Proudly We Served

by Kelly, Mary Pat

  I was a twenty-year-old guy living in Ogden, Utah, making money. See, the trains picked soldiers up in Ogden and took them out to Frisco or Los Angeles. They’d take the boat and go over and fight the Japs. So we had soldiers, five hundred at a time. We made all type of money waiting tables for these soldiers—all kinds of opportunities!

  When the army called, I went right over to volunteer for the navy. This white fellow, a third-class yeoman, said, “What can I do for you?” Now, this was a Monday morning; by Saturday morning, 6 A.M., I had to be in the United States Army.

  “I want to volunteer to join the navy right now!” I knew I had—what?—five days.

  “What’s your hurry?” he asked.

  I said, “Look, man. I’m patriotic.” It wasn’t patriotism; I just wanted to avoid the army, Camp Shelby, Mississippi. I didn’t want any part of that.

  Before that time a black man could be only a mess attendant or a cook. Right? So when this white yeoman asked “What’s the hurry?” I told him, “I’m patriotic, and I want to join the navy right now. Not tomorrow. Today!” Then I asked him point blank, “Look, can I get in or not?”

  “What do you want to be? A cook?”

  “No, man. Don’t you know that I can try for any rate now? President Roosevelt changed things. That’s the only reason I’m here. I know I don’t want to be a cook. I don’t cook for myself. I want to be a seaman, and go from there.”

  He said, “All right, all right.”

  I said, “Wait a second, now. Can you get me in the navy before Saturday?” He must have known that something was wrong, right?

  “Well, I’ll try. I’ll try. I’ll tell you what. Come back Tuesday for the blood test. Wednesday you’ve got to have . . .” something else, right? He told me, “We’re trying to get about three hundred guys to volunteer at the same time so we can have one mass induction, one mass swearing-in.”

  So on Thursday afternoon, 2 P.M., there we all were. Most of the guys were doing the same thing I was, volunteering for the navy to avoid the army. They had gotten their greetings too. All these guys came in this room. There were about three hundred. I was the first one in that room because I’ve only got, now, until Saturday morning. I heard, “All of you raise your right hand.” My hand went up first, and I was a navy man.

  Then I took off and went down to Shreveport, Louisiana, to see my grandmother. I was raised in Louisiana. See, my mother died when I was less than two years old, so my grandmother raised me. I went down to see her because they gave me a week before I had to report to Great Lakes, Illinois—a week from that Thursday. Saturday morning at 6:30 A.M. two FBI agents were at my father’s house in Kansas City, Kansas, looking for me. They thought I was a draft dodger. And my father said, “No, my son joined the navy, Thursday.” They couldn’t do anything. That’s how close I missed Camp Shelby, Mississippi!

  Winfrey Roberts joined the Mason on her third convoy. He takes pride in the skill of the engineering gang and the discipline that prepared him for a lifetime on the South Orange, New Jersey, police force.

  Winfrey Roberts: I was born in North Carolina of a very illustrious family. My grandfather was postmaster for the town of Rich Square, and his brother was the registrar of deeds. That was around 1868.

  My family moved when I was three years old to South Orange, New Jersey. (I still reside there. In fact, I live two blocks from where I started kindergarten.) I left South Orange when I was seventeen to go to Washington, D.C., just four months before I was supposed to graduate from high school. I promised my father I’d go to night school and finish. I went down to get one of those profitable government jobs that were available because of the war. I had two first cousins who lived in Washington who were the same age as I was and were also seniors in high school. They also dropped out of school and took the civil service exam, and we all went to work for the war department on the same day. I had volunteered for the coast guard, but I was turned down and then inducted into the navy.

  Each man came to the navy from a different place—geographically, personally, and socially. But differences would be set aside as the men headed for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and boot camp.

  * These and other cited facts and observations are taken from “The Negro in the Navy” (a first draft narrative), prepared by the Historical Section, Bureau of Naval Personnel (1947).

  2

  Boots

  For many of the men the trip to Great Lakes Naval Training Center marked their first time away from home. Those who lived in the segregated South relished the change they would find up North and were disappointed to find Jim Crow waiting for them there. Their facility, Camp Robert Smalls, was segregated and separated from the main base by railroad tracks. The sailors at Camp Robert Smalls were as diverse in background and experience as their white counterparts in the main camp, though the navy establishment saw them as a monolithic group. Like all World War II veterans, the crew of the Mason found that basic training brought them into contact with men they never would have encountered otherwise. But at Great Lakes, civilian distinctions fell away in one general identification: they were all boots. Country boy or city slicker, each one was a beginner.

  DuFau: There were three of us traveling from New Orleans to Chicago, Illinois. The personnel officer from the navy came aboard to check our reservations. They had reserved a roomette for us to sleep in. The officer instructed the conductor to see that we got our meals. Everything was paid for.

  We ate in the dining car. This was the first time I ever ate in the dining car. When we went up for breakfast in the dining car, this lady asked her husband, very loudly, “What are they doing up here?” He whispered that we were going into the service, and she sat quiet. It was an exciting thing for me to be there eating in that dining car. Walking through the train, going to our roomette, we’d get these strange looks. “What are you doing in that section?” But we arrived in Chicago with no incidents.

  When we got to Great Lakes, it was late at night, and we didn’t get any food. The next morning was a Saturday, the first morning we woke up on the base. We had the darndest breakfast I ever had. They gave us baked beans, corned beef, cornbread, and coffee. That was breakfast, my first meal in the navy! But once I got into it, I really loved it. In fact, you’d get to know the day of the week by the meals. They’d repeat the meals according to the day, so you could wake up any day of the week and know what meal it was.

  Peters: I was inducted into the navy in Cleveland, Ohio, and went from there to Great Lakes, to Camp Robert Smalls, where I went through my boot camp training and then, after boot camp, to service school, where I specialized in radio communications.*

  At that time the navy was segregated. I was fortunate, though, to go into the seaman branch of the navy, as opposed to being in the steward’s branch. Still, Robert Smalls was a segregated camp. It was the only camp out of all the other camps that were at Great Lakes where black sailors were being trained at the time.

  The conditions were good. Most of our company commanders were white naval enlisted men, but there were a few blacks. We were pretty much on our own—as I said, segregated—which meant that everything that went on in Camp Robert Smalls had to do with Camp Robert Smalls. We were ostracized from the rest of Great Lakes, and Great Lakes was a big training center at the time. The conditions under which we lived and worked were not bad, though.

  I grew up in mixed neighborhoods, went to mixed schools, so this was a little bit strange to me, to be in a camp where all you had were black enlisted people, with white officers or white senior enlisted people over us. It wasn’t easy.

  Some of the whites were condescending. Having black enlisted navy men who were not stewards was a new thing for them. It took some time for them to become accustomed to it. But I can’t say that I had any bad feelings about Great Lakes. I was happy to be doing what I was doing.

  Roberts: I was one of a group of five who were the first inductees into the navy from Washington, D.C. Among the five there was one
fellow who was older than we were. He was the valet for President Roosevelt. His name was Fields. He was very nice. We all liked him. As I got to know him he told me a lot of stories about his experiences in the White House. He was a real storyteller. I’m not going to repeat what he told me because I promised him that I wouldn’t, so I won’t.

  We had a club car all to ourselves going from Washington, D.C., to Great Lakes. I thought maybe that was because the president’s valet was with us. This was around February 1943, and Great Lakes was cold as the devil. I had heard that Chicago was the Windy City, but when I got off the train I thought the wind was going to blow me away!

  The camp at Great Lakes was segregated, but that didn’t surprise me. I had spent a year in Washington, D.C., before I went into the service, and I knew what segregation was. I couldn’t sit down and eat a hot dog at a drugstore soda fountain there—and that was in the nation’s capital! Once my cousin and I were walking home from work, and this policeman comes along swinging his billy club at us—for no reason!

  I felt grateful I had grown up in South Orange, New Jersey. There was no outward show of hatred. But when I look back as a man, I see there was more subtle discrimination. For example, I was a good baseball player. I made the first American Legion team to be formed in South Orange, but they wouldn’t issue me a uniform. They used some excuse about my birth certificate.

  So I was prepared for the separation at Great Lakes. Back then I went as a tough guy—did a lot of boxing. Some of the guys didn’t like me; they thought I was cocky because I was winning all my fights. One of our company leaders made me carry sandbags for five hours before my last fight just to be sure I lost. See, I’d won all my matches within the company, and the next day I was to fight somebody from outside the company for the first time. This guy was an enlisted man and seaman like me. He was black, but he wanted me to lose. But then, so did my own cousin. I had beat him so many times that he was at ringside grinning from ear to ear when I lost. But really I’m glad I lost that fight because the next one would have been with a guy who had been a professional fighter in Philly.

  One of the guys who was a boxer later became a shipmate on the Mason. Billy Legget became a professional boxer after the service and won eighteen fights in a row. But at Great Lakes he was getting knocked out—so that tells you something about the competition.

  Buchanan: We got to Chicago, they shipped us out to the black camp, which was Camp Robert Smalls. No big deal about that.

  Graham: I got on the train going to Chicago, to Great Lakes, Illinois. The older guys were smokin’ and drinkin’ and lyin’ and talkin’ about women, and we fell right into it—except for the drinkin’ and the smokin’ and the gamblin’. We arrived in Chicago and went out to Great Lakes. One of the first guys I saw was a guy from my hometown, and he asked if he could borrow five dollars from me. I said, “Sure.” He said he’d give it back to me on payday. That was the last time I ever saw him. I have never seen him since.

  Garrison: When I went from Columbia, South Carolina, to Great Lakes Naval Training Station, we were in a segregated training camp, Camp Robert Smalls. There were all blacks except that the instructors were white, the officers were white.

  Divers: I went down to Prentice Court in Chicago and was sent to Great Lakes, to Camp Robert Smalls. That was the all-black camp. When I went there, it wasn’t even completed yet. When they finished building a barracks, they sent another bunch of sailors in to fill it up. We didn’t have guns. I went all the way through boot camp without ever seeing a rifle. They just didn’t have any at that time. They had one wooden rifle, which we all used for the manual of arms. This was early ’42, see.

  DuFau: Our country was caught short. There wasn’t enough room. They’d already had this camp and changed the name to Robert Smalls. He was a black navy man in the Civil War. A hero. Camp Robert Smalls was across the tracks from the main base. Whenever you had to go to the main base, you had to cross the tracks. When you wanted small stores and stuff like that, you had to go over there. I was in one of the first classes, and being the first was rough. We had to sleep in hammocks: they didn’t have sacks; they didn’t have the bunks at that time. We were caught short.

  Garrison: I don’t think any of us ever went over to where the white sailors slept, so we couldn’t compare their conditions to ours. We only knew that we were separated. That’s my viewpoint; we just knew that we were separated.

  DuFau: We never could understand why you had to do so much drilling on that doggone field in Great Lakes. We were supposed to be in the navy. We couldn’t understand all of this marching. But it was part of the discipline, developing the discipline habit. You don’t ask questions, you follow orders. As I saw it, the navy was making it possible for black men to have rates other than steward’s mates and mess attendants. We would be able to have whatever rank we could qualify for. This would be our first opportunity. It wasn’t until after the war that I found out this was supposed to be an experiment. At the time, I thought it was just a grand opening. After I found out that it was really an experiment to see if we could do the job, I felt kind of insulted. I’m a human being, and you can trust me like any other human being. I’ll get some things; I won’t get some others. But when we were at Robert Smalls, we thought we were just part of a program that was opening the way to prove ourselves in a time of war. We had built up a determination among ourselves now that we had this opening. At Robert Smalls we used to try to police each other so that we didn’t make a bad record, a bad reputation, because you have bad eggs and good eggs in any group. But we used to sort of police ourselves to see that nobody would make us look bad. After boot camp I went to service school at Great Lakes too. I was in the first class to graduate with rates. That was the winter of ’43. I became a signalman third class.

  Peters: In order to get into a senior branch of the navy, you had to be a high school graduate. Then they would administer a battery of tests to try to determine what you were best suited for. My test scores indicated that I would be good at radio communications, storekeeper, yeoman, or some paralegal type of job. I chose radio because as a high school kid I was interested in amateur radio, and this kind of fit into my plans. As a matter of fact, I have carried that through because I am an amateur radio operator today.

  I went to service school right there in Great Lakes, right at Camp Robert Smalls, for five months. There was constant drilling on the Morse Code and radio theory, typing, and so forth. By the time I graduated, they were only rating 10 percent of each graduating class. There were only eight people in my graduating class, so one person got rated—which wasn’t even 10 percent.

  I left Great Lakes in November 1943 as a seaman first class radio striker—a striker was somebody who was not rated yet—and my first duty station was in Massachusetts, at an air station just outside of Boston.

  Watkins: I went to petty officer school at Robert Smalls, and they told us that the next officers—black officers—were going to come out of that class. It didn’t happen. Then they said we were going to get rated, be rated, and that didn’t happen. So they sent me back to Moffett to train boots. So I trained boots. Then the word came around, “You’d better go to school somewhere, or else you’re going to get shipped out.” I took the examination, and they said to me, “You can have a choice.”

  “Can I be in ship’s company?”

  “Yeah,” they said. That meant I could go home every evening. I got something like fourteen dollars extra for eating on the shore. Then they selected the apprentice officers. I was made second platoon leader. I guess I had somebody talking for me because I didn’t know anything about platoons and marching. They’d drafted us, and now they had to do something with us.

  Buchanan: My scores on the aptitude tests gave me a right to go to service school. They gave you three choices. My first choice was quartermaster. At that time, I thought quartermaster was like with the army, where it’s supplies. That didn’t bother me. That wouldn’t have been a bad job. But it turned out
to be navigation, which was way better. Oh, God, I thought that was the greatest thing in the world. I went to quartermaster school, I learned all kinds of signals, and I learned all kinds of navigation. I understood—tried to understand—that thing called radar. You see, it was all new to a lot of people at that time.

  Garrison: I took a series of tests to qualify for service school. You see, everybody went through boot camp, but at service school you learned the specialties needed aboard ship. Those who didn’t qualify remained seamen—the lowest rank. They sent me to quartermaster school. The quartermaster steers the ship, he plots courses. He’s almost like a weather forecaster, and he’s the captain’s right-hand man.

  In service school we had a third-class signalman as our instructor, a big guy. He wanted to show how important ratings were and how outstanding it was for Graham to be second class and DuFau second class and me third class. He told us that competition was so high in the fleet for promotion that in the entire fleet they might promote one person to third class, one to second class, and one to first class—in the entire fleet! So when we came in and were able to show that we could qualify for these ratings, it really meant something. Ratings were not easily gotten; you had to work very hard for them. I had some people come aboard the Mason as third class, and when they left they were chief petty officers.

  You see, third class is the lowest petty officer rating, second class is the next step, then first class, and finally, chief petty officer. A third class petty officer in the navy wears one stripe. If he was in the army, he would have three stripes. When you see a petty officer in the navy with three stripes, it means he’s first class. So it’s a little different.

  One thing I liked about the navy was that almost everyone was a technician. You’re prepared to do a specific job, and you must be extremely proficient in that job. There’s no room for mediocrity at all. The navy sees to that. They will not rate you unless you’re really qualified.