by Richard Snow
Before he went into architecture school, my father had studied at Columbia College with the critic, poet, and novelist Mark Van Doren, who encouraged him to become a writer. The letters suggest what it was that caught Van Doren’s eye. They’re fluent, sardonic, fond, observant, full of irony about many things but never about his work at sea, and not quite like any other war letters I’ve ever read.
But like the unique but widely produced ship he served aboard, my father’s letters encapsulate a vast common experience. This architect became a capable officer, and thus his career echoes those of the eighty thousand other Americans who became naval officers during those years—and of the twelve million Americans who were in uniform by war’s end. Five years earlier these warriors had no more thought of joining the military than of joining the circus. They at once brought about and were formed by the biggest, swiftest change that has ever overtaken our society.
If my father can speak for them, though, he can’t do it yet, because the story starts long before he traded his T square for a sextant. He will make only a few brief appearances before he ventures out into the Atlantic, that beautiful, malevolent thirty-million-square-mile battlefield where he and those like him were to win a great and underappreciated victory.
Flower Show
The dangerous state of the U.S. navy on the eve of war, 1939
The planes that spotted the U-boat that sank the Frederick C. Davis and the ships that pursued it were still minerals in the ground in the spring of 1939. The people who ran them were raising poultry, teaching school, selling cars or stocks or hot dogs. In Flushing Meadows, in Queens, New York, some of them were putting the finishing touches on pavilions designed to advertise the virtues of nations that in a few months wouldn’t exist. For the New York World’s Fair was about to send up its brief sparkle between the paired darknesses of global depression and global war.
This tremendous undertaking—three hundred buildings, sixty miles of new roadway, the vision of a benign future made concrete on top of a sometime municipal garbage dump to the tune of $155 million—changed a great many lives, among them my father’s.
He had graduated from the Columbia School of Architecture in 1931, about the worst possible year for a young man embarking on the profession. The sort of people who commissioned new buildings were hard-pressed merely to maintain the ones they owned. Unlike many newly minted architects, he had a salaried position, but the prospects throughout the field looked bleak. Indeed, they seemed so barren to the parents of Emma Louise Folger, the girl who was about to become Mrs. Richard Boring Snow, that they forced her to break the engagement.
He got rid of the apartment he had rented for them, dated other women, scratched up jobs—a shoe-store redesign was a particular windfall—and soldiered along. In 1936 he read that the World’s Fair Corporation, bolstered with a lot of New Deal money, was going to help architects by mounting a contest: design an “Applied Arts Building” for the fair and, if you place high enough, get a commission to build an actual pavilion. He contacted some friends and acquaintances in the profession and formed a team; they worked up plans and submitted them. One (very) fine morning, riding on top of one of the double-decker Fifth Avenue buses that cost a nickel more than their humdrum counterparts serving lesser streets, he opened the New York Times to discover he’d won.
Well, not “won” exactly, but he had received an honorable mention, which was enough to get him a commission for the Focal Foods Building. This pavilion was not what the name might suggest to the modern reader—a gathering of tapas and sushi bars—but an exhibition meant to teach Americans who had been through a hungry decade something about basic nutrition. The lesson had the virtue of being entertaining, for the building contained an elaborate animated display by the designer Russel Wright. Strongly influenced by the surrealists of the day, Wright had put together a landscape where giant fur-covered eggs greeted the visitor and bright red lobsters circled in the sky over distant mountaintops. Outside stood the exhibit’s emblem, which was less antic: a quartet of gilded steel wheatstalks, designed by my father, severe art deco abstractions that stood one hundred feet high.
The fleet was in on opening day, April 30, 1939, and although for the sailors this was, in a way, demanding duty (the ships had to be made immaculate before they tied up at the Hudson River piers), hundreds of men got liberty and went out to the fair. It seems likely that they would have been more attracted by, say, the Crystal Lassies peep show than by flying lobsters, but surely many of them gave at least a glance to those metal wheatstalks glinting in the spring sunshine.
This was the first time my father’s career intersected with that of the Atlantic Squadron. Of course he had no idea that before so very long the groups of sailors he saw wandering through this pageant billed as “The World of Tomorrow” would be part of his today, once it became clear where all the fair’s pastel boulevards actually led.
THE SQUADRON HAD COME to New York for the best imaginable “flower show.” That’s what the sailors called it when their ship got dispatched to take part in a civic occasion. The phrase had been born in a Florida senator’s request that a “battleship or other suitable vessel” be sent to his verdant state to add heft to an actual flower show. For years the navy had been generating goodwill by responding to such requests: battleships for the big cities, destroyers for smaller ones.
The ships that steamed up through the Narrows and into the Hudson that April gave a good indication of the state of the U.S. navy at the time. For one thing, far fewer were on hand than there should have been. At the last moment many of the scheduled attendees were recalled to the Pacific—the more glamorous ocean, as far as navy men were concerned, and a place increasingly troubled by Japan’s imperial ambitions. The fleets of both oceans had just taken part in a six-day simulated battle that had suggested the rising influence of the aircraft carrier and the waning one of the battleship. Throughout the entire exercise, not one battleship had found the opportunity to fire the big guns that justified its existence. The destroyers, not surprisingly, did best what destroyermen best liked to do: a gallant dash at the enemy line, loosing torpedoes, then dodging away between the (in this case, imaginary) columns of water thrown up by heavy shells. On less flashy duty, things hadn’t gone so well. During a bored and lax patrol of San Juan harbor, the Reuben James was “sunk” by a submarine. None of the vessels assigned to hunt submarines had done well.
The ships looked fine at the Hudson piers, buffed and bright with signal flags. But they weren’t young, and they’d been worked hard, going on cruises that sometimes ran ten thousand miles, training men who were then often grabbed away for Pacific duty.
Here is the battleship Arkansas, commissioned in 1912. Earlier in the year, when she’d been directed to train midshipmen on the .50-caliber antiaircraft guns, her captain made the reasonable suggestion—couched in the inevitable passive voice of any military communication—that if .50-caliber antiaircraft practice is required, “it is felt that .50 caliber anti-aircraft guns should be supplied.”
Tied up near the Arkansas is a sister ship, the Wyoming, commissioned the same year. Half her twelve-inch guns have been removed to comply with the naval treaties of the past two decades. These international accords, designed to discourage aggression, are the children of acrimonious wrangling, parents to immediate cheating, and are satisfactory to nobody who is participating in them.
And here are the destroyers. They seem small next to the battleships, but they’re worth particular attention. They will forever be known as four-stackers or four-pipers, even though not every one was born with four funnels (the single characteristic that they all share is their flush deck, a clean line sloping from high bow to low stern). Products of the ferocious spasm of industrial energy that accompanied America’s entry into World War I, almost all of them were finished too late to take part in it, and many of their fellows are sleeping flank to flank in rusting rows up the Hudson or out in San Diego, thoroughly embalmed for years, but not q
uite dead.
They are handsome. Even from our vantage point of nearly a century they don’t look quaint, although many warships built just a couple of decades earlier can bring to mind antique wind-up toys.
They are not easy ships to work. Their sailors all know a brief poem, by no means affectionate:
Pitch, pitch, goddamn your soul.
The more you pitch, the less you roll.
Roll, roll, you mean old bitch.
The more you roll, the less you pitch.
Before too long, they will bend the course of human events far beyond the capacities suggested by their middle-aged fighting powers.
THE SEAMEN WHO SERVE them, the lucky ones prowling around the city now, their less-favored counterparts showing visitors about the battleships and destroyers, are most of them old hands, members of a guild that goes back to the age of fighting sail. Scraps of their uniforms and many of their assumptions have come down from the War of 1812.
During the next few years they will accept with resigned competence a torrent of newcomers—people who talk about “stairs” instead of “ladders,” of “back that way” instead of “aft”—and in time make sailors of them, too.
The life they live seems fantastic to us now, these men of what would soon be called the Old Navy, the prewar service that is half folklore and half dirty joke. What popular memory remains has them moving through a perpetual riotous shore leave of whores and bars and brawls (a tradition illuminated at its least attractive by the painter Paul Cadmus), and in some navy towns citizens are still hammering into their lawns signs that read SAILORS AND DOGS KEEP OFF THE GRASS. This seems an almost insane provocation, one whose outcome is as inevitable as it is predictable, yet a seventeen-year-old enlistee named Emory Jernigan saw them in Norfolk, Virginia. “Many signs were vandalized and urinated on,” he reported, adding that he was “high on the list of sailors” who had done so.
Too Dumb to Stay on the Farm
The making of a sailor, 1940
Jernigan joined the navy in 1940. Things were already heating up by then, but he nonetheless went through the same process that had been turning out American sailors for generations. Unlike the overwhelming majority of them, Jernigan wrote a memoir about his navy experiences and thus speaks for the multitudes who preceded and followed him into the ranks of the OS—the “ordinary seaman,” who is the foundation upon which all naval enterprise ultimately rests.
E. J. Jernigan, a Chattahoochee, Florida, farm boy, was six years old when the stock market disintegrated. “Our garden assured us plenty to eat,” he wrote, “even though we had no money, no electricity, and no car.”
Attracted early to the military, Jernigan tried to join the navy at sixteen. The recruiting officer he spoke to was sympathetic, but Jernigan was too young. “We’ll be starting the new kiddy cruises in December,” the sailor told him. “I can come back for you then.”
A kiddy cruise, it turned out, took you in at seventeen and let you out four years later, at twenty-one. Jernigan went home, persuaded his parents to sign his enlistment papers, and turned up in early December with other boys who wanted to go to sea. “Of the 21 of us trying to get in the Navy that day, 3 made it.” This would have been about right for the time; in Depression America the service, with its regular pay and regular meals, had plenty of candidates to choose from. During the twelve-month period that had ended the previous June, the navy looked over 159,409 volunteers and accepted 14,512—less than 10 percent.
Jernigan was sworn in by a lieutenant and sent by train to the Naval Operations Base in Norfolk. He ate in the dining car, watching cows and farms and water tanks wheel past, buoyant in the knowledge that he was now earning $21 a month.
Norfolk was dirty, and it stank. “A young man like myself out of the backwoods wasn’t used to the smell of warehouses, stored fruit, and exhaust fumes.” The base itself was smart and well maintained, although the barracks, built for World War I, seethed with cockroaches. There, he was taken in hand by a man so thoroughly Old Navy that he had come back from retirement to find that his rating, chief turret captain, although permanently conferred, had not actually existed for years. Chief Turret Captain Mettick welcomed his new charges by explaining, “We were too damn dumb to stay on the farm, let alone to become sailors.”
Then, after a brief nestle among the roaches, they were up at 4:00 a.m. This was boot camp, with all its routine discomforts and humiliations: shots, venereal disease inspection (“‘Pull it back, milk it down.’ If you didn’t do it right, the pharmacist’s mate would grab you and jerk it half off. He did this to get your attention. It was extremely effective”), on the double to collect uniforms—whites, blues, peacoats—issued with perfect contempt for any consonance in size between the clothes and their future inhabitants, and then, perhaps worst, the barbershop: “The barber was the most sadistic man I ever met,” said Jernigan, rather surprisingly adding that his remorseless shearing was “the best way I could think of to break a man into the hard job he had to do.” The bald products of the barber’s work “even looked alike”—uniform new parts for a machine whose building never ceased.
Jernigan and the other men in his newborn platoon each got a seabag, “shaped like a long bucket made of canvas and tied with a drawstring at the top.” These would follow their owners down the years, for everything they had went inside them; there were no closets, no footlockers, just the bags. Amid much cursing and scorn, the men learned how to pack them. Chief Mettick would seize one man’s jumper, fling it to the floor, and stamp on it screaming, “Roll the damn thing right or give your heart to God and your ass to me!” Rolling it right meant along the seam and then, for seabag stowage, tying it with twine, like a butcher’s roast. Two other vital items went in with the cylinders of clothing: a sewing kit and a small ditty bag with shoe-polishing equipment. All sailors knew how to sew (to the end of his days, my father would darn and redarn his socks far beyond the boundaries of respectability); and their black shoes had always to glow with a liquid sheen, an effect achieved by hours of brushing and polishing and alchemical acts such as the application of Aqua Velva. Finally, there was The Bluejackets’ Manual, which, Jernigan said, “was our Bible.”
Bound in flexible covers so it could squirm in among the stacked coils of uniform, the 1940 edition of the Manual contained 784 pages of maritime wisdom. At “ninety cents, postpaid,” as it said on the title page, it was an impressive bargain, with color plates of signal flags and the markings on shells, drawings and photos showing the firing chamber of a rifle, platoon formations, and, of course, an infinitude of knots. The book opened with instructions on how to behave under such headings as “Knowledge” (it “comes only through study and hard work”), “Self-control” (“Do not fly off the handle”), “Justice” (“Play the game hard but play it squarely”), “Faith” (“Count on yourself to be one of the best man-o’-war’s men in the whole Navy”), and “Cheerfulness” (“If you cannot smile, at least try to. You can surely keep the corners of your mouth up”).
This last dictum was not always easy to follow. From the moment the master-at-arms came clattering through the barracks clubbing the steel bunks to wake the men, the day was one long, loud, wearing scramble: push-ups, jumping jacks, squat-and-walk (and at all other times, run); learning rifle drill on bolt-action weapons from the Great War; learning to row under the scalding tutelage of a man Jernigan described as “the ugliest, meanest seaman in the Navy”; learning how to talk (“a bed was a bunk; upstairs was topside . . . you drank water from a scuttlebutt. The window was a porthole. To work was called turning to; the kitchen was a galley; a light was a lantern; a light on a ship was a running light”); learning to take a swat on the ass from the flat of the chief’s saber without making a move to retaliate.
Christmas came: “We slept until noon and turkey time. Everyone was sad, happy, and lonely at the same time and thankful when the Navy routine started anew. That December 25, 1940, was to be our last peaceful Christmas until 1945.”
Back to drill, to marching in formation, and to—in the wake of some particularly egregious breach of military order—scrubbing the sidewalk with toothbrushes. The weeks passed. Jernigan began to realize that he liked some things about navy life: the food was fine; the jumper—so tight that pulling it “over your head was like skinning a squirrel”—looked good; he found the archaic complexity of the bell-bottoms satisfying (“with a flap that had thirteen buttons and was big as the opening in a coal chute. When you had to get to your talley-whacker, you unbuttoned a vertical row of buttons right and left and a horizontal row at the top”); his peacoat (“I was never cold in one”). The hat was another story; he could never manage to get the little white disk firmly secured on his head.
Then, after a week of close-order drill, came graduation. The men checked each other’s blues, flicked motes from their shoes, gave a final rub to the stocks of their rifles, laced and relaced their leggings. Finally they marched past the reviewing stand. The captain of the base was there, along with “many flag rank officers, their wives, and kids.” It was over too quickly, and they wanted to march past again. Instead they threw their caps in the air, hugged each other, and felt the first stirrings of affection for Chief Turret Captain Mettick.
Jernigan drew $15 and went back to Chattahoochee on leave. Nobody met him at the station. “It was a homecoming without anything happening. I’ll never forget how disappointed I was. My little brothers and sisters said, ‘Oh, you look thinner than you did when you left. Your hair’s too short.’ The girls didn’t take to the uniform like I thought they would. I had a bad 15 days and went back to Norfolk.”