What A Difference A Day Makes

Diane Marcus

Wasn’t it only yesterday that I lay in bed eyes tightly closed, covers over my head, not wanting to acknowledge a life that I thought had ended? Wasn’t it only yesterday that I had to tell my left foot and then my right foot what to do? Get up, walk to the bathroom and turn on the faucet. Brush your teeth and wash your face. Looking at my robe in the mirror stained with toothpaste I remember that I need to do a laundry. Ignoring the dusty cobweb on the ceiling I listlessly walk down the stairs to the kitchen and turn on the coffee pot. All day I wander from room to room, cluttered with my children’s clothing and books. Signs of a normal home surround me but only reach the surface of my skin. I nod to my mother in the living room who is asking me to take her somewhere. I can’t remember what I answer. The day finally ends and I crawl back into my bed, draw the covers over my head and hope for a night free of dreaming images of being lost, alone and abandoned. There’s a barrier that has been built preventing me from taking a step forward beyond the wall of longing and fear of tomorrow.

This morning I woke up early and saw the suns rays shinning through the slats of the shutters turning the white paint into a mother nature only orange and the walls glowed and the dusty cobweb on the ceiling above my bed began to dance like a tapestry of silk threads reflecting the rainbow of colors from the glass prism that hangs in the window. The sweet aroma of the honeysuckle vine intertwining with the magenta bougainvillea growing wildly along the fence filled my bedroom and tickled my nose. And I feel the breeze from the flutter of wings and hear the cooing of the Doves and clacking of Hummingbirds and bees buzzing around the yellow and magenta flowers. I jump out of bed tossing my dirty robe into the laundry basket, and race down the stairs out to my patio. I raise my arms upward trying to grab the suns rays and breathe in the warmth of life.

I see beauty, I feel content, I am alive!

The title sums up my experiences in the U. S. Navy during and after World War II.

Like most of my World War II contemporaries, I went into the military service determined to utterly destroy our hated enemies, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan; but a rigid, anachronistic, embedded bureaucracy—the U. S. Navy—soon chilled that fire in my belly. Within weeks of going on active duty as an ensign assigned to temporary duty at the University of Minnesota, I was made painfully aware of the truism that there is a right way to fight a war, a wrong way and the Navy way.

The Navy is handcuffed by hide bound tradition that brooks no variation from set routines—a caste system that gives officers privileges that are denied to enlisted men and rampant racism that relegated African-Americans to menial chores and refused to put guns in their hands. A strange way to unite America in its war effort.

The highlight of my two months wait for a new Navy Supply Corps class to begin at Harvard’s Business School in Boston was a house party at the commanding officer’s private home where the wives of officers sat in one room playing bridge while their officer husbands joined host Captain Gates, swilled beer and watched a pornographic movie in a back room. A Navy cultural event that embarrassed the new officers and their innocent brides. Adding insult, the two junior officers, George Rossman and I, had to pick up the total tab on our $150- per-month pay.

Daily mandatory volleyball filled the time we waited to get down to business. No attention was paid to the world in flames during the most ghastly war in history. The war might as well have been fought on another planet.

At the Supply Corp School at Harvard most of my classmates were professionals—accountants and attorneys whose average age was in the 30s. I was among the youngest, a 22-year-old college graduate. The training course had been condensed from eighteen months to four months without cutting out any irrelevant fat. Up at 0600 and out into the field for calisthenics for out-of-shape bodies not likely to see combat from behind desks.

As the Boston weather turned frigid, we did not deviate from the set routine. Up at 0600 and calisthenics. One-third of my class ended up in the infirmary with pneumonia. But still up for 0600 exercises regardless of below zero temperatures and frozen turf. Totally insane. Typically Navy. We were also given an intensive course in close order drills—extremely useless for supply and disbursing officers armed only with .45 caliber automatic pistols.

How in hell are we going to win a war with such knuckleheads running the show? I state emphatically and unequivocally that WW II was not won by generals and admirals or military tradition but by the raw courage of infantrymen, seamen and aircraft crews and the all-out conversion of our nation’s industries to military production. We overwhelmed our enemies with our manufacturing might, not with the leadership of numskull, bungling brass—as clearly documented in Ken Burns’ “The War.”

I requested duty aboard a cruiser in the Atlantic, so the Navy assigned me to Motor Torpedo Board Squadron Thirteen in the Aleutian Islands where a regular Navy officer, Lt. Commander James B. Denny of Bellflower, Texas, insisted I quarter with him as a staff officer and participate in anti-submarine night patrols on the ferocious Bering Sea in the middle of winter. The pounding of the 78-foot wooden boats caused piles among boat crewmen. Our feet were off he boats’ oak decks about seventy-five percent of the time. Nothing for me to do but hang on and avoid being swept overboard when the boat crashed into huge waves. Dressed with multiple layers of foul weather gear, we were soaked to the skin in ice water. After these insane all-night patrols (we never saw a Japanese submarine) the boat crews slept in, but I had to be in my office at 0800 for a full day’s work. Fortunately, this killer ordeal lasted only four months.

When MTBRon 13 moved out of the Aleutians en route to the South Pacific, I stayed behind at Adak, loaded our gear onto a Liberty ship and flew down to Seattle where I would eventually be reunited with the boat crews after their several weeks’ voyage down the Alaska coast to the Bremerton, Washington, Navy base, where the boats were outfitted with radar, repaired and sent via San Francisco across the Pacific. I made the horrendous mistake of getting emergency leave papers while waiting in Seattle in order to meet my newly born son in Chicago.
I was in Chicago one day when I received a telegram from Denny ordering my immediate return to Seattle or face a court-martial.

Apparently, he decided at the last minute to use air transport to Seattle well ahead of the boats, found me missing, tracked me down and threatened me with severe punishment. I flew back pronto, then sat for several weeks with nothing to do waiting for the ship to arrive with the squadron’s supplies, which I loaded on a freight train to San Francisco. Just plain mean. Vindictive. Arbitrary and capricious—a typical regular Navy commanding officer overloaded with power and devoid of sensitivity.

The drunken captain of the Liberty ship on which I crossed the Pacific in 28 days to New Guinea was a sadist who got his kicks beating up a drunken, masochistic chief mate. Then Captain Johansen went too far and started beating the third mate, a former U. S. Navy enlisted man who was released from service because of battle wounds, got his merchant marine papers and went back to sea. The chief engineer, Orlando Cepeda, and I sent for the shore patrol, had Johansen arrested and hauled ashore to the brig. At a hearing the next day, the Navy solved the problem with typical insanity. They transferred the third mate to another ship and did nothing to punish Johansen who was obviously unfit to command. You and I would lock Johansen up for the duration and place the sober and capable second mate in command. Back unscathed as ship’s captain, Johansen resumed his abnormal life style.

Two of our PT boat captains abandoned their boats under fierce daily Japanese suicide plane attacks at Mindoro Island in late 1944 and early 1945. They were not punished for desertion under fire. They could have been shot and certainly should have been court-martialed for cowardice. Ironically, one of them wrote the official (revisionist) history of the squadron.

The captain of a PT boat tender, the U. S. S. Orestes, was one of the first to abandon ship after a Japanese suicide plane smashed into the Orestes and set it ablaze with its load of aviation gasoline and torpedoes ready to blow. He left superior officers lying wounded on deck. Our commanding officer, Lt. Commander N. Burt Davis, took a volunteer crew to the Orestes, put out the fire, rescued the wounded officers and crewmen, came ashore, found the ship’s captain and tore his face to shreds with his bare fists. Was the Orestes’ captain punished for abandoning the ship? Not by the Navy. A year later I saw the Orestes at Samar Island after it had been rebuilt. The same captain Muller at the helm. You won’t read any of this in official U. S. Navy history.

One of my storekeepers collected $1.20 from Lt. Commander Davis when he handed him two ears he cut off a dying Japanese pilot he found in the swamp—totally illegal and unacceptably brutal but authorized and encouraged by Davis.

Several years after the end of the war, Navy Intelligence filed charges against me for “subversive” activities in the San Francisco Bay Area. None of my activities were subversive or illegal, but they were not acceptable to the Navy, which still had me under its thumb. They caught me picketing a Safeway Store in all-black West Oakland that forced the supermarket to hire black checkout clerks. I also helped lead a campaign that persuaded Governor Warren to reject a Mississippi extradition order that would have sent an innocent black Oakland storekeeper to life in prison—an historical first.

After serving with honor and distinction during the war, I got a Kafkaesque hearing and a discharge “other than honorable.” The Navy would not allow me to simply resign my commission and save thousands of taxpayer dollars. It took me more than thirty years to have the discharge changed to “honorable.” I never gave up. My Navy correspondence file is four inches thick. The honorable discharge arrived one happy day in 1986, forty years after I went on inactive duty, forty years after the end of the war.

I entered the Navy with high hopes, worked my butt off and was rewarded with a bad discharge based on civil rights political activity after the end of the war. The General Accounting Office gave me a clean bill with only one exception. I overpaid a new officer who joined the squadron and illegally ripped off a notice of a pay advance from his orders, so I had no way of deducting the advance from his pay.

I hope the Army, Navy, Marines Corps and Coast Guard have instituted major reforms; but, based on my experience, I would not recommend the pursuit of a military career unless our country is attacked as it last was in World War II—certainly not since December 7, 1941.