A Measureless Peril by Richard Snow

Author:Richard Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cadet O’Hara’s Last Fight

The Naval Armed Guard and the ordeal of the Stephen Hopkins, 1942

“Do you want to go to sea immediately?” During the weeks following Pearl Harbor this question drew bold affirmatives in recruiting stations across the country. The recruiters were as good as their word; the eager respondents were often at sea in days. But not, to their dismay, on a destroyer or a cruiser. Rather, they shipped out aboard a freighter—or, worse yet, a tanker—as part of a service they had never heard of: the Naval Armed Guard.

Plans to arm merchant ships had been going on for nearly a year before America entered the war. At first the training of the men who were to work the guns was scattered and haphazard, some of it taking place in a small, ramshackle camp in Little Creek, Virginia. In September 1941, Little Creek got orders to train two hundred officers and a thousand enlisted men by early January. The first class contained 207 men, 27 of them officers, and most of them leery of the assignment they had drawn. The officers established a club and painted the motto they’d worked up on a sign that went in the bar: READY!—AIM!—ABANDON SHIP!

A Virginian named Floyd Jones arrived at Little Creek a month later. “All we did was train on a .30-caliber machine gun, that was all we had at the time. We didn’t know what we were training for, but a few days later they called us to the flagpole and told us we were training for armed guard duty on merchant ships in case of war.”

The machine gun might have seemed a feeble tool for the job it had to do, but it was appropriate because in the beginning that was the best the navy could come up with. In the early days of the arming program, some merchant ships put to sea carrying on their main gun mount a creosote log, a promissory token of a cannon yet to be forged.

It was the same story with the men. Pushed through brief courses, they were token sailors. Some went to war with a single week’s training in “seamanship,” followed by another week learning gunnery, which culminated in watching a gun being fired. One recruit summed up his month of training, which included squeezing off a brief burst from one of the .30-calibers, saying, “We knew two things for sure when we got finished there: do not stand in front of the gun when it is being fired, and don’t salute doormen.”

Out of such scrabbled-together ingredients the navy made Armed Guard crews and put them aboard merchant ships, with the social effects one might imagine. The novelist Robert Ruark, who served in the Armed Guard, described the situation in a Saturday Evening Post article that ran under the vivid title “They Called ’Em Fish Food.” “The big bugaboo in our business has been, and always will be, the maintenance of cordial relationships with the merchant personnel. Although the master is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.