Monthly Archives: December 2024

by Joel | 29 December 2024 · 5:54 am

Moo Aviator Bragging Rights, 1945

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 308-310:

Recovery of Allied POWs swung into action soon after the occupation forces anchored in Tokyo Bay. Commodore Rodger Simpson was in overall command but heading up the Navy side of the effort was Cmdr. Harold Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota and later a prominent figure in the Republican Party. Stassen’s political star was bright at the time, and many Americans thought he would be Truman’s challenger in the next presidential election. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, two of the Moo’s Avengers transported Commander Stassen and his staff ashore to Atsugi airfield, thirty miles southwest of the capital. They were the first naval squadron to touch down on Japan; they did not receive a warm welcome, but this time the hostility was from the US Army, not the Japanese. The Eleventh Airborne Division had arrived on the airfield two days earlier, taking up residence in barracks that only days before had been occupied by kamikaze pilots. As far as the Army was concerned the Navy was not welcome.

Commander Melhorn’s Avenger—with Stassen in the back—blew out a tire when he landed, and he limped his plane down the runway, looking for a place to deliver his passenger. As the damaged plane came crawling in, Melhorn described how an Army colonel “[came] charging out on the taxiway, waving this .45 [pistol] and motioning for me to take off, to get out. Obviously I had no business there that this was an Army show.” Melhorn was disappointed and annoyed that the war was barely over and interservice rivalries had reemerged, a turn of events he described as like the bad old days of 1940 all over again. But the arrogant colonel got his comeuppance when Commander Stassen stepped out of the back of the plane. Melhorn described him as doing the “double take of all double takes” and suddenly becoming very deferential to Stassen’s direction.

The Japanese were waiting to meet the arriving US officials in a little striped tent just off the runway. They made some attempt at pleasantries, offering lemonade and snacks for the arriving Americans….

Even though only a fraction of the air group had gone, all of them were immensely proud of having been the first squadron to touch down on occupied Japan. To recognize their accomplishment, Air Group Cmdr. Raleigh Kirkpatrick printed up brag cards to distribute to his men. Decades after the war, some of these veterans still proudly kept the cards in their wallet:

In the interest of public safety and the future well-being of all bars, clubs, beer-joints, pubs, juke-joints, cocktail lounges, night spots, dives, shower rooms, bowling alleys, football stadiums, and other places of amusement where liquor and argument lead to bloodshed and mayhem; this is to certify that [name] is of the stalwart company of Air Group Fifty, which led Naval Aviation into Japan by making the first group landing on Japanese home soil, at Atsugi Airfield on the Tokyo plain, at 0951 on the morning of August 28th, 1945, AD. Any claims to the contrary are damn lies. [signed] R.C. Kirkpatrick, Commander US Navy, Commanding Air Group 50.15

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by Joel | 28 December 2024 · 9:25 am

Moo Mothballed, then Scrapped

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 320-321:

The Navy needed the Moo and her Independence-class sisters early in the war when losses had thinned the number of available carriers. But now the war was over, and the situation was far different; American industry had caught up with wartime losses. By the end of 1945, the US Navy had nineteen of the larger, more capable Essex-class, as well as two of the even larger, armored Midway-class battle carriers. Accordingly, it had no need for the humble “stopgap sisters.”

Cowpens’ service had come to an end. She was inactivated in February 1946. By then, Captain Duckworth had moved on to his next assignment and so the ship’s executive officer, Frederick Brush, oversaw her decommissioning. The remaining crew, most of whom had arrived too late to witness her in her wartime prime, celebrated her inactivation in grand style with a party in San Francisco, which the program for the evening dubbed the Mighty Moo’s “Last Rendezvous.”

The Navy was not ready to dispose of Cowpens just yet, and she was mothballed at anchor outside San Francisco in a way that she could be restored to service quickly if needed. It took more than a year to make her ready, but by January 1947, all her hatches, portholes, and windows were sealed and her interior spaces were dehumidified. All her exposed surfaces were covered in protective insulation and corrodible parts coated with plastic paint. Every piece of machinery was coated with preservative, her electrical system disconnected and tagged with instructions for reassembly. Her gear topside was cocooned under weatherproof hoods, and her gun mounts covered with metal igloos that were sealed at the base.

A survey of her condition in September 1959 found that she was in good shape and capable of being restored to service. But the Navy saw little utility in retaining her, and concluded that “there is no existing requirement for this ship in either its present configuration or any planned conversion to permit is utilization… it would be most uneconomical to maintain her in the reserve fleet without justifiable reason for her maintenance.” The government estimated her worth in raw materials as $422,560, but was unable to get even that. The valiant little Cowpens was sold for $273,389 in May 1960 to a scrapping company, and by October 1961 she was gone.

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by Joel | 26 December 2024 · 2:28 pm

April–May 1945 in the Pacific

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 280-281:

On May 21, 1945, the Moo was again ready for sea. Her two-month overhaul, necessary after the wear and tear of more than 160,000 miles of steaming in wartime conditions, was now complete. Repair crews completely rebuilt her troublesome boilers, replaced all four of her six-ton screws, and located the source of the terrible vibration in the aft end of the ship at high speeds—missing teeth on the reduction gears between her power plant and propeller shafts. The Navy upgraded the Moo’s radar and antiaircraft guns, added an additional catapult, and replaced more than 60 percent of the ship’s wooden flight deck planking, fixing the leaks into the ship’s hangar bay.

Much had happened while Cowpens was in drydock. On April 14, President Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-three at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia. His death shocked the nation; news of the president’s declining health had been kept secret from the public. FDR had been in office since 1933, and most of the seventeen- and eighteen-year-old servicemen fighting the war could barely remember a time when someone else was president. In contrast, Americans knew little about his successor, Harry Truman. He was FDR’s third vice president, had occupied the office only since January, and many Americans didn’t even know his name.

Almost three weeks later, the nation savored the defeat of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945. Close to a million people took to the streets in New York City, and Broadway and Times Square turned on their illuminations for the first time since the war began. In San Francisco, just across the bay from where the Moo was in drydock, the response was muted. The city, as one of the major West Coast ports of embarkation for the Pacific War, did not have the emotional connection to the fight against Nazi Germany that New York City did—and upon learning the news the city government swiftly prohibited the selling of alcohol for twenty-four hours. “I remember all the yelling on V-E Day, but it didn’t mean much to me,” Art Daly noted in his journal. “The war was still on in the Pacific.”

And indeed it was—the latest example of the Japanese willingness to fight until the bitter end was Okinawa, where US forces landed on April 1. Operation ICEBERG, as it was known, was the last major US amphibious landing of the war, and resulted in the highest US casualties of any fight in the Pacific: 12,250 killed or missing and more than 36,000 wounded. These casualties included the bitter fighting out at sea, where the kamikaze campaign reached its terrible climax, with 1,465 suicide attacks over the course of three months. They sank 36 US ships—including 15 amphibious ships and 12 destroyers—and damaged 368 others.

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by Joel | 24 December 2024 · 4:39 pm

Typhoon Cobra vs. U.S. Navy, 1944

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle p. 246:

As soon as Cowpens cleared the storm, all departments began taking stock and cataloging the damage. Seven planes had gone over the side: four Hellcats and three Avengers. In addition to the loss of the ship’s radar, the storm battered several of the ship’s antiaircraft guns out of action, while the twisting and bucking of the ship opened two twenty-four-inch cracks in the hangar deck bulkheads. All four of the ship’s side-mounted smokestacks were smashed in on their undersides from waves, and water taken in through the stacks had to be drained out of the engine rooms. There was only superficial fire damage to the wooden flight deck, just a ten-foot-diameter charred area. The radio generator room was flooded; it was just off the flight deck between the stacks and wasn’t fitted with a watertight door, as the designers never foresaw the possibility that the sea would enter the ship that far up. But all told, the damage was far less than it could have been. Captain DeBaun noted with some pride in the ship’s damage report to Third Fleet that “the USS Cowpens was materially ready and able to fight at the end of the storm.”

While the Cowpens escaped major damage, other ships in the Third Fleet were not as lucky. In a two-hour period at the height of the storm, the typhoon sank three destroyers, damaged twenty-seven other ships, and swept 146 airplanes from carrier decks. Two other destroyers had very close calls with disaster, rolling as much as seventy degrees in the raging seas, and aircraft that broke loose aboard Cowpens’ sister ship, Monterey, sparked a hangar bay fire that gutted that deck, killed three, and wounded forty. The total death toll was 790, more than twice the number of American casualties in the Battle of Midway in 1942, while the loss of planes was five times greater than US combat losses at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot in June.

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by Joel | 23 December 2024 · 2:48 pm

Naval Base Ulithi Atoll, 1944

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 213-214

Cowpens tied up at Ulithi Atoll on October 29. The atoll was on the far western end of the Caroline Islands, southwest of the Marianas. Vaguely resembling the outline of the Italian peninsula, the string of islets created a 209-square-mile natural harbor spacious enough to host in excess of seven hundred ships, more than enough for the Third Fleet. The atoll was a new acquisition for the US Navy, captured without a fight on September 23. Like Majuro before it, Ulithi had been largely bypassed by the war. Under US control, it became the major American fleet anchorage in the Western Pacific, replacing Majuro and Eniwetok, which were now too far to the east.

By the time Cowpens arrived, there were over one hundred ships in the harbor, including nearly forty from Service Squadron 10, which just that month had arrived from Eniwetok, some 1,400 miles away. The squadron rapidly transformed the idyllic Pacific lagoon into a major logistical base, bringing with it specialized ships for repair, salvage, supply, fueling, and medical assistance. For the Moo’s officers and men, Ulithi’s primary draw was Mog Mog, the small islet that the Navy set aside for recreation. After weeks of unending shipboard life, anything that got them ashore was a welcome break. Although it baked under a fierce tropical sun that varied, in the words of one sailor, from “the infernal to the merely intolerable,” Mog Mog offered the opportunity to relax on the pearl-white sands, swim in the crystal clear tropical lagoon, or play baseball, basketball, or volleyball.

The Moo’s officers and men did not have it to themselves. Most of the ships in the harbor were releasing a third of their complement at a time to go ashore, meaning that as many as fifteen thousand sailors and one thousand officers were on the island on any given day. Arriving on the beach for a four-hour liberty, the sailors were given two cans of warm beer, sometimes Iron City beer from Pittsburgh or Rupert’s from New York City. Naturally, the bluejackets soon developed a barter system so those who wanted could drink their fill, with the sailors trading cash and smokes for others’ ration of beer. Unfortunately, the beer was spiked with formaldehyde to keep it from spoiling in the tropical heat. While this deterred few sailors, overindulgence resulted in what Clem described as a “walloping” hangover.

On the officers’ side of Mog Mog the engineers constructed a series of thatched huts that served as a makeshift O club and recreation area, known as Crowley’s Tavern. The officers sipped beer or whiskey at a yards-long bar constructed of crushed beer cans or enjoyed grilled steaks or a game of horseshoes. After the wear and tear of weeks of flying and the strain of on-again, off-again clashes with Captain Taylor and his staff, Air Group 22 went to Crowley’s to blow off some steam. Several of its fliers returned to the ship drunk and belligerent, and only the quick intervention of the air group’s senior pilots averted a confrontation with the ship’s officers. “Some of the boys went ashore in p.m. almost resulting in trouble aboard at night,” Clem wrote sympathetically the following day. “Not that they can be blamed too much as we are still taking a beating about the last attack. Both Houston and the Canberra [battle cruisers they had helped rescue] are here and so we are supposed to be heroes.”

Captain Taylor’s preferred choice for dealing with Air Group 22 finally caught up with the ship at Ulithi. Bob Price, who commanded VF-25 and then Air Group 25 before surviving eleven days adrift in the Pacific in a life raft, returned aboard the Cowpens on October 30 after more than a month in transit. He made the long journey from Jacksonville to Ulithi by train, ship, and finally by air.

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by Joel | 21 December 2024 · 6:50 am

The Price of Rescue at Sea, 1944

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle p. 132:

Despite the absence of the enemy fleet, land-based planes from Palau and nearby islands remained to menace the US carrier task force. By 8 p.m. on March 29 Japanese torpedo bombers were massing at the edges of the Moo’s radar screens. Two divisions of Hellcats led by Al Morton were flying the last CAP [= Combat Air Patrol] of the day; faced with encroaching darkness and imminent enemy attack, Captain McConnell ordered Morton to bring his planes home. Seven of the eight got aboard, but the last man in the formation, Ens. Anderson Bowers, ran into trouble when the plane in front of him went into the crash barrier. By the time the plane handlers cleared the wreck out, McConnell had put the Moo into its evasive maneuvers to throw off enemy attacks, which put her out of the wind and unable to land planes.

Admiral Reeves ordered Bowers to ditch his plane alongside a destroyer, and Bowers, who had little experience in night operations, took the order literally. He made a perfect water landing near one of Cowpens’ escorts, but did not remember that standard procedure was to land one thousand yards ahead of a rescue ship—and the destroyer steamed off ahead looking for him. Bowers floated in his Mae West life vest for fifty-five minutes in the bath-warm Palauan waters before finally attracting the attention of another ship with gunfire from his pistol. Bowers did not keep his gun for long, however; the destroyermen extracted a ransom for every carrier pilot they recovered. Usually they stripped the pilot of every possible souvenir—flight jackets, silk survival maps, knives, and pistol—and then demanded in trade from his home ship a GI can full of ice cream, perhaps thirty-five to forty gallons in all. While grateful for the rescue, one pilot observed that “you don’t come out with a thing except your life.”

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by Joel | 20 December 2024 · 5:30 am

U.S. Navy Ship “Crossing the Line”

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 109-111:

The Moo’s southbound course put her across the equator for the first time some seventy miles west of Baker Island on January 22, an occasion that the ship marked with a line-crossing ceremony. In this centuries-old tradition, sailors who have never crossed the equator before—known as pollywogs—are initiated into the “Ancient Order of the Deep” by their more experienced colleagues, known as shellbacks. Filled with farcical ritual, harmless pranks, and old-fashioned hazing, the festivities were a welcome distraction from daily routines and worries about the upcoming operation. In the days before the ceremony, the crew had received occasional warnings from the ship’s loudspeaker system: “Beware all you pollywogs!” On the nineteenth they received a legal summons from King Neptune himself, warning the Cowpens was approaching his royal domain:

…

In advance of King Neptune’s arrival, his shellbacks relieved Captain McConnell in a bloodless coup and took command of the ship. The air group’s senior officers were forced to serve lunch in the enlisted men’s mess, while many of the junior officers were assigned meaningless tasks, such as calling the bridge every five minutes to report on temperature. For his part, newly arrived pilot Ed Haley was stationed on the forecastle with a pair of beer bottles for binoculars and ordered to scan the horizon for the Royal Party.

Streaming seawater and festooned with seaweed, Neptune and his Royal Court—all of whom bore a suspicious resemblance to several of the Moo’s saltiest chief petty officers—planted themselves on the flight deck and bid the lowly pollywogs to do them homage. A group of Royal Bailiffs rounded up the pollywogs and herded them to the flight deck. Some did not go quietly; Art Daly and some cohorts ambushed several shellbacks in advance of being dragooned, engaging in a bare-fisted skirmish with officer and enlisted alike. There was nearly a large brawl on the fantail between the two groups before a passing officer warned them to knock it off. In another instance, some mutinous pollywogs roughed up a couple of Neptune’s royal cops, and shellback reinforcements restored order by spraying down the melee with fire hoses.

George Terrell described how the pollywogs were rounded up and then led single file up to the flight deck by a group of shellbacks that he called the “Judas Battalion.” Once there, “we were beaten to our knees with blivets by our merciless captors, formed into creeping columns,” and, with further whacks with wooden paddles, encouraged to move forward.” With Captain McConnell watching the proceedings from the bridge with a bemused look upon his face, the pollywogs were force-marched to the Royal Court’s red carpet. This was a target sleeve, a fabric tube thirty inches in diameter and thirty feet long, normally towed behind an airplane as target practice for the ship’s gunners. Unfortunately, the pollywogs were not to walk on it, but crawl through it, and the sleeve had been loaded with stinking garbage and slop from the ship’s galley for the occasion. With further encouragement from the paddles, the pollywogs dove headfirst into the sleeve and crawled through thirty feet of muck. “Do you know how fast you can move on your hands and knees?” wrote Terrell. “Would you believe thirty feet in 15 seconds? Records were set and broken in rapid succession.”

Finally, the pollywogs were introduced to King Neptune and his entourage, bedecked in robes, wigs, and gold-painted cardboard crowns. The most colorful member of the court was the Royal Baby, a fat, balding, half-naked chief petty officer in a diaper and covered in axle grease. Each pollywog was forced to his knees in front of the baby, who took a handful of lubricating grease from a drum at his side and rubbed it all over his sweaty abdomen. Then came the order: “Kiss the baby’s belly!” If the pollywog hesitated, a shellback bailiff delivered a whack to his backside. “I closed my mouth and eyes,” recalled Sam Sommers. “I wish I could have held my nose.” Accepting the kiss as tribute, the Royal Baby haughtily waved on the pollywog, with his paddle-wielding bailiffs making sure he cleared out quickly to make room for the next victim.

The final stop was the Royal Barbers and their merciless clippers. Each pollywog ended up with a highly unconventional buzz cut that left his hair in tatters. “They were real artists,” said Marine George Terrell. “A thousand haircuts to be given and no way were any two going to be alike.” Some sailors emerged with a Mohawk or bird’s nest (bald on top, with a fringe around the bottom), but the barbers also sometimes amused themselves by spelling C-O-W-P-E-N-S or V-I-C-T-O-R-Y on successive heads. Sailor Robert Lee attempted to evade the royal clippers with a preemptive head shaving, but soon found out “it doesn’t pay to be smarter than King Neptune. For punishment I had my head and body smeared with a combination of oil and eggs and had to stand on the bow of the ship for one hour in the sun. Did I have fun taking the oil and eggs off my head and body with cold salt water. I learned my lesson.”

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by Joel | 19 December 2024 · 8:50 am

Japanese Night Attack Tactics, 1943

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 88-90:

The [U.S. Navy] task force beat a hasty retreat [from Kwajalein] with the enemy hot on their trail. Everyone expected trouble that evening, and the Japanese did not disappoint. They were expert at night attacks, with a robust playbook of tactics. A little before sunset, one or more snoopers—usually Betty torpedo bombers—would trail the American formation just out of range, radioing the ships’ position to their squadronmates ashore. When darkness fell, the snoopers dropped a string of float lights marking the direction the ships were traveling. When the striking planes arrived, the snoopers flew over the fleet at high altitude, dropping parachute flares to illuminate the ships for torpedo attacks. Getting spotlighted or backlit by brilliant flares produced a profound sense of vulnerability even among the most grizzled sailors. Capt. William Tomlinson, who commanded the Moo’s sister ship Belleau Wood, likened it to one of his recurring bad dreams where he was naked in a bathtub under the bright lights of Times Square—except in this case it was real.

Sure enough, a Japanese snooper shadowed the force in the late afternoon, and as Clark had warned, after dark it guided in the Bettys that the day’s strike had missed. Starting at 7 p.m. and continuing for the next six hours, Cowpens and the fleet were under almost continual attack, with small groups of one to four bombers at a time trying to break through the outer edges of the formation to torpedo the carriers at the center. When the Bettys were not attacking, they were circling or ganging up for a fresh strike, so that bogeys were constantly on US radar screens. The moon was dangerously bright, and sailors aboard the Moo could easily see the formation of ships around them, illuminated further by the fiery, hissing parachute flares that descended from high above.

Tracking the bogeys on radar, Pownall ordered frequent and sometimes radical changes of course to throw off the Japanese and present them the least favorable angle for a torpedo attack. While the maneuvering frustrated most attacks, there were many close calls. One of the Moo’s flight deck firefighters, George McIntyre, described how the water was “lousy with torpedoes.” One passed just astern of Cowpens, while Yorktown had two near misses of her own. Lexington was not as lucky, and took a torpedo to the stern, wrecking her steering gear and killing nine.

Just before 11 p.m., the enemy started to come in with more determination, and Admiral Pownall signaled his ships, ANYONE WITH A GOOD SETUP LET ’EM HAVE IT! Aboard the Moo, those topside watched the fireworks as the task group’s outer cordon of ships lit up the sky with muzzle flashes, orange tracers, and the bright flares of hit and burning Japanese planes. Cowpens and the other CVLs—unlike the larger ships in the fleet—had no radar-guided guns, and so to avoid giving away her position at night she usually did not fire unless the target was brightly illuminated and at close range. The crew, watching the action from the center of the fleet’s battle formation, quipped that what the Moo needed was a big neon arrow on the flight deck with the words: “The big carriers are over there.”

The Japanese planes withdrew just before 1:30 a.m. as the moon set, and soon after the task force’s radar scopes were clear of enemy aircraft.

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by Joel | 18 December 2024 · 2:15 am

U.S. Navy in Wartime Honolulu

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 56-57:

Hawaii had occupied a special place in the American popular consciousness since the 1930s. Even during the darkest days of the Depression, as much as half of the US population saw a movie every week, and “Hawaii Hollywood-style” was a staple of the films of the era. A string of blockbusters romanticized it as a tropical paradise with a hula girl under every palm tree. The islands’ exclusiveness also added to their popular mystique. In the prewar era, a Hawaiian vacation was well out of reach of the vast bulk of American society, affordable only for the very affluent.

Once servicemen arrived in Honolulu, it was difficult to reconcile the popular image of the place with reality. Rather than an idyllic paradise, Honolulu was just another crowded Navy town, “full of sunlight and sailors and bad liquor.” Pearl Harbor was a major shipyard, supply center, and way station for the Pacific Fleet, and from 1941 to 1945 more than a million servicemen and defense workers passed through it on their way to or from the war. Sam Sommers commented that with the huge volume of men, equipment, and supplies pouring into Hawaii, “the island could have fought a pretty good war by itself.”

Few servicemen said much good about it, however, dubbing it “the rock.” Some of this was just a case of unrealistic expectations, although there were also plenty of legitimate gripes. These included overcrowding by fellow servicemen, high prices, a male-to-female ratio that most men swore was at least several hundred to one, and the seedy industries that sprung up to separate the sailors from their $50-a-month salary. The complaint that there were just too many servicemen was the most common. The men waited in line for everything—restaurant, movie theater, bar, or brothel. The crowds would reach their peak in December 1944, when 137,200 soldiers, sailors, and Marines were ashore, more than half of Honolulu’s 1940 population. The islands had a tradition of hospitality, but many residents felt they had avoided a Japanese invasion only to suffer through a Navy one.

Cowpens had six days at anchor in Pearl Harbor before putting out to sea for exercises, and during that time McConnell released the crew for liberty in rotating shifts. While the officers enjoyed time in the O clubs or playing golf and tennis, some of the sailors went sightseeing, or swam or sunbathed on Waikiki Beach, seeing for the first time that the iconic beach was marred with double lines of barbed wire and patrolled by sentries. Other popular destinations were the USO clubs, the largest being the Army-Navy YMCA in downtown Honolulu. At these clubs, A-list celebrities such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny put on lavish musical variety shows, which interspersed big band music with stand-up or dance routines. The Navy had its recreation center, the Breakers Club, on Waikiki Beach—Artie Shaw and his Navy band made it famous, and up to 4,400 men visited every day.

The Army’s Maluhia Club, at the other end of Waikiki, had the best dance floor on the island. Many soldiers and sailors went there in hopes of meeting women, but the odds were skewed against them. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, the men joked that “never have so many pursued so few, with so much, and obtained so little.” The Maluhia was staffed by a cadre of volunteer USO girls, many of them the daughters of socially prominent Hawaiian families, each accompanied by a watchful chaperone. Perhaps 250 or so were there on any given night to dance with 3,500 or so men. There was no cutting in until the whistle blew, which it did every 2.5 minutes. The female volunteers danced for three or four hours at a stretch just to make sure each of the lonely servicemen got their turn. One such group of patriotic women volunteers called themselves the “Flying Squadron,” and in twelve months from 1942 to 1943 they attended 127 dances with more than sixty thousand men.

The most popular destination for the enlisted men in Honolulu was Hotel Street, the city’s vice district—where they went to get “stewed, screwed, and tattooed.” While the men had arrived looking for the Hawaii they had seen in the movies, on Hotel Street they found the Hawaii later depicted in From Here to Eternity. James Jones’s iconic 1951 novel detailed the intersection between the island’s servicemen and its seedy side, what one scholar of the period called “a small world of rough men and prostitutes, of drinking, gambling, sex, violence, and despair.”

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by Joel | 17 December 2024 · 12:14 pm

U.S. Navy Segregation, 1943

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 27-29:

At the bottom of the ship’s social hierarchy was the ship’s contingent of African American mess attendants, known after 1943 as steward’s mates. The Navy—and the Cowpens—was a microcosm of 1940s America, demonstrating its injustices as well as its virtues. One such injustice was the Navy’s policy on racial integration. Since 1932, African Americans had only been able to serve as enlisted men on Navy combat vessels, and only as steward’s mates, where they were effectively domestic servants. They did a variety of menial tasks, including cooking, waiting on officers’ tables at meals, and doing their cleaning and laundry.

It had not always been this way. The Navy was integrated throughout much of the nineteenth century, and during the Civil War as much as 20 percent of its sailors were Black. But in 1919, [Woodrow Wilson’s] Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels closed the door to any recruitment of African Americans. FDR had served under Daniels as assistant secretary of the Navy, and as president he sought to strike a middle ground between the demands of White segregationists and civil rights activists. Under his watch, the Navy allowed African Americans in only noncombat roles such as messmen, shore workers, dockhands, and in construction battalions, and like the other armed services it remained racially segregated.

It was not until 1944, when James Forrestal became secretary of the Navy, that the service began shifting toward integration. But in the meantime, the Navy came down hard on any resistance to segregation. In the so-called Philadelphia Mutiny of 1940, fifteen African American messmen aboard the cruiser Philadelphia wrote to one of the leading Black newspapers—then a powerful voice in the fight for racial equality—warning other African Americans not to join the Navy, for they were little more than “sea-going bell hops, chambermaids, and dishwashers.” All fifteen were dismissed from the service, which denied them any veterans’ benefits.

Cowpens had a contingent of twenty-eight steward’s mates aboard under the supervision of a White officer, but unfortunately no account of their experience survives. The account of one messman on Independence gives us some idea of what their life aboard the Moo might have been like, however. Willie Thomas was an eighteen-year old from Cincinnati, Ohio, who volunteered for the Navy because he saw little opportunity to contribute to the war at home. Willie’s primary responsibility was taking care of the pilots’ ready rooms and officers’ quarters, making sure coffee and donuts were available after every mission. But like many steward’s mates across the Navy, he also volunteered for additional tasks that pushed the boundaries of the racial restrictions that prohibited him from combat duty. When the ship was under attack, he carried clips of 40mm ammunition from the ship’s magazines to its antiaircraft guns so they could maintain a steady rate of fire. Despite working in a system that was biased against him, Willie was upbeat about the relationship of the steward’s mates with the majority-White crew, saying that “we were all on this big ship together.”

While Willie was charitable about the state of race relations aboard, George Terrell thought there was some room for improvement. He wrote in his journal about how shocked he was to encounter overt segregation and racism for the first time. “I was young and impressionable and terribly innocent about these things,” he recalled years after the war. “Many of the older career officers on the ship were natives of the Deep South… they really believed that these black boys were inferior human beings.” Terrell gradually learned that the prejudice was not universal, saying how it was “not shared by all the officers, not even by all the southern officers. And it was certainly less prevalent among the lower ranks.” For example, the enlisted Marines’ berthing compartment was right next to the steward’s mates, and the two groups got to know each other and often socialized. Getting to know each other, Terrell concluded, taught him how “screwed up” segregation really was.