No Ordinary Joes (16 page)

In the weeks leading up to Bob’s return, Barbara had seen signs of the war everywhere on the home front. “Remember Pearl Harbor” had become the great rallying cry and could be seen in almost every facet of propaganda—posters, pennants, napkins, patches, matchbook covers. The “V for Victory” sign had also become ubiquitous; people flashed it from cars, shops, sidewalks, recruiting rallies, and homes. Patriots hung banners in windows declaring that theirs was a Victory Home. Mothers put it on baby carriages. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse flashed it in promoting war bonds. Little Orphan Annie encouraged kids to distribute V for Victory leaflets. Joe Palooka enlisted.

Everywhere Barbara went in the first few months of the war, she saw anti-Japanese publications and drawings with depictions of bucktoothed Japanese. The anti-Asian racism that had been fermenting on the West Coast boiled over following Pearl Harbor, especially in California. Seventy-five percent (94,000) of Japanese-Americans lived in California, and despite whatever loyalty they had to America, they were automatically considered guilty of sedition. In the aftermath of December 7, 1941, they were harassed, assaulted, evicted, and denied basic needs such as food, clothing, medical care, and shelter. They suffered property damage to their homes and businesses and faced constant threats of mob violence and lynching.

Although Barbara didn’t actively participate in any of the overt
discrimination, like most Americans she had no sympathy for the Japanese. Why would she? Her husband was in constant peril of being blown to smithereens by one of their torpedoes or depth charges.

On February 19, 1942, FDR had signed Executive Order #9066 prescribing the confinement of Japanese-American citizens in internment camps erected east of the Sierras. The roundup of these Japanese-Americans began in late March, with thousands hastily rousted from their homes, businesses, and farms and carted off to assembly centers at Santa Anita and Bay Meadows racetracks before being shipped to permanent internment camps.

A few pacifists objected to this treatment, but Lieutenant General James DeWitt, the commander of the West Coast evacuation, countered: “A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether he’s an American or not.” Many of these Japanese-Americans held to a belief that complying with their government’s orders would confirm their loyalty to America, but it made no difference, even though no Japanese-American was ever brought to trial on charges of espionage or sabotage. They were forced to adapt to primitive conditions in the internment camps, with overcrowding, barbed-wire fences, and dirt and dust a way of life. Armed guards stood watch over them. They lived with rumors and threats—that they would all be sterilized, that they would all be shipped to Japan after the war. They started each dreary day with the Pledge of Allegiance.

But none of that mattered to Barbara as she watched the USS
Pelius
ease its way to the dock. Bob had been gone for only three and a half months, but it seemed like an eternity. She was ready to bring him home to the privacy of her new studio apartment.

Bob’s leave in San Francisco flew by. He and Barbara crammed as much living and loving into three weeks as possible, including a trip home to Oregon. Although Cora didn’t buy Barbara’s story that she had suffered a miscarriage after an adverse reaction to a shot at the dentist, Bob did, or at least he didn’t push for more details. He scored a few points with Barbara’s dad when he helped him fix the carburetor on his car. “At least that boy will always be able to get a job as a mechanic,” said Mr. Koehler. At the end
of the leave, Bob and Barbara both agreed that his departure this time was even more gut-wrenching than when he’d left right after they’d been married. On their last night together, she couldn’t stop crying.

Bob rode the
Pelius
back to Fremantle, where he worked on relief crews for two months before being assigned as the yeoman for the
Grenadier
. He was an enlisted man, just like the mechanics, torpedomen, and all the other guys who got their hands a lot dirtier on the job than he did, but he identified with the officers. His little office kept him in close proximity to the officers’ quarters, and he talked to them frequently, taking great pride in the service he provided. His logs were always grammatically perfect, thorough, and precise, with great attention to detail.

As the recorder of the
Grenadier
’s log, Bob had meticulously familiarized himself with the ship’s design and history, taking pride in memorizing details and facts, such as that she was commissioned on May 1, 1941, and was 307 feet in overall length and 27 feet abeam and had a surface speed of 21 knots. She had ten torpedo tubes—six forward and four aft—and carried one 3-inch antiaircraft deck gun and two antiaircraft machine guns. After the initial shakedown exercises in the Atlantic, she sailed for the Pacific, and on February 4, 1942, she left Pearl Harbor on her first war patrol, commanded by Captain Allen Joyce, going closer to Japan than any Allied vessel since the beginning of the war, sneaking within one mile of the beach just north of Inubo-saki Lighthouse. On her second patrol she sank a large merchant vessel of 14,900 tons, then underwent a scary twenty-three-hour depth charging, surviving a total of seventy blasts that damaged the propeller shaft, knocked out lights, caused leaks, and twisted the superstructure. After repairs back in Fremantle, the ship’s third patrol was spent primarily on station around Truk and Tol Island, and resulted in the sinking of a 15,000-ton tanker. Again, she survived a depth charging that severely shook the ship, returning to port on September 18, 1942. Bob joined the crew shortly after that.

The primary object of the
Grenadier
’s fourth war patrol, captained by Lieutenant Commander Bruce Carr, had been to lay a field of thirty-two mines in the approaches to the harbor in Haiphong, Indochina. The plant,
one of the first submarine minefields of the war, was successfully executed at night as the
Grenadier
dodged junks and islands in water as shallow as twenty-six feet. Returning to base, the ship was forced to dive during another depth charging, the force of the blow as they hit bottom ruining the sound gear and causing chlorine gas to accumulate, which caused considerable suffering and breathing difficulties among the crew, but no permanent casualties. Upon reaching Fremantle, Lieutenant Commander Carr was relieved by Captain James Fitzgerald.

As the
Grenadier
prepared to pull away from the pier at Fremantle to start its sixth patrol, Bob frantically looked through the drawers in his office. He couldn’t find his wallet.

It was March 20, 1943, and the
Grenadier
was headed for the Andaman Sea, from the Gulf of Martaban down through the Mergui Archipelago to the Strait of Malacca. Her assignment was to investigate and destroy enemy shipping. The
Grenadier
was the first American submarine assigned to the area.

Bob checked his pants pocket, then his footlocker. He closed his eyes, trying to remember where he’d last had it. It didn’t take long to figure it out. He’d left it at Leslie Phillips’s house, on the nightstand where he’d emptied his pockets before tumbling into bed.

He’d met Leslie a couple of nights earlier. He and Len Clark, his new best friend on the
Grenadier
, had been hitting the pubs in Perth and living it up like sailors about to go back into enemy waters. They ran into Leslie and her friend Hazel at the Prince Edward Hotel. Bob and Leslie hit it off right away, and when Leslie invited him to come for dinner the next night, Bob didn’t see the harm. He told her about Barbara, and she told him about her husband, who was fighting in North Africa. Her offer of a home-cooked meal was just too good to pass up.

Bob put his hand to his neck and frowned, realizing that not only had he left his wallet at Leslie’s, he’d left his ID and dog tags there, too. Not that he’d need any of that stuff on this patrol, but it was just irritating. He’d told Leslie he’d see her when he returned to port, so he’d pick up the items then.

I
t took Gordy over a year from the time his hot and stinky patrol aboard the
Sculpin
landed in Fremantle until he was assigned to the
Grenadier
. During that time he mostly worked on sub tenders, helping ready ships to go back into combat. He had time to write a lot of letters home.

Gordy liked Fremantle. Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood, a popular, can-do type of officer, was put in charge of sub operations there. He had been associated with subs his whole career, and one of his first commands,
despite contrary advice from naval brass in Washington, was to lease four hotels—the Prince Edward, Wentworth, Ocean Beach, and Majestic—in the Fremantle/Perth area for the returning crews. He had made improving morale a high priority. The area had excellent recreational facilities, and there was no shortage of women.

Gordy had been transferred to the tender
Holland
. He figured he’d been selected because he hadn’t qualified yet. During the previous three months while on patrol, he’d tried to study, but with his duties on the ship, his difficulties with reading, and the constant stress of combat, he doubted whether he’d ever be able to qualify.

On the
Holland
he was assigned as a mess cook again, an assignment he wasn’t happy about. He also spent four hours every night on watch. Even though Fremantle was beyond the range of land-based Japanese planes, the fear was that an attack could be launched from aircraft carriers.

He continued to write home.

The Navy decided to move part of its fleet stationed at Fremantle, including the
Holland
, even farther south to Albany. Should a Japanese attack sink the tender
Holland
, the fleet would have no way to repair damaged subs.

Gordy rode the
Holland
into Albany. From the deck, he could see a small town surrounded by barren hills. The town, population 300, was only a couple of blocks long. The crew of the
Holland
numbered close to 600, and with an additional 150 men from two subs that had accompanied
it south, plus a destroyer tender and its crew, the resources of Albany were overwhelmed. But its people were eager to be hospitable, believing the survival of their country depended on these American servicemen.

With the ship moored in Princess Royal Harbour in King George Sound, the crew received liberty every fourth day. Almost daily Gordy listened to crewmates venting about the bad torpedoes. But it wasn’t just the crews who were upset. Admiral Lockwood also listened to his frustrated skippers’ complaints about watching helplessly as faulty torpedoes either ran deep, fired prematurely, or were duds. Lockwood tried to get the Bureau of Ordnance to conduct torpedo performance tests, but they refused, blaming the skippers for not preparing and firing the torpedoes improperly. So Admiral Lockwood ordered his own tests, which showed conclusively that the torpedoes didn’t work. But the Bureau of Ordnance still rejected the results and told Lockwood to halt his testing. He didn’t, and the further testing eventually caught the attention of Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet, who intervened. Finally, eight months after the war started, the Bureau of Ordnance admitted that the Mark XIV ran deep. The solution included installing new firing pins machined from a light, high-strength aluminum alloy, using metal that reportedly came from the propellers of Japanese fighters shot down during the Pearl Harbor raid. Immediately, the number of sinkings increased dramatically. But the early course of the war had already been seriously compromised and the lives of thousands of submariners unnecessarily jeopardized, a mistake and scandal later described by naval historian Clay Blair Jr. as “the worst in the history of any kind of warfare.”

Gordy continued to write home regularly.