CHAPTER XXI
Finally, on Dec.3, I received orders to report to Astoria, OR. for the commissioning of my ship the U.S.S. Bollinger, which was held six days later. That day,; I boarded the vessel which was to be “my home” for the next year. In addition to my supply and disbursing duties, I was the insurance officer, coding and decoding officer, member of the Summary Court Martial Board which consisted of three officers, head of the Chief Petty Officer Mess Audit Board, President of the officers’ ward room, one of the debarkation officers, and last but not least the “S” Division officer. As I write about my experiences aboard ship, I will describe several of the above duties.
Each member of the crew was assigned to a division depending upon his duty performed. Thus, all seamen were assigned to the deck division; radio operators to the communication division; engine room personnel to the engineering division, etc. Each division was headed by officer, i.e. the deck div. officer was the First Lieut.; communication div. by the Communication Officer, etc. I was the officer in charge of the Supply division which consisted of the storekeepers, cooks and bakers, laundry personnel and the steward mates.
At this time in the Navy, all Negro personnel were assigned to serve the officers and were not in any of the other divisions, other than the “S” division. Their duties comprised being waiters in the officers’ ward room, cooking for the officers, cleaning the officers’ rooms and making sure that the officers have clean, laundered clothing daily. The only military duty assigned to them was manning the anti-aircraft guns during combat. There were about 50 men in my division, including 12 steward mates.
Every morning at
After muster, I would retire to
my room to put on my phylacteries and do my daily prayers. I always drew the
curtain to my room so that I would not be disturbed during my communication
with my Maker. The steward mates, seeing my curtain drawn, would know that they
had to return later to clean my room and pick up my clothing for the laundry. I
received nothing but respect from them and my fellow officers for my religious
beliefs. In fact, my room-mate, Ensign Reilly loved to engage me in theological
discussions regarding Judaism and Christianity. He was a devout Catholic from
Each member of the crew wished to ingratiate himself with his division officer because the latter was responsible for his promotion to a higher rate and increased pay, granting him leave to visit his family and defending him at “Captain’s Mast”. When a sailor went “on report” for an infraction, he was ordered to appear on the Captain’s deck and the Captain of the ship would administer punishment. This procedure was held for minor infractions and the usual punishment would be loss of pay for a specified period. The most common “sins” were not being in proper uniform, i.e. not wearing his hat, unbuttoned shirt, etc. and fighting. Unfortunately, our commanding officer was a clone of “Capt. Bligh” and exacted discipline far beyond what a normal captain would desire. Thus, our ship probably employed this procedure much more often than any ship in the fleet.
If a more severe act occurred, the culprit would be ordered to appear before the Summary Court Martial Board consisting of three officers; I being one of them. There was a prosecutor and defense counsel who pleaded their case. The punishment usually meted out was a reduction to the next lower rate, and occasionally incarceration for a period in the ship’s brig. The decision of this Board was final and could not be appealed by the defendant nor by the Captain. There was one instance where the Captain called the members of the Board individually to his cabin to request us to change our verdict of not guilty; not one of us bowed to his demand and that was the first and last time he interfered with us. He very well knew that his action was against Naval regulations and that if we reported him, he would be censured.
My disbursing duties consisted of paying the officers and crew semi-monthly. I would set up a large table in a large area with a large amount of cash. At all times I had to have in my possession a minimum of $100,000. I paid bills for supplies that were not obtained from Naval Supply Depots with checks signed by me. My Bureau of Supplies and Accounts Manual instructed me as to which articles I could buy and those I could not.
Once, I was called up to the
Captain’s cabin and he attempted to ingratiate himself with me by calling me
Max instead of Mr. Prager as he called the other officers; incidentally, I was
the only officer aboard ship whom the Captain addressed by his first name.
Perhaps, he had an ulterior motive as I soon discovered his reason for being so
nice to me; and he wanted to set the modus operandi with his disbursing officer
for the future. Being a graduate of
He purchased a beautiful, large and very comfortable lounging chair for his cabin which he showed me and even asked me to sit in it and give him my opinion of his purchase. He then proceeded to hand me the invoice which he wanted me to pay. I, being very familiar with the contents of the BuS&A Manual, knew that his purchase was in the personal category and could not, under any circumstances, be paid for by government funds. Also, I knew the regulation that if a commanding officer of any ship or base requests his disbursing officer to expend any funds for a prohibited purchase, the latter can do so only if the former signs a statement authorizing the payment and that I was doing so under protest.
You can just imagine the look on
Carter Printup’s face when I recited the regulation to him. He returned the
chair and never held this incident against me; in fact, his respect for me
rose. Whenever we watched the movies on deck at night, he always made sure to
sit next to me and converse. Once, while watching a movie, he asked me if,
after the war, I could find a good employment position for him in
I was the assistant to the Supply Officer, Lt.(jg) R.C.Zell, a career Navy man who was commissioned to officer’s rank at the outbreak of the war. This position was in name only as he had 2 assistants, one of whom was a Chief Warrant Officer-a commissioned rank- and the other was a Warrant Officer, not commissioned. All three procured supplies-food and material- and supervised the crew’s mess.
Naval officers receive a uniform allowance when commissioned and annually thereafter. Their wardrobe must consist of 2 navy blue dress uniforms worn ashore, usually at night; 2 white dress uniforms for warm climates which I never wore; 4 work uniforms, 2 khaki and 2 grey. In addition as part of their pay, they receive a monthly meal allowance. Aboard my ship as President of the ward room, I purchased the food, phonograph records and other recreational items. I, enjoying classical records, bought many symphonies, concertos and operas. I assigned one of the other officers to purchase jazz and other records that he thought would be enjoyed. I set the monthly amount that each officer would be assessed for the above.
Each officer was assigned a battle station to which he went during combat. Also, each of us was assigned “watch” duties to be performed 4 hours on and 8 hours off, each and every day. It was a Naval tradition that Supply and Disbursing officers automatically became coding and decoding officers aboard ship and performed these duties on ‘watch” and at their battle stations. To accomplish these tasks we sat in a small room adjacent to the radio room.
After a coded message was received by the 3 or 4 radiomen on duty, they slipped the message through a small opening in the wall separating the two rooms. There were 2 different kinds of coding equipment; one was the electric coding machine (ECM) and the other, whose name eludes me, was used rarely. If the message was sent on an ECM, the decoding was done on that machine and if the message was sent on the other machine, then that machine was employed.
The coded message would read like this: xjydl pdieg siqvd, etc., always 5 garbled letter words. Every month the Communication Officer received a manual specifying the daily codes to be used in the machines. On receiving the message, I inserted that day’s code in the machine and then commenced to type the garbled message. A ticker tape would then emerge from the machine and state in perfect English the contents of the message.
At the beginning of each message, the security thereof would read “Top Secret”, “Secret” or “Conventional”. After pasting the strips of the tape to a sheet, I would immediately bring the top secret and secret messages to the Captain for his perusal. I remember reading one top secret message when, towards the end of the war, the USS Indianapolis was sunk with hundreds aboard; no survivors. To this day, the mystery of the cause still prevails. There were rumors that the ship was carrying atomic bombs.
We left
After completing our “shakedown”
on Jan.12 ,1945, we left for
On the very first day of our
training, we suffered our first fatal casualty aboard ship. The victim was a
member of one of the LCVP crews named Victor Passerman, a young Jewish lad from
We stayed in San Diego until Jan.
29 when we pulled in to the repair base for our availability period until Feb.
13 when we embarked an air wing detachment of marines and headed for
We arrived at
From our ship, which was only 5000 yards offshore, we could view constant dive bombing and strafing by our planes and also continuous naval gunfire executed by a few destroyers lying offshore. Machine gun and mortar fire was plainly audible at all times. At night we could see many star shells illuminating the north eastern tip of the island where combat was still going on by the 5th Marine Division sector. The 3rd Marine Division also had a few small pockets of resistance to eliminate and therefore was not ready to evacuate as was the 4th Division who had secured their sector.
The army had come in a week before and was going to be used for garrison work and also to eliminate any guerillas or snipers that would probably continue to exist for quite sometime. The Seebees were doing a marvelous job on construction work on roads, tunnels, airfields, etc. They would be there for a while giving us a first rate air base on this island.
Although the cost in lives was great-over 4000- and other casualties ran very high, the importance of Iwo was appreciated when we saw the many B-29s landing and taking off on their to and from Japan aerial bombing missions. This island was an excellent emergency landing base and ultimately would repay the high cost in saving the countless lives of bombing crews and planes.
Also, it was used as a base for
fighter escort planes for the B-29s and B-24s in bombing raids on the
At 1800 on March 16, Iwo Jima was
officially secured although many snipers and guerillas were still operating. On
that day, we were fully loaded with troops and cargo and waited for all the
other attack transports and cargo ships to be loaded before shoving off from
At 0800 on March 20, the entire
convoy, Bollinger included, left
On March 27 about 1500, we
arrived at
The second tragedy that struck
the Bollinger was another death of one of our crew members. He was a
carpenter’s mate named Johnson who was married and the father of three
children. While steaming from
This was the first and only burial at sea that I witnessed and cannot forget it. Being a friend of the head doctor, I was in the sick bay when his body was placed in a canvas bag which was the sewn so that the body would not fall out. A weight was placed at his feet so that he should sink to the bottom of the sea and not float. The entire ship’s company and the troops we were carrying stood at attention on the boat deck. All the ship’s personnel were dressed in their blue uniforms, officers included. An American flag was draped over the body and six pallbearers then carried the body from sick bay to the boat deck where it was placed on a “horse” near the rail.
A gun salute was then given by a Marine detail and the Chaplain then performed a religious burial ceremony. Taps was then played by the bugler and Johnson’s body was slowly dropped into the sea.
A few days later, one of the
Marines we were transporting and who was a Jewish boy from Howard Avenue in
Brooklyn, suffered a sudden fatal heart attack. He was about 35 years of age
and married. Since we were due to arrive at
On April 4, we arrived in
We debarked the troops and
unloaded our holds which were filled with cargo and on the morning of April 6
we headed back to
We stayed in
On May 5, we sailed for