Читать книгу The Sailor's Homer - Dennis L. Noble - Страница 14

CHAPTER 2

FIRST ASSIGNMENTS

McKenna began his naval career in Salt Lake City. Enlistment was not an altogether radical choice; the Depression meant McKenna had little or no opportunity for either continuing his education or immediately entering the workforce. Moreover, his mother and three brothers needed financial support, and poor economic times have always been the best recruiter for the armed forces (this is still the case in the twenty-first century). Why McKenna chose the Navy is unknown, but some reasons can be surmised. He enjoyed reading travel books, making him an ideal target for the Navy’s recruiting slogan at the time: “Join the navy and see the world.” Furthermore, as a young man McKenna took great pleasure in meeting unusual people, and he had a passion for observing his surroundings. How else could a poor boy from a small, isolated desert community pursue these interests? A young man from the sage-covered desert, he might also have yearned for the long vistas of the sea. For centuries the sea has presented young men the chance to escape imaginary or real injustices and have an adventure. It is likely all of these reasons combined to sway McKenna’s decision to enter the naval service.

Whatever the reason, on 2 September 1931 Richard Milton McKenna raised his right hand and repeated the oath given by Lt. Cdr. J. M. Lewis, USN, the officer in charge of the recruiting station. McKenna became an apprentice seaman, earning twenty-one dollars per month, with orders to report to the Naval Training Center (boot camp) at San Diego, California, to start his four-year enlistment.

The paperwork generated by McKenna’s enlistment gives a glimpse of the young sailor. McKenna filled out a “physical questionnaire,” which asked him about his health. He wrote yes to only three items: Have you had a tonsillectomy? Do you wear glasses because of nearsightedness? and Are you well? Interestingly, the few photographs of McKenna during his early Navy years do not show him wearing glasses. Lt. (jg) J. R. Weisser (Medical Corps), USN, reported the young man had blue eyes, light brown hair, and a ruddy complexion. He stood five feet nine and one-half inches tall and weighed 162 pounds.

At the time of McKenna’s entry into the Navy, new recruits were asked, Why do you want to enlist? McKenna had the yeoman answer: “Earn, learn & travel.” He was also asked whether he intended to make the Navy a career, and he responded yes. However, most men trying to enter the Navy during the Depression probably answered the question in the affirmative.

Another of the forms Richard needed to complete was a “beneficiary slip.” If he died, his beneficiary would be his father, Milton Lewis McKenna. On the form Richard gave the address at Caldwell where his mother and brothers lived. Why he chose to place his father on the document is unknown; perhaps Anna had her mail sent to her under her husband’s name.

Having signed all the paperwork and taken the oath, AS Richard Milton McKenna, USN, departed on 3 September to boot camp at San Diego.¹

Enlisted personnel have been forgotten in military and naval history. “It is obvious that the ability and character of the enlisted force affect the performance of a navy; yet the consistency with which this fact is disregarded makes repetition necessary,” wrote historian Frederick S. Harrod. To date, no one has written a definitive history of naval enlisted personnel. Following is an overview—at times subjective—of the Depression-era enlisted force that McKenna joined.²

The Navy of the young McKenna was far different from the twenty-first-century version and even changed markedly during Richard’s era. For most of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Navy had remained small, with wooden sailing ships. The enlisted force consisted mainly of international mariners. When vacancies occurred in the ranks, the Navy put up notices in seaports advertising for sailors with maritime experience no matter what nationality. Furthermore, captains of naval vessels could recruit men in any port of the world. The sailor-writer Herman Melville signed on board the frigate USS United States in 1844 and wrote the novel White Jacket (1850) about his experiences. Melville noted that the frigate Navy always had signs in port cities advertising for sailors. This method of recruiting provided mariners who needed little, if any, training. Eventually, the service established recruiting stations only in coastal cities with Navy yards: Norfolk, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; New York; Boston; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and San Francisco.³ Seaport signs and recruiting by captains proved adequate for a small, wooden-ship, sailing Navy. The enlisted force numbered between sixty-five hundred and ten thousand from the 1830s until about the Spanish-American War of 1898, with an upward turn during the Civil War. After the ending of hostilities in 1865, the numbers of enlisted went back to normal.⁴

Despite the international pool of trained mariners that served as the Navy’s enlisted force, the naval leadership was dissatisfied with the type of men the service attracted. The Navy’s Bureau of Equipment and Personnel admitted that many of the senior enlisted men were alcoholics. The work of the enlisted force was hard, dangerous manual labor that did not require much technical skill, and living conditions were bad, sometimes in the extreme. The naval leadership viewed the enlisted men as hard drinking and uneducated, capable only of manual work, and this view became ingrained in the leadership’s collective thinking, lasting throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, even as the enlisted force slowly changed. This is not to say no officer opposed this view, but not enough thought differently to sway the general consensus. Members of the American public showed their agreement with the naval leadership, posting signs that read, “Sailors and dogs keep off the grass.”

The Navy finally began to modernize around 1889, replacing wooden sailing ships with steel vessels powered by steam. The new ships led to changes in the enlisted force. For years officers had complained that few of their sailors were native-born Americans. The officer corps worried about the loyalty of the foreigners in combat. Steam ushered in a need for men able to learn the technical skills demanded by the new propulsion technology. The naval establishment addressed the officers’ concerns and steam’s demands by changing how and whom it recruited. Recruitment efforts moved from the port cities to the midwestern United States, hence the major recruit-training station at Great Lakes, Illinois. Considering the Navy’s conservativism, these changes were revolutionary. Historian Harrod, who has studied the changes in the Navy’s enlisted force from the end of the nineteenth century until 1940, pointed out, “As revolutionary as [the changes] were, they were undertaken surprisingly rapidly—virtually all were begun within a decade after the Spanish-American War.”

Harrod noted that new recruitment efforts began to shape the enlisted force’s structure between 1899 and 1910, with only minor adjustments until World War II. In 1890, for example, 49.7 percent of the Navy’s enlisted sailors were foreign born. Nine years later, the number dropped to 20 percent, and by 1910 1.8 percent of the U.S. Navy were noncitizens. By the time of McKenna’s enlistment in 1931, only 0.1 percent of the Navy was foreign born. Filling the ranks with landsmen from the Midwest required new ideas about training. During this period on-shore training of new enlisted men began to replace the traditional on-the-job training at sea.

World War I and the patriotic fever that accompanied the first global war caused many native-born Americans to rush to serve in the Navy. By the end of 1921, the Navy enlisted force had returned to its normal size of between 80,000 and 90,000 men. Few changes were made to the new recruitment and training methods between the world wars, and these methods, in place since the end of the nineteenth century, have lasted until modern times.⁵

The new enlisted force showed a marked downward trend in desertion. Not too surprisingly, desertion reached its lowest ebb during the Depression. For obvious reasons the Depression-era Navy McKenna entered also showed an upward trend in reenlistments.

The eighteenth-century English poet and essayist Samuel Johnson wrote, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Improvement of living conditions on U.S. naval ships moved slowly, but still, Navy recruiters touted them with enthusiasm. Recruiting posters before World War I tended to focus on the enticements of material benefits, training, and travel, without mentioning what life at sea held in store for the new recruit. In McKenna’s novel The Sand Pebbles, which takes place in the 1920s, the author aptly described what many fleet sailors endured before the beginning of World War II: “Holman was used to sleeping on narrow pipe-and-wire shelves stacked four high on either side of pipe stanchions. You were practically in a double bed with the guy across from you. Somebody’s rump sagged in your face and someone else’s feet were next to your pillow. The air was always thick with bad smells and strangled snoring. Bunking like that was supposed to work you out of any private and personal notions you had about yourself.” When you grew “to like living that way, you were a good bluejacket and Uncle Sam loved you.” Living conditions in the river gunboats on China’s Yangtze River were better than those in the ships of the Fleet Navy, and thus, many sailors requested duty in the Middle Kingdom. Again, all this does not mean some senior officers did not try to improve conditions, but these officers remained in the minority. One politician of the 1920s, however, is noted for trying to improve the sailors’ lot.⁶

Newspaper editor and politician Josephus Daniels was born in Washington, North Carolina, on 18 May 1862. Although admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1885, he did not practice law; instead, he worked as a newspaper editor and eventually owned a number of papers. He became an influential member of North Carolina’s Democratic Party and was appointed the chief clerk of the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1893 to 1895 under President Grover Cleveland. Daniels left this post to work to strengthen the party in his home state. His strong support for Woodrow Wilson’s successful presidential campaign in 1912 earned Daniels an appointment as Secretary of the Navy on 5 March 1913. He held this post until 4 March 1921. His assistant was the young and energetic Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a rising star in the Democratic Party.

Most of the twelve Navy secretaries who held the position from 1897 to 1939 had no impact on the enlisted force; their annual reports provided only boilerplate comments in praise of sailors. Because of their lack of knowledge of the Navy, the secretaries usually allowed the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation to handle enlisted matters. Two secretaries proved the exception to the rule: George von Lengerke Myer, secretary from 1909 to 1913 under President William Howard Taft, and Daniels.

Daniels, like most Secretaries of the Navy before 1939, had no naval experience. Unlike his predecessors, however, Daniels came from a “modest background.” Despite his background he decided to control the Navy, “and . . . did so to a surprising degree.” Ernest K. Lindley recalled, “Daniels entered the Navy department with the profound suspicion that whatever an admiral told him was wrong, and every corporation with a capitalization of more than $100,000 was inherently evil.” Daniels’ reforms ran the gamut from banning alcohol from ships (1914) to outlawing prostitution within a five-mile radius of naval installations (1917) to making sure enlisted men were issued two pairs of pajamas and wore them.⁷

One of the most controversial orders Daniels issued was General Order 63, of 16 December 1913, which provided mandatory shipboard instruction for all men. The secretary pronounced “every ship a school,” but as the Navy had already started training programs, including advanced courses, the new secretary’s experiment met with mixed Navy support and stopped altogether during the Great War. After hostilities ceased, Daniels did not try to reinstate the program.

Unlike previous secretaries, Daniels had “an unprecedented and abiding concern for the men,” but he was not above making himself seem the font of all changes in the Navy—so much so that Harrod noted the secretary’s glowing annual reports give the impression that “Daniels must have invented the enlisted man.” Historian Ronald H. Spector wrote, “In fact this [that is, Harrod’s comment] is correct.” Both Daniels and Roosevelt realized the enlisted force had to be reinvented for the new Navy. According to Spector, the Daniels-FDR leadership should not be looked on as a “period of well-intentioned but naive and futile experiment but as the beginning of a modern approach to enlisted policy. . . . [They] laid the foundation for the competence-based, technology-oriented, specialized, and meritocractic navy of the twentieth century.”⁸

Although Spector is correct in his observation, it is instructive to know how some of the enlisted force felt about Daniels. CTM Harry S. Morris, for example, recalled the secretary was not “a navy man, more of a southern Preacher trying to make men and officers things his [own] way.” Even while Daniels boasted of his improvements, life at the enlisted level changed little, as a number of letters in Daniels’ papers in the Library of Congress attest. One petty officer in 1914 wrote to his hometown newspaper, “If some state would only start a movement to compel naval officers to treat the enlisted men like human beings and not like dogs . . . that state would earn the thanks and gratitude of over 60,000 enlisted men.” Not all comments came from within the naval establishment. One high school principal wrote Daniels that he would not send any student into the Navy, adding, “When will the officers of the Navy abandon the poppycock assumption of social superiority? I will not tolerate the old feudal constitution of the Navy in which officers are lords and the sailors villains.” Daniels brushed aside these letters as “an exceptional case and pointed to the Navy’s reenlistment rate as evidence that most sailors were fairly treated and happy.” Harrod noted Daniels’ significance “lay not in establishing dramatically new programs [for the enlisted force] but in emphasizing and publicizing concern for the enlisted force.” Daniels died in 1948.⁹

Changes in the Navy—then and now—can move quickly. Richard McKenna’s naval career illustrates, however, that no matter how rapidly the naval establishment reshaped itself, reforms moved at a slower speed at the enlisted level.¹⁰

Apprentice Seaman 2nd Class McKenna reported to boot camp on 4 September 1931 to begin learning about the Navy. The testing given McKenna showed he scored in the top 7 percent in almost every category, even clerical. Interestingly, McKenna “hated the water during [boot camp] training” and never learned to swim.¹¹

Upon the successful completion of boot camp, McKenna received orders to Naval Hospital Corps training school on 4 January 1932. He completed the school on 2 April 1932 with an overall mark of 3.92 out of a possible 4.0. With this training McKenna became a hospital technician in the service’s medical field; his career field thus changed to hospital corpsman apprentice 2nd class.¹²

McKenna’s first assignment after naval school took him to the naval hospital at Bremerton, Washington, on 13 April 1932. A bluejacket receives periodic evaluations from senior petty officers and officers, earning ratings from 0.0 to 4.0, with 4.0 being the highest possible score. During McKenna’s years at Naval Hospital Bremerton, he was evaluated for proficiency in his rating, ability as a leader of men, and conduct. By 13 December Richard’s marks in proficiency in rate stood at a respectable 3.5, his marks in leadership were 3.0—not too surprising for a sailor just beginning in his career—and his marks in conduct were 4.0. For advancement in rate, the Navy required enlisted sailors to take and pass a naval correspondence course that focused largely on the theoretical material needed for advancement in each grade in a rate. By 1 December 1932 McKenna had completed his course for hospital corpsman apprentice 1st class with a mark of 3.61 out of a possible 4.0.¹³

McKenna’s service record after five months at the naval hospital at Bremerton contains a letter from HA2 Roy Frederick Lindberry. Lindberry, who was stationed at the Mare Island naval hospital, near Vallejo, California, requested a mutual exchange of duty with McKenna. In a mutual exchange of duty, two sailors within the same rating and pay grade seek an exchange of duty stations and pay for their own travel. (The sailors must have the approval of both commanding officers.) Lindberry wanted the exchange of duty because the Bremerton hospital was closer to his home. McKenna probably wished to be nearer to a larger city and, perhaps to expedite the request, said his home was San Francisco. The mutual exchange was approved and McKenna reported to Mare Island on 17 October 1932.¹⁴

Throughout his career in the Navy and thereafter, it seems, McKenna did not throw any paper away. At some point he assembled much of the ephemera gathered in his career into two scrapbooks. Included with the material for this first period of McKenna’s service is an unidentified newspaper clipping announcing Richard’s selection to “attend hospital corps training school.” The scrapbook for Richard’s time at Naval Hospital Bremerton, near Seattle, Washington, reveals a card for the Owl Billiards, at 1510 ½ Third Avenue in Seattle, advertising billiards, cards, and lunch. There is also a medical slip showing an examination of McKenna and a diagnosis of “Staff [staph].” The Mare Island hospital duty is represented in his scrapbook by a round-trip ferry ticket from Vallejo, California, to San Francisco. The duty in both naval hospitals provided the thing he most appreciated: the availability of public libraries.¹⁵

Hospital Corpsman Apprentice 2nd Class McKenna on 16 May 1933 changed his career field to fireman 3rd class, an entry level for the enlisted engineering branch of the service, and transferred to the Navy receiving ship (station) at San Francisco for further transfer. This was a major move—from the cool, quiet, antiseptic conditions of a hospital to the noisy, hot, oily, greasy, dangerous engine room of a ship.¹⁶ Nothing in McKenna’s service record indicates the reasons for this change. In The Sons of Martha, the unfinished autobiographical novel McKenna was writing at the time of his death, however, he hints that he changed his rating because of the Depression. When a shipmate asks the protagonist in the novel, Reed Kinburn, why he switched to engineering, Kinburn says he had no choice in the matter. President Roosevelt had closed the naval hospitals to veterans and thus made a surplus of hospital corpsmen apprentices. The Navy, according to Kinburn, gave those affected three choices: change to seaman, change to fireman, or take a special order discharge. Given the economy, Kinburn (McKenna) chose engineering. Furthermore, Kinburn mentioned he had joined the Navy to go to sea, not spend time in hospitals, and he had submitted letters for a change in his rating and a transfer to sea. This latter reason seems more in line with McKenna’s persona.¹⁷

The Great Depression, which had caused McKenna to join the Navy, also affected the armed forces’ pay and promotions. In 1933 Congress cut all federal employees’ salaries by 15 percent. At the time McKenna drew thirty-six dollars per month, less the 15 percent. Whether because of public outcry or improvements in the economy, Congress restored 10 percent of the reduction in 1934 and the remaining 5 percent in 1935.¹⁸

McKenna eventually received orders to transfer from Receiving Ship San Francisco to USS Gold Star at Guam. He awaited the arrival of the troopship USS Chaumont (AP 5) to make his way slowly across the Pacific Ocean.

During World War I the U.S. government created a large number of emergency shipyards with the American International Shipbuilding Corporation, located at Hog Island, Pennsylvania (Hog Island was also the site of one of seventeen of these yards on the East Coast). The government used the same system of emergency shipyards during World War II. Chaumont began as hull number 671 at Hog Island. Its keel was laid on 18 November 1918, and it was launched in 1920. Originally scheduled for the U.S. Army Transport Service, it became the Navy’s Chaumont on 3 November 1921. The ship was named for the site of the General Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Force in France in World War I and for Le Ray de Chaumont, a French citizen who contributed to the American Revolution by purchasing, outfitting, and supplying American ships in French ports. Chaumont had been a good friend and confidant of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

Chaumont displaced 8,300 tons, measured 448 feet in length, and had a draft of 26 feet 5 inches. It made 14 knots (16 miles per hour) and had a single propeller. The ship had a permanent complement of 286 and sported four 3-inch guns as armament.

During the unrest in China in the twenties and thirties, the transport moved U.S. Marine Corps Expeditionary Forces to the Middle Kingdom. Usually, however, Chaumont plodded its way throughout the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific, moving naval personnel, their wives and children, congressional committees on inspection tours, and cargo to and from destinations as wide-ranging as Bermuda, Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, and Shanghai.¹⁹

McKenna awaited Chaumont, scheduled for arrival in two months, on Goat Island—now called Yerba Buena Island—in San Francisco Bay. The naval facility had a small library, but sailors in transit could not check out the volumes. For McKenna, who described himself as “hopelessly addicted to reading,” the waiting period brought about a “serious problem.” He recalled he had taken out an allotment to send to his mother leaving him with “only 13 dollars” a month. This meant he had little money for books and thus was dependent on libraries.²⁰

A few days after he had reported to Goat Island, McKenna found a store on Mission Street in San Francisco specializing in secondhand magazines. The establishment stood on the fringes of skid row, and down-and-out men were always bringing in magazines to sell. They obtained the periodicals from trash cans or vacant lots, or they begged for them. Richard spent at least an hour browsing the offerings, selected ten magazines for a quarter, and returned to Goat Island. After reading the magazines, he returned to the store, resold them for a dime, and made another selection. He considered the store a library for skid row men and people, like himself, with little money. He even viewed the owner of the “library” as its librarian, although he never learned the man’s name and recalled him as an “unshaven, taciturn, pipe-smoking old man, [who] between transactions . . . was always reading himself.” The “librarian” seemed to resent the interruptions made by sales. The skid row establishment began McKenna’s lifelong prowling of used-book stores. A publicity photograph for a 1972 book shows Richard behind his typewriter with a large bookcase crammed with volumes, most of which appear to be used books.²¹

McKenna had heard that all Navy ships had libraries—he would soon learn this information was false—but thought because he was in a transit status in Chaumont he would not be able to use its library. Before sailing across the Pacific, Richard went to his “library” on Mission Street and, with some money he had managed to scrape together, purchased a dollar’s worth of old magazines. Storage space for personal possessions being limited on a troop transport, McKenna spread his magazines beneath the thin mattress of his bunk. Other people in the compartment either read or pilfered the volumes, but most returned them when finished. When he arrived in Guam, McKenna still had some magazines he had not yet read.²²

Fireman 3rd Class McKenna eventually boarded Chaumont for the long voyage to Guam. Ask any veteran about sailing in a troop transport and he or she will invariably paint a picture of overcrowding and boredom. In the pictorial center of the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) in Washington, D.C., is a sailor’s cartoon that captures what many felt. Vertically along the side of a drawing of a transport ship are letters spelling out USS Chaumont, which the wag has translated as meaning “U Shall Suffer. Christ Help All Us Monkeys on Navy Transports.” Ironically, McKenna’s World War II career would center on troop transports.²³

Upon boarding Chaumont, the new fireman received a sheet of paper printed on both sides, titled “Instructions for Troop Class Passengers,” which outlined what was expected of him while he was in the troopship. McKenna found himself—not too surprisingly—assigned to E Division (Engineering); he would sleep in compartment L-7 and eat “in cafeteria style in Compartment No. 5-B.” In addition to outlining where the troops could or could not smoke, the instructions informed him he was to check the ship’s orders, which were “conspicuously posted about the ship.” Further, McKenna was required to “be habitually in a clean and neat uniform of the day.” His hair had to be cut in a regulation manner, which meant “that hair on top must be no longer than two inches and neatly tapered at the sides and back. The back of the neck must not be shaved.” Furthermore, “no eccentricities” in beards or haircuts were allowed, and McKenna was required to “shave daily.”²⁴

Richard spoke badly about the slow-moving Chaumont throughout his life. In a letter to an old shipmate two months after his retirement in 1953, Richard let loose a stream of vitriol toward all masters at arms (MAAs)—that is, the police force on a ship or shore, known then in the Navy as “Jimmy Legs”—and specifically those in Chaumont. “All MAA’s were bastards and the ones on the Chaumont were the biggest bastards of all,” McKenna wrote. “They would grab a towel or anything else you left on a bunk for a few minutes and put you on report for having clothing adrift [not in the proper place]. If they had to, they would take something out of your seabag. Then you would have to do extra duty or buy off. They wanted you to buy off. If you only had a quarter and two packs of cigarettes, they would take that.” Warming up to his subject, McKenna revealed, “The chief Jimmylegs . . . made more money by shaking down the passengers than the skipper drew in salary. Maybe the skipper was cut in on it. I will always hate that ship.”²⁵

A decade after his 1953 letter, his ire had not diminished. “I hated the Chaumont more than I ever did any enemy ship. I rode her both ways, out in ’32 and back in ’41, and she had not changed a bit,” he wrote. “One ship, one passageway. Eat slop standing up. Standing room only on the well decks and God help any sailor who leaned against an officer’s automobile. The married men could stand down there evenings and watch their wives on the boat deck dancing with the officers. She looked like a shoebox with a bow on each end. I still hate that ship.”²⁶

Even later he wrote, “That wash room, all around a trunked cargo hatch in the tween decks. Half of it always roped off for the crap games the MAA force ran. One fresh water tap that ran a trickle half the size of your little finger. Twenty guys lined up waiting for water, even at two o’clock in the morning. They said the Chaumont had her bow built just like her stern so the German subs wouldn’t know what direction she was going. Nobody aboard ever did, either. I hate that ship.”²⁷

In McKenna’s last letter on the subject of Chaumont, written on 28 December 1963, the years still had not softened his rage. He wrote of his current writing project, “I am going to work in a few pokes at the Chaumont for the sake of all of us who were prisoners of war aboard that floating madhouse. . . . I am still waiting for Congress to vote me a medal for suffering hardship and insult above and beyond the call of duty.”²⁸

Eventually, on 6 August 1933, Fireman 3rd Class McKenna left the “madhouse” Chaumont and reported to duty in his first permanently assigned Navy ship, USS Gold Star, station ship for the island of Guam. McKenna quickly realized the ship and location were all a young man from an isolated town in the high desert of Idaho who liked to meet unusual people and go to unusual places could have ever hoped to encounter. The ship also began his lifelong love of machinery.