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U.S. Navy Armed Guard WW-II Veterans
I was Navy during WWII, or rather Naval Reserve. The Navy, in its infinite wisdom did not even want volunteers during WWII in the regular Navy and insisted we were Naval Reserves. I thought of many things I could write about - losing ships and jumping into oceans more ice than water and being unable to swim, being fired at in lifeboats by Japanese submarine crews with machine guns, or many other things. In the final analysis I decided these were things that happened to some of us and not others and I am sure many, many would have faced it with greater courage than me. Naval Armed Guards were placed aboard merchant ships of the US and its allies, with one thing in common. They had no doctor available, they had only visual aids in detecting the enemy, they were invariably undergunned and they stood an average of 14 hours lookout duty every day at sea. The remaining 10 hours were used to clean guns, stand muster and clean and paint their portion of the ships. They received little or no recognition and their casualty rate was second only to the United States Marine Corps. It requires a particular kind of courage to sail on ships built in as little as four days and fifteen hours, to stand lookout duty for more than half the day in ships not built for the storms and ice they sailed in and to realize that spotting a tiny periscope before a couple of torpedoes had already been fired at you was next to impossible. The tankers we sailed on were often half under water and the Liberty ships wallowed in heavy seas to the extent you needed to be holding on to something most of the time. The Liberty ships were fairly manageable when they were heavily loaded with cargo and deck cargo, but on return trips, with about 20 percent of the ballast you needed they were more like riding a mechanical bull in a barroom. It was never necessary to receive a direct hit to sink. At times depth charges dropped too close could do the job. In convoys, in foggy weather, under zigzag procedures you were frequently sunk by ramming or being rammed. Yet, through it all, including chronic seasickness, the Armed Guard Crews did their jobs and did them well. We never forgot our comrades in arms, the Maratime. Many of them manned the stations below decks, right where the submarines were trying (and succeeding) to place their torpedoes. The drudgery, the fear, the unknown - the things that sapped us all, not just the spectacular explosion of a tanker loaded with 120,000 barrels of benzine or a Liberty ship loaded with half TNT and half Mustard Gas. All Armed Guards were heros as is attested by the simple fact that every time a ship was sunk or damaged the general reaction of crew members was to save their buddies and then worry about themselves. There were so many countless incidents where people lived while the shipmates who saved them perished. I love every Armed Guard Veteran still left. They were my soul mates, my brothers, my friends, my comfort. They still are. God Bless the US Naval Armed Guard of both World War I and World War II. Tom Bowerman Gunners Mate 2nd Class
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