USS SEALION SS 315

In early '41 the US began preparations for war. I was in the draft and had two years to go for my engineering degree. The navy approached the students with a promise of finishing school if we would sign up now. I did and got a commission as probationary ensign. At this point I felt the U S should stay out of the War. On the other hand, I had tried to enlist in the Royal Air Force but needed my parents:' approval which they would not grant.  My blessed Mother flew to California to tell me why they refused. This was when airline travel was still considered fool hardy.  My first words to my Mother when she got off the DC 3 were, "Don't you realize flying is dangerous?"  She quickly reminded me that her son had his pilot's license!

With the option which seemed so glamorous to me now closed, I put my energy into school.  Mother stayed the summer and fixed my lunch every night while I was working at North American Aviation.  We were building Mitchell bombers (B 25's), SNJ's (the advanced trainer) and P-51 Mustang fighters.  Lynn Newcomb, a classmate, and I worked side by side every night. We were made inspectors of sheet metal parts.

Back in school the following December 7, my roommate, Sam Roeca, and I awakened to the news of Pearl Harbor!  I immediately lost my isolationist views and cursed the Japs.  I finished my junior year and was ordered to North Island Naval Air Station at San Diego for the summer.  I had bought my uniforms, but had no training whatsoever.  I reported to the station gunnery officer who had been called in from retirement.  He had sympathy for me and sent me to the Advanced Carrier Training Group as assistant gunnery officer. Raw pilots from Pensacola would arrive at ACTG for more training including gunnery and bombing and simulated carrier landings.  I was given the job of training enlisted men gunnery from the Colt .45 to the .30 caliber Browning machine gun to the .50 caliber.  I, of course, knew nothing of all this, but one learns at the speed of light in wartime.

We learned to tear down and reassemble these weapons blindfolded and subsequently we learned to fire them.  I was supposed to be instructing on the .50 caliber at the firing range when in fact I had never even heard one fired. After I had said all could say about the weapon to these eager young men there was nothing left to do but fire at the target.  I aimed as I had instructed them to do and squeezed the trigger.  It got off about 15 rounds before I could let go and it made more noise than I had ever heard.  It scared me completely.  When I recovered enough to look at the target the man in the butts was waving the bull's eye signal!  My students thought I was hot stuff.

The gunnery officer took leave to be married and I was suddenly gunnery officer of the squadron.  This meant flying as a gunner and as a bombardier.  I studied the Norden bombsight and we dropped practice bombs on a target in the middle of the Salton Sea and fired machine guns at towed sleeves.

On one occasion I was given an old torpedo boat and crew and told rendezvous with the four-pipe destroyer CRANE to pick up practice torpedoes which would be dropped by pilots from ACTG in TBM's and TBF's.  The chief on board knew what to do and so we managed.

It was during this time I was quartered in a bungalow which was meant for a junior officer and his family.  There were five or six of us including Naval Flight Surgeons Falk and Yood.  Bill Mitchell was a fighter pilot there for training who came from an Alabama family that owned no car.  He had never driven a car and went on to survive the war as a fighter pilot. Vic Falk had a perilous time on Guadalcanal and survived.  Yood was killed.

I returned to school for my senior year and served as senior manager of the USC football team.  This involved quite a bit of work and a chance to make money selling the free tickets all the players got.  I had a narrow brush with police for scalping, but got off with nothing on the blotter.  I chartered a train from the Southern Pacific to take the entire entourage of about 100 people up the coast to Oregon and Washington, across to Notre Dame and back through St. Louis and Texas.

Time passed quickly and my parents arrived for graduation.  Two years earlier, they had given me a new 1940 Ford convertible which I now advertised for $950 in the L. A. Times.  No one called.  I RAISED the price (to my Dad's chagrin) to $1050 and was immediately besieged with buyers.  It cost $949 new in Detroit two years earlier, but now there were no new cars being made, so it commanded a premium.

Sam went off to the Army Air Corps to become a B-24 pilot and I went to the Maritime Academy at Throggs Neck, N. Y., for my officer's training.  Sixty days later I volunteered for submarine duty and was sent to Portsmouth, N. H. for sub school.  We learned Morse code signaling, seamanship and made notebooks (which I still have somewhere) detailing all the systems in the boat.

One day while I was undergoing officers' training there was a fire drill. As I was in the midst of a well-earned shower, I rebelled at the idea of stopping to line up in company front outside the barracks.  All hands had gone outside and I continue with my shower.  Well, the inspection party found me, picked me up by the arms and took me to the formation.  As I stood there naked, shivering in the clear morning air almost 2,000 men laughed.  I have encountered a few people who can recall that embarrassing moment.

The shipyard was building boats and there was much activity.  We dated town girls in the blacked out city.  I had brief fame because I was glimpsed in a movie in which I had played as an extra.  If one looked very quickly, there I was!

Sub school over, I was ordered to New London and the yet-to-be-completed USS SEALION.  I reported to Lt. Commander Eli Reich who scarcely hid his disappointment.  During my initial talk with Eli one of his old buddies came in and they talked of the war.  His buddy had just arrived to take command of another boat building.  He asked Eli how things were going and Eli, pointing in my direction, said, "This is what I'm getting to make into a fighting crew!"  They both shook their heads and I wondered what I was into.

We had "school of the boat" everyday and attack training every night.  I was made TOC operator which I later learned was the number one job after the man on the periscope, usually the skipper and sometimes the exec.  The TOC torpedo data computer was really a mechanical analyzer into which there were many inputs of data.  Some were automatic, like our speed, our course, etc.  Others were from periscope or radar observation.  With each observation the solution was to improve.  When we thought the solution was matching reality, we could fire the torpedoes.

The drills and practice seemed endless and were most tiring.  But weekends we could catch the train to NYC and the “action.” The USO clubs attracted many girls and we had good times.  I stayed at the Astor Hotel on Times Square at every chance.  While there, I saw many of my USC classmates by coincidence.

Finally, the SEALION was ready and put into commission.  More training.  We were sent to the torpedo range at Newport where I was to be air observer of the test firings.  I was overhead in an N2N bi-plane and watched horrified when one of the torpedoes locked right full rudder and ran in a great circle coming up on the port side just ahead of the bridge which was now out of the water.  It hit the boat, leaped up onto the deck and broke in two.  That made an impression on me which I carried always.  As a result, I never failed to have the sound men who were my responsibility track our real fish on every firing.  We never had an erratic run, but the TANG with whom we were patrolling in the East China Sea was sunk by one.  Nine survivors.         

At long last we were ready to shove off for the war.  There was a flurry of activity on the dock in the final moments because the slot machine I had asked my dad to get for us had arrived.  It was uncrated and brought aboard.  It served us well and I was put in charge of the recreation fund.  After a couple of runs we tired of it and sold it to the Chief's Club on Midway for $600.  Howard Burns, Sparta's mayor, had provided it with the request that I get him a Panama hat when we went through the canal.  I got two, one for Dad and one for Howard.  After the war he showed me the hat many times and wore it with pride telling everyone its origin.  It cost $100 at the time!  The best.

When we shoved off for the war, I was qualified to stand watch underway as OOD (Officer of the Deck).  This was a big step up from qualification as a watch stander at the dock.  With my big 7x50 binoculars I was very much aware of my importance and took it most seriously.  I was, for the moment, responsible for Uncle Sam's newest submarine at a cost of $5,000,000.  As the least senior OOD, I drew the mid-watch, noon to 1600 and midnight to 0400.  During my night watch we were off Cape Hatteras, NC, somewhere and the bio-luminescence was brilliant.  When the bow would come down, a flash of light from those micro creatures was almost enough to read by!

The watch consisted of the OOD, three lookouts and the quartermaster.  Suddenly, the starboard lookout yelled, "Torpedo, starboard quarter!!!" Training to the fore, I yelled to the helmsman (we were surfaced), "Left full rudder, all ahead flank!” The captain had a speaker in his cabin which let him hear all he wished to hear on the bridge.  He was up there in a flash, pajamas and all.  My binoculars were on the torpedo which was making a brilliant track through the bioluminescence and heading straight for us.  As we were turning left it came alongside our bow and jumped up to reveal itself as porpoise!  Nobody laughed and we got back on course.

The very next day, again on my watch, again running on the surface, we sighted a convoy coming out of an east coast port which was well to our east.  We were going to pass well under its stern.  We had it in sight for at least fifteen minutes when the trailing cargo ship peeled off and began firing its deck gun at us.  We submerged as quickly as we could before he had a chance to improve his aim.  I began to realize we had no friends.

Well into the Caribbean, again on my watch in the day time, we sighted a structure where there just couldn't be a structure. The skipper overheard us debating and asked what was going on.  I stuttered a bit and he was on the bridge.  It was one of the Queens carrying troops and proceeding at high speed without escort – a startling sight.

Going through the Panama Canal was new and exciting.  We over-nighted in Gatun Lake to allow the barnacles to fall off the bottom of the boat.  We spent two or three days in port on the Pacific side and sampled the night life.  Dan Brooks was confined to the ship for some now forgotten error and was therefore missing out on the action.  The last night, Eli suggested I take Dan ashore.  We got a cab and, through a language error, the driver took us to a cat house.  It was a huge place and there were literally hundreds of people there from ships of all nations with many languages.  Hard to believe, but we didn't really know what sort of place this was – we thought it was just this huge night club.  There was music and singing and dancing and a long bar.  We went to the bar and were ordering a drink when I saw a girl bearing down on Dan from behind.  Her first move was to reach between Dan's legs and squeeze his genitals.  His reaction was quick – he jumped up on to the bar!  We immediately left for the downtown area and had a fun albeit a less adventuresome time.

When it came time to shove off for Pearl Harbor, we noticed the chassis of a jeep tied down on the after deck.  The engine and wheels were below.  The crew had liberated it from the Army jokers somehow and it served us well when we got to Pearl.  As communications' officer, I published a newsletter which we broadcast over the radio to keep the crew somewhat informed on what was going on in the US.  I invented a character called Jose Rodrigues who was constantly escaping big trouble.  It was Jose who swiped the jeep.

(Leslie’s note to family:  In an e-mail dated August 3, 2001, in the process of Dad’s supplying me with stories like the above, he wrote a brief note in response to my asking about the various watches – first watch, mid-watch, etc.:  “The First watch begins at 4AM and 4PM and goes for 4 hours in each case.  The mid watch was always stood by the low man on the totem pole.  The first watch was stood by the senior man and the second watch (8-12) by the next senior.  I always got the mid watch because I was junior.  Dan Brooks and I stood the watch together.  It was the time of a lot of the action, incidentally.”)