it was wonderful to hear his voice again, humorous, interested in world around him, and full of sympathy for his fellow man. When he was done talking, Joe asked if he'd like a beer. "Why not?" was the reply.

At the helm of his beloved ketch, Nave Sho