AN UNEXPECTED ENEMY - A BRIEF MEMOIR I 'ghostwrote' this article for my Father-in-law, Eugene Gross, to appear in his a club's newsletter. It is written in the first person as a personal experience. 
  An Unexpected Enemy

Allure of the Sea is the name of the largest and most luxurious cruise ship in the world looming like a small city as we approach the pier in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Also approaching is my ninetieth birthday, which is the reason about twenty of my relatives and I are getting ready to join over five thousand other souls for a seven day jaunt toodling around the Caribbean.

 I cannot help but think how far the distance in time and circumstance is from that moment seventy years ago when I was a young sailor about to embark on a dull gray destroyer escort named the USS Waterman DE 740 to enter the greatest military conflict in history.

 Looking back I can see that the Waterman would appear to be a bathtub toy compared to the behemoth now set to take us on a leisurely tour to tropical vacation spots. And it was certainly no holiday that was intended when I and a few hundred other fellows boarded our warship in 1943.

 Man, were we unaware of what was ahead!

 I had to cajole my dear old mother into allowing me to join the service being that I was not quite seventeen years old, but she finally reluctantly agreed to let me sign up and I joined a National Guard unit in my home state of New York.

It was during basic training when I found myself crawling on my belly through mud and strung out barbed wire that I figured there had to be a cleaner, better way to serve my country. The only route to improving my lot, however, was to enlist fulltime, and I was pretty sure that the one service where there would not be a lot of dirt to deal with was the Navy. So there I went.

After boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Base I was assigned to radio school to learn how to use Morse Code to encrypt and decipher other codes used for secure communications. It was a constant barrage of dots and dashes for hours at a time at the school run by the University of Illinois and after a few weeks my head was spinning with the staccato clicks.

 I was in a fix. My mind seemed unable to make sense of the course and I realized I was not going to be able to cut it, but the idea of quitting was repulsive to me. Finally, though, I went to my commanding officer and explained my problem.

He was not encouraging in his reaction and it did not take long for him to begin the explaining. “Look,” he said, “you’ve cost Uncle Sam fifteen thousand dollars so far sending you to school. You can’t just throw that away.” “Fifteen thousand dollars!” I was flabbergasted by the amount but he went on to itemize the details, and there was no arguing that I had cost the government a pretty penny for the few excruciating weeks I had spent trying to get the hang of the noise in my earphones.

 “Give it another go,” he prodded, “Put your mind to it – you can do it.”

I tried my darndest but it was no use and it was with no small sense of failure that I went back to face the CO and tender my regret at being unable to grasp the course.

 Leaving the school ended my chances for a technical assignment as I was informed that I had already wasted too many of the taxpayers’ dollars.

So it was that I ended up as a yeoman on the USS Waterman escorting tankers in the Pacific.

After the embarrassment of my brief career in the specialist’s school I was determined not to flub up anything else and I became a pretty good yeoman, working on the bridge of the ship alongside the officers.

 One important thing I learned in the Navy was that there are no unimportant jobs aboard a ship and that each sailor has to be totally on task within his given assignment. Unlike the other services where a soldier or Marine has to be able to take on different roles as the situation calls for, a sailor has to do his unique part exactly right for the craft to function the way it should.

 You could say that a ship at war is like a fine watch – there are no extra pieces and what pieces there are have to interact with everything else to keep the proper time.

 That was the way it was with us throughout the well-documented battles of the war against Japan in the Pacific.

 The fights were fierce, with an enemy determined never to surrender and dedicated to inflicting as much punishment as it could. It took a formidable amount of coordination to make sure that the troops involved had whatever they needed to carry out the missions on places that have become legendary in world history.

Tarawa, the Solomon Islands, The Marshall Islands, Iwo Jima, Kwajalien, Guam, Saipan, Tinian and finally Okinawa were all bought with plenty of American blood, sweat, and tears, searing their names forever into the annals of war. And I was there doing my bit while the Waterman and her sister ships provided escort, cover and protection for the tankers, vital mobile fuel suppliers without which the mighty fleets would be rendered virtually useless.

The enemy could come from anywhere and it kept us constantly on our toes. We were prepared for attacks from submarines, planes and other ships but the scariest moments of the war for most of my shipmates and me came from a completely unexpected source – Mother Nature.

 The exact date, time and location escape me this far removed but the experience remains vivid and fresh in my memory.

 I was on watch, which generally ran from midnight until 0400, perched high up in my usual position on the bridge when the storm began.

The spotters and weather guys knew it was coming, of course, but predicting the erratic course of such storms was haphazard at best in those days. I had learned that hurricanes were called typhoons in that part of the world but I had no idea what the power in such a phenomenon could be. It didn’t take very long to find out.

The wind picked up speed, rain stated to splat with the force of a 50mm and the waves began to boil. That was just the start.

For the next eight to ten hours, which seemed like eternity to me, hell was on the seas. It felt as if the ocean was determined to devour us, aided and abetted by ferocious winds and rain like I had never before, or since, experienced.

 We were tossed around as if we were twigs in a flood. Visibility was pretty limited but I could see that the rest of the fleet was not having it any better. Then a sight through a break in the veil of fog and rain revealed something that was hard to comprehend and probably will be hard for you to really believe – an Enterprise-class carrier suddenly went bow under the waves and the gigantic screws lifted up completely out of the water!

 The power of the storm, of nature in a fury still amazes me. It was so intense and insistent that three ships of the fleet went down, taking over twelve hundred American sailors to the bottom of the deep blue. The Spence, Hull, and Moynihan disappeared as if they had never existed.

The sharks gathering, however, told the truth, and the thought of the suffering of those poor fellows makes me sad to this day.

 Why one man dies in war and the other right next him does not has been attributed by some to fate or destiny. Others will say it is divine grace, while still others say it’s just plain dumb luck. Whatever it is was working for me during that torment, for as I was making my way along the bridge the ship rolled and I lost my footing. Had the Captain not been in that place at that particular time I would not be here to relate my story. He saved me from certain death by grabbing the back of my belt as I was toppling off the deck.

 Destiny, grace, or luck, whatever it was gave me the opportunity to enjoy nearly a century of life so far with the wonderful gifts that has offered of family, friends, and extraordinary experiences and adventure.

 But I will always remember most profoundly my time in service to the Good Ole USA, and the hours when I encountered, and survived, an unexpected enemy